Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  ‘I only agreed to talk to you because I’m up for parole,’ she said. ‘It’s my second time. Man said no the last time. This better make a fucking difference or I ain’t talking at all.’ She folded thickly fleshed arms across her one-piece overalls. There was something gross about her that turned Harrison’s stomach. He could smell the sweat on her, gathered in the folds of her flesh, where no amount of soap and water could shift it.

  ‘We’ll talk to the parole board,’ Logan said, leaning across the table. ‘But what we say will depend on what you tell us. That’s the deal. You understand, Leona?’

  Leona nodded, then lifted her snout-like nose to the ceiling. Swann watched her from where he sat, thinking to himself that this was Ismael Boese’s mother. The man who had sat across from him at Paddington Green, the man who had engineered the mass evacuation of London, the man who killed 280 people in Rome. That man had come from the womb of this gross, sassy black woman, who had spent the last twenty-five years in prison. As if maybe she guessed his thoughts, she looked directly at him for the first time. ‘Who’s he?’ she said. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘His name is Swann,’ Logan told her. ‘He’s from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Scotland Yard?’ Her face broke up in a grin, thick lips parted, pink tongue pushing at the white of her teeth. ‘No kidding. I used to love them Scotland Yard shows on the TV. You an English bobby, honey?’

  ‘After a fashion, maybe.’ Swann stared at her. It was hard to believe that this person had ever been on the campus of Berkeley. But that had been twenty-five prison years ago.

  ‘Leona,’ Logan said. ‘Why would your son have Mary Greer killed?’

  The fat, black woman sat still, her body weight balanced on both sides of the chair. ‘Mary Greer’s dead?’

  Logan nodded. ‘She was killed in the jewellery store where she worked. Somebody sent by your son strangled her, then left her body in a dumpster. He wanted it to look like the work of a serial killer we were hunting, but the method of strangulation was different.’

  ‘Ismael had Mary Greer killed?’ Something moved in Leona’s piggy eyes, set deep amid the rolls of pinking flesh in the dark moon of her face. She picked her nose, inadvertently, and searched her pockets for cigarettes. ‘Anybody got anything to smoke?’

  Logan looked sideways at Harrison. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, and tossed her the pack of Marlboro from his pocket. ‘Lady, just answer the question, will you. Why would he do that?’

  Leona looked strangely hurt. ‘Mind your manners, Mr Ponytail. I don’t got to say nothing to you.’

  Harrison’s lips thinned into a line of white tissue. Logan touched him on the arm and leaned forward. ‘Leona, remember we have a deal going here. We can get what we want elsewhere. Can you?’

  ‘OK. OK.’ Leona puffed little clouds of smoke at the ceiling. ‘You got to remember I ain’t seen Izzy since he was a bitty little kid. God, I don’t even remember how old he was before the Maguires took him on.’ She glanced at Swann. ‘You get that Irish business took care of yet, mister?’

  ‘We hope so.’

  ‘There you go.’ She laughed aloud and sucked on the cigarette. ‘I was twenty-nine years old when I saw my son the last time. I’m fifty-three now, nearly fifty-four.’

  Logan interrupted her. ‘How did you know Mary Greer?’

  ‘Worked in the park. She came to the university.’ She glanced at Harrison then. ‘Yes, Mr Ponytail, I went to Berkeley University for a while.’

  Harrison didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mary, Leona. Tell us about Mary,’ Logan prompted her.

  ‘Mary’s a good gal. She was from back east. Virginia, I think. We worked together in the parks, me and her and Gabby.’

  ‘Camilla Hall?’

  ‘That’s right. Mary was part of the prison reform group.’ She snorted ironically. ‘She never joined us, though.’

  ‘Us being the SLA?’

  ‘Yeah. Me and Gabby were in, yeah. Gabby got shot by the cops in LA. My husband, Pieter. He dead now, died in the pen’, just like I will, unless y’all can get me that parole. I tell you, I’d be a model citizen now. I got education. I could get me a job and I wouldn’t have nothing to do with no terrorism. Hellfire, I’m an old lady. What kinda harm could I do? I could be somebody’s grandma.’ She stopped and stared closely at Logan. ‘My boy got any kids?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I don’t know a damn thing. He never once come to see his momma. Never made me no calls. And I never get no letter.’

  ‘Did he know Mary well?’

  ‘Not well. He was nine when Mary and me started hanging out. I think he might’ve stayed with her for a week or two after we got popped. Pieter, that was my old man, he’d already set it up with the Irish, if anything ever happen to us. Well it did, and I guess they took Ismael in.’

  ‘They did,’ Harrison said. ‘And it worked. The little mother became the meanest sonofabitch on the planet.’

  Leona looked pained again. ‘He just a kid, Mr Ponytail. No call to badmouth him like that.’

  ‘He killed your best friend, for God’s sake.’

  She wagged her head at him. ‘Well if he did, he musta had a reason.’

  ‘Leona,’ Logan pressed a hand over her wrist, ‘can you think of any reason why he might have wanted to do that?’

  ‘Nope. I can’t say I can, honey.’

  ‘What about the initials TJ and CC?’ Harrison said. ‘They mean anything to you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Logan’s pager was going off, vibrating against her flesh through her clothes. ‘Leona, that’ll do for now,’ she said. ‘But we might want to see you again.’

  ‘Whatever you say, girlfriend. I ain’t going no place. Don’t you go forgetting what we agreed now, y’hear. The parole board, remember.’

  Outside, Logan phoned the SIOC and when she hung up her face was grave, eyes set back in her head. Harrison cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘What gives, baby?’

  She looked beyond him, back through the prison fence to where one of the bulls was still watching them from his tower. ‘Kovalski and Byrne are on their way to Carson City, Nevada,’ she said quietly. ‘A guy called Teniel Jefferson has just been found in his trailer. Gunshot. Coroner says he’s three days cold already.’

  20

  THE GROUND TEAM FLEW into Reno and were met by a young FBI agent, who briefed them on what had been discovered by the Nevada Highway Patrol. Somebody had checked on an autoshop worker called Teniel Jefferson, after he hadn’t shown up for work for three days. His screen door was open and the front door unlocked. She had found him shot between the eyes from close range, sitting in an armchair as if he was watching television. The Highway Patrol officers had found a black feather in his shirt pocket and one of them had been sensible enough to run it through the NCIC right away. The FBI had picked it up and alerted their field office immediately. The agent looked sideways at Harrison as he drove.

  ‘You guys got a clean shot at this one. Crime scene’s as it was found. Only the ME’s done his bit. We got our ERT boys along there right now.’

  ‘Good,’ Logan said from the back. ‘Maybe we can learn something this time.’

  ‘Teniel Jefferson,’ Swann said, half as if to himself. ‘Who was Teniel Jefferson?’

  The FBI agent looked over his shoulder. ‘Redneck. I don’t think he was from around here originally, but he used to work out at Carson City Jail. We’re doing a background check on him right now. I’ll be able to let you know more pretty soon. We got agents and support staff checking on him. One thing that’s interesting, though, we found a key of low-grade nose candy, right there in the trailer. Killer just left it right there.’

  He drove them out of Reno in the direction of Carson City and Harrison rode up front, thinking again about the future and Lisa Guffy. She was only a day’s drive north of here and he could not get her out of his mind. He did not know why he should suddenly start feeling mortal all at once, suddenly start
to wonder about any of it. Maybe it was just the Englishman bugging him, particularly after what he smelled on him with Logan. She had handled herself pretty well so far, a broad on the ground, running a team with an old hick like him along for the ride. She had weathered the storm from the sheriff’s office and the GBI in Georgia, as well as the odd look here and there in New Orleans. He glanced at Swann in the mirror. He was clean cut and good-looking, young, and, of course, English. Why did American women always go for the limeys?

  ‘You’re Harrison, aren’t you,’ the young agent said, as he pulled off the highway and drove round the edge of Washoe Lake.

  Harrison squinted at the lake. ‘My name’s Dollar, bub.’

  ‘Yeah, but everyone knows you as Harrison. You were UCA up in Idaho.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Come on, man. I was in Pocatello at the time with Kirk Fitzpatrick. I was fresh outta Quantico and working on computer stuff up there. Reno’s my first posting. Course, I report into Vegas like everyone else.’

  ‘Course,’ Harrison said.

  The young agent paused. Swann listened to the conversation and could see the sweat gathering in a little red patch at the nape of his neck. ‘You really take out those three guys in the mine?’

  Harrison took his chew from his pocket and placed some under his lip. He sucked and spat juice out of the window. ‘Two in the mine,’ he said. ‘One just outside. Used my knife on him.’ He looked sideways at him. ‘Killing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, bubba.’

  The young agent was quiet after that and he parked his car in the trailer park, beside other FBI vehicles and two cruisers from the state. Swann got out the back and stretched his legs. The state troopers eyed him cautiously, one of them chewing on a wooden toothpick. Harrison tied his ponytail and turned his collar up. The wind blew in from the west, only half checked by the mountains, and whipped the slate-coloured surface of the lake into flat-faced waves that shucked against the sunken boughs of the cottonwoods. Harrison lit a cigarette and let the smoke drift in the wind. He exchanged glances with Swann as they walked to the steps of the trailer.

  ‘Be kinda sniffy in there, duchess,’ he said. ‘Man’s been dead seventy-two hours already.’

  Swann walked shoulder to shoulder with him. ‘You know what, hick. I think I can manage.’

  Harrison looked coldly at him then. ‘You wanna watch yourself, bubba. That stiff upper lip’s getting loose.’

  They moved into the trailer and the air was thick with death. Swann had smelled it many times before. He watched Harrison watching him carefully for his reaction. Death smells quickly, especially if the body has been lying in a confined and airless space like this one. Jefferson sat in the chair, arms flopped on the sides, feet straight out before him, quite as if he had been watching TV. Only the grey-blue of his skin and the small hole between his eyes gave his death away. The trailer was dishevelled; clearly, only a single, middle-aged man had lived here. Grease-coated pots were stacked up in the sink along with plates and bowls and spoons, with mould growing in blue fur on some of them. A cage sat to one side of the sink with a tarantula spider inside it. At first, Swann thought it was two spiders, but a discarded skin lay cracked and dried in the sawdust. He looked closely at the live one—assuming it was alive. It stood absolutely still, red patches on all of its knees. Harrison came up alongside him. ‘Watch he don’t bite you.’

  Swann looked over to where Logan was carefully considering the body. Harrison moved next to her and studied Jefferson’s open, blue eyes, the colour fading in them now. He bent to his knees and considered the fingernails, before the agent from the evidence response team put the plastic bags back over them. Harrison’s gaze settled on the feather in the left-hand shirt pocket.

  ‘Been out on the town,’ Logan said quietly.

  Harrison looked down at the white silk shirt and black jacket over a pair of black slacks and shiny black shoes. ‘I’ll get the local boys to start asking around. We can bring in help from the Highway Patrol and the county sheriff if we need it.’

  Logan moved through Jefferson’s home: two bedrooms, both in darkness, with the blinds pulled right down. They were musty and smelled now of the death that reeked in the trailer. She glanced at Swann, who stood by the washer and dryer which were set against the wall before the second bedroom. Two ERT agents were busy inside, photographing and beginning to dust for samples. ‘What the hell’s Boese doing, Jack?’ Logan said. ‘I can’t figure this at all.’

  Swann did not answer her. From where he stood, he looked the length of the corridor and could see Jefferson’s prostrate body with the feather sticking out of his shirt. Outside, blue lights flashed and Logan came up beside him. ‘That’ll be the medics,’ she said. ‘Jack, get someone to take the feather out of his pocket. I don’t want anyone outside this room knowing about that.’

  Swann went over to the body and relayed Logan’s order to the ERT agent working the floor area close to the body. He had two shell casings in an evidence bag and Swann squinted at them. The ERT man put the feather in a separate bag and stowed them both in the plastic evidence case, having marked their zone location on his pad of paper. Swann stepped out of the trailer, where he found Harrison with another bag in his hand, a postcard inside it. He looked round at Swann. ‘Hey, duchess,’ he said. ‘Reckon I know where this mother hung out of an evening.’

  They went together, Harrison borrowing the car of the young, wide-eyed agent. ‘Have you been here before?’ Swann asked him, as they drove round the lake.

  Harrison steered with one hand, the window partially rolled down, and a cigarette burning between the fingers of his other one. ‘I been through Carson a few times.’ He looked out of the side of his eyes. ‘I got the whorehouse directions from a state trooper, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Swann snorted then and shook his head. ‘Jesus, Harrison. When’re you going to grow up?’

  Harrison stamped on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt. One hand still gripped the wheel and the other lay fisted in his lap. His eyes were cold and for a moment he did not say anything. ‘You wanna call me on that, bubba?’

  ‘Don’t be a jerk. We’re working together. You don’t like me. I can live with that. I certainly don’t intend getting into a fist fight over it.’

  ‘You know why I don’t like you?’

  Swann curled his lip. ‘You’re jealous of me and Cheyenne?’

  ‘You smart-assed sonofa …’ Harrison lifted his fist and Swann looked him in the eye. Harrison stopped, shook his head and spat tobacco juice out the window. He started the engine, revved hard and squealed the tyres in the dust.

  They drove then in silence all the way to the cat house, high in the hills above the Stewart facility complex, Swann feeling that somehow he had gained a victory. Harrison parked the car, slammed the door and stalked inside. Swann followed him. Two long-legged girls, clad only in underwear, were seated on barstools, while a white, Italian-looking guy polished glasses. The room was hot, oppressive, lifeless. In a strange kind of way, Swann was reminded of Jefferson’s trailer.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ the bartender said. ‘What can we do for you today?’

  Harrison leaned on the counter and waved his shield under the bartender’s nose. ‘You can get me the boss, brother. We ain’t here for the company.’

  Swann sat and listened while Harrison questioned the manager, a woman in her fifties, bosomy, who did her best to look as though she were still in her forties. She was reluctant to talk about clients.

  ‘Ah, Jesus,’ Harrison said, after five minutes of stalling. ‘We’re the fucking FBI, lady. I’m pissed off already today, without you yanking my chain. Either tell me what I wanna know or I’ll have the guys downtown roll this place for drugs every night for a year.’

  She looked at him. The bartender looked at him. The two hookers in underwear looked at him. Jack Swann looked at him: beaten, weathered face, long grey hair, and the hint of spittle on his lip. He meant it. Every one of the
m knew that he meant it.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘He was here two nights ago.’

  ‘On his own?’

  ‘He arrived on his own. He drives a grey Dodge with blue stripes on the side.’

  Harrison nodded and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Just talk. Then we can all get outta here.’

  She seemed to physically bite down on her tongue. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘We have excellent law-enforcement relations round here.’

  ‘Not with me, you don’t.’ Harrison stared at the bartender. ‘I’m sure I could find shitloads of something if I bothered to look.’ He looked back at the manager. ‘You were saying, lady.’

  ‘He drank. He fooled around. He left.’

  ‘Who’d he fool around with?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll check.’

  ‘Do that.’ Harrison sucked on his cigarette. ‘What about other customers? Anyone else in here when he was?’

  She glanced at one of the whores at the bar, a small girl with pale skin and freckles on her naked shoulders. ‘Jenna, you were working that night, weren’t you?’

  Harrison got up and walked to where she sat at the bar. ‘Well?’ he said. Jenna looked frightened, shrinking back, as if from his breath. ‘Who else was in here?’

  ‘Just a cowboy. And a nigger I hadn’t seen before.’

  ‘Nigger?’ He cocked his head at her. ‘You mean negro, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Swann was on his feet now, wanting to interrupt but unable to. Harrison took her by the arm, not squeezing, just holding her firmly. ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘What’s to tell? Nappy hair, black skin, big nose. He didn’t wanna party, just drink a cocktail, have a gawk and fuck off again.’ She shook her arm free. ‘We get a lot like that, mister. They’re either afraid of their wives or just can’t get it up.’

  Harrison asked about vehicles and someone remembered a white Nissan truck. As they were about to leave, the blonde girl pointed at Swann. ‘Hey,’ she said to Harrison. ‘Your partner’s cute, mister. How come he don’t talk?’