Kill Signal, page 22
part #1 of Marko Bell Series
Chapter 37
THREE MONTHS LATER
Shake Wingfield heard the knock on the door and nearly jumped. He hadn’t had many visitors of late.
At first there were plenty — reporters and TV people mostly — who came in the days after the Cortland Banks story consumed the city. Shake turned them all down, including Hollywood agents and producers who wanted to tell his story. But the attention decreased after he was cleared of wrongdoing in Bordelay’s death. Once Bordelay had been revealed to be a key operative for the decades-long conspiracy run by Emerson Banks and Jim Deegan to cover up the murder of Nora Stanton in 1969, the homicide of Wayne Bordelay was quietly allowed to recede. It served no one’s purposes to inspect Shake Wingfield’s actions and motivations too closely.
Things calmed down, and Shake slowly began to unwind his life.
He picked a real estate agent and accepted the first halfway decent offer for the house. With the downturn in the market he had actually lost money in the deal, getting back only $100,000 of the $300,000 he’d made as a down payment. Now he was packing up the house while his daughters finished their school semester in Beverly Hills and Abby tied up loose ends. They had put an offer on a little stucco fixer-upper in Bernal Heights. It wasn’t much, but Shake figured he could work on it during his disability leave. Make it nice and homey. Start over. With the little money he had put away, they could survive for a few more months, he and Abby and the girls.
Then he’d find work, maybe Abby would find work, and by the time summertime rolled around they’d have a routine, in their comfortable little house. Shake imagined picking up the girls from school, bringing them home, making dinner, waiting for Abby.
They’d have to take it slow. It was autumn and the temperature had dipped into the 40s in the Bay Area.
Shake opened the door and was surprised to see Danny Cannon.
“Looks like I found you just in time,” Danny Cannon said, looking around the nearly empty living room.
Against his better judgement, Shake felt a twinge of warmth. “Come on in, Cannon.”
They stood in the big empty room for a long time. For the first time since he had known Danny Cannon, Shake didn’t feel he had to be on his guard. He chalked it up to some new side of Cannon that he hadn’t noticed before, or to the camaraderie that develops between people who had lived through a traumatic event together, before Shake realized that the explanation was simpler: He had nothing to hide anymore.
Cannon whistled. “Hoo boy, you must’ve taken a bath on this beauty. You bought, what, in 2004? Top of the freaking market?” He shook his head and chuckled. “The California real estate dream. It fucked the best, and it fucked the rest.”
Shake had to laugh, too. The funny thing was, he had never even liked the house. Too big and too drafty, with hallways and rooms everywhere. And the eastern exposure meant the house was dark and gloomy every afternoon.
Shake picked up a bottle of Maker’s Mark that had been keeping him company during his morning cleaning. He filled two paper cups, handing one to Cannon. “Goodbye, my elegant Mediterranean. Goodbye, my spacious stunner. Goodbye, four bedroom and three-point-five bathrooms. Goodbye, hardwood floors, updated kitchen and expansive courtyard.”
“Courtyard?
“There’s a postage-stamp sized brick patio in the middle of the backyard dirt. Yes sir, that’s a courtyard. Sure looked good in that glossy magazine, though.”
Cannon roared, and as the absurdity of it sank in, Shake laughed until his eyes watered.
“So what now, Shake?” Cannon asked when they stopped laughing. “You going back to the force?”
“No,” Shake said, nearly breaking into laughter again. “I’m done. Three more months on my disability, then I’m out.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe PI work. Maybe open up a little recording studio, a little music label. Plenty of bands in this town who could use a demo tape and a manager. More likely, just lay low for a while. Work on this new place we found in Bernal, maybe do a little construction work on the side.”
Shake poured them another drink. “What about you, Cannon? You’re not going to stick around in this cowtown after getting a Pulitzer nomination, are you?”
“I’ve forgotten what it’s like not to have lunch with a New York editor in the last three months, Shake. Book deals, the works. And you know what I learned? The New York expense account is a beautiful thing.”
“Well, invite me to your going-away party, alright? I can’t say I’ll miss you, but the city won’t be the same.”
Cannon finished his drink, crumpled up the paper cup and tossed it into a black garbage bag on the floor. “You know, part of me is a little sad. You spend your whole career waiting for a story like this. It’ll never come again.”
“You never know.”
“I know. Look, cut the bullshit, Shake. You know why I came here.”
“You mean it wasn’t to help me pack?”
“Bordelay didn’t really kill Walter, did he?”
“Sure he did. Quintuple homicide, remember?”
“I make it as quadruple. You ask me, Walter was a revenge killing.”
“Revenge for what?” Shake said, wanting Cannon to say it.
“For La Traviata. For Walter being on the take. For letting Donna Bell get killed.”
Shake poured himself another drink. “The District Attorney didn’t see it that way.”
He was feeling a little drunk. He supposed one day, when he and Abby and the girls were together again, life would make sense. “Thanks to you. All those stories of Marko and Donna, a perfect love story destroyed.” Shake laughed. “Marko could have shot the Pope in Union Square and gotten off in this town.”
Cannon shot Shake a look. “I take it you didn’t mind the stories making you look pretty heroic, too.”
Shake swallowed his bourbon and felt the shame come back, and he wasn’t sure if it would ever go away. “Why didn’t you tell the truth about me, Cannon? About how I was slurping from the trough, just like Walter and a dozen others?” Shake left out names, not sure how much Cannon knew, assuming the answer was everything. He left out Cuddy.
“I didn’t lie, Shake. I just didn’t tell the entire truth.”
Shake grabbed two expensive wooden folding chairs that were leaning against the wall – he’d bought two dozen when they first moved in, preparing for a lifetime of elaborate dinner parties and social events, at which Abby would be able to replicate a Beverly Hills lifestyle in the mists of the Marina – and opened them up for him and Danny.
“I still don’t get how they did it. That whole network thing.”
“The lawyers were up my ass on every one of those stories,” Cannon said, rolling his eyes. “Told me I had to check and double-check and triple-check every fact. Nothing goes in the paper that’s not confirmed by somebody in the know. Makes it impossible to write a proper tale. Sometimes you just know things, you know?”
“I know.”
Cannon shook his head in wonderment. “Deegan had staggering organizational and operational skills, honed in the CIA in the 1950s. The system was built on a network of civil servants, in two tiers — an inner circle of ambitious politicians about whom Deegan and Banks possessed knowledge that if revealed would be disastrous to their political hopes, and an outer circle of lowly servants in the key areas of information technology and crime scene investigation who could reliably be counted on and who knew nothing and posed no threat.”
“How did they identify the right people? Make sure they wouldn’t blow cover?”
“Psychological analysis, developed by Deegan himself. They were approached and given simple and specific directions. And they wanted to keep the money rolling in. Didn’t much care where it was coming from, or for what. Plus, it was a careful system. Nothing traceable, no one the wiser. It’s cash, it’s a classified ad in the newspaper – Deegan takes a look at the classifieds each day. If he sees it, he knows something is up.”
“What’s the message say?”
“What?”
“The cryptic classified ad. What does it say?”
“Oh. It’s different for everybody. That’s how Deegan knows who’s sending it. They all have a local angle. One of them is, ‘The Giants win the pennant.’ Another one is ‘Where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars.’”
Shake drained the last of the bottle into their cups and they sat in silence for a few minutes.
The sun had gone overhead and the light started to leach out of the room, bathing him and Cannon in a bourbon-soaked gloom. Shake was drunk but alert, hanging on Cannon’s words, filing away his questions for later. It then struck Shake that the answers may dwindle from here on out; some of them Cannon wouldn’t know, and some of them Shake would realize didn’t matter anymore. They were reaching the end.
“What about Donna. How did they find out about her?”
“I don’t know yet. I figure it was a plant in the public library system who monitored research requests.”
“So they had a bunch of informants out there that we’ll never know about.”
“Oh, we’ll know. Now that the checks have stopped coming, people will start talking. In a weird way, Cort is the victim. I actually don’t think he really knew what they were up to, or at least he knew little enough that he could rationalize he wasn’t a part of it. Now he’s toast. He can’t even get a cushy do-nothing gig with a lobbying firm. He’s got too much baggage. He’s like O.J.”
Cannon shook his head as if to clear cobwebs, then stood up and looked at his watch. “I’m headed to City Hall for Cuddy’s swearing-in. You want to come?”
Shake had heard on the all-news radio station that morning that Alfonse Fuqua, the new mayor, would be swearing in Jack Cuddy as the new police chief, replacing Richard Byrd, who had been, as the boilerplate news phrasing now had it, “swept up in the massive San Francisco political and police corruption scandal that ended the presidential aspirations of U.S. Senator Cortland Banks.”
Shake looked around at the moving boxes, mostly packed up. He’d gotten about as much done as he was likely to get done today, and he figured he owed it to Cuddy. “Sure, Cannon. But let’s take a cab.”
A few minutes later they were riding down Bay Street and making a right on Van Ness, the gray-blue bay disappearing off to their left as they made the turn. Shake settled back in his seat, feeling pleasantly drunk, happy to be out of the force, looking forward to seeing Abby and the girls. This time, he knew, he could make it work. It was the most hope he had felt in a long time.
Cannon was mostly silent beside him, looking out the window and occasionally muttering about a commercial development going up, speculating on the political favors that had been granted to get the steel and concrete in place. Always the reporter. The questions still nagging Shake didn’t seem worth asking now. It was time to move on.
The cab sped through a yellow light at Clay and they crested the top of the hill until the dome of City Hall was before them, the gold filigree outlined against the gray sky.
“Boy, Karen had Cuddy by the balls, didn’t she? Thing about my job, I hear things. Can’t say they’re true or not true, but I hear things. He wanted her out, but she let him know she knew — about him taking his Tommy Phong cut.” Cannon laughed. “I should have known not to underestimate her, after she got me to do her dirty work on Flanagan.”
Karen Yancey was standing on the mayor’s balcony at City Hall. The press corps had arrived en masse and was crowding the terrace, where Mayor Alfonse Fuqua was beaming, his arm around Jack Cuddy.
“And now I am pleased to present the new police chief of the city of San Francisco, Jack Cuddy.”
As Cuddy was speaking, Karen noticed he looked a little older suddenly, but maybe it was because Karen now understood how much he had compromised himself to stand there next to Alfonse Fuqua. To be the one left standing.
She caught sight of a yellow taxi slowing down in front of City Hall, a familiar bristly head looking up at her.
“As my first order of business as Chief of Police,” Cuddy said, turning to hear with a practiced grin, “I’d like to introduce my new Deputy Chief of Police, Karen Yancey.”
The lights of the cameras were blinding as she made her way to the edge of the terrace. Down below, there were more reporters and more cameras. She saw Shake watching her from the back of the taxi and thought she saw something that looked like pride on his face. She looked out at the crowd and waved as cheers rose up from the street.
Zoran Basich, Kill Signal
