Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (72 page)

Set them there, on the kitchen floor,” Leo said.

Riley set the two black bags side by side on the linoleum. Nick was right behind her with an armload of bulging white plastic.

“Don’t get them mixed up with your own trash,” Nick said. “Mr. Vandenborre could turn out to be
really
weird.”

“I’ll get the door,” Riley said, crossing back across the living room.

“Don’t bother,” Leo called after her. “I never close the door—to my apartment or to my heart. It helps with the electric bills.”

“You have an electric heart?” Nick said.

Leo turned to Riley with a look of disgust. “Have you spent the entire morning with …
this
?”

“I had to ride in his car too.”

Leo grimaced. “How could you tell it from the trash? Why didn’t you drive the whole thing up here?”

Riley looked around the apartment. The entry door was braced open by a small entertainment center; she wondered if he ever closed it at all. The windows were open too, and the summer breeze caused the drapes to flutter in like flags. The room was sparsely furnished, but the walls were crowded with framed reproductions of the masters of the Italian High Renaissance. Along the far wall was a long workbench covered with computers, monitors, storage drives, scanners, and devices that Riley had never seen outside the coroner’s own forensics lab. In the center of the workbench, a flat-screen plasma display hung under a copy of Titian’s
Sacred and Profane Love.
Behind a high-speed optical scanner stood a marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s
Bacchus.
The entire room was an endless anachronism: it was a computer lab within an art museum, a brave new world under the watchful eye of the old.

At the end of the workbench, a charcoal gray flat-panel monitor displayed the PharmaGen logo. As Riley watched, the image changed to the company’s most recent corporate report.

“Why are you watching the PharmaGen Web site?”

“I’m not,” Leo said, “Lassiter is. I have our spyware configured for remote viewing; whatever Lassiter is looking at, we’re watching in real-time. You’re seeing what he’s seeing right now.”

“That’s a little creepy,” Riley said. “Anything out of the ordinary? I tried not to call for a few days—Nick said to give it a rest.”

“He should talk—Nick never gives anything a rest. Don’t worry; I check the keystroke logs every hour. There’s been nothing of interest to us so far.”

Riley stopped, took a deep breath, and bent over slightly.

“Are you all right?”

“I carried those bags up three flights of stairs,” she said, stretching her back. “I have to be careful about that kind of exertion.”

“Do you need to sit down?”

“I’m OK. I just needed to catch my breath.”

In the kitchen, Nick gently patted the sides of the white plastic bags until he came to one. “Bingo,” he said, tossing it to Leo.

He tested it himself. “I think you’re right.” He laid the bag down on the kitchen counter and carefully slid a knife up the side; a tangle of paper strips bushed out through the slit. Leo turned and gave Nick a beaming thumbs-up.

“But it’s shredded,” Riley said. “What good is that?”

“Shredding is good,” Leo replied. “Shredding tells you that they have something they want to hide—something that might be worth looking at.” He reached into the slit and carefully pulled out a handful of paper. “See this? This is approximately five documents, and they can be reassembled manually in about ten minutes. That’s the beauty of strip-shredders, Riley. They only create the
illusion
of security. They separate a document into narrow strips, then they drop them side by side into the waste receptacle. It doesn’t take a genius to put them back together again. It doesn’t take a computer specialist either,” he said, turning to Nick. “You can do this yourself.”

“Come on, Leo, I’ve got things to do. Don’t you have some work-study kids you can give it to? Besides, we’re definitely going to need you for
this.
” He handed Leo a second bag. He felt along the bottom; it was filled with paper, too, but it was much heavier and more compact. He carried this bag to the kitchen table and carefully slit along the bottom. Thousands of tiny white-and-black squares poured out in a soft mound of paper confetti.

“Don’t tell me you can put
that
back together,” Riley said.

Leo looked up at her with a pained expression. “Still you doubt me. Still I must prove myself to you. Of course I can put this back together. It just takes a little longer—and it does require a computer specialist. Fortunately for you, I just happen to be one.” He shook the bag until no more came out, then carefully searched the inside of the bag for tiny pieces clinging to other objects. Then he began to spread the bits of paper evenly on the table so that no two were touching.

“Next I lay down sheets of a special transparent plastic,” he said. “The bits of paper adhere to them. Then one by one I place the sheets on an optical scanner and scan both sides of each sheet. The program does the rest.”

“What program?”

“I originally developed it for the FBI. It looks at the image on each bit of paper, and it also notes the exact shape of every edge. Then the
computer goes through millions of permutations, matching images and edges until the original document is restored. It’s like working a hundred-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle at warp speed.”

“Your family would be proud of you,” Riley said.

“But even at warp speed, this will still take a little time.”

“How much time?” Nick asked.

“The rest of the day should do it. And what if this should turn up something—something that confirms this theory of yours? What happens then?”

“Then we call Special Agent Santangelo. We tell him what we’ve learned, and we turn over the physical evidence—that should speed up his investigation.”

“He’s not going to like it,” Riley said. “He told us no more poking around.”

“He said no more poking around in
Lassiter’s
affairs—I always listen very carefully when people are threatening me. And we’re not poking around in Lassiter’s affairs anymore.”

“We’re still monitoring his computer activity.”

“Yes, but the FBI has no way of knowing that—all we’re doing is watching, just like they are. And all we did this morning is snatch someone else’s trash. That’s perfectly legal, as long as the trash is curbside.”

“Nick, we’re reassembling shredded documents. What would the FBI say about that?”

“They’re using Leo’s program—what could they say? Look, Riley, you’re the boss here. We can stop what we’re doing right now and leave the rest to the FBI. Would you be happy with that?”

Riley thought for a minute. “No,” she said. “With the FBI, it’s always going to be a ‘need to know’ basis—even when their investigation is over. They might not ever tell us what was really going on here.”

“I don’t want to interfere with a federal investigation,” Nick said. “I just want to finish what we’ve started. We can’t call the FBI with every little detail we come up with; if we do, they’ll tell us to back off for sure. I think we should finish what we’re doing here, and
then
turn over what we have—because the next time we call Santangelo, we’re finished.”

Nick and Riley stood by the table, watching Leo sort and
arrange the thousands of bits of paper into an enormous, miniature mosaic. He looked up at them.

“Don’t you two have things to do?”

“Right,” Nick said. “I should get going.”

“It is my day off,” Riley nodded. “What’s left of it anyway.”

Five minutes later they were still watching.

Leo walked around the table, took both of them by the hand, and led them to the open window.

“Look out there,” he said to Nick. “What do you see?”

Nick shrugged. “Pittsburgh.”

He shook his head in disgust and turned to Riley. “Please, rescue this lost soul. Look out the window and tell him what you see.”

“Life,” Riley said.

Leo threw both hands in the air. “A heartbeat! Faint, but barely audible. For you, there’s hope. Your friend here has no pulse at all—he may be beyond resuscitation. You know the problem with you two? Your whole existence is work, and you’ve forgotten entirely how to
play.
You find you have a few precious hours off, and still you hover around my table like two old prisoners afraid to leave their cells. Go on, get out of here while there’s still some hope of redemption for both of you. And
you,
” he said, pointing a finger at Nick. “Don’t come back here until you
feel
something. Help him with this,” he said to Riley, “even if you have to defibrillate him.”

He ushered both of them to the doorway, gave them a solid push toward the stairwell, and returned to the apartment.

They stood in awkward silence for a moment.

“He gets like this,” Nick said. “He won’t let us back in for a while.”

“How long?”

“It’s hard to tell. Maybe the whole evening.”

Riley nodded. “Might as well go, then.”

“Might as well.”

They slowly turned to the stairwell, with no idea where they were going next.

You make a mean
kielbasa,
Mrs. Polchak,” Riley said, pushing away her plate.

“All Polish food is mean,” Nick said. “Just give it a few hours.”

Mrs. Polchak looked at Riley’s half-finished plate. “This is how you eat?” she said disapprovingly. “No wonder they think you are a
fellow.
”

They took their coffee in the tiny family room. Mrs. Polchak settled into an upholstered rocker that dominated the room like a throne. On her left was a small taboret, a maple magazine rack, and a portable writing table; on her right was an end table and a reading lamp with a moveable arm. The only other seat in the room was a small love seat directly across from the recliner. Nick and Riley took a seat side by side and stared silently into their cups. Mrs. Polchak turned the reading lamp until it cast its light directly on them.

“So tell me,” she said to Riley, “how are things going with you two?”

“Uh—” Riley looked at Nick for help.

“No way,” he said. “She asked
you.
”

“Oh … well, things are … they’re sort of … things are kind of—”

“She doesn’t like me, Mama,” Nick said. “God knows I’ve tried.”

“That’s not true,” Riley said. “I do like him.”

“Nicky,” Mrs. Polchak smiled, “there is a nice lemon torte in the refrigerator. Go and fetch it for us, that’s a good boy.”

“Why don’t we wait awhile before we—”

“Fetch it for us. Slice it up for us in nice little pieces. Take your time.”

“Mama, Riley doesn’t really like—”

“Nicky!” she said with a quick glare. “Go away so I can talk about you behind your back.”

Nick set his cup on the coffee table. “I’ll get the dessert,” he said. “I may never come back.”

They both watched until he disappeared behind the swinging door, then Mrs. Polchak turned to Riley again.

“We have a nice walnut tree,” she said. “Do you like walnuts?”

“Walnuts? Yes, I—”

“Walnuts are a lot of trouble. The shells are very thick, and they stain your hands. But they are worth the trouble, don’t you think?”

“Mrs. Polchak, it isn’t your son, it’s
me
—”

“It’s him,” she said, shaking her head. “Women take too much blame. When a man does not love us, we say, ‘It’s me.’ When we cannot love a man, we say, ‘It’s me.’ Sometimes it’s
them.
Nicky is hard to love. I know; his father was hard to love.”

Riley set her own cup down. “Mrs. Polchak, what happened between Nick and his father? Can you tell me?”

“Nicky’s father was a very strong man, but he was
ignorancki
—he was not very bright. Nicky was just the other way; he was very smart, but he was weak—his eyes, you see. It is hard for men to have sons; they are like little mirrors. I think Stanislaw did not like what he saw in Nicky’s eyes.”

“That’s so very sad.”

“What about you? Do you like what you see in Nicky’s eyes?”

Riley slowly nodded.

“Me, I like walnuts,” Mrs. Polchak said. “But it takes time to open them up. It takes a big hammer too.”

“I wish I had the time,” Riley said softly.

“You young people! Is your time so short?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Then use the time you have.”

“Mrs. Polchak, I want to be fair to Nick. I don’t want to lead him on.”

“And why not?” she said indignantly. “I led three men on, and then I picked the best of them. Stanislaw was the lucky one, and the others survived. What do you think men are, little pastries? Life is not fair; love is not fair; but time, as you say, is short.”

Riley considered her words. “You know, I think you’re right—Stanislaw was the lucky one.”

Just then Nick reentered the room with a small tray containing plates, forks, and a badly mauled lemon torte.

“Why do you embarrass me?” Mrs. Polchak said, grimacing at her beautiful dessert. “You can slice open those little worms of yours, but you can’t find the center of a lemon torte? What did you cut this with, your elbow?”

“It’s OK, really,” Riley said. “I don’t think I could touch another bite right now. I could use a walk first.”