‘You’re back,’ the guard at Wade’s driveway said through the gate. And with little enthusiasm.
‘And drier,’ I said, waiting for admiring words about my new green top, clear plastic windows and even the little green, pine-tree-shaped air fresheners I’d hung festively from the exposed wiring to kill the lingering reminders of the raccoons that had done dinner and more inside my Jeep.
Smothering his enthusiasm, the guard noted the time on a clipboard. And that gave me a better look at the gold watch I’d noticed him wearing the last time. It was a gold Rolex Day Date like the one my former father-in-law had worn at the moment he’d been murdered. A watch like that went for at least ten thousand dollars and must have been a gift from the Wades, brother and sister, maybe at Christmas. Ten-thousand-dollar Rolexes make excellent stocking stuffers from the rich.
The guard stepped back into the shack and pushed a button. The gate slid back and I drove up the circular drive to the house.
The front door opened before I came to a complete stop. Tim Wade himself, and not some servant or butler, was coming down the steps to greet me.
‘Mr Elstrom, it’s a pleasure,’ he said as I got out.
‘Likewise,’ I said, surprising myself by really meaning it. The guy had an air of non-pretension about him as well as the grace to not stare at a Jeep sporting a green on its top that surely clashed with the color of his carefully tended yews.
He led me inside and down a short hall, past stairs with a chairlift mounted on the wall. Oddly, a retaining bolt at the bottom had worked itself out from the base molding.
We went into a living room comfortably furnished in cloth-upholstered furniture, mostly beiges and pale greens, and sat opposite each other on settees in front of a properly-sized fireplace burning real logs. My own fireplaces, one on each of the five floors of the turret, were preposterously larger, big enough to burn whole chunks of trees. And once again, for an instant, I wondered what my lunatic bootlegging grandfather had been thinking.
On the table in front of us was a bottle of whiskey, a small glass bucket of ice and two plain water glasses no fancier than those average people had in their average kitchens.
‘As you might know, my family is reverential toward Canadian whiskey,’ Wade said, grinning.
‘My grandfather was in the trade, too,’ I offered up. ‘Beer, brewed in garages.’
He nodded like that would bond us forever, and asked, ‘Ice?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘How did you get my cell-phone number?’
‘Amanda Phelps, your ex-wife and very strong admirer, gave it to me.’ He handed me my drink. ‘My sister directs all potentially alarming emails to Jeffries, our security chief. He researched you and reported your relationship to Ms Phelps. I called her and asked her for your number. She was hesitant to give it to me but when I read her the contents of your email she relented. Though she acknowledged nothing, I got the feeling she shares your concerns.’
I turned to look out into the hall.
‘There are no guards inside,’ he said. ‘We’re alone except for my sister, who spends most of her time upstairs.’ He smiled again. ‘It was Theresa who thought it best if we spoke face-to-face.’
‘Because I threatened to go to the media?’
‘That, of course, but also we’re worried about losing Ms Phelps’ support. She’s part of my Committee of Twenty-Four. Though a newcomer to my political world, her counsel is well received.’ He paused to take a sip of his drink. ‘Concerns on her part could become contagious, perhaps spread to other members of the committee, and that could affect all sorts of things. So, from a very practical point of view, you can ask me anything about John, Willard and Red, as long as my responses are kept confidential, for your ears only. Most especially, that includes not saying anything to Miss Jennifer Gale.’
‘You saw that Internet photo of Jenny and me.’ It had been taken at a television news awards banquet the year before.
‘My sister found it, actually.’
‘I can’t control Jenny,’ I said, ‘but I’ll respect your confidence. Let’s start with that silo business.’
He winced. ‘Not my finest hour.’
I nodded.
‘The police believed it was just a prank. My sister thought otherwise. So did I, at least at first. We get all sorts of nasty surprises, though that was the first that actually had a weapon, such as it was.’
‘That little axe.’
‘That little rubber axe,’ he said. ‘We thought it a threat all the same. My sister put out the word that it was a security issue, which was truthful, at the time. Now we think it was simply a prank related to absolutely nothing, since nothing ever came of it.’
‘Nothing to do with your old friends?’
‘Will, Red and John, as you mentioned in your email to my sister?’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard from Will and Red in years, though unfortunately I did hear from John, and very recently. He made several disturbing telephone calls to our campaign office, demanding to speak with me personally.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘Blackmail, I think.’
‘You never spoke to him?’
‘No. My campaign office manager, Marilyn Paul, did. We dismissed it. There is nothing in my past that’s problematic.’ He held up the whiskey bottle. ‘You have to go back to my great granddad to catch the Wades doing something illegal.’
‘Have you wondered if Shea murdered Marilyn Paul?’
‘Impossible. She only intercepted his calls. And besides, John has since died, out in California.’
‘As did Marilyn Paul, only she was killed here in Illinois.’
He stared at his whiskey for a long moment before looking back up. ‘I don’t understand your inference. I don’t see a link between John and Marilyn.’
‘You just said she intercepted his calls to you.’
‘She intercepted many crank calls. His got passed to her as would any other. He’d used his personal number for the first one and she did a reverse look-up. She learned he was living under an assumed name – David Arlin – but recognized his picture on the Internet. She knew John from way back, as did I, of course. She confronted him, demanded to know what he was up to. He hung up on her.’
‘Did you wonder if she planted the plastic bones and rubber hatchet?’
He looked genuinely shocked. ‘For what end?’
‘I’m hoping you’ll tell me.’
‘Marilyn wouldn’t have done that thing with the bones. She had no reason. And anyway, those bones and that little axe meant nothing, as I said. They were just a prank that I overreacted to, which we then covered up.’
It was impossible not to like the man’s straightforwardness. Yet something – his overwhelming earnestness, maybe – held me back from telling him it had been Marilyn who’d salted the silo with the bones.
‘Maybe John said something on the phone,’ he went on, ‘that she never passed along to us. Perhaps she thought all three of the old gang were involved in shaking me down; I’m wealthy, I’m running for office. I’m vulnerable. Above all, Marilyn must have believed that we weren’t taking John’s vague threat seriously enough. And that says a lot about her, that she’d use her own funds to hire you to get to the bottom of a threat aimed at me. I’m going to miss her.’
He smiled at my lack of a response and went on: ‘No, Marilyn did not tell me she’d retained you but it’s obvious from your two emails. First, you contacted my sister saying you and she have a mutual interest in something for which you are being framed. After we learned you live just up the river from where Marilyn’s body was found, it was simple to assume you were being framed for her murder. Then you wrote, demanding to know what we know about John, Willard and Red. That connects you to her because Marilyn had those same concerns, or at least about John. I’m guessing now she was concerned about all three of them, since you’re concerned about all three.’
He held up the bottle, offering to freshen my drink. I shook my head. I’d taken only one sip.
Wade leaned back. ‘We were the Four Musketeers: John, Willard, Red and me. I don’t remember who tagged us as such but the name stuck. We worked on the Delman Bean campaign years ago and we had fun. We were young, single, liked to drink and liked to laugh. They were good times. And then it was over. John and Willard and Red got great jobs with some oil company in California.’
‘They quit so suddenly.’
‘Who could blame them? They had lousy jobs here and they saw a great opportunity.’
‘It was so sudden that not even you, their fourth musketeer, had any inkling they were about to take off?’
‘They never said a word, and for a long time I was a little hurt by that. Now I realize they didn’t think I’d understand because our economic circumstances were so different.’
‘They gave you no hint, whatsoever, that last night you were together?’
‘Beers as usual. I was shocked all to hell when John called me the next morning.’ He looked out the window for a moment. ‘It sure screwed Delman Bean. We were depending on them to chauffeur voters to the polls. Bean lost by just a few votes.’
‘You never heard from any of them again? Not a word, not a card?’
‘Not until John called my campaign office a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Only John Shea?’
‘Red sends a Christmas card every year but it’s a preprinted, impersonal thing – something a mailing service could do.’ He picked up a cell phone from the lamp table beside him, made a call and asked for the security man he’d mentioned, Jeffries. ‘I’d like to send someone over to talk to you,’ he said to whoever answered. ‘Tell him about Marilyn and John Shea. Hold nothing – repeat, nothing – back.’ He listened for a moment, and then clicked off.
‘I don’t expect you to take my word for anything, Mr Elstrom,’ he said.