City of Ice (26 page)

With tea and scones, the men huddled around the tapedeck in Mathers’s living room. The furnishings were a combination of new things bought on sale and older pieces handed down from parents or culled from a flea market. Mathers was using bricks and boards for his bookshelves, but his stereo equipment was first-rate. The television rested on a crate, but it was a good TV. Cinq-Mars suspected that the sofa and chairs represented input from Mathers’s wife, Donna. They’d splurged a little, and he hadn’t attributed a taste in vibrant colors to his partner.

“Why are you working at this hour?” Mathers asked.

“LaPierre called. He set up a meeting.” Cinq-Mars was less brittle with Mathers in his home. The younger man suddenly seemed strange to him. Perhaps the casual clothes he wore, jeans and no tie, accounted for the difference. He tried sitting in a chair
but found that he was more comfortable joining his host on the floor.

Mathers snapped the tape into the player.

The voices were audible and surprisingly distinct given the poor quality of the sound. The policemen easily distinguished Kaplonski’s gruff baritone. The second voice was unknown to them, foreign, an accent embedded in most, but not all, of the speaker’s words. Cinq-Mars wanted to pin the voice on the Russian captain, but he was doubtful.

The tape began with the sound of someone pacing. Heavy breathing occupied the aural space close to the mike, and little peripheral noise was detected above the audio’s gentle static. Cinq-Mars concluded that the conversation had taken place at night, or on a weekend, after the staff had vacated the premises. The first word uttered on the tape belonged to the stranger. He’d said,
“Artinian.”

“That is correct, sir,”
Kaplonski was saying.
“Hagop Artinian.”
He was close to the microphone. Agitation caused his breath to be audible.
“Sorry about this crap.”

“No. That is good. Knowing problem is better than not knowing. We must find a way that is good
,
”
the unknown voice replied.

“The voice, Russian?” Cinq-Mars asked. He stopped the tape a second.

“Definitely,” Mathers attested. “Remember when you were grilling Captain Yakushev and you chided him for his change of accent in the middle of the conversation—?”

“So?”

“When this guy said the boy’s name the first time—Artinian—the accent slipped. It sounded almost British.”

“Who goes around talking in fake accents?”

“Somebody who’d be tough to bust on a witness stand if all you had was an audiotape.”

Cinq-Mars clicked the play button again.

Kaplonski was agreeing with the other man, although it became apparent that he didn’t realize what the stranger had in mind.

“Hear that?” Cinq-Mars provided opinion throughout. “Kaplonski goes along with this guy no matter what he says. Never once does he contradict him. The man has authority. Kaplonski’s scared shitless of him.”

“We must find out one thing—the boy, he speaks to who?”

“Yes,”
Kaplonski concurs.

They heard the stranger suggest bringing the boy down to the ship.
“We talk to him private. There he say to us what he has say to us.”

Kaplonski raised the issue of security down at the docks.

“That is one problem. We have one more, yes? You say boy is maybe to be suspicious?”

“He’s looking worried to me.”

“I am thinking about this.”

A scheme is hatched that’s complex, intricate. The boy will be informed that he is needed to move drugs. He will be given a time and place to meet with Kaplonski and others designated by the man with the Russian voice. From there, they’ll travel down to the ship. Everything will appear routine. Once on the boat, things will change for the boy. He’ll be outfitted in a Santa costume and taken to a cabin where an electric wire will be clipped to his genitals. In that room, in the dark, he will surrender the name of his contact.
“This not difficult.”

“Yes,”
Kaplonski agrees. He sounds glum.

“We eliminate Artinian,”
the man says.
“This not difficult. We do this soon.”
Carried off the ship, the dead boy will be deposited in the car.

“Hear that? The accent changed,” Mathers noted.

“Security at the entrance to the docks,”
Kaplonski points out,
“might check the trunk. They do that, the creeps. More’n
half the time when I leave they check my trunk.”
He lacks the courage to speak against the enterprise, instead he sorts through obstacles, trying to change things. Inadvertently, he assists the operation.

The stranger explains that the boy will be wearing the Santa Claus outfit and sitting up in the backseat.
“He eliminated no blood bleeding.”

“No guns or knives,” Cinq-Mars interpreted the phrase to mean. “Strangulation. Notice, the meat hook isn’t mentioned.”

“No one will be suspicious of Santa on Christmas Eve,” Mathers noted.

“In car need big bag, empty boxes inside. In car we hide boy behind big bag. You need that later.”

“Me?”
Kaplonski asks.

The dead boy will be moved to his apartment. Well before his death he’ll be told that the drug rendezvous will take place there. But he’ll be told that it will happen at a time much later than the hour he actually returned to the apartment as a corpse.

“I don’t know how you get him upstairs with nobody seeing,”
Kaplonski says, still trying to abort the plan with logic.

“That is right. You don’t know how.”

“He doesn’t mention cleaning the place out,” Cinq-Mars said.

“You, Kaplonski, you go inside. Dress also, you, like Santa Claus. Go to room where is dead punk, his place, where he lives. We take keys from him. You leave by back way. Maybe police question to you, you say them nothing. Prove yourself to me this way. If need it, we get to you good lawyer. Not to worry, Mr. Kaplonski, my good friend, police have nothing on you, nothing.”

“No, only that the dead Santa worked for the man leaving his place—by the back way—in a similar Santa suit and without his presents,” Cinq-Mars scoffed. “Explain that one, Dogface.”

“They wanted Kaplonski busted?”

“They didn’t figure only two of us would show. They thought I’d follow procedures. They put Kaplonski at the scene of the crime with his dead employee. There’s more about that later, and the guy’s halfway convincing. But they definitely didn’t care if Kaplonski walked or not.”

“Why I have to be there? I don’t understand. I will do it, don’t get me wrong, but this is not my usual line of work. Why I have to go there? Just phone the cops.”

“Good question,” Mathers noted.

“Listen to the answer,” Cinq-Mars pointed out. “It’s better.”

“You had you a spy in your house. You give to him job, you made to him friend, yes? You give to him information, identity. To spy you give a way in to see the work of our brothers. Contact, you gave him. You responsible are, Mr. Kaplonski. Now, today, you expose to me him. This is good but much damage is done. Friend, you do what we ask you. We want to know, are you man of goodwill? We want to be knowing this. Are you man of goodwill, Mr. Kaplonski?”

“Yes, I am a man of goodwill.”

Cinq-Mars chortled. “You idiot,” he berated the tapedeck. “You don’t even know when you’re being sucked in.”

“You go to apartment where is dead boy. We want for his contact to follow you, boy tells to him come. This way, for sure we know contact is good. This way, contact reveals himself. They wait for Santa Claus. We give them Santa Claus living, alive, outside house. Inside Santa Claus is dead. They will know why is dead. We say to them we found your spy. We deal with spies this way. This is show, Mr. Kaplonski. This is trial and judgment to them for to see.”

“Listen to this, Bill. The first sign of gumption on Kaplonski’s part.”

“I don’t know what it’s like where you come from. Here the cops are different. Over here they don’t like threats.”

“That’s telling him.”

A fist, or perhaps a book, thuds heavily upon a table.
“They learn! If do not fear my threats, they fear my acts!”

“Yes, sir,”
Kaplonski says, retreating fast.

“He’s never called anybody ‘sir’ before in his life,” Cinq-Mars sneered. “He’s calling this killer ‘sir’!”

The portion of tape that André LaPierre had chosen to surrender had reached its conclusion. Bill Mathers and Émile Cinq-Mars sat hunched over on the floor in the late night gloom of the apartment, thinking things through.

“LaPierre gave you this?” Mathers marveled. “I suppose I’m not surprised. I picked him for a cop who’d fudge the law.”

“I’m in a quandary. The boy was killed, and the people who did it were willing to give us Kaplonski. That’s what it sounds like to me. Trouble is, we didn’t pick up Kaplonski that night because we weren’t guarding the back door.”

“When we did pick him up, he had a Mafia lawyer in tow.”

Cinq-Mars conceded that point reluctantly. “The thing is, we never arrested him for murder. What bothers me is—are they giving us Kaplonski now? Have they found a way to do it?”

Mathers ran his hands together and fidgeted. “You’re saying that if LaPierre is dirty, the Mafia or the Hell’s Angels are giving us Kaplonski. They meant to do it the night Artinian got whacked, but we screwed up their plans. So they’re doing it now.”

“It’s a possibility. What’s wrong with that idea, Bill? What doesn’t fit?”

The policeman took his time in answering. “We don’t know what Kaplonski knows—the identity of the man on the tape. I’d like that information. If the Mafia, or the Hell’s Angels, are giving us Kaplonski, they’re also giving us the only man we know who also
knows that guy’s identity—his face, probably his name. Why do that?”

Cinq-Mars had to hoist himself into a chair or his body would seize up. He lumbered up, stretched, and coiled back down onto the sofa. “I’ve asked myself the question. I keep coming up with one possibility. How and why would they risk giving us Kaplonski when he knows things about them? The only answer I get comes out the same way every time. If they give us Kaplonski for the crime, and keep their lawyer close to him so he stays content and mute, they’re in a position to take Kaplonski away from us.”

Mathers blew out a slight whistle of air as he caught up to his partner’s thinking. “How would they take him away?”

In a single sweeping motion Émile Cinq-Mars brought his hands together, raised them, and separated them outward again. “Boom,” he said quietly. “We think we have our killer. Next, we lose him in a blast. Technically, the file might remain open, but we both know it’d be a dead issue. No pun intended.”

“Kill a man. Give us a likely suspect. Kill the suspect. I appreciate the logic. But bikers, they don’t usually go to that much trouble, do they?”

“Different situation. The dead boy was an informant. Killing him is a lot like doing a cop. For all they know he was a cop. They’d guess we’d take a special interest. So they’re covering their tracks. On top of that, it helps them out with their other problem, the one about Kaplonski and what he knows. They have more than one reason to do Kaplonski, what they’re looking for is the most bang for their buck. Maybe they think they can use him to shake us off their shoes. Another thing, it’s not the locals running the show. It could be this guy on the tape. We already know from the boy’s death that we’re dealing with a different mind, a trained mind. I think I know what to call him.
Last September, the Angels put on a show. They were probably trying to impress someone who could do them some good. The Wolverines had a name for the man they were entertaining—the Czar. I bet you that’s the guy.”

On his knees, Mathers started rewinding the tape. “Do you think the boy gave up his contact?”

For the first time on this visit, Cinq-Mars smiled. “He was a smart boy, Bill. Tough kid. Either that or he was coached. When tortured into giving up a name, he gave them mine.”

“That’s why they hung the sign.
Merry Xmas, M-Five.
”

“They were so damn proud of themselves. Hagop gave them a believable name, probably in a believable way. It made sense to them. I’m the guy with the secret contacts, everybody knows that. They probably shit their pants when they heard my name. Hagop put an end to the torture, he saved himself more suffering. I wish I’d known him. He had courage. I’m laying odds that he kept the name of his real contact to himself.”

Mathers stopped the tape and hit play, listening, then continued to rewind. He went a little further back and adjusted the volume lower. “So you’re convinced LaPierre’s dirty?”

“He might be filthy. Bill, when you helped Jim Coates cover himself, you did a good job, right? LaPierre’s out looking for him. So far he can’t locate him.”

“Émile,” Mathers interjected. Crouching close to the machine, he seemed quite animated. “Listen to this.” He played a bit of tape and turned the volume way up until his wife, thinking of their sleeping child, slipped her head through the swinging kitchen door with a finger to her lips. Mathers rummaged for twin sets of headphones. As Cinq-Mars donned a pair, Mathers
quelled a laugh—his superior looked like a being from another planet, totally out of his element. He played the section of tape again.

They removed their headsets. “That static. Sounds like a sweeping motion.”

“My thought.”

“Jim Coates?”

“Possibly.”

“LaPierre wouldn’t pick it up. He’s not that good a detective.”

Mathers hesitated a moment to allow the compliment to register. “He has more tape. From it he could’ve found out that Coates was there, that he knows the stranger. Or, if LaPierre’s dirty, he could’ve been told that Coates knows.”

Cinq-Mars stood and stretched high. “LaPierre bothers me. I know I’m capable of misjudging a man.”

“Then judge the evidence. Nothing else.”

“It works either way. He could be holding on to more tape to protect himself. He could have kept this tape secret to promote himself, to make a dramatic arrest. He could be giving us Kaplonski because that’s the right thing to do. He could be going after Jim Coates because Coates is the one who knows the identity of the killer. All that is perfectly plausible.”