The Lasko Tangent, page 6
I had a notion how it had worked out, but didn’t say so. I chose some neutral words. “I’d appreciate it if you would explain.”
Lehman looked both eager and reluctant, as if unsure whether he would be helped or humiliated. Gubner broke in softly. “Go ahead, Alec.”
Lehman nodded slowly. “My wife was afraid. Hell, I was afraid too. I was a middle-aged, broke business failure in a buyer’s market, with two kids.” His words picked up speed. “Lasko was pushing me to come to Boston. He even offered to loan me down-payment money and to guarantee my mortgage. And I owed my in-laws $10,000. Have you ever owed your in-laws money?”
“I’m not married.”
“Hell, I’d sooner owe money to the Mafia. They might kill you, but you don’t have to eat dinner with them.” He looked at me to see if his little joke had taken. I was beginning to get a handle on him. At the center of him were other people looking back. And now it was me.
“The thing about being dead, Mr. Lehman, is that there’s no future in it.”
His smile was bleak. “So I took it all. I took the job, which was better than I’d expected, and I moved to Boston. Then, I took the loan. Lasko kept pressuring me to get a good house, so I did. A nice old white frame house in Newton, with oaks in the front. My family loved it. And Lasko gave me the loan and set up the mortgage, and I was controller of Lasko Devices, with a house in Newton.” The sad face made it seem as attractive as acquiring leprosy. Lehman’s features were astonishingly mobile. I wondered if it came from practice.
A not-so-wild guess hit me. “Mr. Lehman, were you the one who called McGuire a week ago to talk about stock manipulation?”
He looked surprised. “No. What manipulation?”
It was my turn for surprise. But Lehman hadn’t finished his confessional. “The thing is, I knew why Lasko wanted me. I used to be a CPA with a national accounting firm. You learn pretty fast to figure out your clients. I knew Lasko wanted someone that he owned, that sooner or later I would do something I didn’t like. But I had bought into the whole thing a long time ago. The house, the job, all the expectations. All the deferred gratifications.”
“And when it didn’t work, you folded up.” I said it quietly, looking at him.
He stared at the table. “There wasn’t enough in me. You know, I knew that I was a born lackey.” The voice had gone starkly bitter. “In college I was the class clown.” Gubner smiled faintly in rueful recollection. “Between then and now I must have kissed enough ass to fill a stadium. The one time I tried to get out from under myself is when I started my own business. I was going to be a boss. But I wasn’t cut out for being a boss. I kept looking for someone to please, for someone to tell me what to do. Or what to be.” He paused, then pronounced judgment on himself in a final tone. “And that’s the bottom line on me, Mr. Paget. I’m someone else’s boy.”
And now he was my boy. The thought must have shown in my face. “What do they call you, Mr. Paget?”
“Chris.”
“Tell me, Chris, have you ever wanted to please someone else, even when you thought it was wrong?”
“More often than I’d like.”
“What keeps you from doing it?”
I thought. “I honestly don’t know, Mr. Lehman. I guess I’m afraid to.”
Lehman nodded; he knew what I meant. For a moment, we were almost friends. But he was a witness, and I needed to use him. I decided to put a cap on self-analysis. “Let’s just say that I understand what you’ve told me.”
But Lehman was looking beyond me at some middle distance. The bar reverberated with the echo of a long-ago psychic explosion, of which the current Lehman was the remains, a crazy quilt of roles with no stuffing. The act of contrition was the only thing which was making Lehman real to himself. But I was going to have to push it to the end.
“Let’s talk about what you’ve got for me,” I said.
Lehman snapped to as if wrenched out of hypnosis. “I don’t know about any manipulation. But I’ve got proof of something different. A lot worse.” Whatever it was lent an awed tone to his words. “I’ve got a memo at home that will deliver the whole thing.” He looked around. “But we can’t talk about it here.”
I felt impatient. “Look, you’ve got to tell me sometime.”
Lehman’s voice was thick with knowledge. “Mr. Paget, you don’t want to talk about this here either. I know I’m doing a mental striptease. But I didn’t want to sit in a government office, like a criminal. You’ve been very decent. Come to my place after dinner tonight, and I’ll show you what I’ve got. You can handle it the way you think best.” His voice slowed to a low, emphatic rhythm. “And you are going to want to think about it.”
It was a strange scene and sad. The man had wanted to see me-be friends-before he put his future in my hands. But I couldn’t give him that. “You know, Mr. Lehman, I can question you, under oath, any time. And have you sent up for perjury if you lie.”
Gubner cut in sharply. “He knows that.” I looked from Gubner to Lehman. He nodded.
“All right, Mr. Lehman, 7:30 tonight. And I hope it’s good.”
Lehman stood up, smiling in a lifeless way which made my words sound foolish. “It’s better than you imagine. Or from my perspective, worse.” He paused. “You should remember, Mr. Paget, that Lasko is a very ruthless man.”
He should know, I thought. But Lehman seemed like a weak reed for Lasko to be trusting. “One thing bothers me. Just why does Lasko trust you with whatever this is?”
The bleak smile held. “Because I’m his controller,” he said with irony. “Besides, he’s got me by the balls.”
I could see that. “Then why are you here?”
He exhaled, staring at his feet. Then he looked directly at me. “Because this is my last chance to like myself.”
I nodded. He turned to Gubner. The two friends looked at each other for a moment. Gubner wore the rueful half-smile. Lehman saw it and reached out with one hand to touch Gubner’s arm. Then he turned and walked from the bar. Gubner stared after him, as if regret had turned him to stone.
I let him stare for a moment, then spoke. “Marty, I’ll buy you a martini. They’re good here, and you could use one.”
Gubner turned, then sat down heavily. I ordered two martinis, straight up. They arrived in record time. I pushed one toward Gubner and picked up mine. I felt pretty good, sort of. But not perfect. Lehman appeared in the window, walking with the comic stagger of a penguin. He looked as if he had been shot, but didn’t know he was dead. Which he was, in a way. I sipped on the martini and watched my new star witness walk across the street.
I saw the black car before I knew what it meant. It seemed to have pulled out from the sidewalk. Lehman was crossing Arlington, not looking. From the bar, I saw the car accelerating silently toward him. I half-rose, a strangled yell in my throat which tasted like gin.
Then Lehman saw the car. He stood stock still for a split second, as if he had expected it. Then he gave a pathetic little skip, stretching forward to the sidewalk. The car smashed into Lehman in mid-stretch, his hands reaching toward the Garden. I saw him flying above the car in slow motion, arms flailing like a spastic rag doll. He seemed to snap in mid-air as the black car moved by. Then he fell in a precipitous dive, hit on his head, and folded into a shapeless heap. The heap didn’t move.
Gubner’s mouth was hanging open. I ran from the table, shouting for an ambulance. I smashed into someone in the entrance of the bar and bounced him off the wall. I kept moving. Lehman lay where he had fallen, alone. A few pedestrians stared at him from the sidewalk. A sticky splotch of blood spread like oil from his head. I reached him and felt for his pulse. Nothing. Then I looked at his face. It was a garish nightmare. But out of it stared one pale blue eye. It still looked sad.
Nine
Gubner was squatting next to me, chanting “Oh, my God” over and over, like an incantation. I got up, feeling sick. A lump of passers-by were gawking at me. I went for the nearest one, a thin middle-aged man, and grabbed him by the lapels. “Be useful, you moron. Go to the Ritz and make sure the cops come.” The voice I heard was very clear and very cold. It was mine. The man nodded soundlessly, gaping at my bloody hands. I stared at him for a second, then dropped him from my grasp. He clambered off to the Ritz. I watched him to the door. Then I went to the iron fence, grabbed it, and threw up.
After a moment I stood, staring at the swans and the flowers in the Garden. Then I turned back to the street. Gubner was still stooped by Lehman’s body, standing guard. The squad cars arrived in a squeal of sirens, with an ambulance. Three policemen got out and squatted around Lehman. A white-coated man probed him with his fingers. Then he and another man lay Lehman on a stretcher and bore him to the ambulance. The ambulance moved away. No sirens and no hurry.
Gubner and the cops drifted to the sidewalk. It all had a strange, dreamlike quality, as if I were stoned, watching a movie. The street was eerily empty, like a stage without props or actors. The only trace of Lehman was the splotch of blood.
I liked being alone. But I forced myself to cross the street. A crowd had gathered. One of the cops was asking questions, a big sharp-eyed man with dark sideburns and mustache and a low voice. He turned to me. I pulled myself together, and told him who we were. What had I seen, he asked. It was a Cadillac, I thought, late model. I hadn’t seen the hit-skip driver. Or the license plate. I guessed the car was going thirty-five, forty, and accelerating fast.
He was watching me closely. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think he was murdered.”
The cop’s eyes narrowed. He turned and barked something to another cop. Then they trundled Gubner and me into the back of a squad car. A crew-cut cop drove while the sharp-eyed one asked some more questions. We didn’t speak unless spoken to. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had stumbled into a surrealistic film. Gubner leaned against the corner of the car, white and waxen. We had stepped outside of our profession. And Lehman was dead.
The police station was down Berkeley Street in a squatty grey building. The police ushered us into the main room. It was sterile and badly lit, a paranoid’s cop-house. A fat sergeant with lifeless grey eyes sat at a desk behind a rail. The sharp-eyed cop disappeared. When he returned he told us we were seeing Lieutenant Di Pietro. He steered us down a dark corridor to an office on the left, and opened the door.
The room was light green, except where paint flaked off the walls, which was all over. Di Pietro sat behind a beat-up metal desk, next to a picture of a plump woman and three black-haired kids, and in front of a map of his precinct. He asked us to sit.
He was in his forties, with dark, curly hair, swept back. He had a kind of ridged, Castilian nose, hooded eyes, and a thin mouth set in a seamed face. “You gentlemen are both lawyers?” he said abruptly.
We nodded. The word “lawyer” had a dry sound, as if Di Pietro had just swallowed something disagreeable. I sensed bleakly that he would have preferred two run-of-the-mill murderer-rapists. “Sergeant Brooks”-he gestured at our sharp-eyed guide-“says that you think this is a homicide, Mr. Paget. I’d like you to tell me why.”
I felt Gubner’s eyes on me. “Do you know a man named William Lasko?” I asked.
The hooded eyes turned vague; evidently Di Pietro was not a reader. I went on. “Lasko’s a big industrialist here in Boston. We got a telephone tip a few days ago concerning some illegal transactions in his company’s stock. Then Lehman contacted me through Mr. Gubner and asked for a meeting. I flew up to Boston and met with both of them at the Ritz. Lehman was controller of Lasko’s company. He didn’t know about the stock. But he said he had something on Lasko-something worse. He never got to tell us what it was.”
Di Pietro inspected me wordlessly. I talked at the impassive face. “The thing is this. Lasko doesn’t need problems with the government. If he does, Justice may stick by its antitrust suit. That means Lasko may lose part of his company. And Lehman had something bad on him. As I recall, that’s known as motive.”
“What else?”
The stiff face was beginning to anger me. “Look, Lieutenant, how many pedestrians get run down in front of the Ritz at forty miles an hour? By hit-skip drivers in late model Cadillacs that accelerate instead of brake? Show me another and I’ll buy two tickets to the Policemen’s Ball.”
Di Pietro snapped at the holes in my argument. “Mr. Paget, I was thinking about motive when you were in prep school. Tell me this. What was Lehman going to tell you? Who drove the car? Whose car was it? How did Lasko find out about the meeting, or where it was going to happen?”
It was the last question that made me sick. “If you find the Cadillac,” I parried, “the rest may come easier. Lehman had to have left some marks.”
Di Pietro looked from me to Gubner. “Was Mr. Lehman a friend of yours?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gubner replied in a far-off voice. In our own ways, Di Pietro and I had started to look forward. Gubner was still looking back.
The contrast seemed to impress Di Pietro. He turned to me. “We were talking about motive. We’re not geared to come up with a motive on a man like this Lasko. I’m not a stock market wizard.” That was obvious. Still, the admission seemed to cost him something; the voice had trailed off unhappily. It struck me that he had been talking like a cop talks to a lawyer. And that I hadn’t helped.
“And I’m not a criminologist. But I can keep pushing and give you what I get.”
Di Pietro nodded stiffly. Then he stepped back into the safety of his own routine. “First you and your friend give us a complete statement. And don’t leave anything out.”
This last was said to me with the unblinking stare. Either I was touchy, or Di Pietro guessed that I was holding back on something. The possibility suggested dimensions to him that I hadn’t considered. I switched subjects. “I’d like some help from you, too. Sort of a trade-off.”
His voice was noncommittal. “We’ll see how it works out. But don’t get your ass in a wringer, playing detective. You’re not a cop.”
The thought seemed to give him some satisfaction. He stood up. We exchanged telephone numbers and a wary handshake. Gubner did the same, belatedly. Then Sergeant Brooks led us away.
They took our statements in a pale green room with a metal lamp hung from the ceiling. Then the crew-cut cop drove us back to the Ritz. Gubner brooded out the window. I wasn’t much better. My game with McGuire had turned into murder.
Giving the statement had made me feel more organized. But it didn’t help with anything else. Lehman’s chances had run out.
I figured Lasko had killed him. Nothing else made much sense. The question was how he had known to do it.
There were a couple of possibilities. I didn’t like them at all.
Ten
Gubner and I got out at the Ritz and wandered aimlessly through the lobby. We passed the bar without looking in, both of us carrying the weight of unsaid things. I decided to get them out.
“Let’s talk, Marty.”
He gave me a resentful look, like a trapped animal. Then he nodded. “OK, my room. But not long.”
We went to his room. I selected one of two matched blue chairs and turned on all the lights I could reach, to push away the police station. Gubner fell into his chair with a thick-bodied slump. He looked like a man who could use a drink. But this wasn’t the kind of tough day you could ease away with gin. I felt sad and helpless.
“This is pretty worthless, Marty, but I’m sorry.”
Condolences didn’t interest him much, especially from me. The useless words hung in the air. Gubner looked at the wall with an air of deliberate choice.
“OK, let’s have it.” The defensive sharpness in my voice surprised me. He turned on me with tired distaste.
“How did they know about the meeting?”
I wondered how he was so sure of the answer. “You can turn off your spotlight. I didn’t tell anyone outside of my agency. Try Lehman or yourself.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said distinctly.
“That leaves Lehman.” I said it with the hollow feeling that Gubner had an answer.
“I talked to Alec once. He called from a pay phone on the Mass. Turnpike. No tap possible. Sorry.” His voice wasn’t sorry at all.
I decided to play out the string. “What about meeting you? That could have looked strange.”
Gubner’s eyes flashed impatience. “I had lunch with Alec about seven, eight times a year. Almost every time I came to Boston. I was an old friend. Everyone knows that. And Alec swore he hadn’t told anyone else about meeting you. Not Valerie. Not anyone.”
I believed him. I could see Lehman cowering in a lonely phone booth before I could imagine him calling Gubner from his office. His sad afternoon apologia had the freshness of catharsis.
“Do you know anything more than what he told us?”
He shook his head. “Not about what he had on Lasko.”
I got up. “I can’t help you, Marty. But I may want to talk to you later-to get your help.”
His eyebrows raised in bitter inquiry. “Why should I?”
“You’ll have to answer that question yourself.” I let myself out, went down to my room, flopped on the bed, and stared at the bare ceiling, trying to pull my scattered thoughts together. A slow, sick anger spread through me like nausea. Lasko, Catlow, and a friend of theirs paraded around in my stomach. The phone rang.
It was McGuire. I looked at my watch. 7:30.
“Chris. I was at the office late. How was your wild goose chase?” His voice sounded reedy through the bad connection.
“Not good.”
“Cop out on you?”
“Not exactly. Someone ran him over.”
Silence. “You’re kidding me.”
The anger rose and gripped my throat. “You want pictures? He’s dead.”
