Cowboy Angels (26 page)

‘No, it was way before that,’ Lipscombe said. ‘As a matter of fact, it was my first real lesson in the way the world works. Adam knows all about it, and Anna has heard me tell it about a hundred times, but it’s a good story. I’m sure they won’t mind hearing it again.’

He held up his hand and with the fondness of a retired soldier examining a campaign medal studied the silvery scar that sealed the stump of the missing finger. ‘Back in the bad old days, I was a raw kid driving a truck for one of the State-owned haulage companies and taking kickbacks from my immediate boss, who was connected, to run an extra trip or two at night. I’d drive across the border along the fire roads, load up, come back. I’d been doing this for a couple of months when I was jumped coming back with a full load. The usual set-up - a tree across the road, half a dozen guys in black balaclavas stepping out with machine guns and telling me to climb down. They were very efficient, knew exactly what they were doing. Hauled me out of the cab and put a gun in my ear and told me what was what, told me I’d come out of it okay if I did as I was told. So I sat nice and quiet on the tree they’d used to block the road, and didn’t say a word while they took the goods.

‘But the thing was, I recognised one of them. This tall skinny guy with a stutter who was one of the workgang that had loaded up the stuff in the first place. What they were doing was ripping off the outfit they worked for, the one that had sold the whiskey, as well as ripping off the outfit that had
bought
the whiskey, the outfit my boss at the haulage company was connected to. When they were finished they beat me up a little, and one of them slipped a twenty-dollar bill into my pocket and told me to say I had been held up by crooked Customs officers. That kind of thing did happen, but usually the customs officers shot up the truck and killed the driver, took half the load for themselves, then turned in the rest and made themselves out to be heroes. There was a telephone number on the bill that I was supposed to call the next time I made a run. They promised me a couple of hundred if I did that.

‘Anyway,’ Walter Lipscombe said, ‘I knew that
my
boss might be taken in by the lame-o story about Customs officers, but I also knew that
his
bosses would think it was a crock. So, I told him about the guy with the stutter. Next night, I’m pulled out of bed by two big guys in expensive black overcoats, put in a car and driven across the border to the place where I usually loaded up. There are maybe twenty guys there, standing in a circle around six bare-ass-naked bozos all beat-up and bleeding. I’m told to identify the one I’d recognised, and although I’m sick at heart, what can I do but finger him? I mean, they’d already beaten a confession out of those guys, they just wanted confirmation from me, and if I didn’t give it they’d kill them anyway. But by laying the finger on one of them, I became part of it, you see? Which was what happened. I was given a new job at a government warehouse and told to recruit drivers, and that’s how I started on my long climb to where I am today, with my beautiful wife and my beautiful children and my beautiful house. All of which I owe to some poor dumb cluck with a stutter, who didn’t know to keep his mouth shut.’

Linda said, ‘But what about the little finger?’

‘I didn’t tell you?’ Walter Lipscombe widened his eyes and struck his forehead with the heel of his hand in a pantomime of amazement. His wife was smiling at this bit of business, even though she must have seen it a hundred times. ‘What happened was, I kept that twenty-dollar bill that had been tucked into my pocket, and my bosses found out about it when they turned those guys over. So I was promoted for breaking open the scam, and I lost my little finger to remind me to be fully truthful at all times. And I’ve never forgotten that lesson - don’t try to play both ends against each other, or you’ll wind up in the middle, neck-deep in shit.’

 

After dessert and coffee, Walter Lipscombe and Stone retired to the library while Walter’s wife took Linda on a tour of the rest of the apartment. The library was panelled with fifteenth-century oak from a manor house in Kent, England, and contained more than ten thousand volumes, including one of the most comprehensive collections of pornography in the world. One wall was dominated by Jan van Eyck’s
Last Judgement
. Display cases showed off drawings by Tintoretto, Pisanello, and Dürer, an illuminated page from Jean Fouquet’s
Book of Hours
, rare pre-Revolutionary comics. Suits of ornate fourteenth-century German armour stood in shadowy alcoves.

Lipscombe poured two fingers of hundred-year-old brandy (‘Liberated from the cellars of the Dear Leader’s palace in Washington, DC’) into two balloon glasses, and after Stone had refused the offer of a cigar and they had settled into leather armchairs on either side of a stone fireplace burning real logs, the ex-gangster made a toast to old times.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Stone said.

‘I was wondering when you’d get around to it.’

In the soft red light of the fire, wreathed in the smoke of the Romeo y Julietta that was stuck in the middle of his grin, Walter Lipscombe looked like a minor devil. A nearby lamp put a shine on the pink scalp under his thinning hair.

‘Thanks for holding off over dinner,’ Stone said.

‘I know you have a low opinion of me, Adam, but even I can see that while that little girl is putting up a good front, a breath of wind could blow her clean away. Now we’re alone, maybe you could tell me exactly what happened to Tom.’

Stone told the story he’d put together in the bath: how he’d been recruited to try to bring in Tom Waverly, and what had gone down in Pottersville. He explained that Tom had been involved in some kind of conspiracy buried deep inside the Company, the one that Lipscombe had heard about, but didn’t mention that Tom had taken something that both the conspiracy and the Company wanted to find. He knew that if Lipscombe got wind of that, and found out that he and Linda were looking for it, the ex-gangster would make Stone an offer he couldn’t refuse.

When Stone was finished, Lipscombe took a sip of his brandy and said, ‘Stein told me Tom killed himself, but I didn’t know you were there. And you think Tom was dying of something.’

‘Terminal cancer, according to the Company pathologist. I don’t know whether to believe that or not, but I do know that when we met up he’d reached the end of the line.’

‘The poor bastard. But we had some good times, didn’t we?’ Lipscombe said, and raised his glass.

They toasted Tom Waverly’s memory.

Lipscombe said, ‘You tried your best to save Tom, and the stupid son of a bitch took another way out. But what brings you here? Why aren’t you back on your farm, enjoying your retirement?’

‘I’m trying to help Linda clear her father’s name,’ Stone said. He wasn’t about to tell Walter Lipscombe about Susan’s murder. It was too raw and too personal, and he didn’t want the man’s pity.

‘And you’re following up a few leads, huh? Well, Tom was a good friend of mine,’ Lipscombe said. ‘Anything I can do to help, name it.’

‘When we’ve finished here, Linda and I need to get back to the Real. But we can’t use a regular gate.’

‘Because you’d be grabbed.’

‘I was wondering if you still make use of the old gate at Grand Central Station.’

‘Funny you should mention that. The painting your girlfriend admired? I’m sending it through the mirror tomorrow afternoon, two o’clock. Or is that too early for you?’

‘Not if things work out. I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible. No offence.’

‘None taken. Let me talk to the guys who look after this side of the gate. I’m sure I can persuade them to let you go through at the same time,’ Lipscombe said, rubbing his finger and thumb together.

‘As long as it doesn’t get you into trouble with the COILE.’

‘Forget about it.’

‘We’ll need new ID, too. Something from one of the Real’s agencies. Something that will get us through an interchange.’

‘If you go through the old gate with my name under the contract, it’s strictly no questions asked. You won’t need any ID.’

‘We might need to use other gates later on.’

‘You really are into some serious shit, aren’t you?’

‘I won’t forget your help, Walter. How about that ID?’

‘No problem. Army, DEA, ATF, FBI, or Carter’s peacenik Reconstruction and Reconciliation Corps?’

‘Army will be fine.’

‘You and Ms Waverly will have to give up your present ID - the guy who does this kind of work will need to copy your photographs and fingerprints.’

‘How quickly can he do this?’

‘Hand your stuff to my butler. He’ll get things organised overnight. So, is that it? If you want some company, a nice girl who can help you forget your troubles, my butler can organise that, too.’

‘Maybe you can help clear up a little mystery,’ Stone said. ‘Tom was in this sheaf recently, and he left in a hurry.’

Walter nodded. ‘Right after he killed that woman. A mathematician, I believe, by the name of Eileen Barrie. She worked for the government, in the laboratories at Livermore. I heard all about it from that prick Saul Stein when he was trying to rattle my cage. He told me that Tom blew her up in her car, and they knew it was Tom because the crime scene guys had found his thumbprint on a piece of circuitry. The bomb was packed behind the plastic cover of the steering wheel column, a very nice shaped charge that decapitated her but left the bodyguard sitting next to her with no more than burst eardrums and second-degree burns to his hands. Very definitely Tom’s style, don’t you think? What Stein didn’t tell me, what I’ve been trying to figure out, is why Tom wanted to kill her in the first place. You know anything about that?’

‘I was brought in on a need-to-know basis, and told more or less what you were told,’ Stone said. Lipscombe didn’t need to know that Tom Waverly had been killing off Eileen Barrie’s doppels. ‘I do know that he managed to get out of this sheaf after he killed her. I was wondering if he might have used the old gate under Grand Central Station.’

‘You think?’ Walter said. ‘The West Coast to New York, that’s a long way to travel if you’re on the run for murder. It would be easier to go through the mirror at White Sands.’

‘People would have been watching out for Tom at White Sands and at Brookhaven, just like they’re right now watching out for me and Linda. The gate at Grand Central Station was his only chance of making a clean exit.’

‘And you think I helped him?’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘Especially when I admitted to using it just now. Well, I didn’t help Tom. Maybe he didn’t need anyone’s help to get away, did you think of that? As long as you know the guys running it, and you have the cash, they’ll send you through no questions asked.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘He always was a lone bird. Remember, Adam, how he would take off for days at a time when he was supposed to be working with you?’

‘Did you ever hear from him, after he disappeared?’

‘Not a word.’

‘You didn’t hear anything at all? I find that hard to believe, Walter, given all your connections.’

‘He didn’t call, he didn’t leave anything at any of the old drops, he didn’t even send a postcard. First time I knew he’d been here was a couple of days ago, when Saul Stein sent a squad of officers around. Here, to my apartment, where my wife and children live,’ Lipscombe said with sudden anger, leaning forward in his chair, punctuating his words with sharp jabs of his cigar. ‘They tossed the place and then they arrested me. Saul Stein himself questioned me, and then they threw me in a cell and left me to sweat until my lawyer discovered where I was, filed a complaint, and sprang me. Technically, I’m out on bail, so I hope you appreciate the risk I took, harbouring a couple of fugitives from the law.’

Walter Lipscombe could lie with the best of them, but Stone was pretty sure that he was telling the truth. ‘What kind of questions did Stein ask?’

‘He showed me pictures of what was left of that woman. He told me I would go to the chair for accessory to murder if I didn’t tell him how I’d helped Tom get away. I told him he was talking bullshit. He threatened to hand me over to the Company, said they’d take me to the Real, disappear me off the face of this Earth. Said there were plenty of old crimes outstanding that would put me in a special facility buried in some wild sheaf for the rest of my days.’ Lipscombe drew on his cigar, contemplated the smoke he exhaled. ‘I’m working a couple of favours right now. I intend to get the motherfucker replaced.’

‘The guy was doing his job, Walter. Don’t take it personally.’

‘He sent his gorillas to my home,’ Lipscombe said. ‘They arrested me right in front of my wife and my children. You don’t get any more personal than that. Mr Saul Stein, he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in a world of shit.’

‘How about our former associates? Do you still keep up with any of them? Do you think any of them could have been in contact with Tom?’

‘The woman who acted as a cutout between you and me, Kay Francis? She killed herself a couple of years ago over a soldier boyfriend who died in some sandpit in Mexico. We got problems there with Commie-sponsored nationalists. Johnny Claassen had two heart attacks, one straight after the other, and is now semi-retired, running a sports book down in Miami. Harry Hendricks, he’s a general now, can you believe it? Four stars, very high up in the Pentagon. Even Saul Stein wouldn’t think he had anything to do with this. Joe Mitchell, Tommy Kochiss and Bobby Boyle work for me. If Tom had ever been in touch with them, I would know all about it.’

‘What about Freddy Layne?’ Stone said, as casually as he knew how. ‘Is he still living here?’

Freddy Layne, one of the original cowboy angels, had worked undercover in the American Bund sheaf for three years, recruiting men and women to the cause, networking between dissident groups, setting up caches of weapons and munitions. He’d been captured at the beginning of the revolution and tortured at the FBI’s maximum security facility at Buzzard’s Point. Two weeks later, the First Armoured Brigade had gone over to the rebels, Washington, DC, had fallen, and Freddy and the rest of the prisoners had been freed. He’d never really recovered. After he’d been invalided out of the Company, Freddy had returned to the American Bund sheaf and married the woman he’d been using as part of his legend.