Dead Anyway (30 page)

“I fear for your safety,” I said.

“I fear for yours.”

“You could come with me to New Haven. I’ll drop you off somewhere, then pick you up when I’m done with Shelly.”

“Why is this safer than me staying here?” she asked.

“It isn’t. It just makes me feel like it is.”

“I have a better idea.”

T
HE
B
OSNIAKS
showed up in a dark purple minivan that looked like an eggplant on wheels. There were four of them, including Little Boy. They were clearly taken aback by the house, but tried to not let it show. Natsumi, the Costellos and I came out to greet them, offering food, drink and earnest expressions of gratitude.

“I hope you got cable,” said Little Boy. “The Celtics are acting like they just remembered how to play basketball.”

After getting his crew ensconced in the aircraft hangar-sized family room in front of a TV the size of an average billboard—with the Costellos nervously on call to serve refreshments—I took Little Boy aside and elaborated on the situation.

“In about ten minutes, I’m jumping in a car and going to an important meeting. Three Sticks knows we’re living here. I can imagine him snatching my wife for leverage. Or for that matter, snatching both of us and simply coercing us out of our product. It would be stupidly shortsighted, but possible. Like I said, I don’t know him well enough to know.”

“From what I’ve seen, he’s practical,” said Little Boy. “But seriously cruel if he thinks you’re fucking with him.”

“Does that worry you?”

A look of disdain showed on his face.

“You know what we been through? Back there? The frightened ones are the first to die. The crazy ones go next. The lucky ones last as long as their luck. If you’re smart and have balls, you live on. After a while, the only ones left are those with no fear.”

I shook his hand, instinctively, which was exactly the right thing to do. The gesture seemed to straighten his posture and add another inch to his towering height.

“Post a watch,” I said. “You don’t want to get massacred in the middle of a free throw.”

B
EFORE
I left for the Green Club, I called Evelyn.

“I need you to do something,” I said, when she answered the phone. “Though you’re going to hate it.”

“Don’t sugarcoat it.”

“I want you to contact Bruce Finger and tell him you’ve learned about an irregularity in the accounting at Florencia’s agency that wasn’t uncovered during due diligence by the Brandts. It could have a material impact on the deal, post-close, maybe even involving a claw back that will devastate the selling price. You need him to arrange a face-to-face meeting with the buyers to explain the situation.”

There was a long pause.

“Okay,” she said, stretching out the word. “What irregularities?”

“This is the hard part. You can’t tell him. You just say he needs to call the meeting. And to trust you. It will all become clear.”

“That’s all?” she asked.

“Will he do it?”

“No. Not without more explanation. He likes me, but not that much.”

I knew this was true. I was just hoping it wasn’t.

“Tell him someone will be in touch to fill in the details. I’ll figure something out. The main thing is to impress upon him the importance of this. That you really need him to make that call.”

“You sound a little tense. I’m not used to that,” she said.

“Sorry. Things are getting complicated. Too many spinning plates, too few hands.”

“Okay, Arthur, I’ll do my best.”

T
HE
G
REEN
Club was no longer a club in the traditional sense. Anyone could go there and hang around the bar or have a meal looking out at the New Haven Green. Though as with any well-established venue, it featured a distinct clientele—people devoted to Harris tweed, brown leather wing tips and a largely fanciful notion of the dead Ivy League past.

New Haven was about the same distance from Greenwich and Rocky Hill, which I thought only fair, and the club an ideal venue, with its tomb-like quiet and respect for discreet conversation.

I had to stop along the way to rent a motel room where I could switch my look from Auric Grenouille to Alex Rimes, at least the Alex Shelly had met at the restaurant. I brought along my blue blazer, grey slacks and the red and blue diagonally striped official tie of the University of Pennsylvania, where I received my Masters in Applied Mathematics. Natural camouflage.

Shelly, on the other hand, had opted for a bright yellow, nylon windbreaker over a white polo shirt and an orange baseball cap. If any deer hunters were passing through the Bulldog Lounge, he’d never be mistaken for a grazing stag.

I sat down and put the plastic bag on the table.

“It’s a note from Three Sticks,” I said. “Attached to three sticks.” I told him what the note said. “I provoked him into it,” I said, not telling him how. “I’m reasonably certain he picked up the sticks, wrote the note and placed it on the bed. A bit of bravado in response to my provocation, the way I signaled to him. I’m not a handwriting expert, but I’m fairly certain he wrote the note with his left hand. Unless he brought along surgical gloves, the paper should be covered in DNA.”

“Should be,” said Shelly.

“I also have a list of candidates, wealthy men in Greenwich who could conceivably be modern versions of the man in your photograph. I’m also reasonably sure one of these men left the message. If not, it was a subordinate, which might be good enough.”

I handed him a flash drive.

“I have all their names, addresses, business information and email addresses. And the names of their wives or dates. Also, recent photographs of them all, and some at younger ages that I pulled off the web.”

“That’s pretty good,” said Shelly.

“It gets better.”

A waiter showed up to launch the standard rituals, which I short-circuited by ordering an iced tea and a cheeseburger. Shelly did the same. When the waiter left, I put a box on the table.

“Cocktail and wine glasses. Fingerprints and DNA. Each identified by name with a piece of tape.”

He looked a little perplexed, then he grinned.

“You served them at a restaurant,” he said. “Or a party.”

“How quickly do you think you could run it through your files?”

He smiled.

“My buddies at the Bureau would find that question amusing. Some of the biggest cases in the country can take months to work their way through the labs.”

“I can’t afford days. This venture has a shelf life.”

“The more I ask of them, the more they’ll want to know.”

I sat back in my chair and thought through what I was going to say. Calibration was important. For better or worse, he beat me to it.

“As far as I can tell,” he said, “you don’t exist. That doesn’t mean you have no identity. I bet you have several, but none of them are you. They all belong to dead people. Before you get nervous, I don’t know this for certain, it’s just the result of forty years on the job. But I’m pretty sure if our people ran down the name Alex Rimes, we’d learn some very interesting things.”

He tapped his fingers on the box full of glasses, which he held as if asserting fresh rights of ownership.

“You got a dilemma,” he went on. “You need me because I can do things you can’t, at least not on your timetable. But the closer you get to me, the more I learn, the harder it is to stay invisible.”

“You’re right,” I said. “My risk is trusting you. But if you let others in on it, your biggest risk is losing control over the best, and last, opportunity you’ll ever have to snag the big fish that got away.”

He tapped some more on the table, and appeared to be chewing on the inside of his mouth. I imagined this as an insight into the state of his mood, a giveaway apparent to his former employees, yet oblivious to Shelly himself.

“Interesting situation,” he said.

“Indeed.”

“I have no problem keeping things close to the chest,” he said. “I’ll probably have to use every chit I have left, but we’ll do it your way. Up until the moment I learn you’re scamming me, and then all bets are off. I’ll be after your ass like a starving hound from hell.”

“So how quickly can you turn this around?”

He liked that.

“So who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.

The urge to reveal everything to him, to bare my soul and all my transgressions, was nearly unbearable. It was human nature to confess, to share intimate, sordid information. I’d exploited the tendency many times myself, so I was forewarned. Yet even so, it took willpower to counter the impulse.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” I said. “Even if I knew anymore. It only matters what I do.”

Our meals came soon after that, and we spent the rest of the time eating and sharing experiences we’d had in and around New Haven. I learned a lot about Shelly’s successful campaign to gut local crime syndicates, and he learned something about the historical and contemporary demographic makeup of the city and its environs.

When he asked me how I knew such things, I said, “I absorb a lot of minutiae. It’s a bad habit.”

An assertion he saw no reason to contend, whether he believed it or not.

I
WAS
glad to see nothing had changed when I got back to the house. The Colombians had joined in solidarity with the Bosniaks over the Celtics game, in which the favored team prevailed, and now everyone was swept up in a celebration fully fueled by the voluminous leftovers from the prior night’s party.

Little Boy, interpreting the expression on my face, assured me that his best man, cold sober, was outside guarding the periphery, well-armed and in communication with his second best—who was a little drunk, but famous for throwing a knife through the eye of a Serbian infiltrator after an entire night’s consumption of tequila shots, wherein he lost the drinking contest, but won the fight.

I found Natsumi in the library, curled up like a cat in an overstuffed chair, reading a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
slipped out of the crammed bookshelves that surrounded her.

“Oh, goody, you’re here,” she said, looking up from her book. “I’m so glad.”

“Me, too. It seems like our guests are settling in.”

“I’ve never met such polite people. We Japanese pride ourselves on social decorum, but I’m often suspicious of the sincerity. These guys seem to mean it.”

“You should know I’d only invite the most refined of criminal gangs into our home,” I said, then told her about my meeting with Shelly Gross.

“Do you think he’ll be true to his word?”

“Probably yes, if only because he’s got nothing to lose. I’m sure he has enough to get close to us, if not all the way, if he had the support of the FBI, and wanted to try. But it’s not yet in his interest to try. I realize my analysis of his psychological motivation is amateurish, but it’s all I have to go on.”

“I think your analysis is highly projectable, and this from a recently minted Bachelor of Science in Psychology.”

“You don’t look like a bachelor.”

“Did you use your sense of humor to flirt with your wife?” she asked.

It took a second to adjust to the hairpin turn in the conversation. I tried hard to give an honest answer.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “It was probably the foundation of the relationship. Couldn’t have been anything else.”

“You’re probably shortchanging yourself, but it doesn’t matter. She’s gone, you’re back from the dead and trying to reconstitute your life. Whatever existed before is moot. At least it should be.”

“We dueled a bit. I liked it, up to a point. As soon as she started to heat up, I’d retreat.”

“For fear of conflict,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So you actively avoided anything that might have put stress on the relationship. You never tested the limits.”

“No. Florencia was a breathtakingly beautiful, and successful, woman. I held up my end in the household, but really, I was just a goofy nerd in awe of my good fortune to have the affection of such an amazing woman. No other way to put it. When you find yourself in such an asymmetric situation, you don’t question, you simply thank the gods and get on with it.”

“Are you questioning now?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m questioning everything.”

“How does that make you feel?” she asked.

“Like I love you, but you best not psychoanalyze me. Though I appreciate your good intentions in trying to do so.”

“You’re not just a goofy nerd,” she said.

“Just?”

T
HE NEXT
few days would have been unexceptional but for the effort to integrate four Bosniak gangsters into our domestic routine. The burden for this fell mainly on the shoulders of the Costellos and ourselves. For their part, Little Boy and his men had the demeanor of cheerful unsophisticates who’d just won an all-expenses-paid holiday in a fantasy mansion, which essentially they had.

I spent most of my time racing around the Internet, downloading data, stalking Greenwich millionaires and skulking like a ghost in the financial and operating systems at Florencia’s agency.

Natsumi was less housebound, though she never ventured outside without Little Boy and at least one other Bosniak in tow.

No word from Shelly Gross. I spent hours on the web trying to keep my mind under load and out of emotional mischief. Though after a while, even I can get tired of staring into a computer screen. I find it can send me into tiresome feedback loops, sapping my intellectual energy. The only remedy was to get out of the house and clear my head with fresh air and a natural landscape.

And so one of those afternoons when Natsumi and three of the Bosniaks were out shopping, I thought driving down to Long Island Sound to look at the water and ruminate was a good idea. I dressed in jeans and a dirty work jacket and took the Subaru as a modest form of disguise.

It was cold, but clear, and though the sun still traveled a low arc across the sky, the light was getting warmer and less harsh to the eye. For some unknown reason, I brought along a beer, thinking I could go whole hog down at the beach, wolf down the beer and perhaps open some hidden doors of perception.

I made it to Greenwich Point and was about to crack open the beer when a crowbar smashed into the side window. The safety glass contained most of the blow, though a blizzard of tiny shards sprayed across the left side of my face. Knowing the next strike would get all the way through, I dropped over the center console and covered my head. I heard the wet, concussive sound of the crowbar penetrating the window, then the sound of the door opening. Cold air and strong hands rushed inside.