6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6

by Frederick Ramsay

  “Where is what? Picketsville? You’re kidding, right?”

  “It’s in the Shenandoah Valley, Lieutenant, why?”

  “They have a trace on the guy’s phone, the one who’s missing from that art place, what’s his name…Sacci? The report has the coordinates where the phone is, and it says the thing is there. So what is the big deal about the Shenandoah Valley?”

  “Civil War, Sheridan’s Burning, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Washington and Lee University, Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Tech—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it, important place.”

  “—and Mary Matalin, not that I’d put her up there with the generals, but she can be pretty feisty. So, is the phone in use?”

  “Off and on, not regular. It’s shut down most of the time, but the chip is still powered up, so they could trace it. It’s not moving around much.”

  “Call the local police and see if they can find it and the missing guy. I’d like to get this one off the board.”

  “I’m on it, Lieutenant. Who’s Mary Matalin?”

  ***

  Frank Sutherlin had not said a word all day except to comment on lunch at the diner. He didn’t like it. It was his own fault, he’d been told. “Order breakfast,” Ike had said, but he went for the pot roast and spent the first hour afterward trying to remove the strings of beef caught between his teeth. Finally, his sister-in-law, Essie, handed him a box of tooth picks, and he restored his mouth to some measure of normality.

  “Do you suppose,” he said dropping the last of his tooth picks in a nearby trash can, “that the two crimes are connected?”

  “It would be a huge coincidence,” Ike said. “Why do you ask, or why do you think they might be?” Ike trusted Frank’s judgment. He was the most experienced of his deputies, although he had the shortest tenure, having only transferred in from the Highway Patrol some months before.

  “Why? I don’t know for sure, but they both involve someone interested in art. They happened the same night, we think. Maybe the dead guy was the same one that tried to break into Dakis’ house.”

  “And what? He didn’t find what he was looking for, so someone killed him. It doesn’t track, Frank.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but I still…Oh well, don’t mind me. I have a suspicious mind. I don’t like coincidences.”

  “Oh, come on, deputy,” Charlie said. “Multiple crimes happen all the time. We have break-ins and murders every night, it seems, in the D.C. area, and nobody thinks they’re related.”

  “Yes, I know all about that. Cities have crime in multiples. But this is Picketsville, Virginia. We don’t have that much crime to begin with, and murder is a big deal. Multiples? In Picketsville? I’m wondering, that’s all.”

  “Point taken, but we can’t connect them, Frank. I don’t like coincidences either. But for now, we work them separately.” Ike said, but Frank heard the doubt in his voice. “And speaking of coincidences, Dakis told me his wife had a break-in over the weekend, too. I’m guessing the icon is the point of similarity.”

  “That is interesting, I guess. Right. So, where do I begin?”

  “I want you to go over every statement you took from the people in the urgent care center that night. Then take Amos and knock on doors. See if anybody remembers anything unusual. I mean anything. I don’t see how it is possible to unload a corpse from a vehicle, haul it into a busy emergency room, and nobody notices anything. Also, get out to the local motels with pictures and see if any of the clerks remember seeing the guy, if he registered, and if so under what name.” Ike swiveled around. “Billy, you do the same out at the college.”

  “Ike, I already done that. I got nothing.”

  “If you didn’t find anything, you must have missed somebody. College types are nosey as hell. Somebody saw something. Maybe they didn’t see the significance.”

  “What about me?” Sam said.

  Ike looked first at her and then at Karl. “You’re off duty until tomorrow. Then, I want you to scour cyberspace for anything you can find about Zaki/Sacci. Charlie here will tell you how to access Langley, and, as we all know by now, we already have the back door to the FBI.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.” Charlie said and handed Sam a slip of paper and winked. “Ike is the only person I would trust with that information if I had it, which I don’t.”

  “And add Louis Dakis to your search, him and his estranged wife, whoever she is. Find out what his story is, the works. Now, everybody, go—except you, Charlie. We need to talk.”

  ***

  Louis Dakis’ phone rang. He put down the board on which he was tracing the image the sheriff had commissioned and picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Louis, it’s me, Anne Scott—Anne Scott Jacobs.” Anne was Lorraine’s oldest and best friend. She had two first names. That is, no one called her Anne. It was Annescott, her first and second name run together. Not hyphenated, not a southern Luella-Mae or Billy-Bob thing, just—Annescott. She had been that since grammar school. Her parents called her that, everyone did.

  “Yes, hello. It’s nice to hear from you, I guess. How did you find me?”

  “Four-one-one, information, you know. Lorraine said you were in Virginia. Someone else, I can’t remember who, thought it was down there, so I called around and found you.”

  “And now that you have, what can I do for you?”

  “Oh, Louis, what happened to you two?”

  “You mean me and Lorraine? Ask her.”

  “I did, she said something like ‘not now.’ I mean I was away on the West Coast for three months and I come back and you two, my two favorite people, are separated. What happened?”

  “She didn’t tell you? You don’t know?”

  “No, I…”

  “She went to Italy to check out an estate, lots of things we could sell, old stuff, collectibles. Then, I received a presale catalogue on the Internet about a piece, an icon, in Cairo that looked good. So I sent her there and she met a guy…some hot-shot Italian art dealer, she says. Long story short, she came home with him and asked me to leave. She wants a divorce and a settlement, and then she says she will marry him. That’s it.” Louis felt his temper slipping. He didn’t want to air his problems with Annescott. Not now, anyway. “You never met the grease ball, Annescott?”

  “Noooo…”

  But it didn’t sound like she hadn’t, too much hesitation.

  Louis ignored the disclaimer “What do you think of him, then?”

  “I said I didn’t…okay, I met him. I didn’t like him, if you must know. He didn’t seem genuine. You know I studied Italian in college and spent part of my junior year in Rome. If he’s Italian, I’m Aunt Jemima. Oh, that’s…You can’t say things like that anymore, can you? Okay, if he’s Italian, I’m Paris Hilton. There, that’s better. We can disrespect one of our own. At least until some militant group forms to defend the rights of the congenitally stupid and vacuum-brained.”

  “Then you know how I feel, and like you, I am confused and…Well, that’s it.”

  “Would it be too much if I said something to you, you know, straight up?”

  “I guess so. Shoot.” Now what, he thought. More feminist crap about sharing?

  “I did talk to Lorraine before. I mean when you were still together. She told me…”

  “What, Annescott? She told you what?”

  “Okay, you are a workaholic, Lois. You’re never home, never anywhere except in your studio painting, or at the store, or going through the stock, or reading catalogs. Always something, but not her. She felt abandoned half the time. She told you that didn’t she?”

  She had done, many times. And he’d told her they had a business to run and that meant he had to work. He told her she might be better off giving him some credit for all the work he put in building it. But he did not repeat that to Annescott.

  “She might have said something.”


  “There’s one thing more.”

  “What else?” Louis clenched his teeth. His jaw began to throb.

  “You know about her wish for…Her biological clock was ticking away, Louis. She wanted to start a family and you kept putting her off even to the point of—”

  He knew. He feared she’d “forget” the pill and have an accidental pregnancy, so he’d stopped their sex life for all practical purposes. Did Lorraine confide all this to Annescott? Women had no sense of confidentiality. They’d blab any and all to their friends. Men didn’t do that. Not in his experience anyway.

  “It was a difficult time,” he said by way of apology.

  “Would it help if I had a talk with her? You know, I’ll say we had this chat, and you want her back, and like that.”

  “You could. You’d be lying, but you could.”

  “There’s no hope then?”

  “None that I can see.”

  “I’m sorry to have had to say all this and I hope, um, I’ll talk to her again. You should too.”

  “Perhaps I will,” he said and hung up. In a pig’s eye I will.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ike ushered Charlie into his office. It didn’t provide much in the way of privacy. It more nearly resembled a fish bowl, a human aquarium, than a proper office, a box partitioned off from the main reception area with large casement windows instead of walls. Ike could see and be seen; could close his door but that was about the extent of his privacy. Still, he needed a moment with Charlie and it was better than nothing.

  “Charlie, I need you to go with me up to Callend and brace Ruth.”

  “I would love to meet her, of course, but brace? Why does your fiancée need bracing?”

  “She has never met you, and you know her only from what I’ve told you about her. There are some things I haven’t mentioned.” Ike tapped a pencil on his desk top. “She can be, shall we say, stubborn about the sort of things you do, that is, we did, or I used to do. She comes from the part of society that has this notion about an intrusive government and—”

  “Ike, for Pete’s sake. She leases us that old storage facility, your old ‘bunker,’ now museum, on her campus, the one where the art used to be stored. It is now our building and—”

  “I know what it is now. She knows, too, sort of. But she doesn’t like it and will not renew her lease, if and when.”

  “The lease is for twenty years and if she knew what we’re up to down in the depths of her basement, she’d be grateful.”

  “And what is that? No, no, don’t tell me. If I know, I’ll owe you and I don’t want to go there. Besides, I doubt if gratitude is what she’d feel.”

  “You already owe me.”

  “Wrong. I pulled your chestnuts out of the fire last fall. You and the director owe me big time, so don’t even start.”

  “Okay, we owe you. Is that the problem that has you all snarky and mean spirited?”

  “Not quite. We, that is, the FBI, possibly your people, and certainly mine as well, if I have this pegged right, are going to be all over her turf for a while. She will not be happy.”

  “Why will we, as you say, be all over her turf?”

  “Someone wants that icon. They will come back to get it. If we make a substitute, when they find out, they will not be happy and then bad things could happen. If her people happen to be caught in the middle, she, in turn, will not be happy. The very fact we have brought this to her campus will not make her happy, understand?”

  “Yes. I suppose so. What ever happened to trust in the essential righteousness of your cause?”

  “You know better than to ask. Too many young men lying dead in ditches in far-off deserts and snow-covered mountains because we decided to respond to maniacs in hijacked airplanes and bring democracy to the unanointed.”

  Charlie heaved a sigh, a very stagey one “I will explain all to her, assure her it is a trivial pursuit, a trifle, a bagatelle, a—”

  “You’ll tell her the truth or she will, as the Brits used to say, have your guts for garters.”

  “They still say it and it is silly, no one wears garters anymore. Except at weddings and that is only for that awful bit of business between the bride and groom where he has to…Did I tell you about my sister’s second wedding? Poor dear is in her forties and no longer lithe, you could say. Imagine this, she wore white—for her second. I don’t know what has happened to the usage of proper sartorial symbolism. Where have we gone wrong? Anyway, the groom went diving for that garter, slipped, lurched forward as only the obese and alcoholically impaired can, and knocked her off the chair. Both of them ended up on the floor, he with his head under a mountain of tulle, and she grasping at air like a beached whale, unable to move. It was awful.”

  “That’s fascinating. Now, back to the point of this chat, garters notwithstanding, you will have to turn on all your boyish charm to get around her, and the problem with that is, she doesn’t respond well to charm and as you aren’t a boy anymore anyway, you will need to be at your best.”

  “You’re too kind. Ike, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for years. As Will Rogers said, ‘I never met a woman I couldn’t schmooze.’”

  “He didn’t say that, and you never came across a woman like Ruth. All I’m saying is, forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Not a problem, Ike. I will be charming, persuasive, and if that doesn’t work I’ll send one of our contractors down here to snuff her. Okay?”

  “If the latter, my sympathies go to the contractor’s widow.”

  ***

  The voice on the phone sounded like it came from the depths of an empty garbage can. This was not good.

  “Where are you, Jacob? I cannot wait much longer. Do you have the merchandise or not?” Why would Serak call it merchandise? It sounded like dialogue from a bad television show.

  “We failed to find it in either place. Sacci looked in the man’s house and reported it was not there. He said it must still be at the store in spite of what the woman told him earlier. He thought she might be getting suspicious. He is not reliable, as you know. So, we tried the store as well. No picture there either.”

  “And still, you trusted him to tell you the truth?”

  “What other choice did I have? He is not a significant person, a delivery boy, a weakling, and he gave it up as soon as we threatened him.”

  “Okay, if it is not there, is it possible the man sold it?”

  “I suppose he might have. Sacci didn’t think so. He said the market for such things is slim enough in cities. In the country…?”

  “Find out.”

  “Serak, with respect, I must ask you this, are you sure you gave us the right photograph? All of these holy pictures look alike to me.”

  “I have assurances that it is correct. By the way, where is Sacci? He must have made a mistake. Make him talk if you have to.”

  “That will be difficult. Sacci isn’t volunteering any information anymore.”

  “Make him.”

  “As I said, that will be difficult. He’s dead.”

  “Dead? What do you mean, dead?”

  “There was a misunderstanding, it seems. He was in custody with the two idiots you hired for me and attempted to escape, they said. They reported that Avi Kolb shot him during the attempt. And that brings up my next question. Why did you send Kolb to us anyway?”

  “Avi Kolb? I didn’t send him. He’s not one of us.”

  “He said you sent him, that he was contracted by you to do a thing with Sacci and the other two. He knew all about what we were doing and we assumed…”

  “You didn’t think to check back with me?”

  “Why would I? He knew all about…You didn’t send him?”

  “I told you already, and no. This creates another problem for me. It means someone else knows about the merchandise…” there was that word again, “or something else more important.” A silence followed. He waited. Silences made Jacob nervous. �
��This is not good. You cannot waste any more time. Go back to that man’s house and get that icon.”

  “The police are there. It is a crime scene now. We will have to wait for a while, until they leave. Then we break in and retrieve the picture if it is there. A day or two.”

  “As soon as you can. I will contact our friend in Washington. He will know what Kolb was up to.”

  The line went dead. What was Kolb doing? What was going on here, and where were those two idiots they’d hired? He hated contract help. No matter how dedicated they seemed, the lack of professionalism could cost.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Reverend Blake Fisher turned to his bride of less than four months and pointed toward the church’s altar. “I would like to put icons up front, maybe on either side of the altar. What do you think?”

  “Icons? Like in Greek Orthodox churches? Those kind of icons?”

  “Yes. Only not so large, you know. I don’t think I could manage a full iconostasis even if I wanted to, but something simple. I have that Jesus Pantocrator hanging in my office I bought in Jerusalem a few years ago. I’d put it on the Epistle side and a Virgin and Child on the Gospel side. Maybe on little stands.”

  “I don’t know, Blake. This is the Shenandoah Valley, not mainline Philadelphia. High church trappings don’t sell too well down here in the South.”

  “Come on, Mary, this has nothing to do with high or low church. It has to do with ambience and focus. We have the nation’s flag up there, we have hymn boards bolted to the wall with the assigned hymns and Psalter, even though the same information is printed in the service bulletin and no one even looks at them any more. We have plaques commemorating the dozens of dead donors the church has had over the years. I want something to remind us where we are and what we’re supposed to be about.”

  “But Greek icons?”

  “Orthodox icons. Russian, Greek, Armenian, whatever. Why is it nobody has a problem with saints rendered in stained glass along the side windows, but a painted version of the same saint up front causes an uproar in Protestant churches?”

  “It’s about what we’re used to, Blake.”