The phone’s time display said it was after midnight.
I splashed cold water on my face and headed for the door.
Murphy’s house was in darkness. I parked in the driveway behind the Toyota Camry, went up to the front door and knocked. No answer. I knocked again, louder this time. No one came to the door. I rang the doorbell. No one answered the ring, but something brushed up against my leg.
I looked down at Murphy’s cat, Gus. Funny. Murphy said Gus stayed indoors because of the danger from coyotes.
I tried the knob. The door was unlocked. As I opened the door Gus scuttled past me into the darkness. I stepped inside and called Murphy’s name. No answer. I tried again. This time I heard a low moan. I felt for the wall switch and flicked on the lights.
Murphy was stretched out on the couch, one arm dangling limply toward the floor. The lower part of his face looked as if it had been smeared with ketchup.
I snatched a phone from the floor next to the couch and called 911. I said I was Mike’s neighbor and that he needed medical help. Then I knelt next to Murphy. I put my face close to his, and said, “You’re going to be okay, Mike. Rescue squad is on its way.”
He opened his mouth and I got a knot in the pit of my stomach when I saw that his beautiful Irish smile had been ruined. Something or someone had hit him in the jaw with a force powerful enough to knock out his front teeth. There were bruises on his left cheek. I guessed he’d been worked over with a blackjack.
Anger welled in my chest.
“Who did this to you, Mike?”
He tried to talk. The best he could manage was a wet gurgle similar to the one I had heard over the phone. I asked him again. This time he said what sounded like goats. I tried again. The same answer. His dazed eyes looked past my shoulder. I turned and saw he had fixed his gaze on the fireplace photo of the Crowell barn. Then, mercifully, he passed out.
I had done all I could for Mike. I didn’t want to explain to the police who I was and why I was there. I went outside, got in the pickup, drove half a block and parked where I could see the house. Minutes later, I saw the flashing lights of an ambulance coming down the street.
It was clear to me who’d worked Mike over. Ruskin made no secret that he would crack heads if necessary to get his hands on the decoy. Thanks to my big fat Greek mouth, he knew Murphy held the key to its whereabouts. I had handed Mike on a platter to a dangerous man.
Maybe I should tell the cops what I knew. Lousy idea. Ruskin had the money to hire a team of lawyers who would say that there was no evidence. And Ruskin had the perfect alibi. He never left the house because of his acute allergies, poor guy.
I watched the rescue squad bring Mike out on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance. I followed the ambulance to the hospital emergency entrance. I waited outside a few minutes, but there was nothing I could do while Mike was in the ER, so I drove home.
When I drove up to my house I saw I had company. A black Cadillac was parked in front. I pulled up next to the car and got out of the truck. The caddy’s door opened and a tall man emerged from the car. His silver hair was combed back from a broad forehead. He had a sharp-jawed face with a chin like a shelf. He stood there with his arms folded.
“Ruskin sent me,” he said. He had an accent that was neither English nor Irish. I figured him for Australian.
The black running suit didn’t hide his broad-shouldered physique any better than the white coverall did when I first saw him in the trophy room. “You’re his valet. Dudley.”
If he was surprised I knew his name he didn’t show it. His expression looked as if it had been carved in ice.
“Yeah, that’s me. How’d you know my name?”
“Ruskin’s butler.”
“He talks to much.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you without your hazmat outfit.”
“What? Oh yeah. The spook suit. I put it on after I’ve been out of the house. Ruskin worries about bringing in bad stuff.”
“I’d ask you in for a cup of tea, Dudley, but the place is a mess. What brings you by this time of night?”
“Mr. Ruskin wanted me to tell you you’re off the case. He doesn’t need you anymore.”
“Funny, he didn’t say anything about firing me when I talked to him a few hours ago. He suggested I offer a reward to a source who might be able to lead him to the decoy.”
“Save your energy. You’re done.”
“Does that mean he’s found the decoy?”
“He knows where it is. You’re out of the picture.”
“He paid me a lot of money to snoop around.”
He sneered. “Don’t bother cashing the check. He’s going to put a stop payment on it.”
“Mr. Ruskin is stiffing me?”
“You didn’t find the bird. That was the deal. He had to take matters into his own hands. I’m here to pick up the fake bird.”
“It’s a fake. What’s the hurry?”
“Mr. Ruskin doesn’t like other people to have his property.”
“People like Mike Murphy?”
“Whaddya talking about?”
“I told Ruskin that Murphy might know where the decoy was. A few hours later someone put him in the hospital.”
Dudley smiled. “So?”
“So maybe the police might like to know the connection between your boss and Murphy getting beat up.”
“That would be stupid on your part.”
“Tell Ruskin I’ll drop the duck off tomorrow. Maybe we can talk about my paycheck then. Thanks for coming by, Dud.”
Calling him Dud was my first mistake. Turning away from a violent thug was my second. He moved in, and I saw him unfold his arms from across his chest a second before something hard slammed into the side of my head. My legs turned to rubber and I went over like a fallen oak.
I didn’t even have the chance to yell, “Timber!”
A groan woke me up, which wasn’t surprising because it was coming from my throat.
I pushed myself onto my elbows, then onto my knees, got my legs under me and staggered into the boathouse. The right side of my head was on fire. I had trouble focusing, but I saw that the inside of the house looked as if a bulldozer had gone through it. Only not as neat.
I called Kojak’s name and sighed with relief when he sauntered out of the bedroom. I splashed cold water on my face for the second time that night, put ice in a dish towel and held it tenderly against my head where it helped numb the pain.
I went out on the deck. The box was where I left it, behind the chair. The bird container was still inside.
Dudley said his boss knew where to find the Crowell decoy. I stood on the deck and recalled my conversation with Murphy, and the startled look on his face when I told him his gift to the museum had been moved to the barn.
I remembered, too, the way he had stared at the Crowell barn photo when I found him with his teeth smashed in. It was a deliberate gesture that must have caused him some pain but he did it anyhow.
Sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees.
You can get so involved in the details, you can’t see the whole picture.
Whether he intended to or not, Mike’s wry comment told me he had found a safe place for the original Crowell. Right in the open, where no one would suspect it to be.
It was a short drive from my house to Brooks Academy. The black Cadillac was parked on a side road in the shadow of some trees.
I dug a filleting knife out of its case, snuck over to the car and stuck the blade into all four tires. The car slowly slumped onto its rims. About then, I heard the sound of an alarm from the workshop. Dudley was making his move. I got back in my truck and drove to the police station around a half mile away. I went in the front door and hurried up to the dispatcher’s desk.
“I just went by Brooks Academy and heard an alarm going off,” I said. “There’s a car parked nearby. Looked kinda suspicious.”
The dispatcher thanked me, and while she got on the phone I slipped out of th
e police station. I sat in my truck and saw a cruiser drive away from the station toward the museum. A minute later another patrol car raced past, going in the same direction.
I waited ten minutes, then drove by the museum. Four cruisers with roof lights flashing were parked near the museum. Some police officers were talking to a tall man. He had his back to me so I couldn’t see his face, but his hair looked even more silvery in the harsh beam of headlights.
On the way home I stopped by the bank ATM and deposited the check from Ruskin. The transaction went through, thanks to the warning from Dudley.
I was still thinking about Dudley when I stepped into the boathouse. He’d probably say he got drunk and broke into the workshop by mistake. Ruskin would spring him from jail before the arresting officers got off their shifts.
A guy like Dudley doesn’t make his way through life without leaving tracks. I called the best tracker I knew. If John Flagg was surprised to hear from me at three o’clock in the morning, he didn’t show it. He simply said, “Hello, Soc. Been a while. What’s up?”
Flagg seems to function without sleep. Which may have something to do with his job as a troubleshooter for an ultra-secret government unit. We’d met in Vietnam and bonded over our New England heritage. He was a Wampanoag Indian from Martha’s Vineyard whose ancestors had been around for thousands of years. My parents came to Massachusetts from the ancient land of Greece.
“Ever heard of a guy named Merriwhether Ruskin the 3rd?”
“Sure. He runs one of the biggest mercenary ops in the world. Bigger than the armies of lots of countries. Why do you ask?”
“He hired me for a job.”
“Never figured you for a soldier of fortune, Soc.”
“Me neither. That’s why I’m no longer on his payroll. Ruskin has another guy working for him. First name is Dudley. Maybe Australian. I know that isn’t much.”
“Give me a minute. I’ll look in the bad guy database.” He hung up. I could imagine him tapping into the vast intelligence network he had at his fingertips. He called back after three minutes. “He’s an Aussie named Dudley Wormsley, AKA ‘The Worm.’ Interpol has a pile of warrants out for him.”
“I thought as much. Wonder if there is any way to let the FBI know that ‘The Worm’ is sitting in the Harwich, Massachusetts police station, under arrest for breaking and entering.”
“I’ll take care of it. When we going fishing?”
“Charter boat’s coming out of the water, but there’s my dinghy. As you know, I don’t bait my hooks.”
“Suits me,” Flagg said.
I hung up and thought about Mike. He said he’d been attacked by goats. Dudley had referred to the hazmat suit as a spook suit. Spooks equal ghosts. Which meant plural. Which meant he wasn’t alone. Which meant the second ghost was Ruskin.
With Dudley out of the way, Ruskin was an open target, if I could get to him, although that was unlikely given the air-tight fortress he lived in. When I got home I retrieved the box from the deck and brought it inside. I took out the plastic case protecting the merganser, put it on the kitchen table and stared at it, taking in the graceful lines of the bird’s body and neck.
“Talk to me,” I said.
Early the next morning I got up, poured some coffee into a travel mug, and called Ruskin’s number. The butler answered the phone and said his boss was busy. I said that was all right. I merely wanted to drop off Mr. Ruskin’s decoy. He said to leave it at the gatehouse.
After hanging up, I got a small leather case out of a duffle bag I keep in my bedroom closet. Inside the case was a full range of lock picks. After a few tries, I popped the padlock and lifted the box lid back on its hinges. I remembered how Ruskin had reached into the box for the carving and lifted it above his head.
Then I took the decoy out of the box, put it in the sink and got a jar of peanut butter out of the refrigerator. I spooned some butter out of the jar onto the bird carving and smeared it all over the wooden feathers with my hands. Then I nestled the glistening fake bird back into its fake nest. I padlocked the box again and carried it out to the truck.
As I drove away from the gatehouse after dropping the box off for Mr. Ruskin, I thought what I’d done was rather sneaky and not very nice. Maybe Ruskin was allergic to peanuts. Maybe not. But I didn’t like being played for a patsy, especially when innocent people are hurt. It happened at a village in Vietnam, and with Murphy. It wasn’t going to happen again.
I stopped by the hospital on the way home. Mike was out of the ICU and sleeping. The nurse in charge said he was doing fine.
Bridget called me that night to say that she had been trying to reach Ruskin, but his butler said he wasn’t available. She said she would keep me posted. I didn’t know what Ruskin was allergic to when I returned his decoy. Maybe I just got lucky.
Mike got out of the hospital a few days later. I drove him home and checked in on him while he healed and popped painkillers. When I asked why he had called me instead of 911, he said it was because Marines stick together.
Once he was able to talk at length we discussed what to do about the Crowell decoy.
He confessed that he’d taken it from the Orloff mansion for payment of back wages. When he found out the bird was worth maybe a million dollars, he knew he couldn’t sell it. He read about Chinese reproductions somewhere and went into the fake decoy business for himself. He had the original scanned in New York and made in China. He sold out the first batch except for the one he kept. But he started to get nervous about attracting attention to himself and wanted the Crowell bird out of the house. He hid it in plain sight at the historical society museum, never figuring they’d put it in the Crowell barn.
“Legally speaking, the bird belongs to Ruskin,” I said. “He told me that he paid Orloff for the merganser, but I have only his word for that. It’s quite possible no money exchanged hands, which means that the sale never went through. In that case, Orloff was still the owner. Did he have any heirs?”
“None that I know of. He left lots of folks holding the bag. Including me. But if I admit I took it from the house, I could get into trouble.”
Mike was right. He’d removed the bird without permission. His sticky fingers saved the carving, but it was still grand larceny. If the debtors heard about the bird, they’d want it put up for auction so they could get a cut, no matter how small.
I thought about it for a minute. “You mentioned a fund for handicapped children that Orloff cheated,” I said.
“Big time. They’ll never recover.”
“They might,” I said. “Suppose we contact their lawyers and say we have the bird. Tell them that Orloff felt remorse over cheating the fund, and he wanted to donate proceeds from the sale of the Crowell at auction.”
“Great, but how does that explain me having the bird?”
“You’re a bird carver. Orloff let you take the bird so you could prepare a prospectus at auction. When he went to jail and the house was sealed, you didn’t know what to do. Orloff called and told you he wanted to move ahead with the sale, then he died.”
“That old bastard never said that. Never would.”
“Maybe, but that’s the way you understood it. It makes him look good, and helps a bunch of kids who need it. Splitting it among the debtors would only make the lawyers rich. Look at it this way: the Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand. Semper fi.”
Mike shook my hand with a lobster grip.
“Semper fi.”
Mike’s new implants look like the real thing. They should. I used Ruskin’s check to help pay for them. It was the least I could do, but left me with nothing for the boat loan. I was drowning my sorrows in a beer at Trader Ed’s one night when another boat captain offered me a job crewing on a charter boat in the Florida Keys. I said I’d take it. The timing was good. Bridget called the other day to let me know the Ruskin job was permanently off.
Sometimes I wonder what Crowell would have made of the whole affair. He’d be puzzled at all th
e fuss over one of his birds, but I think he’d be pleased how things turned out with the preening merganser.
The knees of the gods, as Homer said.
Or my partner Sam used to say after a good day of fishing: “Finestkind, Cap.”
* * *
A CREATIVE DEFENSE
JEFFERY DEAVER
She hadn’t wanted to go.
Though she was an academic at a school with a “fine fine-arts program,” as she joked, classical music wasn’t really Beth Tollner’s thing.
Pop, sure. Jazz. Even soft rap, a phrase she coined herself.
Musicals, of course.
Wicked, In the Heights, Hamilton….
She and Robert were, after all, only in their late twenties. Wasn’t classical for fogies?
Then she’d reflected: That wasn’t fair to those of middling age. Most classical was just boring.
But Robert had been given a couple of tickets from one of the partners at the firm where he was a young associate, and he thought it would be political to attend and report back to his boss how much they liked the performance.
Beth had thought: What the hell? Why not get a little culture?
And nothing wrong with dressing up a bit more than you would to see Van Halen or Lady Gaga. She pinned her blonde hair up and picked a black pant suit—Robert wore navy, lawyer attire sans tie. Quite the handsome couple, she thought, catching a glimpse of themselves in the mirror.
The venue was an old monastery on the edge of their small town, Westfield, Connecticut. The place had been renovated but maintained much of the gothic atmosphere it would have had when it housed a functioning religious order. Much of the chill, too; the November cold seeped in through a dozen crevices. Beth supposed that the music she and Robert were about to listen to had echoed around these stone walls long, long ago; the Salem Chamber Players, out of Massachusetts, would be playing music from the 18th and 19th centuries tonight.
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology Page 18
