by Robert White
I waited another fifteen and then he came by at a slow thirty m.p.h. He didn’t want to chance getting stuck in the small ditch that separated the road from the field so he exited the car and walked. He picked his way through the scrub where I had most of the truck secreted and worked his way gingerly to my window. From his knees to his cuffs he was covered with cockleburs and dandelion seeds. He hadn’t taken more than a couple steps before he sneezed.
“Ragweed pollen,” he said. “My allergies are going crazy right now.”
“It’s the season for it,” I said.
“So, tell me why you’re sitting in a patch of weeds, Jack?”
“They’re not all weeds. Look around you, Pippin. I see Fire Pink and Indian Blanket. You’re stepping on Musk Mallow with your right foot, and just behind you is a Sweet Pepperbrush.”
“Do you want to know what I see? I see a landscaper playing a very, very stupid game.” Pippin put both be-ringed and manicured hands across my window; he was almost tall enough to look me right in the eye.
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“Not me, Jack. You and me, we’re not playing a game. You’re my job.” He didn’t raise his voice or show me any annoyance. “So what do you think you’re doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“I was thinking of tacos,” I said.
“Tacos,” he repeated. He nodded as if that made perfect sense.
“I know a good Mexican restaurant in town. Not far from here,” I said.
“I’ll follow you,” he said. “That million dollars burning a hole in your pocket?”
“You see that green flower near the fence there?” I pointed to a spot near my outside tire. “It’s Wild Sarsaparilla. You should take some with you and boil it up. It’ll help your allergies.”
“Thanks, Grandma Moses, but I’ll stick with modern medicine.”
#6
He must have contacted the other agents while I was in the bathroom washing my hands because I saw his cell phone had been relocated to the other side of his sports jacket. The staff at Three Amigos were all young Mexican men and women. Most were bilingual.
“What’s good?”
“Sarah – she’s my wife or my ex-wife, I should say – and I have tried everything on the menu. I like the Santa Fe quesadilla with shrimp and steak strips. Watch out for the green chilies, but everything else is mild.”
“I don’t care for Mex food,” Pippin said scowling at the menu. “Everything looks like the taco in disguise. Besides, my appetite’s off today.”
I set the menu aside and dipped a corn chip shaped like hibiscus petals into the salsa.
“Sometimes they have a mariachi band,” I said. “You’re supposed to put the tip money in the hole in the guitar after they play a set at your table. I didn’t realize that the first time and I embarrassed Sarah. I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t get around much, do you?”
“Not as much as I used to,” I said.
“What does tipping a mariachi band have to do with anything, Jack? What do these blue corn chips,” he plucked one from the bowl and flipped it at me, “have to do with a stolen million dollars you and your knuckleheaded friends took?”
A young couple with two small children stopped eating and looked at us.
“Sorry,” he said and smiled at them. The smile disappeared when he turned it at me. “Getting jerked around like this makes me very unhappy, Jack.”
“Try some chips. It’ll get the juices going again.”
“I’ve spent the morning with a handkerchief soaked in that BCI agent’s cheap cologne wrapped around my face because of the stench of a dead body’s intestinal juices. A week of being stored in a garage rolled up in his own living room carpet doesn’t do much for the decomp so, if you don’t mind, let’s just order and not talk about the cuisine.”
After a moment or two of silence, I felt him looking hard at me, a cop’s auger.
“Don’t play dumb behind that menu, Trichaud. It doesn’t suit you and it insults my intelligence. Your buddy Calderone’s erstwhile employer, some cat named Jonas Fullilov Gomes, late of Youngstown, former proprietor of a roofing business supplemented by a little fencing and a little narcotics trade and some other minor scams we don’t need to go into, had a connection to Calderone. They both did time at Riker’s.”
“Sorry. I never heard of him,” I said.
That much was true. But I had a memory of Calderone arguing with my brother about making a quick side trip to Youngstown the day after they showed up at my place – something about a ‘loose end’ to be tied off. Calderone never used a name, but I inferred it was somebody he had done time with before Dannemora and wasn’t too happy with.
“Yeah, well, if any forensics comes back that says you did,” Pippin growled around a corn chip, “there ain’t gonna be any sweetheart deals with any federal judges I know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ten years,” Pippin said. He picked something out of his teeth and made a show of looking at it with disgust. “Ten to life for complicity. Deal’s off it turns out you did more than fetch and drive.”
“Ten years,” I said.
“Federal time means no good time, no parole. Fox-Whitcomb still won’t ID you, so you don’t have kidnapping charges tacked on. You can do the time in Lewisburg or Atlanta, where you won’t bump into any Aryan Brother friends of Calderone on a daisy chain.”
“Until I met Calderone, I wouldn’t have known one to trip over.”
“Well, you seem to blend in rather well considering your little adventures this past week. You mean you didn’t have to do all that stiff-arming and shouting ‘White Power!’ ‘Hail to Youth!’ and all that Nazi crap?”
“My brother must have gotten involved after my visit to him. He had no tattoos and he never talked any of that Nazi twaddle when we were boys growing up,” I said.
“Something he picked up between shop classes, huh? Look, Trichaud, you think I give a shit about that ‘Fourteen-Words-Heil-Hitler’ horseshit because I’m a black man?”
“What fourteen words?”
“Man, pull my other leg, the one with bells on it. I’m not buying any of your know-nothing act. I grew up in Cabrini Green, Chicago. We invented that don’t-know-nothin’-about-nothin’ shit in the ghetto.”
“I don’t know where my brother is. I think he’s somewhere near Jefferson-on-the-Lake, maybe holed up in a cabin somewhere off the Strip,” I said.
“Give us some credit. We’ve checked the registration of every cabin out there. We’ve checked every known Brand member, skinhead, neo-Nazi and bike gang member from here to Kalamazoo. Nobody’s whispered anything in my shell-like ear so far. DEA keeps informants in every chapter of bike trash that ride through Jefferson-on-the-Lake – the Ching-a-lings, the Pagans, the Mongols, and Hell’s Angels.”
“Calderone’s staying with a woman named Marija Ercegovic,” I said.
“Keep farting around like this, Jack, and I’m going to let that BCI fellow take you in for some serious questioning. They told me you’ll crack like a walnut inside of twenty minutes.”
He looked at me again. The people in the booth next to us were listening.
“How’s the Tejada Tampico?” he asked.
“Salty but not too spicy,” I said. “Your stomach can handle it.”
The outside air had a real chill to it. The sun went down faster each day now and stayed farther west. “Thanks,” I said to Pippin, who was groaning and holding his stomach.
“De nada,” he said. “They tenderized the living hell out that steak.” I watched as Pippin folded some bills into his wallet.
“I tried to tell you.”
The stars were already beginning to etch themselves against the parts of the sky shifting from violet to cobalt.
“I’ll be seeing you soon, Trichaud.”
“Not if I see you first, Special Agent Pippin.”
I parked the truck out front of Augie’s where I had picked
it up. Augie’s house was brightly lit and I saw shadows moving back and forth across the drawn blinds and shades. I had worked for him for nine years but I didn’t have any feelings one way or the other about it. The nearest pay phone was down on Bridge Street, so I decided to walk back instead of call a cab.
I wanted to go home and crash on the floor. Sleep my blank and mindless dreams. Awake in a new world, some other universe besides the one I was born into. I would have bartered my existence for the short life of a sewer rodent.
The walk did me some good. I even worked up a sweat. The back of my neck and chest were damp with perspiration.
I passed the lights of shops closed for the day. Some sold provender to the recreational boats but most were second-hand goods stores that used words like ‘antiques’ and ‘boutique’ in the windows. I passed by a couple of the seedier bars where the locals all knew one another and turned into the Suomi Café, the harbor’s closet thing to a fern bar. It mixed a lot of demographics in its clientele. Rumor was that crack and meth were sold out of the bar with the owner’s blessing. Around ten o’clock the casual drinkers and the middle-aged crowd disappeared; the signal was usually the appearance of the first black male who came in.
I took a seat at the bar. A blonde college-aged girl served me a bottle of Pabst, and I drank a few sips of it. I made it last for an hour and then I ordered another one. The bar was mostly young people now, loud and gregarious. I might as well have had a Plexiglass cone dropped over me. The seats around me were occupied by several men and two girls, who all found someone or a group to party with. I ordered my third drink and was in the act of polishing it off, eager to call it a night.
In the mirror back home I saw my haggard face and was shocked by what I saw. I looked ten years older. They say everybody in the world has a fox face or a pig face. The thickness of my face was gone, all the softness of the Sarah years, and I saw a different face staring back at me.
“I’m not like you,” I said to the mirror. “I’m not you.”
The mirror didn’t say anything back. They also say mirrors don’t lie.
Wednesday, September 8
10:11 a.m.
#7
I was greeted by two city policemen who showed me a search warrant for the house and grounds. They asked me if I would be willing to go down to the station for an interview, and I said I might if I knew what this concerned. They said it was regarding the recent activities of Carlos Maurice Trichaud.
Outside on the porch a team of forensics people with their gear stood around in the yard drinking coffee. The cop leading me said to them, “Try not to mess anything up in there,” which made the other cop snicker. When he put me in the back seat of the cruiser, he said, “I’ll bet your neighbors just love what you do for property values.”
At the station they escorted me to a different room, and asked me if I wanted to waive my rights to having a lawyer present. I asked if this was about my brother or me, and Pippin shrugged.
“I’ll waive my rights,” I said.
The detective said, “The officer who picked you up said you wanted to make a phone call before you left the house. Were you going to call a lawyer?”
“No, I just wanted to know if my phone was tapped.”
“How would you know that from a phone call, Jack?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
Pippin smiled, the lawyer lurking within the cop guessed it. “Fruit of the poison tree, right? You think you can get any evidence we collect thrown out of court if this comes to trial and the phone trap was unwarranted.”
“You think like a criminal, Trichaud,” the officer said. “That doesn’t make you look innocent to us.”
“Who among us is innocent?”
“OK, Jesus of Northtown,” Pippin said. “Let’s cut the shit.”
#8
What followed was a two-hour, intensive grilling that skirted direct questions of my involvement. Pippin and the detective double-teamed me hard. Forget good cop-bad cop; they hammered me with questions and wouldn’t let me think or finish a sentence. They’d have hours to go over the tape scrutinizing my responses, but I had fractions of a second to think and worry about the lies twisting around my feet and dragging me down. Now I was on record as having said certain things that, if later contradicted by facts, would nail me along with Calderone and my brother.
Pippin walked me out of the building. He offered me a ride but I declined.
“Come on, don’t be stubborn, Jack. You knew this was coming. You should be grateful you’re allowed to walk out of there.”
“What weren’t you telling me back there?”
“Let’s walk. My car’s in the back,” he said.
I got in and he turned off the radio as soon as the car started. It was set to the same classical station in Youngstown that Sarah listened to when we went for long drives in the country.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“I think Pehrlman’s a little rough with that one Brahms sonata,” I said.
Pippin’s face widened into a grin. His skin almost matched the mahogany leather of the seats.
“Gee whiz, I don’t know what to make out of you, Jack. I really don’t. I did a deep background on you and got nothing.” He laughed and put the car into drive. “I don’t even know if you should be in this country, man. You and your brother have birth certificates in Minneapolis and then you disappear for fourteen years. Your brother turns up branded with swastikas spouting that ZOG nonsense in Dannemora...”
He looked at me hard. “That your thing, Jack? ‘Holocaust Two – coming to a town near you.’ That you?”
“I’m just an equal-opportunity hater,” I said.
Pippin resumed his recitation of my biography, driving through caution lights and barely slowing down for stops – a man who took chances with life in small ways would take chances in big ways.
“You disappear off the radar until you turn up in this burgh nine years ago and you become a model citizen. You get a job, you pay your taxes, get married. You even go to church, for God’s sake,” Pippin snickered.
“Is that supposed to be a joke, Forzell?”
“Your zany life is a joke. Who are you? Your brother’s IQ should have put him in Mensa. Instead he’s telling the prison shrink he had to shave his head because a generation of panty hoses for women and electric hair dryers for men have shamed him into becoming a skinhead. You’re a minimum-wage laborer working for his boss’ son-in-law, who by the way nearly shit himself when we asked questions about you. He acted as if he barely remembered you.”
“Things happen, Pippin. Did you plan your life so that everything went your way?”
“Gee, no, but unlike you, I pretty much stayed the course. Bachelor’s degree CUNY, Columbia Law, Quantico, and except for a teensy misstep that landed me in Youngstown, I followed my game plan. I didn’t take time out to rob the Bank of New York. I didn’t wake up one morning and start trying my damnedest to make it onto America’s Most Wanted. ”
“I told you everything about me back there,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah. And except for the facts we know, which are the only ones we can corroborate, nothing quite substantiates.”
“Maybe you and these town cops should have got off your backsides, forgotten about me, and started a grid search around Jefferson-on-the-Lake.”
“What makes you so sure he’s there?”
“I’m not. I don’t know,” I said.
“That woman you met back in the biker’s bar. She the reason for your divorce and all this midlife crisis?”
“You’re following her and you have my phone tapped so you might tell me what she has to do with it,” I said.
“Yeah, we’re on her and we’ve got leads. This isn’t going to go away like that smell in your garage that’s driving the sheriff’s cadaver dog nuts.”
“You indict on smells now?”’
Pippin laughed. “Come on, Jack. The first thing they teach us is to control the interview. Y
ou don’t get to ask the questions, my boy. Let me help you. Give me something to work with.” His face looked sincere but I’ve been acting without a script most of my life.
“How do I know this isn’t about the money?”
“Your brother will have to take his chances, but everybody at the DA is in line with the federal proposal. Ten years, one-time offer. It goes away as soon as things change.”
“Things like, say, Alicia Fox-Whitcomb changing her mind?”
“That, certainly, and whether your two co-conspirators decide to kill anyone in the line of duty while fleeing a felony arrest. Next stop, death row, Lucasville. Too bad they stopped using the chair in this state.” He made a wry face. “Hell, a man’s eyeballs’d explode out of his head. The body would stay hot on the slab for days afterward. Now the best we can hope for is somebody getting the lethal dosage wrong. Not much fun in that. ”
“What if I do tell you where the money is?”
“That would be a good start.”
“I’ll call you,” I said.
He leaned toward me and said, “Why is it I have the feeling you timed this whole conversation just so you could say that as I pulled up to the curb?”
I shut the door and walked up the sidewalk to my house. It looked haggard and toothless like an old man’s face.
The search teams might have been inspired by the mess they found. I found broken dishware on the kitchen floors and some bird photos tossed into a corner. Someone had slit the backings. I pulled the attic ladder down and climbed up. Dozens of feet had trampled through the soot that came wafting through the vents and cracks. A dozen plastic totes were emptied on the floor and every keepsake of Sarah’s she didn’t want me to throw out was unwrapped and tossed aside like so much junk. I suppose that’s all it was, finally.
In a small room off the main floor of the attic I kept an old print of an L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi scene: a woman in a clingy spacesuit with a lot of cleavage showing was standing next to a spaceship on an alien planet with three suns. Sarah won it in a contest at the bookstore in the mall. I hated to sacrifice the frame, but it was one of my first fix-it jobs when we moved in. I had nailed the painting against a gaping hole where the north wind came whistling through the missing clay shingles and the holes in the rafters. Behind the painting, right between the studs, dangled the walkie-talkie from a ten-pound fishing line.