Repo Madness (24 page)

I phoned my new buddy Rogan at the Ferry Bar, and he told me he'd given Phil, the mayor of Shantytown, my card and the message to call me. He had no idea why I hadn't heard back. Phil was busy being mayor, maybe.

During the same period, Deputy Dumbbell ticketed me for going fifty-eight in a fifty-five and for parking too far from the curb. I texted and talked to Katie and dodged a couple of calls from William Blanchard, but finally he got ahold of me and demanded I see him at the bank immediately, so I drove over. I grabbed my photocopy of the Wolfingers' one-in-five postcard off the pile of traffic tickets in the glove box and headed in to see him.

Blanchard didn't look so well; there was a sallow pallor to his skin, and a bleary red in his eyes. I thought maybe the heavy drinking had continued past the night of his message. He pointed to the chair in front of his desk, and I took my time easing into it. “The hell you been?” he wanted to know.

“Busy.”

“Get my messages?”

I nodded.

“Then why haven't you called me back?”

“Busy.”

He didn't like that, and I didn't care, and he could tell I didn't care. He lost some of his outrage, realizing it wasn't doing him any good. “I call you,” he said much more evenly, “it means I have something for you. But that doesn't mean what I have will last. It usually is
timely
.”

“Sorry.” I fished in my pocket and pulled out the photocopy. “Hey, I was wondering if you could tell me something about this?”

He looked at it lying on his desk, but didn't touch it. “Makes you think I know anything about this?”

“Word has it that the phone number there connects to a room you're operating.”

“The hell does it matter to you?”

“A couple of friends of mine won a trip to Hawaii.”

Blanchard settled back into his chair, regarding me intently. “Okay, so?” he finally asked.

“So, how does it work? I mean, I can't figure out how it makes any money. They got a credit card out of it and joined some club they can cancel for a full refund.”

I'd seen the look in his eyes from people before, people who assume they're so much smarter than I am that I'm probably not going to be able to grasp anything they're going to say. “What do you know about banking?” he finally asked.

I shrugged. “You open an account, deposit your checks, and the bank takes it all away with fees.”

His smile was cold. “In other words, not a goddamn thing.”

I was getting irritated and, apparently, Alan could sense it.
“Easy,”
he warned.

“Right, not a goddamn thing,” I agreed flatly.

Blanchard nodded. “All right, since we're going to be partners on a new venture, I'll lay it out. The value of a bank isn't its deposits, because that money belongs to somebody else—a deposit is actually a liability, because when they ask for it, you gotta give it back. It's the loan that's an asset—I loan a million dollars, and as long as the borrower isn't in default, I got a million-dollar asset on the books. You understand most of this?”

I understood all of it. I just sat and waited.

“All right.” He pulled a paper clip out of a little bin and started unfolding the metal, bending the thin wire. From where I sat I could see the mutilated corpses of dozens of paper clips lying in the trash can. “I don't have the money to make a bunch of million-dollar loans, so I had to get creative. This one-in-five drop goes to people with lousy credit, people who haven't been able to get a charge account in years, though the poor bastards keep trying. They call the number on the postcard, find out they've won something, plus they get a credit card through my bank, with a five-hundred-dollar limit. It's their lucky goddamn day. They don't give a rat's ass about the interest rate or anything, and most of them use the card to purchase membership in a travel club for three hundred bucks, because they get all these coupons to save them money when they get to Hawaii. Two grand worth of coupons, face value, so instead of paying two hundred bucks for a helicopter ride, they only have to pay one seventy-five.”

“Let me guess who owns the travel club,”
Alan said.

“These people have bad credit for a reason,” I objected. “Don't they default?”

Blanchard grinned at me. “Yeah, though they usually make a few minimum payments first. It's not a bad asset until they're ninety days past due, and then here's the genius part—you're a bank in good standing if your delinquency as a
percentage of total outstandings
is below threshold. Long as I keep growing the base, the bank looks damn good on paper, especially with the interest rates I'm getting. We're for sale, and my bonus is based on our sale price.”

“This cannot be legal!”
Alan stormed.

I slowly reached out and picked up the photocopy, putting it back into my pocket. “Pretty smart deal,” I observed with fake admiration.

Blanchard gave me a satisfied smile.

“So, why did you want to see me?” I asked.

His smile winked out, and his eyes grew cold. “Got kicked out of my own goddamn house,” he told me.

“Sorry?”

“Wife asked for a divorce and hands me a paper to vacate. The bitch! Get this letter from her attorney saying they're going to audit all my books, think I've been hiding money from her. And listen to this: I'm going to have to pay child support for the kid. She's not even mine! Only adopted the brat to make the bitch happy.”

“That's pretty bad,” I observed without sympathy. “You in a hotel?”

“No. Got a place on the south arm of Lake Charlevoix, moved in there. That's not what matters. I can
not
have an audit by some asshole accountant, not now, not with everything going on. This is a critical time for me.”

“I know what it's like to have relationship problems. Maybe you can work it out.”

“Maybe you can work it out,” he mimicked, so angry, he didn't care that he was using such a smarmy tone with the guy who'd thrown Herbert Yancy off a roof. “She said there's nobody else, no other guy, but I know that's bullshit. She's got all kinds of new lingerie.”

I blinked, and he nodded.

“Yeah, I have keys and still check things out when she's not home. Be an idiot not to.”

“Jesus,”
Alan breathed disgustedly.

“Well.” I cleared my throat. “I know a good psychiatrist if you want, you know, counseling.”

“I do not want
counseling,
” he spat. “I want you to take care of this for me.”

“Take care of it.”

“You heard me. I can't have an audit. This whole problem has got to go away. My wife, I mean. I want you to make her go away. Permanently.”

 

19

It Isn't Her

“Blanchard is asking you to commit murder,”
Alan informed me tensely and altogether unnecessarily.

“Go away permanently,” I repeated.

“Don't have to spell it out more than that, do I?” Blanchard asked silkily.

“No, you don't.”

“You interested?”

“Of course not,”
Alan said.

“Yeah,” I replied. I had an idea. “If the money's right, hell yeah.”

Alan made the sort of noise you'd hear if you backed your car over a chicken, but I kept my face professional killer cool.

“Oh, it's a
lot
of money. I'll tell you where and when. Can't be any screw-ups on this,” Blanchard lectured me. “You do exactly what I say.”

I decided an assassin would care more about money than step-by-step instructions. “How much?” I growled.

“Ten percent when I give you the go-ahead. Rest when you finish the job,” he responded tersely.

Now we were both talking like television thugs. “Sounds good.” I nodded. My mind had already left the conversation, though—I was thinking of how to turn this to my advantage.

“Ten percent of what?”
Alan asked testily.
“You just agreed to a price that means nothing.”

“Except you didn't say ten percent of what,” I pointed out smoothly.

“Fifty grand.”

The whole thing was ridiculous—I wasn't going to kill anybody—but I couldn't help but reflect for a moment on how fifty thousand dollars would improve my life. Blanchard's face was sly: He could see me thinking about it. “That's five grand up front,” he informed me, apparently believing I couldn't do the math.

“Five grand now, the rest after.” I nodded again.

“No. Not
now
. See, this is why you have to do exactly what I tell you. I have to set it up so it doesn't look like I had anything to do with it. You don't make a move until I say. No money until then.”

I've read a lot of books with contract hit men in them and never heard of an arrangement like this. He was supposed to give me the money when I agreed to the job, wasn't he? I decided not to argue, though. “I'm in,” I declared.

We didn't shake hands when I stood up to leave. “This is our last meeting,” he informed me. “Now on, you bring in a repo, you deal with my credit manager, Maureen. Ask for her.”

Since he already knew about my repo job, I gave him my professional business card from the Black Bear, one of a dozen Becky had printed for me on her computer. That meant I only had eleven left.

*   *   *

“Of course I'm not going to kill Alice Blanchard,” I informed Alan as I closed the door to the repo truck.

“I can't imagine what you're thinking.”

“I'm thinking that my best friend, Jimmy, has fallen for a woman who is leaving her crook husband and that, if I play this right, William Blanchard won't be in a position to give them any more problems.”

“What does that even mean, ‘play this right'? Play it how?”

“I haven't figured that one out yet. Maybe I'll get Alice to join me on the roof.”

“Very funny.”

Alan fell asleep soon after that, while my tires hummed on the drive to Gaylord. The melting trend had continued, so that every car was covered in muddy splash, and standing pools of water leached out from the snowbanks piled high on the side of the road. Whenever someone passed me going in the opposite direction, I had to turn on my wipers and hit the windshield washers.

In two days I would be peeing into a plastic cup for Dr. Schaumburg. Sighing in resignation, I opened my glove box and pressed my pills out of their blister packs and into my hand, swigging them down with a bottle of water.

Maybe, if the damn things worked like they were supposed to, Alan would never wake up.

*   *   *

This time there were two people waiting in David Leinberger's foyer, plus a young, painfully thin man at the desk who asked me to take my seat and offered to hang my coat and give me water or tea or coffee or a soda. I picked coffee and settled in with a magazine for professional tax preparers.

Oddly, there is no magazine for professional repo men.

Alan woke up and announced that we were in Leinberger's office, which, obviously, I already knew. I guessed the pills hadn't kicked in yet.

The couple ahead of me took about half an hour, shuffling out with glum, just-went-to-the-proctologist expressions on their faces. I guessed they wouldn't be getting a refund from the tax man this year. Then the skinny kid told me I could go on in to the back office.

David Leinberger didn't get up from his desk or offer to shake my hand, so I pretended I was so interested in the decorating, I didn't notice any slight. His office windows had beautiful wood trim, and the light fixtures were all antique, which made his desktop computer seem somehow out of place. I sat in a leather chair without being asked.

“Nice Chevy out front,” I complimented. “New?”

“You probably think I owe you something. Like you did me a huge favor,” he responded.

“You did do him a favor,”
Alan said indignantly.

“No,” I replied, shaking my head, “you don't owe me anything. I just did what I could to put something right. You said I should have listened to you before I hooked your Malibu. I decided you had a point.”

Leinberger thought it over. “Okay,” he said finally. “Thanks for that. So, what do you want from me? Something about Nina, right? Mind telling me why?”

I explained that I was looking into some deaths, some local women. That it was a missing persons case, but that I had developed a personal interest in the unexplained drownings. I mentioned Lisa Marie Walker and a few others, but Leinberger showed no reaction.

“So you think Nina's death is unexplained, somehow? I thought the autopsy showed water in her lungs and a lot of alcohol in her system.”

“So she was intoxicated when she drowned,”
Alan declared excitedly.

This was more than I knew, but I kept my face neutral. “There are just some things I'm trying to get a handle on,” I responded. I brought out the photograph from the newspaper and slid it over to him. He picked it up, frowning.

“Her sister explained what was going on,” I continued. “Between the two of you, I mean. I don't care about any of that; that's your business.”

Leinberger looked unhappy. “Not the sort of thing I want getting around.”

“I'm not telling anybody anything. I'm just trying to understand what happened that day.”

“Yeah.” He shook his head sadly. “Me too. She was so young. The thought of her drowning … God, I feel bad about that. If I'd only been with her, I'm sure it wouldn't have happened.”

“Tell him he shouldn't blame himself,”
Alan urged sympathetically.

“I'm sure it isn't your fault, David. Did you see her at all on the boat?”