by Thomas Perry
She glanced at the others, taking the least time with her eyes on Delia. She was aware that Delia was the enemy. It was too bad, but Delia had already staked out the strict ethical position and could hardly relinquish it now.
Holstra said, “Would his information be good?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He knows that practically nothing can be prosecuted this far out except murder. He only worked for the most important mobsters, so it will be somebody important. And he knows he’d have to supply evidence.”
“Okay,” Holstra said. “Let the opinions fly.”
Bill said, “As much as I like the idea of this kind of informant, his fate is a side issue. If we can get him to talk, fine. But we can’t forget Carlo Balacontano is the main issue. We’ve already got him. He’s one of the old men, the bosses, and he’s in prison, where he belongs. I haven’t heard any evidence that he doesn’t still belong there. He’s never shown remorse, never provided testimony against anyone, and never met any of the other criteria for parole.”
Delia had been waiting. “But you just heard that he was framed with at least the tacit connivance of our predecessors in Justice.”
John’s voice was bored. “Connivance isn’t ‘tacit.’ It has to be active.”
“You know what I mean,” Delia said. “Some people must have been active if they convicted him in a federal court. Everybody who worked here then must have known.”
“I’m sure they acted in good faith,” said John. “Bala’s innocence seems to have been a minority opinion. If there was real evidence of innocence, it’s not for a parole hearing anyway. In order to do this right, we would have to move for a new trial of Carlo Balacontano, and that’s the last thing we want.”
Bill shook his head. “Elizabeth, is this even a practical question? Is there any way that this killer could be brought to swear that Balacontano is innocent because this man did the killing himself?”
“I haven’t thought of a way,” said Elizabeth. “Why would he? It might be possible to get him into an incriminating conversation. But he’s smart, and very wary. And I’m not sure that getting a parole or a pardon for Balacontano would be anything more than correcting a procedural error. To make anything the hit man says even admissible, it would have to be firsthand, not hearsay. We would have to reveal the reason they knew each other at all—that Balacontano had hired him to kill a couple of people.”
John said, “We’ve collected a lot of indications that Balacontano has not been a model prisoner. There are recordings that imply he was directing the crime family’s policies, appointing and removing people who ran certain operations, and so on. He’s even suspected of ordering several killings in the prisons where he’s served time.”
“Any evidence of that?” Delia asked.
“We’ve got a nice display of parallels,” Bill said. “There are recordings of things he said ought to happen in the prison, and then a line beside it about what actually did happen in the prison. They match up.”
“Courtroom antics,” said Delia. “Any long-term inmate was there when a lot of bad things happened.”
“But it speaks to what kind of prisoner he’s been,” John said. “That’s what parole decisions depend on.”
Delia smiled. “A point and a question: The point is that it’s dangerous to say what a federal parole hearing will depend on, since they’ve become so rare. The question is, are any of the things Bala said should happen good enough to take to court as independent new cases?”
“That’s not required.”
“I guess that means no,” she said.
Bill said, “Here’s another possibility. What if we set up the killer so that when he contacts you, there’s an FBI SWAT team to take him into custody?”
Elizabeth frowned. “I’ve thought of that of course. In honesty, I could only predict that he would be killed in a shoot-out and we would lose everything he knows. We would also lose two to five FBI agents.”
“You think so?”
Elizabeth said, “He’s been in dozens of armed confrontations. They produced a lot of dead people, certainly well over a hundred by now. He’s not one of them. I don’t like the risk.”
John said, “I think we should go on as before. Balacontano has a parole hearing because of a historical accident. He and a very small number of other old prisoners are grandfathered in. We should keep our minds on the fact that he’s a very bad man and that it’s our duty to remind the hearing officer and the board of that, not retry a thirty-year-old case after he’s already served most of his sentence.”
Bill said, “Of course I agree on pragmatic grounds. Aside from the work we’ve put in, no public good would be served by freeing an old-fashioned Mafia don into the modern world.”
Delia sat up very straight. Elizabeth envied her posture almost as much as her young body and smooth, unlined complexion. “I’m afraid that I agree with the former deputy assistant AG, Mr. Hunsecker, who seems to have been offended by the idea of helping a serial killer triumph over his enemies. On the practical side, I think we can get by without his rendition of who did what to whom in the days when cars all had stick shifts. If the Department of Justice knowingly withheld the fact that a man has been kept in federal prison for more than a generation for a crime he didn’t commit, we’re already down the rabbit hole. It’s not administering justice; it’s suppressing undesirables.”
“Undesirables who have committed murder and been convicted,” said Bill.
Deputy Assistant Holstra slapped both his palms on the surface of the conference table and pushed himself to his feet. “Invigorating, but I’m out of time. It seems that the issue isn’t that we’ve got the wrong man in prison, but that we should have the other one in prison too. That means, John and Bill, keep up the opposition to the Balacontano parole. Elizabeth, you remain open to the opportunity that your informant offers us. Dale Hunsecker is a fine man and an honest one. But he isn’t the man I would want with me in a fight. Everybody clear?”
Elizabeth watched the others nod in silence, all except Delia. She felt a little guilty for letting Delia strand herself in the ethical position. Delia was the only one Holstra had not given an assignment. Elizabeth wanted to reassure her that it was because he had respected her argument and would not order her to do anything against her conscience. That was true, but Delia was beginning to see that what she’d done was eliminate herself from the rest of the discussion, something a desperately ambitious person should avoid. Elizabeth wasn’t going to give a potential rival a lesson in tactics, so she remained silent as the meeting broke up.
Elizabeth returned to her office and picked up her phone to invite her assistants to come in.
She said, “Now we do what we do best—keep track of the bad guys. What we need to know is which people in La Cosa Nostra are trying to find this retired shooter and kill him. If there are any factions that are more interested in harming Carl Bala than the shooter, we’d like to know about them too. We probably won’t get a clear picture right away, but start with the usual: Who is on the move? Who is showing up in distant places? Are there any small conferences between just a couple of important men? Any sudden deaths? Have the FBI or other federal agencies noticed people watching airports, train stations, or places like that? Have they stopped and frisked any of them to find out who they were? You all know what to do. Go do it.”
Schaeffer took out the second phone that he had bought. He called Elizabeth Waring’s office phone. When the person who answered asked who was calling, he said, “Pete Stohler.” That was the name of the imaginary handyman she had invented to explain who had saved her and her kids years ago.
It took only a few seconds for her voice to respond. “Hi, Pete,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Have you found out who has been sending people out to kill me? I also want to know if there are photos of me out there. People have attacked me who’ve never se
en me before. Some of them wouldn’t have been born when I was still working.”
She said, “If I had photos of you, I think you would have been in jail twenty years ago.”
“The passports.”
She said, “The passports were produced through an unwritten request of WITSEC to the State Department. They don’t officially exist. For practical purposes I wouldn’t even consider them real.”
He was silent, so she added, “There are things that are separate from anything else. You understand? After what Pete Stohler did that day, I lost all memory of how he looked, and I’ve never been able to get the photos back from the State Department. They were the only copies. Nobody else had a chance to leak them.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
She said, “I’m sure you’re right that there are photographs of you, but I don’t know where they came from. There are more cameras around every day, watching us wherever we go.”
He closed his eyes. She was right. The UK was the first place in the world to put CCTV cameras on all the streets so the Brits could catch each other littering. There were a million ways he could have been spotted and photographed.
Elizabeth said, “I’ve asked my people to find out who has been trying to kill you. I don’t know what we’ll learn. If you would tell me anything about where they—”
“I’ll be in touch.”
Elizabeth waited for more, but it didn’t come. He had hung up. It had not been a good first try. She didn’t have anything to offer him yet. No bait.
20
Schaeffer stayed in Virginia, but moved every two or three days. Hotel employees started to wonder about people who stayed too long, and he didn’t like having people wonder about him.
He spent several hours each day working out in hotel gyms and pools to bring himself back to his best level of conditioning. He had trained and kept himself fit all the years in England, but it was no longer the training of a man who fought for his life. Now that the bruises and strains from the fights in Manchester and Australia were disappearing, he worked on his strength, stamina, flexibility, and speed.
He hoped that Elizabeth Waring would learn who was after him, but he wasn’t counting on her. He believed she would tell him if she thought it would serve her purposes, but she was essentially a cop. She had spent his last trip to the United States trying to get him into custody so that he would be locked up for the rest of his life telling stories.
The last trip he had avoided letting her trap him, so she had shut down any real information from her side. But the night when he came to her house and found the three killers there with her and her children had changed everything. He had killed her assailant, and then together they had killed the ones who were guarding her kids.
In gratitude, she’d obtained passports to get him out of the country safely—an enormous risk for her. The relationship should have been over then, along with the communication. The fact that he had gotten attacked now, years later, had made him think of asking for one more favor. He knew that for her, nothing she did would ever pay him back for saving her children. Every day brought Bala’s parole hearing closer, and whatever was going to happen to Schaeffer was going to happen by then. She had come up with nothing. But this was his fight, and he had to act now.
He remembered the route from the old days. It was I-95 north and I-76 west. His phone said it would take five hours and thirty-three minutes in traffic. He checked out of his hotel and drove.
It took most of the day to reach Pittsburgh, but when he got there, he felt strong and optimistic. He had come because he’d had a valuable realization. If someone was determined enough to send people to kill him in the UK, and then hire others in Australia to find and ambush him, they were probably serious enough to have learned details about him. There must still be older men who remembered that the reason people called him “the Butcher’s Boy” was that he’d been raised by Eddie “the Butcher” Mastrewski—that Eddie really was a butcher and had a shop in the South Side Flats of Pittsburgh.
In those days the South Flats had been a real neighborhood inhabited by the families of factory workers, shopkeepers, store clerks, and salesmen, some of them living in big old houses divided into apartments and others in small single-family homes. Their roofs were covered with snow, like frosting, for most of the winter, and when spring came, the houses emerged dripping wet and a little derelict, with scraggly dead or dormant plants and piles of whitened dog shit in the yard that had been frozen under the snow all winter. The last days of winter were dangerous, as the warmth released big stalactites of ice along the gutters that speared down to stick in the last snowdrifts. It was only a week or two after that when the first crocuses would bloom, and then fresh paint would begin to appear on doors, porches, railings, and window frames.
The people in those houses were Eddie’s neighbors and the customers who bought his steaks, chops, hams, sausages, turkeys, and chickens. As Schaeffer drove, he wondered about them. Were any of those families still here? They were mostly descendants of European immigrants—Poles, Irish, Italians, Germans, and Ukrainians. He remembered Eddie saying, “The toughest people in the world are Pennsylvania Polacks from the coal-mining country.” The boy said, “Like you?” Eddie replied, “I’m Ukrainian. We didn’t come this far west until we smelled cabbage cooking.”
Schaeffer made a turn and then turned again at the sign that said “E. Carson St.” The whole street was a long row of restaurants, boutiques, and places that sold pretty things to decorators. He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d been on this street, and realized his last visit must have been right after Eddie died.
Nothing on East Carson looked the way it once had, and so nothing triggered a memory. He turned right and down into the parts that hadn’t been gentrified.
Schaeffer knew he had chosen the right destination. He had been the hunter many times, and the place to look for a lone man who was out of chances and marked for death was wherever he had started. There was a mostly foolish urge in fugitives to return to their home ground. Maybe they assumed that they would know the place better than the pursuers because they had played there as children and found all the hiding places. Maybe they had the illusion that all the people they had known in the old neighborhood would still be there, ready to help fight the final battle. Maybe when a person knew he was out of options, he tried to run backward through time.
Schaeffer wasn’t one of those people, but he had seen the theory work a few times. Tonight, if Schaeffer had been one of the hunters instead of the prey, he would have found a comfortable place to stay right in the vicinity of Eddie Mastrewski’s old butcher shop, or maybe within sight of Eddie’s old house, and waited and watched. It would need to be a place where a hunter could fire a well-aimed rifle shot and kill him. An experienced killer would be too smart to go out looking for a man like Schaeffer or risk meeting him on even ground. The reason a killer got to be the one to go home every time was that he didn’t fight with his prey. He just took him.
Schaeffer didn’t drive past the corner where the old shop had stood, or cruise up the street where Eddie’s house used to be. If he was right, people would be watching for him in those places. Instead he parked and walked toward the old restaurant where Eddie used to take him sometimes on Sundays for minestrone or pasta e fagioli. Eddie could get better meat than a restaurant could, so they tended to order dishes that didn’t involve much meat. The room next to the bar was where the boy had learned to play pool.
Eddie had taught him pool because there were times when a shooter needed to hang around in a place that was warm and dimly lit, except for the bright lights right above the table. It was a necessity of their profession to be comfortable in places like pool halls and bars.
As he was walking in the direction of the Italian restaurant, he realized that one reason the route felt so familiar was that it went right past the Whittaker house. He beg
an to look ahead for the house, and when he spotted it, he could see the house looked almost exactly as it had when he was sixteen. He could barely take his eyes off it.
When he reached the offshoot of the sidewalk leading to the steps, the front door opened. A woman came out, closed the door behind her, and locked it with a key. She was wearing what looked like a jogging outfit—black yoga pants, a powder-blue pullover that fit her tightly, and thick-soled sneakers with chartreuse laces. She descended the steps and glanced in his direction, her face set in the sort of half-smile women gave to strangers, really a cover for the once-over that would tell her if he was a threat. She froze and her mouth opened.
He recognized her instantly. She didn’t look anywhere near as old as she must be. Her long hair was in a ponytail, the same blond color as it had been so long ago, and her eyes were the same bright blue. She still stood upright with her shoulders back.
The blue eyes widened. “Michael? Oh my God, Michael!” She lunged to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I can’t believe it.”
“Diane?” he said. “You look wonderful.”
“I was going to say the same to you,” she said. “And I knew you would, and be in shape too. You always worked so hard. Eddie sure got his money’s worth out of your keep. But that’s why people stay healthy.” She grasped his arm. “You’ve got to come in.”
“I don’t want to interrupt anything if you’re—”
“No, you’re not interrupting anything. And I don’t think there’s anybody I’d rather see.” She ran up the steps and unlocked the door. “Come on.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. The kids are all grown up, and Dan died, but I’m still here. I love company.”
“But you seemed to be on your way somewhere.”
“Just out for a run. It’s a beautiful day, and it’s early, so I’ll go later.” She charged in through the foyer and down the hall toward the kitchen. “Do you like tea?”