Flynn's In Page 6

  “And what about Governor Wheeler and Walter March?” Flynn asked Rutledge.

  “I know earlier they were in the study, talking privately. They were in the storage room when I arrived. I presumed they had come from the study.”

  “Was anyone else here last night?” Flynn asked mildly. “Anyone else who exited through the fence at dawn, or flew away up the chimney?”

  “No,” said Rutledge. “Members come and go at The Rod and Gun Club as we please, Flynn. No one else was here last night. That is to say, only Wheeler and March have left. They had legitimate business elsewhere. And we’ve talked about that, telephonically, since you raised the issue. It’s been agreed that both gentlemen will be available to you by phone, to answer any questions you may have, at any time. If you feel it’s necessary to interview them personally, transportation will be provided.”

  “Cooperative of you,” commented Flynn. “And do any of you gentlemen have any immediate plans to have legitimate business elsewhere?”

  “Ashley will stay here,” Lauderdale said. “Until his problems are solved.”

  “Want to see how this thing comes out,” Oland said. “Who shot my waterproofs.”

  Around the table, no one else admitted plans to go, or openly agreed to stay.

  “So,” Flynn finally said, smiling across the table at Cocky, “each of you gentlemen here, in fact, states you were alone last night at seven minutes past eleven.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Rutledge said. “Such an hour is usually regarded as being after bedtime.”

  “And you’re all here without wives, or girl friends, people with whom you might share your beds.”

  Rutledge shrugged. “That’s tradition.”

  “The charmin’ thing is,” said Flynn, “none of you is providing an alibi for anyone else.”

  Clifford was brushing all his bread balls into his left hand.

  “We all hope for a speedy resolution of this affair,” said Rutledge. “We are cooperating as much as we can.”

  Using an open, overhanded throw, Clifford threw a bread ball at Oland. It hit him in the face.

  Then Clifford fired another at D’Esopo.

  D’Esopo sat back, totally startled.

  Oland threw a bread ball at Rutledge.

  Beside Flynn, Wahler leaned over.

  Bread balls were flying through the air, in all directions.

  Lauderdale stood up to accomplish a wide, full-armed, left-handed throw.

  “No leaving your chair!” Ashley yelled at him.

  Lauderdale plopped back into his chair.

  Across the table from Flynn, Cocky had skidded his chair backward, to get out of the combat.

  One bread ball hit Flynn near his right eye; another on his left ear.

  “A bread fight,” Wahler said. He was crouched over so that his head was below the table surface. “A tradition here.”

  “Every lunch?” asked Flynn.

  “No,” said Wahler. “Only when they serve stew. Youngest gets to throw first.”

  Keeping his head down, Wahler began to creep away from the table. “Come on, Flynn. Let’s go for a walk.”

  9

  “This all must seem rather odd to you,” Wahler said. He and Flynn strolled along the veranda and down the lakeside steps. “It did to me, at first.”

  “I passed a season at Winchester,” said Flynn.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “I understand you.”

  Slowly, Flynn was leading Wahler on a circumnavigation of the main clubhouse.

  Flynn had asked Cocky to get their coats and meet him at Flynn’s car.

  “The Rod and Gun Club was founded more than a hundred years ago,” Wahler said. “Five friends, after graduating from Harvard. They bought this acreage as a hunting and fishing lodge for themselves, a place they could get away from the world, their families, jobs, keep in touch with each other and, I guess, maintain some of their undergraduate spirit.”

  “Is that the gong?”

  Flynn climbed the steps to the back porch.

  “Big enough, isn’t it?” Wahler said.

  It was a thick brass plate three meters in diameter hanging from its own oak frame. A leather-headed mallet as tall as a man stood beside it.

  “You can hear it from anywhere on the place,” Wahler said.

  “Who gets to hit it?”

  “Taylor, I believe.”

  “Must make him regret he has ears.”

  Flynn peered through the steamy window into the kitchen. He counted six servants inside, all male and all apparently Vietnamese.

  “Anyway,” Wahler said as they continued their walk around the building, “as time went on the five original friends invited their friends. They brought their sons here, when their sons grew to a certain, non-critical age. The clubhouse grew. Expenses mounted. I think the thing was formalized into a club sometime around the turn of the century.”

  “And the membership became limited.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know. The original five members, their friends, their sons.”

  “And it became secret.”

  Wahler took a deep breath and blew out vapor. “It was a place for them to get away. From their wives and small children. Their offices. Their duties. The public eye. Let their hair down, drink what they wanted to when they wanted to, play poker all night, play their silly, sophomoric games, hunt, fish. To coin a phrase: fart when they want to.”

  They walked up a grade at the back of the clubhouse.

  There a large, round area had been flattened and smoothed. A cement circle had been laid in the ground. Red and yellow stripes crossed in the center of the circle. Lights were sunk into the ground, their heavy glass covers flush with the surface of the ground.

  “Odd, isn’t it,” Flynn commented, “how much a helicopter pad can be made to look like a hex symbol?”

  To one side a huge earth satellite communications dish appealed to the southwest sky.

  “That dish can pull in signals from almost anywhere,” Wahler said.

  Flynn smiled. “Modern magic.”

  Down to their left another big area had been cleared and arranged as a skeet-shooting range.

  “And down there,” said Flynn, “a place of symbolic sacrifice. Clay pigeons.”

  “What I notice,” Wahler said, as they continued their stroll, “is that these men, in building and maintaining this place, in coming here, are trying to recapture their own youths. But look what they recapture. Not their home environments. All of them being upper-class, they really didn’t know their homes. They’ve recaptured, or rebuilt, their lives in boarding schools and summer camps.”

  “Locks on the refrigerator doors,” said Flynn. “I’ll bet they have boxes of cookies hidden in their rooms.”

  “Poor D’Esopo,” Wahler said. “Clearly not well brought up. Thought he could go to a kitchen in the middle of the night and find something to eat.

  “I find it all sort of sad,” Wahler continued. “This is still the only home most of these men have. The only place they don’t have to be buttoned-down examples to their communities.” Flynn ran his eye over Wahler’s striped shirt, rep tie and three-piece suit. “One member,” Wahler continued, “a world-famous composer, conductor, a darling of society in every capital in the world, comes here, says very little, never touches the piano, slops around in muddy boots. Every morning he goes out with a big axe and just knocks down trees. Sunup to sundown. No pattern; no point to it at all. He doesn’t even trim the trees. Just chops them down. He’s devastated acres. Wouldn’t you say that’s fairly eccentric behavior?”

  “We’re all true dialectic systems,” said Flynn. “Even I have raged at the moon. You, too, I expect.”

  Wahler laughed. “Once, at my apartment, I strangled a lampshade with my necktie. In the morning I couldn’t figure out what I had done or why I had done it. I just knew I had done something that felt good.” He laughed
again, and said more quietly. “‘Once!’ It was only three weeks ago.”

  “I would think,” Flynn said slowly, “that The Rod and Gun Club, however secluded and exclusive it is, would be a ripe orchard for any harvester with blackmail on his mind.”

  Wahler did not respond.

  On the north side of the building, a bandy-legged older man was walking toward them. His face was weathered, peculiarly lifeless; his hair thin in patches. His hands were enormous. His boots were muddy and old.

  “Hello, Hewitt,” said Wahler.

  Hewitt’s eyes had examined Flynn as they approached each other. The face, the eyes were now averted from Wahler and Flynn.

  He nodded.

  “This is Flynn,” Wahler said. “Hewitt. He’s been the club’s hunting and fishing guide forever.”

  The man nodded again and continued walking.

  “Hewitt’s a mute,” Wahler said.

  “But he can hear?”

  “Perfectly. It’s sometimes hard to remember. He hears better than most people. Originally, most of the servants here were mutes.”

  “Now they’re Vietnamese. Do any of them speak English?”

  “Some. Not very well.”

  “Ah,” said Flynn. “Peace and quiet.”

  “You’ve got the idea.”

  Flynn said, “Meetings happen here.”

  They had come to the driveway in front of the clubhouse.

  “Yes,” Wahler said slowly. “Meetings happen here.”

  “Decisions are made here.”

  In an overcoat, Cocky stood beside the station wagon. Over his right arm was Flynn’s bulky overcoat.

  “Yes,” Wahler said even more slowly. “Decisions are made here.”

  “Well,” said Flynn, getting into his coat. “Cocky and I are going for a ride. Find a widow and hear about the recently deceased. If the guard at the gate gives us any trouble,” said Flynn, “I’m liable to give him what passes for conversation at a board meeting of The Anarchy Society.”

  Wahler put his hand on Flynn’s forearm. “You are coming back, Flynn.”

  “Sure.” Flynn unlocked his car. “I want to discover who shot holes in Oland’s new waterproofs.”

  10

  No one was in the reception area of the lounge when they entered Timberbreak Lodge.

  “I’ve seen broccoli farms that do a bigger business than this place,” Flynn muttered.

  Cocky following him, Flynn went around the reception desk and, without knocking, pushed open the door marked “Manager Private.”

  “There, Cocky,” said Flynn. “There’s your switchboard.”

  The three women sitting at their switchboards looked around at them. They were docilely surprised, as cows are at seeing someone standing in their pasture.

  There were switchboard stations for five operators.

  Carl Morris came through the door from his office like an offended bull.

  “This area’s private,” he said.

  “I should think so,” said Flynn. “All these telephone lines for such a wee lodge would make even Maid Marian think twice.”

  “Oh, it’s you, Flynn. I mean, Inspector Flynn. Who’s this?”

  “Shake hands with Carl Morris, Cocky. The manager of this bustling hostelry.”

  On the drive down from The Rod and Gun Club Flynn had told Cocky all the facts as he knew them, as well as one or two conjectures.

  “You might as well come inside.” Morris went into his small office. “You understand. Some press came by earlier. At first I thought you were more of the same. Mister Wahler has said I can talk to you.”

  “Ah,” said Flynn, looking around the closet-sized office as if it were The Hall of Mirrors. “This is where it all happens. Conventions are planned, pillowcase designs are considered, salad chefs hired and fired. Fascinating it is, to see the nerve center of one of the world’s grand hotels.”

  Morris had closed the door behind them. “Sorry I can’t ask you to sit down…” The only chair was behind the small desk. “Don’t get many guests.”

  “Do you get any guests?” Flynn asked.

  Morris sat on the corner of the desk. “Only those we can’t turn away. The occasional lost hunter, or stuck traveling salesman.”

  “And they don’t stay long.”

  Morris shrugged. “We don’t have any food service. No breakfast room. No bar. No ice machines. No swimming pool, sauna, or much hot water.”

  “Not much repeat trade, I dare say.”

  “If travelers insist, we rent them a cold bed for overnight and see them off early in the morning.”

  “‘Insist?’”

  “We turn the ‘No Vacancy’ sign on every night.”

  “You’ve built a bad little business here. Was it much work?”

  Morris chuckled. “Think I should write a book, Reverse Management?”

  “You might try it. More people fail in business than succeed. They might benefit from instruction.”

  “It’s my job. I’m a hired employee.”

  “Of The Rod and Gun Club.”

  “You know it.”

  “This packing case with no motel inside is simply a front for the far grander, more obscure establishment up the road.”

  “The members have to say where they’re going, leave a number. So they say they’re going to Timberbreak Lodge. People call here. The ladies out there answer the phone saying Timberbreak Lodge.”

  “And the calls are transferred to the members’ rooms at The Rod and Gun Club.”

  “Yes. And when someone shows up here looking for one of the members, you know, a reporter, a lawyer, a difficult family member, someone like that, we say he’s out walking.”

  “And the member comes down and meets the person here.”

  “Right. Years ago, some reporter got hold of the Club’s phone number and called a member. That was okay; it had happened before. But the reporter got curious about The Rod and Gun Club, what it was, exactly where it was, who its members are. To make a long story short, a very vague article appeared in Eyebill saying such a club exists, where powerful men get together—men whose interests otherwise don’t seem to connect—and hunt and fish out of season. And commit other various crimes—such as leaving their wives at home.”

  “So other journals, more distinguished and thorough than Eyebill, became curious.”

  “Yes. Of course. They sent up reporters and photographers and found Timberbreak Lodge.”

  Flynn scanned the sagging belly of the office’s plywood ceiling. “The building looks like it was ordered in one piece from a factory in New Jersey.”

  “Very nearly was. The members knew the Eyebill reporters were snooping, so they had a little time to get Timberbreak slapped together. We do have running water, and some of it is even in the pipes.”

  “Build in haste, repent in leisure,” said Flynn. “In God we trust.”

  “Ever since then, when the press gets curious and sends one or two up to snoop around, The Rod and Gun Club sends a few of its younger, less prestigious members down Friday, Saturday nights in hunting clothes, hunting and fishing licenses prominently pinned to their jackets, to sit around the lounge with six-packs of beer, yucking it up, and the press gets tired of watching them and goes away.” Morris ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair. “That’s how Timberbreak Lodge, The Rod and Gun Club at Bellingham, came to be. Sounds fancy enough, doesn’t it?”

  “And you?” asked Flynn.

  “I was born in the local hospital,” Morris said. “That’s how I came to be.”

  “Why are you spending your life running an empty lodge?”

  “I was a science teacher in the local regional high school.” Morris studied the back of his hands in his lap. “There was a school budget cutback. The Bellingham town fathers decided they wanted to educate their kids for Bellingham, not for the world at large. I was fired. Wife, kids, family here. Not really educated for the world at large, either. What was I supposed to do, go out and cut timber
?”

  “Honest men do.”

  Morris looked slapped. “What am I doing that’s so dishonest? I’m getting paid to run an empty motel. So I’m running an empty motel. Is that a crime?”

  “You’re earning a big bonus this weekend, I think.”

  Morris’ right hand cracked the knuckles on his left hand. “Nothing quite like this has ever happened before.” He stood up and went around his desk. Opened face-down on the desk was Bruno Bettleheim’s Surviving and Other Essays. “That’s a different world up there on the hill, Inspector. The members of The Rod and Gun Club aren’t from around here. And, honest, I only know who a few of them are. God knows who they are. I see the limousines and the helicopters come and go.” He stabbed his finger at the closed door. “And I know how many calls a week the various members get from The White House. From Ottawa. From Mexico City. From the heads of the security and commodity exchanges. Senate chambers. Even the Supreme Court, for Christ’s sake. I’m supposed to say ‘No’ to all that?” He sat on the wooden swivel chair behind his desk. “Those guys up there can do what they want to do. That’s clear enough. In this world, we’re all equals, Inspector Flynn, but some are more equal than others. I think you’ve heard that. When the gods on Olympus want to play/Who are we, mere mortal men, to say, Nay?”

  Flynn was looking at the man who looked too big behind his little, empty desk. “And if it comes to it, man, will you perjure yourself? Will you stand up in court and lie?”

  “I’m told it won’t come to that. Mister Wahler says you, Inspector Flynn, will see to it that it doesn’t.”

  “I will, will I?”

  “I’ve shown reporters around today, walked them through ‘the evidence,’ played the good old country boy role, clucked with them over an ever-so-tragic hunting accident.”

  “And they swallowed it?”

  “They just wanted to shoot film, grab a story, any story, and get back to someplace warm. Sure they swallowed it. What’s to make them suspicious? Why should a country boy like Carl Morris lie about the death of someone like Dwight Huttenbach? Obviously, there isn’t any connection between us.”

  “And did you tell the same lies to Dwight Huttenbach’s widow?”