A snap shot ricocheted off the car hood. Brian dropped the rock to stumble into the woods; with his breath coming in rasping gasps. He could hear his pursuer crashing through the foliage after him. He forced his progress to become more studied as he ducked and slipped through trees and brush. Finding a thicket with a nearly obscured deer run behind the first layer of brush, he parted the branches quietly and moved inside, where he dropped to the ground to wait.
The gunman’s movements seemed to circle the thicket and then move away. He heard the car start and drive down the pitted road to the highway. The option was obvious. His assailant would patrol the lake road to Brian’s car in the village and back. It would be a patient waiting game that would preclude any attempt on Brian’s part to reach his car or hitch a ride.
He lay prone in the thicket to await dusk.
Night fell across the lake with the cry of a loon. The haunting sound echoed across the valley as sun brimmed the mountains and darkness fell. Brian slipped from the thicket and made his way quietly toward the shore. He had listened carefully and not heard the car return, and could only gamble that his conjecture was correct. The rowboat had drifted and now floated placidly a dozen yards away, its shape barely discernible in the moonless night.
Brian swam toward the boat with low, even strokes and pulled himself over the stern. He lay in the bottom of the boat breathing heavily for a few moments before raising his eyes over the gunnels. It was still quiet along the shore, and he couldn’t see any unusual shapes. He began to row back across the lake.
As he approached the jetty where he had rented the boat, a door opened to illuminate the water. He tensed as the rowboat gently bumped against the dock.
“I was getting worried about you, mister. Just about ready to get the outboard and go looking for you.”
“Thanks, I’m fine.” Brian tied the boat and jumped to the dock. “Anybody asking about me?”
“Yeah, couple a hours ago. Black man. A big guy, looked like a football player. Said he’d come back.”
They walked into the rear of the building. Through the dirty windows, Brian saw his car thirty feet away, and a few feet beyond that, partially illuminated by one of the village street lights, was another car, with the black man sitting patiently behind the wheel. Brian stepped back from the window. “Let me use your phone for a collect call.”
There was no answer at Jan’s house. Clinton picked up his phone on the tenth ring. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Come get me, Clinton. Indian Forks. I’ll be behind the convalescent home,” he whispered into the receiver.
“I don’t make house calls.”
“Come on, damn it! The guy’s sitting right outside and has already taken half-a-dozen shots at me. Come incognito. Got the place?”
Brian left the puzzled attendant with a soggy ten-dollar bill, and slipped out the back door to slink along the lake shore to the rear of the convalescent home. He found a dark corner near a patio wall with woods to the rear and water to the side. It would provide two possible avenues of escape.
Brian lay back in the darkness, listening to the gentle lap of the nearby lake, but his fatigue couldn’t stop the rise of questions. The man who was trying to kill him had a key to the gate at Bellchamp. How did he know Brian was coming to Indian Forks? Did he get the information from Jan or Clinton? Had he been followed, or had discreet questioning at the library pointed toward Bellchamp?
Brian dozed off with intermittent dreams of people with keys.
He awoke with a start as headlights swept across the yard from a vehicle coming down the drive. Slipping behind a tree, he watched as a pickup truck, loaded with slatted crates of live chickens, stopped and switched to parking lights.
A stooped man in overalls and a dirty baseball cap left the truck to walk toward the lake. He looked out over the dark water. “Where the hell are you, Brian?”
“Jesus, is that you, Clinton?”
He spoke in a low voice without turning. “Get in the back, behind the chickens.”
A porch light flicked on behind the nursing home as a man dressed in white coveralls appeared at the back door. “Who’s out there?”
“Can you give me directions to Three Rivers?” Clinton asked as he walked toward the porch. While the attorney engaged the orderly in conversation, Brian raced for the pickup, pushed aside a crate of chickens and crawled into a space in the center of the truck bed.
A few minutes later, the truck turned out the narrow drive and drove slowly up the highway. It was an old truck, with worn shocks and a constant flutter and a smell of chickens. The odor had begun to make Brian nauseous when the truck pulled off the road and stopped. Clinton moved aside the crate of chickens, and Brian slid to the ground. They had pulled into a wayside rest area and were parked next to Clinton’s car.
“Thanks,” Brian said, as the attorney shucked the baseball cap and overalls, tossing them into the cab.
“Cost a hundred to a slightly inebriated farmer in yonder gin mill. I’ll put it on the bill.” Clinton reached back in the cab and turned to face Brian with a gun in his hand. It was the .22 target pistol borrowed from Gordon’s gun cabinet, and it was pointed directly at Brian’s mid-section.
“Not you, Clinton. Please God, not you.”
Chapter Thirteen
“What? You’re shivering.”
“There had to be someone in Tallman who knew my movements.”
Clinton reversed the gun and handed it to Brian butt first. “We might need this. When you’ve finished your hysterical paranoia, I suggest you get under a blanket and drink coffee.”
As Clinton’s car accelerated through the dark night, now turning to dawn, Brian pulled a blanket over his shoulders and drank coffee from a thermos. His fingers, shaking to the point of palsy, made it necessary for him to hold the mug in both hands. The gun jiggled from his lap onto the floor, where Clinton reached for it and wordlessly put it in the glove compartment.
A giggle began deep within Brian and worked up to a paroxysm of laughter. “I thought …” He was hardly able to articulate the words. “I thought it was you.” The laughter continued until he had to lean back in the seat.
“Highly unlikely,” Clinton rasped, and increased the speed of the car. “What happened out there?”
Brian recounted the day’s events, which had already taken on a distant perspective and formed into a cinemalike quality, with him as a mere observer. The shock of recognition that struck him as he opened the nursery door was still strong, although it was now tainted with an aura of unreality. “I’ve been in Bellchamp before,” he said finally.
“Because you knew where the nursery was?”
“I knew before I opened the door.”
“The room you speak of was at the far end of the house?”
“I went right to it. As if I’d been in that hallway a hundred times before.”
“Where else would a nursery be in a house that size? You wanted to find something, and you found it.”
“Always the devil’s advocate.”
“At this point, that’s what you’re paying me for. What interests me is the fact that your assailant had a key to the gate lock.”
“If I was that child, and the house is still owned by Colonel Wright … why are they after me?” The car rocked around a curve as the speedometer inched toward eighty. “Awfully fast, Clinton.”
“We have things to do in New York City. To answer your question, there are two possible reasons: accomplices to the kidnapping are trying to cover themselves; or else it’s something to do with the Wright money. Something we aren’t aware of. The Colonel’s an old man, there aren’t any other children, and my sources tell me that he’s worth close to fifty million.”
“You think we’ll find out something in New York?”
“That’s where the Colonel is. The taxes on Bellchamp are paid by a New York corporation called the 1280 Company. Controlling interest in the company is held by Wright at a Brooklyn address.”
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br /> “And that’s where we’re going?”
“Not immediately. We have a luncheon date first. Your bag’s in the back, get into some decent clothes.”
The New York Lawyer’s Club is a venerable place, located on the top floors of an older Broadway building near Trinity Church. The dining room is dominated by a two-story stained-glass window that casts a subdued light over the occupants. Dark wood and quiet waiters create an atmosphere reminiscent of the dusty interior of some ancient brief. Clinton and Brian stood by the maître d’s podium as the elevator door behind them opened to disgorge several men.
A large, balding man in his early sixties strode toward them with a smile. He grasped Clinton’s hand with his and pumped it. “Robinson, you old bastard, it’s been years.”
“Brian Maston, this is an old classmate, Silas O’Keefe.”
Over a before-lunch drink, Brian learned that Silas O’Keefe was a senior partner of Daly, O’Keefe and Bernstein, a Wall street firm specializing in insurance law. He and Clinton had attended Columbia Law together and had evidently kept up the relationship over the years. Brian listened with some puzzlement as the two lawyers reminisced over their earlier years and touched on some cases Clinton had ruled on while still on the bench. When the steak sandwiches were served, Clinton brought him into the conversation.
“Brian’s an old family friend from Tallman. He’s a writer doing a book on the 1055 Combat Team.”
The smile faded from Silas’s face as he pushed back from his lunch. “Controversial. Still controversial, but I’d like to see someone get the facts correct.”
“Brian and I were talking about it the other day when I happened to remember that someone from Columbia had served with the 1055. Went through the old Alumni News—I keep everything you know—and there you were, Silas. Major O’Keefe in the 1055.”
“You mean to tell me that you still have Alumni News from the forties?”
“Good secretary.” Clinton began to cut into his steak sandwich with meticulous care. “In the name of fair play and all that, I thought Brian should get the other side’s view. Someone sympathetic to Colonel Wright.”
Silas O’Keefe leaned forward with great intensity. “The most maligned officer in World War II.”
“I’d be interested in anything you know about him, Mr. O’Keefe,” Brian said. “Anything at all would help.”
Over lunch, coffee, and later, when they went into the reading room at the rear of the club, Silas O’Keefe’s story of Colonel Wright and the 1055 began to unfold.
David Bellchamp Wright had followed the family tradition and entered West Point in 1921, graduating near the top of his class in 1925. Impatient with the peacetime army, he had resigned his commission in 1932. In the thirties, he had entered the family cotton brokerage business in Savannah and gradually moved his operations to New York, where he expanded the family fortune with the same diligence he had applied to military matters. He had been recalled into the service as a major in 1940.
The success of special German units in capturing the Belgian border forts at the beginning of the war caused the British to form their famous commando units, and the U.S. to start the Rangers under Colonel Darby and the 1055 under Wright. The 1055 was a crack regiment. Each member was a volunteer, weapons expert and parachutist. They were honed to a fine edge of nervous expectancy. During the North African campaign, they received unit citations and, as individuals, were one of the most decorated groups in the army. Disaster occurred after Normandy and the subsequent breakthrough.
“By pure happenstance,” Silas said, “I was a convalescent in England, but I heard about it later. A company of German troops surrendered to the 1055 and were machine-gunned down. That’s the kind of thing staff people hush up, but somehow the word reached Ike. The 1055 was dismantled. Wright was sent stateside for court-martial, but they dropped it and gave him the boot.”
“Was he guilty?”
Silas shrugged. “It was a combat situation. Just let me tell you, if the 1055 had remained attached to Patton’s Third Army, God knows what they might have accomplished. Wright was a soldier, a natural-born soldier.”
“What about Wright’s wife?”
Silas thought a moment. “As I recall, he married later in life, about the time he went back in the army. I met her once, a beautiful woman, although quite a bit younger than the Colonel.”
“Did you know Captain Ralston, the one involved in the kidnapping?”
“That bastard! Hell, I knew him. A guy who joined the regular army in the thirties as an enlisted man. A mustang who came up through the ranks. He was the Colonel’s aide until he was hit. Ungrateful prick. When he was wounded and sent back to the States, the Colonel let him stay at his house. That’s when he cased the place for the kidnapping.”
“As I remember it,” Clinton said, “it was after the body had been found that they caught Ralston with the ransom money.”
“Only a small part of it. They never did catch the other people involved, if there were others.”
“How did they catch him?”
“Routine police work. They had serial numbers of part of the money. For a long time bills didn’t appear, then, gradually, banks began picking up one here, one there, all from Manhattan. They kept narrowing it down, and the final lead was a liquor store on Madison Avenue. The owner remembered taking one of the bills from a regular customer.”
“Captain Ralston?”
“Right. Ex-captain by then. The war was over, and he was working in New York. They searched his apartment and found a few thousand more of the money.”
“Pretty circumstantial, wasn’t it?”
“Feelings were high and he had the money, or at least some of it. He had been in the house prior to the kidnapping and knew the layout. Then, he couldn’t account for his actions the night it happened.”
“He never confessed?”
“Never. Claimed he was innocent up to the night they executed him.”
Hands seemed to rise toward him through the mist. They pinned his legs and held his wrists clamped together. The dank smell was all-pervasive. He struggled, thrashing in their grip. His cries were somewhere deep within him. He fell.
He awoke on the hotel room floor, wedged between the twin beds. The travel clock on the bureau said five, which meant he had slept an hour. He stumbled to the shower and turned the water on full force. He let it run over him as he tilted his head back under the full onslaught of the spray.
Clinton would still be in the New York Public Library. The lawyer’s past skepticism had been replaced by silent contemplation. He seemed grimly determined to find out all he could in the hope that some hint of the real events of the thirty-year-old incident might be revealed.
Brian toweled and dressed, indecisive about his next move. He wasn’t hungry, yet he felt compelled to leave the room and its oppressive confinement.
He took the elevator to the main floor, where there was a pocket-sized bar off the lobby.
The bartender was mixing a frozen drink for a couple at the corner of the bar. Brian slid onto a stool and ordered a vodka martini.
He stared down at the olive resting in the bottom of the glass like a green gem, and realized he didn’t want the drink. Was that progress or aimless resignation? The velocity of events numbed and frightened him to the point where clarity of thought had become impossible. There were few alternatives left except the Colonel. He found it impossible to contemplate the man as his natural father, just as he found it difficult not to consider the woman buried next to Lockwood in the small New England cemetery as his mother.
Questions rose from the small cocktail glass before him. There had been a thirty-year-old kidnapping, that was known, but to align Lockwood and Mary with such a cause was beyond the reach of his imagination. Perhaps, in naiveté, Lockwood could have been persuaded, but Mary? The Rubinows, pushed forward by Harry’s rapacious nature, could have been involved, but if so, who was the child whose body was discovered and identified as the W
right child? Why were they trying to kill him? Where did the black man with the gun come from?
He pushed the drink away, and with an impatient gesture, slapped a bill on the bar and left the hotel.
New York’s noise broke around him as he left the hotel. He walked a brisk pace toward Fifth Avenue, as if by gaining distance from the hotel he might leave the apparitions that haunted him.
He stood on a corner waiting for a traffic light and impulsively signaled for a taxi.
“Where to, buddy?” An impatient face frowned through scratched Plexiglass. “I asked, where you going?”
Brian fumbled for the address, Clinton had given him. “Ah, State Street … in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn? Oh, sheet.” The driver slammed the taxi into gear.
Brian had always considered Brooklyn halfway to the ends of the earth. Like many who lived out of the exurban reaches of the city, and who traveled to Manhattan to see Broadway shows or museums, his impression of the city consisted primarily of airports and the midtown area. His quickly formed impression of the Colonel did not seem to jibe with a Brooklyn resident.
The photographs from the news accounts he had read were still vivid. Colonel Wright was a short man with a severe military bearing. The earlier pictures had shown a thin mustache cutting across his upper lip, while his eyes seemed set back a bit too far from an aquiline nose. He gave the appearance of a very stern man.
The cab’s progress across the Brooklyn Bridge was accompanied by the hum of wheels over a mesh surface. Just beyond the bridge, by the Municipal Building, they turned down a tree-lined street. The complexion of the city changed. The streets were bordered with well-kept brownstones, and the sidewalks were peopled with a mixture of prosperous housewives and young arty types.
“State Street where?” the driver asked.
“Here.”
Brian got out of the cab, stood on the corner and looked up the two-hundred block. It was not what he expected. The brownstones were wide, and wrought-iron fences bracketed small, carefully cultivated flower plots, while shady trees overhung the walk. It occurred to him that standing on a Brooklyn street corner was not particularly productive and that people were giving him curious glances. He walked the half-block to stop in front of number 216. The house was wider than most of the homes on the street. Heavy drapes were pulled across the parlor-floor windows and obscured the interior. Steps from the street to the first-floor entrance were flanked by an intricate rail. Brian stared up at the front door, as if he could discern the occupants by sheer force of concentration.
The Laughing Man Page 14
