Randy White - Dead Silence

I said, “Hey, old buddy, it’s me.”

His smile was a mix of chagrin and admission. “Sorry. I’ve got a problem with power, you know that. The Bonesmen scare the hell out of me. That fraternity produced how many presidents and vice presidents? A couple of Supreme Court justices and at least two directors of the Central Intelligence Agency. In almost two hundred years, no Bonesman has ever gone public with the fraternity’s secrets. Do you have any idea how much power they have?”

Fifteen minutes earlier, I had heard Virgil Sylvester say something similar about the Hamptons.

“But, hey, I did tell you I’m pretty sure Norvin was recruited by the CIA. It was almost the same as telling you.”

Sort of. Skull and Bones is a favorite of conspiracy kooks. The fraternity’s tradition of secrecy invites wild theories, but so do the few known facts. The OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was founded by Ivy League graduates. Most, if not all, Bonesmen are offered interviews by the various intelligence agencies. The amount of wealth and power the fraternity wields is remarkably disproportionate to its tiny membership.

Even so, the theories are ridiculous. I don’t believe that secret societies hatch international plots, for the same reason I don’t use comic books as research material. When I meet more than three people who can keep a secret when their lives aren’t on the line, I’ll starting giving conspiracy theories another look.

Tomlinson said, “They recruited us heavy back at Harvard, too, of course, spook agencies. Thank God I couldn’t remember my Social Security number or they might have hired me full-time instead of just cashing in on my special skills. But you know about that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.” Tomlinson’s credentials to lecture on clairvoyance were better than most. He had participated in a program called Stargate by its many critics. The Pentagon preferred Asymmetrical Intelligence Gathering Research, and funded the study after discovering the Soviets were recruiting telepathic savants to work as “psychic spies.”

This wasn’t conspiracy theory fantasy, it was documented fact.

My friends in the intelligence community had confirmed that Tomlinson turned in one of the highest scores ever recorded on what must have been a bizarre test used to cull prospects.

We were in Norvin’s room-an apartment, really. One of several in the family’s thirty-room “summer residence.” The place had been built during the days of mustang capitalism, back when the Du Ponts, Rockefellers and Kennedys were making their fortunes.

Tomlinson had introduced me to the family maid, Greta Finnmark, now one of the caretakers. Good-looking older woman, blondish and busty, with Nordic eyes and a Nordic accent, who had to have been a knockout in her day. She slipped her arm through Tomlinson’s, cooing and smiling, saying, “Guards, my dear sweet boy, it is so good to have you home!”

Guards, short for Guardian -her strange pet name for Sighurdhr.

“Because, even as a child, he was always looking after people, trying to raise their spirits if they were sad,” she explained to me. Sincere, too, because she didn’t get it when I replied, “Oh, yeah, he’s a regular Boy Scout. Still raising everything he can.”

Greta led us through the restaurant-sized kitchen, then turned us loose in the first of two great halls. The furniture was covered with tarps, and it was cold as a cave. Greta had confirmed that the main house was rented each summer, then closed in the off-season.

“The rent charged by your family’s trust company is incredible!,” she had said. “For the same money, you could buy a house most places. But they pay. Oh yes, the rich people from New York, they wait in line to pay!”

There was a grand piano near the fireplace. Tomlinson tossed back the cover and played the first plaintive notes of “Clair de Lune” before he noticed that I was staring at a painting over the mantle. It had to be his great-grandfather, the man who’d built the estate. Remove the tux, add a decade of tropic seas, taverns, midnight water, rock ’n’ roll plus salt-bleached hair, and it was Tomlinson.

I wasn’t surprised when my pal stood and motioned me along, saying, “Speak of the devil, huh? Say good-bye to Hank-friendly name for a cold-hearted genius.”

“That was your father’s name, wasn’t it?”

“No, Dad’s name was Hank, as in Hank. The old man’s name was Hank, as in Henry. I told you how he made his dough. Blood money, which is why I’ll never take a cent of it.”

There it was again.

During World War I, the elder Tomlinson had made a fortune off of royalties from a couple of patents. Something to do with a synchronizing device that allowed airplanes to fire machine guns through spinning propellers.

I had read that the invention had changed the course of the war-maybe history-and accounted for huge kill ratios. In that war alone, the invention had facilitated many thousands of deaths.

From the great hall, Tomlinson led me to the west wing, which was sealed by massive doors. He was perturbed they were locked. “It’s the only modern section of the house, if you catch my meaning. There’s a five-car garage, so if anyone’s around…” I didn’t hear the rest because he jogged back to the kitchen for the key. But Greta said she didn’t have it.

“She’s got keys,” Tomlinson told me as I followed him outside, “but she can’t let me use them. It’s the same reason she pretends not to know anything about my brother or father. She’s scared.”

I said, “If her job’s on the line, can you blame her?”

“For sure. I loved that lady, man. With a rack like that, who wouldn’t? She was my wet nurse.”

I said, “Huh?”

He wagged his eyebrows- End of subject -before saying, “If there’s a trust company running the place, it means my father’s still alive. Hell, he could be on the property right now and she’d be a fool to tell me. Or my brother could be holed up here. Fifteen acres-there used to be anyway-including two guesthouses, staff cottages and a machine shop the size of a barn.

“Old Hank would crap his burial skivvies if he knew the place was being rented. Commoners? Yuppies? God forbid, a Protestant. Damn, I should’ve brought a flashlight. But you’ve got one, I bet. The ultimate flashlight snob.”

I said, “I do, and you might be right,” as I took a mini ASP Triad from my pocket. Palm-sized, but it fired a beam so bright it was considered dangerous. I shined it through a garage window. Empty. Next, we went to the machine shop. It was a museum piece of 1890s technology. Industrial lathes, metal stock, instruments for precise threading and tolerances. Both guesthouses were locked, no sign of activity through the windows.

In a wooded area was a cabin where Tomlinson said he’d often slept on summer nights. I watched him stand on tiptoes, feeling along an overhead beam, until he said, “I’ll be damned,” then showed me what looked like a Wonder Bread bag twisted into a knot. Inside were two brittle Trojan packets and a rusted harmonica. Unfortunately, the harmonica still worked.

Outside was a faded outline of a catcher painted on the wall. Sixty feet six inches away was an indentation where there had once been a pitching rubber. Tomlinson stopped blowing on the harmonica long enough to tell me, “Fifty to a hundred pitches a day,” then showed me where his first and only dog, Elvis, a springer spaniel, was buried.

He was right, the estate was huge, at one time a self-sufficient village. It would take a full day to search the place.

We returned to the main house. As I followed Tomlinson up a winding staircase, I said, “When you told me rich, I had no idea,” hoping he’d put the damn harmonica away if I kept him talking.