Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  In the same instant Harry understood what was happening, he cut his lights, swung a sharp left, and hit the gas. He made a sliding right, then another left. The siren was on behind him now, and he could see the blue strobe through the trees. The streets, baked to bone-dry for almost two weeks, were slick with rain and oil. He skidded into another turn, onto a street that was a long straightaway to, the main road. The speedometer was nearing eighty. He had always been a laid-back driver and rarely drove this fast even on a turnpike. A couple backing out of their drive to go to the store, a kid on her bicycle—there were any number of possibilities for disaster now. Undoubtedly, the men in the unmarked cruiser had called for backup as well.

  He tried desperately to think things through. The best he could do was to acknowledge that the situation was absolutely horrible. He was racing around rain-soaked streets in a neighborhood that was completely foreign to him, at night, in a seven-year-old-car, almost certainly with a body in the trunk. One minute. That was about all he had left. One minute before they caught up with him or the backups cut him off.

  He was closing fast on a main road. Assuming it was the one he had taken in, it was a four-laner with no divider. The sedan was on the straightaway now, no more than three blocks behind and gaining. Harry was about to brake so that he could turn into the northbound lane. But at the last moment, he saw a small gap in the traffic each way. He slammed down the accelerator and barreled across all four lanes. A tractor trailer was coming from each direction. In a cacophony of air brakes, screeching tires, and horns, they both swerved, skidding in a ponderous, grotesque pas de deux. The cruiser had no choice but to stop and back away from the potentially deadly dance. There was a street directly across from the one Harry had come up. He shot down it. Slowing a bit he glanced behind him just as one of the trailers, in excruciating slow motion, toppled onto its side.

  In the distance, he could hear sirens—many of them. He swung into a side street, and then halfway up the driveway of a darkened house. The sirens were getting louder. He stepped quietly out of the car, expecting at any moment to have all the lights in the house go on at once, or else to be attacked by a rottweiler. He glanced about. He had no idea at all where he was, except that the river was somewhere in the direction the house was facing. Just past the garage, he could see woods beyond the backyard, to the west. With luck he could make it there. Then he would have to see. He snapped open the briefcase and stuffed what he thought was about seven thousand dollars into his pockets. He was wearing slacks and dress shoes—the perfect outfit for impressing the people at the bank, but not much good for running from the police. Unfortunately, at this moment, he would have to make do.

  He took the key and inserted it in the trunk. Part of him wanted just to leave it closed and run. He dreaded confronting this part of the nightmare Perchek had conjured up for him. Later, wherever he was, he could find out from the news bulletins what was inside. A siren sounded from close by, and moments later a squad car raced down the street, its strobes flashing. Harry threw himself into the shadows. The net was closing. He had little time left. He turned the key, hesitated again, and then threw the trunk open.

  Hot air, heavy with the stench of blood and death, immediately wafted up into his face. Below him, crammed into the smallish trunk, lay Caspar Sidonis. His perfect face was waxen, his hair matted with blood from entry and exit bullet holes just above his ears.

  Bile washed up into Harry’s throat. He hesitated, actually trying to think of something he should be doing. Then, swallowing back the burning acid, he quietly lowered the trunk.

  “Poor bastard,” he whispered.

  A second cruiser, this one with no lights or siren, made its way past, checking every house and driveway on the other side of the street with a spotlight. Harry again ducked into the shadows. His side of the street would be next. With a final glance at the trunk, he moved quickly into the backyard and scaled a five-foot chain-link fence. As he leapt to the ground, he experienced a breath-catching pain in his chest, exploding from just beneath his sternum up into his jaws and ears. He stumbled, then fell to the rain-soaked, mossy ground. Instantly, he was drenched, both from the rain and from his own sudden perspiration.

  The sirens seemed to be all around him now. He crawled deeper into the woods and then pulled himself upright on the trunk of a tree. The pain was leveling off. He battled back a wave of nausea without getting sick. Then he closed his eyes and took several calming breaths. Giving up was a very real possibility. Surely someone would believe he had been set up. Mel Wetstone had worked near-miracles already. Perhaps he could pull this one off as well.

  No. The thought of being taken prisoner, of jail, of Albert Dickinson, was more than he could stand.

  From a hundred yards behind him, he could hear voices. They had found the car. The pain was much less now. Almost gone. With the jungle survival training he had had in Vietnam and several thousand dollars in cash, at least he had a slim chance of escaping. He stuffed the money deeper in his pockets and pushed off from the tree. Then, keeping low and moving as quietly as possible, he began an awkward jog through the dense woods.

  CHAPTER 37

  High Hill, in elegant Short Hills, New Jersey, was an expansive fifteen-room colonial with a coach house and pool on three rolling acres. Built and christened by a liquor baron in 1920, it had kept its name through four subsequent masters. Phil Corbett, the latest in the line, had been living in the estate with his family for almost three years. He disliked the pretentiousness of house names and was constantly threatening to replace the High Hill placard on the fieldstone stele at the base of the driveway with one reading High Upkeep.

  When the phone began ringing at ten-thirty on the night of August 30, Phil was eight hundred dollars up and studying a possible royal flush. The once-a-month, six-man game rotated from house to house, but the participants enjoyed playing at High Hill the most. Shortly after moving in, Phil had converted the music room into a soundproof, walnut-paneled, Wild West card room, complete with honky-tonk background music, sawdust on the floor, an overhead fan, Cuban cheroots, and brass spittoons. Stakes in the game were high enough to make it interesting. But there wasn’t one of the players who couldn’t comfortably absorb a five-thousand-dollar ding.

  Earlier in the evening, several of the men had mentioned the latest news blitz involving Phil’s older brother. Two of them, Matt McCann and Ziggy White, both millionaires who had never finished college, had grown up with Phil in Montclair, and had known Harry fairly well.

  “Talk about your big-time comedown,” Matt said. “Remember how we all used to idolize Harry? He was the scholar who was going to go to college. We were the little shits who were going to go to jail.”

  “You still should idolize him,” Phil replied. “He’s a terrific guy. While we’re all out trying to make an obscene amount of money, he’s off helping people get well. Half the time, he doesn’t even get paid.”

  “But what about all this nonsense at the hospital? This post-traumatic stress?”

  “Harry has about as much post-traumatic stress as you do. Someone’s out to get him. That’s what he tells me, and that’s what I believe.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Ziggy said. “I always liked Harry a lot. But you know, even Dillinger had a brother.”

  “He’s not Dillinger, Ziggy.…”

  The ringing persisted—five, six, seven times. Phil’s agreement with Gail was that if she was in the house on poker night, she would answer all phone calls. But tonight, she had gone to the movies with friends. Phil studied his ten, jack, queen, king of diamonds, and then glared over at the phone, trying to will it to cease. Finally, he slapped his cards down.

  “You gentlemen’ll have to wait a minute for me to take your money,” he said, rising. “But I’d advise you all to fold. I’m working on a straight flush.”

  “Yeah, sure,” someone muttered.

  “Hello?”

  “Phil, it’s me. Are you alone?”

  Phil
had no trouble picking up the urgency in his brother’s voice.

  “Ah, no. No, I’m not.”

  “Change phones, please.”

  Phil put the call on hold.

  “I was lying about the straight flush,” he said, burying his cards at the bottom of the deck. “You guys play on without me for a while.”

  In twenty minutes, Phil was back, his face heavy with concern.

  “There’s been some problems with my brother,” he said. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to call it a night.”

  “Anything we can do?” White asked.

  “Actually, there is. I’d like it if you and Matt could stay behind. The rest of you just head home as quickly as possible. We’ll settle up tomorrow. And if any of you want to, feel free to say a prayer for Harry. He’s in it pretty deep right now and he’s going to need all the help he can get.”

  “Phil, you be careful, now,” one of the other three men said. “No one wants to believe somebody in their family could get into big-time trouble, but it happens.”

  “I know, Stan. Thanks. I’d like you to forget I got that call just now, but in the end, that’s up to you.”

  The three men exchanged concerned glances. Then, without further question, they hurried for their cars. Ziggy White and Matt McCann remained behind. A few moments after the last car had left, a police cruiser, lights flashing, came up the drive.

  “Matt, I’m going to need you to stay and watch the kids until Gail gets home,” Phil said. “Maybe around eleven-thirty. Ziggy, I’m going to speak with these guys. Then I have to get out of here without being followed. Any ideas?”

  During their school years, White had been a daredevil among daredevils—always diving in from the highest rock or shoplifting some unneeded item from the most theft-conscious store. He had gone on to make a small fortune as an options trader. Now, he mulled over the problem for just a few seconds.

  “No sweat,” he said, excitedly. “Matt’ll hide while the cops are here. You make it clear your wife is out and you’re babysitting. I’ll walk them out and have a chat with them by the squad car. Meanwhile, you slip out the back. Take a flashlight, but only use it when you’re certain it’s safe. Go through your backyard and then across that little brook you have back there. If they’re going to stake you out, they’ll have to wait somewhere past the end of the driveway. I’ll leave when they do and head out like I’m going home, but I’ll turn off at Maitland. I’ll meet you right by the Griffins’ driveway. They’re in England until after Labor Day. You know where that is, right? Okay. You can drop me off someplace near my house and keep the car as long as you need it.”

  * * *

  Harry knelt in the dense undergrowth just beyond the soft shoulder of a rural two-lane road. The night wasn’t that chilly, but he was soaked through and shivering hesitated in agreeing to help. Now, if he would only show up. Accessory to murder was nothing he wanted to expose his brother to. But until he found Anton Perchek and a Way to bring him down, staying free was the only realistic chance he had.

  The biggest problem, since he didn’t know exactly where he was calling Phil from, and Phil didn’t know the Fort Lee area well at all, was finding a way to meet up. It was finally left to Harry to choose the right person to bribe into driving him to a spot they both knew—a little-traveled roadway that swung past a power substation not far from their childhood home in Montclair. It was the place where Harry first took his younger brother to introduce him to beer and cigarettes, only to find that Phil was already well acquainted with both.

  The lucky man Harry selected was a motorcyclist on a Harley chopper. Harry watched from the woods beside a service station as the biker lumbered into the rest room and called him over as soon as he came out. The man was well tattooed and grizzly bear huge—as unlikely to be frightened off by Harry as he was to be tight with the police. The fare for the half-hour ride was agreed upon in seconds—a thousand dollars. Over his years in medicine, Harry had seen the ravages of bike accidents often enough to have developed a healthy fear of ever riding on what the ER docs cynically referred to as “donorcycles.” But the biker, whose name was Claude, was worth the risk. Harry donned the spare Panzer Division helmet, hunched as low as the raised passenger seat would allow, clenched his teeth, and wrapped his arms around the bear.

  “Hey, if you’re gonna get that friendly, I want another hundred,” the biker said, laughing.

  “You don’t speed and I won’t get fresh,” Harry replied.

  Within the first mile or two, they had passed four police cars heading in the opposite direction.

  “You must be some hot stuff,” Claude called over his shoulder.

  “Parking tickets,” Harry yelled back.

  During the half hour Harry had been crouched in the bushes by the substation, six cars had passed, one of them a Montclair police cruiser. Now, as he wiped a muddy hand across his forehead, he wondered what his next move should be. If there was any workable option available to him, any at all, his mind hadn’t settled on it yet. On the plus side, he had miraculously made it through the trap Perchek had set for him in Fort Lee. Still, by the time the forty-minute ride was over, Harry’s teeth were chattering mercilessly. He tipped the biker with a hundred-dollar bill as casually as if it were a one and accepted a death’s-head pin in return. Now, as the fear that he and Phil had somehow miscommunicated took hold, he wished he had kept Claude around.

  There were bends in the road about fifty yards in either direction from where Harry was concealed. The headlights of approaching cars reflected off the trees several seconds before they actually came into sight. Each time, as soon as he heard the engine noise or saw the reflected light, he flattened down in the shallow swale beside the road. And each time he got a bit filthier and, if possible, a bit more sodden.

  Through the darkness and the persistent drizzle, he heard engine noise to his left. Moments later, reflected light shimmered high off the trees. A truck, he thought, burrowing back under cover. What it was instead was a mobile home, as large as a bus, moving along slowly, followed closely by a car. Harry froze as the two-vehicle caravan slowed even more and then stopped not ten feet away. Both drivers cut their engines and killed their headlights. Immediately, heavy darkness settled in again. The interior light on the massive RV flashed on and off as the door opened and closed. For several seconds there was dense silence. Then Phil called out.

  “Harry? You out there?”

  Before he could even reply, Harry had to work the immense tension from his muscles and his jaw. He worried in passing about the second car, but at this point he had to trust that Phil knew what he was doing.

  “Right here, bro,” he said.

  He pushed himself to his feet and made an ineffectual stab at brushing some mud off. Phil met him at the front of the RV, which Harry could see now was a Winnebago.

  “You okay?”

  “Soaked, scared to death. Is that the same as okay?”

  “Well, believe it or not, I have a warm-up suit inside that’ll fit you.”

  “Who’s in the car?”

  “It’s Ziggy White. Remember him?”

  “The one who used to bet people he could drive a mile blindfolded?”

  “I didn’t want him to come with me, but he insisted. He can’t get enough of living on the edge—you’d think being an options trader would do it. Besides, he says he’ll never forget that you once kept Bumpy Giannetti from beating the snot out of him.”

  “Thank Ziggy for me,” Harry said as Phil helped him up the step. “But tell him that if that’s really the case, I probably just showed up at the right moment and presented Bumpy with a punching bag less likely to hit back.”

  The interior of the Winnebago was as grand as any hotel Harry had ever stayed in.

  “This is incredible,” he said, stripping off his shirt. “Is this yours?”

  “For the time being, it’s yours. The Luxor. Thirty-seven feet of everything you could ever ask for in a motor home. Two TVs with a
dish on the roof, fax, phone, bar, ice maker, stereo system, washer/dryer, driver and passenger airbags, cherrywood cabinets. You told me you needed a car, but I got to thinking that you also needed a safe place to stay. Then I realized I had both all rolled up in one. We lease this baby from time to time to some people who need a hotel room, but don’t want a hotel. It’s registered to my corporation. The registration’s in the glove compartment, along with a couple of sheets on where you can and can’t take it and park it. My beeper number’s there, too. You can reach me twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Phil, I … thanks. Thanks a lot. This is perfect. How much does it—”

  “Hey,” Phil said, stopping him with a raised hand. “If you have to ask, you really don’t want to know.”

  Harry toweled off and pulled the stacks of soggy bills from his pockets.

  “You neglected to mention the all important microwave,” he said.

  “Just don’t do them all at once.” Phil tossed over the black Nike warm-up suit. “I don’t think I could stand the thought of all that cash vaporizing in my RV. The fridge is pretty well stocked and there are some clothes in the closet that I think will fit you. Just be careful and don’t stay in one place too long. Is there anything else you need?”

  Harry thought for a moment, then took a pen and paper from the small mahogany writing desk and dashed off a note to Maura.

  “The doorman at my co-op will take this up to her,” he said. “Then I want you to back off and keep out of this. You’ve done way more than enough.”

  Phil slipped the letter into his pocket.

  “We’ve had a funny life, Harry,” he said. “I won’t deny that over the years, especially after you won those medals in Vietnam, I pushed myself in business because I wanted to beat you out at something.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “So what? The point is it was always just something inside me. You never did or said anything to make me feel I had to top you. What difference does it make anyhow? It’s not a contest. It never has been. It’s our lives. You’re my only brother, Harry. I don’t want to lose you.”