White Taurus with Parks and Rec markings, blue Corolla with about a dozen little kids in the back seat, dark green Mini Cooper with a lone woman in it, kind of cute, red Chevy pickup with dopey-looking decals and a couple of young guys with backward baseball caps, dirty black Hummer, some kind of small Pontiac in metallic brown. All of them had Minnesota plates, except for the Hummer, which had no license on the front.
At the top of the bridge, I turned right onto a narrow parkway, went around a couple of blocks, and finally turned back south onto Smith Avenue, heading across the bridge yet again. And again, I looked at the oncoming traffic.
Dodge Intrepid, Honda Civic, big box Chevy, PT Cruiser, Hummer.
A dirty black Hummer with no front plate. Very careless, guys.
Unfortunately, the glass on the monster was too dirty or too heavily tinted for me to see who was in it.
The speed limit on the High Bridge is forty. But if I were going to pick up a cop, my goofy U-turn would have already done the job. So I took the rest of the bridge at seventy. At the bottom of it, I ran the gear box on the 328i down into second and made a hard left, accelerating through the turn in a nice, four-wheel power drift, just on the verge of out of control. Forty going in, sixty coming out, and gone in a blink. Any Hummer trying that would be found upside down, a quarter of a mile down Smith Avenue. I blew into the tangled web of narrow streets to the north and west, made a few more turns, and finally parked the car in the customer lot of a body shop. Then I locked it and walked back south through the alleys, to my condo. I didn’t see the Hummer again.
My condo is a two-story stone-clad row house, in the middle of an attached cluster of six others just like it. They are a hundred and twenty years old, restored and gone to seed again more times than anybody can remember anymore. If the stone on the outside were dirtier and rough, instead of newly sandblasted and smooth, and if the whole building were located a couple thousand miles farther east, you would call it a brownstone. It has high ceilings, multi-paned windows, and walls that you couldn’t punch through with a bazooka. And it’s on a short side street that gets no through traffic at all. I like it.
I checked both front and back doors, to see if they had been worked on. They have electronic lock monitors that Pete rigged up for me. If either of them had been opened while I was gone, all the monitors would be flashing tiny red lights at me. Inside, a light on my phone would also be flashing, but no message would go out to the police or anybody else. Satisfied that everything was as I had left it, I went back outside to an old-fashioned sloped cellar door on the end of the entire building complex and worked the combination on the padlock.
The townhouses have the unusual feature of having a single, undivided common basement. Since that has been a violation of about sixteen kinds of building and fire codes for a century or so, the last set of renovators solved the problem by giving no unit any direct access to the space. Instead, the basement has an unbroken fireproof ceiling with no stairs going up into anybody’s house, including mine. My furnace and water heater are in a closet off the kitchen.
Silly as it sounds, that makes the basement a good place to hide things, if only because most search warrants will not be written to cover a space that isn’t exactly in the same building. At least, I thought so. The general clutter of cardboard boxes and broken appliances and antiques with no names would make searching a real undertaking, too. But the real goodie was the dirt floor. I had done nothing any more clever with Charlie’s box than put it in a plastic bag and bury it. I buried it right in front of the basement’s only door, where I figured the dirt would get packed back down quickly by whatever traffic there might be. Then I left a small shovel for myself inside an old laundry tub, as far from the door as it could possibly be.
I don’t know if any of that was really clever or not, but it worked. The box was still there.
It seemed awfully large for a cigar box, but it clearly had a label that said Rigoletto Palma Cedars, so I didn’t think it was a tackle box. It was well made, out of solid wood, with brass hardware, and it had a stamped-on trademark of some importer on it. I threw the plastic bag in the trashcan by the back alley and took the box inside. I put it on the kitchen counter while I reset my lock system. Then I checked for any obvious booby traps or notes warning of booby traps on the box. Finally, I flipped up the brass hasp and opened it.
It was full of junk. War medals, old coins, expired coupons, free passes to places that didn’t exist anymore. Bus tokens for lines that had made their last stops ages ago. Also lists of names and phone numbers, and mailing addresses torn from yellowed envelopes. Little people’s treasures, the kind of crap that the kids closing out their parents’ estates never know what to do with.
And at the very bottom of the box, there was a ledger. An old-fashioned green-page ledger and a loose-leaf scrapbook, showing what people gave him and what they wanted in return, with inserted notes in dozens of different writing hands.
At first I thought they were all the stuff of pure fantasy, vouchers to be drawn on the First National Bank of Neverland. But the more of them I read, the less I thought so. Charlie had often said that for all his other faults, not the least of which was being a self-proclaimed murderer, he was always a man of his word. His markers were good, he said, and I believed him. But these were some damned strange markers.
A typical note in the scrapbook read, “Here’s these two ten dollar bills I been saved since my graduation party at the rehab center, twelve year ago. I never touch them till now. Bet them along with what you want of your own on Bottom Jewel in the Exacta, and if he wins, put everything in the pot for B.”
There was a date on the note, and when I looked up the same date in the ledger, I found the following entry:
Bottom Jewel 40:1 to win, 25:1 to place. $800 to pot, 6/29/97. Tally now $17,250. Hook says he wants an even 20k. Balance to big box.
It wasn’t possible. I mean, Bottom Jewel was possible, but no way Charlie accumulated thirty grand, or even seventeen, by always betting on the right horse. Where the hell did he get the rest of his money? I took the papers to my dining room table, where I could spread them out a bit. Then I laid out a fresh pack of cigarettes and a clean ashtray from the living room and a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler from the hall closet, and sat down to go to work.
I looked for entries in the ledger that had dollar amounts but no references to any bets, and then I looked for notes with the same dates. The first one I found blew me away.
Wells Fargo Downtown. Six guards, all armed. Two of them know how to handle themselves. Security cameras too high to spray or disable. Vault closed. $200 to big box.
There was a similar note for the Bremmer Bank, which was also downtown, and several for grocery or liquor stores, which were not.
I was stunned. Burnout case or not, Charlie was apparently coherent and focused enough to be a point man for a bunch of professional robbers. It would have been easy enough for him. Bumble into the lobby, practice a little aggressive panhandling, and get himself thrown out by the security staff. He could pick up a lot of information that way, and after they threw him out, people were unlikely to bother to have him arrested.
So it was possible that Charlie had a large stash, at that. Then the question became what he did with it.
Partway through the second Scotch, I found a list of names. No notes, just names. Some had check marks in front of them. They were not famous names like the President or some senator or T. Boone Pickens, but I knew a few of them. One was a judge, one a parole officer, and one a cop. They all had checks by their names and if memory served, all of them were dead.
It suddenly occurred to me that in his own strange and twisted way, Charlie had been in the business of selling hope. It was a very angry and bitter variety, the hope of some hated authority figure getting offed. But it was hope, all the same, the stuff that made somebody’s life just a little more bearable. Real or phony, he was in the business of letting little peopl
e believe they had a way to fight back at the establishment.
Of course, he had also been in the business of making the Secret Service and some kind of nameless military types extremely nervous. Nervous enough to kill him? I didn’t know, but I intended to find out. I took another sip of Scotch, a very small one this time, and started to add up the numbers in the ledger.
One other thing mystified me: if everything I was seeing was what it seemed, why had Charlie let me hold the box for him? He had given it to me two years earlier and never asked to see it again. Curiouser and curiouser.
An hour later, I called Anne Packard from the wall phone out in my central hallway and told her I had found her hook. The doorbell rang in the middle of our call.
“Are you expecting company?” she said.
“No, and it’s too late at night for the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the cute little girls selling cookies. Hang on a minute, will you?”
“I’ll be here.”
I put down the phone as quietly as I could and quickly went back to the kitchen and took my .380 Beretta out of its plastic bag in the vegetable crisper of the refrigerator. As I passed the phone again, the little red light was flashing frantically.
Chapter 14
A Deal With the Devil
My house has a storm entry, with about four feet between the inner and outer doors. I peeked through the edge of the leaded glass in the inner door and saw that my intruder was a familiar figure. I flattened myself against the adjacent wall and let her finish picking the inner lock. As she was opening the door, I threw a phone book down the hallway, and when she leaned forward to see what the noise was, I hooked my left arm around her neck, pulled her the rest of the way into the room, and pressed the Beretta against the base of her skull. She tried to put an elbow into my chest, but she had a poor angle, and it was easy to deflect. She also tried to stomp on my instep, but her aim was bad and all she managed to do was flatten my big toe a bit. She had a lean and athletic body, but she had definitely been neglecting her martial arts training.
“Good evening, Agent Krause. I’ll take your sidearm now, please.”
“You’ll take your hands off me, is what you’ll do. I have a no-knock warrant.”
“I don’t care if you have the goddamn Magna Carta. I’ll take your weapon. Now. Spare us both the embarrassment of me pulling it out of some kind of holster between your thighs.”
“You’re putting yourself in a lot of trouble here, Mr. Jackson. For assaulting an agent, you can get thrown in a hole so deep and black, the best lawyer on earth will never find you.”
“Is that what you told Charlie you were going to do to him? Is he dead because he believed you and let down his guard?”
“You don’t really think that, do you? That’s insane.”
“So are black holes where lawyers can’t find you. For all I know, so’s the whole damn Department of Homeland Conspiracy. Now give up the piece.” I pressed the barrel of the Beretta harder into her neck.
“All right,” she said. “Just stay calm, okay? I’m going to move really slowly.”
She started to reach down toward the hem of her skirt with her right hand, and I told her to stop and switch to her left. She did. And slowly, as she had promised, she produced some kind of very narrow, compact semi-automatic. Not standard Secret Service issue, I thought.
“Put it in my left hand,” I said.
“Take your left hand off my neck.”
“Actually, that’s my forearm on your neck. But give me the gun, and we’ll be all done with that, too.”
She put the weapon in my hand, barrel first, and I told her to turn it around the right way. When she did, I held it out in front of us, reached down with my little finger, and tripped the lug to drop the magazine out. If she was impressed with that fantastically dexterous maneuver, she withheld her applause.
“Do you have a round in the chamber?”
“The place I carry that thing? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No. Disagreeable, but definitely not crazy.” But I flipped the safety off and pulled the trigger, all the same, pointing the gun at the floor. It really was empty. Then I let her step away from me and gestured to the living room and its big, overstuffed couch. When she sat down on it, I gave her back her gun.
“I’m going to show you the warrant now, okay?” She made a move toward her handbag, but I grabbed it away from her.
“No. Not okay.”
“You need to see what you’re violating, here.”
“No, I don’t. You need to see that I don’t give a damn. If I shoot you, I’m not violating anything, I’m defending my home. Any jury in the nation would say so. But if I decide you can be trusted, then maybe you don’t need the warrant anyway.”
“Oh, really? That’s not how you were talking last time we met.”
“I’ve been thinking since then that I might be open to some trading.”
“We don’t trade. We insist, and we get.”
“We? I don’t see your partner, Agent.”
“He’s probably inside the back door by now, about to come in here and blow you away.” But she wasn’t looking toward the back of the house. Instead, her eyes were turned down and to her right.
“No, he isn’t. And from the look on your face, I don’t believe he’s coming, either.”
There was also the small matter of the silent alarm. If her partner really were at the back door, I would be seeing two flashing red lights on the hallway phone, instead of just one. But I saw no reason to tell her that.
“Do you seriously think I would come here without my partner?”
And suddenly I saw it. And it was hilarious.
“You dumped him, didn’t you?” I said. “I could see back in my office that you don’t like the little twerp. But you don’t trust him either, do you? That’s why you came here alone. You probably didn’t even tell him what you were up to.”
“Goddamned arrogant little prick.” She folded her arms tightly and found something to study in the pattern of my carpet.
“Him, or me?”
“I mean, stupidity is one thing, but aggressive, gleeful, pompous stupidity is inexcusable.”
I guessed she meant him. I was starting to like this conversation a lot.
“Does he hit on you, too?”
She unfolded her arms and slapped the couch on either side.
“God! What is it with you guys? I mean, is that a given? No, he doesn’t hit on me. That has too much finesse for him. He tried to rape me, is what he did.”
“Oh, shit.” Suddenly it had stopped being funny. “I’m sorry for you.”
“You think you’re sorry? Talk to him. I gave him a case of smashed balls that left him walking funny for a month. But that was just a gesture. I’m going to ruin that asshole’s career, and I don’t mean sometime in the distant future. I really am an agent, you know. I can—”
“Relax, Agent. I respect your professionalism, even if your partner doesn’t. And you might still make a success of tonight. First, though, I want to know why you’re interested in Charlie Victor.” And just to show her how trustworthy I was, I put the .380 in my back pocket.
“You talked about a trade. What do I get?”
“If your story makes sense to me, maybe you get Charlie’s box.”
“The one you said you didn’t have?”
“That’s not what I said. But in any case, how bad do you want it? Would it really hurt all that much to simply tell me what you’re up to?”
“Why is it any of your business?”
“Jesus, you just don’t give an inch, do you? He was my friend, okay? I want to find out why he was killed. And right now, you and your partner are the best suspects I’ve got.”
She sucked in her lower lip and scowled at the ceiling for a moment. “All right,” she said, finally. “I’ll tell you what I can. We have reason to believe your pet homeless person was going to hire an assassin to kill the Presi
dent.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“That would be an understatement.”
“Wouldn’t that take an awful lot of money?”
“Not necessarily. There are plenty of people out there who will try it just for the thrill or the fame. And some will take any fee at all, just to show that they are professionals.”
“Which they are not, in that case.”
“Maybe not, but they’re still potential killers. A lot of agents have died for assuming that nut cases can’t also be deadly.”
“You said you had reason to believe Charlie was lining up a hit man. What reason?”
“That’s classified.”
“Screw classified. I thought we were talking about a trade here.”
“Somebody sent the President a threatening letter.”
“Charlie?”
“No, somebody else. Somebody said they were fed up with the President’s treatment of poor people, so they had decided to contribute to the frag pot that some homeless guy was keeping on him. The letter didn’t give his name.”
“Did the letter call it that? A frag pot?”
“Actually, it called it a frag box, as I recall. That’s a new term, I believe.”
“And the postmark led you here?”
“And the postmark led us here. And we talked to poor people and social workers and jailers and priests. And we talked to a lot of homeless people.”
“And you killed a dog or two.”
“We don’t do that sort of thing, Mr. Jackson.”
“Be cruel to animals?”
“Be cruel to anybody, out in plain sight.”
“So who did?”
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