by Gregg Loomis
They had screwed around with the wrong family. He had no experience in law enforcement but he did have a unique repertoire of acquaintances, people who had access to information unavailable to police. If he had to call every one of them to find the guilty party, he’d do it.
The anger was strangely comforting. It brought order to an otherwise senseless world. He imagined the taste of revenge against persons unknown, ignoring the growing impatience of the cemetery’s crew. His lingering at graveside was postponing the removal of the Astroturf that had concealed the mound of raw dirt from sensitive eyes, the return of the backhoe that would push the mound of soil onto coffins that had remained closed during the service.
A gentle hand touched his shoulder. His thoughts scattered as Francis patted him on the back. Lang had asked him to officiate not only as Janet’s priest and friend but also as his own friend.
“Lang, you need to be thinking of Janet and Jeff, not revenge.”
Lang sighed. “That obvious, huh?”
“To anyone who looks at your face.”
“I can’t just walk away, Francis, forget what happened. Someone did this, killed two innocent people. And don’t tell me it was God’s will.”
The priest shook his head, staring at the two graves. “I assume you asked me to perform the service because you wanted to involve a higher force than yourself. I. . .”
“Oh, bullshit!” Lang growled. “Your higher force was notably absent when needed.”
He instantly regretted the remark, the result of grief and anger as well as a sleepless night or two. Although Lang professed no particular faith, there had been no need to belittle someone else’s.
“Forgive me, Francis,” he said. “I’m a little raw right now.”
If the priest had been offended, he didn’t show it. “Understandable, Lang. I also think I understand what you’re thinking. Wouldn’t it make more sense to let the French police handle it?”
Lang snorted derisively. “Easy enough for you to say. To them it’s just two more homicides. I want justice and I want it now.”
Francis studied him for a moment, large brown eyes seeming to read his thoughts. “Just because you survived one risky occupation doesn’t mean you’re qualified to track down whoever did this thing.”
Lang had never told Francis about his former employment. The priest was smart enough to guess that a lawyer who had attended law school in his thirties and had a blank spot almost a decade long in his resume likely had a past he didn’t want to discuss. Francis had surmised the truth or something very close to it.
“Qualified or not, I have to try,” Lang said.
Francis nodded silently and turned his head to stare down the gentle slope before giving his usual parting shot. “I’ll be praying for you.”
Lang managed to tweak his mouth into a grimace that didn’t quite reach a smile as he gave his usual reply. “Can’t hurt, I guess.”
It was only as he watched Francis walk down the slope that Lang realized he had made a commitment to himself. Not a promise born in fury, not some feel-good resolution to be forgotten, but a commitment.
How he was going to fulfill it, he had no idea.
3
Atlanta
An hour later
Lang went from the funeral to Janet’s house.
He would have to put it on the market, of course, although he was avoiding doing so. Janet had worked hard as a single-income parent for this place where she could give her son a home of his own. It was a part of both of them with which Lang was reluctant to part.
The grass needed cutting, he noted sadly, a condition Janet would never have tolerated. In back, he almost wept again when he saw the swing set he and Janet had erected two years ago. The effort had consumed most of a hot summer afternoon and a cooler of icy beer. Only last month, Jeff has confided to his uncle that he was too big now to play on swing sets like little kids.
Lang unlocked the door, noting that the place had that stuffiness that unused places seem to acquire. Telling himself that he needed to make a thorough inspection, he wandered upstairs and down, winding up in Janet’s living room. He smiled wanly. It was far neater than he had ever seen it. The walls were covered with her paintings: mournful saints, dour-faced martyrs or bloody crucifixions. Janet collected religious art and Lang was the one who had started it.
Years before, a defector from one of the Balkan countries had brought with him part of his art collection, painings he had no doubt stolen from some Communist-banned church and was selling with an enthusiasm only a recent convert to capitalism could muster. The pictures, as Lang recalled, were of a bloody and recently severed head of John the Baptist and an equally gory body bristling with arrows. Saint Sebastian, he supposed. The colors were remarkable, the style early Byzantine and the cost at the London auction quite reasonable. In light of Janet’s recent conversion to Catholicism, the gifts had seemed appropriate. Or at least the source of a good laugh.
They were a bigger hit than Lang had contemplated, igniting an interest that would last the rest of her life. Janet was not a particularly religious person, her Catholicism notwithstanding. She did, however, enjoy the portrayals of the sundry saints in all their miseries of martyrdom. It was the only sort of art, she explained, she could really afford. Impressionists and their contemporary progeny far exceeded her finances. There was enough church art on the market to keep the price of even some of the earlier pieces within her range.
She also got a certain amount of pleasure out of Lang’s not always successful efforts to translate the Latin that frequently appeared in the paintings.
He understood the interest in collecting. In his various travels, Lang had managed to gather together a small group of objects connected to the classical world he found so fascinating: a Roman coin with Augustus Caesar’s image on it, an Etruscan votive cup, the hilt of a Macedonian dagger that might have belonged to one of Alexander’s soldiers.
He was locking the front door when the mail truck pulled up to the curb. Lang watched as the postman stuffed the mailbox and drove off.
Sara, Lang’s secretary, had come by the past few days to collect the mail, mostly a stream of advertising flyers that seemed to proclaim that life, for the buying public, continued as though nothing had happened. The irony of Janet’s existence being reduced to bits on some huckster’s mailing list was a bitter one. As her executor, there were a few bills which Lang intended to pay before saying farewell on her behalf to AmEx and Visa.
The mailbox contained a postcard announcing a sale at Neiman’s, the midtown neighborhood paper and an envelope with the name “Ansley Galleries” printed on it. Curious, Lang opened it, extracting a computer-printed letter informing “Dear Customer” that the gallery had been unable to reach anyone by phone but the job was complete.
Ansley Galleries was a small storefront down around Sixth or Seventh Street, a few minutes from where he was standing. There seemed no point in having Sara make an extra trip.
The teenaged girl behind the counter had spiked purple hair, lipstick to match, a butterfly tattooed on her neck and a ring through her left eyebrow. Looking at her made not having children of his own easier to bear. She glanced at the letter, then at him. Her jaws stopped masticating a wad of gum long enough to ask, “You’re . . . ?”
“Langford Reilly, Dr. Holt’s brother.”
She looked back down at the letter in her hand and then back at him. “Jesus! I read in the paper . . . I’m sorry. Dr. Holt was a sweet lady. Bummer.”
He had had enough condolences for a lifetime, let alone today. Still, it was nice of the kid. “Thanks. I appreciate that. I’m taking care of her estate. That’s why I’m picking up . . .”
He pointed to the paper in her hand.
“Oh! Sorry! I’ll get it for you.”
He tracked her progress between the shelves behind the counter by the sound of popping gum.
When she returned, she had a package wrapped in brown paper. “Dr. Holt sent this from Pa
ris, had us frame and appraise it for insurance.” She tore off a small envelope that had been taped to the paper. “This is a Polaroid of the painting and the appraisal. You’ll want to keep them somewhere safe and we’ll keep a copy.” She put both envelope and package on the counter and consulted a sales slip. “That’ll be two sixty-seven fifty-five, including tax.”
Lang handed her his plastic and watched her swipe it through a terminal as he stuffed the envelope into his inside coat pocket. What was he going to do with some piece of religious art? Selling it was out of the question; Janet had bought it in the last hours of her life. He would find a place for it somewhere.
He signed the credit card receipt, wadded it into a pocket and took the package under one arm. Stopping at the doorway, he let his eyes acclimate from the dark of the shop to the bright spring light outside.
Something out there was not quite right, out of place.
The old sensitivity which made him habitually aware of his surroundings had become so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, like a deer’s instinctive listening for the sound of a predator. His mind noted the doorman of his condo standing on the left instead of the right side of the door, a jalopy in an upscale neighborhood where Mercedes and BMWs belonged.
It took a second for him to realize he had stopped and was staring at the street and another to realize why. The man on the other side, the derelict who appeared to be sleeping off the demons of cheap wine in the paper- and glass-littered doorway of one of the neighborhood’s empty buildings. He sat, facing Lang, eyes seemingly closed. The worn camo jacket, tattered jeans and filthy, laceless sneakers were in character. The man could have been one of the city’s thousands of wandering homeless. But how many were clean-shaven with hair cut short enough not to hang below the knit cap? Even assuming this one had recently been released from a hygiene-conscious jail, it was unlikely he would be here so close to noon when the church down the street was giving away soup and sandwiches. Also, he had gone to sleep in a hurry. Lang was certain the bum had not been there when he arrived at the gallery, yet he had found a suitable spot and dozed off in two or three minutes. Even the gut-corroding poison purchased with dollars panhandled from guilty yuppies wouldn’t knock him out that quickly.
Of course, Lang told himself, he could be mistaken. There were plenty of beggars in Midtown and he could have failed to notice this one. But it was not likely.
Raising a hand as though to shade his eyes, Lang left a space between his fingers, keeping the sleeper in view as he walked to where the Porsche was parked. The knit cap slowly turned. Lang, too, was being watched.
In the car, he circled the block. The man was gone.
Lang reminded himself that paranoia doesn’t necessarily mean someone really isn’t after you.
CHAPTER THREE
1
Atlanta
That afternoon
Lang knew Sara, his secretary, would have alerted him to any emergency in his practice. It was as much as to occupy his mind as to see things for himself that he went to his office, a suite high in one of downtown Atlanta’s taller buildings.
She had been full of teary condolences at that morning’s funeral, and Lang expected Sara to begin weeping again. She had, after all, known Janet and Jeff well. To his surprise, she greeted him with, “Kennel called. Janet left this number as an emergency contact. The dog, Grumps, been there over two weeks. Want me to pick it up? What kind of a name is ‘Grumps’, anyway? What ever happened to Spot or Fido?”
“Name Jeff picked out, I guess.” Lang had no idea what he was going to do with one large, ugly dog. But Grumps had been Jeff’s friend and he sure as hell wasn’t going to see the animal sent to the pound. Actually, when he thought about it, having the mutt around might be like having a little part of his family back. “No thanks. I’ll pick him up on the way home.”
He sat down behind a desk covered with files bearing Post-Its.
Once he had retired from his previous occupation, he and Dawn had agreed the law was an appealing second career. His small pension plus her salary saw him through school. The idea of working for someone else was unappealing. Upon graduation, he set out his own shingle and began working the phones with old acquaintances for clients.
Word spread. His practice became profitable, enabling Dawn to quit her job and open the boutique of which she had always dreamed. No longer subject to the unpredictability of his former work, he was home almost every night. And when he wasn’t, his wife knew where he was and when to anticipate his return.
They pretty much had it all, as the Jimmy Buffet song says: big house, money to do what they wanted and a love for each other that time seemed to fuel like pouring gasoline on a fire. Even after five years, it hadn’t been unusual for Dawn to meet him at the door in something skimpy—or nothing at all—and they would make love in the living room, too impatient to wait to get to the bed.
It had been embarrassing the evening Lang brought a client home unannounced.
The only real cloud on their horizon was Dawn’s inability to get pregnant. After endless fertility tests, they arranged for an adoption that had been only months away when Dawn began to lose both appetite and weight. The female parts that had refused to reproduce had become malignant.
In less than a year, her full breasts had become empty sacks and her ribs looked as though they would break through the pale skin with the next labored breath. This was the first time Lang realized the same universe that could give him a loving, helpful wife could dispassionately watch her degenerate from a healthy woman into a hairless skeleton in a hospital bed where her breath stank of death and her only pleasure was the drugs that temporarily took away the pain.
As the cancer progressed, he and Dawn spoke of her recovery, the things they would do and places they would go together. Each of them hoped the other believed it. He, and he suspected she too, prayed for speed to reach the end that was inevitable.
Lang suffered in the certain knowledge of her mortality and in the irrational guilt that he was unable to give her comfort. He had more time than anyone would have wanted to prepare for her death.
As he remembered, he wondered which was worse: the torture of certain death or the sudden snatching away of his sister and nephew.
At least for the latter, he could dream of revenge, of getting even with the powers that had caused their deaths. That was a satisfaction he would never have for Dawn.
Over the years since his retirement, he had diminishing need to use his former contacts. How many of his old cohorts remained, he wondered as he groped in a desk drawer. His fingers found the false back and he slid a wooden panel out of place. Behind it was a small booklet which he pulled out and opened on the desk. Who was left? More importantly, who was left that owed him a favor?
He dialed a number with a 202 area code, let it ring twice and hung up. Somewhere, Lang’s own phone number would appear on a computer screen. In less than a second, that number would be verified with Lang’s name and location. That is, if the number he had called still belonged to the person he hoped he was calling.
Within a minute, Sara buzzed him. “There’s a Mr. Berkley on the phone, says he’s returning your call.”
Lang picked up. “Miles? How they hangin’, ole buddy?”
The reply took a split second longer than an ordinary call. The call had been routed through one of a number of random relays scattered around the globe and was completely untraceable.
“Jus’ fine, Lang. How th’ hell you doin’?” Through the years, Miles Berkley had clung to his southern drawl as though it were a prized possession.
“Not so good, Miles. I need some help.”
Lang knew his words were being compared to old voiceprints. Or verified by some technology that had come along since his departure.
Pause.
“Ennythin’ I can do, Lang . . .”
“There was a fire in Paris three days ago, looked like thermite was used.”
“So I heard.”
<
br /> Miles still read local papers. Anything abnormal, anything that might be the precursor to possible activity of interest, was noted, examined and catalogued. Miles apparently had the same job.
Grateful for that bit of luck, Lang asked, “Any military stores missing? Any ideas where that shit came from, who might have weapons like that on hand?”
“What’s your interest?” Miles wanted to know. “Think it might be a client of yours?”
“It was my sister, her friend’s house. She and my nephew were in it.”
There was a pause that was too long to attribute solely to a relay. “Shit, I’m sorry, Lang, Had no idea. I can see why you’d wanna know but we don’t have zip so far. No breakins at military installations, no inventory missing, far as we know. ’Course about ennybody could walk off with half the Russian arsenal without the Ruskies knowin’. Your sister into something she shouldna been?”
“Nothing more than her kid, her medical practice and her church. Hardly criminal.”
“That makes it tough to guess at a motive. Say, you’re not thinking of coming out of retirement, are you? Hope not. Whoever these bastards are, they’re likely to be pros. No way you can take ’em on by yourself, even if you knew who they were.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Lang lied. “You can understand my interest. Any chance you can keep me posted, you find out anything?”
“You know I can’t do that, not officially, anyway. Asshole buddy to asshole buddy, I’ll see what I can do.”
For several minutes after he hung up, Lang stared out of the window. He had just begun and already he was at a dead end.
2
Atlanta
Later the same day
Park Place was not a very original name: the developer of Lang’s condo building had taken it right off the Monopoly board. There was no Boardwalk nearby. Putting up a high-rise that looked like a stack of square checkers probably was not a new idea, either. Having a doorman in a comic opera uniform was, however, a first for Atlanta and a bit rich for any place south of New York’s Upper East Side.
