Dead Anyway (17 page)

“So that’s not why you’re calling.”

“I’d like to have a conversation, but I don’t know how to do it safely.”

I got off the highway and drove toward the harbor, winding my way toward the dock area where they built icebreakers and mega yachts.

“You could trust me,” he said.

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“We appreciate the tip on Sebbie. I’d like to know how you did it.”

“Some people are mind readers. Do you know Austin Ott, the Third?”

“Not personally. Do I know you?”

“You might,” I said. “What are the chances you could just tell me where he lives?”

“About the same as you inviting me over to dinner.”

“I just need a hint. Point me in the right direction.”

“What do I get in return?”

“You get him, and the evidence for a conviction. And maybe a few of his fellow rats in the bargain.”

“Why don’t we just team up?” he asked. “Why all the cloak and dagger?”

“Personal preference. I was hoping to avoid a Mexican standoff.”

“I can’t discuss this over the phone.”

“Okay,” I said, and hung up. By now I was standing at the top of a breakwater holding a piece of brick I found by the side of the road. I used duct tape to attach it to the disposable phone, then dropped it in the harbor.

A
S A
way of celebrating my unwanted bout of disorienting paranoia, I decided to do something guaranteed to engender more of the same. I drove across the state to Clear Waters Casino to visit Natsumi Fitzgerald at her blackjack table.

“Hey, mister,” she said as I sat down. “You’re back.”

“I am,” I said, and that was all the conversation we had until I won enough to encourage my table mates to find their luck somewhere else.

“So, was that guy your old friend?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Didn’t look like him at all. Sorry for the trouble.”

“No trouble.”

“I’m not ready to go back to work anyway,” I said. “I have another month of disability, I should take my time.”

“Still getting over that beer? You drank the whole thing.”

“The wages of sin. I’m thinking of having another one tonight. Build up my immunity.”

“I have to study,” she said.

“Of course. You should do that.”

“I have to study some time. Not necessarily tonight. What do you know about Münchausen syndrome by proxy?”

“Sounds complicated.”

“It’s the subject of my term paper. If we talk about it, I can deduct the time from my study budget.”

“We’ve done the Sail Inn. Where else would you suggest?”

She picked a spot in Groton favored by submarine workers from Electric Boat and rarely patronized by casino people.

“They make a lot more money, so the tips and wait staff are better,” she said. She gave me the name and address. “I’ll meet you there in about an hour, okay?”

For the first time since waking from the coma, I was on a mission with no hope of furthering my objectives. That in fact, might even threaten the initiative itself. There was absolutely nothing, based on logic and reason, that could justify this impulse.

Except that I was lonely.

This does not deserve complex analysis, I said to myself. She’s an attractive young woman. She’s flirting with you. You’re not a machine, I could hear Evelyn say, you’re a human being. Accept your humanity.

Which didn’t mean I missed my dead wife any less. If anything, the time with Natsumi had driven that repressed ache to the surface. As if the pain and the palliative were one and the same.

These thoughts were still fresh in my mind when Natsumi slid into the booth across from me at the restaurant in Groton, which likely explained my first words to her.

“That day I was injured,” I said to her, “my wife was killed.”

She folded her hands on top of the table and bowed her head.

“I thought there was something like that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m still not myself. In fact, I’m not sure what I mean by ‘myself.’ I’m different from how I was before, but I’m not sure in what ways. I’m discovering as I go. So it’s not surprising if you think me a little odd.”

“Not odd. Just inscrutable.”

We drifted off from there into a meandering conversation with no references to either of our pasts. And though potentially sensitive areas were left untrodden, I felt that a basis for a legitimate friendship had been established—in defiance of my trepidation—yielding to the need for simple company with a kindred soul whose only motive was precisely the same thing.

T
HE NEXT
day I began to stalk Shelly Gross. I’d been cautious when chasing down the hoods, but I’d imagined Shelly to be far more watchful and vigilant. A wily old G-man with eyes behind his head and prescience crackling through his nerves. I had no particular basis for this romanticization, but it was good discipline to pretend I did, especially given the recent lapses and cautionary moments.

This is why I only drove by his house twice—once in daylight to get a photo of his across-the-street neighbor, and again at night to stick a remote, battery-powered webcam under the neighbor’s yew.

The camera was originally designed to capture wildlife. It was remotely controlled and only switched on when a passing creature triggered a motion detector. Camouflaged, weather-proof and rechargeable by the sun, I hoped it would survive long enough to get a fix on Shelly’s patterned movements before his neighbor peered under the bush or an errant ray of sunshine lit up the lens.

The wireless signal from the camera was picked up by a video receiver hidden within a tangle of roadside brush several blocks away. The receiver uploaded to an Internet service that asked for very little in the way of identification beyond a credit card number. This was still an exposure, even though I’d acquired one for the exclusive purpose. The card was issued to Alex Rimes, but the address was an empty storefront in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Again, not perfect, but probably good enough.

The next two weeks featured a satisfying tedium. Through most of the days and nights I re-familiarized myself with the insurance agency’s finances and operations. It helped that I was the one who set up the folder structure and files, and the day-to-day bookkeeping, including how every transaction was tied back to the general ledger. I eventually discovered that I’d missed some important blocks of data from Bruce Finger’s computer, but that was easily remedied by logging in as Administrator One and helping myself. This I only did late at night as a mild precaution when the activity logs rarely saw anyone else on the network. Many would find this activity a brutal slog, but even with my compromised quantitative skills, I felt tremendous comfort in the presence of long columns of numbers and the puzzle-solving reconciliation that was inherent in double-entry accounting.

It was little wonder that Elliot Brandt was eager to close a deal. Florencia ran an unadventurous but profitable little ship—disciplined, orderly and strictly adherent to the most conservative interpretation of generally accepted accounting principles.

“My goal is to bore the auditors to tears,” I remember her saying.

This happy work was often interrupted by alerts from the webcam that there was activity at Shelly’s house. I was able to review the video, which was time stamped, and either go live or let it slip back into standby. After two weeks, I’d harvested a lot of information on Shelly’s comings and goings.

As important, I got a good look at Shelly himself, a short, fit, white-haired guy who moved very briskly for a sixty-eight-year-old. He always wore running shoes, and lighter outerwear than the increasingly cold weather should have called for. He drove a late-model, silver Chevy Malibu.

Every evening, seven days a week, he left the house at six-thirty carrying a gym bag, returning exactly three and a half hours later. I made a study of the health clubs in the area, choosing one that offered a discount to Rocky Hill residents, that was well-equipped and within easy driving distance. I drove there and parked in the lot near the entrance and waited with a newspaper conspicuously open on the steering wheel.

At the predicted time, Shelly arrived and parked in a slot within eyeshot of where I was waiting. I recorded his location, and after he left the car, I left the lot. I came back a half hour before his estimated departure, but he was already gone.

I repeated the process the next night, returning with an hour to spare. Shelly’s car was still there, so I waited again. He came out soon after and drove off. I tailed him as long as I dared, finally turning into a shopping strip and pretending to use a drive-up ATM.

Over the next several nights I used rented cars to pick up the hunt further down the trail each time, until he finally led me to his destination—a homey-looking bar and grill in Old Wethersfield called the Powder Keg.

I went home to more financial study, waiting until two nights had passed before going to the next step. I also used the time altering my appearance into something both natural and easy to maintain, yet still transformative. This began with growing out my beard, which surprised me by displaying a fair amount of grey. I had to buy a new wig to match, one long enough to sprout out from beneath a baseball cap. I also put in some time at a tanning salon, then further darkened my skin with some cream out of the makeup kit.

The crowning touch was a pair of color-altering contact lenses, a deep brown that completely disguised my natural hazel.

Even given my overestimation of Shelly’s perceptive powers, I thought I looked thoroughly disguised, and not merely a darker, more hirsute version of myself.

I picked a Tuesday night, when restaurants were neither too busy, nor too empty. Old Wethersfield was an ancient American suburb, and the inside of the Powder Keg was eager to uphold that status, deploying Revolutionary War armaments, including muskets lining the walls and a full-sized cannon, as the decorating motif. In keeping, it was a dark place with lots of weathered wood and phony lanterns barely penetrating the gloom. The brightest spot was the bar, discreetly set off in a room of its own. It was just big enough for the bar itself, with a narrow aisle, and a row of wooden, high-backed booths, one of which contained Shelly Gross eating his meal and drinking a tall glass of draft beer.

I sat down across from him.

“Do you still have that Mustang?” I asked.

He looked up from his plate but continued to cut into a cheeseburger that he’d ordered without the convenience of a bun.

“You didn’t read the ad very carefully,” he said. “It’s off the market.”

Shelly had a narrow, pinkish face with an aquiline nose and close-set eyes. His full head of white hair was on the long side, suggesting a hint of vanity. His eyes were grey-gold, not unlike my own natural color, and also likely fitted with contacts, since he didn’t wear glasses.

“That’s what negotiations are for,” I said.

“What are we negotiating?”

“Continued post-career success for Shelly Gross.”

“I’ve already had plenty of success.”

“Partly thanks to me. And if you don’t care about that, do it for the general well-being of society.”

“Vigilantes aren’t good for society,” he said. “It’s one of the first things you learn.”

“Then call it a public-private partnership. You set the rules.”

“How do I know you’ll follow them?” he asked.

“Every successful partnership is built on trust. I didn’t have to hand you Frondutti.”

“That was your choice, not my request.”

“This is not a good negotiating technique,” I said. “It won’t yield results.”

“What technique?”

“Playing hard to get. Pretending you aren’t interested in what I have to offer, thinking that will cause me to turn supplicant, giving up more than I want just to earn your acceptance. I don’t care that much about your acceptance, and you’re not my only option. I picked you because of your record in Connecticut, but you have successors, and they’re still on the job.”

He took another bite of his burger.

“So what technique would you suggest?”

“Give me something. A crumb. I don’t need much.”

“So why me?” he asked. “Like you said, I’m not even on the job.”

“Right. Which means you have more time to focus on the project. And you probably know more about the people I’m looking for than any current agent. And you’re keeping yourself in great physical shape. What, so you don’t get tired pushing the buttons on the remote while sitting by yourself in the living room?”

He pointed at me with his fork.

“Don’t get personal,” he said. “
That
doesn’t work with
me
.”

“Yes, it does. That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”

He went back to his meal, this time with his eyes cast down at his plate. A waitress finally realized he had a booth mate and came over to take my order. I asked her to bring me whatever he was having.

“You won’t blame me if I wonder just who the hell you are,” he said, finally.

“I won’t blame you for trying like hell to find out. But I’d rather you put that time and energy into helping me find Jason Three Sticks. He might not be the most wanted man in this area, but I bet he’s the most elusive. What do you got to lose?”

He finished off his beer as mine was arriving, but didn’t order a second.

“He’s in Connecticut,” he said. “Somewhere in Fairfield County, though his operations spread across the whole North-east. He’s gone by a variety of aliases over the years, Austin Ott is only the most recent. Contract murder is a featured product, but he’s into a lot of other things, what the Bureau quaintly calls criminal enterprises. Hijacking, prostitution, cyber-fraud, money laundering. Not as a principal, but as a backer. This guy is at the top of the region’s crime syndicates, and has at least two or three layers of security between him and the action. That’s expensive and time-consuming to maintain, but it’s working for him. Don’t let the fancy name fool you. This guy’s as evil and merciless as the worst of the lowlifes he deals with.”

He waved the waitress back over and asked for his check, with my beer thrown in.

“That’s all you know?” I asked.