Ken said, “So everything Dunbar did with Cantrell was completely—”
“Unsupervised,” Mike said. “Yes. When Bertoli took his header off the roof—with or without assistance—and Dunbar came forward with his story, you can imagine how elated his Feeb buddies were. Then the Cantrells bailed, and the whole thing started to smell even worse.”
“So they squashed the investigation?” I said. “Are you kidding me? To protect Dunbar?”
“I wouldn’t say that they squashed it, really. I mean, I did work the case for a while, and worked it hard. We couldn’t get anything convincing to go on. Everybody understood that Sanabria probably had the guy killed, but we couldn’t get a lead to work with. Bertoli was a piece of shit anyhow, nobody was crying over his loss, and the last thing the FBI wanted was Dunbar’s story going public. Wouldn’t have been anything criminal, but it also wouldn’t have made them look good. A rogue retiree placing informants without anybody’s knowledge, and then the informant gets killed? No, that wouldn’t have made them look good.”
“Nobody thought it was worth looking for the Cantrells?”
“We looked.”
“Not very forcefully,” Ken said. “The police told his family that they wouldn’t investigate. Told them—”
“Cantrells left of their own volition. That’s the way it looked at the time, at least. Packed a bunch of shit into storage and made arrangements for the house. There was no sign that one of them had been killed. Not until the body showed up.”
“You said you worked the Bertoli case hard,” I said.
“I did. Even if the death ruling wasn’t a homicide, we treated it like one as soon as Dunbar came forward. You have to give the guy that much credit, too—at least he showed up and told the truth when Bertoli got killed. A lot of people wouldn’t have the balls to do that. He had to know it wasn’t going to go over well with his buddies at the Bureau. Took some swallowed pride to come forward, I’m sure.”
“You never got anything that showed a connection between his death and Sanabria, though?”
“I got something, but it was weak. It wasn’t enough to build a case on.” He stopped talking as the waitress passed nearby and eyed her tray hopefully, then sighed with disappointment when she delivered the food to the table beside us.
“What did you get?” I said.
“Lasagna and—”
“Not the food, Mike. I mean on the case. What was the connection?”
“Oh, right. Well, there was a place across from the warehouse where Bertoli died that had parking lot surveillance cameras. It didn’t show the scene, but it caught cars coming and going. Problem was, the street was fairly busy. In just one hour around Bertoli’s time of death, there were sixty-two cars on the tape. I got all the plate numbers I could, ran registrations.”
This was the sort of work ethic that Mike was famous for, a determined pursuit of any angle, no matter how long the odds.
“I got one car, and one car only, that had some possibility,” he said. “A tricked-out Oldsmobile Cutlass, all sorts of custom shit on it, spinners and crap like that. The plate ran back to a Darius Neloms. Big D, as he is generally known.”
I shook my head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“There’s a bunch of Neloms in East Cleveland, and the whole family is nothing but pushers and hustlers. Darius runs a body shop over on Eddy and St. Clair.”
“Tough neighborhood.”
“You ain’t kidding. These days, Big D’s doing well for himself. Making money putting in hydraulics and fancy rims and stereos, all the toys that the young thugs like, makes ’em feel like they’re in a rap video. There was a time, though, when he took a bust for running a chop shop. Taking in stolen cars, repainting them, adding some window tint, maybe changing the headlights or the grille, and sending ’em back out. He didn’t take a hard fall because they had trouble proving he knew the cars were stolen. I’m sure that was crap, but the guys bringing him the cars worked for Dominic Sanabria and a guy named Johnny DiPietro.”
“Later murdered,” I said, “and Dunbar thinks it was by Sanabria, and Bertoli was a witness.”
“You got it.”
“You think Sanabria hired this Darius guy to kill Bertoli?” Ken asked.
“No way,” Mike said. “He would’ve handled that in-house.”
“It was his car at the scene.”
“It was registered to him. One of about nine vehicles he had registered to him or his shop. When Bertoli died, Darius was at a party at a nightclub, which I verified by their security tapes.”
“So maybe it’s a meaningless connection,” Ken said.
“Could be, but Darius Neloms was connected to Dominic Sanabria and Johnny DiPietro, had gone to jail for working with them on stolen cars in the past. If somebody in their crew wanted to borrow a car, Darius was a likely source.”
“Why in the hell would they borrow a car,” I said, “instead of stealing one?”
Mike smiled. “Look at the result. I spent time chasing leads on Darius—and don’t kid yourself into thinking the Italians viewed him as some sort of compatriot. A bunch of racist fucks, those guys. They’re not above working with a black guy to bring in some dollars, but they damn sure aren’t going to worry about redirecting police his way, either.”
“You talk to Darius?”
“Uh-huh, and got nothing. ‘I own lots of cars, lots of people have access to them cars, no way I could possibly remember who might’ve been driving that car on that night.’ ”
“What was your sense of him?”
“That he was lying, of course—but was he lying with a real purpose? Guy like Darius Neloms, he doesn’t necessarily need the extra motivation to lie to me. See a badge, lie to the badge.”
“So that’s where the case died?”
“That’s where it died. I ran that up the ladder, you know, showing there was at least a weak link between one of the cars and Sanabria, but of course it wasn’t enough. No evidence for a homicide, nobody talking to us, the FBI boys embarrassed by the whole thing because of Dunbar, it’s almost surprising I got that far with it.”
I saw the waitress headed our way again and figured this time the food would be ours, and that meant Mike wasn’t going to be answering any more questions for a while. Best to slide in one more while I had his attention.
“A few minutes ago you made a good point, saying that Dunbar’s version is the only official one, since the whole damn circus he put together was so unofficial.”
Mike nodded, waiting.
“So I’m wondering—did you believe that version? That one unsupported but also unconfirmed version?”
Mike said, “Look, Dunbar was one of a group of FBI guys that did some righteous work on the mob around here. Put a lot of those boys in prison.”
“But?”
“But Dunbar also wore a suit every day, and one of the rules I’ve developed after twenty years at this game, Lincoln, is never trust a man in a suit.”
21
__________
A mazing, the way one fact can change your entire perception of something.
John Dunbar was retired at the time he launched his plan with Bertoli and Cantrell? Nobody else approved it, or even knew about it? Yeah, that changed things.
His plan had been terrible, too, a perversion of an old cop game that had never worked well in my experience—planting a snitch in a jail cell. There were plenty of narcs in the prison system, and it was a tactic that had been used for decades, generally off the books, and rarely well. The problem was that the snitches lied, that they had no credibility in court, and that the targets were rarely anywhere near as stupid as required for the tactic to work. Joshua Cantrell had effectively played the role of a jail cell snitch in his own home, welcoming Bertoli in and trying to talk to him about a mob hit. Made it a great deal more difficult to be sneaky about that sort of thing when your wife was the sister of the suspect. They could have concealed that from Bertoli initially—and surely did
, otherwise I couldn’t imagine he’d have actually agreed to the parole assignment—but eventually it would have had to surface, wouldn’t it?
Yes, it was stupid, and Dunbar had known that all along; otherwise he wouldn’t have operated without FBI approval, and that made me wonder about both his motivations and his story. I hadn’t doubted him at first, not in our initial talk, but at the time I had felt like everything he said was a breakthrough, had been almost overwhelmed by the story he told. Now I looked back on it, playing through the conversation again in my mind, looking for holes, signs of lies.
There were dozens of them. Maybe. Or the whole story could have been entirely truthful. No way to know because every other person who could confirm it was dead or missing, and had been for years.
Except for Parker Harrison.
He was on my mind during our drive back from Murray Hill, and because of that it didn’t feel like much of a surprise when I checked the office voice mail and found a message from him.
The request was simple this time, no tips or names or suggestions. Harrison wanted to see me that evening, if possible, and he wanted me to be alone. He didn’t leave any other details, just said he’d be home after five and repeated that he wanted it to be only me.
I played the message on speakerphone, so Ken heard it, too.
“Guy doesn’t seem to like me, does he?” he said.
“Your client relationship does seem a bit strained.”
“Because he knows damn well he’s not really a client. The way we tried to play it didn’t fool him. Not enough, at least.”
“Not at all, would be my guess,” I said.
There were no messages from Graham, even though we’d been late getting back from Murray Hill, almost two thirty, and Graham had predicted an arrival time of one. I assumed he would’ve called if he’d come in early, though; it was too long a drive to give up on us just because nobody was at the office.
I kept staring at the phone, even though the blinking message light was now gone, nobody but Harrison leaving words behind for me. I wished Joe would call, so I could throw all of this at him, let him offer some perspective. It had been a few days since we’d last talked.
“I’ll tell you what,” Ken said, “the more I think about it, the more I wonder what Harrison did out there. Or what he saw. We’re making sense of everything else, slowly but surely. We understand Bertoli’s role now, know that they were trying to use him as a witness and it went bad—but Harrison? I can’t make sense of him. Not even close.”
Nor could I. Or Graham, or Dunbar, or Mike London. A lot of people had considered Harrison, and nobody had made sense of him yet.
While I was staring at the phone and pondering Harrison, there were footsteps on the stairs, and then the door opened without any knock and Quinn Graham entered. He was dressed sharp—black pants with a gold shirt and black-and-gold tie, and when I looked at him I thought of Mike London’s warning never to trust a man in a suit and smiled. Most detectives wore suits every day. Only a guy like Mike could distrust the daily wardrobe of his own peers.
“Happy to see me?” Graham said, noting my amused face.
“Sure, Graham. We’re elated.”
He shook hands with Ken and then took a chair, looked at me, and spread his hands. “Brother, this better be good. I’ll tell you something about the drive between my home and here—it ain’t pretty. Not gonna be on anyone’s scenic route list real soon. I keep making it, though, because of you boys, because of Linc and Kenny. Hope you appreciate that.”
“Graham, you’ll be thanking us by the time you leave,” I said. “We’ve made some breakthroughs for you, buddy. Big stuff.”
“Yeah?” His interest was genuine.
“Yesterday we learned”—I threw in a pause, enjoying the impatience in his eye—“that Salvatore Bertoli was, in fact, placed in the Cantrell home by an FBI agent named John Dunbar.”
I said this with heavy drama, straight-faced, as if I really believed he’d be impressed.
“He was believed to be a witness to a killing committed by Dominic Sanabria,” I continued after another pause. “Joshua Cantrell was working with Dunbar to extract information from Bertoli. Evidently it did not work well.”
Graham stayed silent.
“Pretty big stuff, eh?” I said.
“Right,” he said, but the disgust was clear in his voice.
“What’s the matter, Graham? You thinking about those hours you wasted on the road?”
“You know all of this is old to me,” he said, “yet you made me drive up here.”
“I know it’s old to you, yes. It wasn’t old to us, and it’s something we wasted a day on, when you could have told us the same things in about fifteen minutes. So you want to worry about the time you spent driving up here, tough shit, man. You let us walk around like a couple of—”
“I didn’t want you walking anywhere, Perry. Don’t you get that? I don’t know how you found Dunbar, but I wish you hadn’t. If you’d have called—”
“I did call. Yesterday morning, after we got Dunbar’s name and were standing downtown feeling like hot shit. It’s embarrassing to admit now, but that’s the truth of it. You got a problem with us talking to Dunbar? Well, you could’ve prevented that easy enough.”
He sighed and leaned forward, then ran a hand along the side of his head and gripped the back of his own neck and squeezed as if he were trying to calm himself down.
“I know you were police, Linc,” he said, “but you gotta realize, you are not police anymore. So when you get all fired up over shit you weren’t told, slow down and think about the situation from my point of view, which is: I’m not telling anybody a damn thing that I don’t have to. Ever. I’m trying to maintain control of my investigation.”
It was exactly what I’d expected he’d say, but that didn’t mean it pleased me.
“Graham, you asked for our help. Sat right there in that chair and asked for—”
“No, no, no.” He looked up, shaking his head. “Didn’t ask for anybody’s help, Linc. What I asked for, and what I expected to receive, was your cooperation. Big difference, boy. You had access to Harrison, and that’s where I wanted your cooperation. What I did not want, at any time, was for you two to go running around the city interviewing people and knocking on doors and potentially damaging my case. I as good as told you that, too.”
“When?”
“I said that I was counting on you to keep him from stepping to trouble.” Graham jerked his head at Ken, and I saw a flush of anger—or embarrassment—cross Ken’s face. “Now I find out I should’ve been just as worried about you as him.”
He sighed again, shook his head again, and then leaned back and loosened his tie. “Here’s what I want out of you two, okay? Communication with Harrison. That’s it, and that’s all. I don’t want you to force the communication, either. I just want to be aware of it. Tape the talks when he initiates them, and that’s great. As far as street work goes, I don’t want you on this.”
“That’s not really your call,” Ken said.
Graham looked at him with wide, challenging eyes, his index finger still hooked in the knot of his tie. “It’s not? You get in the way of a police investigation, and don’t think I can shut you down? Boy, you don’t even have a client.”
“I do now,” Ken said.
“Who?”
“Parker Harrison. He retained me through Lincoln. I believe that scenario was your idea, too.”
Graham scowled and released his tie after one last angry jerk.
“Hang on a minute,” I said as he was getting ready to start in on Ken again. “We can all fight this one out later. Fact is, Ken’s got a client, and you gave it to him, Graham. Regardless, I don’t think Ken has any desire to hinder what you’ve done, or what you’re trying to do. If we don’t know what that is, though, we’re bound to cause you some headaches.”
“I told you my reasoning.”
“Yes, and I understand it, but what I’d lik
e to hear you say is what you actually think of John Dunbar. I’m assuming you know he was retired at the time all this went down?”
Graham gave one last stare to Ken, not ready to let that battle fade so quickly, but then he returned his attention to me.
“Dunbar’s straight,” he said. “I know it doesn’t feel right, but he’s straight.”
“How can you say that with any confidence when there’s nobody around to support his story?”
“Nobody around to contradict it, either, but the fact is the man could not be more cooperative,” he said. “The day after we ID’d the body as Joshua Cantrell, I got a call from Dunbar, wanting to fill me in. He initiated the contact. I had no idea who he was at that point, or what his connection was, and I would’ve wasted a lot of hours developing that. Instead, he drove out to see me, brought boxes of shit out with him, photos and notes that he’d taken. Left it all with me, for my review. If the man’s got anything to hide, he’s got a strange manner of hiding it. He was calling me a couple times a week for a while, throwing theories and suggestions until I stopped calling him back because he was underfoot so damn much. Hell, it was him that pointed me to Sanabria’s phone records, showed he’d been in touch with Harrison.”
“Did you make any attempt to verify his version of events?”
“Of course I did, and the man checks out, Linc. You want to do the same, go ahead. He served thirty years in the FBI, thirty strong years, and if you can get anyone to say a bad word about him, it’ll be in the way things went with Bertoli.”
“Well, I’d imagine. You’ve got someone murdering an FBI informant that nobody in the FBI knew was an informant, yeah, that’s a problem.”
“Sure it is. Everyone involved acknowledged that, both at the time and when I got in touch this year. That doesn’t make Dunbar corrupt, though.”
“What about Mark Ruzity?” I said. “The guy seems to have some anger issues. Put a chisel to my forehead while telling us the case was better off unsolved. Then Dunbar showed us a photo of him with Sanabria just days after the Cantrells vanished. How do you explain that?”
The Silent Hour lp-4 Page 16
