Two Women

by Brian Freemantle

  The telephone bank was open pods but there was no one else in the line. It had to be her own name for the collect call but the operator gave no audible reaction to it, although there was from the switchboard girl who immediately accepted at the Northcote building on Wall Street.

  ‘Is that you, Mrs Carver?’

  ‘Get me Geoff Davis, right away,’ said Jane. ‘It’s me and I’m OK.’

  ‘Where are you?’ demanded the Northcote lawyer. ‘What’s happening? The FBI …’

  ‘Be quiet. Just listen,’ halted Jane. ‘Listen, OK?’ There was still no other caller anywhere along the line of telephones.

  Jane talked as quickly as she could while remaining comprehensible. She insisted she was physically all right and gave Davis the name of the town and said she was going to book into a Marriott and wait for him: she’d call with the address within fifteen minutes. He and Burt Elliott were to get to her as fast as possible. Hilda Bennett had the name of a helicopter company.

  ‘The FBI are here,’ declared Davis, when Jane finally stopped, breathless.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Someone’s coming, about some companies your father handled.’

  ‘Don’t co-operate, not yet!’

  ‘Jane. I don’t have a choice!’

  ‘We’ve got to talk first. The firm could be in trouble.’

  ‘All right,’ the lawyer placated her, emptily. ‘I’ll come to get you. Call me, from the Marriott. Where’s Alice Belling?’

  ‘Not with me any more. Let’s stop talking and get moving. I want you and Burt here, now!’

  Jane retraced her steps to leave by the same door through which she’d entered. She was still in the approach corridor when she saw the police car, its lamp bar still flashing, blocking the Volkswagen in its space, the Highway Patrol car doubling the barricade. As she watched, two more police cars, their lights flashing too, swept into the lot.

  Jane hurried back inside, but at once cut left for the next exit, guessing the reinforcements were to close the store: search it, certainly. She emerged directly out on to the street, without being stopped, without seeing a policeman even, although she could hear a far-away siren. Jane kept walking, using the crossing further to distance herself from the car park before turning to go back towards the junction where she’d first seen the policemen, who had obviously seen her – or rather the Volkswagen and its plate number – after all. The Marriott could only be 50 yards after she took a right at the junction.

  The dark-suited man seemed to come out of the rear of the Mercedes with the same movement of the door opening, completely blocking her path. The blow, low in her stomach, was not hard but professionally expert, winding her, preventing any protesting shout and doubling her up at the same time, so that she was easily thrust into the car with the man tight behind, virtually lifting her. The Mercedes was at the lights before Jane could straighten.

  Tony Caputo, the Cavalcante consigliere, looked back from the front seat and said: ‘If you try to scream now you’ve got your breath back we’ll cut off your tongue, Mrs Carver. Not completely, just about half an inch from its tip. You’ll still be able to speak but you’ll sound like a retard. You’re not going to scream, are you, Mrs Carver?’

  ‘No,’ said Jane.

  ‘He won’t show,’ declared Barbara Donnelly. ‘We all know he won’t show. He shows, he’s pussy-face of this or any other year. And I didn’t think we were dealing with pussies.’

  Hanlan hadn’t heard pussy-face before. He liked it. He said: ‘We gotta go with it, everything as planned. It’s all we’ve got.’

  They were in the CCTV viewing room of the Northcote building, the FBI installations doubling the number of cameras and monitors. The lobby reception staff were doubled too, the additions all police. The elevators were staffed, which they weren’t normally, both with FBI agents. There were FBI and police in every office on the floor on which the nervously waiting Geoffrey Davis had his office.

  With philosophical acceptance, Hanlan said: ‘OK, what’s our recovery going to be?’

  ‘What makes you think there’s going to be one?’

  ‘Thanks for that great encouragement!’

  ‘Tell lies, spread lies,’ suggested the woman. ‘Lure them out of their dark places.’

  ‘My people will never go with it,’ rejected Hanlan. ‘Their escape is entrapment.’

  ‘My people will,’ insisted Barbara, who’d lit a cigarette without protest. ‘The prosecution’s yours, federal. NYPD isn’t federal. You don’t entrap anyone. You even say you don’t. Your spokesperson says you’ve no idea what the claim is all about.’

  ‘That puts us not co-operating.’

  ‘We don’t, most times. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘So what’s your entrapment?’

  ‘Defection, from a major New York Family. That’s using the Daily News invention. The investigation’s concentrated on certain specified companies. Which it is. They won’t know who the defector is but mentioning companies will convince them there is one. We don’t get some playback whispers, life ain’t fair.’

  ‘It was your leak, to the Daily News,’ accused Hanlan.

  ‘I could be offended by a question like that.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘It could rattle the cages.’

  ‘We got two women out there, one miscalculation and they’re dead.’

  ‘Big-time advantage of the idea,’ argued Barbara. ‘Our Family – or Families – think there’s an internal source, it deflects the attention from Jane and Alice. Diffuses it, too. Maybe even redirects resources, although I think that’s being optimistic.’

  ‘You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?’ It was better than anything that had occurred to him since the two women had run.

  ‘Talking as the ideas come to me,’ insisted Barbara Donnelly, straight-faced.

  They both turned, as the door burst open. Davis said: ‘I’ve just spoken to Jane: I know where she is!’

  Before anyone could speak the telephone rang and the lawyer said: ‘That’ll be her, with the address of her hotel!’

  But it wasn’t.

  When Hanlan took the call from Federal Plaza, Ginette Smallwood said: ‘Alice Belling’s just walked in. Says she’s got things for us.’

  Charlie Petrie’s first call to the Algonquin was just after nine, directly after hearing from Caputo that their Highway Patrol source had come good with the location of the Volkswagen and that they’d picked up Jane Carver and were on their way into Manhattan. There was no way that Stanley Burcher would have already left for his meeting with the Northcote lawyer that early. Petrie kept calling, every five minutes, right up to ten o’clock, finally slamming the receiver down and saying aloud: ‘Where the fuck are you, Stanley?’

  At that precise moment, in fact, Stanley Burcher was getting off the early New York shuttle to Washington’s Reagan airport, hurrying directly for a cab for Dulles airport and his already booked flight to Geneva. He believed it to have been an elementary precaution to make his escape with such a dog’s-leg detour, just in case Petrie suspected he was running and rushed people out to New York’s Kennedy terminals to intercept him. It was, of course, unlikely because another precaution had been to leave the Algonquin without paying his bill, so that callers would be told he was still a resident there.

  Burcher had always been a man to take elementary precautions, which was why his recent and direct involvement in the Northcote business had been so unsettling. It had been an elementary precaution years before to obtain a legitimate Caymanian passport in the anonymous name of William Smith, the identity he was now adopting and in which his flight to Switzerland was booked. Another had been, even earlier, to open a numbered bank account in Geneva and regularly transfer his Mafia fees into it, from his equally untraceable Grand Cayman account.

  Burcher was sure he was going to enjoy his Swiss retirement. The Swiss understood the attraction – and the benefits – of anonymity.

  Twenty-Eight


  ‘Where is she, Alice? Where’s Jane?’ demanded Hanlan.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Alice, you’re in more trouble than you can shake a stick at, working from kidnapping down,’ took up Barbara Donnelly. She’d come back to Federal Plaza with Hanlan, leaving their squads in place, after waiting forty-five minutes beyond the given time for Geoffrey Davis’s unappearing mystery visitor and for Jane Carver’s promised second call, which never came. Throughout that time Hanlan had remained constantly on the telephone from the Northcote building, confirming the finding of the Volkswagen – but not of Jane – at Morristown and moving McKinnon’s squad there from West Milford. He sent with them the FBI forensics team, which had completed their examination of the cabin. Despite its trashing, they’d found nothing.

  ‘I told you, we split up this morning at the motel. She said she wasn’t seeing the FBI without her lawyers with her and drove off the way we’d come.’ Alice was confused by their combined aggression, which started with Hanlan pedantically advising her of her Miranda rights against self-incrimination.

  Hanlan acknowledged that fitted with what he’d been told by both Davis and Burt Elliott, to whom he’d also spoken from the Northcote building. The way you came from West Milford doesn’t go through Morristown, which was where your car was found.’

  Alice shook her head. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I want to tell you what I do know.’

  ‘Finding Jane Carver’s the priority,’ said Barbara.

  ‘Find her lawyers. It’s Geoffrey Davis at the firm. There’s another named Burt: I don’t know his surname. She spoke to both from the motel.’

  ‘She spoke to Davis from Morristown, too,’ said Hanlan.

  ‘I don’t know how she got there. What she was doing there?’

  ‘How about you took her there?’ challenged Barbara.

  ‘We split up. She took the car.’

  ‘Why’d you run from the cabin?’

  ‘Jane tricked me into running her into town. Persuaded me into letting her drive back but then took off …’ She hesitated. It was all going to come out so there was no point in avoiding it. ‘She wanted me to tell her about John and I. About what I knew about the firm and the Mafia. I’d told her bits but tried to keep some back. It didn’t make sense, I guess.’ Was she making any better sense now? It didn’t seem like it, from the attitude of these two in the cramped interview room with the tape machine with its blinking light, recording everything. ‘Please!’ she said, urgently. ‘Let me tell you what it’s about.’

  Hanlan looked at Barbara, in whose Manhattan jurisdiction the kidnap had occurred, even though it was ultimately a federal crime. She shrugged. He said to Alice: ‘OK, from the beginning.’

  Which was how Alice told it, from her first visit to Wall Street to interview George Northcote. She held nothing back about her affair with Carver, even repeating, to Barbara Donnelly’s visible scepticism, that she was never a threat to the Carver marriage. Alice expected some interjections when she began talking of John’s initial discovery of Northcote’s organized-crime connection and of Northcote’s insistence that he could extricate himself, but none came.

  ‘And then I got involved,’ declared Alice and stopped. No way back, if she continued talking. It was commitment time and she didn’t have a lawyer to advise her and she’d been read her Miranda rights, making what she said admissible in court or before a Grand Jury and from this moment on she’d be at the mercy of these unsympathetic investigators if she said anything more, or at the mercy of gangsters who didn’t know mercy if she said anything less.

  ‘Go on,’ encouraged Hanlan.

  ‘I found out how it worked,’ insisted Alice. ‘I did it illegally and I know I’ve committed criminal offences – technically kidnap, even, although it wasn’t – but everything I did was to understand and try to sort out what happened to George and Janice and then to John. I want to co-operate in every way and I want to be taken into the Witness Protection Programme because if I’m not I know, as you know, that I’ll be killed.’

  ‘Let’s hear the story and then we’ll talk about witness protection,’ said Hanlan. She’d jerked him around, made him look ridiculous, and he didn’t intend offering anything until he was as positive as it was possible to be that she wasn’t holding out on him, not by so much as a single crumb.

  Alice eased the canvas bag up from her lap and tentatively put it on the desk between them. Initially unspeaking she unpacked all the duplicate printouts she’d assembled at the cabin with her hurriedly replaced laptop. As Hanlan and the New York detective frowned down at the jumble, Alice announced: ‘IRS records that show how the Mafia laundered their money over a very long time.’

  ‘Obtained how?’ pounced Hanlan, determined against any more embarrassing foul-ups.’

  ‘Hacking,’ admitted Alice, at once.

  ‘Legally inadmissible,’ rejected Hanlan. ‘An illegal act, which hacking is, does not provide acceptable evidence of the further illegal act it exposes.’

  ‘I know that! John and I knew that: discussed it! I’m showing you how it was done and how, properly and officially, you or your financial experts – I don’t know who, for fuck’s sake – can work with the IRS and the company registry authorities and get exactly what I got but in a way that is admissible!’ She shouldn’t have said fuck. She shouldn’t have come here like this, to be confronted hostilely like this, without lawyers telling her what to say and what not to say. It irritated her that Jane had been right and she had been wrong. Jane hadn’t been right, Alice decided at once. She’d kept the baby – hers and John’s baby – safe and Jane was missing. With her own and John’s baby.

  She wouldn’t tell them about England, Alice decided. They weren’t impressed by – weren’t accepting – what she was offering. Admitting any involvement whatsoever in bomb-outrage murder would get her publicly charged and publicly exposed. A target, even if she were in custody, which was never an obstacle to the Mafia, before she could appear before a court to get any sort of public, protective stage.

  ‘Tell me something I can legally use,’ insisted Hanlan.

  ‘The names of the companies through which the laundering worked, worldwide,’ snatched Alice, feeling a flicker of relieved hope. ‘I didn’t get them by hacking.’

  ‘Neither did we,’ said Hanlan. ‘We got them from John’s severance letters. The Bureau’s finance and fraud division have been working on them for almost two days now.’

  ‘They’re offshore, you can’t get to them!’ insisted Alice. ‘The IRS route, through their supply-chain subsidiaries, is the only way. And you wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t shown you!’

  Hanlan knew she was right. Was aware, too, of Barbara Donnelly’s shifts of impatience at what he guessed to be irritation at his persistent obduracy. ‘What’s in Carver’s safe deposit?’

  Alice patted the printouts between them. ‘A much larger selection of these, showing the worldwide spread of the system: Europe, the Far East. And original stuff that George Northcote kept back. And a tape recording of John talking to a mob lawyer who wanted it all back.’

  ‘Which mob?’ came in Barbara. ‘Give us names!’

  ‘I don’t have any names,’ admitted Alice. ‘John started to hold back, thinking that the more I knew the greater danger I would be in.’

  ‘But there are names in the safe deposit?’ persisted the detective lieutenant.

  ‘Yes,’ guessed Alice. She had the right to a lawyer. It didn’t matter that she’d waived her Miranda rights by agreeing to talk on the record. She had to have an attorney to negotiate for her, get her the protection she deserved. And without which she – and John’s baby – would die. ‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer.’

  ‘What more have you got to say?’ asked Hanlan.

  ‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer,’ doggedly repeated Alice. She hesitated, looking at the recording apparatus. ‘Except that I think you’re a bastard s
on of a bitch!’

  As Ginette Smallwood led Alice away to another room, to make her lawyer’s call in private, Barbara Donnelly said: ‘I agree with her. You’re a bastard son of a bitch. She’s shown you the way, legal or not. And you know damned well the Bureau and the IRS will take it.’

  Hanlan said: ‘Do you think we got it all?’

  ‘We got enough.’

  ‘I want it all.’ It was, Hanlan thought, about time.

  It was the courtesy that frightened Jane Carver the most. The threat to cut off part of her tongue, which she hadn’t the slightest doubt the man had meant, had been made politely and during what little conversation there’d been during the journey the one who did the talking had always addressed her as Mrs Carver. The two men sitting either side of her in the rear of the car did so without crowding her and the one who’d winded her had apologized. Unasked, the man in the front had said she was being taken to meet someone who would tell her what they wanted and that if she co-operated there wouldn’t be what he called unpleasantness. No one wanted unpleasantness.

  Jane could see the Manhattan skyline and the Hudson river from the top-floor window of the warehouse office in which they’d locked her, thirty minutes before. It was bare, clearly unused – a blank desk without a telephone, three upright chairs and a cabinet – but there was an adjoining toilet, for which she was grateful. Having sat for so long, she was ignoring the chairs, standing at the window gazing down at the car park. There were a lot of lorries bearing the BHYF logo.

  What was she going to do? Co-operate, obviously. Tell them whatever they wanted to know, but she didn’t know anything more than Alice had told her. Would they hurt her? Do something like maiming her, if they asked something she couldn’t answer? Of course they would. It had to be the safe deposit. If they …