Double Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
Page 17
“I was supposed to have a job,” Jori-Lee said. “That’s what Robertson said.”
Lee nodded.
“And you will, and you will. We just have to stay within the structure. At the end of the day tomorrow, you’ll have an offer. You can accept it if you want and, if you do, I look forward to having you around here and watching you mature into a partnership position. Or you can reject it. The choice is yours. My secretary, Anabella, will be taking you around today to meet some of the lawyers. You’ll be joining six of us for lunch at The Palm at 11:30. Are you up for all of that?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The day turned into a blur of rotations in and out of offices populated with faces that were all etched to one degree or another with competence, a high work ethic and, to a more hidden degree, exhaustion. It wasn’t until the end of the day that one of those faces broke the mold.
It belonged to Zahara Knox, a petite black-haired beauty with golden island-girl skin and no wedding ring on her finger.
Behind a closed door she leaned forward and said, “You look like a nice person so I’m going to do you a favor. Don’t join this firm. Run like hell. Go anywhere you want but don’t come here. Trust me, you’ll be better off.”
Jori-Lee cocked her head.
“Why? What’s so wrong?”
The woman stood up, escorted Jori-Lee to the door said, “I’ve already said too much. Be a friend and don’t tell anyone what I said.”
“I won’t.”
“Thank you.”
66
Day Eight
July 15
Tuesday Morning
Tuesday morning Rail woke to find San Francisco encased in fog and the streets already neurotic with headlights. He pulled his hair into a ponytail, tucked it under a baseball hat and headed out for a jog down Haight Street. The salty air filled his chest like medicine. He needed to do what needed to be done and then get out of town before anyone recognized him.
The concrete was hard under his feet.
It jolted up his shins and into his knees.
He didn’t care.
Pain was good.
Pain was nature’s way of reminding you that you were still alive.
He passed a flower shop, one he bought a yellow rose in a year ago for Kelly. The thought of her popped an image into his brain, an image so clear and detailed that it was if he was right there.
_____
A terrible storm pounded down on Denver. Jagged rips of lightning shredded the coal-black sky again and again and again, slamming shut with monstrous explosions that rumbled all the way to infinity. Rail took shelter as best he could, in the dark, hunched in a ball against the backside of Teffinger’s house.
The Rocky Mountain air was thin.
Even though it was the middle of summer the night was cold. The rain was an onslaught of chilly little needles working their way into Rail’s skin and then drilling deeper into his bones.
He shivered.
He willed himself to stop.
It didn’t work.
In his hand was a pink SIG with a silencer. Ordinarily he wouldn’t let a piece of art like that get wet in a million years.
This was no ordinary night.
The storm was actually a good thing. It kept the neighbors inside. It kept the dogs and coyotes away. It kept the rattlesnakes away.
Minute after minute passed, followed by a half-hour, followed by an hour.
Nothing happened.
Teffinger didn’t show up.
No one else showed up.
Everything stayed frozen in time.
Then time changed.
Headlights punched up the street and pulled into Teffinger’s driveway. The garage door came up, the vehicle entered, the door swung down.
The interior lights turned on.
Rail wedged back into a deeper shadow.
Teffinger went to the kitchen, got a beer for himself and a glass of white wine for the woman—Kelly Nine—and then turned off the lights as they headed for the couch.
They were visible at first, two black silhouettes raising drinks to their mouths and fondling each other. Then they dropped horizontal and molded into one indiscernible shape.
Rail crept closer to the window and waited for lightning.
It came.
The flash lasted only a bite of a second but was long enough to bring the shapes into clear view. The woman was naked now, stretched out on the couch with her arms up above her head. Teffinger had his lips and tongue on her stomach, making her hips gyrate.
Rail’s heart pounded.
He waited for the next flash.
It took forever but when it the shapes were on the carpet now. Teffinger was on his back. The woman was straddling his hips and riding him for all she was worth. Her face was pointed away from Rail but he could picture it.
He’d seen it before from the other angle, many times in fact.
67
Day Eight
July 15
Tuesday Morning
Kelly Nine’s best friend at b.Box-Media turned out to be to a contemporary, late-20s Chinese woman named Dandan Phon, who Teffinger remembered talking to on the phone at one point but couldn’t remember about what. Her face was confident, her dress was urban-chic, her facial expressions were quick and her eyes were focused.
Teffinger explained who he was and why he was in town. He handed her the photo of Rail and said, “Have you ever seen this guy?”
“No, never.”
“Are you sure?”
“Crystal.”
“Did Kelly ever mention seeing someone—a man, I mean, romantically?”
“No.”
“No one?”
“If she was seeing someone she never mention it to me.” She focused on the photo, looked into Teffinger’s eyes and said, “Is this the man who killed her?”
He nodded.
“Yes.”
“He would be her type,” she said. “Sort of like you.”
Teffinger asked her questions from every angle and on every possible tangent, got not a bit of useful information, then gave his cell phone number in case anything came to her later.
He talked to four other people equally without knowledge of anything and then left.
Five minutes away he got a call.
It was from her, Dandan.
She wanted to meet for lunch.
She told him where and when.
“Come alone,” she said. “Don’t bring anyone with you. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
Shortly after noon, with Del Rey safely tucked back in the hotel room, Teffinger stepped off a trolley in the heart of Chinatown and made his way to Chef Jia’s, a hole-in-the-wall looking place on Kearny Street between Jackson and Columbus. Dandan waived at him from a back table.
“I already ordered for you,” she said.
He sat down.
“So what am I having?”
“Egg rolls.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
She smiled and then got serious. “There’s something I’d like to tell you, something that might help you,” she said. “But I’m going to need you to keep it absolutely confidential.”
He nodded.
“Sure.”
“I’m serious about the confidentiality,” she said. “What I’m going to tell you is partly about me and some things I’ve done, some illegal things. If word ever got out I’d be ruined. My family would be shamed. So what I need you to do is convince me that you really mean it when you say you’ll be confidential.”
Teffinger poured tea from a spout into a little ceramic cup.
He took a sip.
It was hot, coffee-like, but way short.
“Let me put it like this,” he said. “I don’t give a shit what you did, what you’re doing or what you’re going to do in the future. The only thing I care about in the whole world is finding the man who I showed you in the picture. And it’s not just to avenge Kelly, al
though that’s a large part of it. He took someone else and she may still be alive, a Denver woman named Susan Smith. On top of that, he may be after me and/or my lady friend Del Rey, who you met back at the agency. So, rest assured that anything you may tell me about yourself is thoroughly and utterly trumped. Your sins or lack thereof are not on my radar and never will be, unless you’re selling kids into slavery or something like that. Give me even a grain of sand that helps me and I’ll be eternally thankful. But even if what you tell me doesn’t help, rest assured that your words will end at my ears. Nothing will come back to haunt you, ever, as least not as a result me.” He cocked his head. “Was that convincing enough?”
She smiled.
It was slightly crooked, very sexy.
“Yes.”
“Good, because I usually don’t talk that long.”
“I can tell.”
The food arrived.
It was in bags.
Dandan grabbed hers, stood up and said, “Let’s go.”
“We’re not eating here?”
“No, we’ll eat in the car. I have something to show you.”
In the alley behind the building Dandan slid behind the wheel of a red 911 Porsche Targa of the mid-80s era, back when the styling was still exceptional. She hiked up her skirt far enough to wedge the bag between her thighs.
“You’re a car girl,” Teffinger said. “I like that.”
“I hate cars, especially this one. Put your seat belt on.”
68
Day Eight
July 15
Tuesday Noon
They headed north out of Chinatown with something always in their way, either the hundredth red light or a car or a construction crew or a diesel-stained bus or some hit-me-and-I’ll-sue-you fool crisscrossing this way or that. Dandan worked the clutch and the bag of eggrolls, not saying much, rarely getting out of second gear. Teffinger tried to keep his eyes on the cityscape and off Dandan’s thighs, succeeding most of the time.
“I’m still deciding if I’m going to do this,” Dandan said.
“Do what?”
“Show you something,” she said. “It’s against my better judgment.”
“It’s too late now,” Teffinger said. “You already bought me eggrolls.”
She looked over.
The corner of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.
“Good point.”
“There’s no turning back,” he said, “not with the eggroll rule in effect.”
She smiled.
“I get trapped in it every time.”
“It’s a sneaky thing.”
They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, wound through the tourist-soaked shoreline of Sausalito and killed the engine in the parking lot of a large marina on the north end of town. Five minutes later they stepped aboard a 30-foot Island Packard sailboat at the far end of the third dock.
“Yours?” Teffinger said.
“Yes.”
“I never pictured you as a sailor.”
“Good because I’m not,” she said. “I hate boats.”
She inserted a key into a formidable padlock at the cabin door, led Teffinger down teak stairs into the guts of the vessel, closed the door behind them and turned on the lights. She unlocked a storage door near the floor under the front berth, pulled out sail repair material, then reached farther in and retrieved an aluminum case, 2-feet by 3-feet and half a foot thick.
It was heavy.
She wrestled it onto the galley table.
“What do you know about art?” she said.
“Actually I paint a little.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“Plein air landscapes, mostly.”
“Are you any good?”
“I’m in a few galleries.”
“Well, you may find this interesting, then.”
She opened the top. Inside was a painting, an impressionist painting depicting a black sailboat near a beach. Heavy rolling clouds filled the sky, mimicking in size, tone and scale the waves below. Several black-silhouetted figures in a wavy foreground field were doing something, possibly approaching the boat or coming from it. The piece was set in warm tones.
“This is called View of the Sea at Scheveningen. It was painted in 1882 by a man named Vincent Van Gogh,” she said. “You’ve heard of him, I assume.”
Teffinger recognized the style.
“Are you saying this is an original?”
She nodded.
“It was stolen in 2002 out of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, together with another one of his paintings called Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen. If you believe the Internet, the two together are worth over 30 million dollars. This one, in my option, is the much nicer of the two.”
“So what’s it doing here in your boat?”
“That’s a long story, a long dangerous story.”
“You’ve officially gone from having my curiosity to having my full attention,” he said.
“The story relates to Kelly Nine.”
Teffinger nodded his head towards the painting.
“Is this why she’s dead?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then why do I care about this?”
She exhaled, unscrewed a bottle of white wine, filled two plastic glasses half way and handed one to Teffinger. He was more in the mood for beer but took a sip.
It wasn’t bad.
“You’re still going to be confidential, right?” Dandan said.
“Nothing’s changed.”
She studied him, looking for lies or exaggerations. She must not have found any because she said, “Okay then, here’s what’s going on.”
69
Day Eight
July 15
Tuesday Night
Zahara Knox, the associate who so darkly warned Jori-Lee to stay away from Overton & Frey, lived on the 18th floor of a contemporary high-rise smack in the heart of the matter. Tuesday night after dark, Jori-Lee knocked unannounced and unexpected on the woman’s door. Zahara answered dressed in jeans and a T, with a glass of white wine in her left hand, not her first. Her look of surprise fell off quickly.
“Come in.”
“Thanks.”
The interior wasn’t overwhelming by square footage, probably less than a thousand, but was open, ultra-contemporary and played to a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that had a view all the way to London. A lady-day 33 LP spun on an honest-to-God record player, weaving a scratchy lament of love gone wrong. The vinyl had a slight warp as it spun. The needle rocked up and down as if was riding an ocean swell.
Zahara topped her glass off, poured one for Jori-Lee and said, “You’re still thinking about Overton & Frey but what I said has you spooked. You want to know why I said what I said.”
Jori-Lee took a sip.
“Something like that.”
“Sorry but I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know you.”
“Whatever you tell me remains between us,” Jori-Lee said. “I promise you that.”
The woman wasn’t impressed.
“Like I said, I can’t help you more that I already have.”
Jori-Lee looked around.
“Nice place.”
“It’s a golden handcuff,” Zahara said. “My advice is to not put one on.”
Jori-Lee hesitated, not sure she should say was she was about to, and then said it. “The warning you’re giving me relates to Leland Everitt, doesn’t it?”
The woman’s lips said nothing.
Her expression said plenty.
“You know something about him,” Jori-Lee added. “What is it? What exactly is he up to?”
Zahara stood up, took the wine out of Jori-Lee’s hand and said, “It’s time for you to leave.”
Jori-Lee walked to the door, turned halfway through and said over her shoulder, “See you at the firm tomorrow. Thanks for the wine.”
Then she was gone.
Outside in the car she told Sanders, “The woman’s scared to death to talk but whatever she knows definitely relates to Leland Everitt. If we can get what she knows, I think we’ll be in a position to take him down.”
“Together with Robertson?”
She nodded.
“He made his bed, so screw him.”
Sanders exhaled.
“Will Zahara open up?”
Jori-Lee nodded.
“Eventually,” she said. “She liked me well enough even at the first to give me a warning, albeit cryptic. Whatever it is she has inside her, it’s dying to get out. Where else, if not to me? I just need to get her confidence level up that I won’t betray her trust.”
“That will take time.”
“It better not. That’s something we don’t have.”
70
Day Eight
July 15
Tuesday Noon
Okay then, here’s what’s going on. With that, there in the wooden guts of the Island Packard with an original Van Gogh sitting on the galley table, Dandan took a sip of wine and said, “Kelly met a man.”
“Rail—” Teffinger said.
Dandan nodded.
“Yes, Rail. She’d been with him for three or four weeks before she told me about him, although there was a spring in her step that hadn’t been there before so I already knew something was going on. Anyway, he made her promise to never tell anyone about him. He told her he was involved in black market art. INTERPOL was after him as were a number of more nefarious characters relating to transactions that went less than perfectly smooth. To prove what he did, he showed her the Van Gogh. She did research on it and confirmed that it really was an original that had been stolen in 2002 and had never been recovered. It was on a number of stolen art registries.”
“So she didn’t care that he was a criminal?”
“No.”
“That’s not like her.”
“To tell you the truth, I think she actually liked it,” Dandan said. “She wasn’t herself doing anything illegal but suddenly had this portal into a whole different world that hardly anyone ever saw. He gave her details.”