by Barbara Paul
His eyes grew large. “No shit.” He coughed a laugh. “Wow. Imagine that.” He shuffled through the papers some more until he came up with a list headed Yelincic/Malecki. “That one?”
“That one.”
He began to play. The few early guests had watched the interchange curiously.
In the little waiting room, Ivan was looking relieved. “That’s the right music.”
“I’m going to check on the ushers. I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t want to walk back down the center aisle with guests already seated, so she had to go through the church building to the back door and then around to the front. Her new shoes were starting to pinch.
Three ushers were waiting there, smiling and joking with one another. Missing was a young relative of Ivan’s whom everyone called Bingo. “Where’s Bingo?” she asked. The other three hadn’t seen him.
Marian fished an address book out of her new purse. She found a phone in the vestry and called Bingo’s number. No answer.
Out front again, the guests were beginning to arrive in a steady trickle. Ivan’s father was dead, but his mom arrived with two of his aunts. Marian had run out without a coat, looking up and down the street for Bingo. She began to feel chilled and stepped inside the church entrance. “I like that dress,” one of the ushers told her. “Very feminine, very soft.” She managed not to snarl at him.
A cab pulled up, and much to Marian’s relief, it was Bingo who climbed out. But when the cab drove away, Bingo stayed standing in the street, swaying in time to some privately heard music.
Marian hurried out to him. “Come on, Bingo—you’re late!”
He gave her a big goofy grin. “Issh ne’er too late.”
She stared at him, horrified. “You’re sloshed!”
“To the gills,” he agreed amiably.
She steered him out of the street and then went to get one of the police detectives serving as an usher. “Bingo’s drunk,” she said, “and you’ve got to sober him up. I don’t care how you do it, but do it. You have twenty minutes at most before the bridal party gets here.” He grunted and went off to collect Bingo while Marian informed the other ushers they were going to have to do double duty.
A number of guests were lingering on the steps, chatting for a few minutes before going inside. Marian was heading around to the back door of the church again when a white stretch limo pulled up. The waiting guests gasped when Ian Cavanaugh stepped out, and a titter of excitement ran through the small crowd when he reached in to help Kelly Ingram alight. The third person to emerge was Holland, looking as if he could think of one or two places he’d rather be at the moment.
“That dark-eyed broody one,” Marian heard one guest say to another, “that’s Kelly Ingram’s bodyguard. He used to be with the FBI!”
Marian rolled her eyes and hurried around to the back of the church. How did these things get started?
Ivan wasn’t in the little waiting room.
Beginning to feel just a mite hassled, she started hunting for him. She found him tap-dancing in the vestry.
“It relaxes me,” he explained. “I was getting claustrophobic in there!”
She dragged him back to the waiting room. They waited in silence. Marian’s feet were seriously hurting.
Before long Father Kuzak popped in to say the bridal party had arrived; they’d be starting momentarily.
Then it was time. Ivan led the way, followed by his best man. They took their place by the altar and turned to face the main church entrance, where Claire would be coming in. A number of guests were openly gaping.
Ivan said out of the side of his mouth, “Hey, they’re all staring at you!”
“What did you expect?” she muttered back.
Then the ushers came to stand behind them—all four of them, she was happy to see. Bingo’s hair was sopping wet and plastered down neatly against his head; a cold-water spigot could do wonders in a pinch. Marian gave the rescuing usher a wink.
The musician started to play again. Down the aisle came Angela, the matron of honor. Three bridesmaids followed. Then a tiny flower girl. The musician swung into a new tune that everyone recognized as entrance music even though it was questionable whether any of them had ever heard it before.
And here came the bride. Claire was stunning, and Marian could feel Ivan puffing up with pride. Even shadowy Mr. Yelincic looked proud as he led his daughter down the aisle. Marian began to relax for the first time that day. It was really happening.
Ivan and Claire had written their own vows, but Father Kuzak had not read them at the rehearsal, simply saying And here I read the words provided by the bride and groom. He started reading now.
Ivan and Claire exchanged a puzzled look. Father Kuzak droned on, unnoticing. “Do something!” Claire whispered.
“Hsst! Father!” Ivan couldn’t make him hear. He cleared his throat and said aloud, “Father!”
The priest looked up, surprised.
“Those aren’t the vows we wrote.”
“But surely they are!” Father Kuzak whispered.
“No, they’re not,” Claire whispered back. “Those are not our vows.”
Marian stepped closer and looked at the typed pages the priest had inserted into his book. She tapped a fingernail on the name penciled in at the top: Hamilton/Burger.
“Oh, my goodness!” The priest was mortified. “How could that have—I’ve never—”
“Father Kuzak,” Marian said, low, “go get the right vows.”
“Go … yes. I’ll go get the right vows.” He scurried off.
A murmur ran through the congregation. Marian looked over her shoulder at the wedding guests; they looked puzzled, concerned. All except Holland, who was sitting there with a big laugh on his face. And Kelly and Ian, the professionals, who were maintaining perfect poker faces. She caught sight of Mrs. Yelincic, who looked ready to die.
“I can’t believe this is happening!” Claire hissed.
“It’s just a little delay,” Ivan said. “He’ll find them.” He shot a look at Marian. “Well, you told me this would be a day I’d remember the rest of my life.”
“I gotta pee!” the little flower girl announced. Shushing sounds. Father Kuzak came hurrying back with the right vows. “We shall resume,” he announced with as much dignity as he could muster.
This time they made it. Ivan and Claire were well and truly wed. The musician gave them a jazzy exit, none of the women tripped on their long gowns, and Bingo managed to escort his bridesmaid-partner down the aisle without falling on his face.
Marian dashed off to the little waiting room and grabbed her coat and purse. The musician was gathering up his sheet music when she handed him his envelope. “Thanks, Sally,” he said.
She found Father Kuzak sitting on a hall bench fanning himself with a prayer book. “I don’t know how that happened,” he said when he saw her coming.
“Don’t worry about it,” Marian said. “It worked out just fine.” She handed him his envelope. Her feet really hurt.
He opened the envelope. “Oh, that’s very generous, I’m sure—but I was rather expecting more.”
“Mrs. Yelincic said you’d say that.” She hurried out to the church entrance.
There was no receiving line, for which Marian was grateful. On the church steps, a photographer was trying to get everyone in the wedding party together. Marian heard a snore; she found Bingo asleep on one of the pews. She woke him up and got him out front for the picture.
The photographer kept trying to move Marian over with the bridesmaids until Ivan made him understand she was supposed to be standing in the best man’s spot. The picture was finally taken.
Marian gave Claire a hug and whispered, “I think Ivan is one lucky man.” Claire was glowing.
The crowd outside the church started breaking up, going to their cars for the procession to the reception hall. A small group of admirers was gathered around Kelly and Ian, who were both laughing and chatting away. Marian saw Holland
heading toward her.
He was looking at her dress. Marian’s hands formed into fists. If he tells me how soft and feminine I’m looking, I may hit him.
“Well, well,” Holland said with a smile. “I see you can dress just as conventionally as everyone else when you put your mind to it.”
She kissed him.
“That’s nice,” said Mrs. Yelincic, passing by.
“Must we to go to the reception?” Holland asked.
Marian said yes. “I have to toast the bride and groom.” Kelly and Ian wouldn’t be going; they had a performance that evening. Marian slipped into her coat. “We’re in the first limo.”
One final check to make sure all the wedding party had rides. “Are we ready?” she called out.
“Ready!” a dozen happy voices sang.
Holland was standing by the open door of the limo. As Marian climbed in, the driver said, “Hey, that Mrs. Yelincic is really something, ain’t she? She invited me to the reception.”
“So glad you hit it off,” Marian said, and collapsed.
35
Marian dragged into her office the next morning both looking and feeling as if she had a hangover. But she’d drunk very little at the wedding reception; it was the day itself that had been the intoxicant.
Captain Murtaugh stuck his head in the door. “How’d it go?”
Marian sighed. “Well, we got through it. And Ivan established a new wedding tradition by dancing with his best man.”
Murtaugh grinned. “Did the guests know about you ahead of time?”
“Only a few. There was lots and lots of staring.”
“But did you have fun?”
She thought back over the previous day’s craziness. “Yeah. I had fun.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Told you you would.”
When he left, Marian took out a thermos of black coffee she’d had filled on her way in. She was pouring her first cup when Sergeant Campos appeared in the door. Marian swallowed her coffee and looked at him balefully.
Campos said, “I just wanted to know if Walker and Dowd have been working out okay.”
“Absolutely. They’re doing good work.”
The sergeant actually smiled. “I told you they were good detectives.”
I never said they weren’t. “And you were right.”
“Well, uh, that’s all I wanted to know.” He left.
Perlmutter came in.
Marian gave him the bent eye. “If you came in here to say ‘I told you so,’ you’re going to be walking a beat before the day’s over.”
“But I didn’t tell you so,” he said worriedly. “That’s what’s bothering me.” He sat down. “When we were doing background checks, one little thing popped up that I didn’t pay any attention to at the time, but now—”
“What is it?”
“Unger’s secretary … name’s Iris—”
“I met her.”
“She was afraid O.K. Toys would close and she’d lose her job. Both the police and the IRS poking around—you know. But here’s the part that’s worrying me. She said, ‘Mr. Unger even closed the Zurich account he’d just opened—he wouldn’t do that if the business wasn’t in trouble, would he?’”
“So? Big-time criminals have numbered Swiss accounts as a matter of course. You mean he’s accumulating as much cash as he can? Planning to disappear?”
“No, Lieutenant. She said the Zurich account he’d just opened. A new account.”
“Huh.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“Nor do I,” Marian murmured. “Okay, Perlmutter, let me think about it. Thanks.”
She sat pondering this new detail and drinking her coffee. When she’d worked out a possible explanation, she went to see Murtaugh.
“A new account?” he said with a frown. “Why now?”
“Perhaps because he never needed one before. Because he didn’t have anything to put in the account.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Captain, what if the reason we haven’t been able to find out what O.K. Toys is doing is that they haven’t done it yet?”
He shot her a look. “They’ve just been setting it up?”
“Could be, don’t you think?” She sat down, facing him across his desk. “It would take a lot of time just to build their cover—the falsified financial records, the phony invoices they had printed. If it’s a new scam, then Oliver Knowles didn’t have anything to do with it. Unger couldn’t start until after Knowles retired. Then on one of his infrequent visits to the office, Knowles could have stumbled across something—invoices he knew couldn’t be right or whatever. And so Unger had to get rid of him.”
“Which leaves Zook out of it?”
“Unger’s the only one who could have manipulated the switch from toy distribution to whatever illegal enterprise he had in mind. He’s the man in charge. And it has to have been a big operation, to require this much preparation. Big operations require records-keeping. He’d have to set that up as well as the phony books.”
“But the IRS has been there all this week. They would have found those real records.”
Marian leaned her forearms on his desk. “Captain, those IRS agents are accountants—they’re not computer people. There are all sorts of ways to hide files electronically. If Unger used a computer security specialist to set up his system, the IRS wouldn’t even know that other stuff was there.”
Murtaugh pulled at his lower lip. “Maybe we ought to get our own computer people in there.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. The dates on the files would be significant. They’d tell us whether the illicit system was set up before or after Oliver Knowles retired.”
The captain nodded. “All right, let me find out if the police computer people are equipped to handle a case like this. It sounds pretty specialized to me.”
Marian went back to her office feeling uneasy and irritated. That theory she’d just put to Captain Murtaugh could turn out to be a rough approximation of the truth … or it could be a fairy tale. She had no substantiation for any of it. It angered her that eleven days after his murder, she still didn’t know whether Oliver Knowles was a criminal or an innocent victim.
And then at noon, Virgil called.
The meet was set for three that afternoon at the Guggenheim. By two the Spiral Gallery was filled with NYPD detectives wearing wires and showing an intense interest in the new “Art of the Future” exhibit.
The phone call had not instructed Thomas “Hook Nose” Schumacher to carry or wear anything special to identify himself; that meant the courier he was meeting was known to him. Known by sight only, Schumacher stressed; names were never exchanged. Four of the many cops in the Guggenheim had only one assignment: Make sure Schumacher doesn’t bolt.
The plan was not to arrest the courier but to follow her, or him. Robin Muller’s procedure had been to deliver her envelope of murder instructions and then go straight to meet the paymaster. It was the paymaster the police were interested in; he was one step closer to Virgil. Detective Walker had argued for picking the paymaster up rather than risk losing him in the crowd. Detective Perlmutter said they’d be blowing a chance to get all the way to Virgil if they picked him up prematurely. Marian decided to continue the tail.
It would be a close tail, with someone sticking next to the paymaster at all times. The detectives doing the following would shift positions constantly, so the paymaster wouldn’t notice any one face more than he ought to. Marian and Murtaugh were cruising in one car; Sergeant Buchanan and one of his detectives in another. Both cars were equipped with radio receivers tuned to the frequency used by the mikes the detectives were wearing.
“Where’s Captain DiFalco?” Murtaugh asked. “I’d have thought he wouldn’t want to miss this.”
“Gloria Sanchez says she left a note on his desk,” Marian replied. “Right under the big stack of papers she found there.”
Murtaugh looked away and smiled.
Marian ra
n a radio check. Someone in the Guggenheim might wonder at so many visitors wearing earplugs, but the courier wouldn’t be there long enough to spot anything. The radio communication checked out, so long as Marian didn’t drive too far from the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street.
Three o’clock.
A radio voice spoke. “Woman approaching Schumacher. Forty, kinda dumpy, shoulder-length brown hair. Tan all-weather coat and black boots.”
Silence.
“She’s the one. She just handed Schumacher the envelope. Now she’s going out.”
Another voice: “I got her.” A pause of two minutes. “She’s going into the park.”
Gloria Sanchez: “I’m on her.”
A longer pause.
“Guy sittin’ on a bench in Central Park in February. Our paymaster?” Gloria paused a moment. “Yep, that’s him. Just gave the courier an envelope. Dark hair, sallow complexion, wearin’ just about the ugliest coat I’ve ever seen. Mustard-colored. Dirty mustard. The guy’s nothin’ to remember, but that coat’s gonna stand out in a crowd.”
Another minute passed.
“Just got a closer look at that coat. ’S well-cut, material’s good—he musta paid plenty for it. Mebbe the guy’s colorblind.”
Marian clicked on her transmitter. “Gloria, you’re talking too much.”
“Yas’m.” Two minutes later: “I’m droppin’ off.”
“I got him,” a new voice said.
They followed the man in the mustard coat as he paid off another courier, in front of a Times Square camera shop—a second death ordered for that day. The paymaster next led them to an ordinary-looking office building on the West Side.
“Roberts is riding up in the elevator with him,” a voice said.
Then after what seemed like a hundred years, Roberts reported: “He went into a place called Twenty-first Century Consultants.”
“That’s it,” Murtaugh said with satisfaction. “Let’s go get ’em.”
36
When the police burst into Twenty-first Century Consultants—weapons drawn, yelling “Freeze!”—all they found was one terrified paymaster and one even more terrified woman.
The one inner office was empty. “Dust,” Detective Dowd announced. “Place isn’t used.”