Tag Man (16 page)

“Nice way of phrasing it,” Les agreed, following Willy’s train of thought. “But how’s he do it?”

“Right,” Willy said. “What did the landlady say about how long he’d lived here?”

“Metelica? Maybe five years. She wasn’t sure.”

Willy addressed Big Al. “This neighborhood have all the usuals? Groceries, restaurants, Laundromats, one of those shipping places, maybe?”

“Most of that, yeah,” Davis said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I don’t know about any shipping place.”

“Bars, though,” Willy said, largely to himself. “I saw a couple on this block alone.”

“What’re you getting at?” Lester asked.

Instead of answering, Willy crossed over to Davis. “You do us a big favor and stay here while my buddy and I check out a couple of the local bars?”

Davis smiled lazily. “I’ve heard that one before.” He then added, “Sure. I know what you’re after. I’ll give you thirty minutes. All part of the babysitting service.”

“Want us to bring you back anything?”

The big man chuckled. “Tempting. I’ll settle for a coffee that doesn’t have anything swimming in it. Thanks.”

Willy and Les got lucky at the second bar they entered—immediately across the street, named, without any attempt at originality, the Emerald Isle.

Even this early in the day, there were several patrons scattered near the two pool tables at the back, or at the far end of the bar. It seemed that everyone had an aversion to the front door—or the sunshine it briefly allowed in.

Willy and Les sat on neighboring stools and waited for the bearded barkeep to wander down in their direction.

“Name your poison,” he said.

“Leo Metelica,” Willy said without preamble.

“Never heard of him,” was the hair-trigger response.

“You say that about all your regulars?”

“I don’t know the man. You want drinks? Or are you on duty?”

The last was delivered with a faint smile.

Willy raised his eyebrows. “Whoa. Very slick. I can’t imagine what gave us away. Why do all you guys like to fuck with us so much? Especially when you got a business hanging in the balance.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean? I just don’t know the guy, is all.”

Lester wearily rested his elbow on the bar. “It means that you’re putting your license at risk for no good reason.”

Willy removed Metelica’s morgue photo. “Feast your eyes on your dead buddy, clever boy, and ask yourself exactly what you owe him.”

The barkeep leaned forward, scrutinizing the picture without actually touching it. “What happened?”

“Off a bridge and onto the rocks. Really mashed the back of his head.”

The man straightened back up. “Where?”

Willy replaced the photo, reached out, and simply hooked the index finger of his muscular right hand into the top of the barkeep’s breast pocket—a tiny gesture gleaming with threat.

Kunkle looked deeply into his eyes as he spoke. “This is very simple. You talk to us about Metelica and we don’t turn into your worst migraine. He’s dead, and so is your business arrangement with him.”

Still, the man hesitated.

Willy continued with his calculated gamble. “You were his answering service. It’s an old gag with guys like him. They think it’ll cover their tracks. Problem is, the poor sucker they choose ends up being called an accessory.”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

“So share what you didn’t do and we’ll go away.”

The barkeep carefully unhooked Willy’s finger and stepped back. “Wait here.”

His shoulders slumped, he retreated down the length of the bar, reached under the cash register, and returned bearing a legal-size envelope.

This he dropped before them with a slap. “That’s his mail.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah.”

It was too dark even to pretend to take a look, so Willy merely placed his hand upon it, taking possession.

“He used the phone, too,” Lester stated flatly.

“Yeah.”

“Did he receive calls or make them?”

“Both,” the barkeep answered.

“How ’bout a computer? He keep a laptop here?”

He shook his head. “He used Internet cafés. That’s what he told me—a bunch of ’em, so he couldn’t be traced. And no, I don’t know which ones.”

Lester smiled. “We’ll be getting your phone records, anyhow. Now you can start sweating about who
you
might have called.”

The man’s face set hard. “I don’t have anything to worry about. You people can fuck off.”

Willy, against type, smiled pleasantly and slid off his stool, picking up the envelope. “I think we will. Thanks for your time.”

The bartender turned his back and walked away.

Back in the apartment, all three detectives gathered around the contents of the envelope. Al Davis was gratefully sipping the coffee they’d brought back for him.

There were three cell phones, a notepad, an oil company calendar, a credit card, and a couple of pens.

Lester picked up the envelope and peered inside. “That’s it?”

Willy put on a pair of gloves and opened one of the cell phones. He waited for it to power up before punching several of its buttons. He told Les, “Check out one of the others.”

Lester aped his colleague, looking up after a minute. “Totally blank. It’s a virgin. Yours, too?”

“Yeah.” Willy picked up the third, snapping it shut moments later with disgust.

“What’s the point?” Lester asked, staring down at the pile. Willy had already revealed that the notepad and calendar were also empty.

Willy stepped over to the kitchen chair tucked under the table, pulled it out, and sat.

“The point,” he said, “is that I think we better look at this guy from a different angle.”

Les parked himself on the edge of the table, hiking one leg up. “Which one?”

Willy pointed generally around the room. “First I thought he was a slob—a low-brow with the brains of a newt. Now I’m thinking he was more like a good piano player with bad personal hygiene.”

Lester looked at him, waiting, knowing how this worked. Big Al, of course, had no clue. “What?” he asked, drawing the word out.

“He only did one thing, but he did it well,” Willy explained, unusually helpful for once.

“He’s trying to say,” Lester supplied, “that our host may have been a decent hit man, after all.”

“Look at the guns,” Willy explained. “Good equipment, well maintained. He laid his op out in an organized manner, complete with maps, pictures, and the rest. There’re no phones, no computers, none of the gizmos that most of these jerks love and we use to catch ’em.” He pointed to the contents of the envelope. “Even when we found his remote office and grabbed that stuff, you can see how careful he was. No notes, no incriminating messages, and nothing on the phones. And even here, at home—the fridge is almost empty, there’s little to nothing on the kitchen shelves, the trash is loaded with neighborhood fast food wrappers, there’s dust on everything. What I’m seeing is a man who maybe slept here but who lived on the streets—eating, entertaining himself, running his business. I bet when he wasn’t cleaning guns and whacking off, he was out. That’s smart—it stops you from getting attached to a place, and from piling up possessions and electronic gadgets that can be used against you.”

“But what about the phones?” Lester asked. “Why have three blanks in an envelope?”

“For grab-and-run missions,” Willy mused. “We know he used the bar phone for his business calls. Fatso across the street told us that much. But look what we got: a calendar, a notepad, a credit card. That all tells me this is his travel stash. The piece of paper with ‘Bariloche’ written on it was the same as the pages on that pad.”

Les was looking animated by now. “Cool—the credit card’ll probably be blank, too, and I bet he left it behind because Bratt was just a short trip and he didn’t feel he’d need it.”

Willy shrugged. “I buy that.”

“But,” Les added, “assuming all that’s true, here’s my question: Where’s the phone we should have found on him?” He tapped the empty envelope. “This is his gotta-go kit. You may not need a credit card, but you sure as hell want a phone—to report in, to get last-minute instructions, whatever.”

Willy was already getting up from his chair, reaching for his own cell phone. “Jeezum, Les—you’re catching on. Let’s hope the damn thing’s still in the river and not wherever the gun is.”

As Willy began punching in numbers, Lester turned to Davis. “Looks like we’re heading out. We would sure love to take a look at that bar’s phone records, though.”

Big Al smiled. “No problem.”

*   *   *

Late that same night, Lester and Willy were on the first floor of Brattleboro’s municipal building, in the detective division of the police department with Ron Klesczewski and J. P. Tyler.

“You find anything on that?” Willy asked, looking at the cell phone they’d retrieved from the bottom of the Whetstone Brook, about one hundred yards downstream from Metelica’s body, and now resting in the middle of the conference table.

J.P. cleared his throat. “Well, you were right about it being a throw phone. It’s basically fresh out of the box. I did get a single number off of it, belonging to Benjamin Underhill, of Boston. I checked him out, but,” he added, “it turns out the best information I got was already in-house.”

Ron held up a stapled report before them. “Joe Gunther to the rescue—again,” he said theatrically. “Joe volunteered to run a background check on Lloyd Jordan for me—he’s one of the Tag Man victims—and interviewed a source in Massachusetts in the process. That person told him that Jordan used to work for or with Ben Underhill in the old days, before he retired here, and that Underhill is both part of the Boston mob and a really nasty guy, something J.P. confirmed with his record search.”

“Underhill hired Metelica to whack Jordan?” Lester asked.

There was a momentary silence around the table before Willy said softly, “Maybe it’s time to tell Joe to stop farting around and collect a paycheck.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You are looking better,” Eberhard Dziobek commented.

“I’m feeling better,” Joe conceded. “It’s a little confusing. Now part of my problem is I don’t think about her all the time.”

The older man nodded. “Guilt for not feeling guilty?”

Joe shook his head in wonderment. “Jesus. The way people screw themselves up, you should have enough work for two lifetimes.”

“I am not complaining,” Dziobek admitted. “Why do you think this is, though—this improvement? The passage of time?”

“Maybe. I’m also getting back to work, to a limited degree. I offered to help out my old colleagues at the PD, and I guess that’s turned into a useful distraction. I just can’t get over that she deserves more than to have me burying myself in the same old routine in order to forget about her faster.”

“You do that a fair amount,” the psychologist told him. “You head toward a truth and then you veer off at the last moment.”

Joe looked confused. “What do you mean by that?”

Dziobek laughed at the question. “I think your subconscious knows very well, but I will explain. I believe that you enjoy your work as a police officer because it is good work; it helps people in need, it puts people in jail who deserve to be there, and it is good for your soul. It is also intellectually challenging, and it has little vestige of what could be called drone work. Every moment of every day is filled with the potential, even the likelihood, that whatever plans you may have had will be altered by some crisis, large or small.

“Having said that,” he continued, “you diminish that description of your life by invoking a routine, as if you were an office worker fixing an endless row of broken Xerox machines in the basement.”

He removed his glasses and rubbed them on his tie, no doubt merely smearing whatever had been clouding them in the first place.

“I am delighted that you are getting back to work. And while I do agree that it is comfortable for you to do so, I do not think that you should cheapen your self-healing by labeling it as an escape from your grief. You are leavening your loss with the worthwhile work that Lyn admired when she was alive. You are grieving
differently
than you were. That is all.”

Joe smiled at what had amounted to the most forcefully stated opinion he’d ever heard from this otherwise carefully spoken man.

“Jeez, Eberhard, I thought folks like you were supposed to nod and say things like, ‘Very interesting.’ Not ream out your patients.”

Dziobek took up a pad from the small table beside his armchair, poised his pen over its surface, and said sonorously, “Hmmm. Please go on…”

*   *   *

Sally Kravitz took a deep breath and rang the doorbell, as nervous as an actor on opening night.

A few moments later, the door opened to reveal a smiling elderly woman of generous girth who looked her up and down with obvious pleasure, a response Sally’s father had been counting on.

“Yes?” the woman asked.

Sally smiled brightly and stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Nancy. Are you Gloria Jean Wrinn?”

Gloria shook her hand. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m so happy to meet you,” Sally continued, trying to forget the microphone she’d clipped to the front of her brassiere, and the fact that Dan was eavesdropping from a couple of hundred yards away. “I work for the state of Vermont, Agency of Human Services, Division of Indigent Residents.” She reached into the canvas shoulder bag Dan had lent her and extracted a business card he’d also conjured up of the most bogus-sounding piece of bureaucracy Sally could imagine.

“She’ll never buy this,” she’d told him at the time.

“Trust me,” he’d countered. “It’s just the kind of craziness they do buy.”

And she did. Gloria took the card and stepped back a foot. “How nice. And you’re so young, too. Would you like to come in?”

Sally adhered to the cardinal order she’d been given. “Well, not actually, Mrs. Wrinn. I’m just doing a quick survey at the moment—kind of getting things organized for another visit later on.” She reached into the bag again and pulled out a small clipboard with some documents attached to it. “Right now, all I need to know is if a gentleman named Paul Hauser is still living here.”