The President's Killers (4 page)

ELEVEN

It was a little disturbing. "What happens,” Denny said, “if they trace this stuff back to me?”

“They trace it to you, it’s your ass, kid,” Lott said. “Threatening a member of Congress is a federal offense. So is sending threatening messages through the mail.”

“Yeah, well, you better hope I don’t talk.”

Lott gave him a pat on the shoulder. “So you’re going to be careful, right? I don’t want to have to find me another contract employee.”

It seemed so crazy that Denny took no chances. He bought pre-stamped envelopes at a post office and a box of .30/30 cartridges at an Orange gun shop. On the web, he went through local newspapers until he found a good head shot of Congressman Stewart. He photocopied and enlarged it.

After filling four tablet pages with short, nasty phrases, he settled on the one he liked best. With a red grease pencil, he printed in capital letters across the picture of the Congressman’s face, “GUNS DON’T KILL…PISSED-OFF VOTERS DO!!”

He made a photocopy of the doctored picture, pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves, and taped a bullet to the photocopy. Then he typed the address of Stewart’s Livingston office on one of the envelopes, carefully wiped the picture and the bullet with a damp cloth, and slid them into the envelope.

He drove four miles from his apartment before sticking the envelope into a mail box at a shopping center.

When he returned with a bag of groceries in each arm, he heard the land-line phone in his apartment begin to ring while he was unlocking the door. He ran inside and grabbed the phone.

“Hey, buddy,” Lott said. “I just about gave up. How about a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you come over to my place?”

“Right now?”

“Hey, why not?”

There were a couple dozen cars parked near the train station, all of them empty except for Lott’s SUV.

“How’d you like another shot at our friend Nidal?”

“What’s the story?”

SIG had received a tip that the elusive arms dealer was going to be in San Francisco the following morning. Lott wanted Denny to do what he was supposed to do in Chicago. Find the guy and see who met with him.

Denny was eager for another crack at Nidal. “I’ll find him.”

Lott gave him another stack of fifty-dollar bills. “Take these. I still haven’t got an agency account set up for you. Typical bureaucratic red-tape.”

Three hours later, Denny was on a flight to San Francisco. By seven o’clock, a bellhop at the Hyatt Regency in Embarcadero Center was leading him to his room.

TWELVE

Meesh was still fuming over her conversation with her sister when she learned Denny was half way across the country again.

“I’ve just been on the run so much these past couple weeks,” Beth had told her. “I met this guy in Miami. He’s a stockbroker. You’d love him, Meesh. He’s adorable.”

“How about a card, Beth? Did you send Mom a card?” With her cell phone clasped to one ear, Meesh hunted in her leather attaché case for the latest memo from Korn-Ritter’s ad agency.

“I couldn’t find anything I liked. I looked here and I looked in Miami and Chicago. But I didn’t see anything very nice.”

For reasons Meesh never understood, the fact Beth was a flight attendant had always impressed both of their parents.

“All right, all right,” Meesh said. “I bought her a couple of things. I bought a necklace and earrings. A skirt and a couple of blouses. I’ll put your name on a couple of them.”

“Oh, you’re a sweetheart. I’m sorry to do this to you.”

Meesh held her tongue. She was every bit as busy as her kid sister, and this was the second time Beth had pulled this stunt. She had time for guys and parties, time to keep her own closet filled with expensive clothes, but she didn’t have time to shop for a birthday gift for her mother.

An hour later, Meesh received a text message from Denny that he was on his way to San Francisco and had to break a dinner date they’d planned. She just stepped out of the shower and was combing out her long blonde hair when he called.

“What in God’s name are you doing in San Francisco?”

“It’s crazy, babe. We’ve got a big client out here. Owns a bunch of weekly newspapers. He’s out of his mind. I had to drop everything and get out here to kiss his butt.”

“Well, I can relate to that,” she said. “When are you coming back?”

“Two or three days. Do me a favor, will you? I left in such a rush. The neighbors weren’t around, and I couldn’t find anyone else in the building to feed poor Doc.”

What she found in Denny’s apartment floored her.

When Meesh entered, the cat was cowering two feet from the door, eager for company but apprehensive. He recognized her and sank to the floor, rolling onto his side. She bent down and rubbed the white fur on his belly.

On the end table beside the living room sofa were some papers. She placed Denny’s mail on top of them, opened a can of tuna and cheese bits for Doc, and poured dry pellets into his other bowl.

Before leaving, she took a last look around the room and decided Denny would be more likely to notice his mail if it were on the coffee table. When she scooped the envelopes and magazines off the end table, she noticed Denny’s awkward scrawl on a page from a writing tablet. The word “guns” caught her eye. She looked at the sheet of paper.

“Who said guns don’t kill?”

“Guns may not kill, but don’t tempt us!”

“Guns don’t kill, but pissed-off voters do!”

There were more pages in the wastebasket beside the end table. Two began “Dear Editor” and appeared to be part of a letter to a newspaper, which astonished her. She didn’t think Denny was much of a newspaper reader. And he certainly wasn’t a letter writer.

The other pages were filled with more short, inflammatory statements.

“We’re dead serious, Congressman!”

“Get off our backs, Stewart!”

“Say Goodbye, Congressman!”

She was staggered. Denny wrote these terrible things? What the hell was he doing?

THIRTEEN

Denny was eager. This time he was going to find Nidal.

With its towering atrium, open balconies, and glass elevators, the Hyatt Regency at Embarcadero Center made Chicago’s Atwood Hotel look like a quaint little bungalow.

He sat in the atrium lobby pretending to read newspapers as he watched the endless influx of people. He boarded the glass elevators and looked down on the crowd from the balconies. He ate in each of the half-dozen restaurants, searching the faces of the diners. He checked the bars so many times one of the bartenders asked if he wanted a woman.

When he phoned the registration desk, the response was always the same. No one named Ahmed Nidal had registered.

In a rental car in the shadowy parking lot of Denis Kinney’s apartment complex in New Jersey, Groark and Sal Conti were getting annoyed.

It was 2 a.m., and they were tired of the small talk and tired of waiting for the light in a third-floor bedroom of Kinney’s building to go out.

“You shouldn’t have hurt the kid, Lee,” Conti said.

Groark poured some peanuts into his mouth. “He was a wise-ass spade. With a big mouth.”

Sal shook his head. It was an old issue. “Yeah, well, you really got us in deep shit.”

Groark glanced at the other buildings in the complex. Altogether, there were six, separated by wide lawns. In front of each building was a lamppost with a dim electric bulb. In the ghostly semi-darkness, the only signs of life were insects flitting around the lampposts.

Kinney’s apartment was on the second floor of the building just to their left. Except for the light in a third-floor bedroom at the far end, the building was dark. They knew the layout. Conti had checked out the building that afternoon.

Groark finished his bag of peanuts and rubbed the salt off his hands. He looked up at the lighted window again. They’d waited almost an hour for the window to go dark.

“Screw it,” he said. “Let’s go. The goddamned light may be on a timer. We could be sitting here all night.”

After they pulled on their latex gloves, Conti went first, a short dark figure moving quickly up the walk to the wide concrete staircase leading to the main entrance. The balcony of Kinney’s apartment was immediately behind a large white column, only four feet above the staircase. Conti waited behind the column until Groark joined him. Then they climbed onto the balcony.

It took them less than a minute to pry open the sliding glass doors. Groark stuck the blade of his screwdriver in the track beneath the doors. He worked the blade under one of the doors, raised the door out of the track, and pushed it inward. All they had to do was to part the drapes and slip inside.

They flicked on a table lamp. On the floor in front of them was a gold cat, lying on its side, front paws raised, looking up at them.

Groark swung his foot and caught the cat’s hind quarters. It scrambled to its feet, hissing at them, and darted out of the room.

“Slinky bastard!”

While Conti ransacked the front of the apartment, Groark went through the bedroom.

On a small metal desk were an iPad and a portrait of Kinney’s girlfriend. He stuck them into a cloth bag. In the desk drawer and a dresser, he found membership cards for a fitness center, an ID card with a head shot of Kinney from the Millburn Parks and Recreation Department; a Soltair parking permit; and several credit cards. He tossed them all into the bag.

The bedroom closet was filled with sports shirts and jeans and slacks. In the breast pocket of a sport coat, Groark found three fifty-dollar bills and a postcard from the girlfriend. He put them in his pocket.

There was also a Remington rifle and a shotgun in the closet. And fishing rods, jungle boots, a sleeping bag, binoculars, a hunting knife, a four-battery flashlight. Behind some shoes, he found two boxes of cartridges. He slipped one box into the cloth bag, took the Remington and shotgun, and went back to the front of the apartment.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Conti left first, going out the front door with a radio-CD player under one arm and a small TV in his other hand. Groark watched from behind the balcony doors as he hurried down the walk and vanished into the dark parking lot. Then Groark started after him, a gun under each arm.

When he stepped out of the building, the parking lot was lit up by a pair of headlights and he heard male voices. He darted along the shrubs next to the building until he could see the car behind the headlights. There were lights on the roof. It was a goddamn police car.

Groark circled behind the car. As he drew nearer, he saw it wasn’t a police car at all. It was a taxicab.

“My wife and I just moved in a week ago,” Conti was saying.

“You wanna know something?” The cab driver’s voice was slurred. It was the voice of an old man who had been drinking. “You wanna know something? You’re a goddamn liar.”

He was leaning out the window.

Conti, a few feet in front of him, was edging closer. “Keep your voice down, pal. You’ll wake everybody up.”

“Just stay where the hell you are, you lying son-of-a-bitch. I live here, and I aint never seen you around this goddamn place before.”

“My wife and I live in 3C, right over —.”

“Don’t come any closer,” the cabby shouted, “or I’m going to blast the hell out of this horn and call the cops.”

Behind the cab, Groark set the Remington down in the grass beside the pavement and crept alongside the vehicle with the shotgun.

Conti saw him but kept his eyes on the old man. “What’s your name, pal? You look familiar.”

With both hands around the barrel, Groark raised the shotgun above his head.

“What the hell’s your name?” the cabby retorted, leaning farther out the window. “How come you’re hauling off a goddamn TV in the middle of the night, huh? I ought to —.”

Groark brought the heavy stock of the shotgun down on his skull. The small, slight body twitched, then was motionless.

FOURTEEN

Although she never shed a tear, Helen Wuslich looked as though she might collapse at any moment. Her face was as white as the handkerchief she pressed against her lips.

The new widow and eight family members and friends were bunched together in the first two pews of the cavernous Holy Rosary Catholic Church. Behind them were at least thirty rows of darkened empty pews.

The meager turnout for Gus’ funeral made Denny even sadder. For all his shortcomings, Gus was a decent soul.

Watching the priest move about on the lighted altar, Denny tried to shut out the terrible images of what had happened to Gus. Why would anyone bash in the skull of a harmless, old drunk like him?

Four months ago someone had broken into another apartment in Denny’s building. The neighborhood was going to hell. Even his apartment building was unsafe.

Suddenly, the organ tones swelled, filling the huge chamber with the strains of “Amazing Grace.” The service was over. With her sister at her side, Helen stepped out into the aisle, her double-chin quivering, her face horribly contorted.

As soon as he had opened the door to his apartment, Denny saw it had been ransacked. He had left San Francisco and arrived back home on the day after Gus’ body was found.

“Doc,” Denny had called. “Where are you, Doc?”

He found him under the bed.

“C’mon, it’s me, Doc. You’re okay. C’mon.”

He had to tug on the animal to get him out. The cat, reluctant to put his right rear paw down, had difficulty standing.

“Hey, what happened? Are you all right, Big Guy?”

He examined the leg, stroked his head, and brought him a dish of tuna and cheese bits.

The cop who came to make out the burglary report never mentioned the attack on Gus in the parking lot. It wasn’t until that evening, in a hallway conversation with a woman who lived on the first floor, that Denny learned Gus had been murdered.

Wondering if there was any connection between the burglary and what happened to Gus, he called the police department. The homicide detective didn’t appreciate the interruption.

“Burglars don’t hurt anybody,” he snapped, “unless you walk in on them and surprise them.”

“You sure the burglars know that?”

“Oh yeah. We post the rules in the city jail.”

A the same moment the priest was rattling off his final prayers over Gus Wuslich’s body at a cemetery beside the Garden State Parkway, Sal Conti was riding an elevator to the top floor of a Holiday Inn in St. Louis that overlooked the city’s sprawling Forest Park.

The view was spectacular. Conti could look across Interstate 64 directly into the park, thirteen-hundred acres of lush trees, graceful ponds, picnic grounds, and lovely golf-course fairways.

“I was promised something on seven facing the park,” he told the desk clerk when he returned to the ground floor.

The clerk checked his reservation slips. “Yes. I can give you 712.”

“On the park side?”

“Yes. Wonderful view. Two nights, correct?’

“Right,” Conti said. He rubbed his week-old mustache and stubble on his chin, removed a Mastercard from his wallet, and filled out the registration form with the name on the card: Denis Kinney.