The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) (24 page)

“It'll be fine with Carla. Gary's nose might be out of
joint for a while. He thinks of himself as senior to every
body here but you.”

“That probably comes with being a doctor. In terms
of competence as an operative, he's not senior to any
one. He was never trained for the field. He's also never
learned not to let his eyes give him away.”

Molly knew what was coming and said nothing. She
held onto his arm.

“Anything you want to tell me, Molly?” he asked quietly.

She remained silent for several more steps. “Paul,
I'm going to ask you to let it lie.”

“I can't function wearing blinders and I can't set a
precedent of turning my back. How can I go away with
out settling this?”

“Please, Paul. Trust me just this once.”

“You're not going to tell me?”

“I'll tell you that Uncle Billy didn't kill anyone.
That's the truth. And I'll tell you that none of us even knew that woman existed.”

“Were you involved?”

“No.”

“Was Anton?”

“Not at all.”

“What would keep it from happening again while I'm gone?”

“It can't. Not in a million years.”

Molly had tried hard to satisfy herself of that. For
anything like it to happen again you'd have to find an
other shrink who amuses himself by sending patients
out to solicit men in bars. Then one of those women
would have to choose a bar whose bartender happens to be a benevolent assassin. Then of all the men in that bar
she'd have to pick the bartender to come on to. Next
you'd need Gary and Carla going out to head him off,
finding him in time, and then deciding what the hell,
the guy's a shit anyway, and finishing him off them
selves.

They'd told Molly, as they'd no doubt told them
selves, why the killing was unavoidable. And how reluc
tantly it was done. But their story didn't wash. Paul would have seen through it in a minute. Gelman, by
their own account, had never seen Billy's face. Gary
could just as easily have injected Gelman from behind
and then pulled Billy out of there. When Gelman woke
up, the most he could have done was call the police with
an incomprehensible story about unseen intruders who
took nothing and left no sign of forced entry.

No, Molly felt certain Gary and Carla had killed
Gelman because they wanted to. They might say it was
to contain the damage. If pressed by Paul, Gary might say his judgment had been colored by outraged profes
sional ethics and Carla might even claim feminist out
rage. And, of course, Gary would have found a way to
convince
himself that Gelman was as good as dead any
way once he hurt a friend of Billy's, so it really wasn't
murder. But the truth, Molly knew, was simpler. For the
past fifteen years of their lives, most of Gary's and
Carla's problems had been solved by killing. Whatever
they tried to tell themselves, they had killed Stanley
Gelman because killing is what they do.

“I'll think about it,” she heard Paul say.

“Are you still going to talk to Billy?”

“Yes.”

“Even after I promised he didn't do it?”

“It's necessary. But I believe you.”

“Thank you.”

They walked silently for a minute or so. Ahead of
them, the others were walking three abreast. Gary
Russo, Molly noticed, took the curb side, as a gentleman
should. Anton took the inside, as a careful man should.
Paul was right about Gary Russo.

Not that Gary ever made an issue of it, Molly re
flected, but it was clear that he did see himself as intel
lectually superior, and probably morally superior, to everyone but Paul. All those degrees and certificates.
He was liked well enough, and respected generally, but
Gary had never had to act alone in a dangerous situation
and he'd never even planned an operation. He could
never be a leader. The others would trust him in his specialty but that's as far as it would go.

Molly's eyes drifted toward John Waldo's car. He was
getting ready to move again after watching their backs.
There was another thing about Gary. She'd spotted
Waldo, she knew without asking that Paul had, and was
sure Carla had as well, but she'd have bet anything that Gary had never noticed him. And if by chance he had, Russo would have asked what he was doing there. The
rest of them knew. He was there because Anton put him
there. Anton put him there, on his own initiative, be
cause there was a chance, however slight, that Palmer
Reid might do something foolish. That was the differ
ence between them. Paul was right about Anton as well.

Anton Zivic. An intelligent man. An elegant man.
Nice sense of humor, no more ruthless than he has to be;
very decisive, deadly when he ought to be. He was a
man to be feared and yet he was not a frightening man. Molly liked him.

Anton, as much as Paul, had helped set up the sys
tem that had brought a measure of control to the ran
dom violence that marked their first year in Westport.
And he had tamed John Waldo. In fact, in that first year,
Waldo, Carla, Gary and one or two others were almost as
big a problem as poor Uncle Billy was the next. First
there was Carla, who walked out of a cheese shop to find
a young black busily prying the radio and tape
deck out
of her dashboard. She paralyzed him with a thumb
driven under the joint of his jawbone, used the car door
to crush both his hands, and, when she saw the damage
his screwdriver had done, rammed it a full six inches
into his colon.

In another automotive incident, John Waldo shat
tered the right knee of a man who insisted upon making
a high-speed shortcut of John's quiet street. A neighbor
knew the man's name. She'd asked him to stop it on one occasion, and called the police on
another, both without
effect. John Waldo, who could move through a darkened
house as silently as a night breeze, visited the speeder as he slept off his evening martinis. It was eighteen months
before the man could press a gas pedal again.

Westport's first fatality, though it was not a resident
who died, was due to massive internal bleeding, and it
came at the hands of Dr. Gary Russo, assisted, by John Waldo. Russo's home and office had been burglarized.
So had another home on Russo's street a night earlier,
and a home on a nearby street the night before that.
Waldo, a world-class burglar in his own right, agreed
that such acts should be discouraged. He caught the two
felons after two nights' surveillance as they were looting
a large Victorian owned by two vacationing attorneys.
Waldo, wearing a ski mask, disabled both men and then
called Dr. Russo, who arrived wearing a surgical mask
and mirrored glasses.

They chose the less defiant of the two burglars and
invited him to watch and listen, tightly bound, as Dr. Russo questioned the other. The one to be questioned
was advised that he could kick and scream all he wished,
to the extent screaming was possible through a cloth
gag soaked in methyl alcohol, but when the gag was eventually removed he would be expected to give his
full name and address, that of his friend, that of his
fence, and that of every burglar of his acquaintance who
had scored in Westport during the preceding year. He
was advised, truthfully, that his accomplice had already
given two such names and it would be well if at least one
of those appeared on both lists.

By the end of a leisurely two-hour
interrogation,
amid the considerable coughing up of watery blood, the
man being questioned managed to sob out a total of
sixteen names. Russo presumed the list to be largely
accurate since it included the man's father. As he in
jected 50,000 units of heparin into the vein of the man he questioned, he explained to the other that they were
now to be released. He was to take his informative
friend back to their neighborhood in nearby Bridgeport
and tell all his sixteen other friends what had happened,
suggesting that in future they practice their trade in
some other Connecticut community. Russo warned that
he would be telephoning a few at random to make cer
tain they had gotten the message. If the man failed to tell them first, therefore, foregoing the opportunity to
put the best possible face on why he had had no choice
but to name them, they would probably do him addi
tional harm. Though Russo did not mention it at the time, he felt that the message would be further drama
tized when the burglar he had injected died of massive
heparin-induced hemorrhaging within four hours of re
turning to Bridgeport. He was as good as dead anyway, Russo felt, having betrayed the names of so many dan
gerous people.

Paul had no prior knowledge of these and other epi
sodes, such as Janet Herzog torching the home of a
woman who poisoned neighborhood dogs, but he might
have expected them. His people were all specialists.
Most were accustomed to taking decisive action in threatening situations. Individual initiative had always
been encouraged, although usually within the frame
work of specific policy or in pursuit of specific objec
tives.