Past Due

by William Lashner

  I stayed in the shower until the water cooled and then I stepped out and roughly toweled myself down.

  Clean now, and ruddy from the heat, I walked over to my desk, dropped into the chair, opened a drawer, took out the envelope. They were inside still, the photographs of the naked woman found in a dead man’s pocket. I went through them one by one by one, the images so haunting even though they now were so familiar. The taut skin, the long legs, the beauty mark on the breast that seemed to glow in my imagination. Stare at something long enough and it becomes the model for perfection. Dr. Mayonnaise, despite all her evident qualities, was not the woman in the photographs. Dr. Mayonnaise had a face, she breathed and moved, she had the kind of daily concerns the woman in the photograph seemed to never know, and maybe that was the core of my disappointment in Karen, not the tofu or her sincerity or the cats, but her very concreteness. Right now, I was certain, I’d be disappointed in anyone other than her. The her of the photographs. Her.

  Looking through the stack I had a strange idea. I rose and went to the area beside my bed and quickly pinned one of the photographs to the wall. A thigh, gently curving as it rose toward the rear. Then I pinned up another, a calf. Then a foot. Then a hip. Then a breast. One by one I pinned the photographs to the wall, in a rough order. There was no real shape to it, the photographs in no way matched up, each was as individual as a flower, but I did my best, reaching for a photograph, examining it carefully, twisting to pin it in its proper place, as absorbed in the task as a painter before a giant canvas. Picture by picture I created a sort of cubist montage of perfect body parts. And as I worked, something miraculous happened, the disparate parts came together in my mind, this ankle, that shoulder, that finger. As I put the parts of her body together, in my mind, I saw the body move and stretch and turn and bend.

  When I was finished, when all the photographs were arranged on my wall, I sat on my bed and stared, and as I did, fear dropped like a black crow onto the base of my spine, sending out spurts of adrenaline that set me to shaking. There was something coming down on me, something handed to me by Joey Cheaps and kept alive for me by some strange unknown entity, something bigger than I ever could have suspected that first day in La Vigna when Joey Parma disclosed to me the darkest spot in his muddied past. It had cost Joey his life and sent Kimberly Blue my way and caused Earl Dante to threaten me in his smooth hissy lisp. It was huge and I was in the middle of it, for good or for ill, and I had to find my way into its heart before it swallowed me whole. And it seemed, somehow, that these pictures would lead me there.

  These pictures, yes, and something else, a question, the question that Earl Dante had asked, trying and failing to hide the keenness of his interest. Who is behind the debt? he asked. Who is behind the questions? He wanted to know, and so did I. It was time to find out. It was time to meet Eddie Dean.

  But before I did, I needed to know exactly what I was dealing with, I needed to peer into a dead man’s past.

  Chapter

  19

  “I HAD BEEN warned you would darken my doorstep,” said Jeffrey Telushkin as we sat in his time warp of a living room.

  “Detective McDeiss informed you of all my faults, no doubt,” I said.

  “And more, I can assure you,” said Telushkin, his eyes bright, his hands coming together in a clap of glee. “He was positively savage. All of which, of course, only peaked my interest. So I made inquiries of my own, just to learn what I could.”

  “Nothing too awful, I hope.”

  Telushkin didn’t respond, he just chuckled and sat back in his chair. Telushkin was nothing like I expected for a former special agent of the FBI. He was short, round, with a bristly gray mustache, circular black glasses, and very shiny, very small black shoes. And he was cheerful, oh my yes, so very cheerful.

  “You’ve come to talk about Tommy Greeley, from what I understand,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “His name has come up in a case I’m involved with, concerning something that happened many years ago.”

  “Can you give me a clue, at least, as to what it’s about?”

  “No, I’m sorry, there is a privilege I must abide, but anything you can tell me about Tommy Greeley will be much appreciated.”

  “Tommy Greeley, the one that got away. Can I get you some tea? Maybe some Earl Grey?”

  “That would be wonderful,” I said.

  As Telushkin bounded to his kitchenette, I took a swift gaze about and then stood to get a closer look. I was recovering from the night before, but slowly. The bruise on my ribs had turned a fine shade of yellow violet, my wrist still ached whenever I pressed it back, so I pressed it back constantly to be sure it was still aching. But I was here on business, so I tried to ignore the pain as I examined Telushkin’s living room.

  The walls were covered with familiar Picasso prints, a colorful outline of a rooster, the silhouettes of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, along with original and badly painted abstract and cubist paintings of naked women, paintings whose colors had dimmed over time. I peered at one of them more closely. Yes, of course, a tiny J.T. painted in the corner. There was a spinet piano wedged into one section of the modest one-bedroom but the rest of the furniture would have been considered stylish fifty years ago, rounded chrome legs and arms, square cushions, thin slabs of wood. Henry Miller, I assumed. And Henry Miller was on the bookshelves too, the other Henry Miller, along with Joyce and Bellow, Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett, early Updike, early Wouk, a massive biography of Ben Gurion, oversized picture books on Surrealism, the Impressionists, Picasso, Picasso, more Picasso. I recognized the decor and the ambiance, yes I did. I could imagine old copies of the New Yorker stacked thigh-high in the bathroom.

  There were bunches of photographs in silver frames scattered here and there on side tables, on the piano. A younger Telushkin and a prim little woman, undoubtedly Telushkin’s wife. A middle-aged Telushkin with the same wife and some children, presumably his own. Assorted wedding pictures as the children hitched one after the other under the chupa. An older Telushkin alone with his grand-children. A widower now, or had the wife simply had enough of the Henry Miller and just upped and left? Along with those family mementos were the expected trophy photographs of a man who had spent his career in public service one way or the other: Telushkin with Robert Kennedy, with Johnson, with Carter, with Clinton. Was I detecting a pattern?

  “Ah, Mr. Carl, yes.” He brought in a wooden tray with a ceramic teapot, two cups on saucers, a sugar bowl with sugar cubes, a small milk pitcher. “How do you like your tea?”

  “Just plain,” I said, sitting down again.

  “I like mine with milk and sugar, in the British way. There now, how is that? Yes.” He stared at me over his teacup as he took a sip, as if he were sizing me up for some unknown purpose. “So. Mr. Carl,” he said, continuing his appraisal. I grew uncomfortable under his stare, looked around.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “Thank you. I try to keep modern.”

  “You said that Tommy Greeley was the one who got away.”

  “Yes, I did. Of them all, he was the only one not to pay the piper, don’t you see? Which is unfortunate, since he was the main target all along.”

  “Target of what, Mr. Telushkin?”

  “Jeffrey. Call me Jeffrey. I’m retired now, no need to stand on ceremony any longer. The target of my inquiry. My great success. It was I who stumbled on it all.” He looked at me, waited for admiration to show on my face, was disappointed. “How much don’t you know?”

  I took a sip of the tea, dark and biting. “Pretty much everything, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, let me see. Perhaps I’ll begin at the beginning, a novel idea, no? It started with Babbage, Bradley Babbage. A noted entrepreneur, young and successful and much the hit with the ladies. You must have seen his picture in the paper at the time. He was a star at all kinds of political and civic functions.” His eyebrows rose with a
genuine merriment. “He raised money for Rizzo, Specter, and then for Reagan.”

  “Unless he was in Highlights for Children, which was all I was reading at the time, I would have missed him.”

  “Well, too bad then, he put on quite the spectacle. But things in the Babbage empire were not entirely as they seemed. There were questions about the profitability of a building he owned, and another enterprise he ran, a limousine service actually, and about a small publishing house he had purchased that was slow in paying its royalties. It was the complaining authors that put us on the track, imagine that? Babbage was claiming losses in everything, so no taxes were paid, and yet he was constantly buying and expanding. It seemed, well, peculiar. It seemed to deserve looking into, yet it seemed also to be an avenue not so interesting for the agency to vigorously pursue. And, because of the administration then in power and the subject’s connection to it, not an investigation designed to enhance the career of any agent who took it on. So they gave it to me.

  “I was with the department then, of course, but I was mostly considered a mid-level drone, ushered into a corner cubicle and ignored. A bit of excess waste kept on by civil service regulations,” he said, his eyes trying to twinkle but unable to hide the angry pride underneath, “not up to normal department standards. You see, I was never one of those agents who charged about with my gun drawn. It is the hero types who get the press, the big cases, who rise to heights in the department. Yes, I understood that, but that didn’t always make them the most effective agents, despite their swaggered steps and deep voices.

  “Do you know how Rockefeller became the richest man in America?” he asked. “He kept his books more carefully than anyone else. He bought and sold things, that is all, but he knew to the penny the profit on each and every transaction and made his decisions accordingly. You can change the world with an eye on the books, you see. I am an accountant by training. I was not thought much of by the hierarchy or the heroes, but I could read the books better than anyone. And when they gave me the Babbage case I started with the books and that’s how I discovered him.”

  “Discovered who?”

  “The secret investor. There had to be a secret investor. Babbage was losing money, but he was still buying businesses. So slowly, carefully, I traced the money that was keeping Babbage afloat, traced it back from one account to the next, the whole trail. I found the checks, the shifting accounts, the wired deposits, traced it all back to the source. Cash deposits, you see. Some were made by Babbage himself, receipts from his business, he told the bank. But the receipts didn’t match the books, they were higher than his cash flow could have possibly allowed. Something was wrong. And then there were others, from other accounts, cash deposits straight into the bank, all less than ten thousand dollars, the amount that triggered financial reporting, but adding up, when you took them as a whole, to far far more. That is a crime, you know, Mr. Carl, dividing up a single cash deposit into many to avoid reporting requirements. So it was a snap to get the warrant to find the name behind it all, the hidden investor who was laundering his money through Babbage. And there he was, as if his picture itself was painted in the various columns of the various ledgers.”

  “Tommy Greeley?” I said.

  “Yes, of course. He was a law student, that was all. His family was once firmly middle class but it had fallen on hard times, so you would expect him to be struggling to pay even his tuition. But tuition was paid, he had a condominium apartment, a fancy car, a beautiful girl, a huge circle of friends. He took his friends on vacations in Hawaii, was well known in the casinos at Atlantic City for throwing lavish and risqué parties. It was all too obvious to ignore. When I brought it to my superiors, they added three agents and a prosecutor to the case, three hero types and a lawyer with a fetish for free publicity, all of whom tried to elbow me out. That is the way that type works, but you see I wasn’t so easy to get rid of. They began presenting the case to the grand jury, they thought they could do it themselves, but they were wrong. You see, I had something they needed. I had the books.

  “More tea, Mr. Carl?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I watched Telushkin carefully as he poured himself another cup, dropped in one sugar cube, then another, swirled in the milk. Something about him riled me. Maybe it was his utter fatuousness, or maybe it was the way his voice colored judgmental as he talked about everyone else in his story. There was a not-so-hidden subtext to all his comments, as if he assumed, for some reason I could very well imagine, that he and I were so ideologically simpatico that much of what he wanted to express need not be said. His very discretion seemed to put us in the same jolly conspiracy. His self-satisfaction was so evident, I wanted to knock his glasses off.

  “I brought in Babbage and his lawyer,” Telushkin continued. “His understandable position was to say not a thing, to plead the Fifth. He was there only to listen, said his lawyer. So I showed them both what I discovered in the books, the raw numbers that had told me everything. Page by page, entry by entry, I went through it all, and when I was through, both he and the lawyer realized with absolute certainty that Babbage was caught. Tax evasion, of course, and money laundering, yes. But then, when I told him in my quiet way that there was more, that I could twist my reading of the books to tab him with being an integral part of whatever Tommy Greeley was part of, and when the penalties of that became clear, he blanched. And he turned. And he exposed everything that had been going on.”

  “And what was that, Mr. Telushkin?” I said.

  “Call me Jeffrey. Please. I insist. And I’ll call you Victor, is that all right?”

  I smiled at him like we were in a league together and nodded and gripped my teacup ever tighter.

  “It was drugs, of course,” he said. “Cocaine. Massive amounts brought up from Florida and distributed through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, as far north as Boston, as far west as Phoenix. It was more than a business, Victor, it was an empire. We thought we were seeing all the enterprise’s profits being run through Babbage, but he was only working with some of the money from only one of the participants, from Tommy Greeley. But there was another leader too, and others were taking out huge amounts of money. They were selling sixty million dollars a year of drugs, Victor. Sixty million dollars. A year. And it had been going on for half a decade.”

  I put down my cup because it had started to shake atop its saucer. This was big, bigger than I had ever imagined, and it fit perfectly with what Joey had told me, about what Tommy was carrying when he was killed, and the cool way he handled the threat before Joey’s first swing with the bat. And something else, the thing that made my cup shake on the saucer. There was suddenly more than the suitcase at stake. Only Tommy Greeley’s money had gone through Babbage. Where was the rest of it, and was that the reason Tommy was killed? And was that the reason Joey too, twenty years later, was killed? My contingency fee agreement with Mrs. Parma began to glow with a fabulous heat.

  “But, as could be expected, Victor, even with all that business, the heroes were having trouble breaking into the organization, the heroes were finding themselves stymied. This was more than a business organization, all the participants were friends, comrades. They had, all of them, made each other rich. And they weren’t talking, not a word. The grand jury was getting nowhere. They couldn’t prove up the drug charges. We would get some of them for tax evasion, yes, but it was looking like only a tax case. Until I brought Babbage into the grand jury room.

  “I can’t tell you everything he told me, Victor, or what he told the grand jury, that would be improper, not to mention illegal, but he broke it open, did our Mr. Babbage. His testimony was like the wedge that split everything apart. The indictments are public record, and the results were well publicized in the press. There were two indicted as so-called kingpins, eligible for stiff sentences without parole. One was a fellow called Prod, Cooper Prod. He is still in jail, don’t know when he gets out. The other was Tommy Greeley.”

  “The one that got away,” I said, almost ple
ased that this trophy had eluded Telushkin even though I knew what had really happened to him.

  “Yes. I had wanted him especially, with his high living and his haughtiness. You know, once when I went to talk to him, to see what I could see, he laughed at me. He laughed, as if it was inconceivable that someone like me could corner someone like him. And then he leaned over and quietly, in my ear, said ‘You’re not smart enough.’ I wasn’t sure I had caught what he had said, I asked him to repeat it, it was too much to believe that someone could be so arrogant. But he just laughed at me and walked away.”

  “What happened to him, do you know?”

  “Of course I know.”

  I peered at him closely. “What?”

  “He ran,” he said. “He took what he could and he ran. But he didn’t get far.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He was a troubled man dealing with dangerous people. There was a tremendous amount of money involved and he owed as much as he was owed. Not a healthy situation. When someone runs away he always slips up somehow. After a few months, or a few years, his arrogance gets the best of him, he thinks he has won, he has escaped, that his pursuers have lost interest. He will make contact with old friends, with family, he will make a mistake. But Tommy Greeley never did. I spent the rest of my career searching for him, checking the mail to his parents, his girlfriend, keeping tabs on those of his friends released from jail. It became something of an obsession. Call me Ishmael, I suppose.”

  “It was Ahab obsessed with the whale,” I said.

  He clapped. “So it was. So it was. But there was nothing, nothing. Tommy Greeley wasn’t clever enough or modest enough to pull it off. All that time searching for him was not wasted, it gave me the certainty that I sought, the certainty to conclude that something happened early on, that somehow his run to freedom failed at the start. He got his, along with the rest, only he got it worse. Well now, Victor. Anything else? More tea?”