2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 (4 page)

Chapter Seven

September’s promise, in the southwestern corner of Virginia, is cooler weather. When that relief will arrive, however, is never certain. Ike mopped his brow and contemplated a career change in a location with a more varied climate. Someplace, anyplace, where the humidity did not compete with the temperature for top spot and summer confined its presence to a reasonable three months. The building that housed, among other things, the sheriff’s office, had just been rehabbed, and a new, but erratic, air conditioning system installed.

“It’s all zoned,” Solly Fairmont, the town’s new Maintenance Supervisor said, beaming.

Where the zones began and ended remained an unsolvable mystery to the employees captive within the walls of the Municipal Building. Sam Ryder complained for two weeks about the heat and the need to keep her computers and their myriad appendages cool. Finally she threw up her hands and purchased a small window unit, stuck its homely grill out the only window in her cell
cum
office, and closed her door. Both the door and the window were new. Bars had been replaced with studding, drywall, and door and window stock from Home Depot.

Ike settled into his chair, gritted his teeth at its squeal, and picked up the phone. He needed to talk to Ruth. Everyone in town knew he and the president of Callend College for Women were an item. The townsfolk preferred not to talk about it. They liked Ike and could forgive him this one foible, and if he wanted to hobnob with the hoity-toity folk up on the hill, well okay. Eventually, they agreed, he’d come to his senses.

He rolled his chair close to the door, kicked it shut, and winced at the ominous rattle it produced. His office had glass panels, starting halfway up, for walls. His predecessor had insisted on it. The story went around he didn’t trust his deputies, afraid one of them would challenge him in an election, and he needed to keep an eye on them at all times. None of them dared to run as it turned out. But Ike took him on in the general and won in a landslide. The town’s major concern since then: if Ike left, would the sheriff’s office revert to its former corrupt torpor? It was a problem that worried Ike as well.

“President Harris’ office,” Agnes Ewalt warbled.

“Good afternoon, Agnes,” Ike said. “Is your boss in?”

“Is that you, Sheriff?”

“Yes, Ma’am, it’s me.”

“Just a moment, I’ll see if she can speak with you.” Agnes Ewalt shared the townsfolk’s disapproval of their relationship, only in reverse, so to speak. Ike decided if, in the unlikely event he and Ruth Harris ever married, he intended to get Agnes Ewalt pie-faced drunk, make her stand on a table and sing “I love Townies” to the tune of
I Love Paris
.

“Hi, Sheriff,” Ruth said, music in her voice. “Are you behaving?”

“Serving and protecting, Ruth, serving and protecting—I’m on tonight.”

“I know,” she said and paused. “Ike, you’re the boss. You don’t have to pull shifts with the deputies. Why do you do it?”

“I can’t ask them to do something I wouldn’t do.”

“Ike, they know that. They know you’d back them up any day, any way. You don’t have to prove anything to them.”

“Okay, then put it down to stubbornness. I came into the police business through the back door, sort of. I still need the experience.”

“That’s nonsense, Ike. You do it because no matter how much you want to convince yourself you are done living on the edge like you did in your CIA days, you still need the rush—maybe just a little one.”

She had a point. He had not thought about it, but she might be right. Did he? Those days had been dangerous and heady. If Zurich hadn’t happened, would he still be drifting in and out of Europe, a pawn in intelligence chess?

“Enough psychoanalysis, Doc. You up for a late date? I’m off at eleven.”

“At eleven, I will be in bed, asleep, and alone. I have put in one hellish week and I have another coming. We have student transfers in, transfers out. Faculty who were spooked by the robbery business and loss of the art collection have jumped ship. I am going crazy trying to find replacements and at the same time getting classes started on Monday. Do you know anybody who can teach freshman English?”

“I met a guy today who thinks he’s mastered about everything there is to know in that department. He gave me a lecture on usage.”

“Really? Who?”

“His name is Blake Fisher, the Reverend Mister.”

“He’s the pastor or minister or whatever they call them at the church with the ridiculous name, isn’t he?”

“Priest, and Stonewall Jackson is not a ridiculous name, and if I were you, my Yankee friend, I would not say so in public, not in this part of the world.”

“Well really, Ike, what kind of religion are they promoting when they name a church after a slave-owning, states rightsspouting, secessionist civil war general?”

“Southern religion, honey child, and don’t you forget it, unless you want a reprise of that war in your office. So, I take it tonight is a no?”

“You take it right, sorry. How did you meet Blake…what’s-his-name?”

“Fisher. He had the misfortune of having his organist murdered in his church. He found it a great inconvenience.”

“Murder? Who?”

“A guy named Waldo Templeton.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Neither has anyone else, it seems. Just another anonymous out-of-towner. You know how we feel about them.”

“Well, there’s your edge, Sheriff, be happy. Can you break for a bite at, say, seven?”

“Yes, where?”

“My kitchen, for starters. Then we’ll just have to see.”

Ike hung up and shuffled through a stack of papers on his desk. He was famous for the amount of paper he managed to accumulate on his desk and still know where everything was. He found the duty roster and looked around the outer office through the glass windows. He couldn’t see Billy Sutherlin anywhere. He looked at the rack holding the radios and saw they were all in place except for the patrol teams, so Billy either had not come in or had gone missing somewhere. He stood up and stepped into the hallway looking up and down its length. No Billy. He tapped on Sam’s door. His tapping resonated through the hollow core. Tap, tap. Thump, thump. He walked in.

Billy sprawled in the corner reading a magazine. Sam leaned forward in her ergonometric chair studying a flat screen monitor. Her fingers flitted sporadically across the keyboard as she searched through files for something. She stopped and waited. A message appeared on the screen and she rattled the keys some more.

“I’m almost afraid to ask, Sam, but—”

“Installing new software, Boss. I have a beta version of a fingerprint matching system. With it we can access any authorized files practically anywhere. I also have the authorizations we need. Now we don’t have to wait for the State’s system, the armed services, or the FBI to get around to doing our checking for us. We can do it here.”

“That’s good. Um, Sam?”

“Yes, sir?”

“How much did that system cost?” Ike had committed himself to the move into the latest technology, but he knew it as an area about which he knew little or nothing and each month, when the bills rolled in, he wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. His budget had started to look like the federal government’s idea of spending—a big deficit.

“It’s a freebie, Ike. I know a guy who wrote the thing and he wanted a representative sample of law enforcement agencies to test it. I persuaded him we represented poor and rural—a twofer. So we got the goods.”

Ike started to breathe a sigh of relief and then stopped. “After the test? What will it cost then?”

“I said we were a twofer. Poor gets us a free system but—”

“Do I want to hear the but?”

“We have to really evaluate the system, not just run it. It’s no biggie Ike, I can do this. I wrote a program like this in college and I can not only test it but I can write the patches if necessary. They’re going to love us.”

“Okay, good…Billy, why are you in here reading a magazine instead of outside watching the office?”

“Well, Ike, it’s like this. Sam here said she’d teach me how to work that apparatus so I came in for a lesson, but you can see she’s just lost in cyberspace there so I grabbed this magazine. It’s about computers and all.”

“You know Billy, I believe this may be the first time I’ve seen you read a magazine that didn’t have a centerfold. I guess I should thank Deputy Ryder for that.”

“He only came in here because it’s cool,” Sam said and studied another directive on the screen.

“Outside, Billy, time to go to work.”

The two men left Sam with her programs, winking red and green LEDs, and manuals.

Chapter Eight

It seemed unfitting, somehow, that a man should leave this earth with nothing more in his pockets than a key ring, twenty-seven dollars plus change, a driver’s license, and a library card. But that’s all they found on Waldo Templeton. And the driver’s license looked a little quirky. Ike turned it over and peered at the back, then again at the front. Wisconsin licenses did not cross his path very often. This one had all the characteristics of a fake—the kind you find on college campuses carried by underdrinking-age students. He had some experience with fakes, this kind and the professional ones he’d used in his other life. Over the years he had confiscated enough of them from Callend College women and their dates to fill a small filing cabinet. The library card was real.

Sam Ryder stepped out of her office, ducking her head in order to keep from bumping it on the door frame. Sam was taller than Ike by at least three inches, which put her in the stratosphere at six feet five.

“It’s installed,” she said. “Do you want to test it?”

“Sure. Get a set of prints and run them.”

“Whose?”

“How about Billy’s.”

“How about yours,” Billy said. “You don’t want to go running my prints through that machine.”

“Why not?”

“Do we have a John Doe we can try?” Sam said. “We ought to have a control. Billy we know is in there and so are you, Ike.”

Ike wondered about that last part. The Agency had funny ideas about its people, even when they no longer worked for them, but he didn’t want to find out this way. Maybe he’d have Sam look later, but not with anybody else around.

“We’ll do Billy and a John Doe, just to be sure,” he said. “I’d have you run Templeton, but we don’t have his back from the coroner yet.”

“How come it’s always me?” Billy said. “Why not Sam here, then?”

“I already ran mine, if you must know.”

“And you found out you’re wanted in five states—”

“Sam, dig around in the files. There’s bound to be something in them you can use.”

Sam pulled open a file drawer and leafed through a stack of old cases. The original plan had been to put them on microfiche, but before the Picketsville Sheriff’s Office could acquire the technology to do that, it became obsolete. Now they were waiting to be scanned into one of Sam’s new databases.

“Well, here’s something we can try. It’s a print from a nickel bag of dope we took from a student last June. We never prosecuted and never ran the print.”

“Give it a whirl. Go on, Billy. Give the nice deputy your print.”

The two deputies retreated into Sam’s digital den and Ike picked up the magazine Billy had brought out with him. Nobody ever accused Ike of being stupid, and he felt sure if he applied himself, he could master the intricacies of computers. He read one complete article and put the magazine down. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d read and the concept embedded in it. He couldn’t. He could play chess against a computer with more than moderate success. He could recite several of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and he’d read and understood most of Steven Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time,
although the black hole bit still remained a puzzle. But when it came to computers—he knew how to turn them on and off. As for the stuff inside, the buses and the bytes, the RAMs and the ROMs, they danced away from his comprehension like fireflies in May.

“Ike, you might want to have a talk with Billy,” Sam said as the two emerged from her office.

“You said you wouldn’t say nothing, Sam.”

“But this is a very serious matter. You’d better come clean, Billy. After all, you are a law enforcement officer—”

“Billy?”

Billy Sutherlin clenched his jaw and glared.

“He owes over forty dollars in parking tickets in Virginia Beach,” Sam said triumphantly.

“You’re on my list, Ryder,” Billy said and flopped down in a chair and put his tooled cowboy boots up on the desk in front.

“Ike, you should see the setup she’s got in there. It’s like that
CSI
show. Print comes up on a screen and then zippity zap, there’s a match. You know what else we should get—one of those special blue light things that show up the fingerprints and stuff.”

“What special blue light things are you talking about?”

“Like they have on the TV, Ike, you’ve seen them. They shine this here light and fingerprints pop up all over the place and they have another that does blood.”

“I’ve never had any problem finding blood.”

“No, see it shows where the blood was at before they cleaned it up—”

“Special blue light things?”

“Yep, we need one.”

“Billy, the only blue light specials I’m familiar with are at the K-Mart. You could check it out the next time you buy one of those ugly shirts.” Billy scowled. Ike turned back to Sam.

“What about the other print, anything?”

“We got a hit. It belongs to a woman named Della Street. I’m not kidding, that’s her name, just like the woman on the old Perry Mason TV show. She’s new out of jail. She did five with time off for dealing in Philadelphia. Last known address is Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Her probation officer hasn’t heard from her in four months.”

“What’s she doing down here?”

“If she’s here—she might not be. The bag came from a student. He could have had it for weeks, bought it somewhere else and brought it down here from wherever he came from.”

“Let’s assume he got it locally. That way we won’t get caught with our pants down if it’s true. Get Essie to post whatever we can find on her. Make sure everybody’s got a copy, just in case.”

***

Ruth Harris glanced at her watch for the third time. She’d promised Ike something to eat at seven and her watch read six forty-five. Her accountant and the head of Building and Grounds wanted answers. Of course they did. So did she, but she didn’t have any answers. The loss of the Dillon Art Collection had been bad enough and Dillon’s donation of scholarship money a blessing, but scholarships paid student expenses, not physical plant expenses. She did not have the presence of mind, when Dillon made the offer, to build in overhead. Now she had debt in one area and a surplus in another and never the twain could meet. She shook her head.

“Gentlemen, I don’t have an answer for you now. Mr. Hopkins, you will have to talk to our fiscal advisors and arrange a line of credit until we sort this thing out. Jerry, you will just have to secure the storage facility as best you can. We can’t afford to rebuild the alarm system and we have no use for the building now anyway—maybe never. Nail it shut.”

“Okay, I can do that, but with the temperature controls off, I can’t be responsible for what happens down there.”

She dismissed them and looked at her watch again. Seven.

The President’s house stood only a few yards from her office and she hurried across the brick pathway to it. Ike sat on the porch in one of the school’s signature rocking chairs.

“I’m sorry. Business. What am I going to do with that piece of crap in the valley?”

“I’m 10-7 at Callend College,” Ike said to his shoulder and switched off his radio. “I take it the organic fertilizer you are referring to is the building that used to house parts of the Dillon Art Collection.”

“That one, yes. Oh, Ike, I thought when we received the money after that disaster, we were fixed. But the money is in one pile and the debt in another.”

“Dillon would renegotiate the deal.”

“I can’t ask.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“What do you mean, won’t?” Ruth’s back would be up in another second.

“Nothing. Not now. Let me think about it. There ought to be somebody out there who can use a super secure multimillion dollar bomb shelter.”

“Who? I mean the only people who’d even think about it are right wing wackos and troglodytes.”

“That’s a little strong, don’t you think. There must be some left wing wackos who’d be just as interested.”

“As Queen Victoria is supposed to have said, ‘We are not amused.’”

Ike thought a moment. Somewhere in the back of his mind a small bell began to jingle. Not loudly, and not in any compartment of his memory he could immediately identify, but it would come to him sooner or later. Whether Ruth would buy into it—another story entirely.