Murder Miscalculated (3 page)

“Agent Cochran is the one you’ll be teaching.”

I looked over at Lynn. She looked at Talbot.

“You said you could make it worth Greg’s time.”

“We can pay a consulting fee to compensate for the time he has to spend away from the bookstore.” He named a figure that couldn’t help but appeal to us.

“You said away from the store,” said Lynn, ever the practical one. “Couldn’t he teach Cochran here at The Book Nook?”

Talbot shook his head. “No, Agent Cochran is already undercover and has established a routine. You’ll meet with him at Wykowski’s Gym.”

I knew that gym. It was down by what remained of the city’s docks. I wondered what kind of undercover identity the normally button-down Cochran had assumed.

Talbot continued, “Cochran has established a routine of going there every morning for a couple of hours. We can arrange for a private room where you can work with him without anyone knowing what’s going on.”

“Why is Cochran working for you?” I asked. “Where’s Agent Riley?” Riley was head of the team of agents I’d first tangled with, and then eventually worked with, in my previous occupation. Riley was also the one who had made it possible for me to start with a clean slate.

“Special Agent Riley is teaching a course back in Quantico, Virginia, for a few months. I’ve been assigned to lead his team in the meantime.”

No one spoke. I studied Lynn’s face, knowing how much she hated the idea of my getting mixed up in something like this. We had spent the past year working hard to build our new life. While neither of us wanted to see that work endangered, I couldn’t help but feel that I should help Cochran if I could.

“It would be fun to see Cochran again,” I offered.

Lynn ignored my comment and got up from the table, an angry look on her face. She shook her head. “If you want to do it, go ahead, just as long as you don’t get involved in anything dangerous. The money’s not worth it.” She leaned over the table and tapped a long finger in front of our visitor.

“Agent Talbot.”

“Yes, Ms. Vargas?”

“I want a letter on Bureau letterhead, signed by you, stating that the work for which you are hiring Greg is legal. No letter, no deal.”

“You’ll have it.”

Lynn nodded and went up the stairs to her studio without saying another word. Part of me wanted to go after her and tell her the deal was off, but instead I listened to her footsteps on the stairs and the door slamming as she went into her dance studio.

It took only a few minutes for Talbot and me to work out the details. I’d meet Cochran at nine in the morning each weekday for the next month and spend an hour working with him. Talbot would arrange for a gym membership in my name. At my insistence he agreed to make it good for a full year and include a separate membership for Lynn. She and I had been talking about joining a gym anyway, and Wycowski’s was a good one, if a bit far from The Book Nook.

Our business concluded, I walked with Talbot to the front door.

“Trust me, Mr. Smith,” he said as he left. “You’re making the right decision.”

I thought about his words as the jingle from the bell above the door faded away and the store became quiet again.

Junior came back out from behind the counter, and I picked him up and held him in my arms. The late, great Fast Eddie Dupre once told me, “Kid, if someone tells you to trust them more than once in the same conversation, that’s when you shouldn’t.”

“Did you hear him, Junior?” I asked the cat as I rubbed him between his ears. “He said we should trust him. I think I should trust him about as much as a mouse should trust you.”

Junior didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

Later that day I headed up the stairs to the second floor. When I arrived on the landing I could hear Lynn in her dance studio one flight above me, giving commands to her early afternoon class of exercising women. “Now rotate, one, two, three.”

I reached out as I walked down the narrow hallway and let my fingers run along the old wallpaper, feeling the texture and the places where it was peeling. A lingering trace of oily smoke reminded me, as it always does, that Lynn and I still have much work to do repairing and restoring the old building.

I was looking for a room that would suit my purpose. The second floor was a small warren of rooms, some reachable via the hallway, some found only by wandering through interconnecting doors. Most of the rooms on the second floor saw little use, and our very slow renovation of the building had yet to reach this floor except for two rooms at the front that Lynn and I had remodeled into a small bedroom suite. Barbara’s own bedroom was downstairs off the kitchen, harkening back to when she’d lived here alone.

Halfway down the hall I pushed open a door whose hinges squeaked their need for oil. I fumbled on the wall for the light switch. It clicked loudly, and a single bare bulb in the ceiling lit up and illuminated a small, windowless room. Faded posters covered what wallpaper remained. The air smelled of dust, old clothes and time.

In the center of the room was what I was looking for, an old dressmaker’s dummy that kept a lonely vigil over a clutter of dilapidated trunks and stacks of sagging cardboard boxes.

I draped the sports coat I was carrying around the dummy’s shoulders, then stood back and contemplated it. It stood much too low to the floor for my purpose. I dragged a trunk over, picked up the dummy and placed it on top. My hands were covered in dust from the trunk and the dummy, and I wiped them off on an old shirt lying on top of one of the boxes. As I put the shirt back down I wondered whose it was and when it had last been worn.

I looked at the dummy again. Now it was a little too high, but it was good enough for what I needed.

I shook my head. If only Fast Eddie Dupre could see me having to go back to the basics. My guess is he’d be cackling that loopy laugh of his.

“No, not like that. Smooth, smooth like the way a copperhead glides through the swamp.”  Eddie took my wrist and pulled it back from the dummy wearing the coat. We were in the basement of his cheap apartment building. I was fifteen, a street kid who thought he was a pickpocket. Eddie had offered to take me under his wing and teach me the ancient art of picking pockets. “Now watch me,” he commanded. I watched.

Eddie was in his early fifties back then, slicked-back black hair on the long side, handsome face showing his Cajun heritage and a body beginning to show the ravages of a life lived on the wrong side of the street. He took a few steps back and then walked across the basement as if going for a stroll on Bourbon Street in his native New Orleans. He glanced up at the dingy, pipe-lined ceiling as though admiring a cloudless, sunny sky. He looked to one side and waved and smiled at someone, perhaps a lady friend from his long-ago youth. He whistled a little, and then, when he was a few steps past the dummy, he stopped and turned and held up a wallet for me to see. It was the wallet I’d placed in the pocket of the jacket just a minute before.

“I never saw you take it,” I said, amazed. “I was watching you the whole time, and I never saw you take it.”

“You are wrong, my young friend. You thought you were watching me the whole time but I can guarantee you weren’t. Otherwise you’d have seen me do the dip.” He smiled at the confusion on my face. “Think back carefully, and then do what I did exactly, step by step.”

I went over to the dark stone wall where Eddie had started and waited while he replaced the wallet in the jacket on the dummy. I took a step and stopped. “You want me to imitate the way you walked? I don’t think I can.”

“Sure you can, Kid. Think about how I held myself and how I moved.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, visualizing Eddie’s walk. Then I opened my eyes and began walking, swinging my arms a bit, sauntering as best I could the way Eddie had sauntered down his imaginary street.

“Stop,” Eddie commanded. I froze in place. “You’ve got the walk and you’ve got the arms, but what about my head. What was my head doing while I walked?”

“You were looking from side to side,” I answered.

“Then go back and start again and do the same.”

I went back and started again, wondering if I was crazy for thinking this old guy could teach me to be a master pickpocket.

I gave it another try. I walked like Eddie had walked. I swung my arms like Eddie had swung his arms. I looked from side to side in that easy nonchalant way he had.

That was it. As I passed the dummy on my left I looked sharply to my right as though I had heard or seen something. At the same time, I let my left hand drop down and slip the wallet from the jacket without altering my arm’s swinging motion. I kept walking and didn’t break my stride until I reached the other side of the basement, then turned and held the wallet up for Eddie to see. He laughed when he saw the wide smile of triumph on my face.

“Very good, Kid, very good. You see, it’s all a matter of misdirection. When you look to your right quickly like that, anyone watching you, anyone even slightly aware of you, is going to look over there, too. They can’t help it.”

That was the start of my training. I spent countless hours in that basement, walking past the dummy and taking its wallet over and over again. I learned to take a wallet from outside pockets and inside pockets. I learned how to scissor my fingers when plucking a wallet so that there was no visible movement in the tendons of my wrist. I graduated from working with the dummy to using Eddie as my victim. He’d put his wallet in one pocket or another without my watching and I had to find a way to steal it without his noticing, lest his hand come down on my wrist like iron.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he’d say as he tightened his fingers. “That’s what a pair of steel handcuffs are going to feel like if you get caught.” He let go, and I massaged my wrist. “Remember that, Kid. If you get caught, it’s all over.”

His voice faded from my thoughts, and I found myself massaging my wrist as though Eddie had grabbed hold of it through almost twenty years of time.

“So this is where you took yourself, Greg.”

Barbara’s voice brought me back to the present. I turned and saw her standing in the doorway.

“Lynn told me about your visitor this morning and what he wants you to do.” She peered at me with her wise eyes. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?”

“Cochran needs my help, Barbara.”

“I like Cochran as much as you do, Greg, but is helping him really the reason you are doing this? Or is it because you miss the excitement of being a pickpocket?”

I found myself unable to answer. Barbara walked over to me. She gently took both my hands and peered at my face with concern. She is at least a foot shorter than me, but to me it felt as if she was looking down at a child.

“Never mind,” she said. “We all have to do what we’re meant to do. Maybe this is what you are meant to do, or maybe it isn’t. Only time will tell.” Barbara reached up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I trust you to do the right thing.”

She looked around the room, and my eyes followed hers. “Look at those posters, Greg. Relics of a time long ago, back when we wore flowers in our hair, bracelets, bells and bare feet, and we thought we could change the world.”

The faded posters overlapped and covered the walls, leaving little of the original peeling wallpaper exposed. They dated from the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s and were filled with pop-art images, psychedelic flowers and young people wearing bellbottom pants, long hair and headbands. Several posters were stridently anti-war, anti-establishment and pretty much anti-everything else except free love.

“You know, Greg, back then my store served as a meeting place and a way station for the civil rights and anti-war movements.” There was pride in Barbara’s voice. “Oh, the times we had here. Everyone who was anyone in those days spent the night here at one time or another. On some nights every room in the building was filled with people. There was music everywhere, all kinds of food being cooked and planning for marches and protests at all hours of the day.” Her smile broadened. “That’s when The Book Nook began staying open all night.” She swept her arm around. “If these rooms could talk, what stories they would tell.”

She and I stood a minute in silence, listening to the past as it whispered to us, and then Barbara gave my hand a squeeze. “Well, I’d better let you get back to your practicing. You’ve probably got a lot to relearn.” She turned and left the room, blowing me a kiss as she did. I listened to her soft steps on the old wood floor outside the room as she made her way back down the hallway.

I turned back to the dressmaker’s dummy and adjusted the way the jacket hung on its shoulders. I ran my hands up and down the jacket while looking at the ceiling, at the posters on the wall, anywhere but at the jacket. I let my fingers explore each pocket surreptitiously, probing, removing the wallet from one pocket, placing it back in another and then repeating the process over and over, letting my muscle memory regain its surety.

Tomorrow morning I would take on the role Fast Eddie had taken with me and begin teaching Cochran the skills needed to pickpockets. I meant what I’d told his boss. I was confident that I could teach him to do what he needed in four weeks, three if he was a quick study. I was glad Barbara trusted me to do the right thing, and I hoped Lynn felt the same. I only wished I knew it, too.

Early the next morning I walked a couple of blocks from Little Knickerbocker Lane into the morning rush hour bustling along Market Street. I joined the river of pedestrians and flowed with them until I came to where I was able to catch one of the vintage streetcars that ran on the F Line. It was painted a bold yellow and blue with a plaque that told me it had first hit the streets in the1940s. The interior was historically accurate to the era, as well, and smelled of leather and varnish. I rode standing up, holding tightly to the leather strap that hung from the overhead rail as we rolled and swayed across town and down toward the wharves. Above us the connectors on the roof snapped and clacked along the high-voltage overhead lines.