Sleeping Dogs (39 page)

Elizabeth picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Jack Hamp’s motel room in Chicago for the third time, listened to six rings and then set it down again. It was infuriating to know that he was practically on the scene, and she couldn’t even tell him it had happened. Finally she took the report and started to walk toward Richardson’s office, then realized that she was walking alone. She stopped and turned. “Come on, Lana.”

Lana hesitated, then caught up with her. “I don’t usually just pop in,” she said, and then gave a nervous, apologetic laugh.

“He’s not doing anything more important than this,” said Elizabeth.

“What have you got?” Richardson asked as they entered.

“We’re not sure,” said Elizabeth. “What I think we’ve got is several men trying to burn him out of a motel near O’Hare. I’m not sure who that would be. It’s Castiglione territory.”

“Maybe Paul Cambria’s men,” said Richardson. “I’ve been trying to sort out the one from yesterday. The night the cop and the two guys with machine guns got killed, Paul Cambria was at a public function in Gary, maybe a mile from the spot. The local cops think he might have been trying to establish an alibi.”

“A mile from the place where his men were going to shoot someone? An alibi should have some distance …”

“More likely, our friend was trying to get Paul Cambria. I’m not sure where the cop fits in.”

But Elizabeth was racing ahead. “And he missed. Or somebody saw him. Anyway, something went wrong, and they followed him to Chicago, or knew where he was going to stay, and …” she stopped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Richardson.

“The cop. You’re right. Sergeant Lempert. He doesn’t fit in, does he? Maybe he’s what went wrong.”

Richardson was getting excited now. “Maybe he’s the reason the Butcher’s Boy couldn’t get Cambria. Lempert saw him near Cambria doing something suspicious, and chased him.”

“For a mile? Alone?” asked Elizabeth.

“Followed him, then. Kept him under surveillance. Only he wasn’t the only one. But wait. The only reason the two soldiers with machine guns would kill Lempert is if he were with the Butcher’s Boy, and they couldn’t just wait until he left. Which means he must have actually arrested the Butcher’s Boy.”

Lana said, “I don’t follow—”

Elizabeth said, “I do, but I don’t buy it.”

Richardson spoke faster now as his scenario became clearer and more obvious. “The cop and the Butcher’s Boy are in the same store. A Xerox copying business, which probably means the Butcher’s Boy ducked in there to evade capture because there’s nothing else he could conceivably want in a place like that. The other two wouldn’t shoot a cop unless they had to. The only reason they would is if he was going to take the Butcher’s Boy away to someplace where they couldn’t reach him. And where’s that, except the police station?”

“But, then, how …” said Lana, and stopped.

“How what?”

“Well,” Elizabeth said quietly, “they usually handcuff a person with his hands behind his back. But what you’re saying is that the Butcher’s Boy got out of the handcuffs, took the policeman’s gun and shot somebody who couldn’t hit him first with a machine gun.”

“You’re right,” said Richardson. “I got carried away.”

Elizabeth nodded. “He can do that to you.”

“And we’re not even sure he was the one,” said Lana.

“But if he was,” Richardson said, “then you’ve got to take my hypothesis seriously. There’s no vendetta against Balacontano that could include Fratelli in Buffalo and Cambria in Gary.”

“I already take it seriously,” said Elizabeth.

“You do?”

“Sure. I was making a mistake. What I was doing was putting myself in his body, saying, ‘What would I do if—?’ and that’s the wrong approach. In the first place, we don’t have enough information that we can be sure is true, and so we can’t build a theory that’s based on it. In the second place, he
wouldn’t
do what I’d do. Or rather I wouldn’t do what he does: that’s a better way of saying it because it’s a proposition I can prove, and it means the same thing in the end. We don’t know what he feels, or if he has any sensations that we would recognize as feelings, so we can’t build a theory on that. All we can do is try to figure out what would be the smartest thing for him to do, because that’s pure logic, and catch him while he’s trying to do it.”

Elizabeth saw that Lana had slipped away, and turned to see where she had gone. She was outside in the hallway talking to a deliveryman.

“Is she any good?” asked Richardson.

“Didn’t you hire her?”

“Not really. The system hired her. She was in the pool of applicants and had the best school record. When she came in for an interview she was wearing clean clothes and showed no symptom of mental illness, so I would have had to make a written argument to hire anybody else.”

“Nicely put,” said Elizabeth. “I think she’s smart. Eventually she’s probably going to figure out that she’s wasting her time here and do a lateral transfer.”

Lana signed the man’s clipboard and came back with a wrapped package. “It’s for you, Elizabeth.”

“Thanks.” She put the package under her arm.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Richardson.

“Weren’t we in the middle of something?”

“Open it.”

The other two watched while Elizabeth looked for a return address, then tore the brown paper off and opened the plain white box. Inside was a leather folder with gold leaf that said “?. V. Waring.” When she opened it, she saw the stationery with the heading “?. V. Waring” on it. “I didn’t order this,” she said.

“Maybe it’s a present,” said Lana.

“Is there a card?” asked Richardson.

“There’s an envelope for one, but nothing inside. See?”

“What a shame,” said Lana. “It’s beautiful.”

Richardson said his version of the same thing. “It cost a lot of money. English glove leather, engraved vellum. It adds up quick.”

“What am I going to do?” asked Elizabeth.

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody sends you an expensive present for no reason at all, and you don’t have any idea who did it …”

She noticed that Lana was at her desk talking into the telephone. Of course. The messenger. He would know who had paid for the delivery, or at least the name of the store. There must be paperwork because Lana had signed for it. At least her brain was working, even if Elizabeth’s wasn’t.

The phone on her desk rang and she snatched it up. “Waring.”

“Hi, Elizabeth.”

“Jack, I’ve been trying to call you about—”

“About the fire in the motel. I just heard all about it on the police radio.”

“Police radio? Where are you?”

“Gary. I’ve been talking to the cops at the copying store. I figured you might be looking for me and thought I’d better call you.”

Elizabeth’s mind strained in two directions at once. First things first. Find out what Jack knows. “Good. We’ve been trying to work it out. There’s something missing, so it still doesn’t make sense. This Sergeant Lempert—”

“He’s what I’m calling about,” said Hamp. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t get written down on paper. It’s an impression, a kind of instinct. I don’t want to have to fly to Washington and try to prove it, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“Lempert was dirty. Watching the cops going over the scene a little while ago. I got the feeling they didn’t think much of him. It’s just a feeling, and I don’t have time to go into it real deep, but he was dirty.”

Elizabeth groaned.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that it so obviously fits, and it’s the one thing that never crossed my mind. I mean it did, but I kept pushing it out because it didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t take me to the next step. Except that what I was doing was assuming I was the one who got to say what the next step was. That’s stupid.” There was a pause, and now her voice betrayed annoyance. “If the police knew, why didn’t they tell anybody?”

“It’s hard to say what they knew or when they found out. But they’re ashamed, which means that they’re sure. No matter how you look at it, they don’t get anything out of telling somebody like me.”

Elizabeth was already exploring this new terrain. “If the sergeant was taking money from somebody, it wouldn’t have been our friend. There’s nothing we know about him that would lead us to the conclusion that he’d have a corrupt policeman on the payroll. So who would? The local Mafia. And that explains why we have three bodies lying in a copying store: They were all on the same side. The only one that’s missing is the winner. Though I’d love to know what he won.”

“Another wake-up, and that’s about all. The next morning he’s in a motel outside Chicago and they tried to kill him there too.”

“So what did he want in Gary in the first place?”

“I know what I’d want if I were in his place. I’d want a way out. Maybe he thought Lempert could do it for him. People who can be bought once can be bought again, and cops meet a lot of people who can do a lot of things.”

“And Lempert arranged an ambush?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Where are you going next, back to Chicago?”

“Yeah, he’s long gone but I thought I’d go rake through the ashes like everybody else. If we’re lucky, I might be able to talk to somebody who knows something.”

“Jack?”

“What?”

“This is kind of … embarrassing, but did you send anything to me at the office?”

“No. What’s embarrassing about that?”

“Well, it’s a present. It just came, and the card got lost, and … you see what I mean.”

“You didn’t open it, did you?”

“Sure, why?”

“Forget it. I was going to tell you to call the bomb squad, but if it hasn’t exploded yet, I guess it must be from a secret admirer.”

“I guess so.”

“It ain’t me, though. I’ve never laid eyes on you. You might be ugly.”

“Good-bye, Jack.”

It was after six when Elizabeth finished going through the supplemental reports from the Gary police, the Cook County sheriff and the Chicago Fire Department, and then pulling the files on Salcone and Ficcio. There was no question from the rap sheets that Salcone had worked for the Cambria family most of his life, and if Ficcio was carrying an identical weapon and entered the shop with him, then he must have too. But no matter how she put it all together, it still didn’t tell her exactly what had happened. She put away the papers and prepared to go home.

Now that she was alone in the office, without the unnerving sensation that somebody could overhear her thoughts by looking at her, she allowed herself to admit the truth. If she set aside the ugliness of what had happened, and thought of it as an event in the Butcher’s Boy’s personal history, the last two reports were promising. Whatever he was trying to do, he was getting himself into deeper trouble. Now he was being hunted by the Mob in Gary, and more ominously in Chicago, the territory of the huge, powerful Castiglione syndicate. He would understand better than she did what this meant. He was still alive, but the chance of his seeing the end of the month was virtually nonexistent. As long as he survived, each day it became more difficult for him to move freely, and eventually he would realize that he couldn’t do it anymore. Years ago she had spent months looking at windows he might have touched, or carpets he might have walked on, talking to people who might have seen him, always arriving after he had left, never getting closer than a few hours behind him. But pretty soon now he was going to have to walk into a police station somewhere. He would have to come to her, if only he could stay alive long enough to realize it.

She almost forgot to take the leather folder with her when she left the office. At home she was going to hold the paper up to the light and try to read the water mark to see if she could find some store that sold that kind of paper. Lana’s inquiry to the delivery service had yielded an order number that helped them to locate a copy of a receipt that said only “Cash” and Elizabeth’s name and office address.

It wasn’t as though she had a lot of friends who might suddenly send her an expensive present. She corrected herself. When she had begun making tactful inquiries this afternoon, she had run through six of them. Then she had forced herself to call Don Yeter, who had been one of Jim’s friends in the old days. Since a few weeks after Jim had died, Don had shown an interest in her that made her nervous and a little queasy, and she was relieved when she realized that he had no idea what she was talking about.

She had left the present in the white box and even retrieved the paper wrapping from the wastebasket, because either might help. Ten minutes after it arrived she had begun wishing the gift hadn’t found its way to her, and now she was beginning to resent the giver. She spent enough of her life trying to decipher puzzles, and the best she could hope for at the end of this one was to get an address for a thank-you note.

When she reached her car it was already looking lonely in this part of the lot. As she unlocked the door, she remembered that it was Thursday and that she still hadn’t taken it to the garage for its rejuvenation treatment. She felt guilty, and as she settled herself in the driver’s seat the feeling escalated to regret. But when the engine started she forgot about it; all that was important now was to get home to the kids.

Wolf watched the woman pull the little green car out of the parking lot and into position for a right turn onto the street. Even though there was nobody behind her, and nobody across from her, and anyone coming down the road could see that her only choices were to turn right or rise into the air like a dirigible, she had her turn signal blinking. She was E.V. Waring, without a doubt. There was no particular reason to switch the signal on, but no particular reason not to, and it made more sense to use up one ten-thousandth of the life of a forty-cent bulb than to surprise a pedestrian she hadn’t seen. The engraving should have said, “E. V. Waring, No Fool.”

As he pulled out after her, he wondered if she had fallen for the stationery after all. It could be a trap. She could lead him out into some spot in rural Maryland where forty FBI agents were waiting to drop on him like an avalanche. He had made sure the gift was something engraved with the name so that E. V. Waring couldn’t give it to his secretary, but he hadn’t considered the sophistication of logic that E. V. Waring might command; suppose she had figured out why he had sent it. But Waring—Miss or Mrs. Waring—was careful and methodical. If it was a setup, there would be at least one car behind him. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove, but no car stayed long enough to worry him. He concentrated on keeping one vehicle between her car and his so that she couldn’t get a clear view of him for long.