Richard Greener - The Knowland Retribution

He knew this man calling himself Walter Sherman was trouble when he asked to use the bathroom. It was obvious he wanted to look inside the cabin. Leonard didn’t like it, but considering the circumstances he had little choice in the matter. How could he refuse? He didn’t fear exposure. Clearly he was convincingly unrecognizable. The weapons and ammunition were all locked away securely. That was an arrangement Leonard had come up with at the very beginning. He was going to be away for long stretches of time: Boston, Houston, Tennessee, Nevada, and who knows where else. He couldn’t risk someone finding his equipment, so he devised a storage compartment in his bedroom. To the naked eye it appeared as a closet, but behind the plain closet door was another locked door, this one made of steel protecting a safelike box four feet square and eight feet high. Inside were racks of rifles, shelves of special accessories, sights, stocks, cleaning materials, and boxes of ammunition. Walter Sherman could look around all he liked and never find a sign they were there. And Leonard was sure that was exactly why Sherman asked to use the facilities.

As soon as the intruder left, as soon as the sound of his car faded to silence, Leonard began packing. There wasn’t much to it. He threw a few clothes into a bag, tossed in his toothbrush and other toiletries, grabbed three jackets hanging from hooks in the back room, and loaded it all in the SUV. It took about forty-five minutes to move the rifles and other stuff from the secure closet to a lock box in the SUV. When it didn’t all fit, he decided to leave some of the ammunition behind. It was a risk traveling with weapons, but what choice did he have now? “Just make sure,” he told himself, “do not get stopped by a cop on the highway.”

Finally, he tucked a metal toolbox behind the driver’s seat on the floor. It was filled with hundred dollar bills neatly wrapped in packs of ten thousand dollars each. Then he was gone. He would never return. He did not look back. There was no nostalgia. Leaving was not sad. Nothing pulled at his heartstrings. In the last two and a half years Leonard Martin had learned not to become attached to anything. He’d shut himself off from feelings like that. He wouldn’t miss the sunsets or the crisp, chilly mornings, the smell of a fire crackling in the fireplace, the sounds of silence in the high desert. He wouldn’t miss them because he wouldn’t let himself. He came to New Mexico with a single goal-learn to kill. Having done that-and now being discovered-it was time to move on. He drove south on route 39, past Ute Lake and Logan, and picked up I-40 at San Jon. He was in Texas by the time Walter Sherman was considering his options.

New York

Just after seven, Isobel met Walter in the lobby of the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. Dressed for winter, she wore a wide-brimmed woolen hat pulled down to cover her ears and forehead, and a heavy scarf on top of the coat with the fake fur trimmings. She passed unrecognized. “Celebrity,” she thought, although her encounter with it was somewhat marginal and thus far short-lived, “was a crock of shit.”

“Why here?” she asked, after greeting him with a kiss on the cheek. It was a friendly kiss and he felt disappointed. He hoped for more and hoped it didn’t show.

“Dentists,” Walter answered. “There’s a convention of dentists here. The biggest one they have anywhere all year. Dentists love Christmas, and they love New York.” Isobel laughed and dropped her coat next to her on the couch. “Go ahead,” Walter said, “look around you. Every one of these guys pulls teeth.”

“What about the women? What do they do?”

“Hookers,” said Walter after only a slight pause.

“All of them? It appears, perhaps, that some of your American dentists prefer hookers who are, shall we say, older and a twinge on the heavy side.”

“Wives,” Walter said. “There’s a few of them too.”

“So, we’re here to see the dentist?”

“No, we’re here because the dentists do not want to see us-you, in particular. I don’t need to be ducking photographers, but you do. By the way, how did a photographer get that picture of you and whathisname in Tibet?” Isobel laughed, and so did Walter.

“It’s a hoot alright, Walter,” she said, “but honestly, I think it’s a tub of crap. Hard to imagine any person, no matter how well known, who can’t leave the makeup home, dress as casually as everyone does these days, and just walk about. I do it quite well, thank you.”

Walter said, “So, no cloak and dagger stuff for you? I’m overdoing it, you think?”

“Absolutely,” she smiled.

“We don’t need the dentists? Or anyone to cover our movements?”

“We don’t need no stinkin’ dentists,” she said.

Now he too was smiling. Isobel leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. This was more than a friendly kiss, and it thrilled him.

“No one knows who I am,” she said, using her father’s accent again. “I go anywhere and everywhere, just like the common folk.”

“Well, in that case,” Walter said, “let’s go get a good steak. I’m starving and don’t mind spending forty-five bucks for a piece of meat.” They left the Hilton and cabbed the short distance to Ben Benson’s, Walter’s favorite New York steakhouse.

When their salads arrived, Walter said, “I saw him, talked to him, used his bathroom.” Isobel was speechless. She knew he meant Leonard. A forkful of salad never made it to her mouth. Walter waited for something, but Isobel said nothing. Her eyes registered amazement.

“I found him in New Mexico. Way out in the middle of nowhere.”

“How?” she asked. And he told her everything: the guns, North Dakota, and Raleigh; the trip to New Mexico, the Pac-Mail store in Las Vegas, and the lonely cabin north of Albert. He told her how a tall, rock-hard, bearded man with some marked limitations named Michael DelGrazo said he worked for a Leonard Marteenez, not a Leonard Martin. He described the inside of the cabin. He told her how he decided to follow up the lead in Tennessee, how credit-card receipts told him Carter Lawrence had gone there to meet Nicholas Stevenson, Harvey Daniels, and a third man. He told her about Debra Melissa Wallis and the man she called the cowboy.

“My God,” said Isobel. “Michael DelGrazo is the cowboy.”

“No. Not quite. Michael DelGrazo was a man who lost his wife and children in an apartment fire in Detroit in 1962.” Isobel looked at him bewildered and confused.

“The apartment house was owned by a man named Robert Bass. It seemed Bass had paid off the fire department inspector, a man named Willard Cox, who, in turn, gave the building a clean bill of health. The place was, of course, a fire hazard, and it soon burned to the ground, taking DelGrazo’s family with it. When DelGrazo learned all this from a newspaper investigative expose, he hunted down both Bass and Cox and shot them dead. Michael DelGrazo died in prison in 1984, prostate cancer.”

“Wow,” Isobel said. “Then this Michael DelGrazo is…?” Her question hung in the air. She knew the answer already, but Walter obliged.

“Leonard Martin.”

“Oh, my God. B-but you said he looked like-”

“A man can change a lot of things in two years. Leonard did. I missed it, completely missed it.”

“The blindfold,” she said, remembering Kermit and her interview, in the dark, with Leonard. “That’s why the blindfold.” She felt bad saying it, but she said it nonetheless.

Walter described his misadventure in New Mexico again, this time in fine detail. Isobel strained to hear every word in the noisy restaurant. She asked, and he said he didn’t think there was much chance Leonard would call. Their steaks arrived, although they hadn’t touched the salads yet. The waiter insisted he would bring them new steaks, freshly cooked, whenever they were ready for them. Walter insisted the waiter leave the entrees. They would eat everything at the same time. The man was reluctant, but, as any good waiter would, he protested but consented. They ate everything he put in front of them.