Presumption of Guilt (14 page)

*   *   *

It wasn't mac 'n' cheese for Joe that night, although it might have been under normal circumstances, along with a book and his cat for company. Instead, it was a nice dinner halfway to Burlington, early retirement to a motel room, and an hour and a half of much-anticipated and utterly satisfying lovemaking with Beverly Hillstrom.

Then there was a little TV watching, with the sound turned off, featuring the silenced struggles of a series of young men competing to conquer a watery obstacle course featuring a climbing wall and several ropes—all against the background of an oversized clock.

Joe, his arm around Beverly's bare shoulders, and with her head on his chest, asked, “Are we good?”

She chuckled, making her shoulders shake. “Are we worried?”

He shook his head. “Not me. I want to make sure you're happy, though.”

After a thoughtful pause, she said, “I am. Utterly.” She raised and twisted her head around to give him a kiss before resuming her position. “I will confess, however, that if you'd posited a few years ago that you and I would be sharing a motel bed with our clothes off, I'd have laughed you out of the room.” She squeezed his waist and added, “I am delighted to have been proved wrong.”

He smiled. “You could've just said, ‘Yup.'”

She laughed. “Then you wouldn't have known who you had in your arms.”

Good point, he thought. She was an original. And her words rang truer than perhaps she knew. Getting to this point romantically—to this particular woman—had not been without trial and loss, which might have had a lot to do with Joe's self-confidence. With Beverly, at last, he felt as if he'd found a place from which he could build.

*   *   *

It also wasn't an evening at home for Willy Kunkle—at least not yet. He was parked in his car in Brattleboro, across the street from an Argentine restaurant named Bariloche, waiting for all but the antiburglar lights to be turned off. Upon that happening, he crossed the street, climbed the two steps to the locked glass door, and tapped on the glass.

Dan Kravitz finished putting a chair upside down on one of the tables, crossed to the door, and opened it without protest or hesitation.

“Mr. Kunkle,” he said amicably, letting Willy inside. “Would you like me to fix you something?”

“I'm good,” Willy told him, sliding into a booth where he wouldn't be seen from the street.

It was becoming a familiar setting for them, which was unusual for an urban nomad like Kravitz, who had variously called home other people's trailers, abandoned houses, corners of empty warehouses, and now—for the past several years—a large room above this restaurant, which the owner had made available to him in exchange for Dan's helping out now and then.

Willy alluded to this sedentary abnormality. “You running out of gas in your old age, Dan?”

Kravitz slid into the booth opposite him. “Because I'm still calling this place home?”

“You gotta admit—it's not your style.”

Dan reflected before responding. For a long time, Willy had thought him mentally delayed. Their first conversations had consisted of Dan's uttering little more than grunts, single words, or extremely short sentences, painfully doled out. In the end, the truth had proved to be the exact opposite. Dan was articulate, highly educated, and perhaps even a genius—if an unconventional one. He was also a watcher—at once removed from society while obsessed with analyzing and cataloging its every tic and twitch.

Willy, of course, couldn't have cared less about what drove him. He just liked him for what he could dig up, and at that, Dan was the best Willy had ever known.

“I am making adjustments now that Sally has grown older,” Kravitz said at last. “Among them being some sense of domestic stability.”

Willy didn't comment. The floor overhead wasn't actually legally inhabitable, due to its restricted access—a narrow, ladderlike staircase behind the bar—and its lack of amenities, which the restaurant itself supplied for after-hours use. But it was a high-ceilinged, bare, single room overlooking the street, with separate sleeping alcoves for father and daughter, and kept compulsively clean and tidy. That was another striking attribute of the man seated before him: No matter what the task or the environment, Dan Kravitz always managed to stay as scrubbed clean as an operating room technician. Kunkle was a neat-freak—Sam never had to touch a vacuum cleaner or wash a dish at home. Kravitz made Willy look like a slob.

“I don't usually see so much of you as I have lately, Mr. Kunkle,” Dan said in his oddly canted English.

“Yeah,” Willy conceded. “Well, I have a job for you. Maybe seeing you earlier today reminded me of your talents.”

Dan waited patiently.

“You were lying your ass off about breaking into people's houses, weren't you?”

“Have you received complaints?” Dan asked, his concern clearly more directed at having been detected than at committing an illegal act. Dan prided himself on leaving no evidence of his visits behind, nowadays.

Willy understood that. “No. And I'll take that as a yes, since you're being cagey. Let me rephrase: If I happened to know a nutcase who loved to break into houses and snoop around, there's an address I'd like him to check out. How's that?”

Kravitz smiled demurely. “That's excellent. What might be the address and the reason for a curiosity that clearly doesn't amount to legal probable cause?”

“Very clever,” Willy growled. “No, it doesn't. It ties into that body at VY.”

“Yes. The long-missing Henry Mitchell. I read about that online.”

“One of his ex-pals, Johnny Lucas, lives—”

“On River Road, across the Connecticut,” Dan interrupted—an unusual breach of manners for him.

Willy stared at him, struck by exactly that point. “Showoff,” he said. “You been there?”

But Kravitz shook his head, looking slightly embarrassed. “I'm not inclined to cross the river—or leave town, for that matter. I'm simply aware of Mr. Lucas and his residence, because he used to work in Brattleboro, and because of his unusual path to wealth. I apologize for speaking out. You were explaining your interest in Mr. Lucas.” Dan seemed eager to move past his misstep.

“What do you know about him?” Willy asked pointedly.

“Nothing, which I find very interesting.” Dan left it at that.

“Right.” Willy dragged out the word, still amused. “So one of our guys stopped by Lucas's place and was told to get lost over the security speaker. We find that interesting, too.”

A lifted eyebrow betrayed Dan's piqued curiosity. “You suspect Mr. Lucas of a specific malfeasance? Perhaps killing Mr. Mitchell?”

“Perhaps,” Willy agreed. “But it's vaguer than that. All we know for sure is that Lucas was a grunt until Mitchell bit the dust—or left the stage, as people thought in 1970. Then, like you said, it was life on the fast track. Johnny got into BB Barrett's good graces—I'm sure you know him—became his number two man, made the business a big hit, and eventually retired, fat, rich, and happy.”

“You have no indication that Mr. Lucas willfully removed his rival?”

Willy sighed. “You're making it sound like a soap opera. No, we do not. In fact, there was a hiccup in time between when Hank disappeared and Johnny replaced him, which makes it look like BB was hoping to run things on his own for a while—till he realized he needed help.”

“I take it that you've conducted a background check on Mr. Lucas,” Dan guessed.

“You take it right,” Willy reassured him. “As part of our normal routine. I seriously doubt we can do the kind of high-tech snooping you can, though. Our methods are legal, so nobody shows up much unless they've stepped in the shit. We have the fusion center in Burlington, but they feed off public records. I'd bet that what you collect and how you collect it would land us in jail.” He then added quickly, “Assuming you ever did anything crooked, which of course we know you don't.”

“As you also know, Mr. Kunkle,” Dan said disingenuously, “I have a personal moral code. You are assuring me that your request is founded on some real concerns about Mr. Lucas's being a bad person. Is that correct?”

Willy made a face. “I think he's a dirtbag who's hiding something—yeah.”

Dan nodded once and sat back. “May I get back to you about this, perhaps in a couple of days?”

Willy slid out and stood up, automatically adjusting his arm. “You know how to find me.”

*   *   *

Dan Kravitz finished closing up the restaurant and climbed the narrow stairs to the room above, where his daughter was ensconced in an armchair, reading a book.

“You have company?” she asked, looking up as he appeared. “I heard voices.”

“You did,” he replied. “The same police officer who spoke to us on the street.”

“The famous Willy Kunkle,” she said with a small scowl. “He was weird.”

“He is,” her father agreed, adding, “But lucky for me, a righteous man. More important, he's given us an assignment, with which—after I do some preliminary advance work—I may ask for your help. Would that be of interest?”

Her face beamed as she imitated his speaking style. “Surely, Father, you jest.”

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sally Kravitz was completely focused, standing outside the house, watching, as her father put it, for “anything that moves.” Despite his easy manner and the surrounding stillness, her concentration was sharpened by a neophyte's conviction that whatever could go wrong was about to, and that it would be her fault.

“You in?” she asked over the throat mic he'd given her—a tactical model that needed a mere whisper to function.

Her father's voice was light and comforting. “Almost, sweetheart. I'll let you know—promise.”

She pressed her lips together angrily. She'd sworn to herself that her coolheadedness would leave him astonished, and already she was acting like a kid. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Dan had let her select her observation post outside Johnny Lucas's house, and she'd chosen the low limb of a tree across the street. Here, she'd congratulated herself. Not only had her father approved with a nod of the head—high praise from him—but, now that she was in place, she also found that she had a near perfect view of all approaches, including the river beyond. This was made easier by Dan's having given her a pair of night vision goggles, which she loved. Also—and this had truly surprised her—he had planted a pair of motion detectors down the road, in both directions, programmed to signal them over their headphones should anything come near.

“All right,” he whispered laconically over her earpiece. “Home sweet home. Now for the internal security system. You happy out there?”

“Very,” she assured him.

She'd been pleased to be invited. Dan had made it clear from the start that her apprenticeship would take a long time and many “house calls,” as he termed them, before he'd take her on his kind of visitation—the ones with the residents still inside.

In fact, the building was empty now. Nevertheless, Sally recognized this to be a higher-level target than her father might normally have chosen for her, had Willy Kunkle not assigned it to him. Dan's preference—as he'd explained—would have been another simple, non-alarmed, one-story building. Perhaps even a weekend or seasonal home, to further ensure that they wouldn't be disturbed.

This, however, was no such situation. The house was modern, multilevel, wired with both audio and video defenses, and owned by someone with a questionable enough past to have stimulated Kunkle's interest. This was no starter project, and Sally had been flattered by Dan's trust in her.

He had done his homework beforehand, even if he hadn't spent the time he preferred—including several visits over the previous couple of days—“casing the joint,” as was the phrase in the old movies they enjoyed watching together. What he learned had given him the confidence to involve Sally. Lucas lived here with his wife only. There were no children, only fish for pets, and—apparently—the type of security that Dan felt he could readily defeat.

That being said, he hadn't entered the house until tonight, which raised the question about whether she'd be invited inside or not. And truthfully, her excitement about that prospect was about evenly counterbalanced by old-fashioned fear. If Mr. Lucas was a bad apple, what might be his reaction upon finding two strangers snooping around his place?

“Okay,” Dan said after what seemed a very long time. “You interested in a little exploring?”

“Really?” she answered, again immediately regretting her childish glee.

But he didn't laugh at her. He never did. “Yup, if you feel up for it. You have to listen to your inner voice, as we discussed.”

She tried hesitating, to show she was actually making a choice. “I'm ready,” she then said. “How do you want me to come in?”

He gave her directions. She nimbly climbed down from her tree, crossed the road, and—picking her footsteps carefully, as she'd been taught—worked her way around to the riverside aspect of the house.

There, she discovered her father leaning out of a window, proffering his gloved hand.

The house he helped her enter was dark, emotionally cold, and reminiscent of an overly architected rat maze. She even glanced up quickly, upon getting her bearings, to check if the ceiling hadn't been removed for easier viewing from above.

The moon was full and the night sky cloudless, the openness of the nearby river allowing for additional illumination through the windows. The night vision equipment supplied the needed edge, however, giving them near perfect visibility.

Nevertheless, the place remained remote and distant and every inch of decoration was clearly and aggressively expensive. Each item she saw broadcast the fact that price rather than appearance had dictated its selection. The result was like entering the green-tinged frozen hologram of a high-end cocktail party—accessorized with trendy and costly possessions—and minus all the guests.