THE FOURTH WATCH (24 page)

"You guys got enough cars around here?" I
said.

Whorley smiled. "My father was a bit of an
enthusiast I'm afraid."

"What's hiding under the tarps?"

"Two Corvettes," he told me, “1959 and 1966.
Both in mint condition. Dad liked 'Vetts. He would take the tarps
off of them sometimes and just look at them. I can see him now,"
Whorley said, "standing their shaking his head, like they were the
most beautiful things he'd ever seen. Didn't drive them much, but
he loved to look at them."

I nodded. “What was he driving that night, do
you know?"

Whorley frowned. "No," he said, "I guess I
don't. Maybe the Jag. He sometimes took that. He and Sam both used
to drive the Jag and the SUV's. Maybe Sam knows. But she wasn't
here so, probably not."

"She didn't look real interested in talking to
me."

"Well," he said, casting his eyes at his shoes,
"don't hold all that against her. She's still not right with my
Dad's death. Can't seem to get herself clear of it, you know. She
bites our heads off now and then too. We try to ignore
it."

"Yeah," I said. "What's upstairs?"

"An apartment. I have no idea why Dad wanted to
make an apartment up there, I guess he didn't want to waste the
space or something. When we built the garage, he just had them put
the apartment above. Nobody has ever lived in it."

I nodded. "Is there a way out the back through
here?"

"Yep. There's a maintenance bay in the back.
Want to see it?"

"Sure," I said.

We went around the stairwell and through an
alcove that led to the back. Whorley pulled a chain suspended from
the ceiling and the room was bathed in florescent light. The area
ran the length of the building and was crowded with machinery.
Tractors and lawn mowers, a pickup truck and a detached Fisher plow
rig. To the left there was a grease pit below a hydraulic lift. I
could see the backside of another overhead door in the wall in
front of the lift. Against the far wall was a large workbench.
There was a drill press, a lathe and table saws set up around it. A
large multi-drawer tool cabinet on wheels was pushed up against one
side of the workbench. The bench itself was cluttered with power
tools of all kinds. A peg-board set up behind it held a
well-organized collection of large hand tools and utility
equipment. Hammers, pipe wrenches, screwdrivers, vice grips, jumper
cables, voltage meters, etc. On a long shelf above the bench was an
assortment of cans and jars holding bolts, screws, washers, cotter
pins and nails of all sizes. The area was clean and reasonably well
organized.

There was a steel door on the back wall and
Whorley led me out through it. Directly in front of us was a paved
road and across it a copse of woods. The road ran right and left.
To the left it twisted back through the trees toward the main
drive. To the right it ran off around a slight bend, in front of
another building. Across the road from it there were horse
trailers, and to the right of them a large fenced in field. There
were no horses out.

I looked back at the garage and flicked my
thumb back over my shoulder. ''Do your own maintenance around here
do you?"

"Fernando is a magic man, really,"
he told me. "He can fix any kind of device. I don't know where he
learned it. I can't imagine they have this type of sophisticated
equipment in EI Salvador, that's where they're from. But he just
takes it apart, whatever it is, and he, I don't know,
instinctively
knows
what's wrong. It's really quite amazing. He fixes just about
anything. If he couldn't fix it, he'd tell my Father about it. The
old man was probably better than Fernando. He'd come down and start
working on the problem with him. I've seen my father under a
tractor with a shirt and tie on. If between the two of them they
couldn't repair something, I think they'd toss it out and get a new
one, rather than call somebody in to fix it." He smiled at the
memory. "Stubborn old coot."

"Your father was an amazing man," I
said.

"Yeah," Ted Whorley said, "He really kinda
was."

We went back through the maintenance area and
Whorley popped off the overhead lights as we went back out into the
garage. He led me up the stairs and unlocked another door. The
apartment was big and open. There was a large living room with
stucco half-walls and high pine board ceilings with sky lights.
Sliders led out to a suspended deck off the back. A beautifully
finished dinning room sat astride an open kitchen full of stainless
appliances. There were two baths and four bedrooms. One of the
baths was tucked off of what must have been the master bedroom.
Whorley and I wandered through the rooms. They were all empty. In
the master bedroom there was a whiskey glass on the windowsill that
looked out on the road where we had just been. There was an inch of
water in the glass, as if ice had melted in it. There was dust and
a dead fly floating in the water.

"I thought you said no one used this place?" I
asked Whorley

He frowned. "No one does," he said. "Unless Dad
was up here. Maybe he was having a drink and walking through and
just left that there.

The closet door was open a crack. I pulled it
open and on the floor was a rumpled,

burnt orange, afghan blanket. I closed the door
and we went back out into the living room

area.

When we went out through the sliders onto the
deck I could see why Red made an apartment above his garage. It
would have been a shame not to. To the left was a long, lush
valley. The deck looked out across Baron Ridge Lane, at what I
guessed must have been Baron Ridge itself, a semi-circular crust of
rock sticking up atop the trees like the half-rim of a volcano. I
could see the road I had come in on rising and falling across it.
The colors of autumn were spreading through the leaves of the trees
running down the sides of the ridge. To my right was the collection
of horse trailers I had noticed when we were out on the maintenance
road, and the fenced field was a paddock, around the perimeter of
which was a dirt track. I craned my neck over the rail and I could
see the roof of the other building I'd noticed further down. To our
left it swung back through the trees toward the main drive. This
was the road the cars took that night.

I pointed back to my right. "What's that
there?"

''Horse barn," Whorley said.

"Lets have a look."

We went out the back through the maintenance
area, picking our way through the equipment in the shadows, and
walked down the service road to the barn. The air was thick with
the smell of manure and hay. It was getting cool. The sky was going
hard blue through the leaves above our heads. Acorn husks crunched
under our feet as we made our way. The high, split rail fence that
surrounded the paddock had chicken wire strung up between the rails
on the inside. The sun had dipped below the tree line on the other
side of the barn. The meadow where the horses ran and ate was in
shadow. I could hear the horses moving in their stalls as Whorley
pulled the door open and we went in. The smell of manure was
heavier here, and it mixed with the sharp ammonia smell of urine in
the hay bedding. English and Western saddles were balanced on hooks
against the wall. Squat feed barrels were positioned between the
stalls. There were eight stalls, but only three horses. An enormous
stallion, black as coal with cloud white markings on his nose
snorted and came toward us, his stall door was the only thing that
stopped him from getting at me. I stepped back and Teddy laughed.
He dug a handful of oats out of one of the barrels and held them on
the flat of his hand. The horse nibbled them off it with his lips,
looking at me sideways with a black eye the size of a pie plate.
When he was finished, he backed off into his stall.

"My God," I said.

Whorley laughed again. "Alfred can be a bit
intimidating," he said.

"Ya think? That's the biggest animal I've ever
seen!"

"You should have seen my father up on top of
him. Riding him like he was a sports car out there on the track. He
loved that horse. No one can decide what to do about him. Sam can
barely climb aboard. Carolyn takes him out and trots him around,
but they both say that they can tell he is looking for Red. He gets
moody, as if he feels betrayed, and they worry he'll bolt on them.
It wouldn't do to be up on Alfred if he decided to take
control."

"Alfred," I said.

"J. Alfred Prufrock, to be precise," Whorley
said smiling.

I recognized the Eliot poem, but I said, "Was
that Bruce Wayne's butlers full name?"

To the left of the stalls there was a corridor
that led to a door in the back. There were pitchforks and shovels
leaning in a corner and crops and various other gear strung along
the wall. It was a house for horses.

"Okay," I said.

"Let's go this way," Whorley said, pointing out
back.

We went through the door and found ourselves
out on another leg of the red brick walk. Straight ahead sat a
helicopter on a large circular macadam surface. "Nice," I
said.

Whorley shrugged. "I guess," he said. "He used
to fly it to work sometimes, and

down the Cape. I don't know how to fly the damn
thing."

We turned right and headed back across the
lawns toward the house. "Helicopter, sports cars, horses ... your
old man knew how to live, Teddy."

He smiled. “Check that out," he said pointing
at a square wooden box with a flat roof off in the shadows of the
trees.

"What is it?"

"Old fashion steam house. Hot rocks and boiling
water. Red would go out there in the dead of winter, broil for a
half an hour then roll around in the snow bare ass, until he turned
blue!" Whorley shook his head. "He was a piece of work."

As we went back toward the main house, I
noticed that the barn and garage gave easy access to the pool area.
There was a latched gate on the backside of the pool fence,
allowing entrance from the south lawn. I was pretty sure I knew
what happened the night that Red Whorley died - and it wasn't
accidental drowning.

16

NO SELF-RESPECTING WOMAN
is ever ready for dinner on time. It just isn't
done. I know this. Therefore, it came as no great surprise to me
that, when Ted Whorley and I got back to the house, Maria Herrera,
the Whorley's, cook and housekeeper, and the wife of Fernando,
informed me that Carolyn wouldn't be ready to go for another
hour.

"She say if you want, she ken peek you up at
you house, Meester Knight," Maria told me. “She say leave you
heydress. You ken wait, okay, no problem, or go." She shrugged her
shoulders and rolled her eyes at the mysterious ways of rich Anglo
girls.

The kitchen was dense with the smell of her
cooking.

Maria Herrera was a portly Hispanic woman. Her
black-gray hair was pulled into a bun on the back of her head. She
wore a white apron over a flowered dress. I wrote out my address on
North Quinsigamond Ave., and listened to Maria inform Ted Whorley
that he too would be waiting to eat, because his wife was taking a
nap. Sleeping it off was more to the point.

I shook hands with Teddy, thanked him for his
time and drove home. I hoped Carolyn wasn't expecting too fine a
fare this evening. I didn't feel like going from one suit to
another. I didn't want to follow a guy in tails to my table. I
didn't want to wait an hour for him to bring me three string beans
strategically placed around the perimeter of a medallion of veal
the size of a bottle-cap. The smell of Maria Herrera's cooking had
put me in the mood for some ethnic food. Not Latin, I got the
feeling that the Whorley's got their share of that. Maybe something
middle-eastern. It's been my experience that posh restaurants don't
do ethnic well.

I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth and
dressed in a pair of tan Dockers, a long sleeved, button down light
blue cotton shirt under a cream-colored, sleeveless sweater-vest, a
woven leather belt and tan hush puppies. When I went past the
mirror, I thought I caught a glimpse of Pat Boone. I went out on
the deck and drank a cold beer and watched the moon rising in the
gathering darkness. I kept telling myself that this was a business
dinner I was going on. But that didn't jive with the way my palms
got all clammy, and my heart started pounding when I heard
Carolyn's car turn into the driveway.

I got to the door before she did, ''Hi,'' I
said, and let her in.

She smelled of strawberry shampoo and French
soap. She wore tight, white Capri's - no belt, a light cardigan
sweater over a lavender pullover with a modest scoop neck, and
sandals. Her blond curls were loose and shoulder length. Her
beautiful face seemed devoid of makeup.

She looked around as she entered. "Wow," she
said, "this is really nice, Mike."

"Thanks," I said and wandered after her as she
strolled through my digs.

She went over to the sliders and looked out at
the lake. "What a fantastic view!”

"Yeah, I like it."

"Can I go out?" She asked.