We stumbled down the stairs, past the dining room and made it as far as the foyer when Jackie suddenly pulled up, said “hang on a sec,” and made a sharp right towards the ballroom. I had Leta’s little pistol hidden in the palm of my hand, and I surreptitiously handed it to her. Guns make me very nervous.
“Is it loaded?” I asked.
She smiled at me as she tucked it away in her waistband, hidden beneath her oversized wooly sweater.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it probably woulda just winged him. My shooting instructor said that beyond a range of about ten feet, the bullet tends to bounce off things. But if I had stuck the barrel in his ear …”
She smiled at me again. It was not a pleasant smile.
“Maybe you should take tae-kwon-do,” I suggested. “Learn how to kill someone with just two fingers, or a credit card or something.”
She kept smiling her evil little smile. But her eyes were a little different.
“Oh, shit,” I said, smacking my head. “You have, haven’t you? Taken martial arts?”
She nodded, still smiling. “My instructor said I was one of the most dangerous women he knew,” she said.
“You got a thing for instructors, don’t you?” I said.
She let it hang.
Jackie came running back, carrying a new, full bottle of Jack Daniels.
“A little fortification for the road,” he said.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Jack nodded at Leta. “I think we should take the lady home. It’s obviously been a rather long day for her,” he said.
“I can drive myself,” she said hotly. “I made it down here didn’t I?”
“Don’t get her mad,” I told Jack. “She’s rearmed and dangerous.”
“Yeah, well, go ahead and shoot me if you want,” Jack said laconically. “But we’re taking you home. We can help get your car back tomorrow if you want. But I think it would be safer if you went with us. Besides, we can talk a little on the way.”
Leta Papageorge thought that over. Then she nodded her agreement.
“Can I have some of that?” she asked, nodding at Jack’s bottle of Jack Black.
“That’s why I got it,” he said, and led the way outside.
The late Vitus Papageorge lived in a new gated subdivision, one of a thousand like it, that had been built in the hilly country of southern New Hampshire, designed to appeal to a generation of young commuters who didn’t mind making the traffic-clogged 90 minute drive down to Massachusetts and Boston in return for lots of cold fresh air, a homogenous community of other white, upper-middle class businessmen, and New Hampshire’s beneficial state tax system, which is to say no taxes at all. On anything. Which compares very favorably with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has a tax on everything. Of course, Massachusetts does offer some state services to its citizens, while New Hampshire’s attitude is “live free and die.”
Jack drove out of the club, turned left on the river road and headed north. He took the bottle of Jack from between his legs, took a pull and passed it over to me. I looked at it sadly, and passed it on to Leta, riding shotgun in the back seat of Jack’s sedan. I heard her gentle gurgle.
“Aren’t there open container laws in New Hampshire, too?” I wondered, sounding like a little old lady to myself.
“Only if we get caught, Hacker,” Jack grinned. “And I’m absolutely the best drunk driver in New England. Never been caught yet.”
“Always a first time,” I said, mostly to myself.
Jack was taking the scenic route, even though the night was black and moonless. The car rumbled over the frost-roughened country roads. I rolled down my window and took a draught of the cold, fresh air. We drove through the occasional pool of light from the odd streetlamp, and the sounds of the tires were reflected back up into my window from the ancient stone walls that lined the road. We passed the occasional house, each one of which had one window reflecting the blue glow of a television inside. I thought about the first settlers who had used the strength of their own backs and the help of a team of oxen to move these boulders out of their fields, acre after slow acre, in order to grow enough food to survive another harsh New England winter. It seemed a hopeless cycle of struggle against an unyielding land.
We passed an open meadow over which a blanket of mist hung like wispy fluff. Crickets sang morosely, knowing their days were numbered. After the first hard frost would come the cricket holocaust. The road dipped suddenly, and I felt the temperature of the air drop as well. I rolled my window back up and shivered.
Leta passed the bourbon back up to me. “Looks like you could use a shot, Hacker,” she said.
I turned and shot her a quick smile.
“I’m just trying to make heads or tails of this thing,” I said. “We keep taking two steps forward and running into brick walls. I thought this nice little scam Vitus had cooked up over the sewer project provided the perfect motive for someone to kill him, but Herb said not.”
“If you can believe Herb,” Jack reminded me.
“Oh, I believe him,” Leta said.
I turned again. “How did you know about it?” I asked.
She smiled her evil little smile again, her teeth flashing white in the darkness of the back seat.
“Oh, Hacker,” she sighed. “You are such a nice man. Naïve, but nice. Do you have a computer?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you back it up every week like they recommend?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But I know I should.”
“Well,” she said. “I was the back-up for Vitus. Everything he did, I knew about, and filed it away. Not documents or anything like that – I told him years ago that if he ever got caught, I would deny knowing anything and everything, take all his money and go live in the south of France. And I made sure that I wasn’t personally connected to any of his deals. But at the same time, I made sure I knew everything about all of his deals. After all, it was my future at risk, too.”
She reached over the seat and grabbed the bottle out of my hands.
“He knew that I would turn on him at the first inkling that something was going bad,” she said, after tipping the bottle back again. “Eventually, he came to rely on me as a sounding board. He was a smart little operator, but I made him smarter. And safer.”
“So you knew about the scam?” I asked.
“You mean the sewer deal? Oh, hell yes,” she said. “And next was going to be the new bridge over the river, and after that, a new irrigation system, and then probably a major reconstruction of all the greens. Vitus and Herb had a whole series of improvements planned for the next five years.”
“And they were going to skim off the top?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling again. “I don’t think any of the other projects would have brought in as much as the first hit. But a couple hundred thousand every year or so – all hidden from taxes – doesn’t hurt at all. And I heard Vitus say that Herb had been thinking about torching the clubhouse. The rebuild would have been expensive, but insurance would have paid and paid and paid.”
Jack whistled softly. “How would Vitus have convinced the members to keep paying for all this?” he asked. “We lost a bunch of old members over the sewer project.”
“And Vitus signed up twice as many new members at the increased membership fees to replace them,” Leta answered. “There just aren’t enough country clubs in the state to keep up with the demand. He was going to launch a new membership drive, mostly in Boston, which would have raised something like five million. That would have gone into the long-term capital fund to pay for the improvements. The club would get the new stuff, it’s just that Vitus and his friends would keep about one dollar out of every four for themselves. Clean, shiny, legal dollars that couldn’t be traced.”
“Thanks to Herb Incavaglia,” I said.
“Man’s a genius,” Leta nodded. “Personally I always thought he was a weasel, but he knew how to move dollars around so fast that nobody could discover where they had gone.”
“Was Vitus this dirty in his other businesses?” Jack wanted to know.
“My husband loved only one thing,” she said, with a trace of wistfulness. “And that was getting away with as much as he could. Up here in New Hampshire, where the political parties come every four years for the presidential primary, he made a killing. See this? …” She held out her arm to show us the glistening diamonds on her inch-thick tennis bracelet. “Came from the Clinton campaign in 1992. Vitus’ bank served as their campaign finance headquarters. He charged them low rates for the banking, and a nice hefty fee for ‘consulting.’ We consulted before he bought it for me.”
“And your marriage?” I asked. “Did he get away with as much as he could there, too?”
She laughed. “Oh, Hacker,” she said. “I knew it. I had you pegged as a romantic. Look, people get married and stay married for all kinds of reasons. Some people want to settle in with a house, bunch of kids, relatives coming every holiday. I knew from the outset that Vitus wasn’t interested in all that. He wanted to make money, to make people do what he wanted, and to get away with stuff. It made him feel…I don’t know… alive.”
“And you?”
She took another pull on the bottle. “I guess I got away with stuff, too,” she said. “I had a pretty nice life. Did what I wanted. Lived on the edge. I guess it made me feel alive, too.” Her voice caught, at the end.
“You loved him, didn’t you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. The car rolled through the dark countryside. I turned and looked into the back seat. Leta Papageorge was crying, silently, tears coursing down her cheeks.