The Third Bullet (61 page)

At eight the next morning, Richard picked Bob up in a blue rental Ford Focus, and they set out for the two-hour drive west through the rolling Connecticut countryside for the arrival at Marty’s estate in Litchfield County, west of Warren.

“Beautiful country,” said Richard. “Reminds me of the Cotswolds, in England.”

“Never been there,” said Bob. “But beautiful it is. And you don’t see any shacks or rusted-out cars on cement blocks or run-down places like you do in the South. The American South or any south.”

The trees, the houses, the farms, the towns: all mature. Mostly white, wooden clapboard, impeccably serviced, shutters boldly painted a primary color, all well scrubbed by people for whom maintenance was an obsession. They took care of stuff, these people. Flowers beautiful, hedges trimmed, all towns, big or small, boasting a civic hall, a hotel, a park, a church. It felt like some kind of ancient land as imagined by Disney. Every other building seemed to have been built in some far-off place called the eighteenth century, and laws of Enlightenment rationality were still in control.

Swagger ate it up. It was in his genes, it lit his imagination, it was the way things should be, a military duty ethos fused seamlessly with daily life. He was also scanning for air cover—a shadowing chopper
or some other sign that Nick had violated the agreement and laid in backup too close; he’d wondered if the next little Revolutionary War burg would conceal gunmen with body armor and RPGs.

“You seem tense, Jack.”

“I can’t stop looking over my shoulder. I told you, I’ve had a price on my head, and once you’ve been hunted, you never fully relax.”

“Jack, it’s a beautiful day in a beautiful part of America, and you are part of one of the most exciting historical-intellectual developments of our time, which, I should add, will probably have a tremendous financial upside. You should just enjoy the ride in.”

“You are so right, Richard. Man, I wish I had it in me to click the off switch and go to take-it-easy. I just want to look at this rifle case, get the business deal set, and get to work.”

Onward they went, passing through Warren, passing more rich Yankee farmland and forest, finding the hills on the rise, and feeling the gentle slope as the car climbed several hundred feet into the hills.

“There it is,” said Richard. A rusty green sign at a rusty gate sunk in faded concrete abutments with pretensions of grace announced “Adams Glen,” and Richard slowed and took the turn.

The road ran through thick trees on hillside, with slope above and below the dirt of the track. Dust flew in two tire contrails behind them, smearing the pristine beauty of the azure, windless, cloudless day, but on either side, the world seemed green, dense, and hushed. Bending over, looking through the windshield, Swagger could see the hill rising, buried in forest the whole way, to a rounded peak another four hundred or so feet up. Cubed limestone boulders, like fallen ceremonial heads, showed here and there among the trees, which were heavier or lighter in density depending on nature’s whimsy.

They rounded a last gentle turn and the hillside opened up to permit a spacious house against its flank, on the same theme as all those before: a huge clapboard mansion, built with an eye toward symmetry and precision in an age when those things were beauty. This one
was beyond mature and had eased almost into senility. The landscaping had grown ragged, with lawn unkempt, weeds annoyingly clotting the beds, hedges out of square and in some places out of hedge, just jumbles of bush.

Richard eased the car to a halt and Bob got out, noting how badly the house could use some saving paint, having faded from white to something near pewter, with more than a few of the slats corrupted by rot, the shutters flaky and mottled. It was a million-dollar house a million dollars away from restoration.

“Hello, hello,” said the chubby Marty, beaming, stepping from a lesser door. He wore baggy blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt and a shawl-collar cardigan, as sloppy as the decaying house from which he had emerged. “Right on time. You engineer everything just right, don’t you, Jack?”

Swagger smiled, taking the soft, plump hand and shaking it. “Nice place,” he said.

“This old monster? Been in the family three generations. Damn, I’d love to get the money together to get it all brand-spanking-new again. Then it would be something. Sorry it’s so ratty, but the taxes alone eat me alive, and I can barely keep my nostrils out of the brine. Come on in.”

Marty led them into darkness and more of the same. The house had a mildewy quality, many of its rooms filled with ghost furniture under white sheeting, the smell of dust hanging in the air, and where slants of sunlight fell through shuttered windows, they revealed an ecosystem lively with debris.

Marty took them into what was his workroom and presumably had been a pater and a grandpater’s study. It alone was populated by dead animals, all with intense glass eyes caught up in the taxidermist’s high drama, shot by one generation or other of Adamses. The room was paneled and shelved with every book ever written on firearms, some of them by Marty. Behind the cluttered desk stood the glory wall, the young Marty in black-and-white slimness with this or that
prosperous-looking older man of the gun world. Swagger saw a few he recognized, a few he knew.

“Say, isn’t that Elmer Keith, the gun writer?”

“I knew Elmer. He was very old by then. You like the old gun writers? God, what men. Look, there’s Jack O’Connor, and over there, Charlie Atkins, Border Patrol gunman and dangerous gent. This one is Bill Jordan. He was also Border Patrol. He had hands like hams, and I swear, I never saw a man so fast. Bill could put an aspirin on the back of his right hand, draw his Smith 19, and blast the falling pill before it hit the floor. He did it once on
Ed Sullivan
.”

Swagger had some memory of most of these fellows. They’d been his heroes growing up, not ballplayers or fighter aces or disease-defeating doctors but gunmen, like his father. He could say nothing because those memories didn’t belong in the head of Jack Brophy, retired mining engineer.

“When I was trying to learn more about all this,” he said, “I think I read a batch of them. They all seemed to have good times.”

“They sure did,” said Marty. “Now look at this—” and he was off. The next half hour was spent observing his treasures strewn about on random shelves, and he did have many. He had the first serial number in the last six models of .22 target pistol his father had manufactured, pristine, in perfect, untattered cardboard boxes. He had Colt’s experimental 9 mm double-action automatic, offered to the army in the early sixties for consideration in replacing the government model. He had the .300 H&H Winchester Bull gun that Art Haymon set twenty-seven national records with in the late thirties, before being nudged aside by the great Lon Scott. He had Henry rifle no. 15, the brass-framed gun that could be “loaded on Sunday and fired all week,” which ultimately morphed into the 1873 Winchester, which won the West, though as frequently for red people as white. He had Colts, Smiths, Marlins, all exquisite, all virtually pristine, all glorious.

“Sell the guns, Marty,” said Richard. “They’d buy your house a new paint job.”

“Oh, no,” said Marty. “You don’t sell history. At least not this history. I hope—again, maybe it’s more a dream than a hope—to display the collection coherently in its own museum. Maybe this place, all spruced up. That would be an Adams legacy.”

“Marty, don’t tell me you’ve lost that gun case?” asked Swagger, meaning it to be perceived as a joke. “And you’re just softening the blow?”

“No, no, it’s here,” he said. “I can see I’ve kept you waiting long enough. You boys sit over there. Coffee?”

“Not now,” said Bob. “Suppose I spill it on the thing.”

More laughter.

“Okay,” Marty said. He went to what seemed to be a wall and pulled on some lever or something, and the shelving, laden with books, floated outward on hinges, state-of-the-art 1932, to reveal a vault door, dead black, dead steel, dead heavy. He leaned and grabbed a knob beneath the rotary of the combination dial, pulled down, and a heavy steel clank reverberated through the room, loud enough to awaken the dead animals on the walls, stir dust from the books, and maybe make a buried Adams or two turn over.

The vault door swung out, and Marty dipped in.

He emerged in white gloves. He held in his hand a stoutly constructed pigskin-and-canvas case, maybe two feet wide, three long, one deep, of extremely elegant manufacture. He set it down on the bare coffee table before his two guests—before Swagger, really, as Richard’s contributions at this time were negligible. Swagger leaned forward, hungry to apprehend its meanings.

It wore its age well, with scuffs and stains and obscure marks everywhere, but integrity vouchsafed and complete. The leather seemed richer in patina, as if the process of aging had turned it from the utilitarian to the exquisite. Bob didn’t touch it. He put his nose two inches from it and scanned every detail. The locks were tarnished, but he’d noticed that there was no play between lid and case, so he presumed it was tight and nothing had loosened or worn within.

“You have no key?” he asked.

“No. Maybe if you went to the Arkansas state police and got Mr. Albright’s possessions from his death in ’93, it’d be on a key chain. But at this end, nothing.”

“I’d hate to damage it when we open it,” said Richard.

“We’ll have a bonded locksmith open it,” said Bob. “He can get it open without damaging it; he can attest to the age of the lock; he can date the lock and notarize it for us.”

“See, those are the things I’d never think of,” said Marty.

“Marty, do you have a magnifying glass? I’d like to look at the shipping tags.”

“Of course,” said Marty. He went to his desk, got the glass, and returned to give it to Bob. “I’d prefer to handle the tags with the gloves.”

“You got it,” said Bob.

Richard crowded next to him, and Marty hovered close on the other side, leaning to lift the tags for Bob’s inspection.

In the circle of the glass, the red one floated in and out of focus until Bob found the right distance between eye, lens, and object for clarity. He examined every square inch. In black crayon clerk’s scrawl against the stiff red paper under the company rubric BRANIFF AIRWAYS, INTO THE BRIGHT TOMORROW, he saw:

Date: 11-24-63

Flt: 344 DAL/RICH

Psnger: Scott, L.D.

The tag was looped over the double handles of the case, sealing them together. Since the handles were on different halves of the case, that meant it had not been opened since 11-24-63. The heavy paper appeared unrotted and, at least under Marty’s gentle handling, didn’t show any give-and-take when manipulated, suggesting that whatever adhesive unified the two ends of the loop, it held solid, itself without
decay or much in the way of loosening. But it looked brittle, as if to bend it would send flakes of dead glue to the floor.

“Looks goddamn genuine to me,” said Bob. “I guess we’d have to find an expert of some sort to verify that as the proper Braniff tag, in the proper time frame, and do some chemistry on the glue to make sure it’s the same kind Braniff used.”

“Where would we find such a guy?” said Marty. “That’s pretty arcane knowledge.”

“The FBI forensics people are good at document interp. And this is a piece of evidence in a crime, don’t forget. I’m thinking we’re going to have to bring in law enforcement.”

“I’m not wild about that,” said Marty. “Those guys might want to hog the spotlight. They’ll sniff the gold. I hate to be mercenary, but I have a house to paint. This thing is pure gold.”

“If it’s got what we think it has. Let me look at the other tag.”

Marty let the shipping tag fall and scooped up the other. It was less frail, a luggage ID locked in place by a leather case, its face spared the elements by a sheet of plastic.

LON DUNN SCOTT, it said in blue fountain pen, presumably in Lon’s own handwriting. And below that, SCOTT’S RUN, RR 224, CLINTONSBURG, VA.

Bob said, “It’s possible Lon’s fingerprints are under the plastic. I’m assuming they’re all over the locks and the stuff inside. The more, the better. Marty, could I see that X-ray again?”

“Sure,” said Marty, disappearing to his desk, reappearing in seconds. He laid the heavy dark celluloid sheet over the case. Bob could see that it was a one-on-one ratio.

“Got any backlighting?” he asked.

“Yeah, I have a light table over there. I use it to go over contact sheets for the picture books.”

Marty led them to the light table, a large metal frame supporting a square sheet of white-frosted glass. He turned a switch, and the fluorescent bulb inside blinked to life. Marty laid the X-ray out, and
it displayed the case’s contents in perfect outline, everything recognizable.

The incomparably graceful Monte Carlo stock, the ovoid trigger guard still on, bolt, action, containing receiver, bolt slot, barrel, with the scope—a long tubular construction belled at the muzzle end, maybe fourteen inches—held parallel above the action by the ancient Redfield mounts and rings of the time, and above them all, a long tube with a flange at one end that had to be the Maxim suppressor. In the corner were a collection of screws, what looked to be a folded gun cloth, and a small bottle, presumably cleaning fluid. In the other corner, the silhouettes of three cartridges.

Bob took something out of his pocket and laid it next to the three. It was a .264 Win Mag cartridge with a 140-grain spitzer hunting bullet. “Look at it,” he said. “The shells are the same size. Two-sixty-four Win Mag. See how Lon’s have a blunt tip compared to the point on the hunting bullet? That’s because he’s loaded a Carcano bullet into the .264 shell.” He went on with a brief description of his newly revised theory on the ballistics deceit that lay at the heart of the issue. Possibly Marty understood, or at least took it on faith; Richard gave no sign of being awake.

“I think we’ve figured it out,” said Marty.

“No,” said Swagger. “There’s the big issue of speed. We won’t have anything till we have that. If the route wasn’t chosen until late on November 19, they only had two and a half days to set it up. Impossible in that time. They couldn’t have done it. But they did it.”