19 Purchase Street (47 page)

It lifted their spirits somewhat.

However, on the way back to the house in Bedford, Leslie didn't drive her usual fast and Gainer hardly said a word. Five minutes after they got home she took along a worn paperback edition of
Seth Speaks
and went down to the brook to stick her feet in.

Gainer roamed the house, not noisily, just restless. Ended up in what he presumed was Rodger's upstairs study. Gray flannel upholstered Louis XV furniture. Gray flannel on the walls. Touches of navy and white and leopard. A female decorator's impression of masculine without using leather. A nook of framed photographs. Rodger with a couple of presidents, Rodger with a couple of movie stars. The most prominently hung photo was a candid shot of Rodger with a white-haired man who looked like God in yachting clothes.

None of this helped alter Gainer's mood. If he'd been in the city he would have gone for a long walk, perhaps over on the West Side, up Columbus and down Amsterdam, but out here with just trees and bushes and blue and white
New York Times
delivery containers fixed to every mailbox post, a walk wouldn't have the same therapy, might subdue him all the more.

He glanced out and saw Leslie was still down by the brook, trying for Lady Caroline no doubt. He went out and drove away in the Fiat. Thought he was driving just anywhere down Route 22 through North Castle and Armonk to King Street. King ran parallel to Purchase and there, between them, was Westchester County Airport.

Not a vast commercial airport by any means, but a good deal more than an embellished landing strip. Westchester County Airport occupies seven hundred valuable acres and describes itself as the largest base for corporate aircraft in the United States. Mobil keeps its planes there. So does Union Carbide, American Can, Seagram, General Electric and Chase Manhattan. It is quite ordinary, for instance, to have one or the other of the Rockefellers taking off from there in one or the other of their Falcon 50s or Gulfstream III jets. The airport's main runway is north to south. Numerous taxiways network to it and further off along each side are ample aprons. There are two principal hangars. Hangar “D” on the east side of the field and Hangar “E” directly across the field about a half mile away. Next to Hangar “E” is the air traffic control tower and a large orange radar scanner. A short distance from the control tower begins the undeveloped wooded area that serves as a buffer zone between the airport and the private houses along Purchase Street.

Gainer left the Fiat in the airport's public parking lot while he wandered around. He noticed the closed main gate and the guard on duty, went down along the rear of Hangar “D” and used a door there. Assumed that old ambiance of belonging where he was as he entered a major hangar area.

The hangar's huge doors were open to the field, and the corporate jets stood in there like huge birds in sanctuary, as though any moment they might simply fly out. The gray-painted concrete hangar floor was cleared and clean, the planes white, shining and trimmed sky-blue. The white coveralls of the maintenance men were spotless, opened at the neck to show fresh white shirts.

Gainer did a friendly, authoritative nod at two of the men as he passed them on his way to the front of the hangar. Stood there in the opening, hands in back pockets, not apparently viewing the various aspects of this airport for the first time.

He watched a yellow Cherokee glide down and land and run its speed out. And only moments after it a Falcon 50 jet came in sleeker. Across the way in the distance, Hangar “D” and the traffic control tower were diffused by the hot day haze. Also, that wooded area. Gainer decided, as long as he was there, he might as well get a thorough look. He returned to the Fiat and drove around to Route 120 for the side road that led into that newer section of the airport. Parked the car outside the administration building in an empty spot with someone's name stenciled on it. Walked around the rear of the control tower and slipped unseen into the nearby brush.

Within twenty paces it seemed to Gainer that he was nowhere near an airport. The area was extremely overgrown, weeds and bushes up to seven feet tall. Thick twines and knots of wild grape and masses of nettle made the going difficult, and there was poison ivy everywhere.

A little further on were trees and undergrowth. Some oak and maple with trunks two to three feet thick. The ground was tricky, seldom level, outcropped with ledge and gullied.

Gainer did not see the fence until he was right up to it; it was that covered with vines. A steel mesh fence eight feet tall with three strands of barbed wire strung a foot and a half high along the top. He followed alongside the fence for quite a ways, then tore some of the vine from it for a look through.

There, six feet away, was the brick wall of Number 19. At that closer range he saw the relay points of its photovoltaic electronic beam. They were like oblong metal rods set every ten feet into the top of the wall. Beyond the wall Gainer could see only the upper reaches of the house, its aged blue slate roof silvery rich in the sun.

Impossible.

That was Gainer's conclusion.

He was only there because he hated giving up. In that short while he had grown used to the prospect of all those millions. The money and all it would bring had slipped in between him and his earlier motives. Of course, revenge for Norma and the saving of his own ass were still right there pushing at him, but the idea of taking care of everything in one fell swoop had been most attractive. As things were, he had no choice but to keep enduring Darrow and hope for another way at him, hope that Darrow didn't find out that he had not made the carry to Zurich. He would tell Hine it was off, and Chapin. He'd call Chapin that day.

Gainer drove back to the Bedford house.

Parked next to Leslie's Rolls was a new Cadillac Seville, obviously belonging to someone come to stay because there was luggage in the front hallway.

Leslie was out on the screened porch with Chapin and Vinny. Obviously she'd retrieved the tasseled key from beneath the bed to unlock the drawer because the pages of Sweet's report were scattered about. Chapin and Vinny had been there a while. Brie and crackers on a plate were almost gone and there were smudged wine glasses around.

“Hello handicapper,” Chapin greeted him.

Vinny merely raised his hand for hello.

“I was just about to call you,” Gainer told them.

“Thought we might not show?”

“We've been going over things,” Leslie said brightly, her disposition up from where it had been. “They arrived right after you left.”

“Caught her washing her feet in the brook.” Chapin grinned.

Gainer filled a highball glass with wine, gulped some. “Any luck with Lady Caroline?” he asked Leslie, only because he thought she'd appreciate his interest.

“For a while,” Leslie told him. “She's been in limbo.”

“Great place for a vacation.”

“Lady Caroline told me to tell you to go for it, steal the three billion—”

Chapin stopped her. “You didn't mention anyone else in on this.”

“It's another thing altogether,” Gainer assured him.

Leslie didn't like that.

Chapin didn't believe it. “There's another three billion I suppose.”

“Lady Caroline is Leslie's spirit guide,” Gainer explained with a self-conscious edge. “She gives advice from the other side. She's been dead since 1917.”

“She's infallible,” Leslie said.

“No shit?” Vinny said.

Chapin didn't laugh as Gainer had expected. “You talk aloud to her?” he asked Leslie.

“Not usually. Usually we talk inside me.”

It was hard for Gainer to accept that Chapin might be a believer. Technical, calculating Chapin, who now extended his hand to Leslie's to demonstrate his understanding with a brief clasp. “The human level of observation is so limited it's pitiful,” Chapin said. “We can't hear or see very much and what we know is probably a hell of a lot less than what we don't. We keep on amplifying and magnifying things and just when we think we've reached the bottom or the top of something all we find is another opening showing us we've still got a long ways to go.”

Leslie agreed firmly.

“Most people don't want to think about it,” Chapin went on. “Most people swear they believe in a god and yet they live by the rules of not accepting anything they can't see or hear.”

Vinny got up and went inside to use the bathroom.

Evidently the topic had pulled one of Chapin's plugs, Gainer thought.

Chapin continued. “I remember once in a small town upstate, I had a tap going on a certain congressman. It was in October or November, just beginning to get cold. It was set up in an old farmhouse, a place that dated back almost three hundred years. One afternoon I went for a walk and was crossing an open field a short way from the house when suddenly I felt slowed down as if there was something in the air there that I had to use more effort to get through. After I'd gone about twenty feet it disappeared, like a release, making me stumble forward a little.”

“A gust of wind maybe,” Gainer said.

“It was so strange that I asked about the field and was told that part of it had been a family burying ground.”

Leslie took in Chapin's every word as though they helped make up for a deficiency. “I had the same experience,” she said, “at least a similar sensation. One afternoon in Altman's, of all places. There was hardly anyone in the store but it seemed difficult for me to go down the aisle, like I had to push my way along. Perhaps a lot of ladies from the other side who were once Altman customers had come back to look around.”

“Was there a sale on?” Gainer asked.

Leslie shot him a look.

Vinny returned. “I've got a package coming tonight,” he told Chapin.

“Forget it,” Chapin told him.

“It's nice material,” Vinny said, “clean, and I can get it for only twenty large. Probably there'll even be some sapphires,” he added, hoping that might help his cause.

Gainer glanced down, realized he was standing on one of Sweet's pages. He picked it up and tried to straighten the crinkle in it. “What do you think?” he asked Chapin, expecting Chapin's opinion about the robbery of Number 19 was the same as his own. “Those alarms all over the place.”

“The alarms don't bother me so much,” Chapin said.

“No?”

“No, I think I can take care of the alarms. Getting in and out of there is the stumper. Have you given that any thought?”

“A lot,” said Leslie.

“Some …” Gainer said.

“You concentrate on that,” Chapin told them. “Let me worry about the alarms.”

“The split,” Vinny reminded Chapin.

“What do you think would be fair?” Chapin asked Gainer.

“You say.”

“Okay, why don't we slice the forty down the middle. Twenty million each.”

“That's still a nice long number,” Leslie commented.

Gainer and Chapin shook on it.

During the next week Gainer and Leslie focused most of their energies on coming up with answers for their part of the robbery. They tossed suggestions back and forth rather competitively and whenever they hit on an idea that had a possibility they worked it out, checked it out, did a lot of phoning and running around to such places as Paramus, New Jersey, and Mineola, Long Island.

Also, Leslie found an old tailor's suit-form in the attic. The dimensions of Rodger twenty years ago. She set it up in front of a stone wall, pinned a hundred dollar bill where the heart would be so she and Gainer could practice with the ASPs. Gainer felt the same affinity for the weapon as he had in Paris. It went into his hand as though made for it, just waiting to be claimed by his grip. There were no ridiculous misses by him this time. His first shot from fifty feet put a hole through the edge of the hundred.

Every day Gainer and Leslie practiced for twenty-five rounds. From other ranges, angles and firing positions. Horsehair and cotton batting flew from the hole they blasted in the suit-form's chest. The hundred was shot to unspendable shreds.

Leslie invited Vinny to target practice with them but he said he didn't need it. Vinny did little at all that week other than eat very well, nap on the down-filled, silk-covered sofa in the drawing room and wander around the house in his stocking feet. At various times Gainer happened to notice Vinny taking close-up interest in an eighteenth-century, signed Piere Gillions silver tea caddy, paying a good deal of attention to a painting by Matisse and looking long into the hall cedar closet where Leslie kept a few furs. Either by habit or with intention of casing the place, was Gainer's impression. He decided not to mention it to Chapin.

Because Chapin was preoccupied with more important matters. Most of the while he kept to himself working with a note pad and a fine-tipped pen. His handwriting and the schemes he drew were so small it was a wonder he was able to make them out with bare eyes. When he was done with a problem he tore all the note pages into the smallest possible bits and flushed them down the toilet, keeping the solution in his head. Nearly every day he made a trip into town to his laboratory, where it was assumed he was preparing the devices he'd need. He also took those opportunities to get serviced by his working girls. He had to have his working girls.

On the seventh day Chapin announced that he had solved the photoelectric alarm system that ran along the top of the exterior wall of Number 19. Also the pressure alarms in the lawn and on the roof and the sonic alarm in the upper hallway.

“What about the heat sensor alarms?” Gainer asked. “The ones inside The Balance room?”

“Those have me stumped,” Chapin hated to admit. “I thought all along they'd be a problem.”

“Maybe Sweet didn't give us enough information.”

“It's not that. I know what sort of units they are and how they work. Under ordinary circumstances they'd be the easiest to fool because they're remote. All I'd have to do is get a fix on their frequency and scramble the hell out of them, or jam them.”