No Accident (14 page)

Brad nodded to Sheila, who peered with joyful triumph down at her husband. Luke’s face had gone slack with disbelief.

Brad picked up his briefcase and turned to leave. Before he could do so, the door to the room jerked in its frame and discharged the old law school classmate who Brad had recognized that morning. He had left the conference room after lunch, and now rushed toward Matthews with the same urgent, hurried stride that carried him at the end of every law school class to the front of the classroom to brown-nose the professor. With his head slightly bowed, he solemnly delivered to Matthews a folded set of papers that could only be a summons that Matthews had ordered up for himself.

“Not so fast, Brad,” Matthews said. He held the papers at the end of his outstretched arm like a carton of spoiled milk.

Fearing the worst, Brad tentatively reached out to take them.

Lenny
took great care to choose a meeting spot where no one could sneak up on him, but with the sun now accelerating toward the horizon it was hard for him to spy any movement to the west. Lenny knew plenty of places in the city where people could hide in plain view. This industrial lot east of downtown was one of them. Lenny expected to see a car, and so by the time he first noticed the man approaching on foot, the man had come close enough for Lenny to see that he would be trouble. He was not Hubbard. He was tall and wide at the shoulders, with a long, even stride, and he and his briefcase cast a shadow visible from fifty yards.

Nearly everything did. It was the brilliant hour of the afternoon, and the sun’s long, heavy rays illuminated the dusty air into a glittering fog.

The figure remained a tantalizing silhouette—the only visible source of movement—as he unhurriedly crossed the train tracks and the vacant concrete bridge toward where Lenny waited. Details emerged only at the very end—gray wool suit, white shirt, tie, dusty black shoes shaded by his legs. Up close, Lenny saw that the man’s hair, which had looked a golden blond in the sun, was in fact silver, almost white. With the sun still behind him, the man’s pale face was unreadable.

Lenny
handed his briefcase to Rudy, a big man with a sweet face who had gone with Lenny to meet Beto at the pool hall. Rudy held the briefcase as daintily as if it were his mother’s purse.

Lenny
took a step forward to meet the stranger, who was almost a foot taller than Lenny, an imposing wall of gray and white. Only his necktie added a hint of color. It was a pale blue, scattered with tiny designs—little horses, maybe. A pair of handcuffs connected the briefcase to his left wrist.

“Where’s Hubbard? We told Hubbard to come.”
Lenny had been looking forward to dealing with the CEO. On the phone the executive had sounded weak, always ready to give up something more to get rid of a blackmailer, just like Beto said he would be.

“I’m his representative,” the man said.

Lenny slapped the man in the face, then bounced backward onto the balls of his feet, smiling ruthlessly. The man didn’t react. Lenny turned to Rudy. “Frisk him.”

Rudy set the briefcase down on the concrete and approached the man, who was taller even than Rudy. The man’s face remained expressionless as he raised his arms away from his hips to give Rudy access to his torso.

Rudy looked slightly embarrassed when he found the shoulder holster, which held a dark gray revolver. Rudy made a move to tuck the gun between his belly and waistband but froze when Lenny grunted. Rudy handed Lenny the gun.

“You won’t mind if we take this from you,
Mr. Representative
,” Lenny said.

The man looked serenely into the distance. “That’s OK,” he said softly. “I don’t need it.”

Lenny ordered Rudy to search the man for a wire, and Rudy clumsily clapped his thick hands up and down the man’s body again, but more firmly this time. The man stirred only when Rudy started to pick at the knot of his necktie. He gently wrapped his hands around Rudy’s and put them aside, then deftly unknotted the tie.

“It was a gift,” the man said. He loosely folded the tie and dropped it into an inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Rudy went in again, pulling open the top of the man’s dress shirt and exposing nothing more threatening than a thin gold chain that surrounded the man’s muscular neck and disappeared beneath a low-necked undershirt. Rudy stepped back and nodded soberly to Lenny.

“Did y
ou bring the hundred K?” Lenny asked.

“It’s in the briefcase.”

“Open it.”

“You’ll see the money when I see the evidence you’re selling.”

Lenny frowned.

A black SUV pulled up to the men. It stopped sharply enough that its tidy wake of dust and gravel overshot the tires and peppered the men’s shoes. The driver jumped out and ran to
Lenny as if expecting an urgent order. Rudy and the stranger turned their heads toward Lenny as well.

Lenny
spoke to the driver in rapid, hushed words that neither of the other men could hear. As he spoke, he waved the revolver around for emphasis the way some people wave a cigarette. Then Lenny turned his eyes and the gun on the stranger.

“Give him your tie,”
Lenny said. He snapped the tip of the barrel in Rudy’s direction, a flourish that Rudy didn’t seem to notice. The stranger did as he was told.

“Blindfold him with it,”
Lenny said to Rudy. Rudy did as he was told.

“Into the car,”
Lenny said.

The blindfolded stranger went compliantly into the car, moving carefully and steadily in spite of the rough shoves of
Lenny’s two henchmen. There he sat, holding his briefcase with both hands in his lap.

Alex hadn’t heard again from Zeke Andrews or
—no surprise—the super busy Brad Pitcher. Grant Steele’s assistant had sounded noncommittal at first, but then perked up the more Alex told him. Alex hoped that either Zeke or Steele was looking into the accident and the life insurance policies.

In the meantime, Alex needed to find Beto. Alex had tried for a week now, but without success. Back when Alex was first investigating Beto for the fraud that sent him to prison, Beto seemed at any given moment to be avoiding a dozen different landlords, bosses, ex-partners, bookies and gangsters and an untold number of girlfriends and their male relations. Alex couldn’t help but admire the man’s cracked gift for deceit and evasion. Alex remembered that even while encircled by danger, Beto remained flamboyant
—his silk shirts, all the girlfriends. Even his taste in food was ostentatious. The cops told Alex that during questioning they offered him a cold slice of the pepperoni pizza the detectives had been picking at all night—and he had insisted on a new pizza with anchovies and pineapple, and no cheese, before he would talk. And of course, Beto had almost escaped from the county jail with the help of a lonely, love-struck female guard.

Alex drove east to Beto’s old street for the third day in a row. Alex’s discreet visits to various of Beto’s former associates had been fruitless, and at this point Alex was just burning gas money and hoping to get lucky. He wasn’t even sure if Beto still lived around here.

On a weekend morning five years ago, when Alex had surprised Beto coming out of his house, wrestled a knife from him and pummeled him into submission in the middle of the street, no one had come out of any of the houses to watch. No one had shouted or called the police. It was that kind of a neighborhood back then, and it had only gotten uglier since.

Another family seemed to have moved into Beto’s old house. Like most of the other houses on the block, it was a small stucco cube with red tiles on the roof. What told Alex the occupants had changed was the set of plastic children’s toys in the front yard
—chairs and a table, a tricycle—all faded from their original primary colors to sun-bleached pastels. Alex couldn’t imagine Beto having children—couldn’t imagine him ever sharing a house with children, anyway.

The children were either gone or grown up, by the look of it. The toys clearly hadn’t been moved for a long time, as weeds with brittle yellow stalks and serrated tufts on top had found time to grow in the spaces between them. Alex drove on.

He peeked into all the local pool halls and pawn shops—again—and wondered how long it would take before someone noticed that he had become a regular in the neighborhood. It was the middle of the afternoon, late enough for the more committed drinkers to appear at the local bars. Alex picked one to visit first. He parked and was about to enter when he saw a thin, shortish man in a silk shirt exit the front door with a pretty young woman about his height with long straight black hair. If they’d been drinking, they’d sure started early. Alex stopped and watched them walk away from him. From a distance, the man looked enough like Beto to pique Alex’s interest. In any event, this was the closest hit Alex had had all week. He followed them on foot, giving them distance. They walked quickly but unsteadily, like they’d been drinking.

Two blocks away, Alex watched them enter an apartment building. The building was a two-story, U-shaped structure with apartments arranged around a central courtyard. Alex rushed forward to get a closer look. If they disappeared into one of the apartments, Alex wouldn’t be able to confirm that the man was indeed Beto, and he might never find them again. There was a black steel gate at the front of the complex that slowly swung closed after the man and woman entered. Alex reached the gate just before the lock clicked shut again. He silently eased the gate ajar and slipped into the complex, where he hid in the shadows by the wall of mailboxes.

The front doors of the apartments let out onto the central courtyard, and concrete stairs led up to an open-air walkway with a metal railing that gave access to the second-floor units. Alex watched the man and woman climb the stairs, still oblivious to their follower. The woman unlocked the door to the first apartment by the staircase, and the couple entered.

Now what?
Alex pretended to look at the mailboxes and, rather self-consciously, tried to look casual. There was no name on the mailbox for the apartment the couple had entered. The complex was quiet; people were at work or doing whatever they did during the day. Alex waited, playing out scenarios of what he might say if one of the residents confronted him and asked what he was doing here. If only he’d worn a suit he could have pretended to be a Mormon missionary.

After a few minutes, he heard a crash like the sound of breaking glass come from one of the apartments. He looked up toward the second floor but saw no activity there. A moment later, from within one of the ground floor apartments, a woman started shouting in a language he didn’t recognize, there was a loud clap, and a child began wailing. But none of the doors opened.

Alex came out of the shadows and walked around the courtyard. A swimming pool in the middle of the courtyard that once held up to nine feet of water now held scattered scuffmarks from skateboard wheels, ornate graffiti in several styles and a lonely brown puddle at the bottom where the remnants of winter rains patiently awaited evaporation. Near the door to the room with the garbage cans, Alex noticed an empty pizza box lying haphazardly against a wall, and that gave him an idea.

With an empty pizza box balanced on one hand, Alex climbed the stairs and paused in front of the door that the man and woman had disappeared into.

To the left of the door, a ragged curtain made from a torn bed sheet billowed out of a large window that had been opened wide. Alex glimpsed only a tabletop and an ashtray before the curtain slumped back into the aperture. He heard the sound of an electric fan blowing inside, but no speech.

Alex knocked on the door, which he was careful to do not too sharply.

“I gotta pizza here?” he said. “Order for a large anchovy and pineapple, no cheese?” If it was Beto inside, Alex knew he would open up for his favorite pizza. Beto would assume the girl ordered it. Unless Beto asked her. And she said no. And Beto got suspicious.

The door swung open.

There stood the woman, even prettier up close. Her black hair fell over her shoulders. She wore a T-shirt and men’s boxer shorts and nothing else and looked neither surprised, nor ashamed, nor distressed. Calm.

“Yes?”

“You order a pizza?” Alex did his best to sound like he was bored and tired from driving around all day, instead of jumpy and tired from driving around all day. The open door revealed an efficiency apartment, with a bed pulled out from a sleeper sofa and the sheets and pillows in disarray. Lying among them, languidly smoking a cigarette, was Beto.

It was him, all right. He looked the same as when Alex had seen him taken away in handcuffs, but a few years older and with his thin face relaxed in what Alex surmised was post-coital tranquility.

Alex took a large step forward into the apartment. The woman took three quick steps backward. Alex closed the door behind him. “Beto, we need to talk.”

Beto seemed to take notice for the first time that he had a visitor. He bolted upright in bed. His unbuttoned silk shirt fell open and exposed his thin, hairless torso. He too was wearing boxer shorts.

“It’s been a long time, Beto. You look good.”

Beto’s hand shot under the sheet and the sheet rose up, draped over something in his hand that he pointed at Alex. He looked at Alex with fury, and the cigarette bounced in his lips as he spoke.

“Take one more step and I blow you away.”