Fingerman
by Roman Sympos
Part 1
The one-lane gravel road running past the Margate cabin passes a gap in the trees with an unimpeded view down to the dock on Whiskey Lake. Even at the posted speed limit of 10 mph, drivers are going too fast to catch a glimpse, but a jogger or dog-walker might pause to take in the sight: a vertical slice of lake, distant mountains, and deep blue sky bordered on each side by towering pine trees.
This particular morning the viewer’s enjoyment would have been enhanced by the faint sound of a piano, stately and delicate. If they were a long-time resident, they might have been pleased to hear music emanating from the trees below after weeks of silence—pleased not just by the music, but by what the music was telling them. The Margate cabin had new occupants, which meant the man floating face down off the end of the dock was, in all likelihood, not dead.
Theo P. Hart paddled slowly shoreward and stood up holding his treasures: a lead sinker attached to a hook and a child’s red flip-flop. He added them to the little pile on the dock and placed his snorkel next to them before wading out. At 250 pounds he was still too heavy to hoist himself up, although his six-foot, four-inch frame made it look easy. In a former life he’d topped 350, and the thought of even attempting it would never have crossed his mind.
His friends, Sam and Monica Tull, had invited him to join them this weekend at the start of their two-week sojourn on Whiskey Lake. Their toddler, Portia, was with them. They’d been offered the house gratis by Monica’s friend, Alison, her former classmate at Berklee, who’d inherited it after her mother, Harriet Margate, died of cancer. Alison and her husband had been renting it to vacationers since Harriet’s death, until a gruesome murder at the lake in mid-June led to cancellations. When still another renter backed out with no one on their waiting list, they gave Monica a call.
Most of the cases at Monica and Sam’s legal-aid nonprofit were on hold just then—it was the middle of the August lull—and those that weren’t could be handled, for the moment, by Zoom, so they jumped at the chance to flee the heat and humidity of Massachusetts. Hart felt the least he could do for being asked along was clean up some of the debris that had accumulated at the end of Harriet’s dock over the years. It wasn’t heavy lifting and there was nowhere else he’d rather be anyway.
Hart shook the water out of his ears and heard the melancholy opening notes of Chopin’s "Nocturne in F minor" [1] come pacing down the long line of steps from the house. They gave the morning scene a somber, expectant quality, almost as though it had suddenly become late afternoon.
The music stopped in mid-phrase and, after a pause, resumed. Then it stopped again.
“Lose your place?” asked Hart as he entered the living room from the screened-in porch. A red terry cloth beach blanket was draped over his shoulders, making his body seem almost conical—no broader than it was thick.
Monica was peering under the piano lid. “Looks like a missing string.” She pointed to a gap next to a single strand of piano wire. “There. At E flat 3. It’s supposed to run around that pin and double back here, to the tuning pin. Now there’s only one strand left.” She reached down and tapped the key. It made a thin, tinny sound.
A shame, thought Hart, after the previous tenant had gone to the trouble and expense of having the instrument tuned.
It was a baby grand, a Steinway—good enough for a concert pianist like Harriet Margate to practice on when she was away from Manhattan. But the house was three-season, no interior walls or insulation—what in Maine they call a “camp”—and so open to the elements that after Harriet’s death her “baby” had quickly become cranky. The last tenant liked to play, so he didn’t mind shouldering the expense of tuning it. After the murder, though, he’d freaked out and left without so much as a goodbye. Not surprising, said Alison, since the victim’s body had drifted close enough to the dock to be seen from the porch. Fortunately, the guy had paid up to the end of the month.
Alison hadn’t mentioned the missing string at Eb3. But she didn’t play piano or know anything about them—her mother’s prowess had scared her away from the instrument. She played the trombone and, at this time of year, she and her husband, a choral conductor, taught at a music camp for gifted young musicians on the other side of Whiskey Lake.
“Wonder why he didn’t have it fixed when he had it tuned,” said Hart.
“It would have cost more, maybe a whole lot more,” said Monica. “You need a technician, not just a tuner. I’ll have to find one or work around it.” She straightened up and glanced at his right fist. “What’s that?”
Hart looked down at his haul.
“That tangled up wire,” said Monica. “Looks like piano wire. Let me see.”
She took the wire and stretched it along the gap at Eb3.
“Long enough,” she said. “I wonder what it was doing there, in the water.”
“I thought it might be for fishing,” said Hart.
Monica shrugged. “Could be. That makes more sense. They look alike.”
She was putting a good face on it. Ordinarily, Monica was more assertive, especially if she felt sure of her position. And she had a black belt in sarcasm. You wouldn’t think it to look at her: curly blond hair, fair and slim as a runway model and as beatific as a Madonna by Fra Angelico. Most of the time.
Hart understood the reason for her disappointment. She wasn’t very proficient on the piano—at Berklee she’d majored in voice with a minor in business management. But she liked to play the tunes she could handle, and she loved Chopin, and this particular keyboard piece was fairly straightforward for Chopin, at least the A part. It was one of the quieter Nocturnes, too, and Portia was napping. Bummer.
At lunch, he asked about the murder. Sam filled him in.
The victim was a New Yorker visiting his family, who were vacationing at Whiskey Lake. The Zilkowskis had been regulars at a nearby resort for years, spending a few weeks there while the husband commuted from White Plains on weekends.
“Long commute,” said Hart.
“He had a private plane,” said Sam.
“Very New York,” said Hart.
“Very White Plains,” said Sam, who, though Black and originally from Roxbury, had encountered enough lawyers from Westchester County in his brief career at Parker and Houk, a prestigious Boston law firm, to know whereof he spoke.
Early one Monday morning, when Zilkowski should have been on his way to work, his body was found floating about fifty yards away from the Margate dock, face down in the water. He’d been strangled by someone using a length of very fine wire, the kind fishermen use for catching game fish like Northern Pike.
“It’s an apex predator,” said Sam, who knew nothing about fishing but was a devout worshipper of AI. “An invasive species with razor sharp teeth. They can bite right through a monofilament line if you hook one, so the anglers around here tie their lures to a wire leader attached to the line.”
At first, suspicion fell upon a local guide who ran a sport fishing business and had been in a dispute with Zilkowski over an unpaid bill from last summer. He and the victim had been seen by several witnesses arguing outside a brewpub in Fishhook, the area’s sole municipality, on the day before the body was found. Words had come to shoves and almost to blows, until a passing cop intervened. The guide was known to have a volatile temper, but aside from the metal leader, which was as common a sight around the Belgrade Lakes as dead pine needles, there was nothing to connect him to the crime.
The victim, however, turned out to be very “connected.” He was a former bodyguard who was now head of security for Paul Luther, a Gotham celebrity, real estate mogul, and reputed head of a crime syndicate managed by his three sons. One of them, the oldest, had been convicted as an accessory to murder last year on the testimony of a gun-for-hire who was now in witness protection. Paul himself was on trial for bribery, embezzlement, and extortion, and word was that the State of New York had another secret witness under wraps and that this time the Feds were involved. The focus of local attention soon shifted from Fishhook to NYC. Had the former bodyguard agreed to turn state’s evidence? The killing, after all, had all the earmarks of a professional hit: silent, swift, and sure. Lots of people living on Whiskey Lake know how to fish for pike. How many are trained in garroting techniques?
The New York State DA had “no comment” on the case and neither did the chief Federal prosecutor, but they did ask to postpone Paul Luther’s trial date. Word spread that Whiskey Lake had become an R & R haven for the Mob, and long-time residents recalled that Fishhook had been a way station for Canadian rum runners during Prohibition.
The rumors had put a dent in the vacation trade at Fishhook and nearby villages and it was taking a long time to repair the damage. “Nothing to it, of course,” said Sam. "Lucky for us, though,” he added. “I mean, it got us a free vacation.”
#
After lunch, Sam and Monica took Portia for a baby-backpack walk while Hart shopped for dinner items at J & D’s, Fishhook’s mom and pop grocery. This was only fair, since he ate as much at one meal as Monica and Sam (and Portia) combined.
It was tricky for a man his size to negotiate narrow aisles, so Hart always waited until the aisle he wanted was clear before venturing into it.
This time, just as he started in, a cop appeared at the other end pushing a small cart. She was in uniform, wide and heavy-set, with the typical cop gear surrounding her midriff that made her appear even heavier. She had an attractive face, though, and it smiled briefly, even shyly, as she came to a halt.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Hart, beginning to back away.
“No, no,” said the cop, backing up. “You go ahead.”
They spent a few seconds “you-firsting” each other and then, simultaneously, broke into laughter.
“You, too?” asked Hart.
“All the time,” said the cop.
Her name was Gretta, a Scandinavian name to match her icy blue eyes, broad face, and swept back blond hair. She was somewhere in her forties, Hart guessed, so not a rookie. He introduced himself and told Gretta he was shopping for dinner. Did J & D’s have any fresh lake fish?
Gretta shook her head. “Just canned. Next aisle over.” She recommended he stop by Tom McDermott’s. “He runs a game fishing operation.”
“McDermott? Isn’t he the guy who was suspected of killing that vacationer from New York?”
“Oh, you heard about that?”
“It’s why I’m here.” Hart explained how he and his friends ended up staying at the Margate camp.
Gretta nodded. “Bad for business, here at the lake. I knew Harriet. Loved listening to her play. You could hear her all the way to Fishhook when she got into it.”
A shopper appeared at the end of the aisle, so Hart and Gretta headed toward the other end. They met by accident at the checkout counter and resumed their conversation. Hart asked for directions to McDermott’s, and if the man sold Northern Pike.
Gretta shook her head. “Not a good eating fish, not this late in the season. And it’s hard to debone. You’re better off with lake salmon, if he has any.” She started unloading her cart.
“I hear the pike are pretty vicious. You need to use a metal leader. Is that right?”
Gretta placed a carton of eggs on the belt and stopped to look at him. “I get the feeling you’re fishing, but not for fish.”
Hart wondered if she thought he was coming on to her. He’d never been good at reading social cues, especially with women. But he liked being around them, preferred their company. Found them more intelligent, generally, and more observant than men. And kinder to big people like him.
He wasn’t interested in Northern pike. He was looking for ribs. But he didn’t want to tell Gretta what he was really fishing for. Not yet. Since lunch, when Sam described the murder, it had been on his mind. He liked puzzles, problems—chess puzzles, crosswords, riddles—and he was good at solving them. When real life presented him with one it took center stage, brightly lit in the dark auditorium of his mind. In fact, it was the one thing sure to kill his appetite, which helped him keep his weight down. As soon as Sam gave him the details of the Zilkowski case, he’d stopped eating.
Hart’s attraction to mysteries and skill at making connections was how he’d ended up becoming a detective.
That’s why he didn’t want to tell Gretta what he was fishing for. Because eventually he’d have to come clean and admit he was a private investigator. And cops hate private investigators.
But he didn’t see any way out of it.
He explained that he’d found a length of rusty wire when he was picking debris out of the water at the end of Harriet Margate’s dock, and when his friend Sam told him about Zilkowski and how he died, he wondered if there could be any connection between what he’d found and the murder weapon.
“Doubt it. The murder weapon was wrapped around the victim’s neck so tight it drew blood. It was a wire leader, like you just asked about, but obviously not the one you found.”
By now they’d emerged from the store pushing their carts and Gretta stopped to look at him. She had on her cop face now. Dead pan, eyes narrowed.
“What do you do for a living?”
Hart told her.
She smiled. “So was my dad,” she said. “After he retired. US Marshal. He needed something to do.”
Just then a horn honked.
“That’s my wife,” said Gretta. “Come with me.” She walked him over to a nearby pickup.
Gretta’s wife was named Sandy. After stowing their groceries in the back seat, Gretta looked at her watch and said, “I gotta be on duty in five minutes, my last shift before vacation.” Sandy, younger and more mannish than Gretta, sat behind the steering wheel chewing a wad of gum, while Gretta told Hart what she knew.
She didn’t mind telling it because the case had been taken out of her hands within hours of the body being discovered and there wasn’t much to tell that wasn’t already public record. She and a junior officer were first on the scene and rowed out to confirm. They radioed emergency and then their chief, who sent a detective to join them. Gretta and her partner towed the body to shore where the EMTs were waiting. By the time the victim was declared dead the detective had arrived to supervise.
“You could see a wallet in the back pocket,” said Gretta, “but we knew not to touch it.”
Hours later, word came that the case was in the hands of the State of Maine, which was coordinating resources with New York and the Federal Government.
“Could have blown me away like a Parachute Adams,” she said, then saw Hart’s look of incomprehension. “A trout fly. For fly casting.”
By then, Gretta had contacted Tom McDermott at the detective’s request. (It was she who’d ended his argument with Zilkowski the day before.) McDermott had an alibi. Spent the night at his sister’s in Rome, arrived back in Fishhook that morning.
“I was taken off the case before I could verify,” said Gretta. “Can’t see him as a killer, though. We’ve known each other since high school. Temper? Yeah, but all bark.” She paused. “Piece of rusty wire, you said?”
“My friend thought it could be a missing string from Harriet’s piano.”
“Is she the one I heard playing this morning, your friend?” asked Gretta. “Pretty tune. She’s likely right. Fishing leaders don’t rust easily.”
“So why would Harriet throw a busted piece of piano wire off her own dock?”
Gretta shrugged.
Sandy rolled down the window and said, “You’re gonna be late.”
Gretta opened the passenger side door.
“Who called it in?” Hart asked.
“Neighbor of yours, three lots over.”
“Any idea where it happened?”
“Could be anywhere on or around the lake.” She got in and leaned out the window. “Prevailing winds blow toward your end, out of the northwest. They were strong that night. Sorry, Theo, gotta go.”
#
Hart was putting his groceries away when the phone rang. It was a landline, a dial-up that renters used when their cell phones couldn’t find a tower. Which was often.
Hart reached it just before the message machine kicked in. There was a short silence and then a quavering male voice asked, “Is Monica there?”
“Not at the moment,” said Hart. “Can I take a message?”
“This is Fred Hubbard. Someone named Monica called while I was out, about a piano missing a string.”
“You’re a technician?” asked Hart, remembering what Monica had told him.
Hubbard ignored the question. “Is this the Margate residence?” he asked, and then, before Hart could answer, “I recognized the number. Kept that piano tip-top for, oh, maybe twenty years now. Is it the Eb3? Because Harriet asked me to come out and fix it just before she went to the hospital. Now you say it’s missing?”
Hart affirmed it was.
“Huh. It was still attached when Harriet called. The loose ends were jangling every time she tried to play something. I told her to get some tin snips and cut it out. She said she didn’t know if she had any and wouldn’t recognize them if she saw them. She didn’t want to mess with it.”
“Did you come out and tune the piano earlier this year?”
“I don’t do tuning. Wait a minute.” After a pause, he gave a name and number. “Call this gal. I think she’s the one Harriet used.”
Alison joined them for dinner. Sam was fixing his own special ribs, a family recipe, to thank her for her generosity. She wanted to stop by anyway to check on things and to see her favorite goddaughter, Portia, a mythical infant chimera with dark brown skin and soft blond curls. People would stop Monica on the street and ask if she dyed Portia’s hair. “No,” she’d say, grasping the hilt of her sarcasm scimitar, “just her face.”
Portia was sitting in her highchair carefully dropping peas on the floor when Hart steered the conversation to the Zilkowski murder. He saw an opening when Monica mentioned the piano and the callback from the technician. Alison apologized, Monica shook her head and said no need, and they’d be glad to pay for a visit from Mr. Hubbard. She’d already arranged it.
“At least it was in tune,” said Hart. “Your last tenant paid for that, didn’t he?”
Alison nodded. “It was my mother’s, so I don’t want to get rid of it. I was thinking I needed to get renters who didn’t want to play it—it was in such bad condition by the time probate ended. But you guys are making me I think I need to get pianists who’ll pay to fix it.”
“Your tenant had it tuned,” said Hart, “and then disappeared when he saw the victim floating nearby?”
“Well, that’s what I think happened. I saw the body myself. A neighbor called me. The police were out there by then. The house was empty and the car was gone, but the door was unlocked so I expected the guy back any minute. But he never showed.”
“He didn’t tell you why he left?”
“I never spoke to him, or tried to afterwards,” said Alison. “There wasn’t any need. He’d paid up through the end of the month.”
“So he could have left before the body was discovered,” said Hart. “Before dawn, even.”
“I guess so,” said Alison. “I would have contacted him as soon as I saw the boat was missing, if it hadn’t shown up.”
Hart was holding a rib by each end, about to take a bite, but put it back on his plate and asked, “Your boat was missing?”
“I didn’t notice right away. Someone between here and Fishhook found it beached under some blueberry bushes and called. Dave and I . . .”
“That’s Alison’s husband,” Sam said.
“. . . we went over and trailered it back.”
“The boat that’s down there now?” asked Hart. “Upside down, on the lawn?”
Alison nodded, wiping her mouth and said, “Our tenant must have been careless and left it untied. We had some high winds that week.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Hart. “Were the oars in it?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it.”
They walked Alison to the door when it was time to leave and Hart stopped her to ask, “How did he pay? Your tenant.”
Alison looked at him.
“Sorry,” said Sam. “Theo’s like a dog with a bone if he gets a Jones for something. Please just humor him. It will shut him up after you leave.”
“It was a corporate account. ‘Cyclops’ something. I’ll have to get back to you.”
“Do you know where he was from?”
“Kansas City, Missouri,” said Alison. “I’m not sure that’s where he was from originally. No accent I could recognize.”
“What did he look like?”
“White. Average looking. Average height, weight. Older—gray hair. Really, you wouldn’t notice him on the street. But could he play! As soon as he saw Harriet’s piano he sat down and started zipping through Rachmaninoff’s Paganini variations. Signed without another word.”
“His name?”
Sam reached up to put a hand on Hart’s shoulder, as if to tell him, “Enough.”
“Jason something.” Alison paused to think. “Jason Leverett.”
#
After Alison left, Monica put Portia down for the night with her snuggly, a turtle named “Ellis,” and turned on the remote monitor. By the time she came downstairs, Sam had finished washing the dishes and was reading in a hammock on the porch. The sun was about to set.
She sat down at the piano, got out her book of Chopin Preludes, and turned to number seven, the easiest and shortest—less than a minute—and one of the slowest. [2] It was soft and ruminating and sentimental, in a “happy” major key, and Monica often played it as a lullaby. It didn’t include Eb3.
Looking out through the porch, she could see the eastern shore of Whiskey Lake and the mountains beyond illuminated by the setting sun, while the shadow of the western shore spread across the water. As the last chord faded away, she heard a “thunk” from below the house and went out onto the porch to look. She saw Theo starting up the steps, holding a flashlight.
“He went down to look at the boat,” said Sam. Their eyes met.
Part 2
When Gretta and Sandy returned from vacation, they found their held mail waiting for them on the porch. Among the letters was a fat manila envelope addressed to Gretta. It contained several pages of 8 ½ x 11 paper folded in half. Also, a smaller, slimmer envelope, and a coil of rusty wire tied with packing string.
“Dear Gretta,” the letter began:
I’m leaving for home tomorrow and would have called you, but I don’t have your number or your email address and your department wouldn’t give them to me, of course. But I assume you and Sandy have left for vacation by now, so no time will be lost if I send this USPS.
I’ve got some information that might be of interest to you. Also a prediction. Two predictions.
I’ll start where I left off this afternoon, in the parking lot of J and D’s, when I asked you what a broken piece of piano wire was doing in the water off Harriet Margate’s dock. Why not just put it in the trash?
My friend, Monica—the one who plays piano—identified it by measuring it against a gap in the strings of Harriet’s baby grand. The gap was at Eb3 (that’s the name of the note). She contacted a piano technician to get it restrung. I took his return call and he told me that Harriet had asked him to come and repair it more than a year ago. She told him the string was broken but still attached and kept jangling when she tried to play. This was just before she hemorrhaged and was taken to the hospital. She died there and the technician never fixed it.
The tenant that preceded us, Jason Leverett (not his real name, I’m betting), played the piano very, very well, according to our landlady, Alison Barrett. But the baby grand was badly out of tune so he paid to have it tuned. Harriet’s piano technician gave me the name of her tuner, Susanna Negucci (phone # 555-434-4481—Alison must have given Leverett the number) and Negucci confirmed, when I called, that she came out to the Margate camp just two days before Leverett disappeared and Alfred Zilkowski’s body was found floating in the water not far from the Margate dock.
Negucci also told me, because I asked, that there was no broken wire at Eb3, just a gap. She pointed this out to Leverett, who told her he’d removed it because it was driving him nuts. He’d left it on a side table, in case she needed to examine it before replacing it. She said she didn’t do repairs and gave him the technician’s number, but Leverett never called him.
Before I continue, a word or two about “Jason Leverett.” He paid a month’s rent in advance using a corporate credit card owned by a company called “Cyclopicus.” There’s no such company registered either here or abroad—at least, AI couldn’t find it. Leverett disappeared more than three weeks short of the termination of his rental. Alison assumed he was unnerved by the sight of Zilkowski’s corpse floating within sight of his cabin, but she can’t be sure he hadn’t left before dawn made it visible.
You can see where I’m headed, and you must still be wondering what that discarded strand of piano wire has to do with Zilkowski’s murder when it’s clear (or seems to be) that he was strangled with a stainless-steel fishing leader. Leaving aside the why, and supposing he got hold of some fishing wire, how could Leverett have pulled it off? According to what I’ve read, Zilkowski’s wife said he left for the airport at 7:30 pm, after dinner, and his car was found abandoned in Fishhook the next morning, after his body was discovered. Did Leverett lie in wait for Zilkowski as he left the house, attack him on his way to his car, then drive the body to someplace on the lake where he could throw him in? All in broad daylight? (The sun set around 8:30 that evening.)
Or did he break into Zilkowski’s car and surprise him from the back seat, then wait until dark and drive to some remote landing, dump the body, and leave the car in Fishhook? Sounds plausible. But you said the fishing wire had dug far enough into the victim’s neck to break the skin. Surely there would have been blood in Zilkowski’s car. None was found (unless there’s something you know that I don’t).
More to the point, if (as you might be thinking by now) Leverett was sent to Whiskey Lake to silence the key witness in the case against Paul Luther, why pay a month’s rent? The Barretts charge by the week. Wouldn’t it all be over in a day or two?
What if we turn the whole scenario around? That’s what they let you do when you’re working a chess puzzle online: “flip” the board to see your position as your opponent sees it.
So let’s flip the board.
First thing I notice is that a month from the date Jason Leverett arrived at Whiskey Lake, Paul Luther’s trial was supposed to begin. But what happened within days after Leverett disappeared? The State of New York and the Federal prosecutor asked for a delay. Everyone thinks the delay was because Alfred Zilkowski, their key witness, was dead. What if their key witness was now “in the wind,” as they say on the cop shows?
But why? What could have scared Leverett off?
The only answer I can come up with is Zilkowski. Not his corpse, but the living, breathing head of security for one of the most notorious bosses in New York, who is about to go on trial for a long toilet-paper-roll of offenses that could send him to jail for life unless a certain key witness, currently hidden away at a remote safe house, could be “persuaded” not to testify. The State of New York doesn’t use out-of-state safe houses, but the Feds have them all over the country, overseen by US Marshals.
But there’s a problem here. Your dad was a marshal, so I assume you know that, pending trial, Federal witnesses in protective custody are stashed in safe houses close to the trial venue and under 24/7 armed guard. A three-season rental on Whiskey Lake hundreds of miles away doesn’t fit the bill.
But what happens once the trial is over? Typically, the witness is put into the Federal witness security program, or WITSEC. People in WITSEC are given new identities—a fake driver’s license, credit cards, funding through fake corporations like “Cyclopicus”—and sent to undisclosed locations to establish new lives for themselves in perfect anonymity. All they get is a contact number for their handler in case they need to be moved because someone recognized them, or if they need permission to travel, like on a vacation.
It’s not too far-fetched, then (or is it?), to assume that Leverett was in WITSEC, maybe here on vacation, with the knowledge and approval of his official contact. That would explain his fear of Zilkowski. Which means it’s possible, as well, that he was the hit man whose testimony, given behind a screen and under a pseudonym to protect his real identity, sentenced Paul Luther’s oldest son to life in prison a year ago. In light of the events surrounding the murder of Alfred Zilkowski, I’d say that’s not only possible, but likely.
What if Zilkowski’s death was the result of a botched attempt to get revenge on the snitch who put Paul, Jr. away?
Here’s how I envision it.
The day before Leverett vanishes, Zilkowski sees him somewhere, maybe shopping at J & D’s, and recognizes him. He tracks him by car or asks around to find out where he’s staying. The man was head of security for Paul Luther and would know how, wouldn’t he?
Zilkowski drives around until well after sundown, then parks nearby—not too close to be heard, but close enough to walk over, hide in the trees, and see when Leverett goes to bed. He waits another hour or so before taking out his gun and fastening the silencer. The wind is high, rustling the treetops, perfect for covering a forced entry. But Jason Leverett’s been at this game for a long time. He is, after all, a professional killer. He’s used to sleeping with one eye—and ear—open, and never more so than now that he’s on the lam.
Those old camps are full of squeaky floorboards, beginning with the front steps. At some point before Zilkowski even lifts the latch, Leverett knows he’s outside. Maybe he gets up and looks out the window to make sure. The steps are just below the main bedroom and there’s a motion-sensor light above the door.
Leverett has no weapon, and the nearest thing to one is the carving knife in the kitchen downstairs, the first room Zilkowski will enter. There is, however, that piece of piano wire in the living room. I’ve measured it. Even with one end broken off, it’s more than three feet long.
While Zilkowski’s ears are still full of rustling wind song, Leverett creeps downstairs, grabs the piano wire, wraps it around his hands—no time to get a towel or something to pad them with—and takes his position, back against the wall, just inside the doorway leading to the living room.
It’s over in less than a minute—no, less than half a minute. Leverett’s had years to perfect his technique.
First thing he does after the body stops twitching is take the car keys out of its pocket. The victim’s car needs to be moved.
If the piano wire broke Zilkowski’s skin, as you say, some of his blood might have dripped on the floor. You might send a CSI team to check.
While they’re at it, they should examine the rowboat overturned on the lawn near the dock. Underneath it they’ll find a couple of oars. One of them has a faint, brown smudge that looks like dried blood to me. If the wire was pulled tight enough to make Zilkowski’s neck bleed, chances are it made Leverett’s hands bleed, too.
I also examined the steps on my way back up to the house but didn’t find anything useful. Rain would have washed away any blood stains long ago.
Something else CSI will find in the boat, under the center seat, is a couple of ziplocks of wire leader, the kind used for game fishing. Maybe a bag slid out as Leverett was dragging Zilkowski’s body into the boat, which would have rocked back and forth when he stepped in. Whatever gave him the idea, Leverett apparently thought it prudent to remove the piano wire—which could easily be traced to Harriet’s camp (how many other baby grands live nearby?)—and replace it with fishing wire.
Did he throw the piano wire into the water? I doubt it. He’d wait and toss it into the lake. My guess is that he set it down on the dock or the boat seat and a gust of wind blew it off. It was windy that night, and especially dark with no moon, and he wasn’t about to jump in after it.
But why mess with the murder weapon? Why not just attach the body to something heavy enough to drag it to the bottom of the lake?
Well, for that you need two things. The first is rope. The second is something really heavy to tie it to, securely, like a cinder block. The boat was tied to the dock with rope. Easy enough to replace the dock at that end with Zilkowski. But what about the other end? If you accompany the CSI team to the Margate camp, take a few minutes to walk around the property. See any likely candidates? I didn’t. And remember, it was dark, and Leverett had been there only a few days.
So, Plan B: row the body out to the middle of the lake and dump it to be found the next morning. Make sure to replace the murder weapon with a plausible substitute to deflect attention from its real origin and distribute suspicion all up and down the shores of Whiskey Lake.
Wind and darkness are why Leverett couldn’t find his way back to where he started. The Margate camp would be impossible to pinpoint from the middle of the lake on a dark night, and even trying to compensate for the wind, he couldn’t be sure where he would come ashore. As it turned out, he overcompensated, landing upwind of the dock, toward Fishhook, which told me the boat hadn’t just come loose due to a faulty bowline and drifted away, like Alison thought.
So he left the boat under the blueberries and found his way to the camp. Drove Zilkowski’s car to Fishhook and walked back—maybe two hours? Still plenty of time. Cleaned up as best he could. Packed his things. Got in his car and left.
Did he call his WITSEC handler before he drove away? Two reasons for not doing so come to mind.
First, the Feds had done a piss-poor job of protecting him if they didn’t warn him to stay away from the regular summer hangout of Luther’s head of security. Second, he’d killed a man while under WITSEC protection, and that’s a no-no. The first thing his handler would do is have Leverett arrested and held for trial. Not only would his cover be blown, but if convicted he’d be sent straight to the lion’s den, within easy reach of a toothbrush-handle shiv between the ribs. Paul Luther knew people who knew people in the prison system, on both sides of the bars.
So he left. But why, if Zilkowski was no longer a threat? Easy to answer: Leverett couldn’t be sure Zilkowski hadn’t called his boss and told him the good news, even been ordered to get it over with.
That leaves only one thing I don’t get: why did Leverett choose Whiskey Lake for a month’s vacation? Of all places on the face of the earth. Did it mean something to him, or was it just a toss of the dart? I guess we’ll never know.
You’ll find my predictions enclosed, in another envelope. Don’t open it until you see Jason Leverett’s name in the news, or a year has passed, whichever comes first.
Well, it’s way past my bedtime and I’ve reached the bottom of this sheet. Good place to end.
Hope to hear from you again, when the time is right.
Sincerely,
Theo P. Hart
#
Two weeks after leaving his bulky envelope with Sam to mail at the Fishhook PO, Hart received a thank-you email from Gretta telling him she’d give the piano wire to someone she knew at the state forensics lab to check for blood or tissue residue, although finding any would be a long shot after so many weeks in Whiskey Lake. She also said the wire was thinner than most fishing leaders. “A wire leader for catching game fish would be three or four times as thick,” she wrote. “That confirms the evidence of the rusty spots. It’s probably piano wire.”
Another week went by and Gretta emailed again. Theo was sitting in his office on Main Street when he opened his inbox, trying to ignore the smell of fresh bread drifting up from the Italian bakery downstairs. He was glad as soon as he did. It took his mind off eating.
Dear Theo,
I was on my way to a brow appointment in Fishhook when I ran into Sarah McDermott, Tom McDermott’s sister. We chatted for a bit before I thought to ask if anyone ever stopped by her house in Rome to confirm Tom’s alibi for the night Zilkowski was killed. She said yes, a state cop, and she told him Tom had been at her place all night and most of the next morning.
​
He’d arrived with an old army buddy he wanted to introduce, who was vacationing on Whiskey Lake. The two of them hadn’t seen each other in years. Tom had promised to do some work on her patio the next day, so he stayed the night. I asked her about Tom’s friend. Did he stay, too? She said no, they came in separate cars, and the friend drove back to Whiskey Lake right after dinner. On a hunch, I asked if she remembered the friend’s name. “Jason Leverett,” she said.
​
I asked if the two men spent the day in Fishhook before they came for dinner. Sarah nodded and said they went fishing on Tom’s boat and then had a couple of beers at Piney’s Pub before driving to Rome. Piney’s is where McDermott had his run-in with Zilkowski.
​
After my appointment, I called Tom, told him what Sarah told me, and asked if his friend, Jason, had been nearby when I broke up his argument with Zilkowski. The fight was right outside the pub, you understand, and Tom seemed to be by himself. I added that I was being asked to find witnesses. Just procedural, tying up loose ends, not to worry.
No, he said, Jason was inside. Tom had come out to feed the parking meter.
​
I asked where they were sitting. He said a booth near the windows. So your friend might have seen you with Zilkowski? I asked. Tom said he doubted it. Jason hadn’t said anything.
​
Then I asked him if he told Jason about the argument?
​
Yes, he said, to explain why it took so long to feed the meter.
​
Did you use Zilkowski’s name? I asked.
​
He paused—a long pause—before saying, no, just that it was some asshole who owed him money.
​
Had Jason been in touch since then? Only a text, he said, that same day. Family emergency—sorry, great times, all that. Tom texted back, but the message couldn’t be delivered. Called. Not in service. I asked if Jason left his address. Tom said yes. It was in Kansas City, Missouri. As I recall, you told me that’s the address Leverett put on his rental agreement.
​
If Jason Leverett really is who he says he is, he’s the same Jason Leverett Tom served with in the army. End of story. If he’s in WITSEC, as you suspect, he must have told Tom why he’s now using an alias. And in that case, Tom and his sister could be in danger. Zilkowski could have seen Leverett through the pub window, hung around to find out where he went, and spotted McDermott joining him after feeding the parking meter. Assuming Zilkowski contacted his boss for instructions before driving to the Margate camp, McDermott would be an obvious pressure point in the Luther gang’s search for the snitch who put Paul, Jr. away for life, especially now that he’s also killed their head of security. Maybe a knock on Sarah’s door with the butt of a Glock 19 would be all that’s needed.
​
But that’s supposing your version of Zilkowski’s killing is accurate. And we aren’t there yet. Still, I’ll be keeping an eye on Tom and his sister, for their own sakes.
​
I’ll write again as soon as I get the results on the piano wire. I’m also going to ask my friend to run some tests on that oar handle. I’ll need Alison Barrett’s permission first.
Meanwhile, your “Predictions” envelope remains sealed. Hearing Jason Leveret’s name isn’t the same as seeing it in print.
​
Curiouser and curiouser.
Best,
Gretta.
#
Hart typically skimmed the online headers of The Gloucester Times, The Globe, and The New York Times at breakfast, looking for stories that might be relevant to ongoing cases. So he was a little surprised not to find a new email from Gretta waiting for him when he arrived at his office one bright, sunny October morning. It wasn’t until four days later that one appeared.
Dear Theo,
I opened your “Predictions” envelope last Friday as soon as I read the news. This was right after reading about Paul Luther’s conviction. But I waited to contact you until I could confirm your second prediction.
​
So, first of all, and as I expected, there was no human residue on the piano wire. But your prediction about the stain on the oar was correct. My forensics friend confirmed that it’s human blood. Based on that, and your reconstruction of events, I got the Zilkowski investigation reopened. Our department is coordinating with the FBI and the US Marshals service, along with the authorities in Cincinnati, where the body of the man known as “Jason Leverett” was discovered, to determine the chain of events connecting these two deaths. I also have my own sources of information. Not just my pathologist friend, but a former colleague of my Dad’s who’s still a US Marshall.
​
The victim’s biometric record matches the DNA profile of the blood on the oar handle of the Margate rowboat, so that confirms your scenario. It belongs to a professional “house painter” named Stanley Prior. His nickname was “Fingers.” You can guess why. Prior was found duct-taped to a kitchen chair with his belt cinched around his neck. Cause of death: strangulation. Tit-for-tat, I guess. How he remained hidden for so long without using his WITSEC credit card remains a mystery. His landlord knew him by his alias, and a Missouri driver’s license belonging to “Jason Leverett” was found in his wallet, with an address in Kansas City. His car, parked on the street outside, had stolen plates. I don’t know how often they’d been switched out.
​
Interesting fact: Prior was an Army vet assigned to Special Forces, where “silent elimination” techniques are part of the curriculum.
​
The autopsy report confirms your second prediction: both of Prior’s hands were scarred around the palms and backs, especially the “hypothenar eminence”—the fleshy part that runs from the base of the little finger to the wrist, just where you’d expect. To make it all airtight, CSI found flecks of Prior’s blood on the living room floor of the Margate camp, along with traces belonging to Alfred Zilkowski.
​
So, case closed, and congrats, Theo.
​
But before I sign off, I want to share a theory of my own, about how Luther’s gang beat the Feds to Cincinnati.
​
I told you I wanted to keep an eye on Tom and Sarah McDermott, for their own safety, in case Luther’s goons came knocking. So I did, but I never saw anything suspicious. They seemed to go on about their business without a care in the world. I decided nothing was going to happen.
​
It wasn’t until I read about Prior’s murder in Cincinnati that I remembered three weeks had elapsed after the Zilkowski killing before I ran into Sarah in Fishhook. Would Paul Luther have waited even a New York minute after Zilkowski was found floating in Whiskey Lake before sending a couple of his knuckle-draggers up here to ask about game-fishing opportunites? Zilkowski had seen Prior drinking with McDermott, his old nemesis. He must have mentioned it, if only as a way to trace Prior. Those guys wouldn’t have had to threaten Tom, either. Just pals of his pal, who told them about this great fishing guide. Hey, we’ve lost touch with him! Do you know where we can find him? And if Tom got suspicious, there was always the surer option.
​
They wouldn’t find Stanley Prior in Kansas City, of course, but they might have found evidence of places he was likely to be hiding out. And they’d have gotten there before the Feds even knew Prior had vanished. Why would his WITSEC contact suspect that “Jason Leverett” had anything to do with Zilkowski’s murder? Or even know, until days, maybe weeks later, that he was no longer sitting at Harriet Margate’s baby grand every evening, serenading the shoreline inhabitants of Whiskey Lake?
​
I’d rather believe Tom got taken in than face the possibility that he’d betray a friend. And if he wasn’t taken in, I’d still rather believe he pretended to be, because if he let on that he knew who these goombas were, he wouldn’t be the only one in jeopardy.
​
One thing we know for certain, now that Paul Luther’s been found guilty on his ex-wife’s testimony. Alfred Zilkowski remained a loyal soldier to the end.
Warm regards,
Gretta
​
Notes
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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olFHFbijAjM
​
