Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yeah, I said that. It’s true.”

  “And that doing the right thing keeps getting you in trouble.”

  “Shut up, Susan,” Matt ordered with a smile.

  He crossed the few steps to her, put his hand on her cheek, and tilted her face up to look at him.

  Their eyes met, and this time she didn’t avert hers.

  She felt his fingers working the buttons of her blouse. Her breasts, because he had unfastened her brassiere, were not restrained by it.

  When he put his hand on her breast, then his mouth on her nipple, she heard herself saying, softly and plaintively, “Matt, I have to sit down. Lie down.”

  He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where, with one hand, he jerked the cover off the bed. Then he lowered her onto it, and as they looked into each other’s eyes, took off the rest of her clothing.

  Mr. Paulo Cassandro, the owner of record of Classic Livery, Inc., and its president, a 185-pound gentleman who stood six feet one inches tall, who had been summoned nevertheless, entered the living room of Mr. Vincenzo Savarese very carefully, and was immediately pleased that he had.

  Mr. Pietro Cassandro, who was carried on the books of Classic Livery, Inc., as its vice president, immediately looked up at Paulo and made a gesture indicating that Paulo should wait and say nothing.

  Pietro, who was twenty pounds heavier than Paulo, two inches taller, four years older, and equally well-tailored, was not, however, quite as bright. For that reason, Mr. Savarese had some years before decided that Paulo was better equipped to direct Classic Livery and Pietro was better suited to function as a companion, which translated to mean that Pietro served Mr. Savarese as a combination chauffeur, bodyguard, and guardian of Mr. Savarese’s privacy.

  Paulo saw why Pietro had held up his hand, fingers extended in a warning to say nothing and wait until Mr. S. was ready for him.

  Mr. S. was sitting slumped in a very large, comfortable-appearing armchair, his highly polished shoes resting on its matching footstool. His eyes were closed, and his right hand was moving in time with tape-recorded music being reproduced through a pair of five-foot-tall, four-feet-wide stereophonic loudspeakers.

  I know that, Paulo thought with just a little pride. That’s Otello, by whatsisname, Verdi. Giuseppe Verdi. And that’s the part where the dinge offs the broad.

  Paulo had three times accompanied Mr. S. to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to see a performance of the opera. He could see it now in his mind’s eye.

  He very carefully backed up to the wall and leaned on it, to wait for Mr. S. to have time for him.

  Three minutes later, Mr. Savarese pushed himself away from the cushions of his chair, causing Paulo concern that he might have inadvertently made a noise, distracting Mr. S. from his enjoyment of the opera.

  Mr. S. did not seem annoyed with him.

  Maybe he turned around to see if I was here yet.

  Confirmation of that seemed to come when Mr. S. turned the volume off all the way.

  “Pietro, rewind the tape carefully, please, and put it away.”

  “You got it, Mr. S.,” Pietro said.

  “Thank you for coming, Paulo,” Mr. S. said. “Will you have a glass of wine?”

  “That would go nice, if it wouldn’t be an inconvenience, Mr. S.”

  “Get a bottle of wine and some glasses, Pietro, please,” Mr. Savarese said, then motioned Paulo into one of the chairs surrounding an octagonal game table.

  “Thank you, Mr. S.,” Paulo said.

  “If there had been any activity with the man, you would have told me, Paulo?”

  “I had one of the guys ride by there every forty-five minutes, no less than once an hour. Nothing, Mr. S.”

  Pietro took a bottle of an Italian Chablis from the sterling-silver cooler where it had been kept ready for Mr. S. in case he wanted a little grappa, opened it, and set it on the table. He added two glasses.

  “You’ll have a glass, too, Pietro,” Mr. S. said, “when you have finished with the tape.”

  “Thank you, Mr. S.”

  Savarese nodded and smiled at him, then turned to Paulo.

  “I have been thinking that I would like to be there when you talk with this man,” he said.

  “You don’t mean you want to go there, Mr. S.,” Paulo said in surprise.

  “I think that would be best, under the circumstances,” Savarese said. “I would like to personally hear what he has to say.”

  “What I meant, Mr. S., is that you don’t want to go there, do you? I mean, I can have him at the garage, for example, or anyplace else, thirty minutes after you give me the word.”

  Mr. Savarese poured wine in two glasses and handed one to Paulo.

  “Salute,” he said.

  “Salute,” Paulo repeated.

  Mr. Savarese took a small, appreciative sip of the wine.

  “That would involve moving him,” he said. “I would rather that he not be moved. I think that would be better.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. S.”

  “Paulo, he is in a certain state of mind after having been where he has been, under those circumstances, for twenty-four hours. If we move him, that would, I think, break the spell, so to speak.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Savarese. I didn’t think about that.”

  Paulo was frequently reminded, when dealing with Mr. S., that if he was one and a half times as smart as Pietro, Mr. S. was like five times, ten times as smart as he was.

  “There’ll be no problem, nothing to worry about,” Paulo said. “I’ll get enough people to guard that place like fucking Fort Knox!” When he saw the pained look on Mr. S.’s face, his own colored quickly. “Sorry about that, Mr. S.”

  Mr. S. did not like either profanity or obscenity.

  Mr. S. accepted his apology with a curt nod of the head.

  “This man is strong and dangerous. Paulo?”

  “No, Mr. S. He’s not. Not at all.”

  “And there is no question in your mind that you and Pietro can deal with him in any circumstance that you can think of?”

  “I don’t even need Pietro, Mr. S.”

  “Nevertheless, I want Pietro to go along with us.”

  “Right, Mr. S.”

  “I don’t want this man to see me, for obvious reasons,” Mr. S. said. “Or to hear my voice.”

  “No problem, Mr. S.”

  “Although I doubt it very much, he may have had nothing to do with the problems my granddaughter is having. I don’t want to close any doors that might have to later be opened, you understand?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. S.”

  “And, of course, we don’t want to be interrupted while we are talking with him.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wondered if someone saw the vehicle you previously used there if it might not cause curiosity.”

  “I see what you mean, Mr. S. Let me think a minute.”

  Mr. Savarese waited patiently.

  “How about a Chevy station wagon, Mr. S.? We got a couple of them. At a big funeral, we use them to haul flowers ahead of the procession, you know, enough to cover the phony grass by the grave—”

  “They are black, like the Suburban?” Mr. Savarese interrupted him.

  Paulo nodded. “And they don’t have any signs painted on them or anything.”

  “I was thinking of something more on the order of a utility vehicle.”

  Again he waited patiently for Paulo to give that some thought.

  “What we do have is a Ford pickup, Mr. S. We keep it around with a jack and a couple of spare wheels and tires in the back, in case a hearse or a flower car has a flat.”

  “Does that happen often, Paulo?”

  “No, Mr. S. But sometimes, you know, you get a bad tire or pick up a nail.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Savarese said, understanding. Then he gave a dry chuckle. “The final indignity of life, Paulo, a flat tire on your way to your last resting place.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean, Mr. S
.”

  “Is there room for the three of us in this flat-tire truck?”

  “You know, it’s a regular pickup truck. It would be a tight squeeze. And it’s sometimes dirty.”

  “The upholstery, you mean?”

  Pietro finally came to the table and sat down.

  “You heard what we have been talking about, Pietro?” Mr. Savarese asked.

  “We could put a blanket or something on the seats, if they’re dirty, Mr. S.,” Pietro said.

  “You understand, Mr. S.,” Paulo explained, “we get a call there’s a flat, one of the mechanics drops whatever he’s doing and jumps in the pickup—”

  Mr. Savarese held out his hand in such a manner as to indicate that a further explanation was not necessary.

  “What I think we should do,” Mr. Savarese said, “un less this interferes with your plans, Paulo . . .”

  “My time is your time, Mr. S., you know that.”

  “. . . is send Pietro to the garage, where he will clean this flat-tire truck up as well as he can, and if necessary, as he suggested, put a clean blanket over the dirty seats, and then bring it here. By then it will be dark.”

  “Good thinking, Mr. S.,” Paulo said.

  “And in the meantime, you and I will discuss what you’re going to talk to this man about.”

  “Right, Mr. S.,” Paulo said.

  Paulo Cassandro’s prediction that it would be a tight squeeze in the front of the Ford pickup truck proved to be true, and the blankets—he had sent one of the Classic Livery mechanics to a dry goods store to get two nice ones—proved to be hot and slippery when installed over the greasy upholstery, and Paulo knew Mr. S. was uncomfortable.

  But Mr. S. hadn’t said anything. Paulo interpreted this to be another manifestation of Mr. S.’s being fair. Mr. S. knew that he was the one who had ordered the pickup, so it wouldn’t be right to bitch about what happened when he got what he asked for.

  At five minutes to eight, the pickup stopped outside a ten-foot-high hurricane fence in a field south of the Philadelphia International Airport. There were metal signs reading, U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN UNDER PENALTY OF LAW attached at twenty-five-foot intervals to the fence.

  As they had driven up to the fence, Mr. Savarese had seen where there once had been provision for floodlights to illuminate the entire perimeter of the fenced-in area. They were no longer in use. Neither was what had been contained inside the fence: a battery (four launcher emplacements) of U.S. Army antiaircraft weaponry.

  During a particularly tense period of the Cold War, the installation had been one of many such batteries surrounding Philadelphia and from which, should the Russian bombers have come, NIKE rockets would have been launched to blow them out of the sky.

  Roughly in the center of the four launcher emplacements (their launching mechanisms long since removed) was a windowless concrete building. Its thick concrete walls had been designed to resist anything short of a direct hit from a low-yield nuclear weapon. When the site had been active, the building had held, in four interior rooms, an additional dozen NIKE rockets, as well as some maintenance supplies and equipment.

  The dozen NIKEs were to be used to reload the four launchers, a process that would take—presuming the launchers and their crews were still intact after the first Russian assault—about twenty minutes. The possibility had occurred to the planners that the shock waves generated by the first bombs dropped would almost certainly put any elevator system bringing the spare NIKEs from underground storage out of whack, even if there was, immediately post-strike, any electricity to power the elevator.

  So the spare NIKEs were stored at ground level, behind thick concrete walls and heavy steel doors, in rooms from which they could be manhandled to the launchers.

  Paulo Cassandro was impressed—but not surprised—when Mr. Savarese had told him about the NIKE sites, and how he thought they might come in useful at some time for some purpose. Mr. S. had said he thought they would be around for some years, deserted but in reasonably intact condition.

  Wherever possible, Mr. S. had told him, they had been built on land that was cheap, which meant that no one could see much that could be done with it, and for which there was still not much demand. Now that use of the areas would require the demolition—very expensive demolition—of thick, steel-reinforced concrete before anything else could be erected on it, the land was even less desirable.

  But what he had found really interesting about the NIKE sites, Mr. S. had told him, was that they were federal property, much like Fort Dix over in New Jersey. Local police did not have authority on federal property. Which meant not only that the Philadelphia police would not be patrolling the NIKE sites, but also that the federal authorities, with nothing to protect but empty, and practically indestructible, buildings, would not be giving them very much attention, either.

  Mr. Savarese had told Paulo to put an eye on several of the NIKE sites and determine which of them could be put to use while attracting the least attention. And after that, to keep an eye on it, in case anything should change.

  After making a careful survey of the abandoned NIKE sites, Cassandro had come up with two that seemed to meet about equally the criteria Mr. Savarese had set up. They were in reasonably remote areas, and not readily visible from the streets and highways. He had gone to Mr. Savarese and suggested that while it would obviously take twice as much manpower to keep an eye on both sites, he recommended this course of action, as it would give them two convenient places. Mr. Savarese had agreed to this, with the caveat that he did not wish to use the sites routinely, but rather as sort of emergency support, and therefore he wished to be consulted before either of the sites was used at all.

  Mr. Savarese had given permission to use the sites only twice. The first time was to store a hijacked tractor-trailer load of whiskey for five days until the heat was off. In this case, the driver of the truck had been a fucking fool who had gotten brave, and when struck in the head with a crowbar suffered more severe cranial injuries than was planned, which in turn caused more police attention than was anticipated.

  The second site, near Chester, had been used once for a similar purpose, this time a tractor-trailer load of sides of beef. The police seemed to be paying an unusual amount of attention to the cold-storage locker where such a cargo would normally be taken, so Mr. Savarese authorized the use of the NIKE site until distribution of the meat could be arranged. Even the sound of the diesel engine powering the refrigeration system of the insulated trailer attracted no attention in the three days and nights the trailer was at the NIKE site. But, of course, one had to consider that looking for that tractor trailer was not a high police priority.

  Pietro Cassandro drove the Ford pickup to the rear (most distant from the road) gate in the hurricane fence and stopped. Paulo Cassandro got out and swung the creaking gate open and flat against the fence itself, reasoning that it would be better to have the gate open, in case a rapid departure became necessary, even if the open gate—improbably, in the dark—attracted attention.

  He then walked to the building, taking from his pocket as he walked a full-face ski mask and pulling it over his head.

  Pietro Cassandro drove the Ford pickup to the rear of the building, turned it around so that it was headed toward the open gate, and then got out.

  “This won’t take long, Mr. S.,” he said.

  Mr. Savarese nodded, and arranged himself more comfortably on the seat.

  Pietro pulled a similar full-face ski mask over his head, then took two battery-powered floodlights from the tool bin in the bed of the truck. Then he joined his brother at the steel door to the building.

  They opened the door, stepped inside, closed the door, turned on the floodlights, and walked down the corridor to the room in which, twenty-four hours before, they had left Mr. Ronald R. Ketcham to his thoughts in the dark.

  The door was closed with two locking levers much like those used to secure hatches on vessels.

  Pietro Cas
sandro opened both quickly and pushed the door inward. Paulo Cassandro, his floodlight in his left hand and a crowbar in the other, went quickly into the room.

  His floodlight quickly found Ketcham, who was cowering in a far corner of the room, the too-small overcoat not quite concealing his nakedness under it. Ketcham shielded his eyes against the painful glow of light.

  “On your feet, cocksucker!” Paulo ordered.

  Ketcham pushed himself erect by sliding up the wall behind him.

  “Can we talk?” Ketcham asked.

  “Oh, we’ll talk,” Paulo said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Pietro said in disgust, “it smells like shit in here. We can’t bring—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” his brother admonished him, and then addressed Ketcham. “Take the coat off and put it over your head, asshole!”

  “I really think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”

  “The next time you open your mouth without being told to, you’re going to eat the fucking crowbar!”

  Ketcham removed the overcoat and placed it over his head as directed.

  Paulo indicated the two-inch-wide white surgical—or perhaps “mortician’s and embalmer’s”—white gauze Ketcham had removed and which was now lying on the concrete floor, and indicated to his brother that it should be reused to make sure the overcoat over Ketcham’s head did not become dislodged.

  Pietro did as his brother ordered.

  “Just stand there, motherfucker,” Paulo ordered.

  He then left the room, walked down the corridor, and opened the door to another of the NIKE storage rooms. He flashed his floodlight around it, saw nothing that bothered him, and then returned to the room where Ketcham stood naked with an overcoat over his head.

  He went to Ketcham, put his hand on his arm, indicated with his finger that his brother take the other arm, then started to lead Ketcham out of the room.

  “You said we could talk,” Ketcham said plaintively.

  “I also told you to shut your fucking mouth,” Paulo replied.

  They led Ketcham into the center of the other room and turned him around. Ketcham’s situation was almost identical to what it had been in the first room, except in this room there was no odor of feces and urine.