“I didn’t know anything about it until the feds told me,” Dichter said. “I got with John…”
“Hold on,” Rinker said. “I’m gonna go outside. I can barely hear you.”
“Where are you?”
“In a bar,” she said tersely. She pulled the tape recorder away from the phone, as though she were walking away from the jukebox, and clicked it off. Then: “Wait a minute, a guy’s coming…. Let me get over here.”
A guy was coming. A hotel guy, with a chest tag that said “Chad.” She put her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and asked, “Could you tell me where your pay phones are?”
“Down the hall, into the lobby, turn right, then around the corner and they’re right there.”
“Thanks.” She continued down the hallway, into the lobby, phone to her ear. Slipped the safety on the nine-millimeter. Into the lobby, not looking at the few faces passing through it.
Glanced to the left, her vision sharp as a broken mirror, picking up everything as tiny fragments of motion—the Indian woman behind the desk, the guy with the suitcase talking to her, another guy in the tiny gift shop, a sign that said, “Elevators,” and she was saying into the phone, all the time, “That fuckhead killed my guy and killed my baby, and I’m gonna take him out.” The righteous anger was surging in her voice, and was real and convincing. “You can get in or get out, whatever you want, but if you’re with John, I’ll take you right along with him.”
“Listen, listen, listen…,” Dichter was saying, his voice rising.
And she turned the corner and heard the last “listen” both through the phone and in person: Dichter was there, his back to her, talking into the pay phone. He felt the movement behind him and turned, his face going slack when he saw her face and the gun leveled at his forehead. He had just time to say, “No,” and Rinker shot him.
The first shot went in between his eyes. The second and third went into the side of his head as he slumped down the wall, leaving blood lines down the yellow wallpaper.
The shots, even with the silencer, were loud, enough to attract attention. Rinker shoved the gun into her jacket pocket, screamed, and ran into the lobby. “Man’s got a gun,” she screamed. “Man’s got a gun…”
She was looking over her shoulder at the hallway, and somebody else screamed and the man with the suitcase ducked but didn’t run. He was looking at the hallway where Dichter had fallen. She turned down the hall where she’d come in, out of sight from the lobby, now running, banged through the side exit, heard shouting behind her, forced herself to a walk, went to her car, was in, was rolling…
Was gone.
8
THERE WAS NO EASY WAY TO DRIVE TO St. Louis from the Twin Cities. The easiest was to head east into Wisconsin, then south through Illinois on the interstate highways.
The interstates were full of Highway Patrol cops, though, so Lucas took the Porsche straight south through Iowa, along secondary highways and country roads, spending a couple of extra hours at it but having a much better time. He eventually cut I-70 west of St. Louis and took it into town, arriving just after sunset on a gorgeous, warm August evening.
Dichter had been shot the night before, and Malone had called at midnight. As they spoke, Mallard was on his way to St. Louis with his Special Studies Group, with Malone to follow in the morning.
“No question it was her,” Malone said. A late-night caffeinated excitement was riding in her voice. “Two people got a pretty good look at her, but nobody knew who she was. They thought the shooting was coming from somewhere else—she must have used a silencer—and they were all running around like chickens with their heads cut off. She got out of the place clean. Nobody saw her car or where she went.”
“How’d she know Dichter was in the hotel?”
“She’s got a stolen cell phone. Dichter was killed on a pay phone, and we traced the number he’d called to a phone owned by a guy from Clayton—that’s just outside of St. Louis, to the west. The Clayton cops went to the guy’s apartment and talked to the manager, who said the guy was in Europe. So they checked the apartment and found the place had been broken into, ransacked. We called the guy in Europe and asked about the cell phone, and he said it should have been home on the dresser in the bedroom. No phone. It’d been taken.”
“How’d Rinker know Dichter’d be calling from that pay phone? Did she know him that well? Or was she watching him?”
“We don’t know.”
“If she’s watching her targets, you could set up a surveillance net around anybody else she might go after. See if she comes in on them,” Lucas said.
“We’ve talked about doing that. Take a lot of guys—maybe twenty at a time, three shifts. Sixty guys. That’s a lot.”
“How bad do you want her?”
“That bad,” Malone admitted. “But we have to get the budget.”
“St. Louis must have a few stolen-phone dealers. The cops should have some lines on who might be selling them.”
“You don’t think Rinker stole it?”
Lucas said, “Jesus Christ, no. She’s not a burglar. She just knew about the guy who deals them, that’s all. Probably a bar guy—she was a dancer, remember?—or a barbershop in the barrio, if they’ve got a barrio. Get somebody to look in the Latino community, or the African community—I’ll bet there’s a dealer who wholesales them to a couple of guys who retail them out to people who want to call Colombia or Somalia, like that. That’s pretty common. A couple of dozen overseas calls will pay for a pretty expensive phone. Ask the St. Louis cops.”
“I’ll do that. Can you get down?”
“I’ll drive down tomorrow,” Lucas said.
“No problem with Weather?”
“Nope. She’s pretty interested in the whole project, and she’s far enough out on the pregnancy that she doesn’t really need me here.”
“See you then. I’m flying the first thing in the morning.”
THE FBI CONTINGENT was housed in a block of rooms at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a couple of blocks off the waterfront. There was no garage, but Lucas found a spot within direct eyeshot of the front door, parked, and carried his bag inside to the reception desk.
“FBI?” asked the woman behind the desk, looking him over.
“No,” Lucas said. So everybody knew the feds were in town. He pushed his American Express card at her. “I’d really appreciate something comfortable.”
“That’s not a problem,” she said pleasantly. Her accent came from farther down the river. She was looking at a computer screen as they talked, and said, “I see you have a message.”
She stepped to the left, looked through a file, produced an envelope, and passed it to him.
“Are there a lot of FBI people in the hotel?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm,” she said. Then: “They think that lady killer is here—Clara Rinker.”
“Here in the hotel?” She was nice-looking, a fair-skinned black woman, and Lucas thought a little moonshine couldn’t hurt, especially with a southerner.
She picked up on it and smiled at him. “Not in the hotel, silly. In St. Louis.”
“I’ll look out for her.”
They chatted as she checked him in, the kind of light southern flirting that established a mutual pleasure in the present company, with no implications whatever. The room was decent: The space was okay, with a small sitting room, the bed was solid, and if he pressed his forehead to the window, he could see the towboats working up the river. One was working up the river the first time he looked, maybe one of the same tows he’d see from his place in St. Paul. Not bad.
He dumped his bag on the bed, powdered his nose, splashed water on his face, and opened the envelope. The note said, “We’re at the local FBI office. Easy to get to, too far to walk. Ask at the desk.”
Though it was warm, he got a jacket, a crinkled cotton summer-weight, before he headed out. Downstairs, the southerner was working the desk and he asked, “Can you tell me where the FBI office is?”
S
he looked at him, a little warily—was he hustling her, trying to extend the FBI comment?—and he said, “Really. I have a meeting.”
“Big fibber,” she said. “You said you weren’t—”
“No, no, I’m not FBI. I just have a meeting.”
“Well…if you’re really not fibbing…”
“Really.”
“Okay. If you were, it’s only ninety-nine dollars federal rate for your room. You save fifty dollars.”
She paused, but he shook his head. “Okay, the FBI building. It’s about, ummm, twenty blocks from here. You want to go out this way to Market….” She pointed him out the door. He retrieved the Porsche, found Market, took a right, and five minutes later was easing into a parking space outside the FBI building. He’d expected a high-rise office with security. He got a low, flat fifties-look two-or three-story building that must have covered a couple of acres, with big green windows, a well-trimmed lawn, and a steel security fence on the perimeter. Lights were burning all through the building.
Inside the front door, a guard checked him off a list. Lucas declared no weapon, and the guard said, “We have a weapon pass for you, Mr. Davenport.”
Lucas shrugged. “I thought it’d be better to leave it for now.”
“Fine. I’ll show you the conference room. Mr. Mallard is there now with the rest of the Special Studies Group.” He handed Lucas a plastic card with a metal clip. “Put this on.”
The guard led him to an elevator, while another guard took the desk. The first guy was older, mid-fifties, Lucas thought, with a mildly unfashionable haircut and a nose that might have been broken twice. “You ever a cop?” Lucas asked, as they got in the elevator.
The guard glanced at him. “Twenty-two years, City of St. Louis.”
“You let these FBI weenies get on top of you?”
The guard smiled pleasantly, showing his eyeteeth. “That doesn’t happen. You a cop, or a consultant, or what?”
“Deputy chief from Minneapolis. I’ve bumped into Rinker a couple of times, and Mallard thinks I can help.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “She’s a problem. You think these guys’ll get her?”
The guard considered for a minute, and the elevator bumped to a stop one floor up. “Ah, these guys…aren’t bad, for what they do,” the guard said, as the door opened. They took a left down the hall. “We used to think, downtown, that they were all a bunch of yuppie assholes, but I seen some pretty good busts come out of here. What they do usually has a lot of intelligence, lot of surveillance. Patience, is what they got. They might have trouble with a street chick…. Here’s your room.”
The conference room was unmarked. Lucas stopped and said, “You ever have a beer when you get off? Bite to eat?”
“Usually,” the guard said. “There’s a late-night place up on the Hill—get together with some of my old pals.”
“I don’t know St. Louis.”
“If you’re out of here by eleven, stop at the desk. I’ll give you a map. You driving?”
“Yeah.”
“No problem, then.”
“What’s your name?” Lucas asked.
“Dan Loftus.”
“Lucas Davenport.” They shook hands. “See you later.”
THE GUARD HEADED back to his station, and Lucas knocked once on the conference room door and stepped inside. A dozen people—seven or eight men in ties and long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and four or five women in slacks and jackets—were sitting around two long tables, with Mallard at the front. A white board covered the front wall, and somebody had drawn a flow chart on it with three colors of ink. Five or six laptop computers were scattered down the conference table. Malone sat in a corner, wearing a skirted suit: She lifted a hand.
“Lucas,” Mallard said. He stepped over to shake hands and pointed Lucas at a chair. “This is Chief Davenport,” Mallard said to the group. “Treat him well.” A few of the agents nodded. Most looked him over, then turned back to Mallard.
Like that, Lucas thought. Not a member of the tribe. On the other hand, he had his own tribe. He thought of the guard and leaned back in the chair to listen.
MALLARD HAD SIX names on the whiteboard: six local crime figures who might have been tied into Rinker. They included Nanny Dichter, now dead; Paul Dallaglio, a business partner of Dichter’s in the import and dope businesses; Gene Giancati, involved in sex and loan-sharking; Donny O’Brien, improbably a trustee of a half-dozen different union pension funds; Randall Ferignetti, who ran the biggest local sports books; and John Ross, who ran a liquor-distribution business, a trucking company, several lines of vending machines, and an ATM-servicing company.
“We think Rinker’s most likely target is Dallaglio,” Mallard was saying, tapping the white board. “He and Dichter were like Peter and Paul—the salesman and the organizer. If Dichter was involved enough with Rinker that she killed him, then Dallaglio’s got to know her.”
“Can we talk to him?” a blue-shirted agent asked.
“I called him this morning, but he wouldn’t talk,” Mallard said. “He said he’d have an attorney get back to me, but we haven’t heard anything. We suspect there’s some pretty heavy conferencing going on right now.”
“We could put a net around him without asking,” the agent said.
Malone chipped in: “We could, if we could keep it light enough that he didn’t know. The problem is, he’s hired private protection—Emerson Security out of Chicago. We don’t know who yet, but Emerson has a whole bunch of ex–Bureau guys. If they put up their own security net, they’d spot us.”
“So what?” another agent asked.
“So we want him scared,” Mallard answered. “Officially, we’re reluctant to get involved in this, unless we get something back. If we do it right, we might do a lot of damage to these guys.”
“Maybe he’ll just hire Emerson forever.”
“No. Good protection from Emerson’s gonna cost him between three and five thousand a day. He’s got money, but he’s not a rock star,” Mallard said. “We’re gonna let both him and Emerson know that we’re watching his banking activity—that the IRS will want to know where the money’s coming from, and where it’s going to. Probably most of his money is offshore, and getting it back here, in big amounts, won’t be easy, especially to pay off a legit company like Emerson. They won’t take cash under the table, not in their business, not when they know we’re watching.”
“Maybe we’ll eventually put a net around him,” Malone said. She and Mallard were double-teaming the briefing. They were good at it, practiced, coordinated without awkwardness or deference. “Right now, though, we want to put some light tags on the other people. Keep track of them. Maybe somebody will run, and we’ll want to know that.”
“Do we have anybody on the street?” asked a woman in a square-shouldered, khaki-colored dress that made her look like a tomboy or an archaeologist. “She’s not in any hotel within two hundred miles, she’s not staying with anybody we’ve got in our history, her face is all over the place on TV and in the newspapers, but nobody sees her. Where is she? If we can figure that out…What do people do when they come to St. Louis but the cops are looking for them? They still got boardinghouses or something?”
They all thought about that for a few moments, then started making noises like a bunch of ducks quacking, Lucas thought—no reflection on Mallard.
“Lucas…what do you think?” Malone asked finally.
Lucas shrugged. “You guys are always putting up rewards like a million dollars for some Arab terrorist. If she’s ditched underground with an old crooked friend…why not offer a hundred thousand and see if you get a phone call?”
“Rewards cause all kinds of subsidiary problems,” a gray-shirted agent said. “You get multiple claims…”
“You guys got lawyers coming out of your ears, to be polite,” Lucas said. “Fuck a bunch of multiple claims. Bust her first, litigate later. Once you have her chained in
the basement, you can work out the small stuff.”
“It’s an idea,” Malone said, without much enthusiasm. “We’d have to get the budget.”
A guy in a white shirt said, “We know every place she ever worked here in St. Louis. What if we ran the Social Security records on every place she worked, and got a list of all her coworkers, and cross-matched them.”
That idea turned their crank. Mallard made notes, and Lucas looked at his watch. When they sorted it out, one of the agents asked, “Is Gene Rinker going to be a genuine resource?”
Mallard looked at Malone, who said, “Two possibilities on that. First, we use him to talk her in. He’s resisting. The second is, at some critical point, we throw him out there as a chip. Come in, we guarantee no death sentence, and your brother walks on the dope charge.”
Lucas was twiddling a pencil, anxious to get going, but asked, “Where is he? Gene?”
“We’re moving him here.”
“How’re you going to face him off to Clara? How is she even going to find out about him?”
Malone shrugged. “The press. They’ve been all over the Dichter thing. This is a large story here. There’ll be a story on tonight’s news that we’re bringing Gene here to assist with the investigation, and we’ve let it be known that we’ve got him by the short hairs. Rinker’ll hear about it. Unless she’s in Greenland or Borneo.”
Lucas blinked, and twiddled, and Malone finally asked, “What?”
“I like blackmail as much as the next guy, when you’re dealing with small-timers,” Lucas said. “Clara isn’t. I don’t see her turning herself in. If you hang her kid brother out to dry—he’s the only person we’ve been able to find who she cares about—she could do something unpredictable.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. If I did, it wouldn’t be unpredictable.”
“Well, God, Lucas, what do you want us to do?”
“He’s a resource,” said another guy. “We don’t have to use him.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 81
