A Man of Lies, page 5
“Officer Van Horn,” Dumetz says. “Thank you for joining us. Please have a seat. You were working last night in uniform at a self-storage place down by the river, is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” Peter says. “The U-Store-It. They contract with us to have it patrolled every night.”
Dumetz scans the contents of his folder quickly. He has a thoughtful quality to him that Peter appreciates in a superior officer.
“All right,” he says. “You’ve got a clean record. Your sergeant tells me that you’re a good worker. Not his brightest star, but you can be relied upon to do the job. You have no commendations, but you’ve also had no complaints filed against you. So, Officer Van Horn, I want you to think carefully about your answer to this question, because right now, we’re all on the same side, trying to sort out a big old cock-up. With that preamble out of the way, Officer, won’t you please enlighten me as to what the fuck happened last night?”
Peter takes a breath. The three men watch him intently. You don’t get to command positions like theirs without some real skill at finding the truth. Together, they’ll figure this out. He summarizes the events of the previous night as efficiently as he can. Sarge gives no reaction to his own indirect appearance in the narrative, though the shift commander does glance at him curiously. When Peter is finished, he sits back and folds his hands in his lap, content that his part in this drama is complete.
Dumetz sits forward in his chair as he speaks. “Did you call your sergeant to confirm that there was an issue?”
“No, sir,” Peter says. “As I said, sir. It was very late, and I didn’t want to disturb him.”
“Why would the sergeant be dispatching somebody that late?” Peter’s shift commander asks him. “His shift ends with yours at six.”
“I wondered the same thing,” Peter says. His hair falls across his eye, and he forces himself to remain still.
Sarge clears his throat, speaking for the first time in the meeting. “There’s no issue with your paperwork. And I didn’t send Owen out.”
“And,” Dumetz continues, reading once again from the folder, “the gate guard at the storage facility reported nobody else in or out of the facility all night. Just you.”
Peter is quiet for a moment, unsure how to respond. Dumetz presses a button on the speakerphone and, when his secretary answers, asks her to get Officer Oster for them.
While they wait, Peter says, “I’m sorry, sir. I guess I don’t understand what’s happening. I thought I was here to talk about an issue with the filing system.”
“There’s no issue with the filing system,” Sarge says, defensive of his domain.
“No,” Dumetz says, and as he meets Peter’s eye, the civility and kindness that he had regarded him with earlier are gone. “We’re here because last night, while wearing the badge and uniform of the city police of Omaha, you walked away from the facility that you were guarding.”
“I didn’t—” Peter starts, but he is cut off by the secretary on the speakerphone, announcing that she has Officer Oster on the line.
“This is Owen Oster.” Owen’s voice crackles out of the machine.
“Owen, it’s Sarge. Where were you last night?”
“Last night? Conrad’s sister is having a baby. She had a bunch of girlfriends over to celebrate, so me and Conrad took her husband out.”
Peter is going to object, but a glare from Dumetz silences him.
“And Conrad can back you up on that?” Sarge asks.
“He should. His brother-in-law, too. What’s going on?”
“Thank you, Owen,” Sarge says. “That’s all.”
Dumetz hangs up the call and sits back to consider Peter. “Officer Van Horn, when you walk out of this room, I want you to drop to your knees and thank Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, and every other deity you can come up with that nothing more happened last night. If anything had been stolen, then we would have been responsible, and I’d have gotten every last penny out of you before I cut you loose. Instead, your dereliction has only put at risk one of this department’s most lucrative and long-standing contracts, rather than guaranteeing its destruction. You are being placed on a desk handling administrative tasks. Professional Oversight will want to speak with you soon.”
Peter knows, beyond a doubt, that Owen Oster had been at the U-Store-It. He knows that he followed the appropriate protocol and that doing so is synonymous with doing the correct thing. He hadn’t wanted to be a cop—he had actually wanted to be a librarian—but once he learned that the force had a protocol for everything, he realized he could be happy here. You follow the flowchart from A to B to C, and at the end is success.
Peter had followed the protocol.
But here he is, in the captain’s office, being referred to Professional Oversight. This is not the way the world works, yet it is how the world is working. If he were a different person, he might curse and swear and decry Owen’s lies. He might declare the whole system corrupt and storm out in righteous fury. He might do any number of different things to defend his innocence, were he any number of different people. But Peter Van Horn is not a different person. Peter Van Horn is who he is. He is the man who, when confronted with a minor question, will seek out an answer, but, having been shown that his entire understanding of the world is false, does nothing at all.
Dumetz looks at him from across the table, waiting for him to respond in some way. “Do you have anything else to say in your defense, Officer?”
Peter’s lips purse. He opens his mouth. He closes his mouth. He pushes his hair off his brow. “No, sir,” he says, at last.
CHAPTER 10 Peter Van Horn, 8:27 A.M.
In the bullpen downstairs, he sits at a computer. He turns it on but does nothing further. People move around him. They whisper. Word has gotten out. A few try to engage him in conversation. They ask how he’s doing. He says he’s doing fine. They tell him to keep his chin up. He’ll get through this. The union will take care of him. He nods and turns back to his computer. Before long they leave.
There’s no protocol for this. Eventually, Sarge will come over and assign a task to occupy his time while the wheels of the investigation turn. For now he has nothing to do but accept the empty reassurances of his colleagues. He knows their views of him are changing. Before today, he had been, as Dumetz said, a perfectly acceptable officer. Not exemplary, but not embarrassing. He was the reversion to the mean, made flesh. Now, though, he’s being moved to a new list—the list of those, like Owen and Conrad, who are on the take. He will not be looked down on, and he will be protected without question or hesitation by his fellow officers, but he will forever bear that mark.
As though summoned by his thinking of them, Peter sees Owen and Conrad across the bullpen. Owen is on a computer as well. Conrad catches Peter’s eye and waves. Peter doesn’t think there is any kindness to it. Owen calls somebody on his cell, then scribbles something down, and the two men leave.
Owen left the database program open. He is still signed in. He should have signed out before leaving. That’s what protocol says to do. Peter crosses the bullpen to do it for him, but he notices something strange when he sits at the computer.
Owen is not signed in as himself, but as Melissa Fulli, another officer on their patrol. He could not have done that accidentally, and she wouldn’t have signed in here herself. Peter saw her on the far side of the room.
On another day, Peter might have walked away. This isn’t his problem to solve. But this isn’t that day. The structures that Peter has used have failed him. Do what you are supposed to do, he had told himself, and all will be well. But that hasn’t worked, has it? And if he’s being honest, it isn’t just the last day that has shown that to him. His whole life stands testament to the failures of his systems.
On another day, Peter would have done nothing. Today, he calls up the last database entry that Owen had been looking at. It is a USPS Change of Address form, filed in Chicago a month ago, requesting mail be forwarded here to Omaha. He doesn’t recognize the name on the form. He’d never heard it before this exact moment, but Owen and Conrad had looked the guy up and tried to cover their tracks while they did it. Maybe he’ll know what is going on.
Or maybe it will be a waste of time, but Peter has nothing better to do. Owen and Conrad had gotten this name and address and left in a hurry. Peter writes them down, logs out Melissa, and walks out of the station. He has a mission now. He is going to find Barrett Rye.
CHAPTER 11 Eighteen Months Ago
Scarpello used a decentralized system for his collections. An enforcer—someone like me—would be sent out after a delinquent debt. We called them wellness checks. Methods were left up to the individual’s discretion. Scarpello was a big believer in the wisdom of the perspective from the ground, plus no orders for violence could be traced back to him if he never gave any.
After collecting, the enforcer would report to an accountant—someone like Mickey—and turn in the cash. The accountants each kept their own books and washed their own cash. Once the money was clean, it would be fed into one of Scarpello’s front companies and washed a second time. All of this left him with a relatively high overhead, having to go through at least two complete laundering cycles before the money got somewhere he could use it, but it also kept the boss himself at a significant distance from the criminal activity, and each accountant’s individual cell of enforcers and fronts could be burnt off should it become a risk to the larger operation.
Mickey wasn’t my accountant. If the system had been working as intended, the two of us would have never met. But his guys had needed help on a stubborn job, so I was called in. Mickey knew the target was holding out, but his team couldn’t figure out where the cash was hidden.
So I let Mickey’s guys beat the hell out of me in front of the target, a surgeon who’d started using to keep his hands steady and lost track of the line separating the functional addicts from the common chaff. He helped patch me up, and the two of us got to talking about our mutual dislike for that crew. I let the surgeon think he was taking the lead in the conversation. He suggested I might get a group of friends together to rid us of a mutual problem.
I agreed out of self-preservation, but my friends were honest workers who deserved pay for their specialized labor. Terms were quickly agreed to. Once the surgeon produced the money, my friends failed to materialize to protect us from Mickey’s guys.
Out of everyone I’d ever worked with, Mickey was the first to truly see what I’d done. It scared me, at first, to be looked at as more than muscle. But there was something exhilarating to it as well. I hadn’t felt this way since high school, the last time I tried to do magic for an audience. When he looked at me, he didn’t see the part I was playing. He saw me, and he saw everything that I was capable of being, and he made me see it too.
We were together for almost a year before we decided to run.
Laundering is a slow endeavor. It takes time to feed the money through the various cash enterprises that conceal its origins, and there is a certain amount that disappears at every stage, the cost of doing business. Mickey took advantage of those inefficiencies and ran a pyramid scheme on himself. He skimmed the clean money coming out for us and let dirty money through to make up the difference, using tomorrow’s receipts to cover today’s debts. We’d be gone before any of the IOUs punching holes into Scarpello’s financial records would come due, before there was any reason to have the slightest suspicion that anything was amiss.
We weren’t going to do it for long. Just until we had enough to disappear.
CHAPTER 12 Barrett Rye, 9:00 A.M.
My phone rings at nine A.M. precisely. I let it ring four times before I put down my tools and grab the phone off the wall. I might be the only person in the city under sixty with a landline. If you’re looking to be tracked down, the local phone listing is an effective tool.
The man on the other end tells me to be at the Bob Kerrey bridge in thirty minutes. They make it clear that there will be money in it for me, and I agree. The bridge is close by, leaving me enough time to finish up my work before going.
I hadn’t seen the key before last night, so I wasn’t sure exactly what I would need. Now, with it in hand, I had spent the morning molding two lumps of plastic resin into pretty good matches for the size, shape, and weight of the key. Each is coated with a suspension of powdered tin in a layer of cyanoacrylate, leaving them with a sandy silver coating.
Before heading to the bridge, I put them into an aluminum electroplater I set up in the kitchen. In about an hour’s time I should have two passable duplicates of the key. They won’t be perfect copies, and they won’t do shit to open the safe itself, but they should be a fair stand-in, at a glance, for the real thing.
I decide to walk to the bridge and avoid the morning traffic. I’ve got plenty of time, and the exercise will calm my nerves. I keep to a slow pace, not wanting to arrive dripping sweat. The heat of the summer has been building with heavy humidity trapping the warmth at night, leaving the air a brackish soup. The forecasters are saying it will break soon, with a low-pressure system coming down from the north to release the pent-up energy.
The Hyundai Accent passes me three times before I realize I’m being tailed. It’s not that important, though, so I let it go. I’m looking to be tracked down. Why should I worry that it’s working?
As I turn off Riverfront Drive and start toward the looping ramp that leads up to the half-mile bridge that arcs across the Missouri, a man in a suit falls into step beside me. He’s about ten years my senior and carries himself with the confidence of a fighter. His jacket is buttoned closed, and I can see the sweat breaking out across his forehead and the back of his neck. He can’t open the jacket, though, without flashing the 9mm holstered beneath his left arm to the world.
“Are you Barrett?” he asks. I nod, and he takes my arm and directs me away from the bridge. “Come with me.”
“What’s this about?” I ask, keeping my tone light.
“Just be cooperative and you’ll walk away from here a richer, happier man,” he says. His arm swings as he walks, causing his lapel to gap away from his chest and give me a view of his gun. It’s an unnatural, but practiced, movement on his part. He wants me to know that he is armed.
I could take him in a fight, if it comes down to that, even with the gun, but I give up nothing by letting him think that his little show of force has intimidated me, and so I demure.
“Sure,” I say. “Whatever you say.”
He leads me to a cart where Holzmann waits with a cup of coffee in each hand. It’s my first time seeing him in person, and he looks smaller than I expected. It would be easy to dismiss him as just one more rich old white man in a city with far too many of them. That would be a mistake.
Holzmann’s reputation in Chicago, insofar as he has one, is as a competent local boss who favors rationality above all else. He can be ruthless when the situation demands it but sees outright violence as a means only. His strength comes not from the fear of those beneath him but from his ability to keep open conflict off the city’s streets, something that has, in turn, kept the police away from his operations. He is a useful tool when moving goods through Omaha, but a minor player in the grand scheme of Midwest crime.
He had the good fortune to expand an inherited shipping concern with ties to the Italian mafia into the world of vice just as Berkshire Hathaway and its associated firms brought billions of dollars into Omaha. In the last four decades he became the sole purveyor of illicit distractions in a city with far too much money in far too few hands. He has been wanting to grow beyond the biggest little town in America since the turn of the century but never put together the power to expand outside the city limits.
There is very little as dangerous as a smart and ambitious man restrained, and right now I am the thing standing between him and enough wealth to claim legitimacy on a national scale.
If he thinks for even a moment that I knew what I was doing when I took this key—that I intentionally stole from him—he will kill me. So I have to convince him I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just a dumb lunk, a recent transplant to the city who went to a poker game and got distracted by a shiny bauble. If I can make him buy that, I’m set. Otherwise—well, this is gonna be a short story.
“Thank you, Benny,” he says to my escort as we approach. Benny gives me an admonishing look—he and his gun will be close by—and steps away.
There is a moment of appreciation that most people go through when they first see me. A gradual widening of the eyes as they track up my body. Everyone knows a tall person. They think they know what big looks like. But there is a difference between your coworker who has to duck their head when they get into a car and the truly large.
After the surprise and wonder, Holzmann decides he knows who I am. He might not have anyone my size on his staff, but he has dealt with his share of bruisers, and we tend to be made from the same mold.
Having finished his appraisal, Holzmann offers me one of his cups of coffee. “Thank you for joining me on such short notice, Herr Rye. I didn’t know if you take it with cream or sugar, so I leave that to you, but good coffee is rare in this city, and you certainly don’t hold it now.” He scoops three spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup and stirs.
“Thanks,” I say and follow his lead. He’s using a ploy I’ve used myself before, and I can hardly fault him for it. Benny surely isn’t the only soldier present, and Holzmann knows why we are here while I, presumably, do not. His deference will let him gauge my intentions. If he shows weakness and I push a false advantage, he will snap down in an instant.
Before he continues, he leads me away from the coffee cart and the light traffic of joggers making their way along the riverfront. Away from the crowds. Away from witnesses.
