Dead Anyway (10 page)

I studied the names, all surely
noms de guerre
, hoping for some unconscious perception to signal the most likely target.

The painful stress reactions of the recent past were now forgotten, and in their place was a new set of sensations. My hands were steady and my vision clear. I was calm at the center of my being, and in place of a racing heart was a crystalline ball of silver ice. You might be Omar, you might be Fred. Whatever your name is, I will find you.

Of this, I am now certain.

C
HAPTER
8

I
t was cruel that the better I felt physically and the more present in the world, the more I missed Florencia. No, I didn’t miss her, I desperately longed for her, to such a degree that I often thought the longing too great to bear, that the pain of her absence would ultimately topple my sanity.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d seen her killed, that the hopeless finality of death was not for me an abstract concept. I knew it to be the last, irredeemable, fundamental truth.

She wasn’t coming back.

While I had no precedent for such sadness, I’d always coped with troubles by occupying my mind, by staying busy, throwing myself into my work. It was the only palliative I knew, the only mechanism that could get me out of bed in the morning to get on with the day’s demands.

I
DROVE
back over to the office across from Sebbie’s apartment. I checked the digital files, which showed a return to routine for Sebbie and the woman who’d turned out to be his wife. I downloaded the fresh information, then cleared the hard drive on the recording device, which would provide another forty-eight hours of footage. When I got back to my house, I put together a little package containing a copy of the key to the office, a DVD with select video and still shots of Sebbie, his neighborhood, the young woman, and an edited audio recording of our phone conversation (which I ran through a device that distorted my voice). I put it all in a FedEx box for delivery to Henry Eichenbach. I included a note, “You have one week to get whatever you can. Then your exclusive is over. Thanks for the help.”

Then I made up a duplicate package, addressed to Shelly Gross in Rocky Hill, and tossed it in the Outback for future mailing.

T
HE JOB
of a detective, or bounty hunter, in tracking down missing people has, in a way, become absurdly simple. For a nominal subscription cost, there are perfectly legal, universally accessible databases that cross reference details like name, phone number and email address to cough up a physical address. And often even richer information, like age, time at that residence, occupation, years of schooling, etc. Sometimes, there’s even a photo.

This is how I was able to eliminate Omar Rankin, a distinguished-looking African-American, in about five minutes.

Though a negative result, the speed with which it was achieved bolstered my confidence, helping to blunt the pain of my complete failure with The Jack Hammer. First off, both the phone number and email address Sebbie had given me were inactive. If I’d been the FBI, or even a regular police detective, I could still get the name and physical address attached to those accounts, but I wasn’t. Worse, there were surprisingly few Jack Hammers living in the northeast USA, betraying a surprising reluctance on the part of people named Hammer to inflict a lifetime joke on their children.

I did dig up a Sledge Hammer, but he was a professional wrestler living in Atlantic City, when he wasn’t on the road, which was most of the time.

I put my list of three Jack Hammers aside and went looking for Austin Ott. All Sebbie had provided on Austin was an email address. I found no correlation using the people search engine, though there were several Austin Otts.

I moved on to Fred Tootsie, for whom all I had was a phone number, with a 516 area code, which covered Nassau County, Long Island. I ran it through the search engine and hit a correlation: Frederico DiDemenico, 23 Hartsfield Drive, Apt 3D, Jericho, NY. Age fifty-three. Occupation unknown. Affiliations unknown. I gave him a call.

“What,” he said, answering the phone.

“Hello, Fred. I was given your number by a friend in the business. He said I should call you about a project.”

“Who’s this?”

“Mr. Jones.”

“Sure. And this is Mr. Smith.”

“I heard it was Mr. Tootsie,” I said.

The line was quiet for a moment.

“Who’s the friend?” he asked.

“Can’t say. You understand.”

“Not sure I do. What’s this project?”

I strained to find something familiar in his voice, but soon realized that would be impossible. I remembered much of what the man in the trench coat said, but even without a damaged brain, things like the tone and timbre of a human voice are difficult to recollect.

“Rather talk about that in person,” I said. “It’s sensitive.”

“You want a lot.”

“Do you normally conduct business over the phone?” I asked.

I said this lightly, trying to make it sound more like a gentle inquiry than a taunt or criticism. He took it as intended.

“I hear you,” he said.

“I propose a meet,” I said. “I’ll toss you some options.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Okay,” he said, and hung up.

I moved to the last name on the list, Pally Buttons, and again hit a brick wall. The phone number Sebbie gave me was out of service, and based on the area code, it was likely a disposable like mine. Virtually untraceable even for law enforcement. This was going to be a much harder slog, so I put him in the to-do column and concentrated on Fred.

I wrote down a few dates and locations on the South Shore of Long Island in easy driving distance of Jericho, printed it out and stuck it in an envelope. Then I drove to a FedEx retail outlet and sent it to Fred in one of their envelopes, which would be difficult to open without destroying. It was also trackable, so I could monitor its journey online, for what that was worth. As always, if there was a serious effort by the authorities to monitor Fred’s mail, I wouldn’t know until it was too late.

I instructed Fred to put his response in the form of a message to a new
wallbox.com
account I’d opened for the purpose. I included a step-by-step guide to completing the task, not knowing Fred’s computer literacy, suspecting the minimum.

I spent the next few days searching the other names on Google and the other subscription search engines. The paucity of information wasn’t surprising. It was only when a professional assassin was caught that his story could be told in some detail, though never fully, was my guess.

Omar and Fred Tootsie were the only ones with public records, scant as they were. Fred had shown up in court records, charged in an assault case involving a brawl in Jones Beach between “Rival Italian gangs with rumored ties to organized crime.” Fred had been interviewed by the police in a nearby hospital, so at least for him, the brawl hadn’t gone that well. The transcript reported the only information he provided investigators was that he was a Caucasian male and a member in good standing of the Jericho Knights of Columbus. Which actually wasn’t true.

Compared to the others on the list, Omar Rankin was positively flamboyant. Not only were all his personal stats plastered all over the Internet, he could also be found in news photos cutting a ribbon for a new basketball court in Harlem, protesting with local residents and clergy over lack of funding for a needle exchange program, officiating at a dance contest during a block party and generally establishing his credentials as a protean and relentless community activist in his Upper Upper West Side neighborhood.

Hiding in plain sight? I couldn’t tell, but I catalogued the information just in case.

Then one morning a little ping on the computer told me I had a message on
wallbox.com
. I went there and jotted down Fred’s selected time and place. Then I cancelled the account and started preparations.

Fred had chosen a tatty little bar along Freeport’s Nautical Mile frequented by a clientele drawn from the older and consequently scruffier neighborhoods to the north. I’d been there a few years before, so maybe the ambience had improved, though their web site seemed to testify that it hadn’t.

I’d been practicing my makeup skills, trying for the maximum change in appearance with the least effort. For that day’s outing I simply changed my nose and put a baseball cap over a wig, and a pair of glasses with clip-ons. Simple, convincing and comfortable.

I drove to Long Island by way of the Throgs Neck Bridge, and headed south, arriving in Freeport two hours ahead of our meeting time. The place was called Donny Brooks, attesting to both its Irish roots and featured activities. I parked a half block away in a parking lot behind an ancient five and dime.

I wished I’d learned more tradecraft back when I was tracking down people for my law firm clients. In my defense, there really wasn’t much of a need, since in ninety-five percent of the cases I was trying to give away money, not exactly a fearsome mission. But I had no idea how to spot genuine undercover operatives. All I could do was secure a booth with a good angle on the interior and hope for the best.

It was midafternoon and the few patrons holding down barstools looked like regulars, a judgment reinforced by the aimless chatter with the bartender. The only other booth contained a ragged older woman who was having lunch with the waitress. If this was the state of the surveillance arts, the criminal world hadn’t a chance.

I ordered a sandwich and an iced tea, which I nursed unmolested for the next two hours, during which a few more guys came in, better candidates for undercover agents, but how was I to know? And since there was nothing I could do if they were, I decided to stop thinking about it and started to read the
Time
magazine I’d brought along to signal my identity to Fred Tootsie.

He showed up fifteen minutes early, holding his telltale, a copy of
Sports Illustrated
rolled into a tube. I saw his face before I spotted the magazine, so I already knew it wasn’t the man in the trench coat. The neurologist who examined me felt reasonably sure my visual memory was intact, and I’d tried to keep the man’s face fixed in my mind by constant study of the sketch artist’s rendering. If that had been a false rendering, it would be another factor over which I had no control, so that was another thought I could only cast to the wind.

Fred looked like a retired salesman. His face was round and fleshy, unhelped by a bedraggled head of grey hair, mostly on its way out, and a pair of thick glasses in plastic frames. He wore a windbreaker over a striped golf shirt, bulging at the waist, and a pair of polyester pants. He dropped down across from me in the booth and slapped the magazine on the table.

“How long you been here?” he asked.

“Two hours.”

“You’re a patient fucker.”

“Just cautious,” I said.

“Was it worth it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Only so much caution you can have,” he said. “After a while, you just gotta say fuck it.”

“That’s what I’m learning.”

He studied me.

“Take off your hat,” he said.

“How come?”

“Just cautious.” I did. “Now your shirt.”

I did that, too, and he motioned for me to hand them over. He shook out the shirt and felt around the seams, then gave it back, along with the hat, also thoroughly examined. No one in the bar seemed to notice.

”What’s your racket?” he asked.

“Search and discovery.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “I’m told you may be in a position to help.”

He picked up an edge of his magazine and shuffled the pages with his thumb.

“And if I do, what comes next?”

“I just need a legitimate name and address. I’ll take it from there.”

His dark eyes behind the glasses continued to examine me, his face reflecting little of what he thought.

“I don’t work for free,” he said.

“I don’t expect you to. Write down what you’d want.”

I took a piece of paper out of my magazine and slid it with a pen across the table. He picked up the pen and looked down at the paper as if something was already written there. Then he jotted down a number. A thousand dollars.

I took back the paper and folded it away in my shirt pocket. Then I took out another paper on which the names Pally Buttons, The Jack Hammer and Austin Ott were typed out. He leaned over the table and looked at the paper for a second, then sat back again.

“Who’s the fuck who gave you that?” he asked. “Is that how you got to me?”

I took out my last sheet of paper, the police artist’s portrait of the man in the trench coat. Fred picked it up and studied it with apparent concentration, looking over at the three names, then back at the picture. Then he put it back on the table.

“Come up with the grand and we might have something to talk about,” he said.

“I have it with me,” I said.

“Really,” said Fred. “So you must be carrying more than that. I think I just left some money on the table.”

“I’m good for another five hundred if I like what you say.”

He showed his first smile, a cold thing that didn’t involve his eyes.

“You’ll like what I say when I have the fifteen hundred in my pocket.”

“I’m happy to do that,” I said, “though that shouldn’t tempt you to provide false information.”

His smile lost its tenuous hold on his face.

“Not a thing for a cautious guy to say.”

I leaned closer to him so I could lower my voice.

“I promise to trust what you say, but if it turns out you’ve lied, there will be consequences.” As I spoke, I looked from side to side, as if watching for eavesdroppers.

Then I sat back and let him absorb it all. I thought rather well, considering.

“That’s pretty big talk,” he said.

I took an envelope stuffed with money and stuck it in the
Time
magazine, which I slid across the table. Fred kept his eyes on me and his hands off the magazine.

“You could bet your life,” I said, “or you could take the fifteen hundred bucks and never look back.”