The Butcher's Boy bb-1

by Thomas Perry

  He started walking again. The man in the gray suit walked too, moving parallel with him across the street. So that was the way it would be. The man in the gray suit had intended to let himself be seen. He was herding him somewhere; it must be to a place where a second man waited in ambush.

  He considered the situation. Something up ahead was a trap. The man in gray was herding him forward. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but he knew that there would be somebody following at a distance to keep him from turning around if he recognized the tactic. If he went into a store, so much the better for them. They’d have time to prepare for him while he waited for an advantage that would never come. He knew the strategy, but it had a flaw. It depended upon the victim’s natural inclination to wait while his chances slipped away. The ones who were following him, guiding him toward the pocket, would converge on him until it was too late for him to move, because any one of them was close enough to kill him. So he had to move now.

  He watched the cars gliding past in the street. A taxi would be perfect, but his luck didn’t seem to be running today. Still, it had to be that way, a jump that would put him outside the triangle that was closing on him. Then he’d have a chance. He stopped at the next light and waited. The light changed and all the other people crossed the street, but still he waited. The man in the gray suit was stopped across the street from him, and he knew whoever was behind him would be coming up fast.

  The light changed again and the first car across was a Volkswagen. He waited for the station wagon behind it, then made his move. He ran forward and flopped onto the long, flat roof just as the car began to move. The driver seemed to know that something had happened, because he started to brake, but then horns sounded behind him, so he speeded up again. The horns were louder now, because the other drivers were alarmed. Then it must have occurred to the driver of the station wagon that he’d hit something. He pulled over to the curb, opened his door, and got out, but what he saw made no sense. A man was running away, carrying something—a briefcase, maybe. But he wasn’t concerned about that so much as he was about whatever he’d hit. He started the long walk back up the street to the light. Jesus Christ, he thought when he saw the two men running down the street toward him. It must have been bad. He just hoped to God it wasn’t a kid or a doctor. If you ran over a kid or a doctor they made you pay for the rest of your life. When the two men sprinted past him at full speed he felt a giddy relief. Then he thought, Oh, God, don’t let it be a pregnant woman. Even a doctor would be better than that.

  26

  The afternoon had been exhausting. For once it wasn’t that they didn’t know anything. They had too much information from too many sources. It was too complicated to be coherent. It was just as Brayer had said. “We’re not looking at some gang fight. We’re looking at a disruption in one of America’s biggest industries. We don’t even know what the hell to look at. Ferraro gets killed in a gift shop. Castiglione at his house. A guy named Crawley gets it in a Holiday Inn near Chicago—Christ, we don’t even know what he was or who he worked for. But there was a booby trap in the shower of the room where he was killed—wired to electrocute whoever used it. The killing is what we’re seeing. But how do we know that what we ought to be looking at isn’t that one day the ice cream doesn’t get delivered to a baseball game in Cleveland, or a chain of shoe stores in Massachusetts goes bankrupt because the banks won’t give the company a loan?”

  Brayer was right. It was ridiculous. The Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department was—what? three hundred people? And there was no way even to sort out the information that was coming in now from every agency whose jurisdiction included some avatar of the Mafia. Because that was everybody.

  Elizabeth walked across the casino toward the corridor with its waiting elevators. When she opened the door to her room, she managed to stifle the scream before it got out, but not the jolt of adrenalin that seemed to pump into her veins. She could feel her temples throbbing as she said, “What are you doing here?”

  Grove was the one who spoke. He said quietly, “Please come in and close the door.”

  Elizabeth came in but didn’t put down her purse. She remained standing. “What are you doing in my room? Searching my luggage?”

  “Oh, no, Miss Waring. You’re in the clear. Completely. We’re here for another reason.” It was Daly who spoke.

  Then Grove again, “We’re here because there’s a tap on your telephone. We’ve had a team in here half the day looking for bugs, but all they had was a remote on your line.”

  Elizabeth sat down in the chair beside the desk. “So you’ve found the problem.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. She was relieved. They were here to tell her she wasn’t under suspicion anymore. For a moment she almost felt grateful, but then it didn’t seem appropriate. “You’ve taken care of it?”

  “Yes,” said Daly, “we’ve detected the tap. But it isn’t feasible to remove it. We don’t know where it is, and we can’t take it off without compromising other …” he paused, searching for the right word, “sensitive parts of the investigation.”

  “So what do I do?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Nothing you wouldn’t do otherwise,” said Grove. He looked at his watch, then said to Daly, “It’s almost six fifteen.”

  Daly said, “Miss Waring, in a minute your telephone will ring. Just answer it and say the things you would normally say. But don’t ask for more information than you’re given, and don’t volunteer anything.”

  Elizabeth said, “All right. Who is it, though?”

  “It’ll be Mr. Connors,” said Grove. The telephone rang and Elizabeth jumped. It was too quick.

  “Answer it,” said Grove.

  Elizabeth obeyed. “Hello?”

  “Agent Waring?” came a female voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Please hold for Mr. Connors.”

  Connors came on immediately, and the secretary was gone. Elizabeth had the sensation that there were numberless people listening to him as he spoke. Her mind ticked off the ones she knew of. The secretary, Daly, Grove, a team of technicians trying to follow some electronic signal that could tell them where in the circuitry an extra milliohm of resistance occurred. And the wiretappers themselves. She couldn’t picture them, of all the invisible listeners. There was no face, no idea what it would look like—there was just the sense that there was a person, an intelligence waiting between her and Connors, not breathing or moving, not necessarily even capable of breath or movement. Maybe it was just a tape recorder. Connors said, “Miss Waring?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ve found the leak in the operation.”

  What was he saying? Was he telling the wiretappers that Internal Security had found the tap? Why? “Really?” was all she could say. And why was he telling her?

  “That’s right. And I’m positive he’ll tell us everything he knows. We’ve finally got the break we needed.”

  He? A person? She said, “That’s great, Mr. Connors.” She wasn’t sure how enthusiastic to be, so she tried to modulate her tone to imitate his.

  “We’ve got it set up so he’ll have to talk. Immunity from prosecution, money, resettlement. If he doesn’t talk we’ve got enough to charge him. So the problem turned out to be a bonus.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Elizabeth. She almost asked him what he wanted her to do next, but she remembered that Daly had told her not to ask questions. She said, “Thank you for letting me know.”

  Connors said, “Quite all right, Miss Waring. You can go on with the investigation from your end, and we’ll handle the rest from here. Good-bye.” He hung up.

  Elizabeth put down the receiver. “Do you think that was long enough?” she asked Daly.

  Daly was standing up and beginning to move toward the door. “That was fine, Miss Waring,” he said. He seemed to be speaking to the carpet.

  “But I always heard it took a long time to find a tap—ten or twenty minutes,” she said.

  Gr
ove and Daly were moving toward the door, but she stepped in front of them. “Wait,” she said. It couldn’t be the way it looked, but what else could it be? And if it wasn’t, what was all that nonsense about finding a leak? She said, “Tell me what just went on here. They weren’t looking for the tap at all, were they? It was something else.”

  Grove’s face remained impassive. “That’s right. We’re leaving the tap in place.”

  Elizabeth’s heart was pounding, and she could feel her temples beginning to throb again. She understood, but she was going to make them say it. “So that’s it,” she said.

  Daly’s eyes fluttered to her face and then back to the carpet. “It was necessary,” he said. “There is a leak, we’re sure of it.”

  “So you decided to set him up?”

  “That’s right,” said Grove. “You did a good job. Now we’ve got to leave here and get on with our work. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  “But you know what you did. They’ll kill whoever it is.”

  Grove nodded. “Maybe they will. Judging from the rest of the case, they’ll probably try, anyway. Good night.”

  She said, “But that’s—”

  Grove interrupted, his voice suddenly harsh. “Who do you think that was on the other end of the line, lady? It was Connors. He authorized it, he made the call himself. So forget it. You’ve done your part. Thanks to you the leak has been neutralized.”

  “You—we—just made sure somebody in Justice would be murdered,” she said. “Maybe somebody in my office. And he won’t even have any warning because there wasn’t any real investigation. Nobody was even accused of anything.”

  Grove’s face didn’t change. He said, “What do you think this is, anyway? Do you think it’s a game? Whoever it is was doing the same thing to you. Ever think of that? And if we got lucky and caught the bastard he was dead already. In jail or out of it his friends would have gotten him.” He stopped, and seemed to remember something. “And by the way, don’t stop using that telephone. Just remember not to say anything you don’t want them to hear.”

  Elizabeth sat down on the bed and watched them leave. She tried to decide what she felt. Then she identified it. She knew that a shower wouldn’t wash it off, but she also knew that the shower was waiting for her in the next room and absolution was not.

  “WE’VE FINALLY GOT SOMETHING on Edgar Fieldston,” said Brayer. “The SEC called a few minutes ago, and they think they’ve gotten a glimpse of his coattails.” He was smiling, but it wasn’t his enthusiastic smile. Elizabeth waited for the rest of it.

  “Yesterday a loan was approved at the United Free Bank of the Bahamas to an Edgar Fieldston—four million dollars’ worth.”

  “What was the collateral?”

  “A portfolio of stocks. A lot of blue-chip stuff to sweeten the deal: IBM, Commsat, Xerox, ITT, but the main part was FGE stock. Almost five million dollars’ worth, if you take it on today’s market.”

  “How did the SEC get wind of it? The Bahamas aren’t subject to our reporting regulations, are they?”

  “No, but the United Free Bank wasn’t up to the transaction. They had to get in touch with First National in Miami. You see, the deal was for cash.”

  “Oh, God,” said Elizabeth.

  But Brayer continued. “Even that wouldn’t have done it, because bank-to-bank transactions aren’t subject to reporting regulations. But First National couldn’t spare that much cash, so they got in touch with the Federal Reserve Board. Federal Reserve likes to keep an eye on deals involving banks in the Bahamas, because some of them exist mainly for the purpose of moving dirty money. When they learned about the collateral they got in touch with the SEC to see if somebody happened to notice that he’d misplaced some stock certificates. The SEC didn’t pick it up until it was too late. The stock wasn’t stolen, and Fieldston owned it, so—”

  “So he’s wandering around in the Caribbean,” said Elizabeth, “with four million dollars in cash. At least he’s alive.”

  “Maybe,” said Brayer. “If he is, I’d say he doesn’t intend to come back. If the FGE stock collapses, as I expect it will when we’re through investigating their operations, he’s just picked up four million dollars for about two hundred thousand in legitimate stocks and a whole lot of worthless paper.”

  “But there’s another possibility?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Yes, I’ll admit he could be on his way to someplace like Paraguay or Costa Rica or Haiti, where he can’t be extradited and can live like a king on his ‘loan.’ But it’s more likely he was getting the Mafia’s investment out of the company.”

  “If that’s true, what then?”

  “Then it may not even be the real Edgar Fieldston the bank gave the loan to. In any case, he’s not likely to run off until he’s paid whoever’s behind him. They’re not interested in niceties like extradition. All we know for sure is that somebody is liquidating the assets of FGE.”

  “So what’s being done?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Oh, the obvious things. There’s a list of the serial numbers the Federal Reserve Board turned over to First National. It may turn up in interesting places, but probably it’s already been laundered. The American consulates are alerted for Fieldston’s passport. But I don’t know what we can expect from any of it. With four million dollars he can go pretty deep, if he’s alive and on his own. If he’s not, the possibilities are endless. We’ll never hear of him or the money again.”

  “So what you’re saying is that we’re up against another dead end,” said Elizabeth.

  Brayer shrugged. “Maybe, but maybe we’ll get lucky. The main thing is to keep on it. I’d say that as of yesterday Fieldston Growth Enterprises ceased to be a functioning entity. But that might be a break for us, if we can figure out who’s carving up the carcass.”

  HE LEFT THE OFFICE and Elizabeth tried to return to the reports. The piles of information were getting bigger now. In another week it would be the size of a set of encyclopedias, and there would be nothing to show for it except paper. How many murders so far? A dozen? She began to leaf through the summaries, counting. Thirteen positive, and two more probable if you counted the two blood types found on the pavement in front of the Tropicana. And they still seemed no closer to an indictment than they’d been when Veasy the machinist blew up. And that too, she thought—the union. Veasy was dead, and the union’s pension fund was somewhere in South America by now, maybe working its way northward through a dozen metamorphoses to become a certificate of deposit in some Caporegima’s Swiss bank account. Even if the Justice Department knew about it, the laundering would be so complete they’d never be able to prove it. At least then they’d know whom to watch—but so what? By that time what they were watching for would already have happened. It was worse than hopeless. All they could do was keep score and try to figure out what was next, always hoping an agent might be on the scene when the hit men arrived. Only this time she knew where it would be, and there would be an agent on the scene. Because she had helped put him in front of the guns. If thine eye offend thee pluck it out.

  27

  Just before the five-o’clock rush reached its peak, a businessman carrying a briefcase walked out of the big Romanesque central post office in Peoria, Illinois. There wasn’t anything about him to distinguish him from the surrounding crowds of people, except that he seemed to walk a bit more slowly than some of them. Only the most perceptive of observers would have said he had a slight limp. But they would not have had the time to feel sorry about the limp, because as he reached the bottom of the broad granite steps, a young woman pulled up at the loading zone in a small blue Datsun and opened the passenger door for him. He got in, set his briefcase on his lap, and smiled at her as they drove away. He didn’t kiss her, but that wouldn’t have seemed unusual, because there wasn’t time. She was already off to make room for others at the loading zone, and a moment later the Datsun had disappeared in the traffic.

  “Maureen,” he said, “that was very good.”

>   “I knew if you wanted to meet me it would have to be at the post office,” said Maureen.

  “Is the car safe?” he asked.

  “Sure. It’s rented. I wanted to spend my last few hours on this job in relative ease.” She glanced over at him, as though she expected him to say something unpleasant.

  He said, “Again, very good. We just aren’t going to make it together.” He took a package out of his coat and placed it in her purse on the seat. “You don’t have to waste time counting it,” he said. “It’s all there—fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Fifty?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll get you on a plane tonight, but first there are a few things I want you to get me. I’d better make a list.”

  HE WATCHED THE LIGHTS of the plane as it lifted into the dark sky and diminished to a pair of tiny blinking spots. The problem with airplanes was that they only looked that way—they were built in the shape of the prototypical image of untrammeled movement and freedom. But an airplane was only part of a complex of tubular corridors that moved you from one broad and brightly lighted lobby to another. There were no cutouts, no places to hide, no ways of modifying the predictability of their movement. A telephone call from one end meant that when you walked down the last tube at the other end there would be something waiting for you: maybe a quiet man who was carrying a box that looked like a present for grandma. But Maureen would be all right. They would have no idea who she was or where she’d come from, and they’d have to spot him again before they knew she was gone. He envied her. She was out of it.

  He started the car and drove out of the airport parking lot. It was going to be a long trip, he decided, but the solitude and the darkness would give him time to think about what he was going to do. There was no question about his destination. The one thing he’d been sure of was that he could never go to Las Vegas again, but that had been before he’d realized how things were. They weren’t going to forget about him. They had already devoted too much time and effort to finding him to let him sink out of sight into a comfortable retirement.