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The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series)

Page 25

by Maxim, John R.


  “Don't worry about that,” Loftus told him. “What makes you thinîc Donovan's dead?”

  “Well, first of all,” Poole explained, “I didn't even know he was there. I got to the house before Mr. Reid arrived and I heard this yelling and banging on a door. I ask Burdick who it is and he says nobody and I should wait for Reid in the library. Mr. Reid shows up and I overhear Burdick saying ‘Here's Donovan's notebook.’ And he tells Reid he's made copies of all Donovan's keys. Then I walk in and say ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ and he looks at me like he forgot and he flicks his hand at me the way he does and tells me to go wait in the kitchen until I'm called. Then he tells Burdick to give him ten minutes with the notebook and then bring Donovan down.”

  “Could you hear what was said between them?”

  “Just some raised voices at one point. Then the door opens, Reid tells Jack Gorby to drive Donovan home. I see Gorby nod to Burdick, who then heads out the front door first and drives away. At first I figure Burdick is going to search Donovan's apartment with those keys while Gorby takes his time driving in.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Burdick showed up about three hours later smelling like someone poured a bucket of Gatorade over him. He goes in with Mr. Reid. I had a bad feeling about that smell so I go and listen at the door. I hear Burdick telling Reid he regrets to report that Donovan suffered a fatal heart attack. Reid just says ‘Unfortunate.’ Then Burdick says something else I couldn't really hear about Lesko, the father, I think and that's when I got away from the door.”

  “The smell,” Loftus said quietly. “It was amyl nitrate?”

  “I'm pretty sure, Mr. Loftus,” he said fearfully, “Burdick killed that old man and Reid ordered it.”

  “You don't know that, Doug.”

  “I wish I didn't.”

  “I'm going up there.” Loftus kept his composure with effort. “Doug, you stay far away from this.”

  From Donovan's doorman, Lesko and Lieutenant Greenwald picked up a sample of the message slips he used. There was nothing similar in the apartment. Not in the wastebaskets, not on the dresser tops, not in Donovan's desk or under its mat. They did not search the leaves of every book or the linings of every drawer because it was not a thing Donovan would have taken the trouble to hide. Nor was there a notebook. He and Greenwald had both been right. The notebook could conceivably have been left elsewhere. The message slips could not have been.

  Lesko walked to the bathroom where he stood for a long moment gazing sadly into Donovan's shower, envisioning the body as it must have been found. He caught a scent of something. He sniffed the air.

  “What do you smell?” he asked Greenwald who came in behind him.

  “Deodorant? Maybe the shampoo.”

  Lesko checked for a room deodorizer. There was none. He looked at the shampoo bottle that remained open on the shower caddy. Head & Shoulders, for Donovan's dandruff. Wrong scent. The soap was Irish Spring. Sort of a heather smell. But what he smelled was fruit. He opened the medicine cabinet. Nothing there that smelled like fruit, either. Nor any medication that suggested a heart problem.

  “What are you thinking?” Greenwald asked.

  “I'm not sure.”

  “You think someone else was in here?”

  “Let's go talk to the doorman again. The garage man, too.”

  The doorman had been on since noon. Yes, he said, Mr. Donovan arrived alone. On foot, looking tired, in a bad mood. Yes, he absolutely took the message slip and put it in his right overcoat pocket. Yes, other people he didn't know had entered or left the building that afternoon but all of them were with tenants or were clearly known or expected by tenants.

  The garage man had been polishing cars to make some extra money. Had he seen anyone in the garage he didn't recognize? No, he hadn't. Could anyone have passed through without being seen? I guess, he answered, if I was busy. But they couldn't go anywhere.

  “How come?”

  “They couldn't steal a car without a magnetic card to get past the barrier and they couldn't get up into the building without a special elevator key only the tenants have.”

  Harry Greenwald took Lesko outside. “I'll have forensics look at his keys. If they were copied recently there'd be fresh impressions from the clamps.”

  “Also Donovan's lock. There could be fresh shavings.”

  “But say I find something,” Greenwald told him. “What do we really have?”

  “I know.” Not much. He'd been hoping for a description. Maybe one that fit Robert Loftus. The missing message, plus evidence that the keys might have been copied, would be enough to get the apartment dusted for prints, but Lesko knew none were likely to be found. “You'll call me on the autopsy?”

  “I'll call you. You have to promise to tell me what's in your head, though. No cowboy shit.”

  “I'll tell you. I know anything, I’ll tell you.”

  Fruit.

  Lesko couldn't remember what it was about fruit.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Loftus found Palmer Reid behind an antique horseshoe desk in Ambassador Pollard's library.

  “You are forgetting yourself, Robert.” Reid looked up icily from a notebook he'd been studying. “Kindly leave this room until you can enter like a gentleman.”

  “Let's skip the master-servant routine, Palmer.” Loftus crossed to the desk and stood glaring at him. “I want to know if you have involved me in the murder of a former United States Attorney.”

  Reid's expression was unchanged. “I have not the foggiest idea what you're talking about.”

  “This is a yes-or-no question, Palmer. Donovan's dead. Did you or did you not have Burdick kill him?”

  “Buzz Donovan dead?” Reid dropped his jaw. “Dear God!”

  “And you can fuck your dear God.” Loftus slammed down his hand. “Do you have any idea what you've done?”

  Palmer Reid stared at him. “Burdick, you say. You accuse Burdick?”

  Loftus made a fist. Here we go, he thought. One of my men must have done.it. Acting on his own. Like Henry II didn't kill Becket, his barons did. “Forget it, Palmer. I saw the movie.”

  “The movie.” Reid blinked.

  Loftus waved it away. “For two days now, Donovan's been calling all over Washington asking about Bannerman, about you, and goddamn it, about me. Now all of a sudden he turns up dead. You don't think somebody might wonder about that? You don't think Lesko will wonder?”

  “His heart . . .” Reid said feebly. ”A man that age . . .“he stopped, realizing his mistake.

  ”. . . could go any time.” Loftus finished his sentence for him. “If I ask how you could know it was a heart attack, what are you going to say? Lucky guess?”

  Palmer Reid rose slowly from his chair, his face flushed, one hand making a small, trembling fist. He turned his back on Loftus and sought to gather himself by studying an English hunt painting on the paneled wall.

  “I have always been fond of you, Robert.” He cleared his throat. “I find myself more hurt than angered at your behavior. It is beyond despicable.”

  . Loftus wanted to scream. Instead he worked to calm himself.

  “It is out of affection for you,” Palmer Reid continued, “that I have often tried to distance you from some of the heavier burdens of my, office. I had hoped to reason with the man.”

  “But he was unreceptive.” Loftus closed his eyes.

  Reid kept his gaze upon the painting. “I sought his cooperation in an entirely forthright way. I appealed to his sense of duty. I extended my hand in friendship and he as much as slapped it away. I made a very hard decision, Robert.”

  Loftus nodded slowly, as much in resignation as in understanding. It wasn't just stupidity. Or more of Reid's conviction that he could get anyone to believe anything. It wasn't even an act. This man was out of his fucking gourd.

  “I understand, sir,” he said quietly.

  “I hoped you might.”

  “Could I ask, sir? Was this what you had
in mind when you said you'd give Bannerman something to think about?”

  “Bannerman?”

  “Paul Bannerman.” He gestured vaguely toward the east. “Westport.”

  “Oh, no. That's quite another thing entirely.”

  Loftus gritted his teeth. “I'd like you to know, sir, that you can rely on me fully. I can only hope that my earlier outburst has not diminished your affection for me.”

  “We are all heavy-laden from time to time, Robert. Consider it forgotten.”

  “Can I hope, sir, that whatever you have in mind for Bannerman . . . that I will not be distanced from that as well?”

  “You will be among the first to know, Robert.”

  Loftus's eyes fell upon the notebook the old man had been studying. He picked it up. The notes could only have been Donovan's. There were- several names and phone numbers. Washington names. He recognized them all. Several references to Bannerman, some to Reid, two to Elena. Just bits and pieces, but Donovan seemed to be on the right track. Loftus turned the page. Westport. Community of agents. Bannerman a renegade. Several question marks after that one. Question marks everywhere.

  Sexually abused a child. Loftus didn't understand that reference at all. But the order in which the jottings were written suggested that it was Reid who provided the last several pieces. Yes. There was even a reference to the burning of Reid's stupid boat

  Then, What to tell Lesko??? Susan caught in the middle between Bannerman and this lunatic.

  Those were the last entries. The lunatic was clearly Reid. And Donovan was clearly worried about the safety of Lesko's daughter who, as Loftus suspected, probably knew nothing at all. Donovan, Loftus felt sure, never got a chance to tell Lesko anything. Lesko was in Westport while Donovan was being taken home and killed. Loftus had followed Lesko to Westport although he didn't dare risk getting off the train himself. The trip had mystified him. Reid's conspiracy theories aside, there was just no reason to think Lesko was involved with those people. More likely he'd gone to check out Bannerman himself, more as a father than a cop. But Reid wouldn't see it that way. Reid would see it as proof.

  Lesko. If he ever finds out Donovan was murdered, there'll be no stopping him, short of killing him. Maybe they still should. Leave him alive and he'll surely try to retrace Donovan's last two days and all the phone calls he made. And, damn it, the first thing Lesko would look for is Donovan's notebook and when he sees it's gone he's going to know Donovan didn't die of any heart attack. But kill Lesko and Bannerman would hear about it right away. It wouldn't take him long to connect the two deaths. He might even know already that Donovan was making inquiries about him. He'd see Reid's hand behind this in a minute and then they'd all be as good as dead.

  Jesus.

  And as if killing Donovan isn't bad enough, Reid has something else cooking. Giving Bannerman something to think about, he said. Take away his momentum, he had said. A hit on Bannerman? No. Bannerman had already told him that his involvement would be assumed, whatever the circumstances. A hit on either Lesko or Elena, maybe. They both have other enemies. And the way Reid thinks, killing either one would break a chain that probably doesn't exist in the first place. He could rig an accident, or he could make it look like the grease balls did it.

  “Sir,” Loftus cleared his throat. Palmer Reid had moved to another hunt painting. They seemed to be a series. “Sir, if I'm to serve you properly, I really should know what you're planning.”

  “My father used to ride, you know. In Philadelphia. I still have his pinks.”

  “Sir . . . ?”

  “They're not just ordinary pinks.” Reid still hadn't turned. “He was Master of Hounds. The Master is not normally in on the kill, Robert. But he awards the trophies to the lead riders.”

  “So there is to be a kill.”

  Reid cocked an ear toward him. “I said nothing about a kill, Robert. What I've ordered—suggested really—is a distraction.”

  “But nothing illegal.”

  “That is always implicit.”

  Loftus sighed inwardly. A distraction. And Reid doesn't know the details. Which means he left them in the hands of his creepy little assistant, Whitlow. Which means he has deniability if anything Whitlow does backfires. And Whitlow, who's never done a day's fieldwork in his life, thinks he's a mastermind of grand and complex schemes that almost always go wrong.

  Jesus Christ almighty.

  This whole fucking thing is out of control.

  “You say something, pal?” The cab driver looked through the rearview mirror as he cruised along Queens Boulevard.

  “No.” Lesko blinked. “Long day. Talking to myself.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Lesko looked out the window to discourage further conversation.

  “Hey . . . Katz.” This time he said it in his mind, though even more self-consciously than when the driver heard him. “Help me think. What smells like fruit?”

  No answer.

  He tried envisioning Katz on the seat next to him. It wasn't working. Anyway, he was embarrassing himself. Maybe there was nothing wrong with a dumb little head game of trying to sort things out like they used to, but now he was starting to act as if he really thought Katz was there.

  Knock it off.

  A long day.

  Just get home, have a beer, maybe take a nap.

  Shit.

  “Come on, David. What the hell did I smell back there?”

  Anton Zivic had arrived at Mario's fifteen minutes after Lesko was seen to board the 5:45 to New York. Carla Benedict arrived separately. She now sat huddled with Gary Russo at the far end of the bar. Molly Farrell motioned Zivic toward a corner table for two. She joined him there.

  “Carla's not very happy about this,” she told him. “She says he's now seen four of us.”

  “Seeing is not identifying,” he answered patiently. “Anyone who's stopped here for a drink more than once has laid eyes upon that many of us.”

  “I know. That's just Carla.”

  “What did Billy think of him?”

  “Billy didn't know who he was until after he left. But he wasn't at all surprised. Billy says he could see in Lesko's eyes that the two of them were a lot alike. The only troubling thing is that Billy says he thought Lesko could see that, too.”

  “But Billy saw no threat in him?”

  She shook her head. “Billy kind of liked him. He says they could be friends.”

  “Better Dracula and the Wolf Man be friends. The world would be safer.” Zivic looked at his watch. “Paul has left for the airport. Glenn Cook is driving him. Do you see any reason why he should be told of Lesko's visit before he boards his plane?”

  “No. But it's your call.”

  “Lesko's curiosity would not trouble him. This he would regard as human. His only concern would be overreaction.”

  “Carla?”

  Zivic nodded. “I will talk to her. Lesko is not our enemy unless he defines himself as such. No action is to be taken.”

  “There's an easier way.”

  “Which is?”

  “Just tell her Billy likes him.”

  Zivic shook his head wearily and reached for the menu.

  “I begin to see why Paul needs his vacations,” he said.

 

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