Black Dog

Fifty-Seven

Edwin Charles Jr. sat at the wheel of his idling Mercedes E55 and watched his father’s house. Only the domestic staff appeared to be in residence, and not all of them. The Strategic Services people had gone back to wherever they had come from. He decided to be bold. He took the little remote control that he had stolen from the desk in the study and pressed the “alarm off” button, then he pressed “garage” and put the car into gear.

He drove to the garage door and slowly approached it. The door went up, as it should. He drove in and chose a parking spot for his car. Then he got out, reset the alarm, went to the elevator, and pressed eight. The car rose silently to that floor and the door opened. Eddie held the door back and stepped out of the car. He could hear no sound. He cased the floor thoroughly, finishing up in the study.

Eddie searched the desk drawers and found what he was looking for: some of his father’s stationery, which was too fine and expensive to throw away. Then he took out his father’s Montblanc pen, the old-fashioned, fountain kind, and checked the ink reservoir: nearly full.

He opened a drawer, went to the correspondence file, and removed a sheaf of his father’s letters, which he often wrote by hand. Eddie and his father had been taught penmanship, by the same ancient tutor, to write in the old-fashioned Palmer Method script. He found several letters his father had written as first drafts before he gave them to his secretary to be typed. The woman had filed the originals as the copies.

Eddie put on some latex gloves, took from his pocket a will that he had written out, then rewrote it on his father’s stationery. He went over the result carefully, looking for anomalies and found only two. His father had crossed T’s on a slant, and his R’s at the ends of words were idiosyncratic. Eddie wrote two further drafts of the will before he found his work to be perfect. He went back through the file of copies until he found two that had been witnessed by household employees, two of them dead and one who had been dismissed, signed on dates shortly before his death. He practiced forging all three until he had them perfectly. Then he wrote the signatures on the will as witnesses. Finally, after more than an hour’s work, he took the will into his father’s secretary’s office and ran it through the Xerox machine. He placed a copy in the correspondence file, then wrote Last Will & Testament on the original and sealed it in a matching envelope with a bit of glycerine found in the desk.

He returned everything in the desk to its original position, then placed the envelope in the out tray on the desktop, where someone would eventually find it.

He went to his father’s dressing room and began packing still more of the man’s clothing into another, smaller piece of his alligator luggage and the matching briefcase.

Stone and Joan sat in the rear seat of Stone’s Bentley, with Fred at the wheel.

“What do the cops call this thing we’re doing?” Joan asked, yawning. “Whatever it is, it’s extremely boring.”

“It’s called a stakeout,” Stone said, “and it’s going to be boring until something happens.”

“What if nothing happens?” Joan asked.

“Then we will sprout roots and limbs and be here forever.”

“I vote not to do that,” she said. “I vote to go home. Let’s let Dino’s people do this. It’s what they’re paid for.”

“I seem to remember suggesting that some hours ago,” Stone said.

“Fred,” Joan said, ignoring Stone. “Please drive me to my house. I have a remote for the garage, so you can park there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Fred said.

“Fred...?”

“Yes, miss,” he replied. “Sorry.”

“Drive on.”

Fred glanced at Stone in his rearview mirror, and Stone nodded almost imperceptibly. Fred put the car in gear and drove away. At Joan’s house, she used the remote to open the garage, and they drove in. Nobody noticed the E55 parked at the rear.

Eddie heard a beep and went to look for an alarm screen. Somebody had entered the garage. Then another beep, and the symbol for the elevator lit up. Eddie locked the door from the study to the master bedroom and waited quietly, ready to bolt through the door to the laundry, if necessary.