IF TYRONE XAVIER’S OFFICE looked like a bunker, Dwight Schoonmaker’s was a bunker.
Another uniformed security guard met me at the locked, bank-vault door to SECURITY CONTROL. Inside the door was a video room, a wall of monitors showing various points of the building. The monitors were scrutinized by a female security guard hunched over a communications panel in front of her. To the right was a wall of gym lockers, probably for the guards to use when changing from civvies to uniforms and back again. To the left was a glass-faced cabinet, its contents four AR-15 assault weapons, a pair of pump shotguns, and a half-dozen Glock 17 semiautomatic handguns with empty slots for a dozen more. Like the photo ID process, the arsenal seemed like security overkill for DRM’s type of facility.
In front of me was another door, to the heavy side of normal, with SCHOONMAKER on a brown plastic plaque at eye level. My guard knocked and must have heard something that made him nod to himself, because he nodded to me and opened the door for me.
Schoonmaker was sitting in a gooseneck chair behind another of the Plexiglas desktops, staring down into a red manila file. There were more files stacked on the corner of the desk. He said, “Sit down,” without getting up himself.
I took the admiral’s chair, reading his many weapons certificates on the wall before changing the chair’s original position so that I faced Schoonmaker directly rather than obliquely. He didn’t look up from the file, but another spasm in his jaw told me he didn’t like people rearranging his furniture.
I gave him till the count of five after that. Then I picked the topmost file off the stack and opened it.
Schoonmaker jumped up. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I didn’t close the folder. “Killing time, waiting for some asshole with an authority complex to get around to helping me.”
His face mottled with red, bringing out the raccoon-eyes contrast even more dramatically.
I let him come to a boil, then simmer down a little. “Dwight, let me make this easier for both of us. This is your turf, I’m the intruder. Fine. I don’t want your job, I just want to do mine. That means you cooperate, I’m gone sooner, and Mr. Davison doesn’t get to audition me or anybody else to succeed you, he decides you’re not up to the task at hand. What do you say?”
With what appeared to be a heroic effort, Schoonmaker sat back down and closed his file, eyes on me the whole time. I closed my folder and put it back where it came from.
He said, “I’ve checked up on you.”
“So I’m told.”
“I knew a dozen fuck-ups like you in Nam.” He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘Ma’am.’ “There wasn’t one of you kept his pants dry once the shit started coming in.”
“I don’t have to check up on you, Dwight. I can picture what life was like for you over there. Desk at the embassy or more likely one of the ‘import’ companies. Little apartment in Saigon, a girl or two on the side, rotated now and then so you didn’t get too badly compromised. Using the black market when it suited you, turning them when it didn’t. Kibitzing on some National Police interrogations, maybe offering a hint or two on where to attach the wires from the telephone crank box. Oh, you’d go out into the bush from time to time, babysat by a Special Forces team or a Ranger recon, but basically you lived pretty much like a corrupt cop from the thirties.”
As I talked, the mottled look came back. I said, “How am I doing?”
Through teeth about a millimeter apart, Schoonmaker said, “Maybe sometime I catch up with you in the outside world, I’ll let you know, my way.”
“I look forward to it. But meanwhile, how about we deal with the here and now, since that’s what Keck wants.”
No response.
I said, “You have a file on this I can look at?”
“A file on what?”
“Dwight, Dwight.” I shook my head slowly. “A file on the killings.”
“No. No paperwork.”
“Can you tell me what you’ve done, then?”
He seemed to ratchet his emotions down a notch. “When I got the call about Steve, I contacted Mr. Davison. He told me—”
“Wait a second. When you got the call from who?”
Schoonmaker didn’t answer right away. “From Anna-Pia.”
“Shea called Antonelli from jail.”
“That’s the way I got it.”
“Okay. What did you do?”
“I contacted Mr. Davison. He told me to get Anna-Pia and get up there, find out what the hell happened.”
“How did you reach him?”
“What?”
“Davison. How did you reach him?”
Schoonmaker thought for a minute. “He was up in the boonies, but he’s got this beeper, only for real emergencies. I raised him on it, he got on his plane’s radio and got a patch-in to a phone somewhere and called me here.”
So Davison could have been anywhere to use his radio. “You were here on a Friday night?”
“No. I was out, I got the call from Anna-Pia on my tape machine.”
“Where were you?”
A level voice. “Just out.”
Okay. “Antonelli called you at home?”
“Right. Left a message on my tape.”
“Was she home, too?”
“That’s what she said on the tape.”
“Where do you live?”
“Salisbury, near the beach.”
Like Xavier, about an hour north of Boston, just off Route 95 toward Maine. “When did you get in?”
“I checked my watch when I played her message. It was twelve-twenty-eight.”
Plenty of time for Schoonmaker to have driven back from Maine. “You have a beeper, too?”
“Yes.”
“Telephone in your car?”
“Yes,” with some acid on it.
“Why didn’t Antonelli try to reach you those ways?”
Schoonmaker used the level voice again. “I don’t know. Ask her.”
“So you get the message Friday night about twelve-thirty—”
“Twelve-twenty-eight.”
“Twelve-twenty-eight. You call Antonelli back?”
“Yes.”
“At her house?”
“Condo. Beacon Hill.”
“She lives in the city and commutes out here?”
“That’s how I understand it.”
“Then you beep Davison.”
“I drive out here, then beep him. Right.”
“So, about what time?”
“One, a little after.”
“When did you hear back from him?”
“Pretty soon after I beeped him.”
“What does pretty soon mean?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes. It takes a while to get a patch, that time of night on a weekend.”
“And he tells you to drive up to Maine.”
“Right.”
“When do you do that?”
“Saturday morning. I drive into Boston at dawn, pick up Anna-Pia at her place, and we’re up there by ten, ten-thirty.”
“What happened then?”
“Anna-Pia and I saw Steve at the jail. Then she went lawyer shopping, and I went out to the lake place, do a little recon of the scene.”
“You took the car?”
“No. Anna-Pia took the car because they’re a little light on subways up there.” Schoonmaker opened the ration book where he kept his grins and doled one out to me. “She dropped me off at this inn, and I rented a boat.”
“Marseilles Inn?”
“Right.”
“Why a boat?”
“When we were at the jail, I had a little talk with the sheriff up there, some bull dyke.”
I let it pass.
“She told me to stay off the grounds till the staties got through with it.”
“So you rented a boat to see it from the lake.”
“Right.”
“And you didn’t go ashore.”
Schoonmaker spent another grin. “Right.”
I said, “What did you think?”
The grin vanished. “I did some crisscrossing, measuring distances the way Steve told us he found the bodies.”
“And?”
“Whoever did it came through the trees or over the water.”
“Why?”
Schoonmaker held up his right hand, separating one finger at a time with his left. “First, Steve said he didn’t see any other vehicles on the road. Second, the old woman who lives just south of him has dogs that would have gone nuts if anybody approached from her direction or left by it. So the team came down that mountain behind Steve’s house or through the woods from the north or in from the lake to the east.”
The team. “The timing makes it tricky.”
“They had to be on-station or have somebody on-station, gathering intelligence for the operation.”
“Because you think they didn’t intend to kill Steve, too.”
“That’s right.”
“In that they timed it while he’d be off to the country store.”
Just a nod this time.
I said, “So who do you think it was?”
“I’m not prepared to say right now.”
“A competitor of DRM?”
A judicious pause. “Yes.”
“Which one?”
“I’m not prepared—”
“How about a list of them?”
“No way.”
“You know, Dwight, I think this competitor angle is nothing but pixie dust.”
He just looked at me.
“Nobody will tell me who the competitors are. That makes it a little tough for me to check on them.”
“I’m checking on them.”
“Ah. So, I do everybody else, and you cover the competitor angle.”
“That’s right.”
“And when we come to trial, and Lacouture looks over at you, what does he get?”
“Huh?”
“What do you give Shea’s lawyer by way of evidence when he needs to show the jury a credible alternative to Steve as the killer?”
“Whatever I’ve got.”
“Which won’t be diddly, because the competitor theory isn’t for the courtroom, it’s for your customers.”
“You don’t know—”
“You and the rest of the brain trust cooked up the competitor theory so you could slip it to your customers, ever so gently, to keep them on the string and away from the other companies. Only problem is, any competent investigation of the other companies, by me or even by you, would pretty quickly turn up nothing. Zero. So you maintain the viability of the theory by a strategy of not looking for evidence to support it rather than allowing anybody to search for evidence, not find any, and blow the theory out of the water.”
Schoonmaker didn’t say anything.
“Only one problem with the strategy. It’s great for business but kind of thin soup for old Stevie at the defense table.”
Schoonmaker gave the impression of a man wracking his brain for something that would make the situation better without accidentally making it worse.
“Tell me, Dwight, you’re pretty much into security around here. You keep track of office relationships?”
No reply.
“How about family members of employees?”
The same again.
“Okay, a little different question. When you got the call from Anna-Pia, did you contact Tyrone Xavier?”
“That … No.”
“Why not?”
“Why should I? He was just Steve’s assistant.”
“Not anybody important enough to involve in the problem.”
Schoonmaker worked his jaw a little before saying, “That’s the way we all saw it.”
“Before, you said the killer had to come from the mountain, the woods, or the lake, right?”
Very slowly, “Right.”
“It ever occur to you that a former Marine captain might have a little experience with overland or amphibious operations?”
Schoonmaker swallowed hard.
I said, “Have to be careful of blind spots, Dwight. They can kill you.”