Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (18 page)

“Any fingerprints?”

“No useable ones. The attacker probably wiped them off, or wore gloves. Plus, the handle end has a sort of hatched surface that wouldn’t pick up prints very well.”

“Gloves? Sounds premeditated.”

Paul handed her a fresh beer. “Actually they did find one partial print near the socket end. Unfortunately, it was mine.”

“Oh, no.”

“No problem. The wrench, they figured out, was from the toolbox we keep in the back of the van. Could have anyone’s prints on it, including mine.” Paul turned toward the tent flap swinging in a soft, warm breeze. Pressing his knuckles into the small of his back, he stretched, then took advantage of the seven-foot clearance in the center of the tent to raise his arms over his head. The stretch squeezed up an unbidden beer belch. “They figure Sierra may have been lucky. Someone, it’s not clear who was the first, heard her scream and ran toward her. Otherwise, her attacker would have kept on beating her.”

Lacy cringed. “I’m so glad she’s all right now. She is, isn’t she?”

“No, she’s not all right. She still has horrid headaches. And nightmares. She’s afraid to stay in a tent out here anymore and I can’t say I blame her.”

* * *

It took Lacy a half-hour and a third beer to tell Paul her story. Meanwhile he sat on the side of his cot, shaking his head in disbelief or disgust or both, but said little. As she talked, she wondered if Paul’s mind was back in Lebanon five years ago, reliving the violent death of his wife. Her name, Lacy knew, was Melanie, and she’d simply been caught in the crossfire between warring factions. Not much similarity to the scenario Lacy was describing now, but still, both involved an innocent woman in jeopardy. Well, not entirely innocent in her own case, she had to admit. She sort of asked for it by snooping.

“This guy Milo. You trust him?”

“I do. If it weren’t for him I’d never have gotten out of Istanbul alive.”

“You could’ve solved the whole problem by going to the police.”

“No I couldn’t! First off, they’d never believe me. Second, there was nothing they could do but take down my description of Jason. Then what? I might have talked them into going with me to the little room over the fish market, but what would they see? A chair and some shredded duct tape. Wow.”

“They could have talked to the fishmonger.”

“I have a feeling he was in on it. How else would Jason have known where to look? He got there only a few minutes after I went upstairs. I saw him talking to the fishmonger, and he marched straight up the stairs. He knew where to find me.”

“Refresh my memory, Lacy.
Why were you doing this?”
Paul rose from his cot and leaned forward, his face inches from hers. “This concerns you,
how?”

“A man was murdered and I’m the only person in the world who cares.”

“So, tell the police what you know. It’s their job, not yours. Tell them everything about the train, about the man named Jason, about what you learned at the Whatchamacallit Hotel. They’ll take it from there.”

“No, they won’t. Not unless someone holds their feet to the fire.”

Paul took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You are the
stubbornest
girl I have ever met!”

“Make that tenacious and I’ll agree with you.”

“Bull-headed.”

“Unrelenting.”

One corner of Paul’s mouth quivered. “Okay. You’re the most
unrelenting
girl I’ve ever met.”

“Unrelenting
woman.”

* * *

When Lacy stood to leave, Paul stood as well and threw an arm around her shoulder. “You know what I said the day you got here and told me about the man on the train and the nametag in his coat?”

“You said there was no connection.”

“Coincidence, I said. I take that back. A man wearing a trench coat with Max Sebring’s name in it, was hell bent to come out this way. Looted antiquities are showing up here and Max Sebring is footing the bill. Man gets killed
en route
. There must be a connection.”

Chapter Eighteen

Entering her little tent—actually Gülden’s little tent but Lacy had begun thinking of it as hers—she switched on the battery-powered lantern Gülden had loaned her. She felt strangely warmed by the sight of the belongings she’d left behind. They weren’t much, but they were her very own: shampoo, brush, iPod, the ballpoint pen with a flower on one end, the paperback mystery she’d dog-eared on page 187, the clean blue shirt she’d been saving in case she needed to spruce up. She pulled off her denim shorts and knelt beside her duffle bag, searched the side pocket, and found a one-hundred lira note. Why had she put it there? Never mind. Right now it looked like a pot of gold. She ran her hand down the seam of the pocket and felt paper. Unfolding it, she laughed and pressed it to her chest. It was the copy she’d made at home of her passport photo page, and near the bottom of the sheet, in a secret code only she could decipher, she’d written her credit card numbers and their expiration dates.

She returned everything to the duffle and sat back on the soft lining of her sleeping bag, pulling the top part up and over her bare legs.

“Knock, knock,” Henry called softly from outside the tent.

“Wait a minute. I have to put my shorts on.”

“If you insist.”

When Lacy unzipped the door, Henry crawled through and sat Indian-style facing her, their knees nearly touching. It was a bit uncomfortable. He was Lacy’s first guest in her tiny home, and its dimensions forced them to invade each other’s personal space. She put up both hands, palms forward. “Pattycake?”

Henry laughed. His dark eyes twinkled in the lantern light. “I came to apologize for my rude behavior. I’m sorry. I was concerned about where you were and I drove all the way back from the airport thinking I must have gotten the day wrong. Hoping I had, actually. Otherwise, you might be in trouble and I had no idea how to locate you.”

“I’m sorry, too. I had no idea you’d come to meet me.”

“How did you think you’d get back here?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. Sorry.” Lacy couldn’t remember that far back, to the time when she still planned to take a plane back from Istanbul. So much had happened since then. Suddenly she flashed on a mental image of the return ticket and printed itinerary in her stolen backpack. Jason would have had these well before the scheduled flight, but would he have realized she couldn’t board without a passport?

“So why did you drive back?”

“Make yourself comfortable, Henry. It’s a long story.” Lacy wished she had liquid refreshment to offer him, but she didn’t. She gave him a condensed version of the story, anxious to get to the important questions. Henry’s face was so intent his eyes ceased to blink and he leaned forward, closer and closer. Speaking in a deliberately lowered voice, she said, “Did you and Max, by chance, stay at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul?”

“Yeah. We did.”

“When did you rent your car?”

“The next day, I think. The morning after we flew in. We had to go to this little town south of the city to pick up a rug Max had ordered custom-made.”

“I know.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Henry’s head jerked backward.

“I talked to Elbert MacSweeney.”

“Who’s Elbert MacSweeney? Oh! The dude who manages the carpet project, right?”

“I know MacSweeney. We’re friends, but never mind. Back to the Pera Palace Hotel. Did you and Max go to the hotel bar soon after you got there?”

He thought for a minute. “Max did. I didn’t.”

So far, all details were dovetailing nicely. Lacy forged ahead. “Did Max have a green trench coat?”

“Yeah. Burberry, I think. He got it in London but it wasn’t really green, more like a … green. Right.”

“When was the last time you saw it?”

“Why?” Henry shifted his weight, brought one knee up and rested an arm on it.

“Because the man I met on the train was wearing it, and someone killed him.”

“No shit!” Henry’s smooth, brown forehead crinkled, a vertical line forming between his eyebrows.

“So think. When was the last time you saw that coat?”

After a long pause, Henry said, “He was wearing it at JFK before we left New York. Yes. He was wearing it.” He paused again. “On the plane, he probably put it in an overhead bin. After that, I don’t remember.”

“Was he wearing it or carrying it when you went from the airport to the hotel? Did you go straight to the hotel?”

“They had a car waiting for us at the airport. We went straight to the hotel, but I can’t remember even looking at Max. I was preoccupied with our luggage and all. Max never worried about details. That was my job.”

“When did Max go to the bar?”

“Not long after we got there. We went to our rooms and I wanted to shower, but Max said he was going to hit the bar first.”

“Was he wearing alligator shoes?”

Henry’s eyes popped. “Alligator shoes?”

“Alligator wing-tips, European size 45. Handmade. Italian.” Lacy couldn’t say it with a straight face.

Henry buried his face in the crook of his arm. He was laughing. “Yes. That is, he did have alligator wing-tips, European size 45, handmade, Italian, but whether he was wearing them when he went to the bar, I can’t say. I was in the shower.”

“Was he wearing them on the plane?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Did he bring them with him?”

“Wait. I did his packing for him. Sure.” Henry looked at Lacy’s duffle bag as if picturing the contents of Max’s luggage. “I packed his new boots, old tennis shoes, shower shoes, but I left his alligator shoes out, along with the rest of the clothes he wanted to wear on the plane.”

“Where did Max go after he left the bar?”

“When I got dressed, I went downstairs and called Max out of the bar. We went back to our suite so he could shower and change for dinner.”

“You really did everything for Max, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t mind. I was his Man Friday. My job, among other things, was to figure out what he was forgetting and do it for him.” Henry picked a long blond hair from the coated polyester floor and wrapped it around his finger. “Actually, at one time Max wanted to adopt me.” Henry blushed a little. “After his own son was killed in that plane crash, he, like, transferred all his paternal feelings to me. He told me he would make me the primary beneficiary in his will, and I would take over as head of the Sebring Foundation when he was ready to retire.”

“And you said no?”

“I had to. My mother is still alive. How would she have felt?”

“Did that make things weird between you and Max?”

“No, not at all. He understood.”

Lacy wondered if Henry might be Max’s beneficiary after all. If Henry had turned down the adoption idea and Max wasn’t upset by the rejection, he might well have changed his will in Henry’s favor anyway. But Paul said Max didn’t really have any money because it still belonged, technically, to his comatose father.

Henry seemed to drift off into another world. He twisted the blond hair around his index finger until it cut off the circulation and turned his fingertip blue.

Lacy returned to the former topic. They’d been making good progress there for a minute. “If Max was wearing the alligator shoes on the plane, he was probably still wearing them when he went to the bar.”

“Wait!” Henry threw a hand out and touched Lacy on the knee, then drew it back quickly as if he feared the gesture was too familiar. “The next morning! I remember. Max was trimming his beard—he had taken a mirror over to the window for better light—and he said, ‘Where are my good shoes?’ meaning, his alligator shoes. I said, ‘I don’t know.’ We looked all around but we couldn’t find them. We asked the maid. She hadn’t seen them—or so she said—but we never did find them. I left a message at the desk for them to mail the shoes to us if they were found.”

“And the trench coat?”

He went silent for a minute. “I honestly can’t remember. The last time I’m sure I saw it was at the airport in New York. After that, and until Max died, it never rained so I never even thought about it.”

“I can tell you where it is now, and the shoes, too. They’re in a bag at the gendarmerie station about thirty miles north of here.” At this point, Lacy had to fill in a couple of blanks. She told Henry about her concern for the man on the train, about the trench coat he left behind, about her visit to the gendarmerie, and about running into Milo Dakin in the bar at the Pera Palace. But she didn’t tell him anything about Jason or about her captivity in the Spice Market. She was saving that until he’d had time to digest this new information.

Henry went silent, his head bobbing slightly as he stared at the floor. “I’ll go to the gendarmerie tomorrow.” He rose to his knees, as if preparing to leave. “This guy, Milo. You believe him? You think he’s on the up and up?”

“He’s an odd bird, but yes, I do believe him.”

“Seems a coincidence, doesn’t it? Him just happening to be there and just happening to remember Max right down to his shoe size.”

“Milo is that sort of guy.”

“There has to be a connection. You do see that, don’t you?” His face darkened.

“It’s what I’ve been thinking all along, but I’ve yet to find anyone who agrees with me.”
Possibly because I haven’t
been talking about it.
“Not between Milo and Max, but between Max and the mystery man. But what’s the connection? How many reasons are there for an English-speaking man, probably American, to come out this way? Alone? With no money for a ticket and obviously at his wits’ end?”

Henry, now crouched at the tent flap and preparing to leave, turned and crawled back to his former place. “There’s smuggling going on here. Did you know that?”

Lacy considered acting shocked but decided against it. “Paul says he thinks so, too.”

“He’s right. I don’t know exactly who or what or how, but I do know Todd Majewski goes out a lot at night. More often than you’d expect if he was just taking the occasional nocturnal pee.”

“Was Max missing anything other than his trench coat and his shoes?”

“Now that you mention it … wow. I hadn’t thought of it until just now. Max wasn’t missing anything else but I was. My little address book.”

“What was in it? I mean, I know what was in it—addresses. But why would someone want to steal it?”

“No reason I can think of. I didn’t worry about it because everything I needed was in my cell phone, anyway. I don’t even know why I brought it. Probably as back-up in case I lost my phone.” Henry drew both hands to his mouth, thumbs under his chin, and closed his eyes. “Things may be starting to make sense.”

Lest she interrupt a crucial line of thought, Lacy said nothing.

“Did the police take photos of the man from the train?” Henry asked.

“Yes, I saw them and asked for a copy, but they wouldn’t let me have one.”

“I’ll bet you a dinner at the Four Seasons when I see the guy’s picture I’ll recognize him.”

“And I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by talking to you in the first place.” Lacy looked down at her poor, battered wrists. “Who do you think it was?”

“Can’t give you a name yet, but look. In the museum world, the smuggling and selling of stolen antiquities is a fact of life. But the Sebring Foundation, and Max in particular, brooked no funny business. As soon as he suspected shady dealings, he cut bait and ran. If it involved one of our employees, he fired them on the spot. But what if we were dealing in stolen items and didn’t know it? What if this dig site is part of it?”

“Are you saying Bob or Paul might be involved in smuggling?”

“No-no. Not them. But what about Todd? What about that weirdo, what’s his name, Tyler? Always hanging around, doing nothing. Just looking.”

“Seriously, Henry …”

“I’m not accusing anyone. I’m just thinking out loud.”

“Okay. Think out loud some more.”

Henry looked up at the thin blue ceiling. “Okay. Let’s see if this theory holds up. Mystery man is some little schmuck, a low life, the smugglers have recruited to do their dirty work. If he gets caught, he’s expendable. He’s told to break into our hotel rooms and find whatever he can about where we’re headed. They know we’re coming to a dig the Sebring Foundation is funding, but they don’t know exactly where that is. Maybe Todd, or whoever, is part of it, but he’s gone rogue. Maybe there’s more than one group.”

“You’re going way out on a limb, now.”

“Right. Back to the hotel. Schmuck breaks in, finds Max’s trench coat, finds a real nice pair of Italian shoes, goes into the adjoining room and finds my address book. It was in the outer pocket of my suitcase. He takes the address book. Hears someone coming. Doesn’t have time to go through Max’s coat pockets so he takes the whole coat with him. Might as well take these Italian shoes, too. Splits.”

Lacy could scarcely wait until Henry paused for breath, because the three beers had migrated down to her bladder. “I want to hear the rest of this, but would you excuse me for a minute?” she said, then quickly crawled out of the tent and stood up, shaking the kinks out of her legs.

It was past eleven o’clock and a fog lay over the excavated area to a height of several feet, radiation fog formed by the cooling of the denuded ground after sunset. The port-a-potty stood on the other side of the big tent. As she picked her way across, she looked around carefully in case Sierra’s attacker was on the prowl again. She glanced toward the hill that skirted the eastern side of the dig and saw a burly silhouette. A man wearing a billed cap was picking his way up the slope.