by Rex Burns
“No, sir.”
So Kirk and Associates had the big break. Beside me, Professor Loomis gave a muffled grunt of satisfaction, and, at the edge of hearing and beneath a gust of rain on the glass, the flames fluttered in a soft, furry chuckle.
CHAPTER 2
WE SPENT ANOTHER hour on the details, and McAllister handed me a thick folder holding Haas’s life as viewed by McAllister Enterprises. The usual material was there—dates and places, assignments and achievements. The man himself, of course, would escape his paper profile. But that undefined part was the most interesting. In a lot of ways, the work was like trying to define a thing by saying what it wasn’t—you could come close; sometimes you could even draw a circle around it. But the thing itself waited secretly until finally you found the right word or only the right metaphor, perhaps, to state what it was. And sometimes that never came.
But Bunch and I tried, buoyed by the fact that a healthy portion of our fee had come up front. We fondled the money briefly as it went through our fingers to pay off debts that loomed larger and larger as Kirk and Associates nickel-and-dimed its way toward a bankrupt’s early grave. Taking Uncle Wyn’s investment with it as well as the monument I secretly wanted to build—the thing I could point to in my mind and say, “See, Dad? I didn’t let you down.”
It was the kind of work where you could spend a lot of time looking out the window, and that tended to make the chief backer nervous. Uncle Wyn wasn’t happy to see me or Bunch swiveled around to prop our feet on the iron rail that fenced off the office’s large, arched window while we stared out across the flat roofs of neighboring warehouses and office buildings toward the gleam of snowfields in the distant mountains. But he wasn’t happy, either, at the thought that Bunch and I occasionally looked into windows from the outside. We had tried to convince my uncle that what we did had some redeeming social value and was worth the money he’d invested. But neither Bunch nor I could make him believe that our occupation wasn’t slightly pornographic.
“Hey, listen, some porno I like.” Bunch sat on the tired stenographer’s chair in front of the glass, his hams spilling over the Naugahyde and pinched by the cuffs of running shorts that on anyone else would have been baggy.
“That’s the kind we call erotic.”
“You call it erotic. Susan, she calls it dirty. Me, I call it fun.” He scrubbed with a towel at the mat of hair on his chest and then sniffed it. “God I smell good. Sweat. Sunshine. A light coat of carbon monoxide. I love it.”
“You jog through that traffic, you’ll lose more years of life than you save,” said Uncle Wyn. Like Bunch, he was in the middle of his morning routine. Which, today, meant a visit to the office to check on his investment.
“No, no—I’m contributing to evolution. Five, six more generations, and my descendants will have these carburetors instead of lungs. And it all started with me.” He hocked something out of his throat and stood to spit through an open window panel into the street three floors below. “They’ll think it was a pigeon. Speaking of which, did you tell your uncle about our big client?”
I told him about McAllister.
“The McAllister? Carnival Ball Owen McAllister—the guy that’s into movies and oil and real estate and whatever?”
“That’s the one.”
“He wants to hire you two?”
“Has hired us, Uncle.” I held up the check with its string of numbers. “If things go right, Kirk and Associates is on its way.”
Uncle Wyn, his arthritic leg stiffly out in front of the chair, leaned forward to read the check. “Jesus H. It’s for real.”
“That’s just the retainer,” said Bunch. “Wait till he gets our final bill.”
“I never met the man, but he’s solid. His name’s worth a lot on the street,” Uncle Wyn said. “How did Loomis know him?”
“I’m not sure. But they call each other Mike and Owen.”
Uncle Wyn grunted. “I was surprised you’d even talk to that guy.”
“It wasn’t his fault. And he lost money, too.”
“Crap,” said Uncle Wyn.
“Loomis didn’t lose as much as your old man, Dev. And he got it back damned fast. And he didn’t blow himself away, either.”
“You want to talk about this case or not?”
“Sure, Dev. But you know what Susan says?”
“What makes you think I give a damn what Susan says?”
“Mr. Kirk, you know what Susan says about your nephew? She says he keeps it inside too much. He never talks about it, you know? She says it’s going to blow up some day—that he’s got to ventilate it.”
“Ventilate?”
“Yeah. It’s psychology talk for mental farting.”
“Susan has enough patients without worrying about me. Or about my flatulence.”
“Don’t get huffy. You always use big words when you get huffy. And then our communication, as they say, breaks down.”
“Let’s communicate about McAllister.”
Uncle Wyn heaved to his feet, levering his stiff leg up neatly with the cane. “For a change, you boys got real work to do—congratulations. Me, I got the Cubs game coming on. So good luck with your big chance.”
“Hey, when your lenders wish you luck, you know they mean it.”
I closed the door behind my uncle; his uneven tread on the landing was a pale echo of the years he had spent sprinting across the grass of a baseball diamond.
“He’s a tough old bird, your uncle.”
“He keeps an eye on his investments, that’s for sure.”
“Naw, he just wants to look after his favorite and only nephew.”
“You tell him that when we miss a payment.”
“I hope I never have to. Fill me in on McAllister.”
After Loomis dropped me off last night, with a final reminder of how important this account could be toward establishing the reputation of Kirk and Associates, I spent an hour going through Haas’s personnel file and then following up with some time in the library on points that the official documents only hinted at. Of course all I found in the newspapers was what received public notice at the time—a biographical note when Haas served as a director of the United Way drive a few years back, a squib from a social column about one of his trips to the Caribbean with his attractive wife Margaret and his two lovely children Austin, Jr., and Shauna. These are little things, but they help fill in the background; and, on very rare occasions they can turn into something important. But after a lot of reading, I didn’t see how.
“And this guy Haas is the one who did it?”
“That’s what we’re supposed to find out. Very quietly.”
Bunch, who couldn’t stay in one place more than five minutes when he was awake, moved to the office window and gazed down at the semis and vans and delivery cars that choked Wazee Street this time of day. “We’ll want a twenty-four-hour on Haas.”
That meant hiring some freelancers for routine surveillance, and I began listing the p.i.’s that could be trusted to do decent work. It was a short list. “McAllister gave me permission to tap Haas’s office phone.” I spun a key across the desk to Bunch. “Here’s a pass key; might as well do it this afternoon after the offices close.”
“How about his home phone?”
“That too.”
“How hard is it going to be?”
“I’m glad you asked.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Bunch began pulling on his soaked sweat shirt, the muscles of his arms knotting as he shrugged into it. “All right—I’ll check it out. You want me to go ahead and make the plant if I can?” The sleeves had been cut off, and the waist, so that the thick, hard flesh of his belly showed.
“Yeah. McAllister might give us twenty-four hours before he starts calling about results.”
“I never met one of those rich guys who didn’t want things done yesterday.”
“When did you ever meet someone like McAllister?”
“That’s what I said: I never met o
ne.”
He left me trying to puzzle that out. The tread of his large running shoes made the ancient floor of the remodeled warehouse creak as he started down the metal stairs. In the office above, a piano began thumping deliberately up and down the scale, its muffled chords like a final shred of summer: open windows on a hot afternoon and some kid in the neighborhood pinned under the eyes of a piano teacher. And the day outside looked like it still had some summer in it, too; the sky’s blue was bleached by heat, and the hard, cloudless glare made the worn brick of the warehouses and factories in the district seem sharp and brittle. But beneath the appearance of heat, the sun had a lower angle—a shorter intensity, a longer shadow, something that hinted at how brief these bright days would be and how soon winter would close around the city. My father had liked this time of year; it reinforced his melancholy, he said, with a sort of visual carpe diem. Then he’d apologize for being morbid. “Some people find greater happiness in being unhappy, Dev. Don’t let an old man’s self-indulgent gloom rub off on you.” But I suppose that it already had. I couldn’t remember a time since my mother’s death when I was eleven that my father hadn’t carried around the faint aroma of sadness. Even in the midst of hilarity—one of my birthdays, for example—a moment would always come, no matter how brief or secret, when his laughter had a forced note and the thought deep in his eyes was how much my mother would have enjoyed seeing this. That sadness must have increased especially when I left him to go away to college and, later, to Treasury School and then to Bellesville and all the assignments the Service likes to ship its agents to. But I had been too busy too notice. My father’s scorn for suicide—”We’re in this life to do penance, and a man shouldn’t quit on a duty just because he doesn’t like it”—and the busy pace he kept telling me about when we’d talk on the telephone made me ignore the little hints that must have been there. He did not want to burden me with his sadness, and I did not want to be burdened. It was that failure to him that Susan wanted me to “ventilate” and which I was still trying to understand—the feeling of guilt for being too blind when he must have been asking me for help; the feeling of unclean selfishness for having been too wrapped up in my own life to see what was happening to his. It was a lousy way to repay a father for all that he’d done for his son.
But even though we labor confused and blind, we must labor nonetheless. “That’s where the faith comes in, Dev. We do the best we can at the time, and the rest of it is up to whatever gods care to be bothered with us.” That’s what he would have said. And, “Forget it—it wasn’t your fault; it was my decision, and the best one all-around.” Trying to be generous toward me even in death.
The large old window—the arched top of a brick frame that reached down to the ground floor—showed the flat roofs across the street, and past them the treetops rising from the river. In the glare-faded distance, beyond the low ridges of sprawling suburbs, the forested peaks of the Front Range washed against the ragged outline of the more distant Rampart Range with its blue snowfields, landmarks that had been there long before the city itself and that would be long after I was gone, too. “Lift up your eyes, Dev, lift them to the mountains. Isn’t that a sight? It makes a man thank God he’s alive!”
I pulled away from the window. “God doesn’t know we’re alive,” Bunch would have answered. “And if He does, He doesn’t give a shit.”
Up to a certain level, background checks are fairly routine. For a credit history, a call to the Credit Bureau or an inquiry on stationery with the Devlin Mortgage Company logo for veracity. Credit card numbers and a larcenous skill with the computer—provided by Bunch—opened up credit accounts and bank accounts, and that in turn led to income tax returns, license information, a list of previous addresses, even a fairly up-to-date medical history. People are willing to trade a lot of privacy for a good credit rating. And, of course, McAllister Enterprises employment and personnel records provided a fund of information and further leads. What the paper trail wouldn’t reveal was a bank account not mentioned anywhere in the credit or tax records, an account that provided shelter for the legendary ill-gotten gains. And from what McAllister had said as well as from what little I’d been given access to concerning the two stolen projects, we were talking a lot of gains. Deals that big meant payoffs with an impressive number of zeros to the left of the decimal. And since people with money have a tendency to spend it, it doesn’t take a genius at subtraction to find out if someone’s spending more than the records show he’s making. IRS does it all the time.
Haas’s account with the First Bank of Denver was an orderly one, the month’s paycheck automatically deposited on the thirtieth and the withholding figures matching the records in his company dossier. With the right strings of numbers to cite, it wasn’t hard to find a voice on the telephone that would be happy to discuss Mr. Haas’s current balance.
“Well, you’ve got your numbers and I’ve got mine, and I still can’t find the discrepancy. Can you send me a printout of my last year’s transactions?”
“No trouble at all, Mr. Haas. I’ll send it to the address on your account.”
“Fine—no, wait. Why not just send it directly to my accountant. I’ll tell him it’s coming.”
“Yes, sir. His name and address?”
“Devlin Accounting Agency, 1557 Wazee, 80202. Thanks a lot.”
A series of like telephone calls to various credit accounts took up the rest of the morning and promised a steady flow of mail for the next few days. I’d just finished a call to the regional Visa office requesting a record of the last year’s purchases when the telephone rang as soon as I set it down.
“Jesus, Dev, you been living on that thing. I tried to get through a dozen times.”
“After this case, we’ll get a second line. We can afford it then. What do you have?”
“I looked at the Haas place. I think we ought to talk before I go any further.”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s going to be rough. It’s right in the middle of Belcaro Estates. That’s one of these walled-off areas—you know, Cherry Hills, Polo Grounds, that kind of thing: private roads leading in and a private gatekeeper to keep the peasants out.”
“Can’t you go in as a deliveryman?”
“I already did. That’s how I found the place. It looks like a bunch of barns stuck together out in the middle of a field. All the houses look like that—clumps of barns standing off by themselves and a wall around it all. A few shrubs, not much in the way of trees—it’s too new to have any—and the utilities are all underground. Be harder than hell to get a parallel transmitter on their phones without getting spotted.”
“It’s a new house?”
“Couple years old, I guess. The whole development’s new. One of those with a golf course on the other side of your swimming pool. Where the hell do people get the money to live like that?”
“That’s what we want to find out. What’s the house worth?”
“Four, maybe five hundred thou. And that’s one of the cheapies. There’s a couple must go for a million or two. They got the goddamn golf course in the living room.”
“Can we get to it tonight?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Look, I’m supposed to meet Susan at the Chute. You go on over and we’ll lay some plans that even you can’t screw up. It’ll take me a half-hour to get there, so keep your hands off my woman.”
“If she keeps hers off me. Why do you take her to a place like that?”
“Hey—I feel comfortable there. It’s like home.”
For Bunch, that meant other people were spitting on the floor, too. Chute Number One was a cowboy bar just off Colorado Boulevard, nondescript from the outside and the inside didn’t even try for that. Some of the customers may have been genuine cowboys—if so, they were the ones who stayed by themselves and looked out of place. The others thought they were and wanted everyone else to think so, too. A long bar filled one wall and a line of plywood booths filled the other; in the fl
oor space, tables were jammed as tightly as possible, and toward the back a pair of pool tables glowed green in the cigarette smoke that swirled under their hooded lights. Over it all, a woman’s electronic wail sang something about how hard it was to love a man who loved to roam. A lot of people shared Bunch’s affection for the place, and as usual, it was crowded.
It took a moment to blink away the sun-blindness, then I saw Susan’s blond hair, smooth as a single stroke of silk, catch the light at a table toward the back. She was by herself, but glances from the clusters of men seated around her said she wouldn’t be alone for long.
“Can I buy you a drink, lady?”
“Dev—it’s good to see you!”
If there was a Colorado look, Susan had it: healthy glow, a face that had no cuteness about it, but a beauty that was in the clean symmetry of lines and planes and a smile that—literally—gleamed of all outdoors. All matched by a lithe, tanned body that did nice things to the thin summer dress covering it. Bunch was very fortunate, all the more so as she was a one-man woman, which was fine with me because no matter how polite and friendly we were when we met, we usually parted arguing.
“The animal said he’d be here in about twenty minutes. He told me I could do anything I wanted with you until then.”
“Ha! What happened to your raven-haired beauty—the one who’s jealous of blondes?”
“Renee?” I pretended to dredge up the name.
“Ah yes, Renee.”
“She couldn’t understand my work schedule: canceling dates at the last minute, out at all hours, muffled telephone calls. She thought I was seeing another woman.” It hadn’t been all that neat. Pretty messy, in fact. She had wanted more than I was willing to give, and what had started out as a lot of fun for both of us somehow changed into a burden for me and a sadness for her. There had been no other woman—the last thing in the world I wanted right now was to be serious about a woman—and that included Renee. But another woman was something she could understand and be jealous of, just as—after a glass or two too much wine—she had once admitted to Susan her jealousy of blondes. So I let her believe it. And that was the end of that.
