The Disposable Man (8 page)

He crossed the small room and pulled open the door. The same woman who’d escorted me here was standing in the hallway, apparently summoned by mysterious means.

Snowden nodded to me as I passed him, but didn’t offer his hand, which was just as well. I might’ve been tempted to tear it off. “Sorry to have wasted your time, Lieutenant. Have a safe trip back.”

· · ·

It was dark. The rain outside hammered on the skylight over our bed with a comforting futility. I was lying face down on the bed, a large towel beneath me, and Gail was straddling my hips, alternately oiling and massaging my back, which was sore from hours of driving in lousy weather, not to mention the odd knife fight.

“So what do you think you’ve stepped into?” she asked, bearing down.

“No ghost of a notion. I ran it by Tony, but he’s as confused as I am. We can’t tell if they know everything and are being cute, or know almost nothing and want to know more. Snowden basically told me to lay off the investigation, but there again, that could’ve been just to fire me up. One thing is for sure—he lied about Boris Malik, or whatever his name is. Told me he’d been dumped here out of convenience—a foreigner killed by other foreigners now out of the country—and that finding any evidence, or linking the case to anyone or any place local would be impossible. We know that’s bullshit, since whoever did the dumping knew about the quarry and how to approach it.”

Gail paused to apply more oil. “Which leaves you back where you started?”

“Not quite,” I admitted reluctantly.

She resumed her handiwork along the tender back of my neck, forcing me to reach back and stop her.

“Ease up a bit. Something else happened down there,” I continued. “You probably would’ve heard about it soon anyhow, the way news travels. I was mugged by a guy with a knife. Nothing much happened,” I added quickly to her quiet intake of breath. “He came at me, I threw him off, and then he disappeared, right after he chopped me in the neck. But I’m having trouble believing it was as random as the cops’re claiming.”

She stretched out next to me to look into my face. “You sure that was all of it? Just a near thing?”

I kissed her forehead. “Promise. I kicked him in the balls, and he took off. The neck’s a little sore is all.”

She laid her head on the towel and closed her eyes briefly, one hand still stroking my back. I understood her concern. I’d almost been killed by a knife a few years back, and when she’d been raped, her attacker had used a knife to torment her. Such symbols had become evil icons to her, as had sharp noises in the night, the need for locked doors, and a wariness of things implied but perhaps not meant. They represented a skittish undercurrent beneath an otherwise hard-driving, intelligent, utterly self-possessed exterior.

I kissed her again. “Thanks for the back rub.”

Her eyes reopened. “Want more?”

“No. That did the trick.”

There was a long pause before she asked, “So what made this not a random mugging?”

“I don’t know. For one thing, it happened at the Korean War Memorial. If I were a mugger, I wouldn’t’ve been skulking around a totally empty area, probably famous for its police coverage. For another, I never heard him coming. I just happened to turn around to look at an airplane flying over. And finally, Snowden knew all about it early the next morning—at least he seemed to.”

Gail raised up to prop her head in her hand. “He
knew
about it? How?”

“That’s what I asked him. He pulled the all-seeing-eye routine, implying he even knew who the mugger was.”

“Why would he tell you that?”

“To impress me, to hoodwink me, to scare me. You name it. Whatever it is, it worked. I left his office so full of theories I had no idea which one might be right. We’ve practiced disinformation at the department now and then, either to flush someone out or to get the press to cut us some slack, but this took the cake.”

“But why go to all the trouble?” Gail asked.

“Specifically? I have no idea,” I answered. “But it keeps boiling down to a single common denominator. Regardless of whether the CIA is hoping we’ll drop it or pursue it, we’ve obviously stepped into something pretty interesting, and I would love to find out what the hell it is—and why the FBI is apparently also being kept in the dark.”

· · ·

I waited for Ron and J.P. to squeeze themselves into my two office chairs, one wedged between a couple of filing cabinets, the other shoved under a tiny side table loaded down with files. Each man knew to move slowly and cautiously, having suffered paper landslides in the past.

“You both get the memo on my trip to DC?” I asked.

J.P. nodded. Ron asked, “How real is the CIA connection?”

“Real enough, not that we can do anything about it right now. For the moment, I’m pretending they don’t even exist. What did you two dig up while I was gone?”

Ron started off, cradling a thick folder in his lap, which he patted apologetically. “Not much on the paper trail. All the inquiries we sent out are still dangling, including the ones to Canada. INS and DEA have nothing on their books. I drove to Boston to look over the airline passenger lists personally, but Boris Malik doesn’t show up anywhere, meaning he either used another name, or he picked up the car at the airport as a decoy. In the three hours before he rented the car, planes came in from all over the place, including Moscow, but without a name, I don’t guess it matters. I kept the lists just in case another alias crops up, but otherwise, it’s a dead end.”

“You talk to the rental people?” I asked.

“Yeah, but there again… The girl who did the paperwork recognized him, but she couldn’t remember if he had luggage or not, or if he said where he was headed. She wasn’t even sure if he was alone. She did say he had an accent. It was the only reason she remembered him at all—’cause they had such a hard time communicating.”

“What about the credit card?”

“Counterfeit. The charge went through to some poor bastard in Illinois. The name on the card was Malik’s.”

“He didn’t ask for any maps or directions?”

Ron shook his head.

I looked at J.P. “You fare any better?”

He smiled, despite the absence of a file folder of any size. “I think so. I got two items linking the car trunk to the dead man. The first is a definite blood match, and the second might give us the leg up we’ve been looking for, although to give credit where it’s due, one of the crime lab guys discovered it. Remember the debris collected from Boris’s hair and clothes? Most of it was pond scum, but there was a single leaf fragment that caught this guy’s eye. He’s an amateur botanist—studied it in college—and this thing looked like nothing he’d ever seen. So instead of just sending it down the pipeline for someone else to figure out weeks from now, he took it to a consultant after work. Turns out it came from a ginkgo tree—a
Ginkgo
biloba
, to be exact—native to China, so it’s pretty rare.”

He was about to continue, which I knew he could do for a quarter hour if properly stimulated, but I was too curious to wait. “How rare?” I asked.

J.P. blinked at me a couple of times, caught off guard. “I don’t know—maybe a couple of hundred in the state. But that’s not really the point. See, these trees aren’t like most. They’re distinctively sexed. Male trees are separate from female trees.”

I began to smile, despite my impatience, and decided to leave him alone.

“When I was going through the trunk of the rental car,” he continued, “I collected what turned out to be a tiny sample of flesh from a ginkgo seed, which is unique to the female. It was gooey and didn’t smell too good. I didn’t know what it was then, of course, except that it was some sort of plant, but after the leaf was identified, I drove it up to the lab yesterday afternoon, just before quitting time, and they confirmed it.”

“Which leads us where?” I asked belatedly, realizing he’d come to an end.

“I don’t know yet, but if we could locate all the female ginkgo trees in the immediate area, it might give us a location.” He hesitated a moment. “Of course, that could be easier said than done. I was going to start calling a few local naturalists, botanists, and the like. See what I could find.”

I raised a finger. “I have a better idea. Come with me.”

· · ·

Newfane, Vermont, is about twelve miles northwest of Brattleboro on Route 30, a broad, beautiful, winding road that follows the meandering West River up the valley toward the ski slopes of the southern Green Mountains. During foliage season, every October, the road fills with out-of-state cars and buses “from away,” crowded with tourists soaking in the idyllic mixture of hills, trees, and sun-dappled water. Most of these people make a stop at Newfane village—to shop, take pictures, gather leaves, and walk around a quaint clutter of ancient white clapboard buildings bordering a huge green commons complete with church, courthouse, and meeting hall.

This, over time, has helped transform Route 30 into one of the major non-interstate arteries into the state’s center, and make Newfane a stepping-off point to many inland destinations. Which is why I immediately drove J.P. up there.

Just south of the village proper, across from Rick’s Tavern, was the Newfane Greenhouse, one of the best nurseries in the area and—what interested me most at the moment—a favorite destination for the upwardly mobile. I was counting on the ginkgo’s rarity to translate into an appropriately high price tag—and on the greenhouse’s staff to know who could afford one. J.P.’s notion of chasing down naturalists hadn’t been bad, but no one I’d ever met in that line had ever had two dimes to rub together. I was hoping the ginkgo was less a natural phenomenon and more an upper-class commodity.

It wasn’t too busy when we arrived. The summer was winding down, and while I was still impressed by the activity in the parking lot, it was still less than half-full.

J.P. and I got out of the car, looking out of place in our coats and ties, and walked into the only building that wasn’t a plastic-sheeted greenhouse. A young man greeted us from behind the service counter. “You need any help?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for some information about a really rare tree—a ginkgo. You know anything about them?”

He pulled a face and shook his head, smiling. “I can handle the run-of-the-mill stuff, but that sounds more like Jay’s department. Hang on a sec.”

He reached under the counter and retrieved a portable radio. “Jay?” he said after keying the mike.

“Yeah,” came the answer after a pause.

“I got two gentlemen here asking about ginkgo trees.”

“Be right there.”

The young man replaced the radio with a laugh. “You must’ve pushed a button with that one. He’s knee-deep in mud, working out back.”

A woman approached with a tray full of small plants, and we faded back so the clerk could work the cash register. A few minutes later, an impressively tall, skinny man wearing a baseball cap and an open face ambled into the building, rubbing his hands on a mud-encrusted pair of khakis.

He smiled broadly as he drew near. “Hi. I’m Jay Wilson. You the ones interested in the ginkgos?”

I walked with him to an unpopulated corner of the room, speaking quietly. “Probably not in the sense you’d like, I’m afraid. We’re from the Brattleboro police—sort of on a research trip.”

Wilson’s bright disposition remained undaunted. “Neat. What do you want to know?”

“I guess for starters, do you sell them?”

“I do when I can find ’em. They’re pretty hard to get. Even as high-priced as they are, they move like crazy.”

“So there’re a lot of them around?” J.P. asked, disappointed.

“Oh, no. Offhand, I’d say fifteen to twenty tops in the whole county. Their rarity’s part of the appeal. Not that they’re fragile or anything,” he added quickly, as if we were customers. “They’re quite hardy—grow almost anywhere. Interesting tree, actually, and a real beauty. One of the oldest on the face of the earth. I read they were, around two hundred and thirty million years ago, native to North America, which is ironic, since their only native habitat these days is eastern China. That’s what makes ’em so pricey.”

“I gather they come in male and female varieties,” I commented.

He seemed to dismiss the idea. “Well, they do, but that doesn’t really matter. People only buy the males. It’s all
I
ever sell.”

We both stared at him. “Why?” J.P. finally asked.

“The females have seeds—orange grapey things about an inch long, coated with a messy pulp. They not only litter the ground, but they stink to high heaven—the pulp does. They’re famous for it.”

“How many females do you think are in Windham County?” I asked.

He considered that for a moment. “Probably no more than three or four, but that’s just a guess. They’re a little sneaky. For the first twenty to even fifty years, the males and females look pretty much the same. It’s only after they fruit that the females come out of the closet. So there’re probably several supposed males out there that’re getting ready to surprise their owners. I got called about one just recently. Guy wanted to know how to deal with the seeds. I told him he was screwed. Even picking them up won’t work, since they’re designed to break open when they land. The season only lasts six weeks, though, starting in late summer. I said he should try to work it to his advantage. Make it a selling point to his guests somehow. Asians actually eat the seeds—consider ’em a delicacy, after the pulp’s been removed—and they’re hot right now in the herbal medicine market. Supposed to treat everything from Alzheimer’s to hearing problems.”

He gave a sly smile. “They’re also sold as a sexual enhancer—that’s why I thought he could turn it into an advantage. He didn’t sound too convinced, though. Maybe he couldn’t figure out how to phrase it in the brochure.”

“Brochure for what?”

“He runs the Windham Hill Inn, just outside West Townshend.”

THE DRIVEWAY TO THE WINDHAM HILL INN
is modest enough—a dirt lane branching off from the road between Route 30 and the tiny village of Windham some seven miles farther north. There is an official state sign advertising the place—small, sedate white letters on a dark green background. Vermont does not permit billboards, a decision with which the inn had obviously tastefully concurred, since not even the mailbox continued the message.