The Disposable Man (12 page)

He mention Russia at all?”

She frowned. “No, not that I recall.”

“Anyone else?” I asked. She thought a moment. “There was another couple. I don’t think they were married, but they didn’t seem like sweethearts, either. I didn’t see much of her. She was either feeling poorly, or just not very social, but she kept to their room for the most part. Her name was Ann, I think. I never did catch a last name. His was Howard Richter, and he’d definitely been to Europe. We got into a long conversation about traveling the canals over there, and he was quite knowledgeable. Otherwise, he struck me as a little aloof. In fact, I kind of wondered why they were even there. They didn’t seem like the type.”

“Does the inn serve breakfast?” I asked suddenly.

“Yes.”

“The morning of the seventeenth, did you notice any of these people—or anyone else, for that matter—acting differently, or missing altogether?”

Marcia Luechauer had placed her cup on the table earlier and now steepled her fingers before her chin, her eyes fixed on some distant object out the window. “Let’s see, that would’ve been my last full day there. Ann didn’t show—no surprise there. The Brockmans were there, in tennis whites. Howard… Let’s see… He did come down—late—and I waved to him from across the room. He acted as though he hadn’t seen me. I remember thinking he and Ann must’ve had a fight, because he looked pretty ugly. But like I said, he was naturally a little moody.” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Actually, the one who struck me oddest of all that morning was Douglas, my waiter. He was French-Canadian, and normally as smooth-talking as a bad commercial—one of those God’s-gift-to-women types. He was downright cranky that morning and didn’t look as if he’d slept at all.”

I couldn’t suppress a small laugh. “You have a phenomenal memory. You should be a cop.”

Her eyes gleamed. “I think that would be fascinating. Has any of this helped?”

“Absolutely. We may have gotten a little sidetracked, though, when we focused on the world travelers. Was there anyone else who stood out, for any reason at all?”

“The Meades,” she said instantly. “They were from New York City. She was a lawyer, he was a doctor—Ed and Linda. They both had cell phones, briefcases, perpetual creases between their eyes. I’ve run into people like them, using the inn circuit to try to get back together—try a second honeymoon, I guess. I don’t think it works. It certainly didn’t in this case. They barely spoke to one another. He’d go hiking, she’d borrow a bike. Their dinners were almost totally silent. But there was an odd quality to them that really struck me. It wasn’t hostility. It was coldness. They treated everyone the way they did each other—no favorites. They gave me the creeps. They might have been robots.”

A brief silence settled between us as I continued scribbling notes in my pad. “Other than that,” she resumed, “it was a pretty typical group—couples making the fine foods tour, people just getting away for a few days, some old folks enjoying their retirement… and me,” she added brightly, “the spinsterish busybody.”

“Bless you for that,” I told her. “I wish everyone I interviewed was as observant.”

I rose to my feet and headed toward the hallway. “Are there any last thoughts before I go? Anything more about Douglas, for instance?”

She joined me, shaking her head. “No, I’m afraid not. Other than that one morning, he was his oily self from start to finish.”

“And no one else with overseas baggage?”

She laughed. “Not that I could tell, aside from John Rarig, of course. But him you know about.”

I tried to pause as nonchalantly as possible in the doorway. “How do you mean?”

She looked up at me, surprised. “That he’s been to Europe—speaks fluent German.”

“He told you that?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to. We were talking about wine one evening, and he pulled out a bottle of
Gumpoldskirchen Veltliner
. It’s Austrian, from the Wachau district, and he pronounced it like a native.”

“Sounds like you just did, too,” I commented.

She burst out laughing, “With a name like Luechauer? I should hope so. I was born over there, and I’m the German teacher here. Anyhow, there’s all sorts of German, I suppose, like anywhere else. His wasn’t the school-taught kind. It was regional. He could only have picked it up by living there.”

I reached for the door and pulled it open, letting in a flood of youthful noises from down the hall. “How did Rarig look the morning of the seventeenth?”

She paused reflectively and then answered, “Tired. He had bags under his eyes.”

“HOW DEEP DID YOU GO INTO
his past?” Sammie asked me.

“Usual paper trail, a couple of phone calls. Obviously, he could’ve gone to Europe on vacations, but nothing indicated John Rarig ever lived in Austria, or anywhere else outside the U.S. Marcia Luechauer said he spoke the language like a native. That takes time.”

“Or intensive, intelligence-grade teaching,” Ron said softly.

“If all this is CIA,” Sammie said, “then we’re up a creek. We’re not going to be able to touch them. They’ll just pull the shades like Gil Snowden did in DC and turn into the Cheshire cat.”

I held up my hand. “Hold it. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.” We were back in my office, with the door closed—cramped but private—the only ones left after an already long day. “There’s obviously some CIA involvement here, but let’s not turn it into a full-blown conspiracy. If all this was really national security and cloak-and-dagger stuff, the FBI would be sitting here, not us. They sniffed around Hillstrom’s office and apparently didn’t take the bait. We are reasonably assuming a man was killed on our turf—a straightforward homicide. It would be nice to know who he was and what he was up to, but when you get down to it, our real job is to nail his killer. There’s no reason to think we can’t do that.”

“Yeah,” Sammie retorted, “except that if it really was no big deal, the CIA wouldn’t’ve asked to talk to you, and they wouldn’t’ve lied about knowing Boris in the first place.
That
was obviously bullshit.”

I closed my eyes briefly, fighting the urge to tell her to back down for once in her life. Although, plagued as I was about that supposed mugging, part of my irritation stemmed from the chance she was right. “Luechauer fingered Doug DeFalque, too, Sam. What more have you dug up on him?”

She was obviously unhappy about being cut off, but her expression also told of something surprisingly like embarrassment. “RCMP reported back,” she said quietly. “They have nothing connecting him with the Russian mob.”

Ron stared at her. “This morning, you said he was a free agent working with biker gangs and the mob.”

Sammie turned sullen. “I was right about the bikers. The mob angle was unofficial. My contact’s pretty good up there, and it sounded solid when I heard it. Guess I was wrong.”

“That’s okay,” I said quickly. “It was a theory. They’re part of this process, too. What else did you find out about him?”

“I poked around his neighborhood in Jamaica. I have a friend who lives up there, and another one at the sheriff’s department who actually knows him. They both confirmed he was a bit of a dirtbag—Mr. Smooth around teenage girls, not too swift with anyone else. He’s been seen in town pretty consistently for the last few months. I asked a contact at Customs if they’d run his plate this summer, since they’re keeping tabs on him. Last legal crossing he made was in early June, just before the tourist season, when the inn started using him on a regular basis. If Boris was whacked for some sort of international activity, it doesn’t look as if DeFalque was part of it. Also, despite having a loud mouth and a swagger, he’s never taken a swing at anyone I could find, so using a garrote seems pretty out of character.”

“That confirms what I learned from Dottie Delman,” Ron said. “She called him a slimy little worm. He’s impregnated a couple of girls and left them high and dry, he shirks his debts and talks big, especially when he’s been drinking, but he’s also very good at ingratiating himself when he needs a job, a favor, or a loan, which probably explains his job at the inn.”

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of both hands. “All right. Doug DeFalque may be slipping from our number-one spot. Putting John Rarig to one side, what did either one of you learn about anyone else?”

“I think we can scratch Bob Manship, too,” Ron said. “Dottie confirmed what everyone else was saying—he got into a jam, but he’s a good boy. Always has been, always will be. Dottie thought he’s been taking the whole thing way too hard—that the woman he creamed the other guy for didn’t deserve either one of them. But Dottie’s an old-fashioned sort. In any case, Bob lives like a monk now.

“Marty Sopper—” he went on, consulting his ever-present notes, “Marianne Baker’s boyfriend—might be another matter. Dottie called him mean straight through, and thought he’d slice his mother’s throat for the price of a Coke. She made Marianne sound like the typical abused spouse—a totally dependent target. Marty doesn’t have a steady job. He works wherever he can, or just rips off Marianne, so he fits someone who could be hired to use a piano wire, but we hit a dead end when we come to the international angle. Dottie doubts he’s been beyond Brattleboro, much less into Canada. He tends to work his own patch.”

“How long was he living down here?” I asked. “We sure got to know him well enough.”

Ron checked his cheat sheet. “Only two years. He was born in Wardsboro, so I guess he thought this was the big city. Too big for him, apparently—he still bitches about it, and about us especially. Says we were a bunch of Nazis. This is not a sophisticated man.”

“And presumably not clever enough to sneak up on someone, strangle him, ditch him without leaving a trace, and then keep quiet about it,” I said.

Ron chewed on his upper lip for a moment’s silence. “I guess not.”

“Scratch Marty Sopper,” Sammie muttered darkly.

“Not yet,” I cautioned. “But let’s leave him alone for the moment. Luechauer gave me some new names. Ron, did Dottie mention any guests named Meade, Richter, or Brockman? Ed Meade was a New York physician—a real ice cube. Luechauer said he gave her the creeps.”

Ron shook his head. “Dottie wasn’t much good on the guests. Her bread and butter’s the neighborhood. I tried to see if she’d picked up any names from her inn contacts, but it was pretty useless. By the time she hears about them, they’ve been reduced to ‘the white-haired couple from Florida,’ or ‘Mr. Attitude with the big ears.’ There’s a lot of typical flatlander resentment. Actually,” he added, “as ironies would have it, Luechauer was the only one I did hear about—she passed with flying colors.”

There was a knock at the door. Harriet Fritter, our administrative assistant, stepped in and handed me a fax. “Just came in—RCMP.”

I read it over carefully and handed it to Sam. “The Canadians say Boris Malik is actually Sergei Antonov, one of several point men for the Russian mob, reportedly over here to set up operations. They pegged him through fingerprints, dental records, and the face shot we sent them. They don’t seem to have any doubts about it.”

Sammie passed the report to Ron. “That doesn’t do us much good.”

I placed my feet on my desk and crossed my arms, staring sightlessly out the darkened window that separated my office from the empty squad room. “No. It doesn’t. If anything, it lets more air out of our tires—heightening the suggestion we were just a dumping ground for an out-of-town argument. I wonder where the Canadians are getting their information?”

Ron stared at me in confusion, struck by the implication. “What do you mean?”

“RCMP is a gigantic organization—about six of our major federal alphabet soups rolled into one. It’s interesting to me that we’ve gotten three pieces of information from them recently, two of them contradictory. First we’re encouraged to think Doug DeFalque might be dirty, then that’s canceled. Next, we hear absolutely nothing about Boris for days on end, and now he’s suddenly a major player for the mob. It’s almost as if someone’s either doing a lousy job of feeding us information, or just trying to tie us up in knots. I’m hearing echoes of how Snowden dealt with me.”

Sammie looked disgusted. “Great. We’re getting nowhere here.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I reassured her. “Taken separately, nobody looks particularly outstanding, but if you combine, say, Marty Sopper with John Rarig, things begin to pick up.”

They both stared at me. Sammie spoke first, “Rarig with a sudden European past, and Sopper with the morals of a mongrel and a temper to match.”

“I’d love to look at Sopper’s closet for ginkgo seeds, and under his mattress for a new sack of gold,” I murmured.

“Maybe we can,” Ron said, his eyes bright.

“Right,” Sammie added, “through Marianne Baker.”

I smiled at their quickly recovered enthusiasm. “Like you said—‘maybe.’ Remember what Dottie said about her, though. If she’s willing to be the man’s punching bag, she’s not going to be inclined to squeal on him.”

“She won’t have to,” Sammie continued. “As far as the ginkgo seeds are concerned, all we have to do is either get invited into their apartment, or get Marianne to admit that on the night of the sixteenth, Sopper’s shoes smelled to high heaven. If we don’t tip our hand that we’re targeting her boyfriend, she might even admit he had blood on his clothes, or was out all that night, or said something that might place him at the quarry. We just have to get her conversational. It might take time, but she could be the key to establishing probable cause, after which we really could start cooking.”

Despite the sudden energy in the air, I yawned and checked my watch. It was closing in on nine o’clock. “Okay. Let’s do it. See if we get lucky. Ron, you keep after Marty Sopper. Find out everything you can about him. Does he have a bank account? Has he been throwing money around lately? Any recent change in habits—gambling, drinking more, whatever. Has he suddenly settled any long-standing debts? Paid off back taxes? See if you can establish a daily pattern, and whether he broke it the night of the sixteenth. Did any neighbors hear anything unusual then?

“Sam,” I continued. “Go after Marianne. Take your time, use whatever approach you want. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about our German linguist, Mr. Rarig. If he is or was CIA, and the paper trail I followed is bogus, there have got to be holes in it somewhere. I’ll try to find people who knew him back when—boyhood friends from his supposed hometown. Things like that. If he’s hiding something, maybe that’ll be big enough for probable cause, too.”