The Perfect Crime (6 page)

It started to sprinkle lightly. The sun was out, but it was raining. Reader liked that when it happened. It put him in a happy mood.

“The Indians got muskets themselves, took them off the few white men they were able to kill with their fucking Stone Age bow and arrows. They started to hold their own again for a while. But the white man came up with repeating rifles. The Indians were right back in the soup again. It kept happening, over and over. Once the Indians got their own selves some rifles, the white man said okay, we got to have something else. Andey did. They invented Gatling guns. That was the end of the Indians. You see, Eddie, it’s technology. Today the technology is electronics. They got it--we don’t. That’s why we get caught. By we, I mean those of us on the other side of the law. That’s why you’re an Indian. You and everybody who looks like your sorry ass. You’re trying to fight somebody with a bow and arrow and they got a Gatling gun.”

“You know what, Reader?” Eddie sat the transmitter down on the car hood and reached through the window into the back seat and took out a beer from the cooler. He popped it and took a long pull, beer dribbling off the sides of his mouth. “You’re a smart cookie I guess. Me? I’m a simple gangster, don’t know that much. Know something else? I don’t fucking
care
about all that shit you’re talkin’. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Only don’t call me no fucking Indian. I’m French-Canadian, me, Eddie Delahousie. I don’t know if you been puttin’ me down or what, but don’t do it no more.”

Reader laughed. “Okay, Eddie, okay. Look, I wasn’t putting you down, my friend. Explaining some history, that’s all. Tell you what.
You
do it.” He handed the Futaba back to Eddie.

“Me? Whaddya do?”

“Push the power button. And duck.”

“Duck?”

They both looked to where the dog stood. They could see his tail wagging. He’d quit trying to rid himself of the lump on his back and was standing facing them. He barked.

“Yeah. I’m not sure how big a charge that is. Might be pieces of pipe flying around. Be a shame you got your head tore off before you got to buy all them nice new shoes. Wait’ll I get the camera set.”

Eddie looked at him like he was trying to figure out if he was kidding and shook his head. Quickly, Reader picked up the camera, turned it on and found Eddie with it. As before, he swung the camera around, seeking out the German shepherd. Once in his sight, he held the zoom button down until the dog looked like he was only ten feet away.

“Now,” he said to Eddie.

Eddie held the Futaba out away from him at arm’s length and closed his eyes and pressed the red button. For a split second nothing happened and then…

“Holy fuck!”

The dog evaporated. Half his back disappeared. Flat-out disappeared. The odd thing was, he remained standing. For a second. His back was gone and half his head, the top half, but he remained standing. A frozen millisecond and then the dog collapsed and sank to the ground. Smoke and chips and chunks of metal flew in every direction, but none came as far as the car. They could see small flames sprouting up on the stump the dog had been tied to.

“Hot damn! Would you look at that, Reader! Man!”

“Yeah. Did a number, didn’t it? Took out Rover, killed half his family.” He turned off the camera, tossed it into the back seat.

“What’s the camera for?”

“We’re gonna have a private viewing in a few days. You, me and Mr. Clifford St. Ives, the Third.”

Eddie’s forehead wrinkled, making his eyebrows arch.

“That’s the mark, huh? Who’s--”

“President of Derbigny State Bank. He’s going to see what one pipe will do. Being as he’s gonna have three wired to his ass, I think we’ll have his attention.”

“
Three
pipes? Why three? That dog’s vaporized. Half that damn stump’s gone, too. Only take one to do the job.”

“That’s right, Eddie.”

He opened the car door and got in. Eddie got in his side. Reader started the engine and turned around in the road and began driving slowly back the way they’d come.

“Mr. St. Ives will see what one pipe will do. When he knows he’s got three hooked to him we’ll have his complete attention. Taped to his back, close to his spine and his kidneys and six dozen major arteries. His suit will hide it. Coats usually hang away from the body there. C’mon, get in. We got things to do, some more stuff to pick up.”

“Why we gotta go to all this trouble? You got me running here, there for all this crap when most of it we could pick up in one store.”

Reader sighed. He’d told Eddie a few details, enough for most people to grasp the idea, but Eddie didn’t seem to get it.

“I told you, Eddie. Every single thing connected to this job has to be gotten separately and in ways they won’t remember who they sold it to. Like our friend out there. You go to the pound and somebody remembers your face. You buy a mutt off some local yokel, nobody knows nothing. Why do you think I drove over a thousand miles to get this Futaba clear up in Ohio? I coulda picked it up in town.”

“Well? Why didn’t you?”

“Because, moron. Because some of the stuff I got doesn’t get sold every day. This job goes down--the Feds--everybody--will be all over the place. They’ll know every piece of equipment we used and if they trace it there’s a chance they’ll get a description. I walk into Radio Shack and buy a fine-ass remote controller like this Futaba and the FBI sends a sheet around to all the dealers in the country. About that time, some citizen out in Metry says, ‘Oh, yeah. I sold one of those to a guy looks like this.’ They bring one of them computer artists in and they get together and in two hours they have my face on
Unsolved Mysteries
in thirty-six countries.
That’s
why, you idiot.”

Reader tapped out a cigarette, got it going.

“Most fucks who do a job like this go in with guns drawn, lots of firepower showing. Fucking major mistake. For one thing, we can’t go in when the bank’s open because of all the problems I went over. The electronic shit. Now. St. Ives gets the money on Friday evening when the bank’s closed. Don’t ask me how I know this, I just do. It’s fucking drug money he launders for this outfit.”

“Ain’t
no
way to take it off?”

Reader looked at Eddie and the word
moron
went through his mind.

“Eddie, the only hard part of this is I have to convince St. Ives that a single mistake on his part gets him blown to hell and back and I won’t blink an eye doing it.” He straightened around in the seat and put the car back in gear.

“You think I can convince him of that, Eddie?

***

On the drive back to town, Eddie was quiet for a long time until he began talking again. “Where’d you say you got all this shit, Reader? Why can’t it be traced?”

Reader reached into his pants pocket and felt around for a bill. They were approaching the toll booth for the Pontchartrain Causeway.

“Easy. I got the only traceable part from someone who won’t talk.”

“Bullshit! You can’t trust anyone.”

“I can trust this guy, I think.”

“Oh yeah? How so?”

Reader stared at his partner and smiled.

“Because he’s dead.”

JACK FOGARTY WASN’T DEAD however. He was lying in a hospital bed with needles in his arms and tubes inserted into every possible orifice.

His brother Grady was at his store, which was located in what Dayton residents called the Oregon Historical District. It should have been called the “Oregon Deteriorated District,” Grady thought. It was a neighborhood where the local liquor store wouldn’t be apt to advertise “Free wine samples,” as he’d seen a store out in the suburbs do one time. Jack’s store was on Fifth Street, off Patterson and not far from the Great Miami River. Grady was familiar with the Miami. He’d seen more than a few floaters fished from its depths. When he was a kid he swam in it, took home stringers of smallmouth bass from its waters. The Miami still had fish in it, but you didn’t eat them. Not unless your body was low on its lead quotient for the day.

It was a day and a half removed from his brother’s attack and Jack had passed the crisis during the previous night. Chances were fifty-fifty he’d live, but the doctor still didn’t know the extent of his brain injury and how it would manifest. They were running test after test and the bill was mounting. Grady tried to keep his mind off that.

There was one positive about all this. After all the misfortune piled on him and his brother, once again there was a direction to his life. This sounded terrible when Grady considered it, but it was true. He had a mission once again. To find Jack’s attacker. A negative positive, if such a thing even existed, but Grady couldn’t deny the heightened state he had been in ever since he’d discovered his brother’s bloody body. He realized how much he’d missed the surge of adrenaline that came when you were on a case. Especially this case. Doing something useful. That was it. He realized how purposeless he’d come to feel in the past few years since he’d been forced out to pasture. Oh sure, he helped Jack out a lot at the store and he hustled security jobs when they became available, but jobs weren’t plentiful for a man with only one good eye, even if the vision in it was still 20-20. He had too many days when all he did was go fishing.

Or drinking. A lot of that lately. Booze and women. You hang around the one, you get the other. He’d go into a bar thinking he’d have one quick beer and it seemed like there’d always be an attractive and willing woman in the joint and two hours later he would know more about his new friend than he wanted to. There were times when Grady wasn’t sure whether good looks was a blessing or a curse. It was a toss-up. In a bar, with a beautiful woman sitting next to him, it seemed like a good thing, but the next morning staring out a bleary eye at the disheveled form lying next to him made him think otherwise. He suspected many of the women that ended up in his bed felt the same and he couldn’t much blame them. What he hated most was the morning cup of coffee they both felt obliged to share and which he felt they took with the same sense of sober awkwardness as he did. Rarely did he go out with any of them twice and only when he and a former bed partner found themselves next to each other on bar stools. It was a hell of a way to live, he’d thought more than once, but he didn’t do much to change it.

Booze was a way to keep from thinking how much he missed police work. Funny--the drunker he got, the more it cropped up in his thoughts. He shook his head the way a dog would in ridding itself of water after a dunking, and forced his mind to go blank.

He’d let himself in Jack’s store with his own key and was waiting for Marty to show up. It was the start of the detective’s weekend, but he’d only balked a little at Grady’s request.

“Well, I don’t know, Grady,” he’d said into the phone. “It’s my day off.” After a little silence, Marty said, “What the fuck. My wife is driving me nuts anyway. Give me an excuse to get out for a while. She’s got a bunch of women over for some kind of sex toys party and I can’t hear the ball game for their giggling. If I don’t get out, they’re going to be asking me to come model some of their shit. Give me half an hour. I gotta make a stop and pick up some butts.”

Grady walked through the debris that was strewn everywhere. He consciously avoided looking at the spot where he’d found his brother, but it was hard to miss. The rest of the store looked as though the proverbial tornado had blasted through from door to door. At first, he assumed the perp had been looking for stuff to hock, but the longer he looked at the pattern of parts and accessories lying about on the floor, the more he suspected the mess was too methodical. The way the shelves were tipped over, Grady suspected the crime was designed to look like simple vandalism.

The more I look at this, Grady decided, the more it stinks. At first he’d figured it was kids maybe or your basic armed robbery gone hinky, but none of the evidence seemed to hold up for that being the case. Yeah, on the surface it did, but not when you started looking at things closer. Things like the shelves that were tipped over. It wasn’t done randomly, for one thing. Every single one of them was pitched forward at the same angle. He bet there was no prints on any of them, either.

The front door opened and Marty came walking in.

“Your brother has quite a place,” he said. “Not exactly a Radio Shack.”

They shook hands. “I appreciate your time, Marty,” Grady said. “No, Jack’s got a pretty special store. He doesn’t get things from your usual sources. Most of his customers are serious hobbyists, into more sophisticated stuff than your weekend model airplane buff. I help him out quite a bit. He has some government clients. He’s got stuff the CIA could use.” He paused. “And does.”

“Not your strip center mom-and-pop operation, eh?” Marty grinned.

“Not at all.” Grady replied, a slight smile appearing on his face.

“How’s your--” Marty hesitated.

“Eye?” Grady finished it for him. “It’s fine. Messed up my golf game some, but I manage. My depth perception is a bit off at long distances. Under a hundred yards, it’s fine.”

“I didn’t know you were a golfer.”

“I’m not. That was supposed to be a joke.”

Marty reached down and picked up one of the parts lying on the floor, looked at it a second, then put it back.

“We were all sorry you retired, Grady. You were one of the best.”

There was a short silence in which Grady could think of nothing to say. He turned his face away from the other cop, self-consciously. Marty cleared his throat after a moment and said, “Well, hey, anyway... Listen, you know if any of those militia types ever come in? You know, survivalists, doomsdayers, folks like that?”

“Fruitcakes, you mean?” Grady thought a minute. “Well...a few, I guess. Jack was pretty careful, though.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “Oh--I see where you’re going. You think maybe one of those kooks...”

“I don’t think a goddamn thing at this point. Oh, I’ve got a couple of theories, but at this point, to be honest, we don’t have a line on any suspects at all. It’s a possibility though, isn’t it?”

Grady considered it a moment. “Sure.
Anything’s
a pobility at this point, but for some reason I don’t think this guy’s your garden-variety crackpot.”

“Why? Because it’s your brother who was robbed and hurt?”

Immediately, he took it back when he saw the way Grady’s jaw muscles twitched.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I meant...”

“You meant that my judgment might be colored because my only brother happened to be the one who almost got killed?”

“Well, no...”

“Hey.” He reached over and squeezed Marty’s shoulder and his expression softened. “Don’t sweat it. I’d probably think the same thing if it was you standing here. But, no. I don’t think my judgment’s screwed in this at all. What I think is that whoever did this is one smart cookie, not your garden-variety neo-Nazi fuck. Look at these shelves for instance.”

They walked over and stood looking down the rows of parts on the floor and the upended shelves. He explained to Marty his take on the shelves and the detective agreed, once he was done.

“You’re still a hell of a detective!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t see it that way at first.”

For a moment, both men stood looking silently at the jumble before them and Grady asked, “What have you guys got?”

“Well,” Marty began, “not a whole helluva lot so far. I got a new partner, young pup who thinks he knows it all. His theory is that it was either kids got surprised in a burglary or else it was an armed robbery went bad.”

“New academy graduate?”

“Yeah.”

Both men laughed.

Grady said, “I wish Jack could help us on this.”

“Yeah. Once he’s conscious and gives us a description of this punk, we got ‘im.”

“No, I was thinking another way. Even if he wasn’t the victim he could probably figure this out in a New York second. Remember the Boroni case?”

“It was before my time, but I heard stuff. Jack helped on that one, did he?”

“Helped? Hell, Jack
solved
it. By himself.”

The Boroni case was an insurance fraud affair. It was more than that. It was also a way Mr. Boroni figured out not only to collect the insurance on his Chris Craft, but to get rid of a wife who didn’t approve of his affairs. There was a bonus there too, in that she was worth half a million dead.

“Wasn’t there a bomb in Mrs. Boroni’s drink or something? It was something like that, wasn’t it? Boroni had one a’them weird old-time Eytalian names, didn’t he?”

Marty walked back up to the front of the store poking with his foot at the wreckage on the floor as he went. Grady followed along, recalling the case.

“That’s right. Ideal. That was his first name. Ideal Boroni. See, Boroni knew his wife liked her booze. She had this one she had all the time. Weird fucking shit. Seems she had a sweet tooth, liked Irish coffee. Well, sweet-tooth Irish coffee. She used espresso and dumped two of them packets of Sweet’N Low in it before she hit it with the booze. A dieting drunk you might say.”

Both men laughed. Grady went on.

“She was a pro lush, had a special espresso machine built into the cabinet of her boat that matched the one at home. This guy Ideal, he was a slick mother. He dumped out the Sweet’N Low in ten, eleven packets, substituted sodium and sealed them up again. Musta took him a week to do all that, make ‘em look like they weren’t fucked with.”

“Sodium. What the hell’s that? The stuff in crackers?”

“It’s a chemical. Not soda,
sodium.
Looks kinda like sweetener only more silvery. Not that you’d pay attention. You ever look at a packet of sugar or sweetener when you open it? Naw, you rip it open and dump it in.”

“So there was a chemical reaction, right? To booze? How’d he do it?”

Grady smiled. “I told you, Jack was smart. Figured it out right away. See, when sodium hits water, it explodes. There’s water in coffee. And booze. Both. Either way, whatever, sodium just fucking explodes. Which it did. Twenty minutes out on the Mad River--wham! She mixes a drink and half her head goes bye-bye and the boat goes up like the homecoming bonfire. That’s Ideal’s plan as it turns out. Boroni picks an argument with her. Knocks her around some to show he’s pissed. Asshole knows what she’ll do, knows she’ll go jump on that boat, go out on the river and get shit-faced on coffee la-las, whatever you call that concoction. She did it all the time. Friends said it was a regular thing. Lots of yelling and screaming and then she’d go hightailing it for the boat, take off the whole afternoon and come back so ripped she didn’t know her name. Her friends said it was a shame how he drove her to drink. He doped it all out, the cunning bastard. Soaked charcoal starter fluid into all the woodwork. Really laid it in. Stunk to high heaven, but he figured, and rightly so as it turned out, she’d be so snockered she wouldn’t notice. Figured when the stuff blew up, the boat would burn and sink and they’d figure it was another boating accident. His luck wasn’t so good though. The boat didn’t burn enough and didn’t sink. He shoulda checked the weather forecast. It called for thunderstorms that day.”

“So how’d your brother figure that out?”

“He was with me when the call came in for Arson and Bombs so I asked him to come along. He could always tell more about a crime scene in ten seconds than the lab whizzes could in ten days with their microscopes and college educations. He doped the whole thing out in ten minutes flat. Not that they wouldn’t have sooner or later, but we gained the time we’da lost waiting on the scientists. Good thing, too. Boroni was on the plane that was warming up on the runway. Heading to Eleuthera. If he’d gotten away he might not have collected the insurance money, but it would have been a bitch getting him back to stand trial. You know how many little fucking nitwit islands there are down there?”

“So, I ask you again...how’d he figure it out?”

“Easy. From fishing with our grandfather.”

“You lost me, Fogarty.”

Grady reached in his pocket and got out a stick of gum, taking his time to unwrap it. The corners of his mouth turned up. “Our grandfather used to take him fishing when he was a kid. Only grandpa didn’t use worms. This was a
serious
fisherman, never mounted a damn thing, never threw a single fish away in his life.” Grady paused, remembering, and continued.

“Grandpa used sodium. Sometimes magnesium or cesium, they both do the same thing I guess, the way Grandpa explained it. Quicklime works too. They all explode when combined with water only sodium has the best explosion. Grandpa would fill up a stone jug with the stuff and cork it. Put two strings on it. One to lower the jug into the lake and the other hooked around the cork. When the jug hit the bottom, he pulled the cork. The jug goes kaboom and you get your limit. Ten other people’s limits, too. You row around and pick ‘em up, throw ‘em in the boat, bass, bluegills, walleyes, fucking catfish. Your fishing trip is over. You go home and drink beer. Fuck,
turtles.
He’d get fucking turtlesand eels, crap like that. Takes all the hard work out of fishing. That’s what he always said. Anyway, that’s how Jack knew what the guy used. Actually, he
didn’t
know that right away. He got suspicious when he smelled the starter fluid. It was pretty strong. I smelled it too and so did every other shield on the boat, but I didn’t make any connections. We figured she was probably barbecuing something. I didn’t connect the smell, but then Jack spent a lot more time with Grandpa than I did. Time I was old enough, Grandpa was pretty sick. I only went a couple of times. Jack went fishing with him every weekend when he was a kid.”