Thick as Thieves (18 page)

“Fullback?”

“Defensive mid.”

“You must be fast,” Carr says. The boy nods, and Carr points at his soccer jersey. It’s blue, with a broad gold band across the chest. “Boca Juniors?”

Simon Bessemer raises an eyebrow and nearly smiles. “The home jersey.”

Carr nods. “I’ve been to some of their matches.”

The near smile turns skeptical, and the boy looks suddenly like his mother. “In Argentina?” Carr nods again, but the disbelief doesn’t fade. “I watch them on satellite,” the boy says, “on the soccer channel. You’re a friend of my mom?”

“We’re doing research, my boss and I, for a documentary about Wall Street. About banking.”

The boy’s forehead clouds with questions, but he doesn’t ask any. “My dad worked in banking,” he says finally, “when we lived in New York.”

Carr nods again. “You must’ve been pretty young then. You remember much about it?”

Simon Bessemer studies Carr for another moment and shakes his head. “I don’t really know him,” he says. “I haven’t seen him in a while.” And he turns and leaves the kitchen.

His footsteps recede down the hall and up a flight of stairs. Carr looks again at the pictures on the fridge. Something in the boy’s eyes is familiar, though he cannot say what at first. Something about the watchfulness, and the suspicion. Something about the deliberation. Later, after he has delivered a beer to Valerie and brought another one for Tracy Holland and excused himself again, it comes to him. He is in a hallway powder room, sluicing water on his face, and he looks up, into the mirror, and there it is.

“Portland to JFK at eight,” Carr says as he comes down the wharf. “Then we pick up a rental and drive to East Hampton.”

Valerie grimaces. “Eight
a.m.
? Do we have to be such fucking early birds?”

Carr smiles at her. She takes his hand, and they walk farther out. “There’s a worm waiting for us,” he says. “At least, I hope there is.”

Valerie nods. “Tracy was pretty clear about it,” she says. “The date it went from merely intolerable with Bessemer to call-in-the-lawyers bad. She knew when it was, and where he’d been, and she knew that whatever he was doing, he’d been doing it with Prager. Of course, the fact that it was the weekend of their fifth anniversary, and Howard was supposed to have been at home with her, probably helped it stick in her mind.

“Before that weekend—according to her—he was just a middling-to-bad husband and dad, out drinking with clients too often, paying no attention to her or the kid when he was at home, whining all the time. After that weekend was when it went south in a big way: the gambling and drugs and whores—usually with Prager as his wingman. Or vice versa.”

“Sounds like a worm to me,” Carr says.

What’s left of daylight is sputtering out in the low brick skyline of Portland. The sodium lights along the wharf cast an amber glow on Valerie’s face. Her hand is warm in his. She leads Carr to the railing, and they look out at the swaying boats.

“She didn’t like you,” Valerie says after a while.

“Yeah, I got that.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally—she doesn’t like men. She’s permanently angry.”

“I got that, too. Is it all thanks to Howard?”

“He just finished the job. Her dad started it, and there were others in between.”

“You got all that from a beer?”

“It was six beers, each, and it helped that you made yourself scarce.” Valerie unwinds her hand and slips it around his waist. “Besides,” she says, “I’m a good listener. People open up to me.”

“So I’ve seen.”

“Most people, anyway.” She looks at the harbor again and starts to whistle something Carr almost recognizes.

He is fairly certain she isn’t drunk—he’s seen her drink much more than the beers she had with Holland and the bottle of wine he and she shared in the hotel lounge, and with no discernible effect. No, this evening she’s something different—something open and unguarded, and seemingly without calculation. A Valerie he hasn’t seen before? A performance he hasn’t seen, anyway. She leans against him at the rail, and her scent mixes with the smells of diesel and low tide.

“You like the water, don’t you?” she asks. “Diving, sailing—all of that.”

“I do.”

“You grew up around it?”

“I learned to sail when I was a kid.”

“Who from?”

“My father.”

“You were close to him?”

Carr looks at the bobbing lights and the water, nearly black now. He shakes his head. “I liked it in spite of him.”

“An asshole?”

“Like Tracy Holland—permanently pissed off.”

“At you?”

“At life; at the world; at my mother. I was a convenient proxy.”

The wind picks up, colder now, and Valerie shivers beside him. Carr takes off his blazer and hangs it around her shoulders. Valerie rubs her hand up and down his forearm. “Poor baby boy,” she says, chuckling.

“Are you making light of my troubled childhood?”

“Did they smack you around? Or each other?”

“No.”

“Then we have different definitions of
troubled.
”

“You have that kind of trouble?”

She looks up. Her face is flushed from the wine, and Carr can feel the heat rising from her. “I was too cute to get mad at.”

“Even then?”

She nods. “Still, it sucks having an asshole for a dad. Probably sucks worse for a guy. Role models, and all that.”

“You’re watching too much daytime television down in Boca.”

Valerie wraps his jacket around her and laughs. “It explains so much, though—Deke’s appeal to you, his big, bluff paternal thing, why you’re still picking at what happened in Mendoza like it’s a scab.”

Carr steps back from the rail. “Definitely too much television.”

“Oprah can’t tell me shit, babe. You think I can do what I do without knowing what makes people tick? Now tell me Declan wasn’t a father figure to you.”

“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”

Valerie laughs. “Of course not.”

Carr takes another step back, and puts his hands in the air. “Deke had big plans, he ran a good crew, and he was a good soldier—disciplined, focused, a good motivator. He kept his head in the game, and he made us all rich. That’s what I know.”

“You’re remembering a different guy,” she says. “Yes, he thought big, and he ran a good crew—but disciplined? Focused? C’mon, Carr—that’s what he had you for. And half the time, he didn’t want to listen. Deke liked any excuse to light it up, and you know it. He got bored too easy, and deep down he was a fucking cowboy. Toward the end, it wasn’t even down that deep. Personally, I think it was some sort of midlife crisis.”

“That’s bullshit. Besides Mendoza—”

“I’m not just talking about Mendoza, and you know it. There was César, and before that the Russians in Nicaragua. Before that, there was—”

“That’s enough, Vee,” Carr says, and his voice is icy.

“Don’t go all Eastwood on me now—we were almost having a conversation.”

“You were doing the talking.”

She smiles at him, and there’s a little pity in it. “Okay,” she says softly. “But you’re remembering a different guy.”

She takes his hand again and leads him down the wharf, past a yellow cigarette boat, a chrome-heavy sport fisher, and a big white catamaran. She’s whistling again, softly, and Carr sighs.

“What about you?” he asks. “No lingering mommy and daddy issues?”

She laughs. “You don’t know anybody more mentally healthy than me.”

“Most of the people I know are borderline sociopaths. Your parents stay together?”

Her laugh is sharp, and it echoes like a shot on the water. “They were both military, so they knew how to fight. It was like a nonstop cage match.”

“But you have no issues.”

She shakes her head and slips her arm around him. “It doesn’t always have to be like that, you know—like my parents, and yours. Like the battling Bessemers.”

“I haven’t seen many examples to the contrary.”

Valerie moves in front of him, and slides her hands under his shirt. They’re cold and smooth against his ribs, and a shudder runs through him. “Maybe that’s what we’ll do afterward,” she whispers. “You and me. We’ll conduct a little research to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.”

“You think we’ll have to dig them up?”

Valerie laughs, and her mouth is hungry on his. “Early morning tomorrow,” she whispers. “We should call it a night.”

Carr arrives at the workhouse at three p.m. on Friday. He has swum, showered, shaved, and dressed in a blazer, jeans, and dark glasses. No one inside the house looks as good.

Bobby is bristled and fragile, and he’s working slowly though a liter of Coke and an egg sandwich. Latin Mike is also unshaven, vaguely jaundiced, and unconcerned with anything beyond the cup of coffee on the table before him, the cigarette burning in his ashtray, and the bottle of Advil in his hand. Dennis is green, shaking death. Carr lets the door slam behind him and smiles when they wince.

“I see you’ve been busy while I was away,” he says loudly. Mike ignores him, and Bobby flips him the bird over his sandwich. Carr chuckles. “How’s our man Bessemer doing?” he asks.

Dennis wipes sweat from his forehead. “Pickled. He was at the gin again last night, and didn’t get up until noon. Hasn’t been out of the house yet today. Stearn called him an hour ago, to check that his party was still on for tonight.”

“And?”

“Howie told him nine o’clock.”

“Has he spoken to Prager again?”

“He’s tried twice—yesterday and the day before—and got nowhere.” Carr nods. “And Amy Chun? How’s she coming along?”

Dennis taps on his keyboard. “Good. I pulled some stuff from her laptop—her personal one, not the Isla Privada equipment.”

“And?”

Dennis manages a smile. “She’s been e-mailing Val—Jill, I mean. She talks about how she misses her, how much she enjoys hanging out with her.”

“Fuckin’ Vee,” Bobby says through a mouthful of egg.

“Chun’s also been searching for anything and everything about Jill Creary on the Web,” Dennis says.

“No more stalking Janice Lessig?”

“Not for a while now.”

“What’s she finding on Jill?”

“Everything we put out there, everything Val asked for. Footprints in New York and in Boston. Modeling, PR, cooking school.”

“Chun does all the looking herself? No professional help?”

“All by herself,” Dennis says, and scrolls through some e-mail. “Her last note to Jill, she talks about the two of them going on vacation together.”

Carr shakes his head. “That’s fast.”

Mike rouses himself from his coffee to smile bitterly. “A real heart-breaker, that Vee.”

Bobby laughs, takes a bite of his sandwich, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He looks at Carr. “You gonna say how your trip went?”

“It went fine, Bobby.”

“Fine as in you had a nice little vacation, or fine as in you found something out about Bessemer?”

Carr smiles, but says nothing.

“Asshole,” Bobby says, and he takes a long swallow of Coke. “What time do we set up at Howie’s tonight?”

Carr’s smile widens. “I’m thinking six.”

Latin Mike scowls. “Why the hell we need to get there so early? Stearn won’t show till nine, and the pimp’s people won’t be any sooner.”

“We don’t need to wait for them,” Carr says. “We don’t need them.”

Dennis looks up. “What?”

“We don’t need them. We’re set for tonight, without them.”

Confusion and relief play across Dennis’s pale face. “What about Stearn, and Lamp? They’re expecting—”

“Howie will sort them out for us.”

Latin Mike shakes his head. “Guess
jefe
’s trip worked out okay.”

Bobby looks at Carr. “How do you want to work it tonight?”

“We give Bessemer no time to think,” Carr says. “I want fear, confusion, and compliance.”

Bobby nods, and burps loudly. “You sound just like my ex,” he says.

Water gurgles in the shower drain as Howard Bessemer presses a towel to his face, and then he hears his front door open. He leaves damp footprints on the tiles as he steps cautiously out of his bedroom, and a puddle forms where he stands frozen and stares openmouthed at the men in his entrance foyer.

Carr hands the laptop to Latin Mike. “Set it up in the living room,” he says, and Mike nods and walks off. Carr looks at Bessemer. “You want to get your pants on, Howie, or are you good like that?”

Bessemer wraps his towel more tightly about his waist. His mouth closes and opens again and a sound comes out, but it’s not a word.

“Pants, Howie.”

Bessemer squints, and takes a step backward. “Wha … What?”

Carr points to the bedroom. “Pants.”

“Who … Who the hell are—”

“Get your fucking pants on, Howie,” Carr says, smiling, and he unbuttons his blazer and lets Bessemer see the Glock in his belt. Bessemer backs slowly into the bedroom, and Carr counts to twenty. When he walks to the bedroom door, he finds Bessemer holding the telephone handset, staring at it.

“Just out of curiosity, Howie, if the phone was working, just who do you think you’d call?”

Bessemer drops the phone and stumbles on the edge of his towel. Carr waits in the doorway while Bessemer dresses in Madras shorts and a polo shirt that’s too tight across the gut. Then he walks him into the living room.

It’s a long, bright space, with Persian rugs on the floor, equestrian sketches on the walls, and teak and rattan furniture that is old but still solid. Latin Mike is standing at a black lacquer cabinet whose doors are open to reveal barware and bottles. He pours two fingers of Glenlivet into a tumbler and offers the bottle to Carr.

“Not just now,” Carr says. “You have the disk?” Latin Mike produces a DVD case and scales it across the room. Carr plucks it from the air. “Collect his cell phones. They should be in the office.” Mike downs the scotch and nods, and Carr carries the DVD to the laptop that is open on a low teak table by the sofa.

“Have a seat, Howie,” Carr says.

Bessemer draws himself up and takes a deep breath. “Just who the
hell
are you, and what do you think you’re doing in my house?” The teddy bear face is damp and pink, and the voice is shaky.