The House That Jack Built

6. This is the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog…

They were drinking coffee and eating bagels in a Sabal Key joint called The Miami Deli. It was eight o’clock on Tuesday morning, the ninth day of February — and the sun was shining. This was akin to a religious miracle. Everyone in the place was grinning at the February sunshine that streamed in through the windows facing the beach road. Convertible automobiles with their tops down flashed by in the February sunshine outside. It was like Florida again.

The woman sitting with Warren Chambers was twenty-six years old, a tall, slender, suntanned blonde with frizzied hair and dark brown eyes. She was wearing a white T-shirt, cutoff blue jeans, and sandals. She looked like a beach bum. But she was a private eye. Her name was Toots Kiley.

“Where’d you learn your trade?” Warren asked her.

“From Otto Samalson. And May Hennessy.”

“Who’s May?”

“Chinese woman used to work for him. She went back to China after he got killed. Did you know Otto?”

“Only by reputation.”

“One of the best,” Toots said.

“How about you?”

“I’m pretty good,” she said, and shrugged. “Otto taught me a lot.”

“How long were you with him?”

“Six years. Started working for him when I came down from Illinois.”

“And quit when?”

“Got fired, you mean.”

“When?”

“Two years ago.”

“Why?”

“You know why, or you wouldn’t be asking.”

There was a long silence at the table. Warren picked up his cup, sipped at the coffee.

“Who nicknamed you Toots?” he asked.

“It’s not a nickname,” she said.

“That’s your real name? Toots?”

“Toots, yeah.”

“Your parents named you Toots?”

“My father did.”

“How come?”

“He loves the harmonica.”

Warren looked at her.

“He named me after Toots Thielemans, best harmonica player in the world. Listen, I was lucky. He could’ve named me Borah.”

“Is that another harmonica player? Borah?”

“You mean you never heard of Borah Minevitch?”

“Never.”

“Borah Minevitch and the Harmonica Rascals?”

“Sorry.”

“Boy,” Toots said, and shook her head.

“How do you feel about that? People calling you Toots.”

“That’s my name. Toots.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not a feminist,” Warren said.

“Who says I’m not?”

“I mean… if Gloria Steinem happened to be around when somebody called you Toots…”

“Well, fuck Gloria Steinem, I don’t like her name, either. Tell me about the job, okay?”

“First tell me you’re clean,” Warren said.

“Why? Do I look like I’m not?”

“You look suntanned and healthy. But that doesn’t preclude coke.”

“I like that word. Preclude. Did you make it up?”

“How do you like the other word? Coke.”

“I used to like it just fine. I still think of it every now and then. But the thought passes. I’m clean, Mr. Chambers.”

“How long has it been?”

“Almost two years. Since right after Otto fired me.”

“And now you’re clean.”

“Now I’m clean.”

“Are you sure? Because if you’re still on cocaine, I wish you’d tell me.”

“I am not on cocaine. Or to put it yet another way, I do not do coke no more. I am clean. K-L-double E, clean. What do you need, Mr. Chambers? A sworn affidavit? You’ve got my word. I like to think it’s still worth something.”

“There was a time when it wasn’t.”

“That was then, this is now,” she said, and sighed heavily. “Mr. Chambers, are you here to offer me a job, or are we going to piss around all morning?”

“Call me Warren,” he said, and smiled.

“What’s the job, Warren?”

“Are you still licensed?”

“Class A. Paid the hundred-dollar renewal fee last June. What’s the job?”

“Matrimonial surveillance. Man wants to know if his wife’s playing around.”

“How come you’re not handling it yourself?”

“I got made,” Warren said.

“Oh my.”

“Yeah.”

“Shame on you,” she said. “Who’s the client?”

“Man named Frank Summerville. Partner in a law firm I do work for.”

“And the lady?”

“Leona Summerville.”

“When do I start?”

“Do you have a car?”

“A very good car.”

“What kind?”

“The nondescript kind.”

“Best kind there is.”

“Otto used to drive a faded blue Buick Century.”

“I drive a faded gray Ford.”

“Mine’s a faded green Chevy,” Toots said.

Warren took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. He put it on the table, tapped it with his hand, and said, “The lady’s address and phone number. Case you need to use it for whatever nefarious purpose.”

Toots smiled as if she already had in mind a possible use for Leona Summerville’s phone number.

“Five pictures of her,” Warren said, “one in color, the rest black-and-white. A phone number where you can reach me, and a drop box you can use, all right here in the envelope.”

“The drop box is in the envelope?” Toots asked, deadpan.

“No, wise guy, the drop box is at Mail Boxes, Etc., on Lucy’s Circle. The key’s in the envelope. Aren’t you going to ask how much the job pays?”

“I’m assuming I’ll get what Otto paid me.”

“And what’s that?”

“Fifty an hour.”

“Nice try.”

“It’s what Otto paid me,” Toots said, and shrugged innocently.

“Bullshit,” Warren said.

Toots shrugged again.

“So how much are you paying?” she asked.

“One-sixty for an eight-hour day.”

“Nice try.”

“Hey, come on, that’s twenty dollars an hour.”

“I know how to divide, thanks. Thanks for the coffee, too,” Toots said, and stood up. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Sit down,” Warren said.

“Why? So you can buy a reformed user for coolie wages? No way, Mr. Chambers.”

“We’re back to Mr. Chambers, huh?”

“Only because you’re fucking me around.”

“Sit down, okay?”

She sat.

“How does twenty-five an hour sound?” he said.

“Forty sounds better,” she said.

“Toots,” he said, “we both know the going rate.”

“I guess we do.”

“The going rate is thirty-five an hour.”

“That’s right. So why’d you offer me twenty?”

“Because if you’re still doing coke, you’d have grabbed it.”

“Which means you didn’t believe me, right?”

“Not when you asked for fifty. Fifty sounded like somebody figuring how much dope that kind of money would buy.”

“No, fifty was to show you I wasn’t desperate for the job.”

“Are you desperate?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her.

“I am,” she said.

He kept looking at her.

“I need the job,” she said. “You want to give me twenty, that’s fine, I’ll take it. But that doesn’t mean I’m doing dope.”

“I’ll give you thirty-five,” he said. “Plus expenses. The going rate.”

“Thank you,” she said, and nodded.

“You want some more coffee?” he asked.

“No. I want to get to work,” she said, and picked up the envelope.

The security guard at the gate weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He was wearing a brown uniform, and there was a very large pistol in a holster at his waist.

“Yes?” he said to Matthew.

The unadorned word bordered on rudeness.

The man had jug ears, a little black mustache, black hair trimmed close to his head, and brown eyes spaced too closely together. Except for his size, he bore an unfortunate resemblance to Adolf Hitler. The few words he’d spoken had been delivered without a trace of a redneck accent. Matthew figured him for imported talent.

“I have an eleven o’clock appointment with Mrs. Brechtmann,” he said.

“Your name?”

“Matthew Hope.”

The guard pressed a button on the intercom.

“Mrs. Brechtmann?”

“Yes, Karl?”

“Man named Matthew Hope to see you. Says he has an eleven o’clock appointment.”

Says he has an appointment.

“Show him in.”

“Yes, m’am.”

He hit another button. The gate began sliding open.

“Follow the road straight back,” he said. “Park on the right.”

Morrie Bloom had once told Matthew that a cop was trained to think of all lawbreakers as bad guys. The good guys versus the bad guys. Ask any cop. The trouble with this sort of thinking, however, was that it left no room for differentiating between a man who’d illegally parked his car and a man committing a murder. This was what caused too many cops to behave like storm troopers when they approached a man who had exceeded the speed limit by two miles an hour. The man had broken the law. Hence the man was a bad guy. Hence he could expect the same treatment afforded a rapist. Argue with the cop, try to tell him he didn’t have to behave this way with an honest citizen, and he’d slap you in handcuffs for resisting arrest, and then toss you into the backseat of his car like a plastic bag of garbage.

It took one highway patrolman thirty seconds to destroy the television, motion picture, and book image of the law enforcer as a sympathetic hero.

Thirty seconds.

Morrie said cops should think about that every now and then.

It had taken Karl Hitler here thirty seconds to raise the hackles on Matthew’s neck, and he was only a security guard.

Matthew nodded icily, put the Ghia in gear, and drove through the open gate and up the road. In the rearview mirror, he could see Karl standing in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, staring at the car as it moved away from the gate.

The level road wound leisurely through stands of pine and palm.

Sunshine glanced off the polished tan hood of the car.

There was the sound of muffled waves nudging an unseen shore, and then the unmistakable aroma of salt and sea wafted through the open windows.

Florida.

Matthew smiled.

And eased the car around another bend in the road.

The Brechtmann house came suddenly into view.

It sat in majestic splendor some fifty feet back from a magnificent vista of the Gulf, the waters on this clear sunny day shading from an emerald green in the shallows to a cobalt blue in the deep beyond. Most of the sand on the southern end of Fatback Key had been washed away in last September’s hurricane, but the Brechtmann beach had been spared, seeming proof that the rich only got richer. According to Warren’s report, the Spanish-style mansion had been standing on this very spot since sometime around the turn of the century, when Jacob Brechtmann — then twenty-eight years old — carried his seventeen-year-old bride, Charlotte, to Calusa, where he gifted her with the house and erected a new brewery somewhat smaller than the one he already owned in Brooklyn.

The house had withstood at least five hundred hurricanes since it had been built, and it was still here, a seemingly permanent monument to Jacob Brechtmann’s moneymaking prowess and his expansionist bent.

Matthew parked the Ghia, got out of the car. and walked to the front door.

Leona supposed she still loved that about him. his dedication to the law. Tell Frank he could no longer practice law, and he would cease to exist. The law was his life. In his study here at home, bookshelves lined three of the walls. They contained rows and rows of books concerning the law. There were windows set above the topmost shelves, creating a clerestory effect. Sunlight slanted through the windows. Dust motes from a Charles Dickens novel lazily floated on the air. Leona could imagine a bewigged British barrister sitting behind Frank’s massive desk, pondering a brief, Big Ben tolling a quarter past the hour. Eleven-fifteen. Tooled black leather set into the desk’s richly burnished mahogany top. A brass lamp with a green glass shade. A lawyer’s room. Her husband’s room at home. She felt like an intruder.

She went to the bookshelves, searching.

Last year’s Florida Statutes.

He had brought them home from the office when the new ones arrived.

They would have to do.

She pulled the index volume from the shelf, began leafing through it, found the page she wanted, ran her finger down it:

She kept flipping through pages:

Oops, too far.

She began leafing backward.

Good.

The index directed her to Chapter 790. She took down the volume marked chapters 561–960. She sat behind Frank’s desk again and turned on the lamp with the green globe. Light spilled onto the tooled-leather top. She opened the book.

At first she thought she might have difficulty.

Subsection 790.05 read: “Whoever shall carry around with him, or have in his manual possession, in any county of this state, any pistol, electric weapon or device, or Winchester rifle or other repeating rifle without having a license…”

Damn it, she would need a license!

Damn it!

How was that possible?

In the state of Florida?

She continued reading.

And under subsection 790.25 — Lawful ownership, possession, and use of firearms and other weapons — she found:

Leona held her breath.

Under the long list of persons excepted from the licensing sections, she found at last:

Which she guessed made it legal for just about anybody in the state of Florida to own a gun.

And in case the section had not made its point, it finally concluded with the words:

The hypocrisy of the law astonished Leona.

But it also delighted her.

Because now she knew she could go into a gun shop without a license and buy a perfectly legal lethal weapon.

Sophie Brechtmann was a fat lady with a hearing aid that wasn’t working. She took the button out of her ear, shook it. She shook the battery case. She put the button back in her ear, adjusted the volume control.

“There’s something wrong with it,” she explained to Matthew. “You’ll simply have to speak very loud.”

She must have been a blonde in her youth. There were still the faintest of blond streaks in her otherwise gray hair. She must have been pretty, too. Never beautiful, but perhaps pretty in a gemütlich sort of way. Never slender, but perhaps not as fat as she was now, pleasantly plump perhaps, even zaftig. Perhaps there still resided within this cow of a woman the attractive young girl who had won the heart of Franz Brechtmann more than half a century ago. Perhaps. If so, it was nothing more than a shadow now, or — more accurately — a shade, a ghost. Only the piercing blue eyes seemed youthful. The rest — the corpulent body in the severe black dress, the bloated arms and legs, the pasty, puffed face, the hard line of her mouth — seemed to have been old always.

He searched those eyes.

Helen Abbott’s eyes exactly.

“So,” she said. “What’s this about, Mr. Hope? On the phone, you said I might have information that could help your client. A murder case, you said.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They were sitting in a sun-washed alcove off the larger living room, the room’s French doors open to the beach and the overwhelming view of the Gulf. The day was magnificent. A day for celebration. But Sophie Brechtmann was dressed in the raiments of mourning.

“I must tell you at once,” she said, “that I do not admire men who defend criminals.”

“My client…”

“Especially murderers,” she said.

“I would not have taken the case if I thought my client was guilty,” Matthew said.

“I imagine all criminal lawyers say that,” Sophie said.

“Perhaps they do. I happen to mean it.”

“Perhaps you do,” Sophie said drily. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes to tell me what you didn’t tell me on the phone.”

“We’re trying to find a person my client saw on the morning of the murder.”

“What?”

“A person my client saw…”

“Yes, what about him?”

“He may be the murderer…”

“Unless your client is.”

“No, my client isn’t,” Matthew said gently. “But even if this person isn’t the murderer…”

“What?”

“I said if the person my client saw isn’t the murderer…”

“Yes, yes, get on with it,” Sophie said.

“The possibility exists that he may have witnessed the murder. We would like very much to find…”

“What do I have to do with this?” Sophie said, and looked at her watch. “You’ve got twelve minutes. And speak up, you’re fading. My horn’s on the fritz, I told you that.”

“I thought I was shouting,” Matthew said.

“What?”

“I said I thought I was shouting!”

“Yes, well, you are,” Sophie said.

“Mrs. Brechtmann,” he said, “tell me about your granddaughter and her friends.”

“Oh, I see,” Sophie said, and shook her head. “The little bitch has surfaced again, is that it?”

“Are we talking about…?”

“We’re talking about Helen Abbott,” Sophie said. “What the hell does she have to do with your client?”

“Mrs. Brechtmann, two of your granddaughter’s friends were…”

“I have no granddaughter,” Sophie said.

Matthew looked at her.

“Helen Abbott told me…”

“Helen Abbott is a liar and a fortune hunter,” Sophie said. “And so is her father.”

“Her father’s in the hospital,” Matthew said. “Did you know that?”

“No, but I’m happy to hear it,” Sophie said.

“In any event, Helen Abbott has two friends…”

“The little bitch.”

“… named Billy Walker and Arthur Hurley…”

“Yes, I spoke to Hurley on the telephone.”

“That’s exactly what she said.”

“Did she tell you what the conversation was about?”

“I gather it had something to do with money. She said something about your meeting her price…”

“Fat chance of that!”

“… your writing a check…”

“I’d rot in hell first! Helen Abbott’s claim is an entire falsehood!”

“What is her claim, Mrs. Brechtmann?”

“Why, that she’s my granddaughter.”

“And you say she isn’t?”

“Of course she isn’t! I have only one child, Mr. Hope, my daughter, Elise. Elise has never married and she’s certainly never had any children.”

“Then why would Helen Abbott…?”

“Mr. Hope, I really don’t choose to go into a matter that for the past month and more has brought extreme discomfort to me and my daughter.” She looked at her watch. “You still have nine minutes. You told me on the phone that I might be able to help your client. The meter’s ticking. Speak.”

“Did you or your daughter know anyone named Jonathan Parrish?”

“Parrish? No.”

“Do you have any idea why Arthur Hurley and his friend would have been watching the Parrish house?”

“No. My only contact with Hurley was on the telephone.”

“Billy Walker made reference to some pictures. Would you…?”

“Pictures?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of pictures? Paintings? Photographs?”

“I have no idea. I’m asking you.”

“What about them?”

“He said he knew they would bring trouble.”

“The pictures?”

“Yes. Do you know what he meant?”

“No. Pictures? No.”

“Mrs. Brechtmann…”

“You’ve got seven minutes.”

“But who’s counting?” Matthew said, and smiled.

“I am,” Sophie said.

“Mrs. Brechtmann, I know you don’t want to talk about Helen Abbott, but…”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“I appreciate that. But I already know that her father came to see you sometime in December, just before Christmas…”

“That’s true.”

“And Helen herself came here last month sometime.”

“Yes, the little bitch.”

“And I really would appreciate it if you could tell me something about those visits…”

“No.”

“… because I’m defending an innocent man who…”

“I said no.”

“… may go to the electric chair if I can’t prove…”

“Mr. Hope, I admire your tenacity, but…”

“Mrs. Brechtmann, if those visits are even remotely connected with the case I’m handling…”

“I don’t see how they can be.”

“Please,” Matthew said.

She looked at him.

“Can you please spare me the time?” he said.

She looked at her watch.

“Five minutes is all you’ve got left,” she said.

Matthew smiled.

“You’re on,” he said.

“This was just before Christmas,” she said. “Last year. Just before Christmas…”

The man introduces himself as Charles Abbott. He tells the security guard at the gate that he wishes to see Sophie Brechtmann on a matter of some urgency. Sophie remembers the name out of the distant past, twenty or more years ago, the young chauffeur employed by her husband. British, as she recalls. Handsome young man. She vaguely remembers blond hair and blue eyes. She asks Karl to send him up to the house.

Charles Abbott comes into the living room. The room overlooks the sea. The sun is shining on this nineteenth day of December. It does not feel like the holiday season here in Calusa. It never does. Sophie can still remember Christmases in New York. The snow. The biting cold. Here in Calusa, although the room is dressed for Christmas — a huge tree in the comer, a wreath on the wall opposite the fireplace, evergreen garlands draping the banisters that lead to the upper stories of the house — one is aware only of the sunshine and the sea. No, this is not Christmas. Not for Sophie, and perhaps not for Abbott, either, who spent the first eighteen years of his life in England.

He has changed over the past… how long has it been?

He reminds her that he left his employment here nineteen years ago. Well, just a tad more than nineteen years ago. Nineteen years and four months, to be exact, doesn’t she remember? He smiles when he says this. Sophie feels suddenly uncomfortable.

He is, she supposes, in his late forties now, still handsome in a shabby sort of way. But advancing age has not been kind to him. He is far too thin. His hair is not quite as brilliantly blond as it was in his youth. His blue eyes seem faded. He has grown a sloppy mustache, and it tilts rakishly under his nose when he smiles. The smile continues to make Sophie uneasy. Why is he smiling this wax? What does this former employee want here in the Brechtmann house?

He tells her he is here about his daughter.

Helen.

Sophie politely says. “I didn’t know you had a daughter, Charles.”

“Come off it,” he says.

She looks at him.

“I beg your pardon,” she says.

“How’s Elise these days?” he asks.

The informal use of her daughter’s first name irritates Sophie further. She is reaching for the intercom button when Abbott says, “I want a million dollars, Mrs. Brechtmann.”

She blinks at him in astonishment.

“To keep quiet about little Golden Girl’s baby,” he says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sophie says.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Abbott says. “I’m talking about Elise’s baby! I’m talking about Helen, who’s your granddaughter, Mrs. Brechtmann. I want a million bucks, Mrs. Brechtmann!”

“Yes, I heard you,” Sophie says.

“No, I don’t think you did,” Abbott says. “You want to keep your Beautiful Beer beautiful, Mrs. Brechtmann? Or do you want all those beer guzzlers out there to know your darling Golden Girl got herself pregnant by the chauffeur?”

“This is absurd,” Sophie says, and immediately presses the intercom button.

“Yes, Mrs. Brechtmann?”

Karl’s voice.

“Karl, come to the house at once!”

Matthew waited.

Sophie Brechtmann was silent now.

Outside the living room, the sea sparkled in the sunshine.

“There was no substance at all to his claim,” she said. “It was something he’d pulled out of thin air. Elise was a child when he started working here, only sixteen or seventeen when he left, can you imagine the nerve of the man? To concoct such a ridiculous story? To come back with a clumsy blackmail attempt after all those years? I had Karl toss him out like the scurrilous dog he was.”

“But that wasn’t the end of it,” Matthew said.

“No. The daughter came to see me. His daughter. His little bitch, Helen. A chip off the old block.”

“In what way?”

“Tried to milk me, same as her father did.”

“This was last month sometime?”

“Yes.”

“Would you remember the exact date?”

“Yes. The twenty-eighth. A Thursday.”

Two days before the Parrish murder, Matthew thought.

There is a fire going in the living room when Helen Abbott enters. Sophie has let her into the house more out of curiosity than anything else. She wants to see what this brazen little bitch looks like. What she looks like is her father. Blond hair and blue eyes. The image of her father exactly. Tears fill the baby blues.

“Oh, Grandma,” she says, and falls to her knees before Sophie. She clutches at Sophie’s black skirts. She is playing Anastasia in a road-show production, but Sophie has already met and tossed the dog who masterminded this little scheme, and she is no more receptive to his conniving daughter than she was to him.

“I love you, Grandma,” she says, sobbing.

“You don’t even know me!” Sophie says.

“I want to know you. You and my mother both. Please let me know…”

“You have no mother here.”

“Grandma, please…”

“Nor a grandmother, either.”

“I don’t care about the money…”

“Then why are you here? ”

“The money was Dad’s idea. All I want…”

“You want the same thing he wanted, you little thief.”

“I promise you…”

“You can promise me you’ll never come here again…”

“Grandma…”

“Because next time I won’t let you in, do you hear me?”

“I want to see my mother.”

“Liar, liar!”

“I can prove she’s my mother!”

“You can prove no such thing.”

“I’ll have proof. The next time I come…”

“There’ll be no next time.”

“The minute I have proof…”

“Leave me. Now.”

“I want my share!” Helen shouts.

“Ah,” Sophie says, and nods. “I see.”

“Yes, damn it! I want what’s mine!”

“Yes, show me your true colors, thief. The money was Dad’s idea,” she says, mimicking her. “All I want…”

“I want a million goddamn dollars, you old cow!” Helen shouts. “You’d better get out your checkbook. Because the next time I come here…”

“Shall I have you thrown out, the way I had your…?”

“You’ll be hearing from me,” Helen says, and turns her back and flounces out of the room.

Silence.

Matthew waited.

The silence lengthened.

Out on the water, a sailboat came suddenly into view. Red and blue sails. Spinnaker out. Matthew wished for a fleeting instant that he was out there on that boat. Wind in his hair. Everything clean and fresh out there. Here in this house…

“The next thing was the phone call from Arthur Hurley,” Sophie said. “Same song. Said they had proof. Said they wanted a million dollars. I hung up.”

“And that’s the last you’ve heard of them?”

“Well, of course. The claim is entirely specious. They know it, and what’s more, they know I know it.”

Sophie Brechtmann looked at her watch.

“Your time is up,” she said. “Good day, Mr. Hope.”