1 - Artscape: Ike Schwartz Mystery 1 (9 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Ruth studied Ike out of the corner of her eye. They drove in silence, through town, east to the interstate. He turned north toward Lexington. Ruth settled back in her seat and closed her eyes. They took the exit to Buena Vista and headed up toward the mountains. A mile or two out, Ike turned left and the car bounced up into the mountains.

“Sheriff,” Ruth said between potholes, “it’s your party, but for the record, where in the name of all that’s holy are you taking me? You said dinner and it is almost eight. I could eat a horse.”

“Just a little farther,” Ike replied, his eyes fixed on the dirt road. The car lurched. Tree branches scraped its windows and doors. Just when Ruth had decided that she was the victim of a diabolical double-cross, that he was taking her out into the woods to get rid of her once and for all, the car careened to the right and pulled to a stop in a clearing. There were seven or eight other cars parked in front of a log building. Soft light streamed from its windows. Ruth could make out tables and diners inside.

“Where on earth…what is this place?” she asked, turning to him.

“Le Chateau—best-kept secret in the state. It’s the only restaurant west of Richmond worth dining in,” he replied, grinning.

“But there’s no sign and the road is a joke. How do they survive?”

“Well, they’re usually busy, especially on weekends,” Ike said. He got out of the car, walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. “It’s all word-of-mouth, no pun intended. Rumor has it an orthopedic surgeon in need of a tax write-off owns it. I’m not sure. My guess it’s Mafia owned and operated to launder money. Who knows, it might be just what it appears to be. All I know is, they have a menu you’re not going to believe, a wine cellar as good as any I’ve seen, and a chef who’s fantastic.”

They stepped through the rough-hewn door into the warmth and the aroma of good cooking. A short, dark
maitre d’
greeted Ike by name and escorted them to a table in the corner. A dozen tables, twos and fours, two stations and a small bar filled the small room. Candles in pewter holders, a bud vase with a single rose, Limoges china, and linen napery set up each table. Artfully placed indirect lighting and candles in pewter sconces lighted the room.

“Well, I’m impressed, Sheriff. You are a man of many parts, it seems,” she said, shifting her inspection of the room and its occupants to the man who could debate with some force and knew food.

They ordered drinks and waited in silence until they were brought to the table. Ruth felt herself relax. She decided that in spite of their ideological differences, Schwartz might not be so bad after all. In fact, something about him intrigued her. Life in academia and earlier flings at the fringes of the radical movement had given her the opportunity to meet and know many men. But she found only a handful interesting—none like this one.

“Sheriff, with all due respect, you are a puzzle. I can’t picture you as the pride and joy of Picketsville and certainly not as a small-town cop. I’d like to know who you are, and why I keep thinking I know you from somewhere.”

“I’d prefer you call me Ike, if that doesn’t tread on your sensibilities. Well, believe it or not, I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Picketsville. My daddy, as we say down in these parts, is Abe Schwartz. He was, and in his retirement still is, a political wheeler-dealer. His last office was comptroller. When he was younger, my age, he wanted to be governor. He made a very successful run from minor county posts to the state legislature. He was elected speaker of the house and stood in line for statewide office. But back then, thirty or forty years ago, things were not all that favorable to someone of his, ah, persuasion. And he was told, by those who could make it happen, that ‘there wasn’t going to be no Jew governor of Virginia as long as they were alive.’ Abe, my father, decided then and there that his son Isaac was going to realize that goal for him.”

“So you’re going to run for governor? Excuse me for saying it, Sheriff—Ike—but being the top cop in Picketsville does not strike me as much of a political base to launch a gubernatorial campaign. Your father, the wheeler-dealer, does not expect you to go upward from there. He must be very put out with you.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, he is, but not the way you think. I said he wanted me to run. I went away to college and then went to work for the government and never came home…until three years ago. It’s too late now to think about that anymore, even if I wanted it.”

“Children do that, don’t they,” Ruth said. “They rebel against their parents’ plans for them. They go off and do their own thing and then end up as carbon copies of the parent they thought they rejected.”

“Like you, Dr. Harris? You and your father, the dean?”

“If I am to call you Ike, you must call me Ruth. How do you know about my father?”

“Ruth? Not Sydney?”

“No one’s called me Sydney for years. How did you—?”

“You said a while back you thought you knew me. We did meet, a long time ago.”

“We did? Where?”

“At your house. A group of us were there one evening and you breezed through. You were in your grunge phase then, black baggy jeans, bare feet, lots and lots of black makeup, fringed jacket, and long, very black hair. As I recall, you had a young man in tow dressed the same, except his hair was spiked up and dyed an amazing shade of red. He looked like a rooster.”

“You. So that’s it. Now it makes some sense. You were one of Daddy’s young men. Mother always called you people ‘your father’s young men.’ She never knew about his connection with the CIA, but I did. She thought he was just the dean of the law school who had these nice young men over for tea and conversation. She didn’t know he was screening and recruiting for the Agency. You were one of them. The government job you had, it was with the CIA, am I right? You were one of his recruits.”

“Yes. You still want to have dinner with me?”

“What? Oh, well, I’ll be. In all those years I never knew any of you—not one. It drove Daddy crazy. He’d keep urging me to go out with solid people, you guys, and stop hanging around with weird types.”

“But you never did?”

“Nope, never, until tonight. Well, I’ll be.” She beamed at him, inspected him with renewed interest. He squirmed under her scrutiny.

“Whatever happened to the one you were with that night?” he asked.

“Bobby? I haven’t thought about him in ages. The last I heard, he was in the construction business with his uncle in Providence.”

Ruth sipped her drink lost in thought, her eyes out of focus. She returned to the present and fixed Ike with a no-nonsense look.

“No fair, Sheriff. You have me doing all the talking. What about you? What’s a college graduate—what college, anyway?”

“Harvard.”

“Holy smokes. What is a Harvard graduate, Yale Law School graduate and former spook doing playing sheriff in Picketsville, Virginia? There has got to be something more to you than you are willing to share. You married?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“She died. An accident.”

“Oh,” Ruth said, subdued. “I’m sorry.”

Their waiter appeared to take their dinner orders. The cuisine was French, the menu English, an unbelievable menu. When the waiter left, she pressed on.

“So what about you?”

“There’s nothing to tell. You know all the important parts, born and raised in Picketsville, sent by my father to Harvard, supposed to come home for law school, Virginia or Washington and Lee, but I went to Yale instead. I met your father, and the rest is, as they say, history. I worked for a dozen years for the Agency, in Europe, and when my wife was ki…died, I quit and came home, to get out of it.”

“What did you start to say about your wife, Ike, just now?”

“Nothing. It’s all past now.”

Ruth wondered again what she was doing here. Her college faced an economic crisis, there were police, press, and curiosity seekers trampling all over the college’s lawn, and the guy who declared he would sort it out had her in the middle of the boondocks for dinner. The whole thing struck her as a bit from
Alice in Wonderland
.

She studied him. Questions begged to be asked…about his wife—
When my wife was ki
…killed? And why sheriff, of all things? She saw the evasion in his eyes and something else—pain and anger. He covered it well, but no mistaking the look. Ike Schwartz perched on a personal volcano. She decided to let it go and try later, maybe…but not now.

“Wine,” she said, changing the subject. “We need wine, Ike.”

Ike scrutinized the wine list.

“White or red?”

“White or pink, please.”

“White, it is.” Ike beckoned the waiter back and pointed to a Macon-Blanc. The waiter beamed. Ike asked for the wine straight away. The waiter disappeared, to return a moment later with the bottle resting on his arm. Ike inspected the label, nodded, and watched the waiter uncork. Ike felt the cork, sniffed it, and nodded again. He sniffed the splash poured into his glass, sipped, chewed, and rolled it around in his mouth.

“Very nice,” Ike said.

The waiter poured a glass for Ruth, filled Ike’s, and disappeared again.

“Tell me something,” Ruth said, her chin in her palm, “Do you know what the hell all that’s about, the cork, the sniffing, the wine-tasting ritual? Be honest, now.”

Ike grinned. “I haven’t the foggiest, Ruth, but waiters always seem disappointed when you don’t do it.”

“Aha,” she crowed, “at last, an honest man. I do not know how many people I have asked that, and they all give me some bogus story about bouquet and texture and the most incredible bullshit, and none of them could tell you there was a fire if their pants were in flames. But you do it because you don’t want the waiter to be disappointed. That is terrific. I am beginning to like you, Ike. You’ve got possibilities.”

He smiled. His face relaxed.

The waiter brought their food and hovered over them, checking and rechecking, swooping in to pour sauce on the duck, on the beef, to grind fresh pepper on the salad. Finally, satisfied they could manage the rest of their meal without him, he left them to dine alone.

***

They busied themselves with their meal, filling in the silences with small talk, about the town, the college, speculations on the robbery, Parker’s whereabouts. He told her about Loyal Parker. Parker, the local redneck bully, was the kind of kid who would throw cats out of speeding cars, make lewd remarks to Callend girls, and if he and his oafish friends could, beat up their dates. He and his pals went to Roanoke to harass gays. As far as Ike was concerned, Parker had not changed much in twenty years. That was one reason he had decided to run for sheriff.

Ruth shifted in her chair as she crossed her legs. Ike heard the whisper of nylon. He thought, not for the first time, about the erotica of ordinary sounds and smells, of sensory stimulation, the sound of nylon against nylon for example, and where that took his thoughts.

“Ike? Problem?”

Just in the nick of time, Ike was jerked back from the images that were beginning to form in his mind.

“No, nothing. My mind just wandered off for a minute. Must be the backlash from a busy day,” he lied.

Ruth’s eyes scanned the other diners. “You know any of these people?”

“Well, yes I do, as a matter of fact. You see the silver-haired man sitting with the short fat guy in the corner?”

“The two men with the two young women?”

“Yes. Well, the distinguished older man is Senator Rutledge and the man with him is the attorney general.”

“So that’s Senator Rutledge. He’s on some of my boards but I’ve never met him. He never attends meetings but always sends a nice note. Is it too much of a stretch to hope the woman with him is his daughter?”

“Way too much. They are, or one of them is—not to put too fine a point on it—bait.”

“Bait?”

“The attorney general, Bob Croft, wants to be senator. Rutledge has hinted he might step down, but everybody knows in the end he won’t. So Croft has brought the good senator to dinner and, I’m guessing now, set him up with one of those bimbos—excuse me, professional women, in the hopes of putting the good senator in a compromising situation, thus advancing the time the said senator declares his retirement.”

“And will he?”

“Senator Rutledge did not get to Washington by being stupid. He will see through this and will report it to his friends, and the attorney general’s career will end before the next general election.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Wow. Life must be tough in the fast lane.”

“You’re having me on. Now look over in the corner. Do you see those three men and the woman together? Well, that’s Gloria Barnes, Clint Davis, William Danzinger, and Mordichai Blum. You know who they are?”

“Only by reputation. I think Ms. Barnes attended my inauguration. The others run Fortune five hundred companies and she owns a chain of newspapers or something.”

“Newspapers, television stations, cable TV, and major stockholder in more big companies than you can imagine. If Daddy Warbucks had a female rival, she would be it. What do you suppose those four are cooking up tonight?”

“I’m afraid to ask. Do you have an idea?”

“No, but I do know that they all have two things in common: one, they all have bought development rights to vast tracts of land south of Washington, adjoining the Manassas battlefield, and two, they are the honorary chairpersons of the Roanoke College capital campaign. You choose what they’re up to tonight.”

“It staggers the imagination.”

Chapter Fifteen

Time slipped by. They didn’t notice the other diners finish and leave for home, or assignations, or whatever came next on their program. Ruth kept Senator Rutledge in view from the corner of her eye, fascinated by the process unfolding at the table. The waiter appeared with the dessert cart.

“Oh my, did you ever.…A person could gain five pounds just by looking.”

“Well, are you going to slide all the way into decadence and take one of those or are you just going to drool down the front of your blouse?” Ike said.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she said and pointed at a big éclair on the cart. “That’s got to be at least thirty-five hundred calories—one pound. I’ll risk a pound.”

Ike waved off dessert. The waiter shrugged and rolled the cart away.

“So, how about you? How did the gum-chewing grunge child I saw years ago end up in the Shenandoah Valley?”

“Oh, it’s not much of a story. I went to college, tried my best to outdo my parents in upholding the great causes of the day. Then my father had his first heart attack. It sobered me up, I guess. It is one thing to be forever young and believe you are on society’s cutting edge, another when you realize that your father might die and you haven’t done anything with your life except embarrass him. All the fun went out of hell-raising so I settled down. No more marching, no more provocative articles in the school paper, that sort of thing.

“Graduate school was a logical next step, and before I knew it, I became my dad. Academia is a safe haven for us left-liberals, you know.”

“Oh yes. So what did you study?”

“Majored in political science, switched to history in graduate school. It gave me a wider range of things I could study.”

“Let me guess—you did research on the history of women in politics.”

“Close. I did my doctoral thesis on Margaret Sanger.”

“No romance? No great affair of the heart?”

“I got married. Does that count?”

“But you’re not married now?”

“No, not any more.”

“It’s none of my business, but what happened?”

“I’ll tell you my story, but only if you promise to tell me yours. Deal?”

Ike hesitated. Could he? He had not spoken of those events in three years. Why now? Why this woman?

“Okay, it’s a deal.”

“Well, by the time I’d finished my doctorate in history, I had made a name for myself. I signed on as a faculty member, published journal articles, and wrote chapters—earned my academic merit badges. I sat on committees, commissions—all the usual stuff. But I did not feel good about me. Too many men. Don’t raise your eyebrows like that, Sheriff. There weren’t
that
many.

“Then I met David. He was four years younger than I, a graduate student in the medical school studying reproductive physiology. We used to meet at night in the rat lab, gave the rats lessons in reproductive technique. We got married. I loved him, and it might have worked—only it didn’t.”

Ike signaled the waiter for more coffee. When he left, Ruth continued.

“I married David because I wanted stability. He gave me self-respect. In return, I supported him while he finished his Ph.D. He got a junior faculty position at the medical school and everything seemed to be fine. The problem was—I was doing better professionally. As hard as he worked, he couldn’t get into a tenure track. I got promoted and started receiving offers from more prestigious schools.

“We told each other nothing changed, that the differences didn’t matter, but they did. I resented having to turn down offers. He resented my success. But we could never bring ourselves to talk about it. That was our big mistake.

“Then, one day I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, department chair at the University of Chicago. We talked about it, or rather I talked, and David listened. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘there’re six or seven medical schools in the area. I’m sure we can find you something.’ What a terrible thing to say.

“I moved from New York and commuted home on weekends. It wasn’t too bad at first. He began to look for jobs, but all his prospects fell through. He wasn’t that good professionally, to tell the truth, and he was in a crowded field. I got more and more involved in my work. I stayed in Chicago one weekend a month, then two. I was flying high and I never noticed. I was meeting new people. I was important. I was appreciated and—”

“Another man?”

“No. Yes. No, it just happened. The pressure got to me and I went crazy for just a moment. It meant a fifth weekend in a row away from home, the sixth in two months. You know the funny thing about it? I intended to tell David, say ‘look at what’s happened to us.’ I reached a point where I was ready to quit even, come home if that would save the marriage. I came to believe what I had only given lip service to before, that I loved him.

“When I got home to put my marriage back on track, he’d gone—left me a note. ‘Dear Ruth,’ it said, ‘I accepted a position in La Jolla. I wanted to tell you when you came home for the weekend, but you never came. I called, but you were out.’ Then he put in the clincher. He said, ‘Don’t worry, there are six or seven undergraduate schools there, I’m sure we can find you something.’ It was dated two weeks earlier. Two weeks.

“I called him and he said, ‘How’s your friend?’ and I said ‘I love you, David,’ and he said, ‘I can’t live with that kind of love’ and hung up. Since then I made a vow—no more messing up other people’s lives. No commitment. Have fun, but do not get involved. Besides, my work takes up most of my time. There’s not much left for a social life outside it. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure. I think I do, maybe. It sounds pretty final—a commitment to not commit. I guess that paradox ought to be explored sometime.”

“Maybe, but not now, not by me.” Ruth glanced around in surprise. “Ike, do you realize we’re the only people here?”

All the tables were stripped of their linen and silver and the candles out. Their waiter chatted with the
maitre d’
, glancing in their direction. Ike looked at his watch.

“Good Lord, it’s nearly twelve. This place closes at eleven. We’re holding these people up.”

“Is it that late? Make it up to them, Ike. Give him a big tip. Did you know you’re an easy man to be with? And all this talk about the past makes me very sentimental and sad. But I have a full day tomorrow and we, sorry, you have a tiger by the tail. Home and to bed.”

They drove down the mountain in silence.

“Pull over here,” she said.

Ike slowed the car and then pulled into an overlook. He killed the ignition and turned off the lights. A nearly full moon bathed the pull-off in silver-blue, its carefully ragged stone walls contrasting sharply with the soft symmetry of the forest. Puzzled, he got out of the car and went around and opened the door for her. She walked across the few feet of gravel to the wall.

“In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never gotten away from my desk long enough to see any of this.” The ground fell away at her feet creating a magnificent panorama. She gazed across the tops of trees and down into the Shenandoah Valley. She stood in silence, unsure if she was overwhelmed by the view, the day’s events, the wine, or inner turmoil as she realized, to her amazement, that this man had more than just charmed her. He stepped up behind her and for a brief moment she let her head fall back on his shoulder.

She turned to face him. The moonlight filtering through the pines made his features seem dashing and mysterious. Ruth felt her heart turn over. This is crazy, she thought. What am I doing here?

“Ruth?” Ike murmured. She said nothing but turned back to the view, as if she might find some guidance from the twinkling lights scattered across the valley floor. A shadowy movement caused her to jump.

“Something moved down there.”

He moved behind her and looked in the direction she pointed.

“A doe and her fawn.”

“Oh, I’ve never seen one, not in the wild. They’re beautiful.”

They watched as the slender wraith-like forms, washed in moonlight, ears alert, stepped from the brush into a small glen, stiff legged and cautious. They hesitated, nibbled the tough mountain grass, and drifted silently into the trees. Ruth turned to face Ike.

As a child, when left to play alone, she had invented an enchanted place—the Fairy Ring she called it—where she imagined wonderful, magical things happened. Her dolls were no longer plastic and stiff, but moved, talked, and drank tea. Later, when the dolls no longer served as her companions, she dreamed of adventure and romance. Inside the Ring, she believed, anything could happen.

As she gazed into Ike’s eyes, the moonlight worked its magic and the world drifted away. He moved closer and time slowed, then stood still. She felt the Fairy Ring coalesce, circle, and enclose them. She waited. Ike put his hand on her cheek. It was not a caress, just a touch. Ruth felt her eyes begin to tear.

“Oh,” she said, eyes wide, lips parted. “Oh.”

Ike drew in his breath and exhaled. “Time to go.”

They returned to the car and rode in silence. As they neared Pickettsville, she turned to him.

“Ike, what happened just now?”

She searched his face in the dim light, looking for some hint, some clue, perhaps just reassurance.

“It’s not you, Ruth. God knows.…”

The pause seemed to last forever. She realized ghosts stood in the space between them. They defeated the Fairy Ring’s magic.