Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  Leary stood at the top of the subway stairs just inside the turnstile where he could see Simmonds’s legs down on the platform, striding restlessly up and down—eloquent, angry legs. When the uptown train came, Leary skipped down the steps and entered the car behind Simmonds. Simmonds got off at Grand Central—astonishingly, Grand Central, always Grand Central—and walked to Madison Avenue, then up to the mid-forties. There he entered an office building, the entire first floor of which was occupied by a large Manhattan bank.

  She wouldn’t tell him.

  “My mother’s maiden name was Leary. I wonder if we’re related.”

  “I doubt it. There’s no one as pretty as you in my family.”

  “Oh, bad. Just bad, Mr. Leary. In all my fifty-five years I’ve never been pretty. I was born on a diet. My family is filled with shameless flatterers, though—so maybe we are related.”

  “Well, that’s a six-pointer. Thanks a bunch. Tell me more about Jay Simmonds.”

  “Can’t unless you identify yourself. Official business only.”

  “Leary took out his ID card and showed it to her. “What I’m doing here is highly confidential. Okay?”

  She nodded and waited.

  He took a sheet of paper from his pocket. “This concerns the Kotlikoff kidnapping.”

  She nodded and sat up more attentively.

  “He transferred three sums of money from his account to Jay Simmonds’s account on these dates. A total of $100,000. I need to know where the money went from here.”

  She studied his face doubtfully for a moment, frowning. Then she read the three dates on the paper. “And if I don’t tell you, you can get a court order.”

  “Honey, minutes count.”

  She looked hesitantly at his face again. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  She came back with a large yellow printout sheet. “You don’t want an official document? Just the information? Okay. My boss says if you want it official, he wants a court order. If you want information, you can have it, provided you don’t reveal your source—and that’s only because it’s part of the Kotlikoff case.”

  “Agreed.”

  She sat down and studied the printout. “Each of those drafts from Mr. Kotlikoff was deposited to Mr. Jay Simmonds’s account on the day it was drawn. And each of those sums was transferred within forty-eight hours.”

  “Where?”

  “To Signor Gabriele Napletano. In Rome.”

  The man with the wide-winged mustache walked up to a pay phone on the corner and dialed a number. The spring sunshine had made the booth hot, and he shoved the folding door back and forth several times to fan the air.

  A man’s voice answered. “Hello.”

  “Yeah. Listen. You know your playmate, Leary? He’s found out about Napletano. I told you that slap on the wrist wouldn’t work.”

  “Did he report it?” asked Gus Geller.

  “No, I don’t think so. But for Christ’s sake, all his friends are FBI agents.”

  “What does he know about Napletano?”

  “So far, it’s just a name.”

  “Okay. We’ve played nice long enough. Deck him.”

  “Any way?”

  “Sure. Under a subway. Just make sure it’s an accident. A fatal accident.”

  The man hung up and walked back to the restaurant where Leary was having a cup of coffee. He waited for him to finish.

  From the first, there was no doubt: Leary could tell even from the back that it was the same man—the same short brown hair, the same head, the same pugnacious set of it, the same bulking shoulders, the same large mustache.

  Leary touched his sore abdomen, remembering. He had been standing at the stationer’s counter, waiting for the clerk to find some foolscap pads in the stockroom, when he saw the back of the man’s head through the shop window—through window shelves holding plastic busts of famous men. Framed thus, the man’s head seemed to be trying to conceal itself by blending with the stock of busts, all looking out with their backs to Leary at the crowded street—Beethoven, Plato, Freud, Franklin, and one U.S. government agent, provenance unknown—spectators all, watching a passing parade of pedestrians.

  Leary walked over to the window to look closely through the shelving at the agent’s head, now just a few inches away and turned slightly in profile. The closeup confirmed it: the muscular nape, brown hair brindled with a trace of gray in military cut, the thinning pate, the mole below his left ear, the bulging left jaw muscle placidly chewing, and the mustache like a signature.

  The agent stood near the subway entrance in front of the shop and stared boldly ahead over the edge of his outspread newspaper at a young woman with a large leather hatbox. All the busts on the shelf looked at her, too.

  In the bright streets the agent wore sunglasses that moved slightly as he chewed. A slope head, an arm-bender, a grunt, thought Leary, one of Geller’s street bullies, a civil servant with GS rating, paid by his fellow citizens of the town to muscle and pummel them: his employers and his victims both. Government by paranoia.

  There he stood, nature’s most successful model, prepackaged violence, reason’s nemesis. There he stood, clearly waiting for Leary. And clearly, this time, there was to be no message, no warning: Leary was to be removed in a basket. This time bones would break. This time, as at first, aware of the cowardice of crowds, the agent would attack anywhere—on the street, on the steps of the subway, discreetly in an alley, in the back of a cab. For this time, oh this time, it would be a major decommissioning job.

  Leary looked around the shop for another door; he looked for a prowling cab in the street; sought a policeman; flicked his eyes among the pedestrians; looked for a familiar face.

  He found none. And there was no other exit. He decided he didn’t want one.

  “Found them,” said the clerk.

  Leary nodded and opened his attaché case. “I’ll take these, too. Six of them.”

  “Sure they’ll fit? They’re very heavy.”

  Leary paid him, pushing the coins and paper bills of his change in his jacket’s side pocket, and, eager to be done with it, walked toward the door. In streaming spring sunlight he turned to the right toward the agent. The case was now very heavy.

  He stepped, remembering his figure crawling on the gum wads and wrappings, the cigar butts and cigarette packages as the crowd stepped around him: the violent death of his absurd innocence.

  Up in position was the newspaper like a mask, concealing the agent’s head. In a few steps Leary reached the man, drew back his right foot and kicked the man’s kneecap.

  “Ahhhhh!” yelled the agent, crouching to grab his knee. Leary drew the attaché case back and up over his head, then swung it downward like a piledriver. It struck the agent just behind the left ear, bursting open and driving the agent in a tumble down the steel-edged subway steps into the crowd, followed by flapping manila folders, fluttering foolscap pads and the six heavy glass ashtrays. Like skeets, the ashtrays spun in air, rising, then arcing down the stairway in merry pursuit of the agent, shattering as they struck the stair walls and the steps, and falling between the pedestrians.

  The agent tumbled, legs in air, over and downward, through the legs and bodies that blocked his way. Leary hurried down after him, pushing through the crowd and yanking the flapping open case after him.

  The agent tumbled down against a wall and began to roll over. His sunglasses, a pad, a pencil, a package of cigarettes and a key case lay amid a scattering of coins and broken glass on steps and landing. The knee of his right trouser leg was torn. Under his left shoulder lay his service pistol; beside his head, the brass knuckles. Leary kicked the knuckles away, then booted the pistol after them.

  Leary drew back his right leg and delivered a soccer kick to the man’s abdomen. The agent shouted and rolled over on his face.

  Leary pressed into the moving mass of people. They fled up the steps before him as he gathered the scattered papers and pads from his attaché case. Halfway up the steps, amid br
oken glass, he found the Kotlikoff manuscript and the biography: the Ashkenazim strike back. Someone had stepped on both manuscripts, and he slapped them clear of dirt before putting them back into the case.

  Looking back, Leary saw the agent, curled now in a slow writhe, intruding into the path of pedestrians like responsibility, while the pedestrians stepped hastily past him without a glance, fleeing kinship, a vast constituency of indifference. A train rushed into the station below, forcing a rush of air that lifted the sheets of scattered newspaper from the steps like fleeing storks, raised them up past his head to the street and sunlight.

  Leary saw that the agent’s left shoe sole had a hole in it.

  The bar was a tunnel, a dark corridor turned away from the sunlight and populated with solitary drinkers lined up in a rank of stools along the bar, participants in an unspecified game of waiting.

  Leary stood waiting, too, for Powell to return his call. He wondered where his exultation was for his great victory, his conquest over the goonism that went about with a hole in its shoe … the hole that turned his victory into, somehow, a defeat.

  It seemed to him, feeling the brandy burn in his throat, that in a world increasingly run by grunts and arm-benders and clerks, with people helpless prisoners in their own fears, man wandered ever farther from the long-lost, longed-for garden. It happened a step at a time, a punch at a time—a gut-kick at a time: still farther into a dead land of brambles and thorns, where victory is defeat.

  So now it was done: With one swing of an attaché case, one kick, he’d challenged Geller and his silent army. It was Geller’s move, and any doorway would serve. Leary felt the hair on his neck prickle. He thought back two days to his terrarium world, a sun-filled lotus land far back across the chasm.

  “Put some more brandy in there,” he told the bartender. Leary made a face at the brandy: there was a chill far down inside that the brandy didn’t reach.

  The front door opened, throwing bright sunlight into the dark interior. A girl entered with a basketful of bundled daffodils. The bartender waved her away, an interrupter of solemn events. Several men raised their heads to look at her—a messenger with bright tidings delivered to the wrong place, to the wrong people. She left, taking the flowers and the light with her.

  L’chaim: to Life. Leary drank down his brandy like hemlock.

  When the wall phone rang, Leary answered it.

  “Leary?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay. Turns out to be unimportant.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m not. What’s up?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Powell hesitated. “Okay.” He hung up.

  Leary suddenly felt alone, adrift. He decided not to tell Powell what he’d done for fear Powell would think he’d become unhinged.

  And maybe he had.

  On the window was the legend: Apartment Rental Units Our Specialty. Leasing and Maintenance.

  Mr. Charles’s secretary was typing hastily, a burning cigarette and a cooling container of coffee on her desk.

  Idly, Mr. Charles stroked the lapel of his plaid jacket and considered the young woman. “Rent’s due the fifth of every month,” he said, making conversation. The young woman nodded. They both glanced at the secretary’s clattering typewriter.

  “Nice apartment. The last tenant was in there for five years.”

  “Six,” said the secretary.

  “Six,” said Mr. Charles.

  The young woman nodded with a faint smile.

  Leary strolled over to the office window next to the secretary’s desk and gazed out at the late afternoon traffic on Third A venue. The secretary exuded a faint odor of faded perfume and stale perspiration. She filled in the last of the blank spaces and plucked the lease in triplicate from her platen and laid it on the desk.

  Mr. Charles studied it, thoughtfully stroking his smooth-shaven chin. “Okay. Yeah. Okay. That’s—yeah. Okay. You sign all three copies here, see? And I’ll sign them here. Go ahead. Use my pen.”

  The young woman signed the three copies, then surrendered the pen to Mr. Charles, who signed underneath. His secretary put the notary seal on each copy and squeezed the embossed seal into the paper. Mr. Charles then selected one of the copies of the lease, put the two keys on top and pushed the lease and the keys across the desk in a slow, deliberate move. He sat back, having enhanced the value of the key with a smile. “I wish you a lot of happiness in your new home. If you need anything, you’ll call.”

  “—and call and call,” said the young woman.

  “No, no, that’s not—oh, I see. You’re joking.” He smiled and shook her hand, half-rising from his seat. “A pleasure.”

  The young woman smiled at the secretary, who said, “Luck, doll,” and left, folding the lease into her purse.

  Mr. Charles said: “You’re the gentleman who called about the four-bedroom?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Oh. How can I help you?”

  Leary showed his ID card to Mr. Charles. “I’m interested in a lease entered into with one Boris Kotlikoff.”

  Mr. Charles glanced at his secretary. “She said I should call. We saw the papers. I didn’t make the connection until she said something.”

  “I told him,” said the secretary.

  “That’s okay. Who’s in the apartment now?”

  “No one. That is—I don’t think … let me see.” He reached down and unhooked a clipboard hanging from the side of his desk. “It’s a one-roomer, furnished. Six months paid in advance. So far as I know, there’s no one—” He sorted through keys on a board behind his head. “Let’s walk around. It’s just up the street.”

  They walked up the street quickly in gathering cloud shadows. The soft spring afternoon was failing fast. “Rain,” said Mr. Charles. “More rain.” He made several more icebreaking comments about the weather and the traffic, then asked, “What’s new? I mean—can I ask? Have you any news?”

  “There have been no major developments in the case yet.”

  “I see.” Mr. Charles walked with the key card against his lips, blowing a tuneless screak.

  It was a third-floor-front apartment, freshly painted in white with comfortable, slightly worn and dowdy furniture, mismatched. The paint odor was strong from a lack of air.

  “This is the fold-a-bed. Looks like a couch, doesn’t it? We have a strong demand for one-room furnished. This one even has some sheets and pillow cases and a new blanket. I would say no one’s been in here since we rented it,” said Mr. Charles.

  “Did Mr. Kotlikoff sign the lease in person?”

  “Oh, yes, right in my office and fully notarized. Tall man, very thin, with dark eyes and high cheekbones. Has an accent. That’s him. Whole thing took twenty minutes. I could have leased this place twenty times that afternoon.”

  “Did he say anything? Or did his questions give you any idea what was on his mind?”

  “No. I let him look at it, and then we went back and he said, ‘I’ll take it,’ just like that, and sat down and wrote a check. Then he took the keys and left. I haven’t seen him since.”

  On the counter in the kitchen was a pile of books. Leary looked at the titles on the spines. There were copies of Kotlikoff’s English-language volumes, plus a book titled The Immigrant Experience, and a thick textbook, The Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Power.

  “One more question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Mr. Kotlikoff have a woman with him?”

  Mr. Charles shrugged. “I thought of that right away. But if this is a love nest, where’s the bird?”

  It was dusk when Leary entered the cab for the airport. Almost immediately a soft rain began to fall, and the cab driver turned on his windshield wipers. Powell was getting his wish: rain on the Kotlikoff rally.

  Rain at dusk, the blue hour, the hour for the summing up of the day’s victories and defeats in black ink and red. The hour of truce; cessation of hostilities until tomorrow. Lights were appearing all ove
r the city, and Leary watched the people in the drizzle as the cab drove toward F.D.R. Drive. All seemed introverted, withdrawn, scattered by the rain. An army in disarray.

  The day was an olla-podrida: a mélange of facts and impressions. How do you make anything out of the kidnapping of a poet, the transfer of $100,000 to Rome, an unexplained appointment somewhere for Monday at eleven, an unoccupied leased apartment, two men named Simmonds quarreling over a secret, fear and expectations of torture, a long-forgotten dedication to a book of Russian poetry, a beating by a thug, an atrocious assault by a lawyer, talk of war, of troops and ships and bombs and on and on. All the pieces reminded him of a crossword puzzle: they were all tucked into their appropriate squares, but they bore no syntactic relationship to one another. Strung together, the facts meant nothing. Gibberish, all gibberish.

  Leary got his crossword puzzle book out of his case and opened it. From the pages tumbled a pellet of broken ashtray glass into his lap, there to lie like a shattered diamond catching the passing lights.

  He considered it for a moment, remembering the swing of the case, the falling body, the shattering, scattering glass, the strangely dead faces of the crowd, the fallen agent and the kick. Especially the kick; the furious, homicidal, great-ape kick; the kick that had pulled him down to Geller’s gutter. The great leveler, the kick. Leary felt a wash of pity flow over himself, great pity, but he couldn’t say for whom.

  He opened the taxi window and pushed out the bit of broken glass. After it, into the raining night, he chucked the crossword puzzle book.

  Part Six

  BREWER

  When Amy Kotlikoff received the phone call, she didn’t like the sound of Brewer’s voice. It was polite enough, but there was something intimate and presumptuous about it. It was a voice that made obscene phone calls.

  When Brewer arrived and showed her his ID card for Charles McMurry, his appearance and manner intensified her dislike. He kept his hat on. He stood close, too close, exuding the heavy fragrance of a man’s aftershave lotion. It was cloying. She decided to keep him standing just inside the apartment door. She moved around an overstuffed chair, and he put both hands on the chair back. Ugly hands: hard, dry, mottled with dark freckles, dominated by large ridged fingernails and white cuticles. They reminded her of a turkey’s claws.