Known to Evil (29 page)

"I'd tell her that running was an option but not an easy one. She'd have to change her name and get a new Social Security number. I could give some suggestions along those lines. But I would have to tell her that she'd have to abandon any hope of reconnecting with her former life while living among strangers. And even in this new life she would remain a stranger. She could never tell the truth about her history or upbringing or education. And that young man who just left would never see her again.

"That's what I'd say about long-distance running. But, regardless, she'd have to run for a little while. If I took her on as a client I'd tell her to go to ground for a week or so while I investigated the threats and attempted kidnapping. I wouldn't want to hear about any supposed crime that she might be implicated in. That way I could keep my nose clean if the cops got involved."

"But what good would it do if you couldn't prove that she's innocent of the crime?"

"If the threats and the attack are the cause of the crime, I should be able to prove it--blind, as it were, to the circumstances."

"That seems kind of self-defeating," Angie Lear said.

"Yes, it does," I agreed. "But it protects the client from admitting any involvement with a crime and it shields the detective from prosecution. Later on, if it comes to an interrogation room, or a courtroom, the detective can say that he was simply trying to help a young woman where the authorities had failed. And if the crimes are connected, it will serve to add weight to the client's innocence."

Of course I didn't mean what I was saying. I already knew her crime. I just wanted Angie to feel comfortable talking to me about her problems.

"How much?" she asked.

"Tell me about the threats and the attack and I'll give you a number."

Just the topic, even though she was the one who raised it, brought suspicion into my client's face.

"Can I see your card again?"

I handed it over.

She studied the information for a full minute and then got out her cell phone.

"What's your receptionist's name?" she asked.

"Mardi."

"Marty?"

"Replace the '
t
' with a '
d
' and you've got it."

She entered the number, stood up, and walked away from our little tables. I watched her talking but couldn't hear what she was saying. That didn't matter, though.

Later on, Mardi told me that Angie identified herself by name and then waited to see if it was recognized. When Mardi had no particular reaction, Angie left the message that she called.

She came back to the table and sat down. There was decisiveness in her movements now.

"Four weeks ago a man named Shell called me at my office," she said. "He told me that he was a headhunter and that he had a job for me. It was the perfect job at a start-up ad agency in San Francisco. The salary was great. They'd agree to move me and all my things, and help to find me an apartment. I'd, I'd just broken up with my boyfriend and wanted to make a new start. It was everything I wanted."

"Sounds too good to be true."

"It was, but in my life I've had a great deal of good luck. Scholarships, good jobs, even my apartment was a lucky deal. I got into college because a counselor from Hunter came into a diner where I worked one day and we had a talk about how much I wanted to go to school."

"So you went to see this Mr. Shell?"

"Yes. At first it was all pretty straightforward. He knew about my education and my work for Laughton and Price . . . that's where I worked. But then he knew other things that had nothing to do with the job. He asked me about a man I never heard of."

"What man?"

"Rinaldo."

"Rinaldo what?"

"I forget. That might have been his last name."

"And you never heard of this Rinaldo?"

"No. I had no idea who he was. That's what I told Mr. Shell, and he started listing things--like grants and scholarships, even my job--things that he said I'd gotten over the years because of this Rinaldo. But I told him that I never heard of the man."

"And what did he say to that?"

"Up until then he was very professional, nice. I mean if he wasn't I would have left. But then he said that he hoped I was lying. I asked him why and he said because if I did know this Rinaldo he could do a lot for me, but if I didn't that still wouldn't get me off the hook."

"What'd he mean by that?"

"I don't know. I tried to explain to him that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn't listen. He told me that he'd wait a few days but that if I didn't get back to him by then there'd be consequences. He also told me that if I spoke to this Rinaldo about our talk that I'd end up being collateral damage."

"And you really don't know this guy?"

"I never heard of him."

I didn't think that she was lying. If she wanted to cover her relationship with Rinaldo she'd never have mentioned his name.

"What did this Shell look like?" I asked.

"White guy," she said. "Kinda tall."

"Fat? Skinny?"

"Just normal. You got the feeling he was pretty strong. His hair was dark but I don't think that was his natural color. Here's the card he gave me," she said, handing it over.

There was just a name, Oscar Shell, and a phone number with a 917 area code. I tried the number right then but the automatic operator told me that the line had been disconnected.

"Where was it that you met him?" I asked.

"The Leontine Building, on Park and Thirty-first."

After that she told me about the attack in front of her building. I pretended to listen as if this were all new information. I even asked a few questions about the men. But none of that mattered.

Three-quarters of an hour had gone by when we had finished with her stories.

"Three thousand dollars," I said, "plus expenses. You can pay me when I prove that you are innocent on all counts."

"But you don't even know what you're saying you'll prove me innocent of."

"Doesn't matter. I'm sure that this Shell is dirty. All I have to do is show him to the cops and they'll do the legwork."

"And if you don't prove it?"

"You save three thousand dollars and you can still run away."

"I never told you that I was going anywhere."

"Your bags did that."

"And so I should just stay here until I hear from you?" she asked rather hopefully.

"No," I said. "I don't think so. You need to go where nobody knows you. You need a new name and identity."

I fished a Visa credit card out of my wallet. It was in my daughter's name. This I handed over to Miss Lear.

"Michelle Constance McGill," Angie read. "Is this your daughter?"

"Yeah."

"Won't she mind?"

"She doesn't even know the card exists. It has a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit. But remember--every cent you spend will go for expenses. Go find a cheap hotel someplace and call me at my office every day at four-thirty. If I'm out, Mardi will put you through to me wherever I am."

"Why are you doing all this?" she asked.

"You look like a good kid," I said easily. "If it works out, I make my weekly nut and see that justice is done--for a change."

51

I
t only took a minute for Tiny "Bug" Bateman to disengage the lock on the shamrock-green, reinforced metal door to his underground apartment/workshop. This door was eight feet below street level on Charles, near Hudson.

The electronics lab that had once been a living space was now a series of rooms lined with worktables containing every sort of gadget that a spy-store devotee could imagine. Listening devices, hidden lenses, specialized walkie-talkie telephones, motion sensors, and a lot of things I couldn't even begin to explain.

I was walking down the hall toward the one-time master bedroom that was now filled with a dozen or more linked CPUs that combined to make one of the fastest civilian computers in the world.

Bug met me in the hall.

I had never seen Tiny outside of the hole cut into the round table that dominated his control room. There he always sat, surrounded by more than a dozen screens, swiveling this way and that between keyboards and other, more exotic, devices.

I had never seen his fat, cafe au lait feet before. As usual, he was wearing blue-jean overalls with no shirt and the red-and-blue iridescent glasses used to track the otherwise invisible spectrums that appeared on some of his more bizarre screens. He was four inches taller than I, close to three hundred pounds, and very, very soft. His curly hair was longish and unruly.

"Tiny?"

He lifted his hinged ultraviolet lenses, so that they flipped up over his forehead, and gave a rare smile.

"Did you talk to her?" he asked.

"What?"

"Zephyra," he said as if he were the pope and I a priest who had somehow forgotten the Latinate Lord's Prayer.

"No, man," I said. "I've been on a case. I've been working."

"You couldn't make a call?"

"Zephyra Ximenez is not a
call
girl," I said. "Not when it comes to something like this, anyway. I was thinking that if I survived the next few days I'd meet with her at the Naked Ear and we'd talk. But now that I see you got feet that actually work, maybe all three of us could meet there."

The look on the brooding young man's face was classic. He went from monadic particulate to an eight-year-old boy in no time.

"Um . . ." he said.

"I'll take that as a yes. Now can we get down to some business?"

EVEN ONCE HE WAS back in his hole, Tiny was still a little off at first. I kept having to repeat myself when explaining about the Leontine Building and the man named Shell.

In order to prime him for more challenging work, I had him look up the license-plate number I got from Lonnie, the redheaded ex-con, but that was just a rental to a guy named Bob Brown.

"And you want to know where this Shell is?" Tiny asked once we were back into the meat of my visit.

"If that'll help me find out who he's working for," I said. "I need to know who's behind all this."

After some time Tiny settled down to his usual brilliance and brought his bug-eyes to bear on the subject of Oscar Shell.

Problems showed up immediately when it became clear that no one by that name worked for any company situated in the Leontine Building. No Oscar Shell had ever rented space there. As a matter of fact, there wasn't an Oscar Shell that fit Angie's description anywhere in the tristate area.

"This isn't gonna work," Tiny said after an hour on the bully's trail. "How about we take another route?"

"The building?" I asked.

From there the fat genius went into overdrive.

T. D. Donnie and Sons were listed as the owners of the Leontine but they actually owned less than one percent of the building, making their money as absentee property managers. The corporation they answered to was Graski Incorporated, which was located in Chicago. Graski had gone out of business in 1955, however, though the corporate name was owned by a woman named Hedda Martins of Miami. Hedda had died three years earlier, and a Florida lawyer's report had informed her heirs that Hedda was a small partner in a company in San Francisco called Real Innovations. RI had listed among its properties the Leontine.

The trail might have ended there, except for one of Hedda's pesky heirs--a man named Thom Soams. Soams filed suits in New York, Illinois, Florida, and California in an attempt to receive payment for what he felt was the heirs' rightful due. After two and half years of wrangling with a new firm, Mallory Investments, Soams collected the sum of $22,307.31 in settlement.

Mallory Investments was a subsidiary of Regents Bank of New York, a private institution owned lock, stock, and barrel by a sometime socialite oddly named Sandra Sanderson III.

It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but at least I had a business, and maybe even a name.

The articles we pulled up on Sanderson painted her as a hands-on tyrant in her multibillion-dollar business. She fought long and hard against anyone who stood in her way. The New York skyline owed a lot to Regents Bank, which collected its interest with a stopwatch and a stable of lawyers.

Her son, Desmond, had died of a rare heart disease at the beginning of 2008, and Sandra had gone into seclusion, which was peculiar, because mother and son had been on the outs for years.

The structure of this story put me in a rather literary frame of mind.

If Desmond was Grendel, and Sandra Grendel's mama, then maybe Alphonse was Beowulf and this was all a reenactment of a classic masterpiece.

I smiled to myself, leaning on Tiny's round white table as I read the articles he'd produced for me.

"Uh-oh," the genius said.

"What?"

"Somebody's trying to track me down."

"Regents?"

"Not by the signature, but you can bet whoever it is, they work for them."

"How close are they?"

"I've laid down four thousand ninety-six false trails," he said, unrattled. "They might could get through them all, but I doubt it."

"What if they do?"

"If they pushed hard enough they might break the shield on my place."

"That's a lot of work, isn't it?"

"I hacked their database," he said blandly. "They're worth billions. But don't worry, I have a lot of traps set. It's very unlikely that they'd make it all the way here."

" 'Unlikely' is not a word I swear by," I said. "Maybe we should get you out of here for a couple of days."

"No."

"No?"

"No one drives me from my home. My life's work is here in this room. I'll die before I let anyone take it from me or me from it."

"You don't really mean that," I said.

"This bunker could withstand a nuclear blast," he told me. I believed him. "It would take a crew of construction engineers just to take down my front door. Being underground, I don't have any assailable walls, and the apartment overhead is mine, with a reinforced floor. There's booby traps all down the hallway and even in the toilet and I have plastic explosives embedded in all four walls of this room. If they ever got this far--they'd never get out."