The Dead Man

by Joel Goldman

  "Like what?"

  "For starters, like Anthony Corliss's adventures in dream land at the University of Wisconsin. Hiring someone with his track record is grounds for punitive damages."

  Bolt was baiting me again, hoping I'd give him something he didn't already have. When I didn't respond, he threw more chum in the water.

  "And then there's Peggy Murray."

  "Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?"

  "I don't care but it will mean everything to Milo Harper. You tell him that. Remind him what happened the last time he took me on. He'll get a settlement offer from me tomorrow. It will be on the table until the end of the week. Tell him to take it because he'll never have a better chance to put this behind him."

  "That's the second ultimatum I've been given in the last five minutes. Must be a special on them today."

  "Luck comes in bunches."

  "In that case, I can do with a little less luck."

  Ammara drove past us, glancing my way, looking past me for oncoming traffic, making me invisible. Kent stared straight ahead. Dolan aimed a finger gun at me, pulling the trigger. The traffic cleared and they were gone.

  "Car has government tags and the guy in front has a shitty sense of humor. Must be friends of yours," Bolt said.

  "In another life."

  "That's what I like about what I do. I only have one life. It's a simple one, dedicated to my clients. I know that sounds like a self-serving, sanctimonious bunch of crap but it's true. They depend on me and I depend on them to depend on me. There's no ambiguity, no shades of gray. We're loyal to one another. I don't have friends from another life taking real or imaginary shots at me and I don't need anyone to watch my back."

  "You sleep at night?"

  "Like a dead man."

  "No worries? No nightmares?"

  "Just one. Letting my people down."

  "That doesn't sound so simple, all those people counting on you."

  "The cases are complicated and the stakes are high but it's a simple life as long as I follow one rule."

  "What's that?"

  "Do whatever it takes."

  Chapter Forty-three

  I slid into the passenger seat next to Lucy. She was locked in a thousand-yard stare, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, her eyes red-rimmed and full.

  "Hey," I said. "You okay?"

  "Yeah." She triggered the ignition, put the car in gear, and glided toward the street, taking it too slow like a drunk trying to walk a straight line.

  "So, how'd it go with Ammara and Dolan?"

  She took a deep breath. "Some things you never get over, you know that?"

  "Tell me about it."

  She pulled into traffic. I didn't ask where we were going. I'd let her find her way.

  "I'd come off a twenty-hour shift when I was busted for the diamonds," she began, reading more into my offhand suggestion to tell me about it than I had intended. She glanced at me, her raised brows asking if she should continue.

  "It's okay. Go on."

  She took another deep breath, gathering herself. "My eight hours were up when I found the jewelry guy's body. We were short-staffed. It was a hot case and the thought of going home, taking a shower, and going to bed with those stones under my pillow freaked me out. I never asked for the overtime. I just stayed with the case. It was understood that's what I'd do. The whole time, I'm trying to figure out how to get back in the motel room, drop the stones on the floor, and let someone else find them, but there's no way. First the room is packed with cops, CSI, everybody. After that, it's taped off and I'm on the street with one of the detectives, a drop-dead gorgeous guy named Ricky Brown who I'd been flirting with for a month, trying to get him to ask me out and I think he's interested except he's coming out of a messy relationship only he's not all the way out yet. No way I can go back. Part of me is scared shitless and part of me is so jacked up I can't see straight thinking everything will be okay if we just don't catch the guy that did it. I'm like praying, please God, I know he killed the salesman and I screwed up but how about giving me a break because nothing is going to bring the dead guy back and I'll make it up to you if you let me skate. I'll sell the stones and give the money to the church. I swear on my mother's grave I will. Then, twelve hours later when we catch the guy and he's got the stuff on him and Ricky asks him is that all of it and he says it's all of it except for some diamonds that he left lying on the floor and Ricky looks at me and I choke, I mean I don't say anything but it's like I'm saying everything. Later, when I'm serving my sentence, I talk to this prison chaplain and I tell him the story and that I must have been really screwed up to think God would answer my prayer and the priest says to me that God answers all prayers, it's just that sometimes the answer is no. Which makes sense so I keep praying that I don't screw up again because I don't think I can handle going back and then Dolan puts me in the backseat of their car and starts grilling me about you and the pictures of Enoch's body I took and they found on your laptop and I swear to Jesus for a few minutes there I was back in that shitty Gaithersburg interrogation room, Ricky staring at me across the table, the diamonds spread out in front of us, him saying what a shame because we could have had something and me thinking my life is over and I want to die. That's how Dolan makes me feel and then he says that he knows about Gaithersburg and that if I help him, maybe wear a wire with you that they'll take care of me. All I have to do is give you up."

  "Do whatever it takes," I said, the words becoming the zealous mantra of the true believer no matter the cause.

  She pounded the steering wheel, looking at me for the first time since I got in the car, tears pouring down her face. "Exactly. The bastard!"

  I opened the console between our seats and handed her a package of tissues. She sniffled and wiped her eyes and nose.

  "What did you tell Dolan?"

  She smiled at me. "I told him to go fuck himself. Guy like him, it's the only way he'd get any."

  She was a mess but a beautiful mess. I stroked her hair and patted her on the shoulder. "You did good, kiddo. So, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the rest of the play?"

  She laughed at the old joke, a small gurgle that blossomed into full out whooping, spreading to me, the two of us howling until she was crying again and I was shaking, our laughter opening our internal relief valves, purging the day's pressures, letting us begin again.

  It started with a phone call from Kate.

  "We just turned on the news. Are you okay?"

  "Never better," I stammered, punctuating my answer with a grunt.

  "Right. You sound terrific. Go home and take it easy."

  "Make me believe you and Simon haven't come up with anything, in which case I'll have to fire you, and maybe I will."

  "Is Lucy driving?"

  "Yes."

  "In that case, you can come over. We're at my office. See you in a few."

  I gave Lucy directions. "Any luck with the construction crew on Regina Blair's project?"

  "No. She was on site a lot but no one was working the morning she was killed."

  Lucy had classified Blair's death as a homicide. My gut said she was right even though we still couldn't prove it.

  "Did you ask the people who knew her about her fear of heights?"

  "Yeah. The foreman said she was famous for it. He joked with her about it but he liked her. Said she never got close to the edge of anything unless it was the sidewalk. He gave me a lead, though."

  "What?"

  "He introduced me to the homeless guy who found her body. You'd be surprised how bad someone can smell in the middle of winter. His name is Vinny and he's equal parts teeth and charm, which is to say he's doesn't have much of either. But, twenty bucks bought me a dissertation on life on the street and a complaint that no one gave him a reward for finding the body."

  "He probably went through her pockets before he flagged down a cop."

  "That's the thing. He came clean on that at the get-go. He complained that she didn
't have anything on her worth stealing."

  "Nothing?"

  "He said she had a cell phone but that was no good to him since there wasn't anybody he wanted to call. He went through her wallet but the liquor store wouldn't let him use her credit cards and that would just land him in jail anyway. He was looking for cash, jewelry, a watch, anything he could turn into a fifth of gin without a lot of questions. He figured someone got to the body ahead of him and he said that pissed him off more than anything because that alley was his. I don't remember the police report saying anything about her being robbed."

  "Maybe she wasn't robbed, not the way Vinny means it."

  "Is there another way?"

  "It's not the way, it's the reason," I said, picturing Anne Kendall's mutilated left hand, her ring finger snapped off with wire shears. "Vinny was looking for something he could sell. The killer was looking for souvenirs."

  Chapter Forty-four

  Kate's office was on the second floor of a block long building at Thirty-eighth and Broadway, the north end anchored on the ground floor by a jazz joint called Blues On Broadway. The rest of the street level block was occupied by a dry cleaner, a tattoo parlor, a tax pre-parer, and a comic book store. The second floor was all offices, a dentist on the south end, a lawyer on the north end, and Kate's firm in the middle.

  Wilson Bluestone Jr. owned the building and the jazz joint. Kate told me he'd rehabbed it, updating the old dark brown brick exterior with new dark brown brick and green awnings, gutting the office space, and finishing it out with twenty-first century upgrades, making it eco-friendly and techno-smart, which Kate translated as hip, chic, and cheap enough.

  Not long after I left the Bureau, Kate took me into the bar and introduced me to Bluestone, calling him Blues, which explained the club's name. He had five inches and forty pounds of ripped muscle on me, and the easy assurance that both attracted and repelled trouble. Kate said he owed his copper coloring to his Shawnee Indian ancestors.

  She also introduced me to Lou Mason, the dark-haired, dark-eyed lawyer who was tending bar. When I asked him if that paid better than practicing law, he said he was taking a sabbatical from the practice, Blues grinning, saying that sabbatical was lawyer jive for getting your ticket punched. Mason nodded and grinned back at him, adding that, either way, bartending beat the hell out of working for a living. Mason shook my hand and gave Kate a hug that lasted a beat too long unless they had a history. When I asked Kate, she said it was a long time ago, the hug saying it might be history but it wasn't ancient history.

  There was an entrance to the second floor offices in the center of the block on the Broadway side and another in an alley on the backside. I guided Lucy to the alley where we parked, taking the stairs to Kate's office, the door bearing the firm name in bold black, DMC, and beneath that in a smaller font, Decision Making Consultants.

  Kate's ex, Alan, once told me that he liked the name because it reminded him of his favorite musical group, Run DMC. Alan is bald, five-five stretched out, and one forty-five wet with a sun-starved complexion and a rhythmically challenged body that's been declared a muscle-free zone. When I laughed and told him that he and hip-hop went together like pocket protectors and crack cocaine, he stopped talking to me. I was too hard on him but I couldn't help it. Kate had loved him, married him, had a child with him, and still worked with him. He had something she had loved that I couldn't see and didn't have. On the other hand, maybe I wasn't hard enough on him.

  Kate described the office as egalitarian. It was all open space, no private offices, everyone on equal footing on the geographic food chain, the floor divided into task zones separated by chest-high partitions, money that could have paid for show-off furnishings instead plowed into the hardware and software that made DMC run.

  The office was littered with empty pizza boxes, wadded sandwich wrappers, donut sacks, and coffee cups. People were slumped in their chairs, a few watching the screen savers on their computer monitors, one long-haired guy tapping the last drops from cans of Red Bull onto his tongue before adding them to the pyramid he was building on his desk.

  Some of them looked up, nodding as we passed; others were too wiped out to notice. They'd been going hard for twenty hours. We found Kate, her father, Henry, Alan, and Simon gathered in one corner.

  Henry was sleeping, his thick body nestled in a deep-backed chair, his legs stretched out, chubby fingers locked over his chest, breathing lightly. The older he'd gotten, the longer he'd grown his bushy white hair, letting it hang to his collar.

  Alan was standing at the windows, watching the traffic on Broadway, wearing a navy warm-up suit with red piping, one of several that comprised his casual wardrobe. Simon, his eyes glazed, was shuffling through a stack of papers. Kate, her back to me, was watching a video on a desktop computer, one frozen frame at a time. Alan saw us first.

  "Oh, it's you," he said.

  Kate turned around, her face lighting up. She stood, swept her hair off her forehead, and gave me a quick kiss, squeezing my shoulders in a half hug. Alan watched, swallowed, and resumed his traffic survey.

  Simon looked up from his papers. "I'm never buying you a cup of coffee again for as long as I live."

  The subdued greeting was enough to rouse Henry. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, sat up straight, and tilted his chin toward me.

  "Jack," he said.

  "Henry."

  It was as close as we ever got to a conversation. Kate sighed, wordlessly apologizing for Alan and her father. I was Alan's rival in a competition that he'd lost years ago and Henry was his second, backing him up and encouraging Kate to give their marriage a second chance for their son's sake.

  "Your people look exhausted," I said.

  "They are exhausted," she said. "But they've worked their butts off."

  "How far have you gotten?"

  Simon answered. "The staff just finished the background checks on the dream project volunteers. I did the ones for the people on the list Frank Gentry gave you. "We've generated a lot of paper but I haven't had time to process the content."

  "Then send the staff home," I said. "Tell anybody who doesn't feel like driving to call a cab. Add it to the expenses and tell them I appreciate what they did."

  "Will do," Simon said, making his way toward the troops.

  "What about the videos?" I asked Kate.

  "That's taking longer," she said. "Dad, Alan, and I are about halfway through but we're done in. We can't see straight. We need a break."

  "Anything worth talking about?"

  She shrugged. "A few, but it's hard to tell without more context. Simon says there's additional material in the institute's files on the volunteers that might help but he doesn't have access to it."

  "I'll get what you need from Frank Gentry in the morning."

  "Morning would be good. We can be back at it by eight, right, Alan?" she said.

  He didn't answer, his hands planted on the glass, his attention on the street.

  "Eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Okay, Alan?" she repeated.

  "No," he said, his voice quiet but firm.

  Kate cringed, bit her lip and took a breath. "Okay. What time do you want to get started?"

  He turned and faced us, hands jammed in his pants pockets. "I'm not coming in. I quit."

  Kate's eyes narrowed, her mouth slack. "What do you mean, you quit? You can't quit. We took this job and we have to finish it. Our employees are depending on us."

  "Kate, you're kidding yourself. The employees finished the background checks. There's nothing else for them to do. Nothing. Not on this project or any other project. They wrapped up what little we had in the pipeline last week."

  Her eyes darted past my shoulder to the rest of the floor, lowering her voice to keep the conversation semiprivate. "This job will pay us enough to keep going until we get more work."

  "You're wrong, honey," said Henry. "I wish you weren't but you are. This job will let us give everyone two weeks of severance and cover our rent for the res
t of the month. After that, we're all in and all done."

  She wheeled around, confronting her father, hands on her hips. "You taught me never to quit."

  Henry was tall, his height, girth, and flowing mane giving him a mythological cast as he stood, putting one hand on her shoulder.

  "I also taught you not to be a fool. It's okay. Our people are good people. They'll find something else. Hard times make for hard choices and, sometimes, choices that are past due being made. Like for me. I'm eighty-three years old. It's time I retired. I'll be here in the morning to tell the staff and help you finish reviewing the videos. Good night, sweetheart," he said, kissing her cheek. "I love you."

  "What about you?" Kate said to Alan as her father ambled toward the exit.

  "I'm sorry, Kate. I can't do this anymore," he said, waving one hand toward the rest of the office but aiming a finger at me, making his real point, then dropping his arm to his side in surrender. "Anyway, you and Henry are a lot better with the facial action coding system. I'm just in the way."

  Kate's color was building, her face red and her blue eyes flashing. "So you're just walking out on me?"

  He shrugged, turning his palms up. "You walked out on me a long time ago, Kate. I'm just catching up."

  Kate stamped her foot, her hands balled into fists, her arms clamped to her sides. "Damn it, Alan, is that what this is about? Our divorce? Are you kidding me? You've got to move on, Alan."

  He picked up his coat, pulled a muffler from one sleeve, draping it around his neck. "I am. I've taken a job with a neuromarketing firm in San Diego. It's good money and I'm going in as a partner."

  "San Diego! How are you going to do that? Are you walking out on our son too?"

  "I'll commute on weekends until the end of the school year."

  "Then what?"

  He took a deep breath. "Then Brian and I are moving to San Diego. He'll be fourteen in a month and legally can choose which one of us he wants to live with. I told him about the job and he wants to go with me."

  Kate folded over like she'd been punched, stumbling backward. I caught her and eased her into a chair. She put her head in her hands and let out a low moan. Alan left without another word, his head down. I scooted a chair next to Kate's, sat beside her, my arm around her, pulling her close.