As expected, his B.M.W. wasn’t there.
Rather than ring the bell, give Lynn the chance to eye me from the upstairs window, I decided to back door it.
I couldn’t have made a better decision.
The way the house was set on a decline, the back door off the basement was accessible at ground level. The finished basement also served as a playroom for my son who, at the time, was sitting on the carpeted floor playing Nintendo.
I tapped on the window beside the door with my knuckles. When the scrappy little kid looked up from his game, he saw my face and smiled. From outside I couldn’t help but notice that his baseball mitt was set in his lap.
“Daddy,” I heard him say through the glass.
I motioned with my right hand for him to unlock the door, let me in. Without missing a beat, he tossed the glove onto the floor, got up and opened the door. A second later, I was in.
When I bent down to kiss him, I felt my head go light, my throat close in on itself.
“We were supposed to be together last night,” he said, a little pout forming on his face. “What happened?”
“Daddy sort of got tied up,” I said. “But I promise, I’ll make it up to you next week. How about we take the canoe up to Little’s lake, catch some bass?”
“Cool,” he said, with a little jump. “So long as I don’t have a game.”
“You don’t always play ball, do you?”
His Batman pajama bottoms were falling down, so he hiked them up.
“I saw you on T.V.,” he said.
I felt my heart race when he said it.
“How’d I look?” I said.
“Like that guy in The Fugitive. Like a bald Harrison Ford. Mitch and me watch that movie on DVD”
There it was again, the tightening of my throat, the sinking of my stomach, the pressure in my head. I squeezed my fist, fought the dizziness, the vertigo.
“I looked that good?” He snickered.
“Mom said it was about time you got what you had coming.”
“That’s mom,” I said. “Always joking around.” I ran my left hand through his hair. “Speaking of mom, is she up?”
“She’s on her treadmill, I think. I’m not supposed to disturb her when she’s exercising.”
I took a quick moment to listen. I made out the sound of the treadmill belt winding its way around the rollers.
I said, “I think I’ll go up and say hello.”
He said, “Okay, but Mommy’s not going to like being disturbed.”
I told him I’d proceed at my own risk.
“That’s what Mitch always says,” he quipped. Then he said, “Daddy, will I see you on T.V. again?”
I smiled.
“Yes, you will. And when you do it will be one of the best days of my life.”
“I can’t wait to see it,” he said.
“Neither can I.”
I took the stairs up into the kitchen, two at a time.
I didn’t stop in the kitchen.
I pulled the one hand cannon I had left from out of my jeans, made my way into the front vestibule, up the center hall stairs.
On the way I noticed that the wall was covered in photos of the whole Cain family. Smiley faced pics of Mitch, Lynn and my son sitting on a sunny beach in what looked to be Cape Cod, and another of just Lynn and Mitch holding hands on their wedding day—at a time when my sex plumbing was just beginning to work again. At the top of the stairs was a picture of Mitch and my son, each of them down on one knee, smiling for the camera. Mitch was wearing a red baseball cap that said “Joe’s Grille” on the brim. It matched exactly the red t-shirt and cap my son was wearing. Further down another photo revealed Mitch all dressed up his uniform blues, his hair cut just as short as it was now, but without the gray.
As for the smug cop smile, it hadn’t changed one bit.
At the top of the stairs the rolling thunder noise coming from the treadmill was almost deafening. I made my way down the narrow hall, past the bathroom, past walls covered with more family snapshots, past Mitch and Lynn’s bedroom, until I came to a room that contained the treadmill, a television and nothing else.
I stepped inside, tapped the pistol barrel on the doorjamb.
Lynn looked up quick. If this had been a “Loony Toon,” she would have shot straight through the ceiling. She was wearing headphones. She pulled them off, yanked a plastic red key from the readout panel that instantly stopped the tread.
“How did you get in here?” she said, breathless voice barely a whisper.
I said, “You shouldn’t leave our son alone in the basement.”
She stepped off the treadmill.
“I’m calling the police.”
“We are the police,” I said, thumbing the hammer on the 9 mm. “‘Sides, it’s your husband they really want. They just don’t know it yet.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, I’m in my right mind for a change. Mitchell is the crazy one. Believes he can get away with murder.”
Lynn was wearing black spandex biker shorts, ped socks with Nike emblems on them and Nike running shoes. Her hair was bleached blonde, trimmed butch short. When I was married to her it was Martha Stewart sandy brown and shoulder length.
“Mitchell is an outstanding officer and a decorated detective,” she said. “He would never do anything to jeopardize his reputation and the reputation of his family.”
She actually seemed genuine, her eyes filling with tears.
“I saw what they said about you on the news. About how you killed Scarlet Montana. You’re the criminal now. The screw-up-everything-you-touch son of a bitch. Knowing you probably have no recollection of it. Or at least, that will be your story. Won’t it be, Richard?”
She rattled the whole thing off without taking a breath.
It made my skin shiver to be the subject of one of her tirades, especially one accusing me of a murder that up until a few hours ago, I was convinced of perpetrating.
Maybe she knew something more than I knew. Something from the inside.
But then that was silly. She didn’t know what I knew. That I could not possibly have harmed Scarlet. That it had been her husband all along who was trying to set me up.
In any case, I wasn’t there to argue. I was there to get information. Which is why I slid my hand inside my shirt, hit RECORD on the tape recorder I’d duct-taped to my already bandaged chest just after George left for Woodstock.
“Mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes or no,” I said. “Make a choice.”
“You’re the one with the gun,” she said.
I asked her the standard questions that I knew would either go unanswered or just relegated to I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Did she know that Mitch was engaged in illegal black market activity, namely the illicit harvesting and sale of body parts?
Did she have any idea how long he had been participating in the operation?
Why, in her opinion, would Mitch want to risk his own life by killing Scarlet and Jake?
I asked her everything I could think of. But the most I got out of her was the tight angry face I recalled so well. The face that told me, if she could, she would tear my eyeballs out, swallow them whole.
Straight, no chaser.
A face that wasn’t entirely her fault. Not by a long shot. Because I wasn’t exactly being fair, was I? In a real way, she had every right to be angry. I was the one who decided to end my life. I was the one who decided to play the role of the suicidal cop by “eating my piece.”
Maybe I couldn’t help what came in the weeks and months that followed the head-shot—the impotence, the obsession with newspaper clippings, the thirst for whiskey, the need for silence, the dread of headaches, the safety and painlessness of darkness, the cowardly withdrawal from my wife, my son, my work and from all that once made me a happy and complete man. But then in the end, all I had to call my own were my nightmares an
d a new life lived on the verge of death at any moment.
So who the fuck could blame Lynn now?
Now that she was about to be screwed over again. Not by a man, necessarily. But by a goddamned cop.
“Now if you do not plan on shooting me,” she said, “I have a child to get off to school. You do remember our son, don’t you, Richard?”
Memory, it’s not the problem …
She approached me.
I thumbed back the hammer, lowered the weapon to my side. I couldn’t help but feel deflated and defeated, as if my life were nothing more than a badly played board game.
“I don’t blame you for not talking,” I said. “I hurt you once.”
“You gave me a world of hurt, more than once. And to believe I tried to help you when you needed it most, and you refused.”
“Maybe it’s Mitch who’s hurting you now.”
That’s when her eyes went from wide and angry, to heavy and hurt. The mere mention of Mitch and hurt in the same sentence seemed to knock the wind right out of her.
“He’s cheating on you, isn’t he?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“But what is my business is this: I’m not going to prison for a murder I did not commit.”
She lowered her head for a second. When she came back up, I could see that she was crying. Really bawling. If I had to guess, they were more the tears of frustration than sadness. In any case, I let her cry it out for a while.
“That Scarlet Montana,” she said. “Nobody deserves to die that kind of death. But I can tell you this: she was no good, Richard. She was trouble.”
Her words hit me hard. Because it was then that I knew for certain, Mitch Cain was fucking Scarlet. Or should I say, fucking Scarlet right along with me. The pressure behind my eyes balls, it suddenly shifted, dropped into my stomach like a lead weight. Scarlet might have been clinically dead, but for the first time ever, I was beginning to feel a genuine animosity towards her.
Lynn was right. Scarlet Montana was a boatload of trouble. Even in death.
“Mitch,” I said, a rock-sized lump in my throat. “Mitch and Scarlet … for how long?”
“Since last summer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We have a son,” Lynn went on. “We will always have a son, no matter how we feel about one another.”
“Yes,” I said. “We have a son.”
“I would prefer that his father stay out of prison. He needs you. He needed Mitch too, once upon a time. But now he needs you again.”
“Then for our son’s sake, Lynn, give me something … anything I can go on that will set this thing straight.”
She looked into my eyes, nodded her head.
“If I give you something,” she said, “will you make certain that nothing happens to our boy?”
I told her I would make sure.
“Promise me, Richard,” she insisted, her voice verging on a shout.
“I promise, Lynn,” I said. “You know I do.”
She nodded with tight lips and wet eyes.
“That’s exactly what worries me. Not knowing if you will keep your promise. You have a habit of not paying attention to certain matters of importance.”
What could I possibly say to that?
For shade of a second, it was as if we had never divorced when I watched her walk into her bedroom where she opened a drawer, dug her hand deep inside, produced a stack of envelopes. When she came back out she handed one of the envelopes to me along with a pen and a yellow Post-a-Note. It had the name of a bank on it. A Swiss bank.
“I’ll give you exactly five seconds to write down the social security number and account number,” she said. “Then I want you out of this house.”
It took me about three.
I handed her back the envelope.
She took a moment to smell it. I mean she actually brought it to her face.
“You’re smoking again.”
“No, you live with a smoker. My old good friend, remember?
She gave me a funny look.
I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Just leave.”
I started for the stairs. But before I took them, I turned back to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “about the way things turned out.”
“I’m sorry for our son. I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for the sad son of a bitch I replaced you with. Or maybe I’m sad for what you’ve become.”
She took a staggered step back, looked me up and down, shook her head. For a moment, I thought she was going to pass out.
“Are you really going to call the cops, tell them I was here?”
She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“My God, Richard,” she sadly laughed. “When are you going to wake up to the fact that you have damned us all?”
68
HOLDING OUT HIS HAND, Cain gripped the damp stainless steel doorknob, turned it counter-clockwise. When he discovered the door unlocked, he pulled it open, quietly stepped into the dark kitchen storage room. That’s when he felt the hand grip his jacket collar, yank him back outside, toss him to the ground.
With the rain falling into his eyes, Cain peered up, made out a dark-haired short man dressed entirely in black leather.
He went for his gun, but not before the dark man leaned down, pressed a pistol barrel against his forehead first.
“Reach for a weapon,” he said in a Russian accent, “and I will blow Yankee brains all over the pavement.”
Cain nodded.
“Where’s Joseph?” he asked.
“Maybe you answer question for me.”
“I thought he’d be here.”
“You have appointment?”
“Yes … no.”
“You want to tell me something on behalf of missing Joseph?”
With sound-suppressed automatic gripped in his left hand, the dark man reached into Cain’s leather with his right, pulled out the Lieutenant’s service weapon, tossed it into a dumpster pushed up against the wall.
“Get up,” he insisted, once more yanking on the cop’s jacket collar. “Tell me why you came here with weapon.”
I came here to kill your fucking Russian brother before he kills me first, you stupid fuck!
As Cain slowly emerged from his knees to his feet, both men were unaware of the car that pulled up along the back street, cut its engine and its lights before coming to a quiet stop.
69
I FELT LIKE CRYING.
But I sucked it up and drove the less populated secondary roads on my way back to George’s town house; a route that took me through narrow alleys flanked on both sides by the backs of the old brick row houses. I motored steadily past overfilled dumpsters and countless burnt out cars that had been stripped of everything but their steering columns. The drive took me ten more minutes than it would have had I gone the usual, out-in-the-open route.
Which meant that as soon I arrived at the town house, I wasted no time.
Out in Robb’s living room, I sat at the computer and went online as an AOL guest. When I typed in “WWW.BANKVONERNST.COM,” I came up with a web site that was housed in Liechtenstein. Post-a-Note laid out before me, I typed in the account number and the social security number in the spaces indicated.
The on-line spreadsheet appeared before me in a flash.
Scrolling down I discovered thirty-two separate transactions dating back the past four years to early 1999, all of them adding up to a grand total of $400,806 US.
Unless Mitch Cain had come into some money from some recently deceased aunt or uncle, he was making one hell of a payday as a detective for the Stormville Police.
I made a hardcopy of the statement.
If I’d possessed Mitch’s passwords, I might have cashed the damn thing out, sent all proceeds care of the Attorney General. For now, the bank statement would have to do.
In the galley kitchen off the dining room, I pulled George’s phone book back out from the sta
nd below the wall-mounted telephone. Since I couldn’t very well go to the police with my discovery, I located the address for the local F.B.I. In another drawer I found an envelope and some stamps. Addressing the envelope, I penned URGENT under it and stuck it sideways under the lid of George’s mailbox as outgoing mail.
That done, I pulled the duct-taped tape recorder off my chest, set it onto the coffee table. Setting my aching body down onto the sofa, I laid back, head against the springy cushion. To say that I felt very heavy and tired was pretty much an understatement. The 9 mm resting on my chest—easy access—I closed my eyes, drifted.
There was a slam.
I shot up, pistol in hand, aimed for the door.
“Take it easy, Divine. It’s just me.”
George, a white bag in hand.
I took a minute to catch my breath. How long had I been passed out?
“Did you get the shots?”
“We’re ready to roll,” he grinned.
70
THE SUPER 8 FILM had been shot from across a rather dusky, early morning side street somewhere near Woodstock’s rather quaint downtown business center. It showed Mitchell Cain and a thick, black clad (Russian?) man standing outside the back service entrance door to what looked like a restaurant.
The Russo.
Smartly, George took a quick shot of the dashboard-mounted digital clock at that exact point in time. It read 7:30. When the film once more focused on the two men, there seemed to be no doubt that they were arguing. Maybe there was no sound to go with the old 8 mm, but clearly the dark man was holding a silenced automatic on Cain. Clearly they were moving their mouths rapidly and at certain points, waving their arms at one another. I had no idea what they were saying. Although I could not see their faces, there was no doubt that they were fighting, face to face, nose to nose, seemingly oblivious to the pistol as they were the steady rain that soaked them.
But then Cain suddenly turned, tossing a burning cigarette to the wet concrete sidewalk and stormed off across the road.
Another shot at the rental car clock showed 8:20. Cain had been negotiating with his buyers for nearly an hour.
That was it: the visual eyebrow-raising evidence I needed.
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