The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  “Was anybody home at the time?”

  “Michaels had been there but left about ten minutes before Roffman showed up.”

  “What the fuck?” Miller said quietly.

  “I know. Roffman is up to something, Tommy. There’s no doubting it now.”

  Miller nodded, took a breath, then said, “Did you get hold of Spadaro?”

  “Yeah. He got your friend’s home number and I called it.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “The good news is he sold a device with that serial number. The bad news is, it was over four years ago.”

  “Who to?”

  “A guy named Bechet. Jonah Bechet.”

  Miller said nothing.

  “Tommy?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I take it your hunch was right.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a guy we need to find as soon as possible. Did you get an address?”

  “Yeah. It’s just a few blocks from you, actually, on Hampton Road. But the address is four years old, so he might not be there anymore. You know how people move around a lot out here. I can see what Spadaro can find out through the DMV.”

  “Do that. And find out, too, if you can, why the cops showed up at the cottage minutes after I got there.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No.”

  “You obviously got out okay.”

  “Barely. But there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Romano’s girlfriend was in the tub. Dead.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “Her wrists were slit.”

  “That doesn’t quite add up, does it?”

  “No. Someone put her there and then called the cops when they saw me go inside.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in the restaurant.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m a little shaken. She didn’t have any clothes on.” He hesitated, then said, “For a second there I didn’t know if it was Abby or not. Of the four of them, she’s the only one who’s left.”

  “We’ll find her, Bobby. How’s your knee holding up?”

  “It’s not.”

  “Do you have any Tylenol or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bring some. First I’ll call Ricky back, then meet you at your place, okay? We need to make some video copies of what’s on the DVR, for safekeeping.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “See you in a bit.”

  They hung up. He went back to the table but didn’t sit, downed the rest of the grappa standing, feeling its heat move down through him as he looked toward the large front windows. The heat wasn’t the same heat he felt when he took his painkillers, but it would have to do. Outside, it was still raining, a mizzling rain, though, as much churning mist lingering in the air as needlelike drops falling. There were blurred halos around the streetlights that lined Elm Street, and the lights that ran the length of the train platform. Miller watched them all for a moment, till his own vision began to blur from exhaustion and everything that cast or reflected even the smallest trace of light took on a halo all its own. He then left the tranquility of the empty restaurant and returned to his apartment above, to the very place he’d been when he last felt Abby next to him in the dark, last heard her voice and the sound of her feet on his floor, was last in her presence when he spoke her name aloud.

  Standing at his front window, watching the train station, his overcoat still on, it was difficult for Miller to think of Abby at all and not see in his mind’s eye the dead woman in the bathtub. It was difficult, too, not to do the math—first the two men were killed, then, hours later, one of the men’s lovers. Assuming the worst—the best and only thing to do in this situation—meant that Abby could be next. Would be next. The thought was more than Miller could bear.

  Leaving his window, Miller grabbed a lockbox from an upper shelf in his bedroom closet, thumbed in the combination and opened the lid, looked at the Colt .45 semiautomatic and the three loaded clips resting on a cloth inside. Dark, well-oiled metal, a walnut grip, the thing was older than he. Removing the items, he quick-checked the weapon, then slid in one of the clips. Back in his living room, at his front window, the gun hanging heavy in the pocket of his overcoat, Miller looked out at the last hours of night and waited for Barton.

  Part Three

  Dawn

  Seven

  A MOTEL ROOM, THE FIRST HINT OF DAYLIGHT A FAINT GLARE around the edges of the drawn curtain. Bechet, his clothes not yet dried, waited in the gloom for the call from Gabrielle. Usually they were asleep by now, had gone to bed together every morning around this time for more than a year. It was a habit that ran deep in him now, but that was what all this had been about, wasn’t it, making new habits and breaking old ones, the Bechet he used to be replaced forever by the Bechet he wanted to become, had become. It was strange, more so than he would ever have thought possible, to witness the pale, rising light beyond the curtain and not sense her—hear her, feel her, smell her—near. Despite the habit of going to bed around first light, Bechet wasn’t tired now, there wasn’t time for him to be tired, but he knew that closing his eyes for even a few moments wouldn’t be a bad thing, considering what was ahead, the miles still left to go, as it were, till this was over and he would be rid of this feeling of absence. But he knew that even if he did manage to nod off, take a little bit of rest in preparation for the hours to come, that he would only, upon returning to consciousness, realize all over again that he was a man caught in the last place in the world he wanted to be, a man in secret motion behind enemy lines, separated from his lover, everything that mattered to him now currently beyond his reach. It would be better, he thought, to spare himself the ordeal of forgetting and then remembering and remain awake as he waited for the time it would take Gabrielle to make it to Manhattan and then into Brooklyn to pass.

  As he sat, still naked, a thin motel blanket around his shoulders for warmth, he went through everything he had taken from the two LeCurs. The cell phones were older models, therefore not equipped with GPS tracking devices, so there was no way Castello could use these phones to locate Bechet and come after him. Still, Bechet’s general location could be determined via an incoming call, once it was established which cell tower was used for the final relaying of the call, and even that, as complicated and as time ineffective as it was, would be more than he wanted to give away. Bechet, then, powered the phones up only as he scrolled through their respective call histories and address books, to reduce the time that each phone was active and could receive a call. Both phones contained a variety of numbers and names, none of which were immediately useful or recognizable to Bechet, though it was possible that these could prove otherwise at some point down the line, when Bechet learned more about Castello’s current businesses. Certainly, at any rate, these names were cogs of some kind in the Castello machine, and going after a cog or two was definitely one way to cause any machine to halt or falter. Bechet hoped, though, that it wouldn’t come to that. He didn’t want to have to wage a campaign of destruction, simply wanted to do what needed to be done and get away clean. He already had the one number he needed right now, maybe even the only number he would ever need, if he played things right—Castello’s cell phone number, an incoming call on the older LeCur’s phone, the last call that phone had received. Once Bechet copied that down, along with all the names and numbers from the address books and incoming and outgoing logs, he disconnected the batteries and set them and the phones aside on the motel bed.

  The Moleskine notebook he had taken from the older LeCur promised to be much more useful. It was close to three-quarters full of notes, written in a code that Bechet knew well, had learned from LeCur himself. It wa
s a simple sequence based on the telephone keypad. Twenty-one signified a, the two representing the key for the numeral two, the one representing the first letter assigned to that key. Twenty-one for a, twenty-two for b, twenty-three for c, thirty-one for d, thirty-two for e, and so on. It wasn’t the most elaborate of codes, could be broken by anyone with any kind of experience with encryption, but it did offer protection from casual readers, should the notebook get lost or end up in the hands of the competition or even a cop. To complicate things, LeCur’s code, once deciphered, had to be translated from his native tongue. But Bechet knew enough French to get the gist of what was there. Locations, dates, sizes of shipments and, it seemed to Bechet, an account of how much each shipment had actually contained when it was delivered. Castello had said that the two men found murdered at the canal were couriers who had been stealing from him. The more Bechet decoded, the more he got a picture of the operation. Deliveries from Southampton to various places in New York—Queens, Manhattan, Westchester County, even a few places in New Jersey. Times when the deliveries left Southampton and times when they arrived. Clearly, Castello and LeCur were keeping a close eye on things.

  Along with the dates were notations on the weather and traffic patterns—possible explanations, Bechet assumed, why a delivery from Southampton to New York’s West Side would take longer than it should. Next to each one of these entries were the code 51–61 or 77–77. JM or RR. James Michaels or Richard Romano, the names of Castello’s dead couriers.

  There were other entries, too, logging deliveries from points in New York to Southampton, each of these marked with the code for Michaels or Romano, each one of these with dates and times. It would be difficult to see all this and believe that Castello, as he claimed, had nothing to do with these murders. Nearly every entry on every page screamed motive and opportunity.

  One of the last entries in the notebook—just prior to the page that contained Gabrielle’s license plate number and street address—was a Southampton address, and below it, again, the initials JM and RR.

  Bechet recognized it as the place where a girl named Abby had lived, back when she had worked for him, when he had his housepainting business. He remembered taking her there several times, when she was too drunk to drive. Often he and she would slip away from the rest of his crew after a day’s work and grab something to eat. He didn’t drink, or at least not often, but she did. Maybe the familiar address was a simple coincidence—the gulf between affordable winter rentals and out-of-reach summer rentals meant that the working class usually moved around a lot. Bechet knew of one apartment on Main Street that had over the course of five years been occupied three different times by acquaintances of his, some who knew each other, others who didn’t. That was one of the peculiarities of East End life. Certainly Abby had moved out, and at some point after that the two couriers had moved in. Still, there were certain things about her that would make her having been involved with either of those men in no way a surprise to Bechet. She had lived with some private investigator at one point, learned everything she could from him before leaving. Even though they had never become intimately involved, she had certainly learned things from Bechet. It would not have been entirely uncharacteristic for her to want to see, perhaps, what a courier for a man like Castello might have to teach her.

  But Bechet couldn’t care about any of that. Abby had disappeared when the summer was over and the weather grew too cold to paint outdoors, when his crew was reduced to just himself and Falcetti. What she was up to now wasn’t any of his concern; he had problems enough, thanks. Still, he wrote down the address, along with dates and times and locations, and when he was done, he tore from the notebook the page with Gabrielle’s information. He tore out, too, the half dozen or so blank pages that followed it, just in case the force of LeCur’s handwriting had pressed through and formed indentations on those below. Bechet tore up those pages, flushed their pieces down the toilet, then removed the lid on the back tank, closed the seat and rested the lid upside down on it. He knew better than to carry it with him—it was a possible ace that he didn’t want to lose or, worse, have on him if things went wrong. Same with the phones. They would be safer there, easy enough for him to retrieve later on.

  The contents of the wallets were the least useful of all the items he had collected, but Bechet had expected that. Fake New York State driver’s licenses, some cash, no photos, no business cards, nothing. But of course these men would hardly carry anything that would connect them to Castello, or to anything, for that matter. Cell phones and notebooks were necessary evils, there was no way around that, but wallets filled with items that could add up to some kind of trail would have simply been the careless oversights of the untrained and inexperienced. Bechet removed his clothes from the top of the heating unit, dressed despite the fact that they were still a little damp, and pocketed the cash and the fake driver’s licenses, the only photos of the two LeCurs he currently possessed. He then resumed waiting for Gabrielle’s call. He should have heard from her by now, but he could also think of several reasons why her trip could take longer than the train schedule claimed it would take. The Long Island Rail Road wasn’t the most reliable system around. Still, he was considering calling her from the cell phone he had taken off the charger in the garage he rented, finding out where she was, when his phone finally rang.

  He didn’t bother to check the caller ID; only she had this number.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “You there?”

  “Yeah.” She sounded so far away. It wasn’t, Bechet knew, just the actual physical distance and the poor signal of a cell phone to cell phone connection that he was hearing.

  “You all locked in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What took so long?”

  “The train stopped in the middle of some field. We sat there for a half hour.”

  “Yeah, it does that once in a while. You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound it.”

  “Well, this place isn’t the coziest I’ve seen.”

  “It’s safe, though,” Bechet said. No one, not even Eddie, knew of this place. He tried to imagine her there, almost couldn’t do it. The building was an old industrial workshop, a nondescript brick structure in a row of nondescript brick structures set along the edge of the East River, unchanged for decades except for what the cycle of season after season after season had done to it. Two stories tall but open inside, its floor cement, one wall comprised of two side-by-side garage-style doors that led from a small indoor loading dock out to the street. These doors were not only locked but bolted. For added security and privacy, there were no windows at street level, and those set high up on the two adjacent walls were smudged by years of pollution and fitted with wrought-iron bars that had long ago begun to rust.

  The only enclosed space within the building was an elevated office that overlooked the workshop. It had been built onto the west-facing wall and was accessible by a set of cement stairs. There was a bed and couch in this room and, through a heavy steel door, a bathroom with an old cast-iron tub. The windows in both rooms, each one spanning nearly from the floor to the ceiling, offered a clear view of the river and, beyond it, Manhattan. Bechet had spent a year—longer than a year—in that room, sleeping in that bed, soaking in that tub, watching the skyline light up at night and then dwindle as morning broke. He was drinking a lot back then, did that—and not much else—till he was done with it, done punishing himself. From that point on he spent the rest of his self-exile getting back into fighting shape, readying himself for his return to the world. Not the world he had known, but something else. Housepainting, he was thinking, a business of his own, nothing to do with death or violence. In retrospect, yes, maybe he should have gone somewhere other than Southampton to start over. That would have been the smart thing to do. But he knew that a guy could make money painting houses out there. He knew, too, where he stood there, where the dangers—the traps—were hidden,
and there was, for a man with his past, a real advantage in knowledge such as that. But more than all that, he had his deal with the older Castello, his détente, for which he had worked hard, so why not there, why not the place he knew like the back of his hand?

  In the end, whatever the reason, Bechet was glad he had returned. If he hadn’t—hadn’t gone back to the place where he had become, if only briefly, what his father had been, gone back there to become what his father hadn’t become—then he would not have met Gabrielle, would not know what he now knew, all the things that there were between them, things the old Bechet could never have imagined.

  He thought now of Gabrielle, his Gabrielle, in that place, alone. He wanted to be there with her, locked away in that elevated room, the two of them in the bathtub, watching the skyline together, nothing at all to think about but what and when to eat, no need to listen for a knock on their door or decipher the sounds that made their way in from the street.

  He wanted that more than anything, resolved himself to do whatever needed to be done to have that.

  “Is it raining there?” he asked.

  “Yeah, a little. I’m cold.”

  “Did you turn the heat on?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  He instructed her on how to operate the heater fans mounted high up on the brick walls, then directed her to the elevated office. He could hear her footsteps as she climbed the cement stairs. The door to the office was heavy steel, and the large windows that overlooked both the workshop and the river were thick, a web of wire mesh running through them. Bechet had always felt safe in that room, hoped she would, to some degree at least, feel the same. In times of trouble, people seek high places; even a dozen steps up counted for something. The steel door and safety glass served only to increase the sense of protection that the room offered by design.

  A thermostat on the wall inside the door controlled a cast-iron radiator not far from the bed. Bechet told Gabrielle to turn it from its current setting of fifty up to seventy, so the room would warm up quickly. He then told her to go into the bathroom and turn the water heater from its vacation setting to full heat.