The Blackmail Club Read online

  Chapter 4

  Nora Burke’s shadow twisting and ducking against her window shade grew faint in the rising sun. Then her shadow left and did not return.

  It was Tuesday morning, and the blackmailer had learned that Nora’s landlord, who lived next door in the corner house, was away on a spring cruise. Nora had the property all to herself. The house on the other side was thirty yards away with the space divided by a dense, shoulder-high hedge.

  The clank of her garage door startled him. He eased down his binoculars and watched her raising the top on her Mustang convertible, and then backing out of the driveway. Her brake lights winked as she stopped before accelerating down the street.

  Jack went out to pick up his morning paper, and saw Roy, a ten-year-old boy who lived next door with his divorced mother. Roy came over to say Hi.

  “You're big, Mr. McCall.”

  Jack mussed Roy’s straight-cut blonde bangs. “I never planned to be. It just happened. I haven’t seen you for a while. How are you? And how’s your mom?”

  “I’m fine, so’s my mom. She always is, ‘cept when she hollers at me.”

  Jack had met Roy and his mother, Janet Parker, the morning they moved in. Roy had kept throwing his foam football into Jack’s backyard until Janet came out and told her son to stop. She had worn one of those loose-fitting house dresses that would drape the same on a telephone pole or an exotic dancer. A gust of wind had blown the fabric tight against her, revealing she definitely was not any kind of pole. She had a nice smile and lively eyes.

  During the year before his marriage to Rachel, Jack had spent many evenings with Roy and Janet, barbequing and watching family movies. He was very fond of Roy. When the boy spent weekends with his mother’s parents or had a sleepover at a friend’s house, Jack and Janet would have their own sleepover.

  “How big are you, Mr. McCall?”

  “I’m six-foot-two and I weigh two-hundred-ten pounds.”

  “Gee, I hope I’m big when I grow up.”

  “Is your dad tall?”

  “Don’t got a dad. Got a grandpa though,” Roy said with one eye squinted because of the morning sun.

  “Is he big?”

  “Grandpa’s way shorter’n you. He’s my mom’s daddy,” Roy said. “Seems like I oughta have my own dad though, don’t you think, Mr. McCall?”

  “Some youngsters do. Some don’t. You see a lot of your grandpa?”

  “Yeah. Grandpa was a policeman in Baltimore ‘til he got too old. His name’s Elroy, Grandpa Elroy, so’s mine. Only mine’s just Elroy. But I go by Roy. You like Roy better than Elroy, Mr. McCall?”

  Jack had seen Grandpa Elroy. The man wasn’t tall, but he was built like a garage beer fridge. Jack settled his hand on the curve between the boy’s neck and his shoulder. “I like you and Roy’s a fine name.”

  The boy held up his metal dump truck and asked Jack if later on he wanted to go across the street and haul some dirt.

  “I can’t today, Roy.”

  The boy hung his head, the hand holding the dump truck dangling at his side. “Gee whiz. It’s no fun alone.”

  “Where’d you learn to say gee whiz? I used to say that when I was your age.”

  “My grandpa says it a lot.”

  “Roy, a lady I work with is coming by to pick me up. I came out front to wait for her. But tell you what, one of these Saturdays, real soon, if your mother says okay, I’ll call my friend who owns a company that has lots of dump trucks. We’ll go over and take a ride on one of the real big ones, okay?”

  “Gee whiz, really, Mr. McCall?”

  “Really, Roy. If it’s okay with your mother.”

  “She’ll say okay. I’ll be really nice to her so she’ll let me. ‘Sides, she likes you a bunch, Mr. McCall. She told me so.”

  “I like her too, Roy. She’s a fine lady.”

  “I gotta go, Mr. McCall. My mom’s looking for me.”

  Jack watched the youngster run toward his house and saw his mother standing on the front porch in a dark pantsuit, heels, and a scoop-necked white blouse.

  “Come on, Roy. You need to get ready for school and I can’t be late for work.” Janet waved, Jack waved back. She put her thumb to her ear and her little finger in front of her mouth and lip synced the words, “Call me.” Then she followed her son inside.

  Jack tossed the paper inside the front door and sat on his front step to wait for Nora. After a while his attention drifted to a line of ants busily carrying bits of something in a precision march across his porch and down into the lawn which, with the help of the coming spring, was struggling to recover its color. A second row of ants carrying nothing hurried back the other way, toward him. The two rows passing like tiny dark sedans speeding along a miniature two-lane road.

  Jack’s mind drifted to thoughts of his own father, a career navy man who, like the ants, had always been in a hurry. His strongest boyhood senses of his father were the man’s aftershave and the hard touch of his stiff white naval uniform.

  It had been Dr. Chris Andujar who had helped Jack realize that his own twenty-plus-years special ops and counterterrorism career had likely been a result of his father’s frequent litany on the subject of duty. As a teen, Jack realized his parents’ marriage had never been a good one. The year after Jack left for college, his mother divorced his father and moved to Chicago. She had promised to stay a part of Jack’s life, but she had not kept that promise.

  When his father died ten years ago, Jack felt surprise, but not grief. Chris Andujar had told him, “On an emotional level men expect their fathers to live forever, so men are always surprised when their fathers die. And the sons are left with the thoughts of the things fate had left unsaid.”

  A car horn blew. Jack looked toward the street to see Nora behind the steering wheel of her Mustang convertible. The air was on the cool side, so she had the soft top up. He climbed in.

  “You didn’t see me?” She ran her fingernails along her leg, scratching through her black capris.

  “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

  At the corner Jack looked in the side-view mirror and saw Roy, wearing his school backpack, just standing at the edge of the road watching as they drove away. Jack stuck his hand out the window and waved. Roy waved back.

  The blackmailer spoke into his cell phone. “What’s happening with McCall?”

  “He just got picked up by some fox in a Mustang convertible. They split.”

  “You still on ‘em?”

  “Being on her tail would be nice, but I’m on ‘em both.”

  The caller hung up, got out of his car across from Nora’s home and, dressed as a workman carrying a toolbox, ducked through the bushes along the side of her house. After fiddling with the appropriate pick and tension tool, he freed the lock on her front door and stepped inside Nora’s duplex.

  After a quick look around, he chose two spots to secret small FM transmitters. He put the first one atop the valance box over the bedroom window, and the second, using two-way tape, under the edge of the couch near the living room phone. Each of the transmitters had been previously configured to wirelessly transfer to the CD of a voice-activated recorder he would hide among the rip-rap sized boulders that bordered the side of the property.

  Chapter 5

  Jack watched Nora’s legs as she worked the pedals. She had small feet with red painted toenails revealed by her open-toed black pumps. In a lot of ways she reminded him of Rachel. Nora’s shoulder-length hair was strawberry-blond, Rachel’s black. That was certainly different, but not much else. At five-eight Nora was shorter by an inch, and, like Rachel, she had a body that made clothes come alive.

  Nora turned onto MacArthur Boulevard and asked, “Do you figure Dr. Andujar for a suicide?”

  Jack shook his head. “Some people get tired, just tired of dealing with whatever, and they quit on life, I don’t figure that for Chris.”

  They drove quietly for a few miles before he said anything more. “Nice shoes. New?”

 
“Just yesterday, I didn’t really need them, but what’s a woman to do?”

  “Don’t buy them.”

  “Men just don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “A woman shopping for clothes.”

  “Men’s clothes are fashionable, too.”

  “Oh, please. Take a look at those old movies you enjoy watching. Men are wearing the same clothes today that they wore in 1945. Maybe fewer hats, but that’s the only real change. Lapels going from wide to narrow and back again, and the comings and goings of pleats and cuffs in trousers don’t exactly constitute changes in fashion.”

  “Sounds practical to me,” Jack replied, knowing it was a weak defense.

  “I like your shirt,” she said. “Denim looks rugged on a tall man with a trim waistline, well, reasonably trim.”

  Jack scowled but didn’t say anything. He had just this morning been forced to back off a notch when cinching his belt.

  “The blue matches your eyes and goes nicely with your khaki pants. I’m glad you took my advice to stop wearing suits and ties.”

  “We’re going to a friend’s home.”

  As they drove on the Key Bridge over the Potomac, Nora brought up an old subject: a grand opening for McCall Investigations. Nora and Rachel had intended to go over the final plans for MI’s open house the day Rachel was run down after she pushed Nora into the clear. The open house was forgotten, Rachel was buried, and Jack went off to Europe and the Middle East.

  “I’m aiming for Friday,” Nora said. “The invitations are addressed. Just give me the okay.”

  “Keep the pressure on, right?”

  “Seems like a good plan.”

  He looked out over the river at the bluish-gray sky, smeared with clouds stretched thin and long like hand-pulled taffy. Then turned and looked at Nora. “MI’s already been open for nearly five months.”

  Nora steered into the right lane as she approached the Virginia side of the river. “Rach told me you don’t like big gatherings, but it’ll be good for business.”

  “It’s been nearly five months,” he repeated, shaking his head in a slow arc.

  “I don’t mean to sound matter-of-fact about it, but your leaving town was in all the followup articles on Rachel’s death. We need DC to know Jack McCall is back and ready for business. Where do I turn?”

  “You know how to get on George Mason, toward the Virginia Hospital?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go like that. A few blocks past the hospital we’ll turn left on Patrick Henry Drive.”

  When Nora downshifted on the off-ramp and then reapplied the gas, Jack noticed she pressed the accelerator with her red toes down, while holding her toes up when applying the brake.

  “Jack. The open house. While you were gone, I took a few missing persons cases and some background-checking work. It hardly kept me busy and now that you’re back …” Her words trailed off, then she closed her argument. “Your name is juice, and we need it to establish MI as the firm to call when someone needs a private investigator.”

  “Let me think about it. Okay?”

  “I need to know tomorrow morning—early. Any later and I’ll have to cancel the caterer and reprint the invitations. Now, tell me about the events preceding Andujar’s supposed suicide.”

  He took in a long breath and let it out slowly before beginning. “Sarah called two days before Rachel was killed, begging me to come for Sunday dinner and talk with Chris. She said, ‘He’s very moody and he won’t tell me anything. I’m worried sick. He’ll always talk to you.’ After Rachel was run down, I forgot all about Chris and my promise to go for dinner. Maybe he’d still be alive if I had just … I need to find out what really happened.”

  Chapter 6

  The freshly-painted white picket fence around Sarah Andujar’s home simulated fresh recruits standing at attention as Jack and Nora approached the house. Folded towels and bed sheets hung patiently on the porch rail, waiting to cover the more delicate plants in the event of another cool spring night.

  Jack heard the clunk of the deadbolt before seeing Sarah’s pruned complexion peeking through the crack of the door. She inhaled through her first words, “Oh, Jack!” And exhaled through the finish, “I am so glad to see you.” Her cheeks were more sallow than he remembered, her eyes more haggard and cavernous, but crow’s feet still danced around her eyes when she smiled.

  Sarah hid her small hand inside Jack’s while leading her two guests though her home. For Jack, the Andujar home had always held the comfortable feeling of an old, favored sweater, but not today. Today it looked perfect, spotlessly clean, everything in its place, precisely in its place.

  “I made berry-flavored herbal sun tea,” Sarah said, pointing toward a pitcher on the table in her screened sun porch. “I think you’ll like it.” She had also put out a platter with cold-cut sandwiches on little triangles of white bread trimmed of their crusts.

  Jack turned to Sarah. “Forgive me for not coming to dinner that Sunday. Maybe—”

  She reached up and touched her fingers to his lips to stop him.

  Jack had seen her expression on the faces of wives and mothers of men lost under his command in covert operations. A look of pride and despair tossed like a salad in the empty place where their once happy hearts had beaten.

  “There is no need to apologize,” she said, moving her hand from his face. “I had no idea Christopher had—,” her eyes welled. “And please accept my condolences. I remember your wife, Rachel, as a lovely and caring person.” The old woman hugged Jack.

  “Ms. Andujar,” Nora said, “I’m picking up the most wonderful fragrance from your garden.”

  “Thank you. That would be my early-season lilacs and the cucumber magnolia.”

  They all sat around the small table in the sunroom. Jack and Nora each took one of the small sandwiches and a napkin. Sarah reached in and straightened the stack of napkins.

  “Nora. Is that short for Eleanor?”

  “Yes. My mother was a huge fan of Eleanor Roosevelt. I never felt the name fit me so I eventually dropped it. Please call me Nora.”

  “I will, if you will call me Sarah.”

  The old woman sat still for a few moments staring at the flower pattern on the patio chair that framed her thin legs which she kept close together. Then she told Jack and Nora about her stressful experience with Sergeant Suggs when he had come to interview her. While she spoke, a breeze tinkled the wind chimes hanging at the fringe of her patio. She didn’t seem to hear them.

  Sarah’s lips moved as if she were considering but rejecting words. Then she spoke. “Christopher was murdered. Forgive me. I should be clear. I understand that technically my husband took his own life, but because someone was blackmailing him, though I cannot imagine over what. To my way of thinking, that makes the blackmailer a murderer.”

  Jack put his hand on Sarah’s arm, his fingers circling to meet just above her wrist. “Whom have you told about your blackmail suspicions?”

  “Only you. I could not bring myself to tell that coarse Sergeant Suggs.”

  Sarah leaned forward and took a sandwich. Jack waited while she chewed, then watched as what she had swallowed worked its way down her withered throat. Then he asked, “What makes you think Chris was being blackmailed?”

  Sarah pinched her eyes shut, then blotted her mouth with a handkerchief curled over the tip of her index finger. “When I first met Christopher, I believed he had hung the moon just for me.” She dabbed the corners of her eyes. “I am sorry. You were asking?”

  “Why do you think blackmail?” Nora said repeating Jack’s question.

  Sarah took Nora’s hand in her left and reached over to hold Jack’s in her right. The skin on her hands was mottled. “He was a healthy, successful doctor. He planned to retire next year. We were both so looking forward to spending our twilight years traveling. Then it all changed somehow. Two months before … that day, my husband had told me that in addition to paying off our home
he had accumulated a quarter of a million dollars in his safety-deposit box. I never told the police because I didn’t know how he had gotten that much cash.”

  “Did you ever see a blackmail note,” Jack asked, “or overhear a phone call from the blackmailer?”

  “No, but what other explanation could there be?” She used the fingers on her other right hand to fiddle with her wedding ring. “I went to the bank the day after that horrid Sergeant came to my home. The box was empty. That’s when I knew, knew for certain. That was why Christopher had been so moody. He had no more money to give the blackmailer, so he—” She shuddered, and then regained control. “I considered calling the sergeant, but did not. He probably would have accused my husband of losing the money gambling or running around in some inappropriate manner. I am afraid Sergeant Suggs has become very jaded from all the unsavory characters with whom he has dealt.”

  Jack heard a noise and looked up to see a young man with a thin face step through the kitchen door. He wore sunglasses and sported a neck hickey.

  “Donny Boy,” Sarah said after putting her hand to her mouth, “shame on you for neglecting your old mother.”

  The young man’s smile barely wrinkled a face smooth as polished glass. His mother made introductions.

  Jack had never met the son, and Chris had rarely spoken of him. Donny looked to be in his late thirties. He wore an open-necked green shirt, a big silver-buckled belt on designer jeans, and square toed snakeskin boots.

  Donny leaned in and gave his mother a serviceable hug and took a seat. He reeked of cologne. Sarah poured him a glass of tea, and then used a fresh napkin to absorb the drop lingering on the ledge of the spout.

  Donny’s eyes moved like lottery balls before the pick. “How do you know my mother?”

  “I knew your father for many years. I’ve been out of the country and wanted to pay my respects.”

  The young man wagged his finger. “Wait a minute, Jack McCall. I remember my father talking about you. You’re the super-spook who caught that dude last year who had bumped off some bigwigs in the government?”