I glanced at the rearview mirror. Little ol’ me. Once I started poking and probing, asking questions, things started happening.
Good.
If I was getting paid by anyone, I’d say that I was earning my pay.
Now it was time to stir up a few more things.
I shifted the Pilot into drive and two minutes later I was pulling into my nice, brand-new garage.
After securing the perimeter—meaning I walked around and made sure no hidden gunmen were waiting to attack me while I made dinner—I got my phone and made a call to someone I hoped was still being a faithful public servant. It rang twice and the crisp voice said, “Krueger.”
“Special Agent Krueger,” I said. “Special correspondent Lewis Cole calling.”
“I know,” he said dryly, “I can tell by the incoming phone number. What do you have?”
“What I have is a desire to get something, and you’re just the fellow who’s going to get it for me,” I said. “At 1:43 this afternoon, a phone call was made to the Port Harbor Realty Association in Porter, New Hampshire. I need to know the phone number and where it’s located.”
“Why?”
“Are you questioning my investigative techniques, Agent Krueger?”
“You know it.”
I said, “Then don’t waste my time. If I were to tell you what I was up to, then you’d ask questions, criticize me, poke holes in my theories, and then you’ll make me pout. I don’t want to pout today, and neither do you.”
A sigh. “All right. Anything else?”
“Yes,” I said. “What’s going on with Raymond Drake? Is he still in his house? Is he all right?”
“We’re fairly certain he’s there,” Krueger said. “We can’t tell if he’s being held against his will or not. As to his condition, like I said, there are still three people alive in that house. That number hasn’t changed.”
“Why not go up to the front door, knock, and see for yourself?”
“We don’t think it’s advisable at this time.”
“Why?”
He changed the subject. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
“Not at the moment,” I said.
“Then I don’t need to remind you that your friend Felix is in danger, and every hour you waste or spend not helping him get out of prison leaves him in that danger.”
“Agreed. So don’t feel like you have to remind me.”
Another sigh. I don’t think Agent Krueger was having a good early evening. “You’ll have the information sometime tomorrow.”
“Great,” I said.
“Anything else to report?”
“Yes,” I said. “Since I’m a writer on assignment for the Law Enforcement Bulletin, do you accept e-mail submissions, or would you prefer a paper printout?”
“I’d prefer results,” he said, and he hung up.
After another meal of Hormel’s finest—though I wondered how much more I could survive on takeout sandwiches and cans of corned beef hash—it was time for another phone call. I dialed the number and it rang and rang, and then was picked up by a woman, much to my surprise.
“Hello?”
I said, “I’m sorry, I might have dialed the wrong number. Is Angelo Ricci there?”
She giggled. “Well, yeah, I guess you could say that. He’s in the pisser. You wanna hold on?”
I started thinking quickly and said, “Yes, that would be great. Tell me, I’m in charge of organizing a surprise party for his friend, Hollis Spinelli.”
“Oh. When’s that?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s a surprise, right?”
She giggled again. “I guess so.”
“Would you like to come?”
“Where’s it being held?”
“That’s another surprise, now, isn’t it? But I’ll make sure you’re put on the list.”
“Hey, thanks,” she said.
“The master of ceremonies wants to tell a couple of funny stories about Angelo and Hollis. Tell me, where did they meet?”
“Oh, it’s a family thing. You know how it is.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. What kind of family thing?”
“Well, you should know. Angelo’s dad and Hollis’s dad, they were best buds, over there, growing up in the North End.”
“Oh, I remember now,” I said, and then, jumping to a conclusion that seemed to make sense, I said, “They were wiseguys, right?”
Another giggle. “I’ll never say that. Hold on, here comes Angelo.”
“Thanks.”
A bit of clatter as the phone was passed over, and a familiar and not-so-friendly voice came on. “Hey, who the fuck is this?”
“Angelo, ol’ friend of mine,” I said. “This is Lewis Cole calling. Remember? Your dancing partner the other day in the Lafayette House parking lot.”
“Shit, yeah, I remember. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty stiff and bruised, if you need to know,” I said. “But I was thinking back to that special time, and how you lost a .32 Browning during our dance lesson. You still looking for compensation?”
“You looking to pay?”
“Gee, Andy, I sense some surprise in your voice.”
“You fucking should,” he said. “You gonna pay me back?”
“Maybe, Alan,” I said. “Depends if we’re going to be besties anytime in the future.”
“I fucking doubt it.”
“You still don’t want me to call you anymore?”
“Unless you’re telling me where to pick up cash to replace my .32 Browning.”
“Or what?”
“Huh?”
“What’s going to happen if I call you again? Or bother dear old Hollis?”
A breath. “You fucking know. I’ll come after you.”
“Really? You and what baseball bat?”
“The baseball bat I’m gonna shove up inside of you,” he snapped back. “Along with a couple of my best buds, who’ll do anything I ask them to do.”
“Grand,” I said. “Glad to know you have a plan in place.”
Restless now, I went back upstairs. I again went into my office and checked the bullet hole in the near window. Going to the bathroom—the shower and toilet still festooned with various fresh manufacturer stickers—I wet a paper towel and went back to my office, swept up the shards of glass with the towel, and then tossed it away. To my bedroom, then, and I put a finger again in the outbound hole. Back and forth I looked. Some fair shooting.
Strike that. Some very good shooting.
I took a shower, checked my skin for any bumps or swellings that would give me the not-so-cheery sign that my lifelong souvenir of my exposure way back when to a biowarfare agent had decided to come back for a visit.
Skin check done, for some reason I didn’t have the energy to return downstairs, so I stretched out on my bed, dozed some, and half waited for the phone to ring with my static-filled call. Somehow in that in-between world of being wide awake and deep asleep, a memory was tickled. I couldn’t quite grasp it, but the call and the sounds therein were now familiar. But how? When I was a young and solitary boy growing up in Indiana after we had moved there from New Hampshire, I had played at night with my father’s old Heathkit shortwave radio receiver. There, decades before something called the Internet wired up the world, I would be in bed at night, earphones on my head—the best way to hear and the best way not to have my parents listen—and in the glow of the tubes and the dials, I would slowly scan the ether.
I wasn’t looking for any particular station or broadcast. I just enjoyed stumbling over stations by accident: Radio Moscow, with its cheerful propaganda about the most excellent life under communism, Spanish-language stations I couldn’t understand but that had music that was foreign and tempting to an Indiana boy huddling under the covers, and odd music from the Mideast, which made me quietly shiver with the thought that some Bedouin with a battered transistor radio in the middle of some remote desert was listening to t
he same music I was.
And there was the place between the dials, where there would be bursts and blurps of static, and occasional bits of Morse code, which made me wonder what secret messages were being passed along, and what they were saying.
Most likely it was this yearning to find out secrets that led me to work for the Department of Defense.
And maybe it was those memories that were being dredged up as I stayed in bed, stretched out, eventually falling asleep and hearing nothing save the motion of the waves.
When I woke up the next morning it came from a serious pounding at my front door. I rolled out of bed, feeling stiff and and not quite awake, and I wondered if I was in the first stages of a cold or flu. I threw on a robe, grabbed my Beretta just in case, and thumped my way downstairs, and from the microwave in the kitchen, I saw it was almost nine in the morning.
I checked out my visitor through a first-floor window, didn’t quite expect seeing who I was seeing, and dumped my Beretta in a robe pocket when I opened the door.
“Counselor Spencer,” I said. “This is . . . unexpected.”
Before me was Mark Spencer, counsel for the town of Tyler, local lawyer, and fiancé of Paula Quinn, but that last statement was on shaky ground, considering the absence of an engagement ring on Paula’s finger and her enthusiastic response to my kiss yesterday in the courthouse parking lot.
“Yeah, well, I decided to come down and speak a piece,” he said. Yet his face was flushed and his eyes were a bit unsteady, and both hands were in his coat pockets.
“What a treat,” I said. “You want to come out of the wind? I can make some tea or instant coffee, and that’s about it.”
“Nah, I just came down from a Chamber of Commerce breakfast up at the Lafayette House,” he said. “I’m pretty well stuffed. I don’t need your tea or coffee.”
“More for me, then,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I hear you still haven’t gotten your insurance payout. Too bad, huh?”
The words expressed sympathy, but not the tone. “Happens. So what can I do for you, Mark?”
He weaved just the tiniest bit, like my granite steps were slowly being rocked by the incoming waves, and then it came to me.
“How were the mimosas up there?”
“Delicious. They weren’t served at the breakfast but I managed to score a couple afterward. And speaking of delicious, stay away from Paula.”
I couldn’t help it. “Excuse me? Did you just say what I thought you said?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s cute,” I said. “Next time I see her in study hall, before band practice, I’ll make sure to tell her what you just told me.”
“I’m serious.”
“No, you’re slightly hammered, and you’re ridiculous. Why don’t you stumble back up to the parking lot and I’ll call a taxicab to give you a ride to wherever you want?”
He probably thought he was moving quickly when he tried to punch me, but his anger and his sloppiness gave me an advantage when the punch came my way. I easily ducked it and slapped his fist away, and then gave him a firm shove into his chest. He fell back, off-balance, and landed on his butt.
Mark quickly got up, brushed his hands and the bottom of his coat. “You think you know me, you think you know Paula, and you’re full of crap.”
“I don’t care to think about you, and what I think about Paula is none of your business.”
“Well, you’re making it my business,” he said. “She’s mine, she’s always going to be mine, and once we figure things out, you’ll be in the background, right where you belong.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Then keep this in mind,” he said, grinning. “I’m the lawyer for the town of Tyler.” He nodded in the direction of my house. “If I wanted to raise hell with you, I can do that with a few phone calls, a few favors called in. You sure your new construction was made under code? Your drinking water had a quality test lately? Your septic tank’s leach field been checked lately to meet state regulations? So stay away from Paula, stop fucking up my life, or I’ll make your life miserable.”
I said, “Mark, the amount of damage you can do to my life is somewhere between zero and nothing. What I do with Paula is my business and hers, and not yours. And as to fucking up your life, you seem to be doing that on your own pretty well. Now, go away before I come over and dirty up that pretty coat again.”
He weaved. For the sake of the town of Tyler—his biggest client—I hoped he would head home instead of his office today.
“Bold words. Maybe I’ll make somebody else’s life miserable.”
A few more slurred and obscene words were tossed my way, and I gave him a cheery wave before going back inside.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Breakfast was stale bread that made a decent toast, once I trimmed away the green stuff on one side. I mixed up some sugar and cinnamon and sprinkled it over the buttered toast, and washed it down with a cup of tea. Thus refreshed, I left to go out and seize the day, or have the day seize me, or some damn thing.
My first stop of the day was the post office, whereupon I was disappointed yet again by the American insurance industry. I had an agent who was allegedly handling my claim, and for the past few months the dark part of me that we all have (and hate to admit) got pleasure from twice-daily phone calls to check on the status of the settlement check for my house, garage, and previous set of wheels, a Ford Explorer. But somewhere around New Year’s, I stopped making the phone calls, after realizing the phone calls weren’t doing anything much more than letting the company and its agent reside in my head.
I’d say reside in my head rent-free, but they owed me a large chunk of change.
Next up was the Tyler Public Library, where I was able to secure a public computer for use in the reference room. I felt funny about sitting in my office with my new computer and a bullet hole just over my shoulder, so I sought refuge here. I logged on and thanked the voters of Tyler for supplying a computer system for use, and I also wished the voters of Tyler would dig deep into their pockets and give the old clunkers an upgrade.
Still, with the outdated technology, I got to work, first checking my e-mail account and then the news of the day—both depressing visits that caused me to quickly exit—and although then tempted to decompress by looking at videos of cats playing piano or dogs welcoming home their owners, who were returning after spending months overseas, I buckled down and got to work.
First things first, I did some digging around the Port Harbor Realty Association and Russ Gilman, its owner. Not much poked up, except for a zoning board issue up in North Tyler, and a brief Wallis police log item involving vandalism taking place at a condo project, which checked out Russ’s tale of how he came about hiring Felix. I then went back to the homepage of the company, found a photo of Russ, and printed it up.
Next up, Felix’s lawyer, Hollis Spinelli, and that took a long chunk of time, such that my time ended on the computer, I had to get up and let somebody else use it, and I spent the next thirty minutes reading the morning newspapers, starting off with the Tyler Chronicle. I skimmed Paula’s story on Felix’s trial, and based on what I had seen from my own courtroom attendance and from Paula’s story, the state’s pretty strong and airtight case against Felix was still standing, or as Paula called him, “a former resident of Boston’s North End with an extensive criminal record, who claims he’s a security consultant.”
No argument with that, and then I went to the comics page to see where the sensible commentators hung out.
Back again on the computer, the nice older lady from the reference department gave me an odd look, and during my next bout on my Dell product, she managed to wander by a few times to see what I was doing, no doubt checking to see if I was wallowing around in the darker and muddier portions of the Internet. Since I wasn’t, and at the time was hanging out in back issues of the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe, she gave me a pert nod and went back to her desk.
<
br /> Hollis had been a busy guy, with lots of lawyer work in lots of things, including defending those charged with not only stealing from the public till, but taking the till itself and trying to sell it on eBay. The funny thing, though, was that from what I saw, he didn’t do any criminal defense work for those doing physical harm, like assault, battery, or shooting to death a Tyler politician and Realtor.
So why did Felix pick him to defend him when he couldn’t get Raymond Drake?
I printed out a nice headshot of Hollis, resisted the urge to ink in devil’s horns and vampire fangs on his face, and then decided to do one more search, and boy, was I surprised at whose name came up.
By the time I was finished it was getting close to lunchtime, and I paid the nice lady a dollar for the two color sheets of paper I had printed out. She gave me a nice smile and said, “Find everything you were looking for?”
“That I did, and then some,” I said, and strolled out, feeling pretty smart, but actually, I had done something pretty dumb. I should have researched one more item, but I didn’t, and I would definitely regret that later. I suppose I could have blamed it on the moldy toast, but that would be an explanation too far.
At the Tyler Town Hall, just a brisk walk from the library, I grabbed a sample ballot for next Tuesday’s town election, and then I got into my Pilot and drove to the famed Tyler Beach, which this March day was doing its best to climb out of its winter sleep and try to look presentable for all the folks who would soon be coming in to spend lots of money on food, drink, fun, and the occasional bail bondsman.
The southern end of Tyler Beach is the most crowded and developed. Imagine a large ladder, stretching from its base against Falconer and then going halfway up the beach. One rail will be Atlantic Avenue, hugging the beach northbound. The other rail will be Ashburn Avenue, heading southbound. And the rungs are narrow, tiny, one-way streets that start at First Street and work their way up. The avenues are mostly populated by restaurants, fried-dough establishments, T-shirt shops, arcades, nightclubs, motels, and hotels. The narrow streets are usually filled by cottages, tiny apartment houses, and other slapdash places of residence.
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