by Les Edgerton
There was one positive about all this. After all the misfortune piled on him and his brother, once again there was a direction to his life. This sounded terrible when Grady considered it, but it was true. He had a mission once again. To find Jack’s attacker. A negative positive, if such a thing even existed, but Grady couldn’t deny the heightened state he had been in ever since he’d discovered his brother’s bloody body. He realized how much he’d missed the surge of adrenaline that came when you were on a case. Especially this case. Doing something useful. That was it. He realized how purposeless he’d come to feel in the past few years since he’d been forced out to pasture. Oh sure, he helped Jack out a lot at the store and he hustled security jobs when they became available, but jobs weren’t plentiful for a man with only one good eye, even if the vision in it was still 20-20. He had too many days when all he did was go fishing.
Or drinking. A lot of that lately. Booze and women. You hang around the one, you get the other. He’d go into a bar thinking he’d have one quick beer and it seemed like there’d always be an attractive and willing woman in the joint and two hours later he would know more about his new friend than he wanted to. There were times when Grady wasn’t sure whether good looks was a blessing or a curse. It was a toss-up. In a bar, with a beautiful woman sitting next to him, it seemed like a good thing, but the next morning staring out a bleary eye at the disheveled form lying next to him made him think otherwise. He suspected many of the women that ended up in his bed felt the same and he couldn’t much blame them. What he hated most was the morning cup of coffee they both felt obliged to share and which he felt they took with the same sense of sober awkwardness as he did. Rarely did he go out with any of them twice and only when he and a former bed partner found themselves next to each other on bar stools. It was a hell of a way to live, he’d thought more than once, but he didn’t do much to change it.
Booze was a way to keep from thinking how much he missed police work. Funny--the drunker he got, the more it cropped up in his thoughts. He shook his head the way a dog would in ridding itself of water after a dunking, and forced his mind to go blank.
He’d let himself in Jack’s store with his own key and was waiting for Marty to show up. It was the start of the detective’s weekend, but he’d only balked a little at Grady’s request.
“Well, I don’t know, Grady,” he’d said into the phone. “It’s my day off.” After a little silence, Marty said, “What the fuck. My wife is driving me nuts anyway. Give me an excuse to get out for a while. She’s got a bunch of women over for some kind of sex toys party and I can’t hear the ball game for their giggling. If I don’t get out, they’re going to be asking me to come model some of their shit. Give me half an hour. I gotta make a stop and pick up some butts.”
Grady walked through the debris that was strewn everywhere. He consciously avoided looking at the spot where he’d found his brother, but it was hard to miss. The rest of the store looked as though the proverbial tornado had blasted through from door to door. At first, he assumed the perp had been looking for stuff to hock, but the longer he looked at the pattern of parts and accessories lying about on the floor, the more he suspected the mess was too methodical. The way the shelves were tipped over, Grady suspected the crime was designed to look like simple vandalism.
The more I look at this, Grady decided, the more it stinks. At first he’d figured it was kids maybe or your basic armed robbery gone hinky, but none of the evidence seemed to hold up for that being the case. Yeah, on the surface it did, but not when you started looking at things closer. Things like the shelves that were tipped over. It wasn’t done randomly, for one thing. Every single one of them was pitched forward at the same angle. He bet there was no prints on any of them, either.
The front door opened and Marty came walking in.
“Your brother has quite a place,” he said. “Not exactly a Radio Shack.”
They shook hands. “I appreciate your time, Marty,” Grady said. “No, Jack’s got a pretty special store. He doesn’t get things from your usual sources. Most of his customers are serious hobbyists, into more sophisticated stuff than your weekend model airplane buff. I help him out quite a bit. He has some government clients. He’s got stuff the CIA could use.” He paused. “And does.”
“Not your strip center mom-and-pop operation, eh?” Marty grinned.
“Not at all.” Grady replied, a slight smile appearing on his face.
“How’s your--” Marty hesitated.
“Eye?” Grady finished it for him. “It’s fine. Messed up my golf game some, but I manage. My depth perception is a bit off at long distances. Under a hundred yards, it’s fine.”
“I didn’t know you were a golfer.”
“I’m not. That was supposed to be a joke.”
Marty reached down and picked up one of the parts lying on the floor, looked at it a second, then put it back.
“We were all sorry you retired, Grady. You were one of the best.”
There was a short silence in which Grady could think of nothing to say. He turned his face away from the other cop, self-consciously. Marty cleared his throat after a moment and said, “Well, hey, anyway... Listen, you know if any of those militia types ever come in? You know, survivalists, doomsdayers, folks like that?”
“Fruitcakes, you mean?” Grady thought a minute. “Well...a few, I guess. Jack was pretty careful, though.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “Oh--I see where you’re going. You think maybe one of those kooks...”
“I don’t think a goddamn thing at this point. Oh, I’ve got a couple of theories, but at this point, to be honest, we don’t have a line on any suspects at all. It’s a possibility though, isn’t it?”
Grady considered it a moment. “Sure. Anything’s a pobility at this point, but for some reason I don’t think this guy’s your garden-variety crackpot.”
“Why? Because it’s your brother who was robbed and hurt?”
Immediately, he took it back when he saw the way Grady’s jaw muscles twitched.
“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I meant...”
“You meant that my judgment might be colored because my only brother happened to be the one who almost got killed?”
“Well, no...”
“Hey.” He reached over and squeezed Marty’s shoulder and his expression softened. “Don’t sweat it. I’d probably think the same thing if it was you standing here. But, no. I don’t think my judgment’s screwed in this at all. What I think is that whoever did this is one smart cookie, not your garden-variety neo-Nazi fuck. Look at these shelves for instance.”
They walked over and stood looking down the rows of parts on the floor and the upended shelves. He explained to Marty his take on the shelves and the detective agreed, once he was done.
“You’re still a hell of a detective!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t see it that way at first.”
For a moment, both men stood looking silently at the jumble before them and Grady asked, “What have you guys got?”
“Well,” Marty began, “not a whole helluva lot so far. I got a new partner, young pup who thinks he knows it all. His theory is that it was either kids got surprised in a burglary or else it was an armed robbery went bad.”
“New academy graduate?”
“Yeah.”
Both men laughed.
Grady said, “I wish Jack could help us on this.”
“Yeah. Once he’s conscious and gives us a description of this punk, we got ‘im.”
“No, I was thinking another way. Even if he wasn’t the victim he could probably figure this out in a New York second. Remember the Boroni case?”
“It was before my time, but I heard stuff. Jack helped on that one, did he?”
“Helped? Hell, Jack solved it. By himself.”
The Boroni case was an insurance fraud affair. It was more than that. It was also a way Mr. Boroni figured out not only to collect the insurance on his Chris Craft, but to get rid of a wife who didn’t approve of his af
fairs. There was a bonus there too, in that she was worth half a million dead.
“Wasn’t there a bomb in Mrs. Boroni’s drink or something? It was something like that, wasn’t it? Boroni had one a’them weird old-time Eytalian names, didn’t he?”
Marty walked back up to the front of the store poking with his foot at the wreckage on the floor as he went. Grady followed along, recalling the case.
“That’s right. Ideal. That was his first name. Ideal Boroni. See, Boroni knew his wife liked her booze. She had this one she had all the time. Weird fucking shit. Seems she had a sweet tooth, liked Irish coffee. Well, sweet-tooth Irish coffee. She used espresso and dumped two of them packets of Sweet’N Low in it before she hit it with the booze. A dieting drunk you might say.”
Both men laughed. Grady went on.
“She was a pro lush, had a special espresso machine built into the cabinet of her boat that matched the one at home. This guy Ideal, he was a slick mother. He dumped out the Sweet’N Low in ten, eleven packets, substituted sodium and sealed them up again. Musta took him a week to do all that, make ‘em look like they weren’t fucked with.”
“Sodium. What the hell’s that? The stuff in crackers?”
“It’s a chemical. Not soda, sodium. Looks kinda like sweetener only more silvery. Not that you’d pay attention. You ever look at a packet of sugar or sweetener when you open it? Naw, you rip it open and dump it in.”
“So there was a chemical reaction, right? To booze? How’d he do it?”
Grady smiled. “I told you, Jack was smart. Figured it out right away. See, when sodium hits water, it explodes. There’s water in coffee. And booze. Both. Either way, whatever, sodium just fucking explodes. Which it did. Twenty minutes out on the Mad River--wham! She mixes a drink and half her head goes bye-bye and the boat goes up like the homecoming bonfire. That’s Ideal’s plan as it turns out. Boroni picks an argument with her. Knocks her around some to show he’s pissed. Asshole knows what she’ll do, knows she’ll go jump on that boat, go out on the river and get shit-faced on coffee la-las, whatever you call that concoction. She did it all the time. Friends said it was a regular thing. Lots of yelling and screaming and then she’d go hightailing it for the boat, take off the whole afternoon and come back so ripped she didn’t know her name. Her friends said it was a shame how he drove her to drink. He doped it all out, the cunning bastard. Soaked charcoal starter fluid into all the woodwork. Really laid it in. Stunk to high heaven, but he figured, and rightly so as it turned out, she’d be so snockered she wouldn’t notice. Figured when the stuff blew up, the boat would burn and sink and they’d figure it was another boating accident. His luck wasn’t so good though. The boat didn’t burn enough and didn’t sink. He shoulda checked the weather forecast. It called for thunderstorms that day.”
“So how’d your brother figure that out?”
“He was with me when the call came in for Arson and Bombs so I asked him to come along. He could always tell more about a crime scene in ten seconds than the lab whizzes could in ten days with their microscopes and college educations. He doped the whole thing out in ten minutes flat. Not that they wouldn’t have sooner or later, but we gained the time we’da lost waiting on the scientists. Good thing, too. Boroni was on the plane that was warming up on the runway. Heading to Eleuthera. If he’d gotten away he might not have collected the insurance money, but it would have been a bitch getting him back to stand trial. You know how many little fucking nitwit islands there are down there?”
“So, I ask you again...how’d he figure it out?”
“Easy. From fishing with our grandfather.”
“You lost me, Fogarty.”
Grady reached in his pocket and got out a stick of gum, taking his time to unwrap it. The corners of his mouth turned up. “Our grandfather used to take him fishing when he was a kid. Only grandpa didn’t use worms. This was a serious fisherman, never mounted a damn thing, never threw a single fish away in his life.” Grady paused, remembering, and continued.
“Grandpa used sodium. Sometimes magnesium or cesium, they both do the same thing I guess, the way Grandpa explained it. Quicklime works too. They all explode when combined with water only sodium has the best explosion. Grandpa would fill up a stone jug with the stuff and cork it. Put two strings on it. One to lower the jug into the lake and the other hooked around the cork. When the jug hit the bottom, he pulled the cork. The jug goes kaboom and you get your limit. Ten other people’s limits, too. You row around and pick ‘em up, throw ‘em in the boat, bass, bluegills, walleyes, fucking catfish. Your fishing trip is over. You go home and drink beer. Fuck, turtles. He’d get fucking turtlesand eels, crap like that. Takes all the hard work out of fishing. That’s what he always said. Anyway, that’s how Jack knew what the guy used. Actually, he didn’t know that right away. He got suspicious when he smelled the starter fluid. It was pretty strong. I smelled it too and so did every other shield on the boat, but I didn’t make any connections. We figured she was probably barbecuing something. I didn’t connect the smell, but then Jack spent a lot more time with Grandpa than I did. Time I was old enough, Grandpa was pretty sick. I only went a couple of times. Jack went fishing with him every weekend when he was a kid.”
“So what put Jack onto the deal?”
Grady looked at Marty and grinned. “He noticed there wasn’t a barbecue grill around. He thought of Grandpa and his fishing technique. His mind works funny, makes connections like that, connections most of us miss. He looked around and sure enough, found a big jar of the stuff on the bar. Boroni musta left it out like that, figuring once the explosion happened it would help it along in a big way. Me, I woulda figured it was sugar like it was labeled. It was in a glass thing that said sugar, for chrissake. Jack seen it right away, seen it was the wrong color. I never noticed, but he did and I saw what he meant once he explained it.”
“What color was it?”
“Well, it was mixed with the sugar, but sodium is more silvery. You’da never noticed it if you weren’t looking for it. Like I say, we woulda figured it out, but the guy would’ve been long gone by the time we did. I don’t know why he put it in the sugar jar unless he wasn’t into taking chances. Like maybe he figured she might be pissed enough she’d go off her diet. Later, we find the stuff in the sweetener and figured out that was what she’d used.”
“Damn! That was some slick thinking!”
“Boroni?”
“Yeah. No. Your brother. Hell--both of them.”
“Jack’s smart, for sure. Lot smarter than I am. Got that from our dad.”
Grady was more like his mother, he knew. Tenacious. Or, as his dad always put it: bullheaded. He usually got his man during his time on the police force, but it was more through dogged persistence than flashes of brilliance. Jack was the one with the insights. And now... he didn’t want to think about what was going on with Jack’s brain or his body. Maybe the doctor was wrong. He didn’t know how tough Jack was.
Grady shook his head and got back to the present. “Look, did you guys take prints?”
Marty shook his head. “Sure, but not any we could use, looks like. That’s why I knew you were right about the shelves. That was the first thing we dusted and the lab guys said whoever’d done that probably used gloves. You could tell where he grabbed each of them by the dust. They were smeared, but not a trace of a fingerprint. I got to tell you Grady, some of the guys think like my partner. That this is a B&E went hinky.”
“That what you think, Marty?”
“You know better. I’m old school, same as you. These young guys think everything fits into a category and that’s how you solve crimes. Build a profile, feed it into a computer and out comes your criminal all nice and neat. You and me, we know better. The thing is, these new guys we got, they got no respect for the criminal mind.”
Grady agreed. Whatever this bastard was, Grady thought, he was no dummy. Marty was right. That was the difference between experience and inexperience. As much as you might hate the
bad guys--and in this instance, hate was a mild description of how he felt--you couldn’t make the mistake of underestimating themHe said, “I’m glad to hear you say that. This guy is slick, all right. It’s good to know we’re both on the same wavelength. I’m going to need a friend on the force if I have any chance of solving this.”
“Now wait, Fogarty. You’re retired. Leave this to me. I’ll get this fucker. You know what the captain’ll do if he finds you messing around on a case. Especially this one.”
Grady turned and spit his gum into the trash can behind him. “No, you wait, Marty. This is my brother and nobody’s going to keep me from working on this case. You’re a friend, you’ll help. Matter of fact, I’ll show you my good faith, share what I know with you. And don’t worry. The captain won’t know I’m around.” Before the detective could reply, Grady began walking toward the darkened back of the store.
“Come here. I want to show you something,” Grady said, beckoning. Marty followed. If he was going to comment further he kept it to himself. At the back of the store Grady stopped and pointed up at something on the wall near the door.
“See that? That’s the control box for the burglar alarm.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, whenever we were in the store after he closed, Jack and me--chinnin’, stuff like that--Jack always turned the alarm back on. Lifetime habit. In case someone tried to break in while we were there. He didn’t keep a gun or anything around. It was the way he protected himself. This isn’t the best neighborhood, if you haven’t noticed. This shoots the B&E-gone-wrong theory. This wasn’t some guy who threw a brick through the back door glass like we’re supposed to think it was. This guy was in here with Jack. My brother let him in for some reason. It’s attempted murder, pure and simple. I don’t know why. I don’t know what was in the store that this creep wanted, but I’m going to find out. Look around. This place has electronic shit the government spooks don’t have. This wasn’t some punk after a couple of hundred bucks for his crack habit.”