The Bright Silver Star (10 page)

Tito glowered at him in lethal silence for a long moment—until he broke into sudden, side-splitting laughter. Uncontrollable hysterics. “God, that was so cool,” he finally managed to say, gasping. “Thanks for that moment, man. I’ll have to use it in a scene someday.”

“It’s all yours,” Mitch said, wondering just how much of Tito’s erratic behavior was for real and how much was simply designed to keep people off-balance and afraid. He couldn’t tell. Could Tito?

“Tito?!” Esme called out to him from across the food hall. She and Chrissie were waiting at the door. “Come on, let’s go!”

Tito waved in acknowledgement and started toward her.

“One more thing,” Mitch said, stopping the actor in his tracks.

“What is it
now,
man?” Just like that he’d switched over to irritation.

“This kind of stuff is really beneath you.”

“You know dick about me, man.”

“I know you’re better than this. Much better.”

Tito considered Mitch’s remark for a long moment, tugging thoughtfully at his lower lip. Then he abruptly spat on the floor at Mitch’s feet and stormed off.

“Then again,” Mitch said to himself softly, “maybe you’re not.”

C
HAPTER 4

T
HE
C
ITGO MINIMART WAS
three miles down Old Shore Road from the village, past McGee’s Diner, past Jilly’s Boatyard, just before the turnoff for Peck’s Point. There were some summer bungalow colonies clustered another couple of miles down the road, so the Citgo usually did a thriving business this time of year. Right now, Des found only a couple of pickups parked outside as she pulled up in her cruiser and got out. Right now, she found trouble.

Their big plate glass window had been smashed to bits.

Most of those bits were scattered inside all over the floor, Des discovered as she strode through the open door, crunching them under her feet. Some pieces remained framed in place, their sharp jagged edges exposed. A young workman was using a rubber mallet to tap them onto a tarp he’d laid on the pavement outside.

The owners of the station, the Acars, were visibly upset. Behind the counter, Mrs. Acar, a tiny woman in a headscarf, was trembling, her dark eyes wide with fright. Her husband was busy sweeping up and acting extremely brisk and take-charge. Also really unhappy to see Des. He wouldn’t so much as look at her.

It wasn’t either one of them who’d placed the call to her. It was the young workman, a customer.

“I got me some plywood I can let you have, Nuri,” he said. “Until you can get a new piece of glass, I mean.”

“That would be very kind of you, Kevin,” Mr. Acar responded, glancing up at him. Which meant he could no longer pretend that Des wasn’t standing there in the doorway “Good afternoon, Trooper. How may I help you?”

“You can tell me what happened here.”

“This happened,” Mrs. Acar responded, placing a smooth, round,
granite stone on the counter. It was about the size of a man’s fist. In her tiny hand, it looked huge. Someone had painted 9/11 on it in red paint. “It struck very near to my head,” she said, pointing to a dent in the Sheetrock wall behind her. “It was fortunate we had no customers in line at the time or they might have been hit, with dire consequences.”

“As you can see, no one
was
hurt,” Mr. Acar spoke up, forcing a tight smile onto his face. “The window is easily replaced. So there is no trouble.”

“Did either of you see who threw it?”

“We saw nothing,” he replied crisply. “It was one of our quiet moments. I was in the back room replenishing some supplies for the men’s lavatory. And Nema was—”

“Where were you, Mrs. Acar?” Des asked, not liking the way he was trying to stampede her. The man was a bit too anxious for her to pack up and go.

“Restocking my case,” Nema replied, indicating the glass case next to the cash register, which was filled with exotic homemade pastries.

“You didn’t see it happen?”

“I heard the crash of broken glass. And I ducked. I saw . . . nothing,” she said, glancing meekly at her husband. “Then I heard a car pull away very rapidly, a screech of tires. That is all.”

“Did you get a make or license number of the car?”

“No, this was not possible. It was gone before I could get a look.”

“Which way was the car heading when it left—back toward town?”

“The other way, I believe. I am not positive.”

Des went to the door and glanced outside. On this stretch of Old Shore there were no businesses on the other side of the road, just an overgrown tangle of vines, creepers, and wild berries. About a hundred yards past the Citgo, heading away from town, there was a sharp left turn onto Burnham Road, a narrow, residential lane that snaked its way through some old farms and ended up back in the village. Whoever did this most likely turned there and was gone in a
flash. Probably two kids in a pickup—one drives, the other crouches in back and throws the stone. Swamp Yankees, if she had to guess. Indigenous lost boys with a hate thing for immigrants. Especially immigrants who were operating a successful new business.

“Have you folks had any trouble like this before?” Des asked Mr. Acar.

“No trouble at all, Trooper,” he answered. “Everyone has been very welcoming. And, while your presence is greatly appreciated, I wish you’d not pursue this matter any further. It will only draw more attention toward it, which we do not consider desirable. We shall happily bear the cost of replacing the glass. As you can see, this gentleman is already helping.”

Des shoved her horn-rims up her nose, and said, “Look, I understand where you’re coming from, Mr. Acar—”

“Please, call me Nuri,” he purred, smiling at her ingratiatingly. More than ingratiatingly. The man was starting to ogle her long form right in front of his wife.

“Nuri, a crime has been committed here,” she said, her stomach muscles tightening involuntarily. The smarm wasn’t just undressing her with his eyes, he was licking her. “I have to file a report—that’s my job. Furthermore, the message on that stone is an obvious reference to the attack on the World Trade Center. We’ve got a task force operating out of the state’s attorney’s office that specializes in hate crimes such as this.”

“But who would hate us?” he asked her imploringly. “We are Turkish people, peaceful people. Turkey is America’s good friend.”

“You and I know that, but the morons who did this may not be too up on their international coalitions. Besides which,” she added, glancing at Nema’s headscarf, “you
are
Muslims, and that makes you different. Some people don’t care for different. I happen to know a little bit about what that’s like. I also know that when this kind of thing happens, it doesn’t just hurt you, it hurts the entire community. Look, let me show you something, okay?”

She went back out to her cruiser and fished around in her briefcase for the four-by-seven laminated Hate Crime Response Card that the
Connecticut State Police had developed in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League. When she returned with it the Acars were talking heatedly to one other. They broke it off at once. Des had a definite feeling that Nema was more anxious to cooperate than her husband was. Clearly, he didn’t want to involve the law at all. How come? Was something else going on here—say, somebody running a protection racket on him?

“Please, listen to this,” she said, reading to them from the laminated card. “It defines a hate crime as ‘a criminal act against a person or property in which the perpetrator chooses the victim because of the victim’s real or perceived race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, or gender.’ ” Des glanced up at the Acars, who were staring at her now in tight-lipped silence. “That’s why the task force needs to be brought in. They know the different hate groups and how they operate. They’ll know if someone’s been pulling this elsewhere around the state. It might be part of a pattern.”

“Foolish boys,” Mr. Acar sniffed at her dismissively. “Just a prank by foolish boys.”

“You’re probably right,” Des said, although she did have some nagging doubts. Why during daylight? Early afternoon was not the local bad boys’ usual hour for committing random acts of stupidity—late night was. “But this way we’ll know for sure, okay?”

“As you wish,” Nuri Acar said with weary resignation.

A customer in a BMW pulled up at a gas pump out front. Mr. Acar darted outside to help, grateful for the chance to get away from her.

Des was just as happy to see him go. One of the things in life that she was truly bad at was being civil to people who she thought were creeps.
Get along.
That was the Deacon’s motto, and he had ridden it all the way to the tippity toppity—deputy superintendent of the Connecticut State Police, highest-ranking black man in the state’s history. But Des was not her father, and that was why she wasn’t working homicides anymore. At age twenty-eight, Des had been Connecticut’s great nonwhite hope—the only black woman in the state to make lieutenant on the Major Crime Squad. She had produced, too. Outperformed every single man in the Central District.
Except she didn’t
get along
with the so-called Waterbury mafia—the inner circle of Italian-American males who pretty much ran things in the state police. They liked to have their big, fat egos stroked, especially by the pretty girls. Des hadn’t played along, hadn’t respected them. And they could tell. And when the chance came to knife her, they had.

“May I offer you a coffee?” Nema asked, smiling at her uncertainly. “A baklava, perhaps?”

“I’m all set, thanks,” Des said, as Kevin began hammering the plywood into place over the broken window.

“I regret the circumstances, but I am so pleased to meet you at long last. Your friend is my friend, after all.”

“My friend?”

“Mr. Mitch Berger,” Nema said. “He is a fine, fine man. And one of my very best pastry customers.”

“I’ll just bet he is,” Des said, her eyes scanning the case of sweets. Some were covered with powdered sugar, just like the powdered sugar he’d had on his collar at lunch. So this was where he came to blow huge holes in his diet. It did occur to Des, standing there at the counter, that Mitch was at heart a fat little boy and always would be. Still, if this was the worst kind of lie he was capable of then she was lucky and she damned well knew it.

“Such a modest gentleman,” Nema added. “No airs, despite his prestigious position with the newspaper. And quite the gourmet. Very discerning.”

“That he is.” Des did not mention his penchant for eating potloads of his god-awful American chop suey, or that she had once found a box of Great Starts microwave sausage-and-egg breakfast burritos in his freezer. She did not want to shatter any illusions, or slow Nema down. The lady was working her way up to telling her something.

“Nuri does not mean to be difficult,” she finally said, clearing her throat uneasily. “We wish only to blend in. Surely you can understand that.”

“Absolutely,” Des said, because she could understand. She just
couldn’t blend in. “Your husband said he was in back when it happened. You were here behind the counter?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“Sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me, one friend to another?”

Nema glanced nervously out the glass doors at her husband. “No, nothing.”

Clearly, the lady was holding back. She was also frightened. Of what? Who? “Well, if you remember anything . . .” Des handed Nema her card and urged her to give her a call, knowing she never would. Then she bagged and tagged the rock, which would go to the Westbrook Barracks along with her report. The task force would take it from there.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of canvassing.

Mr. Acar was washing the BMW’s windshield. She tipped her big hat to him politely. He acknowledged her gesture with an equally polite wave. She got into her cruiser and eased it down Old Shore to that quick left onto Burnham, where she parked on the shoulder and got out. She knelt and inspected the pavement carefully for fresh skid marks. Saw none.

Three old farmhouses were clustered there on Burnham not far from Old Shore Road. No one was home at the first house. At the second house she managed to wake up a young man who’d worked the overnight shift at Millstone, the nuclear power plant in Water ford. He hadn’t heard anyone speeding by his house in the past hour and was very grumpy about saying so.

Des approached the third house with some reluctance. This one belonged to Miss Barker, an elderly spinster who had called Des twice in past weeks with dire emergencies. A prowler who turned out to be a meter reader from Connecticut Light and Power, and a suspicious-looking hoodlum dumping toxic waste in the marsh who was, in fact, a marine biologist with the Department of Environmental Protection. Still, Miss Barker wasn’t a bad person, just lonely and scared. And she missed nothing that went on out on her street.

It took the old girl a while to get to the door. She didn’t move very
well, which was why Des hadn’t tried pressing a kitten on her—she was too likely to trip over it and fall. She was a slender, frail thing with Q-Tip hair, partial to pastel-colored pantsuits. Today she was pretty in pink. The scent of Miss Barker’s heavy, fruity perfume wafted out of the doorway with her. She wore so much of it that Des got lightheaded if she went inside the house.

“Sure, it’s those darned kids,” she responded promptly after Des had explained the purpose of her visit. “They all come tearing around that corner too fast. Especially at night. I hear their tires screeching when I’m lying here in my bed. I’m afraid of what’ll happen, dear, I don’t mind saying. One of those fool boys is going to smash right into the side of my bedroom some night. The explosion will kill me dead in my bed. Incinerate me sure as I’m standing—”

“This would have happened within the past hour, Miss Barker,” Des said, trying to rein her in.

“We ought to have a speed bump out there to slow those boys down, but do you think they listen to me at town hall? I’ve only been paying property taxes here since 1946, never missed a single payment.”

“Miss Barker, did you hear any screeching tires within the past hour?”