Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  58

  Betty Friedman had strong square hands and shrewd brown eyes that didn’t miss much. ‘Willie called,’ she said. ‘He oughta be walking through that door any moment. You want coffee, tea, anything while you wait?’

  ‘Water, please,’ Amanda said.

  Rhees sat to one side of the sergeant’s desk in the wheelchair. ‘Water’s fine,’ he said.

  She filled two dixie cups from the cooler and passed them out. Amanda gulped hers down. It had a faint chlorinated taste, but it was wet and welcome.

  Rhees asked, ‘Would you have a painkiller handy?’

  ‘I got some codeine somewhere.’ Betty Friedman, who wore her dark hair in a tight curled perm, rummaged in the drawer of her desk, opened a bottle and tipped out a couple of white pills. Rhees washed them down with his water.

  ‘That message business is pretty weird,’ Betty Friedman said.

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ Amanda said. She thought of Dansk driving past and the way he’d grinned, and she wondered why he hadn’t looked unhappy to see her outside the Police Department HQ, why he wasn’t worried by the prospect of her walking inside the building. Because he’s tricky, he’s made a move I haven’t taken into account, he’s shuffled the deck and come up with a different hand. But what?

  She felt she’d been manipulated, except she couldn’t figure how. It was almost as if he wanted her to come to this place.

  Because.

  ‘Any idea who sent the message?’ Betty Friedman asked.

  Amanda said nothing. Dansk lures Willie away because – no, this was one of those roads she didn’t want to travel. It went straight to a black destination.

  ‘I guess it’s something you’d prefer to share with Willie,’ Betty Friedman said. ‘Fine by me.’

  Amanda looked at the clock on the wall. ‘How long since he phoned?’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes about, from Metrocenter.’

  ‘He should be here by now.’

  ‘Any moment. Relax.’

  Amanda was thinking of Drumm out there in the city, maybe bogged in traffic, delayed by roadworks, something. Any moment. He’d come through the door and he’d believe her story and he’d say leave it to me and she’d walk away from the whole thing, back to a private life. Mountain air, owls flying into the moon.

  Any moment.

  She looked at Betty Friedman and said, ‘Try to reach him, please.’

  The telephone on the desk rang then and Betty Friedman picked it up, and Amanda watched her face go through various stages of change, from disbelief to shock, and then to some other expression, a kind of puzzled vagueness, an emptiness, spirit draining out of her.

  Amanda couldn’t sit, she had to move. She rose from her chair and paced the room and felt a disastrous darkness beat against her. She knew. She tried to distance herself from the external world, to silence extraneous sounds and sights, but she could hear Betty Friedman’s voice anyway, scratchy and thin, like somebody on an ancient record. ‘Did anybody get the goddam number? Sweet Christ, I can’t take this in. I don’t believe it, I talked to him maybe half an hour ago.’

  Betty Friedman had put down her phone without hanging up, and the line beeped like the sound of an electrocardiograph emitting the bleak whistle of fatality. Surgeons took off their masks, sighed and washed blood from their hands. She pushed her chair against the – wall and tilted her head back and appeared to be looking at the ceiling.

  ‘It’s Willie,’ Amanda said. ‘Something about Willie.’

  Betty Friedman said, ‘Run down by a car.’

  Amanda flattened her hands on the surface of the desk and leaned forwards, and Betty Friedman said again, ‘Run down by a car.’ Her eyes had a far-away look. ‘DOA.’

  Rhees shifted his wheelchair a little. There was the sound of rubber tyres on the floor.

  ‘Somebody,’ Betty Friedman said, but her sentence gathered no momentum and she gave up on it and looked at Rhees as if his presence puzzled her. She picked up the handset but didn’t hang it up. ‘Some bastard,’ she said. ‘Some bastard hit Willie then backed up over him to make sure and then drove away and …’

  Amanda felt like a long steel needle had entered her heart, an emotional biopsy. We need a small sample, Miss Scholes, to check your condition. Killed by a car. DOA. Betty Friedman got up and dropped the handset and it slithered from her desk and swung back and forth on its cord, a pendulum measuring nothing. Watching it, Amanda thought of Willie, and the image she received was of Drumm being struck and thrown, a killer’s face in shadow behind a windshield, metal cracking bone, Drumm jolted, damaged by the impact, and then the car reversing over him. Just to make sure.

  This is going to go away. Somebody will touch your shoulder and say it’s time to get up.

  She looked at Rhees. She went towards him and he caught her hand and held it against the side of his face. Betty Friedman had knocked over a waste-basket and papers spilled across the floor. She had all that unfocussed energy of grief, the kind that burns without purpose. ‘In the parking-lot at Metrocenter, and all we got is a colour, and that colour’s red, and a partial of the licence number, that’s all. That’s all we got. Just D–O–A.’

  Betty Friedman drew the cuff of her shirt across her face. Amanda moved away from Rhees and reached out and touched the woman’s arm. Whether she meant to comfort Friedman or comfort herself, it didn’t matter which. A red car at Metrocenter and Willie’s dead. Rushed to a hospital, the scream of an ambulance, Willie dying with an oxygen mask on his face and maybe blood spurting against the inside of the mask, and Willie’s hands clawing air, life flying out of him.

  And somewhere a man in a red car.

  One of Dansk’s people, she thought. One of Dansk’s people sticking the hook into Willie’s flesh and hauling him up out of the water.

  Betty Friedman stared at Amanda in a hollow way and asked, ‘Where the hell did that message come from?’

  59

  An elevator ride, Betty Friedman white and mute, Rhees hunched in the wheelchair, Amanda beset by a sense of sluggishly wading through water. A walk along a corridor to an office, a big room of panelled walls hung with various awards and civic honours.

  Dan Kelloway stood behind his desk, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, arms burned brown, shaven head suntanned and gleaming. Another cop was present, a guy in a double-breasted suit and a lapel badge that identified him as Lt. Wom, S. He had Asiatic features, tiny hands and small feet in black patent-leather shoes. He lounged in the corner of the office, half in shadow, motionless.

  Amanda thought, I don’t know if these people will listen to me, and even if they listen whether they’ll believe. But the telling of her story had become more important than how she gauged the mood of her audience, and even though she wanted Willie she couldn’t have him, and that was something she couldn’t change.

  Kelloway told her to sit. Betty Friedman must have picked up on some sign from him, because she went out of the office, closing the door quietly.

  Kelloway looked at Rhees. ‘Who’s this?’

  Rhees introduced himself. Kelloway frowned and turned to Amanda. His voice was like an old-fashioned razor drawn across a leather strap. He sat down behind his desk, white shirt phosphorescent. ‘OK, I’m listening.’

  Amanda hesitated. She felt the solid wall of Kelloway’s hostility. He had that hard-bitten scepticism common to career cops, and he had it in spades. You might have been a shit-hot prosecutor once, but you’re history, and your history with me is a bad one.

  She remembered Willie’s kindness at the hospital, the depths of his concern for her, her face against his shoulder and the faint scent of dry-cleaning chemicals from his jacket, and the way he’d pressed Kleenex into her hands. She heard the room roar in her ears and saw Kelloway clasp his hands on the desk. ‘We’re waiting. You got something to say, Miss Scholes, say it.’

  When she spoke she had no fluency, she fumbled over names and episodes. It didn’t take long to tell the story – five minutes, te
n, she wasn’t sure. Neither Kelloway nor Wom moved. Kelloway watched her without expression, Wom studied his fingernails. She was dry-mouthed when she finished. She wanted to smoke, but it wouldn’t have been allowed in Kelloway’s sanctum.

  Kelloway glanced at Wom. Wom shifted his head a little. Some kind of exchange passed between them. It was hard to tell what it meant. She didn’t feel good about this little signal, whatever it was. She felt suspended, awaiting judgement.

  Kelloway said, ‘Pity about that purloined letter.’

  Amanda didn’t like the spin he gave the word letter. ‘I wasn’t the only one who read it,’ she said. ‘So did John.’

  ‘I’m not denying it existed,’ Kelloway said. ‘All I’m saying is it would be useful to have.’

  Wom spoke for the first time. His accent was East Coast clipped, maybe Boston. ‘You say this guy Dansk is a resident at the Carlton downtown.’

  ‘He is. At least last night he was.’

  Wom picked up a phone on the desk and turned his back. He dialled a number and conducted a conversation in a low whisper. While Wom was on the phone, Kelloway said, ‘What you’re telling me is that Dansk is part of some corruption inside the Witness Program, and he’s on the Sanchez payroll. And you also think this same Dansk is behind Willie’s death because Willie was conducting an investigation Dansk didn’t like.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. Her thoughts drifted to her last conversation with Willie, and she remembered Mrs Vialli’s concern about her son. ‘Willie talked to Lew Bascombe, also to Bernadette Vialli. My guess is he was followed to both places –’

  ‘You told us that already.’ Kelloway looked at Rhees. ‘You were attacked by associates of Dansk, right?’

  Rhees nodded.

  ‘How do you know they were his associates?’

  Rhees turned his face to Amanda for help. She read a certain helplessness in his expression.

  Kelloway said, ‘You’re only going on what Miss Scholes said. Have you ever seen Dansk? Ever laid eyes on him?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘I wasn’t getting at anything, Miss Scholes. I just want to know if Rhees has ever encountered Dansk.’

  Kelloway had a way of staring that made you want to turn your face aside, but Amanda held his eyes. She was damned if she was going to relinquish any of her territory to this hard-ass. ‘I’m getting the strange impression you don’t believe Dansk exists,’ she said.

  Kelloway said, ‘You’re overreacting.’

  Overreacting. She liked that. Drumm had been killed and Dansk was out there scheming, and she was overreacting.

  ‘You just jumped to the conclusion that the people who attacked your boyfriend are associates of Dansk? Maybe the same people that shot Galindez and chased after Isabel Sanchez? Maybe even the same people that ran a car over one of my most experienced men? And one of these quote unquote killers is a resident at a place called the Hideaway Knolls, but you don’t know his name.’

  ‘I don’t need your scorn, Kelloway. I come here, I tell you something is totally fucked inside the Protection Program, and you treat me like I’m some drooling idiot that just wandered in off the streets, instead of getting up off your ass and being practical.’

  Kelloway was unaffected by her. He clasped his hands behind the back of his skull and cracked his finger-joints.

  She said, ‘Begin with something indisputable and work from there. Galindez and Isabel Sanchez – both protected witnesses, allegedly.’

  Kelloway nodded. ‘According to the elusive letter, Galindez was shot by the people protecting him and Isabel Sanchez ran away, et cetera. After that, what have you got? Some vague reference to Benny Vialli, which is a case I remember real well, but it doesn’t seem to fit anything I can see.’

  It doesn’t seem to fit, she thought. Willie had said much the same thing. What was she doing? Looking for connections where none existed? Inventing structures that couldn’t support any weight? And yet she was trying to forge something out of Bernadette Vialli’s story, even if she wasn’t sure what. I put Galindez and Isabel into the Program. I placed Benny Vialli in the same custody and nothing’s been heard of him since. A kid out there somewhere – maybe he’d fallen in love, married, forgotten his mother. Maybe he’d found an altogether new life and the past was something he didn’t want to resurrect.

  No, she knew that wasn’t true. It didn’t square at all with the impression she’d had of Benny Vialli. But why did he send those flowers and the message that Bernadette thought was a fake? Answer: he didn’t, somebody else did. Because Benny was in no position to send anything, because –

  Wom hung up the phone and said, ‘A man called Anthony Dansk checked out of the Carlton this morning.’

  ‘Big surprise,’ she said. Checked out and gone, she thought. Perfect timing. Dansk disappears into the sewers, planning to re-emerge when he’s ready.

  Kelloway said, ‘Here’s something puzzles me. If you know so much about Dansk, how come you’re walking around to tell the tale? Why hasn’t Dansk sent a car to run you down or get one of his killers to blow you away? Why didn’t he stop you before you reached my office?’

  Amanda looked into Kelloway’s sharp blue eyes. ‘Maybe because he’s self-confident in a way neither you nor I understand. He lives in a demented world we can’t quite fathom, Kelloway. And maybe he has other plans for me.’

  ‘What kind of plans?’

  ‘I can’t read his mind, I doubt if anyone can do that. I only know his plans are lethal, whatever they are, and I’m feeling vulnerable because he’s out there somewhere.’

  Kelloway’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened, then he rose. He said to Wom, ‘Back in a second, Sonny,’ and went out of the room.

  Amanda heard the door close. She looked at Wom and said, ‘I bet he stuffs dollar bills into collection boxes for religious missions in Patagonia. I bet he’s active in the Big Brothers organization.’

  Sonny Wom said, ‘He’s not a happy man today. None of us are.’

  ‘Is he ever happy?’ she asked.

  Wom didn’t answer. Kelloway came back into the room, carrying a piece of paper he spread on the desk. His skull shone like a hazelnut. ‘What kind of car do you drive?’

  ‘Car? A VW.’

  He read something scrawled on the back of the paper. ‘Registration number 4KL580?’

  Rhees said, ‘That’s the number all right. Why?’

  ‘Colour red?’ Kelloway asked.

  ‘Where is all this leading?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘It was your car that ran down Willie.’

  ‘My car?’

  ‘We found it abandoned a couple of miles from Metrocenter. Front seriously dented, blood on the windshield, plus a strip torn from the sleeve of Willie’s jacket stuck to a broken front light.’

  Her own car. Willie’s torn jacket. She couldn’t think around this. ‘I left that car last night outside a convenience market on Lincoln,’ she said.

  ‘By left, you mean you just walked away from it?’

  ‘Somebody was tailing me. I decided to skip.’

  ‘Who was tailing you?’

  ‘One of Dansk’s people,’ she said.

  ‘Naturally,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘So I dumped the car.’

  Kelloway said, ‘And somebody came along later and drove it away. And somebody sent Willie a message, using your name. And Willie walked into a trap.’

  ‘Not somebody. Dansk.’ How many ways could she tell Kelloway the same thing?

  Kelloway tossed the sheet of paper aside. ‘A suspicious person could look at all these things and interpret them in a dark way, Miss Scholes. A message you say you never sent. The fact your car was used in a hit and run. Somebody could add these things up and you’d come out looking murky.’

  Rhees said, ‘Crap, Kelloway. Are you accusing Amanda of something?’

  Kelloway said, ‘I’m just looking at the angles.’

  ‘Wi
th some offensive results,’ Rhees said. He sounded angry, even in his pain. Amanda rose and stood directly behind him, laying her hands on his shoulders. She felt heat rise from his body.

  ‘I saw that goddam letter,’ Rhees said.

  ‘Did I say I disbelieved you?’

  Amanda stepped in front of Kelloway’s desk. Calm was the important thing. An air of reason. ‘Don’t you see what’s going on, Kelloway? Dansk is stirring the pond, he’s making the waters muddy. He leaves a message for Willie in my name, he uses my car, it’s all diversionary stuff designed to confuse.’

  ‘It’s confusing all right. I grant you that.’

  ‘He knows how to hide and he knows how to manipulate. Look, I don’t have any motive for fabricating this story. I don’t have anything to gain from making up fictions.’

  Kelloway shrugged. ‘I never accused you of making up fictions. Did I, Sonny? Did you hear me accuse Miss Scholes of that?’

  Wom said, ‘No, I missed out on that.’

  Amanda smiled thinly. ‘The pair of you are missing out on quite a few things, not least the fact that I was very close to Willie Drumm, and it hurts like fuck to think about what happened to him.’

  ‘You’re grieving,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘Goddam right I’m grieving.’

  Kelloway tapped the surface of his desk. His tanned hand was bony. He looked at Sonny Wom and said, ‘This lady won a few cases in her time. She came in for some courtroom glory. Sent some real bad guys away. She didn’t do it all by herself, of course. No, we did all the shit work, built good solid cases for her. I don’t think she ever once went into court on wobbly roller-skates. And the press she got. Jesus, you wouldn’t believe it. Like a movie star. Cher or Michelle or somebody.’