by David Ellis
“Fuck,” said Tucker. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I thought that was an accurate summary of tonight’s events.
TWO IN THE MORNING. Chris Moody had joined us. We were sitting in the kitchen. Tucker and Moody had listened to the contents of my F-Bird several times already on a laptop computer Moody had brought.
Charlie Cimino had returned home shortly after I did, near midnight, and was still there. They’d tailed Leather Jacket’s SUV to some location, though Moody and Tucker didn’t elaborate on where or what had transpired. All was quiet now. Greg Connolly was dead. I was alive and secure. Cimino and his cronies were home in their beds, hopeful that their crime had gone undetected.
Greg Connolly had been found facedown, with his pants at his ankles, in an area of the city called Seagram Hill but more typically known as “Semen Hill.” The Hill was a notorious west-side locale for prostitutes, many of the male variety. Found in the condition he was, the story would be obvious enough: Greg Connolly was jumped and murdered while looking for a ten-dollar blowjob.
Tucker looked at me. “So you slipped the F-Bird out of your pocket in the car, then you dropped it in the goon’s pocket?”
I nodded.
“So they’re searching through your clothes, and meanwhile it’s sitting in the goon’s pocket.” He shook his head. “Ballsy, Jason. I mean, seriously.”
“Desperation is the mother of invention.”
“No, ballsy is right,” Moody said. It was as close as he could come to a compliment.
Tucker said to me, “Cimino never mentioned Connolly by name. How’d you figure?”
It had to be Connolly. There weren’t that many options. And he’d been upset about being pushed out of the loop when I’d hatched this new plan with Charlie. It also explained why Tucker and Moody were so pissed off when I’d called that audible. You cut out the board, they’d complained. Sure. They’d flipped the chairman of the PCB to be their eyes and ears, and I waltzed in and cut him out of the action.
I explained all of that to him. Moody said, “Connolly wasn’t good at this. He never was.”
“Greg knew about me, didn’t he?” I asked. “I didn’t know about him, but he knew about me.”
Moody nodded. I wasn’t sure if he’d let me in on that piece of information. He probably figured it didn’t matter at this point. “Yeah, he knew.”
That stood to reason. Connolly recorded the conversation with me that the feds used against me, when they first confronted me. I had thought, at the time, that the feds had to go through the extraordinary procedure of bugging his office and tapping his phone without his consent. I’d been wrong. Greg had been working with them all along.
That was a significant point for me, in particular, but now wasn’t the time to raise it.
“Where was Greg headed today?” I asked. “With the F-Bird?”
“He had an assignment,” Moody said.
“Obviously. But where? With who?”
Moody didn’t answer right away. He looked so unusual, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, like a totally different person tonight. “I can’t reveal that,” he finally said. There was a trace of apology in his voice, which was uncharacteristic. But this was an unusual situation, to say the least. Everyone was tired and strung out. The operation had crash-landed over the last several hours.
I got out of my chair. I had two blankets draped over me and I was chugging coffee, not for the caffeine or the taste but the warmth. I’d spent the better part of two hours, wearing nothing but boxers, in temperatures that were probably just above freezing. It was hard to imagine that there would be a time when I would feel warm again.
I filled another cup, held it in my hands, and watched Tucker and Moody roll their necks and mumble to themselves.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked. “You going to pick up Charlie and his crew?”
Moody shrugged. “Connolly’s dead, so there’s no urgency. Unless we think he’s coming after you.”
“He’s not,” I said. “He had his chance tonight.”
The prosecutor stretched his arms, working out the anxiety. “I don’t know yet.”
“How do you vote?” Tucker asked me. “You’re the big hero tonight. Do we roust Cimino tonight? Do we wait?”
I’d been thinking about that for a long time. I thought about what had happened tonight.
Who said you could do that? Charlie had said, when he walked into the room and saw that Paulie had thrown his first forearm into my face.
We’ll handle this, Leather Jacket had replied.
Give him a coat, Charlie had said.
No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.
“I think we hold off,” I said to Tucker and Moody. “I don’t think we’re done yet.”
And when Leather Jacket and Paulie had turned up the heat at the end, putting the knife against my hand. Stop, that’s enough, Charlie had said.
Nah, Leather Jacket had said. It’s not enough yet.
“The cover’s blown,” said Tucker. “Cimino knows we’re onto him.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” I said.
And Charlie’s words when the interrogation was over. Sorry about that. They had to be sure.
I paced around the kitchen, into the living room, my neck stiff and sore, my head throbbing, the eternal chill throughout my body.
Who said you could do that?
We’ll handle this.
Give him a coat.
No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.
“We might be able to put Charlie’s mind at ease,” I said. “If we can do that, we can keep the operation going.”
“What operation?” Tucker said. “Cimino’s been spooked, at the very least. He’s not going to keep up that scheme of yours.”
“He’s not talking about Cimino,” Moody said. “You’re talking about moving up the ladder. You’re talking about accepting Madison Koehler’s offer to work for the governor.”
“Chris wins the prize,” I said.
“Wait a second,” Tucker chimed in. “You tell us no, over and over again, when we want you to go inside the governor’s inner circle. Now, tonight, you come this close to getting your ass killed, and now you want to do this?”
“Lee has a point,” Moody said. “We know for certain that Cimino would kill you if you were ever burned. We have a federal witness lying facedown in the mud on Seagram Hill to tell us that much. And you can figure you’ll be watched more closely than ever. So why now?”
It was a valid question. Like many things, there was more than one answer. Moody was right. We couldn’t be sure what Charlie knew. He definitely knew the federal government was sniffing around, at a minimum. And now we knew, firsthand, that Charlie Cimino did not have a high tolerance for risk. I’d have to watch my back, more than ever. But I thought it was worth the risk. And I was the only person who could do this.
And I still had a murder to solve. I still wasn’t sure I had the answer to that one. Charlie Cimino was looking pretty good as the puppet master behind the murder, but I wasn’t totally convinced. Not after tonight.
Who said you could do that?
We’ll handle this.
Give him a coat.
No, pretty boy’s doing just fine.
Stop. That’s enough.
Nah. It’s not enough yet.
“So?” Tucker asked again. “Why now, all of a sudden, you’re willing to go work for the governor?”
Sorry about that, Charlie had apologized to me. They just needed to be sure.
They.
I looked out the window in the kitchen. Somewhere out there, FBI agents were guarding every exit to my house. This would be risky, no doubt.
“Because Charlie wasn’t calling the shots tonight,” I said. “And I’m going to find out who was.”
59
I WAS IN MY OFFICE THE NEXT MORNING AT NINE. MY back, shoulders, and neck were faring the worst after last night. I couldn’t turn my head in any direction—hell, I couldn’t cough without feeling a searing pa
in all the way down to my ass. My jaw was sore as hell from Paulie’s forearm, and the side of my head was swollen and tender.
I had a deposition scheduled for eleven on one of the cases that had been handed to me courtesy of Charlie’s and my extortion scheme. I was neither prepared nor interested. I would have shoveled it off to Shauna, but I didn’t want to involve her in any way in the stuff I was dealing with.
The city’s newspaper was on my desk. Greg’s death wasn’t on the front page; it was reserved for another obituary, the death of Warren Palendech, one of the justices on the state supreme court. Justice Palendech was dead of a heart attack? It was an article that would typically captivate me, but I had more pressing concerns.
There it was, across the headline of the metro section, the story of one of Governor Carlton Snow’s top aides and oldest friends, Gregory Connolly, found dead near Seagram Hill from a gunshot wound. The reporter was not afraid to speculate on what Mr. Connolly had been up to in that neighborhood, what most people are up to in that neighborhood. She didn’t directly attribute sexual folly to Greg, but anonymous police sources believed that Mr. Connolly’s reason for being in that area was not original.
Good. Not good for Greg’s wife, who would now be coping not only with her husband’s death but with the notion that he’d been late coming home because he stopped off for a hummer from a teenaged prostitute. But good from our perspective. Charlie’s thugs had dumped Greg at Seagram Hill to give this precise impression, and the morning papers were announcing that their plan had worked. And spending much more time on a dead supreme court justice, at that.
Marie buzzed my phone a few minutes after I arrived. “Charlie Cimino,” she said.
I took a breath and said, “Put him through.”
“Jason, it’s Charlie.”
“Yeah, Charlie—”
“Did you see the paper today? About Greg Connolly?”
I felt a bitter smile on my face. Charlie was playing to anyone who might be listening. He was being careful. Did he still suspect me? Tucker and Moody had both mentioned it to me last night, as we kicked ideas around my kitchen table. Their concern was well founded. Connolly knew that I was working for the government. Had he given up that information under duress? The smart money said no, he didn’t, or else Charlie would have killed me last night. But the smart money doesn’t always win. The truth was, nobody knew what Charlie knew and didn’t know.
“I was just reading about it,” I said.
“Yeah, God, that’s terrible,” Charlie said. “Hey, listen, want to grab a cup of coffee?”
“Sure, Charlie.”
“How’s one o’clock look for you? In the lobby?”
“Great,” I said. I might have to leave the deposition early, but that was hardly my concern at the moment.
I went down to the fourth floor of my building and opened Suite 410. Lee Tucker was there. We’d expected Charlie would be contacting me soon, and we couldn’t be sure what he’d been doing in terms of surveillance on me, so the plan had been that Tucker would park himself in this office until we heard from him. We knew for certain that nobody was watching me last night, as the feds had been covering every side of my house, and presumably everyone working for Charlie had been busy disposing of Greg Connolly’s body. But today was a different story. Charlie had put someone on me two days ago and for who-knows-how-long before that. He could do it again.
“You look like shit,” Tucker pronounced. “Does it hurt?”
“Only when I breathe.”
Tucker tossed me my cell phone. “Phone’s clean,” he said. Overnight, federal agents had looked over my cell phone to be sure Charlie hadn’t planted a recording device of his own in my phone.
“Charlie called. Coffee at one o’clock,” I said.
Tucker nodded slowly. “How’d he sound?”
“Cautious. ‘Did you hear about Greg,’ that sort of thing.”
“So he’s still worried,” Lee said.
“Worried about you. Not necessarily about me.”
Tucker seemed skeptical. “You willing to bet your life on ‘not necessarily’?”
It was a legitimate question. “Charlie trusts me,” I said.
“You realize, Kolarich—even if he doesn’t think you’re wearing a wire, he could think that Connolly gave us information about you.
Which means we might come to pay you a visit. Which makes you a liability. If Charlie’s as cautious as we think, it would make sense to get rid of you.”
“Of course I know that. That’s why we have to set his mind at ease.”
Tucker tossed me the F-Bird. It felt like a hundred pounds in my hand.
“You understand my limitations,” said Tucker. “I can’t cover you. I can’t wire you up for real-time monitoring, and I can’t follow you wherever you go.”
“I understand,” I said.
Tucker sighed. He started to say something but thought better of it.
“Talk,” I said.
He struggled for a moment.
“Speak,” I said.
He held up a hand. “Look, when they found Greg—the bullet to his brain? It wasn’t the only . . . it wasn’t the only . . . injury. You follow?”
I thought I did. Before the end of his life, before the bullet entered his brain, Greg Connolly endured things he probably considered worse than death.
Tucker leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t accustomed to talking people down from taking risks. He’d spent far more time talking people into them. “I’m just saying, we’ve got Cimino on a lot. We can confront him, flip him—get to the higher-ups that way.”
“You think that would work?” I said it like I was doubtful. Because I was. I couldn’t imagine Charlie agreeing to cooperate with the feds. Nor could I imagine him being successful at it if he tried.
At one o’clock, I went down into the lobby. Charlie was there, on his phone. He gestured to me and started walking toward the exit. He liked a coffee shop down the street. I joined him outside, not braced for a cold, gusty wind. We headed due east, my head down against the wind, when he hit my arm. I looked up and saw his Porsche parked at a meter.
“C’mon,” he said.
“Change of plans?”
He got around to the driver’s side and looked at me. “That’s right. Change of plans. That okay with you?”
Charlie trusts me.
“Whatever,” I said. I got into his car.
60
I WOULD FOLLOW CHARLIE’S LEAD. HE DIDN’T SPEAK, so neither did I. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was taking me. We were going to his club, presumably for another game of racquetball. For another chance to strip-search me without strip-searching me.
It hadn’t been that hard to foresee. Tucker and I had discussed it. We’d gone back and forth in Suite 410 earlier today about the F-Bird. We finally decided against it. As much as we wanted Charlie on tape, confessing to the murder of Greg Connolly, there was too large a risk that Charlie would search me for a listening device. If he had even the tiniest lingering doubt about my loyalties, the day after Greg’s murder would be the time to test me.
Charlie’s expression was tight. Controlled. He had a lot of worries at the moment. He knew the feds had been looking at someone—presumably him included—and he didn’t know what the shakeout of Greg Connolly’s murder would be.
We went through the same routine as previously. An attendant gave me clothes and a racquet, and I left my clothes in an unlocked locker. Once again, I had dodged a bullet with the decision to leave the F-Bird at home.
“What the hell, Charlie?” I said to him when we were on the racquetball court. It was an isolated court, but my voice echoed. It hardly seemed the place for this conversation. And he hadn’t received confirmation yet from whoever it was who was going through my clothes, searching for an F-Bird.
“Let’s just play,” he said. So play we did. Each of us, in different ways, had a lot of steam to vent, and this was the perfect setting. I was sore at first
for obvious reasons, but the flow of adrenaline helped, and soon enough I was playing like my life depended on it. I felt sorry for the little blue racquetball and for Charlie, if he had any pride in how he played, because I showed him no mercy whatsoever. The first game was over in less than twenty minutes. The second, less than fifteen.
Charlie was grabbing his knees. His gray shirt was stuck to his body with perspiration. I had to admit, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d keeled over right there, but justice wouldn’t work that way. In the end, I think it was good for him, the workout. “Three out of five,” he suggested.
I was just getting loose. I shut him out in the third game.
He grumbled about it, but he had weightier issues on his mind than a racquetball game. We retired to the same parlor area for juice. He excused himself, presumably to meet with the person who had searched my clothes in the locker, and who would give me a clean bill of health. Probably Leather Jacket was not that person this time, or if he was, he wouldn’t want me to see him.
When Charlie returned, it seemed that his load had been lightened slightly. Once again, I had won his trust. I wondered how many more times I would need to do that.
“Christ, this thing,” he said to me, considering a glass of grapefruit juice. “You understand, it wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. I mean, can we get past this? You wanna punch me in the face to make us even or something?”
“What, this thing that happened?” I asked. Never say it outright. A code of the corrupt—say it out loud as little as possible.
“Not something I enjoyed,” Charlie said again. “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“Hey, Charlie,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. I leaned into him. “First of all, just to reiterate a thought from last night: Fuck you. Second thing: Fuck you again. You do that to me again, you better kill me. Okay, glad that’s settled.” I took a breath. “I don’t give a shit about some snitch. Greg made his bed. I just want to know what he told them. Is someone going to be knocking on my door?”
Charlie didn’t smile—it was hardly the occasion—but I sensed that he liked my remarks. He didn’t want me playing ethical watchdog or getting cold feet. I had reassured him on both counts.
