“I know you can’t do it officially, McCloskey. How about unofficially? In return, we’ll make sure you hear right away about any relevant information we may dig up.”
“You’re legally bound to do that anyway.”
“You’re not listening carefully to Garth, Lieutenant,” I said. “He told you we’d get the information to you, personally. You wouldn’t want anyone else—especially the F.B.I.—horning in on your case, would you?”
McCloskey looked at me, smiled grimly. “You should negotiate for us with the Russians, Frederickson.”
“Is that a compliment, a yes, or a no?”
“It’s a maybe. Give me a couple of days.”
“How long will it be before the autopsy is performed?”
“A couple of days.”
“That sounds fair, Lieutenant. Thank you.”
Garth said, “Do you need us anymore, McCloskey?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll be on our way.”
“Hey,” McCloskey said as we started to walk away.
We stopped, turned back. “What is it, Lieutenant?” I asked.
The surly-looking man with the acne-scarred face jerked his thumb back in the direction of the crucified corpse on the tree behind him. “I’ve never seen anything like that, and I don’t want to again. I’m thinking that the famous Fredericksons should watch their asses.”
I nodded. “You too, Lieutenant. Like Garth says, these guys are crazy; if you get in their way, the fact that you’re a cop won’t mean shit to them. Now they’ve shown that they’ll kill others, as well as themselves, to keep their secret. If you do get a lead on the location of that dirt pile, I’d take a lot of firepower with me.”
“Yeah? What are you two going to use for firepower?”
“Ah,” I said, smiling. “Garth and I have our stealth and cunning.”
“Merry Christmas, McCloskey,” Garth said.
Malachy McCloskey nodded to both of us. “Merry Christmas to you.”
We went home. Incredibly, Beloved had not been towed; she was still at the curb where I had parked her, beneath the NO PARKING OR STANDING AT ANY TIME sign. I put her in our underground garage, then went to bed. However, despite the fact that I’d been up all night, I found I was too wired to sleep. It was the same with Garth; he called me on the phone and asked, without any trace of irony, if I was sleeping. We got cleaned up, then went out and ate a desultory Christmas brunch at Rick’s.
“Can you think of anything we can do today, brother?” Garth asked as we finished our steak and eggs.
“No—except to have another bloody Mary or two. We need to get some rest.”
“Agreed,” Garth said, and signaled the bartender, raising two fingers.
“I may as well go back to Jersey City tomorrow and try to check out some more shipping companies. I may not find out anything, but it seems like a forced move; we don’t really have any choice but to keep plodding on.”
“They’re not going to be open on a Saturday which is the day after Christmas.”
“I’ll check out the situation anyway. If there are ships coming in, somebody’s going to have to unload them.”
Garth nodded. “There are a number of suppliers I want to check out. I’ll start my calls, see if anybody is open. If not, it will just have to wait until Monday.”
“Christ, they’d need hundreds of tons of glass, plastic, steel, whatever, to build a biosphere big enough for people to live in. You’d think somebody would remember orders like that, even if they didn’t remember that it was for Nuvironment.”
“They’d remember—unless they’ve been told not to remember.”
“Or unless all of the supplies have been ordered and delivered through companies owned by Blaisdel.”
“Right. But you’re correct about them needing an awful lot of shit, including a few million gallons of sea water. And they’d need a lot of expertise. They’ve gone outside before, to the Botanical Garden; there may be other outside experts they’ve used. I think I’m going to check back with Sam Zelaskowich and see if he knows of anyone else, in any other institution, who’s done consulting work for Nuvironment.”
“Good idea. But you’re going to have to be very careful—for Zelaskowich’s sake.”
“I know, Mongo. I will be.” He paused, nodded to the bartender as he brought us over our drinks, then continued: “All we need is one lousy lead, the name of one person who won’t end up dead on us. There are records somewhere, and there are people who have the information we want.”
“Where are you going to start?”
“I’m not sure,” Garth answered after what seemed an unusually long pause.
Something about the tone of my brother’s voice made me wonder if he was being evasive; but since I could think of no reason why he would be evasive, I let it go. We finished our drinks, Garth grabbed the check, and we headed for the cashier. Outside, the sky was leaden with thick, dark clouds. It was, I thought, going to be a very long Christmas Day.
The good news was that I slept; the bad news was that I woke up at two thirty in the morning. I made a large pot of coffee, exercised, then sat for a half hour in my sauna and tried to relax. It was useless; the more I sweated, the more nervous I became. Something was nagging at me—something besides the obvious difficulties and frustrations of the situation we were dealing with. I kept struggling to find the source of my unease as I showered, dressed in a terry-cloth jumpsuit, and went into the kitchen to make myself something to eat.
I’d just popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster when it came to me.
Three men associated with Nuvironment had killed themselves rather than divulge information they didn’t want Garth and me to have; all three had implied that they, at least, expected something to happen very soon, namely the end of the world. Peter Patton, on the other hand, certainly hadn’t seemed to share their sense of urgency; indeed, he’d offered to give Garth and me the run of his place. Next week. After the first of the year.
Under any circumstances it would be most unlikely that anyone would be at the Nuvironment offices in the middle of the night to answer the phone. In addition, it was a holiday weekend, and Patton had said that the offices were being closed down until after New Year’s. Still, acting on an impulse that sprang out of my unshakable sense of foreboding, I picked up the telephone and dialed the number for Nuvironment.
There was no ringing; instead, a recorded voice came on, courtesy of the New York Telephone Company, to tell me that the number I was trying to reach had been disconnected.
It left me with a very cold, knotted feeling in the pit of my stomach. I buttered my toast, ate it with my fourth cup of coffee. But I put the eggs I’d been about to cook back into the refrigerator; I wasn’t hungry anymore.
At eight thirty I rolled Beloved out of the garage and noted with decidedly mixed feelings the black limousine parked just down the block. As I headed downtown, the limousine tailed along, about six car lengths behind me. Nuvironment might have closed up shop permanently, but Peter Patton was obviously taking no chances on having any loose cannons messing up his act—whatever that act might be; the tails were still on duty. It was almost comforting to be followed, implying as it did that it still might be possible for us to learn something, and I made no effort to lose the Cadillac.
I returned to Jersey City, found a few of the shipping offices open and operating with skeleton crews. Nobody knew anything about a shipment of a hundred tons of Amazon rain forest soil.
The one thing I did discover was that my tail was none other than Tanker Thompson himself, apparently alone, and looking even meaner and uglier in person than he had on television. He was truly massive, with his six-and-a-half-foot height and three-hundred-pound body, and a neck that was almost as thick as his head. Perhaps because it would be difficult for such a big man to move with much stealth, he didn’t bother. When I stopped my car, he stopped his only a few yards behind; when I got out and walked, he got out and walked, k
eeping no more than a block or so between us. There was an arrogance in this open, casual approach that tended to infuriate me, and once I almost stopped and turned around, intending to confront him. But I knew that he would simply keep coming at me until I found myself staring up into his bruise-colored face with its flattened nose and small, black eyes. There was no question but that Tanker Thompson frightened me, and I knew that it would be a waste of time to try to talk to him. I just wasn’t ready for a confrontation with the murderous ex–football player, and I quickened my pace.
I finished visiting all the offices that were open in Jersey City, then headed for Hoboken. I was thoroughly dispirited, certain now that I was wasting my time, but just as certain that I would have no peace of mind if I didn’t play out the string.
It was five thirty by the time I got back into Manhattan. With Tanker Thompson still on my tail, I came out of the Holland Tunnel, headed for uptown and home. I resisted the impulse to wave at the black limousine as I pulled into my garage.
Garth wasn’t in his apartment—a fact that disturbed me somewhat, since I couldn’t figure out who or what he would be visiting at six in the evening on the Saturday after Christmas. I left him a note asking him to come up as soon as he got in, then wearily climbed the circular staircase in his den that led up to my own apartment.
I poured myself a stiff Scotch, downed it quickly. I started to pour myself another, then thought better of it. I busied myself making linguini with homemade clam sauce, ate it with a half bottle of Chianti while I watched the Cable News Network—always with half an ear turned to hear the door opening or the phone ringing. I finished the linguini and wine, fell asleep in my chair in front of the television set.
10.
I awoke with a start, knocking the food tray on my lap to the floor. CNN was showing something that looked like a farm report, with a two-hundred-pound woman kneeling and chucking a six-hundred-pound pig under the chin as she spoke about how the new, sophisticated farmer always has a computer linkup to check the latest prices of futures in pork bellies. I glanced at my watch; it was four thirty in the morning. My first reaction was annoyance with Garth for not waking me up when he’d come in.
My second reaction was fear that he hadn’t come in.
I bolted out of my chair, kicking the tray and wine bottle out of the way, and hurried down the circular staircase to his apartment, went into the bedroom. His bed was made, unslept in.
This time Santa Claus was more than just late; he was missing.
The first thing I did was make myself instant coffee, using hot water from the tap in the kitchen, just to give myself time to calm down. I sipped at the tepid liquid, grimaced. Then I made a systematic search of his apartment for a note he might have left me. There was none. Next, I sat down at the telephone in his den and pulled out his list of the numbers of all the hospital emergency rooms in the city; there was no Garth Frederickson in any of them. I searched through his desk until I found his private phone directory, found the number I wanted, and dialed it.
Malachy McCloskey answered on the sixth ring. “Yeah,” he mumbled sleepily. “What is it?”
“Lieutenant, this is Robert Frederickson.”
It took a few moments for the words to register. “Frederickson? How did you get this number? Do you know what the hell time it is?”
“They’ve got Garth,” I said tersely.
There was another lengthy pause, then: “Huh? Who’s got Garth?”
“Nuvironment, Patton, that bunch of lunatic ex-athletes—whoever it is that doesn’t want us snooping around, and whoever it was who scooped out William Kenecky. Now, I’m calling you because we said we’d keep you informed, and I’m calling you because I know you’ve been unofficially assigned by the department to keep an eye on us, but most of all I’m calling because I need you. I know there’s a forty-eight-hour wait before you can file a missing persons report, but by then I’m afraid I may find Garth nailed upside down to a tree in Central Park. Can you help me out, put something on the wire now?”
“When was the last time you saw your brother, Frederickson?” McCloskey asked, fully awake now.
“Christmas Day. I left early the next morning, because we were pursuing different avenues.”
“What were the avenues?”
“I went over to Jersey to check out shipping companies, to see if one of them had been used to bring in the rain forest soil. Garth was going to stay home and make phone calls to various suppliers who may have done business with Nuvironment. He was gone when I got home last night. I fell asleep waiting for him, and I just woke up a little while ago. He isn’t here.” I paused, took a deep breath, slowly exhaled. “I’m just a little bit upset, Lieutenant. It’s kind of hard to get that image of Kenecky out of my mind.”
“Take it easy, Frederickson. I hear you. Are you sure he’s not sleeping over at his girl friend’s house, or something like that?”
“His girl friend is vacationing in Barbados—and he wouldn’t be sleeping over there anyway, not while we’re working on this matter.”
“What kind of suppliers was he checking out?” “Plastics, glass, steel, what have you. I don’t know where he planned to begin, and it wouldn’t matter if I did; if he did come across something important, and got snatched as a result of it, whoever he talked to isn’t likely to admit it. We’re talking very nutty and dangerous people here, Lieutenant. I need your help.”
“I’ll put out an APB on him, Frederickson.”
“That’s not good enough, Lieutenant, because it’s too much. Whatever screws these guys have left in their heads are pretty loose; they’ll kill Garth if the police start making loud noises all over town.” If they hadn’t killed him already, I thought … but I couldn’t bring myself to put that idea into words. I debated whether or not to tell McCloskey about Tanker Thompson, decided not to. Even if the police picked up Thompson, the man wasn’t going to tell them anything—and it could goad Garth’s captors into killing him. Thompson was just a foot soldier; it was the general who had to be found and put away. “You’ve got to move fast, but you have to go after the right people. If you’re going to put out an APB, put it out on Peter Patton; I doubt very much that he’s in Europe. Also, it’s time for the big brass there—maybe along with the mayor—to have a chat with Henry Blaisdel. Somebody has to tell him that his people have gone too far, and that he’d better pull them back before it’s too late.”
“That’s crazy, Frederickson. I’m not even sure how I can justify an APB. Now you want me to go after Patton, or risk offending one of the most powerful men in the world, just because your brother is missing?”
I took another deep breath, screwed my eyes shut. “You said we’d made you a believer.”
“Believing something isn’t the same as having evidence, Frederickson,” McCloskey said in a strained voice. “You’re asking me to make some very big moves without anything solid to back them up.”
“You saw what they did to Kenecky. Do you want Garth to end up looking like that? I’m begging you, Lieutenant. I need help on this. I can’t find Patton, or get to speak to Blaisdel, on my own, and they’re the keys to finding out where Garth is right now. I know you can’t make the big moves on your own hook, but at least you can go to your captain, lay out the situation, and then see what he’ll authorize. I realize I’m asking for a lot, the same as I realize we’re chasing shadows here, but I don’t know what else to do.”
There was a long pause during which I could hear McCloskey breathing, then: “You and your brother have been right about a lot of things, Frederickson. Your brother may still show up, but in the meantime let me see what I can do.”
“I appreciate that very much, Lieutenant. How long will it be before you can give me some kind of answer as to what you can and can’t do?”
“I don’t know. How can I get in touch with you, Frederickson?”
“I’m going to be on the move, Lieutenant. You can leave a message with my answering service, or I’ll be in
touch with you. If you’re going to be out, you can leave a number where I can reach you—if you care to.”
“Where are you moving to, Frederickson?”
“At the moment, I’m not sure. I just know I can’t stand to do nothing. I’ll appreciate anything you can do, Lieutenant. Good-bye.”
I hung up the phone and immediately went to the computer terminal in Garth’s den. I punched up the code we had agreed to use for this case, but nothing came up on the screen except the word Nuvironment, and the names of Peter Patton and Henry Blaisdel; it was about as much as I had in my electronic file. I’d hoped there might be some indication of how he’d planned to proceed, what companies he had planned to contact first. Nothing. However, I understood the paucity of information; when you’re in a hurry to stop the sexual abuse of a little girl, you get impatient punching information into a computer.
I shut off the computer, opened his desk drawer, and, in a way, found what I was looking for—but it was useless to me. The drawer was crammed full of photocopies of lists of various manufacturers and distributors, but there were no handwritten notations beside any of them.
And yet, as if by waving a magic wand, Garth had somehow picked, out of hundreds of possibilities, the right company or individual to lean on. He had hit pay dirt—or a land mine, depending on how you looked at it.
I closed the drawer, then clasped my hands against my thighs to stop them from trembling. As far as I could tell, Garth had left absolutely no indication of what he had planned to do, or where he had gone. It was unlike Garth—and contrary to both company and personal policy. Ever since we’d started working together, we’d always left bread crumbs for the other to follow, even while working on the most benign cases. Garth had violated procedure, left no tracks, and I wondered why. I hoped his lapse wasn’t going to cost him his life.
Despite the fact that it was still very early, I called Samuel Zelaskowich, on the outside chance that Garth had picked up another lead from the botanist. To my surprise, he sounded wide awake; he explained that he did some of his best work in the early morning hours, and in fact had just returned from a five-mile walk. No, I wasn’t disturbing him; no, Garth hadn’t contacted him; no, he was sorry to say that he knew of no other consultants who had worked for Nuvironment. I thanked him and wished him a good day.
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