Chapter 5 Erik #3
“Did I miss anything besides a threat on my life?” Ben asked, but his humor fell flat.
Erik gathered him into his arms. “Never joke about that,” he growled, and kissed Ben. “I’m going to keep you safe no matter what it takes.”
“We are going to keep each other safe,” Ben corrected when they stepped back. “And a good offense is a great defense. We need to start offending.”
Erik chuckled at Ben’s wording. “That seems to come naturally.”
“You know what I meant.”
“I got that list of buyers from the Commodore Wilson sale,” Erik told Ben as he retrieved the chicken casserole Susan brought and turned on the oven.
“I thought we could split it up after dinner and see if any names pop out to us. I don’t think we’ll find Gusev or Barone themselves, but we might spot an underling.
Or someone with minor organized crime connections who could have been working on their own for a third party. ”
“You think that will help us find the dome?” Ben poured drinks and set the table.
“I’ve got a hunch that the dome never left this area,” Erik replied. “Maybe Cape May proper, but not the general vicinity. Call it intuition.”
“Backed up by psychic abilities, that’s way more than most people’s hunches,” Ben said. “Do you have a theory?”
Erik shook his head. “As to why someone would buy the dome and not pass it off to a wealthy purchaser? I’m still working on that.”
The next morning, Erik woke after a restless sleep. His mind kept turning the questions of the case over and over, and he didn’t have a breakthrough to show for it.
“I’ll make a fresh pot of coffee,” Ben said. “It’s going to be a long day. What are you going to work on, since the shop is closed?”
“Maybe it’s a wild goose chase, but all that tossing and turning did yield an idea,” Erik replied. “I keep thinking, if the dome never left the area, where would it be, and why was it forgotten?”
“I’ll bite.” Ben made himself a piece of toast with peanut butter. “Why?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Erik admitted sheepishly, “But what if someone temporarily stored the boxes at another property they owned, and then for some reason wasn’t able to go back and get them?”
“Why would it still be there after all these years?” Ben’s background as a cop made him good at punching holes in stories.
“Maybe the property fell on hard times, and no one has been paying a lot of attention,” Erik theorized.
“That’s what I’m going to research today, hotels and other large locations that existed when the Commodore Wilson was demolished that are still standing, but maybe not in good shape or abandoned. ”
“Promise me you won’t go spooking around old cellars alone.” Ben gave him a look that silently added or else.
Erik waved him away. “No. I’m hoping that I can come up with a couple of options, and then we figure out where to go from there.”
“I’m hoping to make a short day of it.” Ben set his coffee cup in the sink and took his mostly dry raincoat down from a peg and put it on. “With luck, Jenny and I won’t find any leaks or overflowing gutters, and the punch list will be short.”
“Stay dry, and keep your eyes open for trouble,” Erik warned as he stood to give Ben a kiss.
“I will.” Ben tapped the holster at his belt. “And I’ve got my Glock.”
Erik sincerely hoped Ben didn’t need the weapon, but he felt relieved that his partner had taken the warning seriously enough to go armed, just in case.
“See you soon.” Erik leaned in for another kiss. “Call if you need me. I’ll be right here.”
After Ben left, Erik refilled his coffee and settled back in at the table.
He started with hotel listings from the mid-nineties, around the time the Commodore Wilson was destroyed, and then went back decade by decade to identify hotels and other buildings that might have been a hiding place for the dome.
As the hours ticked by, Erik got an education in Cape May’s real estate market as well as its rising and falling fortunes.
At the time of the Commodore Wilson’s destruction, the city wasn’t as vibrant as it became later.
During that slump, many older commercial properties and hotels fell onto hard times.
Some were purchased and leveled, while others got a second wind.
A small number of locations just stopped being mentioned.
Erik couldn’t find a record of them being demolished, or any information about being sold or repurposed.
If they fell into receivership, the proceedings dragged on for years without a published resolution.
It didn’t seem possible for the properties to just fall between the cracks, but it looked like that was exactly what happened.
By lunchtime, Erik had a list of a dozen possibilities.
After a sandwich and soda, he whittled that down to five likely locations.
Since Ben was busy with the rentals and wouldn’t be able to run the leads on his computer until evening, Erik reached out to Brent Lawson, a friend who was also a private investigator.
“Erik, great to hear from you. To what potentially world-ending catastrophe do I owe the honor?” Brent greeted him.
“Who says there has to be an apocalypse for me to call?” Erik bantered.
“Because you don’t usually want to talk about the latest blockbuster movie,” Brent replied. “What’s up?”
Brent lived in Pittsburgh and had a law enforcement background similar to Ben’s.
He often collaborated with them on problems involving magic and the supernatural, so Erik didn’t have to worry about being believed.
Brent even had experience dealing with the Pittsburgh Mob, so he understood that part of the equation.
“Old Mafia trouble, missing artwork, same old, same old.”
“How can I help?”
“I need to run a couple of addresses for a history, and Ben’s tied up with work. I’m hoping you can please do me a favor and put them through your databases.”
“Yeah, sure. Not a problem. Ben’s managed not to go back into the business?” Brent asked as Erik typed an email with the locations he was hoping to learn more about.
“He doesn’t take new clients,” Erik replied.
“Technically, he’s taking over the rental real estate business for his aunt and uncle, but he keeps his P.I.
license so he can get the insider scoop when we get trouble.
He’s out all day, and I’m trying to make headway on some research that’s pretty time-dependent. ”
Erik heard a ping on the other end of the connection.
“Got your email. Give me an hour or so, and I’ll send you what I can get out of the databases. When are you and Ben going to come visit Pittsburgh?”
“I could ask when you’re going to come up to Cape May. Bring Travis. We can go ghost hunting,” Erik joked. Travis was Brent’s work partner, and together they teamed up to stop supernatural dangers in Pittsburgh.
“Spring,” Brent replied. “It’s already getting cold here, and you’re farther north.”
“Fair enough. Let me know when you’ve got something. Thanks so much. I owe you.”
Erik spent the next hour catching up on paperwork for the shop, dusting the displays, and ordering supplies. By the time Brent’s email came through, he felt like he had managed to put in a good morning’s work.
He texted Brent his thanks and dug into the trove of reports his friend sent. Brent’s detective license and connections gave him access to data that was not openly available to the public, and the additional information helped Erik narrow his search.
After he waded through all the documents, Erik had a top contender, Weston Hall.
Named for an English country house and built in 1910, Weston Hall’s builder had envisioned it as a grand manor befitting his fortune.
He barely outlived the construction and left one heir, who died on the Titanic.
The property sold to a developer who made it into a resort, which held its own until competition from other historic hotels siphoned off its clientele during Cape May’s revitalization.
From there, Weston Hall passed through various hands, and its owners attempted a number of different ways to reinvent the buildings, from private school to conference center to hotel again.
Age and upkeep made it increasingly expensive to maintain, and the parade of owners meant damage occurred as maintenance became irregular.
Notably, it had a sizeable warehouse among its outbuildings.
By the time Thomas Bartolo bought Weston Hall in 1995, it had become something of a white elephant in the local real estate market.
Bartolo’s success and wealth from trucking and real estate came with ties to organized crime, and he was linked to the shady dealings of the firebrand preacher who was the Commodore Wilson’s final owner.
Erik recognized Bartolo’s name from the list he had compiled of people who made purchases at the Commodore Wilson’s liquidation sale. He checked that information and confirmed that Bartolo had spent big money to purchase many of the doomed hotel’s architectural features.
The liquidation sale records were spotty in places, but what Erik could find reported that Bartolo had his purchases shipped to his various properties, presumably to install them there.
Erik didn’t see a mention of Weston Hall, but it seemed likely that the most local property would receive some of the Commodore Wilson’s pieces, for nostalgia value.
Whatever Bartolo’s plans might have been, he was killed over a poker debt with another mobster. Lawyers and bankers litigated his estate, with claims and countersuits wending through the courts for years. Through it all, Weston Hall seemed forgotten, even as other properties found buyers.
According to the database information, Weston Hall remained abandoned and dilapidated, still tangled up in lawsuits. Its uncertain ownership and lack of a clear title, as well as unpaid debts, meant no one had been able to purchase the old hotel either to renovate it or tear it down for the land.
“Bingo,” Erik muttered under his breath. That sounded like the perfect place for the dome’s crates to go missing, overlooked in the storage area of a deserted ruin.
Curious about what Weston Hall had looked like in its glory days, Erik turned to the internet. He found photos of the building over the years of its checkered existence, as well as its long-ago British namesake.
The Cape May version of Weston Hall bore only a passing resemblance to its English cousin, an odd combination of British estate with elements from Cape May’s Victorian and Edwardian opulence.
When Erik saw that Weston Hall had a narrow Tiffany-style arch over a main hallway, he felt certain he had found where the Commodore Wilson’s dome had been languishing all these years.
Bartolo probably intended to install the dome to build on the archway Weston Hall already had. But what if he sent it there and then didn’t live long enough to do anything with it?
Boxed in crates, the dome could easily be forgotten in the warehouse as the Weston became abandoned.
No one would have known to look for it, and with the building left empty, the odds of being discovered by accident were slim.
Erik hoped vandals hadn’t happened upon it, but the heavy crates might have seemed too boring to attract attention.
The more he thought about it, the more convinced Erik became that Weston Hall was a likely resting place for the missing dome.
When he searched online for photographs, he found relatively recent drone footage that showed the warehouse behind the main building covered with vegetation, nearly invisible behind an overgrown lawn with a sagging chain-link fence to keep out trespassers.
Erik couldn’t wait to tell Ben about Weston Hall, but his call went to voicemail.
Outside, the storm had grown worse, with the rain spattering against the windows in fat droplets, hitting hard enough it sounded like they could break the glass.
Erik guessed that Ben had his hands full dealing with his property inspections and didn’t envy him the drive home.
A crack of thunder made Erik jump. Then the lights went out.
“Shit.” Erik took his laptop upstairs and got out enough candles to light the kitchen, glad that a gas stove meant he could at least make a hot dinner.
His phone rang, and he answered automatically, expecting a return call from Ben.
“We have him,” a gravelly voice said. “And if you want him back, you will follow my instructions exactly.”