The Manx Murders Page 7

  Henry laughed under his breath. “And what he called us then! Said we could take our factory and do something uncomfortable with it. Said if what we wanted was somebody willing to kiss the ass of a fool, he didn’t want to work there, either. He told us he’d make it—in this very town, without a bit of help from the great and powerful Pembroke brothers.”

  Henry sighed. “I always liked that boy. Anyway, he up and joined the army, finished high school there, went to college on the GI bill when he got out, joined the State Police, and took the chief’s job here in Harville when it opened up three years ago.”

  “He’s done a real good job, too,” Chip said. “I used to know him a little. We’re about the same age.”

  “The only thing that bothers Viretsky,” Henry added, “is that Clyde and I supported his appointment to be chief. I don’t think he’d be happy unless he was ‘showing us’ something, somehow.”

  The speaker on the small conference table buzzed. The receptionist announced the arrival of Chief Viretsky.

  Ron was expecting a Mike Ditka type, a brawny, rebellious Pennsylvania Eastern European. Instead, the chief was small and slight. He’d been a Pennsylvania state trooper—if they had a height requirement, Chester Viretsky had just sneaked past it. He had thick, wet-looking black hair, and a bushy black mustache. Rimless glasses glinted on his thin nose.

  Ron rose to shake his hand. The chief looked at him with little enthusiasm, but did manage a nod and a muttered “Pleased to meet you.” At Henry’s invitation, he took a seat. Despite his size, Viretsky moved with confidence, and the .357 magnum on his hip looked as if it belonged there.

  “Where’s Clyde?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” Chip said. “It’s not like him to be late.”

  “Well, let’s either get him here or get started without him. We’ve got seventeen thousand people in this town, and I work for all of them.”

  “We know that, Chief,” Chip said. He rose. “I’ll just phone Alpha House.”

  Viretsky nodded and turned to Henry. “You’ll remember, Mr. Pembroke, that I urged you to get better security for this place when I first took the job as chief, didn’t I?”

  “Did you? I don’t recall.”

  Viretsky turned to Ron. “You talked him into it, Gentry? How’d you do it? Fat consulting fee in it for you? How’d you get the brothers talking to each other again?”

  “It’s true I’m a PI, but I don’t do a lot of security work. This is like a favor. Niccolo Benedetti is doing a job for the Pembrokes at the request of the Federal Government.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?” Viretsky demanded.

  “No, Chief. You asked a few questions. I’m trying to give you the background so that the answers make sense, okay?”

  Viretsky bent his mustache in a grin. “Don’t be so touchy, Gentry. Maybe I am impressed a little. I’ve certainly heard of Benedetti. But doesn’t he usually go after serial killers? I know the Pembrokes have their own way of doing things, but somehow I doubt they’d keep a series of murders from me.”

  Ron turned to his nominal employer. “Mr. Pembroke, I want to tell the chief what’s been going on.”

  “By all means,” Henry Pembroke said. He rubbed the purple spot on his wrist again. “I just wish I knew where Clyde is. If he’s reneged on our agreement ... Set me up to look like a fool ...”

  “Let’s try not to jump to any conclusions just yet, Mr. Pembroke. Let me brief Chief Viretsky.”

  Ron went on to tell the chief about the missing birds, and about yesterday’s dead cat.

  When he finished, Viretsky was incredulous. “Birds? Cats? This has brought the World’s Greatest Detective, so-called, to my town? It’s kids, for God’s sake. I never went so far as to smash a cat’s head, but I knew plenty of kids who did worse things to them. It’s wrong, and if I catch them, I’ll kick their asses, but come on.”

  “What about the birds?” Ron said.

  “What about them?”

  “How do kids make a bunch of birds go away and stay away from one small area?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of poison.”

  “Then there’d be dead birds, right? You ought to go take a look at the place. It’s spooky.”

  “I haven’t got time for that kind of foolishness. I’ll leave it to the World’s Greatest, okay? Now, we’re supposed to be doing some kind of security plan, right, Mr. Pembroke? Until you and your brother can get a real consultant in here and put in a decent system? Then I think I’d better get started.”

  “I’ll have Clyde’s head for this!” Henry’s face was brick red. “If my brother ever expects—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Chip came back in, frowning.

  Ron was grateful for the interruption. Things were getting out of hand again.

  “Uncle Clyde. He’s not at home. His bed hasn’t been slept in. He hasn’t been to the factory. And his Lincoln is missing.”

  “And I take it he’s not in the habit of taking nighttime drives in order to relax?”

  “For God’s sake. Gentry,” Henry Pembroke said. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “Hang around me for a while,” Ron suggested mildly. “What’s stupid for one person is obvious for another. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying so, Mr. Pembroke, but I’ve never seen two people for going off half-cocked like you and your brother. It’s a wonder you weren’t at each other’s throats in the womb.”

  Viretsky smoothed his mustache, but not in time to hide a small smile.

  “All I’m trying to say,” Ron went on, “is that there’s no reason to panic yet.”

  Just then, the receptionist bustled in with a white envelope. She handed it to Henry Pembroke, who sat there looking at it.

  It bore no stamp or address. Just the words HENRY PEMBROKE—URGENT printed somewhat sloppily in the unmistakably nondescript blue of a Bic Crystal pen.

  “Put that on the table,” the chief barked.

  Henry Pembroke dropped the envelope as if it had burned him.

  “Just leave it there,” Viretsky said. “I’ve got to get some stuff from the car. Gentry, can I trust you to make sure nobody else touches that thing?”

  Ron nodded. Viretsky disappeared. Chip looked stunned and hurt, like a man who’s stepped on a stingray.

  Sandy, the receptionist, started to babble. “It was delivered to your house, Mr. Pembroke, and your man, what’s his name?”

  “Mr. Jackson.”

  “Mr. Jackson went out to get the mail the way he always does, so he said, and he saw that in the mailbox with the regular mail, and it said ‘Urgent,’ so he brought it here, knowing I’d give it to you. But then I remembered Mr. Pembroke,” she indicated Chip, “being so upset not being able to find his uncle. I thought, what if this is a message, you know? Like, what if it’s important or something, and every second counts? Isn’t somebody going to open it?”

  “Chief Viretsky is going to open it,” Ron told her. “It’s got three sets of fingerprints on it already, at least. He’s going to handle things so as not to smear up what’s inside.”

  “Then you think it is ... you know, important?”

  “I think the chief doesn’t want to take any chances. Now, Sandy, is it? Sandy. Good. You go back to your desk. The chief is going to want to hear your story firsthand—”

  Ron cut himself off when he saw the growing excitement on Sandy’s face.

  “No,” he said. “You just sit right here at the table with us, and wait for the chief.”

  Sandy sat down, delighted to be included in the big doings. No need to tell her that Ron had decided, if at all possible, to keep this young woman away from telephones until further notice. If this was going to hit the papers—and Ron was willing to guarantee it was going to hit the papers—let it happen in such a way that the chief couldn’t blame Benedetti and Company for it.

  A few seconds later, Viretsky came back inside, carrying a small valise. He was accompanied by a
tall, thin black man dressed in natty light-blue sweats.

  Henry Pembroke said, “Chief, is this really necessary? All Mr. Jackson did was deliver the letter.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Pembroke,” the tall man said. His voice made him sound a lot older than he looked. “Chief Viretsky explained why he wanted me here.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, perturbed. “Perhaps Chief Viretsky’d be kind enough to explain it to me.”

  The chief looked at Ron. “Why don’t you explain it to him, Gentry? I’ve got business to take care of. Please have a seat and relax, Mr. Jackson.”

  Viretsky looked around the table. He seemed to notice Sandy for the first time. “Why is she still here?” he demanded.

  “I took the liberty of asking her to stay until you got back, Chief.”

  “You did, huh?”

  “Yes, sir. I was thinking about when she phones her best friend about this, as she inevitably will, won’t you, Sandy?”

  “Well, sure,” Sandy said. She didn’t like the silence that followed, so she added quickly, “If I get permission, of course.”

  Ron smiled at the chief. “I just figured if she sat around, she’d have a much better story to tell—later. If she got permission. You’re in charge, of course, and you’ll decide what’s best, but I wanted to make sure you had the chance to decide. For Sandy’s sake.”

  The chief gave Ron a long, hard stare. Perhaps he was finding Ron hard to hate, and even partially useful. That was the idea, at least.

  Viretsky transferred the look to Sandy.

  “My men will be here any minute,” he said. “Then we’ll make different arrangements. In the meantime, enjoy. Gentry, go ahead and explain.”

  Viretsky opened the valise and took out a pair of white cotton gloves, a razor knife, and a tweezer.

  Ron said, “The reason the chief brought Mr. Jackson back here, Mr. Pembroke, is that he handled the envelope. So did you and Sandy. You’ll all have to be fingerprinted, for elimination. He’ll probably have to track down the mailman, too, in case he touched the thing while he was putting the rest of the mail in the mailbox. Then, everything that isn’t a fingerprint from one of the three of you or from the mailman might possibly belong to whoever put the envelope in there.”

  The chief had taken a little spray can from the valise, and was playing a fine black spray over the envelope. Lots of nice latent prints sprang to view.

  Chip cleared his throat. He’d been so quiet Ron had almost forgotten about him. “This is an awfully big to-do, isn’t it? Weren’t you saying five minutes ago there was nothing to panic ourselves about?”

  “The envelope wasn’t here five minutes ago. There’s still nothing conclusive. The chief is just smart enough to avoid taking chances.”

  “Don’t butter me up, Gentry,” the chief muttered under his breath.

  Carefully, holding the envelope by its edges, Viretsky used the razor knife to slit it along the top. With the tweezers, he pulled the page inside free so that it sat, folded, on the table.

  Viretsky held the single sheet of paper down with the tip of one gloved pinky against its edge. Using the tweezers, he pulled one corner until the top third was unfolded. He repeated the procedure with the bottom third.

  The letter wasn’t scrawled in ink the way the envelope had been. It was a careful cut-and-paste job, in the classic ransom-note style.

  Ron could read upside down, even through a jumble of type styles and sizes. The note read:

  PEMBROKE—

  WE’VE GOT YOUR BROTHER. IT WILL COST YOU ONE MILLION DOLLARS TO GET HIM BACK. INSTRUCTIONS WILL REACH YOU. NO POLICE OR YOUR BROTHER DIES.

  It wasn’t signed.

  “Or your brother dies.” Henry Pembroke’s voice was hollow.

  “My God,” Chip exclaimed. “What are we going to do?” It occurred to Ron to suggest that it would probably be okay to panic now, but he let it go.

  Ten

  CHESTER VIRETSKY HEARD THE gasps and saw the shocked faces and reflected that the Pembrokes, in one way or another, had been giving him a pain in his ass his entire life. If it hadn’t been the brothers lording over the town by virtue of their vast fortune or their very existence (or, most accurately Viretsky supposed, by virtue of the very existence of their vast fortune), it was Henry’s late wife, Sophie, prevailing upon his predecessor to fix the speeding tickets she got cruising around with her various boyfriends while Henry was out watching birds. Old Chief Supman had done it, too. Made Viretsky sick, and sick at himself that he hadn’t reported it.

  The only Pembroke Chet Viretsky had ever met who hadn’t caused him trouble was Chip.

  And he was starting in now.

  “No police, Chet!” he yelled. “It says no police! Get out of here, quick, before somebody sees you!”

  “Chip, you know I can’t—”

  “I know my uncle’s in danger, for God’s sake, and your being here with Dad could get him killed. Can’t you understand that?”

  Gentry was shaking his head. His dark eyes were sympathetic behind his big, square glasses, and he seemed to know what he was doing, more or less, but what the hell good was he? He was just another complication that Chet didn’t need.

  But, then, Gentry did something Viretsky could never have done. He touched Chip gently on the arm. At that point, if the chief had touched Chip Pembroke at all, it would have been to slug him in the jaw.

  “Chip,” Gentry said. “You’re showing the family trait again; you’re acting like a spoiled brat.”

  “The note says ‘no police’!”

  “What if it said ‘no gravity’? Chip, a two-year-old learns you can’t make things unhappen. That bell is rung; you can’t unring it. The chief knows, and the chief is going to do his job, and he’s going to do his best to get your uncle back safely. Your smartest move is to help him do it.”

  Chip grumbled, then reluctantly subsided.

  Viretsky took a deep breath. “Gentry’s right. Even if I hadn’t happened to be here, I hope to God you would have had the sense to call me. Now. The first thing we’re going to do is play this low-key. Give me that phone.”

  Mr. Jackson was closest. He handed it across the table. The receptionist licked her lips as the phone went by, maybe because she was itching to blab, maybe because she was wishing for some popcorn. She was enjoying the show. She was going to have one hell of a story to tell.

  The chief dialed headquarters and had them patch him through to the cars en route. “Forget it,” he told them. “Go on with your regular patrol. I’ll fill you in later. Yeah, yeah, ten-four.”

  Then Viretsky picked up the letter, still with the tweezers, put it and the envelope into the proper-sized evidence bags, and put the whole thing into the valise. “All right,” he said. “I’ll have to handle this myself, for now. No big police presence. Just go on about your business. But.”

  The chief snapped the valise shut. “Nobody says a word. Not one word. Not to a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a fellow employee, nothing. Don’t even write it in your diary until I say so.”

  Viretsky had been talking to the room at large, but he was staring directly at Sandy Jovanka, Chip’s receptionist. She’d reddened a little when he’d mentioned the diary. She’d be safe enough through working hours, but afterward, the chief would have to think of some way to handle her.

  “I want to stress what Mr. Chip Pembroke has said. His uncle’s life is in danger, and a crowd of reporters around here can mess things up so badly we won’t be able to get him back. If that happens, the person who shot off his—or her—mouth will, I promise, go to jail as an accessory after the fact.”

  He was glad there were no attorneys present to hear that one.

  “We were supposed to make a security plan. If anybody asks, that’s what we did, we made a security plan. If anybody asks what that is, tell them it isn’t much security if everybody knows it.”

  Viretsky stroked his mustache.

  “But if anybody—anybody—gets too c
urious, I want to hear about it, immediately. If anything happens, I want to hear about it, immediately. I’ve got a gimmick in my car that will record any calls coming in on a given phone. I’m going to stop at Omega House and install it there on the way out. Mr. Pembroke, Mr. Jackson, I suggest you get back there and make things look normal. Chip, you and Sandy stay here for the rest of the workday. You’ll hear from—”

  “I want to go back with Dad,” Chip protested.

  Viretsky took a breath. “Chip, you’ll stay here with Miss Jovanka, okay? Keep up normal appearances, business as usual, that sort of thing. Can the two of you do that?”

  Chip’s face clouded. He was about to say to hell with business, it’s my uncle we’re talking about, and, besides, what do I care if she can do it, she’s having the time of her life over this. Then the dawn broke. “Right, Chief,” he said. “I’ve got it. Keep her busy. Quietly busy.”

  “Right.” Viretsky nodded in the same exaggerated way. They must have looked like a couple of idiots, the chief thought. “I’ll get back to you before quitting time. I’ll get back to all of you long before that, as a matter of fact.”

  Henry Pembroke and Mr. Jackson were standing in the doorway. “It would be best if you got going now,” the chief told them. “It wouldn’t do for me to give you a lift.”

  He turned to Gentry. “You come with me. We’re going to go talk to that professor of yours.”

  They rode in silence as far as Omega House. Ron watched as the chief carried the phone recorder, which he took from the trunk, into the house. Viretsky turned in a stellar performance as a man who had to go to the bathroom on the way in, and a better one as a man in an ecstasy of relief on the way out. Then the chief started the engine and jounced them out of there again.

  “You did a pretty good job with them in there,” Viretsky said. His tone sounded a little grudging, but it was sincere. “They might have gotten out of hand without you. Thanks.”

  “Glad to do it, Chief. Besides, a cop with the guts you have deserves support.”