The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series)
Page 4
Lesko frowned at her.
"I'm sorry. Forget it."
"Susan, that last part. Is it true?"
"Of course it is."
"I never knew that. I really didn't."
"It's okay."
"It's not okay. What did she say exactly?"
"She would just talk to me about how dangerous your job is and how you had to have your head clear at all times. And how she didn't want you getting hurt because your mind was on a broken washing machine or any of my little schoolgirl problems."
"Little schoolgirl problems. Are those your words or hers?"
"Mom's."
"With due respect, she could be a real jerk at times."
"It's okay, daddy."
"As for your question about shootings it's not so much that I don't want to answer ... it's just that general questions can lead to specific questions and there are certain things you and I should never ask each other."
"That isn't true. It shouldn't be true."
"Fine. Then let's talk about your sex life. I realize you're a big girl and the recent stuff is none of my business so well just talk about whatever happened while you were under my roof. Don't start until I get my pad out."
"You've made your point, thank you very much."
Susan sipped her second glass of Chablis, sent over by Buzz Donovan, the retired U.S. Attorney.
"Daddy, have you seen Harriet Katz?"
"Not for a while. I hear she's moving to Florida. It'll do her good."
"Could I ask you a question about David?" Lesko waited. She saw that same odd look.
“Would you have turned him in if you knew what he was doing?”
“Most people think I probably had a piece of it.”
“Most people don’t know you. You’re the single most honest man I've ever met."
"Let's not go crazy here."
"You wouldn't take a dime."
"Sweetheart," Lesko tapped his Seagram's glass, "if someone wants to buy me drinks, or dinner, or give me some free tickets, I'm not about to read him his rights."
"That's different."
"And that word is part of the problem. You can find a way to say 'that's different' about anything. David thought that stealing from drug dealers was different from knocking off a payroll."
"What would you have done if you knew? Would you have turned him in?"
"No."
"Because cops don't turn in cops? No matter what he did?"
"Not no matter what. Just not for that."
"What would you have done?"
"What I wish I'd done is ask more questions when I first saw he was spending more money than he should have had. But it wasn't like he was buying jaguars. It was just things like new clothes and a watch and picking up more than his share of checks. Besides, it didn't go on all that long."
"But if you'd actually known. What then?"
“That's not really a useful question, Susan."
“Please? I want to see ... please tell me." What she almost said was that she wanted to see how well she knew him. But she did know him. She saw the anger come flowing right through his eyes. She saw the look that made people afraid of him.
"I would have taken him into a quiet room," his voice came softly through his teeth, and I would have kicked the living shit out of him. He would have told me where every dollar was that could be converted back to cash. I would have stayed on top of him until we had it all and then I would have taken him down to Catholic Charities and stood behind him while he made a large, anonymous donation."
"From David Katz to Catholic Charities?" "An object lesson."
"It still bothers you. Talking about David Katz, I mean."
"Lately, I guess. I don't know."
"Why lately?"
Lesko hesitated. But what the hell. They'd talked about this before. "Last couple of weeks I can't get through the night without dreaming about him."
"What kind of dreams?"
"Just dreams. Dumb ones."
"Yes, but what about?"
"What is this? We're learning to be open about dreams, too?"
"No, now we're learning how many times I have to ask the same question to get an answer. What kind of dreams?"
"He just shows up with a bag of bagels, like normal. He makes fun of my clothes, like normal. He doesn't realize he's dead until I tell him he is and then I throw him the hell out."
"Are you fast asleep or are these the pre-dawn gremlins?
"They're the half-awake kind. Four in the morning." Lesko pushed a cold piece of onion ring around his plate. "Listen, you want some cheesecake?"
"I'll have a bite of yours. Are you worried about anything in particular? Dreams like that usually come when you're worried but you don't know exactly what's bothering you."
"Nothing's worrying me," he lied. Something was. He just didn't know what. It was a feeling he'd learned to pay attention to when he was a cop. Half the time it was nothing. Or it went away. But the feeling made him more alert. He'd see things, make connections, that he wouldn't have made otherwise. This time, for example, he was getting a feeling about the guy at the bar who kept looking at them.
"Maybe Uncle David was haunting you." Susan decided to lighten it. "Maybe he found out about Catholic Charities."
"Maybe."
A grin started small and then it spread across her face. "You know, I love this. This is great."
"What's great?"
"I can't believe we're talking about bad dreams and ghosts."
"You sucker me into telling you things and then you laugh at them?"
"Oh, no." She reached for his hand again. "It's just that no one would ever believe it. My father, Raymond the Terrible Lesko, one of New York's all-time toughest cops, talking about seeing a ghost. Were you scared? Tell me you were a little bit scared."
"I got a better idea," Lesko took her hand and squeezed it. "What if Raymond the Terrible Lesko just crushed your fingers for being such a smartass?"
"So," Lesko shook off the subject of David Katz, "what have you been doing at the paper?"
She spooned some whipped cream off her Irish Coffee. "Just the regular news beat. A little City Hall. And I'm always looking for a good, juicy feature article."
"There's not plenty happening every day in this town?"
"Most days," she nodded. "But all the plum assignments go to the senior writers, and half the time the TV reporters beat us to it, anyway. The trick is to dig something up by yourself and don't tell anyone until you've got it written. I thought I had one up in Connecticut but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere."
“Connecticut stories for a New York newspaper?"
"Sure," she told him. "Half of Fairfield County commutes to New York every day and most of them read the Post on the way home."
"What kind of story was it?"
"You ever been to Westport?"
Lesko shook his head. "I don't hang around places where they wear pink pants and paint ducks on mailboxes."
"Or put little onions in their drinks. I know." Her father had spent time in Greenwich about a year before, working on some weird case involving the Beckwith Hotels family. He'd said he thought he'd stumbled into a convention of George Bush look-alikes. "Anyway, you remember my old roommate, Allie McCarthy? Well, now she's Allie Gregory, and she and her husband bought a house in Westport, which is a lot more laid-back than planet Greenwich. I was up there last fall helping her fix it up. She and Tom—that's her husband —had collected a whole pile of literature on places to live in Connecticut. You know, stuff about tax rates, schools, quality of life and all that. In the pile there was this little statistical abstract that gave figures on absolutely everything ... lottery income by week, water tables by average season, gypsy-moth infestation by area ... you get the idea." Susan kept her eyes on him as she took a sip of her coffee. "Guess what laid-back Connecticut town had the highest suicide rate and the highest accidental death rate in the state last year?"
“That's your angle? Pink pants
cause stress?"
"Whatever the cause, isn't that a remarkable statistic?"
"How'd it look in past years?"
"For ten years running, both figures were a third to a half of last year's. No other town in Connecticut, Massachusetts or Rhode Island had that kind of jump. I checked."
"Figures like those, they're usually based on so many incidents per hundred thousand population, right?"
"Per ten thousand, in this case."
"Even so, in a small town like Westport you'd only need ... what? An extra six or seven cases a year to double what they had before?"
"There were six more suicides and eleven more accidental deaths. That's seventeen extra people who died violently last year, a number way beyond the laws of chance."
Lesko's expression still showed no more than polite interest. Violent death would not have been his topic of choice. "What kinds of people died? Was the mix any different than before?"
"Not really. That's the first thing I checked. My first hunch was teen suicides because there's been a rash of them in other communities. But it's almost all ages and income groups. There were two odd things. Adult suicides tend to be older people, sick people, but these were much younger. The other thing I found was that quite a few had records as petty criminals. Two were drunk drivers with multiple convictions. One had a reputation as a wife-beater.'
"You can't be serious."
"About what?"
"You're looking for a vigilante story? In Westport, Connecticut?"
"Not really." An embarrassed smile.
"That sounded more like a maybe.”
The smile spread. "Wouldn't that have been great, though? Talk about human interest stories."
"I can see it now," Lesko snorted. "A bunch of Westport types are sitting around the patio drinking out of plastic glasses with little dice in their bottoms. A teenager drives by with a loud radio and he throws a beer can on their lawn. They decide to put out a contract on him and they hire some Mad Max-type to run the kid into a light pole. They say, hey, this is even more fun than our investment club. Why don't we knock off that guy who let Japanese beetles into the country? And then I want the guy down the block whose golden retriever shits on the pachysandra. . . ." Lesko heard a gasp from a woman at the next table. He lowered his voice. "You haven't told anyone about this, have you? Like your city editor?"
"I know. He'd take my head off."
"You got it. And before he threw you out of the office he'd explain to you that conspiracy stories almost never pan out because conspiracies never work. Murphy's Law. The Post wouldn't touch it but you could always write it for one of those newspapers they sell at supermarket checkouts where no one cares whether it's true, and which the Pulitzer Prize committee wouldn't wipe its ass with. Excuse me. The other thing wrong with a vigilante angle is that vigilantes don't try to make an execution look like a suicide or accident unless they totally miss the point of being vigilantes."
"How about a serial killer, then?"
"That's just a hair more likely. Except serial killers almost always concentrate on one type of victim. And
they almost always leave some kind of signature." Susan let out a breath and sat back. "I admitted it wasn't going anywhere. It's just that those figures were so striking."
"You want to know what I think happened in Westport in the last year or so?"
"Sure."
"You gotta be careful with suicide figures. In towns like Westport, the local cops will play down a suicide especially if it's someone who has money. A citizen decided to take the pipe and all you see in the obituaries is that so-and-so 'died suddenly.' But then all you need is for some new medical examiner or police chief to decide a spade should be called a spade and there, all of a sudden, is your apparent increase in suicides."
"That wouldn't explain the rise in accidental deaths."
Lesko shrugged. "Same kind of problem. Let's say I'm hurt in a car accident and then a few hours later I have a heart attack. Some will call it an accidental death, some will call it natural. An insurance company will fight to have it recorded as natural to avoid paying double indemnity. But how it's listed can still come down to one public official deciding what to call it."
“So," Susan brightened a bit, "all we have to do is find out if Westport has tightened its definitions in the past year or two."
"In which case you wouldn't have much of a story. But you'll probably never find out because chances are you won't find anyone who'll admit it. The admission could invite all kinds of lawsuits, especially by survivors who think they've been screwed out of insurance money."
"Maybe I'll just forget about that one."
"Up to you."
"Want to hear my new idea?"
"What?"
"Dead partner haunts New York's toughest cop. Inquiring minds will eat it up."
Lesko didn't smile.
"I'm kidding, daddy."
"Yeah, I know." He looked off toward the rear of the restaurant. "Listen, Buzz Donovan's giving me the high sign over there. I'll be back in a second."
"I'm sorry. I guess that wasn't very funny."
"No problem. Really." Lesko slid back his chair.
Buzz Donovan, a florid-faced, tousle-haired man of seventy who looked more like an Irish saloon keeper than a former federal prosecutor, said, "Don't look around, Ray, but do you know any reason why you'd have a tail?"
Lesko scratched a stain from the lapel of his blue suit from Barney's. "The guy at the bar, right?"
"You spotted him."
Lesko nodded. "Could be he's just looking at Susan. That happens."
"Maybe. But he's been looking for an hour over one drink. Hasn't taken his topcoat off."
"Yeah. Thanks Buzz."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. We're going to leave pretty soon. I'll see if he tags along."
"You taking Susan home?"
"Now I am."
"You want some backup? You have friends here."
"It's okay, Buzz."
"Come back for a nightcap. Don't let me sit here wondering."
"Okay. Half an hour or so."
Susan thought he looked a little angry when he returned. He tried to hide it with a wink. Angry or not, she decided, she was not sorry she tried to make a joke of the David Katz thing. That whole business, the killings, the headlines. She didn't know how much her father was involved or not involved and she wasn't about to ask him. But she also wasn't about to treat him like he had cancer, tiptoeing around the episode and falling into uncomfortable silences the way most other people did. After this much time it could use a little lightening up. And he could use a trip himself. Out of New York, someplace where people had never heard of him. She almost wished she could take him to Switzerland with her.
"So," he tapped his knuckles on the table to signal a change of subject. "Tell me about this trip you're taking."
Susan smiled. "Sometimes I think you can read my mind."
"What do you mean?"
"I was half-tempted to drag you along. You could use a vacation."
"You could picture me on skis? Maybe I'll also go to ballet camp."
"That's another thing," she scolded. "Quit being so down on the way you look. You happen to be a very impressive man. If you would let another woman, besides me, see how wonderfully gentle you can be...."
"Come on," he rapped again, "tell me about Switzerland."
"I'm counting the hours now. First we fly Friday night to London and then we…”
"Who's this `we'?"
Susan took a breath. "I'm going with a friend, daddy," she said evenly. "My friend is a man."
"That's nice." It was said without sarcasm.
"You'd like him."
"If you like him, I'm sure I would, too."
"That'd be a switch."
Lesko spread his hands and looked skyward as if asking God to witness that he had not fired the first shot. "His name is Paul. Paul Bannerman."
Lesko’s face s
oftened. “Thank you.” He couldn’t remember the last time Susan had volunteered a name.
“What would you like to know about him, daddy?"
“How did you meet?"
“How we met? That's your first question?"
Lesko shrugged.
"Paul lives in Westport. Allie Gregory introduced us during one of my weekends up there last fall. Allie, by the way, is just as picky as you are when it comes to who she thinks is good enough for me."
To say that Allie introduced them might have been stretching it just a little. They met Paul together. But all her father wanted to know, she felt sure, was that it was a proper meeting and not a pickup at some West Side singles bar.
She was partly right. And the answer did satisfy Lesko. At least it raised no red flags. It didn't sound as if this Paul Bannerman had gone out of his way to get close to her.
"What does Paul Bannerman do?" he asked.
“He runs a travel agency up there. I'd rather tell you what he's like."