Dying Memories

by Dave Zeltserman

It had been less than two minutes since Hank T stumbled out of the office, and Bill figured he had another five minutes or so before he had to be leaving, and he used the phone to try the numbers that he hadn’t been able to do reverse directory lookups for.

  The first number reached a generic answering machine message, which didn’t help. The second one he tried a man answered, simply saying, “Yes?”

  “This is Elliot Johnson calling from Forster’s Hedge Fund,” Bill said. “I want to make sure I’m talking to the right person.”

  “Okay,” the man said.

  “Don’t give me any of that okay shit,” Bill demanded sharply. “This is about what happened last night at ViGen. You want to confirm who I’m talking to?”

  “Allan Rosten,” the man replied, a mix of confusion and subservience entering his voice.

  “Okay, then, I’m waiting. Yes or no, did you hear what happened?”

  “Yes, of course I heard,” Rosten said. He hesitated before adding, “I don’t understand. Why are you the one calling about this?”

  “Why do you think? Who do you think it was that directed me to call you?”

  Almost timidly, Rosten said, “Kloot.”

  “Damn straight. He wants to make sure we don’t have that type of fuck up again.”

  “Why does Kloot think this is my responsibility?”

  “You figure it out.”

  Bill hung up on him. The conversation had gone in such a surreal direction and it left him jazzed by what he had just pulled as well as curious as hell to know who this Kloot was. He tried the next number he had, and this time when a man answered his blood chilled as he matched the voice to a very pink face. He hung up and thought it would be wise to get going, but was itching to check whether G had left him any more messages. He logged onto G’s web-site and found a new message.

  Bill, very cute. Yes, you guessed right, we had a tracking device installed in the iPhone, but that was for your own protection. You’ve gotta start learning to trust someone if you want to get out of this alive, or at least without spending the rest of your life in maximum security. As it is you had us wondering for a good two hours why the fuck you were hanging around a Chelsea high school. Again, very cute. Below’s a name and address of someone we think is a player at ViGen. Start showing some brains, okay?—yer pal G.

  Bill wrote down the name and address, then cleared out the history for the web browser. He didn’t bother wiping off his prints, instead just grabbed the stack of folders and papers that he had collected. Then he was moving fast out the door.

  Hank T stood by the reception area talking in a low voice into the phone. When he saw Bill he stopped. He glanced to see what Bill was carrying, then back to meet Bill’s stare. His right eye showed a twitch as he told Bill that he’d better put everything back.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Bill said. “Just stay where you are. There’s no reason for you to get hurt.”

  Hank T stood frozen as Bill hurried past him and out of the office. His heart thumped wildly in his chest as he waited for the elevator. Who the fuck did Hank T call? Security? The police? ViGen?

  When the elevator came he took it to the second floor where he found a back staircase leading to a fire exit. It was that easy for him to leave, then he was racing back to where he had left the car he had boosted. There weren’t any police sirens, no one chasing him, nothing immediate that he needed to be worried about. Once he got back to the stolen Chevy Nova he was nearly hyperventilating, his body drenched so fully in sweat that his clothing felt soaked. He sank to one knee and stayed like that until his breathing became more normal and his head stopped swimming. Then he got into the car. He wanted to know who it was that Hank T had called, and he drove past the entrance to One Post Office Square. There were no police cars out front, only a familiar black Mercedes double-parked by the entrance.

  Bill slowed the car down to a crawl and squinted hard and was able to make out a familiar looking thug inside the lobby, along with a thin, well-dressed man, both of whom were talking to the security guard. The thin, well-dressed man had his back turned to Bill, but he made out the pointy ears and knew who the man was. He stepped harder on the gas and wondered briefly why he’d only been seeing the clean-shaven thug, and not the thug’s ox-sized goateed twin and had to guess that whatever he had injected into the other man had put him out of commission, maybe for good. Fine. He certainly wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

  Chapter 66

  Bill waited until after midnight before heading back to Jeremy’s apartment. Earlier that night he caught the news on the radio with the lead story being about the ex-Tribune reporter wanted for two grisly murders, the near-fatal beating and sexual assault of his ex-girlfriend; and newly added to his litany of violent crimes, a brutal senseless beating of a homeless man under an overpass near Porter Square. With a grim satisfaction he noted that they at least got one right. Hearing the story made him sink lower in his seat and pull Jeremy’s Mets cap further over his eyes. Still, when a police cruiser pulled up behind him, he felt his heart turn to cold sludge. After a couple of blocks the police cruiser peeled off and he breathed more normally again.

  He needed to eat something so he spent some of G’s money and went through a drive-thru window and picked up several cheeseburgers, fries, and a frozen plastic-like concoction they called a vanilla shake. He kept his face shielded while ordering and picking up his food, then drove to a deserted parking lot. He barely tasted his dinner as his thoughts kept drifting towards Emily. Several times he turned his cell phone on and keyed in Emily’s number before turning the phone off. The last time he turned on his cell phone Chuck Boxer called. The homicide detective seemed surprised when Bill answered.

  “You get my messages?” Boxer asked.

  “I’ve been keeping my phone off,” Bill said. “Rings too much when it’s on. Sorry, haven’t bothered checking my messages. Too many to check, anyway.”

  Boxer cleared his throat, said, “Conway, you need to come in. This has gone too far as it is.”

  Bill didn’t bother responding.

  “Want to explain what happened with Dr. Henry Schlow?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “You stole his car. We know you did that. Your prints are all over it. All over his wallet too”

  “Yeah, I stole his car. And I stole his wallet.”

  “But you didn’t kill him, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t kill him.”

  “How about Joseph Fasteua? The man whose jaw you busted up at Filene’s Basement?”

  “The punk kid posing as a security guard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he actually working for Filene’s?”

  “No. It was a scam.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Bill said. “Anyway, it couldn’t be helped.”

  There was a hesitation, then Boxer asked about the man Bill almost kicked to death the other night. “That couldn’t be helped either?”

  “For once you’ve got me dead to rights,” Bill said.

  There was another hesitation, then, “Look, Conway, there are things that don’t add up, and I’m thinking it’s not exactly what it looks like, but I need you to turn yourself in so we can work this through—”

  Bill turned off his phone cutting Boxer off. With everything that had been happening he had stopped thinking clearly and it took him a while to realize why Boxer was calling. They were trying to locate his position by using a method called triangulation. While talking to Boxer he remembered a story he had worked on a year earlier about the Boston police having the technology to do that. It didn’t always work—it was dependent on the cell phone being within the range of three cell towers, and even then it could take up to fifteen minutes. But when it worked, they could pinpoint exact locations.

  He put his stolen Chevy Nova in drive and pulled out of the parking lot. Five minutes later he passed four police cruisers speeding along in the oppos
ite direction with their lights and sirens off. Wherever they were going, they were in a hurry.

  While he drove he couldn’t keep from thinking of Emily. There had to be a way for him to explain to her what was happening, even if he needed to show her G’s website to convince her. He pulled into a strip mall parking lot. An anxiousness knotted his stomach as he debated whether or not to call her. He keyed in her phone number. It got so quiet in his head as he waited for her to answer. The phone was picked up on her end, but if it was Emily she wasn’t saying anything.

  “Emily, shit, is that you?” Bill asked, the same ice-cold panic gripping him as he once again imagined a very pink-faced man picking up the receiver in Emily’s apartment. There was a long, agonizing wait before Emily spoke. There was a heavy sadness to her as she told him he shouldn’t be calling her anymore.

  “It’s not the way it looks, Emily. None of it is. I promise you.”

  “Bill, I saw you afterwards. I saw the blood on you. You told me what you did to your ex-girlfriend and her fiancée.” Her voice trailed off, then a long silence before she continued again, this time an exhaustion in her voice. “Please, Bill,” she said, “if you really don’t believe you did those things then you’re ill and you need help. Please go to the police.”

  He was about to tell her how he could explain why she thought she remembered the things she did, how ViGen was behind all of this, and all the rest of it, but he stopped himself realizing that they could be bugging her phone. More likely than not they were. He’d be putting her at risk if he told her any of it. He sat tongue-tied trying to think of what he could say to her but his mind went blank.

  “Bill, are you still there?” she asked.

  “I have to get going,” he told her. “But, Emily, I promise you, all of this can be explained.”

  He hung up. For several minutes he sat unable to do anything as he was consumed by an unbearable longing for what he had lost and a furious anger over what they had done to him. When he could finally move he rubbed some moistness from around his eyes and decided fuck them all, this wasn’t over. He put the car back in drive, his jaw muscles tightening to where they ached.

  That was all hours ago. Now he was back in Jeremy’s apartment trying to make sense of the papers he had taken from Forster’s hedge fund. He had them spread out covering Jeremy’s kitchen table and was using a red pen to circle names and dates and other bits of information, while sorting the papers into an arrangement that could clear up the picture. Augustine lay in his lap, and every time he’d start to get restless Bill would scratch under the cat’s chin or along his ears.

  From what he could tell, Forster’s hedge fund was a shell company and that all the money that came in was funneled to ViGen. The client names listed in the paperwork were limited partnerships, which Bill’s gut told him were shells also. He found Peter Kloot’s name among the papers. Kloot seemed to be calling the shots from outside the hedge fund, sending directives over how the fund needed to operate. Other than Kloot’s name, he found two others that he had pulled from Schlow’s cell phone. On a separate piece of paper he had written down the names, phone numbers and addresses from what he was able to get from Schlow’s phone and his reverse directory lookups, as well as Allan Rosten, the name G gave him in his last message and Peter Kloot. He didn’t have an address or phone number yet for Kloot, but he had Kloot’s name circled in red ink all over the papers he had stolen.

  Still holding Augustine, he stood up, cracked his neck with a chiropractor-type move, then made his way to Jeremy’s computer where he sat bleary-eyed as he tried unsuccessfully to get an address for Peter Kloot and find more information about the limited partnerships that he uncovered. After an hour of that he was having trouble focusing on the computer screen, his eyelids too damn heavy to keep open. He lay down on the bed. All he wanted was a few minutes rest—no more than five minutes and he’d be back at it. He closed his eyes, telling himself it was only going to be a short cat nap. Five minutes tops...

  Bill woke up disoriented, not quite sure where he was but sensing someone else in the room with him. The last few days came back to him in a sickening rush. He bolted up expecting to find either an ox-sized thug or a man with a very pink-face. Instead, standing in the open doorway staring wild-eyed at him and gripping a baseball bat as if he were going to be swinging for the fences was his friend, Jeremy.

  Chapter 67

  Jeremy looked badly scared as he stood in the doorway, the bat gripped tightly in his hands. He still hadn’t recognized Bill. Augustine was with him, meowing loudly and rubbing his body furiously against Jeremy’s leg, but Jeremy appeared oblivious to it. Slowly recognition seeped into his face.

  “Jesus, Bill, you just about gave me a heart attack!” Jeremy said excitedly, his tone rising from the adrenaline pounding through him. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Bill took a quick glance at the alarm clock next to the bed and saw it was six-twenty, then looked back to his friend. He hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol the other night, but three hours of sleep left him groggy and feeling the same as if he were suffering from a bad hangover. He also had the unpleasant fuzziness and taste inside his mouth as if he had swallowed a piece of a wool sock.

  “It’s a long story,” Bill croaked out, his voice a hoarse whisper. He cleared his throat to try to get the hoarseness out. It didn’t help much. “Can I tell it to you over some coffee? And how about putting that baseball bat down?”

  Jeremy gave the bat he held a confused look as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. He leaned it against the doorframe. For the first time he noticed Augustine demanding attention by his feet and he picked the cat up. “Goddamn it, Bill,” he swore, “I arrive home after my trip, and what the fuck do I find? You sleeping in my bed and my place smelling like the inside of a locker-room. And what’s with all those papers spread out on my kitchen table?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” Bill promised, relieved over the obvious fact that Jeremy hadn’t seen a newspaper since getting off his plane. “And I’ll be paying to have your place cleaned and deodorized.”

  “You’re fucking right you will.” Jeremy made a face, his lip curling in disgust. “And what’s with this smell? Gawd, it’s awful.”

  “I promise, I’ll explain everything. Let me get the coffee brewing first.”

  “Making yourself right at home, are you?” Jeremy asked, annoyance hardening the muscles along his mouth.

  “Yeah, I guess I have been. Sorry about that. You want to make the coffee, go right ahead.”

  “Nah, seeing how you’re so comfortable here, I’ll let you do it.”

  Bill didn’t argue the matter any further, instead he led the way to the kitchen. While they waited for the coffee to brew, Bill made small talk, asking Jeremy about his trip to Italy which Jeremy answered politely, all the while his impatience tightening his mouth into a hard line.

  They had gone through so much together over the last five years. When Karen broke up with Bill, they had more than a few beers together, just as they did when a year earlier a gorgeous twenty-five year-old receptionist who could’ve been Jessica Alba’s body double and who Jeremy was head over heels for had dumped him. Still, going through all that was normal stuff, this was something altogether different, and Bill found himself keeping the small talk up after the coffee had finished brewing and they were sitting opposite each other. He dreaded telling his friend any of what had been happening.

  “Cut it out,” Jeremy said at last. “What the fuck’s been going on?”

  Bill took a deep breath, nodded. “This is going to sound insane, completely bizarre and outrageous, but keep an open mind, okay? I’m not crazy, I’m not imagining any of this, and everything I’m going to be telling you I can prove.”

  Jeremy smiled at that. “Fuck if you’re not crazy,” he said.

  “No more than you, anyway.” Bill hesitated for a moment, his expression frozen as if he were trying to fight back a sneeze, then with a look of resignati
on softening his features he went into the story, starting with everything he had found about the Gail Hawes shooting. As he went through his being kidnapped, the murder frames and all the rest of it Jeremy’s smile turned plastic, his eyes shifting to show his incredulousness.

  “This is a joke, right?” he asked.

  “I wish it were.”

  “It must be,” Jeremy insisted. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. Let’s pretend everything you’re telling me is true and this really nasty group is developing a way to inject instant memories into people. Let’s also say they can do all this cloak and dagger shit you’re claiming. If they wanted to kill Forster and they’re as scary and powerful as you’re saying, why would they do something as elaborate as manipulate Hawes? Why wouldn’t they just make this guy quietly disappear?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m guessing they were as much interested in using Gail Hawes as a guinea pig as they were in killing Forster. Maybe they saw it as a chance to test how far they can control someone with these fake memories.”

  Jeremy was shaking his head, still smiling his tight plastic smile. “It still doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If this is some sort of military ops project, why would they be grabbing homeless people from Porter Square to test their drug on? Don’t these guys usually just test on their own or grab prisoners from Gitmo? I’m sorry, Bill, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s too risky. Too easy for them to be caught doing this shit.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. They must have their reasons.”

  “I don’t buy it. And this whole G stuff sounds like complete bullshit,” Jeremy said

  Bill shrugged halfheartedly.

  “So what you’re telling me is if I go to the Globe’s web-site I’ll see that you’re wanted for at least a couple of murders?”

  “Same if you checked the Tribune site.”

  Jeremy made a face. “That rag? I wouldn’t believe a goddamn thing they said. Alright, we’ll see.”