Authors: Thomas Perry
The driver got back in the SUV and pulled it clear, and the other man pulled the door
down and slid the bolt in. Crane took one of the locks out of its box and clasped
it on the bolt. The man at the door gave the lock a tug to be sure it was fully engaged,
and then got in the backseat.
A WOMAN DROVE UP TO
the front gate of the storage facility in a small blue car and took a ticket, then
drove in through the open gate. She parked in a space close to the main building a
few feet to the right of a gray Cadillac. She had a cell phone pressed against her
left ear and she was talking into it. Her window was shut, so Salamone and Mr. Malconi
couldn’t hear anything she was saying, and she didn’t look at them. All they could
really see was the cell phone and her left hand.
Mr. Malconi said to Salamone, “I’ve got some places to be. You can handle the rest
of this, right?”
“Sure,” said Salamone. “I’ll bring you the keys in a day or two.”
“No hurry,” said Mr. Malconi. “Victor isn’t going anywhere, and it will take a while
to make arrangements. It’ll have to be a small, quiet thing. And somebody will have
to think up a story for the priest.”
“I understand.”
Mr. Malconi’s tinted window rolled up, and his face was gone. Salamone turned and
walked to the door, then disappeared inside the building. The dark gray Cadillac pulled
back, turned, and went out the gate, then accelerated down the road.
The woman in the dark blue Volkswagen Passat put her cell phone away, got out of her
car, and went into the building. There was a stack of printed price lists for bay
rentals on a table just inside, and a stack of blank contract forms beside it. She
took one of each and went back out to her car carrying them, making sure that anyone
watching her would know what she was doing.
A moment later, her blue car backed up, turned, and pulled out of the lot. The driver
watched to be sure she wasn’t being followed, but only after a few minutes did she
feel satisfied that she wasn’t. Coming into the storage facility had been a risk,
but while she’d been sitting a few hundred yards away she’d gotten curious about the
convoy of three vehicles that had arrived. Now she was glad she had taken the chance.
The cell phone pictures were clear and sharp. As she drove, she wondered what was
in that big box she’d seen them putting into space J-19.
23
I
n his dream Isaac Lloyd was running. He felt his rhythmic breathing and strong heartbeat,
the pleasant pressure of his feet padding along on the deep, spongy layer of leaves
and dirt on a forest path. A faint breeze cooled his face as he ran, and the canopy
of the tall trees along the path let a dapple of sunlight through.
There was someone ahead on the path that he couldn’t quite see, but he knew he would
catch up before long. Now and then the path ahead would straighten and he would catch
a glimpse of a branch just swinging back to its normal position after someone had
passed.
There was a sudden flutter of birds ascending to avoid whoever had disturbed them,
and then a female voice. It said, “Ike. Hey, Ike.” He ran harder. As he did, he broke
through the fragile barrier of sleep and moved his real leg in the realm of consciousness
and felt the sharp pain.
Ike opened his eyes. He was at home, in his own bed. Remembering and feeling it was
an immense pleasure. But then he saw movement near the far wall and realized the woman’s
voice had been real.
“Hi, Ike,” she said, and stepped to the foot of his bed. She was wearing the mask,
scrubs, and cap that hid her hair so well he didn’t even know the color of it.
“How did you get here? They’re not supposed to give anybody a state police officer’s
home address.”
“Don’t be angry. I won’t be coming again. I just needed to—”
“How did you get my address?” he said.
“When I visited you in the hospital I saw it in your file on the admission papers.
I went to the hospital a while ago and learned you had been sent home, so I parked
near here and waited until I saw your wife drive away. I figured that in my scrubs,
anyone who saw me would figure I was a nurse checking on you, so I will. How are you
feeling?”
His voice was irritable. “Have you ever been shot?”
“I’m sorry to say I have,” she said. “In the leg, just like you.”
“When?”
“No you don’t,” she said. “You’ll try to use that to find my name.”
“Is anything you’ve said to me true?”
“All of it.”
“Are you even real?”
“If I weren’t, I’d probably say I was. That’s how dreams work. But I’m here on business.”
“What business?”
“I want you to look at some pictures I took and tell me if you know these men.” She
reached into the pocket of her scrubs, held out her cell phone where he could see
it, and tapped the first picture to make it fill the screen. “That’s the storage facility
where Nick Bauermeister worked.”
“I recognize it,” said Lloyd.
She brought up the picture of the old man in the side window of the gray Cadillac,
and the other man beside him. She had taken it with the phone clapped to her ear,
but it was very sharp. She tapped the screen to bring up a picture of both men.
Lloyd said, “Okay. Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Right now, today. I appreciate
your taking out that shotgun and giving me backup the other night. But this case is
not what it looked like at first. It just got a lot more complicated.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re men you really don’t want to meet.”
“You know their names. Tell me.”
“The man standing beside the car is Bobby Salamone. I don’t keep up with these people
most of the time, because they’re not involved in my usual cases. But I know who he
is. He’s a member of the Mafia, kind of an underboss. He’s been in prison for extortion
and aggravated assault and probably other things I don’t remember. He’s been suspected
of arranging at least a couple of murders over the years, but the evidence wasn’t
strong enough.”
“And the old man in the car?”
“He’s your prize photo. Lorenzo Malconi. He looks like a sickly old man, doesn’t he?
I hope he is, because he can’t die soon enough for me. He’s Salamone’s boss, the head
of the Mafia in this part of the state.”
She said, “What would they be doing at the storage place?”
Lloyd looked very tired and a bit distracted, and Jane recognized the look. He had
tensed a muscle and reawakened the pain. “I don’t have any idea. Probably nothing
illegal. People like them don’t do anything. They tell people to do things and take
a cut.”
“I saw an SUV come in with him and then I saw two men carry a big cooler into bay
J-19. That’s what made me come inside the gate to take these pictures.”
“There’s your answer. He was putting something into storage. He brought men because
he’s too old to carry things himself.”
“Come on, Ike. You’re holding out on me. Give me what you know and I’ll leave.”
“I told you who these men are. That’s all I know without getting a warrant and taking
a look in that storage bay. For obvious reasons, I can’t do that now.”
Jane lifted her loose scrub shirt and pulled out a manila envelope she’d had stuck
in the elastic top of her pants.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a record of what I’ve been doing—copies of the pictures I’ve taken. There are
shots of the stolen stuff hidden in Nick Bauermeister’s basement, pictures of Chelsea
Schnell with Daniel Crane at his house, the shots I just showed you, the two storage
bays that Malconi’s men visited. You can tell the cop you give them to that he doesn’t
have to be careful with them. No fingerprints or anything.” She held up her hands
to show him that she was wearing surgical gloves. “Now go back to sleep. I’ll try
not to bother you again.” She turned to go.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Just about nine thirty.”
“In a few hours there will be search teams at Nick Bauermeister’s house and Walter
Slawicky’s.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because at Slawicky’s, they may find the rifle.” He watched her for a reaction. “That’s
what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“One of the things.”
“It would prove Slawicky shot Bauermeister himself.”
“I’m not so sure he did,” said Jane. “I don’t think he would have gone to the police
voluntarily unless he had an unbreakable alibi. I think he just supplied the rifle
and the false story about what happened to it.”
“Who, then?”
“The one who gave Slawicky the money for all the cool stuff.”
“Salamone or Malconi?”
“I don’t know. If they’re the Mafia, why would they bother with people like Slawicky?
They must have people on their payroll who do that kind of work. I think it was the
one who had a reason to want Nick Bauermeister dead. The one who wanted his girlfriend.”
As she slipped out the door of his bedroom she heard a car pulling into the driveway.
She looked out the side window of the house and saw Lloyd’s wife coming to a stop
in the garage. She could see bags of groceries in the back of her station wagon. In
a moment she would be carrying bags through the side door into the kitchen. Jane went
out the front door, moved along the front of the Lloyd house to the next yard, and
then walked quickly to her car.
MORNING WAS HELL FOR DANIEL
Crane. The sun was blinding, punishing. He drove to his storage business at ten because
he couldn’t think of a better place to go. As he drove he kept remembering things
that he would have to fix as quickly as he could. There was still quite a bit of merchandise
he couldn’t explain stored in his bays along the J row. Every month he had stored
things his crews stole in bays registered to fictitious people. Now that he was being
charged with a felony, there wasn’t much to stop the police from checking to see if
those renters were real, or just aliases for Daniel Crane. There would then be nothing
to stop them from going through the bays, maybe with a list of items that had been
reported stolen in burglaries in the area. Then they would find the body in the cooler.
Crane would have to do something to be sure Slawicky had actually sunk the rifle a
few miles offshore in Lake Ontario, and not kept it somewhere with Crane’s fingerprints
still on it. And he couldn’t just ask him. If Slawicky had kept the rifle as a threat
to hold over him, then asking would make him even more defensive and paranoid. For
a moment Crane considered killing him, too. Jimmy Sanders was still at large, and
it had been in the newspapers that Slawicky had gone to the police and given information
about him. If Slawicky died now, there would be a suspect already wanted in connection
with a murder. But he remembered that Salamone had warned him not to take steps like
that on his own again. Maybe he would just bring the problem up with Salamone.
As he drove up to the storage facility his eyes rested on the big sign:
BOX FARM PERSONAL STORAGE
. He thought he’d like to change the name. When he’d thought of it, the name had sounded
pleasant—an old farm with acres of storage spaces—but the words seemed creepy now,
maybe a cynical, slangy way of referring to a cemetery. He knew it was too late to
change it now, after years of building the business, but he wished he could.
He pulled through the gate and drove to the office, then saw the big sedan parked
in his reserved space. Salamone. What was he doing here? Salamone had never come this
early in the morning. Crane got out of his Range Rover, entered the building, and
climbed the stairs.
He stepped into his office and found Salamone’s two companions had made themselves
comfortable. Cantorese was sitting behind the second desk, where the man on duty usually
sat to watch the windows and monitors and answer the phone. Cantorese sat back in
the chair with his feet up on the desk, so Crane could see the soles of his shoes.
Part of Crane’s mind noted that even the man’s feet were wide, feet made to hold up
a three hundred fifty pound body. Pistore was sitting in the customer chair near the
desk, the first time Crane remembered seeing him seated. Neither of them reacted to
the sight of Crane coming in.
Salamone was at Crane’s desk. He hadn’t just sat there as he often had, because that
was the most comfortable chair. He had opened all the drawers and left them open,
and he had moved things around on the desktop. The bay rosters, the time sheets for
the men, the bills, notices, and price lists had all been combined into one pile.
As Crane approached he could see that there were two sets of papers on the cleared
desktop, one facing Crane and the other facing Salamone. Two of the pens that Crane
usually kept in the desk were set beside the papers.
“Hi, Danny,” said Salamone. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t a big, heavy stupid
one with lots of little dials and buttons. It was white gold or platinum, as thin
as a coin with a leather strap, the sort of watch Crane imagined on the wrist of a
French banker. “Run into some traffic?”
“No,” Crane said. “I overslept a little.”
“Bad night, huh? I can’t blame you.” He looked toward the counter where the coffee
maker was. “Want a minute to pour yourself a cup of coffee and get up to speed?”
“I’m fine,” said Crane.
“Suit yourself. We heard you had some trouble.”
“I did, but it’s not going to be a big problem.”
“No? I heard your girlfriend went to the hospital and the police have a bunch of roofies
you’d used on her. I’m glad to hear that wasn’t what happened.”
“It wasn’t rohypnol. It was GHB. I bought it through a Mexican online site, and they
must have made a mistake in the dose, or the concentration was uneven and she got
a strong batch. She was still asleep when the cleaning lady came unexpectedly, found
her, and got worried. I’ll explain it to Chelsea, and she’ll be fine with it. The
stuff disappears from the bloodstream right away, and it’s a natural substance, so
the police can’t prove anything anyway.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Salamone. “But I do kind of wonder what you were thinking.”
“I gave her some once before, and she was okay and the next day she didn’t remember
a thing. The other night she was acting crazy, talking about leaving me, and I figured
I’d just make her forget what she’d said. She’d sleep and then wake up the next day
okay.”
Salamone and Cantorese met each other’s eyes. Salamone shrugged. “Okay. I hope your
trouble goes away. In the meantime, I’ve got some papers here for you to sign. Take
a look.” He pushed one set of papers toward Crane.
Pistore sprung up and brought his chair to Crane so he could read and sign sitting
down. Crane was expected to sit, so he sat.
After a minute Crane looked up from the papers. “This says I’m selling my business
to Angela Milton. I don’t know anybody named Angela Milton.”
“Look, Danny. You know something about business. Do you know how mortgage insurance
works? The company that lends you money isn’t a hundred percent sure you’ll always
be able to keep paying the money back. So they cut their risk by having you insure
them against you not paying.”
“What does that have to do with—”
“It’s an analogy to your current situation. You could be right that your little girlfriend
will be generous about things and shrug off the fact that you—legally, anyway—raped
her. But you’ve opened a big box full of uncertainty here. What happens if you’re
wrong?”
“There’s no risk,” said Crane. “The drug isn’t detectable. They can’t prove she took
it, let alone that I gave it to her.”
“Mr. Malconi has an excellent team of criminal attorneys. They tell him that having
her wake up with your sperm in her and claiming not to know she’d had sex with you
could be a problem. The fact that there was a supply in your home of an illegal drug
that causes those symptoms makes the problem worse. Mr. Malconi has decided to make
sure that he’s protected.”
“Can’t you talk to him?”
“Danny. You met Mr. Malconi yesterday. Did he strike you as a man who changes his
mind about things like this?”
“But he can’t just take my business because I had a problem with my girlfriend.”
“This isn’t just an unfortunate spat. You had her in the first place because you shot
her boyfriend through the head. Then you had the idea you’d get a stranger arrested
for it, and have him die in jail. You have to be fair about this, and admit to yourself
that you’ve given Mr. Malconi reason to think you’re not a hundred percent reliable.
Ninety percent isn’t good enough.”