“I’m just a helpless prisoner. What have I got to push with?”
“Right. Okay, if you’re as tired of your computer as I am of that Hudson Heights bullshit, we could play some cards.”
I stood abruptly. “I’d rather chop wood. Watch or stack, take your pick.”
Calvin tooled up about half an hour later, to Frank’s undisguised relief. They conferred briefly in the driveway before he
split.
“Did you catch the five o’clock news?” I asked Calvin as we walked back around the house.
“Oh, yeah. Bummer.”
“So what’s happening?”
“Dunno. Baxter thought it’d be a good idea to lean on Thurman Haynes, but the man’s gone to ground. Then we went to see Chauncy
Bellis. Asshole’s stonewalling. His brother’s got a chunk of dough in Hudson Heights, could be why. Steve’s bringing back
everything he’s had time to copy this afternoon. Maybe we’ll get something strong enough there to go over Phil’s head for
a warrant.”
“Don’t count on it. All Mariah could have found in Albany was a basis for speculation. She was trying to shore that up when
she called Chauncy about the effects of that chemical. It’s used in making wood preservatives, by the way, so it’s a fit with
that one Albany Univers plant. But if Chauncy’s not cooperating—”
“Also, we have to figure in how tight the definition of probable cause is in Riverton just now. Maybe we ought to have you
go public. You’ve got legitimate claims to expertise, you’ve worked out at Hudson Heights. If you’re quoted as saying they
might have this problem, how many houses are they going to sell until somebody checks it out?”
“As many as they can build? Think about it. I was close friends with a woman known for her opposition to Hudson Heights. In
the course of the past week I have found two bodies—one of them in my own front yard—blown my only local professional connection,
and had it brought out that I once was a troubled teenager with a propensity toward violence. At this point my credibility
isn’t worth spit. Even if Chauncy Bellis admits to uttering the words ‘chromated copper arsenate’ in my hearing, which it
doesn’t sound as if he’s about to do, it’s still a longer leap from theory to fact than most people would be willing to make.
Like I keep saying, for credibility I need properly taken, properly witnessed, properly analyzed soil samplings that give
the right results. Yet here we sit.”
“Val, Baxter’s not giving up on this. Cut him a little slack, can’t you?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not on my watch,” Calvin acknowledged. “So, want to play some cards?”
He proved equally superior at gin rummy and double solitaire, the only two-person card games we had in common. But it did
pass the close to an hour before Baxter showed up.
From a distance he looked as unruffled as ever. Closer up, you could see the taut, tired facial lines. My residual anger drained
away. “Guess we’ve got ’em worried now,” I greeted him.
“Guess we have,” he concurred. “So—you still want to go on that date tonight?”
I stared at him.
He gave a little shrug. “The stakes got a whole lot higher these last few hours, and the options are shriveling up fast. If
we can’t get hold of something good enough to build on, I don’t see a bright, shiny future for either of us around here. Possibly
not a very long one, either, if Chauncy doesn’t keep his distress to himself.”
“Maybe you should write your memoirs, too.”
“Maybe so. I hauled out my maps and drove around some. You were right. Realistically, I can’t bring this off on my own. If
you think the two of us can, let’s go for it.”
“There’s one thing I should tell you. I can’t guarantee soil tests will show what we need them to. It’ll depend on how rampant
the contamination is and how well Thurman’s been able to shore things up. When the first batch of Cornell Pink azaleas crapped
out, he showed me a pH reading—this measures acidity—that was too high for azaleas. In other words, the soil was sweeter than
they can tolerate. It’s possible to acidify soil gradually, over a period of time, but there’s no chemical quick fix that
would change the acidity enough for those plants, so we ended up replacing the top foot and a half of soil right around there
with some that had a better pH to start with.”
“Assuming Thurman was faking the test results, he was getting rid of contaminated soil and replacing it with fresh?”
“Exactly. Not a permanent cure, but it could skew test results for a while. We can’t sample just that one area. If we go there
tonight, it will not be a simple in-and-out run. Thurman always wanted to be told about plant problems as they developed,
and you have to remember he knows much more about soil composition than I do. When it comes to where to sample, it might turn
out to be a matter of can I out-guess him.”
“Are you saying maybe we shouldn’t do this?”
“Hell, no. I’ll get my stuff together.”
“Whoa. Aren’t we thinking dead of night?”
“That’s up to you. But I was wondering. The country club closes at what—one, two
A.M.
?”
“Two,” Calvin supplied. “I was out there for a wedding a couple weeks ago. Incidentally, guys, I’m in on this excursion.”
“Fine with me, but you’ll have to clear it with your boss. He runs a tight ship.”
Baxter nodded his head in Calvin’s direction. “Welcome aboard—I’m assuming you do like to live dangerously. What’s your point
about closing time, Val?”
“That whoever’s keeping watch has an easier job of it from then on because there’s a big reduction in random movement that
needs to be monitored. If Chauncy’s touched base already, you know they’ll beef up their manpower for that watch. They might
anyhow, as a general precaution.”
“So?”
“There’s bound to be something doing at the club on a Saturday night, lots of coming and going all through the evening. Hard
to keep track of. Mariah’s wake starts at eight, and most of our principals will be putting in some time there.”
Baxter broke into a smile. “Mariah would love it.”
B
axter insisted on working out a detailed itinerary, so prepping for our mission took a while. First of all, he and Calvin
needed to know enough about Hudson Heights to follow what I was talking about. Simply marking a route on a site plan wouldn’t
do. Site plans bear scant resemblance to conventional maps, and most people, picking one up for the first time, will not make
much immediate sense of it.
Our operations center was my dining table. We started out working with the plan of the entire development. Even though we
were concentrating on the plateau, both men wanted to improve their familiarity with the overall layout. Complex though that
is, you can identify a linear structure to it. Hudson Heights is essentially a ragged rectangle, oriented north-south along
the river, much longer than it is wide. The golf course and adjacent residential areas wind sinuously around the north-south
axis, with the plateau and its satellite terrace the western cumulation of an off-center cross-axis drawn closer to the south
than the north end.
Where it got tricky was the elevation changes, of which Hudson Heights has an abundance. “Think of it in terms of levels,
in roughly fifty-foot increments,” I tried finally. “Level one starts about fifty feet above Route 5 and the valley plane.
There’s no spot lower than that in the whole development, even the quarry pond. Levels one, two, and three comprise the golf
course and residential areas. Don’t think sharp cutoffs, though there are some of those; think mostly gentle ups and downs.
Like the first hole would be Level three and a half. Level four is that terrace they smoothed off for the pool and tennis
courts. Level five is the plateau.”
“Making that tunnel from the country club onto the golf course something like four and three-quarters?” Calvin asked.
“Something like. Yeah, I’d say there’s close to a fifty-foot slant, all told, between the lower level of the club and the
approach to the first hole.”
“Can we key in which holes belong to which levels?” was Baxter’s more difficult question.
“Let me get some colored markers.” Starting with the elevations I was pretty sure of I tried to work out the various relationships
from there. Absolutely correctly? Not a chance, but it provided at least a rudimentary idea of the ups and downs, one that
Calvin, who’d had a little site-plan exposure from his backhoe moonlighting, came up to speed on pretty fast; Baxter struggled.
With that under their belts, both men found it relatively easy to master the layout of the plateau. In shape, it’s a ragged
polygon: a long, almost straight side fronting the river, and four soft-edged segments making up the remainder of the perimeter.
There aren’t many major design elements on this surface. Both of the two large buildings hug the straight edge of the river
cliff to their west. The country club stands a little in from the northern perimeter; the inn, a skinny rectangle, is all
the way south, with a moderate southwest orientation. Until the inn opens vehicular traffic in and out from the access road
is restricted to one of two routes. For delivery trucks, there is a ramp down to the lower level of the country club. Everyone
else is channeled into a porticoed drive-through in front of the club entrance, where their vehicles are surrendered for valet
parking. They end up in the large, three-feet-high walled parking lot that occupies roughly the northeast quadrant of the
plateau.
The short east-west roadway between country club and parking lot also has walls, much lower ones. They serve as a visual divider
between the two large, distinctly different landscaped areas on the plateau. The core of the difference lies in the amount
of vegetation. Willem’s design for the area north of the crossing road between country club and parking lot incorporates a
lot of it, including many tall shrubs and small trees. South of the road, he left the space much more open. He envisioned
a plaza: sunny, with paved walkways fringed by beds of flowering annuals, spoking out from a central paved seating area replete
with fountain. At the edge of this plaza, near the south wall of the parking lot, is the site of Johnny Armitage’s infamous
mudslide. It had been designed as the gateway down to the pool/tennis-courts terrace. Shortly after new soil was trucked in
and packed down to restore the former land lines, a railed stairway was installed and the slope itself was densely planted
with cotoneaster, barberry, and other tough shrubs to discourage erosion.
For our excursion, sizable areas of the plateau surface could be avoided altogether: the entire western side, where the two
buildings stood, and of course the concrete surface of the large parking lot. There might be interesting stuff under there,
but how would we get to it? Between the paving and the outer walls was a four-feet-wide strip of vegetation, carpeted with
turf plugs from Batavia. I wanted to sample the eastern and southern stretches of this perimeter, which struck me as prime
territory for seepage.
We could also pretty much ignore the plaza-to-be. With construction supplies for the inn stacked all around and no serious
cleanup yet undertaken, there were too many possible extraneous soil contaminants. Besides, that area did not afford enough
cover to sample in safety. Of course I did want to check where Johnny’s mudslide had occurred. It would be interesting to
see how the soil read out, and maybe even more interesting to measure down around the tennis courts, where the mud had ended
up. We could check both areas in comparative safety on our way in.
So basically, our target was that large landscaped area between the country club and the parking lot. That’s where the Cornell
Pinks were, along with something like 250 other species of vegetation, large and small. I’d made up my mind where to sample
and I could draw in all the major plant clusters and most of the minor ones from memory. Diagramming our path for maximum
cover took only a few minutes.
“I’d dearly love to sample around the quarry pond, too,” I said wistfully, looking up. “See what effect the drainage runoff’s
having. But they’ve made that area damn near inaccessible. It would have to be another trip, preferably in daylight.”
Baxter stared at the clutter in front of him on the table. “In daylight and legal. We’ve already got plenty to cover tonight.
Let’s check over what we have with an eye to escape routes, in case we need to abort at some point.”
I nodded my agreement. “We’ll need to factor in the security setup.” I proceeded to summarize what I already knew. There were
twenty-four-hour manned gatehouses at the north and south entrances to the golf-course/residential loop road; you had to be
either a resident or an expected visitor to get in. All driveways would open off that road, and a number of areas along it
would be set aside for small parking lots. There was a lot of green space, part of neither the course nor anybody’s yard.
The master plan called for numerous foot and bike paths, a few of which were already established. Three of these paths would
access the tennis-courts/pool area, and from there people could climb those stairs to the plateau. By car, resident or non-
and whatever your reason for going to the plateau, you had to drive up along the steep access road bleeding off Route 5. This
road could be gated shut at its bottom end and regularly was when the country club was not open. “But I figure there are a
few more wrinkles,” I said when finished.
Indeed, Baxter assured me. Besides the night lighting up top, there were motion detectors along the access road and covering
all building access points. TV cameras panned the surrounding area. Information from these sources was monitored throughout
the night from a small first-floor room in the country club. If something looked wrong, one or both of the armed gate-booth
personnel would be drawn in to investigate. How many calls they’d gotten he didn’t know, but presumably they’d been able to
handle whatever problems arose on-site without the need for police involvement. In the months since the country club opened,
the sheriff’s department had never been summoned.