Hard Candy (Tom Keeler Book 4), page 8
Keeler looked into the night. “I can’t tell you about it now, but I could use your help in learning more. In exchange, maybe I’ll give you a call at some point, tell you something that nobody else knows.”
She blew out smoke. “I don’t have a ton of information. I have sources among the police, the paramedics, and the hospital. It’s the benefit of actually being from here. Rosenbaum isn’t local. She was up at Copenhagen House. I guess they’re trying to get in touch with the family. What happened to her, it’s touch and go. They have no idea what’s wrong, just that she’s barely alive. Supposedly they’re running toxicology tests that take a little time.”
“What does that mean, up at Copenhagen House?”
The woman drew on her cigarette. “You aren’t from around here.”
“No.”
“Copenhagen House is an estate, up past Dyer Bridge.” She pointed northeast. “It’s an old manor, like an aristocratic European home, now run as a residency program for a think tank. Something like that.” She blew smoke and Keeler saw that behind the horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes were lively and intelligent.
Keeler looked across the road at the darkness and the row of houses clad in aluminum siding. “Did you try to learn anything about Rosenbaum, who she is?”
The woman took a moment to respond. “Actually, I didn’t.” She took a last puff. “But I will now. Didn’t even consider there’d be a real story, to be honest.” She crushed the butt into an empty flower pot that was having a second life as an ashtray. “Shit, you’re trying to tell me that she may not be just a person who had an accident.” The gloved hand was extended. The nicotine hit was making the woman gregarious. “I’m Julie Everard by the way.”
Keeler took the hand and they shook. He wasn’t going to give his name to the journalist. He said, “Ron Darling.” He’d always liked the fact that the former Mets player was from Hawaii, and since this was New York, it seemed fitting to use his name.
Everard’s hand was bony beneath the fleece padding of her glove. Keeler’s mind drifted to other things, like toxicology, syringes, and the various means of killing somebody with modern poisons. If the police don’t suspect foul play, there isn’t usually any kind of postmortem investigation. Cardiac arrest happens all the time. Minuscule punctures of the epidermis are hard to spot, and investigating death requires time and energy and most importantly, suspicion. He was also wondering about the place. Killing her on the train would have been preferable since the assassin could then have hopped off at any stop and been conveniently distant when the body was found. But whatever they’d done to her hadn’t completely worked out, Rosenbaum was still in the land of the living.
He said, “Will you let me know if you find anything else?”
Everard produced a business card from her phone holder and handed it to Keeler. She was watching him carefully. “So you aren’t just a guy who was on the train?”
He regarded the cool set of eyes examining him and shook his head. “For now I’m just a guy who was on the train. Tomorrow I might be a different guy, we’ll see.”
“All right then, Ron.” She indicated the card. “That’s my personal number. Call it right now, I’ll have your number. That way I can let you know if I find anything interesting about Irma Rosenbaum.”
Keeler slid out his phone and tapped in her number, called it so that she had it on her phone.
Everard said, “I’m going back inside to finish up and then skedaddle back home for dinner. He’s making shepherd’s pie tonight, and I do love me a good shepherd’s pie.” She pointed at the business card, still in Keeler’s hand. “I’ll look into this again tomorrow.
Keeler watched Everard enter the building and make her way up the stairs. He had no traction on the situation. Everard had given him a clue, something to look forward to, a location even, which meant a destination. Who knew, maybe something could come of a visit to Copenhagen House.
He came down off the stoop with a sense of relief and even something like anticipation. Copenhagen House sounded both fancy and old and mysterious, in equal measure. He was looking forward to creeping around the place and seeing what he could shake up. If nothing came of it that was all right too. He could go back to DeValla’s house and see if she had come home, or not.
He’d take it from there, one step at a time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mini had not come home, and her sister, Candy, was worried.
The kids were in bed and she sat with her mother in Mini’s kitchen eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich her mom had prepared. Mom didn’t eat, just busied herself around the kitchen, reorganizing it into some kind of an ideal image, despite its not being her house. If she was in a kitchen, that kitchen was going to be organized.
Candy ignored her mom. She was pissed off at Frankie. He was a ham-fisted idiot, like most of the Kitchewan Landing police force. Minerva had projected attributes onto Frank that were more her own fantasy than anything possessed by the actual Francis Robert O’Leary. It wasn’t only Candy who had been surprised by the marriage; pretty much the whole town had been a little surprised, including Frankie himself.
Candy hadn’t been surprised by the divorce, only that it’d taken so long for Mini to figure out that he wasn’t the guy she thought he was, that Frankie wasn’t going to suddenly grow a brain. She bit down on the last corner of the grilled cheese and had what she liked to call a brain fart.
The computer.
Candy rose from the table and went into Mini’s bedroom. On the dresser was a laptop computer. She brought it back to the kitchen and set it on the table. Her sister’s password was an amalgamation of the kids’ names and dates of birth. The laptop was the same brand as Mini’s phone. Candy opened an app for finding lost phones. The computer demanded another password and luckily Minerva had used the same one for everything. The computer whirred and a little wheel spun and fifteen seconds later a map was forming on the screen. There were more things to click and select before a little blinking blue dot appeared.
Mini’s phone was at the golf course.
Candy spoke to her mother. “Ma, you okay here? I’m going out for a bit. Give me a call if Mini comes back.”
Her mother was busy finding a new home for the cheese grater and shooed her away. Candy went to the door to get her boots on. She was feeling trepidacious but excited.
The golf course was up in the hills north of town. It was accessed by a long winding driveway, but by then everything had been plowed, and driving steep hills wasn’t so much of an issue. Candy was pretty certain that nobody played golf in the winter, at least not in New York state. The parking lot was a nighttime teen hangout spot in the summer, but she’d never been to the actual club and didn’t know anybody who had. That said, she understood that golf clubs were clubby, in the sense that hanging out in them was part of the deal. Maybe more so than actually playing a round of golf.
Candy steered her old Subaru up the incline. At the end of the driveway she came to the parking lot. On the other side of that was the clubhouse, a sprawling stone structure that wasn’t very old, but was made to look it. The lighting helped, recessed spots highlighting angular gray stone. The entire place was snowed over, but the walkways and the lot were cleanly shoveled, plowed, swept, and lit.
There was light coming from the clubhouse and cars in the lot.
Candy parked and kept the Subaru running. She had her sister’s laptop, and used her own cellular device as a hot spot to get Mini’s phone location activated again. It took a while to do that, but the phone once more appeared as a blinking blue dot on the map. It was in the same place as before, but now Candy zoomed in on the location. The dot wasn’t just at the golf course; it was in the parking lot.
Candy swept her eyes from left to right. There were maybe fifteen parked cars besides her own. None of them were vehicles she immediately recognized. The actual blinking dot seemed to be on an empty area of the lot. Candy got out of the car with the laptop balanced in one hand. She walked to where she thought the dot was located, and saw nothing but wet and cold asphalt.
Weird.
For a second she didn’t know what to do, but then she figured out the best course of action.
Candy switched off the ignition on her little Subaru. She kept the laptop open for fear of losing the signal and walked up the clean path of stepping stones to the entrance. The interior of the club was hermetically sealed by a two-door system with a space between the doors the size of one great big step. Candy was five foot nine, which is tall enough for a woman, but didn’t make her any kind of a giant. She crossed the threshold in a step and a half. Through the second door, she experienced an atmosphere change, like the cold was sucked out of her and replaced by a cozy warmth. Inside the foyer was a solid oak concierge desk with a young guy sitting behind it eating with both hands.
When Candy approached she was able to identify the object in his hands as a club sandwich. He looked up at her and did a double take. For a moment the boy looked silly, staring at Candy with elements of the sandwich visible inside of his open mouth. Candy was used to seeing the reaction her appearance produced on men’s faces. She tried not to judge them for it. The kid closed his mouth and finished his bite. Candy set the laptop down on the counter and rotated it around for him to see. The kid was in his teens, maybe the son of a member who was working nights at the club for pocket money and free food. He wiped his fingers on a napkin and composed himself.
She spoke slowly and articulated her words well. “This computer is telling me that my phone is at your club. Do you see that?”
The kid leaned in and examined the screen. Candy saw that his eyes flicked over the interface elements comfortably, like he’d seen that kind of thing before and knew what it was. “Yeah. It’s in the parking lot.”
She pointed at the blinking blue dot. “But it isn’t exactly there. That spot is empty asphalt.”
The kid nodded. “They don’t give an exact spot. Margin of fifteen to twenty yards or something like that. It’s probably in one of the cars. You know anybody at the club?”
“No, I don’t.”
The kid stared at her blankly. “So how did your phone get into one of the member’s cars?”
“It’s my sister’s phone, and I have no idea. I guess we should check the cars.”
He shrugged and she saw indifference in his eyes. “You can go ahead and look into the cars, but don’t go opening the doors or anything, that’s private property. Where’s your sister?”
“That’s the point. I don’t know where she is and I figured I might find her phone with this.” She tapped the laptop. “Now I found the phone, and it’s at your club. We need to find out whose car the phone is in and then speak to the vehicle’s registered owner.”
The kid didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. “I don’t know. It’s a private club. But if you find the phone, come back and let me know. I’ll ask.”
Which pissed Candy off. “There are like, fifteen cars out there. I bet they’re all having dinner with each other or playing poker or something. What else would they be doing?”
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. Hold on a second and I’ll ask. What’s your sister’s name?”
“Minerva DeValla.”
The kid was back inside of three minutes. He shook his head. “Nobody’s heard of her. Nobody has her phone.”
Candy went back outside into the cold. She roamed the parking lot, looking into the vehicles. Ten minutes later she had gazed deeply into the interior of fifteen automobiles without a glimpse of her sister’s phone, or any phone for that matter. Thirteen out of the fifteen in the lot could be described as SUVs, the remaining two were luxury sedans. One was a silver Jaguar with tinted windows that she couldn’t see into. The dot on the laptop screen kept on blinking stupidly.
Candy drew two conclusions from this. One was related to the vehicles. The Jaguar had been hidden behind a large Chevy Tahoe and she hadn’t noticed it initially. The Jag belonged to Bob Tsipiras, the owner of the diner. Everyone knew his car. The second conclusion was related to the kid inside. He wasn’t going to help her open up all of those vehicles. She also knew that it would be a pain to get the members to cooperate.
So she called Frankie again. At least that meathead was good for breaking things, if for nothing else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Keeler was good at a lot of things, including breaking and entering.
He was sitting twenty feet in from the road in the snow with his back against a tree. In terms of public access, and the view from across the road, Copenhagen House presented as a stone wall with a tall white wooden gate. The wall was high enough to dissuade casual entry, but low enough to be unremarkable. As far as Keeler could make out, the gate was under observation from two cameras.
The woods were quiet. There were not many sounds louder than his own breathing and the occasional crackle of ice and snow adjusting. Just a trickle of water from the river off in the distance. The estate boundary ran along the narrow road that he’d taken up. The property occupied a plateau above the steep valley. The river was most likely the same one he’d heard behind DeValla’s house, except he was now on the other side of it and farther to the northwest. It was peaceful and beautiful; heavy clouds covered the moon, which made it even more picturesque.
A car came up the road from the valley below. The sound of tires on asphalt preceded the appearance of headlight beams. Once the vehicle rushed along the straight stretch of road before him and disappeared around the bend, the winter silence reasserted itself.
Keeler got up and moved through the woods, parallel to the stone wall on the other side of the road. Every step plunged his boots into the thick snow. He paused several times to examine the wall. There were no surveillance devices as far as he could make out. Just the two cameras at the gate. The wall turned after about a quarter of a mile, running directly away from Keeler’s position.
Maybe there was surveillance from the inside, but he’d have to get up on the wall to check. Doing so required little more than scaling the narrow trunk of a tree, then stepping onto one of the stone slabs which topped the barrier.
Keeler crouched there, well balanced, hidden by branches. He had a view across a meadow. In the dark, the fresh layer of snow looked like a white blanket laid atop the flat area, with soft mounds that he figured were buried boulders or hedges. There weren’t any buildings in sight—only the meadow, a dividing line of trees, and traces of white beyond signaling another open area.
Keeler stayed up top for a good three minutes, thinking and waiting and watching and listening. He wasn’t tired, and he wasn’t hungry. He was alive and invigorated and curious enough to get in there and see what was going on.
He slid down the other side of the wall, slowing himself with a hand against a tree trunk, his feet stepping and slipping down the stone face. At the base of the wall, he crouched and watched for a minute before moving northeast along the inside of the wall until he arrived at the edge of the meadow.
He cut into the overgrown spit dividing the open area from another just like it and stayed in the trees until the end of the wooded section. On the other side of the second meadow was the building, three sides of a giant rectangle surrounding a courtyard. The external walls had a line of windows, some of which were lit, illuminating plant beds hosting a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs.
To get closer to the building, Keeler would have to cross open space. He was stranded on the thin peninsula of wooded cover, like standing on the forked tongue of a giant serpent. Nothing was moving out there. Inside the building was warmth and light. He could see movement in one of the windows, and the hot glow of a fireplace.
Keeler detached from the trees and slipped across the white meadow. The snow was thick and his boots sank deep. The crossing was slow going and it took all of a minute and a half to get into the shrubbery close to the building. Then he was at the window, looking in. The walls were lined with bookcases. Everything wood paneled and wood floored, with high oak beams crossing an A-frame ceiling. The fireplace was glowing and a silver-haired man sat on a velvet sofa with his back to Keeler.
The guy’s head wasn’t doing anything except nodding every once in a while, which made Keeler think there might be someone else in the room he couldn’t see. He shuffled over to the next window about fifteen feet away. From there he had a new angle into the room.
Instead of looking at the room however, he was looking directly at a woman standing in the window gazing out. The woman had silver hair cut in a bob and a plaid dress beneath a gray cashmere sweater. The floor she stood on was about a foot and a half above the ground, which brought her head about level with Keeler’s.
It took her a half second to focus on Keeler’s face, then she dropped her scotch glass and screamed with everything she had. Except, Keeler couldn’t hear her scream, or the sound of her heavy glass hitting the floor. The windows were perfectly soundproofed. For a long second he stood watching her face do contortions. In the background, the man leaped up off the sofa, eyes gaping.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Keeler slid away from the window. He still couldn’t hear anything but the pure winter silence. What would happen next? They’d call security, if there was any. If not maybe they’d call the police. Keeler let that thought sit there for a moment and examined it. Maybe they’d send big Frankie up. On the other hand, if someone came out from the estate to check the grounds, they’d simultaneously open up the place for Keeler to get in.
He slid along the wall to his right, which was back toward the entrance. He had the germ of an idea and sprinted close along the side of the building where the snow hadn’t accumulated, staying just inside the shrubs. He wasn’t going to be making any more tracks in the open meadow, that was for sure. If he went out that way he’d go back on his own steps. Twenty seconds later the wall stopped being straight and jutted out in a semicircle. Keeler followed the curve around and stopped behind the cover of an evergreen hedge. He was looking at the entrance, the opening in the three-sided rectangle.
