The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) (43 page)

“Oh, fuck you. ”

The black woman squeezed in. She sat on Katz's lap.
Served him right.

CHAPTER 14

Detective Harry Greenwald, who had worked with
Lesko four years in Manhattan South until he made lieutenant, had left calls for him at Gallagher's and at
the Beckwith Regency, and had asked the watch com
mander at Lesko's local precinct to leave a note under his door. Lesko found it when he arrived home from
Westport. Forty-five minutes later he was at the Belle
vue morgue looking down at the dead, contorted face of
Buzz Donovan.

Donovan was on a gurney table, naked, covered
with a sheet. His eyes looked past Lesko through slits,
his mouth was open, his white hair messed and matted. His expression, it seemed to Lesko, was more one of
anger than of pain.

“Preliminary is a heart attack,” Harry Greenwald
told him.

Lesko reached for the sheet and drew it back over
his friend's face. “What do you think?”

Greenwald pulled out his notebook and opened it to
a page held by a paper clip. “Doorman says he arrived
around half-past two. Gave him the messages you left,
which is how I knew to call you. Super says you'd asked
him to check Donovan's apartment and it was empty
then. Donovan gets home, takes off his clothes and gets
into the shower, lathers himself up, which
is
why his
hair is like that, and has an apparent heart attack.
Maybe another two hours go by before enough water
splashes out of the shower to go through the ceiling
below. That tenant calls the super, the super finds him,
calls
911.”

“Any marks on him? Anything?''
Lesko made a ges
ture of futility with his hands. No matter how much
death he'd seen, it was still hard for him to believe that a
life, particularly that of a friend, could be snuffed out
just like that.

”A small cut on the back of his head, a long scrape down his back, both consistent with sliding down over
the shower fittings. He ended up with his face into the
shower stream, mouth open. They'll probably find wa
ter in his lungs.” Greenwald touched the bigger man's arm. “I'm sorry, Ray.”

“Where was he?” Lesko asked. “I mean, last night.”

“No one seems to know.”

“You went through his pockets?”

“Nothing. Just his keys, wallet, pen. The usual.”

“How about his notebook?”

“He didn't have one. The clothes, by the way,
smelled a little sour, like he slept in them. They were
folded across a chair in his. . . .” Greenwald suddenly
fell silent, staring into space as if he'd just remembered
something. “He always carried a notebook?”

Lesko pulled out his own. “Leather bound, like this
one. It's always either in your pocket or where you
empty your pockets. Did you look on his dresser?”

Greenwald's mind was clearly on something else.
“Ray,” he asked, “what was going on between you?”

“Nothing.” He was damned if he was going to bring
his daughter into this. “He's a friend. I see Donovan
maybe twice a week since he retired.”

“So why all of a sudden are you so hot to find him?
What was in his notebook, Ray?”

Lesko studied him. “Something just got you inter
ested,” he said quietly, “what was it?”

Greenwald shrugged. “What I'm asking about. The
missing notebook.”

“Don't fuck with me, Harry.” It wasn't the note
book. That could have been lost anywhere. It would have taken more than that for Greenwald to suddenly
ask what's going on and to wonder, which Lesko could
see in his eyes, whether it was a heart attack after all.

Greenwald studied Lesko in return. “The messages.
The ones the doorman says he gave Donovan to call
you.”

Lesko's eyes narrowed. “You didn't find them, ei
ther.”

“Come on. We'll go look.”

Robert Loftus had wanted no part in the abduction
and illegal detention of Buzz Donovan.

It was stupid. No other word for it.

At the root of the stupidity was Palmer Reid's con
viction that he could, given the chance, persuade any
body of anything. At the root of that conviction was
Reid's fundamental contempt for any intelligence but
his. That was what was so ludicrous. Reid would end up
telling Donovan the most transparent lies, never
dreaming for a minute that a former federal prosecutor
might see right through them. Almost everybody saw
through them. Almost always. And when that hap
pened, Reid would regretfully conclude that there was
just no reasoning with the man, and that's when Reid
would get even more stupid.

The only good thing to say about working for a man
like Reid is that you could get rich. No real supervision.
Few questions asked. Hardly any financial accounting.
Loftus could retire right now on what he had taken out
of Bolivia alone, if Reid would let him go. But Reid had
told him. You retire when I do, Robert. Not before. Your
country needs you. What that really meant, Loftus
knew, was that Reid would have the IRS and the FBI
inquiring into his affairs within a week, and the DEA would end up confiscating every nickle, every car, ev
ery piece of property they could find that could not be
explained on an R-2's pay grade.

“Not that it should be any cause for concern, Rob
ert,” Reid had told him. “I am entirely confident that
you, like myself, have not enriched yourself in any way
while in the service of your country.”

What was so fucking galling was that Reid's state
ment was one of his infrequent brushes with the truth.
Reid, in all probability, had never pocketed a dime. Of
course, having a trust-fund income all his adult life and
picking up about four million when his mother finally
died just might have had something to do with it.

As for the abduction of Donovan, Loftus had been
sure that Reid's “chat” with him would be anything but

friendly. What he had feared most was that Reid would
then try bullying him, threatening him, or even order
ing him kept on ice until he began to see things Reid's
way. That would have been stupid enough. But never in
his darkest dreams did Loftus imagine that Reid would
have Donovan killed.

It was Doug Poole who told him. Poole had been summoned to the Scarsdale house early that morning.
Reid's orders. Reid wanted to hear directly from him
what he saw in Westport. Nothing, Poole had sworn.
Only what he had told Mr. Loftus. The questioning
made Poole nervous, both because of his own abduc
tion, which he was not about to admit to anyone, and
because the questioning suggested that Reid was losing
confidence in Poole's immediate boss.

“Don't worry about that,” Loftus told him. “What
makes you thinîc Donovan's dead?”

“Well, first of all,” Poole explained, “I didn't even
know he was there. I got to the house before Mr. Reid
arrived and I heard this yelling and banging on a door. I
ask Burdick who it is and he says nobody and I should
wait for Reid in the library. Mr. Reid
shows up and I
overhear Burdick saying ‘Here's Donovan's notebook.’
And he tells Reid he's made copies of all Donovan's
keys. Then I walk in and say ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’
and he looks at me like he forgot and he flicks his hand
at me the way he does and tells me to go wait in the
kitchen until I'm called. Then he tells Burdick to give
him ten minutes with the notebook and then bring
Donovan down.”

“Could you hear what was said between them?”

“Just some raised voices at one point. Then the door opens, Reid tells Jack Gorby to drive Donovan home. I see Gorby nod to Burdick, who then heads out the front
door first and drives away. At first I figure Burdick is
going to search Donovan's apartment with those keys
while Gorby takes his time driving in.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Burdick showed up about three hours later smell
ing like someone poured a bucket of Gatorade over
him. He goes in with Mr. Reid. I had a bad feeling about
that smell so I go and listen at the door. I hear Burdick
telling Reid he regrets to report that Donovan suffered
a
fatal heart attack. Reid just says ‘Unfortunate.’ Then
Burdick says something else I couldn't really hear about
Lesko, the father, I think and that's when I got away
from the door.”

“The smell,” Loftus said quietly. “It was amyl ni
trate?”

“I'm pretty sure, Mr. Loftus,” he said fearfully, “Bur
dick killed that old man and Reid ordered it.”

“You don't know that, Doug.”

“I wish I didn't.”

“I'm going up there.” Loftus kept his composure
with effort. “Doug, you stay far away from this.”

From Donovan's doorman, Lesko and Lieutenant
Greenwald picked up a sample of the message slips he
used. There was nothing similar in the apartment. Not
in the wastebaskets, not on the dresser tops, not in Don
ovan's desk or under its mat. They did not search the
leaves of every book or the linings of every drawer
because it was not a thing Donovan would have taken
the trouble to hide. Nor was there a notebook. He and
Greenwald had both been right. The notebook could
conceivably have been left elsewhere. The message
slips could not have been.