Flynn's In (12 page)

Lauderdale put the music box on the table.

Rutledge asked, “Where’s Concannon?”

Flynn said, “He must have detected what is on the menu.”

D’Esopo had both hands over his eyes.

“Does anyone know where Concannon is?” asked Rutledge.

“We’ll keep a plate warm for him in the kitchen,” Taylor said.

“Maybe he didn’t hear the gong,” Lauderdale giggled.

The music box ran down.

“He says he wants to stay here,” Arlington was saying to Clifford, “in the cabin by the lake, until it’s time for him to go to the terminal ward. Says there’s no place else for him to go. Wife died ten years ago of the same disease. Has a daughter in Vermont somewhere who apparently hates him.”

“Can’t be anything he said,” Buckingham laughed.

“A son serving a long stretch in a prison in Hawaii for some silly thing or other. Some sort of mayhem.”

“But will he be able to go out with us tomorrow?” Rutledge asked. “Is he up to it?”

“He wants to,” Arlington said. “Wants to keep going until he drops. Hewitt’s a tough old bird.”

“I saw Hewitt this afternoon,” said Oland. “Stomping along lakeside with a doe over his shoulders. Looked perfectly fit to me.”

Rutledge said: “We all mean to go deer hunting tomorrow, Flynn. Will you accompany us?”

“Yes,” said Flynn. “If you’re all going.”
“Great!” exclaimed Clifford. “There are plenty of rifles in the storage room, as you know, but after dinner, have a look at mine. I’ve got—”

“Won’t be taking a rifle,” said Flynn.

D’Esopo’s look at Flynn had settled into permanent dismay.

“Going deer hunting without a rifle?” asked Oland. “Are you one of these bow-and-arrow fans? Or do you mean to slay the deer with your wit?”

“You breed deer here at The Rod and Gun Club, don’t you?” asked Flynn.

“Yes,” said Buckingham, “And stock the lake.”

“And most of you have wives, I think?”

“Yes,” said Roberts.

Flynn said into his plate of boiled fish and broccoli: “So much for
rumble de dump
.”

He wondered what the three belles of Bellingham were having for dinner. He thought of his wife’s good soup.

Dinner conversation then became a series of narrative monologues, hunting and fishing stories, each bright enough, most showing the narrator in a good light. Clifford’s story was personally modest; only Robert’s made fun of himself.

As the men at the table made repeated trips to the beer keg with their tankards, the stories became louder, slower, and less credible. Volume fought veracity and won.

Clearly, most of the men at table had heard most of the stories before. Only Oland insisted he had never heard any of them before. Therefore many stories were told despite the obvious boredom of most of the listeners.

When Lauderdale became bored with a story he started the music box again, and again
The Wedding March
, F-less, tinkled through the dining room.

Dessert was tapioca pudding.

Over coffee Dunn Roberts said in a voice well used to calling meetings to order: “I’m hankering to know what D’Esopo, Flynn and his cohort, Concannon, have discovered so far about the death of Huttenbach.”

“Commissioner D’Esopo and I will be meeting after this
slimming exercise you refer to as dinner,” Flynn said. “We have several things to discuss.”

D’Esopo put down his beer tankard.

“Can’t you tell us anything?” asked Roberts.

“Yes, I can tell you something,” answered Flynn. “To a great degree, although not entirely, I have satisfied myself that Huttenbach was not killed by someone outside The Rod and Gun Club. The people in the surrounding area know The Rod and Gun Club exists, or they know there’s something up here. I suppose they resent having to drive around it, and resent not being able to hunt and fish through here, that your two thousand acres of timber isn’t being farmed, that whatever is here provides no jobs for the surrounding communities whatsoever—except, that is, for Carl Morris, who runs an empty lodge, at least five telephone operators well paid, I suspect, for their tight lips, and the odd gratuity handed out when necessary to such pillars of the community as the Chief of Police and Roads, in this case, at least, the County Coroner, as well as whoever else might be tempted to tell the truth. Whether your power is really all that pervasive, whether your perimeter of guards, dogs and fences is all that perfect, I cannot say, but over a very long period of time, you seem to have gotten everyone to believe in these defensive devices.” Flynn banged the cold ashes from his pipe into the brass ashtray.

Arlington smiled at Rutledge, and Rutledge at Oland.

The Wedding March
began to tinkle through the dining room again.

“I’m not sure you understand me.” Flynn declared his chance at dinner over by standing up to leave. “No one from the village or surrounding area, none of your associates outside The Rod and Gun Club, none of your relations not members of The Rod and Gun Club seems to know you members well enough, or care enough about you, to penetrate your defenses, and do murder.”

As Flynn was leaving the room, he heard Clifford’s voice say, quietly,
“Rumble de dump!”

“I
need to know what all this means to you,” Francis Xavier Flynn said to Commissioner Eddy D’Esopo. They were in a small, book-lined den with a few reading chairs, a desk. Flynn was sitting while D’Esopo paced. “You were quite right. I don’t like it at all. You’ve put the three of us—you, Cocky, and me—in the way of being accused as accessories to murder after the fact.”

“Come on, Frank. We have some positions. We are police.”

“Not in this state.”

“You do, Frank. Don’t you?”

“Is that what you think? Is that why I’m here?”

“I know you’ve operated well outside my jurisdiction before. And gotten away with it.”

Flynn said, “I suppose so. But not the way you think.”

D’Esopo squared his shoulders. “I’m just a guest here. However incriminating that may be. And I didn’t ask you to bring Concannon. I distinctly told you to come alone. And to shut up about where you were going.” D’Esopo waved his hands. “And here your kids seem to feel free to call you, whenever one of them spends too long in the bathroom!”

“Ach,” said Flynn. “If Jenny only knew the extent she has to go to, to get a little privacy in this world.”

After dinner, Flynn had toured the clubhouse, finally, in a loose search for Cocky. Not in Flynn’s room; not in his own.

Flynn had found a communications room at the back of the house with several television screens, several computer consoles, several telephones. In the basement he found a well-equipped gymnasium and the large sauna.

Along the corridor from the great hall to the dining room were three of these smaller rooms overlooking the dark lake. Obviously they were designed for quiet reading, quiet meetings. The largest, in the middle, in which the affairs of Ashley-Comfort Incorporated had been discussed that afternoon, had a baby grand piano in it.

He had not found Cocky.

“That’s all very well, Eddy. But I need to know what all this means to you.”

In the room next to them, chords rippled from the piano.

“You’re not one of these people. You’re not a member. And you never will be. Do you know that?”

Accompanying himself on the piano, Lauderdale began to sing the old romantic ballad,
The Isle of Capri
, in a loud, wavering falsetto.

“That nut!” D’Esopo clapped the palm of his hand to the back of his neck.

Flynn chuckled. If such was Lauderdale’s “act,” as Wahler had described it, it was funny. Especially when Lauderdale’s off-key falsetto and fumbling piano notes only could be heard through the wall, the sight of him sitting alone at the piano in raspberry wig, punched-in evening gown, huge high-heeled shoes working the pedals could be only imagined in the mind’s eye. Satiric. For an all-male company, Lauderdale was satirizing what errant people thought of the most terrible traits of womanhood, from constant bitchiness to an insistence on ballads after boiled fish and broccoli. Errant, as satire is, but funny.

“I swear to God!” D’Esopo said.

“As I was saying, Eddy: You’re not one of these people. By the way, tonight I might join you in burglarizing the kitchen. Together, we might manage to break a few locks.”

In the next room, Lauderdale reached for a high-C and missed.

In a more serious tone, Flynn said, “Eddy, I’ve had enough of this. You asked me to come; you ask me to stay. I cannot take part in destruction of evidence, bribery, suborning of witnesses, possible perjury…”

“I have an expensive child.”

Flynn waited, saying nothing.

“Born defective,” D’Esopo said. “Born with a defect the very name of which make me sick even to think about, let alone say.”

Flynn said, “I didn’t know.”

“It—My wife and I decided some time ago it was okay,
necessary, to call our child an ‘it.’ You may not think it nice, but we decided, we had to decide, that referring to
it
as
it
was the only way of impersonalizing
it
. Staying sane.”

Flynn thought of his own five healthy, gorgeous children and said nothing.

“It needs constant care, twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year. More than any man can afford; more than any mother can manage.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Eddy.”

“A while ago, when federal and state agencies cut back on programs caring for such children, our child was turned back to us. I couldn’t afford private care. I have the other kids. Coincidentally, at about the same time, I was invited up here. I came quick enough. I was glad to get away for a weekend. Home had been turned into…a kind of hell. Have you ever heard of the Huttenbach Foundation?”

“Just recently.”

“That first weekend I was here, Dwight Huttenbach mentioned to me that his family foundation runs a school, hospital, whatever you want to call it for such children. Within ten days my child was in that hospital, where it has been ever since. And, honest, Frank, some of its abilities have improved. The people there are just marvelous.”

“And no expense to you.”

“Very little expense.”

“How did Huttenbach know about your child?”

“In vino veritas
, D’Esopo smiled at Flynn. “You and I have never had a drink together, Frank.”

“Maybe I’m missing out on something. Whose guest at The Rod and Gun Club were you, Eddy? Whose guest are you?”

“Ashley’s.”

“Ach: guns.”

“That’s right. Buying guns and ammunition for the force.”

Flynn tried to remember. “Do we Boston police use Ashley-Comfort guns and equipment?”

D’Esopo shrugged. “We were anyway. To answer your next question, we are not now buying more or less equipment from Ashley-Comfort than we ever were. I do admit that Ashley
asked me, as Edward D’Esopo, individual, not as Commissioner of Boston Police, to make a quiet endorsement of Ashley-Comfort equipment. And I found, in good conscience, I could do so.”

Now Lauderdale was warbling through
Silver Threads Among the Gold
. Oddly, it wasn’t funny anymore. Flynn supposed satire must keep its distance from reality to remain funny.

“And what else do you do for the members of The Rod and Gun Club, Eddy?”

“Oh, sometimes the V.I.P. treatment when one of them comes to Boston and asks for it. Lay on a police escort with siren. Special police protection, the few times it’s been asked. Had a police honor guard at a funeral for someone’s maiden aunt, once. That took a bit of doing. I said she’d baked brownies for the vice squad.”

“It would seem to me,” conjectured Flynn, “that many of these members would have children and grandchildren at schools and colleges in the Boston area. How many times have you stopped charges against them, Eddy?”

“I’m not going to answer that, Frank.”

“And in all this time, I’m willing to wager, no one has put you up for—”

In the next room, Lauderdale’s singing stopped for a brief moment. As did the sound of the piano.

Then the keys of the piano were banged.

The falsetto returned and warbled successfully through high-C It became a horrible shriek.

“That guy!” D’Esopo said. “I don’t see what’s supposed to be so funny—”

D’Esopo read Flynn’s face.

“He’s just playing,” D’Esopo said.

The shriek became a gurgling and a coughing.

Finally, there was a weak yell in a distinctly man’s voice.

“Isn’t he?” D’Esopo asked.

Flynn said: “I think not.”

F
lynn looked through the porthole in the door into the lit gymnasium.

Dressed only in shorts, Taylor was working a leg press.

Flynn entered.

Taylor stopped his workout and stood up. Throughout his body his muscles were extremely well defined.

“Do you wish to use the equipment, Mister Flynn?”

“Funny time of day, or night, to be taking such heavy exercise.”

Taylor shrugged. “It’s the only time I’m sure the members don’t want to use the room.”

Flynn looked up the stairway beside the sauna. Half the bulkhead door was open. “How long have you been exercising?”

“Years,” the muscle-bound young man said modestly.

“I mean, tonight.”

“Oh. About twenty minutes.”

“You’re not sweating.”

“I’m used to it. I do this every night.”

“Why is the bulkhead door open?”

“Fresh air.” Even standing easy in all his heavy muscles, Taylor remained the obedient servant, ready to fetch and carry. “Something wrong, Mister Flynn?”

“Yes. I missed you from the music room.”

“The music room?”

“The room with the piano in it. Everyone showed up there but you.”

“Why? What happened?”

What happened was that when Flynn and D’Esopo hurried into the room, they found Lauderdale slumped over the piano keyboard.

Rutledge was standing over Lauderdale at the piano as if waiting to turn a page of sheet music for him.