by Davis Bunn
Matt signaled to Connie. Together they headed for the carriage house. He entered and found Sol seated behind his desk. Stacks of flyers and campaign posters and press announcements and time sheets filled every surface. Sol stared at the greaseboard covering the side wall. Across the top was written, “Campaign Timetable.” The next day, Tuesday, was blanked out in red.
“Sol.”
He turned slowly. “Any news?”
“Pop is outside.”
Sol tried hard to work up some enthusiasm. “Is he okay?”
“Cold. Bruised. Maybe a cracked rib. Otherwise okay. We’re taking him to the hospital.”
Matt and Connie followed him outside. They all did. Judy Leigh burrowed into her voluminous purse and got digital snaps of the reunion. Sol was nervous and agitated. Paul Kelly remained wrapped in a blue ambo blanket and tensely refused to make eye contact.
“Sol.” Matt grabbed his arm. “Come along this way.”
Sol let Matt draw him over to the car’s other side. “He’s going to be okay, right? I mean, sure, we won’t do anything outdoors tomorrow. But a taped interview, that’s doable. Hospital bedside, to be played on the morning show, asking people to get out and support . . .”
Sol expelled the remainder of his words unshaped. Allen Pecard’s window rolled down. Up close his face looked severely battered. One eye was closed and taped. His jaw was distorted. The line across his forehead was clotted and raw. It clearly hurt him to be there. Pecard watched as Bannister approached and said, “Sol Greene, you are under arrest for the sale of false American passports, extortion, and the attempted murder of Porter Reeves.”
“What?” Sol tried hard for outrage. “How bogus is this? That was thirty years ago!”
Connie stepped forward, jangling her cuffs. “Place your hands behind your back, Mr. Greene.”
“This is totally—”
“Hands behind your back.” This time she helped him.
“My lawyer will have me released in an hour! I’m suing you for assault!”
“I doubt that,” Matt replied. “We’re going to ask the judge to hold you over without bail until the full ownership of Downtown is unraveled.”
His father stopped his glare at the front window and looked over to see his campaign manager sag.
“Ian Reeves was right about one thing,” Matt said to his father. “Some people never want to change.”
His father just looked at him.
“A good campaign manager has to know where the money is, right, Sol? Cash and lots of it. So you found some of Baltimore’s underworld, offered them a way to go legit. Big, splashy, make them a power in the city overnight.”
Sol gave him a killer’s glare. “You rescued your father just to ruin him?”
“What was it about the deal that you needed national influence for, Sol? My guess is two things. Inner-city housing grants, and rights to turn the old military harbor into a huge new yacht basin. What would they be worth, Sol? Enough to convince your old friend he needed to form a trust and put it in your hands and run for national office, I bet.”
Sol spotted Judy Leigh writing furiously and clamped down. “I want my lawyer now.”
Pecard twisted in his seat far enough to watch Connie deliver the suspect to the federal agents, then said, “I owe you quite a considerable debt.”
“Not now, not ever.”
He tightened the muscles that still worked into a partial smile. “Never refuse a debt, Agent Kelly. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
Matt shook the man’s hand, then walked around to where Bryan Bannister was waiting. “Thank you.”
“Hey, I’m the one doing the owing here.” Bannister pointed with his chin back at the car. “He saved my life. Pecard.”
“A Major Stafford is head of base security at Upper Heyford. You might want to check and see if he was based in Manila during the war.”
“He was involved in the scam?”
“Not in Nam. The British contacts were clear about that. Porter Reeves drank with him and possibly bought illegal weaponry from him. My guess is, Porter Reeves obtained the information leading to the National Guard Armory heist from Stafford as well. But those two were close enough for Porter to be certain Stafford was not in Nam. If he had been, Porter would have known, and Stafford would have wound up suffering the same fate as Barry Simms.”
Bannister nodded thoughtfully. “They give medals in your division?”
“Never heard of one.”
“Well, they ought to.” He offered Matt his hand. “Anytime, anywhere, Kelly. I mean that.”
“In that case, I’d like to ask that you let Baltimore Homicide share the press on this collar.”
“Far as I’m concerned, it’s you and them. We just played ride-along.”
Matt stepped back to where his father stared at him through the open window. Paul Kelly said, “I suppose you’re expecting me to thank you.”
“No, Pop.”
“My best friend destroyed, the worst day of my past reawakened, my business gone, my future, my wife. How could anyone expect me to be grateful for anything?”
Connie was the only one looking his way. She had stepped over to where Matt could see her clearly. Showing him that disconcertingly deep gaze. “Nobody does, Pop.”
“You’re going to accuse me now? Ask me what I know about all this? How I could have trusted my oldest and best friend?”
“Bannister might want to talk with you about that. But I won’t.”
Paul Kelly struggled over the next item. “I wanted to tell you. But your mother . . .”
Matt found himself recalling that night in the kitchen. How his father had attempted an apology. The first ever. And left Matt convicted by his inability to offer anything in response. He could blame his father all he wanted. But the truth was brilliantly scripted upon the city and the dull gray sky. He had nothing to offer even when the chance came. Matt said quietly, “You did what you thought was best.”
As usual, Matt’s refusal to argue only heightened his father’s ire. “Who are you?”
Connie moved slightly closer. Matt did not need to look up to feel the strength of her caring concern. The gift was so powerful he could reach across the void and touch his father’s shoulder. “I’m your son.”
Matt dropped Judy Leigh at the newspaper and then drove Connie home. Throughout the silent journey, he remained locked onto the exchange with his father. He could not say why he had spoken as he had. The words hung there before him. The touch to his father’s arm. Such a feeble gesture, so paltry the words. Thirty years in the making.
It was not until Matt turned onto Connie’s street that he acknowledged the underlying current. Connie sat there beside him, enveloped in the same disconcerting serenity.
He parked the car, cut off the motor, and turned to her. She met his gaze. And waited.
Where Megan Kelly had worked her way beneath his barriers with words, Connie was doing so with silence. This was a harder struggle, for she gave him nothing to defend against. He could not argue with her, nor barricade himself against questions she did not ask.
The exchange with his father was now coupled to this growing awareness over Connie. As he left the car and walked her to her front door, every false relationship he had known paraded before his eyes. The implacable rhythm at the hands of one woman after another. Different lady, same story. Meet, heat, defeat. Their accusations tossed like farewell grenades.
Only not this time. The difference was palpable. Connie unlocked her front door and then just stood looking at him with that dark calm.
She was not going to tell him good-bye. He knew that with a certainty that rocked his world.
Matt turned away from the suffocation, not from her. He walked back down the street and continued on past his car, a lone pilgrim so lost he could not even drive away.
At the corner stood a solitary maple, sheltered from the day’s winds, still emblazoned with a final autumn song. On the opposite corner the lights of a
bar sputtered and flickered and gleamed. If only he had learned to be a drinking man.
He watched his fingers trace a line down the tree’s irregular surface. The image from his sleep in the car with Judy Leigh returned to him then. Sharper now than when he had first dreamed it. And he understood the dread he had felt.
The dream had been a single image. He was seated on a park bench. Connie was beside him. They ate ice cream from a cup. She held the spoon, he the container. She fed him, then herself. She had been so very happy. Not in the way of one who laughed. Down deep. In her very bones. In her soul. And it had been because of him. He had done this thing. He had given her such peace and fulfillment that this simple act of sharing a cup of ice cream had been utterly complete for her. She had looked at him with the tenderness of a woman unafraid to share her love.
A wind touched the leaves then, a soft sigh of lost breath. The leaves might have shifted. But all Matt heard was the call of crystal chimes.
He dropped his arm. He turned around. Connie still stood on the street in front of her house. He started back. She watched him return, motionless. Trapped in the helpless amber he had created around her and them.
He stopped in front of her. He wanted to take her and hold her until the air left both their bodies.
So he fought harder than he ever had in his entire life. The words were scarcely a whisper. “I don’t want to get it wrong again this time. With you.”
He was trembling so hard he doubted she caught everything he said. “You don’t know. You can’t. I’ve never, I haven’t . . .” He felt the inevitable defeat swallow him, a great dark maw of winter blasting down and taking him whole. “I have to go.”
“No, Matt.” She was so calm, this woman. She reached for his hand. “There’s no need to run. Not this time.”
He looked down at her hand. Watched her join it with her other. And knew so long as she held him, he would never be able to leave.
“Just do this. Okay? Take a deep breath. Will you do that? Just breathe. Okay. Again. That’s it. Nice and easy and deep. Good. Okay. Now I want you just to unlock that muscle. The one you’ve got clenched up so tight. Let it go. I’ll be there. It’s okay. I’m not going away and neither are you. Feel that muscle unclench?”
“Yes.” He was so scared. But the power of her voice overwhelmed his ability to remain as he was, as he always had been. Here on this street, the winter wind could not touch him. The years of holding back meant nothing. All was washed away by her soothing concern.
“Okay. Breathe once more for me. Good.” She smiled softly then. Confident in him. And them. “Now tell me what it was you wanted to say.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dealing with cops and security forces is a lesson in reality. I have been gifted with some of the finest teachers around. Special thanks must go to Detective Melisa Anderson and Detective Michael Hammel of Baltimore’s homocide division, and Major James Rood and Detective Elizabeth Geiselman with Baltimore’s organized crime squad. Thanks also to Dr. Patricia Aronica-Pollak and Jerry Dziecichowicz with the Office of the Medical Examiner. And to Richard Feser, patrol officer with the Washington, D.C., police, for helping me learn what questions I needed to ask.
Debbie Bernstein was formerly in State Department Intelligence, and a key reason for why this book came into being. Clare Lopez is a senior intelligence consultant to Homeland Security, and served in CIA ops for a number of years. Bruce Stofko is a special agent with the FBI. Nick Eftiamiades with State Department Intel kindly walked me through the FLETSE training school. Heartfelt thanks to all these great people. It has been a genuine honor.
Frank and Ruth Protokowicz and Jeff Leach are lifetime Baltimore residents and supplied much of the details that made the city live for me and hopefully on the page. Laura Vozzella and Doug Donovan are reporters with the Baltimore Sun and helped enormously. As did Hannah Lee Byron and Fran Carmen of the Baltimore Film Office, together with Kristen Zissel of the Baltimore Visitors’ Association, and most especially Jack Gerbes and Kathi Ash of the Maryland Film Commission.
Thanks also to Sean O’Keefe, President of Union Pictures, and to Alan Nevins of The Firm. It was great working with you both on this concept.
Special thanks must also go to my publisher, Allen Arnold, and my editor, Ami McConnell. They represent a tremendous team at WestBow. It is great working with you guys and coming to know you as friends.
Lynda Atkins is a former adjutant with the Royal Air Force and kindly helped structure the UK military base scenes, as did former RAF navigator Brian Spurway. Christopher Compston is a senior judge with the Oxford Crown Court, and a new friend.
Heartfelt thanks to Isabella, my darling wife, whose guidance and wisdom and confidence in my meager abilities shine from every book.
This book is dedicated to all the great folks who call Charm City home.
Go birds.
