3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Why isn’t your new phone on?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Turn it on.” Charlie hung up. Ike retrieved the phone and turned it on. It vibrated almost immediately.

  “Tango blue leader, this is foxtrot, over.”

  “Stop horsing around, Ike, and listen. This is what we know so far. Whoever had Mr. K. on their payroll does not know he’s dead.” Charlie sounded tired, edgy.

  “We figured that.” He’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the columns of figures Sam had been watching must belong to Kamarov. They were tracking his credit cards or bank transactions.

  “You know? How?”

  “Someone has been tracking his credit or bank cards and they’re active. Here’s something else for you. There are two other groups following those accounts. One yesterday and another joined in today. That’s not counting us, of course.”

  “Two…just two?”

  “Two, besides us, right.”

  “Good. You’re tracking and you found that out how?”

  “You have the power of the Agency’s super computer, I have Sam the hacker. It appears, on balance, I have the edge.”

  “I’m impressed. Sam, you say?”

  “You try to recruit her away from me and I’ll—”

  “No, you won’t, but I’ll resist stealing your guy—”

  “Woman.”

  “Woman…at least for the time being. I’m afraid to ask, but have you turned up anything else?”

  “Maybe. Who or what is Cutthroat?”

  “Sam again?”

  “Charlie, I’m waiting. Please don’t tell me you don’t have Cutthroat on your radar screen.”

  “Thanks for the lead. How about out in the field. Anything there?”

  Ike thought a moment and then told him what Whaite had been doing. The Steve Bolt lead had gone cold and that seemed odd. Charlie said he’d do an all-points search for Bolt—hotels, airports, buses, the works—and call back in the morning. Ike told Charlie he would not be reachable—would be incommunicado. He told him why. He owed him that. After a silence that seemed to last minutes, Charlie said he understood—sort of. He sounded hurt but did not protest. He did insist that the mole definitely went down but beyond that, whether there might be more people involved, he could not confirm or deny. The answer died with their man.

  “Okay, Ike, you keep your lady safe from us, and anyone else for that matter. I won’t try to find you.”

  “Thank you for that. You know what I want to believe.”

  “You didn’t last long in the field by being stupid. Who knows, Ruth might be right, at least in principle.”

  Ike thought he ought to feel better. He didn’t.

  Chapter 17

  Picketsville hung its Christmas decorations a week after Halloween. In years past, they would have gone up later, but a warehouse fire that destroyed the town’s surplus office equipment and its only working snowplow had also consumed the array of plastic pilgrims, turkeys, and autumnal icons that formed the nucleus of the Thanksgiving display. Rather than replace them, the Town Council moved the Christmas setup forward a month.

  The Jeep’s wipers flicked erratically across its windshield. Squinting through its slush-smeared surface, Ike noticed that one of the candlesticks and two of the stars set in the center of wreathes festooned at irregular intervals across Main Street were dark, their bulbs already burned out. Along the sidewalk, lights twinkled, flickered, or raced in mad circles around display windows. Rudolph in several guises flashed his red nose at passersby. Bing Crosby and a dozen imitators moaning “White Christmas,” competed with an equal number of jolly voices narrating the unlikely itinerary of “Frosty the Snowman.”

  Christmas was not Ike’s holiday, but he did enjoy the season. True, the crime rate, suicides, and fatal accidents always escalated in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s—The Month of Heavy Eating, his mother called it—but for most people it was a time of good cheer and remarkable generosity.

  Ruth sat huddled, grim faced and shivering, in the Jeep’s only other seat. Its heater functioned more or less, but worked best if you also had the foresight to wear a down-filled jacket, boots, and gloves. She wore only a thin wool overcoat, fashionable but relatively useless, leather gloves, and heels.

  “Tell me again why I am freezing to death in this relic.”

  “The roads are slick. This has four-wheel drive, and Abe hasn’t had time to plow his driveway. So, it’s more likely to get us there.”

  “You could have warned me, you know.”

  “I did . I told you we were going to the country. I figured you’d dress accordingly.”

  “Going to the country? Do you consider Picketsville the big city? It’s all country out here.”

  They passed the Crossroads Diner and he caught a glimpse of Flora shaking her finger in the face of someone Ike could not recognize—probably one of the people who wanted her establishment relocated.

  “Point of reference only, ma’am. You big-city folks reckon all of us out here must is hillbillies but the troof is—”

  “Don’t start, Schwartz, I’m too cold to play games with you.”

  “Nevertheless, for the people who grew up here, Picketsville is the city, or as close as they want to get to one. For them, country is out in the valley, on the farms, or up on the mountains. Have you been up there?”

  “Skyline Drive count?”

  “Just barely.”

  “I went with you to that restaurant, Le Chateau, once. It’s out in the sticks.”

  “Better.”

  “How come you never took me there again?”

  “It’s a restaurant for first meetings, celebrations, great occasions and…”

  “And what?”

  “You are very hard to pry away from your desk and duties. It takes time to eat a fine meal correctly.”

  “So, it’s my fault?”

  “Um…I had dinner at the Crossroads Diner tonight. I may not eat again for a week.”

  “That bad?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Good. It serves you right for not taking me to Le Chateau tonight before we decided to mush to Nome.”

  “You think you’re cold now. Try two and a half hours, maybe three, over unplowed mountain roads to that place.”

  “You have a point. You’re forgiven.”

  ***

  Sam slouched down in her chair until her chin settled on her chest. She eyeballed the phone on the coffee table in front of her. Guilt is not an uplifting emotion. In her case it made her wish she could continue her downward slide and disappear into the floor. She had not told Ike everything. She would eventually, but she needed to talk to Karl first. She’d halfway expected to hear from him by now, but since reading what had popped up on her screen this afternoon, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her problem, the source of her guilt—her guilts, to be precise—had two parts. The first stemmed from what she had discovered, or thought she had discovered, while looking for traces of Kamarov. She knew for a certainty that Cutthroat was not someone’s internet alias. She had seen more. Cutthroat had people assigned to it and those people had names which meant it must be a group, a program, a…a black program? Her second had to do with one of the names she saw, only for a split second, in fact, but long enough to recognize—Hedrick, K. The name had jumped out from the screen like a happy puppy. Only it did not make her smile. Hedrick, K. could only be Karl, and that signaled his involvement in the search for Kamarov. That, in turn, meant the program they feared resided deep in the FBI and, again, meant the Bureau could be the enemy. She flinched at the thought. Less than a week before, she’d scolded Whaite for using that term about the FBI and now…If what she assumed to be true could be confirmed, everything Whaite said would be correct, and, worse, she stood to lose the brightest spot in her life.

  She picked up her phone and held it against her cheek. What would he say? No, what could he say? If he had been assigned to a black program, he
probably would have to lie to her. On the other hand, if she didn’t call, she might never know and then they could go on as usual…“Just call me Cleopatra, da queen of de Nile.” Hoping it would just go away wouldn’t help. She considered blotting out what she knew from her memory—if that were possible. If she called, it all could end. Ike said something about finding out what her instincts were telling her, and she’d said she didn’t do instincts. So what now? “Just the facts, ma’am.” She dialed his number.

  ***

  All the windows on the first floor of the farmhouse were lighted when Ike pulled up at his parents’ place. He helped Ruth down and retrieved her overnight bag from the back of the Jeep. Together they climbed the steps to the porch and the front door swung open as they reached it. A gust of warm air enveloped them along with Abe Schwartz’s famous baritone.

  “Well, now, it looks like you all made it just fine. Come in, come in.” He circled Ruth’s shoulders with one arm and swept her into the hall. “Ike, you take that case up to the front room.” He led Ruth into the front parlor. “It’s got its own bath, Ms. Harris. I figured you might want that.”

  Ruth shed her coat and gloves. A fire danced on the living room grate and she moved to it, holding her hands toward the flames.

  “Your son made me sit in that ridiculous truck of his all the way out here. I nearly froze.”

  “He brought you here in his old Jeep?”

  “He did.”

  “Must’ve had a reason.”

  Any thought Ruth had that she might receive a sympathetic ear from Abe Schwartz evaporated. As much as Ike and his father argued about every topic from politics to the funny papers, at their core they were as alike as two peas in a pod. Ike returned and gave his father a brief hug.

  “I got no solace from your father about the cruel and unusual punishment you subjected me to on the way out here.”

  “Call the ACLU.” He turned to Abe. “City folk, they just never will learn that Gucci and Dior just aren’t fit clothes for country folks.”

  “Well now, Ike, you know we got some sensible working clothes in the back closet. I reckon we could tog the lady out, if you think. Hate to see her suffer.”

  “You two stop it right now or so help me, snow or no snow, I will walk back to town.”

  “Not a good idea,” the two men said in unison.

  “Why do I have a feeling I just signed on to ride to California in a converted Hudson Super Six with the Joads?”

  “I’ll fix you a drink and then I want you to meet my mother…before it gets too late.”

  Too late was to be understood in more than one way.

  Chapter 18

  Ike’s mother held court ensconced in what used to be the back parlor. A hospital bed dominated the center of the room. The rest of the furniture had been removed except for an overstuffed Victorian loveseat and a recliner of uncertain age, each placed in one of the room’s two remaining corners. An incongruous combination, but the first served for visitors and the second for Abe, who would sit with his wife for hours and often late into the night. A lamp cast a soft glow from a side table and the bed had been raised so that she could sit up, see, and speak to her visitors.

  Abe ushered Ike and Ruth into the makeshift hospital room and closed the door.

  “You are Ruth Harris.” Ike’s mother smiled at Ruth. Her skin looked like old parchment. Ruth smiled back and took her hand. She could smell death. Ike’s mother would not see her next Passover.

  “You have that look,” she said from the depths of her pillows.

  “Sorry?”

  “You can feel it, can’t you—Death. He’s here in the room waiting for the old bat to give it up, but I’m not ready to go, so he’ll have to wait. Don’t worry, Abe and I talk about it all the time. Now, Isaac here gets a little jumpy when I bring it up. It comes from being young and unwilling to face the inevitable.”

  Ike started to say something, but his mother held up her hand to silence him.

  “Ruth is a nice name. I wanted to change mine when Abe and I married. My nose-in-the-air, bigoted family held with Hitler that the Jews were an inferior race and cut me off forever.”

  “They never accepted you two?”

  “No. You have to understand they were from a different era and were very right wing even for that one. They were closet Nazis, if you want to know the truth, and thought the late unlamented Führer was just the victim of a lot of bad press. Hard to believe, isn’t it, but there you are.”

  “There are people like that out there now,” Ruth said and recalled one or two prospective faculty interviews.

  “Oh yes, always will be. But I wanted to tell you about my name change. When they tossed me out of the family, so to speak, I decided I would change my name. Not just my surname but all of them. Well, I started calling myself Naomi. Isn’t that a lovely name?”

  “Yes, yes it is. Why Naomi?”

  “Well, that’s the good part. Do you know your Bible?”

  “Um…to tell the truth, no.”

  “Not to worry, practically no one does anymore. Just enough to misquote it. Well, the story is this—a man from Bethlehem went with his wife and two sons to live in Moab. That’s another country across the Jordan from Israel/Judea, a gentile country. The wife’s name was Naomi. So anyway, both of their sons marry Moabite women and things were going pretty good but then all the men died. Not important for now to go into the how of it. So broke and widowed, Naomi decides to go home. Her daughters-in-law walk with her but she says they should return to Moab where they have family and so on. One of them—I forget her name—”

  “Orpah,” Abe said.

  “Thank you, honey. Orpah went back to Moab but the other woman, Ruth, said, ‘No, I will stay with you and where you go, I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge, and your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.’”

  “I told her if she wanted to use that old story, she should be Ruth, not Naomi,” Abe said. “See, Naomi was not the one making the big switch. She was just going home. It was—”

  “You hush, Abe, this is my story. And I liked the sound of Naomi better. Ruth could be anybody. I had a roommate at Wellesley named Ruth and she was as WASP as the DAR. Naomi is a departure and likely to catch my family’s notice. Ruth wouldn’t do it.”

  “But you never did it.” Ike winked at Ruth. “Tell her why.”

  “Never you mind, Isaac. That’s all over and done with. It’s the principle that I am illustrating here.”

  “She and Dad were married no more than three months when there was a huge scandal in Richmond concerning a certain lady of the night who was caught in flagrante delicto with the governor. Her professional name was Naomi. The press started calling her Naughty Naomi.”

  “Had to put the kibosh on the name. I’d just won a seat in the House and couldn’t take no chances on a misunderstanding and stupid questions from the press boys,” Abe added.

  “If you two would just excuse me, I’d like to finish my story.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Together.

  Ruth smiled.

  “So, it didn’t matter in the end. My family lost all their money in get-rich-quick schemes my moronic cousin, Randolph, persuaded them to buy into, and they ended up selling their mansion in the Greenspring Valley to Baltimore’s best known and, forgive me, notorious, Jewish family. Isn’t that just a wonderful irony?”

  “On that happy note, we will let you rest, Momma.”

  “Now Isaac, I will decide if I need to rest. You two men go on back to the living room and talk politics or maybe something a little less lethal, and leave me to have a little heart-to-heart with Ruth. Go on, scat.”

  ***

  Sam let the phone ring twenty times. Ten was her usual limit, but for Karl, she’d wait. What had happened to his answering machine? He had an answering machine. Why didn’t it pick up? She had the headset poised to disconnect when a voice crackled at her. A woman’s voice.

  “Yes, hello?” She sounded yo
ung. “Who is this?”

  “Is Karl there?” Sam’s heart sank into her shoes.

  “He’s not available. Who’s calling?”

  “Sam.”

  “Sam? Come on, who is this?”

  “He hasn’t told you about me, has he?” She would fight back even though she really only wanted to hang up and have a good cry.

  “Sorry, no Sam on my list.” The line went dead.

  So that’s that. She thought. New assignment indeed. Tied up for the time being—right. She wanted to be angry, she wanted to drive to Alexandria and scratch the woman’s eyes out, and she wanted Karl back. She put the phone down, picked up her box of tissues, and went to the kitchen where she proceeded to down a pint of rocky road.

  ***

  Steve Bolt drove to the store at the foot of the mountain. Sonny Parker greeted him when he walked in. “Where you been, Steve. People been asking about you.”

  “Where’s Wick?”

  “Goad? Poker night. He’s probably fleecing your buddy Oldham out of whatever money he has.”

  “He ain’t my buddy, you hear? Anybody says otherwise and they’re in trouble with me.”

  “Okay by me. So where you been?”

  “Had an errand to run, and then I had to lay low for a while.”

  “None of my business but—”

  “You got that right. I need some kerosene and some canned goods.”

  “Well, now Wick, he said I wasn’t to give you no more credit—”

  “I have cash money. Look here.” Bolt flashed a wad of twenties.