by John Farrow
He’d gotten over the momentary loss of confidence, emerging with a heightened sense of his place within the department. He learned that he could teach himself to think like crooks by empathizing with them and, more important, by allowing the Roman Catholic in him to come to the fore. If he was a creature of God, and a man with a God-driven destiny, then surely what was intrinsic to him had specific, if undetermined, value. In time Émile Cinq-Mars grew to believe that, through maintaining what he saw as purity of purpose, his role was to be the conscience of the Police Department, to remind his fellow officers of the thin line they walked between civility and abuse, between discipline and disorder and, significantly, between justice and vengeance. Similarly, he reminded cops that crooks were the bad guys, in need of repair or incarceration, that cops were not supposed to be their own worst enemies. Overall, he ceded any pretense to being one of the boys in blue, and set himself apart.
As Cinq-Mars sipped his coffee, ruminating, Okinder Boyle fairly bounced through the door, offering up a morning eagerness that amused the older man. The journalist ordered a chocolatine, a croissant filled with a rich dark chocolate heated to dripping. Cinq-Mars feared the temptation about to be placed across from him.
“How’ve you been?”
“Good, Émile, thanks. How’s the world treating you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“No kidding. At your age, that’s hard to imagine.”
“Bear in mind, Okinder, who’s carrying a gun.”
“I forgot. Truth is, I hope I’m as well preserved as you are when I’m ninety-five—whoops, sorry, don’t shoot—fifty-five.”
“Fifty-six, but who’s counting?”
Boyle’s chocolatine arrived, and the young reporter bit into it lasciviously. He closed his eyes, chewed, and returned the pastry to the plate. Cinq-Mars observed an infinitesimal amount of chocolate dribble out from between his lips. “Detective, long story. Bear with me, all right? I’ve had a helluva weekend.”
“I’m all ears,” Cinq-Mars vowed, eyes on the chocolate.
Boyle reminded him of his Christmas Eve visit to the tunnel and his talk with the Banker. He discussed the visit from Carl Bantry’s daughter, Heather, who’d been bent on assuring that the tale about her father was printed.
“And then a few days ago I received a visit from another young woman, also claiming to be Heather Bantry, who directs me to her father, who is the real Carl Bantry who is living in a nursing home on the south shore, thank you kindly, not inside any damn tunnel.”
“Hold on. There are two Carls and two Heathers?”
“Exactly. Except that one father-daughter combination is real and the other one’s a CIA plant.”
“We are definitely jumping to conclusions here, Okinder. You’re not saying you have proof of that?”
Boyle was dusting the crumbs off his fingers and smiling mischievously. “Okay. Sheer speculation. But face facts. A group of men is planted in a tunnel to direct me to someone called the Banker, only he really isn’t that person and those men usually aren’t there. I’ve checked. The Railway Police go through the tunnel nightly. Nobody can make fires and live there. It just so happens that the Railway Police get a few days off around Christmas. So these actors took over the tunnel after a seed had been sown in my head. They were very convincing. Anybody would’ve been taken in by them.” Boyle first wet his lips, then took a gulp of mud. “Now I find out there’s a real Heather and a real Carl Bantry. So I visit Carl on the south shore, where he’s minding his own business in a nursing home for dodo birds. He’s pretty sound. He tells me, and his daughter confirms, that his bills get paid by his former employer, by the bank.”
“And is the bank paying?”
“I inquired at the bank when I first did my story. They didn’t know his whereabouts. Their financial support is minimal. Their insurance company sends checks, which apparently get siphoned off by his wife. That part of the original story bears out. I checked back with the bank over the weekend. They weren’t overjoyed to hear from me, but there you go. As far as two executives are concerned, they are not supporting Carl Bantry in a nursing home. Why deny it? The information would only make them look good. I called back the nursing home. They don’t know who’s paying the bills. They receive direct deposits monthly.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You haven’t leapfrogged into the lap of the CIA, not yet.”
“I visit Carl Bantry in the nursing home Saturday morning. Same day—that evening, Saturday night—I get a visit from the original Heather, the fake one, trying to find out what I’d been doing there, how much I know, what I plan to write. The fake Heather knows I visited the real Carl. She has to admit that she’s not Heather Bantry, she has no choice, but she won’t tell me her real name. If I publish, she warns me, she’ll probably die, her death will be on my head, and—get this—the people who do her will be the same gentle folks who broke Hagop Artinian’s neck.”
“Whoosh,” Cinq-Mars exclaimed.
“Then she gets to play her final card. If I don’t believe her, she says, I can call up the famous Detective Émile Cinq-Mars, and he’ll convince me not to publish.”
“She said that?” He shook his head. “Still no CIA connection.”
“Hey, it’s come up before. I don’t find it such a stretch. The chick was trying to make me think she’s a cop. She wasn’t saying so flat out, but she’s letting the insinuation ride. She has to give herself some kind of connection, doesn’t she? She can’t exactly let on that she’s being run by the CIA. More news, Émile—I’ve seen the guy.”
“What guy?”
“The CIA guy.”
“What CIA guy? Who—when?—where?—how do you know?” Cinq-Mars didn’t know what he needed to hear first.
“Friday night, before my caper to the nursing home, after I’ve learned about the second Heather, I met Heather One, the fake, in a bar. Actually, I saw her walk through the bar I was in and look around. I followed. She did the same thing in another bar. After that she went into a third and met this older guy. Welldressed dude. They held hands, talked up close, looked into each other’s eyes, that sort of thing. So I went over and said hello.”
“You didn’t.”
“I’m not shy. I asked the fake Heather—when she’s over at my place the next night—who was the guy? She tries to pass him off as her stepfather. I call her on that. Since when do college girls hold hands across the table with their stepdads and look dewy-eyed at them? She admits it’s a story. Again, she offers no explanation. He’s the guy, Émile. He’s the one.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Midforties. Well-dressed. The threads jump out at you. Good-looking for a suit. What can I tell you?”
“How about the make of his car? How about the fake Heather Bantry’s phone number? No! You have a phone number?”
The reporter had a hit of java. “Tried it this morning. The chick answered. I hung up. Friday night after I talked to them, I followed them out from the bar. They walked through a building where I lost them, so I just headed back to the club scene to do what I planned to do all along. Drink and meet girls. What do I see? The two of them coming out of some other building. I mean, who walks through a bunch of different buildings for no reason except people who don’t want to be followed and who think they might be? They got into a car and were out of sight before I could catch up. All I saw was that the car was green.”
“Too bad.”
“But Saturday night, after the chick left my place, I slipped downstairs and caught a glimpse. Again, no plate number. It was dark, and the light over the plate was out. But the car was an Infiniti Q Forty-five. There aren’t many of those in town.”
Cinq-Mars was beaming. “Okinder Boyle. Good work!”
“Just call me Steeplechase B. Here’s the phone number.”
The reporter ripped off a small sheet from his pocket notepad and passed it across the table to Sergeant-Detec
tive Émile Cinq-Mars, who, as if it had been written in invisible ink and might momentarily vanish, committed the number to memory before stuffing it away. Speechless awhile, he finally managed to say, “Thanks, Okinder.” He cleared his throat. “Saturday night, probably just after the young woman was at your place, I received a call from the man in the Q Forty-five. He pulled me away from a dinner party I had on. I don’t know who he is. We’ve had contact, but I don’t know him. He prevailed upon me to beg you not to publish.”
“I’ll consider myself persuaded. It’s the big story I’m after here.”
“Someday you’ll have it.” Cinq-Mars put his elbows on the table and rubbed his hands. “How were the pastries?”
Boyle laughed. “Come on, Émile. Splurge. Live a little for a change.”
“Maybe I will,” the detective intimated. “I may have something to celebrate.” He and his new friend grinned.
Detective Bill Mathers made his way along narrow, congested streets to the mechanic’s last known address. Spotting a mailman on his way up the walk, he decided against ringing the kid’s bell and waited as the man selected the appropriate key and entered. The postal worker held open the door for the loiterer, and the cop followed him to the cubbyhole of mailboxes. The man slung down his sack and started sorting.
“Anything for Jim Coates?” Mathers asked after a bit.
“Regulations, sir. You have to use your key. I can’t hand over mail if I don’t recognize the face.”
Mathers displayed his badge.
“Same difference,” the mailman told him.
“I don’t want his mail necessarily. I want to know if he received any.”
The man checked the box. “There’s a postcard and a letter.”
“Who from?”
The man took the mail out. “The postcard’s from Brazil.”
“Who from?” Mathers asked.
“How should I know? I can’t read the signature. Look, I’m not supposed to do this.”
“Every mailman alive reads postcards. In the history of the postal service no mailman has made it through his career without reading postcards.”
The man was older than Mathers, in his forties, made fit by his profession. Under his winter cap gray hair showed at the temples. He took another glance at the card. “It’s nothing. You read it,” he said.
Somebody was traveling in Brazil wishing Jim Coates was there. At first Mathers deciphered the signature as reading, “Me,” but by comparing the letters to others on the page he discerned that the scribble could be deciphered as “Mom.”
“What about the letter? Who’s it from?”
“No return address.”
“Postmark?”
The man checked. “Local.”
“Thanks. I appreciate your help.”
He climbed the stairs to the third floor and knocked on Jim Coates’s door. Footsteps approached, and the youth opened the door, the chainlock in place, peering sleepily through the narrow gap.
“Hi there, Jim. How’re you doing?”
“It’s you.” He unlatched the chain and let him in.
“Glad to see me?” Clearly, the kid had just clambered out of bed. He was wearing jeans which he hadn’t zipped and the black T-shirt he’d probably slept in. He shrugged, yawned, and fastened his pants. “You should be,” the policeman admonished him.
“How come?”
“You don’t know?”
The youth shrugged again. “I heard about Kaplonski,” he admitted.
Mathers strode deeper into the apartment, sizing things up. “That’s right—Kaplonski. Blown to smithereens. Not much left of him. Imagine that, eh? You go to park your car. Put it in reverse—kaboom! Off to kingdom come. All of a sudden you’re ringing the bell at the pearly gates wondering why nobody’s answering.”
The youth was smoothing down his wild hair a bit, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“That was some garage you worked at, Jim. One of your co-workers gets his neck snapped, a meat hook through the heart, your former boss gets a keg of dynamite under his ass. Makes you wonder who’s next.” Mathers ceased his examination of the apartment, nondescript except for the lack of a telephone, and confronted the youth again.
“Good thing I’m out of there.”
“I’d call that an understatement, Jim. Do you have any coffee?”
The request surprised the young man. He had to defog before answering. “Yeah, maybe, I think there’s some left.”
“Could I trouble you? I’ve been running on empty and we’ve got a few things to sort out. Looks to me like you could use a cup yourself. I need you wide awake.”
Mathers followed him into the kitchenette and checked things in there. No phone, a sink full of dishes, and as the young man opened the refrigerator door to take out the cream, he saw that he had food.
“You working, Jim?”
“I got a job, yeah.”
“Great! Mechanic?”
“Naw, tire place. I repair flats, install new tires, stuff like that. It’s good. It’s around cars. I get training and the pay’s okay, it’s all right.”
“I’m happy for you. You should be reasonably well hidden in a garage like that.”
Coates looked at him as he measured out the coffee. “Nobody’s looking for me,” the boy postulated.
“No? You got a phone yet?”
“No, but, there’s no point being stupid about it.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping your head down, Jim. That’s important. I don’t want to scare you, but word on the street is, somebody might be wondering where you are.”
Coates appeared to be waking up by the minute. “Why? I don’t know nothing.”
Mathers performed an extensive grimace and sucked air between his teeth. “That’s the thing, Jim. That’s the point of view that doesn’t wash clean anymore. Truth is, if you knew nothing, then nobody would care about your existence. But people care. Maybe the same people who did what they did to poor Hagop. Old Man Kaplonski didn’t stand in their way either, did he? He probably considered himself a friend of the family. So I’m thinking, either you know something and know what it is but you’re not telling us, or you know something and you haven’t figured out what it could be. Either way, you know something, Jim. The evidence points in that direction.”
Pouring water into the back of the coffee machine, the young man did not seem up to issuing further denials. He was looking a trifle pale.
“I got a call last night from my partner. Wanted me in early. So I’ve been going all morning. Sure could use that coffee. Remember him, Jim? My partner? He gave you a rough ride down at the garage. He had me in early to talk about you. He’s concerned about a few things. Your safety, for starters. He’s also bothered by something else, Jim.”
“What’s that?” Coates was washing out cups.
“We know that Hagop Artinian was up to something. My partner asked the question ‘How did Kaplonski find out?’ I told him I didn’t have a clue. Then he says to me, ‘We know Artinian told somebody else about what he was doing.’ That’s true, he did that. My partner—do you remember him, Jim?”
“Sure, yeah, Cinq-Mars. I got his card. He’s a famous guy I found out.”
“That’s right, he is. He’s a great cop. Anyhow, my partner is asking these tough questions, you know? Brutal, that early. He had a point though. If Hagop told somebody about what he was doing once, maybe he did it twice. Could’ve been a chronic problem with him, a pattern, talking too much. So my partner was wondering, how come Jim Coates got friendly with Kaplonski all of a sudden?” “I didn’t,” the youth objected.
“Cinq-Mars, my partner, he’s saying things to me like, ‘That boy was put in charge of the garage, all by himself, Christmas week. That’s a lot of responsibility when it’s a hot garage. How come he was trusted? And if he wasn’t trusted, why didn’t they waste him back then?’ Those are good questions, and I didn’t have the answers. Seems like you were in Kaplonski’s good graces.”
The
young man just stared back at him. Detective Bill Mathers returned the look. “If he wasn’t trusting you, maybe he was testing you. What do you think about that? Leaving you alone in that garage to face the cops—was it a test? Or maybe he was tying your leg to the can.”
“I don’t get it,” Coates said. “What’re you saying?” “Another thing. You didn’t give Kaplonski much notice, did you? None, in fact. You just left. Tell me, Jim, what’s your mother doing in Brazil?”
“What do you care? She’s on her honeymoon.” “That’s good. I mean, it’s good she’s out of the country. Nice guy?”
“He’s good for her, I think. He got me my job.” “We’ll have to talk to her when she gets back.” “What do you mean? Why?” The timbre of his voice broached hysteria.
“I’ll go with you if you like. We have to explain that people might come around looking for you, that she can’t let anybody know where you live or work.”
The youth was panicking now. “Who’s coming after me? I mean—why? What did I do? I don’t know nothing.”
“Jim, listen to me. We have to get serious about your protection. You know what that means. You can lie low awhile, but down the road, a new identity maybe, a safe house. Expenses, Jim. For expenses I need authorization. To get that, I want the information at my fingertips, so I can make a case for you with the brass.”
“I don’t know nothing!” Coates burst out. Simultaneously, the coffeemaker gurgled, followed by a hissing noise, and the pot was ready to be poured.
“Nobody’s judging you. Maybe in your shoes, at your age, I would’ve done something similar. Hagop Artinian gets all the credit, the best jobs, the free time off. He’s tight with the boss. Then you find out—because he tells you—that he’s doing this other stuff and—”
“I didn’t give him up—”
“Sure you did, Jim, of course you did, that’s not so hard to figure. You told Kaplonski that his golden boy was really a spy—”