No Witnesses

by Ridley Pearson

  Face after face of what were mostly young college students streamed past. Seeing his intensity, these kid strangers looked away uneasily. He encountered no six-foot male wearing a greatcoat. He caught up to Walcott, who, sweating, shook his head and cursed.

  Fowler said eagerly to Boldt, “Let’s stay with this.”

  Dodging traffic, the two men ran back to the waiting car.

  Boldt grabbed the police radio handset. He was willing to play a gamble. “Cover the banks to the south. And let’s make sure our patrols are aware of the Be On Lookout for that mug shot.”

  Dispatch acknowledged.

  “What about the north?” Fowler asked. “Do you want my people—”

  “South,” Boldt insisted. “The density of the ATMs favors the city.”

  “That’s a hell of a chance to take,” Fowler objected.

  Boldt rudely handed him the cell phone. “Tell your people to cover south of the bridge: Broadway and east of I-5. I’ll keep our people west of the interstate.” He was, in effect, giving in to exactly what Fowler had suggested. The security man looked a little stunned, but he made the call quickly before Boldt changed his mind.

  The radio began to sparkle with the new deployment. Boldt headed toward the university. As he drove past the ramp to I-5, Fowler, coming off his call, queried, “Where the fuck are we going?”

  “Back to square one.”

  “Why?”

  “Exactly,” Boldt said, swerving to miss two kids on mountain bikes who had disregarded a crossing light.

  He came around the block and parked in front of the Meany Tower Hotel at Eleventh Avenue NE, because this offered him immediate access to the U district—and the ability to block the most predictable route the extortionist would take back to I-5, the entrances to which were only two blocks away.

  Fowler scratched at a stain on his pants. Boldt explained softly, so as not to cover the dispatcher’s voice, “If I’m this person, I want it as crowded as possible, as confusing as possible. Friday night, this is where you come. A couple of the malls, maybe—but they’ve got cameras everywhere. I hit the ‘Ave.,’ then I go out Forty-fifth—it’s close, it’s quick and easy. I head back to the U because it offers me everything I’m looking for and it worked the first time I was there.”

  “I don’t know,” Fowler disagreed.

  “Broadway—where your people are—is my backup choice. Again, lots of weekend activity—a difficult area to police, and only a few—”

  He was interrupted by the dispatcher’s bizarrely calm monotone. “Position four-one. All field operatives: Position four-one is active. Repeat: active.”

  Checking the map, an excited Fowler said, “It’s a Pac-West. It’s right around the fucking corner.”

  Boldt stuffed a radio earphone into his ear and was already out of the car and on the run.

  “Ten seconds active,” the dispatcher announced.

  The average ATM access time, from keying in the PIN to the ATM card being returned to the account holder, ran eighteen seconds.

  “No operatives in the immediate vicinity,” the dispatcher announced into Boldt’s ear. Boldt had neglected to make his own position known and, therefore, dispatch remained unaware of his presence.

  Ten thousand … Eleven thousand … he counted in his head.

  Natalie Smith, normally assigned to SPD’s Sex Crimes, checked in. She had been crossing Montlake Bridge when the hit was announced. Now she was on her way back, a minute away. An eternity.

  Fourteen thousand … Fifteen thousand …

  “Transaction complete,” dispatch announced.

  Boldt turned right, took an immediate left through a parking lot, and broke around the corner. The blue-and-green Pac-West Bank sign hung over the sidewalk, twenty yards ahead.

  Boldt said, “Six feet tall, maybe wearing a greatcoat.” He signaled Fowler across the street. Boldt took this side, moving quickly toward the sign and the entrance to Pac-West Kwik-Cash. The sidewalk was mobbed. He searched for Caulfield’s face in the crowd. The effect of the kids flowing past him was dizzying.

  He reached the Pac-West sign. Through the glass window, he saw three ATMs side by side. One was in use by a young redheaded woman, a short woman—not a six-foot-tall Harry Caulfield. Boldt tugged on the door. It was locked. A small sign indicated how to use one’s cash or credit card to gain entrance. Boldt slid a cash card into the slot and the door opened.

  She glanced quickly at him, but displaying none of the fear or concern he might have expected of a guilty party.

  “Someone just left.” He interrupted her transaction, showing her his badge.

  She squinted. “That girl?”

  “A girl?” Boldt questioned, recalling the account application.

  “Weird chick—she was wearing a motorcycle helmet.” She nodded toward the door. “Just left,” she said, echoing him. “Just now.”

  Back out on the sidewalk, in a teeming horde of college students, Boldt searched left … right …

  He saw the glossy dome of a motorcycle helmet on the opposite side of the street, heading away from Fowler’s position.

  Not wanting to shout, not wanting to alert the woman, he signaled Fowler, making a motion around his head, attempting to indicate a helmet, and he pointed down the street.

  Fowler saw her.

  Boldt crossed the street, just as Natalie Smith’s tires yipped to a stop in heavy traffic. A horn sounded. The helmet turned. “Sergeant?” Smith yelled loudly from her car.

  The helmet broke down an alley at a run, Fowler sprinting to catch up.

  Boldt pushed through the melee of teeming students and headed down the adjacent alley. Suddenly overcome with the stench of urine, he jumped over a pair of legs at the last second and turned to see a man sleeping next to a bottle.

  The helmeted figure blurred past the intersection with another alley, heading to Boldt’s left.

  Another blur—Fowler in pursuit.

  Boldt ran fast and reached the corner, which he rounded in time to see Fowler’s back turn down an alley parallel to his.

  He rounded this next corner as well, and when he came to the end of the alley, he faced another street teeming with hundreds of students.

  Kenny Fowler was doubled over, winded, clutching the knees of his pants.

  He gasped to Boldt, “I lost her.”

  Boldt searched the crowds for another half hour. He issued a Be On Lookout for a motorcycle with a black helmet and female rider. Frustrated and out of his element, a failed Lou Boldt returned to where he had last left Fowler, but the man was gone. Back at the car he found a business card on the seat where the surveillance map had been. The map now belonged to Kenny Fowler.

  With this one agreement, Boldt effectively doubled his surveillance manpower—and yet he did not feel right about it. He did not feel entirely right about Fowler, something he attributed to Fowler’s having left the department to seek his fortune. Or maybe it was just the man: unceremoniously direct and brusque.

  He flipped the business card over where Fowler had written: Thanks, partner.

  He pocketed it, and drove straight to the Big Joke.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A late-night talk show was playing on the television in the living room as Bear Berenson unlocked three locks and admitted Boldt to his upstairs apartment.

  “Kill the fatted calf,” Berenson said, admitting his friend and locking the door behind him. Whenever he heard a lock turn, Boldt felt he was somehow failing in his job.

  “Liz is pregnant.”

  “Do I congratulate you or offer my sympathies?”

  “Miles gets a sibling,” Boldt said, elated.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  As usual, the place was a mess. Berenson lived the quintessential bachelor’s existence: He termed it magical realism, because lately he was reading Latin American writers. Boldt called it hedonism, enhanced by a generous consumption of marijuana—hence the magic.

 
Bear stood just under six feet. He was stocky, with dark Arabic features and intense brown eyes—often bloodshot. He owned the Big Joke, the bar, restaurant, and comedy club immediately below them where Boldt often performed during happy hour.

  “I thought I’d find you downstairs.”

  “The stand-up is awful. I booked the wrong act.”

  “Place is pretty full.”

  “No accounting for the taste of the public.”

  Berenson punched the remote, killing the television. “Went channel surfing instead. You know what I think? All this information superhighway shit? Bunch of crap. Even with thirty channels, there’s nothing on. I mean I have a hard time believing that, but it’s true. Crap to the right of me. Crap to the left of me. Five hundred channels? Give me a fucking break. Five hundred times zero is still zero.”

  They sat down. Bear rolled a joint. The policeman in Boldt felt tempted to ask him not to, but not tonight.

  “I’m kind of at wit’s end,” Boldt said seriously.

  Bear nodded.

  They were the kind of friends where Boldt felt no need for apologies or approval. They had been—and continued to be—there for each other through, as Bear called it, “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

  “I’m right back into it: solid work. Leaving Liz and Miles and you and others in the lurch. In to the point I can’t get out. Buried in it, along with a few victims.”

  “Do you want out?”

  “I need out—there’s a difference.”

  “For me? It’s this damn club.” The IRS had shut down the club and seized much of its property about a year earlier, and Bear had stood up and fought them and had won. Now he had the place back, though at times he complained about it. “Are we talking about freedom or escape?”

  “Breathing room. To be away from death more than my three weeks a year. Three weeks I never take. I love this work—that’s the thing.”

  He lit the joint. “So do you hate it, or do you love it?”

  “I’m exhausted. I say stupid things when I’m exhausted.”

  “You say stupid things all the time.” He grinned, pleased with himself, and smoked more of the joint. He stubbed it out gently in the ashtray, holding his breath for an interminable amount of time. When he exhaled, surprisingly little smoke escaped.

  Boldt said, “I think I’ve got a bad apple.”

  “One of your own squad?”

  Boldt nodded.

  “That hurts.”

  Another nod. “A guy I like.”

  “And what do you do about it?”

  “I hide the truth from him. I sit back and watch.” Boldt informed him, “Someone broke into Daffy’s. Maybe following her.”

  “This guy of yours?”

  “He’s moved to the top of my list.”

  “He’s got good taste if he’s after Daffy.” Then Berenson added, “Just kidding.”

  “What do you do if you suspect a bartender is robbing your till?” Boldt asked.

  “I watch him. I lay a trap for him.”

  “And does it work?”

  “Sometimes. Sure. It’s a funny thing with the people who cheat. They get numb to it, you know? They talk themselves into things. If it’s petty stuff, if I just want to stop it, I confront the person. If it’s the bigger shit, I lay a fucking minefield and blow a leg off. Like this,” he said. He turned the television back on and switched channels. The screen showed a black-and-white image of inside the club—an area immediately behind the bar, including a close look at the cash register and several of the stools. He said, “No one knows it’s there.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “It’s funny you should say that. Some people obviously feel the thing, you know? Look right at it. They can’t see it—it’s behind a beer mirror—but they feel it. That third-eye thing. Yet after a while they stop looking. Numb, just like the thieving bartenders.” He said, “Maybe you’re just numb, Lou. Maybe you’re looking into the mirror a little too hard.”

  “Maybe you’re stoned.”

  “No maybe about it. I’m roasted.” He waited a minute and asked, “What’s your excuse?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “So that’s what that is. I always wondered what that looked like.”

  Shoswitz had ordered Boldt to take the weekend off. The city and department had rules about consecutive hours on the job—rules constantly broken, but easily enforced if someone like Shoswitz felt the necessity to do so. Nevertheless, Boldt spent the early morning at the kitchen table doing paperwork.

  “There’s a Mercedes out front, and I think it’s for you,” Elizabeth Boldt announced from where she stood, parting the front curtains. “Who is coming by unannounced at eight-thirty on a Saturday morning? And me, looking like this!”

  Boldt had been up for the last hour tending to Miles and working at the kitchen table with a baby spoon in one hand and a pencil in the other. He had had four hours’ sleep, and felt it.

  Liz wore a white satin robe tied tightly around her waist, open in a long V of bare skin at the chest, stretching from her neck to her navel, and black Chinese flats for slippers that lent a further touch of elegance. Her dark hair was pulled tightly off her sleepy face, held back by a turquoise rubber band, and she had silver studs in her ears. “I think you look fantastic,” he told her, handing her her first cup of coffee and stealing a look for himself. “Oh shit.”

  Boldt seldom cursed, and this caught his wife’s attention.

  “Lou?”

  “It’s Adler.” Hurrying toward the front door to open it, Boldt defensively apologized, “I did not schedule this.”

  “I’m gone,” his wife said, beating a hasty retreat.

  Miles caught a glimpse of his mother and complained for her attention as she dashed into the bedroom, all satin and skin. “Not now, sweetie,” she told the child, although this communication only added to the child’s longing.

  Boldt yanked open the door, said, “Inside,” and closed it just as quickly so that Adler never broke his stride. “What are you doing here?”

  His eyes bloodshot, his skin an unhealthy gray, Adler wore a wrinkled aquamarine polo shirt, stone-washed blue jeans, and leather deck shoes with leather ties. His arms were hairy. His watch was gold. He needed a shave. “I’m folding the company,” he declared. “I thought that you should be told before the press conference.”

  Boldt felt like throttling the man on the spot, but maintained his composure.

  Boldt offered him coffee and Adler accepted. Too nervous to sit down, Adler faked a smile at Miles and paced the small kitchen, toying with whatever he found on the counter. Mumbling, he said, “It’s all over the news—this family dying—although they’re claiming it’s believed to be E. coli. It’s not E. coli, right?”

  “The first thing you have to do is settle down,” Boldt advised sternly. “I know that’s easier said than done.”

  “I thought you wanted us to pull our product.”

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  “Eaten? Are you kidding? What would you recommend—some soup maybe?”

  “Have you slept?”

  Adler’s eyes flashed anger. “This isn’t about me. This is about that poor family. It’s about Tap and I trying to stay in the market, because once you leave—especially in a situation like this—it’s damn near impossible to get back market shares. It’s about greed, Sergeant. And ego—trying to hold on to something we fought hard for. And it’s over.”

  “And are you going to kill yourself?”

  That stopped Adler from fiddling. He looked over at Boldt, who said, “Because that’s the second half of the demands.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Hello?” It was Liz. She who had apparently dived into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Barefoot. A hint of lipstick, nothing more. She introduced herself to Adler—reintroduced, as it turned out, for he recognized her immediately as being connected to the bank. Liz’s bank had partially financed Adler’s
move into the European marketplace, something she had never told her husband because she took client confidentiality at face value. Wisely, having taken one look at the man, she made no attempt at small talk. She said, “Why don’t I take over duties here?” pointing to her son, whose arms were begging for her.

  Boldt led Adler back into the front room. Liz stopped Adler on his way by and gently took the serrated bread knife from him. He seemed embarrassed to be holding it, as if he did not know how it had gotten there. Boldt guided him onto the couch and placed his coffee down for him.

  Sounding on the edge of tears, Adler said, “No more deaths.”

  Boldt had no intention of babying a man like Owen Adler. Adopting a business-as-usual tone of voice, he said, “If you intend on shutting down your business, there’s little I can do to stop you. But I would caution you against it. And although I strongly objected to keeping product on the shelves during the initial contaminations, I don’t see any way around it right now.”

  Boldt understood then that he had no choice but to take Adler into his confidence, and though he would have rather checked with Daphne before doing so, he could not allow Adler to risk the lives of hundreds by panicking. “We know who the killer is.”

  Adler, too stunned to get a word out, cocked his head at an unusual angle and glared at him.

  “His name is Harold Caulfield. He worked for Mark Meriweather at Longview Farms.”

  “But why wasn’t I—?”

  Boldt interrupted, “We think he blames you for the Longview salmonella contamination. He wants to see you bankrupt and dead, just like Mark Meriweather. Daphne is the one running with this, but I have to tell you that it was my decision not to inform you or your company. We have evidence that the State Health department altered at least one lab report crucial to the placement of responsibility for the New Leaf salmonella contamination. It seemed to me unlikely that a state government employee would take such an action without an incentive. The who, when, and what of that incentive remains in question.”

  This news clearly struck a blow to Adler. Looking ill again, he sank back into the couch, too dumbfounded to speak. Boldt continued: “In the short amount of time I’ve known you, you’ve struck me as being straightforward. So that’s what I’m being with you. Whether you’re an honest man … I can’t say. But whatever you or your people may have done to Mark Meriweather, it’s insignificant when compared with the lives of Slater Lowry and the Mishnovs. If you or one of your people was behind that altered State Health report,” Boldt said, “I need to know right now.”