Ben twisted the wrist and at the same time brought his knee up between the assailant’s legs, ramming it into his groin. The man screamed and let go of the knife. With a mighty heave, Tolliver threw him off. Then he rolled to his right, drawing himself up onto his knees and reaching behind him for the Mauser.
He was a fraction of a second too late.
At the instant his hand closed around the pistol grip, he caught a kick on the point of his jaw. It lifted him up and over backward. He landed flat on his back.
After that, everything was in slow motion. He tried to move and couldn’t. There was the sound of footsteps and voices, and then for what seemed like an hour, he was moving through a black tunnel whose walls were a spiraling yellow light. He could hear the voices, but it was as if they were coming from a great distance.
When he opened his eyes, he realized he’d been out of it, but he didn’t know for how long. Strange faces were looming over him.
One of the faces said, “Hey, buddy—you all right?”
Another face said, “Yeah, he’s okay. Let’s get ’im up.”
He felt hands grab him under the armpits and then he was lifted to his feet.
Three men were standing in a half circle around him, big guys wearing jeans and short-sleeved shirts. One of them had a beard.
The beard grinned. “Man, he really kicked the shit out of you.”
Ben’s jaw felt numb, and when he spoke his voice seemed to belong to somebody else. “Where is he?”
“Aw hell, he’s gone. Soon as he saw us, he took off. Jumped in a car and hauled ass.”
“You can catch the mother some other night,” another one said. “Come on inside and have a drink.”
“Thanks,” Tolliver said, “but I’ll see you later.”
He trotted to the rental car, leaving the trio shaking their heads.
65
Pulling out of the parking lot, Ben was disgusted with himself for having been so careless. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know Aguila had a bodyguard—he even knew the guy’s name, for Christ’s sake. Yet he’d let himself get taken like some bubble-brained rookie.
Driving back to Southern Boulevard, he headed for the hangars where the Falcon was parked. This time when he arrived, there was a uniformed guard near the gate, but the man merely waved lackadaisically as Ben drove in.
He pulled to a stop in front of the administration building and jumped out.
The Falcon was gone.
Ben stared at the vacant space, feeling all the more like a prize asshole. He heard the roar of jet engines and, looking up, got another view of the airplane as it took off. The Falcon climbed at the familiar steep angle, rising sharply from the eastbound runway and vanishing into the night.
Turning away, he looked at the parked aircraft standing in rows, wishing he’d gotten here a few minutes sooner. The empty space was like a confirmation that he’d blown it.
Something else was different, he realized. Not only was the Falcon no longer there but the space next to it was vacant, as well. What was the airplane that had been there?
It was a Lear, he remembered.
He stepped to the one-story office building and went inside. The same young woman was on the desk. When she caught sight of him, her mouth fell open.
Which wasn’t surprising; he looked as if he’d been run over by a truck. His blazer was ripped open and the front of his shirt had blood all over it from the kick in the jaw Pablo Chavez had given him. His face was swollen and his shoulder was stiff where the knife had nicked his flesh.
Ben got out his case and waved his shield at her. “I was here earlier,” he said. “The Falcon that was here just took off, right?”
She nodded, staring at him.
“What happened to the Lear that was next to it—when did that leave?”
“Just before the Falcon.”
“Whose airplane is that?”
She looked at her register. “I don’t know. It just says—”
He grabbed the book and turned it around. “Where is it?”
She pointed. “The N number is five-six-four-nine Tango.”
Next to the number was the billing address: Amvest Corporation, 420 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022.
Bingo—there it was again.
Ben glanced up at the young woman and grinned. “You know something? You’re the best-looking girl I ever saw in my life.”
She continued to gape at him as he went out the door.
When he got back into the Chevy, he sat there for a moment, thinking.
It wasn’t drugs; he knew that. And it wasn’t jewels or gold—that made even less sense.
But he had no doubt whatever that after the money had been laundered through the Banco Cafetero, Aguila had smuggled something of great value back into the States and transferred it to Kramer.
So what was it that would fit into a couple of large suitcases and be worth 50 million bucks?
Fifty million bucks, of course. The suitcases hidden in the Falcon had almost surely been packed with cash. But was that physically possible? How much space would that amount take up, and how much would it weigh?
Some years ago, Tolliver had worked on the hijacking of an armored bank truck. Most of the money had been recovered, and there was so much of it in loose bills that instead of counting, the feds had weighed the bills. A million in twenties, he remembered, came in at 115 pounds.
Doing some calculations in his head, he figured there were fifty thousand twenties in a million dollars. And fifty thousand pieces of paper currency would have the same weight, regardless of their denomination.
Assuming the Banco Cafetero had cashed Cunningham’s check in thousand-dollar bills, Ben reasoned that fifty thousand such bills would come to $50 million. He went over it again slowly, to be sure he hadn’t screwed up the zeros.
Okay, he was right.
He went on thinking: Take out both the bank’s commission and Aguila’s cut—a couple of pounds or whatever—and what you had left could be split into two bundles of roughly 24,000 thousand-dollar bills each. The bundles would fit into two large suitcases, no problem.
Ben started the engine and backed away from the building, then pointed the car toward the gate, banging a fist on the steering wheel in exultation.
66
Orcus drove his car onto the grounds of the Brentwood Treatment Center and followed the winding drive to the parking lot. He pulled into an open space not far from the main entrance and turned off the ignition. It was twilight and lights were on in the building; through the tall windows, he could see much of the activity going on inside. Hunched down in his seat, he was confident no one would notice him sitting there, especially in the gathering darkness.
It was important that he plan this well. He was still smarting over the way he’d missed taking out that goddamned detective, bumbling the job like some amateur. He wouldn’t miss next time; you could bet everything you owned on that.
And he wouldn’t miss this one, either, which was why he was scouting it now, checking out every detail, making sure he knew exactly what he had to do and what he could expect, when the time came.
A half hour later, it was pitch-dark. A number of staff members came out, got into their cars, and drove away. Over the next few hours, Orcus sat where he was, observing the ivy-covered stone structure.
For a mental hospital, Brentwood was surprisingly casual about security, he thought. There was no wall around the grounds, no gate with a guard stopping visitors to ask for identification—just this rambling old building on the eastern end of Long Island, surrounded by pine trees and exposed to the cold winds that were blowing in off the Atlantic. He’d seen summer houses out here that were better protected.
But then, Brentwood wasn’t a state facility, a place where hard cases were treated. An asylum like Wingdale, for example, where there were corrections officers armed with rifles and where spotlights were trained on the high steel fences throughout the night, making the area as bright as day. Wher
e confined inside the forbidding red stone buildings were homicidal psychopaths who had to be watched around the clock to prevent them from killing hospital personnel or other inmates. Or themselves.
No, Brentwood seemed more like a country club or a rest home. The nurses were wearing pale blue outfits, but without caps, and many of them had on gaily colored sweaters over the uniforms. The attendants were even more informally garbed, in sport shirts and slacks.
The patients were easy to pick out, as well. They were all adults, ranging in age from young to the last stages of doddering senility. No one bothered to draw the shades or pull the drapes over the windows, so Orcus could see people sitting in their rooms or walking through the halls. Most of them also wore leisure clothing, although a few had on pajamas and bathrobes.
On each of the upper two floors was a space that appeared to be some sort of lounge, with card tables and TV. He couldn’t see into the one on the top floor very well, but he assumed it was more or less the same as the one below, where inmates were playing games or watching the tube. Occasionally, one of them would wander past a window.
By now, it had to be long past visiting hours. In a place like this, visitors probably weren’t permitted in the evening. This meant that after the office workers left, there would be fewer staff members wandering around. And if Brentwood was like other institutions, it would be at its quietest after the evening meal.
Satisfied that he’d seen all there was to see from his vantage point, and confident that he had a clear impression of the hospital’s nighttime routine, Orcus started his engine and pulled out of the parking lot. When he reached the narrow blacktop road, he turned toward the small village he’d passed on his way here.
It was amazing, he thought, that there were still stretches of Long Island that were sparsely populated. Yet when you got out past Port Jefferson, you saw many good-sized open areas. Couldn’t last, though. Someday they’d be converted to developments that looked like all the others—rows of chicken coops.
The village was little more than a crossroads with a few shops and a scattering of houses. Orcus reached it in less than ten minutes. There was a gas station on the corner of what was apparently the main street. The station was closed, but he saw what he was looking for: a public phone booth standing off to one side.
He parked near the booth and got out of his car. There were streetlights along here and occasional traffic whizzing past. He tugged the brim of his hat down over his eyes and flipped up his coat collar as he stepped over to the booth.
As usual, she answered on the first ring. He could picture her camping beside the telephone, anxiously waiting for him to check in. Women were like that; even when they thought they were tough, they acted like nervous Nellies when it came down to it.
“It’s me,” he said.
“Have you been to the hospital yet?”
“I just came from there.”
“I hope nobody saw you.”
“They didn’t, I guarantee. I didn’t go inside, just sat in the car and watched.”
“Do you know which room she’s in?”
“No, but I won’t have any trouble finding her. The whole thing should be easy.”
“If that’s so, why didn’t you do it while you were there?”
“Because I wanted to plan it carefully, that’s why.”
“So plan it, and then get it done. Fast. She’s running her mouth off, don’t you realize that? Can’t you see what would happen if it got out?”
“Don’t try to push any of this off on me. It should’ve been taken care of a long time ago. I told you that.”
She bristled. “Nobody ever thought she’d live, let alone come out of it.”
“Still was a dumb mistake.”
“You’re telling me about dumb mistakes? You? After you fucked up the other one?”
“I’ll take care of him, too. Don’t worry about it.”
“One of us has to.”
He hung up. More and more, she pissed him off. Maybe that was another thing he’d handle when this was over.
She’d be just one more bitch to get rid of.
67
Tolliver spent the night in the airport Hilton and in the morning took American’s first flight out of West Palm Beach. He was still a little stiff, but a few hours of sleep had helped.
The cut on his jaw and the one on the back of his shoulder he’d cleaned and patched up with alcohol and tape he bought in a drugstore. What was left of his blazer and the bloodstained shirt, he’d thrown away. The shirt he had on now was the one he’d worn to Panama, and it was getting ripe.
Breakfast on the airplane wasn’t bad; at least there was plenty of hot coffee. And despite the soreness from his encounter with the guy who’d tried to knife him, he was feeling pretty damned good. He had answers now; he’d closed the loop. And he was almost certain he knew how the Cunninghams were running the scheme.
The problem was, did he have enough to take to the DA?
That was where it got sticky. No matter what he’d learned, he was still facing the same dilemma that had plagued him from the beginning of the case: He had no hard evidence.
And yet, look at what he did have.
He knew that Cunningham Securities had made staggering sums through illegal trades and he was certain they were laundering the money by sending it to Tomas Aguila’s account in the Banco Cafetero. Aguila would then bring the cash into the United States, using ports of entry like Palm Beach International because slipping the money past such operations was a breeze.
Ben had to admire the ingenuity of it. No playing hide-and-seek with border patrols, no dodging U.S. government aircraft or the Coast Guard. Instead, they even announced they were coming—in a fancy corporate jet, following all proper procedures and being greeted with courtesy and respect upon their arrival. Once in the States, the money was then transferred to Kurt Kramer, who also had long experience in illicit financial dealings. Amvest Corporation was the repository, and it was owned by the Cunninghams.
As far as the deaths of former Senator Clayton Cunningham and Jessica Silk were concerned, Ben not only knew both had died under suspicious circumstances but he would bet his soul they’d been murdered.
And yet there was so much he didn’t know, let alone what he could or could not prove. The ultimate question was still how all this fit together, and why.
Take the laundering operation. There was nothing new about turning dirty money into clean. What was different here was that instead of going into phony front companies or even lawful ones, with the money eventually winding up in Swiss bank accounts or legitimate investments, he felt sure it was coming back into the United States in cash. If that was true, what the hell would anybody want with all those bills? It would be like starting the process all over again.
And if the senator and Silk had been murdered, who had killed them and what was the motive, or motives? And how were those issues related to the money schemes?
He wrestled with it all the way to New York, but when the airliner made its final approach, he still hadn’t come up with anything definitive. All he had was a bunch of theories, and none of them quite worked.
At La Guardia, the air was a good thirty degrees cooler than what he’d been experiencing the last couple of days. He got his raincoat out of his bag and put in on, then stopped at a pay phone.
He called 115th Precinct headquarters first and told Lieutenant Morales the plan had worked, that he had the information he’d been hoping to get. He also told Morales to be sure the ADA kept his end of the bargain involving Fuentes’s brother. For a number of good reasons.
Next he called Shelley at WPIC TV, was relieved when she answered. “I’ve been out of town,” he said.
“I know. I got your message.”
So much for civility, he thought.
He tried again. “Shel, look. I’m sorry I blew up at you, okay? I think we both made mistakes. You went too far in what you said on the air and I overreacted. Maybe we both learned some
thing.”
She softened. “I’m sorry too, Ben. I’ve missed you.”
“Me, too. How about we get together tonight?”
“Can’t. I think I just might be getting close to something.”
“What’s that?”
“Laura Bentley has invited me to the Cunningham’s estate on Long Island for the weekend.”
“She what?”
“Now don’t go into orbit again, okay? What happened was, I talked to her about doing an interview on her career. She’s planning to revive it, only in TV this time. She wants me to help her with her plans. That’s what brought on the invitation.”
“Shelley—”
“Relax, I know what I’m doing. No matter what happens, I’ll get a damn good story out of it. Might even get some things that could help you.”
He knew better than to argue with her or to launch another tirade. He exhaled. “Listen, be careful, will you?”
“You know me.” She hung up.
Ben put the phone down, wishing she’d stayed the hell away from Bentley. This thing had enough complications as it was. He walked out of the terminal and took a cab to the NYPD repair shop, which wasn’t far from the airport.
The Taurus was parked outside the garage. Charley McManus led him over to it. “Good as new,” McManus said. “We filled up the holes in the door with Bondo before we painted it. Came out okay, huh?”
Ben crouched beside the door on the driver’s side. There was a slight ripple in the metal and the blue color wasn’t an exact match, but you’d never notice the imperfections if you weren’t looking for them. “Not bad, considering.”
McManus pointed. “Put in a couple new windows, too.”
Ben straightened up. “So I see. Hope you didn’t use the same glass as last time. Stuff went out like Saran Wrap.”
“Hey, don’t kid yourself—there’s no such thing as bulletproof glass. Bullet-resistant is the best we got. And besides, whoever was shooting at you was using heavy artillery. Wasn’t for the armor in the door, we’d be filling you with Bondo, too.”
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