Death Under the Lilacs (14 page)

“I want to speak with you, Raymond,” Rocco said.

Brohl turned away from the police chief to finish his conversation with a young lawyer standing stiffly by the side of his desk. “Do you really want to record these instruments in this order, Counselor?”

“Our senior partner just closed the transaction, and he told me to rush them down here for recording.”

“Like this?” Raymond Brohl waved a sheaf of legal instruments in the air. His white-haired assistant across the room rolled her eyes appropriately. “Don't they teach you anything at Yale Law School, young man?”

“Well, not about recording documents, Mr. Brohl.”

The town clerk continued his lesson in a singsong, pedantic voice. “To begin with, we record the satisfaction of the existing mortgage first, then the new deed, then the new mortgage, and finally the new second mortgage. Doesn't that make sense?”

“Yes, sir. I guess it does. Suppose we do it that way,” the flushed lawyer said.

“My idea exactly,” Brohl said as he ran the papers through the date stamps and began to record their receipt in the Day Book with a flowery Spencerian hand.

Rocco nudged Lyon in the ribs and they left the clerk's office.

“You brought me down here to see Brohl chew out some neophyte attorney?” Lyon asked.

Rocco glanced at his watch. “I just noticed that it's Raymond's coffee-break time. In exactly four minutes he will have coffee at May's.”

Every small town in America has a May's. They are undistinguished establishments similar only in that they are located near the center of town, have at least one large circular table known as the “coffee table” to the regulars, and provide an unending stream of strong coffee to the local business people.

Raymond Brohl arrived at exactly two minutes past ten and would stay until ten-thirty. He would dispense free information to any of the regulars who asked, expecting nothing in return for his encyclopedic knowledge of the physical facts concerning the town of Murphysville.

“I got a new listing on Elm Street, Mr. Brohl,” Darlimple the real estate broker announced. “Number 219.”

“House across the street went two years ago for seventy-one five, the next block up had one last month that sold for seventy-six, but they had an in-the-ground pool. List it at seventy-five and go to contract at seventy-one.”

Nods were thanks, and Brohl basked in the approval of his peers, which ensured his reelection.

“Tell Lyon what you told me, Raymond,” Rocco said.

“Man came in to see me about your place, Wentworth. I gave him the pertinent facts—zoning, engineers' reports, and so on. When I recorded his deed from his corporation, it came back to mind.”

Lyon looked puzzled. “Everyone knows that. I sold my place to a builder from Middleburg who is going to put up some condos.”

“Of course I know that,” Raymond bristled. “Fifty condominiums at two hundred thousand a unit. Real quality stuff.”

“What do you estimate, after seeing his plans, and including roads and services, that the whole package will cost to build?” Rocco asked.

“Five mil including the price of the land.”

Lyon did a hasty mental calculation. “Can he really get fifty units on this rocky land?”

“If he clusters them he can.”

“That brings the total sales price to ten million.”

“At a cost of half that,” Rocco added.

“Mr. Brohl,” Lyon asked, “exactly when did this man first make contact with you regarding my property?”

“A month ago. A month ago Tuesday.”

“And his name was Burt Winthrop?”

“Same fella.”

Lyon found Bea in the breakfast nook with a sketch pad. She had already filled two pages with detailed drawings and was looking intently at the third, with her pencil clenched between her teeth.

“What are you doing?”

“You remember my telling you about redoing Nutmeg Hill? All those hours in that … in that place, that planning kept my sanity. I thought we'd start with the kitchen. You know, if we knock out that far wall, we can use that extra flue we boarded over. I thought we'd turn this into a real country kitchen. Look at what I've come up with so far.” She pushed the drawings toward Lyon.

Lyon couldn't look at them and turned away.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“You know what happened in London?”

“The guy got away.”

“With the stamps.”

“I don't understand.”

“There was no other way to raise the money.”

Her pencil snapped. “Funny how the human mind can compartmentalize unpleasantries if it tries hard enough. I didn't want to ask. I forced myself to forget to ask. I didn't want to know.”

“I had to sell Nutmeg Hill.”

She turned to look out the window for a long moment before she spoke. “How long do we have?”

“Another couple of weeks.”

She wadded her drawings and bustled from the breakfast nook. “Well then, we have to get going. There's one hell of a lot of packing to do.”

“I'm sorry, Bea.”

“Not your fault, Went.” She turned to face him with tears in her eyes. “Not anyone's fault.”

10

“I've described Burt Winthrop to Bea, and she says no way,” Lyon said over the phone.

“I never figured it for Burt himself. It's his twin sons I wonder about.”

“How old are they?”

“About mid-twenties, I should guess. Taller than their daddy and real hell-raisers.”

“Why would he take the gamble? Just to get his hands on a piece of real estate?”

“With a profit throw-off of five million dollars. A lot of men will do a great deal for that sort of money.”

“You know, Rocco, at the beginning of each legislative session Bea automatically files a financial disclosure statement. It's not required, but she does it voluntarily. Anyone taking the trouble to check would know our complete financial picture.”

“And that you couldn't raise ransom money without selling your real estate.”

“Exactly. I still wonder about our friends in Wessex. You're the one who said he didn't believe in coincidences, and Reuven's the one who chloroforms women.”

“I'm in the process of setting it up so that Bea can see Reuven and the Winthrops in a protected situation.”

“Thanks, Rocco.” The phone went dead, and Lyon continued staring out the window. He picked up a ballpoint pen and began to doodle on a pad, listing Robert Traxis first. The man disliked Bea with a passion, made trips to London, collected stamps, and had an associate with an inclination toward the use of chloroform. Lyon drew heavy lines under the name.

Burt Winthrop, builder and professional country boy, had exhibited an interest in their property weeks before Bea's abduction. Rocco had just indicated that Burt had young sons who had the agility and speed to have taken Bea and then snatched the stamps from under the nose of the London police.

Then there was the Stockton cemetery pie located only yards from where Bea had been imprisoned. What had happened to Bates Stockton after his dismissal from the university?

Lyon reached for the telephone and dialed the one organization he sometimes considered the best skip tracer in the whole country: the Middleburg Alumni Fund Raising Office.

An officious voice informed him that mail for Bates Stockton had been forwarded to a Fernwick address for the past decade. No change of address had been received, nor had mail been returned.

He made a note of the address and went to tell Bea that he was going out.

The borough of Fernwick was theoretically within the town limits of Lantern City, Connecticut, but it actually belonged to a different world. Granted town-within-a-town status through some obscure state law in the late nineteenth century and surrounded by a high stone wall, it had always been an exclusive enclave for the very rich.

Lyon was forced to slow to a halt at the electronically controlled gates that were the only entrance to Fernwick. He waited behind the wheel as a smartly uniformed security guard with a revolver on his hip sauntered over to the car. Lyon knew from map study and past balloon flights over the area that the settlement was built on a peninsula that jutted out into Long Island Sound.

The guard's smile was obsequious but held an underlying firmness. “Can I help you, sir?”

Slowly revolving television monitors were mounted on each gatepost.

“Do you wish to see someone?” the guard pressed.

“Yes. Mrs. Stockton. Please inform her that Mr. Wentworth is here.” He made the statement as matter-of-fact as possible, hoping that a direct approach might work.

The guard went into the gate house, telephoned, and returned to the car as the gates swung open. “She is expecting you, sir. Are you familiar with the house? It's the second back from the seawall.”

Lyon gave what he hoped was an imperious nod and drove through the gates, which immediately closed behind him. This was old New England money; the houses were unostentatious, rambling, wooden Victorian affairs built at the turn of the century. Wide screened porches ran along their fronts, and each of the so-called cottages was separated from its neighbor by neatly lined shrubbery.

He parked in the driveway of the second house from the seawall. An old woman in a long black dress buttoned to the neck stood just back from the screen door leading onto her veranda. She smiled as he approached.

“Mr. Wentworth, how good of you to come.” A delicate hand with finely lined blue veins crisscrossing its surface was extended.

“Thank you,” Lyon answered.

“We shall have tea out here if you would like.” She sat on a small wicker divan placed behind an ornate silver tea service. “Lemon or sugar?”

“Lemon, please,” Lyon said as he sat on a wicker easy chair on the other side of the tea service.

She poured with a special care that Lyon imagined had been learned at some long-ago finishing school.

“Did you have a good trip down from the city?” she asked.

Lyon accepted a cup and balanced it on his knee. “Yes, thank you. It was a pleasant drive.” He tried to place her age, but the aging process had seemingly ceased years ago; she could be in her mid-seventies or ninety.

She took a dainty sip from a bone china cup and gave a quiet laugh. “I know you must have legal papers in the car, but let us pass the time of day for a few minutes before we go into all those complicated things.”

“Ah, Mrs. Stockton, I am perhaps not who you think I am.”

“Mr. Wentworth from the law firm.”

“No. Mr. Wentworth from Murphysville. I came to see you about Bates Stockton.”

She looked past and through him into some distant time and place. “Bates has been dead for many years. Sometimes I forget that.”

“I speak of Bates Junior.”

“My grandson?”

“Yes, I would judge so. Do you know where he is?”

She put her teacup down. “Bates was never the same after that awful man at the university told those terrible lies about him. I wanted to bring suit, of course, but Bates wouldn't hear of it. He said he didn't want the Stockton name dragged through an awful court proceeding. A very thoughtful boy.”

“Does he live here?”

“Oh, goodness no. He did stay with me after his father died. He stayed here until he went to college. He would often sit out here with me at twilight while we had tea together. I would knit and he would play with his things. I've kept all his things in his room, just as he left it. He had a dreadful time in Viet Nam, but of course everyone knows that.”

“No, I didn't know. Did you see him after he was discharged?”

“He did stay here awhile, but he smoked those funny cigarettes and took too much medication. I thought it best that he should leave and find his own place.”

“Do you have any idea where he went?”

“Yes. I think he went west. Yes, that's it, west to San Francisco. That's where he died, you know.”

“Died?”

“They said he took too much medication.”

“OD'd?”

“Yes, an overdose of his medication. Poor boy. Such a pity. It was all due to that horrid teacher at the university. We can only hope and pray that evil men like that will have their just rewards in the hereafter.”

“I hope so,” Lyon agreed.

“Are you sure you don't have any papers in the car for me? They always have so many things for me to sign when they come down from the city.”

“I'm afraid not,” Lyon replied. He stood. “Thank you for the tea. I must go now.”

“Such a short visit. Do come again.” Her hand was extended.

As Lyon left the porch, he had a quick glimpse through the open front door into the interior of the house. The cottage had remained unchanged for decades. Immediately inside the front door was a polished Hepplewhite table with a silver calling-card tray containing a small address book next to the telephone. The floors were dull, as if they had not been polished in years. As he walked to the car, the elderly Mrs. Stockton carried her tea service into the house.

Lyon swung the car door open. She had acted senile, and yet she had seemed to have immediate recall of a number of subjects. He had the inchoate feeling that she was not exactly as she appeared.

He turned and hurried back to the porch. The front screen door was closed, but the inner door was still open. The old lady was standing by the phone preparing to dial. He pressed against the house wall and held his breath to listen better.

He heard the dialing and then a connection.

“Bates,” she said in a firm voice devoid of any of the frailty she had exhibited earlier, “that awful man Wentworth was here. He was asking about you.… I told him you were dead, of course.… In San Francisco, dead from drugs. I thought you should know.”

Lyon heard the receiver being replaced in the cradle and then steps clacking down the long hall that would lead to the kitchen at the rear of the house. He judged her to be meticulous and guessed that she would tidy the tea service, wash the cups, and replace them in the pantry. He had seconds to do what was necessary.