The Heir Hunter (14 page)

“We still need to dust the place,” said the police captain. “What’s so urgent that your men can’t wait an hour?”

Arminger exhaled. “I told you already, Captain, this is now a federal matter. There’s nothing further for you here.”

The captain frowned beneath a flared salt-and-pepper mustache. “One of my men was almost killed here last night. My detectives have a right to get in there and look around. You’re hauling out evidence, goddamnit.”

“Evidence which will get proper attention from the FBI crime lab. I regret that the officer was hurt, but—”

“Waiting an hour or so wouldn’t make a difference and you know it,” the captain snapped. “Why don’t you quit being so damn stubborn and show a little flexibility?”

“We have nothing more to discuss, Captain.”

“I want your boss’s name.”

Arminger turned and faced him.

“I
am
the boss. Go bother someone else now.”

Arminger made his way past the cop and up the walkway. He examined the entrance. The door frame was
cracked, the bolt hanging like a broken limb. Brazen, he thought. The gunman had seemingly walked right up and kicked the front door in.

He stepped inside and looked around the living room. Things were thrown about. Books were on the floor, a coffee table was on its side. A security box on the couch gaped open at him like a metal oyster. He walked over to it, his hands in his pockets. If there had been a pearl inside, it was long gone now.

He took the stairs to the second floor. The movers were fighting with a mattress now, and he sidestepped them as he made his way up. The hallway above was filled with towels and bed linens.

“Rogers,” he said, stopping a passing agent. “What’s this mess?”

The agent shrugged. “It was like this when we got in, sir. Place has been all torn up.”

Arminger proceeded down the hall, reaching the master bedroom. He stopped in the entrance and paused. Now, this was interesting. A kind of trapdoor was propped open out of the floor. He approached it and looked inside. A small space, now empty. Recently emptied. The thief had made off with a serious haul.

He made his way back outside to the front yard. A police officer was leaning against his patrol car watching the movers. Arminger approached him.

“Morning, Officer. Were you here last night?”

The cop nodded, his eyes to the house. “The cop who got shot’s a good friend of mine.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’ll make it. He’ll be on his back for a while, but he’s going to pull through.”

“Good news. Were you here when the shots were fired?”

“En route. I think I might have seen the guy disappear off Joslen. A van maybe—black or dark blue. We lost ’em in the side streets.”

“Is this your neighborhood normally?”

“Yeah.”

“Ever have any kind of trouble at this address before?”

“Never. What’s going on in there? My captain’s pissing fire.”

Arminger was thinking of the backyard. He turned and walked back toward the house. “I’m glad the officer is going to recover,” he said over his shoulder. The deputy director reentered the house and walked through the living room again. The movers were looking at the piano and scratching their heads. The agents were busy avoiding eye contact with them.

Arminger stood and surveyed the backyard from the patio. There was no mystery regarding the old man’s gardening habits. The yard was a dry brown mess of weeds and dead rose bushes. The concrete paths were barely traceable through the tangle of roots. An agent was walking along the eastern perimeter, his eyes trained to the ground.

“Lose something, Davis?”

“Just looking around, sir,” replied the agent. “Look at the table there.”

Arminger followed the agent’s finger to the patio table. A small black device lay flat on its surface. He took it and gave it a cursory look.

“So what’s this?”

“It’s a two-way radio, sir.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. My turn to show and tell now?”

“I found it by the fence,” replied the agent, approaching him. “The power was on.”

Arminger looked at the radio with new interest. It was a cheap, mostly plastic model—a toy really. But a functional toy. He popped open the battery compartment. A nine-volt, brown acid oozing.

“The power was on, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Arminger nodded and considered his suspects. It was a short list. He lowered the antenna and placed the radio in his coat pocket.

“Let me know if you find anything else.”

T
HE SUN WAS
falling to the west as another day faded to black. It was 5
P.M.
, Thursday evening.

Nick shielded his eyes from the glare of the runway and yanked the window shade closed. As soon as Flight 438 out of JFK taxied to the runway and lifted from the ground, he would start planning strategy. He would have plenty of time to do so. The flight to Frankfurt would be nearly eight hours. From there, he would switch planes and fly to Salzburg, Austria—another hour. He anticipated being well rested by the time he finally drove back over the German border to Berchtesgaden. He would need to be. Germany would be uncharted territory, but that had also been the case in Japan, Australia, Denmark, and the other foreign countries he had visited to find heirs. He would find his way around just as he always did. He had already made arrangements for a translator to accompany him to Berchtesgaden. Things would proceed smoothly from there.

The plane had positioned itself for takeoff when his phone suddenly rang from his pocket like a muffled bird. Rose’s voice had a frightened edge to it.

“Nick, what’s going on here? I just got in from running my errands and these two men were here waiting for me. They said they were with the FBI. They were asking all sorts of questions about you.”

“They showed up there at the
office?
”

“Two of them. And they weren’t very friendly.”

Nick tried to swallow a knot in his throat but failed. He hadn’t expected anything beyond a simple phone call from the feds.

“What exactly did they say, Rose?”

“They told me to get hold of you. They wouldn’t leave, Nick. I didn’t know what to do. I finally told them I’d been paging you all day and you hadn’t called me back.”

“So they left?”

“Yes, but they left a phone number in Manhattan. You’re supposed to ask for Deputy Director Edmund Arminger.”

“Deputy Director?”
Nick blurted, far louder than he had intended.

“Yes. This Deputy Arminger has left several messages on the answering service. Sounds like he’s very concerned about something.” She took a moment to catch her breath. “What’s going on, Nick? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

A stewardess walked by and gave Nick a scolding look. The plane was set to move.

“You won’t get in trouble, Rose,” he said, lowering his voice. “I don’t know what these people want, but it definitely has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, I’m worried just the same. I think you better call them right now.”

Nick bit a fingernail as his eyes darted about the floor. “Give me their phone number. . ..”

The jet engines howled to speed, and the sickening sensation of liftoff fluttered through his stomach. It never got better. Flying was something he still couldn’t bring himself to enjoy. He laid his head back and closed his eyes.

The FBI couldn’t be ignored, as much as he would have liked to do just that. Safe to say, all this special attention
wasn’t good news. They certainly hadn’t come by the office to offer him a job. He had heard stories of the federal agents—the dirty intimidation tactics they used—and he probably didn’t know the half of it. He would have to call them, but if he did it now, it would in all likelihood mean the end of the Jacobs investigation. The thought of that brought a sharp frown to his lips. He made his decision, a compromise of sorts. He would call them, but only
after
he acquainted himself with Claudia. Until then he was going do a wonderful job of playing dumb.

He reached over and pulled down the shade, doubting if he would be able to sleep.

He woke some time later, feeling disoriented and stiff. His watch revealed that only slightly more than an hour had passed. He raised the shade and looked out at the last purple rays of the sunset. Below, the dark gray of the North Atlantic lay in wait like an enormous dormant monster.

He cracked his neck and thought of the hours he had to kill. He dismissed a few lingering thoughts of the FBI and decided to look over his notes. They were more interesting than last month’s
Time
anyway.

They had delivered Claudia’s letters into the hands of Alex’s Albany translator at daybreak. The conclusions to be drawn were hardly definite. The text of the letters was incoherent and rambling, but in each of them, the writer referred to Jacobs as
Liebling—
“darling.” Claudia would ramble on about Germany and the weather, and then reverse direction and talk about war, the 1930s, and other scattered topics. Alex was certain that Claudia was Jacobs’s lover. Nick felt less convinced. He felt more certain that she was crazy, or at the very least suffering from senility. The translator had agreed with that summation. It was irrelevant. Claudia knew Jacobs—that was enough. She needed to be checked out.

Time moved like a stubborn tortoise. Nick divided the hours between his notebooks, broken sleep, and a movie. Scattered dreams merged. He saw the gunman at the Jacobs home. He saw Emma McClure and her son sitting on their shabby living room couch. He saw his father lying in the morgue, his face drained white and sunken, his naked, desecrated body like some alien mass of bone and tissue. He woke abruptly and ordered a cocktail. It didn’t seem to help.

From Frankfurt the connection was met smoothly, and the flight to Salzburg lasted almost exactly an hour. Nick watched the ground rush by as they descended to Austrian soil. It was misting, dreary—he saw the tiny headlights of cars traveling along winding country roads. Unknown territory, an unknown land. He had never flown back from a foreign country without clients. This was not the case he wanted his luck to run out on.

The plane jolted to the runway through a light rain. Nick rose to his feet and reached overhead for his bag. He felt exhilarated. He passed through customs and wove his way through the terminal of the Salzburg airport. The loudspeaker overhead blared announcements in a pleasant fräulein’s voice. The terminal was filled with travelers, most of them blond-haired and blue-eyed—an odd spectacle for him after countless trips through San Francisco International. He found a cab outside and was taken to auto rentals. Within fifteen minutes, he was speeding through the rolling Austrian countryside along southbound Autobahn 312 and passing through customs at the German border. His map showed it to be a simple route—a half-hour trip on the autobahn would lead directly into the heart of Bavaria. And Berchtesgaden.

Nick marveled at the view surrounding him on the rapidly
ascending roadway. The drizzle of the German border had vanished into a brilliant blue sky which shimmered off the pavement of the autobahn. To the right, massive limestone and granite mountains rose and fell magnificently into the greenery of the surrounding valleys. Alpine meadows sprinkled with color and bordered by thriving forestland blanketed the countryside. The views opened up further as the valleys seemed to sprawl deeper within the shadows of the Bavarian Alps. He lowered his window slightly and enjoyed the cool, pine-scented air.

The natural beauty of the drive was soothing, so much so that he nearly missed his turnoff, a winding cobblestone road that shook the wheel in his hands. According to his map, he was about to enter a small mountain village just outside of Berchtesgaden, a town with a name he wouldn’t even dare attempt to pronounce. He glanced at the map. Bischofswiesen.

The road evened out as Nick found himself in the center of the tiny town. He slowed the car. He was in the town plaza now, alone on the road. An open marketplace, teeming with older ladies bustling about in search of choice produce, lay to his left. To his right was a cream-colored hotel with dark wooden balconies and colorful flower boxes. Locals lounged under table umbrellas in front of a cafe.

He found the address he was looking for and pulled to the curb. With arrangements already made, it took only a minute to hire a stout, middle-aged fellow by the name of Rolf as translator. A generous wage equivalent to twenty-two dollars an hour was negotiated.

Back on the road, Rolf asked if he could smoke. They lowered the windows. Nick feared the German’s hairpiece would be lost in the torrent of wind. He could feel his ears popping as they continued to ascend.

“Yes, Berchtesgaden is less than five minutes from us, Herr Merchant. Just stay on the road. Your exit is coming shortly.”

Nick nodded and looked at his speedometer. He was flying along at a speed that would earn him a serious ticket back home. He was enjoying himself, savoring the thrill of traveling the autobahn at seventy-plus. Rolf reclined in contentment with his hands folded on his ample belly, seemingly unconcerned with their speed.