THE FOURTH WATCH (22 page)

I turned in and saw right away what Adam Lynch
meant about how dark it might get up here at night. A thick forest
of oak and maple trees ran along either side of the way, and even
in daylight it was dark in the woods under the broad leaf canopy.
The drive was maybe three hundred yards long and about halfway up I
saw a paved track that veering off to the left. That must have been
where Lynch saw the headlights flashing off into the trees, the
night Red Whorley died. The drive went up around a bend and
suddenly I could see the lawn, and where the driveway ended in a
circle in front of an enormous Spanish style home. To the left of
the turn-around, another small road went off into the thicket. To
the right the lawn rolled away and I could see a tennis court off
in the distance. There was a match in progress. Beyond the court,
and to the right, just on the edge of where the trees encroached
again, there looked to be a cottage in the same style as the main
house.

House is not quite right. Mansion, maybe, or
perhaps more precisely, Villa. It was a broad faced affair done in
tan stucco with a red, slate roof. It had two floors and I counted
twelve windows down the length of the second floor. Windows wasn't
right either. They were French doors that opened onto balconies. On
the ground floor there were only six, spaced out on either side of
a pillared entryway, but they were floor to ceiling, double width
and arched in a peach-tree design. Huge slabs of granite with soft
chiseled edges formed a wide three-step stairway that rose up to
another fat slab, supporting the stone pillars of the entrance. I
parked the Jeep to the right of the stairs and climbed out. I was
still gawking at the grounds when the front door opened.

"Hey, Mike Knight!"

Carolyn Whorley came out and down the stairs
toward me. Again, her beauty overwhelmed me. Her blond curls were
pulled back off the soft lines of her face and knotted at the back
of her head. A few strands had come loose and danced about as she
came down the stairs. She wore a white collared shirt tied off
below her breasts, over a yellow tube top. She had on tight jean
shorts with a braided white rope belt, and brown leather sandals.
Her long legs and flat belly were tanned copper. Her green eyes
were the color of a summer sea, and smiled at me as she took my
arm.

"What, no hello?” She said.

"Hello, Carolyn. I was stunned to silence by
your beauty," I said, trying to make it sound light - not quite
pulling it off.

But she laughed and squeezed my arm to her
breasts. "Yeah; right! Teddy's out back on the patio and Ellie and
Sam are just finishing up a game of tennis." She leaned in
conspiratorially and said, ''It's a grudge match."

"Oh."

"Yes. Must be number ten thousand and
something," she said flashing me a smile.

"To my knowledge Ellie has never beaten
Sam."

"She must be good!"

She shrugged and I felt her breasts rise and
fall again on my arm. She smelled of lavender and sandalwood.
"Sam's good at everything., Daddy loved that, her...intensity." A
shadow fell across her face at the mention of her father, but it
was gone as quick as it came. ''He could beat her
though!"

She led me across a marble foyer and down two
steps into a sunken great room the size of an airport terminal. The
back of the house was mostly glass, interrupted in the center by an
enormous stone column, which held a deep fireplace. Above the
fireplace, a thick slab of oak was inset into the stone and served
as a mantel. It was covered with lanterns and water candles, and
mounted above the mantle was the huge head and curling horns of an
animal. I stopped and stared at it. It's flat eyes, black as coal,
stared back at me.

Carolyn followed my gaze. ''Bighorn Sheep," she
said and rolled her eyes. ''Daddy, the Great White Hunter." She
tugged me along again.

There seemed to be an elegant furniture store
on the left side of the great room, with an art gallery on the
walls. There were hanging plants suspended from the ceiling in
front of the glass, and giant curtains tied back in bunches at
intervals among the windows. To the right a beautiful staircase
wound up through the architecture.

French doors opened out onto a raised flag
stone veranda. Ted Whorley was sitting in a wicker chair on floral
cushions reading the Boston Globe with narrow reading glasses
pinched down on the end of his nose. He got up as soon as we came
out and extended his hand. "Mr. Knight," he said smiling, "glad you
could make it."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," I told him,
returning his smile as we shook, "and it's Mike. Quite a place you
have here."

"Yeah, we like it," he said. "What can I get
you to drink?" He gestured at a stainless steal bar on wheels to
his left. He folded the reading glasses off his head and put them
in a case on a glass-covered coffee table next to his chair. He put
on the gold rimmed glasses he had worn yesterday at lunch. ''I was
thinking of having a martini myself."

"Sounds good."

"Carolyn?" Whorley asked.

"I'll have a glass of wine, white I
guess."

"Comm' up."

As Ted Whorley put together the drinks I let my
gaze wander around the grounds. They were spectacular. Directly in
front of us, below the patio, was a large garden. An entire section
of it had been newly planted for the fall with mums, astors and
ornamental cabbages. To the left of these new plants there was a
section of dormant rhododendron, pruned precisely, and to the
right, a beautifully sculpted tangle of rose bushes. In the very
front of it all was a dazzling row of impatients in every color,
growing in the shade of the shrubs and thin trees that were
impeccably placed around them.

In front of the garden was the pool. I tried to
push away the vision of Red Whorley's corpse bobbing there in the
wee hours of the morning. An immaculate lawn stretched away from
the house to the edges of the woods, and to the left and right it
was criss-crossed with red brick walkways. I could see the shingled
roves of a couple of buildings poking up above the tree line down
the far end of the east side of the property.

To the right of the pool, and set back just a
bit, was the tennis court, and beyond it the cottage I had seen
driving in. A fast paced match was in progress on the tennis court
between what appeared to be two beautiful women. The court was
surrounded by green netting, that obscured a clear view of the
contestants, but there was no mistaking their strength and skill.
In the near court a tall, leggy brunette was dressed in a short,
white tennis dress. In the far court a smaller, leaner woman with
straw colored hair pulled tight in a bun at the back of her head,
wore shorts and a halter-top. They both wore tennis shoes without
socks. The surface was clay. As I watched, the brunette hit a
screeching backhand cross court at the feet of her opponent who
side stepped and lined it back over the net to the side of the
court opposite the brunettes momentum. But the brunette had guessed
right and was turning back when the shot came. She reached the ball
with just the tip of her racket and flicked a lazy lob to the half
court. Halter top, who had rushed the net, skittered back three
steps and hit a bullet at her opponents head. The brunette got the
racket up in front of her face in more of a defensive gesture than
anything else, but it was effective and the ball slid sideways off
the racket and caught the corner of the near court before going
out.

"Yes!" she cried, pumping a fist.

Halter-top was unperturbed. "40-30," she said
and turned her back and went to the

baseline to serve.

Carolyn was standing next to me with a glass of
wine clutched to her chest.

"That's Sam in the far court," she
said.

Whorley came up on the other side of me and
handed me my martini. He chuckled to himself. ''Ellie hates to
lose. Unfortunately for her, its something shes had to get used to,
playing Samantha."

I took a sip of my drink. "They're both very
good."

Samantha Whorley hit a hot smash serve that was
just long of the corner of the service court. Her second serve was
a more controlled smash that still had enough on it to start her
opponent off balance. Ellen Whorley managed a forehand return to
her opponents backhand but Samantha smoked it down the line forcing
Ellen to lunge and hit a soft floating return. Samantha had rushed
the net in anticipation of the weak volley, and smashed it
cross-court for the winner.

Ellen Whorley screamed and threw her racket
against the netting. Sam smiled at her, stuffed her own racket into
her bag and said: "That's match," before walking around the net and
out. Ellen threw her head back and let out a frustrated screech,
and then she snatched her racket up off the ground and followed. As
the two of them approached across the lawn we applauded
politely.

"Well done, ladies," Teddy said as they came up
the stairs to the patio, "Well done!"

Sam bowed from the waist and smiled. Ellen
Whorley just smirked at her husband and went to the bar where she
began building herself a mammoth high ball.

"Carolyn, perhaps you'd like to introduce your
lawyer," Ted Whorley said.

I felt like I had just walked into a Charlie's
Angels episode, with Ted Whorley as the Tom Bosley
character.

Samantha Whorley was lovely, in a country girl
kind of way. He hair was a frazzled reddish blond, and her eyebrows
were the same. Her eyes were brown and small, her nose and ears
were dotted with freckles. She had a nice open smile. Her arms and
legs were hard, her musculature well defined. Her shoulders were
square and I was sure there was not an ounce of fat on her body.
She wiped the sweat off her hand on her shorts before extending it
to me when Carolyn introduced us.

I smiled back at her. "Nice to meet you, Mrs.
Whorley," I said.

''Really? I wish I could say the same,” she
said. “So you're the creepy little asshole that's exploiting my
husbands death?" The smile never left her face.

"Sam!" Carolyn sputtered, "We talked this out
last..."

"Save your breath, Carolyn," Samantha Whorley
said without looking at her. ''I only agreed to meet you, Mr.
Knight, because I wanted to see what kind of man you were. You're a
handsome devil; I'll say that for you. I can see why you would take
in Carolyn. But, I'm not taken in by you, Mr. Knight, you're a user
of people. You should be ashamed of yourself."

I stood there blinking, unsure of what to say.
"I'm sorry you feel that way ... "

"No you're not. You don't give a shit. You got
yourself a live one here. Rich, beautiful, you're gonna milk her
for all you can get. How's it going to work, Mr.
Knight?"

She said my name with such thick disdain that I
winced.

"First we'll find someone to blame for Red's
death, right ... or maybe not even ... maybe we'll blame the city
or the state or someone for not finding out who killed him. You
ought to be able to burn up a pile of fees doing that. Then you
sue. Take a couple year run at that at what...three or four hundred
an hour? Civil rights violation or something. With Carolyn's money
behind you, you can probably keep this alive for a long time. Do
they teach you guys how to play a sucker like Carolyn in law
school, Mr. Knight, or do you have to be born with a con man's
instincts?"

"Sam you stop this right now. Mike is not like
that at all! He tried to talk me out of it and ... "

"And then he got to thinking," Samantha cut her
off, her eyes fixed on mine, on fire now. "Got to thinking about
that mortgage he could payoff ... and those law school loans? Sure.
He found a sweet meal ticket. You want to drag up all this crap
about your Father, Carolyn, I can't stop you. I wish I could, for
his sake. But I don't have to help you, and I certainly don't have
to make nice to your lawyer!" She snatched her bag up off of the
floor.

"Mrs. Whorley," I tried, "I certainly have no
intention of spending Carolyn's money just for the sake of legal
fees. There are some things that you should know about the ...
"

"I'll tell you what Mr. Knight, fuck you. Save
you're stories for someone else. Do me a favor? When you finish
your drink make sure to throw the glass away." And with that she
was gone off into the house.

I stood there stupidly in the middle of the
patio. Ted Whorley was looking down at his shoes and swirling a
couple of olives around in the bottom of his martini glass. He
looked almost as uncomfortable as I felt.

Ellen Whorley was leaning against the bar table
nursing her drink and smiling. She had let her hair down and I saw
that it was really a raven color, almost black, and cut in a short
pageboy. She was the opposite of Samantha Whorley in appearance,
and I hoped in demeanor. She had smooth, dark skin and her long
neck was dotted with perspiration. Her eyes were violet-gray, her
nose was sharp and trim. She had high cheekbones, a wide mouth and
white, even teeth. Her body was long and shapely; her breasts and
hips full and her waist narrow. She had one ankle crossed over the
other and was chewing an ice cube, leaning on the bar with one
hand. Her eyes smiled at me. ''Gee, that went well," she said, her
eyes smiling, and turned back to the bar to mix herself another
drink. "You're the life of the party there, Mr. Knight."