“I don’t get it; doesn’t the phone company have to keep records of that kind of thing?”
“Sure. But they don’t have to tell you about it. And believe me, friend, they aren’t. I’ve got a good friend in the business office down there; I called him yesterday to have him check it for me. He does that kind of stuff for me all the time. He called back yesterday afternoon and said he couldn’t help me. Just like that—‘Sorry, Elmo, can’t help you.’ I said, ‘What do you mean you can’t help me,’ but he’d hung up.”
“Funny.”
“Tee-hee. I’ve got a couple other things to try, though. I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”
I told him not to waste any more time on it, but he blew me off. It was a matter of pride. He wasn’t about to be done in by seven lousy digits.
I called Kim Banner.
“One of your customers complained to me about you last night,” I said.
“As long as it’s you and not my boss,” Banner said, unruffled. “Something I should worry about, I hope.”
“Yeah, I’d go ahead and get my desk cleaned out if I were you.” I filled her in on my conversation with Alexander Wayne—if “conversation” is the word.
“The man’s gotta be two-thirds loopy,” was Banner’s assessment of the situation. “He ranted and raved about it to us, too, when we were out there yesterday.”
“What’s his main problem? In twenty-five words or fewer.”
“I half wonder whether he doesn’t half wonder whether the kid killed her. I call Thomas Wayne a kid even though he’s my age, about.”
“I call him a kid because he’s my age, about. What’s the official thinking in re Mr. Wayne?”
“Which Mr. Wayne?” Banner said coyly.
“Choose one.”
“The official thinking is that this investigation has just gotten underway and, so far, has produced no conclusive results.”
“Okay. What’s the unofficial thinking?”
She sighed, and her breath buzzed heavily in the phone. “The kid—Thomas Wayne—is a hothead. You told us that yourself, and I could see it when we chatted with him. It was all he could do to keep a lid on it. But I don’t know if he’s enough of a hothead, you know? There’s a gap between losing your temper and losing your mind. I’m not convinced Wayne has closed that gap.”
“Is he alibied?”
“Yes and no. We haven’t gotten the coroner’s report yet, so we don’t know for a fact when she was killed, Sunday night or Monday morning. Sunday night he’s accounted for until about eleven-thirty. He was entertaining some out-of-town clients. Took ’em to a game, bought ’em dinner, stayed out late.”
“Late for a school night, at least.”
“He says he left them about eleven-thirty, and the two we’ve gotten hold of vouch for that, give or take fifteen, twenty minutes either way. He says he went home and to bed. His father, whom we talked to separately, of course, says he hit the hay after the ten o’clock news, read for a while, and fell asleep. He didn’t hear Thomas come home. That leaves Thomas unaccounted for between eleven-thirty Sunday night and seven o’clock Monday morning, when he had breakfast with his father before going to work.”
“So if Meredith was killed between eleven-thirty p.m. Sunday and seven a.m. Monday …”
“Then Thomas Wayne doesn’t have an alibi, that’s all. Like everyone else in town. It doesn’t mean he did anything to have an alibi for.”
“You’re no fun anymore,” I said. “I don’t suppose either of them’s considerate enough to have a record of any kind.”
“Not in this burg; we’re checking with Lincoln—state and PD. But what’s with this ‘either of them’ business? You don’t suspect the father just because he got worked up about us questioning his boy? Hell, his boy got worked up too.”
I said, “So far the only one with any kind of motive for killing Meredith Berens is Thomas Wayne …”
“Says you.”
“You have any other candidates, trot ’em out. Meanwhile, Thomas Wayne: His only reason for getting Meredith out of the picture, as near as we can guess, would be this engagement, whether real or a figment of Meredith’s imagination.”
“Okay …” she said as if she felt it was anything but. We’ve had similar conversations before, Kim Banner and I. Banner likes to pretend that, as a member of the Omaha Police Division, she is guided by facts and facts alone. Like Joe Friday, she assembles pieces, turning them this way and that until they either fit or must be discarded. Eventually, with dogged determination and a little luck, she pieces together a picture, or enough of one on which to hang a case. She further likes to pretend that a free agent such as myself isn’t hindered by the need to stick to demonstrable facts. According to her, I can invent a scenario and then hunt for the facts to fit it. I don’t have to worry about the captain, the chief, the DA, the mayor, the public. I just have to satisfy my client. That done, I collect my check and go home, letting someone else worry about the slow-turning mills of justice.
The truth, though, as usual, lies somewhere in between. And in that in-between place, Banner’s approach and mine—or, let’s say, the official and unofficial approaches—are more similar than different. It is neither a matter of merely assembling “clues” until the truth is revealed, nor a matter of collecting circumstantial evidence to clothe a preconception. It is both. It’s taking this piece of evidence and trying to imagine how it came to be; then testing the possibility against that piece of evidence; then revising, discarding, inventing and reinventing as necessary. You need both halves of your brain, the objective and the imaginative, the half that processes cold data and the half that plays “what if.” Whether you work in the public or private sector has little to do with it.
“Meredith was being a pest,” I went on. “Either because she had gotten hold of this engagement idea and wouldn’t let go, or because there had been an engagement that Thomas Wayne now wanted out of … or for some other reason that we don’t know about.”
“I wish I could be a fiction writer,” Banner said dreamily.
I ignored her. “For whatever reason, Meredith was at best an embarrassment and at worst a threat to our young up-and-comer. Okay?”
“Sure, why not.”
“But that state of affairs could be just as obvious to Alexander Wayne as Thomas. See? Maybe you’re right—Thomas has a bad temper, but he’s no killer. What about his old man?”
Nothing from the other end of the telephone line.
“We both saw his temper in action last night,” I continued. “He basically offered, through me, to give Donna Berens a blank check to drop the case. Why? Because he’s afraid of what the publicity might do to his son? Maybe. Because he’s afraid his son might be guilty? Maybe. Because he’s guilty? Maybe. You see what I’m getting at?”
“Maybe,” Banner said flippantly. But not so flippantly that I couldn’t tell there were wheels turning under that mop of dirty-blond hair. “Have you discussed Wayne’s offer with your client?”
I wasn’t the least bit sure I still had a client, but I didn’t say anything about that. I merely said I hadn’t spoken with Donna Berens yet today, which was perfectly true.
She said, “I’m going to have to talk with her today.”
“She’ll have a head on her,” I said. “Let her have till noon if you want her to be good for anything.”
“That’s okay. I can take whatsername, Castelli, and the people at Meredith’s office this morning yet. Swanson and Murdoch are at Meredith’s building right now. Do the mother this afternoon. And I want to talk to that Johansen woman, too.”
That made a couple of us.
I remembered the house, one of those big-ass ramblers set way back from the street in one of the more secluded and exclusive pockets of the secluded and exclusive development known as Regency. The yard sloped gently upward and back from the street, although I suppose when you have that much yard you call it “grounds.” The house had a very gentle angle to it, su
btly suggesting wings that pushed out from the double doors at center. The roof rose high on a steep pitch, the eaves hung low to give the house a shaded, shielded look. The house was a pale gray, a Cape Cod gray, with charcoal trim. A high wall surrounded the yard—grounds—or at least appeared to. At the edges of the lot dense foliage took over. No telling what was in there.
I don’t know how the deed was made out, but the house belonged to the Mob.
Sal Gunnelli had lived there when he headed the Omaha operation. That was the one and only time I had been to the house. Now Gunnelli was long gone and the house, with the other perquisites and privileges, had been passed to Gunnelli’s successor, Paul Tarantino.
There was a wrought-iron gate that closed off the long curved driveway from the riffraff that might blow in from the street. The gate was electrically operated from the house. The last time I’d been summoned to the place I had had to be admitted. This morning the gate stood open. I couldn’t decide whether that was a good sign or not.
I put a few miles on the car by pushing it to the top of the long driveway.
By the time I got the engine shut off and got out of the car and got the door closed, one of the two overgrown doors at the front of the house was open. A man stood at the threshold. It had taken me longer than usual to get out of the car, but not that long. I smoothed my tie into my jacket—yeah, I had put on a coat and a tie—and glanced around for the surveillance cameras. Unobtrusively, I hoped, though I don’t know why I should have cared. I didn’t spot any cameras. But it was a safe bet that the man in the doorway didn’t spend his days sitting there watching for cars to pull up. There probably was an electric-eye beam across the driveway at the gate. I hobbled toward the man.
“Mr. Nebraska?” I confessed.
“My name’s Ballard. I work for Mr. Tarantino.”
He was younger than me, and in better shape. Not that he was a bruiser. The average college student is younger than me, and in better shape.
“I’m expected, I see.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Tarantino’s inside.”
“Inside” had changed. There used to be a wide, open entry, beyond which lay the living room. Now the entry had been closed off, like an airlock between the great outdoors and the inner sanctum. I could see why they didn’t worry so much about the gate these days. Security had been moved indoors.
No effort had been made here to hide the surveillance camera, a black Sony CCD Handycam in a corner where two walls met the ceiling. CCD cameras are expensive, but they’re good for surveillance or any other application that requires a camera to remain stationary for some time. They use microchips to capture an image, so there are no tubes in which to “burn in” a picture. Also handy if you need some footage of the noonday sun.
Except for the camera and a small crescent-top table, the room was bare. Ballard took something from the table. A hand-held metal detector. He passed it down my right side and up my left, then forward and back. Then he took a little black box, somewhat larger than a pack of cigarettes, from his coat pocket, depressed a button on the box, and waved it in front of me at chest level.
“I do my act without wires,” I said.
He smiled politely. Then he put away the black box and pulled out a blue-gray box that had been clipped to the waistband of his pants. It looked like a pocket pager. He worked a stud on the box a few times, holding his hand in such a way that I couldn’t see the number of times he worked it or how long he held it each time. After a few seconds the heavy security lock on the door into the house buzzed and Ballard yanked it open for me. It took some yanking, too. I guessed it had a core of solid steel.
I preceded him into the house and he preceded me through it. The place had been done over entirely since my previous visit. I don’t know why that should have surprised me, but it did. In Gunnelli’s day the place had been sparsely furnished, decorated in a spare, cold fashion that was artificial and uninviting. Then it was a page from a magazine; now it was a house. An expensively outfitted house, to be sure, but a house like the kind people live in. Comfortable furniture and lots of it, thick carpeting, pictures on the walls, junk on shelves and tabletops. Ballard took me into the sunken living room, asked if he could get me anything, and invited me to have a seat while he went in search of his boss. I decided against sitting. I’d only have to get up again when Tarantino showed, and all this up and down was murder on my battered carcass.
Paul Tarantino was younger than he looked on TV, older than he looked in the papers. Call him fifty-five. He was of medium build, about my size, but I’m pleased to report that he carried more of a gut than I did. His hair was dark and thinning, parted low over his left ear and swirled across his forehead and plastered down with hairspray. That always fools ’em. His eyes were dark and deceptively mellow—I say “deceptively” because I noticed, as we spent time together, that they were never still; they darted constantly, observing, appraising. He had a great Roman beak of a nose, with dramatically flared nostrils, and a thin, bloodless gash of a mouth that, with the nose and the dark, darting eyes, gave him something of the look of a bird of prey. Yet his voice was soft, even cultured, and his handshake was no knuckle-buster.
“Mr. Nebraska? Paul Tarantino. Thanks for coming out.”
We sat, him in a ladder-backed rocking chair, me—gingerly—on a mushroom-colored sectional.
I said, “I don’t get invited here very often, so when it happens I’m … curious.”
Tarantino crossed his legs and brushed imaginary lint from the topmost knee. He wore designer jeans faded with scientific precision, an expensive dress shirt worn open-collar, cuffs turned back with deliberate casualness over the pushed-back sleeves of a gray cashmere cardigan. Beat-up tassel loafers with no socks. A heavy gold watch was nestled in the thick dark hair at his left wrist.
“Curious about what?” he wondered quietly.
“I’m a heckuva nice guy, Mr. Tarantino, but the last time I was asked up to the big house it was because I had something that the owner, or resident, perhaps I should say, wanted. This time I have nothing. Nothing, that is, outside of my incomparable charm, good looks, and modesty, and I’ve always had those. Why should you just be getting interested in them now?”
He smiled politely. The guy didn’t come off like a gangster. He reminded me of an accountant. Which, I suppose, he was in a way.
“Mr. Nebraska …” Tarantino paused and smiled almost shyly. “We’re awfully formal this morning. Why don’t you call me Paul and I’ll call you …” He made it a question.
“Nebraska’s fine.”
The shy smile grew into an uncertain grin. “No first name? What do your friends call you?”
“ ‘Nebraska,’ mostly, outside of a few choice monickers on special occasions. Of course I have a first name, Paul. I’m just not wild about it.”
He shrugged in a uniquely Mediterranean way. “Nebraska, you did the previous occupant of this house, Salvatore Gunnelli, a great favor.”
“Not exactly,” I corrected. “I didn’t give him what he wanted. But I also didn’t give it to his rival. Al Manzetti. Without it, Crazy Al was stymied. He didn’t dare move against Gunnelli. In the end, someone moved against Crazy Al.”
Tarantino was nodding. “I know the story. My point is, by not siding with Manzetti, you did Gunnelli a favor. It didn’t go unnoticed. I was still in Chicago at the time, but I heard about it there. If you know anything about the history of this organization I work for, you’ll know it prizes loyalty and friendship above all. Many things have changed since the early days, but not that. We still need to know where people stand. We need to know which people will do exactly what they say they’ll do, whether they’re friends of ours or not. You did exactly what you told Sal Gunnelli you would do. That counts for something.”
I wanted to ask what. In fact, I did ask.
Tarantino smiled. “We’ve left you alone. For, what, almost five years now? Think about it: you possess some information that could be dangerous to us�
��”
“I defused most of the danger myself.” I was referring to my forcing the resignation of a Mob-backed politician. If I had been foolish enough to have wanted to play touchy-feely with the big kids I wouldn’t have insisted on the resignation but rather on a monthly stipend for keeping silent.
“Troublesome, then,” Tarantino said equably. “Bothersome. But you had proven as good as your word once; we decided to wait and see if you would continue to be so.”
“Did I pass?” I was under no illusion that the set Paul Tarantino ran with would think twice about flattening me like a bug if it suited their purposes. And wouldn’t think twice about flattening me like a bug if it suited their purposes. The reason they hadn’t was easy to figure. Their organization, as Tarantino had called it, existed and exists not so much on loyalty as obligation. Who owes what to whom. They owed me a favor because of what I had done or hadn’t done for Tarantino’s predecessor years ago. Tarantino admitted that easily. And then immediately pointed out that I owed them a favor because I had been eating solid food, or any kind of food at all, for these past few years, courtesy of them. Charming crowd.
He spread his hands. “What would you say?”
“No, I mean did I pass today’s test? You didn’t ask me out here just to be neighborly. There’s something you want. That you don’t seem to be zeroing in on the point tells me there’s some sort of test I’ve been undergoing. How’m I doing?”
Something like annoyance flashed across Tarantino’s birdlike features, but it was gone just as quickly. He glanced from me to the open archway that separated the living room from the south wing of the house and back. When he spoke again it was with a slightly raised voice. “All right, Mr. Nebraska.” We were back to being formal. “You have been … tested, as you put it. Whether you’ve ‘passed’ or not, I can’t say …”
He let it hang and glanced toward the archway again.
The man who had been standing around the corner, out of sight, listening in, stepped into the room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 18
