Dead Anyway (6 page)

The guitars were in shelves stacked ten feet high lining the walls of a large open area. Using Gerry’s code sheet, I dug out three guitars that most closely fit my criteria, based on some research I’d done on vintage guitar values at the anarchist’s café. I piled them on a cart which I pushed with agonized slowness back to the office, where the cabby helped me load everything in the cab.

I paid the cabby a hundred dollars to take me all the way to the clock factory and help me haul the musical loot into Gerry’s studio. By then, I was deranged by weariness, my hands shaking so hard I could barely get the bills out of the binder clip I was using to hold my cash. The cabbie stood and waited patiently, with no apparent complaint. This built his tip into a heroic amount.

He took the money and gave me his card.

“You need something else in the transportation regard, you call me, sir. I come from wherever.”

I spent the next few hours lying on Gerry’s cot trying to regain my strength. When I thought I could speak without sounding like my mouth was full of cloth, I used my disposable phone to call another disposable I’d sent to Evelyn the week before.

“Oh, thank God,” she said.

“For what?”

“You called. I was afraid I’d never hear from you again.”

“No such luck. How did the funeral go?” I asked.

“Everyone honored my request that we skip the funeral. I gave out a list of charities for donations in your name. I think your passing was well publicized. And you’re right, the cops were furious, though they bought the dumb doc excuse.”

“I saw the obit in the
Stamford Advocate
.”

“And it made the evening news. How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“It’s getting better all the time,” I said.

“Nice to hear, but it would be nicer if you told me something that made me less worried.”

I thought about that.

“When I went off to college, you told me I could do anything I wanted. You didn’t mean that in a ‘this is America where anybody can follow their dream’ sort of way. You meant I was so omnivorous in my interests and abilities that I could achieve any single thing I wanted to achieve. Remember?”

“I was just trying to get you to focus,” she said.

“Well, I’m focused now.”

“Thank you,” she said, after a moment of thoughtful silence.

“You’re welcome.”

T
HE NEXT
day I went to Wally’s Wall of Music in Bridgeport and sold him a mint 1960 Gibson ES-335, with a sunburst finish and a double bound maple body, mahogany neck, bound rosewood fret board, dot inlays, twenty-two frets, two PAF humbuckers, original electronics, stop tailpiece and original Kluson tuners and hardware, for $32,567.

This was about two grand less than what I could have gotten for it, but part of the deal was being paid with a bank check, which I took to one of my new banks and deposited all but $7,000, which I added to the $15,000 I still had in my cash pouch, and went car hunting.

Plowing through a stack of want ad flyers, I quickly spotted a late model Subaru Outback on sale for $21,000 by a guy in Darien, Connecticut. I liked the Outback for its sturdy utility and ubiquitousness, so I called the guy on my disposable phone and arranged to meet him two hours later. I test drove the car, then said I could do ninety percent of his asking price if he’d take cash. Two hours later, the car was registered and parked in Gerry’s garage, supplanting his white van, which I parked out in the alley.

I felt a little bad about that, but his van was a familiar sight around the clock factory, and it would only be there for a few days.

The next day, I deposited $2,635 dollars in one of my accounts—an entirely innocuous amount, well below various thresholds for federal reporting. Over the next few days I made other deposits at all three of my banks, being sure to widely vary the amounts. This was after several agonizing hours working out a deposit schedule that would keep a steady flow of cash into the accounts while staying well under the regulatory radar. Something I once could have done in the time it took to write down the figures.

By now, my physical condition had improved to the point where I could get through the whole day without stopping to rest and catch my breath. My right leg, still sore, had become limber enough that it almost had a normal swing, though I liked having the cane in case of sudden collapse. I hadn’t completely reconciled myself to the new shape of the world, but I could usually navigate my way around without running into things, or feeling nauseated by the manifold irregularities.

My math skills had developed to the point where I could add, subtract, divide and multiply at the level of a modern third grader. Not bad for a guy who used to unwind by swimming around the equations supporting Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

I stayed at Gerry’s shop long enough to build up more strength and receive a shipment of some crucial equipment bought online at the anarchist’s café: a beefy laptop rigged for wireless and cell phone access, a scanner, printer, router and two external hard drives with a terabyte of storage space apiece.

When I had the laptop up and running and the wireless connections configured, I took it with me in the Outback and prowled around Stamford for public wireless access. After I tested a half-dozen connections, found while parked outside hotels, restaurants and cafés, I was confident that I’d configured everything for optimum receptivity.

Parked in front of an accommodating Starbucks, I opened an account with a major email provider under one of my dead guy’s names, with the screen name “MrPbody.” I hoped Evelyn would recognize the professorial dog Mr. Peabody from
Rocky and Bullwinkle
—the name she called me through most of my childhood—when it unexpectedly showed up in her mailbox.

From there, I started to surf, tapping “Organized crime, Connecticut” into Google. I didn’t expect “Portraits of CT-based Hit Men” to pop up on the first page, but I knew very little about crime, organized or otherwise, and had to start somewhere.

One of the dangers researchers face is the natural tendency to treat as received truth the manifold misconceptions, biases and opinions formed by Hollywood movies. I had trained myself to wipe away all prior assumptions on any subject about which I had minimal empirical knowledge. I used to pretend I was the Man from Mars, a recently arrived alien sent down to study strange Earthling ways.

Now I had a better role to play—the Man Who Just Awoke from a Hundred Years in a Coma and Had a Lot of Catching Up to Do.

The first three Google pages were rich with information, which took almost an hour to read or download for future study, then it petered out. I kept clicking through the pages, however, having learned that some of the most rewarding material was often twenty, thirty, or even a hundred pages in. The Google search algorithm was a marvel of speed and efficiency, but it wasn’t omniscient. Often the best stuff was tucked deep inside the search, where the less obsessive never took the trouble to look.

And this was no exception. On page sixty-three was the retirement notice in the University of Michigan alumni magazine of an FBI Special Agent named Shelly Gross, who’d spent the last ten years of his career setting up task forces around the country focused on organized crime, most recently in Connecticut, where he decided to settle down in Rocky Hill, a fact corroborated by an obituary on his wife in the
Rocky Hill Post
.

The singular success of the Connecticut project was noted in several sources. There was no mention of Shelly, but quite a bit on the nature of the various rackets the task force targeted, and the methods by which they seriously compromised criminal enterprise.

I jumped from there into a people search, which quickly yielded results for the only Shelly Gross living in Connecticut. I also tried to locate three crime bosses that my initial research had shown to be deeply entangled in the state’s rackets over a long period of time, but not surprisingly, the public search sites yielded very little. There were more legal, professional search programs for tracking people down, but I’d never felt compelled to use them, on the theory that the cost would never justify the improved penetration.

I now abandoned that qualm, which quickly led me to a short list of three overachieving punks: Ronny DeSuzio, Ekrem Boyanov, and my favorite, Sebbie “The Eyeball” Frondutti. He was an entrepreneurial underboss who’d set up a satellite operation in Connecticut for one of New York’s prominent crime families. He had a taste for nightlife, having rolled up through acquisition and intimidation a string of restaurants, strip joints, night clubs and other entertainment venues across the state and into Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

This provided Sebbie with diversified revenue streams, legal and illegal—including unregulated gambling, prostitution, drug sales and cigarette smuggling—enmeshed in such a way that confounded regional law enforcement. Until Shelly rode into town. Backed by Federal resources and leverage, he’d soon built up a rock-solid case against Sebbie, leading to a racketeering indictment.

Sebbie was an hour away from being arrested when he dropped out of sight. There was a lot of conjecture by the media that the disappearing act had followed a tip-off from someone inside the investigation. The team was led by Shelly Gross, but included undercover cops with the State Police. Predictably, the Feds implied the leak came from the staties, and vice versa. That they were able to try and convict everyone involved in Sebbie’s little empire other than Sebbie himself never cleared the air of rancor that hung around the prosecution.

Before moving on, I took note of the name of a reporter, Henry Eichenbach, who wrote a long exposé on Sebbie for the
Connecticut Post
. I searched for him on the
Post
’s web site, but he wasn’t listed among the editorial staff, so I went back to Google and found his blog. This was expected, since any newspaper reporter with a pulse sets up a blog in anticipation of the mad dash to online media. I read through the site, noting he was working on a book about the Fed’s secret Connecticut organized crime task force. The date of that posting was almost three years old. I checked Amazon unsuccessfully for a book.

I was grateful to see that Henry had a contact email address in addition to the regular comment mechanism.

MrPbody wrote him this message:

“Looking for the Eyeball?”

From there, I downloaded what looked to be the remaining worthwhile information, and pulled away from the Starbucks, nervous that more than two hours online might draw notice. I went back to Gerry’s studio and spent the rest of the day packing up, wiping down anything that might reveal a fingerprint, vacuuming anything that might capture a fiber, and scrubbing anything where bodily fluid or epithelials might have been left behind. I wasn’t a forensic scientist, but I was a world-class obsessive, so if I couldn’t be expert, I could at least be thorough.

C
HAPTER
5

I
felt reasonably secure at Gerry’s studio, and would have contentedly stayed there forever, but practicality drove me to move on before others at the clock factory registered my presence.

I’d already picked out the next stop, a tiny, furnished, single-story house in Wilton, a town just northeast of Stamford, Connecticut, with a nice view of an abandoned crushed stone and gravel distribution center, and thus one of Wilton’s less desirable properties. I found the place over the Internet, avoiding the owners and limiting personal exposure to a woman at a real estate office. She gave me the key after I showed her my driver’s license, signed the lease and paid three months’ rent in advance, plus the security deposit.

Invisible from the road, and well removed from other houses, it featured the ultimate in privacy at a very affordable price. Still, I waited for nightfall to move in with my duffle bag and computer gear. The place had a kitchen with an eat-in area, a living room, two bedrooms and a single bath with a metal-lined shower. A drop-leaf pine table in the kitchen opened into a decent workspace, so this became my base of operations.

After setting up the gear, I made out a provisioning list—hardware, software and consumables—before picking out a bedroom, where I slept in my clothes on the bare mattress, registering the need for sheets and towels.

The next day I went to the Wilton post office and secured a P.O. box, then I went back to the house and opened up an email account. I’d come to the decision that cruising a string of wireless hot spots, some intentionally unsecured, some not, was too time-consuming and inefficient. Sitting on a traceable IP address was an exposure, but couldn’t be helped.

I continued to harvest information on the New England underworld and outside influencers in New York and else-where. I copied the pertinent data into a ten-gig flash drive that screwed into a pen, and then deleted the file on my computer to the extent that was possible, shy of throwing the thing in a furnace.

My last act for the day was checking email, where I found this in MrPbody’s box, from “EichenWrite.”

“Yes.”

I wrote back with a description of a bench in a park in Norwalk that looked out on Long Island Sound. I gave him three time and date options, with the words, “pick one.”