Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  I reconnected with the conference call and asked everyone to identify themselves. When all were accounted for, I laid out the setup: There were three of our cars converging on the park. One would cover the west entrance. The other would follow us and cover the east. As soon as the Three Sticks vehicle showed up, we’d drive the Subaru into the park. Little Boy would stay with me slumped down in the front passenger seat, gun ready.

  When the Three Stick vehicle reached the gazebo, the snipers would shoot out its tires. We’d take it from there.

  “Take it from there?” Little Boy asked, his phone on mute.

  When we got to the park, the east entrance looked clear. I pulled the Subaru just inside the entrance and stopped. Our escort drove past and looked around the area. They called in all clear. The guys at the west entrance confirmed the same.

  So we waited.

  At the appointed time, a black Ford Expedition with darkly tinted windows drove into the west entrance. It moved slowly, exuding not so much caution as confidence, even arrogance, a lumbering, invincible dreadnaught of a truck.

  I shifted the Subaru into drive and drove into the park.

  “On my mark, snipers,” I said. “You boys at the entrances, kill anything that tries to follow that Ford.”

  The lay of the land made it difficult to see cars approaching from the opposite direction until you were nearly at the gazebo. So the massive grill of the SUV almost filled the horizon before I was able to give the command.

  “Snipers, fire,” I said into my Bluetooth.

  Little grey puffs appeared around the Ford’s wheels. The SUV stopped dead in its tracks and dropped about six inches toward the ground. I slammed the Subaru into reverse and cut the wheel hard to the right. Two men in battle fatigues leaped out from the gazebo and started firing at the Subaru with automatic weapons.

  “Snipers—take ’em out!” I yelled into my phone.

  The splatter of bullets hitting the car was mostly obscured by the sound of the gunfire itself. But Little Boy was undeterred. He opened his window, then sat up in his seat, looking for targets.

  I was busy trying to drive in reverse around the gazebo, hoping none of those incoming rounds would disable us before I could complete what I had in mind. Little Boy threw himself half out the window and began firing away at the guys in the battle gear. With all the noise from the guns and the agonized scream coming from the Subaru’s engine, I had no idea where the threat was coming from, so I just concentrated on spinning around the gazebo until the rear end of the Subaru was pointed directly at the driver’s side of the Expedition. Then I straightened out the wheel and stuck the accelerator into the floor.

  I pulled Little Boy back into the car.

  “Put on your seat belt,” I yelled.

  He did, just in time, as we hit that Ford hard enough to knock it over on its side.

  The Subaru was still upright, so I was able to see the two guys from the gazebo being picked off by our snipers, seconds before they had a chance to shoot through our windshield.

  I looked over at Little Boy, who was slumped back in his seat holding his chest.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Rib hurt like a fucker. We now go finish off these assholes?”

  “We do,” I said.

  We exited the Outback, and Little Boy climbed up the chassis and looked inside the Expedition. Then he reached down his hand and hoisted me up so I could look in as well. There was only one asshole still conscious, and he was in no shape to do anything but stare in disbelief through a veil of blood pouring from his forehead. The driver was thoroughly integrated with his vehicle, and one other guy in the back, holding a Kalashnikov, looked like someone had removed his skeleton and replaced it with silly putty.

  Next to him was a backpack. Little Boy reached through the smashed window and pulled it out. Inside were lots of bundles of cash secured with zip ties.

  “Why bring the money if you’re only going to steal the merchandise?” I asked Little Boy.

  “Good to have options,” he said.

  He should know, I thought.

  AFTER STRIPPING it of the precious metals, the Bosniaks towed the Subaru out to the street. When well clear of the area, they called a wrecker. They left the Expedition, now likely filled with dead people, to be discovered whenever it was discovered.

  Little Boy and I went on to Stamford, about a half hour away. On the way, I stopped at a fast food restaurant and used the bathroom to pull off the wig, put on a pair of glasses in place of the contacts, and strip off all the makeup, returning my face to its natural, flawed appearance. This is how Little Boy had originally seen me, when we first met.

  “I like this Mr. G. better,” he said. “You look less like a rich prick.”

  I gave him a rundown on what to expect at the meeting. I told him everything I thought I should, in the interest of his safety, and mine, though I might as well have made it all up, since he didn’t believe anything I said.

  “What you been smoking lately, Mr. G.?”

  “Just stay alert and assume I’m right,” I said. “For both our sakes.”

  We were early, so I parked down the street where we could see cars pulling in and out of the agency’s parking lot.

  “So who are you really, Mr. G.?” Little Boy asked me, as we sat and watched for incoming cars.

  “I used to be a market researcher. Now I don’t know.”

  “I used to be an arborist. I have a degree in Agriculture and Forestry from the University of Sarajevo. Worked all over Europe for a big landscape architect. Got a little distracted by the war.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “It’s true. You got nice trees here in New England. Someday, I’m going back to the forest. I’m better there.”

  About five minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting, a new Jaguar drove into the parking lot. I followed. Elliot Brandt got out as we pulled into the slot next to his. I waited for him to enter the building before getting out of the car. He’d already passed through reception when we got there. I asked for Bruce Finger, and the receptionist picked up the phone and announced our arrival.

  “Your other guests are here, Mr. Brandt,” she said, speaking to Damien, the agency’s new president.

  A few moments later he came out to greet us. He was a lot shorter than his father, and fleshier around the middle, with darker and curlier hair. Yet the family resemblance showed itself in the shape of his face and the insistent edge in his voice.

  “You’re the investigators,” he said, shaking our hands. “I don’t think I have your names.”

  “You don’t,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Right,” said Damien. “This way.”

  We followed him down the hall to the agency’s formal conference room, the place where Florencia charmed clients and underwriters from the big carriers. The room was unchanged from the last time I’d sat there, eating tuna fish sandwiches with Florencia, and making her laugh over tales of recent one-on-one interviews with earnest, benighted consumers of some dopey packaged good or another.

  Damien excused himself with a promise to be back momentarily. He told us to help ourselves to coffee from the machine in the corner. Bruce came in soon after that, carrying a stack of folders under his arm, which he dropped on the table before offering his hand.

  As we shook he said, “I’ve been going through the financials. Everything looks good on this end, unless I’m really missing something.”

  “You are,” I said. “But let’s wait for the others.”

  It wasn’t a long wait. Elliot entered with an impatient scowl on his face, his son trailing him, looking more puzzled than affronted. They sat across from us, and with little ceremony, the elder Brandt said, “What is this about?”

  Having forced the meeting, it was only fair that everyone looked at me for the answer.

  “It’s about a beautiful, kind, young woman of Chilean ancestry, whose parents came to the U.S. to escape the
political upheaval tearing up their country,” I said. “And to give their daughter an American education. She was a bright student, majoring in economics and business administration. Her only weakness was a foolish attraction to this hapless mathematics major.”

  Brandt’s scowl deepened.

  “We know to whom you are alluding,” said Elliot, jabbing his finger at the conference room table. “The former owner of this company, and her husband, who were murdered by an unknown individual. What the hell does that have to do with us today?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  I reached inside my jacket and took out a piece of paper, folded lengthwise. I unfolded it and slid it in front of the Brandts.

  “As you can see,” I said, “I have the routing numbers used to transfer funds from the agency’s premium trust account to a shell known as Deer Park Underwriters. From there, the money is transferred, automatically, to a lockbox being held at Blue Hen National Bank in Delaware. I also have that account number, along with the username and password that allows me to access monthly statements. But not the funds themselves. These are also automatically transferred out, this time to a numbered account at a bank in Grand Cayman.”

  As I spoke, Damien stared at the paper. Elliot stared at me.

  “I have that number as well, “I said, “along with the original code required to access the account. You can see it there at the bottom of the page. It’s the phone number at the apartment Florencia lived in when she was going to Wharton. AT&T still has all those old records. Kind of amazing.”

  “Original code?” said Elliot, in a soft voice.

  “I needed a fresh set of numbers when I moved the money to another bank. But don’t expect me to tell you any of that. I think there’s, what, a bit shy of eleven million dollars in that account? Right, Damien?”

  Damien looked up from the paper, his face a blank, white wall of misery.

  “Who are you?” said Elliot. “You’re not from a carrier.”

  “You’re right. I’m not. And you’re not Elliot Brandt.”

  His stare intensified, and he stopped ignoring Little Boy, who had stood up from the table and was now leaning against the wall, arms folded.

  “You,” he said to Little Boy, “say something.”

  “Fuck you, Three Sticks,” said Little Boy, his Bosniak accent dripping off every word.

  A phone at the end of the conference room buzzed, causing Bruce Finger and Damien to jump.

  “Mr. Brandt,” said a woman’s voice out of the speaker, “there’s another gentleman here to meet with you. Oh, sir, wait, you can’t do that,” she said, her voice rising in volume as she held her mouth away from the receiver.

  Elliot jumped out of his seat, and leaned across the table.

  “It’s you, you bastard,” he said to me, then turned toward the conference room door and starting backing away. Bruce stood up as well, nearly stumbling over his chair.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said.

  The door opened and Bela Chalupnik walked in. In his right hand, pointed toward the ground, was a black automatic fitted with a silencer.

  “Oh, God,” said Bruce.

  Elliot pointed at me, and then at Little Boy, and said, “A million bucks, Pally. You know I’m good for it.”

  Chalupnik raised the automatic and shot Austin Ott, the Third, through the bridge of his nose. Then he swung the gun toward Damien, who was still sitting at the table, but before it got there, Little Boy put a fifty-caliber round through Pally Buttons’ chest, the impact from which lifted the assassin off his feet and into the blood splatter that preceded him to the wall.

  CHAPTER 25

  It only took about an hour to get all our important belongings, in particular my computers and Natsumi’s textbooks, and a single bag of new clothes, into the back of the Mercedes.

  Before Little Boy bolted back to Hartford, I gave him the pile of cash taken out of the Expedition that morning, and he made a second distribution to his fellow Bosniaks.

  “So no more dreams of golden riches,” he said to me.

  “Not for now,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  The Costellos, to whom I also awarded a stack of cash, said they’d stick around the house until the rental people showed up to take back a few pieces of furniture and all the kitchenware we’d rented. Then they planned to stay with their families in Colombia for a month or two. Or once they figured out how to get their cash out of the country, maybe buy a business there and never come back.

  Natsumi and I drove into New York and booked a room at a midtown hotel. Natsumi ordered in room service and I went across the street to another hotel where they had free and untraceable access to the Internet in a room off the lobby.

  First I used funds from the Caribbean account to pay my bill at Connecticut Machine Tool and Metals, minus the remaining inventory, which I arranged to have returned. There was no point in giving up the house yet, even if we weren’t planning to return. It might come in handy in the remaining months covered by the deposit.

  I was able to leave a text message for Evelyn soon after Little Boy and I had walked briskly past terrified agency employees—those who weren’t under their desks—and jumped in the car for the trip back to Greenwich.

  “I’m okay,” I wrote her. “Will explain.”

  I’d been ignoring calls from Shelly Gross that were coming in every hour or so since news of the shootings hit the media. I waited until I was back in the hotel room to call him back.

  “You set me up,” he said, his voice ragged with emotion.

  “I had the guy,” I said. “You just confirmed it.”

  “That’s a fine point. You still used me.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And don’t give me any crap about the world being a better place. I told you, no vigilantism.”

  “You did,” I said. “But at least you can check off two big boxes.”

  “Yeah. And add a new one. Yours.”

  Then he hung up.

  I flushed the phone down the toilet, then dug out the one I used to talk to Evelyn. She’d also called recently. I called her back.

  “Oh, Arthur,” she said. “What happened?”

  “The men killed today were the ones responsible for Florencia’s death. Elliot Brandt was also known as Austin Ott, the Third, street name Three Sticks. Also not his real name, but that’s irrelevant now. He hired the other guy, Bela Chalupnik, street name Pally Buttons, to kill us both. It was Chalupnik who took care of Three Sticks today. An associate of ours disposed of Chalupnik. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “Why would this man Chalupnik kill his employer?”

  “He had a thing about rats,” I said. “I sent a message through his sons that he could pay a call on the biggest rat in town.”

  “Rats?”

  “It a long story. I’ll explain later,” I told her, knowing I probably wouldn’t.

  “But why would anyone want to kill Florencia?” she asked.

  “She’d been running what’s called a skimming and lapping embezzlement scheme for years, siphoning off a modest, yet steady stream of premium money and sending it to a shell company, then into a lockbox, and finally a numbered account in the Caymans. She likely could have kept it going indefinitely, except for the bad luck of hiring Damien Brandt as her new comptroller, who unknown to her was the son of the region’s most notorious gangster. Somehow Damien stumbled on the scam—probably by discovering the shell, which was on the agency’s books as a legitimate insurance carrier. He dug a little deeper, and realized he’d discovered a pot of gold. He shared the news with his father, who hired Pally to get the codes for the numbered account, and then kill Florencia, thus taking control of both the stolen premiums, and ultimately, the agency itself.

  “After buying the place, Damien allowed what he thought was a safe amount of time to go by, then re-launched the old scam. I have a feeling he hadn’t asked Dad’s permission, but that’s sort of irrelevant at this point.”


  “Now what happens to the agency?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The lawyers are going to have a field day. You need to get a good one. We sold a business that had been running a massive fraud. Of course, the buyers were criminals, who knew about the fraud, yet failed to report it, and in fact, kept it going after acquiring the business. I have to think this would destroy their standing as an injured party, but I’m not a lawyer.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I’m done with the people who killed Florencia, but not with the reason they killed her. I need to know why she was stealing from her own company.”

  “So you’re not coming home.”

  “Not yet. There’s a chance a retired FBI agent named Shelly Gross has my fingerprints and DNA, which could lead him to Arthur Cathcart. Though I’ve never been arrested, or tested, or fingerprinted for any reason, so I can’t be in their database. Though he’s good. And determined. And he’s really mad at me right now.”

  I told her I was shutting down our email account, and to destroy the cell phone she’d been using to talk to me.

  “Stand by,” I said. “I’ll make new communications links when the time is right.”

  “I don’t know whether to be happy or disappointed,” she said.

  “Try being cautious, but hopeful. That seems to work for me.”

  I KNEW there were plenty of loose ends that needed to be tied off, though nothing that couldn’t be handled remotely. There was little reason to stick around New York any longer than it took to steal a new crop of Social Security numbers, from which we acquired driver’s licenses—leading to the establishment of a series of new bank accounts and credit cards. And lastly, with a fair amount of tricky work—some involving interaction with less than entirely legal enterprises—two new passports.

  Throughout, Natsumi maintained a trusting and thus not terribly inquisitive attitude, though something about holding that fresh, new, dark blue American passport triggered a renewed curiosity.

  “So, Alex, or Arthur, or whatever your name is, where the hell are we going?”