Caruso 01 - Boom Town (11 page)

“Reese and Shabato. Are they good cops?”

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“What are you gettin’ at?”

“Nothing,” Tony said. He felt like he was interrogating his friend. “What I mean is, why are they so interested in a two-week old missing person? Doesn’t sound like something you’d put two detectives on, considering Frank Peroni’s relationship with his wife.”

The captain sipped his coffee, stalling. “First of all, Tony, those two don’t work for me. I’m in charge of special units. Secondly, it’s none of your fucking business.”

“Hey.”

“I’m sorry, Tony.” He leaned back in his chair, his eyes wandering around the room. “I honestly don’t know what they’re up to. You’re right, though. There’s something more to Frank Peroni than the fact that he’s missing. That I am sure of.”

Tony thanked Al Degaul for his beer, sofa and breakfast, as well as the info. He told him he’d be in touch and gave him his cell phone number and e-mail address.

Then Tony drove west to Beaverton.

It was past nine o’clock, the traffic having died down somewhat on Highway 26 and the surface roads.

Pulling into a business complex, with brick and glass structures no more than three or four stories high, he parked in an unmarked spot and sat for a moment.

He had the laptop on, so he checked the address for Cascade Lock one more time. It was a useless reaction, because there was a big sign out front with the company name engraved in granite.

That said something about a company, Tony thought. If a company throws up a wooden sign with the name painted on it, the logical assumption is the company won’t be there long. Marble or granite, though, and that shows permanence. This company was here twenty years ago, and still would be in a hundred years. He was sure of that.

Tony went inside. The lobby and reception area on the third floor, where the sign on the first floor said the marketing director’s office was, reminded Tony of one of those influential law
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firms with a hundred lawyers working for Microsoft. Marble walls. Columns. Stone floors. Again, permanence.

An older woman, who still tried her best to look young, sat at an oak desk, a phone notched between her ear and shoulder as she flipped through an appointment book. She was dressed top to bottom in gray wool. Under her blazer was a white satin blouse.

Tony stood patiently waiting for her to get off the phone, gazing at the water colors on the wall. Someone had studied the French impressionists. Finally the woman hung up.

“May I help you, sir?” she said. Her voice had a Tootsie quality, only perhaps a bit more masculine than Dustin Hoffman.

“Yes. I’m Tony Caruso. Here to see Mr. James Burton.”

She checked her appointment book, even though Tony was sure she knew he wasn’t on it.

“Mr. Burton has an appointment in ten minutes,” she said.

He thought quickly. “What about Frank Peroni?”

Her eyes shot up at him. Surprised. That’s what he’d hoped for.

James Burton’s office was probably as impressive as the reception area. Would have been, if Burton hadn’t covered his desk and credenza with mounds of papers that must have taken a small forest to produce.

Burton himself was a tall, stout man in his mid-forties. His remaining hair was a blond gray mix, slicked back, trying to cover bare spots. He wore a fine domestic suit with enough mate-rial to make two suits of normal size. His tiny round spectacles could have been a matching pair of the ones Dawn Sanders wore.

Burton stood and shook Tony’s hand. Firm. Businesslike.

Tony took a seat in a leather chair that seemed to invite him to stay there forever.

He told the lock man he was a private investigator representing a credit company looking for Frank Peroni. It was as good a lie as any.

“I’m afraid Frank no longer works for us,” Burton said, adjusting his glasses even though they didn’t need it.

Tony pulled out a small notebook, flipped through a few pages,
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and stopped on a page where he had scribbled a few notes. It was really his grocery list from when he had first gotten to the condo in Bend.

“Says here he’s an account representative,” Tony said, using the fancy term for a lock and hardware salesman.

“Was, Mr. Caruso. As I’ve said, he’s no longer with us.”

Tony turned a page in his notebook and shook his head. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find him?”

The man shook his head and his jowls stopped shaking a few seconds after his chin.

“We sent him to Bend over two weeks ago,” Burton said. “He never came back.”

This conversation was taking a dive in a hurry. But Tony had had a little time to think about what would concern two Portland detectives in a simple missing person, that could have been merely a man who didn’t want to be found. So he bluffed.

“Something else is missing from the company besides Frank Peroni,” Tony said. Accused actually.

Burton’s reaction was incredible. Would have gotten a D in high school drama for that performance.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Burton said.

Bullshit! That’s what Tony wanted to say. Instead, he said,

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Burton hoisted his body up and rolled toward the door. He opened the door and turned toward Tony. “Our conversation is over, Mr. Caruso.”

Tony got up and headed out, but stopped right in front of Burton, his finger pointing at the guy’s sternum. “You want to get what’s yours, you should have talked with me.”

Tony took off and went to the elevator. When he got to the first floor, the doors opened and his two favorite detectives, Reese and Shabato, were waiting, their jaws somewhat slack.

“I warmed him up for you,” Tony said, passing them.

Not bad. He’d managed to get thrown out of two offices in just a few days. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a record for him.

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Tony got back to Bend in the late afternoon. The pass around Mount Hood had been cleared, with the exception of the very top, which still had piles of heavy snow unplowed.

Bend itself was clear and cloud-free, like it was nearly three hundred days a year.

Tony would be the first to admit that his methods when working a case were somewhat unorthodox. Trying to use logic, he collected information from those he thought should give him what he needed to know. Then he sifted out the bullshit. What remained should be the truth. Problem was, damn near everything he was currently collecting seemed to be irrelevant bullshit.

He didn’t know if Frank Peroni had anything to do with Dan and Barb Humphrey dying, yet he was certain the man knew something about it. And the fact that he had disappeared right around the same time as their deaths was reason for concern.

He’d watched far too many old episodes of Barnaby Jones to dismiss the notion that Frank might have died in the fire at Cascade Peaks Estates. Since there hadn’t been much left of Dan after the blast and blaze, it was a possibility.

Tony pulled into the parking lot of a new development west of Bend’s old downtown. It was one of those trendy complexes of tourist shops, condos, and high tech manufacturing along the Deschutes River on the former site of a huge wood products facility. At one time a couple thousand people used to work there dur-86

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ing Bend’s heyday as a lumbering town. Pickup trucks and black coffee. Now it was Beemers and cappuccino.

As he walked up to the building housing Cliff Humphrey’s development company, he stopped for a moment taking in the scene of Mount Bachelor to the west. He had found out that this was Humphrey’s second office. The main office was in downtown Portland on the twentieth floor of the Lange Building, a tall mirrored generic structure with a view of Riverfront Park and the Willamette River, and, presumably, Mount Hood whenever it wasn’t raining.

Looking out across the Deschutes, Tony realized that almost directly across the river was Dan Humphrey’s old office. Dad looking down on son. Nice.

The outside of the building was stone over wood. It was a single story structure with a prime spot along the river. Canada geese wandered about in the wet grass along the shore.

Inside was a large, open room with fairly modest industrial carpet, pure white walls with original watercolors, and large plants positioned nearly everywhere. There were a few drafting desks facing away from the bank of windows that ran the length of the room. Tony could see why. The architects wouldn’t have gotten any work done with a view of the Cascades like that. In the center of the room was a few more desks divided by padded parti-tions.

There wasn’t much activity in the place for a Monday. Maybe the boss had let them go early to catch some of the powder that had fallen on the mountain the night before.

A receptionist sat at the front of the large room. Although she had all the attributes of a full-fledged woman, she looked pre-pubescent in her retro 70s attire. Reminded Tony of someone he might have asked to a high school dance in the Disco era. She was wearing one of those headset phones over curly red hair, talking at someone who didn’t want to listen. So she hung up and smiled at Tony.

“You’re Tony Caruso,” she said.

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“Good guess.”

“It wasn’t a guess,” she said. “I looked you up on the web for Mr. Humphrey. Saw the picture of you after that explosion in Seattle.”

One of his finer moments. Tony had damn near lost his left arm in that debacle. He had been shadowing a young bomb squad officer who had watched one too many Mel Gibson movies where the crazy cop tries to decide if it’s the red wire or the green wire to cut. Tony was right in the middle of telling the rookie not to try to outguess a bomber, who could be colorblind anyway, and try to figure out where the wires were going. Too late. Luckily it was only a small charge pipe bomb.

“That was my right side,” Tony said. “My left side is better.”

He cocked his head to the side for her to see.

She laughed.

Cliff Humphrey came out of his office, startled when he saw Tony, and then came over and shook his hand.

“Let’s talk in my office,” he said, and then escorted Tony away from the reception area.

Humphrey’s office was decorated in a southwest motif. Navaho rugs. A carved wood sculpture of an eagle. Tall cacti in two corners by the windows.

Cliff Humphrey took a seat in his plush brown leather chair that squeaked with the slightest move he made.

Tony’s chair was leather also. In fact, it could have been cut from the same steer as the one in Larry Gibson’s office across the river.

“What have you dug up, Tony?” Humphrey said. He had his hands on the shiny oak desk in front of him, his fingers rolling nervously.

“Do you know a man named Frank Peroni?” Tony asked.

His fingers stopped. “No. Should I?”

Tony laughed at that. “How am I supposed to know what you should know?”

Humphrey gazed off at the river and then rose from his chair.

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“It’s a nice day. Let’s go for a walk by the river.”

Tony wasn’t sure where that came from, but he didn’t argue. He was always game for outdoors over indoors.

They walked down to the river. Geese waddled away from them as they approached the water. The walk from the building had given Tony time to think. Somehow Cliff Humphrey knew Frank Peroni. He was sure of it.

“You see this complex,” Humphrey said, spreading his arms out like Moses parting the Red Sea. “I conceptualized the whole thing. Came up with the idea of condos and shops side by side, along with the new industry. There are bike trails that follow the river to downtown. Buses come right through here picking up residents for Mount Bachelor. You could walk to work here, walk downtown for dinner, and even shop for almost anything you need right here.”

Sounds nice, but why was he telling Tony this? He wasn’t sure.

“People think that developers are Lucifer in the flesh,” he said.

“They think we’ll do anything to make a buck.”

Okay. Now Tony had to speak. “Seems to be some truth to that.”

Humphrey tried to laugh. “Maybe so. In fact, I know some people in Portland who might think of me that way. But it’s just not true. We opened our Bend office almost fifteen years ago. There was huge potential here. Californians had discovered the place.

Moved here in droves, selling their houses in L.A. and San Francisco for big bucks and then building veritable mansions on golf courses or up on Awbrey Butte for a fraction of what it would have cost them back home. We have people at Cascade Peaks who moved here from Singapore and Hong Kong. The influx has slowed somewhat in the past few years, but that won’t last long.”

“Is that why you want to build the new destination resort up the mountain toward The Three Sisters?”

Humphrey looked surprised. “You’ve heard about that?”

Tony nodded. Anyone in Bend for more than a day would have had to be brain dead to not hear about that.

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They started walking upstream toward the park used in the summer for open-air concerts. There was nobody there today.

“It may never happen,” he said. “Still has to clear the county land use board. They’re not sure Bend needs another resort.”

“I also heard the property is land-locked. It would cost a lot if everyone had to fly in to their houses.”

Humphrey thought about that for a moment, as if he were actually considering the concept. “We’ll get the land,” he assured Tony. “We always do.”

Tony had a feeling he did. He started to walk away and then stopped, his eyes locked on Humphrey’s uncertain expression. “I stayed at a nice condo unit near Yachets recently,” he said.