One thing that I’ve noticed is how bonded Laurie and Tara have become. Tara is constantly at her side, graciously accepting the petting that Laurie seems comforted to give. Tara might even be more inclined to be near Laurie than to be with me. A less secure person than myself would be jealous, but the way I figure it, whenever I have the chance to be stroked by either Laurie’s hand or my own, it’s a no-brainer to pick Laurie’s. Why should I expect a smart dog like Tara to make a different choice?
Laurie and I have settled into a kind of pattern, where after we have dinner, we sit in the living room and I bring her up to date on the events of the day. Very often she knows a lot of it, since my office is operating out of the house. But in this case I tell her about Celia Dorsey and ask her if she can make an educated guess as to the identity of the other lieutenant who was in cahoots with Alex. It seems as improbable to her as it did to Pete.
We’re finished talking at about ten o’clock, and we go upstairs to bed. I’m just falling asleep when the phone rings, and I get it.
It’s Barry Leiter’s voice on the line, a little tentative. “Mr. Carpenter? This is Barry … from Sam’s office? I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I found something, and I figured—”
I interrupt. “You traced the money?”
“Part of the way, and then I sort of ran into a road-block. I wanted to talk to you before I went any further.”
“What about?”
“These guys are good—I mean really good. I think … well, they were waiting for somebody to try and follow this money.”
This isn’t terribly surprising news: Once we knew that Dorsey was alive, it became a predictable way to try to follow him. “How do you know that?”
“Believe me, I can tell,” he says. “But that’s not the strange part. The strange part is they were geared up to trace the tracer. That’s what I thought you should know.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I say.
“I mean they were set up to know who was tracking the money. They know it’s me.”
Now I’m fully alert and growing uneasy. “Did you give them your name or address?”
He laughs. “Mr. Carpenter, no offense, but this is the twenty-first century. They can get that by pressing a button.”
It’s amazing how fast unease can turn to panic. “What’s your address?”
“Three eighty-three Vreeland Avenue.”
“Okay. Barry, lock your doors and turn your lights off. I’m coming right over. Don’t let anybody in unless you know it’s me.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Just do what I tell you.” I hang up the phone and get dressed.
Laurie is asleep, and I wake her. She can tell from the sound of my voice that something is wrong.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“Call Pete Stanton and tell him that there’s an armed break-in taking place at three eighty-three Vreeland.”
“Is there?”
“Not if I can help it.”
I’m out the door and running to my car. I can run really fast when I’m scared, and this is just about the fastest I’ve ever run.
Barry lives on the other side of town from me. It would ordinarily take me about twenty minutes, but there’s no traffic and I’m not stopping at any lights, so it takes me fifteen. It feels like an hour.
As I turn onto his street, I’m glad to see that the police have beaten me there. There’s about half a dozen police cars, lights flashing. I see Pete standing in front of Barry’s house and I pull up in the driveway. He’s going to be pissed at me, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.
I get out and walk over to Pete. “Thanks for coming,” I say.
He nods. “I wish it could have been a few minutes earlier. You know the victim?”
It feels as though somebody has lifted Barry’s house off the ground and dropped it on my head. The pressure literally pushes me to my knees. “Don’t say that, Pete. Don’t say there is a victim. Please …”
“I’m sorry, Andy … the guy who lived in the house. He was shot once through the head.”
“Oh, no … no …” I don’t think I can stand this.
“We got the perp, Andy. He’s on the floor in the kitchen.”
I start walking toward the house. Pete yells ahead for the officers to let me through and then follows me. It feels like it takes me an hour to get to the front door, but in truth Barry lived on a small piece of property.
We finally reach the kitchen. There is blood everywhere, obviously that of the murderer, whose bullet-ridden body lies on the floor next to the counter.
“You know him?” Pete asks.
He’s lying on his stomach, with his head turned away from me, so I have to walk around toward the counter to get a better view.
I’m struck by how little I’m surprised that I’m looking at the very dead face of Geoffrey Stynes.
Pete mentions the obvious, that he needs me to detail what I know about tonight’s incident to him. He drives me down to the precinct, having somebody else follow in my car. I ask him to have someone call Laurie and tell her what happened, and then I don’t think either of us says another word the entire way there.
My mind is still something of a blur, and the only clarity that is able to get through is the fact that I am responsible for Barry Leiter being murdered, as surely as if I pulled the trigger. I brought this craziness, this sickness, into his twenty-three-year-old life, and he paid the price.
We reach the precinct and go into an interrogation room so that Pete can record what is said. I tell him everything, starting with the moment Stynes walked into my office. He raises his eyebrows when he hears that it was Stynes, the man he tried to find at my behest.
When I’m finished, I have a couple of questions for Pete. “Stynes was shot a bunch of times. Did he resist?”
Pete shakes his head. “He committed suicide.” When he sees my surprise, he explains. “We had him dead to rights, half a dozen of us, guns pointed at him. We yelled, he saw the odds, and he raised his gun to fire, forcing us to shoot him. He had to know he would die, but in his mind it was better than letting us take him into custody.”
“How can you be sure about that?” I ask.
“I saw his eyes,” he said. “They weren’t scared … they were already dead.”
It’s almost two o’clock in the morning when I leave the precinct, after assuring Pete that I’m okay to drive. He promises to update me on whatever he learns about Stynes, and tells me I’ll probably have to answer more questions from Sabonis in the next day or two. He’s also going to track Sam down and tell him what happened, and ask where Barry’s family is.
Laurie is waiting up for me when I get home. She heard from Pete’s underling what happened. The numbness I felt is wearing off, and the pain is changing from a dull throb to a piercing agony. Laurie has a million questions, but she hardly asks any of them. She just holds me, and Tara nuzzles against me, until it’s morning.
It doesn’t make me feel better, but it doesn’t make me feel worse. Nothing could make me feel worse.
MARCUS CLARK SCARES EDNA HALF TO death when he comes to the house to give his first weekly report. I assure her that he’s on our side, but I don’t think she can reconcile his menacing presence with the fact that he’s one of the good guys.
Then Laurie comes into the room, and the transformation is immediate. She and Marcus hug warmly, and he inquires as to her health, her mental outlook, anything she might need, etc. Edna grudgingly accepts him as one of the team, though she occasionally glances over at him, as if to make sure he doesn’t turn on us.
Marcus essentially has made no progress, which in his eyes is in itself a sign of progress. He has not found a trace of Dorsey, and since he firmly believes he can find anyone, he considers his failure a sure sign that Dorsey is dead.
“I spoke to him,” Laurie points out.
“Or somebody trying to sound like him” is Marcus’s response.<
br />
She pushes back. “It was him.”
They kick around this unresolvable issue until finally Marcus allows as how it’s possible Dorsey is alive, but with a lot of help powerful enough to keep him totally hidden. We all agree that only somebody like Dominic Petrone has that kind of power, but Marcus doesn’t believe that Petrone would have let Dorsey make the phone call. That was the act of a man with intensely personal motivations, and Petrone would look at this as strictly business.
The court clerk calls to announce that Hatchet has reviewed Dorsey’s files and set a meeting for tomorrow morning in his chambers to discuss our motion to receive them in discovery. Hatchet likes to resolve these matters without a formal hearing, and that’s fine with me. I’m glad he didn’t call it for this morning, because I’ve got the meeting with Willie Miller and the attorney representing the estates we are suing.
The easiest way for me to explain how Willie is reacting to his impending wealth is to say that he asks me to pick him up at a Mercedes dealership. He’s standing out front when I pull up, and he gets in the car.
“How come you weren’t inside kicking the tires?” I ask.
“They weren’t taking me seriously. They don’t think I can afford one of those pieces of junk. Shows what they know.”
“How much do you have in your checking account?” I ask.
“I don’t have no checking account,” he says, and then he smiles his broad smile. “But I’m gonna.”
The conversation during the rest of the drive to the lawyer’s office involves Laurie. Like everybody else who knows her, Willie is concerned, and he has a better idea than most how unjust the justice system can be.
We arrive at the law firm of Bertram, Smith, and Cates, a respected civil litigation firm in Teaneck. I have spoken a couple of times to Stephen Cates, the attorney representing the defendants, and he has been properly noncommittal as to his position, pending this meeting.
He greets us cordially, sits us at a conference table with a large fruit bowl, offers us something to drink, and gets right down to business.
“I understand you’ve been approached by the daughter of one of my clients,” he says, referring to Nicole.
I nod. “I have.”
“I apologize for your being put in that position. I, of course, had no idea until after the fact.”
“No problem,” I say.
He then launches into a long-winded recitation of the position of his clients, and their desire to bring this unhappy matter, or at least this portion of it, to a close. They recognize the negative impact their actions have had on Willie’s life, and they have concocted a formula that they believe accurately assigns a financial value to it. He is so busy explaining the formula, he neglects to mention what that value is.
After twenty minutes that seem like two hours, he reaches the end and says, “Do you have any questions?”
Willie, who has had three oranges, two apples, a banana, and a bunch of grapes during this presentation, doesn’t waste any time. “How much?” he asks.
Cates seems somewhat taken aback by Willie’s directness, but decides to meet it. “We’re looking at in the neighborhood of four point three seven million dollars, paid out over seven years.”
Willie almost spits up three grapes at the absurdity of the offer. “That may be the neighborhood you’re lookin’ in,” he says. “But not us. We’re lookin’ uptown.” By “us” Willie means he and I, although my intention is to keep him functioning as chief negotiator. He’s doing fine, and I prefer to spend my time mentally beating myself up over Barry Leiter’s murder.
But Cates turns to me, obviously looking for a weaker link than Willie. “What exactly is your position?”
I look to Willie and he nods, in effect giving me the floor. “Eleven point seven million, paid out over five minutes.”
He doesn’t blink. “May I ask how you arrived at that figure?”
“Gut instinct,” I say. “We consider it a fair figure, and as such it is nonnegotiable. I believe we can get considerably more at trial.”
“I see. I’ll convey this to my clients.”
I tell him that’ll be fine, and with Willie grabbing a final orange on the way out, we say our goodbyes.
Willie asks if I can drop him off at his girlfriend’s house, which is in a rather depressed area of downtown Paterson. Paterson is a city of over a hundred thousand people and can match any other city blight for blight. Yet whenever anyone in the area refers to “the city,” they are talking about New York.
We are about ten blocks from our destination when we almost hit a dog running loose on the street. It looks to be a Lab mix, skinny, worn-out, and frightened from life on the street.
Willie and I are both shaken by the near miss. “Damn, that was close,” he says.
“Poor dog. They’ll catch him and take him to the pound,” I say.
“And then what?”
“And then they’ll kill him.”
“What?” Willie yells, outrage in his voice. “Stop the car!”
I barely have time to pull over when Willie jumps out, chasing the dog down the street and calling, “Here, dog!”
The dog demonstrates his intelligence by running away from the screaming Willie, so I pull the car up ahead and try to cut him off. I jump out of the car and start chasing him back toward Willie, but again the dog is clever enough to run down an alley.
The chase is on, as Willie and I spend the next twenty minutes running up and down streets and in and out of alleys, all in pursuit of this poor dog. We execute a number of maneuvers to cut him off, but he outsmarts us each time.
The workout in the whirlpool at Vince Sanders’s club hasn’t quite prepared me for this kind of running. I’m gasping for air and my insides are burning, but Willie handles it like he’s out for a walk in the park.
After a few minutes more I lose sight of both Willie and the dog, and they are going to have to handle this on their own. I stagger up and down a few alleys, hoping to find one of them, although my first choice would be to stumble upon an oxygen tent.
And then, at the end of an alley in front of a dirty garage, I see Willie. He is sitting on the cement, back against the wall, cradling the dog in his lap and petting him gently on his head. The dog contentedly rests that head on Willie’s knee. They look so relaxed that the only thing missing from this picture is a pond and a fishing pole.
When I’m able to breathe and walk again, the three of us go back to the car. Willie keeps the dog on his lap in the front seat and announces that he is now his dog, and his name is Cash, for obvious reasons. I check and see that there is no collar or tag on the dog, which makes it far less likely that there is an owner somewhere looking for him.
Willie promises to put up signs in the neighborhood with pictures of the dog, but I’m not sure he’ll follow through on it. Whatever. A dog has found a loving owner; there are worse things that can happen in this world.
I get back home and am surprised to see Pete Stanton waiting to update me on the early stages of the investigation of Stynes. He could have done it by phone, but I think he wanted to see Laurie and offer additional moral support.
The report on Stynes is stunning in its brevity. “So far Stynes doesn’t seem to have existed,” Pete says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Pete proceeds to tell me that they have run his prints everywhere, military, federal, and state, and come up with nothing. They’ve circulated his picture to every law enforcement agency in the country on a priority basis and came up empty as well.
“How is that possible?” I ask.
“I don’t think it is,” Pete says. “A guy like that, he had to have a record, or been in the military, or applied for a gun permit … something. If there’s no record of him, then that record had to have been erased.”
“By who?”
Pete shrugs. “By some record eraser—how the hell should I know? Anyway, we’re still looking, but I don’t think we’re going t
o find anything.”
Pete leaves and I spend the rest of the night preparing for the meeting in Hatchet’s chambers tomorrow to discuss our request for all of Dorsey’s records. It’s not a motion we can afford to lose.
The morning is sunny and bright, but as always, Hatchet’s chambers are cloudy and dark. Once again, Dylan is there before Kevin and me, which annoys me. The judge should not be talking to one counsel without the other present. I could lecture Hatchet on this point, or I could decide to keep living.
It becomes instantly apparent to me that their pre-meeting was by Hatchet’s design. “Mr. Campbell has decided not to oppose your motion” he announces to me.
“Good,” I say.
“You will have the file by close of business today.”
“Good,” I say.
“That will be all, gentlemen.”
“Good,” I say.
Dylan hasn’t said a word, and I’ve only said one, although it’s a word I like and I’ve gotten to say it three times. Within moments Kevin and I are back in my car.
“What the hell was that about?” Kevin asks.
“Hatchet obviously read him the riot act before we got there,” I say.
Kevin is incredulous. “And Dylan just caved?”
“You’ve obviously never had Hatchet read you the riot act. Giving up on the motion was easy; if Hatchet had really put on the pressure, Dylan would have sacrificed his firstborn.”
I call Edna and she tells me that there’s an important message from Marcus, asking me to meet him at an address in a very depressed area of town. Kevin agrees to go along, and within twenty minutes we’re at the location, which seems to be an abandoned apartment building. It is next to an abandoned movie theater and across the street from some abandoned stores.
We get out of the car and start looking around. After a few moments we hear a voice.
“Up here.”
Looking down at us from one of the few unboarded windows in the building is Marcus. “Come on up,” he says. “Sixth floor.”
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