by Steven Gore
“No. They’re doing an autopsy. But they’re guessing it was a heart attack brought on by heat stroke. Out in the sun too long.”
“But you’re thinking he must’ve been murdered,” Gage said, “because you felt like murdering him yourself.”
“Not just me. There are three widows and their kids who have just as good a motive as me.”
“Where were you yesterday evening?”
“Home. I got back at about six o’clock.”
“Back from where?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“The Delta. Near Big Break. She called me last week and asked me to help her pick out some shrubs at a nursery.”
“Isn’t that something she could’ve done herself?”
“Well, we sort of . . . kind of . . . made friends over the years.”
“What time did Karopian’s wife find the body?”
“The newspaper said ten o’clock. She last saw him during the morning. She spent the afternoon at one of the spas in Calistoga with her girlfriends. They had dinner in Napa.”
Gage glanced at Skeeter’s wall calendar.
“I’ll check into it,” Gage said. “Fax or e-mail me a chronology of where you were every minute during those hours. And give me a call if the police pay you a visit.”
Porzolkiewski sighed. “You’ll be the first.”
Skeeter grinned after Gage filled him in, and said, “Maybe you scared the asshole to death.”
Gage didn’t smile back.
Chapter 42
Boots Marnin drove by Jeannette Hawkins’s house twice before he figured out which one it was. The first time he missed it because he’d failed to spot the faded plastic numbers against the peeling paint on the porch support. The second time he spotted both the numbers and a recycling bin overfilled with beer bottles.
He decided to postpone his visit until it was last call.
Marnin drove back through Richmond, past dope dealers, taquerias, full garbage cans, empty storefronts, and a couple of cops kneeling on the back of a homeless man in front of a shattered flower shop window. He crossed under the freeway, then slipped two blocks down a divided commercial street to Gold Rush Western Wear. The owner’s exaggerated Texas accent was way too loud and he was way too friendly, but Boots got out of there in twenty minutes with a fresh pair of Wranglers and a George Strait button-down white shirt. He checked himself in the motel mirror just before he headed out that night. He even gave himself a little wink and a nod. He looked like he was just about to walk on stage at Nashville’s Gaylord Arena.
The next morning Jeannette couldn’t remember much of what happened.
The handsome man at the door. A gentleman. Cowboy hat held against his chest with both hands. Golly-gee-whiz shy. His father was an old buddy of Son of a Bitch from the navy.
That’s what he’d said, anyway.
Come on in. Sure he’d have a beer.
First she got jealous when he stared too long at her daughter running out the front door, no bra, boobs bouncing under her father’s faded AC/DC T-shirt. But then she got turned on when he looked back at her, a you’re-my-type-honey smile on his face.
Man, what he would’ve thought twenty-five years ago when I had tits like that.
He was already gone by the time sunlight falling on her eyes woke her up. She rolled over, sort of expecting to see him, but there was just a slight depression in the pillow.
Must’ve been a light sleeper.
She was hoping for a nice note, nothing flowery, but something anyway, even just a phone number, but she didn’t see anything.
She slid out of bed and steadied herself using the night table before shuffling to the bathroom. She examined herself in the mirror.
I look like shit. No afterglow on this broad.
She inspected the dark splotches under her eyes.
What did that cowboy want with me?
Something about Son of a Bitch. Hadn’t seen him for years.
Yeah, he called. Couple of years ago.
Anybody come by trying to find him?
Some PI a while back. I got his card somewhere.
Jeannette took a pee, slipped on yesterday’s shift, then walked into the kitchen. She decided on coffee instead of beer. She didn’t need the hair of the dog, she needed something to jog her memory.
She dumped a little too much Folgers Instant into a cup, added water, then set it in the microwave. Took her a couple of tries to set the time. Twenty seconds. Twenty minutes. Twenty-two seconds. But finally she got the numbers punched in right: two minutes. She watched the cup through the fractured glass, wondering if she was irradiating herself, thinking for the millionth time maybe she ought to get one of them gizmos to find out if the thing was leaking microwaves and giving her cancer.
Maybe later. She didn’t fear death much when she was hungover. In fact, it kinda seemed like a good idea.
She didn’t wait for the beep. One-fifty was long enough. She pulled it out. Shit. Tasted like coffee grounds. She’d forgotten to sweeten it. She ripped open a couple of McDonald’s sugar packets, then dropped in the contents and jiggled a spoon in the cup.
Another sip.
That’s better.
She stood there, staring out the kitchen window at the rusted swing set in the backyard.
That’s funny. Cowboy didn’t even know Son of a Bitch got a dishonorable discharge. It’s the kind of thing people talk about.
She turned back toward the living room. She smiled again. This time a bitter one.
Maybe his daddy liked fondling them little Okinawan girls just like Son of a Bitch.
Her eyes swept toward the telephone hanging on the wall. It seemed different. Not the phone. The wall around it. A blank spot.
Something’s missing.
Chapter 43
Namaste.”
“Namaste to you too, pal.” Wilbert Hawkins pointed at a plastic lounge chair on the veranda. “Have a seat.”
Prasad Naidu, deputy superintendent of the Gannapalli Police, glanced toward the central district, then shook his head. “I think we should sit inside.”
Hawkins followed Naidu’s eyes, and then scanned the street. A half-dozen buffalo were walking the dirt track, heading home from the fields on their own, and beyond them a group of men had collected at the bus stop, some looking sideways in Hawkins’s direction. He grabbed his beer from the low table, then led the deputy superintendent into the living room. Naidu shut the door behind him and sat down. He wore a long-sleeved, dark green uniform pressed like folded paper. No gun on his black belt. No badge on his shirt.
“An American is asking where you are living,” Naidu said.
Naidu’s accent was heavy, sometimes sounding to Hawkins like comical gibberish, but not now.
“Same one?” Hawkins asked.
“Different.”
“By himself?”
“With a Telegu language interpreter from the U.S.”
“Did he say who he was?”
“He said he is working for the American consulate in Chennai and is coming here to check on your welfare. No one is believing him. Half the population has applied for visas, so they know the consulate only uses local translators.”
Hawkins felt his stomach tighten. “What are people saying about me?”
“Playing dumb. He is not handing out money, yet. I think he is afraid they will figure out he is not for real once he does.”
“But they’ll take it.”
“Yes, they will take it.”
Hawkins rose. He walked into the hallway, then up the stairs into his bedroom. He returned two minutes later with an inch-high stack of hundred-rupee notes still stapled together like he had received them from the bank. Two hundred dollars U.S. He handed them to Naidu.
“Tell him I’m in Hyderabad for a few weeks,” Hawkins said. “Say I needed hernia surgery.”
“He’ll be wanting to see your house.”
“Bring him by
. Walk him around the place like there’s nothing to hide. That way I can get a peek at him.”
Boots spent a jet-lagged, frustrating day trying to weasel information from a dozen different Hyderabad hospital clerks until he found a friendly one at the Deccan Infirmary, one who smiled at him and told him the doctors had recommended “Mr. Wilbert” have his surgery at the Parvatiben Gujarati Hospital in Chennai.
He felt like kicking himself. Hawkins had been no more than ten miles away from where Boots’s flight from the U.S. had landed at the Chennai Airport, and not twenty hours down clogged and dust-swirling roads first to Gannapalli, then to Hyderabad, and back.
Twelve hours later, after speaking to the Deccan Infirmary clerk, he knew he’d been had: nobody at the Parvatiben Gujarati Hospital had ever heard of Wilbert Hawkins. And five hundred dollars in bribes had gotten him records proving they were telling the truth.
Boots felt like slitting a buffalo’s throat.
Another guy trying to find him.
When Hawkins had peeked out of his upstairs window toward the dirt track running in front of the house, he had a nauseous feeling he wasn’t so sure anymore who the good guys were. He knew who they used to be. Back then it was easy to tell. They gave him a million dollars and a first-class plane ticket to Karachi, then to Hyderabad.
But everything turned upside down when Gage appeared in his living room, and he still hadn’t found his feet.
First he thought he’d call the good guys to find out who his more recent visitor really was and what he might be up to. But he didn’t know any of them anymore. He didn’t even know who still worked at TIMCO. He’d never met any of the lawyers. He’d heard of Marc Anston, but never saw his face. And Charlie Palmer was dead.
Hawkins walked downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a Kingfisher beer from the refrigerator. The five regular girls were sitting at the dining table giggling, painting their palms with henna and drinking mango juice through plastic straws. They knew he was worried so they went silent when he entered and didn’t even look over to see if he wanted sex. Usually, he’d catch the eye of one or two, then jerk his head toward the door. It took them a while to learn what that meant since Indian men avoided using the insulting gesture, but now it was second nature to the girls. This time he walked past them through the kitchen and out to the back sleeping porch.
Hawkins stared at the monkeys sitting on the brown stucco wall. When he’d first arrived in India he thought they were cute; now they just seemed like big red rats. He couldn’t even sit outside and eat anymore because of them begging or grabbing food off the table. Damn annoying.
Annoying. A face appeared in his mind, along with an answer. The only way the visitor could have figured out where he lived was from Jeannette. He hadn’t talked to anyone at TIMCO for eight years, maybe more; at least since he moved from Hyderabad to the countryside. And he believed Gage when he said he’d keep his location a secret because he knew Gage still needed him—maybe.
But all Jeannette had was a telephone number. Without his cop friend from Hyderabad, Gage never would have found him. And if it was police coming to arrest him on the criminal complaint in Richmond, they’d have been Indian, not American, and the first thing they’d do was stick out their hands for a bribe to go away.
Then the truth rose up before him: If the good guys were still the good guys, they would’ve called and just asked him if Gage had come by. Hawkins wouldn’t have told them, but he figured they’d ask. Try to take his temperature. See if they needed to send somebody out to snip off a loose end.
Hawkins set his beer down and returned to the kitchen and picked up the telephone. He woke up the person at the other end of the line and told him the story.
“What did he look like?” Gage asked.
“I guess you could say he looked like a younger George Strait. Same build, but a little taller.”
“Does the name Pegasus mean anything to you?”
“Peg-a-sus . . . Peg-a-sus . . . That’s it. That’s who sent me the money . . . Shit. You didn’t tell Jeannette about the money, did you?”
“No reason to. And don’t call her yourself until I tell you it’s okay. I don’t want anyone else figuring out where you are.”
Gage also didn’t want Hawkins to figure out that the criminal complaint was bogus.
“If I were you,” Gage said, “I’d hightail it. The George Strait–looking guy is named Boots Marnin. There’s no doubt he’s on his way back to Gannapalli, and I don’t think it’s to drink a beer with you on the veranda. Now that you’ve ducked him, he knows for certain you’ve got something to hide.”
Chapter 44
Old law partners. Thursdays, 11:45 A.M. at Tadich Grill in the San Francisco financial district. None of the waiters and none of the other regulars gave it a second thought after all these years.
Countless attorneys had been cut off mid-closing argument, even in mid-sentence, FBI agents had been left waiting outside chambers with search warrants to be signed, and juries left sitting with verdicts held over, all so Brandon Meyer could make it to lunch on time.
Marc Anston leaned a little closer toward Meyer sitting across the cloth-covered table. His Putin-like head gleamed in the light from a pendant fixture above, while his wireless glasses reflected the one suspended beyond the next table.
Looking back at him, Meyer felt, as much as saw, the familiar. A thin, old-money face, twelve years older than his, containing eyes that never stared or peered or gawked or leered or squinted. They only gazed, taking in, never projecting out. They were eyes formed by years of cold war intelligence work beginning in Moscow after Yale Law School and ending in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
“Gage knows about TIMCO,” Anston said. “All we can figure is that he found Wilbert Hawkins and applied some pressure.”
“What about the money trail?”
“We have to assume Hawkins told him about the million, but Gage didn’t say anything about payoffs when he confronted Karopian.”
Brandon took in a long breath through his nose, then breathed out, eyes fixed on Anston’s. He interlaced his fingers and rubbed his thumbs together.
“What about Palmer’s hard drive?” Brandon asked. “Anything?”
“Nothing. Our people searched every which way. There’s no mention of Pegasus anywhere.”
Brandon shook his head. His voice rose. “There has to be. He threatened to e-mail the spreadsheets to CNN.”
Anston raised a palm toward Brandon. “Take it easy.”
“It just pisses me off. That little punk takes a look at the grim reaper, then goes to jelly.” Brandon pounded his middle finger on the white tablecloth. “None of us got into this for money.”
“Except Palmer.”
“And that’s what’s biting us in the ass,” Brandon said. “He never believed in the cause in the first place. And once he realized money was no good in heaven or in hell—wherever he thought he was going—he caved. It’s a damn good thing he had the seizure before he spilled it all to Gage.”
“You know Gage,” Anston said. “Is there any way to get him to back off?”
Brandon shook his head. “But we don’t need to. Hawkins can’t take Gage beyond Palmer, and Palmer’s dead. Karopian knew how you fit in, but he’s dead, too. Another lucky break.”
Anston half smiled. “And Gage is in way too good a shape to have a seizure or a heart attack.”
“What do you mean?”
Anston’s smile faded. “Nothing.”
“But what if he finds out about the Pegasus companies and all the accounts?”
“It won’t make a difference. He’d have to go one step farther to connect them to us, and the Cayman Exchange Bank is never going to give up those records.”
Both Anston and Brandon leaned back as the waiter set down their seafood sautés and remained silent while he topped off their water glasses.
“New subject,” Anston said as the waiter walked away. “How did we do with OptiCom?”
; “Should be around ten million.”
“Ten?”
Brandon nodded. Big smile. “It’s a multibillion-dollar company. Ten is nothing. Hardly a blip, and no one will be able to trace it to us. I’ll find some way to suppress the evidence as soon as the defense files a motion to do it. I’ll make a record so strong the U.S. Attorney won’t even bother appealing. In the end, it’s a no-harm, no-foul case. OptiCom pays a little money for FiberLink’s switch as part of a civil settlement and everything is back to just the way it was before.”
“How much more does your brother need?”
“For his campaign or the Supreme Court nominees?”
“One thing at a time. The nominees.”
“I don’t know for sure. We got pledges of about five in Silicon Valley during his last visit. It really depends on how big Landon’s promises have to be to get his colleagues’ confirmation votes once he gets the nominations out of the Judiciary Committee.”
Anston fixed his eyes on Brandon’s. His voice was low and hard.
“He’s going to have to do whatever it takes. If Reagan had the guts to put up a fight in 1987, we’d have gotten Robert Bork instead of that wimp Anthony Kennedy. That lunatic cited European law more often than the U.S. Constitution. And I don’t want to wait another twenty-five years for those idiots in Washington to get it right.”
Anston stiffened as a two-term member of the city council passed by their table, a transsexual with the body of a linebacker, encased in a short-cut pant suit.
Anston shook his head as he stared after her.
“I hate this fucking town.”
Chapter 45
This really is like a ball of snakes,” Alex Z said to Gage in his loft overlooking the tourist shops and seafood restaurants on the Oakland waterfront. “There’s no way we’d have seen it if we hadn’t been looking for it.”
They stood facing a six-foot-by-eight-foot sheet of posterboard displaying a flowchart and chronology of the TIMCO and Moki Amaro cases.