The Ten-Mile Trials (22 page)

I almost changed my mind when I saw them walk in. Gary was wearing ragged cut-offs and a Twins baseball cap, back to front. And Wally was even more outstanding, in lime-green pinstripe pants and a T-shirt that demanded, ‘Get off my case.' They vibrated with last-days attitude. Their unlined sulky faces said, ‘You already cut the orders to send us back on the street. What more can you do to us now?'

There was quite a bit, actually, that we could still do to them, but they knew we were busy and were not going to launch the long, tiresome procedure to get them fired over a little matter of stretching the dress code in the detective division.

They perked right up when they heard the assignment we had in mind for them. Spending the whole day sneaking around the pawnshop, phoning in weird reports of bizarre behavior, what could be more fun than that? Ironically, we now even liked their outfits – they might look defiant in Government Center, but they were just about right for hanging out on the south end of Broadway.

‘I got groatier shoes than these in my locker, too,' Gary said, flashing his gap-toothed smile.

‘Put 'em on,' I said. ‘I don't know about using the old van, though. It seemed to me that maybe the bad-suit boys were getting a little curious about that vehicle the day I joined you down there. You got anything else you could use?'

‘Our dad's got a pickup for his fifth wheel, we might be able to get that,' Gary said.

‘Oh, hell, it's quicker if you use my old fishing car,' Kevin said. ‘It's a '69 Jeep Wagoneer and the body's so rusted out you can see through it anywhere, but the motor's still reliable and it'll look right at home in front of a pawnshop.' He slid the key off his ring and held it out to Wally, telling him, ‘Now remember, you've only got two or three gallons of gas and it does about twelve miles to the gallon, so don't take any side trips.' Then he called home to tell his mother not to call 911 when she saw ‘two skinny kids dressed like juvenile delinquents' driving it out of the back yard.

Before he let them go he shook a long forefinger at them, saying, ‘The men you're watching for are presumed armed and dangerous. Wear your body armor. Don't argue, put them on and keep them on. And if you see these guys, don't try to pick them up yourselves. You see them, you call me. At once, hear?'

They gave him Christmas-morning smiles and were out of there like a shot. Watching them go, Kevin said, ‘Sometimes this job scares the piss out of me.'

‘Tell me about it,' I said. Fear is not a good thing to discuss out loud in a police station, so after that conversation I needed comfort and went looking for a jolt of caffeine. In the break room, I stood with my mug in my hand watching Andy Pitman pouring the whole bottom third of a pot into an immense styrofoam cup. When I cleared my throat he looked around, saw my cup, and said, ‘Oh, do you want some of this?' and quickly put the pot down.

I poured the skimpy half-cup he'd left me. ‘Actually, you are just the man I wanted to see,' I said. ‘In my office.'

He executed a tiny, delicate shrug that lifted dozens of pounds of gristle a quarter of an inch and allowed the whole mass to settle again. ‘Lead on,' he said.

When I closed my door he said, ‘If you lock it, I'm calling my Mom.'

‘My heart is pure,' I said. ‘Now don't amuse me any more, we got a gutbuster day going here. How far did you get with the search for the people involved in Riteway?'

‘Riteway is owned by the Davilee Corporation. I told you that, right? Davilee was incorporated a little over a year ago. It's a real-estate management firm that appears to be entirely owned by its board of directors. Meets twice a year, issues a report, the officers sign it, all pretty ho-hum. All of Davilee's properties are in Chicago. Riteway is a newer corporation, set up about six months ago. All it does is buy and manage properties in Rutherford.'

‘You got any names?'

‘Far as I can see Riteway is run by an executive secretary in Chicago, looks like a paid hand. She signs the checks and files the papers. In Rutherford, she has a contract with a company to clean and maintain the buildings, execute the rental contracts, and hand out the keys. Aaaannnd,' he said with a little flourish, ‘that company is Home Cleaners.'

‘Ah.'

‘Yeah. It gets more interesting, too. The president of the Davilee Corporation, the man who signs the checks, is Lee Kostas.'

‘Lee Kostas? Would he by any chance be “my son the CPA”?'

‘Bingo! He grew up over the pawnshop, I remember him now. He went to Jefferson High, we played intramural football against each other.'

‘So that's the Lee part of Davilee?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘And the Davi part? Oh, I can guess where this is going.'

‘Yup. The vice president of the corporation is David Knowles.'

I once owned a cat I called Tweedy because his calico pattern looked liked orange tweed. Days he mostly slept, but at night he turned into a fearless hunter, and he liked to bring home small creatures, mice and voles and gophers, to arrange neatly on the kitchen step for my approval. Looking at me now the way Tweedy used to look up from the bottom step in the morning, Andy said, ‘Does it seem to you the mischief is starting to stack up into neat piles?'

‘It does,' I said, ‘although it doesn't quite get us where we need to go, does it? Owning houses is not a crime, per se.'

‘No.' His large, doughy face looked a little disappointed. ‘But it gives us probable cause to search the shop, doesn't it? All this cozy business – Lee Kostas and David Knowles, the houses and the shop, and the crazy Russians?'

‘Yes, it does. And I'm not saying . . . You did a great job, Andy!' His face had just reminded me that, even more than the taste of fresh mouse, what Tweedy wanted on those long-ago mornings was praise for his skill as a predator. Ray and I recruited Andy into investigations to get the benefit of his long experience policing the toughest streets in town. We got an undeserved bonus when the lumpy terror of the gang wars turned out to be a closet geek. He loves to travel the Internet in search of, oh, the title of a book you read in grade school about a Shetland pony, or a current street map of the ancient city of Tashkent, or the name of the winner at the Viola Gopher Count in 1938. Or the names of the officers of a Chicago corporation named Davilee. And he's like Darrell's dog – it's all a wonderful game to him, so he never tires of it. Wanting to show appreciation for his efforts, I smiled and asked him, ‘Have you told Kevin yet?'

‘No.' Watching me, he gulped a huge swallow of coffee out of his monster cup. ‘You're not satisfied yet. What don't you like?'

‘How many of the boys at those two companies are in on it? It's pretty hard to tell, isn't it? We know they're playing cute games with the IRS and some of them are padding their work hours, but do they all know they're in bed with major-league crime?' I drank some coffee. Mine tasted bitter. ‘Does Ole know?' Andy shrugged. ‘And how about' – I finally said what was really bothering me – ‘Ike Kostas?'

‘You mean did he know all along that his son was buying his shop to help some unregistered aliens get into the drug biz? How would I know that?'

‘If Ike didn't know,' I said, ‘if he wasn't part of the plan, don't you think it's interesting that his lying deceitful son saw to it that he got paid top dollar for the shop? And even got a few thousand extra for good will?'

‘In a minute,' Andy said, turning moody, ‘you're going to start saying nobody's all bad, huh?'

‘God no. I was about to say this changes almost everything we were going to do today. How about that?' I laughed out loud, suddenly, realizing how perfectly this morning was imitating yesterday morning's dream. ‘We have to reprioritize all our tasks! Let's go find Ray and Kevin.'

By now, Andy was giving me the look you usually get from the man guessing your weight at the county fair. But he came along with me to Kevin's office, where Julie Rider sat frowning as she flipped through her notebook. She was reviewing her notes from yesterday's investigations.

‘I feel like those high-school brats bamboozled me some way,' she said. ‘I've been over and over this and I still can't decide which ones are lying to me.'

‘Let Andy help you,' I said. Her dissatisfied frown smoothed out as he told her about the Davilee Corporation.

‘So Knowles is in on it?' Julie looked dubious. ‘He is so not my idea of a gang-banger. Does this mean Yard & Garden's off the hook?'

‘We don't know that,' I said. ‘Maybe Ole, but I think you should take another look at Arnie. And the whole Anderson household, eventually. How could Ricky Anderson get so far into weed and meth, and nobody else in the house have a clue?'

‘You're right,' Julie said, ‘his parents would have to be blind and deaf.'

‘Or up to something themselves,' I said. ‘Why don't you copy Ray's and Rosie's notes from those interviews? See if you can see anything obvious. If not, maybe you and Chris ought to go back out there and interview them yourselves. One at a time.'

‘Better still,' Kevin said, ‘maybe we should bring them in here and do that in an interview room. Sometimes the presence of recording equipment concentrates the mind . . .'

‘What's this?' he said, looking up. ‘Everybody run out of work at once?' Five of his detectives were standing in his doorway, with Chris Deaver in the lead.

‘We've got to bag the employee list thing for now, Kevin,' Chris said. ‘We just got a fresh cluster. Three new break-ins, all reported in the last half-hour.'

‘OK,' Kevin jumped up. ‘Everybody in here, let's figure out the teams. I think we're going to have to pull the Krogstads off the pawnshop, Jake,' he said to my back as I walked out.

‘No,' I turned back into his crowded office, bullied my way to the head of the line. ‘Absolutely not! Soon as you get your teams going on this cluster of crimes, I want you to call those Krogstad boys and tell them they are not to leave that shop unwatched for a single minute. Tell them, if they have some problem that can't be solved by taking turns, call us and we'll get them some help. My gut is telling me we're going to see a lot of action at that shop before this day is over.'

‘You think the burglars will bring in the merch that fast?'

‘If Ray's contact in Phoenix is right, they might be headed there right now. And this could be our last chance to nab them. Amos thinks they're getting ready to wrap it up out there – and if they are, these guys might be getting ready to go, too.'

‘Go where?'

‘I don't know, that's the point!'

‘So now all of a sudden you're ready to grab the whole outfit?'

‘With all this probable cause Andy just found,' – Andy tucked in his shirt and looked modest – ‘I think we've got all we need. Gloria will be well enough to testify soon, and with her help we can hang all those drugs from the grow house on them. Any luck, we'll catch them with some loot today. So yeah.'

‘So we'll still wait a while on the shop?'

‘I'd like to try to take the bad-suit guys first. The shop can't go anyplace, let's get the thieves put away first . . . I'm going to negotiate with the chief for an Emergency Response Unit standing by all day today, ready to go whenever we spot them.'

‘OK!' Kevin said. ‘Hear that, guys? Gangbusters today.'

‘Yeah. I'll go tell Ray. Soon as you've made your assignments, Kevin, come over and we'll set it up with the ERU. We need everything ready to go as soon as we see the first bad suit.' I crossed the hall thinking hard. Before we talked to the ERU guys, I should alert Rosie and Winnie. We might need them to back up the Krogstads . . . What else?

My phone was still blinking. The message said I should call Rosie Doyle. I called her and said, ‘How'd you know I wanted to talk to you next?'

‘Next after what? Never mind, I'm the one that wants to talk to
you
. Urgently.'

‘You forget where my office is? All right then.' As soon as I hung up, I heard a drumbeat of click-clicking heels along the hall, too much noise even for Rosie Doyle. Then the springy red curls and the shiny black braids stood side by side in my doorway, the faces underneath not smiling at all. Oh shit, I thought, there
was
a swamp at the end of that line.

‘We did something brilliant,' Rosie said.

‘Or anyway clever,' Winnie said. ‘Even if it was kind of an accident.'

‘Don't waste time sugar-coating it,' I said. ‘Just tell me what you did and I'll try to fix it.'

‘Boy, feel the love,' Rosie said. ‘Isn't that gratifying?' They exchanged a quick uneasy glance.

I ground my teeth. ‘Tell me what you did.'

‘Last night after work . . .' Rosie started.

‘. . . we decided to eat Chinese,' Winnie said.

I looked at Rosie, raised my eyebrows. She blushed and looked at her shoes.

She wasn't eating with Bo any more, and she didn't want to talk about it. Fine with me, I didn't have time to hear it. I said, ‘Will one of you just please say it?'

‘We were paying our bill at the counter at Wong's,' Winnie said, ‘when I looked out the glass door and saw two of the bad-suit guys walk by. Right there on the sidewalk, a few feet away.'

‘Walking on the sidewalk,' I said. ‘How low can they sink?'

Rosie made that same little shushing motion at me that she'd made before at Kevin's back. ‘Winnie nudged me and whispered, “There they go!” And I knew right away they were the guys you'd all been talking about. The velour and the gold chains, aren't they just too good to be true?! I watched them get into their flashy SUV—'