Dust

39

“All the phones here are on software like a PBX.” Benton talks more freely now, showing me what Lucy just sent.

“A good way for Lombardi to keep tabs on what everyone was doing,” he elaborates but not happily or with the gratification that I feel as the facts are made plain, “and apparently he got a call at four fifty-seven this morning from a number that has blocked caller ID. None of Double S’s sixteen phone lines including the ones here in the house accept blocked calls.”

Inside drawers I find wooden boxes of steak knives and a variety of cooking tools, potholders, and dishcloths. There are takeout menus for local pizza and Chinese but I doubt anybody delivered up here.

“So this particular caller had to enter star eighty-two like every other poor schmuck on the planet or his call wouldn’t have gone through,” Benton says. “Lucy’s asking if I recognize the number and I do. It’s Granby’s mobile and it’s not the only time he’s called here. She says this same number has shown up a lot. The question is when.”

He types his answer to her, and he’s no longer careful about what he tells me out loud. We have evidence of Granby’s criminal involvement. Double S’s computer is proving to be a treasure trove and it’s no longer our word against anybody else’s. It’s not a suspicion or circumstantial evidence, and it’s impossible we can be accused of misrepresenting the ugly truth. The data are irrefutable and safely backed up at my office. And Benton’s boss has no idea what’s about to happen to him.

“Marino arrived at my house around five this morning,” I point out. “By then news of the body at MIT and who it might be was already on the Internet. So it appears Granby’s call to Lombardi was probably about that.”

Another irritating bicycle ring and Benton reads, and then he says, “A lot of calls back and forth between the two of them, clusters of calls back in March, April, during the time when Granby was relocating here, and dozens of them last month, some on the very days that Sally Carson’s and Julianne Goulet’s bodies were found. Christ.” Benton leans the small of his back against a counter. “This is fucking awful.”

“We knew it would be.”

“What else would Granby have been calling about if it wasn’t Gail Shipton?”

“I think you know the answer.”

“A simple one,” Benton verifies what he already believed. “She wasn’t supposed to be murdered. Nobody asked this psycho to do it and Lombardi was ballistic and he’d been there before with whoever this person is only now there’s even worse trouble because Gail is directly connected to Double S. It’s like asking a drunk to run your bar.”

“You don’t ask a drunk to run your bar unless you don’t know he’s a drunk or have something personal with him.” I slide out a knife with a nine-inch carbon-steel blade that’s curved to carve around bone.

“Get your rogue killer here, get your PR person here, serve cupcakes and straighten it out,” Benton says.

“Good luck when the rogue killer is on stimulants and craving sugar, swinging out of balance and about to explode.” I hold the knife in my gloved hand, feeling its balance and the smooth, hard shape of its elegant wooden handle.

It wouldn’t be good for killing someone. I return it to its cutlery block and it makes a quiet steely hiss as it slides into its slot.

“Of course the chef would have to confirm if something’s missing.” I don’t need to look at any other knives in Dominic Lombardi’s kitchen. “Any one of these could inflict lethal damage.”

“But it’s not what was used,” Benton says and I shake my head.

The weapon is nothing like any of these. It’s an oddity, whatever it is, and as I continue taking photographs I explain that the blade we’re looking for is short and narrow, single-edged, with a beveled angle, and possibly the tip is rounded and badly bent.

“I’m basing this on the shallow incisions with peeled skin and abraded edges that parallel the deeper ones,” I add. “And the pattern on a towel he used to wipe off the knife also gives us a clue about its shape and that it might have burrs that snagged threads when he wiped it off. Knives generally don’t get burrs unless you sharpen them.”

Another bicycle bell, a long text from Lucy, and she informs Benton that Lombardi’s second wife spends much of her time in the Virgin Islands where he has a number of companies registered. Shell companies, Lucy suspects, including art galleries, high-end spas, stores, hotels, construction, real estate development.

“Businesses convenient for money laundering and probably drugs,” Benton suggests. “Maybe labs where the designer drugs are coming from, here or abroad.”

He opens a door near a half bath, with a toilet and sink, and a windowsill overflowing with gourmet magazines. Bon Appétit, Gourmande!, Yam. The leisurely reading of a French chef who suddenly has no job anymore. And people like him would be a dime a dozen if he went back to Paris, where his wife is with someone else and his children have no use for him. Tout est perdu. Je suis foutu, he said to Benton when he and Marino were making their clandestine tour.

We climb carpeted steps, four of them, and then a landing with prism crystal sconces spilling from faux-stucco walls. I imagine Lombardi climbing and pausing to rest or catch his breath with thick, stubby-fingered hands on the polished brass railings, the diamond ring on his right pinky and the bracelet of his solid gold watch clicking against metal as he moved his heavy body along. Getting around his compound and up to the master floor couldn’t have been easy, as big as he was.

Benton opens another door that isn’t locked because he left it that way and on the other side is a vast space overwhelmed by antique Italian furniture in rare woods, and the elaborate crown molding and decorative relief on the walls and ceiling are gold. A multicolored, two-tiered Murano fruit chandelier hangs from a faux Michelangelo mural of God creating Adam, and there’s a circular conversation settee upholstered in gold satin near the foot of a bed fit for a king. The headboard is more than five feet high and a brilliant red with gilt acanthus.

A Renaissance desk with a Florentine throne chair would never have handled Lombardi’s considerable girth, and the Venetian mirrored chests of drawers would have reflected his discontent and glutted boredom every time he opened a drawer. Drapes across the floor-to-ceiling windows are crimson velvet with intricate gold and silver embroidery, and when I push a panel to one side the lining is gold silk, heavy and lush against my hand. I look out at the view of his bloated world where everything had a price and probably meant nothing, paid for with the blood and suffering of whoever he could squeeze the smallest commodity from, whether it was sex, murder, or money for designer drugs that will make you insane and dead.

The unlit connected walkways are barely etched in the foggy dark early night and there are no lights on in the spa building, and I notice for the first time that the back of the office building has no windows. Lamps along the winding drive are smudges of yellow light and beyond are the voids of the paddock and the pond, and then the gambrel barn. It hulks against a black horizon, a hint of light seeping through spaces in the wide sliding door and shuttered windows that are barred, and I wonder who’s in there besides the horses. The staff who heard and saw nothing have made their exodus, and Marino would be waiting for us but I doubt he can. He’s NEMLEC, he’s nothing, and Granby’s henchmen will have told him he’s nonessential and to leave. I continue to glance at windows and doors and to look for lights and listen for sounds, wondering when the same thing will happen to us.

I walk over to the bed stand, with its alabaster lamp, a cut-crystal carafe, and water tumbler, and I slide open the drawer. Inside are a pistol with a satin nickel finish, a.50 caliber Desert Eagle with enough rounds to wipe out everyone on the property and on neighboring farms and then some. Lombardi didn’t bother to arm himself when he picked up Haley Swanson at the commuter rail station and sat down with some drugged, sugar-craving acquaintance or connection who might have fancied himself an assassin or a hero.

I close the drawer and move to a mirrored bookcase to the right of the bed, its reflective shelves arranged with framed photographs of Lombardi during different eras of his violently ended life. A young boy sitting on the front steps of a row house in what appears to be a rough neighborhood, probably in the fifties based on the cars lining the city street, and he was sandy-haired and cute but already hard looking. There are plenty of pictures of him with women, a few of them famous, in nightclubs and bars, and then sitting at a wrought-iron table with a handsome dark woman who I suspect is his wife, surrounded by a lush tropical garden on the edge of a magnificent stone pool.

Then another photo of the two of them and in the background is a magnificent villa that looks very old and reminds me of Sicily. And there are photographs of the couple and possibly their three children, a boy and two girls in their late teens or early twenties, on a white yacht, cruising turquoise waters near dark green mountains and red-roofed villages that could be the Ionian Islands, and Lombardi is older now and grossly overweight. His puffy face and small, squinting eyes look discontented and bored as he poses on the teak deck in the midst of beauty and luxury that should have seemed beyond the wildest dreams of the boy sitting on the steps in a poor neighborhood, assuming Lombardi remembered that boy. But I doubt he thought of him anymore or dreamed.

A photograph that doesn’t fit with any of them is the one I pick up and look at carefully, a big gray elephant that dwarfs the young man giving him a bath, holding a running hose and a scrub brush. I move the photo in the lamplight and study the small but strong-looking shirtless figure in baggy camouflage shorts, tightly muscled with dark hair and an empty, icy stare as he grins boldly into the camera.

I feel the hair prickle on my scalp as I notice his shoes, black running gloves, his powerful tan legs ending in what look like black rubber feet. The photograph was taken in a grassy area with coconut palms surrounded by a chain-link fence and beyond are deep blue waters, a speedboat going by, and beyond it white cruise ships are moored at what I recognize as the Port of Miami.

“Who is this?” I ask Benton.

He steps close to look, and then he steps away to give me space as I continue seeing what there is to see for myself.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but we should try to find out.”

“The Cirque d’Orleans is based in South Florida.” I return the photograph to its mirrored shelf. “And at the first of this month it was in this area and the train was parked at Grand Junction for several days. Right in the middle of MIT.”

“I suppose it’s possible Lombardi owns a circus, too. That would be a good venue for distributing drugs, also a way to launder money, faking ticket sales, and who knows what. Maybe he dealt with the black market selling of exotic animals. Who the hell knows?”

I take several photographs, angling the camera to avoid reflection and glare as best I can, and I ask Benton about Dominic Lombardi’s family.

“He has the second wife in the Virgin Islands, according to Lucy, possibly the woman in a number of these photographs,” I say. “What about children? Has Lucy mentioned anything about that?”

“I’ll ask her.” He types a text on his phone.

Benton waits in front of a standing cheval mirror carved with cherubs playing music and I see him front and back, facing me and reflected in the glass.

I look at a Luca Giordano painting of blacksmiths and next to it an André Derain seated woman before an abstract background of reds and greens. Pierre Bonnard, Cézanne, and Picasso are arranged unimaginatively on one wall and I ask right off if they might be expert forgeries.

“I’m sure that’s what he told anybody who might have seen them,” Benton says. “What do you think?”

“I feel like I’m in an art gallery or a vulgar palace, I’m not sure which. I guess the answer is both. I don’t know if they’re real or not but they’re magical and he probably didn’t even notice them beyond what they’re worth.”

“The Maurice de Vlaminck you’re standing in front of, stolen in Geneva in the 1960s. Valued at around twenty million.” Benton’s eyes follow me.

“And the others?”

“The Picasso was last in a private collection here in Boston in the 1950s. It would go at auction for around fifteen million except for the minor problem that it’s hard to sell stolen art unless the buyer doesn’t mind and there are plenty who don’t. Masterpieces like these end up in private homes. They hang in yachts and Boeing business jets. They make the rounds until they surface like these will now. Someone dies. Someone gets caught. Someone realizes what he’s looking at is genuine. In this case all of the above.”

“You know this off the top of your head.”

“When I was growing up we had a Miró in the living room and one day it was replaced by a Modigliani, and after that a Renoir, and at some point there was a Pissarro, a snow scene with a man on a road.”

Benton moves away from the mirror to look at the Vlaminck, a painting of the Seine in intense colors that are mesmerizing.

“We had the Pissarro the longest and I was very unhappy when I came home from college and it was gone. There was this space above the fireplace where the art rotated. My father bought and sold it often, never really got attached to it. To me each one was like a cat or a dog I grew to love, or not love, but I missed every one of them when they were gone the same way you miss your friend or most boring teacher or even the bully in school. It’s hard to explain.”

I know about his father’s love of fine art and how much money he made from it but it’s the first time I’ve heard about the space above the fireplace and the Pissarro that Benton missed.

“It took five minutes to find out about these. I e-mailed photographs to my office before Granby sent me home.” Benton holds up his phone, which has become our most trusted link to truth and justice. “The small bronze on the bedside table is a Rodin. You can see his signature at the base of the left foot, stolen from a private collection in Paris in 1942 and off the radar ever since.”

There are scraps of paper and what look like receipts under it. Lombardi was using it as a paperweight, and the loathing I shouldn’t feel because no crime scene should be personal only gets more acute when I look inside his dressing room crammed with racks of hand-tailored suits and shirts and rows of handmade shoes and what must be hundreds of Italian silk ties. In the master bath is a countertop made of tiger’s-eye with a gold-plated sink and a shaving set made of mammoth ivory.

The back wall beyond the shower and the tub is filled with an opulent trompe l’oeil mural of Lombardi in a suit and tie posed with a magnificent Arabian horse inside an English barn, and, behind it, a stone arch that opens to what looks more like a Tuscan landscape than the Concord countryside. His plump hand rests possessively on the horse’s sleek neck as a farrier in a leather apron and chaps bends over the hind leg he holds in his leather-gloved hands, trimming the hoof. Lombardi’s jowly face with its small cold eyes seems to stare at me as I lean closer to get a better look.

The workbench is mounted with a vise and arranged with many picks, rasps, nippers, and sharpening files and a leather strop, but it’s what the farrier grips securely in his right hand that transports me to a place I never thought I’d be while inside the private spaces of Lombardi’s house. Suddenly I find myself inside the gambrel barn without going there, staring at a knife with a long wooden handle and a short, chisel-shaped blade, one side beveled, the other flat, with a hooked tip that curls in on itself to trim away a horse’s loose and dried-out sole.

“When you were in the barn with Marino was this what it looked like?” I point to the workbench inside a large stall with hay on the floor and dark wooden exposed beams overhead.

“Not quite as nice and tidy and no stone arch opening onto vineyards,” Benton says wryly. “There are a lot of tools. The horse’s name is Magnum.”