Thick as Thieves (9 page)

It’s in the later chapters that things get more interesting, and that the Bessemer story plays out in the New York newspapers, and in the records of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. It becomes the tale of an affable private banker who for years poached funds from the accounts of certain customers to bolster the investment returns of certain others. A banker who, when caught knee-deep in the cookie jar, sang long and loud to the feds about the inner workings of an elaborate tax evasion scheme that involved several of his well-heeled clients and a pair of Swiss bankers, and featured hundreds of large wire transfers that somehow managed not to appear on anybody’s suspicious activity reports.

Cooperation and a guilty plea bought Bessemer a reduced sentence—eighteen months in Otisville—but he could’ve gotten off with even less. The feds had dangled another offer before him, just before his trip upstate: a suspended sentence in exchange for testimony against Curtis Prager and Tirol Capital. But Bessemer declined. Mr. Boyce’s dossier dryly lists two possible reasons, neither of which involves Howard’s unwavering loyalty.

One hypothesis is that, despite his friendship with Prager, Howard was never a Tirol insider, so he simply didn’t know enough to be useful to the feds. Another—a favorite of the prosecutors, and encouraged by the conspiracy theories of the ex–Mrs. Bessemer and her frustrated lawyers—is that Howard knew plenty, but kept quiet because Prager had helped him hide assets during his divorce. Eighteen months of medium-security time, their reasoning went, was more appealing to Howard than writing off five million or so in hidden funds.

Bessemer did his time without incident, and when he was released, two years back, he settled himself in Palm Beach, in the Bermuda-style cottage he’d inherited from his grandmother, and with a modest income from a trust she’d left.

A good start, but not enough for Carr’s purposes. Nor is his own research—not yet. Seventeen days of arm’s-length observations have given Carr the routines—the tennis, the lunches, the poker, and the whores—and the comfort that Bessemer does almost nothing to safeguard his home or his person, but Carr needs more than that, and for more he needs to get close.

So Dennis and Latin Mike are even now in Bessemer’s cottage, with an hour to work before the maid arrives for the weekly cleaning—time
enough to plant the microphones and cameras, tap the landline, skim the mail and the garbage, and for Dennis to work his dark magic on Bessemer’s laptop: sniffers, keyloggers, screen scrapers—enough spyware to turn Bessemer’s computer into a digital confessional every time he switches it on. Carr checks his watch. Time enough.

Bobby wipes his chin and opens the van door. “Give me the Nikon,” he says, as he unzips his painter’s coveralls. He brushes stray crumbs from the AT&T logo on the polo shirt he’s wearing underneath, tosses the coveralls in back, and straps a phone man’s tool rig around his waist. Carr hands him a palm-size camera from the backpack, and Bobby drops it in the pocket of his cargo shorts.

“The last jelly’s mine,” he says, and Carr watches him shamble down the alley to the Barton’s small loading dock.

For the job of following Howard Bessemer around Palm Beach, Bobby is Carr’s first choice. Valerie is distracting, and besides, she is otherwise occupied in Boca Raton, and Dennis is too jumpy. He sweats and fidgets whenever he has to playact, and his anxiety glows like neon. Latin Mike is poised and utterly capable but, with Carr at least, sour and taciturn. His shuttered face and silent disapproval wear on Carr and remind him of his father.

Bobby is easier to take, especially without Mike around. Without Mike to impress, he’s more relaxed and accommodating—funnier, and less inclined to carp or balk. More likable. Carr knows that Bobby isn’t as comfortable with him as he is with Latin Mike—Carr lacks Mike’s working-class credentials—but one-on-one, Bobby gives him the benefit of the doubt. And, most important, Bobby likes to talk.

A steady stream of it has issued from him as he and Carr have tailed Bessemer—a miscellany of profanity-laced observations on Bessemer’s choice of car and clothing, the latest heartbreak served up by Bobby’s beloved, despised Mets, the crappy house he, Mike, and Dennis are staying in, the ass of any woman who crosses his line of sight, his Brooklyn boyhood, his truncated air force career—McGuire Air Force Base, Ramstein, Aviano, and back to McGuire for the court-martial—his shrew of an ex-wife. A grab bag, but short on the topic that interests Carr most—the topic that has circled his thoughts like a scavenging bird ever since his last conversation with Tina.

Carr tries to keep in mind his long-ago training, incomplete though it
was, on agents and their early cultivation.
Walk softly. Come at it obliquely. Keep your shopping list to yourself. Let them broach the topic first, but change the subject the first time they do. Change it the second time too
. But he was impatient at the Farm—one of his many failings—and he’s been impatient in Palm Beach too, and in neither place did it help his cause. His instructors scowled and shook their heads, and so did Bobby.

Another truck, another alleyway, three days before.

“For fuck’s sake,” Bobby said, “you ask about this I don’t know how many times. What else is there to say about it?”

Carr put on a pensive look. “I’ve got no one else to ask, Bobby. Valerie wasn’t there, and Mike won’t say shit about it.”

“Well, you know it all already. Deke thought it was a layup, but it wasn’t. Bales of cash sitting in a barn on Bertolli’s ranch. No real security besides a little local talent, and the ranch being at the ass end of nowhere, and all we have to do is drive in, deal with the locals, load up, and drive away—straight through to Santiago. Deke had a flight lined up out of Los Cerillos. The driving-in part was fine; after that it was a shit storm.”

“You had two trucks.”

Bobby sighed. “Two vans—Fords—four-wheel drive conversions. Ray-Ray lined ’em up in B.A., and we drove ’em north. Me and Mike in one, Deke and Ray-Ray in the other. You know all this.”

“Deke decided who rode where?”

“Deke decided everything. Ray-Ray was the best driver, then me—so he split us up.”

“And he rode with Ray.”

“He always got a kick out of the kid.”

“Everybody did; he was a good kid. So you drove in the main gate?”

Bobby squinted at him. “You not listening the first ten times I told it? We came up a service road—three miles of washboard in the pitch-fucking-black—and clipped the chain on a cattle gate. It was another two miles from there to the airstrip and the barn.”

“And then you hit trouble.”

“Soon as we got out of the vans. They came around back of a tin hangar on the other side of the strip—four big four-by-fours—and fucking fast.”

“You didn’t get into the barn?”

“Didn’t get closer than twenty meters. We got out of the vans and they lit us up like fucking Vegas.”

“They seem like regular security, or something laid on especially for you guys?”

“The fuck should I know? All I know is they could shoot.”

“Deke said there wouldn’t be much opposition.”

“That was the intel.”

“Where’d he get it from?”

“Might as well been from a cereal box, for what it was worth. He’d been looking at Bertolli a long time, I know that, but he always played his sources close to the vest. He was big on that
need to know
crap.”

“You guys put up a fight?”

“It was like pissing in the wind. We had MP9s; they had like a dozen guys with AKs. Mostly we ran like hell.”

“But not in the same direction.”

“It was Deke’s call—split up and regroup in Mendoza. We had a fallback off the Avenue Zapata, near the bus station. He and Ray-Ray went out the main gate, me and Mike went out the way we came.”

“And only you and Mike made it.”

“Only by the hairs on our asses, lemme tell you—those motherfuckers were serious. Two-plus hours hard running down Highway Forty, and those bastards were bouncing in my mirrors the whole time. We could barely put a mile between us and them. Half busted an axle, and my rear panels were like Swiss cheese. Wasn’t till we got to town that I could shake ’em.”

“Just the one truck after you guys, though—just one of those four-by-fours.”

“One was enough.”

“So the other three were on Deke and Ray-Ray?”

“The fuck should I know? All Deke said was that they were on his ass. He didn’t say if that meant three trucks or one.”

“He called just once?”

“And I could barely hear him then. The service isn’t great out there.”

“He didn’t say that he wasn’t going to Mendoza? That he was making for Santiago instead?”

“He said they were on his ass, and that was it. If he’d said anything about Santiago, or not showing up at the fallback, we wouldn’t have spent two days waiting in that fucking hole, peeping through those moldy curtains, and jumping every time a toilet flushed.”

“So no idea how Deke and Ray-Ray ended up westbound on Highway Seven?”

Bobby ran a thick hand down his face. “Come on, Carr—enough already with this.”

“You were there, Bobby—you must have an idea.”

“Like what—they were cut off, couldn’t get back on Forty, took one of those horse trails to Seven, and got tagged in the mountains? You don’t like that story, make up one of your own. You know as much as I do about what happened.”

“You were there.”

“And you weren’t, and you don’t know how to give it a rest. Look, everybody gets that you never liked the deal—you and Val both. Not enough planning, too rushed, whatever. You guys made it clear, and it turns out you were right. Nobody thinks it’s your fault, Carr. Nobody holds it against you, except maybe you.”

“I’m not holding anything. I just want to know why it went bad.”

“There’re a million reasons. Crappy planning, crappy intel, crappy roads, crappy luck—take your pick. Who knows why, and who the hell cares? Deke is gone, and so is Ray, and picking at the roadkill won’t bring ’em back. You feel guilty, find yourself a priest. Talking to you about this is like talking to my Irish grandma, for chrissakes, or talking to a cop.”

Carr had smiled at that. He hadn’t been talking like a cop, but he’d been listening like one. That was the sixth time he’d gotten Bobby to tell the story, the third time since his talk with Tina, and every time Bobby had told it just the same way, down to the pitch-fucking-black, the bastards bouncing in his mirrors, the half-busted axle, and the moldy curtains. Always the same details—never more, never less, never different. Every time. The same.

Bobby comes up the alley, wiping the corner of his mouth, and Carr comes back.

Bobby unhitches his tool belt and tosses it into the van. “Ichabod’s name is Willis Stearn,” he says. “I got more pictures. I got a number and an address too. And I knocked over the kitchen for a tuna on white with the crusts cut off. Fucking master criminal, huh?”

Carr nods. “Nobody better, Bobby.”

In the maze of machines and shining bodies, it is her shoulders that he finally recognizes. They’re angular and broad for a woman, with well-defined deltoid muscles and a faded scar—a ragged-edged dime of unknown origin—over her left scapula. It appears and disappears beneath the edge of her sweat-darkened tank top as she works the fly machine. Carr forces himself not to stare, but to keep drifting around the perimeter of the vast gym.

It has taken him ten minutes of drifting to find Valerie, and no wonder. Her hair is shorter now, and expensively tinted—a champagne and honey cap with bangs swept to the side—and her skin is biscuit brown. But the hair and tan are just window dressing, sleight of hand. The real transformation runs deeper, and Carr is no closer to working out the trick now than he was in Costa Alegre.

So she is older today—thirty-five, maybe forty—and very fit. But also tired, though not from the exercise. It’s a longer-term fatigue, a kind of erosion—the product of a beating tide of disappointment, wrong choices, bad luck. Its etchings appear at the corners of her mouth and around her eyes, in her dye job, and in the concentration she puts into her workout. They tell a story of assets carefully managed but dwindling nonetheless—an inexorable spending of the principal. Carr has stopped and is staring again, and now she knows he’s here.

This is another bit of magic he can’t work out—some radar she possesses. Her look is fleeting—less than that—the barest flick of her eyes on the way to glancing at the wall clock, but Carr reads the anger there. He drifts back to the lobby, out the doors, and across Mizner Park to his Saturn.

In twenty minutes Carr is at the Embassy Suites, in a pale blue room with a view of some dumpsters and of planes departing the Boca Raton airport. Forty minutes after that Valerie is at the door, in flats and a sleeveless orange dress. She smells of honeysuckle, and her hair is still damp from the shower. She walks past Carr and sits at the end of the bed.

“What the hell were you doing there?” she says. Her voice is tight with anger, and Carr hears something else in it—the hint of a twang, a whisper of Texas or Oklahoma.

“I told them I was interested in a membership,” he says. “They let me walk around.”

“I don’t give a damn what you told them. What the hell were you doing? We were supposed to meet here. You want to fuck this up while we’re still at the gate?”

“Was Amy at the club?”

“She had a yoga class this afternoon; she left half an hour before you showed up. But that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want you there. I don’t want to be seen with anybody there. Jill’s supposed to be on her own.”

“You take the yoga class with Amy?”

Valerie’s lips purse. “Monday. I join the class Monday.”

“You talk to her yet?”

“In the locker room, to say hello,” Valerie says, and slips off her flats. Her bare feet are tanned; her toenails, like her fingernails, are pale pink.

“She knows who you are?”

“She knows I’m Jill. She’s heard me talk about being new in town.”

“That’s not much.”

“It’s enough for now. Get this for me,” she says, rising and turning her back to Carr. He slides her zipper down.