Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last (19 page)

“I’m the CFO. We’re still working through what the transition will look like. Have you seen our brochure? There are a number of options.” He removed a glossy publication from a file drawer and thrust it at Cummings.

“I’ve reviewed your website,” Cummings said, “but I have a few questions.” He made up a few and received a few answers. In between, he tried to ask casually about the state of the business: How long had Mister Nicholas been with the company? Had Chess been the sole owner, or had there been investors? Had the business been sold?

Mister Nicholas politely deflected Cummings’s inquiries, and Cummings left a few minutes later with very little concrete information. Further, he had no intuitive sense whether Mister Nicholas was trying to project positivity in the face of unclear circumstances or trying to deflect unwanted questions to avoid revealing perfidious activities.

As he walked out of the office, he noticed the door to the lunch room was open. He glanced inside and saw three men sitting at a table, joking, drinking coffee and eating donuts. One he recognized as the chubby, bearded man who sold him candles the previous day in Samaria. Cummings invited himself into the room.

“I think we met yesterday,” Cummings said, approaching the table. It took the man a few moments to recognize Cummings. “I bought some candles from you. I’m Cummings Flynn Wanamaker, by the way.” Cummings extended his hand.

“That’s right. You did. I’m John Harpwater,” the man responded. He shook Cummings’s hand. “This here is Glenn Marvell and Pauly Bolduc.”

Hands were shaken all around.

“What are you doing here?” John asked Cummings. “In the market for an orgone accumulator, are you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“You’ve come to the right place. We make some wicked nice ones.”

“So Mister Nicholas tells me. Incidentally, I’m so sorry to hear about your boss.”

“Yes. Wicked bad thing. Wicked bad,” John said, seemingly quite sad about Chess’s death. His colleagues appeared to be similarly morose.

“Mister Nicholas said no decisions have been made about the business.”

“That’s what they tell us,” John replied.

Cummings probed further, asking John and his friends questions similar to those he’d asked Mister Nicholas. The workers were even less forthcoming than the CFO.

Cummings was offered a maple walnut donut. He left the factory munching on it, feeling frustrated and wondering if an alternate path of inquiry would be more likely to advance his investigations. But what might it be?

At five-thirty the next morning Cummings received a call from Elektra.

“Mister Deuty wish you come at seven of the clocks. I make the Greek breakfast.”

“Okay,” Cummings said, yawning. He got out of bed and took a shower.

At a few minutes before seven, he approached the Smelt residence, where he observed Elektra in the yard, milking a goat. She gingerly squeezed the teats, resulting in exuberant bursts of liquid that she caught in a white plastic bucket. With her other hand, she was clutching a copy of Gypsy Rose Lee’s novel,
The G String Murders
. Elektra appeared to be reading avidly.

“You here early, Mister Cummings,” she said, a bit irritated. “I make teas, yogurts, fruits and
paximathaki
but not done yet.”

“You shouldn’t have gone to such trouble,” he said, navigating around a large wheelbarrow that stood in his path.

“This not trouble. The Ottomans, that is trouble! The Greeks they say the good life is good food, good love and good revenge.”

Cummings smiled.

“I understand you’re thinking of opening a restaurant,” he said.

“Who says this?”

“My stepmother. Apparently you made a presentation at her church.”

“One day maybe. This is my dream. Okay, I finish breakfast. You into house and sit in parlor,” she ordered. “Mister Deuty out soon from water closet.”

Cummings went into the house. A few minutes later Deuteronomy emerged from his bedroom. In his pale tweed coat and subdued bow tie, he looked like a black-and-white author photograph from a 1950s book jacket. He sat down near Cummings.

Elektra, carrying a tray, entered the room, set it on a side table and then quickly left.

“It’s good to see you,” Cummings said. “You look well.”

“Thank you,” Deuteronomy replied. “I’m glad for this opportunity to exchange information. Please. Help yourself.”

They ate and continued to chat.

“Has something happened? My impression was that you were eager to see me.”

“It may well be that something has, but I can’t be completely certain,” Deuteronomy replied. “If I’m right, the implications are rather startling.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s rather involved. Perhaps it might make more sense for you to update me first.”

“All right. As I told you last time we met, I’ve been investigating Chess’s death. However, I’ve also been looking into a murder in Chicago. I didn’t mention this earlier because I had no reason to think there was any link between them.”

“But you do now?”

“I think it’s possible. The victim in Chicago was once married to Chess. Her name was Therese Hickok.”

“One of the Hickok girls? You don’t say! I didn’t know Chess was ever married.”

“Apparently the union was brief. They were both quite young. So you knew her?”

“A bit. This is a rural place, low population density. Everyone knows everyone. I did hear she’d passed on. I read it in the newspaper, I think, but I don’t recall any details. How did she die?”

“She was giving a presentation to an occult group in Chicago and burned to death. It was made to look like spontaneous combustion.”

“Is there some similarity to Chess’s death — I refer to the manner of the crime — or other information that leads you to suspect the killer of both is the same?”

“No.”

“But you’ve learned other information that’s made you suspicious?”

“I’m suspicious because they were both murdered and within a few months of each other. They’d been married. There’s also the connection with Wilhelm Reich. Therese wrote a book about Wilhelm Reich, and Chess manufactured orgone boxes. Of course, I don’t know that necessarily means anything beyond a shared interest.”

“We know that Chess wanted to write a book about the Cold War. Did Therese share that interest?”

“If she did, I don’t know about it. I’ve investigated the members of the Mathers Society. That’s the group Therese was speaking to when she died. They’re harmless and eccentric. At least that’s how they seem, though some are obviously withholding information. All of them had opportunity, most of them had the means, and some of them had a motive; but I don’t have proof of anything or even much concrete suspicion. Also, there’s a strange piece of jewelry that may have something to do with the crime, but I don’t know what.

“As to Chess, there is even more lack of clarity. He seems to have been very popular; no one I’m aware of had an apparent reason to kill him. So that’s all I know. I’m hoping you’ve learned more than I have.”

“I have a theory about Chess’s murder,” Deuteronomy said. “It may seem a bit far-fetched, but hear me out. Do you recall that when we last met, I told you I needed to review some files?”

“Yes.”

“I created these files over the years to track famous unsolved mysteries from the Cold War: the theft of state secrets, political assassinations, that sort of thing. I thought I might ultimately incorporate some of these tidbits into plots. When I saw Chess’s notes for his book, it jogged my memory of a particular case, an unsolved assassination. The victim was a Polish writer named Wolfgang Babka. He defected to the West in the late 1960s, where he became something of an anti-Communist public intellectual. Have you heard of the case?”

“No,” Cummings said, “but the Cold War isn’t my bailiwick.”

“The Communists made three attempts to kill Mister Babka. They finally succeeded in September of 1978. Babka was waiting at a London bus stop when he felt a slight pain on the back of his right thigh. He said it was like an insect bite. He looked around and saw a man pick up an umbrella off the ground, then scurry across the street. Babka described the umbrella as black and nondescript, the classic cane type—you know, the full-size umbrella that one might expect an English gentlemen to carry on a drizzly day. The man got into a taxi and drove off. Babka died a few days later.”

“Do you think this has something to do with Chess?” Cummings asked.

“I’m getting to that,” Deuteronomy said. “An autopsy revealed that the cause of Babka’s death was ricin, a highly toxic poison. It was injected into Babka’s thigh in a tiny metal pellet. The common view among those who think about such things is that it was likely delivered through a small injection gun embedded in that umbrella. Of course, no one’s ever proved that, and the umbrella’s never been recovered.”

“I see,” Cummings said to be polite. In truth, he did not see where Deuteronomy might be going with this.

“You may recall that while you were at Omurtag Farm, you ran into Howard Oliver,” Deuteronomy continued. “You may also recall that he told you about a shipment of umbrellas from Eastern Europe.”

“Of course,” Cummings said, suddenly getting it. “You don’t mean you think the umbrella in question somehow ended up in that silly museum?”

“Espionage is a nasty business. The umbrella was an unfortunate and embarrassing leftover of the Cold War. I think of these things as the dangling participles of espionage, silly mistakes that shouldn’t have happened and now must be corrected. We know from his notes that Chess was going to write about the Babka case. Perhaps Chess somehow found out the umbrella was in the Museum.”

“Someone killed him because he found the umbrella?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Almost anything is, I suppose.” In truth, Cummings was unconvinced. The proposition was too extraordinary. In Cummings’s experience, murder was mundane, not prone to the eccentricities of spy fiction. He considered how to respond diplomatically.

“How would we determine if your theory is correct?” Cummings asked.

“We could have any umbrellas in the museum matching Babka’s description of the murder weapon tested for ricin.”

“And how would we manage that?”

Deuteronomy thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t see how we would.”

“In any case,” Cummings said, “your theory doesn’t explain why Chess’s body was left in your boat, where it was sure to be discovered.”

“I’ve thought about that. The location of the body almost guaranteed it wouldn’t be discovered for months. This ensured deterioration that would mask the circumstances of the crime. Or it could have been a ruse to hide the real motive for the crime.”

“Why would that be necessary?” Cummings asked, confused.

“I don’t know yet. However, I suspect the idea may have been inspired by one of my novels,
Cat and Spouse,
published, as I recall, in 1962. In my book the villain, a KGB agent, planted a body in a rowboat as a diversion. A husband and wife spy team found the body. This distracted them temporarily from what was really going on, a plot to blow up the Hermitage. You see, one of the galleries concealed an underground vault in which smuggled United States military documents were hidden.”

“That sounds like a James Bond movie.”

“It was made into a movie, but unfortunately, it didn’t involve 007 or anything else of interest,” Deuteronomy sighed. “It was directed by a pompous auteur dope fiend just out of UCLA film school. Mercifully, the film was only released to drive-ins in the Midwest.”

“Interesting, but as you said, there’s no reasonable way to try and prove your theory.”

Deuteronomy handed him a manila folder stuffed with newspaper clippings and handwritten notes.

“This is my file on the Babka case. Why don’t you read through it? Maybe I’ve overlooked something. You could also make a trip to the Gethsemane Public Library. When I looked previously I didn’t see much of use in their collection, but who knows? I might have missed something. Also, I don’t bother with computers, so you might check the Web. Perhaps there’s something in the electronic ether about the Babka case.”

“I suppose I could follow up,” Cummings agreed half-heartedly, “if you really think it’s necessary.”

“And don’t forget to have a look see at the Museum. Interview Howard Oliver.”

Reluctantly, Cummings was at the Gethsemane Public Library when it opened a few hours later. Gethsemane, about ten miles away, was the nearest town of any size to Horeb. Cummings carefully reviewed each item in Deuteronomy’s folder, as well as the library’s print and online resources. While he learned some additional details about the Babka murder, none of them involved the murder weapon or anything else of apparent relevance to Chess’s demise.

This portion of his commitment to Deuteronomy fulfilled, he moved forward to complete the rest: he phoned Howard Oliver at the Ephemera Museum and made an appointment to see him after lunch.

Although it stood next to the Horeb Arts Center, housed in an imposing Victorian brick structure that had once been the village Grange Hall, the building housing the Ephemera Museum lacked distinction. The structure was a perfunctory metal warehouse built in the 1950s to store the trucks, sand and salt needed to make the roads in and around Horeb passable during the winter. These items had been moved to a larger warehouse in the early 1970s. Howard Oliver had been able to petition the board of selectmen successfully to purchase the old warehouse for one dollar. With minimal renovation, he had made it into a museum of objects of no value or interest — which, to the extent that anything Howard Oliver did had an objective, was probably the objective.

As Cummings walked up to the building’s main door, he noticed an awkwardly lettered sign thumbtacked to the facade. This advertised the museum’s current exhibition, “Toothpicks of the Americas.” Cummings opened the door, which was in need of paint, and went in.

The interior was rudimentary: whitewashed steel beams and metal panel walls with a poured concrete floor, badly stained but at least level and not excessively cracked. A long partition, about six feet high, separated the lobby area from the exhibition space behind it. A cheap desk and several chairs were positioned in front, presumably to greet visitors and take admission fees. At one end of the space a gift shop area had been created. This offered local artisanal items from metal bins on metal shelving.