The Blackmail Club (36 page)

Jack realized then there had been clues he had not seen or perhaps had not wanted to see. When he and Nora had visited Sarah to give their first progress report, he had looked at pictures hanging in Chris’s study. None of the pictures of Chris with his friends included Troy Engels. When he told Sarah he had the pictures Nora had salvaged from Chris’s office, Sarah had lost it for a moment, gotten angry and insisted they be thrown away. The pictures Chris had kept in his office all included Engels. That clue had been there. Subtle perhaps, but there and he had failed to see it.

The latest hint had come less than an hour ago, when Sarah asked, “I won’t be hearing on the evening news why Harry Mandrake blackmailed my Christopher, will I?” She had been afraid Chris’s relationship with Engels would become common knowledge. In the end, she could not face that her husband was gay.

Jack went inside and called a number he would always know, the twenty-four/seven secure line that rang directly into Engels’s department at the CIA.

“This is Jack McCall. Troy Engels is dead. His death is not the result of any terrorist or foreign activity. He’s at home. You know the address. I’ll come by Monday morning to be debriefed … No, I will not talk to the control officer on duty. Tell him if I’m bothered before Monday I’ll suffer a massive loss of memory.”

Jack hung up without waiting for a reply. He unknotted his tie, leaving the two ends trailing unevenly down his shirt, and headed for his car.

When Jack turned onto George Mason, he dialed his cell phone. This was scoop time in the newspaper business.

“Eric Dunn.”

“Eric. Jack McCall.”

“Jack. It’s frigging late.”

“You wanted the scoop. Get out your pencil.”

Jack told the columnist about the blackmailer who called himself Moriarty, a longtime good cop whose heart had rotted. Next he told Eric about the dirty ex-cop and scummy PI, Arthur Tyson. He also told the fascinating story of the heist at the National Portrait Gallery, and how that connected to Donny Andujar’s club and the death of Phoebe Ziegler. Lastly, he spoke of the payoffs and Tittle’s records.

He omitted the deaths of Troy Engels and Sarah Andujar. He’d leave the CIA to decide how to spin their deaths.

He ended with the story of the blue-blooded investor, Dean Trowbridge, another of America’s growing number of amoral, I-can’t-get-enough money grabbers.

Then Jack hung up without saying anything more.

Not even goodbye, take care, or I’ll see ya around.

Epilogue

For the past week, the stories of blackmailings, murders, and indiscretions had unsettled the nation’s capital, but like a pail of water left to sit after having been stirred, things had settled back to calm. Well, DC’s brand of calm anyway.

On Monday Jack had gone to the CIA as promised and told his story. By the end of the week the agency had loudly praised Engels and quietly closed their file on his death. A separate story told of the sad suicide of Sarah Andujar, a widow who could not survive the grief of having lost her husband a few months earlier, when he too had taken his own life.

The Friday evening sun would set in a little over an hour. Jack decided he would watch it go down from his balcony while sipping a little Maker’s Mark, and use the solitude to tuck his memories of Rachel into a warm private corner of his mind where he could visit her, while otherwise letting her go.

Tomorrow morning he was taking Roy to ride a big dump truck. In the afternoon the boy was going to a friend’s house for a sleepover, and Jack had a date with Roy’s mother, Janet.

He cracked the bedroom door to let in some fresh air, turned on his gas log fireplace, and settled down at the small desk in his bedroom. The time had come to prepare his final report to Sarah.

Dear Sarah:

My real assignment was not identifying Moriarty, but finding out what happened to your husband. Chris and the mysterious Troy Engels died for two primary reasons. They lacked the courage to live their sexual orientation, and together they shattered your fantasy life.

Chris might have coped with the blackmailing, but he was devastated when he learned Donny had sexually assaulted his patient Allison Trowbridge. Then you stepped in and helped pull the trigger. I can’t guess what the final outcome will be for Donny and, frankly, I don’t care.

You had met Mary Lou Sanchez. I expect she will rise above the twin catastrophes of the murder of the father she knew, Tino Sanchez, the good cop, and the suicide of Harry Mandrake, her birth father, the bad cop.

True to eternal history, the members of each generation must perish or survive, despite the sins of their parents who never meant them harm. In the end, life is a series of choices. These young people will make theirs as we made ours.

In the final analysis, justice is a perfect concept we struggle to apply to imperfect people and circumstance.

McCall Investigations, Inc.

Jack McCall

Jack crumpled his report to Sarah, and tossed it in the fireplace.

The End

Note to Readers

It is for you that I write so I would love to hear from you now that you have finishing reading the story. I can be reached by email at [email protected], please no attachments. For those of you who write or who aspire to write I encourage you to write, rewrite, and write again until your prose live on the pages the way it lives in your mind. If you have found errors of fact or location, I would like to hear about them. As for any errors you might imagine in spelling or punctuation or capitalization, please let me rest in peace. There are many conventions and styles with regard to these matters, and I often have characters speak incorrectly intentionally, for that is how I envision that character would speak. I will reply to all emails that respect these requests. And with your email address, I will send you announcements for my upcoming novels. Thank you for reading this story. I’d love to hear from you.

With appreciation,
David Bishop

P.S. I have two, maybe three other writing projects in mind for release this year.
The Original Alibi
, and possibly a collection of short stories. I may also get another novel finished:
Empty Promises
. These are working titles and may be revised. To stay current on these endeavors and other announcements, please visit my website from time to time or stay in touch with me through email, Facebook or Twitter.

www.davidbishopbooks.com
[email protected]
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An excerpt from David Bishop’s next novel,
The Original Alibi
, begins on the following page. For a list of David’s other novels and their release dates, please see the front of this book.

The Original Alibi

A Matt Kile Mystery

By

David Bishop

Prologue

“I believe that’s your cell phone, dear.” The woman’s husband said.

“Hello, Mrs. Clark,” said a voice into her ear. “I see you are enjoying your first evening walk on the beach with your new puppy. How lovely. Have you and Mr. Clark named the pooch?”

“Who is this?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you stay on the line after what is about to happen, happens.”

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Clark demands, “Who are you?”

Right then the leash Mrs. Clark held went limp, their white poodle falling to the sand. “Bobby, what happened? Snookie is, I don’t know, she’s just . . . down.” Mrs. Clark held her cell phone as if she no longer knew she had it in her hand.

Bobby, her husband bent down, his knees displacing the sand next to Snookie. “She’s dead, Mel. I think Snookie’s been shot.”

Melinda Clark began to bounce on her toes, her hands waving spasmodically. She dropped her phone onto the beach, bent down to Snookie and began to cry. She went to her husband; he held her.

Several minutes later, Bobby Clark picked up his wife’s cell phone, shook off the sand, and started to close the top when he heard a loud voice. He held the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“I’ve been waiting. Sorry about Snookie. It was necessary. You should know I took no pleasure in it.”

“Did you do this?” Mr. Clark asked. “Who the hell are you?”

“To your left, near the partially burnt log I’ve left a box for you to use to take Snookie home. It’s the right size. The inside has a soft new towel. It should do nicely.”

“You shot Snookie? Why?”

“Take Snookie home and bury her in your yard. You will hear from me. In the meantime, be glad you were not walking your newest grandson, Bobby, named after you, I presume. Your wife sometimes walks the little tike on a leash just as she today walked Snookie. I will know if you say anything about this, to anyone. If you do, Bobby Junior will be my next target.”

“But what do you want? Why us?”

“All that will be made clear. Do not fret needlessly. There will be no more violence if you do as you’ve been told. What will be required of you will not be difficult. It will not cost you any money. And it will be painless, if you follow orders. We’ll talk soon.”

The phone went dead.

The Original Alibi
Chapter 1

Eleven Years Later:

“Don’t forget boss, we got a ten o’clock appointment. Its eight now,” Axel said, as he handed me the morning paper, and put down a tray holding a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a buttered English muffin.

It was pleasant enough sitting on the balcony, a little chilly but that’s why they make robes.

Axel started working for me only a few days ago, but we’d known each other for years in a very different setting. We were cellmates during my four years in state prison. I looked up. “Isn’t that my shirt you’re wearing?”

“Yeah.”

“And my belt, why are you wearing my belt?”

“You wouldn’t want your pants to fall down, would you, boss?”

“No, of course I wouldn’t. And before you set up any more of these appointments, let me remind you I write mysteries. I don’t handle cases in real life.”

“You was a homicide dick and a good one from what I hear. And you got a PI license.”

“I just wanted to prove I could get one after the governor pardoned me. I’m a writer now, end of story.”

“Aren’t you cold out here, boss?” Axel wrapped his arms around himself, gripping his biceps. “You wanna go inside?”

“It’s a little nippy, but I’ll stick for a while. But I do wish they made robes in various lengths. No reason they can’t.” I’d been six-three since the eleventh grade but over the years robes keep getting shorter. Probably for the same reason two-by-fours are no longer two-inches-by-four-inches.

I helped Axel’s parole along with the promise of a job. He had been inside for thirty years, during which he became as sweet a senior citizen as you’ll ever know. A half a million dollar payroll had been taken by a lone gunman, without violence. The jury had found Axel guilty. Axel had never changed his claim of innocence, but he had sometimes winked at me when the subject came up. It was likely why they held onto Axel while letting out younger hardasses because of the overpopulation of prisons. So I did what I could to grease the wheels.

In these first few days, his duties included trips to the dry cleaners and doing the home laundry. Unfortunately, we wore the same size clothes, or near enough for Axel who was an even six feet. For each wearing, he hand-altered my slacks by rolling up the pant legs. He also adjusted for our different waist sizes. I wore size thirty-eight and, I’m guessing, his waist size at thirty-six, maybe thirty-four. My guess was based on his having my belt cinched up two notches tighter, which meant there would now be his and mine cinch marks in the leather.

“Boss, you remember that movie where Jack Nicholson’s character said, ‘never waste a boner and never trust a fart. Well, that man was a prophet.” Then Axel rushed inside. The Bucket List was a wonderful movie but I didn’t like him quoting that line while he was wearing my slacks. I settled back and looked at the paper with an eye out for Axel’s return.

A few minutes later, Axel came back out. I felt some relief as he was still wearing the same pair of my pants. “You helped save Clarice Talmadge,” he said, as if he had never left the conversation. “I kept up with that story before you got me sprung.”

I looked over at a gull that was circling past the balcony just off the railing. “I didn’t get you sprung. The parole board was about to release you anyway. You’d been in long enough. I just tossed a job offer in the mix. That’s all.”

“That’s what tipped the scales.” Axel looked over at the gull that squawked while making its third pass.

I knew why the gulls, there were three now, were squawking. Axel sometimes threw pieces of bread out over the rail and he hadn’t this morning. This was why feeding the birds was against the building policy. I’d have to speak to him about it, but for now I couldn’t deny him the kind of small pleasures he had been denied for decades.

“You got out because you were no longer a threat to society, maybe to my wardrobe, but not to society.”

“Well, that don’t change the brilliant way you saved Clarice Talmadge’s ass and, from what I’ve seen in the hallway, hers is an ass I’m glad you saved.”

“Clarice was different. She was a neighbor and a friend accused of killing her husband, Garson. I just handled the investigation for her defense attorney.”

“This case’ll be different too, boss,” he said while picking up the coffee carafe.

“How many times I gotta tell you to stop calling me boss? It’s not necessary.”