Black River (23 page)

“Gotta see a lady about some buttermilk,”
Corso said.

Monday, October 23

11:23 p.m.

O
ne
blue eye. Three brass chains. “It’s late,” she
whispered through the crack in the door. “I’ve got a
midterm tomorrow. I can’t—”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Corso
said.

“Is this about Donald?”

“Yes.”

She heaved an audible sigh. “That’s my
past. I don’t want to—”

“It’s about you too,” Corso said.
“I think you better open the door.”

Instead, the door closed. He waited a silent moment,
wondering whether she’d gone back to bed before the first chain
rattled.

Marie Hall wore one of those billowing flannel
nightgowns favored by single women on cold nights—the white a
little off from the washing machine, little shriveled roses around the
edges—that and a pair of bright blue Road Runner socks. She
closed the door behind Corso and stood with her hands on her hips.

“This may be the middle of the afternoon to you
famous writer types, Mr. Corso, but I work for a living, so if you
don’t mind let’s get to whatever it is you think is so
important as to show up here at this time of night.”

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

Her foot began to tap. “You’re starting to
piss me off, you know that? I shared my private life with you. I
answered your questions. And now you see fit to invade my privacy in
the middle of the night and insult me!” She pulled the door open.
“So—if you’ll excuse me.” She gestured toward
the opening. Corso wandered farther into the apartment.

“I don’t think you’ll want your
neighbors to hear this,” he said.

“Get out.”

“I need to know about the money,” Corso
said.

“Do I have to call the police?”

“I’m betting the police would find the
scenario real interesting.”

She pushed the door closed and started for the phone on
the kitchen wall. Corso kept talking. “About how your husband,
Donald, was a member of the second Balagula jury.” She stood with
the phone poised in the air, a foot from her ear. “About how he
sold his ass to Nicholas Balagula for something like a hundred thousand
bucks and about how you somehow managed to screw him out of half the
money.”

“Money? There was no money,” she scoffed,
pushing a button on the phone. She looked over as if to give Corso one
last chance to leave.

“If you push that second one, Marie, the cops are
coming. No matter what. There’s no calling it off.” Her
finger wavered.

“You know what I’m betting?” Corso
said. She didn’t answer. “I’m betting if I were to
run a serious financial check on you, I’d find you’ve got a
little nest egg tucked away somewhere. A little something you can draw
on for college tuition or”—he swept his hand around the
room—“for a coupla nice pieces of furniture maybe.”
She started to protest, but Corso waved her off. “Probably got it
squirreled away in some nice safe mutual fund or something like
that.”

“Don’t be—”

“I’m betting that if I were to go down to
where you work and ask around, I’d find out that for most of last
summer you didn’t take the bus to work like you usually did.
I’m betting you drove a yellow pickup truck.”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” The
tone was right, the gaze stony. Her lower lip, however, was not
cooperating.

“Donald didn’t need the truck. He was
locked up in a downtown hotel.” Corso reached into his inside
coat pocket. Pulled out the list of jury expenses and threw it on the
coffee table. “Ordering T-bone steaks and drinking buttermilk
every night with his dinner.”

“Get out,” she said.

Corso turned on his heel and started for the door.
Stopped with his hand on the knob. “I’ll leave,” he
said. “I’m not in the business of terrifying people. But we
need to get something straight here.” She seemed to be paying
attention, so he went on. “A couple of innocent people are dead
because you sold your silence.” He waved a finger at the woman.
“So I’m putting you on notice, Marie Hall. As of tomorrow
morning, I’m aiming every information source I own at you. In a
week, I’m going to know things about you and your life even
you
probably don’t remember. I’m
going to be more intimate with you than your parents or your
lovers.” He waggled the finger again. “And if I find out
you had anything to do, directly or indirectly, with letting Nicholas
Balagula go free? I’m not only going to go public with it,
I’m also going directly to the authorities with whatever I
have.”

He made a good show of it, closing the door with a bang
and stomping down the stairs. He’d just arrived at the lower
landing when the upstairs door opened.

“Please,” she said, in a strangled voice.
“I have so little.”

She began to hiccup and then to sob. Before Corso could
process the data, she disappeared into the apartment, leaving the door
wide open.

Corso stood at the bottom of the stairs. He recognized
the feeling, the odd mixture of triumph and revulsion he always felt at
moments like this, when he’d managed to poke a hole in the nest
of truths, half-truths, and outright lies that we all, over time, come
to swear is the story of our lives.

He took his time walking back up. Stepped into the
apartment and looked around.

She hadn’t gotten the bathroom door closed. At
the far end, she knelt in front of the toilet. The sound of her
retching scratched the air like sandpaper.

Corso wandered into the living room, moving over by the
stereo, where she was no longer visible. The sound followed him like a
stray dog. He picked among her CDs. Heart. Barry Manilow. Barbra
Streisand. All kinds of easy listening. Ricky Martin was in the player,
Sarah McLachlan nearby.

When he looked up, she was standing in the hall with a
towel pressed to her mouth.

“Tell me what happened,” Corso said.

“It wasn’t me!” she blubbered.

“I know. Just tell me what happened.”

“They came one night. Maybe two days into the
trial.”

Corso stopped her. “You sure it was that
early?”

“Positive,” she said. “It was the
first Wednesday night.”

“Who came?”

“Three men.”

“What did they look like?”

She described all three men. An older guy with a
European accent and a couple of Hispanic guys. One tall, one short.
Older European guy giving the orders. From the descriptions, Corso
figured it had to be Mikhail Ivanov, accompanied by the dear departed
Gerardo Limón and Ramón Javier.

“So what happened?”

“They pushed their way in.” She was
starting to blubber again.

“Take it easy,” Corso said. “Just
tell me the story.”

She stuck her face into the towel and wept for several
moments.

“They made me call Donald at the hotel,”
she said, when she’d recovered.

“You could call your husband?”

“Every night between seven-thirty and
eight-thirty.”

“Directly?”

“Oh, no. You had to go through a policeman first,
who made sure who was calling. They had caller ID, and after a
while—you know—you kind of got to know them and they kind
of got to know you.”

“So you called your husband. What happened
then?”

She looked like she was going to cry again. “I
don’t know,” she said, her lip trembling. “They put a
gun to my head. They took me in the bedroom while the older guy talked
to Donald.”

“Then what?”

“After a while, the guy came in and said Donald
wanted to talk to me.” She wiped her mouth with the towel and
then threw it over the back of a chair. “Donald said I
shouldn’t tell anybody that the men had come. Said it was super
important. Said our whole lives depended on it.”

“And you went along for the ride?”

She nodded miserably.

“It was probably for the best,” Corso
said.

Big tears ran down her cheeks. “I should
have—”

“If either you or Donald had refused,
they’d have killed you right there and then. Donald had never
seen them. You were the only eyewitness. They had nothing to lose. If
Donald goes to the cops, they get a mistrial and somebody finds your
body.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“If you’re right about the date, they had
the list of potential jurors from the very beginning. They went looking
for a weak link, and Donald was it. He was a fanatic about his
son’s education. He was behind in his payments to Harvard. They
were making noises about asking the kid to leave. He’d applied
for a loan and been turned down. Donald was exactly what they were
looking for.”

“About a month later, I found the receipt in the
mail.”

“From?”

“Harvard.” She looked sheepish. “I
steamed it open.”

“He’d paid it all.”

“Forty-two thousand dollars.”

“And you put two and two together.”

She squared her shoulders. “No matter what you
might think, Mr. Corso, I’m not stupid. Of course I figured it
out.” She stared at Corso as if daring him to disagree.
“You know what he tried to tell me?” She didn’t wait
for a reply. “He tried to tell me the money he sent to Harvard
was all of it. That he was broke again.”

“And you said?”

“I said the bill to Harvard was for forty-two
thousand and the bill for my silence was going to be the
same.”

“And he ponied up?”

“I should have asked for more.”

“You ever find out exactly how much he
got?”

She shook her head and began to cry again.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she said between
sniffles. “I’m going to go to jail, aren’t
I?”

“You’re an accessory before and after the
fact in both bribery and jury tampering. They want to get nasty, they
can charge you with interfering with a murder investigation and filing
a false statement.”

“It’s not fair!” she cried. “I
earned every dime of that money! Living with him all those years, doing
without. I had a right…. I only took what was mine.”

“You’ll get off a lot lighter than Donald
did.”

She looked up from her self-pity party. “I
don’t understand. It was all over. Why did they kill Donald after
everything was all done?”

“I think he was killed because he tried to go to
the well again.”

“What do you mean?”

“His son needed money to go into private
practice. I’ll probably never be able to prove it, but I think
Donald Barth looked up one day and saw that Balagula was coming back to
Seattle for another trial and decided to put the bite on him
again.” Corso shook his head sadly. “Which with a guy like
Balagula was a very, very bad idea.”

She steeled herself. “I won’t
testify,” she said, in a voice that made Corso a believer.
“I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in fear,
looking back over my shoulder, waiting for something to strike. I
couldn’t stand that. I’ll go to jail first.”

It took everything Corso had not to smile. It was like
Renee Rogers said. First you scare the shit out of them and then you
offer them a way out.

“What if I told you there was a way you could
avoid testifying against Balagula and maybe stay out of jail at the
same time?”

Hope flickered on and off in her eyes. “Oh,
please,” she sobbed.

“You’ll have to do what I tell
you.”

“I will.”

“You’ll have to be a good
actress.”

She sat up straight like she was in school.
Straightened her nightgown. “What do I have to do? Just tell me.
I can do it.”

“All you have to do is make one phone
call,” Corso said with a smile.

Tuesday, October 24

9:11 a.m.

T
he
pages fluttered slightly as the book arched across the room and hit
Corso in the chest. “Who told you to pay my bill?”
Dougherty demanded. She was sitting up in bed wearing scrubs, makeup,
and a frown. Joe Bocco slid down in the chair, hiding a smile behind
his hand.

“Goddammit, Corso, if I want your help I’ll
ask for it.” She looked around for something else to throw but
couldn’t find anything that wasn’t connected to the
bed.

Corso bent and picked up the book. “Any
good?” he inquired.

“Dark,” she said, then pointed a long
manicured finger. “Don’t change the subject.”

Bocco got to his feet. “You kids don’t
mind,” he said with a smirk, “I’ll wait out in the
hall while you work this out.”

He crossed to the door, pulled it open, and allowed
himself a final shake of the head before disappearing from view.

Corso walked over to the bed and dropped the book in
her lap. “You seem to be feeling quite a bit better.”

“I was doing just fine until I inquired about the
state of my hospital bill, and next thing I know they send in this
Crispy character who gives me a smarmy little smile and tells me
everything is taken care of.”

“Edward Crispin,” Corso corrected.

“Whatever.” She reached for the book
again.

Corso took a step back. “I didn’t want to
lose you,” Corso said.

“What did you say?”

“I said I didn’t want to lose
you.”

“I don’t need a goddamn sugar daddy.
I’m a functioning, self-supporting adult. If I want—”
She stopped. The frown disappeared. “Oh, Jesus, Corso,
don’t get soupy on me here. You’ll ruin your
image.”

“It’s only money,” he said.

“You’ve got no respect for money,
Corso.”

“Money’s not important unless you
don’t have any.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“I felt the same way when I was broke. Nothing
was ever about the money.” He waved a hand. “Way I see it,
I’m just a conduit through which money passes.”

The movement of his right hand in the air pulled her
eyes to his left hand, which was pushed deep into his pants pocket.
“What’s with the hand in the pocket?” she asked.

“What? A guy can’t stand with his hand in
his pocket?”

“That’s not Frank Corso body language at
all,” she said. “What’s the deal?” Corso
didn’t answer. “And that fruity shirt. You look like a bad
foreign film.”

With great care, Corso slid the bandaged hand from his
pocket. “I had a little cooking accident,” he said.

“A cooking accident,” she repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Come here,” she ordered. Corso stood
still. “Come on,” she prodded.

This time, Corso wandered over to the bedside. She
looked him over, then reached up and pulled the turtleneck aside. She
winced. “Damn, Corso. That’s nasty. Looks like whatever you
were cooking tried to cook you back.”

“I’m taking Joe with me when I go,”
he said.

She eased the material back over the welt. “Looks
like you need him more than I do.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re going to stop over in finance
and tell Crispy Critters the bill is on me, right?”

“Sure.”

She looked him over. “You liar. You’ve got
no intention of doing any such thing, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Get out of here, then,” she said.
“If you’re not going to show me any respect, you can
leave.”

Corso eased his damaged hand into his jacket pocket and
silently left the room. Joe Bocco leaned against the wall in the
corridor. “You kids get your spat worked out?”

Corso ignored him. “I don’t need you here
anymore,” he said.

“So our friends…”

“Won’t be back,” Corso finished.

Corso watched the wheels turning in Bocco’s head.
“Then, way I figure it, I owe you a refund of—”

“I’m going to need you tonight. Marvin
too.”

“What’s the gig?”

Corso laid it out for him.

“You’re saying this guy’s a
pro?”

“For sure.”

“Sounds to me like we could use an extra pair of
hands.”

“You got a pair in mind?”

“Got a woman I worked with a few times.
She’ll make good cover.”

“Get her.”

“What time?”

“I’m thinking we’ll schedule the drop
for eleven.”

“If this guy’s careful, we’re going
to need to be in place early.”

“This guy’s very careful,” Corso
said. “And very dangerous.”

“This is gonna cost ya,” Joe Bocco
said.

“What else is new?”

Tuesday, October 24

9:22 a.m.

M
ikhail Ivanov took a deep breath and
coughed into his hand. His voice must not betray him. He knew it would
be a mistake to underestimate Ramón and Gerardo. They
complemented one another well. The strengths of one masked the
weaknesses of the other. Ramón was smart but a bit too
introspective for a man in his line of work. Whatever Gerardo lacked in
intelligence and sophistication, he made up for with the kind of
animal instinct that senses earthquakes days in advance.

He’d thought it over earlier and decided that the
final disposition of Gerardo and Ramón would take place after
they returned to the Bay Area, making today’s contact a mere
holding action, ostensibly paying them for services rendered while he
worked out a suitable scenario for their permanent removal.

He dialed. The phone began to ring. And ring. Ivanov
stood with the phone pressed to his head for a full two minutes, before
using his thumb to break the connection. He couldn’t recall a
time when they hadn’t answered their phone. Thinking he must have
misdialed, he tried again and got the same result.

Mikhail Ivanov was troubled as he pulled open the door
and stepped out into the hall. The sight that greeted him did little to
lift the pall.

The guy was there in the hallway, the sex peddler.
Sixty feet away, knocking on Nico’s door. “May I help
you?” Ivanov asked the man evenly, as he started up the corridor
toward him.

“Goddamn right,” the man blurted.

Ivanov’s practiced eye noticed how his right arm
was tense, as if holding a great weight. Ivanov moved that way,
approaching the man obliquely. “What can I do for you?”

The craggy, creased face was more haggard than usual.
He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a couple of days. “He
messed the boy up.”

“You’ve been paid for your services,”
Ivanov offered.

“Inside,” the guy said. “He’s
all screwed up.”

“You better go,” Ivanov said.

The guy’s face flushed. “Didn’t you
hear me, mother-fucker? The docs are telling me—”

When he began to pull his hand from his pocket, Mikhail
Ivanov was ready. He clamped an iron grip onto the wrist and used the
man’s own momentum to lift the arm high into the air. A silver
stiletto flashed beneath the lights. When the man looked up at his
weapon, Ivanov kneed him once in the balls and then, when he bent in
agony, again in the face. In an instant, the flesh peddler was on his
back in the hotel corridor while Ivanov stood above him, patting his
suit back into place and inspecting the knife.

Between gasps, the flesh peddler tried to speak.
“I’ll get you…I’ll…”

Ivanov dropped one knee onto the man’s chest,
driving the air from his body. As the man watched in horror, he slipped
the blade of the knife between the man’s lips, into his mouth.
“What you are going to do, my friend, is ride that elevator back
to the lobby and then run, just as fast as your little legs will carry
you, back to whatever rat-infested sty a piece of shit like you lives
in, and when you get there”—he rattled the knife blade
around the guy’s teeth—“you will give thanks that I
let you leave here alive.”

Ivanov’s wrist twitched twice. The man emitted a
piteous howl. Ivanov got to his feet. The guy sounded like he was
gargling as he brought his hands to his mouth. He stared at his bloody
palms for a disbelieving moment and then clamped them back over his
ruined mouth. As he struggled to his feet, droplets of blood from the
sliced corners of his mouth fell onto the thick wine-red carpet and
disappeared.

Blood seeped between his fingers, as he waited for an
elevator to arrive. He was rocking on his feet now, emitting a low
keening wail and moving back and forth, as if dancing to a rhythm
unheard.

Ivanov carefully wiped the knife clean on the carpet
and stuck it in his pocket. When he looked down the hall toward the
elevator, the flesh peddler was gone.

Tuesday, October 24

10:02 a.m.

T
he
sky was layered gray: lighter to the west out over Elliott Bay, where
Bainbridge Island was little more than a smudge on the mist; darker and
more menacing to the east as it tightened its coils around the
buildings on Beacon Hill.

Corso stood on the corner of Second Avenue and Royal
Brougham Way. He’d chosen the spot because it was directly in
between Safeco Field and the new football palace that Microsoft
billionaire Paul Allen was building out of pocket, two blocks to the
north. In this neighborhood, limos were commonplace,
twenty-four/seven.

When the gleaming Cadillac slid soundlessly to a stop a
foot from his shins, the door seemed to open on its own. Renee Rogers
sat in the jump seat, facing the rear, her briefcase clutched in her
lap, her expression bland and ultraprofessional.

Corso got in and closed the door. At the other end of
the opulent brocade seat sat the Attorney General of the United States.
She looked more like a kindly aunt or a small-town librarian than the
chief law enforcement officer for the most powerful nation in the
world. The car started up Royal Brougham Way.

She looked Corso over. “I saw you once on
Good Morning America
. I didn’t realize you
were so tall.”

Corso didn’t know what to say, so he merely
nodded. She lifted her chin.

“We never had this conversation. Do you
understand?”

“Yes.”

She glanced at Rogers. “Ms. Rogers tells me you
think you have a scenario by which we might be able to salvage our
present untenable position.”

“I believe so, yes,” Corso said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“It goes back to the second trial,” Corso
began.

The Attorney General raised an eyebrow. “If Ms.
Rogers can stand the mention of it, I guess I can too.”

“It starts with a man named Donald Barth. He was
a juror at the second trial.”

She looked at him over her glasses. “And how
would you come to that conclusion, Mr. Corso? The identities of those
jurors have been destroyed.”

He told her about Balagula having the master list of
jurors from the beginning. About Berkley Marketing, Allied
Investigations, and Henderson, Bates & May. And finally about Marie
Hall’s admissions. “I’ll be damned,” she said.
“Go on.”

As he talked, she took a lens-cleaning kit from the
storage area in the door and began to clean her glasses. She looked
older without the thick lenses magnifying her eyes. She didn’t
speak again until he’d finished and had settled back in the
seat.

She adjusted the glasses on her nose and sighed.
“When I told your publisher, Noel Crossman, that I’d allow
you to sit in on the trial, I was hoping for a sense of closure to this
whole thing.”

She allowed silence to settle in the car’s
interior.

“There can be only one answer, of course.”
She shot a glance at Renee Rogers and then back at Corso. “This
scenario that you envision—were it to come off as
planned”—she shrugged—“then it most certainly
would have to be part of an overall strategy by my office to finally
bring Mr. Nicholas Balagula to bay.”

“Of course,” Corso said.

“And if something were to go awry?” She
flattened her generous lips. “Then—” She looked over
at Corso with a flat, emotionless expression.

“Then the secretary will disavow any knowledge of
our actions,” Corso finished for her.

She cocked her head at him and smiled.
“Where’s that line from?” she asked.

“The original
Mission
Impossible
. The voice on the tape recording always said that
right before it caught fire.”

The smile disappeared. “That is precisely what
the secretary will do,” she said.

“Ms. Rogers is going to need the authority to
make a deal. She’s going to have to be able to
offer—”

The Attorney General held up a hand. “If the
matter reaches a successful conclusion, Ms. Rogers’s actions will
be regarded as part of the overall plan and her authority to make
legal concessions will have been granted directly through
me.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Corso asked.

“Then she will have substantially exceeded her
authority and any agreement into which she may have entered will
necessarily be null and void.” She waved a hand. “At
best…” She hesitated for effect. “Even if it works
out exactly as you envision, Mr. Corso, major elements of the
constituency are going to have their noses bent out of shape.”
Corso began to speak, but the Attorney General cut him off. “They
prefer their justice simple: good guys win, bad guys lose. This one is
going to raise some hackles.” She sat for a time having a
discussion with herself. “We never had this conversation,”
she said, after a moment. She resettled herself in the seat and stared
out the window.

They rode without speaking. “Understood?”
she asked, finally.

They said it was. She must have had a signal arranged
with the driver or a hidden button that she pushed. Ten seconds later,
the car slid to a stop at the curb, directly across Royal Brougham Way
from where they’d picked him up, twenty minutes earlier. The car
door opened. “If you two will excuse me,” the Attorney
General said. “I have a press conference at
eleven-thirty.”

Corso stepped out into the rain, leaned down, and
offered Rogers a hand. She took hold and joined him on the sidewalk.
They stood side by side in the steady drizzle and watched the big black
car disappear into the mist.