The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  Leonard swept enough space off of his desk to make room for Sparks’s personnel file, hoping to find some reason he’d been sent to Harbor to babysit a school of cops who hadn’t quite misbehaved badly enough to lose their badges. But what Detective Harrison had said kept bouncing around his head. He had softened his delivery, but Leonard knew what he meant. You wanna tell me where you were last night? The nice way of telling Leonard that he was their best option for this right now.

  Outside this room, down the spattered hallways, was a room with sixty cubicles staffed with ambitious young investigators. Each one longed to be the next Serpico, but instead each investigation meant spending six months looking for another witness to a cop’s discourtesy. Most of the complaints were really only a sentence long: He called me “lady” when I hopped the parade barrier. He told me to go whine at the judge when I complained about the parking ticket. And on like that. Hundreds and hundreds of sick little disputes: Each would have been easily forgotten on a packed subway or on the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush. But because one of the people was a cop, the complaints became official and gave birth to full-blown investigations with sworn testimony, sheaves of records, and a detailed closing report. You could go your whole career at DIMAC and never get a death case. Truth of the matter is that the NYPD doesn’t shoot that many people. Not like the cops in Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans. Every kid on that floor ached to jump into Leonard’s seat, was looking for him to trip up and get shipped out. It would open up a chance to take over the shooting. Stand at a press conference with a deputy mayor, someone from the DA’s office, and say how none of the twenty witnesses had seen a gun. No gun had been recovered. Mulino was guilty as hell.

  Except that Leonard wasn’t all that sure. When you’ve had even a round of soft questioning about a crime you didn’t commit, you slow down your own predatory instincts. Mulino was called out to that boat. Rowson himself wasn’t supposed to be there. Rowson had a partner too. Officer Del Rio shared his schedule with Rowson, down to the same regular day off. Leonard made a note to bring in the partner. Find out if he knew anything about Rowson’s detour. If he had maybe ever been out with him before. Or if he’d gone out that night. It wasn’t blaming the victim exactly. Just trying to get the facts. He started to sense what it might be like to get railroaded himself.

  The first thing he did was to call Victor Ells at City Hall. If someone really and truly accuses you of a crime, you pack up and ask for a lawyer right away. But if there are just insinuations and soft words from burly cops, you can do worse than have a well-placed friend look into it for you. He’d already asked the deputy mayor for one favor this week. That had been a success. The story had made Mulino look foolish and there hadn’t been a rally by the police union. There hadn’t been a raft of volunteer statements defending the detective. No evidence officer had called to say he saw a gun but it slipped overboard. By leaking the story, Leonard had learned that Mulino’s fellow officers did not have his back.

  But City Hall isn’t a great place to double-dip. You only get so many favors before they start calling them in. After the morning he’d had, he would have been happy to pay twice. He called anyway. He left a message with the very polite secretary to have the deputy mayor call him back. He left his work phone and his cell number. He said it was important. He then wrote an e-mail saying nothing more than “call me” in the subject line and “it’s important” in the body, just in case.

  His phone rang before he’d even finished sending the e-mail. He picked up too quickly, he knew, hoping Ells was getting right back to him. It wasn’t.

  “So you gonna tie up this detective, put a bow on him, and send him to City Hall before my Sunday deadline, or are you gonna be too busy in lockup for that?” Either way, Leonard was just another story to Tony Licata.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tony. Investigations take weeks, longer. And I don’t see myself getting arrested for anything, unless they start enforcing the jaywalking laws again.”

  “You were questioned this morning in the murder of your ex-boss, weren’t you, Len?”

  “Some warrants officers came by the office, said she was missing. They found her on the docks while we were in here. I went out with them. If they wanted to question me, they’d lock me in a room for twenty-four hours without sleep so they could tickle a false confession out of me, wouldn’t they?”

  “They know you’re too smart to fall for that.”

  “And who are you talking to, that gives you this nonsense? Some tech on the scene sees me talking to the detective and tells you they like me for it?”

  “You know I keep my sources safe, Len. Like no one will ever know how I got ahold of Mulino’s interview.”

  “Yeah. We’re looking into that internally. You tell your source that when we find him we’re going to fire him from this agency.” This was a game you always had to play. It wasn’t that the phones were tapped exactly. You just acted like they were. If anyone ever got questioned about it under oath later on, you could always say something entirely true and utterly misleading. Licata knew the game too.

  “I’ll be sure to. In the meanwhile, you want to have a beer, talk about your old boss, tell me how much you loved her and would never do her harm, you know how to reach me.”

  “Don’t hold your breath, Tony.” And with that he was done. The PD was whispering to the press about Leonard. Just as Leonard had been whispering to them about Mulino. He slid back into his desperate chair. He still had work to do. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to read all the paper that had come in, he could put it back in the boxes. Make the place manageable after the warrant team had been through. It wasn’t as though he had an assistant to do it for him. At the very least it would distract him from the hot, wet death outside. And from the card the woman on the bridge had slipped him. He didn’t need to be reminded that he was in danger, but now he wanted to know from whom. And why. Midnight was a long way off. Maybe he’d take the afternoon off, take a nap, and head out later. He hoisted himself up and rounded the desk. He dragged a few folders off the floor and slid them into the first box. As he did, he saw the first page. A list of all of Brian Rowson’s cell phone calls for the past two months. The evidence guys don’t mess around. About to slip it back in the folder, he caught himself. He pulled the paper to his desk and looked down it, at one number that appeared over and over down the page.

  Brian Rowson had been calling someone seven times a day, every day, the last few weeks of his life. Leonard tapped the number into his computer. It was the general line for a little investment firm. One of dozens that can spring up or vanish depending on a single year’s earnings. Leonard scrolled through the company’s website: a corporate name, some photos of men in expensive suits, and meaningless aphorisms. EHA Investments. The name rang a bell. He looked down at the card the woman on the bridge had given him. Rowson probably wasn’t managing his 401(k) in a place like that. The woman wasn’t going to tell him something about Davenport at all. She was going to tell him something about Rowson, Mulino, and the shooting on the ship. Leonard fished out the rest of the folder and set it on his desk. He wouldn’t be leaving early after all.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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  “I missed you this morning.”

  As usual, Veronica had not noticed the pale old man in his winter suit and his serene cufflinks. The soft smile didn’t make what he was saying any less of a threat.

  “I had a doctor’s appointment.” No one ever asks if you say that. They are afraid it will be bad news. Impolite. Remembering her mistake from yesterday, she kept herself anchored to the terminal, refusing to look at the bright eyes hidden in Eliot’s ashen face. If she had looked up, he would have seen her fear, and now all he saw was her concentration.

  She was still afraid, but at least she had a plan now. She would need the other one. The investigator at the docks. When she had heard about Davenport, she realiz
ed that anything could happen. That it might all be true. All the more reason to avoid Eliot. She had rushed to the scene and caught the man just in time. He had worked with the dead woman. He would be able to help. From here on out, she would not be able to do it alone.

  “So, then. Later on today?”

  She was still fused on the screen, pretending to catch numbers as they flew past her. “After the markets close, if that’s okay.”

  “Of course.”

  She didn’t look up, but she could see that he didn’t have the binder with him this time. It was waiting in his office. She wasn’t sure what would happen to her once she went in. He was being patient, toying with her. She knew what had been going on and that made her dangerous. But he could wait to deal with her. His kind always could.

  He lingered at the door a little as she kept at the keyboard, trying to look like she was still focused. Maybe he was waiting to see if she would break stride, to see if she would turn from the screen. Most of them do from time to time. The longer she held straightforward, keeping her eyes down and her fingers moving, the more she feared he was on to her act. But she was committed now; if she stopped, relaxed, then he would ask her to come with him right then. From Eliot’s posture, you would never know that the lawyer who visited him two days ago had been found dead. Perhaps they hadn’t told him. Perhaps he had known for so long that it was old news. It was one of the many things that Veronica knew not to ask him.

  The old man turned back to his sitting room. Veronica allowed herself a slight breath of confidence. She looked down from her machine to the hard drive below. If he had seen the flash drive stuck into her machine, it would all have been over. Breathing deeply now, she moved another two hundred files onto the device. In a week, maybe less, there would be a team of forensics guys determining what exactly she had taken. She couldn’t worry about that. If she found herself, a week from now, explaining to Eliot why she had been copying five thousand files from her hard drive, that would mean that a week from now she would still be alive. At this point, that would be as much as she could hope for.

  She leaned back in toward the humming screen. Midnight was still ten hours away. There was more left to do until then.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MANNA

  Orchard Street south of Delancey was the old part of the Lower East Side, the part that hadn’t yet been swarmed with senseless shops selling frilly clothing to people who want to prove they can pay more than you for a skirt. Most of the neighborhood’s Jewish haunts had eventually been handed over to Dominicans and now were grocery stores or bars playing the Spanish feed of the Yankees games. A few places seemed to have been boarded up for twenty or fifty years. The boom had reached as far as it was going to, and as it crept backward, a few old storefronts seemed totally safe from renovation.

  One of them sported a stenciled plate-glass window, “Men’s Suits and Finest Haberdashery,” which no one had bothered to throw a brick through even though it had been closed for decades. Maybe eight or nine years ago, someone had hung a black curtain behind the window, outfitted the inside as a bar, and started telling a few friends. Back when the place had opened, it seemed sweet and fun and slightly scandalous to pretend you had dialed back to Prohibition. Days were bright and money was easy to come by, and you had to work to imagine what it had been like during hard times, when sneaking into bars had been the norm. The little bar, without a name on the door but known as Manna to everyone who went, sparked its own little mini-boomlet of fake speakeasies, starting a trend that soon eclipsed it. The place had been abandoned by its former friends; now only the stray tourist even bothered to go inside.

  By the time Leonard followed the stranger’s directions and showed up at midnight, Manna had been surpassed by even odder and harder-to-find places, entered through the back door of a tool-and-die joint in Queens, or on the seventh floor of an office tower, empty at night, somewhere north of the flower district. And its cachet had faded further now that there was no more thrill in imagining a crime-ridden world. Less of a fantasy, it was no longer any fun to indulge. By that summer night, there were once again whispers that this corner of the Lower East Side might creep back toward the unthinkable. That it might once again become unsafe to so much as wander down the street.

  Still the place hung on, its unmarked front door outfitted with a sliding peephole, so that when you knocked, some overdressed twenty-three-year-old could give you the once-over, pretending to check if maybe you were Eliot Ness come to shut the joint down. A few years ago, Leonard Mitchell, a little too square with his bureaucratic posture and his nondescript clothing, might have been turned away. But they couldn’t afford to be so picky anymore. In a quieter and closer city, the place was no longer the favored haunt, but had begun, almost because of that, for the first time to feel genuine.

  Leonard stood in the doorway. There were only six people in the bar. A couple of tourist kids were nestled in the back. One of them maybe had read about the place in a magazine a few years ago and wanted to tell the crowd back in Dayton that he had been to a real speakeasy. He didn’t know how to find the ones that people still went to. Closer to the front, three people, a little older, were drinking white fuzzy coolers in tall thin glasses. Perhaps they had seen some kind of performance art in one of the sweatshops-turned-galleries dotting the Lower East Side. Or they were leftovers, trendsetters who had moved to this neighborhood when it was red hot, had settled in, and who didn’t now feel much like picking up and moving to Bushwick. Or maybe they were just thirsty.

  Veronica sat in a booth by the front, alone, cradling an amber-red cocktail with her long fingers, the nails still bright and gaudy. She wore the sharp black suit, and her green eyes shone even in the dim bar. Her posture was elegant without being rigid; she was comfortable, looking important. Her chin barely moved but the bartender caught it and swung round to meet Leonard. He gave a look that said he was maybe ready to take an order or maybe ready to throw Leonard out for chatting with a lady who didn’t want him around.

  “I’ll have the same.” The bartender checked with Veronica, who approved Leonard with only a hint of a nod. Satisfied, the bartender turned to his work, mashing up a couple of pristine berries. He wore rolled-up sleeves and a banker’s eyeshade to play his role to full camp. Leonard joined Veronica on the severe wooden booth. It was uncomfortable on purpose. Sidling on the bench, he set a manila envelope next to her, filled with Rowson’s phone records. It was his ace in the hole. In case she didn’t tell him enough. But maybe he wouldn’t even need to use it.

  “Thanks for coming.” There was something in her accent he couldn’t place. Not foreign exactly. Just the kind of American that sounds maybe like it wants to be foreign. The rounded vowels of the more prestigious zip codes of Connecticut.

  “What did you mean by danger?”

  Veronica looked toward the window. It was blacked out with a curtain, so there was nothing to see anyway. “I really am sorry about your boss.”

  “Thank you. But I’d like you to tell me who you are, and what you meant by danger.”

  She didn’t flinch, exactly. She looked down at her drink and she bit her lip and she looked up again, just as the bartender brought Leonard the same concoction. He took a sip of it—something like a Manhattan, but wrongly sweet. Manna made cocktails with loads of fresh fruit, boasting authenticity but leaving you with drinks that tasted a lot like punch. The bar was draped with glistening boysenberries, bright slices of pineapple, and austere pomegranates. The juice of one of them had made it into the drink. Leonard didn’t care for it. She spoke again.

  “You saw my card. I’m sure you know where I work.”

  Leonard had done the due diligence on EHA Investments that afternoon. A sleek homepage littered with boilerplate about providing value to clients during restless times. A collection of disclaimers at the bottom. Most of these operations try to look comprehensive and professional while providing as lit
tle information as possible. If he didn’t know Veronica’s name beforehand he wouldn’t have found it on their site. Then he’d gone through financial news sites and some of the angrier blogs that had popped up since the recession started. Some people seemed to know an awful lot about EHA. It had made its reputation by betting on failure, short-selling companies on their way under. In the six years since so many firms started crashing and burning, it had been doing very well. It was one way to survive a recession. Some lonely critics singled it out as a vulture, preying on dying firms. But no one had written anything about danger.

  “I know a little. I don’t know why you gave me your card. Or why you were running to where Davenport was found.”

  Veronica clipped the edge of her glass with the bright nails. “Davenport came to talk to the head of the company. Eliot Holm-Anderson. I don’t know why. We don’t do any business with the city.”

  Sure. Leonard hadn’t even paid attention to where Davenport had landed when she had jumped ship. It would make sense. Leaving the city to go to a private law firm, doing internal investigations. These places will pay a lawyer a little money to write a bright report about their operations so they don’t have to pay a lot of money to a federal regulator. Davenport could cash in and still hunt bad guys. And Veronica was at the place under investigation. It still didn’t explain anything about the cop calling them all day long.

  “And so she was going to embarrass the firm? For making money off of failing businesses? She had evidence someone had done something wrong?