The Chessman (16 page)

“Too bad it has to be so soon.”

“A damn shame, really, that we can’t put it off for a few more months. It’s just that I won’t be able to keep the balls in the air that much longer.”

“Why is that, Papa?”

“Like every other sucker, Drake Hartzell was taken aback at the suddenness of the crashing markets, stunned at the hemorrhaging stock prices as well as at the politicians’ desire to repeat past mistakes. In other words, dear old dad got caught with his pants down. But over the decades Drake Hartzell has acquired several genuine endeavors, numerous real estate properties of substantial worth, a Bentley dealership and other tasty morsels here and there. Once Hartzell morphs away, the window will slam shut as the government steps in to seize all of Hartzell’s remaining assets. Damn shame to forfeit the St. Leonards’ estate—I’ve always loved that place—and the hut in Morocco, too. A damn shame.” Hartzell looked at his daughter. “But we wouldn’t want to get greedy now, Slim, would we?”

Lucy took a sip of her Earl Grey and then placed the cup down on its saucer. “What exactly do you need, Papa, to keep the
balls in the air
long enough to liquidate
Hartzell’s remaining assets
?”

“You don’t happen to have fifty million in loose change lying about your dresser, do you, Slim?”

Lucy smiled and shook her head.

“What I’d need would be a horde of new investors.”

“What about Paul Crenna?”

Hartzell looked blank for a second. He knew Lucy’s gentlemen callers more by the nicknames she’d assigned them. “Is that Metro or Hermes?”

“Paul Crenna is Metro, Papa, every hair on his head perfectly in place. Ridiculously GQ. He spends more time in front of the mirror than I do.”

“Best to let Paul keep his lunch money.”

“I’m serious, Papa.” Lucy sounded frustrated at the slight. “You need time to work your pixie dust and I’d like to visit Mom a last time before we depart.”

“Fifty million is a rather big fish, Slim. This is not anything you want to do to a friend.”

“Paul’s hardly a friend. He’s a braggart and a bore.”

Hartzell was surprised at the direction the conversation had turned. “In that case, tell me more about young Master Crenna.”

“I met Paul at one of Caitlin’s parties last fall. He’s a friend of hers from NYU. He comes from money—a different convertible every time he picks me up. And you should be flattered, Papa—your reputation precedes you, even in Chicago. Paul mentioned that his father had heard of you, maybe even met you at one of your charity to-dos.”

Hartzell thought of the events he’d held in the Windy City over the years. A zoo of faces, infinite handshakes. “Crenna doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Whenever we go out Paul prattles on and on about how he’d love to connect you with his father’s investment group.”

“What’s Metro doing at NYU?”

“A business degree. I think he’s being groomed to manage the family empire.”

“What does Master Crenna’s father do?”

“His dad leases buildings in cities throughout the Midwest. Something tedious to do with warehouse maintenance and some shipping interests on Lake Michigan.”

Hartzell crunched numbers in his head. If this could buy him more time, diverting new investment funds to stave off earlier investors, Hartzell could cash out most of his remaining chips and he and Lucy would have a near bottomless pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

“How soon can you set up a meeting?”

Chapter 20

G
rand Rapids Police Chief Leigh Irwin listlessly stirred his house salad as though it were soup, eyeing Cady’s cheeseburger and onion rings platter. “It’s not fair. My wife and I eat the exact same food, yet her cholesterol test comes back with a thumbs up and coupons to Pizza Hut. My results come back with an urgent demand that I take a course in nutrition or buy a burial plot.”

Cady had taken a bumpy puddle-jumper out of Minneapolis, grabbed an Avis—a red Saturn Astra—on Airport Road, and hustled it to the Grand Rapids Police Department on Pokegama Avenue. He had phoned Chief Irwin from Minneapolis that morning and bribed the head of the police department with lunch if he would be so kind as to dig up the police report on Bret Ingram as well as the autopsy findings. Irwin drove Cady in a squad car to the Forest Lake Restaurant and Tavern on Fourth Street—a rustic-looking lumberjack joint with bear skins on the wall.

“Want some onion rings?” Cady offered.

“Want some? I’d like to inhale all your onion rings and your cheeseburger, as well as gnaw on that gentleman’s fried chicken,” the chief said, nodding at another table. “But I best stick with the damned Bugs Bunny buffet.”

“You try statins?”

“I’m sure that’s next. It’s hereditary—the Irwin bloodline is mostly Crisco oil. But I’m giving diet and exercise a first chance.”

Leigh Irwin had round features, face, jowls, chest, and stomach—a defensive lineman gone to pot, the police chief looked like he could easily shed forty pounds. Rotund or not, though, Chief Irwin was an imposing figure.

“So are you here for the same reason that agent out of St. Paul was here a few years back?”

“Potentially,” Cady said. “It’s a preliminary investigation. Some friends of Bret Ingram’s—his school-day associates, actually—were murdered several years back and we’re still trying to figure out if there was any connection between Ingram’s death and those other killings.”

“Your guy in St. Paul—hey, I stuck him with the tab for a rib-eye right at this very table back when life was worth living—mentioned the killings in D.C. But there were no records of those murderers, the Zalentines or that Dane Schaeffer fellow, ever having traveled to Minnesota.”

“I know.”

“Bret Ingram may have owned that fancy resort out on Bass Lake,” the police chief said, “but he himself was in the running for town drunk. Ingram had two DUIs before he figured out that it might make more sense if his wife or the local cab service chauffeured his intoxicated ass back home to the lake. When Terri finally saw the light and split, no one was there to watch out for him so Ingram pickled himself nightly and ultimately turned himself into Christmas roast while messing with gasoline.”

“Terri’s his wife, right? Terri Ingram?”

“Yup.” Chief Irwin looked like he’d just bit into a lemon. “Wear a nut cup if you plan on talking to her.”

“Why’s that?”

“Terri Ingram is easy on the eyes, but she’s a firecracker. She’s got her teeth lockjawed on this notion that some imaginary Itasca County Mafioso or some such bullshit had her husband killed.”

“That so?”

“I’ll be honest, if I happen to see Terri Ingram on the street first, I’ll make a fast turn around the corner because I’m sick of her harangues. Even your guy in St. Paul agreed with the evidence. At first I thought Bret Ingram had a meth lab going in that old barn of his when it went boom on him—that’s the kind of shit we see day in and day out up here.”

“What was he doing in the barn at that time of night?”

“Filling up about a dozen portable boat motor fuel tanks with gas. He rented outboards to some of the cabin folk who don’t bring their own boats. Gouged them on the gas as well. Ingram had the barn completely closed off, probably didn’t want any cabin renters to see how shitfaced he was. Terri really ran Sundown Point and I know she lived in fear of Bret interacting with the guests after, say, five at night, as that could negatively impact repeat business, if you know what I mean.”

Cady nodded.

“Anyway, it was a hot night and the fire investigators felt that maybe with all the gas vapors, this old fan he’d been running could have kicked off a spark, but more likely he lit a cigarette…and that, my friend, was that. Half the barn burned down by the time the firemen arrived at the scene. Poor Ingram made it out of the barn and doused himself in the lake, but the poor bastard suffered major burns—over eighty percent of his body—mostly third-degree. They got him to Grand Itasca Hospital, but he only lasted an hour, which was for the best if you know anything about burns of this severity. It’s all in there,” Irwin said, pointing at the file on the table.

Cady lathered a remaining onion ring in ketchup and thought about Bret Ingram’s history of alcohol abuse. “Pathologist do a BAC that night?”

“Tests indicated Ingram’s blood alcohol content at an even .2. Nothing earth-shattering for him, just another night.”

“You got a desk or table I can steal for a few hours?”

“Anything to help.”

“Excellent,” Cady said. He began to fetch his wallet, and then stopped. “Would you like any dessert?”

“In my dreams.”

“What in holy hell did you think you were doing?!”

Cady had to hold his cell away from his ear. He had answered his phone in the parking lot of the Forest Lake Restaurant while Chief Irwin stopped to talk to a table of Chamber of Commerce suits eating pancakes the size of Frisbees.

“Doing?”

“I just got off the horn with Steve Kellervick’s pit bull. I had to grovel, Agent Cady—and you know how I despise groveling. If he follows through on his lawsuit threat, I’ll have your butt in my briefcase.”

“Steve Kellervick?” Cady squeezed a word in edgewise to the assistant director’s tirade. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“You demanded that Kellervick come clean because, quote, ‘We know you gutted your wife. A squad is on the way over. Enjoy your new roommates in county lockup,’ unquote.”

“I have never spoken to Steve Kellervick in my life,” Cady said, shaking his head. “I’m in northern Minnesota, for Christ’s sake.”

“His attorney said you called him on the phone.”

“If I brace someone, I do it in person.”

“Oh, shit!”

“It’s him.”

Cady heard voices in the background, but could not make out what was being said.

“I’m putting you on speakerphone,” the AD said. “Liz is here.”

“Hi, Drew,” Agent Preston said. “I knew you would never have done anything that stupid.”

“Thanks for the rousing vote of confidence.” Cady saw Chief Irwin exit the restaurant and head his way. “Was that all the Chessman said to Kellervick? ‘We know you gutted your wife’?”

“No,” the AD answered. “Kellervick took the call from a male identifying himself as
Special Agent Drew Cady
. Evidently, the caller grilled Kellervick for ten minutes on what his wife did at Koye & Plagans, who she reported to, worked closely with, what projects she was on. Then faux Cady starts in with the stiff arm, accusing Kellervick of murder.”

“Sounds like he was fishing. He rattled Kellervick to gauge his reaction.”

“We’ll trace the phone records,” Preston said.

“Good idea,” Cady replied. “But I guarantee he used a prepaid throwaway.”

“At least this takes the heat off us. I’ll call Kellervick’s attorney back. Damn it, Drew, I don’t know why, but he’s dicking with you. Finish up in Minnesota and get back here ASAP.”

“Nice to know I’m loved.”

Chapter 21

“O
f course Bret was murdered,” Terri Ingram said. “That’s what I’ve been telling Fife all these years.”

Cady had called Mrs. Ingram late that afternoon from the Grand Rapids Police Department—Chief Irwin had made good on his word and found Cady a broom closet to work in. He introduced himself and asked if he could stop by her resort in Cohasset that evening and ask her some questions regarding her late husband. She responded in the affirmative. Cohasset was a small blip on Cady’s highway map of Minnesota, a five-minute drive west of Grand Rapids. Grand Rapidians might get away with calling the little town a suburb but more than a few Cohassetians might take umbrage. Mrs. Ingram had sounded pleasant on the phone but as Cady’s line of in-person questioning proceeded, she let her frustrations be known in no uncertain terms.

“Fife?” Cady asked.

“Police Chief Leigh Irwin. I call him
Fife
, like in
The Andy Griffith Show
, except lacking Barney’s reassuring poise. Chief Irwin’s IQ is lower than whale poop—please let him know I said that.”

Cady tried not to gawk at Mrs. Ingram. The police chief had been correct on at least one point: Terri Ingram was easy on the eyes. She was short, maybe a hiccup or two over five feet tall, with dirty blond hair done up in an informal schoolgirl bun and white-cream skin that shouted Norwegian ancestry.

“The police report stated that Mr. Ingram had been filling the outboards with gasoline in order to prepare them for the next week’s guests.”

“Bret never fueled a boat tank in his life. Tommy Reckseidler from across the lake comes over every Saturday morning and takes care of all that mechanical stuff. Guests don’t check in until noon and mostly they bring their own boats. There are only three or four boats that Tommy needs to rig up in a given week.”

“But you weren’t here the night of the fire?”

“I was living in town at that time. We were separated, but I still ran the day-to-day functions here at Sundown Point.”

“The blood tests placed your husband’s alcohol level at a .2.”

Terri Ingram shrugged. “What else is new? Bret was an alcoholic. Hardcore. He drank every night of his life. That’s why I lived in town.”

“Any chance he was intoxicated and just messing around in the barn?”

“No way is Bret fartskulling with gas tanks in a closed barn at midnight. Bret would begin drinking at lunch, cheap beer and vodka. He’d be passed out no later than nine.”

Cady scratched his temple, looked into Terri Ingram’s blue eyes, and pushed. “Addictive personalities tend to have dependency issues that crop up in other avenues. You’ve probably heard of ‘huffing’—inhalant abuse of chemical vapors to achieve some kind of euphoric rush. It’s primarily adolescents huffing household products out of a plastic bag, but considering the gas vapors, could Mr. Ingram have—”

Terri burst out laughing. “No, Agent Cady, Bret had discovered his drug of choice years before I met him. And it had more to do with gulping than huffing.”

“But he did smoke, right?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Ingram suddenly seemed weary, as if she’d had this same conversation ad nauseam. “Bret was an alcoholic, not the village idiot. He would have passed out by nine o’clock, ten at the latest. Even in his most inebriated state he wouldn’t be playing with gas and Marlboros. Bret didn’t screw up and set himself aflame. And he didn’t commit suicide, either, if that was the next item on your checklist.”