by Steven Gore
“I’m not here about the car,” Gage said. “I’m looking for your husband.”
“Ex . . . Ex-husband . . . Ex-son-of-a-bitch husband.” She inspected Gage. “Who’re you?”
Gage reached into the pocket of his brown corduroy workshirt and pulled out his business card. She accepted it in her veined hand, but ignored it. Instead she stared at his shirt.
“That a Carhartt?”
He nodded.
“Son of a Bitch used to wear Carhartt every day over at TIMCO. Like a uniform.” She squinted at Gage. “You’re not from TIMCO, are you? I already got my check. I don’t figure I have to keep saying thanks in person.”
Gage pointed at his card in her hand. “I’m a private investigator.”
“Big deal.” She looked down at it, then extended it in front of her to allow her fifty-plus-year-old eyes to focus. “Anybody can make one of these. You got some ID?”
Gage reached into his front jeans pocket, withdrew his ID case, then flipped it open, displaying his California private investigator’s license. She grabbed for it, but he pulled it away. “Sorry. No touching.” He didn’t want to wrestle with her to get it back.
“Why do you want to talk to Son of a Bitch?”
“It’s about something that happened a long time ago,” Gage said. “You know where he is?”
Jeannette lifted the beer to her mouth and took a sip while peering at him with narrowed eyes. The bottle made a popping sound when she pulled it away.
“What thing that happened a long time ago?”
She said the words in a tone communicating that other than Son of a Bitch running off, only one thing of any significance had ever happened in her life, and she had only been at the edge of it.
“Over at the refinery,” Gage said.
“Can’t help ya, pal. He’s gone, gone, gone.”
“As in dead, dead, dead?”
“Naw, just dead gone.” She grinned, then eyed his left hand. “You married?”
“You looking?”
“Does pork fat come off a pig?”
Two Harley-Davidsons downshifted up the short hill; the syncopated chugging of their V-twins vibrated the house. Gage turned to see black Hell’s Angels vests disappear over the crest.
“You wanna come in?” Jeannette asked.
Gage smiled. “You’re not going to try to seduce me, are you? My wife won’t let me go out and play anymore.”
Jeannette winked. “We’ll see.”
Gage followed her as she backed into the house. It smelled of beer, cigarette ashes, and dog pee, the odors Gage went to sleep with as a rookie cop the night after his first day on the job. It couldn’t be washed off and stuck to those old wool uniforms like epoxy. That was one of the reasons he’d decided to wear a cotton shirt and Levi’s.
She pointed to the couch. “You can move those newspapers.”
Gage was surprised. He hadn’t taken her for a reader, and she wasn’t. They were months-old Auto Traders she apparently used to shop for the Fiesta.
“You wanna beer?” she asked, walking toward the kitchen and stepping over a Slurpee cup.
“Sure.”
Gage watched her open the refrigerator, pull out two Budweisers, then twist off the caps. She headed back with the two bottles and handed one to Gage. He lifted it toward her, then took a sip.
As she lowered herself into a green upholstered Barcalounger, her shoulder strap slipped off again. She left it there, then peeked over at Gage and grinned.
“It do anything for you?”
Gage shook his head. “I’m not allowed to look.”
She pulled it up.
He took another sip, then waited for her to take one.
“You know where he is?”
“Sorta. He’s in one of them rag-head countries.”
“You know which one?”
“I’m not good with geography. My son is though.”
“Is he around?”
“Nope. County jail.”
“How come?”
“Got wrongly accused of touching a little girl—at least that’s what he says. But I don’t believe him about that any more than I believed his father about anything.”
“Has Wilbert called lately?”
Jeannette’s brows furrowed. “Wilbert?”
She said the name with such puzzlement Gage thought for a half second he’d misremembered Hawkins’s first name.
“Wilbert?” She laughed. “I’ve been calling him Son of a Bitch for so many years I almost forgot his name was Wilbert.” She shook her head, a smirk twisting her mouth. “What a stupid name for a guy born in Marin County.”
She squinted toward the tan phone hanging on the kitchen wall.
“Yeah, he called three years ago. On my daughter’s thirteenth birthday.” She snorted. “He should’ve spent the money on child support.”
“Where is she?”
Jeannette stared at the clock on the mantel of the trash-filled fireplace. “Let’s see, she got off work at Wendy’s about a half hour ago, then she was going to pick up my pills at the Walgreens . . . Let’s see . . .” She tapped her finger against her chin as if thinking through her daughter’s after work route, then looked back at Gage. “I know exactly where she is. She’s screwing her thirty-six-year-old biker boyfriend in the garage he calls an apartment.”
Gage glanced up at framed baby photos of the children on either side of the clock, innocent eyes gazing out at the wreckage their lives had become, and then changed the subject.
“Did Son of a Bitch leave an emergency number?”
Jeannette lowered her bottle to the armrest. Her eyes slid from Gage’s face to his Carhartt shirt, then held there. She breathed in and out like a kid gathering up courage to race across a railroad track just ahead of a train.
“Yeah, you can have it. I don’t owe any of them shit. None of them suits from TIMCO ever sat down in my house and had a beer with me.”
Chapter 23
Isn’t this kind of a long shot?” Faith asked as she drove Gage toward the San Francisco International Airport. They were traveling south past the 49ers’ stadium, dropping down to the gray stretch of freeway bordering the bay. The afternoon traffic crept along, more stop than go.
“Of course it’s a long shot,” Gage said. “But at worst it costs the price of a flight and a few days of jet lag.”
Faith flicked on the radio to check the traffic report in order to decide whether to slip onto the frontage road and skirt the backup. It was tuned to National Public Radio broadcasting one of a series of interviews of leading presidential candidates. It was Landon Meyer’s turn. She reached to change to the A.M. news channel, but Gage said, “Hold on. Let’s see what he has to say.”
“I’d like to start with your first campaign for Congress, your victory over Democratic incumbent Nelson Hedges. It’s still the closest race in California history.”
“It stands as a lesson that every vote counts.” Landon chuckled. “Well, at least the last twelve.”
“Were you aware during the campaign that Congressman Hedges had been diagnosed with ALS?”
“I didn’t learn about it until his announcement on the day he left Congress.”
Gage shook his head. “Amazing guy. He’s still keeping his promise even though Hedges has been dead for years. I’ll bet he’s never even told Brandon.”
Hedges had called Landon to come to his hotel near Stanford Hospital at midnight on the day he was diagnosed. The two talked and prayed together until past midnight. Landon promised neither to disclose nor to exploit it during the campaign.
“Did you learn any lessons from that election, Senator?”
The night concierge had spotted Landon exiting the lobby elevator at 2 A.M., a step behind a familiar prostitute from a local escort service.
Landon had called Gage moments after the first extortion attempt eight hours later.
“Yes. An extremely useful one. Elections often turn on events the public never sees.”
<
br /> Gage discovered the night’s surveillance tape missing. He tracked it to the apartment of the guard who’d been on duty, where it was hidden with a dozen other tapes of guilty public figures who’d been blackmailed, and innocent ones like Landon who’d been extorted.
“And they depend on people you’ve never met before, but who become trusted friends for life.”
Faith pointed ahead to a stalled car on the shoulder a quarter mile ahead and the traffic clearing beyond it, then glanced over at Gage.
“There are just too many ifs to justify a trip halfway around the world,” Faith said.
“They’re either ifs or they’re links in a chain.” Gage switched off the radio. “Porzolkiewski is the key to Charlie getting shot and I’m pretty sure he’s got a copy of whatever was in Brandon Meyer’s wallet.”
“Is this about Charlie or Brandon? For a while I was wondering whether you were being driven by self-reproach for not insisting that Tansy let you prove it was Charlie who subverted the prosecution of those kids. But now I’m starting to think it’s really about Brandon.”
“Brandon’s a pipsqueak. Landon never should have gotten him appointed in the first place. Sometimes Landon is just blind to what he’s really doing.” Gage’s voice hardened. “And it wasn’t the first time someone in the Meyer family sacrificed the public good to a private one.”
“That makes me think you might be looking for a way to turn this into your father’s last revenge.”
One of the first things Faith had learned about Gage’s father was his fury at the Meyer family, once the General Motors of the arms manufacturing industry. As a combat surgeon during World War II, George Gage witnessed the consequences of their weapons sales to Germany, many made after the Nazis’ criminal intentions were clear. Only the intervention of the secretary of state prevented the indictment of Brandon and Landon’s grandfather in 1941 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
“I’m not looking to punish Brandon for his family’s sins,” Gage said, “and I certainly don’t want to hurt Landon. And I’m only interested in Brandon to the extent he’s the link between Porzolkiewski and Charlie.”
Gage fell silent. He watched a plane rise from the runway, then his eyes lowered to an unseeing stare at the dashboard.
“What?” she finally asked. “Porzolkiewski?”
Gage nodded.
“Your heart goes out to him, doesn’t it.”
He turned toward her. “What could be worse than believing somebody got away with killing your child? I don’t think anything has felt real to him since the day his son died. The only thing now connecting him to the world is anger.”
“You think he’ll be able to see his way clear to cooperate with you when you get back?”
“I don’t know. At least he didn’t go running out of the coffee shop yesterday when I sat down at his table to tell him I was going to look for a way to reopen the TIMCO case. The most important thing in his life is finding out what happened.”
“You mean confirming what he already believes.”
“He’s not the only one. I reread the superior court judge’s order dismissing the suit. I know judge-speak. He said ‘my hands are tied’ and ‘this incident appears’ to be an accident—not is, only appears—and he said the explosion was ‘maybe even an accident waiting to happen.’ Which tells me he didn’t believe TIMCO. It was just that Porzolkiewski’s lawyers hadn’t made a strong enough showing so the judge could’ve let the case go to a jury.”
“I don’t know.” Faith shook her head, then glanced over again. “How can you be so sure Porzolkiewski will tell you what really happened with Charlie if you deliver on your promise? What if the truth about TIMCO isn’t what he thinks it is? Accidents waiting to happen can still be just accidents.”
Chapter 24
Jeanette Hawkins was wrong. Son of a Bitch wasn’t in an Islamic country. Gage had recognized it the moment she’d handed him the yellowed slip of paper bearing the telephone number. He’d also seen the hand of genius: laundering a witness through Muslim Pakistan, then depositing him in its Hindu enemy.
It was the overripe end of mango season in southern India when Gage arrived at the Rajiv Gandhi Airport outside Hyderabad. Vendors were selling juice and sodas from carts bordering the parking lot in front of the arrivals hall. Between them and Gage as he walked out of the automatic doors was a mass of men in short-sleeved shirts and women in saris standing pressed up against a low metal barrier. A dozen taxi drivers swarmed him, grabbing at his forearms to lead him toward their cars. Porters wearing dhotis tied around their thighs and pulled up between their legs reached for his rollaboard. He shook them off as he scanned past the hotel placards held up by drivers bearing the names of arriving business travelers, but he couldn’t find the face he was looking for.
Instead, the face found him.
Gage grasped that customs superintendent Basaam Khan was standing behind him when the drivers and porters backed away. He turned toward a stubby man in a crisp white shirt and brown slacks, then reached out his hand, smiling. “Babu.”
Khan was the youngest child in a family of ten who’d stayed in India after the partition in 1947, when millions of Hindus fled from Pakistan and an equal number of Muslims fled in the opposite direction into India. He was among the forty percent of the population of Hyderabad who were Muslim. As the youngest son, he was simply known among friends and relatives as Babu. Sonny in English.
Babu pushed aside Gage’s hand, then hugged him, his head reaching only the middle of Gage’s chest. When they separated, Gage could see Babu had gained twenty pounds since they last worked together.
Gage pointed at his stomach. “Married life?”
Babu nodded, proud not only that his happiness was reflected in his body, but that his parents had allowed him to choose his own bride.
Babu took Gage’s briefcase out of his hand, and then led him along the barrier and through the opening toward a white Ambassador taxi, a five-year-old four-door sedan of the lumpy style manufactured in the U.S. in the 1940s. The driver set Gage’s rollaboard inside the trunk. Gage and Babu climbed into the back. The seat was coved by a clean, white sheet, pulled tight and tucked in.
They didn’t talk about Wilbert Hawkins as they drove from the airport and along Hussain Sagar Lake, the city’s main water supply, toward the hotel. There was no reason to share the purpose of Gage’s trip with the taxi driver. Instead, they talked quietly and cryptically about their last case, a multimillion-dollar diamond theft out of New York when Babu was deputy superintendent of customs at the Hyderabad Airport.
Gage had tracked the diamond cutter-turned-thief from Singapore to Bangkok, and finally to Hyderabad, then hired a local lawyer to analyze the legal issues involved in getting a warrant to search the man’s house. The judge decided Gage hadn’t met the probable cause standards imported into the Indian criminal code from British common law because Gage had no witness to testify that the man had the diamonds with him.
The judge suggested Gage speak with Babu, who reviewed the evidence, examined the law, considered the various legal options, and then kidnapped the thief’s wife and imprisoned her in the squalid, lice-ridden central jail until the man surrendered both himself and the diamonds.
All but a single twenty-thousand-dollar gem was recovered.
The insurance company hadn’t objected to Babu deducting his commission, they just wished they’d had the opportunity to offer it first.
Gage hadn’t objected either. He knew someday having an Indian cop in his debt would eventually pay off.
And that day had come.
Babu pointed toward the windshield. A hundred yards in front of them on the Tank Bund Road bordering the lake, a sash-wearing young Muslim rode a galloping white horse to his wedding. Babu then tapped his chest and smiled, indicating that he, too, had taken the same ride.
They lost sight of the groom as they turned into the tree-lined driveway of the colonial-era Viceroy Hotel.
Only w
hen seated in Gage’s seventh floor room overlooking the earth-toned city did Babu mention Wilbert Hawkins.
“He is still living in Gannapalli,” Babu said. “I’m not sure he is leaving the village since he finished building his house.” Babu spread his hands. “Why he is picking the second hottest district in all of India, I am not understanding.”
“Probably because it’s the last place anyone would think he’d hide.”
Babu grinned, his head working a slight figure eight, the Indian head bob variously meaning I understand, or Yes, or Maybe. “That, and the women, no?”
Chapter 25
The forty-minute drive west from Hyderabad toward Gannapalli in Babu’s Land Cruiser took them from the cool world of offshore Web designers to the scorched farmland of those whose lives were measured not by digital clocks, but by the gestation periods of cattle and the growing seasons of rice.
Villagers dragged flat wooden carts piled with coconuts and potatoes toward the city, while others pulled empty ones back to the countryside. Cows and buffaloes grazed along the undivided two-lane road. Travelers waited for buses in whirlwinds of dust while breathing diesel fumes belching from aging truck engines, and the occasional monkey begged for food from laborers gathered under the shade of axelwood and laurel trees.
“Have you decided on an approach?” Babu asked as he turned north from the highway toward Gannapalli.
“You mean since there’s no one to kidnap?” Gage said.
Babu pulled away, as if offended. “I am understanding from you last time that investigation is an art, a matter of applying the correct technique at the proper time. I am not a one-trick horse.” He grinned at Gage and asked, “Horse?”
“Pony. A one-trick pony.”
“Yes, indeed, a one-trick pony.”
Wilbert Hawkins didn’t expect to find a white man sitting in his living room when he woke from his afternoon nap.
