A Scourge of Vipers (9 page)

I ducked through the revolving door, shook the rain from my cap, and scanned the tenant directory: TD Ameritrade, Janney Montgomery Scott, the BankRI Art Gallery, Café la France, a pride of life insurance companies, a bloat of boutique law firms … Then I rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor and strode to the end of a spit-shined hallway. There I found a frosted-glass door discreetly labeled in gold paint:

McCracken & Associates

CONFIDENTIAL
INVESTIGATIVE
SERVICES

Inside, a secretary who resembled Rihanna stabbed at a keyboard with glitter-polished nails. Putting my own investigative skills to the test, I deduced from the nameplate on her desk that this was not the actual pop star but rather a pretender known to her friends and colleagues as Sharise Campbell. Behind her were three oaken doors. A golden metal plate on one of them said “Mr. McCracken.” The other two doors were blank.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I don't, but I was hoping your boss might be able to squeeze me in.”

“That would be quite irregular, sir, but it would be my pleasure to ask if you can tell me your name and what this is regarding.”

“They call me Mulligan, and I'm here to see if the resident gumshoe can weasel me out of a murder rap.”

She didn't even raise an eyebrow. She just lifted the receiver of her desk phone and murmured into it. Then she beamed at me and said, “You're in luck, sir. Mr. McCracken is able to see you now.” She rose on Rihanna's legs, opened the door to her right, and ushered me inside.

“May I bring a refreshment for you and your guest, Mr. McCracken?”

“Yes, Sharise,” he said as he got up to greet me. “Two cups of your excellent coffee, please. Mr. Mulligan takes it with cream and one sugar.”

“Right away, sir.”

As McCracken crushed my fingers in his grip, I took inventory. Gone was my friend's dated Sears blazer. Now his five-foot-eight-inch weight-lifter's body was draped in a chalk-striped navy-blue suit that hung like it had been made for him. A Glock automatic and a gun-cleaning kit rested on the glare of his desk, a modernistic slab of glass and steel big enough to accommodate off-street parking. To the left was a small cherrywood bar stocked with Johnnie Walker Black, Chivas Regal, Knob Creek, Rémy Martin, and Grey Goose in three vile fruit flavors. Behind the desk, high windows looked down on a neighborhood of restored colonial homes nestled just across the shit-brown ribbon of the Providence River. The red-and-green rug in the center of the white marble floor looked like real Persian.

The office's bone-white walls were adorned with framed autographed photos of Ernie DiGregorio, John Thompson, Marvin Barnes, Johnny Egan, Lenny Wilkins, and a dozen more basketball legends from Providence College, where McCracken and I were undergrads together a lifetime ago. The last time I saw those photos, they were hanging in a shabby, one-man storefront office shoehorned between a bucket-of-blood bar and the police station in the sorry waterfront town of Warren, Rhode Island. My friend's fortune had taken a turn for the better.

“Nice,” I said.

“The office or Sharise? She's engaged, so do your ogling from a respectful distance.”

“I'll try to behave.”

The woman in question returned with a silver tray that held two china cups, matching creamer and sugar bowl, two silver spoons, and a pair of monogrammed cloth napkins. She placed the tray on a cherry coffee table in front of a cognac-colored sofa that smelled like real leather. McCracken and I sank into it and picked up our cups as she left and silently shut the door.

McCracken leaned back and plunked his shiny black Bruno Maglis on the tabletop.

“I gather business is booming,” I said.

“It's getting there. I'm on retainer with five law firms and two insurance companies now, and the wayward-spouse racket is outta sight.”

“That's enough to support all this?”

“Not quite yet. The rent here is steep. But you gotta look the part if you want to attract a deep-pocket clientele.”

“So who are these associates I read about on the door?”

“There aren't any.”

“The other two offices are empty?”

“Yeah, but I got plans to expand,” he said. “Hold on a sec.”

He pulled himself to his feet, padded across the rug to his desk, and rummaged in a drawer. Then he came back and handed me an engraved brass nameplate. The name on it was Shamus Mulligan.

“I know you don't like your first name,” he said, “so Liam was out. I was gonna make it L. S. A. Mulligan, like your byline, but then I realized one of those Gaelic middle names of yours worked better.”

“Because Shamus is slang for private detective?”

“Bingo.”

“On my birth certificate, it's spelled S-E-A-M-U-S.”

“So what? The sign goes on the door as soon as you're ready to start.”

“I'm still thinking on it.”

“Don't take too long, okay? I could use some help around here.”

“I hear you.”

“So tell me, now,” he said. “Who did you kill this time?”

“Whaddaya mean, this time? The creep I shot last year made a full recovery.”

“I know. Thanks to you, the taxpayers have to provide him with free food and shelter for life. I hope your aim is better now.”

“It is the way the homicide twins tell it.”

“The corpse have a name?”

“Mario Zerilli.”

“Mario's dead?”

“Maybe,” I said, and gave him the rest of it.

“Well, I can't say I'm surprised,” he said. “That asshole was into some nasty shit.”

“I know. It would be fine by me if
all
the women-beaters and gay-bashers end up facedown in the Blackstone.”

“If that
was
his body in the river,” McCracken said, “a lot of people had reason to put it there. So what can I do to help?”

“Nothing. I'm not losing any sleep over this one.”

“You're here about something else?”

“I am,” I said. “What do you know about the video surveillance system at Green Airport?”

“Not much, but I can make a call. A buddy of mine runs the crew that installed it.”

“Can you find out how long they keep the video, if they have face-recognition software, and if they do, whether we can get somebody to check, say, the last three months for me?”

“You're joking, right?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Face-recognition software? You've been watching too much junk TV.”

“But I thought—”

“You thought wrong,” he said. “The technology's in development, but unless the NSA or the CIA has come up with something they aren't sharing, it works less than half the time. It's pretty good if the camera catches the face straight on, but the more it veers toward profile, the less reliable it gets. And it's easily fooled by facial expressions, too. Even a grin or a frown can throw it off. And sunglasses? Fugettaboutit. Most times, it can't tell the difference between Osama and Obama.”

“Just like Fox News,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So if I wanted to find a face in the crowd,” I said, “I'd have to go through all the video myself?”

“If you could get you access to it, yeah. Who is it you'd be looking for?”

“This guy,” I said, and handed him my cell phone.

McCracken's jaw dropped.

“What is your interest in Lucan Alfano?” he said.

Then it was my jaw that dropped.

“What's yours?” I asked.

 

12

“The sign on the door says
confidential
investigative services,” McCracken said.

“So you're not going to tell me?”

“Not unless you have something to trade. Even then, it would have to be off the record.”

“Alfano died with a briefcase on his lap,” I said. “Inside it was two hundred grand in hundred-dollar bills.”

“You know this how?” he asked, so I told him.

“What else have you got?”

So I spilled about the list of names.

“Did you already know about this?” I asked.

“No.”

McCracken rubbed his jaw and took a moment to decide what he was willing to share.

“About a month ago,” he said, “a public official came in here with a story. He claimed a stranger who looked like Paulie Walnuts had walked into his statehouse office unannounced on March third and offered him a large sum of cash in return for a favor. The offer came with a warning not to call the police.”

“You took his case?”

“I did.”

“Did this favor have something to do with the governor's gambling bill?”

He nodded.

“The man wanted the bill killed?”

“He wanted it modified.”

“To turn the bookmaking over to private enterprise?”

“That's right.”

“It was Alfano who made the offer?”

Another nod.

“Your client knows this how? Did Alfano give his name?”

“He didn't.”

“So?”

“So my client trailed him outside and watched him walk down the hill toward downtown. The guy crossed the street and entered the Omni Hotel.”

“Then what?”

“After I took the case, I dropped by the hotel and asked the desk clerk if he'd recently had a guest who looked like Paulie Walnuts. He remembered the guy, all right. Said he'd registered under the name Michael O'Toole and paid with an unusual credit card.”

“Unusual how?”

“It didn't have his name on it. Just a company name, Bucks and Pesos Inc.”

“I thought all credit cards are supposed to have the holder's name on them.”

“So did I,” he said. “Turns out there's at least one so-called bank that issues credit cards with just business names.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“You think? Far as I can tell, the bank exists only on the Internet. According to its website, it will also register your company name in Central America and set you up with an offshore bank account.”

“Alfano and this Bucks and Pesos are one and the same?”

“They are.”

“How did you find that out?”

“I gave the desk clerk a hundred bucks for the credit card information, and then I traced it. Had to call in a lot of favors before I was able to link it to Alfano. Once I had his name, I called a P.I. I know in Atlantic City and got the lowdown on him. The P.I. also sent me Alfano's picture.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I phoned the client and gave him my report. I told him I couldn't do anything more for him and urged him to call the state police.”

“Did he?”

“I don't know. I haven't heard from him since. Hasn't paid his bill yet either.”

“What's the client's name?”

“You're butting up against that confidentiality thing again.”

“Was it on the list found in Alfano's pocket?”

“No.”

“I still want a look at the airport surveillance video,” I said, “but I think we can limit it to the first week of March.”

“What do you expect to learn from that? I already told you Alfano was in town then.”

“I won't know until I see it,” I said.

*   *   *

After dinner that evening, I popped open a bottle of Killian's and flopped down in front of the television to watch
Revolution.
The show was one of those sagas of a dystopian future that were more popular than ever this year. You couldn't snap on the TV or wander into a movie theater without being menaced by marauding militias, brain-eating zombie armies, homicidal super-villains, or aliens hell-bent on exterminating the human race.

We were already doing a bang-up job of that without their help according to the so-called news spewed by cable TV pundits, talk radio demagogues, and lunatic-fringe websites. I'd come to dread their daily blizzard of paranoia, misinformation, and outright lies about climate change, Sharia law, secret government concentration camps, and phony wars on everything from guns to Christmas. Conspiracy nuts were in ascendance, hallucinating about communists in the White House, spreading fear about jihadists in the State Department, praying for the Apocalypse, buying gold as a hedge against impending social disorder, stockpiling assault weapons to defend themselves from their freely elected leaders, and ranting about the New World Order, black helicopters, autism-causing vaccines, immigrants who don't learn English fast enough, and imaginary assaults on a Constitution most of them had never read.

I tried to be hopeful about the future, but sometimes, like now, I believed that I was living in an insane asylum. Tens of millions of Americans, so buried in bullshit that they were no longer able to distinguish fact from fiction, had lost the capacity for rational debate. They shrieked insults across a widening chasm, treated political opponents as mortal enemies, and thought compromise was synonymous with treason. I couldn't see a way out of the mess. Newspapers were dying, and nothing was on the horizon to replace them as honest brokers of information.

I clicked the TV off and opened a mystery novel by the late Robert B. Parker, eager to immerse myself in an imaginary world in which problems had solutions and the good guys always won.

Five chapters in, Jesse Stone, the police chief in the mythical coastal town of Paradise, Massachusetts, learned that the body he'd found on the first page belonged to a fear-mongering radio talk-show host who reminded me of Iggy Rock. Jesse didn't think the guy would be missed.

 

13

By Monday, I'd recovered enough from my fake illness to return to work. Several days' worth of mail had piled up on my desk, and it was mostly the usual crap. The lone bright spot was an offering from Lieutenant Governor Pasquale Mancuso, the undisputed winner of my daily stupid press release challenge.