The Price of Malice (13 page)

Terry was sullen. “What about him?”

“He like anything besides married women?”

Terry stopped staring at his finger and looked at Willy. “What’s that mean?”

“Boys? Girls? What else?”

Stein wrinkled his nose. “That’s gross, man. I don’t know nuthin’ about that.”

“You ever see him with Putnam?”

“I walked in on ’em once, by mistake.”

Willy laughed. “You little pervert. This had to be after you stopped living there, unless you just lied to me about the padlock.”

Terry’s face reddened.

“How long did you wait around in the bushes, waiting to quote-unquote walk in on them?”

Terry laughed guiltily. “About an hour,” he conceded.

He then stared at Willy intently. “But I didn’t know nuthin’ about anything else, and I wouldn’t’ve helped him with that.”

“Maybe,” Willy told him. “Maybe not.”

He reached for the door handle and swung his legs out, still speaking. “I know something, though. I know that you will not be leaving your place or your job or going anywhere on vacation without letting me know first, right?”

Terry nodded emphatically. “Right.”

Willy slammed the door and poked his head in through the open window. “And I know you’ll be calling me if you got any more to tell me about this.”

“Right.” Terry wiped his damp face with his open hand and caught sight of the crushed pizza box.

He groaned. “I am so fucked. I’m probably fired already.”

Willy reached into his pocket, threw a twenty-dollar bill onto the driver’s seat, and said with a smile, “Keep the change.”

Terry’s eyes were wide. “What about the customer? He’ll be pissed.”

“I am the customer, stupid,” Willy explained.

L
yn stood aside from the other pedestrians and consulted the map in her hands, trying to orient herself. She’d caught a glimpse of the Thomas Hill Standpipe—Bangor’s picturesque, almost two-million-gallon municipal water tank, overlooking most of downtown from high on a hill—and had twisted the map accordingly, finally deciphering Hammond from Main from Central Streets. Entering the city by car earlier had resulted in total confusion, what with a flurry of one-way streets and up to ten bridges spanning both the Kenduskeag and the Penobscot waterways—a third of which she’d seen up close—and she was hoping for better luck on foot.

It was a good plan. Fifteen minutes later, she entered an older building—three-storied, brick-clad, and reminiscent of some of Brattleboro’s bastions—aside from the refreshing, wall-to-wall air-conditioning—and paused in the lobby to read a glassed-in display case listing all of the offices overhead. She found what she’d been hunting since her conversation with Harry Martin, and hit the Up
button of the old-fashioned elevator, marveling at how easy it had been to locate Richard Brandhorst—and wondering if that meant she’d merely found the wrong man.

Her doubts grew when she stepped onto the mosaic-tiled third floor and found herself staring into an eight-foot-square antique mirror facing the elevator.

She hesitated, looking around. There was a choice of offices, up and down the hall, each carefully hand-labeled in black paint on its glass door entrance. She felt like she’d stepped onto a 1930s movie set.

One of the doors advertised “The Brandhorst Group.”

Lyn stuck her map into her purse, squared her shoulders, and turned the brass knob.

She found herself in a reception room with several comfortable chairs, a coffee table with some neatly arranged business magazines, and a young woman typing on a computer behind a desk. There was a blank wooden door directly behind her.

“May I help you?” she asked.

Lyn smiled brightly. “Yes. I’d like to see Mr. Brandhorst.”

Frowning, the woman checked a book lying open beside the computer. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I’m sorry,” Lyn countered cheerily. “I’m in town sort of by accident, and I was told by a mutual friend that if I didn’t see Dick when I was here, I’d better have a good excuse.” She laughed and leaned forward confidentially. “I guess he comes highly recommended.”

The receptionist showed no reaction aside from a thin smile. “And your friend’s name?”

Lyn pulled out what she hoped would be her trump card—to Brandhorst if not this woman. “Harry Martin, from Gloucester.”

Her hostess rose and crossed to the unlabeled door. “And yours?”

“Lyn Silva—sister of José Silva.”

She hesitated. Lyn was unsure if the names meant something to her, or if she was merely getting them both straight in her head.

“I’ll be right back,” was all she said, suggesting, “Why don’t you have a seat?”

Lyn didn’t bother. This would work or it wouldn’t. She stayed standing in the middle of the room, trying not to anticipate what might come next.

The door opened a minute later and the young woman reappeared, carefully closing it behind her.

“Mr. Brandhorst will see you in just a few minutes, Ms. Silva. He’s wrapping something up right now, but it won’t be long. Would you like some coffee in the meantime?”

Lyn turned her down, and the woman went back to her typing. There followed several minutes of silence, punctuated only by the staccato of the plastic keyboard, during which Lyn imagined what Brandhorst was really doing beyond that door.

The buzzer by the receptionist’s hand startled them both. The woman rose once more, without lifting the phone, and posed by the door, issuing the inevitable, “Mr. Brandhorst will see you now.”

Lyn smiled at all this Alice-in-Wonderland banality surrounding her real reason for being here, and stepped uncertainly but boldly across the threshold.

Through her bartender training, among other places, Lyn had become a practiced observer of human nature. Pragmatically, it helped identify when someone was either about to fall over or get in a fight; more broadly, she used it to judge people’s characters when time was short.

Dick Brandhorst’s body language told her she had some hard work
ahead. Though standing, he stayed behind his desk as she entered, gestured reservedly to a guest chair with two fingers of one hand, and barely managed a smile as he greeted her.

“Have a seat.”

Had he been a dentist, she would have left; instead, she immediately knew she’d found the right man. She sat.

He did not. “What can I do for you?” he asked without preamble.

Not thinking, she came out with it directly, hoping a business angle might allow them more room to talk freely.

“I was wondering how much money my brother still owed you before he died,” she said.

Brandhorst didn’t respond. He stayed where he was, as if transfixed. She had to imagine that he was considering her motives—was she a cop? A crazed family member about to pull a gun? An even more crazed family member offering to pay off the remaining debt? The fine print under the company name on the front door had advertised “Financial Planning, Investment Advice, and Portfolio Management,” which had seemed at once awkward and redundant, as when someone talks to excess in order to cover something up.

“Your brother being”—he paused for effect, swelling her suspicion—“José Silva, according to my secretary.”

Lyn smiled thinly. “Look, I know this is a little weird—my marching in here and laying this out. But I wanted to be totally straight from the start. I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me, or my family, or anything else, for that matter. I’m just trying to find out what really happened. I am not here to jam you up or get you in trouble.”

At last, he reached back, found the chair behind him, and sat down, carefully crossing his legs. His eyes remained as watchful as before—a snake’s on a mongoose, perhaps, or worse.

“Ms. Silva,” he began. “What makes you think I know anything about this?”

She nodded, having expected the posture. This was going to be a cross between chess and a negotiation, with Brandhorst hoping to extract more than he gave, while pretending to know nothing at all.

Except that she wasn’t going to play it that way.

“Because I know that you have a lot of irons in the fire and that some of them aren’t legal. But that’s what I’m saying: I don’t care. My brother was a gambler. That’s his fault. And collecting money from people like him is a service you provide. As far as I know, that contract was being honored, wasn’t it?”

“Go on.”

“So, the rest of the family didn’t know this was going on. We just thought they were a couple of lobstermen doing what they do. Then a storm hit, they disappeared, and we moved on, thinking they’d been lost at sea. But they weren’t, were they?”

He merely frowned and shook his head vaguely.

“The boat was found near the Canadian border, just a few weeks ago,” she resumed, unsure of her headway. “Stored in a boathouse, all identifiers painted over.”

“Does sound like a mystery,” Brandhorst said blandly, but the legs became uncrossed and the pen he’d picked up idly froze in his hand.

“Where’s the boat now?” he asked.

“That doesn’t matter,” Lyn told him, struck by the question. “The mystery is whether they were killed or not. I’ll tell you something else you already know: In order to pay you, they were smuggling goods into the U.S. from Canada. That’s a Homeland Security problem, meaning federal agents and U.S. attorneys and closed inquests and everything else. All that shit can land on you if you want it to, since
we already know you’re a link in this chain, but from my position, that’s entirely your choice. I’m not here for that.”

He scowled. “Hold it. Are you threatening me? I thought you wanted help.”

“I do,” she insisted. “But I want you to know I’m serious.”

He kept on with the outrage. “That’s a funny way of showing it. Help me out or I’ll call the cops—especially when I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

She decided to play by his rules. She rose and crossed to the door. “Look,” she told him. “You already screwed up. You agreed to talk with me. Not smart if the names I gave your secretary meant nothing. Cops don’t need proof to start with; they just need it at the end. Till then, they run around interviewing people, staking out offices and homes, and getting court orders to dig everywhere.” She pointed to a row of beige file cabinets lining the wall. “I can get that ball rolling, if you want. Even if it doesn’t pan out, your clients might decide you’ve got a reputation they don’t need.”

She paused by the door, while he stared at her meditatively.

“Tough little bitch,” he finally said. “You sure they didn’t commit suicide just to get away from you?”

She placed her hand on the knob. “That the best you can come up with?”

He flapped a hand in the air, as if shooing away a fly. “Sit down, for crying out loud. Let’s see what we can figure out.”

She accepted his offer, genuinely curious.

He laced his hands behind his neck. “All right. Despite your being obnoxious and wrong—about everything—I can see you’ve had a rough time, and I’d like to show you I’m not the asshole you think.”

“Meaning you know something?”

“Meaning I know people who know people. I deal in finances.
That’s a who-you-know kind of business. If I want to get in on a deal at the bottom, I’ve got to know what’s going on in the street.”

A comment welled up in her throat, but she kept it quiet so he could keep laying out a mythology he probably believed was being captured on a tape recorder.

“Okay,” she said instead.

Brandhorst pulled a pad toward him from the middle of the desk. “Why don’t you give me a few details? How to spell your dad’s and brother’s names, the name of the boat, where it’s moored now, a few dates—stuff like that. I’ll make some inquiries and get back to you.”

She covered her contempt with a counteroffer, smiling as she spoke. “How ’bout this, instead? I’m at a local motel—what time should I come back tomorrow?”

His hand froze around the pen again. “That’s not much time. I might not have anything for you.”

“Then I’ll come back the day after that.”

He frowned, glanced out the window overlooking the street, as if composing himself, and then suggested, “Let’s get to it, then.”

S
am slowed down at the entrance of the West Bratt Mobile Park, a name conjured up, she imagined, by a developer with a loathing for polysyllables and a marginal sense of subtlety. It was a middling place on the economic scale, neither high-class—with picket fences, concrete slabs, a central clubhouse, and aboveground pools—nor subsistence level. The roads were dirt but free of roots and car-sized potholes, and some effort had been made to preserve a few trees, instead of either clear-cutting them or wedging the homes amid a tangle of half-dead, mature evergreens destined to fall over and crush the nearest roof.

For that matter, it wasn’t far from what Sam herself had called home as a child.

She glanced down at the printout she had cradled in her lap and drove down the road, killing the air conditioner and rolling down all the windows. She wanted to feel and hear what this neighborhood experienced daily, if only in passing.

It was incredibly hot, and very quiet, the temperature having either driven everyone indoors or reduced their activities to merely
breathing, like iguanas on a rock. In fact, she did see a few people, sitting in the shade, moving as little as possible.

Sam reached the address and slowly rolled to a stop, the back of her shirt already sticking to the car seat.

She opened the door, got out, and looked around. The heat almost buzzed inside her head—echoing the sound of distant grasshoppers and the gentle hum of traffic.

“My mom’s not here.”

She tried locating the source of the boy’s voice, but saw nothing moving.

“How do you know I’m looking for her?” she asked the surrounding air.

“You’re a cop, right?”

“Your mom get a lot of visits from us?”

“Wouldn’t you know that?”

Sam smiled. “Yeah, we probably would.”

“So, you either know or you didn’t check, which makes you pretty sloppy.”

That made her laugh. “Ouch. Are you the family member who gets all the high grades?”