Dead Anyway (31 page)

They pulled me out of the Subaru and dragged me a few yards across the parking lot. One of them kicked me in the stomach, which caused more shock than pain. I curled up and waited for what was to come.

“We tole you we’d contact you,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to Jenkins. “What’s with all the Eurotrash? Damn, that’s so unnecessary.”

“I’m just trying to be careful,” I said, without uncurling from the fetal position. “You’d do the same.”

“Not careful enough, eh brother?”

“Hurting me serves no purpose,” I said.

“Yes, it does. It teaches you to show a little more respect,” said Jenkins, before kicking me in the small of my back. Most of the shock was absorbed by the meaty muscles to the right of my spine, but some of it reached the kidney. I grunted, but held my defensive curl.

“Point well taken,” I said, picking my face up off the macadam. “From now on I’ll hold you in greater esteem. I’m not a physical person. More of this, and you’ll have to explain to the boss why his potential business partner died on the way to the deal.”

“I’ve a mind to shoot your ass.”

“Go ahead, but you’d only be shooting yourself. If Three Sticks doesn’t take you out for insubordination, some Bosniak certainly will.”

It was quiet for a moment, then Jenkins said, “You are one strange motherfucker,” with a hint of a laugh, which I took as encouraging. Several sets of hands grabbed me by the clothes and pulled me to my feet. I had trouble standing fully upright, my abdomen bruised and clenched like an angry fist. They shoved me back against the Subaru and rummaged around in my pockets, finding one of my disposable phones. Luckily one with no important numbers recorded in recent calls. I also had a wallet, but there was nothing in it but a little cash and a credit card belonging to Auric Grenouille. A minor victory for paranoid precautions.

Jenkins bundled me into the passenger seat of the Subaru and assigned one of his boys, a pockmarked white guy with unnaturally black hair and a fur parka, to drive the car. The only thing the driver said to me was, “Fuck up once and I’ll kill you.”

Which was a clear enough directive.

We drove in a caravan, following Jenkins’ Escalade along the coast into New York. The landscape quickly transitioned from seaside opulence to manufacturing ruin, with train tracks and metal-sided warehouses, forlorn gas stations and brick monuments to the industrial revolution. My driver held his silence and I was just as glad, as it freed up lots of bandwidth for self-recrimination.

We followed the Cadillac south into a suburban neighborhood of early fifties vintage—ranch homes packed close together, carports and curvy streets. We pulled into one of the driveways. It was plain, but better kept than most. Two trash cans were at the curb. The shrubbery, what there was of it, was neatly trimmed. Another SUV, a Range Rover, was parked in the carport.

Jenkins got out of the Escalade and went down the front walk, picking up a newspaper in a blue plastic sleeve along the way. He rang the doorbell and was let in. A few moments later, he came out and waved to us and the guys in the other car. My driver got out, walked around to my side and opened the door. With my driver’s encouragement, I led everyone to the door of the house.

The interior reflected the same spare tidiness as the outside of the house. You entered directly into the living room, which featured a long sofa against the far wall and two club chairs. Another pair of wooden chairs, colonial reproductions, completed the seating area, at the center of which was a large coffee table. In the middle of the table was the only object out of place—a futuristic black phone you commonly see in commercial conference rooms.

I sat in one of the wood chairs before they had a chance to direct me. Jenkins took the other one, facing me across the table. The big white guys, including the one who’d opened the door, filled in the upholstered furniture.

“A call’s gonna be comin’ in,” said Jenkins. “We’re gonna be discussin’ business. I’ll give you some inside information. People’re gettin’ sick of foolin’ with you. This is your last chance to make your case. I strongly suggest that you settle down and make the necessary accommodations. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I do.”

That seemed to make him happy.

“That’s good,” he said, looking around the room. The other guys all nodded, though no one said anything.

He looked at his watch, then at the phone, which buzzed as if on his visual command. He leaned forward and pushed a button.

“We’re here,” he said.

“With our guest?” the other party asked. It was a male voice run through a distortion device like they use to hide the identities of people during TV interviews, their voices a mechanical drone, their faces in shadow.

“That’s right. He’s right here.”

“Hello,” I said.

“I’m interested in coming to an agreement with you, but we need to iron some things out.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You need to agree to the provisions outlined in the note.”

“I agree.” It was quiet on the other end of the line. He obviously expected more resistance. So I kept talking. “You get the same terms I gave Little Boy. All product is available at a quarter of the market price set at the opening of the day it is sold. The agreed-upon quantity will be fulfilled. I prefer cash, but a wire transfer is acceptable. You can place your order now, or have Jenkins bring it to my house after you’ve had a chance to think about it. I’d prefer that he call ahead, in that some of my colleagues may react poorly to an unannounced visitor.”

“About that,” said the distorted voice. “Aggressive tactics would not be looked upon favorably.”

“Good. Then tell your boys to keep their hands off me.”

“Don’t be too enamored of the Bosnian bravado. It would be a contest they cannot win.”

“Conflict is never healthy for business,” I told him. “I’ll do my part, you do yours,
everybody
wins.”

Jenkins curled his lip at me, a gesture that clearly said, “What a bunch of bullshit.”

“You’ll hear from us,” said the voice, and the line disconnected.

On the way out I looked for the street number of the house, but had to do with the numbers next door and across the street. Likewise, the street name itself, which had been removed from the pole. But I caught the next one we passed, and the one after that.

Though we left by a different route than we used on the way in, it was easy enough to determine, as we crossed into Larchmont, that the house was in New Rochelle. I laid my head on the headrest and closed my eyes, a cheap signal to my driver that I had no interest in our surroundings. And it wasn’t that hard an act to fake. I was bitterly exhausted and sore, and now that the adrenalin had drained out of me, my nervous system began to crackle like static electricity.

And all the while, the quiet center of my mind kept asking the question: how, after all these months of vigilance and deliberation, could I be so stupid?

C
HAPTER
23

I
counted among Natsumi’s admirable qualities a consistent failure to overreact, no matter how fair it would be to do otherwise. She held true to that when I told her where I’d been and what I’d been doing.

“And you don’t know why you went out on your own?” she asked.

“Actually I do. It used to be a habit of mine, under normal circumstances. Get out of the house and go off on some meaningless chore, just to clear my head and breathe a little fresh air. What I don’t know is why my sense of self-preservation didn’t tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘ ’Yo bud, these aren’t normal circumstances. You aren’t living in Stamford anymore doing market research on feminine hygiene.’ ”

“You did that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Researched feminine hygiene?”

“Absolutely. Did at least twenty focus groups in different parts of the country. The product wasn’t exactly hygienic. More cosmetic. Essentially perfume for the nether regions. I learned a lot. Once a group gets going, respondents will tell you anything.”

After I filled in Natsumi, I went over the story again with Little Boy and the other Bosniaks. I was afraid they’d see it as a flagrant provocation, deserving of ruthless reprisals, which I’d have to struggle to suppress. What I got were grins and some gentle teasing.

“Hey, lucky they not kick you in the nuts,” said Little Boy. “That’s what we do.”

“The nuts, then the head. Not necessarily in that order,” said one of his boys.

“I thought they were going to kill me,” I replied, I hoped matter-of-factly.

“Kill you? The goose who’s laying all these golden eggs?” said Little Boy. “No way. They just working off a little steam. Probably got impatient waiting for you to come out of the house. I been on those stakeouts. It gets damn boring.”

Cheered by the outpouring of concern, I slipped away to spend some time with the sort of company that rarely failed to gratify my expectations.

My computer.

I liked to believe aeronautical engineers never lost their wonder over the proposition that objects heavier than air can fly. By the same token, even a tech hound like me finds it difficult to believe that you can see an image of your house taken from a tin can orbiting the earth so clearly you can make out the Weber grill on the patio. On a clear day, whether you’re grilling hot dogs or chicken breasts.

This was the kind of wonder and appreciation that filled my heart as I zeroed in on the house in New Rochelle. Knowing two of the streets in close proximity, it took only a few minutes to identify Newbury Street. Then, with two of the street numbers of nearby houses, it was child’s play to pin down number twenty-five.

From there, I used a simple directory service to capture the home’s phone number. I could have obtained much more, like the market value of the house, the yearly tax bill, the number of bedrooms and any outstanding mechanic’s liens, but all I cared about was ownership. This came up as New Heritage Properties, a real estate management company headquartered in Bermuda. Aside from having an oxymoron for a name, my sense before doing more research was that research would turn up absolutely nothing. Corporate confidentiality in Bermuda wasn’t the steel vault of the Cayman Islands, but close enough.

I wouldn’t be able to get much further, but somebody else could.

I wrote to Shelly Gross and described the day’s events. I included all the information I’d obtained about the meeting house, and ended with another request: “I bet you could dig up the phone number of the guy who called that house today. He might have taken some precautions, on the other hand, maybe not. It could save a lot of lab time.”

I also gave him the make and model of both the SUV’s and their license plate numbers.

“Surely something will connect,” I wrote.

He wrote back soon after.

“So you didn’t get high definition images, DNA samples or fingerprints of these guys?”

E
VELYN CALLED
soon after that.

“I talked to Bruce,” she said. “I told him someone from the insurance commissioner’s fraud unit had contacted me asking a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer. I said the fraud people instructed me not to discuss the call with anyone, but I said screw that and immediately contacted him. He sounded very concerned. He asked me a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, mostly because I was making it all up. I told him they wanted to interrogate me, but I was terrified to do it on my own, so could he just do me this one huge favor and come along? I don’t do damsel in distress very well, so maybe that’s what convinced him.”

Evelyn would be the last person on earth, maybe just behind Hillary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, to make a good damsel in distress. Under any circumstances.

“It probably was,” I said. “Brilliant job.”

“I hope so. Now it’s your turn. Just keep me informed.”

I exited the call filled with contrary emotions. Admiration for my sister’s courage and imagination, countered by a vague panic over how to play a ploy I hadn’t conceived of myself.

Insurance commissioner’s fraud unit? Was there such a thing?

I dove onto the web and quickly discovered that there was. Bruce would know that, having spent most of his career in Hartford, the insurance mecca of the nation. Chances were, he knew the commissioner and half the people in his office. Two minutes after Evelyn’s call, he probably knew there was no investigation, current or planned. At least I had to assume that.

I couldn’t see a way to make this happen without Bruce Finger. And no way to compel him, least of all without his awareness and willing consent.

I put my head between my hands and tried to force a strategy.

I couldn’t do it, because there wasn’t any. Nothing elegant, subtle or immune from risk. Which made me recall something I’d heard from a Vietnam veteran I once interviewed. I’d forgotten the original subject, but remembered the discussion taking a radical turn into the limits of human endurance in the face of desperate circumstances.

“Sometimes, man, the only way out is through,” he said to me.

I took out my phone and called Bruce Finger.

“Mr. Finger?” I asked in my Clint Eastwood voice.

“Who’s calling?” he asked.

I told him I was a private investigator for the insurance carrier who covered the largest number of Florencia’s clients. I supplied enough information, gleaned from the agency’s files, to prove my intimacy with the company in question, information no one else could possibly have.

“So you’re not from the insurance commission,” he said.

“I lied to Ms. Cathcart. I didn’t think she could handle the truth. You can. In fact, I think you were expecting my call,” I said.

“You need to tell me what this is all about,” said Bruce.

“You know what it’s about.”

There was a long period of silence on the other end of the line. I shut my eyes, tightly, adding darkness to the quiet.

“I do not,” he said, finally.

“You were the acting president of the agency. The fiduciary responsible for the ethical management of your clients’ funds. You don’t know that some of them are missing?”

More long periods of silence.