Sleeping Dogs (31 page)

The deputy assistant looked down at his watch, then at her. “Miss Waring?”

“Hello, Mr. Hillman,” she said. There were three other women in the room, and all of them were in their twenties and wore designer glasses that had been chosen as accessories to outfits of the sort that nobody in this office used to wear except in court. From the looks of their hair, all of them had gotten the call hours before she had.

“It’s nice to see you again.” She could tell that Hillman wasn’t sure if he had seen her before, but if she had been in the Justice Department for more than ten years, she had a right to expect that the upper echelon at least knew her by sight. “I understand you’ve been transferred from Fraud. What’s your first impression?”

“I’m not exactly new,” she said. “This is where I started, And I’m not transferring back; I’m just on loan for this case.”

Hillman nodded sagely. “That’s right.” It was as though he had been testing her hold on her sanity. “The reason we’re having this little get-together is that this case came as a surprise upstairs. I’d sort of like to get up to speed. I understand that this Butcher fellow assassinated one of our informants in New York so that the wire was discovered; then the theory is that he flew to Santa Fe and killed a boss named Peter Mantino, and then went to Buffalo and killed the boss there.”

Elizabeth nodded. “That’s one possibility.”

Richardson looked alarmed. “Just a day ago you were sure of it.” He glanced at the deputy assistant as though he were checking to see if he was on fire. “Has something changed?”

Elizabeth answered him but looked at the deputy assistant. “The Buffalo police pointed out to me that it’s a lot of work for one person, no matter who he is. It meant he had to kill several other people in Buffalo—at least three—in different ways in a few hours. Not that he couldn’t do it, but it leaves the question of why.”

“Why?” This time it was the deputy assistant. “I understood that this is what he does.”

“It’s easy to think of reasons why a boss is murdered. Somebody hires the killer, or he has a personal grudge to settle. It’s not as easy to imagine why one man would come in and shoot two or three soldiers in one part of town, then go shoot the boss and three more soldiers afterward. Nobody would hire one man to do that, and the only reason anyone would want that sort of massacre is an unfriendly takeover. The Butcher’s Boy isn’t eligible for management.”

Richardson smirked. “I don’t think we really need the advice of the Buffalo police on this sort of thing, do we?”

“I didn’t ask for it, but it makes a certain amount of sense.”

Richardson prompted her. “But you aren’t buying it, are you?”

“Some of it.”

The others waited, but she didn’t go on. Finally Richardson prodded her. “Which parts?”

“The last time we heard of the Butcher’s Boy, ten years ago, he did something very similar, only we didn’t know what was happening until later. I think that something went wrong that made his clients turn on him, so he was on the run and did it to churn up the water so he could get away. I can’t be sure why he’s doing it this time, but I don’t think it’s for money.”

“All right, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. She noted the change to her first name. “You’ve just come from Fraud, so you know something about revenue-center budgeting. That’s what I’m here about. We have limited resources to work with. This is one case, one man. What do we get if we catch him, and what does it cost?”

Elizabeth thought for a moment, then decided. She was going to have to defeat Hillman by tunneling under whatever position he took so that she got there before he did. “In Fraud that wasn’t hard to answer. We were recovering money stolen from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We just figured out who took the most who was likely to still have it, and we went after him. This is different. I don’t have the slightest idea what it would cost to catch him, and I don’t know what we get.”

The deputy assistant nodded again, and this time he was smiling in contemplation of the triumph he was about to savor. “You have to look at this from the Malthusian point of view. I have to go upstairs and tell
our
bosses what I think we should do with our finite resources that will result in the greatest good. Or the maximum damage to evil, if you will. The range of options is staggering, and we’d like to do it all. But you have to be hard-nosed about this Is this something we should pursue on a federal level?” He smiled as though he knew the answer, then added, “Of course, you could tell me that this is the kind of decision I get the big bucks for making.” He looked around, and the people at the table chuckled on cue. He seemed pleased. “But I’ve got nothing to go on unless you help me.”

“All right,” said Elizabeth. What a loathsome little man. She would have to argue his position for him, and let him see what was wrong with it. “As I said, I believe that the Butcher’s Boy fell out with his employers ten years ago, and as a result killed a number of organized-crime figures—some important, some not—in order to create the maximum chaos so that he’d have time to get away. I think that he’s an evil man, and in a perfect society would be forced to suffer some punishment. But if you’re asking if you should take, say, two million dollars from enforcing civil rights laws to spend on getting him, I don’t know. I doubt it.” The current administration had spent virtually nothing on enforcing civil rights laws, and everyone at the table knew it.

Richardson looked faint, but the deputy assistant seemed to relish the conversation. “Give me your reasoning, Elizabeth.”

“The reason we wanted him ten years ago was that we believed he knew a great deal about the men who ran organized crime and their activities. He’d have to. He was a sort of contract exterminator for people at a very high level. But I think he’s been in hiding for ten years. If that’s true, what he knows is mostly old news, which might make it hard to get convictions. There’s also the problem that his knowledge is pretty much limited to capital crimes. If we find him, we may not take him alive. If we do, he probably won’t tell us anything. I can’t assume many judges would grant him immunity to testify, or that immunity would be worth much without protection from the Mafia. Which would get us into the area of the Witness Protection Program. If he’s stayed alive while they were looking for him for ten years, he can do better on his own. And, of course, it would put the Department in the position of setting a man free who has probably killed dozens of people.”

“Dozens? Literally?” Hillman raised his eyebrows.

“That’s if the stories are true. It’s hard to tell.”

“And we won’t know unless we go out and catch him?”

Elizabeth didn’t take the bait. “I can’t guarantee we’ll ever know more than we do right now. I’m not qualified to tell you whether taking him off the streets will be of political value to the Department. I do know it probably won’t contribute much to the safety of the average citizen in his home; in fact, what he’s been doing all week is killing off some of the very people we’d most like to take out of the game. That includes the informant you mentioned. Tony T was a bad man.”

“I’m impressed, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. “I asked for hard-nosed, and that’s exactly what I got. What’s your conclusion?”

“I think the opposition is more likely to get him than we are.”

“You do?”

“Sure. They would consider him a more serious problem than we do because his memory can put a lot of them away for life. They know more about him than we do, and they have an unlimited budget.” She hesitated for a second, not because she was considering not saying it, but to be sure he got it. “And they operate on utilitarian principles too.”

Richardson came out of the elevator and stalked directly to Elizabeth’s desk. “He likes you.”

“He does?”

“He thinks you’re the best thing that could happen.”

She shook her head. “I could see it from the minute I walked in there. We were made for each other. The electricity in the air, the—”

“Jesus, Elizabeth, you handled him brilliantly. You won. Now, be gracious in victory and stop fighting. He wants us to go for it.”

W
olf stood in the shower and let the heavy flow of water pour over him. He needed to be soothed. When he moved, he could feel a small hitch in his back where he had taken the jolts of the bus ride across Arizona. He had been awakened a few times during the night, not by the sounds of cars, the motel ice machine or the voices in other rooms, but by his mind running through its accumulated clutter. Each time, when consciousness came, he would find himself in midthought, sometimes in midsentence, fully aware of the specious train of logic he had been following in his sleep.

The last time, he had been thinking about Meg. He hated to think about her now when he was awake, because she was gone forever. He never had any trouble recalling the sight of her, or even the scent of her perfume. He had been constructing a dream about her; in it he would live, and then he would go back and look at her. It wouldn’t be easy to accomplish, because women of her class ventured off the enclosed, protected parks their husbands inherited less and less often as they grew older. They were occupied with their children until they sent them away to some awful boarding school, and after that they saw a select group of friends who were, after so many generations, so closely related that they looked like sisters. When he reached this part of the dream, the sense of loss and disappointment woke him up, and he began to scheme in the darkness for some way to go home. At some point in the night he had let go of it, and awakened to the one thing the darkness and isolation had let him forget. He had been doing his feeling and thinking on the premise that he was a constant, unchanging being, that the continuity of his memories and consciousness somehow guaranteed that he was the same. But now, as he became more alert to the physical world that chilled his bones, put pressure on his joints and reflected his body in mirrors, he remembered. When he was asleep, or when nothing reminded him of it, he felt exactly the same as he had the first time he had put on his Little League baseball uniform. He could even remember the incredible whiteness of the flannel, and feel the softness of it against his legs. That was the ridiculous part of memory, or one of the ridiculous parts. It was only his body that wasn’t still ten years old.

Wolf dried himself with two of the big rough white towels and walked into the bedroom. There were really two problems now, and the way to get through this was to look at them separately. The old men were the big problem. He had done the right thing by going to Las Vegas. Little Norman might be able to convince them that the best thing they could do was to let Carl Bala stay in his cage and forget about helping him with his revenge.

The other problem was new to him. He knew that Little Norman must have been telling the truth. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire. It was the only thing that explained the commotion in the kitchen when he had popped the bastard. It had been so obvious; why hadn’t he figured it out? Because it was such an outrageous idea that his mind had somehow blocked it. But now the New York police knew something about him. Hell, they must know a lot about him if they could have five cops waiting for him in the Los Angeles airport a few hours later. Because that’s what it had been; he had seen the whole thing wrong. It wasn’t four cops looking for a shooter; it was five cops looking for him.

He sat down on the bed and thought about this, and it was still wrong. The New York police couldn’t have gotten on a plane and caught up with him like that. They would have needed to take practically the next flight out of New York, and what could they expect to do in Los Angeles? They wouldn’t have jurisdiction. Now it fell into place inevitably. It wasn’t the New York police; it was federal cops—the FBI. It fit better anyway. They were the ones who were always bugging telephones and taping microphones to people, and they wouldn’t have to put anybody on a plane; they would simply make a phone call to the Los Angeles office to have their agent bring four bozos across town to scoop him up.

Wolf dressed quickly and walked across the street to the pay phone outside a small diner. He had twenty dollars in quarters, two ten-dollar rolls that he had bought from the sleepy change girl posted near the slot machines in the lobby of his motel in Las Vegas. He had picked up the habit from Little Norman in the old days, and it had come back to him. Little Norman had always told him that his hands were too small to use by themselves. A fist wrapped around a roll of quarters might lose a few hundredths of a second getting there, but when it did it would make an impression.

He put a quarter into the telephone and dialed the number. The operator came on the line and said, “Please deposit three thirty-five.” He laboriously pumped fourteen quarters into the slot, and after the fourteenth, the operator wouldn’t go away until she had said, “You have fifteen cents’ credit.” Then it sounded as though she were climbing into a jar and then screwing the lid on after her. And finally he heard the ring. It sounded different from the ones here, sort of bubbly and quick, and it made him feel as though he were home. It was maddening. He was listening to her phone, and he could see the room in his memory.