Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  By the time Clara returned it was well into dark. The river was shadowed, and lights glowed in the low Queens skyline on the other side. A few streetlights had come on, along the pathways in the park behind me. She must have run for an hour.

  When she was thirty feet away, I raised a hand in a wave, but kept to my seat.

  “Clara!”

  She slowed but didn’t stop, instead swinging her head left, right, checking the entire area before focusing on me. Good reaction.

  “Just me,” I said.

  After a moment she halted, putting her hands on her hips, breathing a little hard from the run. “Silas? What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I live here, as you well know. Have a nice jog?”

  “A little wet.”

  I’d noticed that. Her shirt was soaked, from drizzle or sweat, clearly showing the dark outline of a sports bra underneath. The nylon shorts, equally wet, were plastered to the long, clean muscles in her legs.

  “Want my jacket?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  We were at the edge of the park, alone. Somewhere a siren rose and fell.

  “You’re almost home,” I said. “Long run? Why don’t I walk you. We can catch up.”

  “Since six hours ago?” But she was smiling. “You’ve been working, if you’ve got more to report already.”

  I got up from the bench, feeling stiff. I have to say, my ass hurt from sitting so long—people were smaller or tougher or something in Olmstead’s day.

  “Marlett’s death is more and more suspicious,” I said, as we started down the path.

  “You mean apart from the fact he was assassinated by a sniper, on his doorstep, in the most expensive county in Connecticut?”

  I looked sideways at her. “Foul play does seem to be involved, yes.”

  “Good to know.”

  “There’ve been two others,” I said. “So far.”

  “Others?”

  “Betsy Sills and Jeremy Akelman.”

  She was slower than Johnny, but only by a second or two. “Three suspicious deaths. All money managers of some sort. Oh my God.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t believe this isn’t news yet.”

  “Nothing connects them directly.” Not exactly true, but I didn’t see any reason to bring Ganderson into it. “It seems…odd.”

  “Shit, I wish I had my phone. I sort of remember Akelman—got hit by a car or something. And Sills drowned. Do you have any proof they were murdered?”

  “No.”

  “That’s okay, I can still use it. What an awesome lead! It’s perfect—just what I need to follow up my stories on Marlett.”

  Which was, in fact, what I’d been hoping for.

  “I saw you made the big time today.”

  “Thirty thousand hits, as of midafternoon.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Better than anything else I’ve written, by far.”

  “Akelman and Sills, though—that’s no more than rumor. Utterly unsubstantiated, far as I know. Can you post it unsourced?”

  “Sure. It’s online, I can write whatever the hell I want.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “Close enough.” She pushed at her hair, which had begun to escape the ponytail and stick to the sweat on her face and neck. “Though it would be nice to have some official statements or something.”

  “They’ll arrive fast enough, once you publish. It’s too good a story for the press to ignore.”

  “The rest of the press.” But Clara was all action now. “I can’t wait. I have to get back and write this up before someone else figures it out.”

  “Can we talk when you’re done?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” And she was off—skipping up the path, on the way to her next huge scoop.

  Okay, I admit I’m lazy.

  Ganderson wanted a quiet inquiry. Maybe he was right that the Beardstown Ladies had gone vigilante. Maybe Wall Street was now facing armed rebellion, and every underperforming investment adviser was going to need an SUV full of Xe bodyguards. On the other hand, maybe it was just coincidence, bubbling and burbling in Ganderson’s paranoia. I certainly had no idea—and I didn’t feel up to the endless drudgery of an actual investigation, trying to figure it out.

  Instead, I could just kick over the anthill. Once Clara wrote up the rumor, it would be everywhere. If there was a gang of anticapitalist bomb throwers, the publicity might drive them closer to the open, where they’d be easier to find. If not, well, I’d still done Clara a favor. And if Ganderson was ticked that his fears were now front-page news, oh well. I hadn’t exactly signed a nondisclosure, and how would he know it was me anyway?

  Up ahead, Clara was already almost gone, lost in the shadows of the park, where the pathway curved out of sight around a forested slope. Her legs and arms, paler than the dark running clothes, were visible, moving steadily. I wondered how easy it would be to keep up with her, over the long distances.

  A scream.

  From the trees to Clara’s right, two dark figures appeared, stepping into her path. At a hundred yards, I couldn’t see much. Shadowy motion, and Clara fell, tumbling to the ground.

  Before my brain finished processing, I was at a sprint.

  Another shadow—three attackers, now. Clara yelled again, cut off as one seemed to kick her. She rolled left, into range of another. By then I was close enough to gain some detail. Sweatshirts, loose pants, white faces. White hands, too, meaning no gloves. I couldn’t make out any weapons.

  They saw me coming, at the last moment.

  “Shit!” One swung my way, trying a slant kick, but he was too slow. I slammed into him at speed, putting my elbow into his torso, protecting my head. He went down hard, and I rolled off, keeping the momentum, coming back to my feet in a combat stance.

  S-S-SHHK.

  Uh-oh. A nasty, familiar sound—a telescoping metal baton, flicked out into its locked position.

  The man to my right swung at me. Two feet of coiled, slightly resilient steel—it would have crushed my skull if it hit, or snapped my arm. I twisted aside. The baton grazed my shoulder, and I reversed, punching at the attacker’s arm.

  Missed.

  “That’s enough, motherfucker!” His voice was rough, not loud enough to carry beyond our little melee.

  The first guy kicked Clara in the head.

  A swish, I ducked again, the baton flashed past. I went inside, striking the man’s wrist to deflect the weapon. He lunged sideways, and I chopped his forearm, this time connecting. Hard. The baton spun away into the grass.

  The third man was on me from the left. I blocked one punch, took another in the ribs. But he lost some balance, and I put a knee into his hip, followed with an open-hand strike to his collarbone, and shoved him sprawling.

  “Stop! Stop now!” The leader’s voice again. I spun to confront him.

  No baton now. He held a pistol, two hands, pointed right at my midline.

  “We’re done,” he rasped. Apart from the weapon, he could have been a roofer or a plumber, something like that—lean, not too tall, a little stubbly.

  Nobody moved for a moment. Bad odds, even with one of them bleeding into his eyes, the second just getting up from the ground.

  “Remember what we said, bitch.” The leader glanced at Clara, limp on the grass, then back to me. “Next time, kid, we use the gun first.”

  They backed off, the pistol steady on me, then faded around the trees and were gone.

  Clara lay unconscious, limbs sprawled. I did an immediate first-responder check—airway, breathing, circulation. Respiration okay, mild trauma, abrasions. The real problem was the likely concussion from that kick to her head. If you don’t wake up in a minute or so, the docs start worrying about permanent damage.

  Too bad I had to burn another new cellphone on its very first call, but this wasn’t a time to hesitate. I dialed 911.

  “A girl just got jumped in Schurz Park,” I said. “Three guys. She’s hurt bad.�
�

  The operator began her interrogation—where are you? What’s your name, sir?—but I just said, “Near 86th Street” and hung up.

  Then I picked up the baton and followed the attackers’ path into the trees. Sherlock Holmes would have found clues in the dirt, bits of thread caught by twigs, partial foot prints, all that. I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t see anyone else around, but who knows? There might even have been a surveillance camera somewhere, though with the city’s maintenance record, it probably wasn’t working.

  I waited until the patrol car arrived. Less than a minute. Impressive. Maybe they’d been on duty at Gracie Mansion. They came directly up the bike path, lights on, the second cop shining his spotlight. When they saw Clara lying on the ground, one went right to her side, pulling on latex gloves, while the other radioed for an ambulance on his portable.

  Time to go. I slipped backward through the trees, through the shadows, and picked up the pace after a few dozen yards. This was going to be a big scene—one siren already approaching on First Avenue, and more surely on the way. Clara would get decent care.

  It was killing me to leave, but I couldn’t do anything more for her.

  Maybe I could stay out of the story. Talking to the police was a complete no-win, even though I’d done nothing wrong—hell, the Post would probably call me a hero, and even the Times would inevitably use the word “samaritan.” But any attention is bad attention for someone who lives in circumstances of, shall we say, tenuous legality.

  Odds were good the detectives would come calling anyway. Clara would tell them she’d been talking to me, of course; a bystander could have seen it all happen; or they might even catch the assailants, on a tip maybe, and they would give me up. But none of that was absolutely certain—not nearly as certain as if I hung around and ended up in a Nineteenth Precinct interview room.

  Clara had just complicated my life enormously. I can’t do my job and be a citizen. I might even need Walter’s services myself soon. What a dreary thought: having to flee to Central America or Uzbekistan or God knows where.

  What’s worse, I’d brought this attack on her myself.

  “Remember what we said.” They’d been delivering Clara a message, and it wasn’t rocket science: stay away from the Marlett story. Whoever had started plugging Wall Streeters, they wanted no interference.

  I strode out of the park, wondering where I could dispose of the baton, feeling guilty and angry, wishing I’d hit that smug bastard harder when I had a chance.

  Much, much harder.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The cops didn’t show.

  I’d even made it easy for them—went home, went to bed, set the alarm for seven. They could have called or shown up or accosted me when I walked out to buy a paper in the morning.

  Yeah: too quiet.

  The weather remained lousy. A day or two of Indian summer is all we can expect, I suppose. Rain was pocking the window glass when I awoke, and the temperature had barely crawled above forty. I wrapped the comforter around me and maneuvered from bedroom to office—that is to say, the five feet separating the pine futon bed from the Ikea desk half blocking the kitchen alcove. Four hundred square feet and it still cost $2,450 a month.

  I unsleeped my laptop…hang on. No more argument about the death of civilization: that sentence confirms it, right there. No wonder ten-year-olds today are illiterate.

  Never mind. I started with the Times, then the other papers, then the neighborhood micronews blogs, of which Manhattan has, predictably, many. Some are rather good. One had even reprinted the police statement verbatim, and I discovered why I wasn’t in stir that very moment.

  “Dawson remains under observation at St. Joseph’s Hospital, recovering from traumatic amnesia attendant to the concussion suffered in her attack. She has spoken at length to investigating authorities but is unable to remember much of the incident. Detectives are nonetheless aggressively pursuing forensic and other evidence, and expect to…”

  My first reaction was relief: Clara was okay. Losing a little short-term memory after a head knocking is more common than not—I should know. She was up and talking and doing fine.

  On the other hand, it seemed she’d blacked out our entire conversation. I yanked at the comforter, freeing it from a snag on my chairback. Some mixed emotions here. Wonderful that she was recovering, excellent that my role had been kept from officialdom. But honestly? Disappointing that, apparently, she’d also completely forgotten I was even there.

  I checked Event Risk and found a new entry, posted only an hour earlier. More good news because it meant Clara had to be nearly recovered from the physical effects of the head injury—and even better, she’d written up the Akelman-Sills-Marlett connection. Sure, she’d hedged it with “speculation that” and “possibly” and “one may presume,” but the story was clear. Ganderson’s media-suppression strategy could now be marked a definitive fail.

  And seventy-six comments already. She’d be hitting the most-forwarded lists by noon.

  I know, perhaps better than most, how terrifying an unprovoked physical assault is. Twelve hours after being jumped and battered and hospitalized, Clara was practically daring them to try again.

  Alone in my room, listening to the rain, I found myself smiling. I was proud of her.

  Except—wait a minute. The amnesia also meant she’d forgotten the threats the attackers had made. Or that they had anything to do with the story at all. Clara might have no idea that it was her reporting that had drawn the attack—that it wasn’t a random mugging.

  I stopped smiling. Now I was worried.

  I thought about calling, but cellphones were banned in hospitals, weren’t they? And the cops would probably be paying close attention to all her communications for a while. Instead I clicked my browser over to a secure routing, set up a one-off Twitter account and friended Clara, using the link I found on her social-networking page. As I’d hoped, she’d set her account to auto-follow, and when the notification came through a few minutes later, I was able to send a DM directly.

  “Thank god you’re OK. need to talk—Silas.”

  I threw the comforter back on the bed, put my head under the shower for a moment and started to get dressed. I had one sock on when it hit me: Clara had lied to the police.

  Twenty minutes of amnesia would have wiped out our entire conversation—she’d never have recalled seeing me at all. And yet she’d run the Akelman-Sills story, just like I’d asked.

  Maybe she’d lost memory of the attack, but she had to have remembered us talking.

  Could it have been her subconscious, working it out down in the lizard brain while the rest had shut off? Hardly likely. No. She knew exactly what she was doing.

  Protecting me, just as I had protected her.

  Damn, I was smiling again.

  I decided to get out and do some real investigating. Those assholes weren’t just whacking the Street’s best and brightest, they’d gone after an innocent. It was time to make them pay.

  And I was just the detective to do it.

  “You’re a detective like I’m a poodle groomer,” said Goldfinger, and laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, then hacking, and then a big goober into the wastebasket by his desk.

  All this time, I’d never known he had a room of his own—a utility space, off the parking garage. An “office,” he claimed, but it looked like he might have moved in. Shirts hanging from a wire along one wall, toothpaste tube sitting atop a half-empty case of water bottles, a couch I thought I remembered seeing at the curb a few weeks ago.

  No wonder he was never in the booth anymore.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know how you groom poodles.”

  “You can groom my poodle.”

  Et cetera. What can I say? Goldfinger had skills and access unavailable to the rest of the world—at least, the world outside legitimate law enforcement. I had to put up with him. And he wasn’t a terrible guy, if you could ignore the affect.

  His real name
was Ernie, but we called him Goldfinger on account of the absurd collection of rings on both hands. He said it was instead of brass knucks, so he could at any moment seriously damage someone in the face. Fourteen-carat knuckle dusters. That was all bullshit, he just liked the Gambino look, but what the hell.

  The pair of CZ .45s he kept under his jacket were more of the same.

  A car squealed down the ramp to the lower level, just outside the door. Fumes drifted in. No natural light penetrated this far, just the buzzy fluorescents.

  Last night, on my way home, I’d left the baton in a plastic bag tucked behind the dumpster at Amir’s. This morning the bag had still been there, wet but undisturbed. I had planned on finding a permanent disposition today, but now I had a better idea.

  “I need this printed,” I said, showing Goldfinger the baton inside the bag.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t reach out to take it.

  “And run through IAFIS.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “In the next thirty minutes or so.”

  “What? Get the fuck outta here.”

  “Come on. You’re the man. Help me out.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Ask for the fucking moon, why don’t ya?”

  And so forth. The dickering was going to take as long as the actual job, but that was Goldfinger for you. I noticed he’d installed his technical equipment on a table by the desk—hood, lighting, tool rack, dirty unlabeled jars.

  See, he hadn’t always been a parking clerk. Not long back he’d been a forensic technician—sorry, criminalist, he gets annoyed if you disrespect him like that—for the Manlius County sheriff’s office. Despite a personality that any normal person would find tedious at best, he apparently made plenty of friends among other forensi–criminalists throughout New York and, more important, the FBI. He’d be there still, despite an inclination to drink, except that Goldfinger was a really lousy drunk. Really lousy. Even your friends will overlook only so many D&Ds. Pissing all over the sheriff’s shiny new Interceptor one night was the last straw.

  For a while he’d done okay as an independent consultant—serving as an expert witness in criminal cases, with a nice sideline in freelance forensics. Here’s the thing: anybody can learn to take fingerprints or sample DNA. That’s the easy part. But to find a match, you need access to the databases, and those are firewalled, quite securely, by the Department of Justice.