The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) (7 page)

"You've made
your
point, thank you very much."

Susan sipped her second glass of Chablis, sent over
by Buzz Donovan, the retired U.S.
Attorney.

"Daddy, have you seen Harriet Katz?"

"Not for
a while. I hear she's moving to Florida. It'll
do her good."

"Could I ask you a question about David?"
Lesko waited. She saw that same odd look.

“Would you have turned him in if you knew what he was doing?”

“Most people think I probably had a piece of it
.”

“Most people don’t know you. You’re the single most honest man
I've ever met."

 
"Let's not go crazy here."

 
"You wouldn't take a dime."

 
"Sweetheart," Lesko tapped his Seagram's glass, "if
someone wants to buy me drinks, or dinner, or give me
some free tickets, I'm not about to read him his rights."

 
"That's different."

 
"And that word is part of the problem. You can find
a
way to say 'that's different' about anything. David
thought that stealing from drug dealers was different
from knocking
off a payroll."

 
"What would you have done if you knew? Would you
have turned him in?"

 
"No."

 
"Because cops don't turn in cops? No matter what he
did?"

 
"Not no matter what. Just not for that."

 
"What would you have done?"

 
"What
I
wish I'd done is ask more questions when I
first saw he was spending more money than he should
have had. But it wasn't like he was buying jaguars.
It
was just things like new clothes and
a
watch and picking up more than his share of checks.
Besides, it didn't go
on
all that long."

 
"But if you'd actually known. What then?"

  “
That's not really a useful question, Susan."

  “
Please? I want to see ... please tell me." What
she almost said was that she wanted to see how well she
knew him. But she did know him. She saw the anger come flowing right through his eyes. She saw the look
that made people afraid of him.

"I would have taken him into a quiet room," his
voice
came softly through his teeth, and I
would have
kicked the living shit out of him. He would have told me
where ever
y dollar
was that could
be converted back to cash.
I would have stayed on top of him until we had it
all and then I would have taken him down to Catholic
Charities and stood behind him while he made
a
large,
anonymous donation."

"From David Katz to Catholic Charities?"
"An object lesson."

"It still bothers you. Talking about David Katz, I
mean."

"Lately, I guess. I don't know."

"Why lately?"

Lesko hesitated. But what the hell. They'd talked about this before. "Last couple of weeks I can't get through the night without dreaming about him."

"What kind of dreams?"

"Just dreams. Dumb ones."

"Yes, but what about?"

"What is this? We're learning to be open about dreams, too?"

"No, now we're learning how many times I have to
ask the same question to get an
answer. What kind of
dreams?"

"He just shows up with a bag of bagels, like normal.
He makes fun of my clothes, like normal. He doesn't
realize he's dead until I tell him he is and then I throw
him the hell out."

"Are you fast asleep or are these the pre-dawn grem
lins?

"They're the half-awake kind. Four in the morning."
Lesko pushed a cold piece of onion ring around his plate. "Listen, you want some cheesecake?"

"I'll have a bite of yours. Are you worried about
anything in particular? Dreams like that usually come
when you're worried but you don't know exactly what's
bothering you."

"Nothing's worrying me," he lied. Something was.
He just didn't know what. It was a feeling he'd learned to pay attention to when he was a cop. Half the time it
was nothing. Or it went away. But the feeling made him
more alert. He'd see things, make connections, that he
wouldn't have made otherwise. This time, for example,
he was getting a feeling about the guy at the bar who
kept looking at them.

"Maybe Uncle David was haunting you." Susan de
cided to lighten it. "Maybe he found out about Catholic
Charities."

"Maybe."

A grin started small and then it spread across her
face. "You know, I love this. This is great."

"What's great?"

"I can't believe we're talking about bad dreams and
ghosts."

"You sucker me into telling you things and then you
laugh at them?"

"Oh, no." She reached for his hand again. "It's just that no one would ever believe it. My father, Raymond
the Terrible Lesko, one of New York's all-time toughest
cops, talking about seeing a ghost. Were you scared? Tell
me you were a little bit scared."

"I got a better idea," Lesko took her hand and
squeezed it. "What if Raymond the Terrible Lesko just
crushed your fingers for being such a smartass?"

"So," Lesko shook off the subject of David Katz,
"what have you been doing at the paper?"

She spooned some whipped cream off her Irish Cof
fee.
"Just
the regular news beat. A little City Hall. And
I'm always looking for
a good, juicy feature article."

"There's not plenty happening every day in this
town?"

"Most days," she nodded. "But all the plum assign
ments go to the senior writers, and half the time the TV
reporters beat us to it, anyway. The trick is to dig some
thing up by yourself and don't tell anyone until you've
got it written. I thought I had one up in Connecticut but
it doesn't seem to be going anywhere."

“
Connecticut stories for
a New York newspaper?"

"Sure," she told him. "Half of Fairfield County com
mutes to New York every day and most of them read the
Post
on the way home."

"What kind of story was it?"

"You ever been to Westport?"

Lesko shook his head. "I don't hang around places
where they wear pink pants and paint ducks on mail
boxes."

"Or put little onions in their drinks. I know." Her
father had spent time in Greenwich about a year be
fore, working on some weird case involving the Beck
with Hotels family. He'd said he thought he'd stumbled into a convention of George Bush look-alikes. "Anyway,
you remember my old roommate, Allie McCarthy?
Well, now she's Allie Gregory, and she and her husband
bought a house in Westport, which is a lot more laid-
back than  planet Greenwich. I was up there last fall helping her fix it up. She and Tom—that's her husband
—had collected a whole pile of literature on places to
live in Connecticut. You know, stuff about tax rates,
schools, quality of life and all that. In the pile there was
this little statistical abstract that gave figures on abso
lutely everything ... lottery income by week, water
tables by average season, gypsy-moth infestation by
area ... you get the idea." Susan kept her eyes on him
as she took a sip of her coffee. "Guess what laid-back
Connecticut town had the highest suicide rate
and
the
highest accidental death rate in the state last year?"

  “T
hat's your angle? Pink pants cause stress?"

  
"Whatever the cause, isn't that a remarkable statis
tic?"

"How'd it look in past years?"

"For ten years running, both figures were a third to a
half of last year's. No other town in Connecticut, Massa
chusetts or Rhode Island had that kind of jump. I
checked."

"Figures like those, they're usually based on so many
incidents per hundred thousand population, right?"

"Per ten thousand, in this case."

"Even so, in a small town like Westport you'd only
need ... what? An extra six or seven cases a year to
double what they had before?"

"There were six more suicides and eleven more acci
dental deaths. That's seventeen extra people who died
violently last year, a number way beyond the laws of
chance."

Lesko's expression still showed no more than polite
interest. Violent death would not have been his topic of
choice. "What kinds of people died? Was the mix any
different than before?"

     
"Not really. That's the first thing I checked. My first
hunch was teen suicides because there's been a rash of them in other communities. But it's almost all ages and
income groups. There were two odd things. Adult suic
ides tend to be older people, sick people, but these
were much younger. The other thing I found was that
quite a few had records as petty criminals. Two were
drunk drivers with multiple convictions. One had a rep
utation as a wife-beater.'