“Rinker’s probably going after a guy named Andy Levy. A banker,” Lucas said, as he found a chair. He pulled it back from the table so he could stretch his legs. “She had a list of at least two guys when she came into town: Nanny Dichter and Andy Levy. There’s an Andy Levy who’s a vice president at First Heartland National Bank here in St. Louis. I don’t know he’s the one, but he’s a possibility.”
They all turned to look at him again. Malone, who’d been sitting in the corner poking at a laptop, asked, “Where’d you get this?”
“On the street,” Lucas said. “While I was out drinking.”
“Drinking with any specific guy?” asked the tomboy agent, who the day before had been wearing khaki. Now she was wearing an olive-drab blouse, with epaulets. Lucas liked the look, sort of square-shouldered Italian Army.
“Nobody specific,” he said. “Just a bunch of guys.”
“Maybe nothing to take seriously,” said another one of the agents.
“Gotta take it seriously,” Lucas said. “You don’t take it seriously and Andy Levy gets hit, and the papers hear about it, then you’re a laughingstock. That’s not the FBI way. Or maybe it is, but it’s not something you’d want to talk about.”
“Who’d tell the papers?”
Lucas shrugged. “I might. I always liked newspaper guys.”
Mallard said, “Ah, man—Lucas, let’s step out in the hallway for a minute, huh? We gotta talk.”
MALLARD PUSHED THE door shut, stood with his back to it, and asked, “Who’s your source?”
“A guy I ran into last night,” Lucas said. “If you wind up desperately needing him—and I can’t see how that would happen—then I’ll tell you who he is. Until then, the information’s got to be enough.”
“Is it good information?”
“It’s good. It comes right out of Rinker’s mouth. But I’m not sure the guy at Heartland is the right guy. Rinker’s the one who called him a banker, and my source doesn’t know if she meant a mob banker or a legit banker or what. If Levy’s legit, maybe Rinker’s got some money with him.”
“That’d be good—that’d be really good. Anything else I ought to know?”
“Yeah. The AIC here is running another Rinker group out of his back pocket. Four guys named Striker, Allenby, Lane, and Jones, out of Intelligence. He doesn’t like you being here. What that means is, there are about six groups of cops looking for the same woman and not finding her. But pretty soon, they’re gonna start finding each other.”
“Boy—you do keep your ear to the ground. Where’d you hear this? On the street?”
Lucas grinned. “Everybody knows about it. You’re the last.”
Mallard sighed and said, “Listen, I’m going over to talk to John Ross. That’s really why I was a little anxious about your not being here. I want you to come along, and we’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
“Could have called.”
“Never occurred to me that you might be sleeping in,” Mallard said. “I figured you were up to something…and I was right. And listen, take it easy in here, okay? I know they’re a little chilly with outsiders.”
“A little chilly, my ass. I almost froze to death last night,” Lucas said. “I’m sure your guys are good at what they do, but that’s not what I do. I think I’d be more valuable doing what I’m doing—hooking up with the locals, seeing who is doing what.”
Mallard shrugged. “That’s fine with me, as long as you stay in touch. I sort of value your input.”
“I’ll be around.”
“Andy Levy, a banker,” Mallard said.
“That’s right.”
“Let’s go back in.”
BACK INSIDE, Mallard looked at one of the agents and said, “I want you and four more guys on this Andy Levy, and I want a list of all the Andy Levys in the metropolitan area. As soon as we’ve got the right guy, I want a team on him around the clock. Start now—find him. Take whoever you want, except Sally.”
The woman named Sally, in the epaulets, sat up and tapped the eraser end of a pencil on her yellow pad. Why not her? Mallard answered the question without being asked.
“Sally, Lucas is going to be running around town. I want you to run around with him as our liaison.”
She shook her head, looked at Lucas, unhappy.
“I can’t do that,” Lucas said.
“Don’t be a princess, Lucas,” Malone snapped from the corner. “Take Sally. Her old man is a cop, her brother’s a cop, she understands.”
“I don’t care if her father’s the fuckin’ Pope of Cleveland, I ain’t taking her,” Lucas said. “The people I talk to aren’t going to talk to me if she’s around.”
“Don’t tell them that she’s with the Bureau.”
Lucas looked at Mallard. “Think about the second piece of information I gave you. That’ll give you a clue about where some of my sources are, and why I can’t take Sally along.”
“Are you…ah, man.” He got it in one second. At least some of Lucas’s sources were with the FBI. “All right. Sally, you work here with Malone, but Lucas, Sally’s your contact with us. She’ll get you what you need, from our side. Call her anytime day or night. Feed her everything you collect, all right? And try to get to the morning report on time. Seven o’clock, okay?
“Okay,” Lucas said, with no sincerity whatever.
MALLARD WENT THROUGH the list of the day’s assignments, then said to Malone, “I’m outta here. I doubt that we’ll be with Ross for an hour, and I’ll be on the phone the whole time.”
“Good luck,” she said.
SALLY FOLLOWED THEM out into the hall. “Give me two minutes with Chief Davenport,” she said to Mallard. Mallard said, “I’m going to hit the john,” and walked away. To Lucas, she said, “What was the second piece of information?”
Lucas shook his head. “You’d have to get that from Louis.”
“I surmise that one of your informants is with the Bureau.”
He shook his head again, kept his face straight. “You’d have to get that from Louis.”
“It’s really good to build up this level of trust with the guy you’re coordinating with,” she said.
“I don’t need my balls busted by the FBI,” Lucas said. “I’m getting tired of leading you guys around by the hand.”
“I don’t think that’s the case,” she said.
“Bullshit. You guys couldn’t find your own elbows with two agents and a pair of binoculars.”
Her lip twitched, and Lucas thought she might smile. “My old man would’ve said, ‘You couldn’t find your asshole with both hands and a flashlight.’”
“That was my thought,” Lucas admitted. “I edited it because of your tender years.”
“I’m not that tender,” she said. “What are we doing?”
“I’ll get your number and give you mine. It’s always on, except at night.”
“Good.” They finished the arrangements in two minutes, and she asked, “That Andy Levy stuff isn’t just a rumor, is it?”
“No. But I don’t know anything about him.”
She nibbled at the inside of her lip. “We’ll have a formal profile in an hour. We’re very good at that.”
Lucas started down the hall. “Then do it. When you find anything out, call me,” he said over his shoulder. “And hey—I like the epaulets.”
THEY TOOK A dark government car, a Dodge, Mallard in the back, a younger agent driving, Lucas riding shotgun. On the way over, Mallard browsed through a file on Ross, reading out occasional anecdotes.
The anecdotes covered Ross’s youth (he’d taken piano lessons for four years as a child, but didn’t like them; he had allegedly pushed the piano out of his parent’s fourth-floor apartment and down the stairs, it had rocketed through the side of the apartment house and into the street); his love life (he was on his fourth wife; his third had died tragically in an unsolved hit-and-run shortly after the divorce, while Ross had been vacationing in alibi heaven); and his legitimate interests (
his long-distance trucking company was “Mother Trucker of the Year” for ’98, and was listed in Missouri magazine as one of the top 100 Missouri companies to work for).
ROSS LIVED ON a semiprivate street in the town of Ladue, in the middle of a broad, rolling lawn of faultless green, dappled here and there with flower beds. The house, a rambling redbrick mansion with white trim, was set at the crest of a low hillock, and was surrounded by mature, artfully spaced trees. If Ross had any kind of security system, Rinker would need a rocket launcher to get at him, Lucas thought.
The driver stayed with the car, while Lucas and Mallard went to the door. Ross’s wife answered the doorbell. She was a striking woman in her mid-thirties, with strawberry-blond hair, a smooth oval face, and jade-green eyes—way too much for her Missouri accent. She was wearing tennis whites and carrying a bottle of orange Gatorade. She led them across polished wooden floors, past colorful, intricate framed prints, back to a home office, and called, “John—they’re here,” and then said to Mallard, “Well, I’m off to play tennis,” as though she found the idea amazing.
“Good luck,” he said. She turned away as John Ross came up to the office door.
“Come in,” Ross said, looking after his wife. Mallard and Lucas followed him back into the office.
Ross looked like what he was: a hood. The smart, hard kind of hoodlum, the borderline psychopath, the kind who might have run the docks in New York in another era. He weighed maybe two-twenty, Lucas thought, and had wide sloping shoulders. He was square, with heavy lids over dark eyes, a dark, saturnine face, and fingers like fat stubby cigars.
The office around them was attractive, just as old man Mejia’s library had been: all good wood and well-coordinated, the furniture sitting on a blue-and-beige oriental carpet that glowed at them from the floor. Two orchids sat on his desk, and another on a side table. One of the orchid blooms was the exact color of green that Lucas remembered from a huge Luna moth that had once visited his Wisconsin cabin.
“Beautiful flowers,” Mallard said, as they settled around Ross’s desk.
“My principal hobby,” Ross said. “I have two thousand of them.”
“You take care of them yourself?”
Ross nodded. “Mostly.” He wasn’t interested in talking about his flowers. “What can I do for you folks?”
“You’ve probably got a pretty good idea,” Mallard said. “You once employed Clara Rinker. She just killed Nanny Dichter, and we think she is probably going after you. She blames you for the killing of Paulo Mejia.”
Ross made a hand gesture, a what can you do gesture, and said, “I never had anything but the best relationship with her. I was amazed when I found out that she’d been killing people. But her career started way before I met her—at least, if what the papers say is correct.”
“Look, you know as well as I do that the Bureau has a major file on you,” Mallard said. “I think that some of the…surmises…made in those files are correct. But I don’t care about that. I don’t care if you’re a big-time mobster, because my job right now is to find and stop Clara Rinker. What I want from you is any ideas you may have of where she’s staying, who she may be working with. Old friends, people she could force to take her in—anything like that.”
Ross was shaking his head. “I’d have no idea. I will go around and ask, though. When she worked for me, she mostly worked in the warehouse, and there must be twenty or thirty people out there who knew her. I’ll have one of my guys talk to everyone.”
“How about if we talk to them?”
“I’ve got no problem with that,” Ross said. He leaned forward, opened a small drawer, and took out a sheet of paper and a yellow pencil. He scribbled on it and pushed it at Mallard. “This is the manager’s name and phone number. I’ll call him as soon as you leave, and tell him to expect a call from you.”
Mallard nodded. “Thank you…. You personally have no idea….”
Ross shook his head again. “None. I’ll tell you, I’m really not sure that she’s coming after me. I’m not sure exactly why she went after Nanny Dichter—I mean, you hear these rumors that Nanny played by his own rules, sometimes, but I didn’t know they had any prior…relationship. Maybe that’ll be the end of it. Nanny.”
“That’s a possibility, but she has at least one more man on her list for sure—not you. And we know that she made a series of phone calls from Mexico, to Missouri, after the shooting, and that you were the main topic of conversation. So we think there are at least two more people on the list, and you are one of them.”
“Who’s the other guy?” Ross’s dark eyebrows went up.
“Sorry,” Mallard said. “I can’t…”
“Paul Dellaglio?”
Mallard shook his head. “…really give you that information. Why would you think Dellaglio?”
“Because anything Nanny Dichter did, Paul was part and parcel of. Unless the Rinker thing involves sex.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Neither do I. Nanny didn’t get around so much. So I would guess that Paul’s the other guy on your list.”
Mallard shook his head and said, “I’ll have a couple of our agents around to your warehouse this afternoon.”
“Anything I can do,” Ross said.
THAT WAS THE INTERVIEW. After a few more unpleasantries, Ross took them out. On the way, they stopped in a room whose leaded-glass wall overlooked the back lawn. To the left, a greenhouse stood facing the south. A resort-sized rectangular swimming pool was straight ahead, and with its black-painted bottom, acted as a reflecting pond. To the right was a tennis court, where Ross’s wife was batting tennis balls around with a white-haired man.
“Tennis lessons,” Ross said ruefully. “That guy costs me fifty bucks an hour.”
“Your wife’s got a nice swing,” Lucas said.
Ross looked at him with a tiny spark in his eye, the first sign Lucas had seen of humor. “Yes, she does. Always has had,” Ross said.
Ross stood in the doorway and watched them go. When they were in the car, he pushed the door shut and walked to the opposite end of the house, moving silently on the thick carpet. Two men were in the billiards room, one of them looking out the window, while the other, a fiftyish man with a bald, pink scalp and a long Swedish face, was flipping playing cards down the length of a billiards table, at a tweed hat.
Ross watched him for a moment. Johnson’s dour face reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t think who. Ross did not like Honus Johnson—nobody did—but he was sometimes afraid that he’d let that attitude leak through, and that Honus had picked it up.
Honus was a throwback, a genuine sadist who’d found his perfect place in life as an interrogator, a punisher, with Ross’s organization. Some of the others used him from time to time, with Ross’s approval, but he was Ross’s creature…and like most people who owned creatures, Ross sometimes wondered if the beast would ever turn on him.
Johnson, with his playthings, his hammers and saws and pliers and wire, would give a man a hard way to go.
He stepped into the room, and both men turned to him. “They’re gone,” Ross said. “They have no idea where she is. But they pretty much said what I told you—she has to be staying with somebody she knew from before. I want you guys to get out there and start talking to people.”
“If we find her?” asked the man from the window.
“If you find her—if you literally find her, like walk in on her—you won’t have to worry, because she’ll kill you. But if you hear where she is, get back to me. We’ll get some guys to pick her up.”
“I don’t know if I can be of much use,” Honus Johnson said. “I’m not a scout.”
“I want you to go along with Troy, here, and stand in the background,” Ross said. “People have some ideas about you. That might convince them to be more forthcoming. And I have something else for you.”
“Hmmm?” Johnson didn’t quite look eager.
Ross looked at Troy. “You remember that woman Nancy Leigh
ton? Used to work in fulfillment? Black hair, little mustache…Quit maybe three years ago?”
“Drove a Camaro,” Troy said.
“That’s the one. She used to be a good friend of Rinker’s. I think she’s got an apartment down on the south side somewhere. Get in her apartment, take her apart.”
Johnson’s eyebrows went up. “Take her apart? Completely?”
“Completely. Be careful—no prints, no DNA, but we want it to be noticed. We want it in the newspapers. Front page. Make it ugly.”
“An example,” Johnson said with relish. He rubbed the edge of one hand through the palm of the other, back and forth, like a saw. Then: “Do I get Clara if we pick her up?”
“I’d have to think about that,” Ross said. “I do like the girl—but she’s a very bad example, hitting Nanny like she did.”
“I’d like to have her for a while,” Johnson said. His flat tongue flickered out to his thin lips, his flat pale eyes catching Ross’s. “It wouldn’t have to be long.”
At that moment, when he caught Ross’s eyes, Ross realized who Johnson looked like: the old man in the Grant Wood painting American Gothic, the somber old man with the pitchfork standing next to his equally somber wife. “Old rivals, huh?” Ross said, and smiled at the thought. The two of them had been a powerful combination.
Too bad about Clara.
AT THE FBI BUILDING, Lucas said goodbye to Mallard and got into his car. “Gonna roll around town for a while,” he said. He dug up Micky Andreno’s phone number and dialed it. Andreno was out in the yard and snatched up the phone on the fifth ring, as Lucas was about to hang up. “Washing the car,” he said.
“Know anybody at Heartland National?”
“No, but one of Bender’s kids works there. Want me to call him?”
“I think that Andy Levy’s a vice president. I did some calling around.”
“Oh, shit…. Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“I’m so fuckin’ stupid. How could I be this fuckin’ stupid?” Andreno sounded shocked.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 83
