19 Purchase Street (11 page)

At five-ten
A.M.
, New York time, Swiss Air Flight 101 again lifted off for Zurich.

Again Norma could begin counting the hours.

CHAPTER FIVE

I
N
the official atlas of Westchester County, New York, the town of Harrison can be found mainly on page thirty, map ten.

According to its boundaries, the shape of that township is remarkably penile. Like a flaccid organ of considerable length it hangs between White Plains and Rye and down nearly into Long Island Sound.

Possibly the surveyor or whoever determined what was to be Harrison had had a roguish sense of humor. It seems somehow more than coincidence that the southern end of the town is rounded off as though a bit swollen and at its very tip is a familiar indentation.

Purchase Street is like a vein running the shaft of Harrison. It goes north-south for about seven miles.

Most streets on the map are indicated in common black and white, and the names of many are in such tiny, crammed type that magnification is needed to read them. Purchase Street is outstanding yellow, shown much wider, lettered large enough for easy reading. At least four lanes, and considerable commerce are expected of it. But Purchase Street turns out to be only two regular black-topped lanes minimally shouldered. A typical suburban way with old maples and elms in touch with one another high above. No sidewalks and surely no Exxon stations or Grand Union markets; not even a doctor's shingle is allowed display.

Giving prominence to Purchase Street is the force of a pattern, a prevailing tribute to an earlier time when along there all the houses were
important
houses—twenty, thirty or more rooms on as many acres. Places of such quality and detail they could not be put up today at any price. The fine materials are still available but the craftsmen are gone, along with their patience and conscientiousness. They had no apprentices. Their lines were abruptly ended by greed—the doing of things not nearly so well and as quickly as possible for much more money.

The houses, their last, are left to stand and speak for them. Especially those situated where Purchase Street is proximate to the Westchester Country Club and farther north where it continues beyond the Hutchinson River Parkway. Anachronistic, these houses that refuse to decay at the current going rate. They require too much heat and help for these times. Many of the people who live in them are caught in them, caught between pride and property taxes. Gatehouses are rented as well as the quarters above ten-car garages. Frontage is sold off with condition of a right-of-way. Orchards, vegetable gardens, even raspberry patches are taken seriously.

Still,
some
do not give ground. Wild sumac is not allowed to overgrow their walls and any tumbled-down rock is hefted back into place. The grandchildren of the children of the original fortunes still occupy and oversee that their charge is mowed and pruned, plowed and replanted. The slightest wound, outside or in, is swiftly healed, despite the pain of the price to do so.

But most of the homes along Purchase Street have changed hands numerous times, and there are those living in them now who had only hoped someday they might. An example is Number 16, a huge Tudor occupied by a recently promoted officer of IBM. Number 18 is a tall, columned Colonial now owned by a marketing executive for General Foods. Across the way, Number 17 is either authentic Mizner or Mediterranean, pale but grand, arches and terra cotta. The man of the family who lives there is quite a ways up at American Tobacco.

Those Purchase Street neighbors do not see one another, not even from their highest windows, never socially. They have too much in common, and there are forty-some country clubs within a five mile radius.

Such cultivated insularity suits Number 19.

Number 19 was constructed in 1906 on a site which at that time was truly country. It was built for a John MacFarlan, whose wealth came from hardware, the making and selling of all the things that made the things to make the things. The house remained MacFarlan until 1925. From then to 1965 it changed hands eight times.

A man named Gridley bought it in 1965. Paid cash. He was ostensibly in the shipping business, which was high-sounding and ambiguous enough. The letterheads of his business stationery listed offices in New York, San Francisco, and ten foreign seaports. Gridley was only in his late forties when he died suddenly of natural causes in 1970.

The Number 19 house was never put on the market. Real estate dealers, who watched the daily death notices hoping to get a jump on an estate settlement listing, were told by Gridley's executors that the house had already been bought. Taxes had been paid on the sale and everything was legal and tidy.

The buyer was Edwin L. Darrow. He also paid cash. His visible source of income was his law practice. Maritime law. That was, apparently, the explanation for his having been acquainted with Gridley and the reason why he had been able to acquire the house in such short order. Being a maritime attorney was also at once nicely abstruse and substantial. To help matters, Darrow was genuinely a Yale graduate and a member of both the New York and Massachusetts bars. His name appeared as a senior partner of one of the oldest highly regarded law firms in Boston.

Number 19.

Last, northernmost house on Purchase Street. Its property lines on two sides were adjacent to the Westchester County Airport. Not the airport proper nor any of its runways or hangars but the far outer reaches of airport-owned land, overgrown and serving as a sort of buffer area. If anything, it enhanced the privacy of the house. For further insurance all twenty-seven acres of Number 19 were enclosed by a red brick wall that averaged about eight feet in height.

The only interruption of the wall gave to an entrance on Purchase Street. Tall gates of iron, elaborately worked. A pair of outer gates, with another identical pair immediately beyond.

On the left, adjoining those second gates, was the gatehouse, a pleasing two-storied structure that nicely prefaced the substantial style of the estate. From there the paved drive went up, but back and forth so as to nearly neutralize the steepness. Clipped holly hedges lined the drive so high on both sides that anyone coming or going felt somehow irrevocably committed. At the crest a slight drop formed a shoulder for the expanse of level green the imposing main house was situated on.

Thirty rooms in the style of an eighteenth-century Georgian manor house constructed of brick and limestone. Two and a half stories with a pitched roof of silvery blue slate from which dormers stood out like so many identically raised eyebrows. Numerous chimneys capped by copper turned green. Spacious upper terraces, balustrades. Ivy not really allowed to have its own way up the brick wall. Rather, carefully disciplined to appear unrestrained, as did the trees, the lindens and elms. The grounds, every foot, were conscientiously attended to, the grass of the wide lawns kept taller-bladed, plushy, textured with white clover so bees were always working in it.

The house was designed in the shape of an extended uppercase letter H with the bottom half of its first vertical leg missing. So, the north wing was only half a wing. That asymmetry enhanced the structure, helped it appear not so formal, somehow more hospitable.

Off the south wing ground floor was the most important terrace. It ran for over a hundred feet, the entire length of the wing. The surface of the terrace was composed of beige granite blocks a yard square and a half-foot thick, laid out so there was precisely all around a one inch space between them. Within those planned crevices fragrant white alyssum was set out, encouraged to squeeze up and cluster, determining one's stride there.

Thirty wide steps below the terrace and across a half acre of lawn was the swimming pool. Off to the left was the fenced and lighted tennis court, a clay court that required and got daily attention.

Altogether the atmosphere around Number 19 was tranquil appreciation for the finer things, a place where venality and violence would be foreign.

O
N
the last Wednesday in that July, Edwin Darrow stood at the open french doors of his study. For the moment he watched a purple finch go from a begonia bed that bordered the outside walkway to its nest in the ivy on that side of the house. The tiny ball of a bird made trip after trip, nervously carrying twigs and fibers.

“Yesterday's flow,” Darrow said still looking out.

“On your desk.”

“It wasn't there when I came down.”

“You were early.”

“No matter.” Darrow refused the excuse, turned to Arnold Hine but didn't give him his eyes. Hine was Darrow's thirty-five-year-old nephew, the son of Darrow's older sister who had married and divorced well. Darrow seldom exchanged looks with the man although he frequently observed him.

On the huge directoire desk was a single sheet of paper. Darrow made a ritual of cleaning his gold wire-rimmed glasses with his breath and a tissue.

Every day, Hine thought, same damned thing.

Darrow sensed the impatience, took his time putting the glasses on, careful not to resmudge them. He remained standing, leaned over and read from the paper without touching it.

There were two figures, one above the other on the paper, hand-printed about twice as large as normal. The upper figure was five comma eight. The figure below was four comma seven. They were what had come in and what had gone out yesterday.
The flow
.

Darrow was slightly pleased, at least not upset. He didn't show it.

Hine didn't expect Darrow to show it. He hitched up with a smile, said how much he admired Darrow's navy flannel blazer, asked was it new.

Darrow nodded once. No need for reassurance that he looked well in clothes. He always had. Even any old shirt and slacks seemed upgraded when he put them on. It was something he'd taken for granted all his life, just as it was natural for him never to be without a sun tan regardless of the season.

He was sixty and lean, ten pounds under for his height. His posture made good use of all his five foot eleven. It was erect, effortlessly erect without even the suggestion of a stoop. His face was consistent with that. Square shaped. A slightly aggressive jaw set with lips somewhat thin, a strong forehead and narrow nose.

The immediate impression of Darrow was a man of means, one who had benefited from conscientious breeding and omnipresent wealth. The sort who could make it through the guarded gate of any yacht club in the world, without question.

Old eastern money?

Actually, Darrow was only two generations away from Nebraska farmland athough he had never stood in a field of wheat. His great grandfather had never seen a lobster.

“Do you want to go up today?” Hine asked him.

Darrow was undecided. He held up his right hand and examined the back of it while he made up his mind. He was especially proud of his hands, the unusual length of them. He tensed his fingers, to define their ligaments and appreciate seeing them work. No, he thought, he didn't want to go up. He would rather leave all that to Hine. However, if there was a discrepancy, he as Custodian, not Hine, would have to face the consequences. That was the established code, the thing his predecessor, Gridley, had not taken seriously enough. “Of course,” he said, as though it had been ridiculous of Hine to ask, “I'll go up.” He folded the sheet of paper with yesterday's figures on it, put it in his jacket pocket.

Hine led the way from the study and down the wide ground floor hallway. Persian runners underfoot, a Gainsborough and a Sir Joshua Reynolds among others on the walls. When they reached the main entry they went up the triple-wide staircase to the second floor landing, turned left, headed for that half-wing at the northern extreme of the house.

Walking behind, Darrow's eyes were level with the strip of white that was the back of Hine's shirt collar. Hine was that much taller, about two-thirds of a head. Darrow resented the fact Hine was able to look down on almost everyone. He also noticed the younger man's dark hairline, evenly trimmed, neck skin showing. Hine always wore his hair cut short, parted high and combed to the side like a good schoolboy. It emphasized all the more his knubby and somewhat elongated features and it also made the most of his eyes. His pale blue eyes with a soft, benevolent quality to them that Darrow knew was a lie.

At the end of the hall the grinding sound of a motor stopped Hine. He looked out of the window to the service area directly below. There was a garbage truck and three men. The truck had
Santiano & Son
and a Bronx address lettered on its housing. The men worked with an automatic efficiency, detached from their task. They raised the hatches of the enclosed garbage bins situated along that rear side of the house. In the bins were six regular garbage containers, green plastic with black covers. The men emptied the trash and garbage from five of the containers into the jaws of the truck. The sixth container had nothing in it. One of the men shouldered an ordinary black plastic trash bag. It was full, bulging, but securely tied. He dropped it into the sixth container, put the cover on. They slammed the bin hatches shut and got aboard the truck that growled down the drive in second gear.

“The northeastern ‘bring',” Hine said.

“Get it,” Darrow told him.

“I'll have Sweet go down.”

Darrow let it go at that. In his estimation, Hine and Sweet were of the same cut.

Hine continued on down the hall of the north wing. Darrow followed. Past secondary bedrooms to a closed door at the end of the hall that appeared identical to all the other doors in that area, solid wood with several inset panels. Hine, tall as he was, hardly had to reach for the upper right corner of the door trim. He placed his fingers lightly there and electronically snapped the door open.

It gave access to two adjoining rooms, each about twelve feet by twelve feet. No windows.

The first room had two long counters, waist-high. Several electronic calculators were plugged in, and there was various other office equipment for collating and packing, including an electronic scale that could weigh from a thousandth of an ounce to three hundred pounds. Underneath the counter stood ten suitcases of various types, leather and canvas, men's and women's styles. Each had a red and white identification tag attached to its handle. In the center of the room were two canvas bins, like those used by the U.S. Postal Service. One of the bins was half full with money, loose bills, some fifties and five hundreds, but mostly hundreds.