by Jan Burke
The doors slid open. I waited. Heard the stairwell door close just before the elevator doors slid shut.
The descent began again, and again the car lurched to a stop. The doors opened, this time in the cavernous underground parking lot. I held my hand on the “open doors” button as I peered out.
The stark overhead fluorescent lighting cast shadows everywhere. I saw no one. The elevator buzzed at me in annoyance. I stepped out into the garage; the doors closed softly behind me.
I heard every single footstep I made on the concrete floor, all the while wondering who else might be listening for them. I had my keys out, but still I fumbled to get the car door open. I got in, locked the door, and started the car. I heard the squeal of tires somewhere in the garage, hurriedly backed out, and roared toward the exit, my own wheels screeching. The startled attendant at the gate pressed a button and raised the gate arm just before the Karmann Ghia would have smashed into it, a contest I’m not sure my car would have won. The car jolted hard onto the pavement as it burst from the garage onto a blessedly empty street. I slowed, glanced in the mirror, and saw no one leaving the garage behind me.
I took a series of unnecessary turns just to make sure no one was tailing me, finally ending up at the Express. I sat in my car for long moments, staring at the clasp envelope on the seat next to me. Finally, I reached for it, opened it carefully.
There was a plain white envelope inside it. This one was postmarked Las Piernas. Except for that and Tyler’s office address, the white envelope looked identical to the ones Claire had shown me. Typewritten, marked “Personal and confidential.” Inside the envelope, the slick paper of a color copy was folded in thirds. There was no writing on it. I unfolded it.
In what appeared to be an enlarged copy of a color photograph, I saw a group of people on a boat. It was a good-sized boat, a boat set up for serious fishing. I couldn’t tell its exact size or model from the photo, but it had the look of an expensive craft. There were seven men visible in the photo: Booter Hodges, Allan Moffett, Roland Hill, Corbin Tyler, Keene Dage, Andre Selman, and Ben Watterson. Hill was at the helm. Ben and Andre had their arms around a young woman. The other men were standing behind the woman, lifting cans of beer, as if in a toast. She was perhaps in her mid-twenties; the men spanned a range of ages, but all older than she by at least a decade. She had straight red hair, worn in a bowl cut. She held out a small sole; she was keeping the fish at arm’s length, but smiled proudly at the camera, in triumph.
I had no idea who she was.
I had the uneasy feeling that I was no better off than the fish.
16
BACK AT MY DESK, I decided to face up to the worst possibility—that Lucas wanted to use me in some way, to help him blackmail seven of Las Piernas’s leading citizens.
Setting aside all the objections I had to that theory, thinking of Lucas as a blackmailer raised other questions. The worst thing portrayed in the photograph was “refusing to toss back an undersized fish,” not exactly an offense that would drive someone to commit suicide or tender a resignation. So what did the photograph represent? What did Lucas want? Had someone killed him in order to be relieved of his threats? If so, who?
Keene Dage and Corbin Tyler had just confirmed a link I had only guessed at. Ben Watterson was not the only one who had been contacted by Lucas. According to Charlotte Brady’s description of the visitor who upset her former boss, Allan Moffett’s visitor could have been Lucas. I was willing to bet that Allan’s response to that visit was to call the other potential blackmail victims.
The dinner party, with Ben added.
“A man shouldn’t panic,” Booter had said. Allan had done just that. But what the hell could a homeless man hold over their heads that would induce that sort of panic? Something that could be hinted at in a photograph of a fishing trip.
From Keene, I gathered that everyone had received this same color copy, but perhaps that wasn’t the case. Jerry Selman had mentioned a picture of his father with a former girlfriend. Ben had received a picture of a group of men on a boat now owned by Andre Selman. Was this woman in the photo the old girlfriend?
Maureen Selman (I had to fight the impulse to think of her as Cinco) might have been upset at a photo of Andre with an old girlfriend, but she had been with Andre long enough to know that she hadn’t married a virgin. A photo—taken a dozen or so years ago—of Andre with a woman couldn’t really be very threatening. And the photo was hardly one of Andre and the woman in flagrante delicto. I looked at the rest of the list. Keene was a widower, as was Corbin. Allan and Roland were both divorced. I didn’t think this was about old girlfriends.
Old girlfriends. I smiled to myself as I realized that SOS would provide me with a resource not everyone would have in this situation: old girlfriends who knew one another. Maybe one of the other members of the group would know the woman in the photo.
What did Lucas want? Money was the easiest answer, but was it the right answer? It didn’t fit with the Lucas I had known, but that man hadn’t been living on the streets, either.
The coroner might not believe that Lucas was killed, but I was nearly certain of it. Beyond a strong hunch, beyond bodies being moved and pennies and missing rings, there was the simple fact that he had been some sort of catalyst. Allan had felt threatened. So did half a dozen other men.
Those men were linked before Lucas threatened them, and I became convinced that the more I discovered about their connections to one another, the more likely I was to learn not only why Allan Moffett had resigned, but why Ben Watterson and Lucas Monroe had died.
I decided I needed to have a long talk with Murray Plummer, the real estate expert for the Express. I called his extension, but he wasn’t in, so I left a message on his voice mail. I wondered if he was in but not taking calls.
I looked over the list of attendees at Allan’s dinner party. They came from three areas. From the college, from the city, and from local business. The businessmen were Keene Dage, Corbin Tyler, Roland Hill. Ben had belonged to this latter group.
Roland Hill. Moffett may have called the dinner meeting, but years ago, Hill would have been the one who originally brought this group of people together. Whatever significance the picture of the boat had, it was apparently regarding something that was going on in the late 1970s.
Like most newspapers, the Express had only recently started indexing stories on the computer, so I wouldn’t be able to look up stories from that decade at my desk. I was going to need to go to the morgue, or library, as we were now supposed to refer to it. With men as publicly prominent as Ben Watterson and Allan Moffett, the noncomputerized files would be huge, going back over several decades. Of the remaining men, Hill was a much more controversial figure than most of the others. His development projects had not been universally welcomed or successful. I decided he would be my best bet for a starting point in a search through the clipping files.
It would help to have guidance from Murray. I tried calling him again. Voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message.
My thoughts went back to Lucas. As far as I could remember, Lucas was working on his thesis when I left Las Piernas in 1976. He couldn’t have been far from finishing his master’s degree.
John Walters’s shadow across my desk startled me out of my reverie.
“Where in the hell have you been all day?” he growled.
“I was only out of this office for an hour,” I said. I thought of telling him what I had done during that hour, but didn’t think he’d approve of the meager results.
“Going to have anything for me by deadline, Kelly?”
“Uh, probably not today, John,” I said, closing the drawer with the phone book in it.
“Goddammit, why not?”
“I need to talk to Murray, for one thing.”
He scowled, but then apparently decided that working with Murray meant I wasn’t chasing after stories on Lucas. “Okay, Kelly. But one of two things is going to happen after a while. Some other newspa
per is going to get the story first, or the story’s going to grow so cold that no one in this town will remember who Allan Moffett is, let alone care about why he resigned. Go look for Murray.”
“Sure, John.”
“And Kelly? Don’t forget to put that phone book back.”
I scowled at Stuart, who was shaking his head. “I can still observe things on my own,” John said, and walked off.
THE EXPRESS IS LAID OUT like a rabbit warren. Hallways appear where you don’t expect them, and a doorway that would seem to lead to a small office often turns out to be the entrance to a large room. Murray and I probably passed one another a couple of times without knowing it, but I finally caught up with him in the composing room. It’s called the composing room even though no one composes pages in it, and the machines in it are called typesetters even though they don’t really set type. Nothing wrong with tradition.
Black and turquoise cubes, about four square feet each, the typesetters sit along one wall of the composing room. The typesetters are really gigantic film processors that turn out “film,” slick black-and-white prints which are a little larger than a newspaper page.
Murray was standing at a dump, one of the counter-height metal tables in the room. I saw him reach into a pocket and pull out a thick packet of folded proofs.
“Were you just downstairs?” I asked.
He turned around and smiled. “Hello, Irene. No, I was scheduling something with a photographer until a few minutes ago. Now I’m waiting to sign off my pages for the real estate section.”
As he spoke, he smoothed out the proofs, which had corrections and changes circled with red china marker here and there.
“Here you go, Plummer,” the compositor said, handing Murray the film that had just dropped into the typesetter’s tray. I stayed quiet while Murray double-checked the folio—the upper corner information which includes the date and page number—and then found the corresponding proof.
“So you’ve been looking for me?” he asked, uncap-ping a pen. It was the kind that marked in a special light blue ink known as “nonreproducing blue.”
“I’ll give you a chance to check your page over,” I said.
“Thanks.” I watched him check the headlines first. As they say, if you’re going to make a mistake, don’t do it in 42 point type. Next he went over the cut lines under photos, the jump lines and jumps, and then checked to see that all the corrections on his proofs had been carried out.
“Turin is spelled wrong,” I said, looking over his shoulder. “Your reporter has this Italian architect coming from a soup bowl.”
He sighed as he made the correction. “Do they teach geography in schools these days? Thanks for catching that—one of those words that makes it past the computer spelling-checker.” He noted the change from Tureen to Turin, sent the page back, then turned his attention to me.
“What’s up?”
“You’ve covered real estate since the early 1970s, right?”
“Right.”
“I saw a group of men having dinner together the other night—the night after Ben Watterson killed himself. Allan Moffett called the meeting.”
Murray lifted a brow over the rim of his glasses. “Who were they?”
I named them. “I know they were also meeting in the mid-to-late 1970s. Back in the seventies, Ben Watterson was meeting with them, too, and would have been invited for the dinner party, except—”
“Except now he is permanently unavailable for dinner parties. How do you know about all of this?”
“Another time, Murray.”
He grinned. “Okay, okay. But before you turn in your story, help me to be ready with a tie-in for my section, will you?”
“If it’s at all possible, I will. I’ll need your help on this anyway.”
“Hmm. Yes. Let’s take a look at this group. Name them again for me.”
I did. He noted the initials on a scrap of paper.
“You want to know what projects they were involved in from, say, 1970 to 1980?”
“Yes. Especially 1974 to 1978.” This time both brows went up, but then he studied the initials again. “Andre Selman has done many studies for the Redevelopment Agency, of course,” he said. “He’s one of their regular paid consultants.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “It all goes hand in hand.” He nodded.
“I need a quick way to figure out which projects they worked on together. I can’t just go through four years of microfilm—not and keep my sanity or my eyesight, let alone make John happy. As you say, the college and city have worked together many times. So, for the moment, if we just stick with the private sector, we’re left with Tyler, Hill, Dage, and Watterson. Can you tell me about any projects they were working on back then?”
“Off the top of my head? Lord. Dozens of them.”
“Oh.”
“Hill was putting deals together like crazy then. But you’re looking for redevelopment, right?”
“Yes.” On a hunch I said, “Maybe something in the area near the Angelus Hotel.”
Murray frowned. “The Angelus?”
The compositor came over with another page. Murray took it absently, still studying me.
“Look,” I said, “I’d just as soon we kept this between the two of us, okay?”
He chuckled. Hell’s bells. What could I offer Murray in exchange for keeping his yap shut?
“Did I ever tell you that Jack Fremont is a good friend of mine?” I asked.
He stopped chuckling. “Jack Fremont? The man who owns over half the beach property in Las Piernas?”
“The very one. The one who’s been so media shy.”
“You’re bribing me with an interview possibility?”
“Emphasis on possibility.”
“I would never betray you, Irene.”
My turn to laugh.
“Let me sign these pages off, then I’ll go back to my office and do a little research for you. I’ll have a list for you by tomorrow morning at the latest. Would that seal the deal?”
“I’m only promising to talk to Jack about letting you interview him, right? He makes the decision on his own.”
“Right.”
“Murray, you’ve got yourself a bargain.”
17
I GOT BACK to my desk, ignored the message light, and called Jack. He agreed to do the interview with Murray.
“I’m not going to tell him this right away,” I said. “I’ve got to make sure he comes through on his part of the bargain.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “If he calls, I’ll just say I’m thinking about it.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
“By the way, did Frank get in touch with you?” he asked.
“No, but I haven’t picked up all of my messages. Why?”
“Well, if you don’t have a message from him, give him a call, okay?”
“What’s this about?”
“Oh, no. I’m not getting in the middle of this one.”
* * *
I CHECKED MY MESSAGES. A few answering-machine Monroes saying they were sorry, but I had reached a wrong number when I had called. Nothing from J. Monroe. Two other calls, one from Frank and one from Rachel. I called Frank first.
“Harriman,” he answered.
“Me, too,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I’m glad you called back. I’ve been a little worried about you.”
“Stop the presses.”
“I’m serious. There have been a couple of developments in this Lucas Monroe situation—”
“Situation? It’s a little beyond a situation, isn’t it? The man is dead.”
“Okay, have it your way. Something has come up in connection with the death of—”
“Has Carlos finished the autopsy?”
I heard a sigh of utter exasperation.
“Okay, I’ll be quiet. Say what you have to say.”
There was no reply.
“Are you pinching the bridge of your nose?” I asked.
�
�How the hell could you know that?”
“You sometimes do that when you’re about to lose your temper.”
“Call Rachel. She’ll fill you in on what’s happening.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait!”
He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t hang up, either.
“Don’t be angry,” I said.
I heard a little snort. We were getting somewhere. “Please,” I added.
“This evening,” he said, in that quiet, measured tone he uses when most people would be shouting, “I would sincerely appreciate it if you went straight home.”
I started to say that I already planned to, then remembered that I wasn’t going to interrupt.
“Jack has promised to go with you when you walk the dogs, so just call him whenever you’re ready. Otherwise, please stay home. Humor me, if you will, and lock the doors. I’m working late, but Rachel will be coming over.”
“Frank, dearest,” I said, “there’s just one teensyweensy problem with all of these plans you’ve laid out for my evening.”
“Namely?”
“I’ve got others.”
“Cancel them.”
“Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on, Frank?”
“Two Toes is looking for you.”
That surprised me, but I was too mad to let it register. “Oh, so what? He’s not exactly fully functioning. How would he ever figure out where I am? The guy spends his time on his knees in front of religious statues.”
“So what?” That cool tone was going all to hell—he was starting to shout. “I’ll tell you so what. While he’s out looking for you, we’ve been looking for him. And guess where he was last seen?”
“Where?” I said softly. He was scaring me a little, not with his shouts but with what I guessed the answer might be.
He didn’t speak right away. He calmed himself, then said, “On Broadway, standing around outside the Wrigley Building. Maybe waiting for you to come downstairs, go out to lunch. Turns out a patrolman told him to move along before he learned we were looking for the guy.”
“Let’s start this conversation over. The Las Piernas Police Department is looking for Two Toes.”