Randy White: Dead Silence

I showered and dressed for dinner, then telephoned NYPD veteran Marvin Esterline. I had his cell number. He was off duty but sounded pleased to hear from me.

I told Esterline that the body of Annie Sylvester had been found and then explained about the golf-club discrepancy. I couldn’t tell him how I knew, but I gave names and addresses. He agreed to keep me posted on the results of the autopsy.

“If you played golf, you’d know that those two clubs are angled very differently,” Esterline assured me. “Depending on the wounds, it might be as obvious as the difference between a. 38 slug and a. 45. The medical examiner will know.”

Next, I telephoned Harrington. He didn’t share my interest in the murder case, but he sounded interested in the possible killer after I’d briefed him.

“A smart guy, Ivy League background, who was recruited by one of our intelligence branches. A guy who’s spent most of his life outside the country, but also an insider who has something to hide-that works for me,” Harrington responded, but there was something oddly dismissive about his tone.

I said, “Are you agreeing just to be agreeable?”

“You were describing the sort of person capable of planning something this big,” he replied. “I’m agreeing because I think you’re right. I think our guy recruited fringe-group types, already motivated, because he needed feet on the ground and didn’t want those feet to be his own. Smart, in other words. He let Rene Navarro plan and handle the really dirty parts-who better? I think the buried-alive deal was pure Farfel.

“For Farfel and his other foot soldiers, the payoff was a chance to erase the past and also get rich. As in very rich-close to five hundred million in gems and gold and collectibles, if our people had made the drop.”

I asked Harrington, “What was his payoff? The man we’re still looking for what? Money?”

Harrington hesitated long enough that I knew he was holding something back. He told me, “I’ll call you on a different network,” and he did seconds later.

“Okay, Doc, here it is,” Harrington continued. “We’re talking about a former black-ops agent. Worked overseas somewhere, using his real-world job as a cover. Exactly as you described. His payoff was a chance to destroy evidence that he was a traitor.”

I said, “You’ve stopped being hypothetical. What am I missing here?”

“You haven’t missed a thing. The man who organized the kidnapping was a traitor. Back in the sixties, he was studying leaves or rocks or something in South America and went south in more ways than one. He tipped off Castro before the Bay of Pigs invasion. That was his payoff: a chance to destroy the proof.”

I was thinking, Leaves and rocks?, as Harrington told me, “A payoff the guy didn’t expect was a visit from a mutual friend of ours. I just got confirmation. I couldn’t cut you in, Doc-you know how things work.”

I was confused and becoming frustrated. “Look, I’m in the area. Long Island. Tell me where you are and we’ll talk.”

“No need,” Harrington replied. “Besides, you have a dinner date, don’t you? With the mutual friend mentioned. Maybe he’ll give you the details.”

I felt a weird cerebral jolt. I was meeting Hooker Montbard at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor in an hour. I hadn’t seen Hooker since he’d left JFK for the Explorers Club the previous night… or, at least, told me he was going to his club.

“Doc?” Harrington said. “You there?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to relax, take a few days off. In terms of the business we discussed, you did another competent job.”

Competent: wild praise from Harrington. And it was true that Navarro was dead.

I said slowly, “You’re not asking me to drop my interest in finding out who-”

“We already know. You need to let it go, because what you’re pushing for is a waste of energy. I need you back, rested up, in good shape.”

“Don’t patronize me,” I said. “I won’t drop it. We are talking about Tinman?”

I didn’t have to explain the code name to Harrington.

“You’ve got the right person. If he murdered that girl, I suspect it was to cover up for his idiot son-even the worst of us occasionally do noble things. But the police will never charge him because the guy we’re talking about has taken a long, long trip. Dr. Hank Tomlinson has…”

Harrington allowed his silence to provide the word: disappeared.

In the middle of February, I had a total of two full weeks to myself and I spent them doing whatever I damned well pleased whenever I damned well pleased.

I hung out at the marina. Traded stories with the fishing guides, bought lunch for Javier Castillo’s widow and daughters, and got tipsy one night with my sisterly cousin, Ransom Gatrell. We ended up aboard a water-soaked old Chris Craft named Tiger Lily.

Tiger Lily ’s owners, two respectable businesswomen, decided that at least once a year the only rule should be there are no rules, so one thing led to another, as it always does when the destination is known in advance.

I exercised twice a day, running the beach, then swimming to the NO WAKE buoy off the West Wind Inn or jogging through Ding Darling Sanctuary and doing laps at the public pool.

Pull-ups were done on the bar beneath my lab. Descending sets, beginning at twenty, then nineteen, eighteen and on down to one. If my Sunday voice signaled there was absolutely no way in hell to do one more, I reprimanded the traitor by starting with one pull-up and working my way back up to at least five.

Sunday voice: It’s the voice we all hear that tells us to quit, take it easy, wait until tomorrow, why bother?, what’s the use?

To discredit the voice, all I had to do was imagine Farfel coming toward me with the power drill… or spend five minutes on the phone with Otto Guttersen.

Otto hadn’t had much free time either. For three days after Will Chaser’s escape, the man was the darling of daytime television, although he refused to discuss what he had endured as a captive after Mazar-Sharif, and he also insisted on wearing an absurd white ten-gallon hat.

Because Guttersen was funny and honest, and a relentless advocate of his teenage ward-“Toughest little cuss you ever met, I bleep thee not”-network producers tolerated the man’s quirks.

But Guttersen finally breached the limits of free speech by offending the guardians of political correctness. He told a national audience that Minnesota’s ACLU stood for Adolescent Commie Lutheran Yuppies, then went off on a tirade about sportswriters, calling them candy-asses for not voting his favorite Twins pitcher into the Hall of Fame.

“What crawled up your knickers?” he fired back when the host rebuked him. “Only thing your screener said was don’t bitch about Ethiopians or call my boy a half-breed delinquent.”

That was the end of the man’s TV career. It was also the beginning of unexpected problems.

The Minnesota Family and Children Services Agency decided that Guttersen’s remarks justified an investigation. If Otto and Ruth Guttersen had assumed the legal role of guardians, why weren’t they in New York to intervene when William Chaser was kidnapped?

The agency sought an injunction through federal courts-the boy was Native American, after all-demanding that he be housed in a neutral place, at least until the completion of three months of post-traumatic stress counseling. When the Guttersens agreed that counseling was a good idea, bureaucrats turned it around like a weapon, charging that a former POW who himself had refused counseling might be a dangerous influence on a fourteen-year-old.

So the bureaucrats had won-temporarily. Will would soon be transported to an Oklahoma safe house administrated by a psychologist who had treated Will earlier. The psychologist told reporters that she had no personal bias in the case other than an interest in synesthesia, a perceptual handicap the boy sometimes suffered.