A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  13

  Leah had reviewed the various photographs of Viktor Panko, read his interviews with the Buffalo Police Department when he was young and the FBI when he was older, and read the court transcripts from his four trials and the police reports going back to his first adult arrest at age eighteen. She had searched for nuance, for small, seemingly unimportant details about him. She had looked at the way he dressed, his preference in cars, his use of figures of speech—any peculiarity that would direct her to some particular place or group of people. After the prison break, the FBI had done interviews with inmates who had known him.

  They learned from the inmate transcripts that Panko’s conversations were filled with nostalgia about women he had seduced, paid for sex, or raped. Two of them noted that the women in the stories often sounded very young.

  The stories emerged again about how Panko had told other inmates that he could help them after they were released by obtaining new identities for them with no criminal histories. He said he had contacts he could talk to from inside the prison who had remained in business after he’d been caught.

  All telephone calls inmates made from Weldonville prison were taped and monitored, so that could not have been his way of placing orders for identity documents. He had to be using a messenger or go-between who visited him in prison. The people on his visitor list were the only ones who could come and go, so they would have been the only possible messengers. She began to spend more of her time pursuing this possibility.

  She still made visits to community and church groups in the parts of Buffalo that had been settled by immigrants from Eastern Europe. Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, Slovakians, Ukrainians, and others had come there to find work, built neighborhoods with churches and schools and stores that sold traditional food and drink. Most of the factories that had drawn immigrants there and employed them were long gone, and many neighborhoods had changed ethnicities or been gentrified or torn down to make something new. But she had found plenty of people who were descendants of the old owners. Often, they lived in the suburbs but came back to the old neighborhoods for visits.

  One night, Leah was at St. Stanislaus Church pretending to be waiting for a women’s club meeting in the school building. She would chat in a friendly way with other women when she could, and as soon as she had a promising woman alone she would find a way to show the pictures of Viktor she had on her current burner phone.

  After a number of tries, she found one woman who seemed to hesitate. She stared at the picture for a few seconds, and then said, “The meeting is going to start in about five minutes, and I need time to think about this. Can you write down your number for me so I can call you another time?”

  “Sure,” Leah said. “It’s not a hurry. I just wondered if he was still around after all these years.” She gave her a slip of paper with the name “Sue” and her number.

  Leah had made similar attempts with other people in the southern and eastern parts of the city, but all of them had said they didn’t know the man. This one seemed promising. Her name was Stella Wizshinski, and she was about sixty, with curly blond hair that she had certainly been dyeing for a few years to hide the gray. Age and living had broadened her body, but she wasn’t soft or fat. She seemed to have done a great deal of physical work over time.

  In the next few days Leah let the contact fade and merge with the others she had made in over a month in Buffalo. But then one night her phone rang. She said, “Yes?”

  As soon as the voice came, she saw the woman in her memory. “Sue, this is Stella Wizshinski. We talked for a minute a week ago at St. Stanislaus.”

  “I remember you,” said Leah. “Curly blond hair—”

  “Yeah, that’s me. My brothers used to tell me I looked like Harpo Marx.”

  “I hope you didn’t put up with that,” Leah said.

  “They’re all forgiven,” said Stella. “I got each of them back years ago, and they’ve got the psychological scars to prove it. But the reason I’m calling is that I thought about the picture you showed me, and I managed to place him and remember the name. It’s Panko. The man whose picture you showed me was Viktor. To tell you the truth, the reason I called tonight is that I want to warn you, even if it’s out of place. Viktor is not a nice man, and his family isn’t any better. If this is a romantic kind of thing, I would get as far away as—”

  “It’s not,” said Leah. “I appreciate your willingness to give this to me straight. Can I ask how you met them?”

  “I didn’t call to talk about me. It was a long time ago.”

  “Please, if you could just tell me what you can, it might matter a lot.”

  “I used to be a cop,” Stella said.

  Leah clamped down her nerves and made her voice sound as though she were smiling. “Let me come clean. I’m a cop too. I need to meet with you in person. Would it be all right if I drove to your house for a brief talk? I promise the second you tell me it’s time to leave I will. You won’t have to hint. I’m not tender.”

  “Interesting,” Stella said. “You’ve got me curious. Let me give you my address.” She recited the address as Leah typed it into her phone.

  Leah said, “Can I come now?”

  “What the hell is keeping you? I expected to hear a car starting by now.”

  Leah was already walking toward the dresser in her hotel room where she had set her purse. She said, “The map on my phone says I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Leah took the elevator to ground level, went across the street to the hotel’s parking structure, and took her car. She followed the phone app’s instructions until she found herself on Fillmore Avenue near the Broadway Market. She looked at the location of Stella’s house on her phone’s map and decided to park and walk the last block to the house.

  She trotted across the street and then walked, looking around her at the area. The houses were all two stories and narrow, with roofed front porches. They were built so close together that Leah wondered how cars could fit up their driveways and into the old one-car garages.

  When she found the right house, Leah climbed the front porch and rang the bell. Through the glass in the door she could see Stella walking toward her to open it. Stella walked with a slight limp, which Leah diagnosed as an old injury in her right knee. It was possible that it had been bad enough to end her career.

  Stella opened the door and said, “There you are. I figured you’d beat that twenty-minute figure. Come on in.”

  “Thank you,” said Leah. She stepped in and held out her identification with her badge on it.

  Stella waved it away and walked from the door into the parlor, which was the first room past the small foyer. “I don’t need to see that. I could hear it in your voice. Come and sit down.”

  They sat in the small parlor, which was furnished with a couch and two large armchairs, all of them positioned to provide a view of the big television screen on the wall. Just as Stella sat down, there was the sound of a teapot whistling. She got up and said, “I made us some tea.”

  Leah followed her along a narrow hallway, past the staircase to the second floor and a small dining room, and into the kitchen, where Stella poured the tea into big cups with two teabags in each one. Leah said, “Where were you a police officer?”

  “Here,” Stella said. “I retired as a sergeant thirteen years ago. I was one of the first cops in Buffalo who sat down to pee. And I can tell you we weren’t exactly welcome at first. It was tough life for a while.”

  Leah nodded and waited. Any cop who had lived through the bad old days had a right to go on a little bit. She took her tea and said, “Thanks very much for the tea.”

  “It’s a pleasure. I like coffee better, but there’s no point in my being up all night anymore.”

  Leah sipped the tea. “I like it.”

  They sat in the parlor and Stella said, “I knew the Panko family professionally. I ran into a couple of them as juveniles. Their age was also the reason I ran into the old man a couple of times too. It was
not a pleasure. He was involved in a lot of small-time stuff—smuggling things to and from Canada, combined with a little fencing of stolen goods both ways. He did a little forgery, mostly in service of car theft—pink slips and registrations and stuff. After I’d met a couple of the kids and their father, I was not happy to notice that they lived a half mile from here at the time. They were another reason to look over my shoulder. The father died a few years ago, and the house was sold. The wife may be alive, but I think I remember something about her going to an old-age home. There are about five kids, I think. They’d all be in their thirties at least, and a couple of the boys as old as forty-five. Viktor would be in his late thirties.”

  Leah said, “I’ve got to open up a little with you. I’m in Buffalo trying to find Viktor because he committed some murders while participating in an escape from the federal penitentiary in Weldonville, Colorado, a couple of years ago. Nearly all the escaped inmates are in custody or dead. He isn’t. I’ve been trying to find local people who might have seen him.”

  Stella said, “Interesting. I’ll ask around and try to find out what I can.”

  “I appreciate that, and I thank you. But I don’t want you to return to police work. If you had happened to know something current—an address for him, a place where he hangs out, I would have run with it. But I don’t mean to get you involved in my investigation. I don’t know about the rest of the family, but Viktor is a violent psycho who has committed several murders. If you recall anything else about him later, great. Call me. But please don’t draw any attention to yourself.”

  “I was a cop a long time, and this is not only my hometown, it’s my home district. People here know me, and they like me. I can tell you that you’re more likely to make a mistake here than I am. People here are not nasty to strangers, but they won’t tell you anything about a local boy, especially if he’s a rotten local boy.”

  “I can’t ask you to take a risk.”

  Stella sipped her tea. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I may come up with zip. There’s nothing safer than not finding the bad guy. I’m just saying I’ll ask some people. If anything useful turns up, I’ll call again. If it doesn’t, I won’t.”

  “Thank you,” Leah said.

  “I read about that prison break, but I had no idea that Viktor Panko was in it. I didn’t even know he was in prison at the time. Do you mind if I ask you a prying question?”

  “You’re entitled. Ask away.”

  “What’s left of your hometown after two years?”

  Leah took a second drink, a sip this time. “Not much. New people will probably come to Weldonville after we’re gone. There are good roads and sewers and water lines and electricity. And the prison is already being remodeled by contractors who fooled the government into thinking they’re making it escape-proof this time. But the people who lived in those houses up and down those quiet streets before the prison break are about half gone already—the people I grew up with and their families. A lot of them had jobs in the prison, and a lot more sold things to the prison itself or to the people who worked there, and that’s been choked off for two years. Others left because somebody they loved died and they couldn’t stand to look at the place anymore.”

  “If your town is ruined, what are you doing here looking for Viktor Panko?”

  “The town I knew is over. It took one night. What I’m doing is not trying to reclaim the place. It’s about who we were, the kind of town our families had built over about six generations. The town didn’t die off, the way some do. These twelve guys just got together and made a plan to kill it. They took something that belonged to all of us that we can’t get back. Your past is your identity, and they took that. I could make you a noble speech that I’m only taking part in the search so they won’t do it to some other little place. But I don’t think they would anyway. It was a onetime thing. I just don’t want them to walk away from it.”

  “I understand,” Stella said. “I’ll get on this in the morning. Can I pour you another cup of tea?”

  “No,” said Leah. “I’ll be working tonight, so I’d better get going. Thank you for everything, Stella.”

  As Leah walked along the street toward her car, she considered her new circumstances. She had never planned to tell anyone who she was or what she was doing. Now she had another cop on her side. Maybe Stella would help, but now Leah had another burden. If she got to Panko, she would have to make his death happen without the body ever being found, or she would have to make it look like self-defense, or Stella would certainly turn her in.

  * * *

  Leah Hawkins went back to work on the fourteen names that Viktor Panko had placed on his list of people he wanted to be allowed to visit him in prison. He had filled out a form when he entered the system at the federal penitentiary in Beaumont, Texas. He had listed his father, mother, three brothers, and two sisters. The other seven were his defense attorney, three cousins with the surname Halasz, and three cousins with the name Varga.

  The list of actual visitors he received was the next thing Leah studied. The most likely go-between for a federal prisoner would be a relative, the closer the better.

  The brothers were Istvan, Sandor, and Gyorgy, and the sisters were Viktoria and Dorina. The sisters had never visited him in Beaumont Penitentiary, and never visited him in Weldonville either. Maybe they didn’t approve.

  She scrolled down the list slowly. His parents had visited him three times a year at Beaumont, when they’d still lived in Buffalo. It wouldn’t be efficient for them to carry messages or job orders from Viktor to some remnant of his organization at four-month intervals. It had to be someone else.

  Leah scrolled farther down the list. Istvan never visited. Sandor came twice, once in Beaumont and once in Weldonville. Gyorgy came once, to Beaumont.

  So much for the siblings, she thought. What about his lawyer?

  She came three times during the Beaumont years. The notation on the record said it was to confer about his appeal. The appeal failed in his third year, and there were no visits from her after that.

  The cousins, then, she thought. There’s nobody else. Of course he could have been bullshitting about still being able to get people new identities. But none of the twelve had been caught, and that meant they all had acceptable identification from somewhere.

  She decided to begin with the Halasz cousins. She scrolled to the end. No. None of them ever came. The Varga cousins then. The Varga cousins were named Denes, Attila, and Regina.

  Regina came a few times while Panko was in Beaumont, Texas. She gave her address as Houston. How far was that? She checked her laptop. About ninety miles. That was close enough.

  Leah went back to the visitor list. Regina saw him about once a month in Beaumont, but it wasn’t a regular routine. She came on random days of the week. He could have called her when he had information to send out about a customer.

  She had visited Weldonville prison too, after he was transferred. She came about as often as she had to Beaumont at first, but then more often near the end. She gave an address in Denver. She had to be the go-between. Neither of her brothers ever visited Viktor.

  Leah began using the common search engines to find the addresses of the Vargas. Regina was not listed anywhere, but Denes and Attila were easy. They both lived in the town of Orchard Park, southeast of Buffalo, in large houses set far back from highways. When Leah found the addresses and looked at them on Google Street View and Google Earth, she began to pack equipment for her visit.

  Late that night, she drove to Orchard Park. Denes Varga lived off Route 20, the old highway that predated the New York State Thruway to run the length of the state from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. His brother Attila had a house on a side street about a mile north of the highway. Leah went past Denes’s house, taking video with her phone, and then drove the car to the lot of a diner on Route 20 and went back on foot.

  She walked into the trees away from the highway to study Denes Varga’s house. The house was huge, a wh
ite mass at the end of a driveway that ran straight back at least two hundred feet and then curved so that it disappeared behind a stand of trees, where it passed the front porch and then split. The right branch hooked around to the rear of the house, where there was a four-car garage, and the left hooked to return to the highway.

  Leah selected a tree, then crouched in the woods and took out the equipment she expected to need. She didn’t want to wear climbing spikes, because they made holes in the bark that would be noticed. She took out the climbing belt she had bought in the afternoon and hoped that she could keep her footing with her treaded walking boots. She slung the belt around the straight, limbless trunk of a hardwood tree that looked like an American sweetgum, leaned back against the belt, and began to climb. She would take a step up with each foot, then use both hands to make the belt hop upward to that level, take two more steps, and shift the belt upward again. In a minute and a half, she was up to the level of the first big limb, about twenty feet off the ground. She took out the safety rope she had tied around her waist, slung it over the limb at the trunk, and clasped a carabiner around it to hold her there. She took out the pinhole camera, attached it to the top of the limb, where it was hard to see from the ground, and aimed it at the front of the house. She took care to be sure the frame included the front porch and its windows, and the section of the driveway where a car’s license plate would be clear enough to read. From her perch she selected another tree that had a good view of the garage and the back of the house. Then she unhooked her safety rope and used her belt to inch her way down.