The Disposable Man Page 10

  “Yeah,” Sammie retorted, “except that if it really was no big deal, the CIA wouldn’t’ve asked to talk to you, and they wouldn’t’ve lied about knowing Boris in the first place. That was obviously bullshit.”

  I closed my eyes briefly, fighting the urge to tell her to back down for once in her life. Although, plagued as I was about that supposed mugging, part of my irritation stemmed from the chance she was right. “Luechauer fingered Doug DeFalque, too, Sam. What more have you dug up on him?”

  She was obviously unhappy about being cut off, but her expression also told of something surprisingly like embarrassment. “RCMP reported back,” she said quietly. “They have nothing connecting him with the Russian mob.”

  Ron stared at her. “This morning, you said he was a free agent working with biker gangs and the mob.”

  Sammie turned sullen. “I was right about the bikers. The mob angle was unofficial. My contact’s pretty good up there, and it sounded solid when I heard it. Guess I was wrong.”

  “That’s okay,” I said quickly. “It was a theory. They’re part of this process, too. What else did you find out about him?”

  “I poked around his neighborhood in Jamaica. I have a friend who lives up there, and another one at the sheriff’s department who actually knows him. They both confirmed he was a bit of a dirtbag—Mr. Smooth around teenage girls, not too swift with anyone else. He’s been seen in town pretty consistently for the last few months. I asked a contact at Customs if they’d run his plate this summer, since they’re keeping tabs on him. Last legal crossing he made was in early June, just before the tourist season, when the inn started using him on a regular basis. If Boris was whacked for some sort of international activity, it doesn’t look as if DeFalque was part of it. Also, despite having a loud mouth and a swagger, he’s never taken a swing at anyone I could find, so using a garrote seems pretty out of character.”

  “That confirms what I learned from Dottie Delman,” Ron said. “She called him a slimy little worm. He’s impregnated a couple of girls and left them high and dry, he shirks his debts and talks big, especially when he’s been drinking, but he’s also very good at ingratiating himself when he needs a job, a favor, or a loan, which probably explains his job at the inn.”

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of both hands. “All right. Doug DeFalque may be slipping from our number-one spot. Putting John Rarig to one side, what did either one of you learn about anyone else?”

  “I think we can scratch Bob Manship, too,” Ron said. “Dottie confirmed what everyone else was saying—he got into a jam, but he’s a good boy. Always has been, always will be. Dottie thought he’s been taking the whole thing way too hard—that the woman he creamed the other guy for didn’t deserve either one of them. But Dottie’s an old-fashioned sort. In any case, Bob lives like a monk now.

  “Marty Sopper—” he went on, consulting his ever-present notes, “Marianne Baker’s boyfriend—might be another matter. Dottie called him mean straight through, and thought he’d slice his mother’s throat for the price of a Coke. She made Marianne sound like the typical abused spouse—a totally dependent target. Marty doesn’t have a steady job. He works wherever he can, or just rips off Marianne, so he fits someone who could be hired to use a piano wire, but we hit a dead end when we come to the international angle. Dottie doubts he’s been beyond Brattleboro, much less into Canada. He tends to work his own patch.”

  “How long was he living down here?” I asked. “We sure got to know him well enough.”

  Ron checked his cheat sheet. “Only two years. He was born in Wardsboro, so I guess he thought this was the big city. Too big for him, apparently—he still bitches about it, and about us especially. Says we were a bunch of Nazis. This is not a sophisticated man.”

  “And presumably not clever enough to sneak up on someone, strangle him, ditch him without leaving a trace, and then keep quiet about it,” I said.

  Ron chewed on his upper lip for a moment’s silence. “I guess not.”

  “Scratch Marty Sopper,” Sammie muttered darkly.

  “Not yet,” I cautioned. “But let’s leave him alone for the moment. Luechauer gave me some new names. Ron, did Dottie mention any guests named Meade, Richter, or Brockman? Ed Meade was a New York physician—a real ice cube. Luechauer said he gave her the creeps.”

  Ron shook his head. “Dottie wasn’t much good on the guests. Her bread and butter’s the neighborhood. I tried to see if she’d picked up any names from her inn contacts, but it was pretty useless. By the time she hears about them, they’ve been reduced to ‘the white-haired couple from Florida,’ or ‘Mr. Attitude with the big ears.’ There’s a lot of typical flatlander resentment. Actually,” he added, “as ironies would have it, Luechauer was the only one I did hear about—she passed with flying colors.”

  There was a knock at the door. Harriet Fritter, our administrative assistant, stepped in and handed me a fax. “Just came in—RCMP.”

  I read it over carefully and handed it to Sam. “The Canadians say Boris Malik is actually Sergei Antonov, one of several point men for the Russian mob, reportedly over here to set up operations. They pegged him through fingerprints, dental records, and the face shot we sent them. They don’t seem to have any doubts about it.”

  Sammie passed the report to Ron. “That doesn’t do us much good.”

  I placed my feet on my desk and crossed my arms, staring sightlessly out the darkened window that separated my office from the empty squad room. “No. It doesn’t. If anything, it lets more air out of our tires—heightening the suggestion we were just a dumping ground for an out-of-town argument. I wonder where the Canadians are getting their information?”

  Ron stared at me in confusion, struck by the implication. “What do you mean?”

  “RCMP is a gigantic organization—about six of our major federal alphabet soups rolled into one. It’s interesting to me that we’ve gotten three pieces of information from them recently, two of them contradictory. First we’re encouraged to think Doug DeFalque might be dirty, then that’s canceled. Next, we hear absolutely nothing about Boris for days on end, and now he’s suddenly a major player for the mob. It’s almost as if someone’s either doing a lousy job of feeding us information, or just trying to tie us up in knots. I’m hearing echoes of how Snowden dealt with me.”

  Sammie looked disgusted. “Great. We’re getting nowhere here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I reassured her. “Taken separately, nobody looks particularly outstanding, but if you combine, say, Marty Sopper with John Rarig, things begin to pick up.”

  They both stared at me. Sammie spoke first, “Rarig with a sudden European past, and Sopper with the morals of a mongrel and a temper to match.”

  “I’d love to look at Sopper’s closet for ginkgo seeds, and under his mattress for a new sack of gold,” I murmured.

  “Maybe we can,” Ron said, his eyes bright.

  “Right,” Sammie added, “through Marianne Baker.”

  I smiled at their quickly recovered enthusiasm. “Like you said—‘maybe.’ Remember what Dottie said about her, though. If she’s willing to be the man’s punching bag, she’s not going to be inclined to squeal on him.”

  “She won’t have to,” Sammie continued. “As far as the ginkgo seeds are concerned, all we have to do is either get invited into their apartment, or get Marianne to admit that on the night of the sixteenth, Sopper’s shoes smelled to high heaven. If we don’t tip our hand that we’re targeting her boyfriend, she might even admit he had blood on his clothes, or was out all that night, or said something that might place him at the quarry. We just have to get her conversational. It might take time, but she could be the key to establishing probable cause, after which we really could start cooking.”

  Despite the sudden energy in the air, I yawned and checked my watch. It was closing in on nine o’clock. “Okay. Let’s do it. See if we get lucky. Ron, you keep after Marty Sopper. Find out everything you can about him. Does he have a bank a
ccount? Has he been throwing money around lately? Any recent change in habits—gambling, drinking more, whatever. Has he suddenly settled any long-standing debts? Paid off back taxes? See if you can establish a daily pattern, and whether he broke it the night of the sixteenth. Did any neighbors hear anything unusual then?

  “Sam,” I continued. “Go after Marianne. Take your time, use whatever approach you want. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about our German linguist, Mr. Rarig. If he is or was CIA, and the paper trail I followed is bogus, there have got to be holes in it somewhere. I’ll try to find people who knew him back when—boyhood friends from his supposed hometown. Things like that. If he’s hiding something, maybe that’ll be big enough for probable cause, too.”

  I got to my feet. “Right now, though, we better hit the sack. Tomorrow’ll be a long day. But let’s keep each other updated as we go, okay? No dropped balls, and no idle chitchat. If anyone gets wind of what we’re up to, we’ll probably be left with nothing.”

  Sam looked at me closely as we gathered by the door. “You really think the CIA is looking over our shoulder?”

  I shook my head. “That’s overstating it. I actually meant don’t tip off Sopper or Rarig. The CIA’s obviously interested, but I don’t buy into the Hollywood hype about their being everywhere and knowing everything. I think Snowden’s curious about Boris, but he’s also probably as ignorant as we are.”

  I ushered them out ahead of me, worried my own doubts could be read on my face.

  · · ·

  West Brattleboro is tenuously attached to downtown by Route 9, otherwise called Western Avenue. It is the only road crossing over the interstate that bisects our jurisdiction like a knife through a cake, and is predictably busy at most hours of the day, especially, like now, when the neighborhood ballpark empties out. It is also posted at a snail’s speed limit, which about one in every ten cars observes. However, on a road this narrow and congested, that one is usually enough to reduce traffic to a crawl.

  I was therefore absentmindedly watching the taillights ahead, and my rearview mirror, when I was struck by the silhouette of the driver behind me.

  It was no more than a flicker at first—a memory twinge similar to what I felt a dozen times every day. In a town this size, where I’d worked for well over thirty years, I knew hundreds of people. And given the rural Vermont habit of waving to every driver one knew, I’d trained myself to associate faces with names pretty quickly.

  Of course, here I didn’t have a face to go on—merely a backlit outline seen in reverse through two layers of glass. It was exactly this odd lighting, however, that stimulated the notion I should know this person and put an ominous edge on my curiosity.

  With time, it was all I could do to keep even one eye to the front. Finally, just shy of where I was planning to turn right onto Orchard Street, the car before me stopped completely, allowing somebody into line. At that point, the headlights of the mysterious vehicle came close enough to be blocked by my car trunk, just as some oncoming lights lit up the driver’s face, fully revealing his features. In that fraction of a moment, I recognized the man who’d tried to knife me in DC.

  Without thought or hesitation, I threw my car into park, stepped into the street, and pulled out my gun. Aiming with both hands, I pointed it at the now darkened figure behind the wheel and shouted, “Don’t move. Police.”

  A squeal of locked tires and a crash right behind me drowned me out, making me jump to one side to avoid being hit. Simultaneously, the man I’d been aiming at threw his car into reverse and slammed on the gas, sending up two putrid plumes of burning rubber between us.

  I began running after him, saw his car collide with the one behind him and slither out into the opposite, now wide-open, lane. “Stop,” I yelled, still waving the gun. But he fishtailed into a noisy one-eighty and disappeared down the road, both taillights broken. I ran back to my car to give chase and radio in, realizing that by yielding to impulse, I’d forgotten to note either the vehicle make or its license number.

  Angry now as well as alarmed, I reported in, asked all units for assistance, and hit the switch to my blue lights, all before noticing I had nowhere to go. The two cars I’d caused to collide were now blocking me in entirely. Defeated, I got back out to help direct traffic, hoping to hell the man they’d catch would be the same I’d met that night in DC.

  · · ·

  I hung up the phone and sat forward, my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands. Gail stretched across the bed and rubbed my back. “Was that Tony?”

  “Yeah—still no hide nor hair of the guy. By now everyone’s thinking I’ve lost my mind.”

  “What were your options, Joe? You reacted on instinct.”

  “Instinct should have told me to radio it in and play bait until other units could corner the son of a bitch.”

  “You might’ve done that if you hadn’t almost died of a knife wound a couple of years ago and relived that experience just last week. You made light of what happened in Washington, but it must’ve been like a nightmare come back to life. Seeing what you saw tonight—nobody should be surprised you did what you did.”

  I laughed shortly and turned toward her. “I had my gun out in the middle of traffic, like in some stupid cop show. It’s lucky I didn’t shoot someone.”

  She hesitated a second. “You were aiming at the man who attacked you, right?”

  I went back to looking at the rug. “The man I think attacked me. I can’t swear it was him. Sammie, Ron, and I had been working late, talking over the case, and at the end, Sam said something about the CIA looking over our shoulder. I played it down, but driving home I kept thinking about it, and about the guy who mugged me—how unlikely that all was, and how Snowden seemed to know all the details right after. I might have projected my paranoia onto some innocent slob who just happened to be behind me. He’s probably on his fifth scotch at home right now.”

  “Except that from what I just heard, he’s totally vanished, and nobody’s reported being attacked by a gunman in traffic.”

  I got up and began removing my clothes, by habit dropping them into a laundry basket, and draping the next day’s selection over a chair by the door, something I did in case I was called out in the middle of the night.

  “There could be a ton of reasons for that,” I explained. “Calling the cops is the last thing a lot of people do in a crisis, including the law-abiding ones.”

  “That doesn’t explain why a dragnet couldn’t find the car. You called it in immediately.”

  Naked, I pulled back the sheet and dropped back onto the bed, leaning against the headboard. “No… I just lost my cool—totally.”

  Gail extinguished the light. Moonlight through the skylight bathed us both in a colorless wash. “Which only makes you human,” she said, sliding over next to me and interlacing my fingers with her own. “How is the case going? Have you found anything yet?”

  “Nothing solid. We think we have a lead, but it’s pure conjecture right now. We’re basically flipping over every rock we can find, hoping there’ll be enough for a warrant under one of them.”

  She slid her arm up and tugged at my shoulder. “Come on. Lie flat. Try to get some rest. You keep chewing on this all night, you really will go bonkers.”

  I did as she asked, and eventually her deep, even breathing told me she’d followed her own advice. I had doubts I could do the same. The shock of what I’d done, the blindness with which I’d simply reacted without thought, would not be neatly tucked away for the sake of a good night’s sleep.

  Exhaustion will have its way, however, no matter the impediments, and soon I found myself in a deep, dark, and threatening dream state, fighting ghosts from within and without, none of which made sense or gave solace.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter anyway. When the phone dragged me back awake, the room was still dark, the moonlight still obliquely on the wall, and I was just as tired.

  “Yeah,” I muttered into the receiver.

 
; “Joe.” It was Willy’s voice. “There’s been a smash-and-grab at Lord’s Jewelers. They’re talkin’ a bundle. I figured you’d want in on it.”

  I blinked a couple of times, trying to clear my head. “Okay. You at home?”

  “Headin’ out now.”

  “That’ll give me time to dress. Pick me up on the way.”

  Chapter 9

  LORD’S IS LOCATED DOWNTOWN, not far from the Dunkin’ Donuts, where Western Avenue, here called High Street, T-bones into Main. It is in the heart of the nineteenth-century, red-brick canyon that gives Brattleboro its identity and, for all that, is the fanciest jewelry store in town.

  It wasn’t looking too purebred when Kunkle and I pulled up to the curb across the street, however. Cut off by yellow police-line tape, decorated by two squad cars parked out front, and sporting a huge hole in its plate-glass window, the store resembled a riot scene.

  The impression was enhanced by the crowd of people gathered around the outside of the yellow tape—a precaution usually reserved for homicide scenes.

  We elbowed our way through the onlookers, ducking under the tape. An officer, standing on the edge of an apron of shattered glass, nodded to us as we passed by, heading for the front door.

  “What’s with all the people?” I asked him.

  He gestured to an alarm mounted to the wall above the door. “That thing went off. Woke the whole neighborhood up—it’s why we had to string the tape. People must be pretty bored.”

  “Not too subtle,” Willy commented, surveying the mess. “Somebody had to’ve seen something.”

  I cast a glance over my shoulder. The wall of old buildings opposite loomed up like a dam, studded with lit windows framing people lounging comfortably, taking in the action. Although it was the town’s commercial center, Main Street was also home to a largely financially challenged population. It added irony to the polish of all the ground-level stores that some of their closest neighbors couldn’t afford the clothes they’d need to come in to get interviewed. These people might’ve been bored. They also—many of them—didn’t have jobs to go to in the morning.