House Justice (8 page)

Emma had worked for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, a group of Pentagon spies. Although she was now retired—or so she claimed—she knew a lot of people who worked at the CIA. She helped DeMarco occasionally on his cases because he’d once saved her life— a deed that occurred more by accident than an act of bravery on his part. She was older than he was, considerably smarter, and her attitude
toward him was usually that of an impatient, somewhat intolerant big sister. She despised John Mahoney.

Asking for her help, however, was going to be different than dealing with Neil. Neil had helped because DeMarco—or, to be accurate, the U.S. Treasury—paid for his services. Emma was different. She wouldn’t take money but she would demand to know why she should help DeMarco and, in particular, she would want to know why Whitmore would give DeMarco—a complete stranger —the name of her source. So he told her the truth, that Whitmore was blackmailing Mahoney, and that he was trying to identify her source in an under-the-table way so Whitmore could get out of jail.

“I’m not going to help you get her out of jail,” Emma said. “That woman should be shot.”

“This isn’t about getting her out of jail,” DeMarco said. “It’s about exposing the rat in the CIA who gave her the information in the first place.”

Emma didn’t respond.

“Look, all I want you to do is find out what Crosby’s job is at Langley. I’m just curious about the guy and it won’t kill you to make a phone call.”

“One phone call,” Emma said. But he could tell that at this point she was curious about Mr. Crosby herself.

He gave her Crosby’s description in case more than one Derek Crosby worked at Langley.

Tony walked out of the Hyatt, singing Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” to himself.

It had been a
damn
fine day—he had almost two thousand bucks in his wallet. Five hundred from that guy DeMarco, one fifty from a man who said his wife was gonna divorce him if he didn’t get tickets to
The Lion King
, over a hundred from out-of-town schmucks who just wanted to know where to go for this and that—and the
real prize: a grand from a private dick who needed access to a room registered to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Tony didn’t know what the detective did in the room—he suspected he might have installed a video camera—and he didn’t really care. It wasn’t his problem that people named Smith kept screwing people they weren’t married to.

So what should he do with the money? His old lady had been bitching because the TV was on the fritz, and his girlfriend was bitching because he wouldn’t take her to Atlantic City. With the money in his wallet, he figured he might be able to make them both happy for a change. Yeah right, like
that
was possible. But he knew a guy who could get him a fell-off-the-truck deal on a Sony, and if he could get a cheap room in A.C., then maybe…

“That’s a gun pressed against your spine. It has a silencer on it. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. Now walk down the alley.”

Oh, fuck me. Why today of all days? Why did this have to happen when I’ve got so damn much money on me
?

“Hey, look,” Tony said, “my money’s in my wallet. Come on. Just take it. Don’t hurt me.”

The guy prodded him in the back and Tony started down the alley. He didn’t want to go into that damn alley.

“Please. My wallet’s in my back pocket, the left-hand side. Just pull it out right now.”

The guy didn’t say anything. He just kept pushing Tony along. He hadn’t seen the guy’s face but he sounded big—and foreign. He had some kind of accent.

They reached a Dumpster that had three big black garbage bags on top, and the man pushed Tony behind the Dumpster so they were hidden by the bags. Tony was facing a brick wall and he was eye level with a line of graffiti that read:
Jesus Loves You
. His first thought was,
If He loves me so much, why is there a gun stuck in my back
? But his next thought was that he hadn’t been to confession in years and the last time he’d been to Mass was his nephew’s wedding. He was going straight to hell if this guy killed him.

“You talked to a man named DeMarco today. At five, you gave him a piece of paper. I want to know what you talked about and what was on the paper.”

Maybe Jesus did love him. The guy wasn’t a mugger.

Tony told him everything he wanted to know: that DeMarco was trying to find a witness who could place a man named Derek Crosby in the hotel with a reporter named Sandra Whitmore on a particular day. He couldn’t remember Crosby’s credit card number, only that it was Visa, but he remembered the address in Fairfax. Thank God he had a good memory for numbers.

“And that’s all we talked about and that’s all I know,” Tony said. “I swear to God. Please, just take my money and let me go.”

“How were you supposed to get ahold of DeMarco? Was he planning on coming back to the hotel?”

“He gave me his cell phone number. He told me to call him if I found anything else out.”

“Give me the number.”

Tony reached into his shirt pocket and handed the guy the yellow Post-it that he’d written DeMarco’s number on.

“That’s it,” Tony said. “That’s everything.”

The man didn’t say anything for what seemed an eternity, and Tony wondered if the guy was thinking about whacking him.

“I want you to stand here for two minutes,” he finally said. “Count to a hundred and twenty. Slowly. If you turn around or come out of the alley in less than two minutes, I’ll kill you. And if you call DeMarco and tell him we talked, I’ll also kill you. I know where you work.”

“I won’t call him,” Tony said. And he wouldn’t. No fuckin’ way was he going to get in the middle of whatever the hell was going on.

Tony heard the guy walk away. He didn’t bother counting. He wasn’t leaving the alley for at least five minutes. As he stood there, he stared at
Jesus Loves You
and wondered if maybe he should give up his girlfriend. He figured adultery was the biggest sin he was currently committing. Plus, the girlfriend was becoming more of a wife than a
girlfriend the way she nagged his ass, and even the sex had gotten kinda stale. Yeah, it was time to fly straight.

After he figured five minutes had passed, he headed toward the mouth of the alley, reaching for his cell phone as he walked. He was going to call his girlfriend and say he couldn’t see her tonight.

Right now, he just wanted to go home and hug his kids.

The florist walked two blocks from the alley and stepped into a bar. He didn’t drink alcohol—he never had—but he needed to sit down for a minute and think, and he wanted to be someplace off the street.

He ordered an orange juice from the bartender and then his hand moved toward his breast pocket to pull out a cigarette and he almost laughed out loud. He hadn’t smoked in years. It seemed as if doing the sort of work he used to do—following people, intimidating and threatening them—was doing more than just bringing back memories he wanted to forget. He was turning back into the man he had wanted to forget.

Now what
? DeMarco had told the concierge he wanted proof that Sandra Whitmore had met with a man named Derek Crosby who lived in Fairfax, Virginia.
But why? Why would this Washington lawyer want to do that
? It was possible DeMarco’s interest in Crosby had nothing to do with Mahata’s death or the reason why Whitmore was in jail. Yes, that was possible, but seemed highly unlikely.

So. He had three options. He could do nothing, just sit in New York and wait for Whitmore to be released from jail, but that could be weeks or maybe even months. The second option was to find DeMarco and talk to him, and since he had the man’s phone number and knew he lived in Washington, that shouldn’t be too hard to do. Or he could question this man Crosby in Fairfax, Virginia.

He decided to talk to DeMarco, although he knew doing so could cause him significant problems. It was one thing to question the concierge, a man who had no vested interest in whatever was happening and who was afraid the florist might kill him. DeMarco could be a
different matter. If he had to persuade DeMarco to talk—and he suspected he would—DeMarco would most likely call the authorities. Unless he killed him.

Well, he would decide when the time came; all he knew was that he couldn’t stop now.

“Do you want another orange juice?” the bartender asked. “Maybe a shot of vodka in it this time?”

“No, but could I possibly purchase a cigarette from you?” the florist said. “Just one.”

As DeMarco was walking down the Jetway at Reagan National, he turned his cell phone back on and saw he’d missed a call from Emma. He went to the nearest bar, ordered a beer, and called her.

“Derek Crosby works at the CIA,” Emma said, “just as Neil told you.”

“Yeah, I know, but what does he do there? Anything related to Iran?”

“I didn’t finish,” Emma said. “Derek Crosby is five foot seven, bald, and wears glasses so thick he should be able to see the canals on Mars. And he’s the only Derek Crosby at the agency.”

“Uh-oh,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah, uh-oh. And he has nothing to do with Iran. He’s an analyst in the Cuban section, which means he probably monitors the cigar and sugar markets, Cuba being the big military threat that it is.”

“Aw, shit,” DeMarco said.

When Yuri called, Ivan Dyachenko was in Escondido, a suburb of San Diego, eating breakfast with his Mexican mistress and their two children. He would eat dinner that night with his Russian wife and his other three children.

Ivan loved children.

Yuri told him what he wanted him to do and exactly how he wanted the job done. When he finished, Ivan tried to tell him that he could use a little extra cash because his wife’s car had broken down and one of the kids needed… but Yuri hung up. The man was a heartless bastard.

Ivan returned to the kitchen, almost tripping over a pudgy baby boy clad only in a diaper, crawling around on the floor. He picked the child up and bussed him on his bare stomach, which was not easy considering the smell coming from the little tyke’s diaper. His mistress asked if he wanted more huevos rancheros, more sausage, more juice, anything at all. When he said no, she got a look of concern on her pretty, plump face, as if worried that he might waste away if he stopped eating after his second helping.

People often asked Ivan if he’d been a weight lifter when he was younger and he understood why: he was a colossus with a head the size of a basketball and, like all the great Russian lifters, he had a big hard gut and massive arms and thighs. He wore a goatee, which he thought made his face look slimmer, but his Russian friends still told
him that he was the spitting image of Andrey Chemerkin, who had won the weight-lifting gold at the Atlanta games in ’96. But Ivan had never lifted weights. In fact, the heaviest thing he could recall ever lifting was a Ukrainian who couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos.

Ivan had thrown him off a roof.

Conrad Diller’s place in Del Mar was a gorgeous white stucco house with an ocean view and a Spanish tile roof. It had a three-car garage, the lawn was professionally manicured, and there were majestic palm trees on the grounds. Ivan just shook his head. He knew he would never own a home like this one.

Ivan rented the crummy two-bedroom apartment for his mistress in Escondido, the appliances so old they barely worked. He had to set off bug bombs every month to kill the roaches, something he hated to do because he was afraid the insect killer could affect the children. He and his wife lived in an equally dismal place in a run-down building near the Gaslamp district in San Diego, although he paid no rent for it because Yuri had an arrangement with the man who owned the building. But that was the only perk his job provided. He owned no real estate, had no pension plan or health insurance, and his income was unpredictable. He was supposed to receive a percentage of whatever the organization made but his salary was inconsistent and seemed to vary with Yuri’s moods. It had occurred to him more than once that he would have been better off driving a truck or working on the docks as a stevedore but how could he get such a job? What would he put down on a résumé? Education: none. Skills: strangulation. References: only Yuri, who could attest to his loyalty and his ability to kill.

He looked up at Diller’s house again. He could see lights on inside and had seen Diller and his wife walk past the windows several times. Had Yuri just wanted Diller dead, it would have been easy. He would have walked up to the door, knocked, and forced his way
into the house. Then he would have strangled Diller, raped and strangled his wife, and stolen a few things to make it look like a home invasion that had gone very, very bad. Yes, that would have been easy.

But that’s not what Yuri wanted. Yuri wanted Diller disappeared. And not only that, he wanted his car left at an airport so it would look as if he had fled the country. So now he would have to snatch the man and his car, then take him someplace where he could bury a body, which was gonna be a real pain in the
zhopa
. He’d have to drive for miles to find a suitable place to dispose of a corpse.

Diller’s neighborhood, he quickly decided, was not a good place for a kidnapping. Too many houses, too close together. Too many people out jogging or walking their silly dogs. The streetlights lit up the block like a football stadium and cops drove by periodically to protect these wealthy people. To do what Yuri wanted he’d have to wait for Diller to go someplace like an underground parking garage where he would be alone—assuming the guy ever left his house.

Why couldn’t these things ever be simple?

Since he wasn’t sure what to do next, he called his wife, then his mistress. He didn’t talk to either woman for very long but he talked to all the kids who were old enough to talk. He talked the longest to little Elena, his oldest child with his wife. She was seven now and smart as a whip, and she told him about a boy at school she wanted to kiss. She cracked him up—but it gave him a funny feeling in his stomach to think about boys kissing his little girl.