The Butcher's Boy (38 page)

He sat down behind his desk, pursed his lips, and folded his hands. "I'm glad you're here early, because I want you to be ready to help with this thing."

Elizabeth thought, I'm not fired.

He leaned forward and said, "You're the one who is most familiar with the case, and that makes it doubly important that you be here when it gets to the trial stage."

Elizabeth thought again, I'm not fired. Then she thought, most familiar?

She said, "What about John?"

He said, "John?"

"Yes, John."

"You don't know?" Then he shook his head, and stared at his desk for a moment. "John Brayer is dead." He looked up at her again and said, "I'm sorry, I thought you knew. Stupid of me."

Elizabeth felt tears clouding her vision. She said, "When? How?"

Connors shook his head again. "Don't waste your tears on Mr. Brayer," he said. It was an order. "He was our informer and his friends decided he was too great a risk. It was in Las Vegas, shortly after the . . . the Palermo incident. He was found in the desert somewhere outside Las Vegas. It took quite some time to identify him."

"But nobody told me," she said. "Why didn't anybody tell me?" She was weeping now. Brayer was dead, and she'd been there, thinking—what? It was too wrong, there were so many things to remember. But she realized Connors had said something else too. Brayer the leak? She said, "John wasn't the leak.

What are you talking about?"

Connors became the formal superior again. He spoke very slowly, as though he expected to say it once and never have to say it again. "When you and I spoke on your telephone we set certain wheels in motion. We both knew 185

that. The result was that you and I both got an unpleasant surprise. The man who was killed was our John Brayer. So that's that. After he was killed we found he had a large amount of money in his home. Almost two hundred thousand dollars to be exact. And after that we received other evidence, which proves that John Brayer was the informer." He formed his hands into fists. "When I think of the things he must have told them—"

Elizabeth said, "No. You're wrong. I knew him and—"

Connors shook his head. "No, Miss Waring. The evidence I'm speaking of is conclusive. If you'll permit me to give you the most recent information, I'm sure you'll agree. I must caution you, however, that this information is sensitive.

It must be released gradually and cautiously, at the right time. Some of it is very difficult to accept, but you must bear with me." He looked almost fatherly now, his white hair no longer in its customary order. In her detachment Elizabeth thought with surprise, this isn't any easier for him than it is for me.

She said, "All right." She would be quiet. It was all she could do. But she knew Brayer hadn't had that kind of money. It must have been planted.

He almost smiled. He said, "Good. Then let me fill you in. Early yesterday the police in Saratoga Springs, New York, received an anonymous telephone call telling them that they would find the remains of Edgar Fieldston buried on the estate of Carlo Balacontano. Actually, it's a place where they raise horses."

"A stud farm," said Elizabeth .

"Yes," he said. "On the strength of the call, the police got a warrant and raided the farm. What they found was, I'm afraid, not a pretty sight. It was the head and hands of Edgar Fieldston, and the pistol that killed him." Connors looked down again. "He was shot in the head."

Elizabeth waited.

"They also found the missing bookkeeping from Fieldston Growth Enterprises. It was a checkbook and we've been able to match the balances to the accounts of Harry Orloff and others."

Elizabeth said, "Wait, Mr. Connors."

He said, "Honestly, Miss Waring. There is no question at all. When you see the evidence for yourself you'll be amazed. Positively amazed. We have conclusive evidence that Carlo Balacontano was the silent partner in Fieldston Growth Enterprises and that he was involved in the killing of Edgar Fieldston and had him buried on his farm along with the secret bookkeeping of the company.

You know, he used FGE to invest illegal profits amounting to over two million dollars. And another thing. Yesterday he received the money Edgar Fieldston got for the FGE stock in the Bahamas. Four million dollars. The serial numbers all match the list the Federal Reserve people made when the money was sent to Miami. It was mailed to Balacontano inside a package of paperback books."

Elizabeth said, "Wait. It must be a frame."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's a frame-up. He wouldn't bury Fieldston's head and hands on his own property. He'd do the same thing with them he did with the rest of the body. Did 186

you find the rest?"

Connors was flustered. "No, but—"

"And the gun and this checkbook. It's ridiculous. Mr. Connors, a man like Balacontano must have people killed all the time. Why would he be so stupid? He could hire experts. People so skilled we'd never find anything. And who made the call to the police?"

Connors said, "Miss Waring, I'm afraid you're asking questions that don't concern us. We have already compared the checkbook with what remains of FGE's records. What is there is genuine. The coroner has determined that Fieldston did die from a shot from the gun found with the, uh, remains. All on Balacontano's property. We have motive, body, weapon. Mr. Balacontano is going to prison. I don't care who made the telephone call or why."

"You know it's a frame," said Elizabeth. "I'm not saying he didn't own FGE, or even that he didn't have Fieldston killed. But somebody planted what was left of Fieldston, the gun, and the checkbook. That was who made the call. And come to think of it, that had to be the one who actually killed Fieldston."

"I know no such thing," said Connors. "And you're stepping very far out of line. I'll ignore it because of your distress over recent events. When you've looked at the evidence you'll see how clearly it implicates Carlo Balacontano."

Elizabeth just stood there knowing that anything she said would be wrong. Connors didn't want to hear the truth.

"I'll tell you what," said Connors. "You've had a hard time of it over the last couple of weeks. And you've built up a backlog of compensatory time off. I want you to take a few weeks. Go somewhere. Have you ever been to Hawaii?

How about London?"

"I've been away a lot. It's good to be home," she said.

Connors repeated, "I'd like to see you take a vacation."

Elizabeth closed her eyes while the plane hurtled down the runway and lifted itself into the air. That was the only part of it she minded, the moment when it was going too fast to stop, but still seemed to weigh tons of metal. Whatever it was that converted it from a freight train to a bird was still essentially mysterious to her. The explanation given by people who understand such things sounded perfectly reasonable to the part of her mind that made decisions; to the part of her mind that controlled her pulse and her eyelids, it sounded like nonsense. But again the airplane defied common sense and rose into the sky.

In the airport she'd bought some magazines to read, but now they seemed to belong to a world that was foreign to her. Sometime she'd care about new ways to turn a strict diet into an adventure, but not now. Soon enough, 187

when she returned from this mandatory vacation. When she'd done her time.

Elizabeth had picked London because she remembered it as cool and wet and densely inhabited. It was a place that looked as though people had always lived there, layers and layers of them, one over the other through time. From there, if she still felt restless, she could go on to the Continent. She wondered if it would be in the London newspapers when she got there. Probably it would.

American scandals seemed to have a peculiar appeal to the English. When the Senator's staff turned up FGE, Balacontano had acted to protect himself. That had been the week poor Veasy had picked to write his letter to the Department of Justice Organized Crime Division. His careful, semiliterate, handwritten letter explaining why he thought his union's pension fund was being looted had found its way through the bureaucratic labyrinth to the desk of the one man who had any knowledge of Veasy's problem. John Brayer. The papers would love that part of it.

The letter had been in Brayer's desk when Connors had ordered the search. That was the part that still kept Elizabeth awake at night. Brayer.

She heard herself sigh. She would try to stay abroad during the trial, at least the first part of it with its sensational revelations. She already knew the strategy the department would follow. They'd arrange to have the trial in Saratoga Springs, where the evidence had been found. Just the head and hands—the parts used to identify a body—and the gun and the checkbook, all buried together a foot or two beneath the surface. But she knew the evidence wouldn't matter to the jury, any more than it did to Connors. If Balacontano wasn't the one who had killed Fieldston, everyone knew he had ordered the other murders. Fieldston was just the one they could prove. So they'd use what they had, and the jury would go along with it. If the prosecutors played according to Connors's plan the jury would even come to believe that the lack of a whole corpse was especially damaging. You had to be a monster to cut a man up like that. A monster, she thought, or a man who wanted to move evidence from one place to another. But Balacontano would be convicted. And maybe the prosecutors would generate enough heat to convict the men found with him at the stud farm at the time of the raid. It might be a week or more before someone else moved in to fill the vacuum he left in the Northeast.

Elizabeth was out of it now. She looked around her at the other passengers in the cabin. There were the usual tourists, an elderly couple seeing the world outside Iowa before it was too late, a pair of college girls in bluejeans, and three businessmen staring at papers resting on their trays. The only passenger within the limited range of Elizabeth ’s vision who wasn't immediately identifiable was the man across the aisle from her. She pretended to read one of her magazines while she studied him. He was wearing a comfortable sort of sport coat that she decided was too informal for a businessman trying to impress people in London. He was traveling alone and she couldn't see any carry-on luggage. He was just a quiet, solitary man with nothing special about him. He was probably a professor. He was a professor of English or history making one of 188

those professorial pilgrimages to England, hoping perhaps that if he could stand where William the Conqueror stood or walk where Chaucer walked he would have insights unavailable to mere reason.

As Elizabeth watched the man leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. She felt proud of herself for her perception. He was a professor.

And right now he's thinking about the fun he's going to have prowling around in castles and cathedrals and libraries where musty old books have sat on the shelves for centuries. The man shifted slightly in his seat. Elizabeth thought she caught just the slightest suspicion of a smile on the corners of his mouth. She felt an involuntary instant of affection for him.

The man's smile faded and the skin at the corners of his eyes tightened in concentration. He was trying to remember. It was ridiculous, he knew, but once the problem had occurred to him, it had bothered him for days. What was the name of Eddie Mastrewski's cat?

THE END