Bad People (18 page)

He walked down to the garage that he had watched Connie drive into and scouted the levels until he found her Jetta. He noted its location and returned to the surface. This hardly killed any time at all.

Luke crossed the street to the nearby transit station and sat on the edge of a concrete planter.

He formulated a plan.

He had enough evidence that Connie and Barry were together at the performance. He walked back up to Ardiss’s Toyota and got in. He drove all the way over the hill, bypassing his own place, and back to Connie’s Meridian Valley condo.

He parked at the far corner and settled in.

Nothing had changed. The game was between Luke and Connie. Barry did not fit because Barry was irrelevant to the future Luke anticipated.

He had only to wait.

Less than two hours later, Connie’s call came through to his cell. He was not surprised. He’d willed it. She hadn’t left a message, clearly embarrassed and regretful about waiting so long to call him back. Connie would have to wait longer. Until he was ready to return the call. There was time. He drove home.

The world correctly realigned itself.

Chapter 19: Tommy

Tommy Brussels watched as Ethan Starvold took a phone call from the assistant district attorney assigned to the Robb Hart murder. The call was brief, as was the summary Ethan gave Tommy as soon as he had replaced the receiver in its black carriage.

“That’s Wendy,” Ethan said.

“Uh.”

“She’s coming over with some evidence she wants us to hear.”

“Hear?”

“It’s tape.”

“We have tape? Who are we wiretapping?”

Ethan shrugged.

They waited. Then they stopped waiting and did some other things. Wendy did come, though, true to her word, though it was near the end of the shift by the time she made it.

Wendy was a good one, older. Most of the ADA’s were young. Some hung around a few years before moving onto better paying, more prestigious, jobs. Wendy, however, had stuck. She was tough, smart, and though her body, like Tommy’s, had worn out, she still mustered the passion and the energy of a kid. She never gave up. She trusted the hunches and experience of her cops. Tommy liked all those things about her.

“Hey, beautiful,” said Ethan when she came in and laid her briefcase in the chair next to Ethan’s desk.

Tommy didn’t like that. Ethan wouldn’t have spoken to one of the younger girls that way, so he shouldn’t speak to Wendy that way either. She was a pro and she deserved his respect, the same as any other professional law enforcement or court officer. He resolved to set his partner straight on that point as soon as Wendy left.

“Ethan,” she said. “Tommy.” She pulled a disc out of the side pouch of her case. “Can we use a room?”

They relocated to an interrogation room that had a CD player. Before starting the recording, Wendy fished back into her case, pulling out some papers. She tossed Tommy and Ethan each a few pages of transcript. “This is a snippet of audio surveillance taken from the back room in a Las Vegas nightclub last spring. The first speaker is Theo Corano, an organized crime figure, and the second speaker is an FBI Confidential Informant.” She pressed play.

Tommy followed along on the page.

CORANO: “Go ahead.”

C.I.: “That about covers it.”

CORANO: “No. No. That other knob. The [unintelligible] asshole.”

C.I.: [Unintelligible].

CORANO: “No. From Seattle. The 20K outstanding.”

C.I.: “Robb Hart? He’s broke. Busted.”

CORANO: “He isn’t paid up.”

C.I.: “We leaned on him pretty hard. We recovered almost ninety thousand from him.”

CORANO: “I want the rest.”

C.I.: “Is it worth it?”

CORANO: “Probably not. I just don’t like that prick.”

C.I.: “I hear you.”

CORANO: “If he ever shows his face in town again.”

C.I.: “Okay.”

CORANO: “He won’t, I guess. He’s one that woke up.”

C.I.: “Seems so.”

CORANO: “[Unintelligible]. Okay, what else?”

Wendy stopped the tape.

“Where did this come from?” asked Ethan. Tommy said nothing.

“An ongoing FBI investigation. Seems your Vegas inquiries raised a red flag, and they sent this to me.”

“Voluntarily?” said Ethan. “That’s a first.”

“The best I can figure is they have nothing on this Corano guy and they are hoping to tie their case to the body of Robb Hart.”

“We caught a break!”

“Bullshit.” said Tommy.

“You think the FBI might be playing us, Tommy.” asked Ethan.

“Playing us? Who knows what the fuck? What are you talking about anyway? It’s irrelevant. Jesus Christ!” he looked at Wendy. “Do you want to explain it to him or do I.”

“Go on,” Wendy said with a sigh.

“This tape fucks our case,” said Tommy.

Ethan waved his hand. “You’re just married to the partner theory, Connie Wexler and Barry Taupe.”

“Because they did it. And this bookie sure didn’t. He says so. Tells the other guy to write-off the debt basically unless Hart ever shows up in Vegas again.” Then he asked Wendy, “what’s the date on this?” She told him. “See, that’s
after
Hart’s last known trip to Vegas. These guys didn’t come up here and clip Hart over twenty grand.”

Ethan interrupted. “But he says he didn’t like the guy.”

“He didn’t do it. I swear that wife has a mother-
fucker
of a guardian angel.” Tommy flung his transcript against the wall.

Ethan looked at Wendy. Let him look. Tommy was done explaining.

“Ethan,” Wendy said, “You’ve got a gangster with a thick East Coast accent with an name ending in a vowel somewhere in Las Vegas saying his hates Robb Hart, who happens to owes him money. Never mind that I explain to a jury $20,000 is not worth killing him over, and that there is no evidence that these guys ever looked into killing Hart. Play this tape for twelve citizens and, assuming Connie Wexler and Barry Taupe having anything approaching decent representation, they walk. The irony is that those FBI agents are probably glowing at the kindness they think they’ve done by sending us this boon.”

“So what if we don’t mention this to anyone?” said Ethan half-heartedly. “Maybe we never even got this tape.”

Wendy looked down at him. “I won’t even dignify that. And face it guys, you haven’t got shit anyway. No physical evidence. No motive, really. There’s no money for the business partners to fight over. No evidence of a love interest.”

“The wife and Barry didn’t know Robb Hart had bankrupted the business. For all we know they
did
do it for the money,” said Ethan.

“No life insurance policy either,” added Wendy, not buying it.

“The wife just happened to be out of town. So did the partner. That’s convenient,” said Ethan.

“Then a third party was involved. And who paid for that? We’ve been over their records, Tommy. Robb Hart was taking cash out of the business, not his partners.”

“But….” said Ethan half-heartedly.

“Now who’s married to the partner theory?” said Tommy snidely, stopping Ethan from finishing.

“I just want to make a case,” said Ethan defensively. “Maybe Connie took some cash out under her husband’s name. A spouse could do that. And what about the missing person? An associate of Barry’s, the comic book guy? That’s a coincidence?”

Tommy just listened.

“Look guys,” Wendy said. “It’s your time, you do what you want with it. I’m just here to tell you how high the hurdles are getting.”

Ethan said: “You’re saying the case is thin.”

“No,” Wendy held her finger up to get Ethan’s attention. “You
have
no case.”

They were all silent for a moment. Then Tommy said, “Thanks for coming in Wendy.”

“Any time, Tommy.”

Tommy reached over to the CD player took out the disc and handed to Wendy.

She didn’t reach for it. “That copy’s for you. Take care guys.”

After she had left Tommy tossed the CD into the waste bin. He and his partner sat in the room a few more minutes. Ethan seemed hyper-conscious of the silence. He wasn’t a bad person, but he could have done better at handling silence.

“So what’s next?” Ethan asked.

Tommy looked at his watch. Six-thirty. “I’m going home,” he said.

“All right,” said Ethan. “Me too, I guess.” After a pause through which neither of them moved, Ethan said, “Friday night in the big city.”

Friday fucking night, Tommy thought. Two endless days until Monday.

Tommy went home. He checked in with Crystal about her food. He watched a little boxing on HBO. He dozed all evening in front of the TV. At eleven he went to bed, but as soon as he took his pants off and laid down he was wide awake.

Around five he drifted off, and woke around two-thirty in the afternoon Saturday.

He checked in on Crystal.

He did the laundry. Two big loads. He made a pot a spaghetti, leaving half of it to heat on the stove, and dividing the other half into plastic containers to take for lunch in the coming week.

He went up and told Crystal about the spaghetti.

He went back down to the kitchen and took a box of vanilla wafers out of a cabinet and left them on the counter where Crystal might see them.

Without thinking much about it, he put on his jacket, called up to Crystal to let her know, and then drove to work.

The guy who worked Saturday evenings in the evidence locker was a friend. Tommy and his friend chatted briefly after that friend got the evidence box from the Hart case out for Tommy. Tommy signed out the box and took it upstairs to his desk. He looked through it briefly until he found the thing he was looking for. He left the rest of the evidence on his desk. He went down to his car and drove to Meridian Valley, to Connie Wexler’s address. By the time he got there it was half past six.

She wasn’t in.

Chapter 20: Connie

Connie sat in her car in the garage under her building for a few minutes waiting for the phone to ring before she realized she had no bars.

Her carrier never
had
had any reception down there.

The thought crossed her mind to pull the car back out and drive. There should be people to call,
someone
to talk to, but who? Maybe Stephen-David would be home—though she doubted it, not at this hour, and he looked down on her as much as Barry and Erika did anyway. So unlike his father in most ways, but had that same air of – what was it?—something like disappointment—disdain? What a horrible word. Her own child disdained her.

Just go upstairs, she told herself. Get into the shower, then get into bed. She had never slept much. Five, no more than six hours a night since Stephen-David’s birth, but lately she was sleeping longer, eight-and-a-half hours—like the men did. And why shouldn’t they? What had they got to worry about? But she didn’t feel any more rested for it. Maybe the amount of sleep made no actual difference. Maybe life was merely divided into two distinguishable states: sleep and not-sleep.

She got out of the car, went to the elevator, and waited. The elevator dropped from the lobby above with hydraulic noises. She stepped into the florescent box, pressed her floor level. She had lived in houses ever since her marriage. And worked from home, or her vehicle, most of those years. Elevators were for office workers, for nine-to-fivers. They certainly weren’t for home.

She exited on her floor, walked down the hall, and entered her dark condo.

She began the motion of turning on the light, and yelped before completing it, already seeing the hulk-shadow in the soft chair by the glass door near her lanai, in the fragment of time that the darkness still hung there.

Later, she would go back and look at the door, at the lock, at the jamb, to see if it had been forced, and she would find no evidence, but she would not be surprised that a man like him could get past a simple door lock.

She recognized him instantly, the detective, the fat one. His stark calmness, his almost righteous sense of place—so much so that he did not even need to adjust his eyes at the sudden light after sitting in darkness who-knows-how-long—almost dampened her terror at finding her home violated.