Dead Watch (24 page)

He was at her door at seven-fifteen. Two television trucks were parked in the street, but neither bothered to film Jake. A man with a funny hat was just leaving, heading for a florist’s van. Another woman was inside, Madison’s best horsey friend from Lexington, she said. She gave him the key with a note to the doorman. “I called the doorman, told him you were coming and to let you in.”

“Is there a computer in the apartment?”

“Of course.” She was wearing jeans and a golf shirt, and was standing close to him, her voice pitched down. Jake could hear her friend talking on a telephone.

“Do you know his password? If it has a password?”

She rolled her eyes. “He was in Skull and Bones at Yale. It’s ‘Bonester.’ ”

“You gotta be kidding me . . .” He shook his head, smiled: the Ivy League. “Is there a safe?”

“Yes, but it’s empty. I emptied it yesterday. It’s in the kitchen, actually, under what looks like a built-in chopping block.”

Her friend was in the living room. They’d walked out to the entry, and as he turned to leave, she caught his jacket sleeve, pulled his shoulders down, and kissed him quickly on the lips. “Be careful. Be careful, please.”

Then he didn’t want to leave; but he did. He stopped at a convenience store, made a call to Don Patzo in Baltimore. Patzo picked up on the fourth ring, sleep in his voice: “What?”

Jake hung up. He wanted to talk to Patzo face-to-face.

Traffic was bad, and all the way to Baltimore, he could feel the kiss.

There was, in his experience, a wide variety of kisses, ranging from Air, on one end of the spectrum, to Orgasmic on the other. Included were Affectionate, Hot, Friendly, First, Promising, Intense, Good-bye for Good, See You Later, Desperate, Mom, and French, not to be confused with French Officer.

Had this been a First—which implied a Second—or had it been an Affectionate or Friendly, which weren’t necessarily good? Had she pushed up against him a little? Had he recoiled? He didn’t think he’d recoiled, but he’d definitely been surprised. Should he have taken hold of something? Like what?

He remembered the old Irish joke, and smiled at it: “Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Sweeney, didn’t you have nothin’ in your own hand?”—“Nothing but Mrs. O’Hara’s ass, and though it’s a thing of beauty in its own right, it ain’t worth a damn in a fight . . .”

Like being fourteen again.

He was in Baltimore a few minutes after nine o’clock, used the car’s nav system to find Don Patzo’s house. He got lost, even with the nav system—the maps showed streets going through where they didn’t—wandered around for a half hour, and finally found the place down a dead-end street not far from the water, but with an unpleasant fishy smell about it.

Patzo was the man who’d tried to teach him burglary before Jake left for Afghanistan. He’d been in prison a half dozen different times in three states, before taking the contract with the CIA, and in class said he didn’t know the exact number, but thought he might have done better than two thousand burglaries. “Quality jobs: wasn’t stealin’ no fuckin’ boom boxes or video games.”

Jake asked him how he’d gotten caught so often. “Percentages, sonny. Just like in gambling. You figure the odds are a hundred to one against getting caught, then you go in a hundred times, and guess what? The percentages just ran out.”

Patzo lived in a small, frame house with shingle siding, a concrete-block stoop, and a neatly trimmed lawn. A dozen freshly planted petunias struggled for life in a window box. Jake knocked, knocked again. Patzo came to the door. Jake recognized him, but only because he’d known who he was.

The Patzo he’d met ten years earlier was a thick-necked, buzz-cut hood in his middle fifties. This Patzo had shriveled, although the hood was still there in his black eyes. His face was gray, the color of heart trouble, and his nose was large and soft. He was wearing a shabby flannel shirt and jeans with a too-big waist, and white athletic socks.

He pushed open the screen door and said, “Yeah?”

“Don Patzo,” Jake said. “You once taught a burglary class to a bunch of special forces guys.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“So I was one of those guys. I need a little help.”

“Ah, fuck you, pal.” Patzo started to pull the door closed. “And I didn’t teach no gimps.”

“I wasn’t a gimp back then,” Jake said. “I got to be a gimp later. What I want you to do is easy, not dangerous, will be all done by tonight, and will get you a thousand bucks in tax-free cash and a couple of decent meals. The best part is, it’s legal.”

Patzo didn’t shut the inner door. “How legal is that?”

Jake fished the apartment key from his pocket: “The owner gave me the key and called the doorman to clear the way. You’re more of a consultant than a burglar.”

Patzo pushed the door open: “I’ll give you five minutes to talk to me.”

They talked, and Patzo agreed. Jake loaded the old man into his car, headed back to Washington. Stopped at Riggs, opened his safe-deposit box, took out ten thousand of the twenty-five thousand he kept there, just in case; stopped at a drugstore, bought a package of vinyl gloves; and drove them both to National. Patzo kept his mouth shut, but he watched everything. The only emotion he showed was a tightening of his fists when the plane took off, and again when it landed.

They were in New York at one o’clock, a cab across the Triborough to the Upper East Side. The doorman had a note from Madison, and sent them up to Bowe’s apartment.

They stepped inside, facing an oval, gilt-framed mirror above an antique table with a cut-crystal bud vase.

Patzo said, “Jesus Christ, that fuckin’ table is worth thirty grand.”

“You know antiques?”

“Enough. Used to do a lot of woodwork. You know—when I was working for the state.” He touched the table gently. “How the fuck would I get it out of here?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Jake said.

The apartment had two bedrooms, but was bigger than that implied. The kitchen was long and narrow, but complete. The living room was expansive, oak floors and three Oriental carpets, contemporary abstracts on the wall, including, over the fireplace, an excellent Rothko. A den opened off the living room; and down a hall were two bedrooms, a master bedroom suite and a smaller guest room. The master bedroom had a bathroom that contained a tub big enough for three or four people. All of it was wallpapered in delicate pastels.

Jake gave Patzo a pair of the vinyl gloves and a short instruction: “Look, but don’t leave any prints. If you find anything that looks like it’s been hidden, or interesting—legal papers, medical documents—come get me. The owner had all the stuff inventoried for the IRS, so if anything goes missing, it’s gonna be embarrassing for us both.”

“Place like this has a safe,” Patzo said.

“It does,” Jake said. “It’s empty—the owner emptied it yesterday. See if you can find it.”

“Like a test.”

“Yeah.”

As the older man prowled the apartment, Jake sat on the floor and started through the filing cabinets. There were two, in the den, under a built-in computer table. He checked each individual file folder and found paid bills, financial records, co-op apartment records, tax forms, receipts and registrations for automobiles, and account papers for mutual funds at Fidelity and Vanguard. He totaled it up in his head, and found that Bowe’s accounts at two banks, at U.S. Trust, at Merrill Lynch, and the mutual fund companies totaled some eighty-five million dollars.

He checked every file folder, looking for hidden papers. Found none.

Patzo came by: “There’s a gun hanging off the headboard of the bed in the big bedroom.”

Jake went to look. The revolver looked like a self-defense piece, an old blue hammerless .38. The gun was in a black rubber holster that had been screwed to the headboard. Jake said, “Keep looking.”

As Madison said, there were no medical records at all. He checked the bank accounts, and there had been several large checks cashed in the months prior to Bowe’s disappearance, but the records didn’t indicate whom the checks were paid to.

He pulled up the computer, signed on with the Bonester password, and started reading e-mail. The e-mail, both incoming and outgoing, was remarkably bland. Too remarkably. He went into the address book, found addresses for fifty or sixty people, including Howard Barber. Yet when he looked for mail involving Barber, either outgoing or incoming, there was none.

The e-mail had been purged.

Patzo came back. “The safe is under the cutting board in the kitchen. It’s open. You want to look?”

Jake went to look. As Madison had said, it was empty. “Now, what does this teach you?” Patzo asked.

“Beats the heck out of me,” Jake said.

“It teaches you that the guy who put the security in this place knew what he was doing,” Patzo said. “He knows he won’t fool a pro, if you give the pro all day to look, but no goddamn junkie on this green earth is ever going to find this safe. Not except by accident. So, if there’s more stuff hid, it’s gonna be clever, and you’re gonna have to look for spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces.”

“That’s why I dragged your ass up here.”

Jake went back to the computer and checked the history setting. The history had been wiped, and the time period for saving documents had been set to zero.

Bowe, Jake thought, was wiping out traces of himself right up to the time he disappeared. He could get Madison to go to the banks, and find out whom Bowe had written checks to, but that usually took a few days, and it might take longer, and involve lawyers, in the case of a dead man.

But if Bowe wasn’t worried about all the personal financial records he’d left behind, why was he so worried about e-mail, about websites he’d visited, about his medical records? Why had this skunk-striped doctor denied seeing Bowe? Jake was thinking about the doctor when Patzo came back.

“Got another one.”

“Another safe?”

“Another something.”

This one was in the living room, in a built-in DVD-CD case. “You see the way it looks like this is a trim panel, on the side, but it’s not a panel?” Patzo said, tracing the wood with his hands. “There’s eighteen inches of space there, a foot high, a foot deep. It could just be a measuring mistake, except everything here is done too well. Everything is very tight, and then you have this . . .”