Dead Bang (19 page)

“You get any license plate numbers?”

“No,” I said, “too much dust, but I can tell you the yellow Dodge isn't going far. It left a trail of gasoline on the road.”

“I'll get back to you,” said Matty, her tone urgent.

“You got the card I left on your windshield?”

“This morning.”

“Was that Manny they found—”

Matty hung up.

“—on the roof?”

I
KNEW
I
WAS IN TROUBLE
when I walked into my office and found Marg and Lily Vincenti chatting like long-lost sisters. Lily wore dark glasses covering a white gauze bandage taped over her left eye.

“Hi, Art,” said Marg. “I think you know Lily Warner.”

“Thought it was Vincenti.” I took the straight-back chair that Marg kept for her accounting clients and turned it backwards so I could straddle it and rest my forearms on the seat back.

“Vincenti is my maiden name,” said Lily. “Mr. Behler said it would be simpler for the audience.”

“I hope your injuries aren't serious.”

“I shouldn't have rubbed my eye. I have to see the doctor again in a week.”

“Mark doing another show about your father?” I asked.

“He says they're going to close the show with telephone calls from viewers from now on, so there'll be no time.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Did you have to travel far?”

“Seattle.”

“Goodness,” I said, trying for a breezy tone. “What made you contact Mark Behler here in Grand Rapids?”

“The producer, Chet Harkness, called me at my shop. I have a coffee bar. He said he had information about my father and asked me to be on the show.”

“I need to hire Chet do some work for us,” I said with a wink at Marg.

“He said a policeman friend helped him find me through my Social Security number.”

“Lily would like us to finish the work Mark Behler was doing on her father,” said Marg.

“The case is over thirty years cold,” I said.

“Mark said you had pictures,” said Lily.

“I took some pictures while I was working on a matter unrelated to your father. I turned the pictures and a license plate number over to the Hamtramck Police.”

“Do you have copies? Negatives?” asked Lily.

“I gave everything I had to the police.”

“What was in the pictures?”

“An automobile, your father, and the men he was with.”

“Was my father alive?”

“I'm not a doctor, Lily. But I'm sorry. I don't think so.”

Lily stared into her lap. Marg produced some tissues from her desk drawer. Lily took them and removed her glasses. She dabbed under her eyes as if the tissues were sandpaper.

“My father was much older than my mother. They met in Okinawa when he went back to visit where he'd been stationed as a Marine during the Vietnam War. I was born after they came to Detroit. When I was six months old, he gave my mother an airline ticket to take me home to visit her family. He never sent a return ticket,” she sobbed and went to work on her eyes again.

The telephone rang. Marg said it was for me. I took the call in my office.

“Chet Harkness,” he said.

“What's up?”

“We talked about the Second Amendment spot.”

“They blew up your building,” I said.

“We're running last night's show again today and setting up over at the junior college broadcast arts facility.”

“How long before you can get back into your studio?”

“The south end of the third floor is gone. Could be months.”

“They find Commander K up there?” I asked.

“Not much of him,” said Chet. “Listen, you wouldn't have to be in the studio for what we have in mind. You'd be a technical advisor. We want you to walk Mark Behler and a camera crew through buying a firearm.”

“Sounds like a hoot,” I said. “When?”

“This afternoon,” said Chet.

“I have a four-hour minimum,” I said.

“Five hundred bucks cover it?”

“When do you want me there?”

“How's two o'clock?”

I looked at my watch—a shade short of noon. “Where?”

“Lobby of the junior college,” said Chet. “I'll bring the check if you'll bring an invoice for me.”

“That would just cover today,” I said.

“Of course. See you at two.”

I opened my office door, and before I could speak to Marg, Lily looked up from the sofa and said, “I forgot to thank you for being so kind to me, even after I'd been angry with you.”

“Wasn't a matter of kindness,” I said. “I was going to hold you over my head to fend off sparks.”

We laughed.

I said, “I'm glad I could help you.”

“I want to know what happened the night you saw my father.”

“Some things I know, some things I don't,” I said.

Lily searched in her purse. “I know what my father was.” She handed me a folded and yellowed page of newsprint in a plastic bag. I opened it and found a front page from the
Detroit Free Press
with a picture of John Vincenti and a story about his racketeering arrest.

“There are two sides to every story,” I said. “Your father never got to defend himself,” I said.

“I lived my entire life angry with a father I thought had abandoned me. I need to know what happened.”

“He died, Lily.” I said. “He didn't abandon you.”

“I'm paying you!” she said, her voice angry. Tears rolled onto her cheeks.

Paying me?
I looked at Marg. Marg made really big eyes and one nod.

“Damn it!” she screamed. “You
are
hiding something!”

I looked at Marg. She nodded. I turned the straight chair around and sat facing Lily. “Lily, they shot him and left his body on a bus bench with a dead canary in his mouth.”

“Oh, God,” she gasped. She clasped her fists to her face and fell forward. I caught her on my shoulder.

I told her, “Maybe he sent you and your mother away so that you'd be safe.”

“So why is he missing? They knew he was dead.”

“I guess that's why you hired me,” I said.

“Mark Behler said it was about my father's union activities,” said Lily.

“Mark Behler has an agenda he wants to advance. He doesn't care who he uses, or who he hurts.”

Lily sat up and blew her nose in the tissue she'd gripped in her hand. “He said he wanted to help me.” She wiped her nose. “He paid for my trip here.”

“Mark Behler wanted you to be sitting on the set and angry with me while the state police arrested me on his show,” I said. “When that didn't happen, he moved on.”

Lily looked at Marg. “Where's the restroom?”

Marg stood up from her chair and put a hand out. “C'mon,” she said. “We've got a great powder room.”

As she passed, Marg slid an envelope across the desk to me. With an arm around Lily, Marg led her out the door and down the hall. In the envelope, I found a check for ten thousand dollars made out to Lily from
The Mark Behler Show.
Lily had endorsed it, “Pay to Peter A. Ladin Investigative Associates.”

I heard the door open. Special Agent Matty Svenson strolled in with a trench coat folded over her arm. She said, “Jesus, Art, what do I have to do, take a number?”

“Busy day.”

“I've been sitting on the stairs for ten minutes,” said Matty. She walked past me and around the corner into the investigator's room.

“Must be your turn, now,” I said, following her. “Nothing in here but the coatrack, file cabinets, and my weight bench.”

Matty looked around the floor, rifled through the trash can, and pulled on a drawer of one of the file cabinets. “What's in there?” she asked.

“Files,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

Matty strolled into my office. “My earring,” she said. “Last time I was here I think I lost my earring.”

“I've never seen you wear earrings,” I said. “And the last time you were here was a year ago. The Lambert case.”

Matty dumped my trash on the floor and moved the crumpled papers around with her foot. “You should shred this stuff, you know.” She walked over to the closet and tried the door knob.

“Locked,” I said.

Matty walked over to my desk and pulled open the drawers one at a time. “A year?” she asked. “That's why you forgot my earrings. I haven't had them, so I didn't wear them.”

I hauled out my keys and opened the closet. “Maybe you ought to look in here?”

“Absolutely,” said Matty. She sorted through my gear and looked in the gym bag I use to haul equipment.

“We should probably look in the files,” I said. “It might have bounced in there.”

“Marg have access to the files?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” said Matty. “If Marg saw it, she would have called.”

“So you don't need to look in her desk?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should look in my car,” I said. “I might have found it, put it in the car, and then forgot about it.”

Matty smiled. “Let's start with the trunk.”

We arrived in the parking lot just in time to see Special Agent M. Amad Azzara—he'd been on the front desk when I visited the FBI—chuck the rear seat of my black Buick Sport Coupe out the passenger door. “Ah, Mr. Hardin,” he said, “how are you today?”

“Great,” I said. “Love the weather.”

He knelt on the front seat and played his flashlight over the pit created by the absence of the rear seat. “What on earth are those things?”

I stuck my head in the door. “Gummy bears,” I said, “Wendy and I had the grandkids last weekend. If you find Agent Svenson's earring back there, don't tell my wife.”

Azzara squinted his face into a puzzle. “What?”

“When you're done, look under the seats,” said Matty. She shouldered past me. “Open the trunk.”

“Happy now?” I asked, watching Matty sift through the uncataloged crap collected in the trunk of my Buick.

“Not a question of happy,” said Matty.

“You didn't really think the money would be there, did you?”

“No,” said Matty. “I was thinking, you know, a big red bow, big black suitcase, maybe a big wad of assorted rubber bands.”

Agent Azzara joined us at the back of the car, pulling on a tan sports coat with brown suede patches at the elbow. “Nothing,” he said.

“I told them we didn't have Manny's money,” I said. “Now I have to tell you?”

“They think you have the money, doesn't much matter what you tell them,” said Matty. “Me, I have to check.”

“I'm not seeing an upside here,” I said and slammed the lid on my trunk.

“Somebody's lying,” said Matty. “The upside is that now I'm a little less likely to think it's you.”

I fished a package of cigars out of my coat pocket, took one, and shook the remaining two in the package at Matty.

“I saved the one you gave me last year,” said Matty. “My plan is to smoke it before I buy another pack of Pall Malls.”

I offered them to Azzara.

He wagged his head. “I do not smoke,” he said.

I fired up my cigar.

“That doesn't smell all that bad,” allowed Matty.

“Black cherry pipe blend,” I said. “On sale. They burn a little hot. I think it's the Chinese newsprint they use to bulk up leaf ends and trimmings they sweep up from the floor.”

Matty piled her purse onto the trunk lid and dug out a still-frame photo made from an airport security video. “This Manny?”

“That's him.”

Azzara picked up the photo and studied.

“Canadian?”

“Karen saw his passport. She said it had a big maple leaf on the cover.”

“I'm going to check with the RCMP, but I have to make the request through the DC office.”

“How much of him did you find?”

“A toasted foot and most of an arm got blown across the roof and out of the fire,” said Matty. “The county medical examiner says the parts are ‘probably' from a male person, but a known DNA sample is needed for any further identification.”

“I recognized his voice from the telephone call to Mark Behler. So did Karen and Wendy.”

Azzara rolled his eyes up to me and unfurled a doubtful smile.

“That doesn't prove it was Manny,” said Matty. “We need a voice sample for comparison. And even if Manny made the telephone call, that doesn't prove he blew himself into confetti.”

“The guy I talked to this morning said Manny was a martyr.”

“Yeah, and he thought you had the money.” Matty put the picture back in her purse. “Tell me about the guy you talked to this morning.”

I took a toke on my cigar and thought about it. “Very dark complexion. Very sharp features. Mid-fifties.” I blew a large smoke ring. “Five-feet, eight inches and a very soft hundred eighty or ninety pounds. Moustache and receding hair. He spoke East Indian English. He was Muslim.”

Azzara made taut lips and narrow eyes.

“How do you know his religion?” asked Matty.

“He called me a kaffir. Seems like you have to be Muslim to think that's an insult.”

“And maybe you are just a narrow-minded bigot, braying about an Arab bogeyman under every bed,” said Azzara.

Matty focused an astonished face on Azzara.

“No!” said Azzara, wielding a pointed finger at me, but speaking to Matty. “Manny is a Muslim; therefore, he is a terrorist. The man he
says
he talked to is Muslim; therefore, he must also be a terrorist. Maybe this phantom man is a criminal. Maybe Manny is a criminal. Maybe Mr. Hardin is a criminal, and that is what they all have in common.”

“Done?” asked Matty, her face stern.

“Yes.” Azzara folded his arms.

“Perhaps you could put Mr. Hardin's back seat where you found it,” said Matty.