Flynn's In (7 page)

“And I went for a walk,” said Ashley. “I walked around the lake.”

“That takes just an hour,” Rutledge told Flynn.

“In the dark?” asked Flynn.

“There’s a path.”

“When I came back the shooting had taken place. Perhaps I heard it. I’m not sure. Apt to get sort of abstracted, when I walk.”

Ashley was no more overweight than a normally healthy man is, in his mid-forties. His complexion was ruddy enough, but partly the source of his ruddiness was broken veins, and his eyes were liverish. Of all the men there, Ashley seemed to have given himself the closest shave, the most careful combing job.

“You were counting the days,” Lauderdale said, “until you have to declare yourself a bankrupt.”

Ashley glanced at Lauderdale. As he reached for his roll, Ashley’s hand shook.

“When Icameback,” Ashley said, “I found everyone in the storage room. Poor Huttenbach lying there, bits of him on the wall.”

“Ashley’s not going bankrupt,” Buckingham said loudly. “When did The Rod and Gun Club ever let one of its members go bankrupt?”

Lauderdale said: “When it serves our purposes.”

In his early fifties, Lauderdale’s extreme thinness could not diminish his bones, his man’s shoulders beneath his blouse, the big knuckles of his hands. Clearly, Judge Lauderdale would look far more graceful in his judicial gown.

Flynn asked Ashley, “Precisely who was in the storage room when you arrived?”

“Everyone. Not Buckingham.” Ashley looked around the table. “Everyone but Buckingham.”

“Was Taylor there?”

Taylor and the waiter had retreated to the kitchen.

Several nodded affirmation.

“How was Taylor dressed?” asked Flynn.

“In shorts,” Lauderdale said definitely.

“Shorts? You mean, undershorts?”

“No, just shorts. Those flimsy, short, running-short things. Barefooted. Shirtless. Sweating.”

Clifford looked evenly at Flynn. “Just shorts.”

“Where were you, Judge Lauderdale?” Flynn enjoyed asking.

“Actually, I was in my tub. Soaking. I had a face cloth folded over my eyes, as I lay back, soaking. There was the bang of the gun. The face cloth plopped into the water in front of me, I was so startled. It was all I could do to get on my chemise and mules and run down to see what happened.”

“Soaking wet,” said the naked Oland. “You did well not to catch cold.”

“I may have a sniffle,” Lauderdale sniffed.

Wahler leaned over and whispered to Flynn: “You realize all this is an act. Away from here Lauderdale is as straight as a Texas road. He just puts this on to entertain the boys.”

“Is that why he does it?” asked Flynn.

“I was reading by the fire,” Oland offered. “I may have
fallen asleep. The shot awoke me. I had gone to considerable trouble to get my new waterproofs. I was alone in the main room at the time.”

Oland, well into his seventies, seemed the most relaxed of all sitting at the table. A skinny old man with thinning hair, tired eyes, a small pot low on his stomach, he seemed perfectly comfortable being the only naked person in the room.

“Do you remember what time Ashley and Arlington left the main room?” Flynn asked.

Oland thought a moment. “I don’t remember them being there at all. I doubt they were.”

Flynn asked Ashley and Arlington, “You were playing cards in the main room, weren’t you?”

Both men said, “Yes.”

“I doubt they were,” repeated Oland.

“That leaves Wahler and me, I guess,” said Rutledge. “We were together in my suite until about quarter to eleven. I had taken a shower, gotten into bed, and read a few pages when I heard the shot. It was seven minutes past eleven by my watch.”

Everyone looked at Wahler.

“I came down to the main room, mixed myself a Scotch and soda, and took it out onto the front veranda.”

“You went out without a coat?”

“I was wearing my suit jacket and vest. I didn’t intend to leave the porch. I wanted some fresh air.”

“And Senator Roberts?” Flynn asked the room.

“I don’t know.” Rutledge looked at others at the table. “Anyone know where Roberts was?”

No one seemed to know where Roberts was.

“How was he dressed when he arrived in the storage room?”

“In bathrobe and slippers,” said Lauderdale.

“Yes,” said Clifford. “I think so. He was carrying a book.”

“And where were you?” Flynn asked Boston Police Commissioner Eddy D’Esopo.

“When I heard the shot?” the Commissioner asked absently.

“I think you’ve been hearing the conversation,” Flynn said softly.

D’Esopo smiled foolishly. Then he laughed. “I was trying to commit burglary. Breaking and entering. I was in the kitchen, trying to find something to eat. The refrigerators were locked. All the cupboards were locked.”

Laughter rose from the table.

“Of course they were locked,” said Arlington. “What’s so unusual about that?”

Testily, Oland said, “Such things are always locked at that hour.”

Embarrassed, D’Esopo said, “I didn’t know it.”

“You learn that at school, man,” said Buckingham.

“A good thing, too,” said Oland. “Can’t have people running in and out of the kitchen grabbing things at all hours. Makes things impossible for the servants.”

Clifford was giving D’Esopo a friendly smile, which D’Esopo was feeling too miserable to accept.

Clifford had rolled an immense number of bread pellets beside his plate.

“And what about Governor Wheeler and Walter March?” Flynn asked Rutledge.

“I know earlier they were in the study, talking privately. They were in the storage room when I arrived. I presumed they had come from the study.”

“Was anyone else here last night?” Flynn asked mildly. “Anyone else who exited through the fence at dawn, or flew away up the chimney?”

“No,” said Rutledge. “Members come and go at The Rod and Gun Club as we please, Flynn. No one else was here last night. That is to say, only Wheeler and March have left. They had legitimate business elsewhere. And we’ve talked about that, telephonically, since you raised the issue. It’s been agreed that both gentlemen will be available to you by phone, to answer any questions you may have, at any time. If you feel it’s necessary to interview them personally, transportation will be provided.”

“Cooperative of you,” commented Flynn. “And do any of you gentlemen have any immediate plans to have legitimate business elsewhere?”

“Ashley will stay here,” Lauderdale said. “Until his problems are solved.”

“Want to see how this thing comes out,” Oland said. “Who shot my waterproofs.”

Around the table, no one else admitted plans to go, or openly agreed to stay.

“So,” Flynn finally said, smiling across the table at Cocky, “each of you gentlemen here, in fact, states you were alone last night at seven minutes past eleven.”

“That’s not unusual,” Rutledge said. “Such an hour is usually regarded as being after bedtime.”

“And you’re all here without wives, or girl friends, people with whom you might share your beds.”

Rutledge shrugged. “That’s tradition.”

“The charmin’ thing is,” said Flynn, “none of you is providing an alibi for anyone else.”

Clifford was brushing all his bread balls into his left hand.

“We all hope for a speedy resolution of this affair,” said Rutledge. “We are cooperating as much as we can.”

Using an open, overhanded throw, Clifford threw a bread ball at Oland. It hit him in the face.

Then Clifford fired another at D’Esopo.

D’Esopo sat back, totally startled.

Oland threw a bread ball at Rutledge.

Beside Flynn, Wahler leaned over.

Bread balls were flying through the air, in all directions.

Lauderdale stood up to accomplish a wide, full-armed, left-handed throw.

“No leaving your chair!” Ashley yelled at him.

Lauderdale plopped back into his chair.

Across the table from Flynn, Cocky had skidded his chair backward, to get out of the combat.

One bread ball hit Flynn near his right eye; another on his left ear.

“A bread fight,” Wahler said. He was crouched over so that his head was below the table surface. “A tradition here.”

“Every lunch?” asked Flynn.

“No,” said Wahler. “Only when they serve stew. Youngest gets to throw first.”

Keeping his head down, Wahler began to creep away from the table. “Come on, Flynn. Let’s go for a walk.”

“T
his all must seem rather odd to you,” Wahler said. He and Flynn strolled along the veranda and down the lakeside steps. “It did to me, at first.”

“I passed a season at Winchester,” said Flynn.

“I don’t understand you.”

“I understand you.”

Slowly, Flynn was leading Wahler on a circumnavigation of the main clubhouse.

Flynn had asked Cocky to get their coats and meet him at Flynn’s car.

“The Rod and Gun Club was founded more than a hundred years ago,” Wahler said. “Five friends, after graduating from Harvard. They bought this acreage as a hunting and fishing lodge for themselves, a place they could get away from the world, their families, jobs, keep in touch with each other and, I guess, maintain some of their undergraduate spirit.”

“Is that the gong?”

Flynn climbed the steps to the back porch.

“Big enough, isn’t it?” Wahler said.

It was a thick brass plate three meters in diameter hanging from its own oak frame. A leather-headed mallet as tall as a man stood beside it.

“You can hear it from anywhere on the place,” Wahler said.

“Who gets to hit it?”

“Taylor, I believe.”

“Must make him regret he has ears.”

Flynn peered through the steamy window into the kitchen. He counted six servants inside, all male and all apparently Vietnamese.

“Anyway,” Wahler said as they continued their walk around the building, “as time went on the five original friends invited their friends. They brought their sons here, when their sons grew to a certain, non-critical age. The clubhouse grew.
Expenses mounted. I think the thing was formalized into a club sometime around the turn of the century.”

“And the membership became limited.”

“I suppose so.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know. The original five members, their friends, their sons.”

“And it became secret.”

Wahler took a deep breath and blew out vapor. “It was a place for them to get away. From their wives and small children. Their offices. Their duties. The public eye. Let their hair down, drink what they wanted to when they wanted to, play poker all night, play their silly, sophomoric games, hunt, fish. To coin a phrase: fart when they want to.”

They walked up a grade at the back of the clubhouse.

There a large, round area had been flattened and smoothed. A cement circle had been laid in the ground. Red and yellow stripes crossed in the center of the circle. Lights were sunk into the ground, their heavy glass covers flush with the surface of the ground.

“Odd, isn’t it,” Flynn commented, “how much a helicopter pad can be made to look like a hex symbol?”

To one side a huge earth satellite communications dish appealed to the southwest sky.

“That dish can pull in signals from almost anywhere,” Wahler said.

Flynn smiled. “Modern magic.”

Down to their left another big area had been cleared and arranged as a skeet-shooting range.

“And down there,” said Flynn, “a place of symbolic sacrifice. Clay pigeons.”

“What I notice,” Wahler said, as they continued their stroll, “is that these men, in building and maintaining this place, in coming here, are trying to recapture their own youths. But look what they recapture. Not their home environments. All of them being upper-class, they really didn’t know their homes. They’ve recaptured, or rebuilt, their lives in boarding schools and summer camps.”

“Locks on the refrigerator doors,” said Flynn. “I’ll bet they have boxes of cookies hidden in their rooms.”

“Poor D’Esopo,” Wahler said. “Clearly not well brought up. Thought he could go to a kitchen in the middle of the night and find something to eat.

“I find it all sort of sad,” Wahler continued. “This is still the only home most of these men have. The only place they don’t have to be buttoned-down examples to their communities.” Flynn ran his eye over Wahler’s striped shirt, rep tie and three-piece suit. “One member,” Wahler continued, “a world-famous composer, conductor, a darling of society in every capital in the world, comes here, says very little, never touches the piano, slops around in muddy boots. Every morning he goes out with a big axe and just knocks down trees. Sunup to sundown. No pattern; no point to it at all. He doesn’t even trim the trees. Just chops them down. He’s devastated acres. Wouldn’t you say that’s fairly eccentric behavior?”

“We’re all true dialectic systems,” said Flynn. “Even I have raged at the moon. You, too, I expect.”

Wahler laughed. “Once, at my apartment, I strangled a lampshade with my necktie. In the morning I couldn’t figure out what I had done or why I had done it. I just knew I had done something that felt good.” He laughed again, and said more quietly. “‘Once!’ It was only three weeks ago.”

“I would think,” Flynn said slowly, “that The Rod and Gun Club, however secluded and exclusive it is, would be a ripe orchard for any harvester with blackmail on his mind.”

Wahler did not respond.

On the north side of the building, a bandy-legged older man was walking toward them. His face was weathered, peculiarly lifeless; his hair thin in patches. His hands were enormous. His boots were muddy and old.

“Hello, Hewitt,” said Wahler.

Hewitt’s eyes had examined Flynn as they approached each other. The face, the eyes were now averted from Wahler and Flynn.

He nodded.

“This is Flynn,” Wahler said. “Hewitt. He’s been the club’s hunting and fishing guide forever.”

The man nodded again and continued walking.

“Hewitt’s a mute,” Wahler said.

“But he can hear?”

“Perfectly. It’s sometimes hard to remember. He hears better than most people. Originally, most of the servants here were mutes.”