by Jane Haddam
“Odd, how?”
“If I knew that, I’d feel a lot better,” Gregor said.
There was the sound of the front door opening down the hall. Bennis called out, “I’m home,” and Pickles came running into the kitchen at Javier. Pickles was wearing a bright red woolly coat, a matching hat, and four matching booties. He looked like the reincarnation of Doris Day.
3
Bennis came in taking her coat off, saw John Jackman at the table, and smiled.
“This is unexpected,” she said. Then she turned to Gregor. “I ran into Tibor. He wants you over at his place at ten o’clock sharp. It’s an emergency. I think he really means emergency. He sounded like it, anyway. I told him you’d be there, so if having John here means you can’t be, you’d better call him. We don’t see you much, John. Aren’t you supposed to be in Washington?”
“Everybody asks me that,” John said. “We’re on recess.”
Javier was snaking a strip of bacon down toward Pickles on the floor. Bennis cleared her throat.
“Javier,” she said, holding up two fingers. “Two.”
“Dos,” Javier said solemnly. “Sí.”
“That dog will eat an entire pound of bacon on its own and then throw it all up on the carpet,” Bennis said. Then she dropped her coat over the back of a chair and sat down herself. “Am I cleared to hear this conversation, or should I leave the room and let the two of you talk stuff you need warrants for?”
“You only need warrants for the particulars,” John said. “The general stuff, you probably already know. We were talking about Cary Alder.”
“Ah,” Bennis said.
Gregor got himself more coffee. He was beginning to feel more than a little wired, and the message from Tibor was making him uneasy. He watched Javier feed Pickles the second slice of bacon. He wished he knew what the boy understood and what he didn’t. He wished he wasn’t so sure that Javier understood ten times what any of them suspected him of.
“Didn’t you talk to Sister Margaret Mary about the circumstances of our getting this one here?” he asked.
Javier didn’t look up at him, but Gregor knew immediately that the kid had hooked into the conversation. Bennis didn’t seem to notice.
“I did talk to her,” she said. “It was weird, the circumstances were, I mean, but it wasn’t bad. He checked out medically. And he looks healthy, doesn’t he? He’s not too thin. He eats like a horse. I’m pretty sure Sister Margaret Mary said he came to the Maryknoll sisters that way.”
“We’re trying to figure out how something works,” John said.
“John thinks Cary Alder is running a coyote operation,” Gregor said. “I’ve looked at the paperwork, and I think so, too. Sort of.”
“Coyotes bring illegal aliens into the country for a fee,” John said. “If you’re sitting in Guatemala or El Salvador or wherever—Venezuela a lot, lately—if you’re sitting there and you want to get here, you pay them and they guide you up here and get you across the border. Most coyotes are freelance. They operate on their own. But there’s a downside to that. They get you across the border, and then what?”
“There are other coyote operations,” Gregor said, “that are centralized. They’re run by business guys who have specific jobs to fill. They hire coyotes to find and recruit people. They pay them a salary, and then the coyotes get more money from the guys they take for the jobs. If you’re an immigrant, it’s supposed to be a better deal. You know you have work when you get here. You know where you’re going. When you get across the border there will be contacts you can use to make your way. You’re much less likely to get caught and deported.”
“And Cary Alder is running one of those?” Bennis asked.
“We think so,” John said.
“There ought to be a paper trail of money,” Gregor said. “Not just money going out, but money coming in. Remember, you collect from the immigrant and not just Alder himself, and some of what you collect from the immigrant has to go to Alder. If it doesn’t, the whole operation collapses financially. But we’ve both looked over all the paperwork, and so have dozens of forensic accountants at Homeland Security and the FBI, and we can’t find any money coming in.”
“So maybe he isn’t running a coyote operation,” Bennis said.
“Practically everybody in the high-end resort and restaurant businesses are involved one way or the other,” John said. “And it’s going to get worse. With all the pushes for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, we think the population of undocumented immigrants working in the US is going to explode.”
“Because you don’t have to pay them the minimum wage,” Gregor explained. “They can’t complain about their situation or their working conditions without being in danger of being deported. So they put up with it. It takes some fancy accounting to make it look right on paper, but some of these guys are only paying their people two or three dollars an hour.”
“And Alder Properties is definitely doing that at some of their places,” John said. “Lawn and landscape workers on their gated communities on the Main Line. Pool boys at the resorts. Dishwashers and other out-of-sight personnel at the Aldergold venues.”
“But if you know all that for sure,” Bennis said, “why don’t you arrest him? Or arrest somebody? Or move into the operations and do something?”
“Nobody wants to,” John said grimly. “The Republicans know if they lower the boom, a lot of their donors lose a lot of money. The Democrats know that if they lower the boom, the result will almost certainly be a wave of mass deportations. The situation is politically intractable on both sides. And no. Opening up to mass immigration wouldn’t work. It would just push wages ever further south. And ending illegal immigration will result in businesses finding ways to hire as few people as possible. Automation is a wonderful thing. Self-checkout lines in supermarkets. Self-checkout lines in fast-food restaurants. Mass unemployment from one end of the country to the other.”
“Well,” Bennis said. “This sounds cheerful.”
John shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I’m doing myself half the time. I don’t know what we’d accomplish if we sent Cary Alder to jail for the coyote operation as well as for the bank fraud. Another operation would open up next week. I can’t fix the world. I can’t fix the country. I can’t even fix the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I just—hate these people.”
John finished his coffee and got up. “The SEC is going to file indictments next week,” he said. “And the FBI is coming in right after them. Are you expecting to talk to Cary Alder again?”
“I was,” Gregor said. “But not over this.”
“Over the Marta Warkowski business? Well, do what you can. And thanks for coming in on this. I know you’re been staying out of it ever since, ah—”
“Russ shot me?”
“Yeah, that,” John said. “Good to see you, Bennis. Good to see you, too, Javier, even if you don’t like me much. I’ll let myself out.”
He got up, got his coat, and went out into the hall. Gregor watched him go. It had been years since they had first met, all the way back to the days when John was the first African American head of homicide in Bryn Mawr. His hair hadn’t been that gray, then. His shoulders hadn’t been so firmly set.
The front door opened and shut. Javier reached for another piece of toast from the stack.
“You ever get the feeling that the whole world has gotten a lot more depressing than it used to be?” Bennis asked. “I was actually feeling pretty good when I came home today. The sisters have this plan for St. Catherine’s. They want to provide free hot lunches for everybody, not just the kids whose parents can’t pay. Sister Margaret Mary says that that way, there’d be no stigma to getting a free lunch, everybody would be the same, and if they could fund it themselves and not take government money, they wouldn’t have to follow government guidelines and a bunch of kids brought up on tortillas wouldn’t have to eat quinoa. And I was thinking—I have money.”
“Lots of i
t,” Gregor said. “Most of which you made before you ever met me. Do what you want with it.”
“It’s a good idea,” Bennis said. “It’s a good approach to that problem. You know what else is? Okay, different problem. Providing money so everybody can go on field trips and no parents have to pay. Even for kids whose parents could pay.”
“Those are good ideas,” Gregor said.
“I know,” Bennis said. “And I can help do something about them. But things are still more depressing than they used to be. And I’m getting really tired of it.”
FOUR
1
Meera Agerwal was not good at planning ahead. It was not what she had been brought up to do, and it was not something she had ever imagined she would need to learn. By both caste and environment, she was used to having things done for her, anticipated for her, arranged for her. At home, someone else cooked and cleaned and took care of the clothes. Someone kept tabs on the weather and got the house and grounds ready for storms. Someone monitored the movies and shows and vetted the young men who were hoping to marry her and her father’s money.
If everything had worked out the way it was supposed to, Meera would never have come to America. Her biggest problem would be checking out the women who would be her mother-in-law. Then her father’s money had gotten low and her brother had brought it lower. Then everybody’s money had gotten low, which had something to do with politics. Meera knew nothing about politics, and she didn’t care. She cared only that she now had almost as much as she needed set up in bank accounts back in India and secret places here. The only reason she couldn’t go home on the next available aircraft was that she’d never get away with it.
It was maddening. The other thing Meera knew nothing about was law enforcement. In Mumbai, the prominence of her family and their position on the right side of the political divide meant she needed to know nothing about law enforcement. They would concern themselves with other people and leave her alone.
Here, law enforcement concerned itself with everyone. Too much of who she was and what she was didn’t matter. This was one of the things she had figured out from her talk with Clare McAfee. Law enforcement already knew what had been going on at Alder Properties. They knew about the false reports to the banks. They knew about the money being shifted from one account to the other so that it seemed like there was always more money than there actually was. The question was not what they knew but how they interpreted it. It was one thing to know that the money had been shifted around and that some of it had been siphoned off. It was another thing to know who had done the siphoning.
The method Meera and her mother used to get money back to India was simple. First, someone in India who needed money here, but didn’t want anyone to know he had it, deposited that money in Meera’s mother’s accounts. Then he came here and threw a housewarming, or a welcoming party, or another event that looked like typical Indian over display of wealth and influence. People brought gifts. In the gift Meera brought there would be cash, lots and lots of it, enough to cover what had gone into her mother’s account. Nobody knew anything. Nobody could prove anything. Meera’s own money was magically safe in Mumbai.
Meera was not worried about the money. That was why she had the gun. When you carried money around with you all the time, in a city like Philadelphia, you had to have a gun. She’d been an idiot to lose the other one in the apartment that night after all that trouble with Marta Warkowski. She should never have gone out there when Hernandez demanded she come. Still, that wasn’t too bad. Nobody could trace the gun to her. She never handled it with her bare hands. She hadn’t bought it legally. That one was like this one, a blank you picked up on the street from some man standing in the shadow of a doorway or at the edge of an alley. Guns were everywhere.
When push came to shove, Meera was sure Cary Alder would say she had tried to kill Marta Warkowski—if he got to talk first. He hadn’t seen her do any such thing, but he was in the same position she was. He had to have someone to deflect it all on.
The whole thing got more and more convoluted, the more she thought about it. Hernandez standing in Marta Warkowski’s apartment. That Juan Morales man lurking in the hallway. Marta just gone, disappeared, as if she’d never existed. Then Hernandez dead on the floor, and that Morales man—
Who would say what about what? Would Marta Warkowski wake up and tell the world what had happened to her? What had happened to her? Had Cary Alder hit her? Had Hernandez? Had Morales? Would she remember? By the time she got back on the scene, Marta was gone and nobody was explaining anything. Cary Alder was gone, too.
One thing at a time.
First, Meera told the girls in the office that she had another meeting. She called from just outside the place where she had met Clare McAfee. Then she went back to her apartment and went carefully through the drawers and cupboards. The money was gone. She had been clearing it out for weeks. She didn’t think a stray bill here or there would make much difference. Nobody had been jotting down the serial numbers.
The next thing was the gun. There were too many checkpoints in too many buildings these days. There were metal detectors. Meera got the gun out of the Bundt pan where she kept it. When she had one of her internal fits about how stupid Americans were, the Bundt pan was high on her list of evidence. What would an Indian woman do with a Bundt pan?
She put the gun in her purse and left the apartment. On the street, she walked slowly and deliberately. She was not in a hurry. She didn’t need to run. She turned in the direction opposite to the one that would take her back to her office. She walked four blocks, then took a right, then took another right. The weather was still very cold. The day was beginning to wind down, even though it was not that late. Eventually she found a stretch that was deserted, and a series of narrow alleys. Those were deserted, too. You always had to worry that the alleys would have junkies in them.
She went down one and walked about half the length of it. There were garbage cans, tall metal ones, stuffed so full their lids couldn’t settle on the rims. One of them smelled so bad, it made her reel a little. She took the lid off a different one. There were orange rinds and carrot peelings. Meera looked up and down the alley. There was no one there. There was no one passing on either street at either end.
She was wearing thick winter gloves. She took the gun out of her purse and put it in the bin, in among the rotting vegetable matter. Then she stripped off the gloves and put them in there, too. The last thing she wanted was the smell of the rot on her hands.
A moment later, she was out of the alley and back on the street. She was walking purposefully now. She made a left turn at the next corner. Now she was on a street with people on it, pedestrian traffic, office buildings. Men were wearing suits. Women were wearing high heels that skidded on the pavement. It was just a matter of keeping her cool, of sounding plausible, or being the heroine of this thing and not the villain. She’d never been a villain in her life. You couldn’t be a villain if it was just about money.
It was four more blocks before she found the building she wanted. There was indeed a checkpoint at the door. She had expected it.
The man at the desk was old and tired looking. Meera put her purse down so that he could search it.
“I would like to talk to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said, as crisply as she could. Her voice had just a hint of British accent. That was because she had gone to a good school. “I have information about a crime.”
“What kind of crime?”
Meera almost blanked. “A crime about money,” she said, dredging it up from somewhere. “A crime about a bank.”
“A bank,” the man said.
Meera thought the whole thing was about to blow up in her face. Then the man picked up the phone next to him on the table, talked into it rapidly, and hung up.
“Take those elevators,” he told her, pointing across the lobby. “Go to room three sixteen. Ask for Madelyn Pertwee.”
2
Father Tibor Kaspar
ian did not believe the things Russ Donahue believed. He did not think the United States was about to explode in a bloody civil war. He did not believe that there was going to be blood in the streets, and that everybody would be the victim of everybody else. He did not believe these things because he had once been in a place at a time when they were true. He could smell them coming. He did not smell them now.
At the same time, he could smell something, and he did not like the way it made him feel. Something was … off, these days, and it wasn’t just that Russ had gone crazy and begun to behave in ways that would have been unthinkable when they first met. He knew the tones in that man’s voice. He knew when ideology was running thought and when reality was. And he had known, since Russ began insisting on this, that here was something connected to reality.
When Gregor knocked, Tibor let him in, then went into the living room and let him follow. He had the landline out on the coffee table, speaker button blinking red to show it was on, sitting on top of Aristotle’s Poetics and a novel by Jackie Collins. It made him wonder what had happened to Jackie Collins. There had been novel after novel. Then it had all stopped. Tibor appreciated silly novels. They relieved the tension in his back.
Here was one thing about Gregor—he showed up when he said he would. Tibor watched him sit down in the big overstuffed chair. The clock on the wall said one minute before ten.
“That’s a phone all ready to go on speaker,” Gregor said. He was pleasant, but Tibor knew he was not happy. “And if you’re doing what I think you’re doing, I’m going to walk out of here.”
“I need you to stay,” Tibor said.
“The man shot me in the face,” Gregor said. “He nearly killed me. He meant to kill me. God only knows what he thought he was going to get out of it, but he did it. I have nothing I want to say. And if he has something he wants to say, I don’t want to hear it.”
“You want to hear this,” Tibor said.
