1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1 (6 page)

More than anything in the world, Harry wanted a six-pack. A dozen—enough to numb the fear and the sordid sense of personal betrayal he was fighting. A drink. He licked his lips.

“No, I guess not, got to do some more planning. Thanks anyway.”

“See ya in a coupla.”

Chapter Eight

Harry crouched in the bushes east of the building. He’d worked his way to that point from the access road through the woods and into the dark side of the building. Avoiding the surveillance cameras had been simple enough, but he did not know if there were trip alarms in the approaches or not. At last, he decided he was overcautious and moved through the trees. Everything looked pretty much as he expected—no activity at the building, no sound, nothing out of the ordinary. Then a car crossed the parking lot and nosed into the trees. He could make out two heads in the front seat. The headlights extinguished and the motor went silent.

He glanced at his watch. Donati would contact him soon. There was nothing to do now but wait.

***

“Anything on the tube, boys?” Loyal Parker stuck his head in the campus police center. The eleven to seven shift had just come on duty. Jake Tarbull hunched over the television monitors displaying various walkways, corridors, and buildings on campus.

“Naw, Chief, one of them quiet nights. Wait a minute, there’s a car pulling into Paradise.”

Two screens monitored the Art Storage Compound. One covered the interior, the other the parking lot and the short lover’s lane that adjoined the facility’s parking lot—Paradise.

“Do you want me to ask Hank to go down and chase them kids away?”

Parker shook his head. “No, don’t think so. I’m about to go off duty. I’ll slip down there and do it myself on the way home.”

He left the building and went to his car, picked up the large flashlight he kept there, and struck out through the boxwoods toward the ravine next to the lane. He had made the trip many times. Chasing, or more accurately catching kids in the act was a duty he reserved for himself.

***

Harry watched the car for a few more minutes, then made his way to the east wall of the building where he had left his equipment, and waited for Donati’s call. He worried about the car. A car meant people, and people meant complications. If it did not leave soon, it would be there for the night, at least as far as the guards up at the main building were concerned. That might provoke one of them to come down to check. Donati had not allowed for enough people to watch the car and everything else. He waited another minute, and then Donati’s voice crackled in his earphone.

“Grafton, what’s the holdup?”

“There’s a car parked about one hundred yards from the building. It’s been down there for ten minutes.”

“I’ll send Red down to look. Listen, I don’t care, go ahead. We’ll just have to risk it.”

Harry decided to wait another five minutes. When the car did not move, he went ahead with interrupting the closed circuit television surveillance.

The system was not an integral part of the alarm system. It had been added only recently and not very expertly. All of the cables and power lines were exposed and exited from a simple junction box attached to the back of the building. Surprisingly, it was just out of range of the exterior camera. Harry wondered about that. No reputable company would leave their system unguarded like that. It looked like someone had changed the angle of the camera after the system had been installed. The area covered now included a view of a small dirt road leading into the woods but which, Harry knew from his earlier survey, was blocked by a tree trunk ten yards in. The car parked there now.

Harry moved to the junction box, backed out its retaining bolts, and lifted off the waterproofed covering. He put it aside and took the battery-operated recorders from their cases. He checked the cassettes and made sure everything was in order. He scraped the insulation away from the coaxial cables, cleared a bit of the sheathing away from the core, and fastened alligator clips. He turned the recorders on and watched as the cassettes completed their loops—three minutes. He then punched the playback buttons and at the same instant cut the cables behind the clips. Now the guards would see the same three minutes for the rest of the night. The batteries were good for nine hours. After that, it would not make any difference.

***

Loyal Parker slipped into the clump of bushes beside the car. He had set the lane up years ago, dropping the tree to block it so cars parked there could be approached unseen from the passenger’s side. He listened to the girl’s muffled cries and protests. He licked his lips in anticipation, unaware of the saliva that dribbled down his chin.

Little tart, he thought. Get what she deserves. They all do. He thought how this one would look when he snapped on the torch—naked and afraid. It was the last thought he had on this earth. The tire iron caught him behind his right ear, crushing most of his occipital bone. The force of the blow drove one piece into his brain stem. For all practical purposes, he was dead before he hit the ground.

***

Jennifer Ames was angry. She was angry with herself for having listened to her roommate.

“You’ll love him, Jen. He’s Jack Trask, you know, the big lacrosse player from UVA and he just doesn’t date anyone.”

Betsy Mae Billups had one of those honeyed accents that only come from the depths of Alabama or Mississippi—the kind of accent that can distract the most rational men and even other women. Jennifer nicknamed her Magnolia Mouth.

“And besides,” she went on, “you’d be doing me a huge favor. My boyfriend is just dying to get a bid to St. Elmo’s and Jack Trask can help him. It’s really important, Jen.”

“Why me?” Jennifer had asked. “Why not Laurie or one of the Marys in fourteen B or someone who wants a date and knows what the hell lacrosse is?” Jennifer grew up in Chicago and, until she came east to go to school, Lacrosse was just a town in Wisconsin.

“Magnolia, you know I don’t like to go out much, and I hate jocks.” It was true. She had gotten a reputation in her years at Callend as a loner. She didn’t date much, content to spend her free time in the library and weekends in Washington, New York, and Boston, cities where her parents and their respective spouses had houses or apartments or connections. She discovered early in her freshman year that the boys who attended the mixers and the few she had dated were boring and juvenile. She gave up, deciding there was something wrong with her because she could not get into the whole scene.

“Jen, they already have dates, and besides, you’re the one he wants to go out with. He said, ‘How about Betsy Mae’s good-looking roommate?’ That’s what he said and…oh, come on, Jen, he won’t bite.”

***

Like hell he won’t, thought Jennifer. And now here she was, in the woods, fighting for her—what? Her life? Her honor? Not her virginity. Her second cousin, Danny, had taken care of that three summers ago.

“Stop it, Jack.”

Jack Trask was an octopus. His hands seemed to be everywhere, unbuttoning, unhooking, squeezing, and clumsy. Jennifer tried to stop the assault and repair the damage, all the while pleading, cajoling, and insisting he stop. But as fast as she got one part of her dress repaired, Jack’s hands found another target and she would feel her blouse being unbuttoned and her bra unsnapped. When she would try to redo that, the hands went to work somewhere else.

Jack’s body had her pinned against the door and his weight was pressing her down on the seat.

“Damn it, stop.” No hope. He wasn’t going to stop. She felt the elastic go somewhere, she guessed she knew where, and heard the thin cotton fabric tear. “That’s it,” she thought, as she twisted back and forth trying to get a purchase, a foothold—anything to get her back into a position where she’d have some room to maneuver or open the door and get out.

She felt her skirt being pulled up around her hips. Why am I doing this, she wondered. Why not give in and get it over with? For one thing, she did not want to be date-raped, and by God, she was not going to have some arrogant, oversexed adolescent push her around.

“If I want to get laid, I’ll decide when and where.” This last comment she delivered aloud, and to make sure she had her assailant’s attention, bit his ear—hard.

The counterattack had not been expected, nor the initial resistance. Jack Trask, like most pampered athletes, expected easy conquests, and he found Jennifer’s reluctance to keep his uninterrupted string intact annoying.

The stabbing pain on his ear caused him to rear back and raise his fist, ready to strike.

As he jerked back, Jennifer realized just how near to his goal Jack was. She was aware of his raised arm, but in the split second his weight lifted from her hips, she twisted, drew on what strength she had left, and sent her right knee to his groin.

Light, bright as noon, flooded the car. In that moment Jennifer saw it all. She sprawled across the seat, practically naked, blouse pushed back, underwear in a shambles. In a brief, irrational moment the words to a Tom Lehrer song her father used to play on an old vinyl record came to her…
revealing for all of the others to see, just what it was that endeared you to me
. Jack screamed in pain as the shock of her knee rocketed to his brain.

“Nicely done, honey. Before he recovers, give him a quick poke in both eyes with your fingers. That will keep him out for at least another fifteen minutes.”

The voice was male and accented, but Jennifer could not see anyone. The light shone in her eyes. She shoved Jack away, scrabbled to the side of the seat, and attempted to put her clothes back in order.

“What the hell we got here?” Another voice. There were two of them, maybe more, Jennifer thought.

“Okay, lady, you too, sport. Put your duds on and get out.”

Jennifer did not know whether to laugh or cry. Now what? She did as she was told and managed to pull her clothes into some sort of order. She got out of the car. Jack still moaned in pain.

“I guess I hit him pretty hard,” Jennifer said to the voices.

“I guess you did, honey. Okay, sport, suck it up and get out.”

She saw a burly arm emerge from the shadows, grab Jack by his collar, and drag him from the car.

“Walk,” commanded the first voice, “that way,” and the light described an arc pointing the way to the parking lot and the bunker.

As Jennifer walked, she felt what was left of her underpants slide down her right leg. She let them fall and kicked them away as they reached her ankle. She was aware of voices, other voices, four voices, discussing her. She wondered who they were. Her first thought—she and Jack had gotten mixed up with a motorcycle gang. The thought terrified her. But now, with the realization that there were only four, she decided she’d been wrong. Besides, she would have heard the roar of the motors. Even Jack’s heavy breathing wouldn’t have drowned that out.

“Bring them over here,” one voice said, and they were steered toward the bunker. “Sit.”

She sat and felt the cold steel of the handcuffs circle her wrists, heard its ratchet-clatter as they were closed. Jack, recovered from her kick, decided to be a hero. He jerked his arm away from the cuffs and demanded to know who these people were.

“Shut up, kid,” a voice said.

Jack danced back and forth like a boxer and told them in no uncertain terms the consequences that would come if they messed with him.

“I said, shut up, kid.”

Then, Jack dropped into a martial arts crouch and signaled them to come on. There was a sigh and then one of the biggest, ugliest red-haired men Jennifer had ever seen stepped into the circle of light. Jack swallowed, raised his fists, and was about to speak, when the red-haired man’s fist caught him flat on the nose, mouth, and forehead. It was a big fist. Jack dropped to his knees like a sack of trash, spitting blood and teeth, and making funny whistling noises. They handcuffed him beside her.

The light and the men moved away. Jennifer looked around. Her back was to the building, its low profile barely visible, even with the parking lot lights on. She wriggled around so that she could watch.

Two men stood in front of the door. One held a heavy rucksack. The other wore a black suit, hat, and tie. He seemed overdressed, she thought. Then she heard the rumble of a truck and watched in fascination as it stopped, air brakes whistling, and backed its trailer up to the door. The trailer unhitched, the tractor drove off again.

I don’t believe this, she thought. They’re going to break into the bunker.

Jack started to whimper.

“Shut up, kid,” she said.

Chapter Nine

Harry studied the door, oblivious to Donati’s presence and the activity around him. It was his show now. Whether the job would go off as planned depended on his skill. It also depended on his willingness to go through with it. He could not refuse, not and live. But he could trip one of the several silent alarms without anyone knowing it, and within minutes the area would be crawling with police. He’d considered that possibility several times during the previous week. It might get him his job back at the Bureau. But he’d rejected the plan as too risky. He would be the first to go, once the double-cross was discovered, and even if he survived that, the chances of the Bureau being impressed were slim. Then there were Donati’s frank references to his children. So now he had to shut out the world and do the only thing he knew how to do—disarm alarms and let his new employers get at the treasure the system protected.

Concentration. It’s about concentration. He took a power drill from his bag, fitted it with a quarter-inch diamond bit, selected his spot in the upper right-hand corner of the door, and drilled a hole through its face. The steel sheathing was thin and soft. The bit cut into the door’s wooden core, solid oak by the look of the curl emerging from the hole. He felt the bit grab metal again and adjusted the drill’s speed to its lowest setting. He gentled the bit through the inner steel sheath, felt it give way, and stopped the drill, leaving it suspended in the hole.

Harry reached into his bag again and removed a tissue-thin diaphragm. He backed the drill out and, as the bit cleared, slid the diaphragm over the hole. Fingers, placed V-like, held it in place. Nothing moved. He waited thirty seconds and studied the diaphragm. There was no ballooning outward, no movement inward. The building had not been equipped with a positive or negative air pressure alarm. Thank God for that. He had not allowed time for fitting an air lock, and doubted he could have done it had it been necessary.

He tossed the diaphragm in the direction of the bag and mounted a cutting device on the door using the hole he just drilled as a fixture point. A self-tapping screw locked in the base plate. He fitted a threaded shaft to the plate, locked a tripod to the shaft, and pressed its suction-cup feet to the door. Next, he attached a four-inch arm to the shaft and fastened a hand crank to that. Finally, he locked the diamond-bitted cutting tool to the arm and began rotating it with the crank. The tip incised an eight-inch circle in the door. When the inner face was breached, he stopped. Now came the hard part. He backed the arm out, removed the tool, and replaced it with a toothed clamp, drawing the clamp tight to hold the new circle to the arm. He advanced the arm again, a millimeter at a time, allowing the cutout to protrude into the room, but so that the movement could not be detected by motion alarm inside. When he had three inches clear, he stopped.

He reached into the bag for the magnets that would bypass the contact alarms on the door. With the same painstaking slowness, he reached through the hole he had just made, holding the wafer-thin magnetized plates between his thumb and index fingers. His second and third fingers felt for the contacts. He found them. Harry removed his hand and cranked the cutout back into place. Twelve minutes. Well ahead of schedule.

Now, he thought, we come to the first make-or-break. He had to swing the door open far enough to slide his deflector panel and himself through, and he had to account for the difference in movement caused by the fact the door was hinged and its outer edge would move more rapidly than its hinged edge. Because the door, no matter how slowly opened, would create an angle that would deflect the sonic beam and trip the alarm, he wasn’t sure how far he dared open it—one inch, two, three—enough.

He slipped the six-foot three-inch transparent Teflon-coated clear plastic screen through the gap, positioned it in front of the door and parallel to the wall. He eased the door open until there was enough room for him to slip through. Harry shouldered his bag, stepped out of his shoes, and entered the building. Once in, he closed the door and surveyed his surroundings. The motion detector was eight feet in front of him, its cord running to an outlet just to his left, beyond the edge of the door—his first break. Plugged in anywhere else, he would have had to inch his way to the device itself and cut the line. This way, he could slide left sixteen feet and just pull the plug. Thank God for slow security guards unable to clear the distance from the back wall to the door within the fifteen-second delay built into the system.

It took Harry five minutes of slow lateral movement to get to the plug and pull it from the outlet.

He laid the panel down and padded over to where the laser grid was located. He had to look hard to find the red glowing dots on the floor, ceiling, and walls. He assembled a shallow trough from snap-together sections, filled it half full with water from the canteen strapped to his waist. Returning to his bag he removed a brick of dry ice. Placed in the trough, the dry ice boiled, and within minutes the room was filled with a dense fog. Now the grid was visible, its bright red beams crisscrossing in front of him

Harry lay on his back, tied the bag to his left foot, and using the palms of his hands and his shoulder blades slithered between two vertical beams and the lowest horizontal. Like doing the limbo, he thought. Once on the other side, he dragged his bag through, stood up, and walked to the master panel.

Disconnecting the remainder of the alarms at their source came next. The panel was mounted flush to the wall and its contents protected by a locked door. Harry reached for his lock picks and then paused. The lock looked different somehow. The key slot seemed normal, but something.…He looked closer, and then ran his fingernail over its face. It was plastic. The face, the key slot, the whole lock assembly was plastic. Harry studied the lock. He had not noticed it two days ago. He had inspected the panel, but from where he stood, the lock’s metallic face looked just like any other. Good news and bad news. The good news is that the door was probably not rigged, just the lock; the bad news was he had no idea why it was plastic. There was only one way to find out—open it. He guessed that it must work on a plastic key and be wired so that any metal inserted into it would close an electrical circuit and trip an alarm. He decided it could not work any other way. He put his picks away and rummaged in his pockets until he found the toothpicks he carried to make wedges to jam trip switches. They did not work as well as his lock picks, but they did work, and he was able to pick the lock and swing the door open.

Harry gaped at the interior. He shook his head in disbelief. There must be forty different alarms in this building. Donati would have been better off stealing the alarm system than the paintings. It was worth more.

There were two rows of lights, each marking the location of the trip in the building. To the right was the master switch. Throw it and the whole lot was killed. Harry reached for the switch, paused, and then squinted at it. Too easy, he thought. There has got to be one more trip here somewhere behind the switch. Throw the switch and they know up at the main building that the system is deactivated. He would have to remove the whole plate from the recessed box and get at each trip separately. It was bolted at the corners.

Harry removed a palette knife from his bag and slipped it behind the plate at the top. It slid freely across the width of the plate, bolt to bolt. On the right side, it caught halfway down. He tilted the blade and worked it past the obstacle, heard the light click as the trip switch snapped back when the blade passed by. He worked it back over the switch and taped the knife to the wall. With another blade, he repeated the maneuver at the bottom—no switch—and left side—one more.

With the two knives taped in place, he backed out the bolts, removed the plate, taped the knives more securely, and turned his attention to the dozens of cables coiled spaghetti-like in the box.

Harry’s hands moved like spiders through the delicate, complicated electronic web, capturing each alarm system like a fly, immobilizing and rendering it useless. His concentration was absolute as his mind sifted through his options. Options developed in equal part from his years of experience and his intuitive grasp of the system. Even in the bad days, when he would often work in an alcoholic haze, his instincts never failed him, had in fact often saved him where someone else, even someone with complete faculties, might have failed. His old boss had once admitted that Harry Grafton drunk operated better than almost anyone else sober. But that was a long time ago—a life that belonged to another Harry Grafton, the one with a wife and family and a job on the right side of the law.

He saved the lasers for last. He watched the beams wink out in the last wisps of water vapor. He was done. He glanced at his watch and then looked again. He had done the job in an hour and fifteen minutes. He guessed there was something to be said for sobriety.

He packed his bag and walked to the door. It had been cool in the building. The designers had included a constant temperature and humidity ventilating system. In spite of its sixty-eight degrees, Harry was soaking wet. He stepped outside, nodded to Donati, and walked to the edge of the woods where he gave in to the nausea. He retched, caught his breath, and retched again.

Red backed one trailer to the main door. He climbed out of the cab and gave Harry a thumbs-up sign, which he changed to a single finger salute. He swung the rear doors open and went into the building. Harry caught his breath and let the sweat cool his forehead. The two kids, now blindfolded, sat handcuffed together, right wrists to the other’s left, encircling the bole of an oak tree. A little late for that, he thought.

Donati appeared at the door and motioned to Grafton. “We got work to do, pal, and we don’t have no union men here, so help haul these pictures up and into the truck. We don’t have all night.”

Grafton swallowed and went into the building to join the others.

It took three and a half hours to remove the paintings and load them into the trailers.

***

Jake was relieved at half past three by Henry Tompkins. Henry was late as usual. They shared the eleven to seven shift and took turns walking the grounds or watching the two television monitors. In the winter, watching the monitors became the better job, in the summer, walking the grounds.

“Anything doing?” he asked. Burt shook his head.

“Nope. There’s a car parked down in Paradise. Parker said he’d chase them out before he went home, but I didn’t see him or the car move so I shut her off.”

“Maybe he’s still sitting and watching. That’s what he does, you know. Don’t seem to be able to make it with the ladies, but I hear he likes to watch.”

“I’d be careful, if I was you, Henry. Last person talked like that was Darlene Thigpen. And you know what happened to her.”

“Yep, damned shame, she was a right smart-looking female up until then, even if she was a whore.”

“Yeah, well there was talk. Some say he had her worked over and arrested after she started talking about him.”

Henry fell silent and thought about Lee. “Shoot, I don’t care how he gets off, long as he don’t start watching me.” He burst into guffaws and Burt snorted.

***

The sky had begun to lighten in the east when they finished. Red closed and latched the doors of the second trailer and turned to Donati. “What about the kids? We can’t let them go and we can’t leave them. You want me to take care of them?”

“We’ll take them with us,” said Donati. “We might find them useful later. If not, we can decide what to do then. Right now, we’ve got to get out of here. Grafton, put them in the back seat of the car. Here.” He handed Harry a snubbed-nosed thirty-eight. “You watch them and,” he raised his voice so that the girl and boy would be sure to hear him, “if they make any move at all, shoot them.”

The boy groaned and slumped. The girl’s back stiffened. She’s tough, Harry thought, a tough cookie. He unlocked one set of handcuffs and herded them stumbling into the car.

“You heard the man,” Harry muttered with what he hoped was a convincing degree of menace. “Nobody move.” Straight out of the movies. Grafton, you missed your calling. Maybe there is a place for you in Hollywood.

The truck rolled up the road. Angelo started the parked car, backed, braked, and followed the truck. Donati slipped behind the wheel and started the rental car. They followed it out to the highway. Donati turned left. Harry, who was facing the two hostages, saw through the rear window that the truck was headed in the opposite direction.

Donati drove through town and west, away from the interstate. Ten minutes later, they were at the motel. The hostages were ordered out of the car and into one of the rooms. Donati told them to lie down on one of the beds. He re-cuffed them to the footboard and headboard.

“There you are, sonny,” he said, “you wanted to get her into the sack—you got her.” Then to Grafton, “Watch them. I have to pick up Red and Angelo.” And he slipped out the door. Harry heard the car start up again and drive off—east this time.

He was exhausted. He wanted nothing more than a shower and six or seven hours of sleep. Then, he wanted to run, as far as and as fast as he could. The whole operation had gone sour. He could feel it more than he could define it. First, Red had to knock out the guard. Harry wondered what became of him. If they took these two, why not take the guard as well? Harry shuddered at the thoughts trying to surface in his mind. And then there were these two. They had seen too much, heard too much. Unless Donati believed they could not identify any of them, he would have them killed. And that, thought Harry, is what he could not allow to happen. He could accept becoming a thief, but not a killer. God, what a mess.

Her voice startled him. She spoke, calm, conversational, a pleasant voice.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Well, first I want to know if I can use the john. It’s been almost seven hours and my back teeth are floating. Another minute and I’ll wet my pants—that is, if I had any. Thanks to Mister America here, I can’t even do that.”