“Stay safe,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Voice mail,” he said.
“What about it?”
“When a cell phone is out of service you usually get routed to voice mail.”
“The whole tower was down.”
“But the cell network didn’t know that. Far as the machinery knew, Beck just had his individual phone switched off. So they’ll have gotten his voice mail. In a central server somewhere. They might have left him a message.”
“What would have been the point?”
Villanueva shrugged. “They might have told him they were on their way back. You know, maybe they expected him to check his messages right away. They might have left him the whole story. Or maybe they weren’t really thinking straight, and they figured it was like a regular answering machine, and they were saying, Hey, Mr. Beck, pick up, will you?”
I said nothing.
“They might have left their voices on there,” he said. “Today. That’s the bottom line.”
“OK,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Start shooting,” I said. “Shoes, voice mail, he’s one step away now.”
Villanueva shook his head.
“You can’t,” he said. “Duffy needs to bring him in. It’s the only way she can save her own ass now.”
I looked away. “Tell her I’ll do my best. But if it’s him or me, he goes down.”
Villanueva said nothing.
“What?” I said. “Now I’m a human sacrifice?”
“Just do your best,” he said. “Duffy’s a good kid.”
“I know she is,” I said.
He hauled himself out of the Saab, one hand on the door frame, the other on the seat back. He stepped across and got into his own car and drove away, slow and quiet, no lights. I saw him wave. I watched until he was lost to sight and then I backed up and turned and got the Saab straddling the middle of the road, facing west. I figured when Beck came out to find me he would think I was doing a good defensive job.
But either Beck wasn’t trying the phones very often or he wasn’t thinking very much about me because I sat there for ten minutes with no sign of him. I spent part of the time testing my earlier hypothesis that a person who hides a gun under the spare wheel might also hide notes under the carpets. The carpets were already loose and they hadn’t been helped by being turned upside down. But there was nothing at all under them, except for rust stains and a damp layer of acoustical padding that looked like it had been made out of old red and gray sweaters. No notes. Bad hypothesis. I put the carpets back in place as well as I could and kicked them around until they were reasonably flat.
Then I got out and checked the exterior damage. Nothing I could do about the scratches in the paint. They were bad, but not disastrous. Nothing I could do about the dent in the door either, unless I wanted to take it apart and press the panel out. The roof was a little caved in. I remembered it as having a definite dome shape. Now it was fairly flat. But I figured I could maybe do something about that from the inside. I climbed into the back seat and put both palms up flat on the headliner and pushed hard. I was rewarded by two sounds. One of them was the pop of sheet metal springing back into shape. The other was the crackle of paper.
It wasn’t a new car, so the headliner wasn’t the one-piece molded mouse-fur thing that everybody uses now. It was the old-fashioned cream vinyl thing with the side-to-side wire ribs that pleated it into three accordion sections. The edges were trapped under a black rubber gasket that ran all around the roof. The vinyl was a little puckered in the front corner, over the driver’s seat. The gasket looked a little loose there. I guessed a person could stress the vinyl by pushing up on it and then peel it out from under the gasket. Then tug on it until it pulled away all along its length. That would give sideways access into any one of the three pleated sections the person chose to use. Then it would take time and fingernails to get the vinyl back under the gasket. A little care would make the intrusion hard to see, in a car as worn as that one.
I leaned forward and checked the section that ran above the front seats. I stabbed the vinyl upward until I felt the underside of the roof, all the way across the width of the car. Nothing there. Nothing in the next section, either. But the section above the rear seats had paper hidden in it. I could even judge the size and weight. Legal-size paper, maybe eight or ten stacked sheets.
I got out of the back and slid into the driver’s seat and looked at the gasket. Put some tension into the vinyl and picked at the edge. I got a fingernail under the rubber and eased it down into a little mouth a half-inch long. Scraped my other hand sideways across the roof and the vinyl obediently pulled out from under the gasket and gave me enough of a hole to get my thumb into.
I worked my thumb backward and I had gotten about nine inches unzipped when I was suddenly lit up from behind. Bright light, harsh shadows. The road came in over my right shoulder so I glanced across at the passenger-door mirror. The glass was cracked. It was filled with multiple sets of bright headlights. I saw the etched warning: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. I twisted around in the seat and saw a single set of high beams sweeping urgently left and right through the curves. A quarter-mile back. Coming on fast. I dropped my window an inch and heard the distant hiss of fat tires and the growl of a quiet V-8 kicked down into second gear. The Cadillac, in a hurry. I stabbed the vinyl back into place. No time to secure it under the gasket. I just shoved it upward and hoped it would stay there.
The Cadillac came right up behind me and stopped hard. The headlights stayed on. I watched in the mirror and saw the door open and Beck step out. I put my hand in my pocket and clicked the Beretta to fire. Duffy or no Duffy, I wasn’t interested in a long discussion about voice mail. But Beck had nothing in his hands. No gun, no Nokia. He stepped forward and I slid out and met him level with the Saab’s rear bumper. I wanted to keep him away from the dents and the scratches. It put him about eighteen inches from the guys he had sent down to pick up his son.
“Phones are back on,” he said.
“The cell too?” I said.
He nodded.
“But look at this,” he said.
He took the little silver phone out of his pocket. I kept my hand around the Beretta, out of sight. It would blow a hole in my coat, but it would blow a bigger hole in his coat. He passed me the phone. I took it, left-handed. Held it low, in the spread of the Cadillac’s headlights. Looked at the screen. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Some cell phones I had seen signaled a voice mail message with a little pictogram of an envelope. Some used a little symbol made up of two small circles joined together by a bar at the bottom, like a reel-to-reel tape, which I thought was weird, because I guessed most cell phone users had never seen a reel-to-reel tape in their lives. And I was pretty sure that the cell phone companies didn’t record the messages themselves on reel-to-reel tape. I guessed they did it digitally, inert inside some kind of a solid-state circuit. But then, the signs at railroad crossings still show the sort of locomotive that Casey Jones would have been proud of.
“See that?” Beck said.
I saw nothing. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. Just the signal strength bar, and the battery bar, and the menu thing, and the names thing.
“What?” I said.
“The signal strength,” he said. “It’s only showing three out of five. Normally I get four.”
“Maybe the tower was down,” I said. “Maybe it powers up again slowly. Some kind of electrical reason.”
“You think?”
“There are microwaves involved,” I said. “It’s probably complicated. You should look again later. Maybe it’ll come back up.”
I handed the phone back to him, left-handed. He took it and put it away in his pocket, still fretting about it.
“All quiet here?” he said.
“As the grave,” I said.
“So it was nothing,” he said. “Not something.”
“I guess
,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I appreciate your caution. Really.”
“Just doing my job,” I said.
“Let’s go get dinner,” he said.
He went back to the Cadillac and got in. I clicked the Beretta back to safe and slid into the Saab. He backed up and turned in the road and waited for me. I guessed he wanted to go in through the gate together, so Paulie would only have to open and close it once. We drove back in convoy, four short miles. The Saab rode badly and the headlights pointed way up at an angle and the steering felt light. There were four hundred pounds of weight in the trunk. And the corner of the headliner fell down when I hit the first bump in the road and flapped in my face the whole way back.
We put the cars in the garages and Beck waited for me in the courtyard. The tide was coming in. I could hear the waves behind the walls. They were dumping huge volumes of water on the rocks. I could feel its impact through the ground. It was a definite physical sensation. Not just sound. I joined Beck and we walked back together and used the front door. The metal detector beeped twice, once for him, once for me. He handed me a set of house keys. I accepted them, like a badge of office. Then he told me dinner would be served in thirty minutes and he invited me to eat it with the family.
I went up to Duke’s room and stood at the high window. Five miles to the west, I thought I saw red taillights moving away into the distance. Three pairs of lights. Villanueva and Eliot and Duffy, I hoped, in the government Tauruses. 10-18, assignment completed. But it was hard to be sure if they were real because of the glare from the lights on the wall. They might have been spots in my vision, from fatigue, or from the bang on the head.
I took a fast shower and stole another set of Duke’s clothes. Kept my own shoes and jacket on, left my ruined coat in the closet. I didn’t check for e-mail. Duffy had been too busy for messages. And at that point we were on the same page, anyway. There was nothing more she could tell me. Pretty soon I would be telling her something, just as soon as I got a chance to rip the headliner out of the Saab.
I wasted the balance of the thirty-minute lull and then walked downstairs. Found the family dining room. It was huge. There was a long rectangular table in it. It was oak, heavy, solid, not stylish. It would have seated twenty people. Beck was at the head. Elizabeth was all the way at the other end. Richard was alone on the far side. The place set for me put me directly opposite him, with my back to the door. I thought about asking him to swap with me. I don’t like sitting with my back to a door. But I decided against it and just sat down.
Paulie wasn’t there. Clearly he hadn’t been invited. The maid wasn’t there either, of course. The cook was having to do all the scut work, and she didn’t look very pleased about it. But she had done a good job with the food. We started with French onion soup. It was pretty authentic. My mother wouldn’t have approved, but there are always twenty million individual Frenchwomen who think they alone possess the perfect recipe.
“Tell us about your service career,” Beck said to me, like he wanted to make conversation. He wasn’t going to talk about business. That was clear. Not in front of the family. I guessed maybe Elizabeth knew more than was good for her, but Richard seemed fairly oblivious. Or maybe he was just blocking it out. What had he said? Bad things don’t happen unless you choose to recall them?
“Nothing much to tell,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. Bad things had happened, and I didn’t choose to recall them.
“There must be something,” Elizabeth said.
They were all three looking at me, so I shrugged and gave them a story about checking a Pentagon budget and seeing eight-thousand-dollar charges for maintenance tools called RTAFAs. I told them I was bored enough to be curious and had made a couple of calls and been told the acronym stood for rotational torque-adjustable fastener applicators. I told them I had tracked one down and found a three-dollar screwdriver. That had led to three-thousand-dollar hammers, thousand-dollar toilet seats, the whole nine yards. It’s a good story. It’s the sort of thing that suits any audience. Most people respond to the audacity and anti-government types get to seethe. But it isn’t true. It happened, I guess, but not to me. It was a different department entirely.
“Have you killed people?” Richard asked.
Four in the last three days, I thought.
“Don’t ask questions like that,” Elizabeth said.
“The soup is good,” Beck said. “Maybe not enough cheese.”
“Dad,” Richard said.
“What?”
“You need to think about your arteries. They’re going to get all clogged up.”
“They’re my arteries.”
“And you’re my dad.”
They glanced at each other. They both smiled shy smiles. Father and son, best buddies. Ambivalence. It was all set to be a long meal. Elizabeth changed the subject away from cholesterol. She started talking about the Portland Museum of Art instead. She said it had an I. M. Pei building and a collection of American and Impressionist masters. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to educate me or to tempt Richard to get out of the house and do something. I tuned her out. I wanted to get to the Saab. But I couldn’t, right then. So I tried to predict exactly what I would find there. Like a game. I heard Leon Garber in my head: Think about everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve heard. Work the clues. I hadn’t heard much. But I had seen a lot of things. I guessed they were all clues, of a sort. The dining table, for instance. The whole house, and everything in it. The cars. The Saab was a piece of junk. The Cadillac and the Lincolns were nice automobiles, but they weren’t Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The furniture was all old and dull and solid. Not cheap, but then, it didn’t represent current expenditure anyway. It was all paid for long ago. What had Eliot said in Boston? About the LA gangbanger? His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. Beck was supposed to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. But Beck didn’t live like an emperor. Why not? Because he was a cautious Yankee, unimpressed by consumer baubles?
“Look,” he said.
I surfaced and saw him holding his cell phone out to me. I took it from him and looked at the screen. The signal strength was back up to four bars.
“Microwaves,” I said. “Maybe they ramp up slowly.”
Then I looked again. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. No voice-mail messages. But it was a tiny phone and I have big thumbs and I accidentally touched the up-down arrow key underneath the screen. The display instantly changed to a list of names. His virtual phone book, I guessed. The screen was so small it could show only three contacts at a time. At the top was house. Then came gate. Third on the list was Xavier. I stared at it so hard the room went silent around me and blood roared in my ears.
“The soup was very good,” Richard said.
I handed the phone back to Beck. The cook reached across in front of me and took my bowl away.
The first time I ever heard the name Xavier was the sixth time I ever saw Dominique Kohl. It was seventeen days after we danced in the Baltimore bar. The weather had broken. The temperature had plummeted and the skies were gray and miserable. She was in full dress uniform. For a moment I thought I must have scheduled a performance review and forgotten all about it. But then, I had a company clerk to remind me about stuff like that, and he hadn’t mentioned anything.
“You’re going to hate this,” Kohl said.
“Why? You got promoted and you’re shipping out?”
She smiled at that. I realized it had come out as more of a personal compliment than I should have risked.
“I found the bad guy,” she said.
“How?”
“Exemplary application of relevant skills,” she said.
I looked at her. “Did we schedule a performance review?”
“No, but I think we should.”
“Why?”
“Because I found the bad guy. And I think performance reviews always go better just after a big break in a case.”
<
br /> “You’re still working with Frasconi, right?”
“We’re partners,” she said, which wasn’t strictly an answer to the question.
“Is he helping?”
She made a face. “Permission to speak freely?”
I nodded.
“He’s a waste of good food,” she said.
I nodded again. That was my impression, too. Lieutenant Anthony Frasconi was solid, but he wasn’t the crispest shirt in the closet.
“He’s a nice man,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong.”
“But you’re doing all the work,” I said.
She nodded. She was holding the original file, the one that I had given her just after I found out she wasn’t a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. It was bulging with her notes.
“You helped, though,” she said. “You were right. The document in question is in the newspaper. Gorowski dumps the whole newspaper in a trash can at the parking lot exit. Same can, two Sundays in a row.”
“And?”
“And two Sundays in a row the same guy fishes it out again.”
I paused. It was a smart plan, except that the idea of fishing around in a garbage can gave it a certain vulnerability. A certain lack of plausibility. The garbage can thing is hard to do, unless you’re willing to go the whole way and dress up like a homeless person. And that’s hard to do in itself, if you want to be really convincing. Homeless people walk miles, spend all day, check every can along their route. To imitate their behavior plausibly takes infinite time and care.
“What kind of a guy?” I said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Who roots around in trash cans except street people, right?”
“So who does?”
“Imagine a typical Sunday,” she said. “A lazy day, you’re strolling, maybe the person you’re meeting is a little late, maybe the impulse to go out for a walk has turned out to be a little boring. But the sun is shining, and there’s a bench to sit on, and you know the Sunday papers are always fat and interesting. But you don’t happen to have one with you.”
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