Even the Wicked (20 page)

“Something like that,” I agreed. “He sounds hired, doesn’t he?”

“The killer? You mean like a pro?”

“Not like a pro,” I said. “The whole thing’s too raggedy-ass for a pro. Here’s a man who’s alone a lot, leads a very regular life, hasn’t set up any security system to make himself hard to kill. It’s easy to get close to him in private, so why would a professional hitman kill him in front of witnesses?”

“Only reason I said a pro, Joe, is you said hired.”

“An amateur,” I said, “hired by another amateur. It pretty much takes a pro to hire a pro. You need to be connected, you can’t look up contract killers in the yellow pages. Ordinary citizens hire killers all the time, but there’s nothing terribly professional about the people who work for them.”

“An’ it don’t always work out the way it s’posed to,” he said. “Like the other day in Washington Heights.”

I knew the one he was talking about. It had been all over the papers the past few days. A Dominican teenager, bridling at her father’s strict discipline, had engaged a pair of local hard cases to kill the man, enticing them with the prospect of the $20,000 he kept in a strongbox in the closet, considering it ever so much safer than the bank.

So they showed up at the house one night and she let them in. She gave them the money, and then they were supposed to wait for Daddy to come home. But they got tired of waiting, and it occurred to them that he might be armed, and there was an easier way to close the account. So they took the girl who started the whole thing and shot her twice in the head, and they did the same for her sleeping mother and brother while they were at it, and then they went home. The father came home from work to find his family dead and his money gone. I bet his car wouldn’t start, either.

“In Washington Heights,” I said, “everybody had a reason. The girl was mad at her father, and the killers wanted the money.”

“So who had a reason to kill Byron?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“Didn’t have any money, did he?”

“Actually,” I remembered, “he had more money than he should have. He cashed in his insurance and he died with something like forty thousand dollars in the bank.”

“Ain’t that a motive?”

“He left it all to some AIDS charities. Some of those organizations are a little aggressive in their fund-raising, but I’ve never heard of them going out and killing for the money.”

“Besides, all they gotta do is wait, right? ‘Cause the man already dyin’.” He frowned. “You know what’d be nice? Piece of pie.” I beckoned the waitress over and he asked her what kind of pie she had, giving her response some careful attention. “Pecan,” he decided, “with some of that whatcha-call a la mode on it. Say chocolate?” She looked at him, confused, and the street went right out of his speech. “I’ll have a piece of pecan pie,” he said, “with a scoop of chocolate ice cream.” She nodded and went away, and he rolled his eyes. “Now she be thinkin’ I a doctor. She be after me to take out her appendix.”

“Tell her your doctorate’s in botany.”

“That’s just as bad, Tad. She’ll have me talkin’ to her plants. If killin’ Byron didn’t put no money in nobody’s pocket, who’d hire somebody to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He had AIDS, right? But he wasn’t gay.”

“He got it from a needle.”

“He keep it all to hisself? Or did he pass it on?” I must have looked puzzled. “The virus, Cyrus. Who’d he go and infect?”

“He could have spread it around,” I said. “Years ago, before he even knew he had it.”

“So he gives it to some woman, and then her husband or her boyfriend or her brother wants to know how she got it. ‘Couldn’t be nobody but that no-account junkie Byron Leopold,’ she says.”

“Whereupon the husband or brother or whatever he is goes out and hires somebody to kill Byron.”

“Or does it his own self. Either way Byron’d be a stranger to him an’ he might axe him his name to make sure he didn’t kill the wrong person. ‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

“Pop pop.”

“All she wrote,” he agreed.

“What about This is for Sheila, you dirty rat?’ The way he did it, Byron wouldn’t even know why he was dying.”

“If Sheila’s brother was doin’ it hisself, you’d ‘spect him to say somethin’. If he only hired the shooter—”

“The shooter might not bother with the oratory. Even if the brother did it himself, he could have a speech planned and be too nervous to deliver it.” I drank some coffee. “I don’t buy any of it,” I said. “Who takes that kind of revenge on a man with one foot in the grave? Byron Leopold was a bag of bones, his idea of a big day was sitting in the sun with his newspaper. No matter what he did to you, one long look at him and the resentment’d go right out of you.”

“What’s that leave? Suicide?”

“I thought of that.”

“Huh?”

“Say he didn’t want to live anymore but he couldn’t bring himself to take action. So he hires somebody to do it for him.”

“He’s afraid to stick his head in the oven, but he’s cool with the idea of waitin’ for somebody to sneak up and shoot him.”

“I said I thought of it. I never put it high up on the list.”

“’Sides, how’s he hire somebody who never met him face to face? You hire me to shoot you, I ain’t gonna have to ask you your name.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It never made any sense in the first place and it makes less sense now. Byron Leopold was murdered by someone who had a reason to kill him, and he himself was the only person in the world with a reason to want him dead. There ought to be a financial motive. That’s what it feels like, but there’s no money in it for anybody.”

“There’s whatever he had. Forty kay? But you said some charity gets that.”

“And it’s not enough anyway.”

“Not enough?”

“Not enough to kill for.”

“Dudes up on Washington Heights, they killed three people and only got half that much.”

“They were lowlife dipshits,” I said. “They probably killed for the hell of it. They already had the money. Why kill the girl? To keep her quiet? She couldn’t tell anybody, and her mother and brother were asleep in their beds, for Christ’s sake. They killed three people for no reason.”

“Guess you ain’t likely to be a character witness for them. Anyway, wasn’t no lowlife shot Byron. Said, ‘Mr. Leopold.’ Polite, you know? Showed some respect.”

“It’s little things that make all the difference.”

His pie had arrived while we were talking, and now it was mostly gone. He held a bite balanced on his fork and said, “Funny about the forty kay. First it was too much and now it ain’t enough.”

“He cashed in an insurance policy,” I said, “and that would have brought him only a fraction of what he had in the bank. So in that sense the forty thousand was too much, but…”

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“No.”

“Way you just broke off an’ started starin’.”

“Too much money,” I said. “Glenn Holtzmann had too much money. It was in his closet when he died. And I dreamed about him, and that’s what the dream was trying to tell me. Too much money.” I looked across at TJ, who still had the last bite of pie on his fork. “I thought the dream was about Will. But it wasn’t. It was about Byron Leopold.”

It still didn’t have to mean anything. It had been a dream, after all, and not a message from Glenn Holtzmann in the spirit world. (If his shade had indeed contacted me from beyond the beyond, he’d probably have had more on his mind than some guy who got himself shot on a park bench in the Village. “Hey, Scudder,” he might have murmured, “what’s this I hear about you and Lisa?”) The dream was my own self talking to me, and I wasn’t necessarily all that much sharper while I slept.

Anyway, sometimes it’s just a cigar.

“If,” TJ said, and stopped himself. “No,” he said, holding up his hands as if to stop himself from running into a wall. “No, I won’t say it.”

“Good.”

“But if we did, be no stoppin’ us.”

If we had a computer
. That was the phrase he’d agreed not to say, and not a moment too soon, because those five little words played a key role in every sentence out of his mouth. I seemed to have two cases, the shooting death of Byron Leopold and Will’s string of homicides. (What I didn’t have was a client, unless you wanted to count Adrian Whitfield, who’d paid me some money a while back and encouraged me to extend the umbrella of my investigation to cover both cases.) Whichever one I wanted to fool with next, TJ seemed certain a computer would make all the difference.

Insurance records? Just boogie on into the insurance company’s data base. Airline records? Do the same for the airlines. The whole world was on-line these days, and a well-schooled hacker could reach out with ease and touch someone, anyone, and pick his brain while he was at it. All you needed was a computer and a modem and a phone line to plug into and the world would whisper all its secrets to you.

“You also need someone who knows what he’s doing,” I said. “It took the Kongs to crack the NYNEX computer. I’m willing to believe you could learn how to do all that, but not fast enough to do us any good now.”

“Take a while,” he admitted. “Meantime, the Kongs could talk me through it.”

“If they happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“They ain’t the only hackers could do it. Be easy to use them, though, an’ they wouldn’t have to come down from Boston to do it. All they’d have to be is near a phone.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Nothin’ to it,” he said. “I’d be on the computer, and be on the phone with them at the same time. You’d need two phone lines is all, one for the modem and one for the phone. Or you could use a cell phone to talk to them if you didn’t want to run a second line in.”

“In where?”

’In wherever you got the computer. Your apartment, most likely. Or the shop.”

“Elaine’s shop?”

“So’s she could use it for keepin’ books an’ takin’ inventory. I could do all that for her.”

“If you took a course or two.”

“Well, it ain’t rocket science. I could learn.”

’There’s not a whole lot of spare room in the shop.”

He nodded. “Be better off settin’ up in the apartment.”

“We had to set up in a hotel room with the Kongs,” I remembered. “Had to rent one, so that our little invasion of the phone company computer couldn’t be traced back to us.”

“So?”

“Because what the Kongs did,” I went on, “was illegal and traceable. If we pulled anything like that from the apartment, or from Elaine’s shop, we’d have guys with badges knocking on the door.”

“Hackers has learned some tricks since then.”

“And what about the cyber cops? Don’t you think they’ve learned anything?”

He shrugged. “Way it works,” he said. “Build a better mousetrap, somebody else gonna build a better mouse.”

“Anyway,” I said, “technology only takes you so far, even if you’re the Kongs. They couldn’t get into the system, remember? No matter how many keys they punched, they couldn’t find the combination.”

“They got in.”

“They
talked
their way in. They put technology on hold and called up a human being on the telephone.”

“Some girl, wasn’t it?”

“And they sweet-talked her into giving up the password. They used that technique routinely enough to have a special phrase for it.” I groped around in my memory and came up with it. “Social engineering, that’s what they called it.”

“What you gettin’ at?”

“I’ll show you,” I said.

“Omaha,” Phyllis Bingham said. “To think there was a time when I booked you and Elaine to London and Paris. And now it’s Omaha?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” I said. “But I don’t want to go there. I just want to find out if somebody else did.”

“Ah,” she said. “Detective work?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And if he went there you have to chase after him?”

“I think he went and came back.” I handed her a slip of paper. “Probably flew out there on either of these dates, and returned on either of these.”

“From New York to Omaha, and—”

“From Philadelphia.”

“From
Philadelphia
,” she said. “I was just going to guess who flies nonstop from New York to Omaha, and I know America West used to, and I don’t know if they still do, but it doesn’t matter if he flew from Philadelphia. But who flies Philly to Omaha nonstop?” She flexed her fingers, frowned, tapped away at the keys. “Nobody,” she announced. “You can get there on USAir via Pittsburgh or you can fly Midwest Express through Milwaukee. Or United if you don’t mind changing at O’Hare. Or any airline, just about, but those are the logical ones. I don’t suppose you know which airline he used?”

“No.”

“And his name?”

“Arnold Wishniak.”

“Well, if we find him,” she said, “we’ll know it’s him, won’t we? Because how many Arnold Wishniaks could be going from Philadelphia to Omaha?”

“I’d say one at the most. I don’t think he would have used his real name.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“But he may have kept the initials.”

“Well, let’s see.” She tapped away at the keys, periodically rolling her eyes while she waited for the machine to respond. “Every computer’s faster than the last one,” she said, “and they’re never fast enough. You get so you want it instantaneous. More than that, you want it to give you data before you can even think to ask for it.”

“Same with people.”

“Huh? Oh, right.” She giggled. “At least computers keep improving. Do you see what I’m doing? I’m starting with USAir, and I’m asking if there’s a Wishniak on Flight 1103 on the fifth, and there’s not, and now I’ll ask about Flight 179 the same day…No. Okay, the other date’s the sixth, right? So we’ll try 1103…Nothing, and now we’ll try 179. Is that the right number, 179? It is, so we’ll try it. Nope.”

“I don’t think he would have used his real name.”

“I know, but I wanted to rule it out because with the name I could access the records. With just the initials I can’t.”

“Oh.”

“Let me try Midwest Express,” she said. She did, and United as well, and wound up shaking her head.

“There’s another name you could try,” I said. “He had a brother who anglicized the family name, and Arnold’s borrowed the name in the past.”