by Chris Knopf
Perfect, I thought. One of the oldest tricks in the book. And why not? Sebbie’s an old trick himself. I looked around and spotted a café with an imperfect, but acceptable view of the newsstand. I went in, bought a coffee and an orange and waited.
An hour later, a short, dapper man wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and sunglasses approached the newsstand. The man behind the counter took that moment to restock some of the merchandise. When the dapper man stopped, lo and behold, he chose to buy one of the restocked items. A newsmagazine.
As he strolled away, at a far more humane pace than Francine’s, I left the café and followed along. At the next intersection, I crossed the street and fell in behind, leaving as generous a distance between us as I dared.
The pursuit of Francine, followed by an hour of inactivity, had wreaked havoc on my weakened left side, which was now entirely engulfed in pain. But since I wasn’t going to stop following the dapper man, I did the only thing I could. I ignored it.
After covering about three blocks, the dapper man stopped at a door sandwiched between two storefronts. I saw him tap at something, then open the door. He was well inside by the time I reached where he’d stood, confirming that it was the entrance to an apartment, presumably on the second floor, accessible with the proper code punched into a keypad.
I walked on to the end of the block, then crossed the street again and walked back. There were three storefronts with an adequate view of the dapper man’s door. A laundry, a gift shop and a shoe store. I looked up, then went into the gift shop. A pale, young woman, wearing black lipstick and what looked like a leather corset was sitting on a stool behind the glass counter. I asked her if there were offices or apartments on the second floor. She wasn’t sure, but came up with the owner’s contact information after a prolonged search of the desk at the back of the store. I told her the least I could do after all that was buy something, but she said no worries, it was all just a bunch of junk anyway.
I made it to my car with seconds to spare on the meter, and drove back to my house in Wilton, where I collapsed onto the bed after setting the alarm for five-thirty P.M. Then I passed out, numbed into oblivion by unfathomable exhaustion.
CHAPTER 7
The alarm went off as planned, but I was still too tired to move. So I lay there and tried to calculate the probability that Sebbie would give me a call at six P.M. as requested. I couldn’t get the numbers to work, but my gut told me he would. My gut was right.
I turned on a digital recorder to capture the message and hit the green button.
“Are you trying to commit suicide?” said a man with a borough accent far more pronounced than Francine’s. Clearly the Bronx.
“I need information from you,” I said in my Clint Eastwood voice.
“That’s unlikely to happen. I don’t give myself information if I don’t have to.”
“You have to, or suffer terrible consequences.”
The phone was quiet.
Then he said, “Threats don’t impress me much. I been around way too long for that.”
“Then you won’t mind if you’re not around anymore.”
“There’s nothing you can do to me,” he said, his voice at a higher pitch, the stress starting to show.
“Not until I’m ready,” I said. “Frankenfelder goes first, though I’ll take my time with him before I move on to Francine.”
Then I pushed the end button.
In the time it took me to write down the number he was calling from, he called back.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice still angry, but with a different tone.
“I need to eliminate a person,” I said. “I need a list of people who could do the job.”
“You’re not from around here,” he said; it was more a challenge than a question.
“I’m not. That’s why I’m talking to you. I need five candidates. Their names and contact information. Where I got them stays with me. I move on and you and your friends get to keep living.”
“Not a chance. Fuck the friends and fuck you,” he said, and hung up.
I USED the information given me by the girl in the store to contact the building’s rental agent. There were three offices available, and to my relief, the entrance to the second floor was via a parking lot behind the building. The transaction was managed entirely over the Internet. I gave them one of my dead guy’s name and Social Security number and booked the unit above the shoe store next to the gift shop. I signed up for a month’s rent in advance and the equivalent amount as a security deposit.
I sent the agent two money orders for $850 each and they sent me the key, which arrived the next day to my P.O. box via express mail. I spent the first part of the day getting the lock changed, and the rest shopping for more electronic gear: an HD digital video camera with a long lens, tripod, and a recording device that could download to one of my external hard drives. I got a nice discount by paying cash for everything.
I schlepped the equipment up to the office, which was a stage set for a weary, anonymous hole in the wall, with a desk, a chair, a file cabinet and coatrack. I measured the lower window sash, then pulled down the shade. Then I went out and bought a sheet of one-way mirror cut to size and some mounting hardware. The supplier wrapped it in bubble wrap and put it in a box with a handle, which I used to carry it up to the office. While waiting for nightfall, I set up the camera on its tripod and ran the wiring. An hour later it was dark.
I turned out the overhead light and stood the one-way mirror on the windowsill, and then raised the shade, pressing the glass to the sash as soon as it was clear. Then I used a cordless drill to screw in the tabs around the edges to hold it in place.
I moved the camera into place and turned it on, the controls appearing in LED red. It was past dusk, but I could easily record through the mirror. I filmed the surrounding buildings to establish context, then racked the lens until I had a crystal clear view of the entrance door.
Having no other purpose for being there, I pressed the record button and left.
THE NEXT day I downloaded my conversation with Sebbie onto DVDs and mailed them to Wayne Frankenfelder and Francine. Then I went to another gadget store and bought a GPS. It was palm-sized and of startling sophistication. I mounted it to the inside of the Outback’s windshield and punched in the address for Shelly Gross.
An hour later I was just outside Hartford, driving by his bland and faceless house in a dull subdivision in the middle-class bedroom community of Rocky Hill. There was an early model, maroon Chevy Blazer in the driveway. As I drove by I held a digital SLR camera up to the passenger window and fired off a dozen photos in rapid succession.
Then I drove back home by way of Danbury, where I withdrew another guitar, which I sold for cash to a guy in Westport who’d advertised on Craig’s List for that precise model. He wanted to consummate the deal in his bank’s parking lot, but I directed him to the waterside park in Norwalk, well away from security cameras. I put the case on a picnic table and let him open it, look over the guitar, fiddle with the knobs and machine heads, and test out the pickups through a little battery-powered amp I brought along for the purpose.
Before resting it in the trunk of his 5 Series BMW, he handed me an envelope. I counted the $24,000 and we parted satisfied.
That night I returned to the office with my laptop. I let the camera continue recording on its digital circuitry and downloaded the day’s file from the external hard drive. Using an application designed specifically for editing lengthy videos, I scanned rapidly through the night hours. When day broke, I slowed the pace, allowing the software to easily pick out changes in pattern.
The first one came fast. The door opened and a young woman stepped out. Though shooting a storey above street level, I still captured a vivid image of her face. I pulled a few frames into another program and selected the best angle.
She was likely mid-twenties, short and stout with wavy black hair, parted down the middle and pulled back at the forehead with barrettes. Her no
se was big and a little crooked, and her heavy-lidded eyes were set wide on her face. She wore a plain raincoat and carried a briefcase.
I assumed she was his daughter.
I noted the time code on the recording, and continued to scan. Sebbie came out an hour later, in more or less the same getup as the day before. He came back two hours later. No magazine.
I slowed the camera speed to a crawl as he punched the code into the keypad. The clarity of the HD and the manipulation of the software made it almost too easy. Five numbers: five, four, nine, one, zero.
That was the last thing that happened that day. Ergo, the woman was still out there. After a quick review of the camera’s most recent recording, I resumed filming, the action playing on my laptop, configured as a monitor.
I’m sure there are more tedious things than watching a closed door for hours, but none that I’ve experienced. Finally, at about nine o’clock, she came home, carrying several shopping bags along with her briefcase.
Relieved, I drove home and went to bed early so I could get up early the next day to stake out the Frondutti apartment. I brought along my big camera with the zoom lens.
I discovered an ideal surveillance location inside a covered bus stop. I had to look through a dirty piece of Plexiglas, but I had a straight shot of the door. I bought a newspaper and pretended to read, glancing every few seconds over the top through my sunglasses.
At about the same time as the day before, the door opened and the daughter emerged with her briefcase. I folded the newspaper and stuck it under my arm and fell in behind her, as I’d done with her father only a few days before.
The weather had warmed enough to inspire one of the restaurants along the street to set tables out on the sidewalk to snare the morning coffee trade. The daughter stopped and ignored the “wait to be seated” sign and sat down at one of the tables. I don’t know what the waiter told her, but he took her order. I strolled (can you stroll with a limp?) across the street and affected the look of someone interested in photographing something high above the heads of the café customers. I snapped away with casual abandon, seemingly at random, until I had a half-dozen clear photos of the young, dark-haired woman sipping her beverage and munching on a pastry.
I stayed away from the street after that, stopping in once a day to download the day’s recordings and charting Sebbie and the woman’s habits, which were flawlessly consistent. The only variable seemed to be her arrival in the evening, though it was never before six o’clock.
I gave it a week. Then one morning I woke up at four-thirty A.M. and spent the last dark hours disguising my face with my theatrical makeup kit. I put a sweater on over a fleece vest, which I further built out by stuffing socks in the pockets. It wasn’t an entirely convincing look of a fat man, but neither did it look like me. Not anymore.
I put on surgical gloves, over which I added another pair in leather. It really wasn’t the right season for them, but I could keep my hands in my pockets.
I didn’t bother monitoring from the office, but rather hung around parts of the street until I saw her leave. Then an hour later, Sebbie left for whatever he did for two hours every morning. I waited another half hour, then walked with as little limp as I could manage up to the entrance door and punched in the code.
The door snapped open and I walked inside. In front of me was a flight of stairs, at the top of which was another door. I ascended the stairs and tried the doorknob, which opened into a living room stuffed with furniture, and walls laden with paintings and photographs that left virtually no free wall space. I walked briskly through the apartment until I found the bedrooms at the end of a narrow hall.
The beds in each were neatly made and everything smelled fresh and lemony from a liberal use of furniture oil. Sebbie’s room was easy to pick out. I took the 8½ by 11-inch color print of his daughter out of an envelope stuffed in my rear waistband. On the reverse side I’d written with my left hand the number of another disposable phone.
I rested it on his pillow and left, staring at the door as I walked down the stairs, willing it to stay closed, depending on the habituated Fronduttis.
Back on the street, I walked to where I’d parked the Outback, then drove it around to the parking lot behind the office. Once inside, I retrieved the external hard drive, but left the rest of the setup. I scoured the area for any possible residue of my presence, then left again for the last time.
It wasn’t until I was safely back in my house in Wilton that I noticed my pulse was elevated, my mouth dry, and my hands slightly trembling. I lay down on my bed and listened to my heart pound in my ears, which I tried to calm with slow, easy breaths.
It wasn’t the first time I’d put myself into a dangerous situation. While never rising to the theatrical heights of a TV detective, the fieldwork I did for my legal clients had occasionally brought me close to people capable of more than an angry word. But then I knew what I was going through in real time. I knew I was nervous, anxious, or even terrified, at the time of the experience. This was a strangely delayed reaction, as if all the normal physiological responses had been held in abeyance until the caper was complete.
If so, it was likely the result of my head injuries. And would be a decided advantage. Assuming I could get the postponed reactions under control before I had a heart attack.
As I regained control over my nervous system, I decided on a course of action. If Sebbie was actually the sociopath Henry Eichenbach thought he was, and could stonewall through the torture and death of his closest friends, or disregard the danger to his daughter, then I would have to let him go and move on to another promising hoodlum. Whatever the bullet had done to my social affect, empathy and equanimity, I wasn’t ready for any of the things I’d threatened.
Two hours later, I got the call.
“You scum-sucking motherfucker,” said Sebbie.
I hung up and he called me right back.
“Civility, Mr. Frondutti, or no deal,” I said.
“You call what you did civil? Threatening my wife?” I stayed quietly on the line, absorbing the revelation that the daughter turned out to be his wife. “How does this go away?” he said, breaking a long silence.
“Do you have a computer?”
“No. My wife does.”
“Do you know how to use it?” I asked.
“Yea. Evil things.”
“I need the contact information for the five people I requested. No one outside the tristate area. I’m going to provide you with a code. Get ready to write it down.”
He cursed some more, but then said he was ready. I assigned each number in the alphabet with a number, and substituted typewriter key symbols, like @, with things like π. It was a very simple code, but I couldn’t give Sebbie too complicated a chore, even if I’d been up to providing one.
After he wrote it all down, I said, “Don’t use your wife’s computer. Use one at the library. Go to a site called wallbox. com.” I gave him a login and password. “It’s an online drop box. Leave the information I’m asking for in the code I gave you. I expect it there no later than four hours from now. After this call, you’ll never hear from me again, unless I don’t get the information. In which case, the consequences will follow in due course.”
I checked wallbox two hours later and the message was there. I copied it into a Word document, which I printed out, then deleted the message and closed down the wallbox account, which I’d opened with an assumed name, since that’s all they required.
Then, using the basic search and replace function in Word, I converted the numbers and symbols to phone numbers, email addresses and names:
Omar Rankin
Pally Buttons
The Jack Hammer
Fred Tootsie
Austin Ott, the Third
It was the first time since I sat with the police sketch artist that I felt palpably close to the man in the trench coat, though it was hardly a given he was on the list. But either way, it was forward motion in the right direction.
<
br /> I studied the names, all surely noms de guerre, hoping for some unconscious perception to signal the most likely target.
The painful stress reactions of the recent past were now forgotten, and in their place was a new set of sensations. My hands were steady and my vision clear. I was calm at the center of my being, and in place of a racing heart was a crystalline ball of silver ice. You might be Omar, you might be Fred. Whatever your name is, I will find you.
Of this, I am now certain.
CHAPTER 8
It was cruel that the better I felt physically and the more present in the world, the more I missed Florencia. No, I didn’t miss her, I desperately longed for her, to such a degree that I often thought the longing too great to bear, that the pain of her absence would ultimately topple my sanity.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d seen her killed, that the hopeless finality of death was not for me an abstract concept. I knew it to be the last, irredeemable, fundamental truth.
She wasn’t coming back.
While I had no precedent for such sadness, I’d always coped with troubles by occupying my mind, by staying busy, throwing myself into my work. It was the only palliative I knew, the only mechanism that could get me out of bed in the morning to get on with the day’s demands.
I DROVE back over to the office across from Sebbie’s apartment. I checked the digital files, which showed a return to routine for Sebbie and the woman who’d turned out to be his wife. I downloaded the fresh information, then cleared the hard drive on the recording device, which would provide another forty-eight hours of footage. When I got back to my house, I put together a little package containing a copy of the key to the office, a DVD with select video and still shots of Sebbie, his neighborhood, the young woman, and an edited audio recording of our phone conversation (which I ran through a device that distorted my voice). I put it all in a FedEx box for delivery to Henry Eichenbach. I included a note, “You have one week to get whatever you can. Then your exclusive is over. Thanks for the help.”
