Cold Open, A Sam North Mystery (19 page)

Chapter Forty-Seven

The idea of going out in a boat with Barnes didn’t exactly thrill me. But that was the offer he made. Just him and me. No Freddie and no camera.

I walked back inside the building on my way out to the Jeep but saw that I didn’t need to go that far. There, standing at the other end by the front door, was Freddie, chatting up the gal behind the desk.

She was young, with long, tangled, stringy brown hair. Freddie had her entertained, laughing like he was doing a stand-up act.

“Shhhhh,” he said as I walked toward them. “Here comes the boss.”

He introduced me to Jennifer, and we exchanged greetings, and I asked to see him outside.

When we were at the Jeep, I laid it out for him.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” I said.

“We’re not going out on a boat, are we?”

“No, you big baby, we’re not. You’re safe.
I’m
going out on a boat.”

“With Mike?” he asked.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Jen told me all about him. Used to have a pretty bad heroin jones. Apparently, was not a nice guy.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I’ll stay back with Jen,” he said.

“I assumed as much. But she doesn’t seem like your type.”

“Need to keep an open mind with these things, my friend.”

“Of course. Look, I’m not all that comfortable with this guy. He’s a little edgy, kind of nasty. I get in any situation out there, I’m going to text you, understand?”

“And what, I’m supposed to swim out to you or something?”

“Good point.”

“Like I’m a damn Labrador.”

“Okay, okay, I get it. Well, just stay awake with this stuff while I’m out there. If, like, a half hour passes and you don’t see or hear from me, call me. How’s that?”

We went back inside, and Freddie pulled up a chair next to Jen while I walked through the place and out the back to Barnes. He was down on the little dock, looking at both of SoundSafe’s other two boats.

“I’m ready for the high seas,” I said as I reached him.

His eyes went from one to the other. “Trying to pick the least bad one. Both of these things need work,” he said.

He gave them another look and finally started for the beat-up faded red one.

“We’ll go with this one,” he said. “The engine is in slightly better shape.”

It was another wooden hulk from the same era as the one up on blocks. Another relic from a long-ago commercial fishing fleet.

A few minutes later we were pushing off from the dock under the power of a whining and wheezing engine. The engine groaned as we moved down the Norwalk River and out into the Long Island Sound.

The water was full of boats, with people taking advantage of a day made for being outdoors. We moved slowly past Sheffield Island and out into the sound, with the shoreline of Long Island a shadow off in the distance. Barnes cut the engine, and we went to the back of the boat.

“It’s somewhere right out around here,” he said, as he scanned the water.

“Buried treasure?” I asked.

“Try tires.”

“Really?”

“Some clown has been making a dump run at night. Mostly tires, but you can figure he’s probably not stopping there. If he has an auto shop, might be batteries and other crap.”

“Geez.”

“No kidding. I catch the guy, I’m going to beat the living shit out of him, then turn him over to the cops,” he said.

Barnes reached for a little red Igloo cooler, and took out two bottles of water, and threw one across to me. He sat down across from me on the little bench that ran along the inside of the back of the boat and pushed his shades up onto his head.

“Why are you trying to dig up dirt on McConnell?” he asked.

I took a drink of water before answering. “Because he’s a bad guy, but I just can’t prove it yet.”

“You want to be the reporter who takes him out? Knocks his ass right out of the race for the White House?”

“Rather it be me than someone else.”

“You think you can handle him?”

“So far, so good. I’ve gotten close and been shot at for my effort,” I said.

“And you’re still here,” he said.

“I am.”

“And your buddy who’s back there flirting with Jen, he knows what he’s doing?” he asked.

I smiled. Barnes didn’t miss a thing.

“He does.”

We both had some water, and I pressed him.

“October, sophomore year at Harvard. What happened?” I asked.

His eyes locked on mine from across the boat and stayed on them even as he had another drink of water. When he was good and ready he started.

“How’d you find out about this?” he asked.

“From someone who doesn’t think Buck McConnell should be allowed anywhere near the White House,” I said.

“I tell you about this, you need to be real careful. This isn’t about beating some parking ticket,” he said.

“Understood.”

He took another long pull on the water like he was still thinking about it.

“There were three of us,” he said. “Middle of October. Not sure what happened over the summer with Buck and his father, but there was some issue, and Daddy cut off the plentiful supply of money to teach Buck a lesson.”

Out on the sound a motorboat zipped along, pulling a laughing teenager in a tire tube. She yelled as she bounced along, and it seemed like a perfectly good way to spend a day.

“Buck was, and I guess still is, a pigheaded, stubborn son of a bitch,” he said. “So he’s going to show Daddy McConnell he can make his own money.”

“His way.”

“The illegal way,” Barnes said.

He paused and looked at me to see if it had sunk in. It had.

“Drugs,” I said.

“Yup. Buck decides to use the McConnell entrepreneurial gene to distribute cocaine to the stressed-out undergrads,” he said.

“So, he was going to buy wholesale and sell retail?”

“He arranges to meet some dirt bag dealer.”

“You were with him?”

“I was supposed to be the muscle.”

The boat rocked on the rolling water and the sun beat down on us, and Barnes just sat and looked at me. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“How much do you know about this?” he asked.

Edmunds had told me Michael Barnes came out on the losing end of the drug bust.

“Enough to know you got the short end of things.”

“‘Screwed’ is how I like to refer to it,” he said.

“So, you were with Buck.”

He shook his head. “Stupidest thing I ever did. Got to remember, back then everybody was flipping out about heroin. Guys were coming back from Vietnam as junkies. Coke was just reappearing and seemed like a harmless, recreational drug. Until you got busted for it.”

“So, you go to make a buy.”

“About five kilos,” he said.

“What happens?”

“Walk in to find the dealer and some other guys.”

“Who weren’t dealers.”

“Cops. Two of them. A black guy and a white guy. Remember it like it was this morning. It was over in a flash.”

“Harvard?”

“Also over in a flash. Got a degree from the state penitentiary system of Massachusetts.”

“Buck?”

“I thought we were all going away. I was wrong,” he said.

“The best lawyers money can buy?”

“Some Houston hotshot flew in that night and had him out the next morning before I woke up from the twenty minutes of sleep I got. Never heard from him again,” he said.

“At least he’s loyal.”

“To Buck,” he said.

“Quite a start to the college business.”

“Possession with intent to distribute. Was good for six years of my life. Could have been three times as much if it weren’t for my uncle’s help.”

“In the legal business as well?”

“Yeah, deceased now, but a New York heavyweight back in the day. Did what he could to get it reduced from twelve years to six. I served almost six.”

“And Buck?”

“Was back at Harvard a week later. Heard he was telling people he had to go home to say good-bye to his dying grandmother,” he said.

“And get his butt kicked by Daddy.”

“He moved on without missing a beat,” he said. “Not sure how his dad’s guy did it, but seemed like he got Buck’s name erased from anything to do with that night.”

The boat drifted a bit and Barnes stood up and put his shades down and went to the wheel. I got up and joined him.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “He’s been hiding this thing for decades. How’d he
do it?”

“Got to remember, he was a snotty rich kid but so were most of the rest of the class. Wasn’t Buck McConnell yet,” he said.

“This gets out, he’s done,” I said.

He laughed and shook his head.

“Crap, guys drop out of presidential campaigns because they lied on their taxes or cheated on their wife,” he said.

“And fact is, he wasn’t looking to dabble as a recreational user. He was looking to make a hard-core, dealer buy,” I said.

“That’s right. As good as he is, no way you spin that. Buck McConnell was looking to go into business as a coke dealer? Not a lot of ways of reframing, as they say, that one,” he said.

“You ever get any pressure to keep quiet?” I asked.

He had both hands on the boat’s wheel now and was staring out into the sound.

“About six months after I got out, someone came by and offered me money. Some big guy,” he said. “I figured he was a hired hand for Buck.”

He stood still and stared. I kept my mouth closed because there was no reason to open it and speak.

“I was a mess. Living in New Orleans. Had a drug habit all my own and it was years before I cleaned up. Told the guy to screw off and he left. Think old Buck probably figured I’d help him out and self-destruct on my own.”

A couple of gulls squawked overhead and swooped past us.

“There’s something you need to understand,” he said.

“Which is?”

“So long as Buck McConnell is running IT&E, really no reason for anyone to say boo. But if the man is running for president, hell, that’s another story. He’s a dishonest sleazebag.”

“Either makes him highly qualified for the job, or disqualifies him,” I said.

“Either way, the voters should know. They need to know,” he said. Barnes started the engine up, and it rumbled to life. It was way too loud to speak over, and I got the feeling he was well aware of that and had told me all he wanted to, or all he knew.

I tried yelling a question. “You ever share this story with anybody else?” I asked.

He looked straight ahead, never taking his eye off the water and the boats passing in front of us.

Chapter Forty-Eight

We were sitting at one of the picnic tables on the deck of Sono Seaport Seafood overlooking Norwalk harbor. I was working on a fried clam sandwich. Freddie was just about done with his New York strip steak sandwich. The large seagull sitting on the post three feet away was getting antsy at the prospect of there not being any leftovers.

“Don’t throw him anything,” I said. “You feed him, and you just encourage him and his buddies.”

“Poor guy looks emaciated,” Freddie said.

“Don’t be an enabler,” I said.

We had stopped for lunch on our way back out to I-95. The place sat right on the harbor, and you looked down onto boats coming in from and going out to the sound. We were just a few blocks from the plush offices of SoundSafe, and I was still trying to figure out if there was a connection between Steele’s death and Michael Barnes.

“You believe him?” Freddie asked.

“Barnes?”

“Yeah.”

I took a bite of the clam roll and thought about his story of the drug deal gone haywire.

“Yes,” I said.

“Going to be hard to verify,” he said. “Be easy enough to check out if Barnes went away to prison, but old Buck got his record wiped clean, sanitized.”

“Scrubbed and tidied up,” I said. “But there has to be some way of proving it. Some record of it somewhere, don’t you think?”

Freddie finished a bite of the steak sandwich before answering.

“Happened decades ago,” he said. “You’d think if it was going to come out, it would have before now.”

“A rich guy’s family lawyer can be a powerful tool,” I said.

A couple of gulls circled overhead, hoping to get lucky, then glided lazily back over toward the water.

“I don’t understand why Barnes didn’t nail McConnell with this before,” Freddie said. “He had the goods on him for all these years.”

“But Buck was just a CEO. He probably knew McConnell had sky-high ambitions and was biding his time,” I said. “Probably plotted this out while sitting in prison.”

“Experience like that can make you bitter,” Freddie said.

“And patient.”

“Guess so,” he said.

“Plus, he knew he couldn’t just hand it to anybody. Needed to make sure it was going to someone who could put it together and someone with a big enough platform to make a splash with it.”

“Jack Steele,” he said.

“Yup.”

A small motorboat buzzed past the dock on its way out to the sound. A guy in a baseball cap piloted it while a yellow Lab stood at the nose of the boat, head held up and enjoying the breeze on its face.

“So, you convinced he told this all to Jack?” Freddie asked.

“Don’t know for sure,” I said. “It was like he refused to say anything after a certain point. He just shut down. Said he needed to get back and take his other boat out on the water to see how it was running. Sounded like an excuse.”

“Maybe he got tired of your questions,” Freddie said.

“Maybe.”

“You can get annoying,” he said.

“I’m just persistent.”

“Obnoxious be more like it,” he said.

There was the low rumble of an engine behind me, and I turned to see the third boat in the SoundSafe fleet moving down the river and heading out into the sound. This one was smaller than the other two, its hull painted in a light blue.

“How the hell does he expect to catch polluters in those piece-of-crap boats?” Freddie asked. “Needs some speedboats.”

“Maybe you and your environmentalist friends can kick in a few dollars to make that happen,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he said.

We watched the slow progress of the boat, and I could make out the figure of Barnes at the wheel.

“Here’s what I think,” I said.

“Always a revelation.”

“I think he was going to tell Jack this story. But I’m not sure if he made the first move to do it,” I said.

“Probably not. There’s no way Jack would have sat on this if he’d had it,” Freddie said.

“Unless he wasn’t sure of it, or didn’t have all the details for something this big. But yes, there’d be no way Jack would not have run this if he’d had it.”

“He wanted to nail McConnell,” Freddie said.

“They both did,” I said. “Barnes is saying the voters need to know, but it’s really all about payback.”

“Always is,” Freddie said.

A small motorboat cruised by at harbor speed with a woman sunbathing in the front. A guy wearing a baseball cap was piloting and gave us a wave.

“How do I trade places with that guy?” Freddie asked.

“What, and give up our quality time? Who’s going to help me solve this?”

“Someone else,” he said.

I poked around at the clams that had fallen off my sandwich. “Barnes said he didn’t watch much TV, but I think he’s lying. I bet you he saw Jack going after McConnell as part as Operation Outrage.”

“If he didn’t see it, he probably read about it somewhere,” Freddie said. “Sure he was keeping tabs on McConnell, being that the man had a part in his winding up on the inside for six years.”

“So say Barnes sees or reads about Jack going after McConnell and the corporate corruption. Now he knows Jack and
Steele Yourself
would be the perfect platform to nail McConnell for good. Once and for all. Even the score,” I said.

“Payback,” Freddie said.

I downed a bit of my iced tea and glanced across the deck to the inside of the restaurant. I could see the dark bar area, in the distance a TV was on above the bar. It was an all-news channel, but not Liberty. On screen was video of Buck McConnell. He was getting out of a car and walking across the sidewalk, standard B-roll shots.

When the anchor reappeared, there was a graphic behind her of McConnell superimposed over the White House.

“Hang on,” I said, getting up.

I went inside and stood at the corner of the bar. The sound was down, but it didn’t matter. Across the bottom of the screen a banner ran with two lines:

“IT&E CEO Buck McConnell to enter presidential race”

“Official announcement expected within days”

When I went back outside, Freddie was leaning back with his eyes closed and face tilted up to the sky, soaking in the sun.

“It’s official. McConnell is going for the White House,” I said.

“Wake me when there’s something important to talk about,” he said, “other than Buck McConnell.”

Freddie was right, Buck McConnell could wait for the moment. I sat down and looked out toward the sound and took in the view. Sheffield Island felt so close you could touch it, and sailboats with colorful sails glided across the deep blue water. I spotted the back of the SoundSafe boat chugging out into the open expanse of the sound, and it occurred to me that Michael Barnes had the best job in the world on days like this.

I closed my eyes, leaned back, and lifted my face toward the sky. I breathed in the salt air and heard gulls squawking out over the water. It was peaceful, and I relaxed for the first time in days.

Then a boom shook the deck. It was a loud, violent explosion.

People screamed and jumped up from the benches of the picnic tables and pointed toward the sound. Overhead, swarms of screeching gulls filled the sky. I jumped up on the bench and saw Freddie already up, his camera on his shoulder, racing to the other end of the deck and pushing people out of the way to get there.

Off in the distance out on the sound a large fireball floated to the sky. Below it flames and thick, black smoke rose from the remains of a sinking boat. The nose of the vessel rose up and out of the water as it sank. I could see the color of the boat as it disappeared underwater.

It was the light blue SoundSafe boat.