The 500: A Novel (30 page)

They all peeled away when Cartwright showed up, leaving me alone inside the garage. The first thing Cartwright did when he caught me was slap me, hard, across the face. No one knew how Cartwright made his money, but everyone knew not to cross him. And there I was, trapped in his storehouse of sharp things and guns and very much on his bad side.

“Do you know what it would do to your father to see you taking stupid risks like this, running around with these fucking morons?” he asked me that day.

I just looked down and shook my head, embarrassed.

“How’d you get in here?” he asked.

I held out the lock, open and undamaged. “I didn’t break it. I didn’t take anything. I just wanted to see if I could.”

“You picked this?” he asked. After a moment, he seemed less angry, even a little impressed. “Who showed you how?”

“Nobody. I just like taking them apart. For fun,” I said.

He knew, between my father being in jail, my sick mother working two jobs, and my fuckup brother and his friends serving as my main role models, that I’d probably end up dead or in prison soon enough. There was no way he was going to stop me, though; I needed the money to help pay the medical bills. He made a deal with me that day: he’d teach me the trade—locks and picks to start—if I stopped pulling stupid bush-league juvenile-delinquent stuff with my brother’s crew. He must have felt bad for me. Maybe he knew he couldn’t keep me out of trouble, so he at least wanted to teach me not to get caught. Maybe he just recognized a precocious talent that he could exploit. Whatever it was, he showed me how to work like a professional, and taught me everything I knew. I did jobs for him and stayed away from tempting fate with the older kids for the most part. Though I could never say no to my brother, and ultimately that was my downfall.

Now, twelve years later, after I’d sworn off that life, I was back in his garage, caught red-handed once more.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded.

“What else do you need?”

I looked over to the wall, the racks of burglary tools, and then pointed high, to a steel bar that ended in a claw. I hadn’t touched one in years, not since the night I got arrested, the last break-in I’d pulled.

It’s called a Halligan, a fireman’s tool, essentially a hopped-up crowbar. It has a thick, slightly offset forked wedge on one end that you can ram between any door and jamb and pry easily. There’s a pick and adze at the other. The New York Fire Department designed it, but the basic idea they stole from thieves. The story goes that some firefighters in the 1920s or 1930s were sorting through the ash and rubble of a bank in Lower Manhattan that had just been robbed and then torched to hide the evidence. The thieves had left behind a custom-forged pry bar with a claw. The smoke eaters copied it, passed it around to different firehouses, and over the decades improved on it to the point where it could gain entry against almost any door in less than a minute.

Then thieves like me, true to form, stole it back.

Cartwright passed it down. God, it felt good in my hands.

He looked me over. “It’s nice to have you back, Mike.”

“Tell my dad that I’m okay.”

“Sure,” he said. “And don’t worry. You can pay me for the guns later.”

After I left Cartwright, I stopped by the local Greyhound station to plant some red herrings. I bought a ticket to Florida on my corporate AmEx and one to San Francisco on my personal card. Then I walked through the station like Robin Hood, handing my credit and debit cards out to the folks in the waiting room—a dreadlocked white dude wearing patchwork pants, a shell-shocked-looking teenage couple, and a guy with one arm who was sipping on a bottle of grape Robitussin—after which they scattered to the four corners.

Now that I’d given up on help from the police, the murder evidence against Henry that Haskins had pointed me toward was my only hope. I had to assume that Haskins wouldn’t have died trying to tip me off to this guy Langford if Langford were really dead.

I needed to dig into Langford’s affairs, and after five hours at the Reston Regional Library (looking and smelling about on par with the other bums who populated the place; I hadn’t had time to change), I pieced together a few glimmers of hope.

Langford’s lawyer was a man named Lawrence Catena. Catena appeared to be working out of his house in Great Falls, Virginia, another high-end suburb of DC, and he specialized in living trusts and Delaware corporations. Delaware allows people  (even if they’re from out of state) to incorporate there anonymously, without listing the names of any of the owners or managers of the company, and so it attracts a lot of shell corporations and the bottom-feeding lawyers who specialize in them. Trusts and Delaware LLCs are perfect for hiding assets, ducking taxes, and so on. A corporation has the legal rights of a person, and some rights that people don’t. Against a well-paid money-hider like Catena, I had no chance of prying into Langford’s affairs—
unless
some local clerk made a mistake, as clerks sometimes do, and put down some information on the articles of incorporation or a chain of title that linked the dummy companies to the people they were shielding.

Enter my iron ass. I was nearly blind from reading small type on my computer, but just before they shut the library down and sent me back onto the streets I found it: a transfer of a vacation property in St. Augustine from Langford to an inter vivos trust.

It could have been simply that Langford knew his health was going downhill in the years before he died and wanted to keep Uncle Sam from fleecing the inheritance. But I was starting to get a distinct feeling (probably fueled by the fact that it was my one lead and I was supremely desperate) that Langford was among the walking dead. Most people think plane crashes or staged suicides are good ways to fake your way out of this life. Too many questions, though, as I’m sure a good lawyer like Catena could tell you. No, better to go down quietly in Florida and have a simple cremation as Langford did.

All of this cogitation had me feeling pretty smug, but it didn’t do me any good. No close relatives had survived Langford, and part of the reason you pay the Catenas of the world five hundred bucks an hour is that they keep their mouths shut. It’s impossible to pry secrets out of their attorney-client-privileged hands.

It’s almost impossible
legally,
that is, which Haskins had realized too late in his quest to find the evidence against Henry Davies that Langford was holding on to. I didn’t have to bother with such niceties and had just picked up from Cartwright tools with which I could pry open pretty much anything. Those were my backup plan, though. I didn’t have time to break into and sift through Catena’s office. I was hoping this would be more of a finesse job.

I tailed Catena leaving his office and followed him to a house down in Georgetown near Dumbarton Oaks. There were valets out front, and clear signs of a high-toned party going on within. I waited for him to go inside, then drove past and parked in a dark spot around the corner where I had a decent view into the kitchen and living room of the house.

I called Catena’s cell and watched him through the window.

“Larry Catena,” he said.

“Mr. Catena. Hello,” I said. “Sorry to bother you so late. This is Terrence Dalton at the office of the chief medical examiner. We have a body here, and according to the identification we found it’s a…” I pretended to read. “Karl Langford. Date of birth is March fifteenth, 1943. We were looking for next of kin and saw that you were his lawyer.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Karl Langford is dead.”

“Yeah,” I said, sounding annoyed. “I know. This is the morgue. That’s why we’re calling.”

“You found Karl Langford’s license on a body in the District?” he asked. Concern crept into his voice.

“Yes, and some credit cards, a few other things. Can you come down tomorrow and identify the body?”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

I gave him a time and a phony number and let him go. I don’t know if Catena really bought my story, but that hardly mattered. It was an old con man’s trick to get information out of people. You’d call someone and inform him that, according to some ID you’d found on the corpse, you had his wife or daughter on ice at the morgue. After you had the person in hysterics, you’d cool him off by describing a body that didn’t match the loved one—a play normally known as the dead black female. The one-two punch of horror and relief would usually knock a person loose enough for him to give you whatever information you needed—typically a Social Security number or name and address—and that you claimed was necessary to straighten the matter out. I knew that Catena wouldn’t just hand over Langford’s current address, but that didn’t matter. I only needed him to contact Langford, and I figured killing someone’s dead client is a sure way to find out if he or she is still kicking.

I watched Catena step outside and make another call. Perfect.

By now, I’d changed into a clean suit. I’d spent enough time hanging around Washington high-society types that I could waltz into any party and fake it just fine. If only I’d known how easy it was when I was younger. Instead of prying open doors and falling off roofs, I could have just walked right into any given house party, said, “Oh, I’m a friend of John’s from work,” helped myself to the bourbon, talked about
NYPD Blue
or some stale political gossip, then sneaked into the bedroom to pocket the jewelry at my leisure.

That’s more or less how I entered the house. It was a beautiful Colonial Revival with a columned porch. They were using the caterer who did the Davies Group Christmas parties, a good sign. I had a couple lamb chops and scanned the crowd for Catena. Polite folks all, the partygoers carefully avoided staring at the guy with the bandage on his nose.

I spotted Catena, looking ill at ease, by the base of the stairs, and set a pick. When he rounded the corner, I backed into him, then apologized profusely.

“It’s fine,” he said. I set my drink down and got the hell out of there. I’d worried that my pickpocketing skills would be a little rusty, and they were. I’d practically felt him up trying to get his phone, but he didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was preoccupied by the recent news about Langford’s corpse showing up at the DC morgue.

A little Googling will tell you the backdoor key sequence to get around a password on an iPhone. All I needed was a glance through his recent calls to find what I wanted. Right after I’d done my morgue bit, Catena had called someone listed only as MT, with an eastern Maryland area code. I didn’t even have to bother with a reverse directory. The address was in the phone’s contact list: an assisted-living facility on the Eastern Shore called Clover Hills. I looked it up on his phone’s Web browser: it seemed like a nice place, and even had a golf course.

That’s how I found myself standing, that same night, in a deep bunker guarding the green of the seventeenth hole at Clover Hills. I peered through binoculars in a drizzling rain. The old burgling duds, a hooded sweatshirt and canvas jeans, felt good as I cased the house. Looking through the bedroom window, I could make out Langford, the man Justice Haskins had told me held the key to the evidence against Henry. Langford looked awful, with tubes running from his chest, but still pretty good for a dead guy.

With the Halligan, I did a neat job pulling the lock on the sliding doors next to his patio, and barely disturbed him when I broke in. By the time he woke up, his arms were bound neatly to the rails of his bed with duct tape. Having my old tools in my hands made me feel calm, however precarious my position: I was dressed like a thug and standing over a terrified old man hooked up to what I guessed was a dialysis machine.

The apparatus pumped slowly. A small wheel squeezed blood through a tube that ran through a host of different plastic bottles before it snaked back to Langford’s bed, across his torso, then tucked neatly through the wall of his chest. It looked like it went right into his heart.

“Henry Davies sent you,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if Langford’s fear of Henry or his hatred of Henry—cooperation or spite—would be a better pry, so I left him guessing on that point.

“I need to know about Hal Pearson,” I said.

Langford licked his dry lips and looked at the ceiling. “Henry murdered him. You kill me and the evidence goes public. Now would you please take this goddamned tape off my wrists and let me get some sleep. It’s hard enough being hooked up to this fucking vampire without people wasting my time with stupid questions.”

“What evidence do you have?”

“Enough.”

“What exactly?”

“Fuck your mother.”

Maybe that was his default tell-off, but he’d sure picked the wrong man and the wrong time to use it. The topic of my mother was still a little raw with me after my run-in with Henry.

I watched the pump turn, the red fluid go around. Small clamps, nothing more, held together the tubing his blood ran through. I checked to see if the monitor was hooked up to anything—a phone line, an Ethernet cable—that might let a nurse know that Langford was having trouble. It wasn’t. I’d already moved his phone to a chair far out of reach.

I stepped a little closer to the machine. A few twists and a pinch and I would hold Langford’s life between my two fingers. I could bleed him slowly, splashing him out over the brown wall-to-wall carpet.

No violence. It was the only law my father respected, the only one I’d never second-guessed. Until today. Now I wasn’t sure what I believed. Apparently my dad was a killer too.

These bloody impulses suited my recent mood. Ever since I’d seen Henry twist my life into a lie, setting me up for the murders, I’d been enjoying my time back on the dark side—a theft here, roughing up a cop there. What did I have to lose? I could show Henry he’d misjudged me. I had what it takes to apply the last lesson, to use it against him. I had the will to take coercion to its absolute, to the worst kinds of violence.

I watched the wet grow in Langford’s eyes, watched him stare as I touched my knuckle to the center of the pump, felt the throb of the machine, the cool plastic slide against my skin.