by L H Thomson
“What did you do with ....”
“Like I said, don’t ask. But suffice to say, there ain’t no gun no more. It no longer exists, ‘cept maybe as spare parts.”
“You owe someone for that?”
He smiled. “Nah, old friend handled it for me. But now you owe ME for it, kid. And the price is this: no more talking to Terrasini. He calls you, tell him your father heard about it, and put the screws to you. He and I know each other a little from the old days.”
The first time I’d met him, Terrasini had told me he knew my old man, and that he was one of the ones that couldn’t be tempted, couldn’t be bought off. So maybe there was a respect there, maybe something more.
By that point, I really didn’t want to know.
“I should go,” I said. “I’ve still got pieces to put together on this Junior thing...”
“Yeah, I meant to ask about that. Look, don’t worry about this other thing. Those guys? They ain’t going to be missed by anyone, even their mothers. And there ain’t much you could have done about this Mince kid. Whether you introduced him to Vin the Shin or not, he was already stone cold. People don’t change so much as they get older; he would have found his way there eventually.”
He was trying to make me feel better... and as usual, he was doing a pretty good job. “Alright Pa, I’ll try to do that.”
“You do,” he said. “And come over on Sunday for dinner, or I’ll never hear the end from your mother.”
I pulled the beast out of the Druid’s parking lot and headed out. I was half-way back to the De Sorias’ condo downtown when something my father had said earlier hit me. I pulled over and dialed my office voicemail at PMI’s downtown high rise.
Sure enough, Alistair the agent had left me a message, and it made a whole lot of sense in light of what I’d just figured out.
And if I was right, I knew how Junior Flores had died. Now all I had to do was prove it.
CHAPTER 10
Mrs. De Soria made us breakfast the next morning, a beautiful Saturday.
We gathered around the round glass table on their condo’s small balcony overlooking the city, the sun already streaming down at eight-thirty, promising warmth ahead.
After we’d mopped up eggs and bacon, we relaxed with her strong, black coffee and I let the weight of the last two weeks’ events slip off my shoulders.
Ramon was paying attention. “What’s gotten into you?”
I smiled. “I figured out who killed Junior.”
He cocked his head alertly. “So?”
“I’ve got to call Davy first and fill him in, like I promised. But if you listen in, you should be able to catch the gist.”
And so he did. Davy was incredulous. I said, “You know the deal: Vin the Shin’s name doesn’t come anywhere near this when you put out the press release. That includes Johnny T.”
“Yeah, about that…”
I already knew what was coming, but it was better that he thought I was surprised. “Yeah?”
“Someone capped him last night. One shot, right through the forehead.”
“Pro hit.”
“Looks like it. Five in all, all at the same time.”
“They calling in everyone on it? Scouring the city?”
He chuckled. “For Johnny T’s killer? Yeah, so we can pin a freakin’ medal on him maybe. Nah, they’re going to be rounding up the usual suspects on it, I imagine. Five foot nothing of mean, that bastard.”
That meant a token effort… which was probably better for everyone involved.
“So how you figure the best way to do this?” he asked. “Home or work?”
“Definitely work. The club’s got a game out of town this afternoon, so everyone will be meeting the team bus there.”
“All in one spot at the same time. Nice.”
I was feeling so positive, I forgot that I still hadn’t asked him about the investigator following me. “You ever heard of an Arven Matabanian?”
“A what now?”
“Matabanian. Private eye, short, bald, annoyingly twitchy?”
“Wait a sec… thin pencil moustache, kind of pudgy? Drives a piece of shit old boat of a car?”
“The one and only.”
“I know of him. There’s a guy in vice, Chucky Delacroix, what uses him for info occasionally.”
“He’s a john?”
“Famously.”
Yeah, Arven had that kind of reek to him. “He was following me yesterday. Said my landlord’s trying to pin that blast on me, because I’m in a dangerous line of work.”
“Hah! ‘Cause you’re a meathead, is more like it.”
“Yeah, whatever. So he’s legit, licensed and all?”
“How the hell should I know? I barely know the guy. The guy to call is Chucky.”
He gave me the number then asked me about the bus.
“They’re leaving the club at noon, so we’ve got a few hours,” I said. “Shoot for 11:30.”
“Okay. Liam….”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a solid: don’t make the guys look bad when you close this one down, okay? They been working real hard on it, you know?”
I had no problem with that. The limelight’s never been much good to me.
When I got to the club, the parking lot was near empty, but the coach’s car was already in his spot near the office building’s front steps.
I was about to climb them when he walked out the front door. “Mr. Quinn.” He gave me a nod. “You’re here early. And you have the look of a man with serious business in mind.”
“We need to talk. Your office for a few minutes?”
Inside, he poured me a weak cup of coffee from the pot on the shelf behind his desk. “You haven’t asked me yet why I’m smiling.”
“Why are you smiling, Coach Crck?”
“I’m smiling because we have an agreement just this morning on our lad Patrick, who will be playing for Paris next season in the French league. Or for their youth team, I should say. But it won’t take long for him to crack their first team.”
That caught me by surprise. “He’s still with the club for now? And his mother and her boyfriend are still around?”
He looked puzzled. “Of course, yes. We have a game away today, but Patrick won’t play. He’ll come along for one last trip but we can’t risk him in an amateur game like that.”
He was so happy, if I could have bottled it and sold it I’d have been rich. “Coach, I hate to break this to you, but you’re in for a pretty rotten day. Were you being blackmailed by Sam Prince?”
His smile disappeared.
“How did you know?”
“Educated guess. He was murdered because he overheard the same conversation that night that Junior Flores heard. But if he knew what Junior knew and held it to himself, it had to be to blackmail someone.
“That someone wasn’t you, of course. But it stood to reason that there was a reason he was turning down that scholarship and staying here, how he was able to afford that townhouse on the small amount his parents were giving him … and why he was arguing with you the night Junior was killed. If he’d blackmail junior’s killer, I figured he’d have no problem with holding something over you.”
He inhaled deeply, worried creases around his eyes. “The real shame of it is it was nothing. Literally.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. It was the threat of impropriety, of … a sexual nature.”
“He was going to say you …”
He nodded. “There would be no evidence, because it never happened. But it would be the word of a young, handsome blonde soccer star against an old, weary Russian. I did not like the odds. I could not really afford what he asked…”
“How much?”
“At first, just pocket money. But once I’d been willing to do that, he said going along with it incriminated me … and it made sense that they might see it that way. Then it was rent for his townhouse. When he turned down the scholarship, I knew things were goi
ng to get much worse, and that is why we were arguing that night. I thought if I called his bluff on the threat, I could force him to reassess taking the scholarship…”
“Move the problem on down the line, then.” I hadn’t meant it to sound so bitter, but the look on his face told me the comment cut deep.
“I… I’m not a bad man, Quinn. I’ve always tried to do the right thing.”
Looking at him, old and tired, beat down by the worst kind of lowlife? Anyone would have felt sorry for him. “I know, coach. I know.”
The entire team was there by eleven in the morning, celebrating the news of Patrick’s contract with bottles of bubbly – sparkling white grape juice, in this case – and cupcakes one of the parents had brought, set up on tables alongside the pitch.
Another kid, a local product, was going to get a look with the Philly team’s youth club as well, so there was double the reason for everyone to be happy.
I let it last half an hour, but once the freshly released David B. Davidson showed up, it was apparent to a whole lot of shocked people that something big was going on. I figured the boys in blue would be along at any minute and scanned the crowd to get a handle on where everyone was. Francois was lurking, menacingly as usual, near the car park. Charity was playing the perfect sports mother, handing out snacks. Davidson was standing -- arms crossed -- by his Lexus, waiting for the bust to go down. He looked like he wanted to kick someone in the shins.
The coach was near the parents, looking grim. Francois seemed to be keeping an eye on him, trying to read him, maybe looking for early warning signs that something was up. Then he looked over and saw Davidson and a look of utter confusion took over.
I couldn’t see Patrick anywhere, and figured he’d retreated inside the office for a few minutes out of the spotlight.
Sure enough, he was in the small spare office they let him use in the back, playing soccer on his Xbox, a few pro posters and his trophies his only company.
“I’m surprised you’re in here,” I said.
He paused the game. “Hey Mr. Quinn.”
“You got tired of celebrating?”
“Yeah… something like that.”
I watched him play for a few seconds, totally confident. Totally in control.
“You like games?”
He grinned. “Of course.”
“Always looking for a win?”
“Always.”
“It’s not going to happen, you know. You’re not going to get away with it.”
The front door closed softly in the corridor outside. Someone was listening in.
Patrick put down the controller and squinted at me as if he’d caught the sun in his eyes. “Eh? Mr. Quinn, I don’t know what ….”
I shook my head, cut him off. “Forget it, Patrick. You prefer Patrick?”
His face went cold, dead-eyed. “How did you know?”
“I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier that Francois wasn’t the only one of you lying about their age. That just because someone looks young, that doesn’t always make it true. I guess because I didn’t see the bigger picture.”
He didn’t say anything at first. Then he looked down at the floor, tired. “The signing bonus was $1.6 million. It was going to be transferred into our account on Monday. Three days. We were….” His eyes flitted nervous towards the trophies on the shelf above the TV.
I stepped into his line of sight. “Don’t get any cute ideas, Patrick. I’m not Junior; I know you better, and I won’t be turning my back.” I looked up at the trophies. “Which one is it? The new player of the year? The playoff MVP statuette?”
His eyes flickered, just enough. “The playoff MVP statuette,” I said. “So you have your argument with Davidson, then you come over to this office. You call Charity, who’s one of your partners in this scam, and tell her what happened. But you leave the door open a crack, and Junior has just arrived to paint the wall. And it’s the one that leads to your door. He hears you talking about the arrangement, confronts you. Says he’s going to tell the club. He turns his back, goes to leave the room….”
“Patrick” was staring right through me, like I wasn’t there. I looked over my shoulder, and Davy was standing in the doorway. “I figured I’m not really on shift for two more hours, so I might as well come over on my own time, see things go down,” he said. “So who is this guy, anyway?”
Patrick was still smiling, trying to keep a brave face. He didn’t know about Alistair.
“His real name is Washington Spencer. He’s a thirty-two-year-old Liberian ex-pro who played in Sierra Leone with Francois Gauthier, who goes by Francois Mpenge over here. Not sure where the two of them hooked up with “Charity” or whoever she really is. I’m guessing there’s probably a real Patrick and Charity Amapikwe somewhere. Probably died at birth in France and had their identities scammed.”
Washington had stopped smiling.
“You know what this is going to do to my reputation?”
While Washington and his pals were being arrested by Philly’s finest, David B. Davidson had agreed to drive me back uptown, after the Beast decided she didn’t feel like starting. I figured it was vapor lock or something, but the truth is I know absolutely nothing about cars. It could have been cheez whiz in the gas tank, for all I knew. It could have been voodoo.
I called my old man and filled him in, and after the congratulations, told him about the car as well. He sounded like he was going to have a heart attack. “Jaysus! Don’t touch ‘er , I’ll be along as soon as I can.”
Davidson sounded annoyed. “Quinn? Are you listening to me? This is going to kill me in the business.”
Somehow, I couldn’t round up much sympathy for the poor multimillionaire. “Hey, you agreed to represent him without due diligence. You saw him play and got dollars in your eyes.”
He looked wistful. “Yeah… yeah, I guess I did. You got to admit, he looked amazing for a fifteen-year-old. Given his extensive actual time playing elite soccer, that’s not surprising, I guess. So what happened after he hit Junior with the trophy?”
“That was the second call he made that night – to Francois, who was waiting outside. He couldn’t leave the body and get his help, after all. Francois told him to move the body into the spare office, and cover the small amount of blood that had seeped into the hallway with a dark-colored towel. Then they waited until they thought everyone had left before Patrick left the building.
“That’s it? I walked right by a pool of blood and didn’t see it because…”
“Because it was covered with a towel. Feel free to feel dumb about that one, too, Davidson. At least Crck’s office was at the other end of the hall. He’s not going to walk twenty yards to pick up a towel when he knows the janitor is there to do it for him.”
“But what about the blood spatter on the hallway roof?”
“Yeah, that got me too, at first. But we underestimated how clever Francois is. He’d done some reading and knew that blood spatter could travel a significant distance. It’s tough to fake, too. So they waited until later that night, probably in the middle of the morning at 3 a.m. or so, and they moved the body into the hallway. You’re right about the same height as Washington, so they struck Junior’s head with a slightly upward blow, and then Francois extended the motion to deliberately spray some blood onto the ceiling, like flicking paint onto a canvas.
“But why? Why set up a scene here if they were going to plant the heroin on him downtown?”
“They had a perfect backup plan. That’s why he planted the hammer on you. Francois knew it was possible police would make the alley as a dumping spot and not the crime scene, and come back here looking for the real murder scene. So he moved it to a spot they’d find before they even got to Patrick’s room at the end of the hallway.”
Davidson had figured the rest out. “But he neglected to consider how good the police are at telling wounds apart, and there was more than one blow. The hammer, but also the statuette, right?”
; “Yeah, that’s why the autopsy was inconclusive on the hammer blow. It was the second time Junior had been hit. Then they cleaned up the office and wiped down the statuette, which Washington was stupid and egotistical enough to want to keep. Later, Francois planted the hammer at your place.”
He rolled down his side window as we got onto Broad Street. “So both crime scenes were bogus, and the real one was the office. I don’t usually smoke in the car, but my nerves are shot. You mind?”
“Your funeral.”
“So how did you figure the kid was a fraud in the first place?”
“Part luck, part diligence. A contact who knows the African player market found papers on them both. We knew about Francois first, and I guessed about the kid after something my father said. He was talking about this other problem I’d been having and he said ‘people don’t change so much as they get older.’ And it kind of clicked right then that maybe there was a reason the kid was so good, but so surrounded by trouble.”
He sighed again. “So that’s why they were so against a longer contract for more money. They had to get the signing bonus upfront and disappear with it before he was expected to report to his new club, or they’d find out he was a fraud during medicals.”
I said, “They couldn’t count on the same sort of cursory attention he got here. And it almost worked: they front-ended a lower value deal to the tune of $1.6 million.”
“Huh. So you get an insurance payment or something out of this?”
“Nope.”
“What…. Nothing?”
“I get to tell the wife of an old friend that he died trying to do the right thing. That he was a good man, even though he had it rough in life. That’s no small thing.”
Davidson looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.”
“And look at it this way, Davidson: Even if no one ever trusts you to be their agent again, you’re already a wealthy, secure guy. You got all the options in the world.”
“Yeah!” he said, a little more brightly. “Yeah, I guess that’s true, too.”
