Death at Charity's Point (The Brady Coyne Mysteries Book 1) by William G. Tapply

Author:William G. Tapply [Tapply, William G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480427433
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

FLORENCE GRESHAM’S HOME IN Beverly Farms is nestled among those of descendants of the Cabots, Lowells, Saltonstalls, and several other moneyed, old Massachusetts clans. It’s less than a fifteen-minute drive from Leonard Wertz’s office in Danvers. I decided to take a chance that she’d be home on Monday morning, see how she was making out, pick up the magazine article we had discussed, and, in general, keep my fences in good repair. House calls. Part of the service rendered by Brady L. Coyne, Inc.

The Gresham estate in Beverly Farms is not visible from the road. A high brick wall surrounds it. The sturdy iron gate that admits visitors opens electronically.

I pulled the front bumper of my BMW up to the gate and stepped out, leaving the motor running. Built into a brick pillar to which the high gate was hinged was a metal box painted flat black. Inside the box was a telephone. I opened the box, put the phone to my ear, and pressed the button beneath the phone hook.

“Who is there, please?” came a man’s voice.

“Brady Coyne, John. Mrs. Gresham available?”

“One moment, please, Mr. Coyne.”

I waited for a couple of minutes before John’s voice said, “Mrs. Gresham will see you, sir. Please come in.”

I hung up the phone and returned to my car. The gates swung silently open and I drove in. In my rearview mirror I saw them ease closed behind me. The tires crunched on the pea-stone driveway, which wound around an artificial pond up to an arched portico on the front of the Georgian mansion where Florence Gresham lived.

John led me to her where she sat at an umbrella’d table in the back garden amid a spectacular wash of blue and yellow late-spring flowers. I took the seat opposite her.

“Coffee, sir?” asked John, with a little bow to me after I sat down.

“No. Thank you,” I said.

I lit a cigarette and spoke to Florence. “How are you?”

Instead of answering me, she thrust a tabloid-sized newspaper across the table toward me. “Look at this,” she said.

It was a copy of the National Tattler, a popular scandal sheet which I confess to picking up from time to time along with my frozen dinners at the Stop & Shop. This edition featured on its front page a photograph in a grainy color of a hard-looking, blonde girl under the blaring headline: “Has Deborah Really Kicked the Habit?”

I lifted my eyebrows at Florence.

“Page three,” she said.

I folded over the page. On the third page I saw a photograph of four young men dressed in military camouflage suits and wearing berets, kneeling side by side grinning into the camera. They reminded me of Cap Spender, the resident Nazi at Ruggles. Each of the men in the photo held a short, efficient-looking weapon which I recognized as an Israeli combat gun. The headline for the story read “Survivalists: Preparing for Armageddon.”

The picture was captioned “Young Americans gird for their next battle.”

“The radicals of the Eighties,” I said to Florence. “The new generation of Abbie Hoffmans.

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