The office windows began rattling like castanets, and I knew the storm was rising in intensity again. I ejected Ken’s camcorder disc from the video player and pulled out the two unlabeled recordings I had found in Sal’s metal carrying case. I inserted the first one in the player and pushed the start button.
Like the one of Jordan and the girl, it was an amateur production. This one featured an old white-haired gentleman and a pimply teenage boy. They were both naked. The boy was almost cadaverously skinny. The old man had a grotesque stomach paunch that looked like a bloated tumor.
It had been shot at night, and the action took place in a blue Jacuzzi tub that was set flush into a wooden deck. In the background, I could see an open sliding glass door that led into the family room of a contemporary home.
The two participants in the foreground didn’t waste any time demonstrating their sexual orientation, and it didn’t appear that either was aware they were being filmed. About five minutes into the action, I stopped the recording and ejected it.
The second revealed another sexual encounter. This one was filmed in daylight. It looked as though it might have been shot somewhere in the Adirondacks. Through the bedroom window in the video, I could see snowcapped peaks. There were three participants, two of them women.
The man on the bed looked familiar to me. He appeared to be in his late sixties and in good physical condition. He needed to be. The two young blondes in bed with him were each giving him enough action for a newlywed.
I ejected the disc and placed all three of them in Sal’s metal case, which I shoved under Lieutenant Ritterspaugh’s desk. There were probably other scintillating episodes on Sal’s videos, but I didn’t have time to review them.
Sal had told me the truth when he said he wasn’t working for the Wonderland Motel, but he hadn’t been recording just Jordan Langford. The net was obviously wider and almost certainly involved other blackmail efforts.
Ken Macready appeared in the doorway.
“Jake, one of the boys you asked me to find is waiting outside in the corridor,” he said. “His father is a housemaster in one of the freshman dorms. He brought him right over.”
“What about the second boy?” I asked.
“When I spoke to his father, he said his son wasn’t guilty of anything and that he was being harassed because of his political views.”
“The political views of a boy?”
“I guess the father’s,” said Ken. “He’s the Tea Party guy who made the public statements about the Jews and Communists taking over Groton.”
I knew which one was his son.
“Bring the other boy in,” I said. “Tell his father to wait outside.”
As I expected, it was the Pillsbury Doughboy with curly red hair and pasty skin. He wasn’t crying this time, but his hands were trembling as he came into the office. I told him to sit down in the chair by the desk.
The boy was dressed in what he had been wearing in the holding pen: NBA jersey, gold chain, baggy jeans, and basketball sneakers. His cap was still jauntily cocked to the right side.
“What’s your name, son?” I asked gently.
“Cody . . . McNamara,” he said uncertainly.
“Cody, I’m told that you were arrested for vandalizing several cars in the parking lot of the campus administration building. Did you do that?”
I needed to find out right away how truthful he was going to be.
“Yeah . . . we did it,” he confessed. “Brett and me.”
“Thanks for being honest with me, Cody. Now this next question is really important. Last night, did you boys gouge some cars in the overlook parking lot, the one next to the suspension footbridge?”
His eyes immediately dropped to his lap. Almost ten seconds passed before he began to slowly move his head up and down.
“All right, then,” I said. “Cody, I guess you know by now that someone died there that night.”
He nodded again but refused to look at me.
“Will you tell me what you saw at the bridge?”
A small flood of tears began to flow out of his eyes and roll down his apple cheeks. They came together at the point of his chin and dropped down onto the links of the gold-plated chain around his neck. I was about to pose the question again but decided to wait.
As the seconds passed, it suddenly came to me who the second man had been in Sal’s sex videos, the one with the two cheap blondes. The last time I had seen him, he was the presiding judge in a state supreme court chamber.
I had been in court representing the St. Andrews campus police department. We were one of the defendants in a liability lawsuit brought by a student who claimed she had gotten ill from asbestos poisoning after living in one of the older dorms.
The man cavorting like a sex-starved porpoise was Supreme Court Justice Addison Davis. I was still trying to remember the name of the law firm that had filed the suit on behalf of the girl when Cody McNamara spoke again.
“Me and Brett were coming back toward campus after hanging out by one of the sorority houses on the other side of the gorge,” he said in a wavering voice. “Both of us had our screwdrivers in our pockets and, uh . . . uh . . . we decided to key the first couple of cars in the lot.”
He stopped to wipe his nose with the back of his hand before going on.
“We were still there by the cars, and it was real dark. I told Brett I didn’t want to stay out any longer, and he started calling me a pussy and a faggot. That’s when I saw something moving down by that phone box that has the blue light over it. I grabbed Brett’s arm, and he looked down there too. This one guy was helping another guy down the path to the bridge,” he continued. “The other guy looked really sick. I mean, he couldn’t walk so good on his own, and the first guy had to practically hold him up as they went down there. When they got under the blue light, I saw that the first guy had something over his shoulder . . . a rolled-up garden hose like . . . and then they went out onto the bridge.”
“What did you see after that?” I asked.
“That was it. That was all I saw.”
“What did you do then?”
“Brett said we ought to go down there and find out what they were doing . . . but I . . . I just wanted to go home. So when he started walking down toward the footbridge, I began walking the long way around. He must have decided to follow me because he caught up in a few seconds and we both went that way.”
It made sense. The boy lived in the housemaster’s apartment in one of the freshman dorms, which were on the opposite side of the campus. The administration building where they had keyed the other cars was on the way.
“Can you describe the first man, Cody . . . the one with the garden hose around his shoulders?”
“It was really dark,” said the boy, “but he was big compared to the other guy.”
“How big?”
Looking up at me, he said, “Like you . . . maybe even taller.”
Ben Massengale was taller than me.
Standing up, I went out into the hallway and thanked Mr. McNamara for coming into the office. I pledged to see what I could do to help Cody when his case came up in juvenile court. As soon as they were gone, I sat down again and rested my head on the cushioned ergonomic pad on Lieutenant Ritterspaugh’s desk.
I knew I had to find Ben Massengale, but first I spent a few minutes thinking about what I could still do to resolve Jordan’s other predicament. If I couldn’t find and then confront the blackmailer, he would be resigning in less than twelve hours. Whoever was demanding the five million dollars had to know about the Wheatley gift sitting in Jordan’s private discretionary account. Why only five? I wondered. Why not ten or twenty?
Had the blackmailer arranged to kill Wheatley because Wheatley was the only one in a position to know that Jordan had the money and could do whatever he wanted with it?
Who would have had access to the information aside from Jordan?
The questions kept turning over in my mind like an ancient cement mixer. Raising my bleary head from the elbow pad, I looked up at the wall clock. It was twenty after six, and the wind was climbing again on the decibel scale. The sky through the window was a weird metallic color.
I came up with two ideas. They probably weren’t going to do any good, but I decided to act on them anyway. Digging into the breast pocket of my waterproof jacket, I found the business card for Bobby Devane. Picking up the phone, I called the cell number that was scrawled on the back of it. The number rang five times before kicking over to his voice mailbox.
“This is Robert Devane,” came a low raspy voice. “Leave a message.”
So I left him a message.
“This is Jake Cantrell in Groton, Bobby. I was the one who met Sal and Angie at the Wonderland. I’m enjoying all that illegal surveillance equipment of yours . . . especially the blackmail videos. Sal was kind enough to tell me what you hired him to do. So before I have you arrested for extortion, Bobby, I thought we should probably talk. Give me a call.”
I left him my extension number at the campus police department and hung up. Unlike the cabin phone, it had a feature that kicked straight back to the dispatcher if I wasn’t there.
Next, I dug out the home number Jordan had given me for Brian Razzano. It rang only twice before someone picked it up.
“Razzano,” said a baritone voice. I recognized it from all the TV commercials.
“My name is Jake Cantrell,” I began. “I live down the lake from you and work in the campus security office at St Andrews College.”
“Jake Cantrell,” he slowly repeated, as if pondering a name from the distant past. I was struck by the fact that he didn’t seem remotely surprised by my calling him at six thirty in the morning in the middle of a hurricane.
“Not the immortal Tank Cantrell?”
“Yeah . . . good old Tank,” I said.
“I was in the stands when you broke through the line against Tulane and ran for the winning touchdown,” he reminisced. “You were dragging two guys on your back there at the end and—”
Interrupting him, I said, “Your name was given to me as someone who employs a man named Bobby Devane in confidential investigations. Last night, I met two of his employees at the Wonderland Motel up near the thruway. They had electronic surveillance equipment in their room, and they have been filming people in intimate situations who apparently had no knowledge of it. Personally I think you’re heading the blackmail operation, Mr. Razzano, and if I give what I already know to the New York Times, they’ll be scraping your name off the front of the campus nanoscience center before the chisel is even dry.”
I was wincing over the mixed metaphor when he shouted, “For God’s sake, what are you talking about?”
“I’m sure you already know, Brian,” I said. “How about the Honorable Justice Addison Davis for one? You ever see the good judge naked and being sandwiched between two blondes?”
I hung up the phone as a branch hurtled against the upper panes of the office window. It remained suspended there for a few seconds before being swept away by the wind.
Only time would tell if my poking a stick into the two beehives would produce any live stingers. In the meantime, I had to find Ben Massengale. I had a pretty good idea where he would be.