Murder at the Opera - Margaret Truman [17]
He ended up on a narrow dirt road lined with poplar and cedar trees. He followed its winding course until arriving at his home, formerly the gatehouse to a sizable estate with river frontage. He’d rented the small carriage house until its owner, a wealthy real estate developer, decided to sell it and a surrounding two acres. As the tenant of longstanding, Pawkins had first dibs, and he purchased the house and land. It had been a bargain. The owner had always liked having a D.C. detective on the premises and readily accepted Pawkins’ lower bid.
He parked the Mercedes in a detached one-car garage thirty feet from the stone-and-clapboard house and crossed a gravel patch to the front door. The outside lights, and a few inside, were on, thanks to state-of-the-art programmable timers he’d had installed. Rather than setting times for the lights to go on and off, he’d programmed in the latitude and longitude of Great Falls, using a chart provided by the manufacturer, and the day of the month. From that point forward, the timers adjusted to changes in the time of sunset and sunrise, the lights coming on a minute or so later each day as summer approached, and earlier later in the year. They even adjusted automatically for Daylight Saving Time.
The alarm system was up-to-date, too, including special motion detectors that would not be set off by the movements of his four cats.
He entered the foyer, turned off the system, and went straight to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where he put up a kettle for tea. Using the time for the water to boil, he went upstairs to his bedroom and changed into blue running shorts, a white Washington National Opera T-shirt, and sandals, stopping briefly in the bathroom to check his hair. Time for a touch-up, he decided; gray roots were showing beneath the subtle, artificial brown coloring.
The kettle’s shrill whistle brought him back downstairs. A devotee of green tea, he opted instead this night for orange spice Rooibos, a recent favorite. Because he was tall, and the ceilings were low, he moved through the old house in a perpetual slight stoop, although it actually wasn’t necessary. The habit of a tall man.
But he straightened once through a door off the living room, next to a wood-burning stove that he used in winter to help heat the house. The room he now entered was large and had twelve-foot-high ceilings, multiple recessed halogen lights, a Mexican stone floor covered by multicolored area rugs, and an elaborate built-in desk, its shiny black surface stretching nine feet beneath a series of narrow shelves that held an assortment of office items and small, framed pictures.
The wall opposite the desk, and a second wall spanning the length of the room and broken only by a large window, held floor-to-ceiling bookcases, their upper shelves reached by a library ladder with wheels at the bottom, and whose top ran along a metal trolley. Every inch of the shelves was filled with books.
A computer with a twenty-six-inch monitor sat on the desk. Built into the wall of bookshelves behind was a fifty-two-inch flat-panel TV. Next to it was the control unit for a Bose surround-sound system, its multiple, tiny cube speakers discreetly nestled in the room’s corners. The subwoofer sat on the floor beneath the desk.
Pawkins had personally designed this addition to the carriage house. He’d had to obtain a zoning variance, which took an inordinate amount of time as well as money for a local attorney, but once the legalities had been settled, his vision of the new space was made reality by an old-school contractor whose attention to detail and dedication to quality matched Pawkins’ needs. Construction had been completed a little more than a year ago. Since then, it had become his refuge, his cave where he could enjoy his music, read his books, and conduct what business