Measure of Darkness (26 page)

M
orning finds us fifty miles to the northeast on a perfect summer day. High thin clouds, glorious sunlight. Everything sparkling, the world alive and breathing. But not everybody's happy.

“I don't like it,” says Jack Delancey.

“Your concern is noted,” Naomi says. “We'll be fine, won't we, Alice?”

“Totally,” I say. “If the son of a bitch tries to torture us I'll tie his shoelaces together.”

“I'm serious,” Jack says. “I saw what they did to Milton.”

“And if something goes wrong you'll come to our rescue, just as you did for him.”

“That was sheer luck. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. You can't count on a thing like that.”

“Certainly I can,” Naomi says. “That's why I hired you in the first place.”

Jack's a pretty smart guy, and knows when the argument has been lost. He grunts unhappily, but he puts the car in gear and steers us over the quaint little bridge onto the island of New Castle, in the
live free or die
state of
New Hampshire. Anyhow, that's what it says on the local license plates. Live free or die. Which I have always assumed had something to do with the state not having income taxes or sales taxes, until Naomi corrects me. Dates from the Revolutionary War, and Patrick Henry vowing to give him liberty or give him death. Whatever, upon crossing the bridge we've entered an enclave of the wealthy, a small, tidy oceanfront village of multimillionaire estates built tight up against the Atlantic shore. The sea visible here and there through gaps between the old colonial homes. Lighthouses, a harbor, a few sleek sailboats bracing in the wind. A postcard home: dear mom, if we win the lottery I want to live here, please.

At Naomi's direction, Jack drops us off a hundred yards or so from our destination. There's a sidewalk and, kid you not, a white picket fence holding back the blooming azaleas.

“Maybe we should be wearing bonnets,” I say. “Carrying baskets of flowers.”

“I'm sadly lacking in bonnets,” says Naomi. “Try to be shy. We're supplicants, begging the lord of the manor.”

“Yes, my liege.”

She snorts and shakes her head. We advance through a picket gate, latch it behind us and follow a white gravel path that slopes down a slight hillside toward the harbor.
Crunch, crunch.
I decide to walk on the grass, which is probably against the rules, but so what, we're here to beard the lion in his den. And quite a den it is, too. A colonial governor's not-so-humble mansion, no doubt rebuilt from the stone foundations up, but looking authentic, from the narrow clapboards to the great brick chimneys that seem to bristle from the cedar-shingled roofline, marking a fireplace in nearly every room. Win
dows glinting with handcrafted panes of glass, and a delicate trellis of heirloom roses arching over the entrance.

“Don't look, but we're under observation.”

“Don't look where?”

“To the left, by the low hedges.”

Naturally I look and spot a big bruiser in a blue blazer. Try saying that fast. He's wearing sunglasses, has an earpiece with a microphone wand drooping alongside his strong, clean-shaven jaw. Standing vigilant with legs apart and hands behind his back.

I wave, he waves back.

“Alice!” Naomi hisses.

“What? You think we're not supposed to notice he has his own personal Secret Service? I'm just being polite.”

“You're flirting.”

“Not my type.”

“What is your type?”

“I no longer have a type. I'm typeless.”

We've reached the entrance, climbed the steps. She rings the bell. Sounds like we've activated Big Ben for a count of two. I'm expecting a butler, or at the very least a French maid, but much to my surprise the door is answered by the man himself. Taylor Gatling, Jr., big as breakfast and favoring us with his billion-dollar smile.

“'Morning, ladies. Ms. Prescott, I presume? Welcome to Langford House.”

Naomi introduces me as Ms. Allen, which happens to be my mother's maiden name. We're supposed to be from the Colonial Dames, scouting out Langford House for the possibility of a tent auction to raise money for a historical preservation fund. But that's just to get us in the door. On the ride up to New Hampshire Naomi called the deception our “Trojan Horse” and I pointed out that she was mixing historical metaphors, and that the real Co
lonial Dames would take umbrage, had they but known. I pointed out, quite helpfully, that unless Naomi was of lineal descent of an ancestor who lived and served prior to 1701 in one of the original thirteen colonies, she would not be eligible for membership. Boss lady had responded with a raised eyebrow worthy of any dame, period. Even one whose ancestors somehow forgot to sign the Mayflower Compact.

“Tour first and then coffee in the garden, how does that sound?”

“Splendid,” says Naomi.

I can't resist adding, “Wicked good.”

Oops. That stops Gatling in his tracks. He gives me a sly look. “Really?”

“My family is kind of backwoods colonial, if you know what I mean.”

He seems keenly and genuinely amused. “I believe the term is ‘Swamp Yankee.'”

“That's us. Very swampy.”

Behind him Naomi is looking daggers, but sometimes I really can't help myself. Besides, I can tell he likes it because he addresses his tour remarks mostly to me. Pointing out the various rooms, all of which seem to feature hand-printed wallpaper and lots of fancy doodads on the trim that he calls “flourishes,” which we have to pretend to admire. There are window boxes with upholstered seats and Indian shutters—to keep out the Indians, apparently—and various hutches and “cupboards,” which are little cubbyholes where the servants slept—and a fabulously formal dining room with an elaborate candelabra that was a gift from some king or other. In the kitchen he shows us a really enormous fireplace equipped with a number of iron doors for baking breads. I point out they'd probably work for pizza, which gets more daggers
from boss lady, although Taylor Gatling continues to find me ever so amusing, to the point of admitting that some of his less illustrious ancestors were themselves “very swampy.”

Ho, ho, ho, we're having such a jolly good time that it's easy to forget our host is maybe guilty of ordering abduction, torture and possibly murder, and that at the very least he'd frightened Milton Bean to within an inch of his life. I for one have no intention of drinking his coffee, given his penchant for chemical interrogation. Luckily there's no need to pretend because just as the coffee is served—our host actually fetches it himself— Naomi gives me a nudge, indicating that she's about to drop the pretense and get down to business.

We've just been seated in a lovely garden overlooking the harbor. Birds are flitting about, bees are prowling the flower blossoms. It's all very civilized. Gatling pours. “Ms. Prescott? Miss Allen? Cream, sugar?”

Leaving her cup untouched, Naomi clears her throat and says, “Actually, Mr. Gatling, I have a confession. We're not from the Colonial Dames and we're not here to discuss a fundraiser.”

Gatling lowers the coffeepot, gives us a tight smile and sits back in his authentic colonial chair. “Ah. And I was so enjoying this. Wanted to see how far you'd push it.”

“You know who we are?”

He shrugs, as if not the least concerned, and very pleased with himself. “Naomi Nantz, private investigator, and her trusty sidekick Alice Crane. Or maybe I should say her ‘wicked good' assistant. You look surprised. Facial recognition software. Not the stuff you have access to. The good stuff that can identify a suspect from a drone altitude of twenty-six thousand feet. As it
happens you were identified by a stationary camera that monitors every vehicle crossing the New Castle bridge.”

Naomi recovers her cool aplomb. “So you know why we're here.”

“Haven't a clue,” he says. “The facial recognition software doesn't read minds. That's an entirely different process.”

“Enhanced interrogation?”

“A misleading term, don't you think? Could mean almost anything.”

“I'm here for the boy, Mr. Gatling. Joey Keener. I'm here to make a deal for his safe release. Whatever it takes.”

As he welcomed us into his house Gatling's eyes had been a lively blue. Now they're chips of gray ice. “No idea what you're talking about.”

“We're not wired, Mr. Gatling. Not even cell phones. Scan us if you like.”

He shrugs. “You were scanned as you came through the front door. That's not the point. I've nothing to do with any person called Joey Keener.”

“You've been running a rogue espionage operation targeting Professor Joseph Keener. Therefore you know about his little boy.”

Gatling lifts his cup, sips rather deliberately. “If you're asking me if I'm aware that Keener, who may well have been a traitor, had an illegitimate child with a Chinese national, the answer is yes. It would have been irresponsible not to know, since my company provides security at QuantaGate. But that's the extent of my knowledge. Where the child might presently be located is no concern of mine, although I hope it is well, as I would hope for any child, everywhere. Children are the future, don't you agree?”

Naomi stares out at the beautiful harbor, where seagulls hover in the breeze like some perfect mobile, as if attached by invisible wires. She turns to our host, speaking with utter calm and complete confidence.

“Here's my offer, Mr. Gatling. If the boy is released unharmed my investigation will cease. Any intelligence we've gathered and developed will be destroyed. Your connection to this case, including your probable culpability in the abduction, torture and framing of Randall Shane will remain, at most, a matter of speculation, although not by me or my associates. All we require is the safe release of the child. Nothing else matters. That's my offer, I suggest you give it due consideration.”

“You must be joking.”

“I assure you, I am not.”

“You sound like you think you're infallible, Miss Nantz. Let me assure you of something. You're not. You're very much mistaken. I had nothing to do with the murder of Joseph Keener, and I have absolute proof that would stand up in any court of law.”

“If you're referring to the items planted in Randall Shane's motel room, those are easily refuted.”

Gatling puts the cup down and leans forward, and for the first time radiates a kind of physical menace, without so much as lifting a finger. It's just there, palpable. This is a man who knows how to kill. “You think you know something but you don't.”

“Please enlighten me,” Naomi says.

He twitches in his seat and for a moment I think she's gotten to him. Then he reaches into a trouser pocket and retrieves a vibrating cell phone. Text message, apparently. Whatever he sees on the screen displeases him. He stands up and jerks his chin at the manicured pathway that leads to the exit.

“Get out,” he says, cold as the berg that sank the
Titanic.
“Now. Or you'll be taken into custody.”

He lifts the cell phone to his ear, turns away and gestures to the bruiser in the blazer, who has been lurking in the rhododendrons.

We dames know how to scurry when the scurry time is here.

F
or the first ten miles or so, Naomi doesn't say a word. She's in the back, brooding, while I ride shotgun, peeking at the side mirror to see if we're being followed. Yes, there are many vehicles behind us, including a convoy of freight trucks, but nothing jumps out. We've cleared the tollbooths on 95, heading south, when I finally decide to break the silence. “That went well. We really left him shaking in his penny loafers.”

Naomi stares out the window, ignoring me. Which totally gets on my nerves.

“It was amazing, Jack,” I say. “You should have seen us. We strapped him to an antique ironing board, stuffed his mouth with an authentic seventeenth-century dish-rag and applied water. Two cups and he was begging for mercy. Confessed he had Joey locked in the servant's cupboard. That's why we're heading back to Boston, to get a locksmith.”

“Hush,” Naomi says quietly. “I'm thinking.”

Nuts. Those happen to be the only two words that will stop me. When Naomi Nantz says she's thinking she's not kidding. Her brain is working the problem, running the possibilities, looking for a way in.

So I shut up for thirty miles.

“I believe him,” she finally says.

“Bernie Madoff? O. J. Simpson? Glenn Beck?”

She ignores me, and directs her comments to Jack. “He said he had nothing to do with the murder of Joseph Keener, and that he has absolute proof to that effect.”

“Okay,” says Jack. “But what makes you believe him? Gut reaction or facts on the ground?”

“That's what I'm trying to determine,” she says. “We know the following about Taylor Gatling, Jr. He was pushing to have Professor Keener investigated by a legitimate agency, and when that failed he took it upon himself to put Keener under surveillance. Because he has reason to want revenge on Randall Shane, we assume that he was complicit in planting evidence that made Shane the prime suspect in the professor's murder. That's an assumption not yet established as fact. On the other hand, it's a virtual certainty that Gatling's men took Shane and subjected him to enhanced interrogation. But why? If they knew Shane to be innocent, what could they possibly learn from him? And if the purpose is to frame him, why not leave him to be arrested, why complicate the situation with an airborne abduction in broad daylight?”

“So you're saying you don't think Gatling had Joey abducted?”

Let her try and ignore that one. She can't, and she doesn't.

“No, I'm not saying that” she says, leveling her eyes at me. “Gatling is a seeker of power. It's highly probable that he had the boy kidnapped in Hong Kong and brought here, to give him some sort of leverage. I just don't know for what purpose, precisely.”

“Maybe it started out as a plot to implicate the great
Randall Shane in a kidnapping,” I suggest. “Turn the hero into a villain, make it look like his whole life was a lie. And then the professor gets killed and framing Shane for the murder is an extra.”

“I'll buy that,” Jack offers.

“Then you are both ignoring facts in contravention of the premise,” Naomi says. “Evidence was planted in Shane's motel room in advance of him discovering Keener's body. That can only have occurred if the plot to frame him was under way before Keener was executed.”

“Maybe the facts are wrong.”

“Facts are facts, Alice,” she reminds me. “Inconvenient as they may sometimes be.”

“Well, somebody famous said facts are the hobgoblin of little minds,” I retort.

“Ralph Waldo Emerson. And what he said referred to a foolish consistency, not facts.”

“Okay. So maybe we're being foolishly consistent.”

“Emerson's idea was that we should all avoid conformity and find our own way. He was urging us to be self-reliant.”

“Know-it-all,” I say.

“I wish I did know it all,” Naomi says, sounding plaintive. “If I knew it all, we wouldn't have been trying to shake the suspect's cage, and Joey Keener would already be safe and sound.”

Not another word from her, all the way home.