The Accident (23 page)

“Recognize it?” he asked.

“That’s Sheila’s cell.”

“Your wife’s cell called Sommer’s at 1:02 the day she died.”

“She must have dialed wrong. And how the hell do you even know this? Where did you get these phone records?”

“We work in cooperation with several law enforcement agencies. They have provided some of their surveillance information. This number your wife called, by the way, it’s not a phone he has anymore. He goes through cell phones the way I go through cheesecake.” He gave his paunch a light pat.

“Okay, so Sheila called Sommer. Who the hell is he? I mean, what’s he do?”

“The FBI links him to organized crime.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not,” Arthur Twain said. “Sommer gets a lot of calls from women—and plenty of men, too—who are unaware he has those kinds of criminal connections. They may think he’s a little shady, but figure what they don’t know won’t hurt them. They just think he’s a businessman, a representative for a company that imports the items they’re interested in selling.”

“What items? When you walked in here you said purses. This guy moves
purses
?”

“Among other things.”

“He looks more like someone you’d go to to get guns or drugs.”

“He can get you those, too. Especially the latter. Of a certain kind.”

“I don’t believe any of this. I don’t get a ladies’ handbag vibe off this character.”

“Sommer moves whatever can make him money, and purses is one of those things.”

“So what are you saying? That my wife tried to buy a knockoff purse from this criminal?”

“It wouldn’t have been just one, if it was purses at all. Sommer’s people offer a full range of products. But knockoff bags are a distinct possibility. Have you ever heard of a purse party, Mr. Garber?”

I went to open my mouth, to say, “Are you kidding? We had one right here.” But I stopped myself.

“I’m sure you have,” he continued. “They’re pretty popular. Women get together to buy fake designer bags for a fraction of what the real things cost. It’s all a lot of fun, a girls’ night out, they put out some cheese
and crackers, open some wine. A woman goes home with some fancy Prada or Marc Jacobs or Fendi or Louis Vuitton or Valentino bag that looks pretty darn close to the real thing. Only one who doesn’t know it’s real is her. And all the women at the party, of course.”

I studied him. “Don’t you have
real
crimes to investigate?”

Arthur smiled knowingly. “That’s what a lot of people say. But selling knockoff bags is a crime. A federal one.”

“I can’t believe police are wasting time on this when there’s people getting murdered out there and drugs coming into the country and terrorists plotting God knows what. So a few women walk around with bags that aren’t a real Marc Fendi—”

“Marc Jacobs, or Fendi,” he said.

“Whatever. So they’re walking around with a fake bag. If that’s all they can afford, then they weren’t going to buy the real one anyway. So who gets hurt?”

“Where would you like me to start?” Twain said. “With the legitimate companies that are having their copyrighted and trademarked work ripped off? The millions of dollars that are effectively stolen from them, and those who work for them, by this kind of crime?”

“I’m sure they’re getting by,” I said.

“Your daughter, Kelly, how old is she?”

“What’s this have to do with Kelly?”

“I’m guessing she’s what, seven years old?”

“Eight.”

“Can you picture her, right now, working nine or ten or more hours a day in a factory, making knockoffs? That’s what boys and girls her age do in China, working for a dollar a day. Working—”

“That’s right, play the exploited-children card when all those companies really care about is losing profits—”

“Working their fingers to the bone in some sweatshop to make a bag, all so some woman from Milford or Westport or Darien can stroll about trying to fool people into thinking she’s worth more than she really is. Do you know where the money goes, Mr. Garber? When a woman here in Milford drops thirty or fifty or a hundred bucks on some bag, do you know where the money ends up? The woman running the purse party will get her cut, of course, but she has to pay her supplier to get those bags. That money goes to produce other knockoffs, but not just other
handbags. Counterfeit DVDs, video games, children’s toys—covered with lead paint with parts that can snap off and choke a kid to death—substandard building parts with counterfeit approval stamps on them, even knockoff baby formula, if you can believe that. There are even imitation prescription drugs out there that look like the real thing, even have the same product identification stamps on them, but don’t have the same ingredients, there’s no regulation at all. I’m not talking about less expensive drugs from Canada. I’m talking pharmaceuticals from India, China. Some of these pills, Mr. Garber, they don’t do
anything
. So you have someone on a limited pension, low income, he can’t afford his heart medication or whatever, he finds what he thinks is the same drug on the Internet, or he buys it off a friend of a friend, starts taking it, next thing you know, he’s dead.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know who’s making money from all that? Organized criminal organizations. Chinese gangs, Russian gangs, India, Pakistan. You name it. And plenty of good ol’ Americans, too. The FBI says some of this money even gets funneled to terrorist operations.”

“Really,” I said. “Some lady down the street buys a Gucci bag and suddenly we’ve got planes flying into buildings.”

Arthur smiled. “You make light, but I saw the expression on your face, a moment ago, when I mentioned building supplies. You’re a contractor, am I right?”

The words had registered with me, and I may have blinked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Imagine,” he said, “if someone working for you were to install into one of your houses, I don’t know, knockoff electrical components. Parts made in China that look, on the outside, exactly like name-brand ones manufactured and approved for use here, but on the inside they’re just junk. Made with wire of insufficient gauge. They overheat, they short out. Breakers don’t trip. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what might happen.”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth and chin. For a moment, I was back in that smoke-filled basement. “So why are you here? If this is such a big deal, why aren’t the police asking me about this instead of you?”

“We work with the police wherever we can, but they don’t have the
resources to deal with this problem. Counterfeit goods are a five-hundred-billion dollar-a-year-business, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. The fashion industry has turned to private security and investigation firms to track down counterfeiters. That’s where I come in. Sometimes, it’s pretty simple. We find a woman who’s been holding purse parties, naïvely thinking there’s nothing wrong with what she does, and we let her know she’s committing a crime, a federal crime, and that may be enough. She stops, we don’t charge her. Sometimes. When we find shops that are selling these goods, we notify the merchants, and the landlords, that what they’re doing is illegal, and that we’re prepared to bring in the police to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And we often do. But just the threat of it is often enough to get landlords to act. They get rid of those tenants and bring in ones that obey the law, that sell legitimate merchandise.”

“What about just buying a purse? Owning a knockoff? Is that a crime?”

“No. But would your conscience be clear, if you were a woman and were carrying around a knockoff, and knew that this kind of thing could be happening?” He was looking in the envelope for a couple more pictures. He handed them to me.

“What are—oh Jesus.”

They were crime scene photographs. If I was going to have to look at pictures like these, I would have preferred to see them in black-and-white. But these were in Technicolor. The bodies of two women, pools of blood beneath them. All around them, purses. On tables, hanging from the walls, from the ceiling.

“Dear God.”

I looked at the next picture. A man, apparently shot in the head, his upper body sprawled across a desk. I thrust the pictures back at Twain. “What the hell is this?”

“The women’s names are Pam Steigerwald and Edna Bauder. A couple of tourists from Butler, Pennsylvania. In New York for a girls’ weekend. They were looking for bargain-priced purses on Canal Street and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The man is Andy Fong. A merchant, and an importer of knockoff purses manufactured in China.”

“I don’t know anything about these people.”

“I show this to you because it’s an example of what can happen when folks get mixed up in this whole counterfeit business.”

I was angry. “This is disgusting, trying to make a point by showing me something like this, trying to scare the hell out of me. This has nothing to do with Sheila.”

“The police believe our man with the many names, the one we’ll call Madden Sommer, may have done this. The man your wife phoned the day she died.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Madden Sommer sat in his car across the street, and three houses down, from the Garber house.

He had his hand on the door when another car pulled up. A black GM sedan. A well-dressed man got out. Soft looking. The rounded stomach hanging over his belt. The way he carried himself. When the front door opened, the man flashed some ID to Garber.

Interesting
, Sommer thought, taking his hand off the door. He didn’t get the sense the man was a cop, but anything was possible. He took note of the car’s license plate, then placed a call on his cell.

“Hello?”

“It’s me. I need you to run a plate for me.”

“I’m not exactly at work right now,” Slocum said. “I’m with family. My wife’s sister is here.”

“Write this down.”

“I just said—”

“F, seven—”

“Hang on, hang on.” Sommer could hear Slocum scrambling to find paper and a pencil.

“Christ’s sake, go ahead.”

Sommer read off the rest of the plate. “How soon?”

“I don’t know. It depends who’s on.”

“I’ll call you back in an hour or so. Have it for me by then.”

“I told you, I don’t know if I can get it right away. Where are you? Where’s this car you—”

Sommer slipped the phone back into his jacket.

Garber had let the man inside his home. Sommer could see shadows in the living room. He’d also been watching the other windows of the house. There was a light on upstairs. Occasionally, a shadow crossed the curtains, and at one point, someone had peeked through them to take a look at the street.

A child. A young girl.

TWENTY-FIVE

I stood up, so angry I was shaking. The idea that Sheila had any dealings, even so much as a phone call, with a thug like Sommer was deeply disturbing to me. And I’d already had enough troubling revelations about Sheila.

“You’re wrong. Sheila didn’t call that guy.”

“If she didn’t, someone using her phone did. Did she lend her phone out to people?” Twain asked.

“No. But—it doesn’t make sense.”

“But your wife has purchased knockoff purses?”

I remembered when I was standing in the closet on Friday, wondering whether it was finally time to do something with Sheila’s things. There were dozens of purses in there.

“There might be a couple,” I said.

“Would you mind if I looked at them?”

“Why?”

“When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you learn to spot certain characteristics. Just as someone could note the differences between a Coach and Gucci bag, I can sometimes notice differences between a bag made in one factory in China versus a bag made somewhere else. It gives me an idea which counterfeiters are making more of a dent in the market, for one thing.”

I hesitated. Why help this man? What difference did it make now? If anything, Arthur Twain was going to tarnish Sheila’s memory. Why help him do that?

As if reading my mind, he said, “I’m not here to hurt your wife’s reputation. I’m sure Mrs. Garber never knowingly broke the law, or intended to. This is one of those things like, like stealing cable. Everyone does it, so no one thinks that there’s anything—”

“Sheila
never
stole cable. Or anything else.”

Arthur held up a defensive hand. “Sorry. It was just an example.”

I said nothing, ran my tongue over my lip. “She hosted a party here,” I said. “Once.”

Arthur nodded. “When was that?”

“A few weeks—no, a couple of months before Sheila died.”

“When you say hosted, did she sell the merchandise? Or did she turn that over to someone else?”

“Someone else.” I hesitated, wondering whether it was fair to drag anyone else into it. Except the person I was going to name was as immune from prosecution as Sheila. “A woman named Ann Slocum. A friend of Sheila’s.”

Arthur Twain looked up something in his Moleskine. “Yeah, I have that name here. My information is that she was in regular contact with Mr. Sommer. I’ll be wanting to talk to her, too.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“She died the other night.”

For the first time, Arthur looked taken aback. “When? What happened?”

“Late Friday night, or maybe early Saturday morning. She had an accident. Got out to check a flat tire, stumbled off the pier.”

“Oh my. I didn’t know.” Twain was taking it all in.

So was I. The day that Sheila died, she’d put in a call to some kind of mobster. A man Twain was telling me was a suspect in a triple homicide. I thought about what Edwin had said, quoting Conan Doyle. How when something seemed impossible, the other possibilities, no matter how improbable, had to be considered.

Sheila had called a suspected killer. And before the day was out, she was dead.

She hadn’t died the way the people in those photographs had. She hadn’t been shot. No one had walked up to her and put a—

A bullet in her brain
.

That wasn’t what had happened to her. She’d died in an accident. An accident that had never made sense to me. Sure, all fatal accidents seemed senseless to those who were left behind to grieve. The deaths seemed so random, so cruelly arbitrary. But Sheila’s accident was different.