The Drifter, page 15
Mingus jumped up on the seat. Peter closed the door. Mingus jumped out the window again, then looked up at him with that serrated grin, tongue lolling.
Peter sighed. “Okay, buddy. But I don’t think they’re going to let you in the library. Especially not with that stink you’ve got going.”
Peter wondered if they’d keep him out, too. After four days without a shower, he didn’t smell so good himself.
He opened the back and collected the cardboard box with Jimmy’s personal effects. He added the bag of papers he’d taken from Jimmy’s apartment and went to find the library. He needed a place with decent windows to spread out and think.
Mingus ranged ahead to terrify the coeds, trailing the stench of pepper spray and dog funk like a plume of tear gas.
Peter had always liked big universities. He liked the young undergrads, the scruffy grad students, and the even scruffier professors. He liked the idealistic vibe, the fliers posted everywhere for meetings and talks and galleries and concerts. He liked the coffee shops and cheap restaurants at the perimeter. Maybe one of these days he’d be a student again. Maybe.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee wasn’t beautiful. Most of the unruly jumble of buildings seemed to date from architecture’s uglier periods. Now that the sun had come out, the sky a high, clear blue, the air crisp and cold, Peter’s legs twitched for a long run.
He found a glass-walled addition to the student union that connected to the library. He looked around for the dog, but Mingus had disappeared. Peter shrugged and pulled open the door. The dog could clearly take care of himself. He knew where the truck was.
Inside, the white static rose up, but less than Peter had anticipated. Maybe it was all the windows, the natural light. Maybe because it was a university, it didn’t set him off like an office building or a cheap motel.
He wondered, could the static tell the difference?
He bought himself a cup of coffee and an accordion folder at the bookstore, then headed into the library.
The girl at the information desk wore red lip gloss, rectangular glasses, and a form-fitting red blouse. She had her hair up in an unraveling bun, trying for that hot-librarian look. Usually Peter went for that kind of thing, and he was sure the undergraduates were eating it up. But next to Dinah or Josie, this girl looked like a spoiled child.
She raised her eyebrows at him as he strode past, the cardboard box tucked under his arm. “May I help you?” she asked, wrinkling her nose and staring at the bruise on his cheek.
“No, thanks,” Peter said, and kept walking.
“There’s no sleeping in the library,” she called after him.
Peter looked down at his work clothes, now worn for four days running. Clearly this girl thought he was a homeless person. She wasn’t exactly wrong.
He had to find a shower, and soon.
He walked through a bright open room until he found an unoccupied table by a window with a view of a broad courtyard. His shoulders were tight, the white static making itself known, but he pushed it down as he thought about why Jimmy would have a suitcase full of hundreds and enough plastic explosive to blow up a car.
Peter couldn’t see Jimmy as a mad bomber, no matter how bad his PTSD was. Couldn’t see him as a mercenary, either, blowing shit up for money. And he couldn’t see Jimmy planning something, then killing himself from remorse before he did it. None of it made sense.
—
He opened the box of Jimmy’s things and began to lay them out on the table. It was a pitifully small collection of objects to represent a man’s life.
On the left, he set out the things from Dinah’s cardboard box of memories. Jimmy’s medals. The photos of Jimmy and Dinah, and Jimmy with his kids, Charlie and Miles looking younger in each picture.
On the right, he put the papers he took from the apartment. The yellow flier about the missing Marine. The folders with his VA paperwork and discharge papers.
In the middle, Peter laid out the things Jimmy had with him when he died. The Lake Capital pen from Jimmy’s coat pocket, and the little notebook with the front pages torn out. The belt with the hidden compartment that had held five crisp new hundreds, the same yellow flier about Felix Castellano, the missing Marine, and the business card for the Riverside Veterans’ Center with the phone number written in spidery black handwriting on the back. And Jimmy’s wallet with only a few dollars, a grocery receipt, a library card, and a driver’s license with his wife’s address.
Last was the torn scrap of paper with Jimmy’s same confident scrawl, but this one written more clearly: worth more dead than alive. The police told Dinah it was Jimmy’s suicide note.
Somehow, though, it didn’t look like the handwriting of a man who would kill himself.
The odd chord that had rung the first time Peter had read the note at Dinah’s house began to chime again. Something Jimmy had said. But what? Where?
Peter closed his eyes and took himself back to the battered city of Baghdad during the insurgency. He remembered standing with Jimmy in the corner of a briefing room, while some major told them about the psychology of suicide bombers.
Jimmy had raised his hand. “Excuse me, sir? I just want to know something. What kind of motherfucker would convince these dumb bastards that they were worth more to their cause dead than they are alive? What kind of motherfucker would do that?” Jimmy was polite, but he was also profane as all hell.
The major had told Jimmy to shut up, but nobody heard him because the rest of the enlisted men were all laughing. But Jimmy was serious and genuinely pissed off. What kind of motherfucker would do something like that?
Then another memory, this time of Jimmy standing at the gunner’s post of a neighborhood outpost after a car bomb had exploded while trying to ram the blast barrier. “These poor dumb bastards. Some asshole convinced them they were worth more dead than alive.”
The slip of paper wasn’t Jimmy’s suicide note.
It was a kind of invocation. Kept in the man’s wallet to remind himself.
A refusal to believe that a single life had no other use than to be wasted.
And a reminder of the reasons to live.
Because nobody was worth more dead than alive.
Peter looked at the slip of paper again. It was torn on two sides. Someone had torn off the first part of that note, whatever it was.
To make it look like suicide.
Son of a bitch.
—
Peter thought back through what he’d learned.
Jimmy had paid his rent in advance and told his landlady he was traveling.
He’d cleaned his apartment, even emptied the fridge.
He’d covered his shifts at work and told the bartender he would be out of town.
Jimmy got a damn dog, for chrissake. Would a man contemplating suicide go out and get a dog?
Peter had thought Jimmy had killed himself because the man was polite?
It was just another way Peter had failed his friend. Failed to keep him safe in the war. Failed to support him at home. And failed to believe in him after he was dead.
He said it aloud.
“Jimmy didn’t kill himself.”
Which meant somebody else did.
—
Now Peter looked back at Jimmy’s things with new eyes.
These weren’t keys to understanding a suicide.
They were clues to a killer.
A killer Peter was going to find.
Peter swept his eyes across the table. What stood out?
The yellow fliers, obviously. Peter needed to talk to the missing Marine’s grandmother.
The business card for the veterans’ center. He needed to go back there again.
He picked up the pen. It was heavy in his hand. Lake Capital Funds.
Dinah told him they didn’t have any investments. They were barely holding on to their house, so why would Jimmy be talking to an investment adviser?
That suitcase full of money.
Although if he was going to invest it, why was it hidden in a Samsonite suitcase under a rotting porch? And why was the dog there?
He thought now about what else was under that porch when he’d cleaned it out, aside from a few decades’ worth of trash. The money, the dog. And an old dog bed—wasn’t there an old dog bed under there?
When he put it together like that, the answer was clear.
Jimmy had hidden the suitcase full of money and explosives under the porch and left his dog there to guard it. With the dog’s bed, so Mingus would know where home was.
Which was why the dog had stayed so long.
After his master was dead.
Peter needed to talk to the hedge-fund guy, Jonathan Skinner.
—
He brought out the accordion file he’d bought at the bookstore. It had divided sections to keep things organized, and a cover flap that tied in place. It was more compact than the box, and felt somehow more respectful. He put Jimmy’s things away, then opened up his new laptop and got online.
Lake Capital wasn’t a financial-planning outfit, a place for normal people to put their retirement money. Lake Capital was a hedge fund, an investment vehicle for the very wealthy, or for large financial institutions like employee pension funds, looking to balance the risk in their portfolios. Hedge fund, as in hedge your bets.
Hedge funds were a great racket. The fund manager—in this case, Jonathan Skinner—got paid twice. He was paid a small percentage of the base value of the fund, usually two percent each year. He also took a percentage of the profits, usually twenty percent. Hedge funds were considered risky but could be highly profitable. Especially for the hedge-fund managers, who always made something, even if their clients lost a lot. And in the big market crash, most funds had lost a huge amount of their value. But a few had made billions.
The Lake Capital website was clean and elegantly designed, but thin on details. The main page featured a beautiful photo of a big luxury sailboat moving fast in high winds, and another of attractive people arranged in a family group. Crisp graphics showed the hedge fund’s performance at more than three times the rate of the market as a whole for six years running. But not much detail about how that was achieved. And no data from the last three years. So either they hadn’t updated their website or they hadn’t done so well since the crash.
He searched the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s site and found many articles featuring Lake Capital, a prominent corporate citizen. Skinner and his wife, Martha, were mentioned often in connection with local charities, with Martha a particular favorite of the paper, even after her death. When she was killed in a home invasion in 2007, there was a long and glowing obituary. But after the market collapse in late 2008, Lake Capital went downhill.
Returns were in the negatives, and many Lake Capital investors had pulled out their money. The Securities and Exchange Commission was also investigating. Lake Capital was down to bare bones, with only a few employees left. And although Skinner had built up a great deal of personal wealth, he had invested much of his own and his wife’s money in the fund, so when Lake Capital closed its doors—and a recent newspaper article speculated that it was only a matter of time—Skinner would be reduced from extravagantly wealthy to merely rich.
Which made $400K in hard cash much more relevant to the conversation.
This time he’d call ahead and make an appointment. He took out his new phone.
“Lake Capital. How may we help you?”
The receptionist was much nicer on the phone than she was in person. Maybe because she couldn’t see Peter’s worn work clothes and unshaven face.
“Skinner in?” Peter tried to sound like an Army captain he’d known in Afghanistan, whose family fortune dated back to the Civil War. The captain talked like the world existed to do his bidding. “Need to see him.”
“I’m so sorry, he’s in meetings all day,” said the receptionist with practiced sincerity. “May I take your information so he can reach you later?”
Her name, Peter remembered, was Gretchen.
“Listen, Gretchen, tell Skinner that I know his recent numbers are shit. But my attorney tells me the man’s on his way up again. So I need to meet him, and soon. Need to park this money before the fucking IRS gets it.”
Gretchen was practically purring. “His meeting is ending just now,” she said. “I think I can grab him. Can you hold for just one moment?”
23
As Peter put away his phone, a campus security guard approached. Maybe in his early twenties, with a soft face. The uniform fit him as if made for a different person. “Um, sir? Are you a student here?”
The girl at the information desk must have ratted him out. Peter gathered up his things. He said, “This is a public library. I don’t need to be a student to come in here.”
“Well, um, no, sir?” said the guard. “But we do want to make sure the library is used for, um, appropriate activities?”
Everything was a question with this kid. Peter was glad the guard didn’t have a sidearm. He imagined the kid saying, Um, stop? Or I’ll shoot?
But it wasn’t worth the argument. “I was just leaving,” said Peter.
He handed the guard the empty box, tucked the accordion file under his arm, and began to thread his way through the tables toward the exit. “You have a public gym, right?” This was his plan to get a shower and change his clothes before meeting Dinah.
The guard, trailing behind Peter, looked relieved at the lack of confrontation. Peter was six inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, even with the guard’s spongy bulk. “Um, I’d have to send you to the campus rec department? I think you need a membership? Or maybe a day pass?”
Peter pushed the door open. The crisp fall air washed through him. “So which way to the campus rec department?”
Then he saw Mingus racing toward him across the brown grass. An uneaten hamburger wedged in his mouth, he was pursued by a campus cop in a golf cart and another cruising behind on foot. The security guard from the library had a walkie-talkie on his belt. It crackled, and a garbled voice said, “Rogue animal, rogue animal. All officers respond.”
Then Peter saw that the cop in the golf cart had his sidearm in his hand. While driving.
This could go wrong six different ways. Peter stepped into the center of the paved area, waved his arms, and raised his voice. “Mingus!”
The dog saw Peter and cranked around in a tight turn. He galloped over, wolfing down the burger on the way, then came to a leisurely stop. His tongue hung out of the side of his mouth as he panted happily. The golf cart almost tipped over as it tried to follow.
“Sir, is this your dog?”
The cop in the cart had his finger inside the trigger guard. He was in late middle age, with the pale and fleshy look of a boneless chicken breast, except for his face, which was bright red with righteous indignation.
“He’s his own dog,” said Peter. “I just clean up after him. Put that gun away, will you?”
The running cop was barely breathing hard. He was young, clean-shaven, and his uniform shirt was pressed. He wore sneakers, and he couldn’t hide his grin. “A couple of girls tried to adopt him, let him into their dorm. He raided the lunch buffet pretty bad.”
“Shit.” Peter didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
The cop with the gun spoke loudly and he levered himself out of the golf cart. “Dogs are not permitted in the residence halls,” he said, glaring at the younger man. “And this animal does not have a license. I have notified animal control.” He hadn’t put the gun away. Maybe he just liked to have it in his hand.
“We’ll just go,” said Peter. “Sorry for the mess.”
“Oh, no,” said the cop with the gun. It was something fancy, bright, shiny chrome with mother-of-pearl grips. “You’re staying right here, pal. There’s a lot of paperwork for this, and the police are coming. You may face charges yourself.”
Peter looked at the young cop. “Seriously?”
The young cop shrugged, his face artfully blank. “Marv’s the senior officer.”
“Yes, I am,” said Marv, still louder than he needed to be. “Take hold of your animal.” He still had his finger inside the trigger guard. Peter could see the red dot on the safety, meaning the safety was off. The barrel was pointing all over the place.
“Sure,” said Peter. He stepped between Marv and Mingus, facing the dog. Then he pivoted and took hold of the pistol, one finger jammed behind the trigger so it wouldn’t go off, and twisted the gun from Marv’s grip.
“Hey!” said Marv, eyes wide.
The younger cop put his hand to his own sidearm.
“Wait,” said Peter, eyes on the younger man. He held up the gun by the barrel. “The safety was off. His finger was on the trigger.” He found the magazine release and dropped it into his waiting palm, and handed it to the other man. Then he racked the slide to eject the round from the chamber, caught it in the air, and held it up between thumb and forefinger for the younger man to see. “Is this how you were trained?”
The younger cop shook his head. “Christ, Marv,” he said. “We talked about this, remember? Somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
“Goddamn you little shits.” Marv was pulling a blackjack from his pocket.
“Marv,” said the younger cop, stepping in close. “We talked about this. Get back in the cart.”
Peter dropped the pistol into a campus mailbox. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “Sorry about the lunch buffet.”
The security guard from the library said, “Um, sir? I’ll just see you off campus?”
He was writing Peter’s license number down in his notebook as Mingus jumped into the cab of the truck.
As Peter climbed in after him, the dog slurped him in the face. His breath smelled like hamburgers. The rest of him smelled like ten gallons of hot sauce at the city dump.
