He had dressed in jeans, a dark blue polo shirt, brown socks and his cordovan loafers. While he wasn’t at his sartorial best, Oak didn’t expect to run into anyone he knew. He took his time sauntering a block west and two blocks south. He stayed close to the darkness provided by hedges.
In his daylight pass by the house, he had noted the small sign advertising home security planted in the front yard, which was nicely done in eco fashion of gravel, rocks, and shrubs—more sage, prickly pear cactus, and barrel cactus. The sign was dated in appearance, suggesting an older security system.
He found that to be true after he pulled on thin vinyl gloves and passed through the wrought iron gate into the backyard. A cement block wall enclosed the back and the moonlight gave him a view of its xeriscape landscaping. No damned lawn to be mowed and fertilized and watered. A canvas covered swimming pool was surrounded by a concrete patio with big ceramic pots scattered about. Weak looking shrubs in the pots. Small diameter tubing snaked into the pots suggested a drip system that was falling behind demand. The covered pool added to his conviction that the Dixons only visited in the winter. Snowbirds from the hell of Washington.
He found the double wire from the interior of the house connecting to the phone system box. It was located on the side of the garage next to the exterior electrical master circuit breaker box. The alarm system was intended to make a call to the security firm if one of the protective circuits was interrupted. With a small screw driver, he opened the box and disconnected one wire. Now the alarm could go off, but it couldn’t call anyone.
Oak was traveling with very few of the tools he normally employed, but he did have a set of lock picks that he stowed inside a gold Montblanc fountain pen. It didn’t write worth a damn, but the solid metal body defied most security checks. He normally carried it and its matching mechanical pencil in a fitted box in his luggage rather than a shirt pocket. Malone wished it was as easy to deal with some telephone marketers as it was to penetrate security systems.
There were two doors on the back side of the house. A pair of glass-paned French doors led out to the pool area, and a single steel-lined door accessed the back of the three-car garage. That door had a deadbolt lock and a knob lock, neither of which held out for long. Judging by the patina and scratches of the Schlage hardware, Malone guessed the age of the house somewhere in the middle ’60’s. It might have been the house Lani Powell grew up in and then kept when she inherited it from her folks.
Inside the garage, he discovered one five year old Lexus SUV covered with dust. Lani and David didn’t visit often, but they wanted local transport available after they cabbed from the airport. He also discovered a touch pad for the alarm system on the wall next to the interior door. It wasn’t even activated.
And the door leading into a utility room wasn’t even locked. He was beginning to think that not much of value was kept in the place. He slipped through the door, passed through the utility room and into the kitchen. Ambient moonlight floated in from half-circle arched windows over the standard windows which had closed wooden blinds. Large kitchen. Everything neat. A toaster, ultra fancy coffee pot, and blender on the counter. The refrigerator door was open, with nothing inside except an opened box of baking soda.
Malone was pretty attuned to his feelings when it came to clandestine activities, and this house felt empty. Long time empty.
The whole house smelled unused and dusty. No lingering aroma of cooked food, body odor, cologne or perfume. He was careful to not test any horizontal surface for a dust coating and thereby leave a finger trail.
The kitchen was open on one side except for a bar height counter with stools on the other side adjacent to a large great room, which was much darker. He withdrew his penlight from his pocket and made a pass around the room with the feeble light beam. Nicely tiled floor with a few area rugs casually placed. Most of the furnishings looked well used and current fashion for 1975. Except for the giant flat screen TV hanging on one wall. This little getaway home in Scottsdale didn’t have to host a lot of parties. It was sooo difficult to get away from the social whirl of Washington.
There were two wings off the great room, and Malone quickly checked the one on the right. The kids’ wing. Four furnished bedrooms and two bathrooms and an empty larger room that was probably the playroom at one time. He found nothing of even remote interest.
The other wing contained an office and a huge master suite, and he selected the bedroom first. It had its own bath, about the size of Flagstaff, with a glass-walled shower for two or more occupants, a large Jacuzzi tub on a raised dais in the middle of the room, his and her lavatories to the left and right, and a closed door on the toilet compartment. The bathroom struck him as having benefitted from an upgrade twenty or so years after the initial construction. A quick check of the two medicine cabinets revealed no medicine but some half-crushed tubes of toothpaste, tooth brushes, a razor, deodorants, shaving cream. Not so much dust in here, as if it had been used in the last few months. No drugs hidden in the expected places.
The bedroom held a king bed with night stands, a conversational grouping of sofa and chairs, and a major armoire standing seven feet tall. Oak opened it to find stacks of sweaters, T-shirts, shorts, blouses, underwear, and a smaller flat screen TV. Most of it was feminine, but there was a little in the way of male clothing. Nothing in the bedside stands except for a couple novels and a guide to Washington D.C. There was some good art on the walls, Southwestern themed, but he didn’t know how good.
The walk-in closet was more the size of Yuma. It was three-quarters full of women’s dresses, gowns, robes, slacks, and half of Bloomingdale’s shoe department. Why would Lani move anything to Washington when she could buy everything new? He wondered if the small stash of two suits and three sport coats with slacks, sport shirts, and pressed casual trousers belonged to David Wainwright Dixon or an earlier husband.
Rifling quickly through all of the clothes and the few shoe boxes and other boxes on the shelf above, Malone found nothing incriminating, much less amusing. There was no safe in the wall. Disappointment!
He moved his penlight to the office.
Nicely done with wainscoted oak on the lower walls, a dark green leather couch with two matching overstuffed chairs. Oak tables and book cases filled with books and art objects, a large oak desk, and more Southwestern art. The two plants on pedestals were made of silk, which saved on water. There were free-standing picture frames on the tables and desk, and he ran his light over them. He realized that these and the photographs in the bedroom were all pictures of Lani. Lani at tennis, Lani at the country club, on the golf course, and on horseback. No pictures of husbands, ex or otherwise. Egocentric?
Yes.
Malone moved to the two bookcases and randomly pulled books out, then replaced them. A set of the Great Books. Winston Churchill’s six volume set. Best sellers through the years. Not one of them appeared to have been read. What a waste.
The drawers of the desk didn’t give up much. The usual clutter in the middle drawer. A drawer full of receipts and statements each marked “Paid” in ballpoint. He checked dates and found receipts as recent as February of this year. No utility or telephone bills. They were probably handled by a bookkeeping service or maybe she paid them online.
The lower file drawer contained hanging file folders. A fat folder held warranty and operator manual information for a refrigerator, the flat screen TV’s, a replaced air conditioning system, a microwave oven. One folder held more photographs of Lani at various ages, some marked on the back. “Sixth birthday.” “HS graduation.” “U of A sorority friends.”
No husbands.
Malone found one shot that looked more recent, Lani maybe in her thirties, and as beautiful as ever. He pocketed it.
Another file was marked “Resume.” In fact, it held about six or seven resumes composed in different years. Oak had never before seen a resume that didn’t include experience at actual jobs. The latest resume had Education – University of Arizona,
political science. It listed Volunteer Work – a couple homeless shelters, a Thanksgiving dinner for transients, and quite a few in support of various candidates for political office, both state and national. It listed Honors – and she had a few of those. Honor Roll in high school, Dean’s List at the university, equestrian showmanship, tennis championship. It listed Organizational Memberships – and that was nearly half a page by itself. Scanning the list, Oak saw the National Rifle Association and the Smithsonian as two of the ones he recognized.
He folded the resume carefully and put it in his pocket.
The rest of the files held zilch. There was some correspondence, old stuff directed to or from women friends. None to or from husbands. Boy, when she discarded a husband, she discarded all of him.
Nothing else in the house pointed anywhere. Except to Lani’s interest in herself. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest she’d ever had parents, other than in the background of a birthday party snapshot. No legal papers regarding marriages, divorces, divorce settlements, wills, funerals to be found.
Well, the NRA. Suggested an interest in firearms, right? Something learned from Daddy? But no guns around. One didn’t haul those into the Georgetown section of Washington all that easily.
He took another turn through the house and found it in the utility room. It was another door off that room, other than the one to the kitchen and the one to the garage.
Better locks this time, and it took him eight minutes of work with the picks. The door opened into an armory. Might as well have been. Daddy or Lani—he didn’t for a minute think that David Wainwright Dixon was involved—collected guns. Locked into a rack on the left wall were twelve shotguns, all premium brands. On the right wall, he counted nineteen rifles in all manner of calibers ranging from varmint plinking to elephant confrontation. Two good antiques from Colt right up to a combat M-4 in 5.56 x 45 mm NATO. They too were locked in place with bars and padlocks. Directly in front of him was a locked glass door in front of two dozen handguns resting on wooden pins. Below that was a locked cabinet that he suspected held ammunition and accessories for everything in the room. He couldn’t tell for certain, but he thought none of the handguns were missing. The cabinet appeared to be constructed specifically for this collection.
There was an 1875 or so Colt Single Action Army he wouldn’t mind having for himself, but he passed on the opportunity and backed out of the room. He used his picks to relock the deadbolt on that door and on the garage door once he was outside. He replaced the wire in the telephone box.
Then he sauntered back to his Jeep without seeing a single soul prowling the neighborhood. He sat there for a few minutes, slid his picks back into the Montblanc pen, and wondered what he had learned. There must be something, just so the whole caper wasn’t a waste of sleep time.
He learned that Lani Dixon had a personality trait similar to Tracy Dinmore. She was just as interested in making a better life for herself as Dinmore had been. Lani Dixon was focused on herself, but he had kind of known that since his few seconds with Lani Kemper at the French Embassy.
So he had reaffirmation.
But that was about all he had.
What else today? Or yesterday? He had slipped into Phoenix in stealth mode, so whoever was tracking him faced an obstacle. Then he met with Jim Mears as himself, and if that flicker in Jim’s eye meant anything at all, the person tracking him now knew he was in Phoenix.
So this afternoon sometime, Oak would give them a new course to follow.
*
Conrad Sherry was still waiting, hanging out in a Denny’s for a late lunch involving a Grand Slam. He’d rather be on a beach. At least there, he wouldn’t have the surreptitious stares from fellow diners.
Sherry spent most of his time in Aruba, and he liked it there. He was born and raised in Texarkana, but left right after high school and had never been back. Hadn’t seen his mother in twelve years, though he called her every year or so. The only thing he’d liked about high school was playing football. He was big at six-four and 255 pounds when he was seventeen, and he’d been a hell of a left guard. He’d crunched a few bones. Sometimes with just his hands, which were big and strong. The newspaper had written him up a few times, about the ferocious way he played the game.
His handicap was a severely acne scarred face that had plagued him throughout school and led him to enlist in the U.S. Army two days after graduation. And what did the Army do with a guy his size? Sent him to language school. He discovered an unexpected knack for languages and he had a fair command of Farsi, Arabic, Pashto, and Kurdish. He spent most of his eight active duty years working in Army Intelligence and Defense Intelligence. Mainly listening. He listened to radio and television broadcasts, to wire tapped phone lines, to intercepted cell phone calls. He wrote reports on what he heard. Boring but not too bad.
Until he met Tracy Dinmore from another intelligence agency who urged him to leave active duty and work for his shadow organization which apparently didn’t have a name. Sherry had never heard one. But he agreed to the conditions and confidentiality of employment, and he took on the assigned tasks which varied somewhat and he took cash payments of ten or twenty thousand tax-free dollars, occasionally as high as a hundred thousand when the assignment made use of his hands.
And he lived well in Aruba.
He’d been on a shopping trip in Miami when he got the call from the Chairman, and then the instructions from May. So he was having breakfast in Phoenix when the cell phone sounded the William Tell Overture.
That theme played on his disposable cell. His good phone just chimed.
“November.”
“This is May. You need to go to Des Moines and wait for further instructions.”
“Des Moines? In Iowa?”
“Go now. The man’s flight left at 12:28, with a layover in Minneapolis.”
As soon as the call terminated, Conrad opened up his iPad and went searching for flight information.
Shit!
The earliest he could get out of Arizona was a 4:49 Delta flight, also going through Minneapolis. About five hours total time to destination.
The Malone guy was going to be about ten hours ahead of him. May had better locate him quick in Iowa.
*
Fred Williamson’s American Airlines flight landed smoothly at 12:33 PDT in San Francisco. He waited for the other passengers, and then followed them off the plane and onto the train. Disembarking at baggage claim, he found his battered carryon and made his way to the parking lot where he’d left Oak Malone’s Chevy pickup.
The truck was white. At one time. It was kind of a grayish dingy now because Malone didn’t bother to wash it often. There were dings along the sides, and a major concavity in the tailgate. The condition insured that Oak didn’t have to worry about kids swinging open car doors in parking lots. It couldn’t get any worse. No one was going to inflict a scratch on the pristine paint of his $80,000 Mercedes because he didn’t have one. Under the hood of his Silverado, however, was a rebuilt and smooth running 454 cubic inch big block that pumped out respectable horsepower and torque. Good for towing trailers, if he ever had to tow a trailer.
He climbed in, cranked it up, and left the airport taking the 101 north into the City. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud loitering around. Off to his right the bay appeared placid.
Malone wondered if anyone was going to Des Moines today. He’d purchased that ticket under his own name and credit card in the hope that someone would find Iowa pleasant at this time of year. He wished he had a way to figure out if anyone had taken the bait. At the very least, the vacant seat on the airplane would afford some traveler the ability to stretch his or her legs. At the most, if someone did pursue him to Des Moines, the someone was going to be royally pissed off at the result.
That was good. Teach Big Brother a lesson. Make him mad.
When the 101 petered out as a freeway, Malone took Oak Street over to Van Ness Avenue, which was still U.S. Route 101, and still El Camino Real, th
e King’s Highway. That highway actually originated in the Baja and meandered north to connect all the missions and four presidios in PAE. Pre-Auto Exhaust.
He briefly considered stopping at Tommy’s Joynt for a custom-built sandwich but remembered he had a loaf of sourdough bread and a pound of some thinly-sliced roast beef at home, if it hadn’t turned green yet.
Mid-day on a Sunday and still the traffic was heavy. He didn’t fight it, but cruised along and took the left at Lombard Street. Lombard ran west and then curved north and led him onto the Presidio Parkway and a short time later onto the Golden Gate Bridge. U.S. Highway 101 ended a thousand feet before reaching the toll plaza and then picked up again on the north side of the bridge. That assured that the bridge was not a part of the 101, but a national highway. Tolls were only collected on the southbound side, so Malone kept moving. There was very little wind today so he couldn’t detect the bridge moving. Also no jumpers either, so it was a serene crossing.
On the north side of the bridge, he stayed with the 101 until he reached the Spencer Avenue off-ramp and followed that down until he could turn right and make his way up the hill. The narrow road curved through lush greenery and houses on the left backed into the hill, or on the right, houses that frequently hung down from the road with their driveways at rooftop level. He had bitched about the tightly packed houses in Scottsdale, but it was even tighter here. People traded space for a chance to live on the hill. Most of the houses fronted directly on the street with very little setback.
Malone’s house was on the left with what the real estate lady had seriously told him was a driveway. It was two cars wide, but about twelve feet long. Any car parked in the driveway had its rear end sticking out into the street. Unless it was a VW Beetle or a Mini Cooper. Oak supposed the builder was subtly reinforcing a desire for everyone to drive a small car. The many progressives in this part of California wanted everyone but themselves to drive smaller cars or ride bicycles, create less of a carbon footprint, or not sell goldfish in a real store. Malone had lived among the Shiites and Sunnis and Taliban, and he didn’t much care what they wanted either.
Solid Oak Page 7
