Blood Money (13 page)
Authors: James Grippando
I
t was league night at Bird Bowling Lanes, and all twenty-two lanes were filled. While each team bore the name and logo of a different sponsor, collectively they had to be the largest display of baby-blue shirts south of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Merselus found a small table near the shoe rental counter, sat down with his cheese pizza and beer, and waited. If he’d been at a pizzeria, he would have sent the pie back to the kitchen as too greasy. Funny how being at a bowling alley made it tasty. To a point. He finished one slice and pushed the rest aside.
Merselus checked his phone. Ten minutes before seven. Ten minutes until showtime. He kept an eye on the main entrance as he drank from his longneck. Technically, he was working, but one beer wasn’t against the rules. Especially since he made the rules.
“Could I squeeze by you and get to those balls, please?” a woman asked.
She was dressed in one of those baby-blue shirts, and Merselus was sitting in front of a rack of nine-pound pink bowling balls, so he knew exactly what she was after, but he turned it into something else.
“Lady, your only hope of squeezing by anybody is a ten-week gig on
The Biggest Loser
.”
She looked more hurt than angry, but she just stood there.
“Take a hike, fatso,” said Merselus.
She hurried away. Merselus watched her ass shake as she made a beeline to another rack on the other side of the alley. He was about to check his phone again for the time, then stopped himself. Patience was normally one of his virtues, but on a night like this, after all the planning, even Merselus had to remind himself to be cool.
His gaze swept the alley. A guy on lane fifteen was in the seventh frame of a perfect game, and a crowd was beginning to gather. Merselus ignored the excitement, his focus shifting back and forth from the main entrance to the men’s locker room.
It took about a week to get approved for a locker at Bird Bowl, and Merselus had reserved one with a stolen ID and fifty bucks in cash. The bait was inside the locker. It was just a matter of minutes before the dumbest fish in the sea came along to take it. Merselus recognized him the minute he walked through the main entrance doors.
The dossier Merselus had compiled on Brian Hewitt was pretty simple. Twenty-seven years old. Unmarried. Unemployed. Two years of community college. He’d lived the fast life during Miami’s real estate boom, once upon a time having owned a town house in Coral Gables, a duplex in Hollywood, and six waterfront condos from Fort Lauderdale to Miami Beach. His typical Friday night had involved two lucky friends and a table full of women who were thrilled to take turns going down on a guy who could shove enough fraudulent mortgage applications through the system to afford a thousand-dollar bottle of Cristal at a South Beach nightclub. The burst of the subprime bubble had left him sharing a shitty two-bedroom apartment with three other losers who had been on a downward spiral since their glory days of high school football. Bankruptcy had seemed like the only answer to seventy thousand dollars in credit card debt. Until Merselus had come along. Not that Mr. Hewitt would ever hear the name Merselus, or have even the slightest idea who he was dealing with.
Merselus allowed himself one more check of the time: seven
P.M.
Hewitt probably wasn’t as stupid as he looked, but he was prompt. And desperate. Not to mention way out of his league.
Merselus watched Hewitt weave through the crowd, past the game room, past the billiard tables, past the ladies’ lounge. He walked briskly, a man on a mission, a complete newbie who had never been on the receiving end of a drop in his life. The clincher was the telltale glance over the shoulder before stopping at the water fountain. He knelt down and pretended to tie his shoe—
ah, very smooth
—and found the key exactly where Merselus had promised it would be: in the gap between the loose rubber baseboard and the wall beside the fountain. Hewitt tucked the key into his pants pocket, gave another nervous glance over his shoulder, and disappeared into the men’s locker room.
Merselus drank his beer and waited. He had no fear that Hewitt or anyone else would recognize him. The eyeglasses, the flat-billed baseball cap, and the three-day stubble were disguise enough for this simple task. Across the bowling alley, he could see the agents in plainclothes moving into position, which gave him a rush of excitement and satisfaction. His call to the FBI had been anonymous, and he was pretty sure that he’d shared enough details to make his tip credible. But there had been no guarantee that the bureau would act on it. Thankfully, they’d not only acted on it, but they’d been smart enough to figure out for themselves that flooding the bowling alley with uniformed police officers would have scared off Hewitt and blown the setup.
A minute later, Hewitt emerged from the lounge with a bowling-ball bag tucked under his arm—the same bag Merselus had left inside the locker. The excitement on his face quickly turned to fear. Two men stopped him right outside the men’s lounge. One flashed a badge. The other took the bag, zipped it open, and looked inside.
There was no bowling ball in there, of course.
A split second later, Hewitt was up against the wall, feet spread, hands cuffed behind his waist as the FBI read him his rights. The bowler who was working on the perfect game in lane fifteen had suddenly lost his audience. The curious crowd was gravitating toward the men’s lounge. The manager stepped out from behind the counter and pushed toward the center of the commotion.
Merselus finished his beer and headed for the exit. The heat and humidity of another summer night hit him as the doors opened. He was in the parking lot, halfway to his car, when he noticed that someone had followed him out.
“Hey, asshole,” the guy called out.
Merselus kept walking.
The heckler kept coming, now just a few steps behind him. “Hey, you owe my wife an apology.”
Great, the thin-skinned fat chick sent her husband.
Merselus wanted to ignore him, but the footsteps were closing in from behind. Merselus stopped, turned sharply, and cast a laserlike glare that very few people had seen and lived to remember.
The guy nearly screeched to a halt.
“Back off,” said Merselus.
Two simple words and the expression on Merselus’ face were enough to make the guy’s voice shake in response.
“You are, uh, gonna go back in that bowling alley and you’re gonna, uhm, apologize to my wife.”
The fear was audible. Merselus approached slowly, looking him straight in the eye, not stopping until they were nearly nose to nose.
“No. I’m not.” His tone wasn’t agitated or even argumentative—just a simple statement of fact, which made it all the more effective.
The guy was built solid, obviously no stranger to the gym, and there was no question in Merselus’ mind that he’d successfully defended his wife’s honor in the past. This time, however, the knight in shining armor nearly dissolved on the spot, smart enough to sense that he wasn’t dealing with just another bully at a bowling alley. Not even close.
The man took a step back, then turned and started away, walking at first, but nearly at a trot by the time he reached the doors and retreated into the safety of the bowling alley.
Good call
, thought Merselus.
Really good call.
He reached deep into his pocket and dug out his keys—sans the locker key—and headed toward his car.
J
ack drove himself to Jackson Memorial Hospital that Thursday night. Rene’s murder made a thing like a civil lawsuit seem trivial, but the Facebook posting was a bona fide legal emergency, and to Jack’s knowledge no judge had ever excused a direct violation of a court order based on the there-are-other-things-in-life-that-are-more-important defense. A frank conversation with his clients was in order.
Jack stopped for the red light at the main entrance to the medical campus. A homeless man working the left-turn lane flashed a cardboard sign that said
NO FUCKING JOB OR FAMILY, NEED MONEY TO GET DRUNK. WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?
Jack could relate. He rolled down the window and gave him a couple bucks for being honest.
“Bless you,” the guy said.
Jack’s “You’re welcome” caught in his throat. He’d suddenly noticed the green directional sign posted on the other side of the intersection:
MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE
, it read. The crushing reality had set in hours earlier, and Jack wasn’t headed back to the ME’s office. But the mere sight of the sign took the pain to another level, and the words just came out.
“Rene, I am so sorry.”
“Who you callin’ Rene?” said the homeless guy.
A horn blasted from behind. The light had turned green, and someone was in a hurry. Jack put the car in gear, followed the street to the parking garage, and walked across the courtyard to the hospital entrance. He met Ben Laramore in the ground-floor cafeteria, seated at the same table where, less than twenty-four hours before—it seemed so much longer—a process server had served them with the judge’s order to file the complaint under seal and keep the allegations confidential.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” said Laramore.
“Thank you for that,” said Jack.
“I feel even worse now that I realize you were trying to call me while all this was going on. I didn’t realize the number I was ignoring was your new phone.”
“Changing my number was the only way to stop the crazy calls I was getting. But don’t worry about it. I was the one who told you not to answer calls from numbers you don’t recognize.”
Laramore sighed deeply. “Is this story on the news yet?”
“So far it’s just local reports about a body found along Tamiami Trail. Once the next of kin is notified, something will need to be said about the fact that she worked here at Jackson. It’s not clear when the media will make the connection between Rene and me, but it doesn’t seem to take BNN long to connect anything to me. That’s not something you need to worry about, though.”
“I am worried. You said Rene was your source. She was the whole reason we knew about BNN’s interference and how it prevented the paramedics from transmitting information from the ambulance to the ER physicians. Don’t we lose that evidence now that she’s dead?”
“No. Rene was our source, not our witness. Everything she told me was hearsay. Even if she were alive, I’d need to subpoena the ER doctors, the paramedics—all the people who were actually involved in treating your daughter. Don’t worry. We’ll get all that. Nothing is lost.”
Laramore did a quick check around the cafeteria, as if to underscore the confidentiality of what he was about to say. “Do you think that’s why she got killed? Because she was the source?”
“No.”
Laramore paused, as if expecting Jack to say more. “That’s it, that’s your answer: ‘No’?”
“BNN is not exactly a model corporate citizen. But I don’t think they kill people to win civil lawsuits.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Laramore. “They probably draw the line at putting young women in comas.”
Jack fully understood the bitterness.
“Sorry,” said Laramore. “Don’t mean to be so sarcastic. This whole thing is just getting . . . it’s getting to be too much.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
Laramore sat back in his chair, breathing out. “So, of all things, we now have a social media problem.”
“I had a tech agent from the FBI check out Celeste’s Facebook page. There is no sign of hacking into her account. Which means that whoever posted the allegations of our complaint on Celeste’s Facebook page used her username and password.”
“Well, that puts that person one step ahead of Celeste’s mother and me. We have no idea how to access Celeste’s account. In fact, I don’t know the first damn thing about Facebook.”
Jack spoke while pulling up Celeste’s page on his iPhone. “It has about eight hundred and fifty million users worldwide. It’s especially popular with people your daughter’s age. They constantly update their status, telling their friends that they’re going out for pizza, dumping a boyfriend, getting a zit.”
“Getting a zit?”
“I’m not exaggerating. Most of the stuff is utterly useless, food for online information addicts whose sphere of knowledge is forever shrinking until someday they wake up and realize that they know absolutely nothing about anything except for whatever it is that happens to be going on at the moment.” Jack laid his phone on the table, the screen facing Laramore. It was Celeste’s Facebook page with the sixty-seven status updates that recounted verbatim the allegations of the complaint.
“But then, of course, there are things like this.”
Laramore looked at it. Jack could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t reading anything. He was staring at Celeste’s profile photograph—the way she’d looked just a week earlier.
“Beautiful, wasn’t she?” he said.
“Yes,” said Jack. “She is beautiful.”
Ben looked up, smiled sadly, as if appreciating Jack’s respect for the rule Virginia had laid down about using the present tense.
“I don’t really want to read this,” said Laramore. “If you say it’s all there, I’ll take your word for it.”
“It’s all there,” said Jack.
“But just so I understand: Anyone with a Facebook account can read a status update?”
“This one was designated ‘public,’ so, yeah, anyone with an account can see it. Anyone on the Internet, for that matter.”
“Still, I find it hard to believe that BNN’s lawyers are scrolling through Facebook updates. This just went up on Facebook this afternoon. How did they find it so fast?”
Jack considered it. “That’s a good question. But keep in mind that these status updates didn’t just appear on Celeste’s Facebook page. They went out to every single one of her friends. It’s possible one of them forwarded it to BNN’s lawyers.”
“Celeste’s friends wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, a Facebook ‘friend’ might.” Jack took back his phone and checked the page. “I see here that Celeste has almost four thousand Facebook friends.”
“So that means any one of four thousand people could have told BNN that the complaint was posted on Celeste’s Facebook page?”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Jack. “There’s another possibility, of course.”
“What’s that?”
“Whoever stole her username and password to access her account and send out the status update also told BNN that the information was all over Facebook.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“What’s the point of any of this? Someone is either trying to piss off BNN or get us in trouble with the judge. It’s one of the two.”
“Or both.”
“Or both, right. The immediate problem we have to address is getting this information down as quickly as possible. It’s not that easy if you and your wife don’t know Celeste’s username and password.”
“I could take a few educated guesses, but—”
Laramore stopped, seeing a doctor approaching.
“Mr. Swyteck?” the doctor asked. He had an urgent expression on his face, alarming enough to make Jack rise to respond.
“Yes, I’m Jack Swy—”
A crushing blow to Jack’s jaw not only cut off his words, it knocked him to the floor. Both Jack and Laramore were too stunned to retaliate, and the doctor himself seemed content to have landed just one good punch. He didn’t come at Jack. Jack rose up on one knee, looked up, and saw equal parts rage and grief in the doctor’s eyes. Then Jack noticed the hospital ID badge:
STEFAN ROSS
,
MD
. Rene’s boyfriend.
“That’s from Rene, you son of a bitch.”
Jack massaged his jaw back into place and said, “I’m sorry for—”
“Sorry?”
said Ross. “No, you’re not. You used her, and you put her in a dangerous situation that she should’ve never been in.”
“Actually, she called me.”
“Don’t justify it. And don’t you dare show your face at the funeral. Spare us the phony sympathy. Please.”
Ross turned and walked away, so much anger in his step that his rubber soles squeaked on the tile floor. Jack climbed back into his chair.
“Are you all right?” asked Laramore.
Jack thought about it, thought about Rene, thought about the joy all this suffering must have been bringing to the sick bastard who had taken Rene’s life.
“I will be,” he said. “I suppose.”
