Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (11 page)

“It’s never that clean.” I drew a deep breath. “The ball took a nasty hop, Mrs. Canon. Someone killed Jeff’s brother and buried him next to his church. The police want to talk to Jeff.”

Air stirred on the other end.

“Jeff’s no killer,” she said. “He certainly wouldn’t kill his own brother.”

“We don’t know yet what kind of brother he was.”

I was barely listening to myself. I’d been smoothing the circular flat on the desk, idly pressing out the creases with my thumbs. Now I picked it up and rubbed one corner between my fingertips.

“Mr. Walker?”

She’d been talking, but for me it had been just so much buzzing on the wire. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she’d said.

“I asked if you were quitting. I need you to find Jeff now more than ever. He’s all I have except little Jeffie.”

“That’s the job. It doesn’t change until I find him or you fire me. Maybe not even then.”

“Did you tell the police about me?”

“Not yet. That’s why I called.”

“What will they do to you if you don’t?”

“That doesn’t have to be your problem. I can tie my shoes and I’m pretty good at staying out of jail. I get plenty of practice.”

“I just don’t think I could face the police. Not until I know if Oral’s coming back.”

“Chances are he’s out looking for me. I have one of those faces guys want to push in when they feel like pushing in a face. That doesn’t have to be your problem either. I push back.”

“You won’t hurt him.”

“I’ll try not to. And thanks for the compliment.”

I said good-bye, but I didn’t hang up. That would be Deputy Yardley’s cue to enter. After an empty silence, the dial tone kicked in. I nodded a couple of times as if I were listening and fiddled again with the five-dollar bill, rubbing it between my fingers the
way I had Paul Starzek’s circular. I put it back where I’d found it and cradled the receiver. Three seconds later the room was full of law, bringing the cold in with it.

Sergeant Finlander made himself comfortable behind the desk. Snow dusted his shoulders, but he didn’t brush it off. The flakes, finer now, blinked as they melted into his uniform shirt, like fairy lights going out. “What’s the verdict?”

“I couldn’t reach my client.”

“Horseshit,” Yardley said. “You were talking to somebody.”

“I had to leave a message with someone. They’ll call back.”

Finlander said, “I’ll be sure and put them through to headquarters. You might have noticed we don’t have any holding facilities here. We could lock you in the can, but then we’d have to go over to the White Castle to pee.”

“I’m not worth that kind of trouble. Yardley saw me pull into Paul Starzek’s place. There wasn’t time for me to kill Starzek and put him in that hole. He was frozen as hard as cinder block.”

“You could have killed him anytime and stashed him in the church, then come back to clean up.” The sergeant played with a corner of the circular. I watched his hand like a dog. I couldn’t help it.

I was holding my breath. I let it out. “I may have a lead. There’s someone else I need to discuss it with.”

“You had your call. You may think murder’s instant overtime up here in Hooterville, but it’s just one more thing on the blotter. We got vacation cabin break-ins, domestic shit, a meth lab we’ve had our eye on six weeks. You’ve used up our discretionary time.”

“You can listen in. Or you can make the call yourself.”

Yardley said horseshit again and took out his cuffs. He stood straining at the leash.

Finlander rested his hand on the circular. His face looked like a woodcut. “Who am I calling?”

I put one finger on a card he’d taken from my wallet and slid it across the desk. It had Herbert Clemson’s name and number on it in raised glittering black letters.

T
reasury paper.” Clemson stroked both top corners of Paul Starzek’s circular between the balls of his thumb and forefinger. “When you said you had two words for me I was afraid they were ‘Fuck you.’ ”

“I wouldn’t have brought you up here for that,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d want me to be specific with the local cops listening in.”

Sergeant Finlander had caught him on his cell, half an hour west of Ann Arbor on his way to the FBI field office in Chicago. He’d been intrigued enough to turn back without pressing for details. I knew then the thing was no coincidence. The case was too important to discuss any way but in person.

We were sitting away from customer traffic in a White Castle, the one whose bathroom the deputies and command officer used when the one in the substation was occupied. I’d suggested it because I was hungry. Clemson had agreed because the late-afternoon rush hour was in full cry and most of the diners were lined up at the drive-in window and on foot at the counter for takeout; the sit-down crowd wouldn’t start gathering for another couple of hours. We had a table without neighbors by a window
overlooking a four-lane highway that never went empty, and whenever an employee wandered by to wipe off a table or sweep under a chair, Clemson stared at him until he went away.

“Better give me a bill, just to make sure.” The agent let go of one corner to snap his fingers.

I munched on a greaseburger. “Use one of your own. I paid my taxes already.”

He clicked his tongue against his teeth and got out a wallet made from the same pigskin as his badge and ID folder. There were at least two more John Doe warrants folded inside it, separated from the bills by a suede partition. He’d used one of them to remove me from county custody. Finlander had taken his signature on a sheaf of forms as thick as
National Geographic
and let me go without a squawk. Deputy Yardley had chewed off the ends of his walrus moustache and gnashed most of the way through his second set of teeth.

Clemson selected a crisp ten-spot, rubbed it and the circular simultaneously using both hands. He turned his back to the room, shielding himself while he held first one, then the other, then both side by side up to the light coming through the window. It gleamed red through his curly hair and made a shadow in the deep cleft in his chin. He hadn’t stood any closer to his razor today than yesterday. I’d probably been on stakeout somewhere when that became a fashion statement.

“Watermark’s genuine, and at a glance I’d say the thread count checks. The Bureau pays someone else to count them.” He put away the bill and the wallet and looked at the circular, as if reading it for the first time. “We get anonymous tips about these shirt-tail churches every day. We try to check them all out. Most of the time, one of them built its porch too close to someone’s property line, or some career atheist is afraid his kid will catch a dose of piety. It was the name Starzek that got us interested in this one.
Some of these Christian organizations are blinds to funnel donations to Islamist causes.”

“What’s the difference between Islamist and Islamic?” I slurped syrup and water through a straw. It tasted like cough medicine.

“Islamics pray to Allah. Islamists only get on their knees to blow an arms dealer. Not the official definition, but accurate.”

“What’s that got to do with funny money?”

“Same thing as cigarette smuggling. Anything that generates a steady flow of untraceable cash is potential funding for weapons.”

“Most smugglers are grifters. They wouldn’t know how to find Iran on a map.”

“I’ll give Jeff Starzek a geography test. Why didn’t you tell me yesterday you were looking for him too?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“That’s so twentieth century. Now the burden’s on the citizen to come forward and tell what he knows.”

“You carry the burden. My leg hurts.”

“Who hired you?”

“I hired myself.”

“That isn’t what you told Finlander.”

“I didn’t like Finlander. He looks like a cigar-store chief.”

“You only tell the truth to people you like?”

“Sometimes not even them.” I pulled a shred of soggy coleslaw out of my burger and laid it on my plate. I prefer my side dishes on the side.

“I don’t like to snap people in the ass with the flag,” he said. “Ever do a stretch in Milan?”

“I came close once. I understand the food’s better in those federal pens.”

“It’s a shithole. Worse when you’re being held on an open-ended charge of being a reluctant material witness in a national-security investigation.”

“It’s all tied up with my getting shot,” I said.

“I wondered about that.”

“Everyone does. You’re the only one who didn’t ask about it.” I told him about Grayling, all of it, including Jeff Starzek. He listened with his arms folded on his side of the table. He hadn’t ordered anything.

“You helped out a friend because he saved your life,” he said when I finished. “What makes your hide worth more than your country’s?”

“I just learned how to program my VCR.” I wiped my hands on a napkin the size of a lens wiper. “How long would you have gone on wandering all over your sales territory if I hadn’t given you that circular?”

“How long would you have hung onto it if you hadn’t jammed yourself up with the law?”

“It’s a chronic condition. Don’t tell me you didn’t pull my file.”

“It reads a little like Victor Hugo. What’s a vet with a bachelor’s degree in sociology doing crawling over transoms and walking exercise yards?”

“The Peace Corps wasn’t hiring. What’s a hipster like you doing chasing guys in skirts and sandals and talking into his shoe?”

“How are the fries here?”

“Help yourself.”

He plucked one off my plate, scooped up some ketchup, and ate it in two bites. “Could be crispier. Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, you’ve made more progress on this case in twenty-four hours than my people have in three months. Your last contact with Jeff Starzek is more recent than anyone’s I’ve talked to, and without a little thing like due process to slow you down, you’ve found something that’s been missing almost a year.”

“The circular? Paul Starzek had a whole stack.”

“More than just a stack. Did you know Treasury paper isn’t paper?”

“Don’t tell me it really
is
lettuce.”

“Okay, so you know.” He frowned. We seemed to be saying
okay
a lot. “All those holograms and infrared ink in the new bills are basically bullshit. It’ll slow down the counterfeiters, but only as long as it takes the old bills to wear out and stop being passed from hand to hand. The printing stock’s our only real defense. No one’s figured out a way to duplicate it in a couple of hundred years of trying, and hijacking’s out because it has better security than the president. A single blank sheet is worth as much as the biggest denomination you can print on it. With modern methods and the right material—” He unfolded his arms and sat back.

“It might as well be genuine.”

“It
is
genuine. The printing image can be copied within a gnat’s whisker of the original. Even the authentic article varies microscopically. No two fifty-dollar bills are exactly alike.”

“Like snowflakes.”

“It’s a lot less obvious than that. You need a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of optical equipment to track the generations.” He refolded his arms and leaned on them. “Civilian technology caught the District with its pants down, big time. We should’ve introduced the new bills twenty years ago, when we had the hardware and no one else did. It would have bought us some time to stay ahead. There are still billions of the old-style in circ, and one percent is fake.”

“That’s still just a few million, printed on toilet paper.” I looked at the circular. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it. “Oh.”

“We’ve given the counterfeiters time to catch up with the new design, and now we’ve given them the stock to go on duplicating the old one and finance the research.”

He stopped talking. A middle-aged couple and a boy of about
ten, dressing out to six hundred pounds total in bulky quilted overcoats, had begun to transfer sacks, paper cups, and a twenty-piece set of plastic utensils from a tray onto the next table. We stared at them hard until they became aware of us, packed up, and decamped to another part of the restaurant. I felt like a bully in a junior-high cafeteria.

“You can’t steal Treasury paper,” Clemson said. “It’s not like knocking over a bank or an armored car. It isn’t transported the conventional way, and the guards are troops in tanks. Direct assault is out; if it looks like an attack will succeed, the sentries have orders to destroy the shipment. There’s more, but I can’t tell you about it, because I don’t know myself. My clearance only goes up to the attorney general.”

“So how’d they steal it?”

“They had an accomplice named Uncle Sam. Same lazy bureaucracy that let five hundred tons of fissionable material drain out of the federal stockpile over ten years.”

“My mother wanted me to take the civil-service exam,” I said. “I kept putting it off.”

“No one’s ever failed it. Eleven months ago, someone too new to know how things are done in Washington decided to do an inventory in San Francisco and Denver. He lost his job, naturally. But not before it was discovered a ton of stock had disappeared from the United States Treasury.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Not so much, in volume. You know how much paper weighs?”

“My old man drove a truck. He made regular deliveries of bound copies of newspapers to University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. Dock boss blew his whistle when the trailer was still three-quarters empty. The truck was already overweight. But that was paper.”

“Cheap newsprint at that. Linen stock like they use for currency
would’ve tipped those scales much earlier. Can you give me an idea how big that stack was you saw in Paul Starzek’s church?”

“I’d say about the size of a double bed.”

He nodded. I heard his brain ticking. He’d said he wasn’t an accountant, but intelligence is a right-brain operation.

“That’d be a day’s run in Denver,” he said. “At a guess, fifty billion dollars.”

“That’s plenty of attrition. Who was minding the store?”

“Some foreman, just like your old man’s. A bunch of them over who knows how many years. Sheet at a time, say, like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac. At the end, enough to bankroll every paperhanging operation in North America.”