Michelangelo's Notebook Page 17

  “I think it was murder,” said Kenny, his voice heavy with doom.

  “Why?” said Izzy. “People bleed for all sorts of reasons. Maybe he had lung cancer or an embolism or something.”

  “I don’t think he could see too well, or his goggles got clouded up.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “There’s broken bottles all over the bottom of the pool.”

  “Bottles?”

  “Yeah, like you’d take a bottle and smash it and then put the bottom of the bottle on the bottom of the pool. I’ve got twenty-twenty vision and I could barely see them. There’s hundreds of them. It looked like he was swimming and started walking up the deep end and got cut, badly. Not to mention this big long sliver of glass that’s sticking out of his mouth. That was no accident.”

  Izzy took a sip of coffee and fished out his Zippo and his Marlboros. “A sliver of glass?”

  Kenny nodded, somber. “About a foot long, like a dagger. Looks to’ve cut his tongue just about in half.”

  Izzy snapped open the Zippo, fired up his Marlboro and took a deep drag. He stared down at his breakfast plate. He felt a bubble of gas moving painfully through his system. He should have had something simple, maybe just the oysters. He sighed again and let out a cloud of smoke.

  “Well, you’re right there, Kenny boy. A foot-long piece of glass sticking out of an old man’s mouth sure doesn’t sound like an accident, even in Gulf Shores.” He pushed himself away from the table and heaved himself upright. The gas bubble gurgled. “We better go take a look.”

  32

  Finn Ryan pushed away from the computer in the Ex Libris office, pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and squeezed her eyes shut. At her right hand there was a ragged pile of scribbled sheets from a yellow pad representing her efforts over the past few hours. She sat forward, yawned and tapped the pages together, trying to concentrate. Half her thoughts kept wandering back to the warm liquid feeling in the pit of her stomach and the faint iron memory of Michael as he’d slowly pushed into her, neither of them able to wait for the bed, her legs wrapped around his waist as she sprawled back over the table in the kitchen. Wonderful enough and enormously satisfying, but always with the feeling of distance and loneliness, of someone who could never quite give all of himself. A dark, cold anger that was as much the source of his sexuality as simple passion. Perhaps it was only the age between them but she knew that whatever they had together was not going to last for very long, one way or the other.

  “Fiona Katherine Ryan, you think too goddamn much.” She stared down at the yellow sheets in her hand, focusing. Who else would start up an intimate relationship with a man at least twenty years older than her in the midst of investigating a murder or two and trying not to get killed in the process herself? And all because of a sheet of parchment inked by the hand of a genius five hundred years ago. It didn’t seem quite real, but then she remembered the copper tang of blood in the air that signaled Peter’s killing and the black insect helmet of the homicidal bicycle freak as he spun through the air to his death. Very real.

  She’d started her research by looking for a Greyfriars Web site. For some reason she’d been a little surprised to find that it was slick, graphic-based and very sophisticated. She’d been expecting something a little plainer, an austere page in Times New Roman with a crest in the corner. The crest was there, the faintly sinister image of a shield split by a bar running left to right with three thistles on the right and a black swan with two Maltese crosses on the left. The word Greyfriars and the Latin motto Mens Agitat Molem sat over the shield. A scroll ran below with a second obscure verse in Latin: Aut Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam. The first motto meant: Mind Over Matter and the second, roughly translated, meant: I Shall Find a Way or Make One.

  According to the Web site’s canned version of the school’s history the Mind Over Matter motto fit the school’s original purpose. Founded in 1895 by a Calvinist minister named George Haverford, the first principle of the school was to remove boys from the temptations of the opposite sex in an utterly isolated environment where they could turn their attentions to the Teddy Roosevelt concept of manliness in all things—particularly sports, military training and rigorous academics. Add cold showers and a hefty dose of hard-edged religious teaching and you had a school that every parent of the time could love. Reading between the lines it was the epitome of “Children should be seen and not heard”—and seen as rarely as possible. In every way that Finn could see it was the worst of everything she’d ever heard about English boarding schools.

  Searching the Web and using Valentine’s private and very complicated search engine, something called ISPY-XRAY, Finn found a variety of Web sites, some established by ex-Greyfriars students and others by run-of-the-mill information junkies that told a different story. Looked at a little closer it appeared that Greyfriars had a less illustrious background than the official Web site suggested. According to what she’d discovered, the “manliness” of the school had led to half of the alumni from the mid nineteen hundreds being slaughtered in the trenches of Belgium and France. An inordinate number had committed suicide. The hazing of lower form kids by their “betters” in the senior grades had led to at least one death and a series of lawsuits just before the Crash of 1929 that had nearly bankrupted the school. What the lawsuits didn’t take, the Depression did, and the school foundered, buried under debt and bad publicity. In 1934 a group of alumni purchased the school, which by then was in receivership. At this point, Finn stumbled on her first real clue: a list of Greyfriars’s new trustees. There were twelve names in all but it was the first six that caught her attention:

  Alfred Andrew Wharton

  Lauder J. Cornwall

  Admiral Tobias Gatty

  Jonas Hale Parker III

  Orville Dupont Hale

  Jerome C. Crawley

  There was no room for coincidence; there couldn’t be. A. A. Wharton was presumably the present headmaster’s grandfather; Lauder Cornwall had to be related to James Cornwall, the late director of the Parker-Hale; Jonas Parker and Orville Hale were descendants of the museum’s founder; Tobias Gatty was obviously connected to the colonel; and Jerome C. Crawley related to Alexander Crawley. No coincidence, but no real connection either. What did six school trustees from the thirties have to do with a pair of present-day homicides and an errant page torn from a notebook half a millennia ago? Mysteries were mysteries but this was verging on the impossible.

  Finn glanced up from her notes and looked around the room and its Sherlockian décor. She vaguely remembered something from a Sherlock Holmes story she’d read in first year English lit: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So if the venerable detective was anything to go by, there was a connection; she just wasn’t seeing it. The next two hours spent in front of the computer didn’t make anything any clearer though; if anything, her research into the names and their associations only made things more confused.

  Using the ISPY search engine, Google, and everything else she could think of, Finn ran not only the first six names but the rest as well, tracing them forward from 1934. Unlike schools such as Phillips Andover in Massachusetts—with alumni including everything from the creator of Tarzan to gay rights activists and assorted recent presidents of the United States—Greyfriars seemed to specialize in people just under the public radar. Of the twelve trustees who took over the school in the 1930s none was truly “A” material. Parker and Hale were only the inheritors of family fortunes and not their creators, like a Cornelius Vanderbilt or a John D. Rockefeller. Gatty was only a rear admiral and the ship eventually named after him was a Liberty cargo vessel, not a battleship or an aircraft carrier. Jerome Crawley, a lawyer, had worked with Bill Donovan, the man who headed up the OSS, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. All twelve trustees were like that: senators but not governors or presidents, secretary of the interior but not secretary of
state, deputy directors of the CIA but never the head. In fact, when it came to government, the trustees and the sons who followed them were almost invariably non-political appointments: clerks to Supreme Court judges, but never the judges themselves. In business and every other facet of life it was the same—not quite famous, but never scandalized and never dropped. It was almost as though it had been planned that way, and after a while Finn began seeing a vague pattern: the trustees and their progeny weren’t the movers and shakers, they were the bureaucrats and bean counters—the people who held the real power, and held it the longest. A president lasted four years, eight at best; a senator could go on for half a century if he was smart about it, quietly inserting himself or herself onto a dozen or more critical committees. A businessman could collect board memberships like matchbook covers, few people knowing who he was or the clout he wielded. Expediency over ego. Power by proxy. It could easily have been the real motto of the school.

  The only other piece of information Finn managed to discover was the fact that all twelve of the trustees had purchased the school under the aegis of something called the Carduss Club. Carduss, she discovered, was the Latin word for “thistle,” possibly in reference to the thistle on the school crest. It was also, obscurely, a pagan sect of Satanists. As far as she could tell, the Carduss Club had ceased to exist in 1945. She found no reference to it after that date. Checking the Web site again she found that everything on it was copyrighted to the Greyfriars Alumni Association LLC—which, she discovered, was actually a numbered trusteeship that had been incorporated in Delaware for some reason.

  At that point Finn gave up for good. It was all too confusing. She checked her watch, discovered that most of the day had vanished and gathered up her papers. Maybe it would make more sense to Michael. She smiled at the thought. She thought of him as Michael now. A lover, an assault victim and a fugitive, all in seventy-two hours. She stood, stretched then threaded her way through the gloomy top-floor stacks of Ex Libris and went upstairs to the loft.

  She rode up in the elevator, a thousand facts and feelings whirling around in her head. She reached the upper level of the building, waited until the elevator had thumped to a stop then pushed up the gate and opened the rumbling doorway. She stepped out into the brightly lit foyer that opened into the living room, the elevator door shutting automatically behind her. She paused, her heart beginning to thump wildly in her chest, her mind emptying of everything but a single, simple thought: when she’d gone down to the office hours before, the foyer light hadn’t been turned on. Somewhere in the back of the loft she heard the sound of breaking glass.

  33

  Bobby Izzard smoked a cigarette and poked around in Carl Kressman’s past, meandering through each room in the expensively decorated beach house, opening drawers and looking in cupboards. Maggie and her beefy assistants had zipped Kressman up and taken him away in the big Vandura coroner’s van hours ago. Kenny Frizell was still outside by the pool, fishing for broken bottles with the skimmer net and methodically putting each deadly piece of glass into paper evidence bags, each one with its own little ID tag filled out scrupulously by the young detective. Izzy was alone in the empty house, the last of the light slanting in through the porch screens and the windows, filling the rooms with bars of dusty golden light. They’d done an initial ID by running the guy’s plates. Year-rounder, no snowbird, no record, no violations, no nothing.

  Kressman’s house was a classic Gulf Coast “cottage” of the old style, even though it was clearly very new. Covered and screened porches wrapped around the bottom floor, the second floor contained a master bedroom and a guest room and a spiral staircase led from the master bedroom to an eight-by-ten captain’s walk on the peaked roof, fitted like the bell tower of a one-room school-house.

  The main floor had a living room and dining room that looked out onto the beach and the Gulf beyond. A kitchen led off from the dining room and behind that was a small bedroom facing the pool. Across the hall from the small bedroom was a large den. The bedroom, the den and the hall all had doors leading out to the pool area.

  Even someone who had no idea of the victim’s identity would have picked up on a couple of things as soon as they entered the front door, or maybe even before. The car outside in the garage was a top-of-the-line S-class Mercedes and the furniture inside the house was mostly Edwardian, antique and expensive. Kressman had money. As well as the furniture, all of the art on the walls looked like the real McCoy, canvases thick with paint and framed with lots of gold. Izzy didn’t know art from a horse’s ass but most of it had the same rich feel as the butter-soft leather on the inside of the Benz.

  Kressman had been no fool about it either. There was a class-A burglar alarm system and it was connected to the cop shop up on Clubhouse Road, not some empty office in a strip mall and a tape that told everybody the cops had been called in a loud, bullshit voice. At the price the old man had paid for the setup in the cottage there’d have been a cruiser at his front door thirty seconds after anyone so much as breathed too hard on his precious paintings. Not only that, as it turned out the art was all lag-bolted into the wall.

  Izzy looked through the kitchen, checking the refrigerator first. In the first place it was huge, and in the second place it was almost empty. Automatic ice maker and a frigid bottle of white label Flagman vodka. Pricey stuff.

  Down below a few takeout cartons from local joints, the carefully wrapped remains of a salad and a good supply of beer, most of it in the form of stubby brown bottles of Schultheiss Berliner Weisse which probably cost more to mail order than a single glass would cost in Germany. If it was one thing Izzy knew it was his beer.

  He didn’t hesitate for a moment. He reached in, picked up one of the frosty bottles and snapped it open. He took a sip. Like old gold. The picture on the label showed women with parasols walking down a tree-lined boulevard. Even the guy’s beer was old-fashioned. Izzy gave a contented little sigh, belched lightly and continued on his tour, careful to keep the bottle top in his jacket pocket.

  He moved into the study. It was good-sized, maybe fifteen feet on a side, and there wasn’t any sign of a woman’s touch. The curtains were dark, the walls were paneled in bookshelves filled with books by the yard and he had one of those Queen Anne-style globes that slid open to reveal a well-stocked bar.

  Maker’s Mark, Hennessy Five Star, Jack Daniel’s, Johnny Walker Blue Label and a couple of single malts with unpronounceable names. Izzy grinned and wondered what Maggie would find when she sliced up the old man’s liver. He thought about the coroner’s exquisite, firm little fanny for a moment, took another sip of beer and continued his investigation.

  Collection of beer steins, collection of model cars, a ship in a bottle, an old-fashioned rolltop desk. It was locked. Earlier on, Kenny had found a set of keys on a bureau which Izzy now had in his pocket. The detective sergeant took out the ring and tried the keys one by one.

  He hit it right third time around and he pushed the rolltop back. Everything neat as a pin, envelopes and this and that sorted into the various pigeonholes. Right up front was an Acer Ferrari laptop in flame red, fitted with a wireless net access modem, very futuristic. Izzy tapped the computer on and spent five minutes noodling around in the old man’s files. Half of them were password protected.

  He got up, went out onto the porch and called Kenny in to work his magic fingers on the machine, then went upstairs to the bedrooms. Nothing in the guest bedroom, nothing of real interest in the bathroom except an array of high blood pressure medications and dandruff shampoo. No Preparation H, so Kressman had been hemmie free. He went into the master bedroom and looked around. More big furniture including an ornate four-poster bed that reminded Izzy of that scene in the old black-and-white Scrooge movie where he wakes up and realizes it’s Christmas morning.

  An old-fashioned hanging lamp hung from the ceiling and there was a palm tree in one corner, so tall its fronds were bent at the ceiling. Little rugs scattered everywhere, no wall to wall car
peting for a change. Izzy’s old man had worked house construction for forty years and Izzy’d spent his summers building crap all over New York and Jersey. He knew exactly the kind of shit you could hide under spackle ceilings and cheap broadloom. Not here: this was all top-grade stuff.

  The walls were hung with more art. Like the paintings he’d seen downstairs, these looked like the real thing, and even a slob like him could almost recognize some of it. Even a slob like him could recognize the little dwarf guy’s stuff, the one they’d made the movie about. Always wore a top hat and liked hookers—what was his name? Toulouse-Lautrec—yeah, that was it.

  The painting in question hung over the head of the bed, big, showing a man and a woman, both of them ugly, standing in some kind of beer hall at the edge of a dance floor. There was another one by the same guy, the same ugly hooker standing with a busy bar behind her. She looked bored. So was Izzy. Paintings weren’t high on his list for holiday giving.

  He went over and gave the one of the old broad standing by herself a tug. Lag bolted like all the others. Ugly or not, this wasn’t the kind of thing you picked up at the starving-artists sale down at the Holiday Inn. The burglar alarm and the lag bolts said big insurance policies. Too bad one of them hadn’t been stolen, at least then he’d have a motive to work with, but to steal one you’d have to cut it out of the frame with a utility knife and that hadn’t happened. He went over to a big chest of drawers. There was a big silver plate with personal goods in it.