Chain of Fools (17 page)

I said, "The conflict over the
Herald
is an incidental part of what I'm looking into. I'm investigating a murder and two or three instances of attempted murder. All the victims and intended victims were members of your family. Could we get together for a few minutes after your game, Attorney Puderbaugh?"

The four bridge players frowned over this, but none lunged at me. They watched their cards serenely. Tidy appeared to be the most placid of all. Whatever the mental idiosyncrasies of his branch of the Osborne clan, attention deficit disorder did not appear to be one of them.

"After this game," Tidy said, "I've got another game scheduled. If you'll call my office and talk to Lillian, she'll set you up for something next week or the week after, over at the office." He fished in a side pocket, came up with a business card, and held it out to me. I accepted the card, considered chewing it up and swallowing it, but stuffed it in my pocket instead.

I said, "If there's an ongoing violent plot to eliminate an anti-InfoCom Osborne from the
Herald
board of directors, next week or the week after might be too late. I was hoping to pick your brain sooner than that on any background or insights you might have that could aid my investigation, however indirectly."

Tidy shrugged lightly and said,
"I
wouldn't worry about murder plots if I were you, Mr. Strachey. I've heard that's the story you and my Aunt Janet and some other people are spreading around Edensburg. But the only thing you're achieving by spreading this crap around is, you are embarrassing my family."

"I'm trying hard to achieve more than that. But few members of your family are giving me much help."

Tidy peered purposefully at his cards, not at me, and said, "And I'd

be surprised if that situation changed anytime soon."

I waited, and when he continued to ignore me, I said to him over his shoulder, "Too bad you're playing bridge, not hearts." Then I left.

Having spent what felt like a useless afternoon getting stonewalled by anti-Griscomb, pro-InfoCom Osbornes and their allies, I was about to head back to Maple Street and report my futile wheel spinning to Timmy, Dale and—if they were back at the house—Janet, Dan, and Arlene.

But when I came to the turnoff for Summit Road, I hung a left, on impulse, and drove up the long hill to Chester and Pauline Osborne's house. As I had hoped, only one shiny Lexus, the teal one, was parked in the cul-de-sac. I left my dusty Mitsubishi next to it, walked over, and rapped on the main door of the big house. The bronze knocker made an impressive racket, but half a minute went by and no one responded. I knocked again and was about to give up, when the door suddenly opened and I was face-to-face with a woman I assumed to be the blonde I'd caught a quick, back-of-the-head glimpse of when I'd called on Chester the night before.

"Yes?"

Like everybody else that afternoon, she wasn't happy to see me. The tension in her narrow tanned face was partly from obvious subcutaneous cantilevering for cosmetic purposes, but the wiring couldn't have been responsible for the fear in her hazel eyes.

"How do you do. I'm Don Strachey. Are you Mrs. Osborne?"

She was dressed in tennis whites, though the object in her hand aimed at me was not a racket but a .38 caliber revolver. In a flat, tight voice, she said, "I'm Pauline Osborne. Are you the detective?"

"I might be, or I might not be. Which is the answer you'd like to hear?"

She didn't chuckle. Not moving, she stared at me for a long moment, apparently trying to decide something about me—Shoot me? Trust me? Ask me in for a drink?—or about something or someone else. Her eyes were full of indecision and pain and—even though my manner was unthreatening—fear.

Finally, she said, "You are the detective. I saw your car last night when you came here to see my husband."

I said, "It sounds like you've been doing some detective work yourself, Mrs. Osborne." She flinched when I said this, and I quickly added,

"But I am the private investigator from Albany you might have heard about. I've been retained by Janet to investigate Eric's death and attempts on the lives of two other Osbornes, Janet and Dan."

"Dan too?" she said, and her eyes widened.

"This morning someone tried to run his car off the road. Arlene Thurber was riding with him, and they barely avoided being shoved over a cliff. The State Police are investigating too. I'm surprised the police haven't been up to see you already."

This startled her, and I said, "Would you mind pointing that gun somewhere else? I'm harmless, and if you inadvertently blew bits and pieces of me all over that fine automobile of yours, it could badly interfere with your tennis schedule."

She looked down at the .38 for the first time, shuddered, lowered it, then looked back at me. Suddenly, Pauline Osborne shrieked at the top of her lungs. Her face twisted with rage, and I hoped nothing inside it snapped. Then she slammed the door in my face. She shrieked again, then, some seconds later, a third time. I listened for a gunshot and thought about smashing my way into the house. But I waited, and after five or ten minutes went by, I got into my car and drove away. In those five or ten minutes, there had been no gunshot, just the occasional shriek from somewhere deep inside Chester and Pauline Osborne's house. A half mile down the hill, I thought I heard still another shriek, but that one I probably imagined.

17

Friday morning I hit the road early for the three-hour drive out to Attica. I had the radio on for a while, but the news on
Morning Edition
was unrelievedly bad—tornadoes, Bosnia, Newt—so I shoved a Betty Carter tape into the player. Some of her news was bad too, but with a musical ingenuity that seemed to rival the engineering feats of Leonardo, Carter transformed both good and bad news into the aural equivalent of human flight. The miles flew by, and I would have enjoyed the solitary couple of hours of sublime music while cruising under a deep, cloudless August sky, except for the fact that as I drove I was nagged by two events of the day before.

One was Pauline Osborne's greeting me at the entrance to her home with a pistol, followed by her sudden, unprompted screams of what I took to be rage and frustration. A few hours afterward, I had described this scene to Janet, Dale, Timmy, Dan, and Arlene. None of them knew what to make of it. Janet said Pauline had long been prone to both anxiety and depression and probably relied a little too heavily on alcohol to get from one shopping day to the next. But Pauline had never shown signs of a crack-up coming on, nor had she brandished a firearm, as far as anyone present knew So what did this incident mean?

The other disconcerting revelation of that evening concerned Craig Osborne. I had asked Janet for tear sheets or printouts from the
Herald
library on the jewel heist that had landed Craig in prison. She had brought them back to the house, and I read them and discussed the clippings with members of our odd, jittery household while an Edens-burg policeman watched over us from his cruiser parked across Maple Street.

Osborne, I learned, had been tried and convicted the previous November of robbing a luxury hotel in Tarrytown, Westchester County, New York. A second armed robber, who turned out to be a part-time hotel employee, had been shot and killed by a hotel security guard during the middle-of-the-night stickup. Craig had escaped, for a time, with the loot—a box of high-quality cut diamonds and other gems. The jewels had been stored in a hotel vault overnight and were owned by a party of hotel guests, a wealthy Kuwaiti family in the area for a wedding the next day in nearby Briarcliff Manor.

Craig had shot and killed the security guard before making his escape, and that was one reason for his long prison term, twenty-five years to life. The other reason for the trial judge's imposition of the maximum sentence for Osborne was this: When Craig was captured three days after the robbery—he had been wounded in the leg in the shoot-out and a suspicious nurse at an Oneonta walk-in clinic alerted the police—the gun Craig had used in the robbery was still with him, stashed in his luggage in a motel room. But the stolen jewels were nowhere to be found.

At the time, none of the Osbornes had thought much about the missing jewels. They were busy coping with their shock over Chester and Pauline's only son having committed a horrible violent crime. The armed robbery itself was uppermost in the minds of everyone in the family, and the police and the hotel's insurers would have to worry about the jewels. Craig had repeatedly insisted to the police that he had dropped the box of gems outside the hotel in his panicked getaway. While this was considered possible—a dishonest passerby might have picked the jewels up and made off with them—a likelier scenario, according to police, was that Craig had either handed the jewels off to a third accomplice, or he had hid them in anticipation of his eventual release from prison or even a possible escape.

The Osbornes I spoke with on Maple Street that evening said they had failed to make anything of the fact, or even notice, that the estimated value of the missing jewels from the Tarrytown robbery was nearly the same amount—$16 million—as the
Herald
company debt that had forced the Osbornes to put the paper up for sale. When I pointed this out, Janet said it struck her as a kind of goofy coincidence and she urged me not to head off on an unpromising tangent. She said that if Craig had meant for the proceeds of the robbery to erase the

Herald's
debt, he'd have planned some elaborate fencing and money-laundering scheme—Craig was violent and amoral but not stupid, Janet said—and the money would have turned up already and saved the
Herald.
Dale, Timmy, Arlene, and I began to speculate on ways that the jewels or cash might have somehow gotten waylaid or diverted from their intended purpose. That's when Dan excused himself again and headed for the bathroom.

"I was wondering how long it was gonna take before somebody with some smarts came along and made the connection," Craig Osborne said. "We didn't even know the fucking jewels were
worth
sixteen million. We figured we'd have to make two hits, or five, or a hundred, before we had a stash big enough to pay that fucking bank what the
Herald
owed it. We about shit when we hit the fucking big payoff on the first hit."

"You said 'we,' Craig. You and who else?"

"Me and cousin Dan," he said, giving me a big Jack Nicholson-style demonic grin. "Who the fuck else do you think it could've been?"

Craig Osborne was a tall, rangy, bony-faced man with long, thinning straw-colored hair, cool gray eyes, a cold sore above his upper lip, and a fresh bruise on his left temple. The Plexiglas divider between us was filthy and smudged, as if Osborne's last visitor had been his pet rottweiler, and this made it harder to read his face and eyes. There was also the sobering reality that among the Osborne family, Craig was famous as a liar. Yet my inclination was to believe him. I had barely introduced myself when Osborne began to vent. He warned me that he would refuse to repeat anything he was telling me to the police or to the prosecutors, and he would deny to them that he had talked to me about anything other than the American League pennant race. Yet here he was spilling his guts to a stranger, and he was confirming my suspicions that Dan-of-the-sensitive-stomach was deeply involved in— what? It looked like some wild and woolly attempt to save the
Herald
through illegal means that had somehow gone all wrong.

I said, "Why are you telling me this, Craig? You don't even know me."

"I know enough about you," he said cockily, "to know that you are the man I need to talk to."

"And what is it that you know about me?"

Osborne laid his sinewy forearms on the table and leaned closer to the glass. He said, "Dan called me up yesterday and told me about this hot-shit private eye called Strachey. He said you'd been hired by my cousin Janet and Eldon McCaslin to find out who killed Eric. Dan said if you came out here, I should tell you to fuck off because if I told you anything I'd just get the law after him, and that wouldn't do anybody any good and it wouldn't help the
Herald.
But as you can tell," he said with a sneer, "I'm telling you everything I know about the deep shit the Osbornes are in. I mean
everything."

"Okay."

"You are one lucky dick, Strachey."

"Uh-huh."

The sneer faded, and he said coolly, "There are a couple of small things I want from you in return. One of them is easy."

"What's that?"

He looked at me and said,
"I
want you to find out where the jewels are. I want you to report this information to me."

I said nothing.

He went on. "I don't need them. I sure as fuck don't have any use for diamonds in this house of scumbags. I just want to know. I'm curious. Artie would have been interested too."

"Who is Artie?"

"Artie Wozniak. Artie was blown away in the hit at the hotel. Artie got killed for nothing. That sucks. I want you to tell me why Artie got killed for shit." He watched me expressionlessly.

I said, "Where does Dan say the jewels are? Or wasn't he the third accomplice who ended up with the jewels?"

"Dan got the jewels, sure. The hit was his idea too. He always knew I was a fucking thief. Everybody in Edensburg knew that. It was Dan's idea that I could use my talent for being an asshole for a good cause. And when we made the hit, Dan was down the road from the hotel. I made the handoff to Dan, and then I drove up to Oswego with my leg ripped open, and this hot-looking nurse turned me in. Dan was supposed to stash the jewels in Edensburg somewhere until this Cuban he knew came through—some kahuna with the Cuban U.N. office—and this guy would be the fence in return for a cut. But something went wrong. Fucking Dan won't tell me what it was, but he's trying to fix it, so he says. He says the fucking jewels got away from him, and he's