A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  Ike opened his eyes. He was at home, in his own bed. Remembering and feeling it was an immense pleasure. But then he saw movement near the far wall and realized the woman’s voice had been real.

  “Hi, Ike,” she said, and stepped to the foot of his bed. She was wearing the mask, scrubs, and cap that hid her hair so well he didn’t even know the color of it.

  “How did you get here? They’re not supposed to give anybody a state police officer’s home address.”

  “Don’t be angry. I won’t be coming again. I just needed to—”

  “How did you get my address?” he said.

  “When I visited you in the hospital I saw it in your file on the admission papers. I went to the hospital a while ago and learned you had been sent home, so I parked near here and waited until I saw your wife drive away. I figured that in my scrubs, anyone who saw me would figure I was a nurse checking on you, so I will. How are you feeling?”

  His voice was irritable. “Have you ever been shot?”

  “I’m sorry to say I have,” she said. “In the leg, just like you.”

  “When?”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “You’ll try to use that to find my name.”

  “Is anything you’ve said to me true?”

  “All of it.”

  “Are you even real?”

  “If I weren’t, I’d probably say I was. That’s how dreams work. But I’m here on business.”

  “What business?”

  “I want you to look at some pictures I took and tell me if you know these men.” She reached into the pocket of her scrubs, held out her cell phone where he could see it, and tapped the first picture to make it fill the screen. “That’s the storage facility where Nick Bauermeister worked.”

  “I recognize it,” said Lloyd.

  She brought up the picture of the old man in the side window of the gray Cadillac, and the other man beside him. She had taken it with the phone clapped to her ear, but it was very sharp. She tapped the screen to bring up a picture of both men.

  Lloyd said, “Okay. Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Right now, today. I appreciate your taking out that shotgun and giving me backup the other night. But this case is not what it looked like at first. It just got a lot more complicated.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re men you really don’t want to meet.”

  “You know their names. Tell me.”

  “The man standing beside the car is Bobby Salamone. I don’t keep up with these people most of the time, because they’re not involved in my usual cases. But I know who he is. He’s a member of the Mafia, kind of an underboss. He’s been in prison for extortion and aggravated assault and probably other things I don’t remember. He’s been suspected of arranging at least a couple of murders over the years, but the evidence wasn’t strong enough.”

  “And the old man in the car?”

  “He’s your prize photo. Lorenzo Malconi. He looks like a sickly old man, doesn’t he? I hope he is, because he can’t die soon enough for me. He’s Salamone’s boss, the head of the Mafia in this part of the state.”

  She said, “What would they be doing at the storage place?”

  Lloyd looked very tired and a bit distracted, and Jane recognized the look. He had tensed a muscle and reawakened the pain. “I don’t have any idea. Probably nothing illegal. People like them don’t do anything. They tell people to do things and take a cut.”

  “I saw an SUV come in with him and then I saw two men carry a big cooler into bay J-19. That’s what made me come inside the gate to take these pictures.”

  “There’s your answer. He was putting something into storage. He brought men because he’s too old to carry things himself.”

  “Come on, Ike. You’re holding out on me. Give me what you know and I’ll leave.”

  “I told you who these men are. That’s all I know without getting a warrant and taking a look in that storage bay. For obvious reasons, I can’t do that now.”

  Jane lifted her loose scrub shirt and pulled out a manila envelope she’d had stuck in the elastic top of her pants.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a record of what I’ve been doing—copies of the pictures I’ve taken. There are shots of the stolen stuff hidden in Nick Bauermeister’s basement, pictures of Chelsea Schnell with Daniel Crane at his house, the shots I just showed you, the two storage bays that Malconi’s men visited. You can tell the cop you give them to that he doesn’t have to be careful with them. No fingerprints or anything.” She held up her hands to show him that she was wearing surgical gloves. “Now go back to sleep. I’ll try not to bother you again.” She turned to go.

  “Wait.”

  “Wait?” she said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just about nine thirty.”

  “In a few hours there will be search teams at Nick Bauermeister’s house and Walter Slawicky’s.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because at Slawicky’s, they may find the rifle.” He watched her for a reaction. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “One of the things.”

  “It would prove Slawicky shot Bauermeister himself.”

  “I’m not so sure he did,” said Jane. “I don’t think he would have gone to the police voluntarily unless he had an unbreakable alibi. I think he just supplied the rifle and the false story about what happened to it.”

  “Who, then?”

  “The one who gave Slawicky the money for all the cool stuff.”

  “Salamone or Malconi?”

  “I don’t know. If they’re the Mafia, why would they bother with people like Slawicky? They must have people on their payroll who do that kind of work. I think it was the one who had a reason to want Nick Bauermeister dead. The one who wanted his girlfriend.”

  As she slipped out the door of his bedroom she heard a car pulling into the driveway. She looked out the side window of the house and saw Lloyd’s wife coming to a stop in the garage. She could see bags of groceries in the back of her station wagon. In a moment she would be carrying bags through the side door into the kitchen. Jane went out the front door, moved along the front of the Lloyd house to the next yard, and then walked quickly to her car.

  MORNING WAS HELL FOR DANIEL Crane. The sun was blinding, punishing. He drove to his storage business at ten because he couldn’t think of a better place to go. As he drove he kept remembering things that he would have to fix as quickly as he could. There was still quite a bit of merchandise he couldn’t explain stored in his bays along the J row. Every month he had stored things his crews stole in bays registered to fictitious people. Now that he was being charged with a felony, there wasn’t much to stop the police from checking to see if those renters were real, or just aliases for Daniel Crane. There would then be nothing to stop them from going through the bays, maybe with a list of items that had been reported stolen in burglaries in the area. Then they would find the body in the cooler.

  Crane would have to do something to be sure Slawicky had actually sunk the rifle a few miles offshore in Lake Ontario, and not kept it somewhere with Crane’s fingerprints still on it. And he couldn’t just ask him. If Slawicky had kept the rifle as a threat to hold over him, then asking would make him even more defensive and paranoid. For a moment Crane considered killing him, too. Jimmy Sanders was still at large, and it had been in the newspapers that Slawicky had gone to the police and given information about him. If Slawicky died now, there would be a suspect already wanted in connection with a murder. But he remembered that Salamone had warned him not to take steps like that on his own again. Maybe he would just bring the problem up with Salamone.

  As he drove up to the storage facility his eyes rested on the big sign: BOX FA
RM PERSONAL STORAGE. He thought he’d like to change the name. When he’d thought of it, the name had sounded pleasant—an old farm with acres of storage spaces—but the words seemed creepy now, maybe a cynical, slangy way of referring to a cemetery. He knew it was too late to change it now, after years of building the business, but he wished he could.

  He pulled through the gate and drove to the office, then saw the big sedan parked in his reserved space. Salamone. What was he doing here? Salamone had never come this early in the morning. Crane got out of his Range Rover, entered the building, and climbed the stairs.

  He stepped into his office and found Salamone’s two companions had made themselves comfortable. Cantorese was sitting behind the second desk, where the man on duty usually sat to watch the windows and monitors and answer the phone. Cantorese sat back in the chair with his feet up on the desk, so Crane could see the soles of his shoes. Part of Crane’s mind noted that even the man’s feet were wide, feet made to hold up a three hundred fifty pound body. Pistore was sitting in the customer chair near the desk, the first time Crane remembered seeing him seated. Neither of them reacted to the sight of Crane coming in.

  Salamone was at Crane’s desk. He hadn’t just sat there as he often had, because that was the most comfortable chair. He had opened all the drawers and left them open, and he had moved things around on the desktop. The bay rosters, the time sheets for the men, the bills, notices, and price lists had all been combined into one pile. As Crane approached he could see that there were two sets of papers on the cleared desktop, one facing Crane and the other facing Salamone. Two of the pens that Crane usually kept in the desk were set beside the papers.

  “Hi, Danny,” said Salamone. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t a big, heavy stupid one with lots of little dials and buttons. It was white gold or platinum, as thin as a coin with a leather strap, the sort of watch Crane imagined on the wrist of a French banker. “Run into some traffic?”

  “No,” Crane said. “I overslept a little.”

  “Bad night, huh? I can’t blame you.” He looked toward the counter where the coffee maker was. “Want a minute to pour yourself a cup of coffee and get up to speed?”

  “I’m fine,” said Crane.

  “Suit yourself. We heard you had some trouble.”

  “I did, but it’s not going to be a big problem.”

  “No? I heard your girlfriend went to the hospital and the police have a bunch of roofies you’d used on her. I’m glad to hear that wasn’t what happened.”

  “It wasn’t rohypnol. It was GHB. I bought it through a Mexican online site, and they must have made a mistake in the dose, or the concentration was uneven and she got a strong batch. She was still asleep when the cleaning lady came unexpectedly, found her, and got worried. I’ll explain it to Chelsea, and she’ll be fine with it. The stuff disappears from the bloodstream right away, and it’s a natural substance, so the police can’t prove anything anyway.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Salamone. “But I do kind of wonder what you were thinking.”

  “I gave her some once before, and she was okay and the next day she didn’t remember a thing. The other night she was acting crazy, talking about leaving me, and I figured I’d just make her forget what she’d said. She’d sleep and then wake up the next day okay.”

  Salamone and Cantorese met each other’s eyes. Salamone shrugged. “Okay. I hope your trouble goes away. In the meantime, I’ve got some papers here for you to sign. Take a look.” He pushed one set of papers toward Crane.

  Pistore sprung up and brought his chair to Crane so he could read and sign sitting down. Crane was expected to sit, so he sat.

  After a minute Crane looked up from the papers. “This says I’m selling my business to Angela Milton. I don’t know anybody named Angela Milton.”

  “Look, Danny. You know something about business. Do you know how mortgage insurance works? The company that lends you money isn’t a hundred percent sure you’ll always be able to keep paying the money back. So they cut their risk by having you insure them against you not paying.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “It’s an analogy to your current situation. You could be right that your little girlfriend will be generous about things and shrug off the fact that you—legally, anyway—raped her. But you’ve opened a big box full of uncertainty here. What happens if you’re wrong?”

  “There’s no risk,” said Crane. “The drug isn’t detectable. They can’t prove she took it, let alone that I gave it to her.”

  “Mr. Malconi has an excellent team of criminal attorneys. They tell him that having her wake up with your sperm in her and claiming not to know she’d had sex with you could be a problem. The fact that there was a supply in your home of an illegal drug that causes those symptoms makes the problem worse. Mr. Malconi has decided to make sure that he’s protected.”

  “Can’t you talk to him?”

  “Danny. You met Mr. Malconi yesterday. Did he strike you as a man who changes his mind about things like this?”

  “But he can’t just take my business because I had a problem with my girlfriend.”

  “This isn’t just an unfortunate spat. You had her in the first place because you shot her boyfriend through the head. Then you had the idea you’d get a stranger arrested for it, and have him die in jail. You have to be fair about this, and admit to yourself that you’ve given Mr. Malconi reason to think you’re not a hundred percent reliable. Ninety percent isn’t good enough.”

  “Maybe I can talk to him,” said Crane.

  “I’ve talked to him on your behalf. I’ve said everything you could say, and more. But even I have to be careful. You’re used to businessmen like you. They negotiate everything, and then if it doesn’t work out they sue each other. Mr. Malconi’s options are much, much wider. I’ve persuaded him to limit himself to creating a simple legal safeguard. Read the papers and sign them.”

  Crane scanned the pages. “This says I give this person my business for five million dollars.”

  “A fair price, right?”

  “But I’m supposed to get paid for the sale at the rate of a hundred thousand a year. That’s fifty years. And the money doesn’t come from Angela Milton. It comes from the ­business—my own business. I’m supposed to run the business and pay myself?”

  “She’s not a businessperson, Danny. You don’t want her running it.”

  “Who the hell is this Angela Milton?”

  “Milton is her husband’s last name. Her maiden name was Torturro. She’s one of Mr. Malconi’s brother’s grandchildren.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Mr. Malconi is protecting all of us from the possibility that you have to spend some time in jail. You could get sued in a civil suit for doing harm to Miss Chelsea, and lose. This way, your business will not be taken away from you in a forced foreclosure.”

  “That’s a very remote possibility.”

  “Mr. Malconi has lived to be old by protecting himself and his people from possibilities other people thought were remote.”

  Crane felt acid rise from his stomach to his esophagus, but he fought it back down. He knew that if he signed the contract his business would be theirs. He would have to work for the rest of his life to pay himself for the false sale. And because he could only pay himself a hundred thousand a year from the company, he would have to keep running the burglary crew to bring Salamone a supply of stolen jewelry and furnishings. “This is unfair,” he muttered. “He’s just taking it.”

  Salamone reached out and patted him on the shoulder, and then touched him on the side of his face. It was a strange gesture, almost the way a parent caressed a child’s cheek. “Be glad,” he said. “You could have been found hanging in one of your storage bays. He would never do that in a business he owns.”


  24

  Jane transferred the photographs to the temporary account she’d been given at the business center in her hotel, and sent them to the e-mail address she’d found on Sergeant Isaac Lloyd’s business card. Then she checked out of the hotel.

  She drove to a big chain drugstore on Niagara Falls Boulevard and bought three more prepaid cell phones, loaded them with calling minutes, and put two in her backpack and one in her pocket. She dismantled the cell phone she had been using and threw the parts into two different dumpsters and a storm sewer. She knew the photographs she had sent Isaac Lloyd couldn’t be used in a court, but she was showing the police where to look, so they could find the same evidence themselves.

  She used a new phone to call Jimmy Sanders in Hanover, New Hampshire.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Me again. Did you have any trouble meeting her at the airport?”

  “No,” said Jimmy. “We found a picture of her online from a couple of years ago. She was the twenty-fifth runner-up for some beauty contest. Ow! Okay, she won. Want to talk to the ex–beauty queen?”

  “Yes.”

  A second later Chelsea Schnell’s voice came on. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” said Jane. “I had to leave the airport in a hurry, so I didn’t actually see you off. I just wanted to be sure you got there without being followed.”

  “Yes. I had no trouble at all. There was nobody in the Albany airport that I’d ever seen before, and I was on a plane in forty-five minutes.”

  “And have you managed to talk to your mother?”

  “Yes. I called her in Denver as soon as we got here. Thank you for asking. She knows I’m safe and I’m not going to be in touch again for a long time. I said I needed to be away, and that there’s a man who won’t stop trying to stalk me. I said I wanted time to get my head straight from all the things that had happened. I didn’t tell her about the hospital and the rest, because that would just make her feel worse.”