The Dread Line

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Feeling better?” I asked.

  “I’d feel better if you’d touch me.”

  I pulled my fingers tentatively through her hair. An exasperated sigh told me that wasn’t the type of touch she had in mind. She nuzzled her head deeper into my groin and grabbed one of my hands, pushing it toward her breast beneath the robe.

  “Not gonna happen, Belinda.”

  “You know your girlfriend can’t see us, right?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  That exasperated sigh again. After a moment, she popped up, her demeanor changed. Suddenly she was Belinda Veiga, bank officer, again—although her robe gapped in very unprofessional places.

  “I hear you’re still poking into the robbery case.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Even though you’re not getting paid?”

  “Yes.”

  “You just can’t let it go, can you?”

  “It’s too damned intriguing.”

  “Is there anything new?”

  “Nothing I can get into with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m sorry, Belinda. I’m just not at liberty to discuss it.”

  With that, I could actually see her body soften, her eyes smoldering again. “I’m still pretty scared,” she whispered. “Think you could at least hold me?”

  I gathered her in my arms, and she pressed her face against my neck. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed, and for a moment I thought she had fallen asleep. But then she murmured.

  “The bed would be more comfortable.”

  “Go ahead, then. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “You don’t want to join me? I could use some love tonight.”

  “Love wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

  If she had a reply to that, I didn’t hear it. The whiskey, and a long, hard day, were dragging me under. I’m not sure how much time had passed when I felt her fingers fumbling with my zipper. I gently pushed them away, and she gave up. I heard her stumble off to the bedroom.

  Maybe the excitement of the evening had worn her out. Maybe it was the whiskey. Or maybe that woman nine hundred miles away in Chicago was more powerful than I thought.

  25

  I awoke to the sound of a shower running, got up, and left without saying good-bye. I dashed home to feed Brady and Rondo and then headed straight to the Jamestown police station.

  “Bubble wrap?” Ragsdale said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What about it?”

  “Did you find any in the vault after the robbery?”

  “No.”

  “Check the wastebasket?”

  “Yeah. No bubble wrap.”

  “Then you’ve got to let me watch the surveillance video from the bank.”

  “No can do, Mulligan. It’s evidence in an open criminal investigation.”

  “Yeah, but if you bend the rules, maybe I can help you close it.”

  Ragsdale crossed his arms and stared at me. I stared back. After a minute, he unlocked a desk drawer, slid out a portable hard drive, and plugged it into his computer. I stood behind him as the video began to play.

  “Fast-forward to when the perp leaves the vault and walks out of the bank,” I said.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Bubble wrap.”

  “Mulligan, I already told you—”

  “Humor me,” I said. So he did.

  “Okay,” I said. “Show me the same time sequence from each of the other cameras.”

  As we watched the perp stroll out of the bank one last time, Ragsdale turned to me and said, “Satisfied?”

  “Yes.”

  “See any bubble wrap?”

  “No.”

  “Are we done?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Because?”

  “Because according to Ellington Cargill, most of the jewelry pieces were sealed in bubble wrap. If it wasn’t left behind in the vault, it should be on the perp.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s not.”

  Ragsdale raised one eyebrow, then started running through the video again.

  “Bubble wrap is bulky,” I said.

  “But none of his pockets are bulging,” the chief said. “Could he have sewn some kind of pouch inside his sweatshirt?”

  “If it was stuffed with bubble wrap, I think we’d notice.”

  “Well, I’ll be a sonovabitch.”

  “So what do you think it means?” I asked.

  “That we need to shoot some pool. Eight ball helps clear my head.”

  * * *

  It was a slow evening at the Narragansett Café. No live music. Just a couple of customers hunched over the bar and an ancient couple gumming a late dinner. Ragsdale racked, and I broke. The balls scattered, and the twelve streaked cleanly into the right corner pocket. I dropped five more, missed a bank shot for the seven, and Ragsdale ran the table.

  “Means the drinks are on you,” he said.

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have let you win.”

  “The hell you did. Go again?”

  I shook my head no, asked the bartender to draw a Blue Moon and a Sam Adams, and carried them to a corner table.

  “So what’s your theory?” he asked.

  “What’s yours?”

  “I’m thinking the perp must have a safe deposit box of his own.”

  “I’m with you so far,” I said.

  “Once Cargill’s and Veiga’s eyes were taped,” the chief said, “our guy unlocked it with his key and the master Veiga used to open Cargill’s box. Then he switched the jewelry from one box to the other, told Cargill and Veiga to count to a hundred, and calmly strolled out of the bank.”

  “Pretty slick,” I said. “There’d be nothing incriminating on him if he got stopped.”

  “Except the gun,” Ragsdale said.

  “Probably dumped that in the box, too.”

  “Even slicker.”

  “Only one thing wrong with your scenario,” I said.

  “What?”

  “When you open a safe deposit box and pull the metal tray out, it makes a distinctive scraping sound. It’s something Belinda must have heard a thousand times. She would have recognized it.”

  Ragsdale raised an eyebrow. “When I questioned her, she never mentioned it,” he said.

  “Didn’t mention it to me, either.”

  “Well … Maybe she was too rattled to notice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That could explain it.”

  With that, he drained his beer, set the glass on the table, and shoved it toward me. I got up and went to the bar for another round just as Carter Blount, the night manager, wandered out of the kitchen with an angry scar where his left ear used to be.

  “Jesus!” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “A skinny punk with a gravity knife tried to jack me when I was taking the day’s receipts to the bank. Stuck me in the right arm and sliced my ear off before I kicked him in the nuts and knocked the blade out of his hand. I tried to grab him with my good arm, but the prick got clean away.”

  “They couldn’t sew the ear back on?”

  “Couldn’t find it. Either an animal got it or it went down a storm drain.”

  “Did you go to the hospital?”

  “Nah. I got cut up way worse than this back when I was working as a deckhand on a fishing boat. My sister’s husband is a doctor. He stitched me up in his office, gave me a tetanus shot, and I was back to work the next day.”

  Which explained why my check of area hospitals had come up empty. Another mystery solved, and it was only Monday.

  “Shit,” Ragsdale said as I clunked our refills on the table and sat across from him. “Now you’ve got me wondering if Belinda could be involved in this. I always thought she was a good kid.”

  “Hot, too. I figured she wanted to sleep with me because of my manly physique and rugged good looks. Now I’m wondering if she was just trying to pump me for information.”


  “Did you?”

  “Sleep with her? No.”

  “Tell her anything?”

  “Not that, either.”

  “Damn,” the chief said. “She never tried to seduce me.”

  “Gee. Imagine that.”

  “Fuck you, Mulligan.”

  “Do you know if she’s got money troubles?” I asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Well,” I said, “a drawer full of diamonds and emeralds is enough to tempt anybody.”

  “Which includes everybody who worked at the bank,” the chief said. “Any one of them could have tipped the gunman off about surveillance-camera angles and bank procedures.”

  “What’s your gut telling you?”

  “That maybe it was Carson,” he said. “With twins on the way, she must have had money worries.”

  “What’s her husband do?”

  “The bastard ran out on her.”

  “I still don’t see it,” I said. “If it was her, why would she have brought me in on the case?”

  “Wasn’t her idea. Corporate ordered her to do it.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

  We sipped our beers and thought about that for a while.

  “Maybe we’ve doped this out wrong,” I said. “If Belinda was the inside man, the loot could have ended up inside her safe deposit box.”

  “Are you sure she’s got one?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” the chief said, “I guess I better bring her in and find out.”

  “If she does, can you get a warrant to open it?”

  “Not a chance. At this point, all we’ve got is conjecture.”

  I shrugged. “I doubt the jewelry’s still in the bank anyway. Whoever was behind this has had nearly four months to get it out.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but it looks to me like they’ve been waiting for the heat to cool before they fence it. Can you think of a better place to hide it in the meantime?”

  I picked up my beer and took a long pull. “No,” I said. “No, I can’t.”

  * * *

  Late that night, I bolted awake from a sound sleep and padded into the kitchen. I opened the freezer, lifted the ice tray, and slid out the baggie. Then I snapped on the overhead light, sat at the kitchen table, and stared at the contents.

  Somebody was missing a right ear.

  Carter Blount had lost his left.

  26

  A couple of days later, I was playing tug–of–war with the dogs when “Who Are You,” my ringtone for unknown callers, began blaring. I pulled out a kitchen drawer, dumped five burner phones onto the counter, and took a minute to figure out which one was ringing.

  “Mulligan.”

  “It’s Conner Bowditch returning your call.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In Providence.”

  “We should talk face-to-face, Conner. Can we meet for lunch?”

  “Name the place.”

  “Rogue Island at noon.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the Arcade building downtown.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “Don’t sweat it. I’m buying.”

  Three hours later, I pushed through the door and found Bowditch seated at a table with a glass of beer in front of him and a Sharpie in his hand. A dozen patrons, most of them clutching menus, crowded around him, clamoring for autographs.

  “Wait your turn, bud,” a guy in a Patriots jersey said as I pushed past him. I shrugged, pulled out a chair, and took a seat at the table.

  “Mr. Mulligan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry about this. It’ll only be a minute.”

  “Take your time.”

  So he did, asking each person’s name, writing personal messages for them, and patiently answering a series of inane questions about football. The last of them, a middle-aged woman in a cranberry blouse and tan slacks, stuck out a plump hand and squeezed his left bicep. Then she giggled, turned, and asked him to write his name on her ample bottom. Bowditch hesitated a beat, then scrawled a John Hancock–size signature across the fabric.

  “This must happen to you all the time now,” I said.

  “Yeah. I hated it at first, but I’m getting used to it. Except for the part about signing butts and breasts. That’s freaking embarrassing.”

  With three hundred and thirty pounds of bone and muscle sculpted onto a six-foot, seven-inch frame, Conner Bowditch was the largest human being I’d seen close up since the Syracuse center cracked my hand against the rim in a Big East basketball game. And that was a long time ago.

  “I left a lot of messages for you, Conner. What took you so long to get back to me?”

  “I apologize for that, Mr. Mulligan. First I was busy with football. Then I was studying for exams. When I’m doing that stuff, I don’t like distractions.”

  “So Meghan told me.”

  “Truth is, I was pissed off at you, too.”

  “Because I told her about your gambling?”

  “Yes, sir. Wish you hadn’t gone and done that. She really read me the riot act.”

  “I’m about to do the same.”

  Before I could say more, two men in business suits strolled in, spotted us, and made a beeline for our table. More autograph seekers. If this kept up, it was going to be difficult to have a conversation.

  “Please forgive the intrusion,” one of the men said, “but aren’t you Liam Mulligan? The guy who used to write all those investigative stories for The Dispatch?”

  “The one and only.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. My son is a journalism student at Providence College, and he’s been studying your work in class. I was wondering if I could trouble you for your autograph.”

  Bowditch stared openmouthed as I snatched his Sharpie, pulled out a business card, and wrote my name on the back. As the man thanked us and walked away, the two of us burst out laughing.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s going to ask me to sign a butt, but most people who come in here are sure to recognize you. I don’t think you’re going to want them overhearing the questions I’m going to ask.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Let’s enjoy our meal and then find a quiet place to talk.”

  “Okay by me, Mr. Mulligan.”

  “And knock off the ‘mister.’ It’s just Mulligan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After we ordered, I turned the conversation to safer subjects.

  “What are you doing in town? I thought you’d be back in school by now.”

  “I’m taking the spring semester off. You wouldn’t believe all the stuff I’ve gotta do to get ready for the draft. Hours in the gym every day to stay in shape. Interviews and workouts with nearly every pro team. The NFL combine next month. Hard to do all that and still keep my grades up.”

  “And you don’t like distractions.”

  “Like I said. Oh, and I gotta find an agent, too.”

  “You haven’t done that yet?”

  Until then, he’d been looking me straight in the eye. Now he hesitated, averted his gaze, and said, “No, sir.”

  After we finished the meal, Conner signed more autographs while I paid the check. Then we slogged across town on slush-clogged sidewalks, strolled past Johnson & Wales dormitories, massage parlors, head shops, and several boarded-up storefronts, and pushed through the door to Hopes.

  Lee, the daytime bartender, spotted Conner, widened his eyes in surprise, turned away to grab a bottle of rye from the shelf, and replenished the shot glasses of two serious drinkers who were slumped over the bar. There was no one else in the place. I ordered our drinks, Killian’s for me and a bottle of Poland Spring for Conner, and led him to a table in back.

  “Do you have a gambling problem, Conner?”

  “Wow. You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

  “Well?”

  “No, sir. I don’t believe I do.”


  “Can you elaborate?”

  “I know a lot about sports, you know? So I figured I could place a few bets. Maybe pick up a little spending money.”

  “How’s that been working out for you?”

  “Not so good.”

  “Who have you been betting with?”

  “Meghan says you already know.”

  “Anybody besides Joseph DeLucca?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No bookies in Boston?”

  “No.”

  “No side trips to Vegas?”

  “Never been there in my life.”

  “Internet gambling?”

  “Never.”

  “Have you ever bet on football?”

  “No, sir. Just basketball and hockey.”

  “And baseball?”

  “Once in a while, yeah.”

  “Never bet on games you played in?”

  “Oh, God, no! I’d never do that.”

  “So tell me, Conner. What the hell happened in the Syracuse game?”

  “What do you mean?’

  “You sucked.”

  He sighed. “Everybody has a bad game once in a while, Mr. Mulligan.”

  “You weren’t shaving points?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, his voice colder now.

  “Let me see your phone.”

  He furrowed his brow, drew it from his pants, and placed it on the table. I picked it up and dropped it in my shirt pocket.

  “Hey! I need that.”

  “Soon as I’m done with it.” I slid a brand-new prepaid from my jacket and slapped it in his palm. “In the meantime, use this.”

  “What do you need my phone for?”

  “I’m going to have a computer guy look at it.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure you haven’t used it to place bets on Internet gambling sites. Do you have a computer?”

  “A laptop, yeah.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my car.”

  “When we’re done here, I’m going to need you to give me that, too.”

  Until then, nothing I’d asked had angered him—at least not outwardly.

  “You think I’m lying to you?”

  “I’m paid to be thorough.”