7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7 (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Robert Twelvetrees, (Colonel, USA Ret.) met Ike outside the Crossroads Diner. Colonel Bob, near to his ninetieth year—people were not sure on which side—found himself relegated to a motorized scooter if he wished to do anything more than be driven to and from places by TJ and his companion, chauffer, likable, but intellectually challenged semi-caregiver. Colonel Bob, who’d served with his hero, General George Patton, during World War II, had required his scooter be painted olive drab, with the insignia of the old Second Cavalry, where he’d first served on horse, decaled on the battery box.

“Colonel Bob, it’s good to see you. Are you here for breakfast?”

Ike held the door open for him as Colonel Bob maneuvered his scooter around various objects that normal, ambulatory persons would have hardly noticed, the undertaking made doubly difficult for him due to his advancing macular degeneration.

“Every Wednesday if I can. Flora takes care of me. I keep telling her the EEOC or whatever G-D government agency it is that wants to tell you how to live your life, will be all over her if she doesn’t make this place more handicap friendly.”

“What did she say about that?”

“She said she still had her old scatter gun and if some hotshot federal Johnny wanted trouble, well bring it on. I don’t know where she gets all that aggression, do you?”

“It’s the company she keeps, Colonel Bob. A lot of riffraff hangs out here, present company excepted, of course.”

“Of course.” Colonel Bob eased his scooter to a table with minimum damage to intervening chairs and stools and yelled for Flora to get his breakfast. Flora Blevins shouted something in return that might, in another age, have been deemed obscene. Colonel Bob smiled and waved in acknowledgment.

“Sorry to hear about your lady, Sheriff. Currently, I am a complete wreck only waiting for the hearse to come and collect me, but if there is anything a half-blind, completely gorked out old Army man can do, you let me know. If I can’t get it done, I’ll send TJ out to do it for me.”

“Many thanks. I will let you know, but right now, I am just trying to figure out where to start. I don’t know if the scuttlebutt has reached you yet, but Ruth’s wreck was not an accident and I have a lot of questions to put to people. The immediate problem is who to ask.”

“Can’t help you there. Flora, where’s my breakfast? I still have some contacts with the DOD, though most of the people I grew up with in the service are dead. Hell, they’re all dead, but still you never can tell.”

“Thanks.” Ike moved down the length of the diner and found a seat in what he thought of as his booth. Flora plunked down his coffee and stood arms akimbo, waiting. “Just you, this morning. Where’s your smart-mouthed friend?”

“If you mean Mr. Garland, he will be joining me shortly. Also, I think Deputy Sutherlin plans to join us as well.”

“Is that the smart Sutherlin or the dopey one that married Essie Falco?”

“The smart one.”

“Too bad, I like the dopey one better. He has a sense of proportion.”

“He has a what? Billy has a sense of proportion? Billy is moment to moment most days. What do you mean he has a sense of proportion?”

“It means I like him `cause he don’t take life too seriously, unlike some people I know. So how’s Miss Ruth doing?”

Ike gritted his teeth. “She’s holding on.”

What a stupid answer. Ike had become weary of hearing that question. How to answer? Were the folks who asked it really concerned about Ruth, about him, both, or merely being polite? How did he relate to them the turmoil he felt, the emotional swings between guilt, anger, fear, and hope—sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous? And did they really want to know? He wondered if people would think him rude or crazy if he printed up little cards that listed possible responses to that question. He could check off one or the other and hand it to the asker.

“Well you let me know if there’s anything I can do. They feeding her good up there at that hospital? I could fix up a tray.”

“She’s fine right now, Flora, thank you. Eating isn’t her big problem.”

Charlie slouched into the diner, waved a greeting to Flora, which was studiously ignored, and sat across from him.

“What do you recommend for breakfast, Ike, and why are we here? You made a perfectly adequate meal yesterday. Now, I wake up, you have vanished and left me a note. Not very hospitable, I must say.”

“In the first place, I always eat here in the morning if I can. It is one of my listening posts. I’m not officially on duty at the moment, but you never know what I’ll pick up. Secondly, Frank is meeting me here because I refuse to go to the office. Oh, and as I indicated to you before, I don’t recommend food to Flora’s customers. If she likes you, she will select your breakfast for you. If she doesn’t, she insists you order it yourself, and then will tell you she’s out of whatever you ask for.”

“Then the strategy, assuming I am not on her dance card, is to order something I really don’t want in order to get what I do.”

“You have the proper devious mind to figure that out.”

“I’ve had lots of practice.”

Flora brought coffee and glared at Charlie. He ordered a fish sandwich with extra tartar sauce and was told the diner was out of fish. He got scrambled eggs. Frank joined them a few minutes later and sat next to Charlie.

“What’s new, Frank?”

“Nothing changes. Amos Wickwire has taken up permanent residency, it seems. The mayor, we assume, is convinced you will return and he will catch you using public, that is to say, police equipment to work your private case.”

“Poor Amos. It can’t be easy working for the mayor in an election year. Anything else?”

“It appears our suicide, isn’t. The ME says he died of asphyxia, all right, but not carbon monoxide intoxication. He surmises that the man was hit on the head and then smothered somehow. Plastic bag, maybe. After that he was dumped in the van. The suicide is a setup.”

“The dead man, who is he again?”

“Worker from up at Callend, general duties, janitorial, I think. We’re still checking. We’re looking into his background now. His name is Marty Duffy. He arrived about the time the school underwent the merger to become a university. He rents in the trailer park, we think. We’ll find out more soon enough. Also, I’ve had a number of calls about the Comcast truck in the alley behind the stores near Lee Henry’s back door. Do I need to worry about that?”

“Nope. I hear Lee is installing Internet and TV for her customers. Maybe she’ll put in a coffee bar too.”

“Great. One last thing, and you are not going to like this. Essie and Billy have been snooping around Jack Burns. I had a call or two from his campaign people wanting to know who authorized the Sheriff’s Office to stalk their candidate. They threatened to call the Fair Election Committee and file a formal complaint.”

“It’s my fault. I told them if they could connect Burns to a truck and so on, I’d consider Essie’s idea. Tell those two to cool it. I have enough
tsouris
at the moment and Burns may be a bad candidate for sheriff, but he is not a good one for attempted murder.”

“I know, but there is one little problem the two of them turned up. He has no alibi for Sunday night and his cousin owns a platform truck like the one in the video.”

“That’s not good, but still doesn’t move him into the picture. Did Grace turn up anything useful on Ruth’s cell phone?”

“The caller used a store-bought throwaway, but she says she’s not done with it. Something about backtracking and matching a signal to other calls, locations, triangulation, or something.”

Chapter Seventeen

Frank left to return to the office to work on his suicide/murder, and to ignore Amos Wickwire. He had to tell Essie and his brother to leave Jack Burns alone, at least for now. They were not happy.

Ike and Charlie finished eating and made their way to Lee Henry’s Cuttery and Style. They announced their presence, and retreated through the back door to the ersatz Comcast van. A young man Charlie introduced as Travis Blasingame sat staring at the bank of computer screens and attacking a keyboard. Ike could only guess what all that activity meant, but no games appeared on any of the flat panel monitors.

“Travis, are we ready?”

“In a minute, Mr. Garland. I need to sync these two programs so that if one gets a hit, the other won’t keep searching for the same person.”

“Ike, you have some additional lists and papers. Tell Travis how you wish to proceed.”

Ike handed him the flash drive Karl had given him, the folder he’d received from Agnes, and the items forwarded to him from the Secretary of Education’s Office.

“There are a lot of names there, Travis. Too many names for us to handle easily, and there are duplicates that may or may not be obvious at first glance or may only seem to be the same person. I want you to merge all of them into one comprehensive list. When you’ve done that, apply two or three discriminators to reduce the number of people we need to look at closely.”

“No problem. Give me an hour to input all this and then I can start culling through the list. What discriminators do you want to use?”

“Okay. First, a prior history of violence, record of arrests, particularly at demonstrations, appearance on a police blotter somewhere, that sort of thing. After that, any time they may have spent in any form of law enforcement.” Travis eyebrows shot up. “I think whoever drove the truck knew something about apprehending a vehicle during a chase. Third, their proximity to Washington, DC. I am assuming for this first cut through the data, that the person driving the truck lived nearby, within a few hundred miles at least. I know some of the more vocal opponents to the committee’s work will be found in places like Texas and Idaho, but the guy was driving a truck. That is not an easy vehicle to escape in, nor an easy one to acquire for a one-time use.”

“How about we also look for stolen trucks, dark, older Silverados to be precise,” Charlie suggested.

“Yes, in the greater DC area. That should include Northern Virginia, Maryland, the south Philadelphia area, and perhaps even as far as the Eastern Shore.”

“Can do,” Travis said and began typing faster than before. “I’ll be awhile. You can wait here as the stuff begins to appear on the screen or go get a coffee somewhere. If you do, bring me one back.”

“There’s no coffee pot in this luxury home?”

“Could be but with the doors shut, and in spite of the filtered air, the aroma can get pretty overpowering, so no, no coffee pot.”

“Lee has got a whole kitchen setup, coffee, pastry, and so on. You should feel free to step in there if you need to. Oh, and restrooms, too.”

“Thanks, that’s a relief, or will be.”

Charlie said he had some calls to make and would stay in the van. Ike decided to head to the hospital. He stepped out of the van and closed the double doors.

***

After the doors closed on Ike, Charlie began to work his way through the backlog of calls on his phone. The fact that the director had turned him loose to help Ike did not mean the rest of his projects could be ignored, or that they ceased creating difficulties. Most of them were delicate in the extreme and time-critical, and he couldn’t simply drop them. He stayed with it for a half hour and then closed the phone.

“Travis, how about that coffee? If you’d like, I’ll check out the kitchen Ike described and fetch you one. Or you could take ten minutes and join me. Either way, I’m headed to the restroom.”

“Sure thing. Give me a minute here first, though. There’s something I think you need to see.”

Charlie rolled his chair down the narrow aisle and sat next to Travis, who touched the screen with the eraser end of a pencil.

“See those names?”

Charlie squinted at the list of four names Travis had isolated from the rest.

“I think they’re ours.”

“Oh, crap. You’re sure?”

“I cross-checked them with our database, Mr. Garland. I’m pretty sure they are. Why are they on these lists?” Charlie tapped his foot and stared at the screen.

“I can think of four possibilities, only one of which is good. We put them there and the FBI doesn’t know, not good. We put them there and they do know, that’s the good one. We didn’t put them there and the FBI doesn’t know, very bad. Or we didn’t, and they do, very, very bad.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Hang on, I need to think about it for a second. Damn those FBI guys. Why…?”

“I was wondering the same thing. If they were on the Bureau’s list and they know who they are, why didn’t they tell us right away?”

“Indeed, why? You are young, Travis. If you stay with us for a while, you will learn that while the several investigative bodies the federal government maintains cooperate, they do not trust each other. The business of keeping the country safe may be the primary task of us all, but behind the smooth façade of interdepartmental good will lurks a nagging sense of distrust born of competition and ego.”

“Competition? For what? Don’t we all want the same thing?”

“Indeed. That is the one saving constant in the equation. But it is the variables that hurt us, chiefly competition. We compete for the president’s ear, we compete for funding. We compete for prestige, for flattering press coverage, all the accoutrements of power and position. There is only so much money to go around and every institution believes it must grow or die. Can you think of a single university that doesn’t believe it needs a new student center, gym, research laboratory, and then when it gets it is satisfied?”

“No, sir, I can’t. So how does all that relate to this list?”

“It depends on which of the four possibilities I mentioned before are in play. If the FBI knows, it has determined, I guess, that these people pose no threat to the country in spite of their appearance on a roster of some sort. But they also know that we may have some lists as well and assume some of their people may be on them. This list is their equalizer. If we out their guys without letting them in on it, which we might very well do, they will counter with these. It is all very juvenile but what can you expect from institutions built by bureaucrats and funded by politicians?”

“I don’t know. So, what do I do with this bunch?”

“Okay, I’m making an executive decision here. I do not believe those birds are in any way a part of what we’re looking for. I am hoping for option number two, but I could be wrong. And because they are ours, and because they have access to information and assets which makes wrecking a car in the middle of Washington a very easy undertaking, we will temporarily assume the worst. We will delete them from the main file and enter them in a separate one. You will treat that file identically as the big one, but you will not tell the sheriff what we are up to, unless or until one or the other of them surfaces as a real possibility. And, because they are uniquely positioned, they might have information we can use. I, on the other hand, will notify the director who will, no doubt schedule some serious face time with them. You got it?”

“Got it.”

“Good, do that and then we’ll go get our coffee.”