I’m half expecting her to lead me directly into the bedroom, which makes me half wrong. Instead she actually makes me a cup of coffee; I may have been too convincing.
We sit in the kitchen and she asks me to update her on everything that has happened. I lay it all out: my visit to the prison to speak to Filion, and my confirmation that Jerry Bettis was the arresting officer.
“It’s not true,” she says. “There are some cops I would believe it of, but Jerry Bettis is not one of them. I know him very well; he’s a straight-up guy and a good cop.”
“Right after Filion implicated him, he was knifed in the yard. That’s a pretty big coincidence.”
“And that’s what it is, a coincidence.” Jessie does not easily abandon her friends.
“Well, here’s my problem. I have to prove it one way or the other, and my first try at that got me shot. I should probably take a different approach this time, which is made more difficult by not knowing what the hell I did last time.”
“Where was your phone after you talked to Filion the first time?” she asks. “Both later that day, and the next day.”
“I’m not sure. I have the list at home in my apartment. I need to get it.”
“You can go get it first thing tomorrow morning,” she says. “I’ll set the alarm.”
Tomorrow morning is an excellent idea.
The alarm wakes us at 6 A.M.
When Jessie said she was going to set it for first thing in the morning, I should have asked her what she meant by that. I think she may be more of a morning person than I am, because she has already showered and is getting dressed.
“Get your ass out of bed,” she says. I would have preferred “Good morning, honey, can I get you anything?”
I do as I’m told, shower quickly, and eat some pancakes she makes. They’re good, but I prefer chocolate chip. “What are you doing today?” I ask.
“The first thing I’m doing is going with you to get the phone records. Then we’ll decide after that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We go to my apartment to get the GPS records. I’ve long ago given up hope that they will magically provide the answer to my questions, and this time seems to continue the pattern. According to the locations that Jessie identified, I went from the prison to Centre Place in Newark.
“That’s the FBI building,” she says. “It’s where Dan Congers’s office is. He splits his time between there and our barracks.”
I nod. “That makes sense; he was Bettis’s partner. I could have gone to talk to him about what Filion said. Do we trust Congers?”
“We do,” Jessie says. “Let’s go.”
I call Congers and tell him I want to come down and talk to him. He seems less than thrilled with the idea, but agrees. Jessie and I head for Newark, but she agrees I should talk to Congers alone.
I’m brought right back to his office, and he closes the door behind us. I don’t know if he thinks we should have privacy, or he doesn’t want to be seen with me. Or both.
“You really need to let us handle this,” he says, even before I say why I am there.
“Handle what? You guys think this is over.”
“It’s never over,” he says. “What can I do for you?”
“I came to see you here last month,” I say, and I give him the date and time.
He seems surprised. “You got your memory back?”
“Let’s just say I know I was here. I want to know why.”
He seems to take some time to consider his words. “You wanted to talk to me about something.”
“I was hoping for more specific information than that,” I say.
He nods. “I know, but I’m not sure if I should give it to you. There’s nothing to be gained.”
“I’m going to find out eventually. I’d appreciate if you’d just make it easier. I’d like one goddamn thing to be easy.”
He considers this again, and finally says, “Okay, you came to talk to me about Jerry Bettis.”
“What about him?” I ask, although I basically know the answer.
“You thought he might be dealing with Bennett, that he might be on the take. You specifically referred to an arrest he made of one of Bennett’s soldiers. I don’t remember the guy’s name; you may not have even told it to me.”
“Do you know why I had these questions, or why I suspected Bettis?”
He shakes his head. “You didn’t say, and I didn’t really care.”
This makes me feel a bit better. If I didn’t tell Congers that I talked to Filion, then I wouldn’t have told it to anyone. I was clearly maintaining confidentiality, which decreases the chance that I did anything to cause Filion to be stabbed in the prison.
“What did you tell me?” I ask.
“I told you it was bullshit. And the reason I told you it was bullshit is because it was and is total bullshit.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
I see a quick flash of anger in Congers’s eyes. “Because I know Jerry Bettis. I know how he thinks, how he acts, what he does, and what he cares about. There is simply no chance that Jerry Bettis is dirty. I told you that last time, and I’m telling you that this time. Let’s make this the last time I have to tell you, okay?”
“Somebody tipped Bennett off the other night, in time for him to get rid of whatever it was that was snuck through customs.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he says. “But it wasn’t Jerry; I’d trust him with my life. You may not remember what he is about, but I do.”
This is his story and he’s clearly going to stick with it. Just before I leave, I ask if I could see the report that said Tony Gibbons, the pier operator, checked out fine.
“Actually, I had meant to ask you the same thing,” he said. “You indicated during that meeting that someone had reported him as clean.”
I nod. “I thought Homeland Security checked him out.”
He shakes his head. “Never happened. Who told you that?”
“Jerry Bettis.”
I leave. Let him chew on that for a while.
I go downstairs, where Jessie is waiting for me in the car. “What did he say?” is her logical first question.
“That Jerry is a prince among men, that he would never do anything illegal, and that there’s no chance he’s on Bennett’s payroll. He said he told me that last time as well.”
“Is that it?”
“No. He also said that the report on Tony Gibbons, the one Jerry quoted to me, never existed.”
“Those two statements seem to contain a contradiction,” she points out.
“Yes, they do,” I say. What I don’t have to say is that the contradiction represents still another indictment of Jerry Bettis.
After I left the FBI offices that day, I went to the state police barracks.
At least that’s what the GPS list says, and it hasn’t been wrong yet.
Of course, while the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location, in investigations that is only a piece of the puzzle. It takes care of the wheres, but doesn’t do anything for the whys, the whats, or the whos.
There is no way to know what I was doing at the barracks, and not even close to a guarantee that whatever I was doing had any significance to the matter at hand. The barracks is where I work, it’s where my office is. I could have been doing paperwork, or bullshitting with the guys, or any one of a number of things that I would normally do.
I doubt that I would have confronted Jerry Bettis that day. Even if I had conclusive evidence, which it doesn’t appear that I did, that would not have been the way to go. If I were to do anything in the barracks related to Bettis, it would likely have been to tell Captain Bradley my suspicions and my evidence.
But that would have triggered some reaction, and word would have gotten out. At the very least, Bradley would have had to conduct some kind of investigation, and there would have been repercussions to that. None of it could have been done totally in secret.
&nb
sp; Jessie and certainly Nate would have heard about it, and in fact I likely would have discussed the whole thing with Nate anyway. Yet he and Jessie have no knowledge of it. So it is very probable that I kept it to myself, waiting for additional confirmation, which I subsequently may or may not have gotten.
As far as Jessie knows, there have been no rumors about Bettis before or since, at least nothing that she has heard. Bettis has been promoted over the years, and is considered by everyone to be a fine cop.
I need to be careful how I go about this. For example, I’d sure like to know where Bettis was when I got shot, but I can’t go about interrogating him about it. I have to try and go through records and logs, but I can’t do that until Bradley lets me officially come back to work.
The problem is, I have the very strong feeling that there’s no time to wait.
Jessie has been going over the GPS phone records, and she says, “The day after you talked to Congers about Jerry Bettis, you went to New York City. Seems like you spent most of the day there.”
“I’ve retraced those steps; it was a complete waste of time.”
“Let’s do it again,” she says. “Maybe I’ll see something you missed.”
“You won’t. We’re just spinning our wheels.”
“Maybe you’re right. But it’s Manhattan; if things don’t work out we can take in a show.”
So we head for Manhattan, and after a couple of hours in the city, a show is starting to sound like a pretty good idea. Jessie sits in the front with the GPS records, and we start to cover the same ground I covered last time. Each address is just a place, be it an apartment building, a restaurant, a museum, whatever. There’s no consistency, no rhyme or reason.
The fifth address on the list is in the Diamond Exchange, and we’re almost there when Jessie notices something. “This is weird,” she says. “The GPS records for the day you were in the city are erratic. They track you for a while, and then stop. They go on and off a bunch of times, but never off for more than a few minutes.”
“So?”
“So I assumed that it was because of cell phone reception issues; you know, with all these high buildings maybe the signal gets blocked. But I’ve been checking my phone all day, and I’ve had a signal the whole time.”
“Maybe some days are different than others,” I say, no doubt demonstrating that I know very little about cell service. “Maybe the weather has something to do with it.”
“Pull in there,” she says, pointing toward a parking lot.
“Pull in there? It’s sixteen dollars for the first half hour.”
“Do it.”
I pull into the lot, which is self-parking. She directs me to take the ramp downward, watching her cell phone as we go. When we get to the third floor below street level, she tells me to stop. “He was parking in each building,” she says. “And you were following him.”
“That doesn’t exactly crack the case,” I say as something attracts my attention.
“No, it doesn’t. But it’s a piece of information. Maybe at some point all these pieces will fit.”
As we drive through, I notice it is much darker near the walls than in the center of the floor. When we get toward the end, I stop the car and open my door. As I’m getting out, I say, “Take my picture.”
“What?”
“I’m going to stand over there. When I do, take my picture.”
“Why?
“Please. Just do it,” I say.
“Okay. Roll down your window.”
“No. Through the window. Lean over to the driver’s seat and take the picture through the window.”
I get out and stand a few feet in front of the wall, where I might stand if I had parked my car there. Jessie snaps my picture, and I get back in the car. When I look at the photograph, it looks like a slightly blurry nighttime shot. I can see myself, but everything else is mostly black.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“We just got another piece of information. I think this might be where I took Gharsi’s picture, the one I e-mailed to Nate. Now we have to figure out if the location means anything.”
“How do we do that?”
“Well, for one thing, we’re not going to get to see a show.”
We have to put the entire day on rewind.
It means retracing all the Manhattan stops that the GPS led me to, but it has to be done, because now I have something specific to look for.
“What might that be?” Jessie asks.
“Well, we think we’ve learned a few things, which seem to fit together. One, that my photograph of Gharsi might well have been taken in a parking garage. Two, that if you get low enough in a garage, you lose cell service.”
“I hope you’ve got more than that.”
“I think I do, but I’ll ask it as a question. If those two things are true, why would Gharsi go to a dozen buildings and park his car for five minutes in each one?”
I can almost see the light come on in her eyes. “Because it’s the parking lot he was going to, not the building.”
“Bingo.” Then, “Do people still play bingo?”
“I think on cruise ships.”
By the time we’re halfway through the process of checking out all the addresses, my hunch is proving to be exactly right. There are underground garages to each of the buildings, and just as importantly, they are all self-parking. Gharsi would not have had to just give his car to an attendant on the street level; he could have driven down there himself.
That proves to be true of all the locations. There are only three that are dark enough down there to have been the scene of the picture-taking, but I don’t think it matters which lot I took it in. I think the fact is that the lot and buildings are interchangeable.
They are all targets.
We head for home, and on the way we discuss what we’re going to do with what we’ve learned. “We’re going to have a tough time selling this,” I say.
She nods. “Especially after the search fiasco at the used car place.”
“Right, but it’s more than that. Playing devil’s advocate, all we really know is that all the addresses I visited one day have parking lots. We can’t be sure I was following Gharsi; I could have been sightseeing in the city. And we can’t even be sure we have the exact addresses; you yourself said the GPS info isn’t necessarily exact. And parking lots in Manhattan are not exactly a rarity.”
“You kept losing cell service; it had to be because of the parking lots.”
“Maybe, but again, that only speaks to whether I was there. It has nothing to do with Gharsi.”
“We do have the picture of him,” she says.
“Which we only think was taken in a parking lot, because we believe all the other stuff, and that fits in. But there’s nothing to identify the parking lot in the photograph; it’s just dark.”
“I know we’re right,” she says. “So where do we go with this?”
It’s a question I’ve been thinking about since we developed our theory. It’s definitely a matter for Homeland Security and the task force, and Congers did say he thought I was right about the used car lot. However, his boss, Metcalf, made it very clear how annoyed he was at the waste of time and resources that he felt I caused.
“I have more credibility with Bradley than with Homeland Security,” I say. “Though not by much.”
“And proper procedure would be to go through Bradley.”
“I have a tough time giving a shit about proper procedure,” I say.
“You never did. And then there is the issue with Jerry Bettis.”
I nod. “I know. That complicates it.”
We finally decide that I will talk to Bradley. That way I have two shots at the apple: if I’m not satisfied with his reaction and don’t think he’s taking it seriously, I still have the option of going to Congers with it.
Jessie wants to be in the meeting, but I talk her out of it. There just isn’t any reason to involve her yet, and I don’t want to jeopardize
her career. I’m perfectly capable of conveying the information; having her there with me is not going to change the dynamic or the ultimate outcome.
I drop her off at home, and head down to the barracks to see Bradley. He’s in a meeting, but I tell his assistant to get word to him that I have to see him on a critical matter. The message back is that he’ll be able to see me in twenty minutes.
I wait outside his office, and Jerry Bettis sees me sitting there. He comes over, smiling and inquiring how I’m feeling. I tell him that I’m fine, that everything is good, and I leave out the part about my believing he is conspiring with criminals and terrorists.
When I finally get in to meet with Bradley, he opens the conversation with, “What kind of bullshit are you peddling today?”
As opening lines go, that is not a promising one, and it has the added negative effect of pissing me off. “Captain, I’m coming to you with something important because they tell me that I respect you. I don’t remember respecting you, and at this point I’m having trouble figuring out why I would. So if you don’t want to hear this, then just say the word, and I’m out of here.”
“You report to me,” he says.
“If that’s what’s causing the communication problem, then I’ll quit. Is that what’s necessary for you to hear this?”
He hesitates for a few moments, probably deciding if he wants to escalate the fight, or just hear whatever the hell I have to say. “What have you got?”
“First I’ve got a ground rule. When you hear this, you’ve got two choices. One, you can think it’s bullshit, tell me so, and do nothing with it. Two, you can think it’s important, and go to Congers and Homeland Security. Either way, you cannot tell anyone else, inside or outside your department.”
“You think there’s someone dirty in this building?”
“When I’m ready to go there, you’ll know it. For now, you just need to agree or not.”
“You’re a pain in the ass,” he says.
“I am keenly aware of that. Now make up your mind.”
“Okay … this better be good. Tell me the damn thing already.”
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