The Night Crew

by John Sandford

  Inside, the clientele seemed to hover over their coffee, arms circling the cups, as though somebody might try to take the coffee away from them; and they tended to look up whenever the door opened. The blinds, which blocked the view in, were open just enough that, from the inside, they could see out.

  ‘‘There he is,’’ Anna muttered.

  Tarpatkin looked like her idea of a crazy killer: his pitchblack hair, six inches long, streamed away from his narrow face, as though an electric current were running through it. He had thin black eyebrows over a long, bony nose; his lips were narrow, tight, and too pink, the only color in his face. He was dressed all in black, and was reading a tabloid-sized real-estate newspaper. He had one hand on a cup of tea, showing a tea-bag string and tag under his hand. He was wearing a heavy gold wedding band, but on his middle finger. An empty cup sat across the table from him. ‘‘What if he’s the guy?’’

  ‘‘Do you know him? Ever met him?’’ Harper asked.

  ‘‘No. I’d remember the face.’’

  ‘‘Then he’s not the guy, because you know the killer, at least a little bit,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Slide into the booth across from him; I’ll get a chair.’’

  Tarpatkin watched them coming, eyes just over the top of the paper. His expression didn’t change when Anna slid into the booth: ‘‘Hi,’’ she said, smiling. Harper hooked a chair from an empty table across from the booth, turned it backward and sat down, just blocking Tarpatkin’s route out of the booth.

  ‘‘Mr. Tarpatkin—name’s Harper, and my friend here is Anna.’’

  ‘‘Hello, Anna,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’’

  ‘‘No, no, it’s a gun,’’ Anna said pleasantly.

  ‘‘We’d show it to you, but in here’’—Harper looked around—‘‘somebody might get excited and we’d all start shooting.’’

  ‘‘What do you want?’’ Tarpatkin asked.

  ‘‘Just need to talk,’’ Harper said.

  ‘‘That’s all you guys ever want,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘Talk. Then your ass winds up in jail.’’

  ‘‘What?’’ Anna’s eyebrows went up and she glanced uncertainly at Harper.

  Tarpatkin caught it, and clouded up: ‘‘If you assholes ain’t cops, you can get the fuck out of my booth.’’

  ‘‘We’re not cops, but I used to be, and I still know a lot of deputies,’’ Harper said. ‘‘The thing is, you’re caught right in the middle of a major murder case and the cops are freaking out. You can talk to us, off the record, or talk to them, on the record.’’

  ‘‘You’re talking bullshit, man, I don’t know any murder mysteries.’’ His language veered from formal, almost scholarly, to the street, and then back again; he might have been two people. Tarpatkin shook out the newspaper, as though he were about to resume reading.

  ‘‘One of your clients, Jason O’Brien, got taken off in a really bad way a couple of days ago. Beat to death, carved up with a knife.’’ When Harper said it, Anna was watching Tarpatkin’s eyes: they flickered when Jason’s name was mentioned. ‘‘And maybe you know a guy named Sean MacAllister?’’

  Another flicker: ‘‘He knows them both,’’ Anna said to Harper, not taking her eyes off Tarpatkin.

  Tarpatkin didn’t deny it: this was news he could use. ‘‘Carved up?’’

  ‘‘You know a guy who likes knives?’’ Harper asked.

  Tarpatkin thought for a second, then said, ‘‘I know a couple of them, but they don’t know those two. When did this happen? I haven’t seen anything about it in the paper.’’

  Anna told him, briefly, and then said, ‘‘We’re looking for a guy selling wizards. We understand you don’t, but we’re hoping that you might know who does. Right around here— the university neighborhood.’’

  Tarpatkin looked her over for a moment, then said, ‘‘Honey, I don’t know what kind of mission you’re on, but you really don’t want to mess around with those people. They’re amateurs—they’re crazy and they’ll kill you for a nickel.’’

  ‘‘Somebody might be trying to kill me for free,’’ Anna said. ‘‘We’re trying to get him to stop.’’

  ‘‘Huh.’’ He pulled at his goatee, then said, ‘‘Let me give you fifteen seconds on how the smart part of this business works—and for the tape recorder, if you’re wearing one, you’ll notice that this is all hypothetical.’’

  He pulled a napkin out of a chrome napkin holder and smoothed it on the tabletop. Anna thought he was going to write on it, but then he started folding it as he talked: L.A.diner origami. ‘‘Suppose you got a small-time dealer,’’ Tarpatkin said. ‘‘He’s got maybe seventy-five, a hundred regular customers. He only takes new customers from recommendations, and only after looking them over.

  ‘‘This guy is making, say, ten grand a week after expenses, no taxes. He flies over to the Bahamas a few times a year and makes a deposit, takes a little vacation. In ten years, with some careful investments, he’s got eight or ten million in the bank, and he moves to the Bahamas full time. Or Mexico. Costa Rica. Somewhere . . .

  ‘‘If he’s smooth, he don’t have to worry too much about the cops, because he’s such a small-timer, and when they come around, he cooperates. The cops always want the big guys—Christ, if they busted everybody like this small-timer, they’d have to build twenty new jails. So, they don’t. I mean, hey, he’s a small businessman. A little better than insurance, maybe not so good as selling stocks and bonds.’’

  Anna broke in: ‘‘But these other guys are different.’’

  Tarpatkin shook a finger at her, like a schoolmaster making a point. ‘‘I’m coming to that, honey—they’re very different. They go into the dope business, and they think, ‘If I sell a pound of crank, I make ten thousand dollars. If I sell a ton of crank, I make twenty million dollars. So I’ll sell a ton of crank. This year.’

  ‘‘And since they’ve been to the movies, they know the business is dangerous. So they buy a load of guns and knives and dynamite and chain saws and whatever else they can think of. Then to get their heads right, they get into the product themselves. The next thing you know, you’ve got these drug freaks with guns and dynamite and chain saws, and there’s crank all over the street and everybody’s going crazy looking for them—competitors, cops, DEA. They always find them. Go to jail, don’t get your twenty million. Or wind up in a bush somewhere, with your head cut off.’’

  He shook his head sadly, and asked in his street patois: ‘‘Is this any fuckin’ way to run a fuckin’ business?’’ And then back to the scholar: ‘‘I think not. But these are the people who are selling your wizards.’’

  ‘‘So can you put us onto somebody?’’

  Tarpatkin shook his head. ‘‘No, I can’t. I stay away from those people. However, if one of you has a cell phone—or a regular phone, for that matter—I could ask around and call you.’’

  ‘‘So you wanna talk to the cops,’’ Harper said.

  ‘‘No. But I don’t know anything—not what you want. Why would I? I don’t hang with those people. I stay as far away as I can.’’

  ‘‘That’s bull,’’ Harper said. ‘‘You guys have always got your ears to the ground . . .’’

  Tarpatkin shrugged: ‘‘Well, you could drag me out into the street and beat the shit outa me until I tell you what you want . . . except that I don’t know it.’’

  Anna and Harper looked at each other, and then Anna dug in her purse, found a pen and wrote her cell phone number on Tarpatkin’s folded napkin. ‘‘Call me anytime,’’ she said.

  ‘‘I will. You’re a little sweetie.’’

  ‘‘About your hypothetical dealer sending his hypothetical money to the Bahamas,’’ Anna said. ‘‘How long has he been doing this, hypothetically?’’

  ‘‘Could be eight years,’’ Tarpatkin said. He bobbed his head and smiled; one of his canine teeth was solid gold, and it winked at her from beneath his ratty mustache.

&nb
sp; Outside, Harper said, ‘‘I don’t know what we could do: all we got is threats of siccing the cops on him.’’

  ‘‘We could drag him out in the alley and beat the shit out of him,’’ Anna said wryly.

  ‘‘In that place, we’d get about three steps,’’ Harper said. ‘‘I have a feeling they sort of look out for each other . . . In fact . . . just a minute.’’ He walked back to the diner door, pulled it open, looked in, then walked back, shaking his head. ‘‘He’s gone. He’ll be in the Bahamas by dawn.’’

  As they were getting into Harper’s BMW, the phone in Anna’s purse rang. She glanced at Harper, then took the phone out and clicked it on: ‘‘Hello?’’

  A little girl’s voice, oddly tinny, with an adult’s vocabulary and intonations, said, ‘‘The men you want to see are brothers named Ronnie and Tony and they live . . .’’

  ‘‘Just a minute, just a minute,’’ Anna said. And to Harper: ‘‘Gimme a paper.’’

  She found the pen in her purse and Harper groped in a door bin and finally came up with a road map. ‘‘Write on it,’’ he said. The tinny little girl’s voice recited an address in Malibu, and finished, ‘‘. . . real modern, gray weathered wood, lots of black glass, right on the hill above the highway. You won’t have any trouble finding it.’’

  And she—it, Tarpatkin?—was gone.

  ‘‘Voice-altering phone deal,’’ Harper said, when Anna described the voice. ‘‘Lot of dealers use them. You get like twenty choices of voice.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘So in case we were recording it, he wouldn’t be on the record.’’

  ‘‘Strange life.’’

  ‘‘Trying to make it to retirement,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Two years.’’

  Anna glanced at her watch: ‘‘We’ve got time to run out to Malibu. Or we could head down to BJ’s.’’

  Harper glanced at her: ‘‘The question about BJ’s is this: you’ll see some people you know, but so what? How do we pick out the guy?’’

  ‘‘If he talks to me, or comes on to me . . .’’

  ‘‘Somebody’s gonna come on to you, you go to a party box. That’s what it’s for.’’

  Anna thought about it for a minute. Harper was not only right, but he was also on the track of the people who’d fed dope to his son. She’d go with that: ‘‘Malibu,’’ she said.

  Harper nodded. ‘‘We spot the house, but we don’t do anything. I want to check with some guys in the sheriff’s department, run these names. Ronnie and Tony . . .’’

  Harper had a Thomas Brothers Guide stashed in the back seat. Anna turned on the car’s reading lights as they dropped onto the PCH and made the right turn up toward Malibu, and began paging through the maps.

  ‘‘If the address is right, it’s just before the turnoff for Corral Canyon,’’ she said after a moment.

  ‘‘Should be easy to pick out,’’ Harper said.

  They sat in companionable silence for a while, not much traffic, just cruising. Then Harper asked, ‘‘How come you’re not going out with anyone?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. She looked out her window, away from him: nothing to see but the dirt bluff rising away from the highway into the dark. ‘‘I’ve just had other things.’’

  ‘‘Been a little lonely?’’

  ‘‘I’ve been busy,’’ she said. And after a few seconds, ‘‘Yeah, I’ve been a little lonely. Then . . .’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Ah, there’s this guy. I went out with him years ago; pretty intense. I thought we were gonna get married, but we didn’t. I saw him the other day, at a gas station. He’s out here on a fellowship, I guess—I called a mutual friend. Anyway, it all sorta came back on me . . .’’

  ‘‘What’s he do?’’

  ‘‘He’s a composer. Modern stuff—the New York Philharmonic debuted one of his poems, ‘Sketch of Malaga´.’ ’’

  ‘‘One of his poems ?’’

  ‘‘Compositions; he calls them poems. He’s not really that arty, he just knows . . . how to work the levers on the classical music machine.’’

  Harper glanced at her: ‘‘Sounds like you might resent that, a little.’’

  ‘‘Oh, no. I guess it’s necessary. But I wasn’t good at it.’’

  ‘‘So you’re a musician.’’

  ‘‘That’s what I really am,’’ she said. Harper had a way of listening—maybe picked up when he was a cop—that seemed to pull the words out of her. He was attentive: really listened.

  She told him about growing up in Wisconsin, about her mother’s death. How she’d been the best pianist in her high school, the best they’d ever had. That she’d been the best at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the year she graduated. That she was the one of the best two or three in graduate school.

  ‘‘Not quite good enough,’’ she told him, staring out the window at the night. Clark had also been a pianist, not quite at her level, but he’d seen the writing on the wall much sooner than she had. He’d branched into direction and composition, started working the music machine.

  ‘‘Couldn’t you have gone that way?’’

  ‘‘Nah. Performance is one thing, composition is something else. Takes a different kind of mind.’’

  ‘‘Did you ever try it?’’

  ‘‘I was never really interested in it,’’ she said.

  ‘‘So what happened?’’

  ‘‘We were living together, and he was the big intellectual and I was doing session gigs. Movie music. I don’t know; it pulled us apart. I kept thinking that if you just played well enough, practiced hard enough, you’d make it. And that wasn’t the game at all . . . So I went to Burbank, and he went to Yale.’’

  ‘‘Ah, that’s really excellent,’’ Harper said.

  ‘‘What?’’ she asked, half-smiling.

  ‘‘You do resent the mealy little poser.’’

  ‘‘No, I really don’t,’’ she protested. Then, ‘‘You’d like him. He even plays golf.’’

  ‘‘Rock bands play golf,’’ Harper said, not impressed. ‘‘So . . . are you pining for him?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘Maybe.’’

  ‘‘Shit.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, it’s sort of a problem. You know, if you’re thinking about . . . it might be sorta awkward having you stay over.’’

  ‘‘I’m gonna stay over,’’ he said. ‘‘But I won’t be rattling your doorknob in the night. Staying over is business.’’

  ‘‘Okay.’’ Was she just the smallest bit disappointed? Maybe.

  ‘‘Would you play something on the piano for me?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘If you like.’’ The car seemed hushed; the outside world away from the two of them. ‘‘What music do you listen to?’’

  ‘‘Mostly hard rock or hard classical; some old funky blues and jazz, but only for an hour or so at a time.’’

  ‘‘We like the same things,’’ she said, ‘‘except I’m not so big on rock, and a little bigger on the jazz . . . what should I play for you?’’

  ‘‘Maybe something by, I dunno . . . Sousa, maybe.’’

  He turned quickly, saw her embarrassed: ‘‘That was a joke, for Christ’s sake,’’ he laughed. ‘‘Loosen up, Batory.’’

  ‘‘So who do you like?’’

  ‘‘You could play me anything by Satie.’’

  ‘‘Satie? Really?’’

  ‘‘Really,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve been listening to him a lot; he’s very delicate and funny, sometimes.’’ He glanced at her, interpreting her silence as skepticism. ‘‘I’m a lawyer, not a fuckin’ moron,’’ he said.

  She ducked her head and pointed up the hill. ‘‘Malibu,’’ she said.

  The house was a half-block east of Corral, on a short, hooked turnoff with a circle at the end. There were two other homes on the circle, all three showing lights, and all with steel fences, darkened and turned to resemble wrought iron, facing the street. The driveways w
ere blocked with decorative eightfoot-high electric gates between stone pillars.

  ‘‘We’ll just keep rolling through,’’ Harper said, looking out through the sweep of his headlights. ‘‘Look for dogs, anything that might be a dog . . .’’

  ‘‘I can’t see anything,’’ Anna said.

  They were back out at Corral: Harper stopped, looked both ways, then said, ‘‘We’d be crazy to try to get in the front.’’

  ‘‘Get in?’’ She looked back at the house, at the fence and the hedge behind it, the security sign next to the stone pillars beside the driveway. ‘‘That place is a fort.’’

  ‘‘Let’s go get an ice cream,’’ he said. ‘‘Isn’t there an ice cream place down at the shopping center?’’

  She got a Dutch chocolate and he took a raspberry and they sat on a bench outside of a Ben & Jerry’s and ate the ice cream, talking about nothing of importance. When they finished, Harper wiped his hands and face with the tiny napkin from the ice cream parlor, pitched it into a trash container and said, ‘‘You drive.’’

  ‘‘Why?’’

  ‘‘I want to go back there and take one more look. . . .

  Maybe get out.’’

  ‘‘Jake . . . this is a really bad idea.’’

  He nodded. ‘‘I know, but I can’t figure out what else to do. I just want to stand on one of those stone pillars, if I can, and take a look. See what’s in there.’’

  ‘‘Jake . . .’’

  ‘‘What, you chicken?’’ he asked.

  Never a chicken. Never.

  One of the houses had gone dark, but the target house showed lights on all three floors. ‘‘We’ll roll right up, I’ll hop out, do a quick step-up, look in and then get right back in the car and we’re out of there,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Aw, man . . .’’ But she felt a little thrill, a little of the roaming-through-the-night feel; she took the car into the hook and heard Harper’s door pop.

  She slowed and he said, ‘‘Keep rolling, slow, I’ll latch the door, don’t want them to see headlights stopping . . .’’ He hopped out with the car still moving, pushed the door shut until it caught, looked around once as he approached the fence and then stepped on a horizontal brace-bar, pulled himself up and looked into the yard. Anna continued through the circle, headed out toward the street; she rolled her window down and looked over at his back and said, in a harsh whisper, ‘‘Let’s go.’’