Frag Box (11 page)

***

“Herman?”

I blinked.

“Are you all right, Herman?”

“Sure.” Not even slightly.

“Do you want to claim this body?” said Brian.

“I’m not sure what I want yet.” I gave him one of my cards. “Don’t burn him without calling me first, okay?”

Chapter 12

Dead Man’s Key

We thanked Brian for all his help and went back out on the street.

“Well, that certainly didn’t gain us much,” said Anne.

“Maybe, maybe not. How quick can you get me a print of that key photo?”

“If we go back to my office, I can run one in two minutes, flat. What are you going to do with it?”

“Take it to a pawnbroker friend of mine who also happens to be a locksmith, see what he makes of it.”

“And also have him make you an illegal copy?”

“Are you so sure it would be illegal? I mean, I really am Charlie’s heir, you know.”

“I think I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You’re probably right, you don’t want to.”

***

We walked back to the skyway reception area again, and I did a poor job of making small talk with Pam while Anne took her camera to some inner sanctum to do her thing with it. As good as her word, she was back in less than five minutes with an eight-and-a-half by eleven color print.

“It’s a little grainy at this enlargement size,” she said, “but the serial number comes up all right.”

“That should do very nicely. If it’s a real key, from a real lock company, my guy should be able to look it up.”

“The bad news is, we shouldn’t have come back here.”

“Oh?”

“I ran into my editor, who was tactless enough to remind me that I have a deadline for a column I haven’t started yet. I’m going to have to pass on going to see your locksmith.”

“Tell you what: you go do your column and I’ll go do the things you don’t want to know about. And later this evening, I’ll take a look inside Charlie’s box and call you on your cell if I find anything that looks important.”

“Call me no matter what you find. I won’t shut the phone off until I’ve heard from you.”

“Deal.”

“Later.”

“Happy column.” I thought about inviting her to a romantic candlelit dinner of takeout Chinese with a cigar box instead of a fortune cookie. I thought about it rather a lot, in fact. But if she was sending me any of the right signals for such a venture, I couldn’t read them. I sighed slightly and headed back down the skyway.

Nickel Pete’s was only a couple of blocks away, but instead of going straight there, I took the skyway system all the way to the City Hall Annex. Whether my friendly shadows had found my phony cigar box amusing or not, I figured they would still be following me.

At the Annex, I took the elevator to the basement, then picked a lock to let myself into a stairwell to the sub-basement. Some remnants of my old life skills are handy at times. I re-locked the door behind me and went down to the original boiler room, now covered in dust and cobwebs, where I waited. Five minutes later, somebody rattled the knob from the other side. Then he kicked the door twice. Then nothing.

I waited another ten minutes, then headed back north through a maze of forgotten storage spaces and mechanical rooms. All of the sub-basements on that block are connected, and I finally came back out into the daylight through a freight elevator at the far end of the block, where I turned up my collar, put my head down, and sprinted the block and a half to Nickel Pete’s pawn shop.

He was about as happy to see me as he had been the last time.

“It’s too late for lunch now, Herman, so what kind of weird favor are you going to hit me up for this time?”

“Good to see you, too, Pete. Always a pleasure. I have a picture to show you.”

“Is it pornographic? Will it awaken long-forgotten urges and incite unwise adventures?”

“Afraid not.” I unfolded the print and laid it out on his counter, along with the impressed stick of gum, which really hadn’t fared all that well in my pocket.

“Then what’s the point?”

“Just look at it, will you?”

He looked.

“Do you have a book of some kind where you can look up the serial number of that key?” I asked.

“What for?”

“Is this what they call a senior moment? To tell what it is, of course.”

“I don’t have to look it up, I know what it is. It’s a Master.”

“That’s probably why it says ‘Master’ on it. I picked up on that already. Can you look up the serial number and tell me what it fits?”

“Obviously Herman, you were having a little nap when I said the word ‘Master.’ Master only makes padlocks.”

“So?”

“Millions and gazillions of padlocks. The most you might find out is the name of some hardware wholesaler, who is most likely out of business for ages now.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the number is only four digits. That baby is
old
, Herman.”

“Well, bat shit, Pete.”

“Now I expect you’re going to ask me if I can make you a copy, using nothing but the photo and that mangled piece of chewing gum for a pattern.”

“Pete, you really should have made a career on the stage. You can read minds perfectly.”

“How nice for me. But instead, I’m stuck here, breaking the law and putting my locksmith’s license in jeopardy.” He let out a profound sigh and headed for the back room. “The things I do for you.”

It was favorite line of his.

While Pete made the key, I watched the storefront and main door, looking for shadows on the other side of the glass that I might want to hide from. Then I grabbed the phone from Pete’s side of the counter and called Wilkie’s cell phone.

“Harra.” He always answers that way, and I have never figured out what it means.

“Hey, Wide, Herman here. How’s your work load?”

“Your man Russo hasn’t left town yet. Unless he tries to leave the country, I can’t grab him before his trial date, so I got one of my second-stringers keeping an eye on him.”

“That’ll work. So are you available for something else?”

“Well, seeing as how I failed to pick up any loose change last night when my eight-ball shooter split on me, I could use a little something, you know? Not for tonight, though. I got a date.”

“Would that be with the ugly broad from the Minneapolis cop shop?”

“Hey, watch your mouth. She’s a nice person.”

“Me? You’re the one who always calls her that. I’ve never even met her. Anyway, is that the lucky lady?”

“So?”

“I’m wondering if you can hit her up for a favor.”

“The number of dates she gets? I can hit her up.”

“Now who’s saying mean things about her?”

“Well it’s not like she’s listening, is it? What are you after?”

“Go by my office and pick up a snow shovel that’s wrapped in a black plastic trash bag. Don’t open it unless you’ve got gloves on. I need somebody who knows what they’re doing to see if they can pull some fingerprints off it.”

“And then see if those prints are on record.”

“Well it would be a pretty pointless exercise otherwise, wouldn’t it?”

“What do I use for an excuse?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“But this is a bounty hunting job, right?”

“We’ll call it that, anyway.” Wilkie doesn’t have a PI license, and sometimes we have to do a little creative labeling of the work he does for me. Bounty hunting doesn’t require a license.

“Who am I hunting besides Russo?”

“Whoever’s prints are on the shovel.”

“Uh huh. And who am I hunting before I know who that is?”

“Joe Kapufnik. The Duke of Paducah. I don’t care. Have Agnes pull a couple of names out of our ‘long-gone’ file. And tell her I said to give you a couple hundred retainer out of petty cash. Take your friend someplace nice.”

“Hey, you’re right. I’ll think of something. Anything else?”

“One other thing. This one’s a little more open-ended and not so quick. See what you can find out about a guy who calls himself Eddie Bardot, claims to work for something called Amalgamated Bonding Enterprises. He was in my office this morning, so my security tape will still have him on it. Aggie can print you a still photo off it, if you see a frame you like. Either his name or the company’s could be phony, but he doesn’t look as if he ever changed his face. Give it a shot, okay?”

“What are you liking him for?”

“I’m not sure. He comes off like old Mob, but he could be just a freelance shakedown artist trying to look that way. Before I decide how to deal with him, I need to know if he’s connected.”

“Time and expenses-plus-ten?”

“That’s the drill, only I might not be able to pay you right away.”

“I can wait. I’m on it.”

“What’s your girl’s name?”

“None of your business.”

“Odd name. Say hi for me.”

Pete brought me the key, and I left.

Chapter 13

Charlie Victor’s Box

I left Pete’s by the back way, through an L-shaped alley, and went straight to the Victory Ramp, where I retrieved my BMW, after carefully looking over the undercarriage and the wheel wells to see if it had acquired any bugs or bombs. If it had, they were extremely tiny, so I decided they couldn’t hurt me.

If my tail included one or more vehicles, I couldn’t spot them. But just to be on the safe side, I took a very indirect route home. I crossed the Mrs. Hippy on the Robert Street Bridge and wandered around the river flats for a while, then headed up the Wabasha hill to the top of the river bluffs, to an area known as Cherokee Heights. There I got on the high end of the long, straight, severely sloping High Bridge and went back down across the river again. But at the bottom of the bridge, I made a strictly illegal U-turn and headed back up. As I went back the way I had come, I did a mental inventory of the oncoming traffic.

White Taurus with Parks and Rec markings, blue Corolla with about a dozen little kids in the back seat, dark green Mini Cooper with a lone woman in it, kind of cute, red Chevy pickup with dopey-looking decals and a couple of young guys with backward baseball caps, dirty black Hummer, some kind of small Pontiac in metallic brown. All of them had Minnesota plates, except for the Hummer, which had no license on the front.

At the top of the bridge, I turned right onto a narrow parkway, went around a couple of blocks, and finally turned back south onto Smith Avenue, heading across the bridge yet again. And again, I looked at the oncoming traffic.

Dodge Intrepid, Honda Civic, big box Chevy, PT Cruiser, Hummer.

A dirty black Hummer with no front plate. Very careless, guys.

Unfortunately, the glass on the monster was too dirty or too heavily tinted for me to see who was in it.

The speed limit on the High Bridge is forty. But if I were going to pick up a cop, my goofy U-turn would have already done the job. So I took the rest of the bridge at seventy. At the bottom of it, I ran the gear box on the 328i down into second and made a hard left, accelerating through the turn in a nice, four-wheel power drift, just on the verge of out of control. Forty going in, sixty coming out, and gone in a blink. Any Hummer trying that would be found upside down, a quarter of a mile down Smith Avenue. I blew into the tangled web of narrow streets to the north and west, made a few more turns, and finally parked the car in the customer lot of a body shop. Then I locked it and walked back south through the alleys, to my condo. I didn’t see the Hummer again.

My condo is a two-story stone-clad row house, in the middle of an attached cluster of six others just like it. They are a hundred and twenty years old, restored and gone to seed again more times than anybody can remember anymore. If the stone on the outside were dirtier and rough, instead of newly sandblasted and smooth, and if the whole building were located a couple thousand miles farther east, you would call it a brownstone. It has high ceilings, multi-paned windows, and walls that you couldn’t punch through with a bazooka. And it’s on a short side street that gets no through traffic at all. I like it.

I checked both front and back doors, to see if they had been worked on. They have electronic lock monitors that Pete rigged up for me. If either of them had been opened while I was gone, all the monitors would be flashing tiny red lights at me. Inside, a light on my phone would also be flashing, but no message would go out to the police or anybody else. Satisfied that everything was as I had left it, I went back outside to an old-fashioned sloped cellar door on the end of the entire building complex and worked the combination on the padlock.

The townhouses have the unusual feature of having a single, undivided common basement. Since that has been a violation of about sixteen kinds of building and fire codes for a century or so, the last set of renovators solved the problem by giving no unit any direct access to the space. Instead, the basement has an unbroken fireproof ceiling with no stairs going up into anybody’s house, including mine. My furnace and water heater are in a closet off the kitchen.

Silly as it sounds, that makes the basement a good place to hide things, if only because most search warrants will not be written to cover a space that isn’t exactly in the same building. At least, I thought so. The general clutter of cardboard boxes and broken appliances and antiques with no names would make searching a real undertaking, too. But the real goodie was the dirt floor. I had done nothing any more clever with Charlie’s box than put it in a plastic bag and bury it. I buried it right in front of the basement’s only door, where I figured the dirt would get packed back down quickly by whatever traffic there might be. Then I left a small shovel for myself inside an old laundry tub, as far from the door as it could possibly be.

I don’t know if any of that was really clever or not, but it worked. The box was still there.

It seemed awfully large for a cigar box, but it clearly had a label that said Rigoletto Palma Cedars, so I didn’t think it was a tackle box. It was well made, out of solid wood, with brass hardware, and it had a stamped-on trademark of some importer on it. I threw the plastic bag in the trashcan by the back alley and took the box inside. I put it on the kitchen counter while I reset my lock system. Then I checked for any obvious booby traps or notes warning of booby traps on the box. Finally, I flipped up the brass hasp and opened it.

It was full of junk. War medals, old coins, expired coupons, free passes to places that didn’t exist anymore. Bus tokens for lines that had made their last stops ages ago. Also lists of names and phone numbers, and mailing addresses torn from yellowed envelopes. Little people’s treasures, the kind of crap that the kids closing out their parents’ estates never know what to do with.

And at the very bottom of the box, there was a ledger. An old-fashioned green-page ledger and a loose-leaf scrapbook, showing what people gave him and what they wanted in return, with inserted notes in dozens of different writing hands.

At first I thought they were all the stuff of pure fantasy, vouchers to be drawn on the First National Bank of Neverland. But the more of them I read, the less I thought so. Charlie had often said that for all his other faults, not the least of which was being a self-proclaimed murderer, he was always a man of his word. His markers were good, he said, and I believed him. But these were some damned strange markers.

A typical note in the scrapbook read, “Here’s these two ten dollar bills I been saved since my graduation party at the rehab center, twelve year ago. I never touch them till now. Bet them along with what you want of your own on Bottom Jewel in the Exacta, and if he wins, put everything in the pot for B.”

There was a date on the note, and when I looked up the same date in the ledger, I found the following entry:

It wasn’t possible. I mean, Bottom Jewel was possible, but no way Charlie accumulated thirty grand, or even seventeen, by always betting on the right horse. Where the hell did he get the rest of his money? I took the papers to my dining room table, where I could spread them out a bit. Then I laid out a fresh pack of cigarettes and a clean ashtray from the living room and a bottle of Scotch and a tumbler from the hall closet, and sat down to go to work.

I looked for entries in the ledger that had dollar amounts but no references to any bets, and then I looked for notes with the same dates. The first one I found blew me away.

There was a similar note for the Bremmer Bank, which was also downtown, and several for grocery or liquor stores, which were not.

I was stunned. Burnout case or not, Charlie was apparently coherent and focused enough to be a point man for a bunch of professional robbers. It would have been easy enough for him. Bumble into the lobby, practice a little aggressive panhandling, and get himself thrown out by the security staff. He could pick up a lot of information that way, and after they threw him out, people were unlikely to bother to have him arrested.

So it was possible that Charlie had a large stash, at that. Then the question became what he did with it.

Partway through the second Scotch, I found a list of names. No notes, just names. Some had check marks in front of them. They were not famous names like the President or some senator or T. Boone Pickens, but I knew a few of them. One was a judge, one a parole officer, and one a cop. They all had checks by their names and if memory served, all of them were dead.

It suddenly occurred to me that in his own strange and twisted way, Charlie had been in the business of selling hope. It was a very angry and bitter variety, the hope of some hated authority figure getting offed. But it was hope, all the same, the stuff that made somebody’s life just a little more bearable. Real or phony, he was in the business of letting little people believe they had a way to fight back at the establishment.

Of course, he had also been in the business of making the Secret Service and some kind of nameless military types extremely nervous. Nervous enough to kill him? I didn’t know, but I intended to find out. I took another sip of Scotch, a very small one this time, and started to add up the numbers in the ledger.

One other thing mystified me: if everything I was seeing was what it seemed, why had Charlie let me hold the box for him? He had given it to me two years earlier and never asked to see it again. Curiouser and curiouser.

An hour later, I called Anne Packard from the wall phone out in my central hallway and told her I had found her hook. The doorbell rang in the middle of our call.

“Are you expecting company?” she said.

“No, and it’s too late at night for the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the cute little girls selling cookies. Hang on a minute, will you?”

“I’ll be here.”

I put down the phone as quietly as I could and quickly went back to the kitchen and took my .380 Beretta out of its plastic bag in the vegetable crisper of the refrigerator. As I passed the phone again, the little red light was flashing frantically.