Greenwich (15 page)

“What's that you got in your belt?” Larry demanded.

“That's my fish knife.”

“Show it to me.”

“What for? Just an old fish knife.”

Larry took out his .45. “I said, show it to me.”

“OK, captain. You say, show it to me, I show it to you.” Cal took the fish knife out of his scabbard, and Larry shot him, a single shot to the heart.

The black community raised hell over this killing, but the fish knife was grasped in Cal's hand, and Larry made sure that the hand was tightly clenched around it and ripped the front of his shirt to prove that Cal had come at him. The black community hired a lawyer from the capital city, but the case never went to trial, and Larry finished out his second term as sheriff.

It was this second killing that drew Hugh Drummond's attention. He came down to the little town that Larry ruled as his fiefdom, and they had a long talk in the sheriff's office. Drummond asked a series of questions about Larry's past, starting right at his birth and going into every detail. He then went into the record of Larry's father. When Drummond had telephoned to make the appointment, Larry asked some acquaintances in Washington about him, and he had good reason to respect Drummond and answer his queries.

Drummond liked him. His round, innocent face was good currency, and his southern accent was tempered by education. He smoked an occasional cigar and he confessed to his casual use of cocaine.

“No more,” Larry said. “I gave that up when they elected me sheriff.”

“Stick to that,” Drummond said.

“Oh, yes, sir. I intend to.”

“You drink?”

“Socially. A beer, not much more.”

“You're not married. Are you gay? I want the truth.”

Larry grinned. “You don't mince words, do you? I'm not gay. I'll give you some names if you want them.”

“I'll take your word for it. How would you like to be a congressman?”

“I thought about it. I'd like it fine.”

“I need a congressman. When I say I need a congressman, I mean exactly what I say. That little nigger you shot weighed one hundred and twenty pounds. You must be a hundred eighty.”

“A hundred ninety-five.”

“That incident defines where you stand on civil liberties, and today there's a lot of shit about civil liberties. You'll go into the state legislature next year. I want you to file immediately. Consider it a postgraduate course. Get your name around the district. Firm stand against busing and desegregation, but do it with regret and class. You'll come up to Washington, and I'll introduce you to a friend of mine, Curtis by name. As for the word
nigger
, that's out of your vocabulary. ‘Negroes' from here on, or ‘colored folk.' Curtis will introduce you to some of the right people and give you a little training.”

“Where's the money coming from? I can raise a few thousand dollars, but not much more. These things take a lot of money.”

“Don't worry about the money. I'll take care of that. I got a man in the state legislature, name of Ted James. He'll be your top sergeant and he'll teach you the ropes. Believe me, Larry, we don't sign contracts on this kind of thing. Sam Goldwyn once said that a verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on. That was the movie business. This is another kind of business entirely, so if we shake hands, that's it. You want to think about it?”

“I thought about it,” Larry answered, smiling. He had a cherubic smile. He thrust out his hand, and Drummond took it. Larry had a strong grip; Drummond's was stronger.

N
ow, on this Saturday morning in June of 1998, Larry was awakened by the hotel operator at 5:45. It was a lovely morning, the sunrise streaked with thin lines of vapor glowing in reds and yellows and violets. Larry stared out of the window for a moment or two, thinking how odd it was to see Lexington Avenue almost empty of traffic. Like so many out-of-towners, he enjoyed the energy and excitement of New York.

He shaved carefully. He had a good head of hair, turning white now, and his round face still bespoke innocence. He put on a lightweight silk suit, a white shirt with thin blue stripes, and a bow tie. He looked once more at the driver's license and the American Express card that belonged to a CIA man, whose name was Koles and who was fifty-five years old, wondering for a moment what name Koles was using on his mission to Latin America. His own wallet and identification, he sealed in a brown envelope. Then he examined the pistol and the silencer very carefully, even though he was quite familiar with the working of a .38 automatic. It had a full chamber. He dropped them into his jacket pocket.

Downstairs in the lobby, he smiled at the girl at the desk. “I'll be drifting around town today. I love to get up early and walk in New York, and the less I have on me, the better I feel. So put this in the safe, and I'll pick it up this afternoon.”

“So do I,” she agreed, “but I'm on the night shift, Mr. Johnson, and when I'm done, I don't feel much like walking. But the streets are much safer since Giuliani took over.”

The breakfast room had just opened, and Larry always ate a good breakfast. After ham and eggs and fried potatoes, he felt ready for the day. He enjoyed the walk to the garage, and the car he had reserved was waiting for him. It was close to seven o'clock when he drove out of the garage.

Twenty-four

M
onsignor Donovan was troubled when he awakened that Saturday morning, and since he was a man rarely troubled by either his beliefs or his actions, his state of mind was unusual. As was his daily habit, he awakened at six o'clock in his rather bare bedroom, adorned only with pictures of his mother and father and a carved crucifix given to him by a local bishop in South Africa. He shaved, showered, and dressed, and then he sat down on his bed and stared at the check Castle had given him—ten thousand dollars. The outreach of St. Matthew's always grew faster than its funds, and the church was always in debt. “You don't look a gift horse in the mouth” had been said to him so often that he hated the phrase; yet Sister Brody was right. He couldn't refuse the gift. But why had Castle given it? His wife? From what Sister Brody had told him, Richard Castle had little respect for the woman he had married, “a trophy wife,” as the nun had put it, and Castle himself had not indicated any religious desire during their talk. At best, he felt that a Catholic priest was a willing receptacle for confession. He knew nothing about religion, less than nothing, thought the monsignor, recalling part of the talk around Castle's dinner table, when Castle asked him, “Just what exactly is a Jesuit? I know he's a priest.” That followed the monsignor's mention that he himself was a Jesuit.

Having no desire to go into a lecture at the dinner table, Donovan simply replied that it was an order of priests devoted to education and to missionary work. Curiously, Castle had not followed up on the question when they spoke in the study. Something tugged at the priest's memory though, and he decided he would look into it before he deposited the check—at least sit down later, with youthful help, at the computer in the rectory and see what he might learn about Richard Castle.

Twenty-five

R
ichard Castle slept poorly. His was a carefully constructed world that he had planned for years. He was a good salesman, who worked not with pressure but with enjoyable persuasion. He had thrived as an investment banker and had made money for himself and for his clients.

He was not the richest man in Greenwich, which was probably a wealthier community than even Beverly Hills, and he was still short of the billion dollars that had been his aim when he hit sixty. Real-estate men had told him that he could get four million for his home, but he had no desire to sell. He belonged to the Hill Crest Club, and he had a beautiful wife. He had achieved all of the American Way of Life, and he could buy anything he set his heart on. He could even afford that ultimate of the wealthy man's desire, a private Learjet; but he disliked air travel and was content with commercial first-class seating.

Yet he had a son who bitterly disappointed him and who was without either common sense or direction. For this, he blamed the boy's mother, his former wife, who had lost Dickie because of drugs and alcohol. Sally had passed the age of safe childbearing, nor was he sure that she could conceive.

As for Larry, well. he would take care of that in his own way. Larry loved money. Castle did not love money; he loved the power that money gave him. But Larry loved money the way a man loves a woman, or the way Drum-mond loved bulldogs. Castle was rarely introspective so he had created his self-image without ever realizing that he was creating it. He liked to think of himself as a country gentleman, and he had in his mind a picture of himself and Sally, two beautiful people riding horses together; but there was little room in Greenwich, particularly in his own patch of Greenwich, for horses, and he would live nowhere else. Once, the Back Country of Greehwich had consisted entirely of great estates, where there were broad pastures and plenty of room for horses as well as cattle, but that time was long gone. Anyway, he was not sure that he cared very much for horses as anything except a mental image; he preferred the fact of himself in a convertible BMW, of which he owned two, as well as a two-seater Mercedes and a Range Rover. He had decided that he would dock Dickie's car for a month; he could think of no worse punishment.

Finally, he fell asleep, with his alarm clock set for 6:50
A.M.

He woke of his own accord a few minutes before the alarm and immediately switched it off. In spite of the blinds and curtains, the bedroom was filled with a dusty light, and he turned to look at Sally, sleeping so peacefully beside him. Of all his possessions—and he saw her as such—he was most pleased with Sally. After all, she would be forty years old in the fall, and he had never seen a woman of her age who could match her looks. He knew he could have had his pick of any number of beautiful women between twenty and thirty, but he had no desire for a clone of the blond, blue-eyed, long-legged second wives that so many of his friends sported, and looking at Sally with her strawberry blond hair and translucent skin, he had a feeling of well-deserved superiority, not as a partner but as an owner. That she was meek and subject to any and all of his desires made no difference to him. She was his; and these reflections reminded him that he had made a sort of date with Muffy the night before.

Well, the hell with that, thinking of the times he had been to bed with Muffy, the hard-limbed emaciated body and the “augmented” breasts; she'd have a long wait before he'd call her again.

He left his bed quietly, went into their bathroom with its huge square tub, remembering a nasty crack he had once overheard in the locker room at Hill Crest, “Castle, his bathrooms have bathrooms,” and then grinning with pleasure as the warm shower flowed over him. Then he shaved, went into the dressing room and pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a polo shirt, and put his bare feet into moccasins. That was his weekend dress, unless he had a luncheon or dinner date.

Rising early pleased him. Dickie never got out of bed before ten, and Josie would be up in a few minutes, at seven, to set for breakfast on the terrace during the summer weeks; and since it was Saturday, Sally had not set her alarm and would probably sleep until nine. She professed great sympathy for Dickie, but Castle wondered how real it was. Certainly, Dickie was far from pleasant to her.

Going to his study, Castle closed the door behind him. Then he pressed the button, hidden behind an etching, that moved the bookcase, revealing the safe. He twirled the combination quickly and pulled the heavy steel door open. Inside, there was a compartment, closed off from the rest of the safe, filled with packets of bills, in denominations from twenty dollars to five hundred dollars. The five-hundred-dollar bills were in packages of fifty, bound with a strip of tape, each representing twenty-five thousand dollars. Castle removed ten packages, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, closed the compartment, closed the safe, and pressed the button that moved the bookcase back into place. Then he packed the bills into an old sport bag and left the house, still without seeing anyone or being seen by anyone.

In the part of the pool house that had been converted into his at-home office, Castle looked at his watch. It was a half hour past seven o'clock. He had a few minutes before he would walk down to the gate posts of his driveway and wait for Larry.

Castle had already made plans to take off with Sally if the need arose, but there was no indication, so far as he knew, that the newspaper investigation of what had happened in El Salvador had reached the point of a congressional inquiry. The Republicans, who controlled both houses of Congress, were too focused on Clinton and his sexual antics; and since some of what had happened occurred during a Republican administration, a public hearing of the case was the last thing they would look forward to. He had a small but elegant home in the Bahamas, where he was on good terms with most of the government. But that was a last resort.

He could think of only two reasons that Larry made the appointment. The most likely was that Larry needed money. The far reach was that Larry intended to kill him. Either way, he was confident that he could handle it. In any case, as his ace in the hole, he scribbled a note:

If I am found dead, my killer is a former United States congressman, name of Latterbe Johnson. He murdered me between eight and nine on the morning of June 20, 1998.

He quickly copied it, locked one copy in the drawer of his desk, a solid, stainless steel and rosewood desk and a drawer not easily opened, folded the original, and left it on his desk. He meant the note to be seen by Larry and no one else. Then he put on a light sweater that he kept in his office and walked down the long driveway.

Twenty-six

A
t seven-thirty on this Saturday morning, Nellie Kadinsky's alarm shrilled, and the two naked bodies on the bed stirred awake. It was warm in the room, and they had slept with only a sheet to cover them. Nellie had a tiny apartment in a frame house converted for nurses' occupancy about half a mile from the hospital. There was an old window air conditioner in the room; just enough air crawled in to make it sleepable.