by Thomas Perry
He went back into the room and closed the window. He looked around for something long enough to reach. There was a long, low table along one wall. He studied it—no, it was bolted down too securely, and it was too heavy to handle alone. Then he noticed the closet. It was a double closet, huge, for a hotel room. He looked inside and saw the shelf. Perfect, he thought. It was a good ten inches wide and eight or nine feet long. Thank God for good, substantial hotels. And it was screwed in, too. Working rapidly, he used his pocketknife to take out the screws, then brought the shelf out with him to the balcony.
He stopped to take one last look at the layout of the room, memorizing the location, size, and shape of each piece of furniture. Then he slowly and carefully extended the board across the void between his balcony and the next one. It reached, the other end making a light tap on the railing as he set it down. He lifted his right leg up and got his knee on the board, then the other one. He winced with pain. He had forgotten that. It would be a long, hard crawl. The shelf bowed in the middle as he eased his weight onto it, but it seemed safe enough. Four floors below him he could see the little fence with the garbage dumpsters in it, a tiny square in the corner of the parking lot. He thought about falling all that way; lying there in the cold, smashed on the pavement. But then he was at the end of the board. He swung his legs down to the balcony and turned to pull the shelf behind him. One down, four to go.
One after another he took them, not thinking about the rest of it now, not thinking about anything but crossing the cold, empty space that separated him from the fifth balcony. And then he was there. He leaned the shelf against the wall, then thought better of it. There might be some vantage, from some other building, where somebody could see it. He laid it down flat on the balcony, then ran his hand along the edge of the sliding window to feel for the latch. There wasn’t one on the outside. Another security feature, he thought. Then he went to the other end of the window and checked that, hopelessly.
He would have to take the chance of leaving a sign. He opened his knife and slipped the blade under the rubber molding a few inches below the level of the inside latch, then slowly brought it up. The glass shifted minutely. He smiled, and kept smiling even though it hurt. It was just as he’d hoped. The latch was secure, but the glass wasn’t fitted tightly to the aluminum frame. Using a gentle, steady pressure of his finger tips, he slid the large pane as far as it would go away from the latch, then stuffed his handkerchief into the crack to hold it there. He studied his accomplishment. He had about an eighth of an inch to work with now. Using his knife as a pry, he bent the aluminum frame a little to gain a few more thousandths of an inch. Then he took the knife and pointed the blade up under the latch. The spring was strong, but he managed to lift the hook clear of the catch and slide the window free. He stopped for a moment with the window open a hair, and pressed the molding and frame back into shape. He whisked his handkerchief over the glass and the frame, just in case. They wouldn’t put it in the papers, he thought, but they’d send somebody to do it even if they thought he died of old age.
He took out the ballpoint pen he’d brought with him and held it up out of the deep shadows. He took out the clear plastic refill and looked at it. To any other eye it looked like nothing, a refill that only had about a third of its ink left. But the last two thirds were a clear liquid, like water only thicker.
Touching the window with his handkerchief, he quietly slid it aside and slipped into the room, closing it behind him and moving away from the light. He stood there, silent and unmoving, studying the room. Claremont was sound asleep, his slow, regular breathing faintly audible.
Now to find just the right thing, he thought. A bottle of pills, maybe. Or a laxative. Old people make a big deal out of taking a shit. He saw a glass on the coffee table, so he went over and sniffed it—liquor. That wouldn’t do now. He could feel the seconds slipping past him, seconds he needed. He moved into the bathroom straining his eyes to find something for his purpose, but no—it was too dark. He thought of just forgetting the whole thing and smothering him with a pillow, but that was too dangerous and chancy. The bed was next to the wall, and all the old bastard would have to do was pound it once or twice in the struggle and that would be that. Old or not, he could make noise. He came out of the bathroom and stared at the sleeping figure. There was nothing—only the bed, the nightstand with the lamp and the glass. The liquor would have been great if he’d managed to get here in time to help with the mixing, he thought, but not now. And then he realized it wasn’t the same glass. The liquor glass was on the coffee table.
Slowly and carefully, he drifted over to the bed and stared at the nightstand. He had to look a little to the side to discern anything much in the darkness. He brought his face close to the glass and then almost laughed out loud. Of course, he thought. False teeth! He slowly reached over and poured the contents of the pen refill into the glass.
Then he drifted back out to the balcony and closed the sliding window behind him. In a few seconds he was already on the third balcony and putting down his portable bridge to the second. He looked down again, this time elated by the height, but he held himself in check. Always work slowly when you’re tired, he reminded himself. He channeled his concentration into his work, moving along the shelf and then pulling it after him, setting it on the next shelf and easing himself onto it. And then he was there. He slipped back into the room and closed the window, this time letting it lock. Then he went to the closet and set the shelf back on its supports. For a second he considered just leaving it, but no. Later he’d regret it. He took out his knife and carefully replaced the screws. Then he forced himself to stand quietly for a moment. Did he have everything? Was anything out of place? He reached into his coat pocket and screwed his pen back together. Then he took a few deep breaths, listened, and stepped out into the hallway.
At the elevator he pressed the button for the parking garage. The doors sighed and opened immediately. That was a good sign, he thought. In all that time since he’d come up, nobody had used that elevator. He glanced at his watch. It was only one fifteen. And then he realized he was getting an erection. It struck him as funny, but he didn’t dare laugh yet.
When the elevator doors opened again and he felt the cold night air he forgot about it. He moved across the parking ramp and out to the lot. At the fenced-in dumpsters he stopped and retrieved his suitcase, then kept on going. At the first public trash can he came to, he broke his pen in two and threw it in among the crumpled cups and napkins and bottles and cans. He moved again, nursing his injured knee into exactly the right pace for a man disappearing into the night.
THE SENATOR STIRRED, then woke up. The room seemed awfully cold. The Constellation hadn’t been the same since they’d remodeled it in 1972, he thought. It was those damned fancy windows and balconies and things. The workmanship just wasn’t any good anymore. People didn’t take pride in their work. But then he reminded himself that he was an old man, a cranky one at that, and it was probably just his bad circulation. He rolled over and composed himself to go back to sleep. “A goose probably just walked over my grave.”
7When the telephone rang it tore Elizabeth out of sleep, leaving her in an unknown place. After a second or two she remembered it was Ventura and a motel room, but it took four rings for her to see the telephone and one more to get her hand on it. The call was from Hart, who wanted her to be ready for breakfast in twenty minutes.
Elizabeth hung up and went to the nightstand for her watch. Seven o’clock exactly. Then she went off to the bathroom to brush her teeth and see about a shower. As she hurried through the morning rituals she tried to keep herself from becoming too excited. Even if there were a clue, something to go on, it would probably take months to follow it up, and by then the case would be common property. A hundred people in a dozen overlapping agencies would be involved. And there still wasn’t any reason to believe she had finally crossed the trail of a genuine professional hit man or that he’d be of any use if they caught him. It
was like trying to capture an animal that was so small and rare and elusive that you sometimes doubted that it existed, but if it did exist it would be capable of killing you. No, this was worse, because there wasn’t any point in hunting it down unless you could keep it alive and teach it to talk.
WHEN THEY WALKED INTO the foyer of the Ventura police station, a sergeant carrying a mug of coffee was crossing the floor toward a corridor of tiny offices. He veered toward them, giving a reassuring half-smile. “Hi. Are you being taken care of?”
“Agent Hart, FBI, and Miss Waring, Justice Department, to see the chief,” said Hart, flashing his badge.
“Okay,” said the sergeant. “This way, please.” He shot a look over his shoulder as he conducted them down the hallway. “Chief know you’re coming?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Hart.
Elizabeth said nothing, having reminded herself as they were coming up the steps that she’d learn more by listening and watching than by trying to take charge. But the fact that Hart had said FBI and Justice department hadn’t been lost on her. Technically the FBI was just one of the divisions of the Department of Justice although that had been very easy to forget the few times she’d been inside the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building with its millions of files and hundreds of millions of fingerprint records and its museum. For the moment, anyway, she would leave Washington protocol for Washington.
The sergeant led them into one of the tiny offices, where an older version of himself sat behind a wooden desk, frowning over some papers as though he were translating them with difficulty from a foreign language. When he saw he had visitors he looked relieved. He turned the papers face down in a far corner of his desk and popped up, his hand held out. “You must be agents Hart and Waring,” he said. “I’m Bob Donaldson. Always happy to cooperate with the FBI.”
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth, forestalling the correction Hart would probably feel was necessary. “As they probably told you on the phone, we’re interested in the Veasy murder.”
“Well now, ma’am,” said the chief. “We’re still not absolutely and completely sure it was a murder yet. We’re coming around to that hypothesis, but we aren’t sure.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling. “I misspoke, calling it what we’re looking for rather than what we’re looking at.”
He seemed appeased. “I’ve notified the homicide squad that you’d be here, and told them to be ready with the reports of the investigating officers and so on. Beyond that I thought we’d just wait and see, let you look around and pick out the leads you want to follow.”
“I’d like to take a look at the physical evidence, since that’s what I do best,” said Hart. “Miss Waring would like to study the reports. That way we can do two things at once.”
“Good idea,” said the chief, as though the idea struck him as revolutionary. “Sergeant Edmunds, take Agent Hart to the lab, will you? Miss Waring, I’ll show you the reports.” He took her elbow in a gentle but somehow weighty pressure, as though he were guiding a prisoner who wasn’t quite dangerous enough to be handcuffed, and led her down the corridor.
There was nobody in the room marked Homicide when they got there, but Donaldson sat her at a table and gave her a stack of reports. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.
She heard his voice in the next office. “Where the hell are those guys? I told them these people were coming this morning.”
Another male voice said in a bored monotone, “Out on a call. Found a Mexican lemon picker stabbed to death out on Telegraph Road about half an hour ago. Macaulay told me to let you know if you asked.”
“Oh,” came the chief’s voice, now much quieter. Then there was a moment or two of silence. At last the chief said, “Well, when they come back in tell Macaulay I want to see him.”
Elizabeth heard him returning from the other office. She looked up at him in the doorway and listened with an expression of interest while he recapitulated the substance of the conversation she’d just overheard. She wondered how he could not know the sound carried between the little cubicles, but apparently he didn’t. Then he was gone and she was able to look over the reports in peace.
Until the instant of his death, Veasy hadn’t been particularly noteworthy. He had a wife who’d been in his graduating class at Ventura High School, and three children born in the second, fourth, and fifth years of their marriage. They lived in a three-bedroom house in a tract which they’d been paying on for about eight years. Veasy was a machinist, making fairly good money working for Precision Tooling. The investigating officer had made a note at the bottom that his sources—the wife, the shop foreman, two fellow workers, and a neighbor—had not the slightest idea that Veasy had any enemies.
There was no indication that he owed anybody any money except the mortgage on his house. He didn’t gamble except for an occasional poker game at the union hall and the beer frames in his weekly bowling league. He had never been arrested or had anything to do with known criminals. Elizabeth was more than disappointed. She was bored. The only thing about the man that made interesting reading was his death.
She turned to the interviews with the witnesses. The whole thing had been completely unexpected. The monthly meeting of Local 602 had adjourned, he had climbed into this truck and was blown up. That was all any of them seemed to know.
After an hour and a half of reading and study, Elizabeth had made only two notes: to interview Richard O’Connell, the union president, about the minutes of the meeting, and to request file checks of Precision Tooling and Local 602. The file checks would have to wait, because it would be lunchtime at Justice now. She went to one of the empty desks and dialed the extension at Precision Tooling that O’Connell had given the homicide man. Yes, O’Connell said, he could see her at ten thirty.
Elizabeth sat for a minute staring at the file. She got out her telephone credit card, deciding to take a chance that Padgett was still busy enough to be working through another lunch hour.
On the other end she heard Padgett’s phone snatched up and his voice say, “Justice Padgett” as though it were a title.
“Roger,” she said. “I know you must be busy if you’re answering phones at twelve thirty, but I need some background. I need a file check on a company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling, and on Machinists’ Local 602.”
“All right, but what specifically?”
“I’m afraid I’ll need the whole thing on both. Any indication that anything isn’t aboveboard. History, assets, cast of characters, everything.”
“So you don’t know what you’re looking for.” He said it without emotion, as though he wasn’t surprised.
“I’m afraid not, Roger,” said Elizabeth. “I’m fishing.”
“I’ll get somebody on it after lunch. Give them a couple of hours and call back.”
“Thanks, Roger. I’ll do that. You’re a love.”
“I’m that all right. But Elizabeth?”
“What?”
“Try to keep it within bounds. Fishing can get expensive.”
She put her notebook away and went down the hall to Donaldson’s office. She found him still pondering the same sheaf of papers. “Chief,” she said, “I wonder if I could get a ride in a squad car. Agent Hart has the keys to our rented car, and I don’t want to interrupt him.”
“A ride? Sure,” he said. He lifted his phone and said, “I’m sending Miss Waring to you. Get her a car and driver. Right.”
THE FACTORY WAS A SMALL, rectangular aluminum building surrounded by a chain-link fence with an open gate. The place seemed to be all metal. Even the sounds that came from it were metallic, the noise of metal machines cutting and grinding and shaving metal, heating, bending, cooling it.
When she entered the shop, a man working a lathe lifted his safety goggles and walked over to her. “Are you Miss Waring?” he asked. He seemed to be about fifty, balding, and with the massive forearms of a man who worked with his hands.
“Yes. Mr. O’Connell?”
“We can talk out in the yard where it’s quiet.”
She followed him through the shop—where the whine of machinery was punctuated by an occasional ring of a hammer or the clank of chains—and out into a small asphalt square where there were a picnic table and benches. “Is this where you eat lunch?” she asked.
“That’s right,” said O’Connell, sitting down. “Now what can I tell you?”
“Mr. Veasy’s death was rather unusual, as you know, and so we’re working with the Ventura police to find out whatever we can about it. If there’s anything at all you think should go into the record, I can guarantee that it will.” She watched him for a moment, but he was just waiting for her to continue.
“I’d like to know what went on at the union hall that evening. Do you have the minutes of the meeting? I understand you’re president.”
“There aren’t any minutes of that meeting. We didn’t vote on anything, so there wasn’t much to write down,” said O’Connell.
“Do you remember what was said?”
“We were talking about the investment of the pension fund. How to get the best return for our money, how to keep it safe, you know. The usual things.” He looked at her through clear, empty gray eyes.
“Did Mr. Veasy say anything that you remember?”
“Al? Sure,” he said, beginning to smile as he remembered. “He was a great talker all right. He was complaining about the quarterly statement from our biggest investment. Said we weren’t getting anything back for our money, that we were speculating instead of saving, and that we were gonna lose it.”
“Do you agree?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all. A union has to do something or inflation will eat up the pension funds before anybody has a chance to use them. You have to put money into things that’ll produce profits in the long run, even if nothing much happens the first year or two.”
