Par Four, page 26
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
Back in my car, feeling hollow and whipped, I reviewed the charges: I was an insensitive clod, too seldom home, insufficiently responsive when I was home. This was not new information. In the long, noisy months we spent together on the scorched earth of our failing marriage, Nancy had hurled these accusations at me many times. They were as true now as they ever had been, and just as hopeless. Because she was right: I didn’t want to hear what she had to say.
It’s not true I never listened. I listened closely during the happy first years of my sexual enslavement, usually without the foggiest idea what she was talking about. It’s girl stuff, I thought; I’ll get the hang of it. When lust eased its hold on me a little, I began to appraise the odd mishmash of airhead self-help manuals, New Age spirituality, health-food hype, astrology charts, and the worst gleanings of daytime talk shows that guided her life. I was appalled, but I figured she’d eventually outgrow most of this flimflam. Her convictions got stronger every year, though, and before long I couldn’t stand to hear another word about the healing power of crystals or which house Jupiter was in. She would start stirring up some confection of Shirley MacLaine and Deepak Chopra with Oprah and Sally and Jerry, and I would find myself on the front step, headed out.
I wasn’t aware of the extent of my disenchantment till she threw me out. After a few months alone it dawned on me that the regret I was feeling was mostly for my lost yard and workshop. I missed the tumultuous sex of the early years, and I hated the feeling of failure that divorce had loaded on me, but I was glad as hell to have escaped the unfettered flow of intellectual hokum that flowed out of my wife.
Her anger had been perfectly real today, however, and now I confronted a hateful conundrum: having been lucky enough to start over, in an exciting relationship with a woman as different from Nancy as possible, how had I so mishandled it as to bring Trudy to the same feelings of rejection my wife had? Nancy was so fed up with me she wouldn’t even let me touch her groceries; Trudy was ready to move across half a continent to insure that she would see me no more. Good old Jake Hines, what a way with women.
It was probably just as well my beeper went off. I found a public phone in the front of the supermarket. “Clint Maddox is looking for you,” Neva said. “He wants you to find him in the brown van, parked on the corner of Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue.”
I drove west to Seventh Avenue and turned left. The brown van was tucked in behind an overgrown hedge on the north corner of the Eleventh Street intersection, where only a sliver of its left front bumper was visible from the front door of the pawn shop. Clint was in the driver’s seat, pressed against the window to watch the store.
“Something new is going on up here today,” he said. “At the bookstore and this place both. They been hauling stuff out all morning. And today the loads aren’t all going to the warehouse on the highway. These guys have got another stash.”
“They have? Where?”
“Damnedest thing,” he said. “It’s a nice big house in a good neighborhood. Almost a mansion really. On Clover Avenue, you know where that is?”
“Sure. Branches off Southwest Twenty-second Street, runs kind of up and around a hill and into a cul-de-sac.”
“Exactly. Lot of big old trees out there, and all the houses have hedges. The house they’re going to, 2295, is on the circle at the end of the street, with a gate at the corner of the property and a long drive. Lotta bushes along the front of the house. Real secluded.”
“And the pawn shop operator is taking stuff from his shop to that house?”
“Once, he did. Once to the warehouse this morning and once to the house. And after he delivered a load to the house he went on out to the warehouse, left off some more stuff, put something from the warehouse into the van and brought it back to the house on Clover Avenue.”
“So…lots of shuffling going on. You see what any of it was?”
“No. I was afraid to get close, and he’s using wraps, and those quilted pads that movers have. Really organized for his work, I’ll give him that. Everything he’s handling is small enough for one person to carry; he never had a helper.”
“The bookstore operator went to the house too?”
“No. Just one trip to the warehouse.”
“Anybody in the house, could you see?”
“The garage was empty, when he raised the door. No lights on in the house.”
“How are you covering all these places?” I said.
“Well, that’s why I called you. We’ve been watching their two stores here and then following wherever they lead us, keeping in touch with each other by phone. But it’s getting kind of dicey with all this activity; we’re afraid they’ll spot one of us. Any chance you can get us some help, and a couple of different cars?”
“You bet. Also, what about a break? You had any lunch?”
“Oh, we just talked to Putratz; he’s driving the squad in section three this morning. He said he’d keep an eye on the book store while Darrell got us a pizza. You wanta join us?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I called the department, got Bo, and asked him to check out a Crown Vic and come up. Darrell walked up to the passenger door just then with a flat box and said, “Anybody in here speak Italian?” He was in high spirits. We snarfed down hot cheese and mushrooms while we waited for Bo. He climbed in the van fifteen minutes later and sat nodding silently while we explained the operation.
“Be best if we park one car near the house and somebody just stayed there,” Clint said. “Then we could trail from here till we see which location they’re going to, and pass ‘em off and go on if it’s the house. It’s not so tough to follow somebody to the warehouse where there’s plenty of traffic. But in that cul-de-sac it’s hard to keep from being obvious.”
“Then I think it’s best if Bo takes the Crown Vic to Clover Avenue; that’s the vehicle that’ll look natural there. Clint, you can follow him in the Dodge I brought up here. Help him find an inconspicuous parking spot with a view of the house, and then come on back here. I’ll take the van back downtown, and with what we have now I should be able to get a search warrant for the house on Clover Avenue. What’s the number?” I wrote it down. “I’ll come back in a different car and trade with you, Darrell, so where you gonna be?”
That’s how we started the big shuffle that went on all afternoon. I widened the network to include Ray, hanging out in the parking lot near the warehouse in his father’s pickup, and Kevin, shuttling between vehicles in Frank’s old fishing car. When I had my search warrant I went back to Eleventh Street, found Clint Maddox, and sat beside him in the Dodge, which he had parked half a block south of Kwik Kash. We were watching the front of the pawn shop in the rear view mirrors.
“Anything more gone to the house?”
“No. Two more loads to the warehouse, from here, and one more from the bookstore. You got me some help just in time; these fellas are really goin’ after it this afternoon. Tell you the truth, Jake, it’s beginning to look like they’re clearing out.”
“I agree. I don’t think I’ll wait much longer to see the inside of that house. I think I’ll get Kevin to run me out there–”
I was reaching for my phone when he grabbed my arm.
“You ever see Mr. Sewage?”
“No.”
“Feast your eyes.”
A sixty-ish man in felt bedroom slippers walked out the front door of the pawn shop, turned, and went back along the alley at the side of the building. He wore a food-spotted blue chambray shirt with the collar open, and ancient pinstriped pants with the fly half unzipped. His mouth looked as if several front teeth were missing. The left lens of his eyeglasses was cracked, and the ear pieces must have been bent, because they hung crooked on his face.
“Do you love him so far?” Maddox asked, starting the car. We watched the corner of the pawn shop building until a faded blue 1973 Ford passenger van nosed cautiously out of the alley and turned right. Maddox drove to the end of the block, turned left, and waited by the curb on Thirteenth Street.
“If he’s going to the house on Clover Avenue he’ll come this way,” he said. “If we don’t see him in a couple of minutes we’ll–no, there he is.”
Maddox followed him while I called Bo. When Sewell turned into the cul-de-sac, we drove past it and parked in the next circle. Maddox parked and waited while I walked slowly back along the sidewalk. The old Ford van was out of sight. “You won’t see it,” Maddox had warned me. “They drive into the garage and close it every time.” I inspected the leaves on the cotton Easter hedge of the house just outside the cul-de-sac, till I heard the garage door roll up and a motor start. When I heard the Ford coming out of the circle I turned away from it and walked briskly along the sidewalk till it passed me. When Maddox had trailed after him, I crossed the street and found Bo Dooley in the easement between the two houses directly opposite the cul-de-sac.
I slid in beside him and said, “Anybody in the house?”
“Don’t think so. The driver of that van opened the garage door himself, electronically. Which is kind of interesting because he doesn’t look as if he belongs here.”
“Nobody inside the garage when he opened it?”
“No. No lights in there, no movement. Looks empty to me.”
“Lessee, what time is it? Four-twenty. I’ve got my search warrant; I’m ready to go in anytime. I should have backup, though, and you need to check out pretty soon, don’t you? I better call–”
Bo shook his head. “My sister came to help me for a while,” he said. “I can stay, I’d like to.”
“Shall we do it, then?” I own a first-rate set of burglary tools that I took off a petty thief a couple of years ago and purchased from the evidence room during the next annual spring cleaning and auction. The city owns a cheapo set that sucks, and there are times when you need to get through a door quickly without smashing it to bits. Bo drew his weapon and held it flat against his leg while I worked the door.
The lock slid open almost silently and closed again behind us with a tiny well-oiled snap. We stood in the dusky foyer, listening. As my eyes adjusted, I caught a glint of polished floors, and of silver massed behind glass doors. A deeply carpeted stairway led up to stained glass on a landing. We eased together through the roomful of gleaming silver, past a heavy mahogany table and a sideboard loaded with more silver: trays, a tea service, a tureen. Bo pursed his lips and rolled his eyes. We eased down a short hall and stood together with weapons in the air, pressed against the wall at the door to the kitchen. The refrigerator turned on and we both jumped. “Shit,” Bo whispered and kicked the door open.
The kitchen stood empty and gleaming. It was fully, if somewhat sparsely, appointed, but showed no signs of use. I opened the refrigerator. Two bottles of Dom Perignon lay side by side on the bottom shelf, along with a jar of caviar and an unopened package of brie.
Bo eased open the door to the garage. Across his shoulder I could see the empty garage with half a dozen boxes stacked against the back wall. Bo shimmied sideways down three linoleum steps from the kitchen, looked in all the corners of the double garage, and lifted the cardboard top of a box with the butt of his gun. He rustled through a layer of crumpled newspaper, replaced it, and came back to the door. “Looks like more silver and glassware.”
We crossed the ornate dining room again, tiptoed past the stairs and peered into the living room, where velvet wing chairs faced each other in front of a marble fireplace flanked by two breakfronts loaded with fine china. More silver gleamed from picture frames and lamps, and the far end of the room was a luxurious grouping of velvet sofas and chairs heaped with satin and taffeta pillows. Everything seemed to have ruffles and beads and tassels.
We eased silently up the stairs. There were four bedrooms, all lavishly decorated like the rooms below and loaded to the doors with state-of-the-art music systems, a massive TV set with a thousand video cassettes, a walk-in closet full of velvet negligees, satin teddies, frou-frou mules.
“What the hell is this,” Bo whispered, “La-La Land?”
Then we both heard the heavy whir as the garage door opener was activated.
“Shit, how could he get back here so fast?” Bo hissed.
“Why didn’t Darrell or Clint call us?” I said, and then, “Wait. They don’t know we’re in here. Maybe they won’t come in.” We were in the first bedroom at the right of the stairs; I pointed toward the hall and we moved out there together so we could hear better. There was a period of silence in which nothing at all seemed to be happening, and then I heard steps come up the short flight of stairs from the garage.
The kitchen door opened and closed, and steps moved quietly across the hard kitchen floor and onto the muffled softness of the dining room carpet. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify, turned toward Bo with my eyebrows raised, and then heard it clearer. Someone was in the dining room, moving things from place to place and absent-mindedly humming scraps of a tune.
The song stopped, the steps came off the dining room carpet and crossed the hardwood floor of the foyer. Carpet muffled the step onto the bottom of the stairs, but I heard the creak when the railing was grasped. Bo was watching me; he knew as well as I did that the advantage of surprise would be gone in a few seconds. I flipped the light switch at my elbow and the two of us stepped forward into the light with our Glocks trained down the stairs.
There was a terrified yelp and then a bump. For the second time in five days, Doris Pearce had collapsed at my feet.
12
✜
“I don’t get it,” McCafferty said, late Tuesday afternoon. “Why would Doris Pearce need to mess around with drug dealers?”
“She didn’t need to,” I said. “She decided to. Opportunity beckoned, she says, and she grabbed it.”
“Getting bossed around by people like Bad Boy? What kind of opportunity is that?”
“Doris wasn’t getting bossed. She was doing the bossing. Essentially, for the last couple of years she’s been running the whole Rutherford operation. Clout was a big part of what she liked about it. That and the, uh, fantasizing.”
“What fantasizing?” It’s hard to tell Frank about sexual peccadilloes; his nose wrinkles up and he starts looking at you like you’re pissing on his leg. So I moved briskly through a description of Doris’s library of porn videos and the array of implements in her bedside table at Clover Avenue.
“Jesus,” he said, “right under Ed’s nose?”
“Ed’s nose had a tendency to be elsewhere one or two nights a week. That left Doris with free evenings that Ed didn’t want to discuss any more than she did. She used them for work as well as play; most of the illicit cash has been distributed on what she called her ‘bridge nights.’ And being the wife of the county attorney gave her the best cover you could ever have.”
I yawned. Doris and I had talked most of the night, and as a result of the information she gave me, my crew and I had been very busy all day. “Ed didn’t just give her cover. Unbeknownst to himself he gave her names. Ed is lazy, so Doris helped him get through his files sometimes.”
“So you’re saying she hired some of the people he was prosecuting?”
“Sure. If they pleaded down and got time served, something like that, Doris would get in touch afterwards and offer a little gainful employment. She got the people at the adult bookstore and the pawn shop that way, and most of her maintenance crew for the houses. I understand now why my apartment’s going to hell; drug runners and petty thieves aren’t selected for mechanical aptitude. Tammi Fae Boe got picked up for DUI while she was carrying a few bags of crack; Ed got her paroled on condition she enter a treatment program and Doris took her from there.”
“Wait now. You’re not saying Ed Pearce was part of this business, are you?”
“Never. I’m sure not. He showed up in adult detention about midnight last night, after I’d left messages for him all over town, and when he found out what was going on he was devastated. Some day when you’re not busy will you explain marriage to me?”
“Sure,” Frank said, “right after black holes and cloning.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Does this fit into the discussion somewhere, or are you starting to drift?”
“Ed and Doris,” I said. “It’s hard to see how that marriage works, but in some ways it’s clear that it does. The other day when she fainted at the river, he was really concerned, he wasn’t faking it, and she turned to him as trusting as a child. Then last night, she was telling him this appalling story about accumulating a secret fortune from drug money and slum housing, and he never flinched, he just kept saying, ‘We can beat this, Doris, trust me; I’ll get you out of this mess.’ But when he asked her, ‘Honey, why did you want this other house?’ she told him how she went there on his so-called poker nights to put on fancy negligees and get her rocks off watching porno movies. ‘It made me feel like I was getting my fair share,’ she said. And he broke down and cried.”
“But you said he was playing around–”
“Well, in his mind that was no big deal, just a hobby like chess or model trains. He said to her very sincerely, ‘I’ve always thought of us as the perfect couple.’”
“Aw, shit,” Frank said. He sat shaking his head, looking dismayed. Then he asked, “Why did Doris faint that day by the river? Do you know?”
“She didn’t know Babe was dead, till then. When the news about the Rowdy’s robbery hit the street, Doris called Bad Boy and told him to find out who had done it. He already knew all about it so he told her. Doris was furious. She called Babe and told her she had to do something about her son, that he was going to ruin their deal for all of them. When Doris saw Babe and Randy tied together and drowned like that, she thought maybe the dealers had started a purge and she was gonna be next.”
“Wow. She might have been right, too, who knows?” He thought a minute. “How much trouble are we facing with this house on Clover Avenue? Lotta stuff there?”
