“I’ll talk to Melville. No promises.”
“Thank you. That’s all I ask.”
We rumbled over the MacArthur Bridge, hung with icicles like something out of Nordic legend, and I let her out near the volunteer tent. The homeless stood or crouched in the snow, dark lumps with red faces, some smoking, others messing with smart phones; you wondered where the bills were sent.
Maybe they just needed the distraction. In any case it was none of my business. My business was why Amelie Gates wanted to pull the plug.
The wind was blowing my way. I smelled corn chowder and Tater Tots, and remembered I hadn’t had time for breakfast after all. I stopped for an Egg McMuffin and a towering cup of blistering hot coffee on my way to Christ Episcopal Church. Waiting at the drive-through and again when I pulled out I watched the rearview mirror, but it looked like George Gesner’s day-shift replacement hadn’t clocked in. That’s how it looked.
* * *
“You know, if it weren’t for people needing to get in and out, I’d leave the stuff where it is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just interfering with God’s plan.”
Florence Melville leaned on a square-bladed shovel on the front steps of the church on Jefferson; snow piled the flower bed hibernating on either side. She wore what looked like a man’s army greatcoat, but the sleeves fit and the hem came just to the tops of her galoshes. Sturdy as she’d looked sitting at her desk, upright she topped six feet.
“Can it wait?”
She stopped leaning. “Has something happened? A break in the case?”
“You’ve been watching Law and Order when you should be watching the Religious Channel. Can we go inside? My heater’s on the fritz. I’ve forgotten what my feet felt like.”
Her office looked the same as before; even the light quality hadn’t changed. It was an island in the sea of time.
“You do look a little gray,” she said, opening a carved square in the paneling. “Is it too early for brandy?”
“Not if you join me.”
“Just a sip.” She filled two cut-glass snifters from a matching decanter filled with liquid the color of old gold and brought them to the desk. Mine was empty before she sat down. Her brows lifted. “You’re not supposed to drink it like that. It was a gift from a parishioner. It’s thirty years old.”
“It’s old enough to go out on its own.”
“Would you like another?”
I shook my head. “The Widow Gates wants you to give me my walking papers.”
“Just how soon did she expect results?”
“It isn’t that. It isn’t what she said it was, either, that she wants to get on with her life. It all started when I asked her a second time if I could talk to her son.”
“That little boy? What could he know?”
“They’re not kittens. They’re born with their eyes open.”
“What do you suspect?”
“Too early. It’s not like drinking brandy. I promised her I’d ask.” I found a comfortable position in the medieval chair and rested my hands on the scrolled arms. “I’m not quitting. I could make the case that I’m still halfway employed by the sheriff’s department, but if you can me and it gets back to them they’ll have an excuse to cut me loose. Lieutenant Henty tried once already.”
“You’re not a very popular man, are you?” She took a sip, swallowed, turned her glass around by the stem, took another. “I want you to stay on, of course. At the same time—”
“You don’t want to rock any personal boats. In answer to your question: No, I’m not Big Man on Campus with a lot of people. You get used to it.”
“Well, I’d rather not do that; I have a board to answer to, and as I said, the Gateses were very generous to this church. Is it all right if I think about it?”
“That’s the B answer, but I’ll take it; if you promise to take your time.”
She leaned forward without seeming to move. “You’re on to something, aren’t you? The end is in sight.”
“No. Something else has moved in to block it. Which is encouraging, because it means there is an end.”
“Is there danger involved?”
“Three people are dead who should be walking around. You tell me.”
She emptied her glass and got up to pour refills for us both.
TWENTY-FOUR
We spent the rest of the visit talking about the Tigers’ chances next season and I left, still part of the workforce.
Sitting at the curb scraping the winey aftertaste off my tongue with my teeth, I ran my options. Before I could talk myself out of the first one I came to I started the motor and headed for Centerline. I wanted to ask Richard Perlberg why he’d sent me off on a wild–Canada goose chase about such buddies Donald Gates and Chuck Swingline were.
His building was still redbrick, still situated on a straight section of track imported from Indianapolis Speedway; but this time the timing of the stoplights came through and I got a space a block down without risking a fender.
The middle-aged receptionist was on the phone. She recognized me when she hung up. “Are you here for Richard? I don’t”—she checked her book.
“No appointment this time. I just need a minute.”
“I’m sorry. He took a personal day.”
“Can I get him at home?”
“He said something about going ice fishing up north.”
I thanked her and turned to leave. She swiveled, reaching for a stack of papers on a credenza. With her back turned I scuttled down the hall toward the office. I slipped the spring latch with a thin steel strip I carry in my wallet, let myself in, and closed the door behind me quickly, easing the latch into the frame.
There was enough light coming through the window to give the place a good frisking. I didn’t know what I was looking for, a cooked book or the Hope diamond or what was left of Jimmy Hoffa, but I didn’t find anything I wouldn’t expect to find in a bean counter’s place of business.
Which was suspicious enough. Everyone has something that doesn’t fit. If I were a man with a secret and I was fixing to cut out for a long spell I’d get rid of the porno and Air Supply CDs, but there wasn’t anything even half that criminal. None of the detective’s manuals say anything about looking for the thing that isn’t there.
I stood there a while hands on hips, looking around, then went back to the door. I was turning the knob when something caught the corner of my mind’s eye. I went back to the desk and picked up Perlberg’s electric stapler. The brand name was embossed on the handle: SWINGLINE.
“Sir?”
But I was passing the receptionist’s desk too fast, and went out the door.
* * *
The tail this time was a blue Chrysler; it stayed with me for six blocks, never falling more than five lengths behind, until I caught a ripe yellow light, left it sitting, and made a right and a left and a right again, stair-stepping to make sure I’d lost it. I was fresh out of fake Primacord, and anyway I didn’t feel like another masquerade.
It hadn’t been there on my way to Centerline, which meant I’d picked it up at Perlberg’s building. Maybe it had something to do with that audit he was working on.
I dialed my cell.
“Yeah.”
“Walker, Barry. Most people say ‘Hello.’”
“Telephone etiquette went out with the Yellow Pages. Whatever it is, can it wait? I just this minute got back from Aspen.”
“You ski?”
“This isn’t your father’s prosthetic. I’m thinking of having the other leg lopped off and getting a matched set. I’m wiped. I just want to finish eating my fish and hit the sheets.”
“It’ll take just a minute.”
“Longer than that, if you can’t talk over a cell.” A long breath let out. “The Blue Heron.”
It was in Birmingham, with reservations stacked up like Friday air traffic. Barry Stackpole had a table waiting for him every day until closing; a party named Paulie Rock of Ages had been soaking the owner for protecti
on until Barry had offered to sweep Paulie’s house for bugs every month for a year in return for taking his business elsewhere. The owner was grateful.
The restaurant offered free Wi-fi, whatever that was, and Barry’s table was in the sweetest spot in the joint. He was polishing off a plate of Atlantic salmon and washing it down with a Corona when I sat down opposite him. He was beginning to show age for the first time since I’d known him. In order to pass for a college freshman, he’d have to make up some story about a two-year tour in Iraq. His fair face was tanned the color of Florence Melville’s brandy, which made his blue eyes more startling than usual. He pushed aside his plate with the hand that still had all its fingers, reached across to shake mine, and sat back, drawing a smart phone from the flap pocket of a flannel shirt.
“Who’m I hacking today?” he asked.
“You can do that from that itty thing?”
“I’ll never make the younger generation understand it used to take a warehouse to hold a computer and it couldn’t keep up with a Dora the Explorer model.”
“I wouldn’t know how to use the Dora. I can’t figure out how to put my phone on vibrate.”
“If that’s why you’re keeping me out of a nice soft bed, you can pick up the tip.”
“If I want my pants to buzz I’d put a bee in my pocket. I’m government bait this season.”
“That why you look like shit?”
“No, but it’s sweet of you to notice.” I told him about George Andrew Gesner. He thumbed some buttons, waited, frowned. “Nada. Which backs your story. Only a spook can keep his name off the Big Eye. Did you really tell him you’re ATF?”
I grinned into the general atmosphere: muted, only half full at that hour, with Bacharach leaking out of invisible speakers and discreet waiters setting tables for the lunch rush. “I think they’re too busy rounding up stray pressure cookers to tank me. Gesner’s twins; or maybe not. I picked up some more interest this morning, but I don’t know if it’s government. On the other hand, I haven’t been back in circulation long enough to start collecting a variety of shadows.”
“The clink?”
“Rehab.”
He looked at me. I opened a palm. “I was past due. I’m all right now. Just a little sore from shots.”
“See any celebrities?”
“Just fat Elvis. All I know for sure is this isn’t Treasury. George as much as told me that flat out.”
“Anything in this for me?”
“For a while it looked like the Ukrainian mob, but it’s beginning not to.”
“We’ll come back to that. Get the plate?”
I gave him the number. He entered it. While he was waiting for a hit I asked him if he wasn’t worried about eavesdropping.
He spent some time stroking the screen. “Not anymore. Right after I bought this I took it to an old friend who used to be in Mossad. The Israelis are light years ahead of everyone else in intel when it comes to electronics. They make Mitsubishi look like Fisher-Price.”
“They got a Mafia over there?”
“What, I’m not allowed to hang out with somebody not connected to my business?”
“You are, but you don’t.”
“Fuck you, Jack. Yeah, scratch any kibbutz and you’ll find a wiseguy who orders his meatballs without pork sausage. Mazel tov to me,” he said, turning the screen my way.
I read what was written there, sat back, took a pull off his beer bottle, and swallowed loudly. “I’ll be damned.”
“That’s between you and your spiritual adviser. You owe me a beer.”
TWENTY-FIVE
He signaled the waiter for his beer. “Tell me about the Ukrainians.”
“What, you don’t want to talk about this?” I waved a hand at his vest-pocket ENIAC.
“Nothing to talk about, without hacking into Washington, and I’m not going to do that wearing a bag over my head. Spill.”
I waited until the beer came and the waiter left. Then I gave the particulars. Just laying them out made me dizzy.
“I passed one of those billboards on the way back from the airport,” he said. “That’s one of the things I planned to poke into when I sat down. Yuri Yako?”
“He was born Yuri Crowley. The marshals changed it.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Must be low-level. Don’t know Boris, but I know some Atamans. Fyodor sold out all his local interests when things got hot and went back home. Either he forgot he was wanted there or he thought things had changed since the Iron Curtain rusted through. Some things haven’t. They walked him down a hallway in Lubyanka Prison and put a slug from a Vostok in his brain.”
“He have a son?”
“One of the things he was wanted for was practicing homosexuality.”
“They execute you for that?”
“Not since capitalism. He cut off his lover’s head with a saber he inherited from his great-grandfather.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“Officially speaking, I don’t have it. State Department offered Witness Protection, but he decided to take his own chances. His file’s sealed.”
“You hacked it?”
“FOIA kills trees. I’m an environmentalist.”
“How do you stay off the no-fly list?”
He took his turn grinning.
“What, I don’t have friends? He might have inherited his sexual persuasion along with the saber. Those old steppe winters were seven months long.”
“Still, he could have a kid.”
He mashed some keys, massaged the screen, read, turned it around. He’d brought up what looked like a corporate executive chart, with a Vladislav Ataman at the top and more branches than Starbucks. There were two Borises, but from the dates they’d been dead since before the October Revolution.
“I seem to remember something about a Boris raping a sister with the Eastern Orthodox Church under one of the czars,” he said; “at a guess, it’s not a cherished moniker in the family. Well, occupation names like Ataman are like Smith and Wheeler here. Fyodor’s the only one who mobbed up.”
“Maybe this Boris is a street soldier, like Yako.”
“If any other Ataman had anything to do with Mafiasky, he’d be in my program. I keep up with all the little buds on the family trees. Somebody’s pulling your leg about the mob thing.”
“The one I know recruited civilians from time to time. Yako’s computer showed drug activity. Maybe he and Boris were running an indy operation.”
“Shit.” He pressed another key. A chorus of “Rags to Riches” played him off-line. It was the Goodfellas theme. “Now I’ve got to start a new file. I feel like J. Edgar Hoover.”
* * *
We finished both his beers and we stood and shook hands again. He looked as tired as he said he was. If he’d really gone skiing, odds were he’d shared a hot toddy with the acting head of Murder, Incorporated.
He didn’t let go of my hand right away. “You sure you’re all right? I went through a patch myself.”
“I remember.”
“That was just booze. This was further back, after they stitched me back together. I made friends with every pharmacist in the western hemisphere.”
“I’m holding my own.”
“You know who else said that? The captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It was his last transmission.”
* * *
I went to the McNamara Federal Building, this time in broad daylight. Apart from the fact I had some questions to ask, it was probably the only place in the city where I wouldn’t pick up a government tail. It’s a psychological no-man’s-zone, like double-parking in front of Detroit Police Headquarters.
It’s a hollowed-out granite block without a single original architectural idea to distract the occupants from their work. Even the name was slapped on as an afterthought, to honor a corrupt county executive on the occasion of his death.
I left the Chief’s Special in the car, but a ballpoint pen set off the metal detector anyway. Within ten minutes, everyon
e in the building would know what was in my pockets.
The directory led me to Mary Ann Thaler’s office on the third floor. She’d graduated from the closet where they used to keep the copying machine to a room with a window, with her name lettered on a plastic strip beside the door; she was just one promotion away from a metal sign. No one answered my knock and the door was locked. Everyone was busy ice fishing that day.
I hit the jackpot when the elevator doors opened and she was standing there, this time wearing a wool cap with a button on top and an all-weather coat that glistened like a seal’s. She looked fresh as buttered toast.
“If it isn’t Jimmy Valentine,” she said. “Did you bring your burglar tools?”
TWENTY-SIX
I hesitated with my thumb still poised above the button. “I didn’t peg Gesner for a company man.”
“He didn’t initiate the report. His section chief hit him up for a lift and spotted the punched-out lock on the passenger’s side. Gesner didn’t know it was there.”
“Whose bright idea was it to put him in the field?”
“The situation has been corrected.”
“By you?”
“I don’t hire or fire. The day they ask me to do that is the day I give notice.”
We were walking down the hall now toward her office. “I should have known he was one of yours, but I didn’t think the marshals were that hard up.”
“NSA gets first pick. You’ve seen the news. They know who we’re interviewing.” Stopping at her door, she produced a glossy card with nothing printed on it and scanned it above the lock. The LED flashed green and she held the door for me.
“Ladies first.”
She stood her ground. “Say that again and I’ll add obstruction of justice to all the other charges. That one sticks when all the others fall away.”
I went in ahead of her. A lamp with a brushed-steel shade came on when she flipped a switch. The walls were paneled in charcoal and chalk arranged in vertical stripes with the texture of burlap. Crossing the gunmetal carpet was like walking on a bed of nails.
You Know Who Killed Me Page 13
