Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online
Authors: John R. Maxim
Molly.
He had no business asking her to stay. He knew it and so did she. What's more, he would soon have need of her back home. A job more suited to her skills. Not that Molly couldn't protect Susan. He had bet his own life on her more than once. It was just that she and Susan knew and liked each other. They'd had lunch together several times, played tennis once. Susan would talk to Molly. Listen to her. Trust her. Maybe.
He'd considered sending Carla, to keep her mind off Gary Russo. Maybe he should have. Carla would have jumped at the chance to drive the last nail into that relationship. Good riddance, she'd say. You shouldn't have let yourself get involved with an outsider anyway. Especially a reporter whose father is a cop. Especially that cop. Besides, Carla had told him more than once, she's just a kid. You need your ashes hauled, find a hooker or pick one of us. We're all happy to oblige. You won't have to tell us you love us and we won't ask any questions you can't answer. Try telling the truth to that kid, she'll run screaming from the room, first back to daddy and then to her city editor. Next day we'll have the network news all over Westport.
Bannerman knew she was probably right.
Even so, he could have choked her.
Molly, on the other hand, had encouraged him. Susan was young, she said, but not
that
young. And forty-ish was hardly old. Susan was also bright, thoughtful, energetic, had a good sense of fun and she was kind. Being her father's daughter, she was not likely to be fragile.
“She could be good
for you,”
Molly had said. Could it last? Long-term, probably not. But most relationships end. Why treat this one any differently? Everyone has secrets that they can't or shouldn't share. Get what you can out of it, give what you can, tell her what lies you must for her own sake as well as your own.
Susan, he hoped, would open up with Molly. People just naturally did. Molly would tell her what she could, help her understand, take some of the edge off whatever her father was saying to her.
“You're thinking about Susan, right?” Billy asked quietly. They had entered the airport grounds. He was following the signs for rental car retums.
Bannerman sat up. “Among other things.
”
”I liked her,” he said. “And you know what? She liked me too, I think.”
“Everyone likes you, Billy.” Bannerman turned his head toward Westport's favorite bartender. “You've made more friends than any of us.”
People did like him. He had friends. And it didn't feel funny any more and it didn't cause problems for Paul like in the beginning. Back then, before he got used to it, he figured that if you got a friend, and the friend gets in trouble, you help him out. His friends would come into Mario's and sometimes they weren't smiling. He'd ask what's wrong and mostly they'd tell their Uncle Billy. You'd be surprised, the problems people have. Guys getting sued, or cheated, or fired off their jobs. Burglars working their neighborhood, taking their stuff. Women getting beat up by their husbands but afraid to move out. Women getting raped. And not just by street punks either. One was by her dentist after he gave her gas. Another was by her shrink.
He had helped them out. Some of them. He made it look good. Like accidents and suicides. Before you knew it they were smiling at their Uncle Billy again and talking about nicer things. He never said anything. For a couple of years, nobody even noticed.
Then one day Susan Lesko shows up in Westport to help this friend of hers from college move into her new house and she finds this little book about Connecticut that's full of statistics. It says Westport is a good place because crime, especially the last couple of years, is so low. But it also says people there are more careless than almost anywhere else in the state because they keep drowning in bathtubs or getting electrocuted and that they must worry a lot because a lot of them take the pipe. It wasn't such a lot. It was like eleven. But Susan thinks maybe there's a story for her paper and she starts snooping around. Paul thinks maybe she knows about us so he gets to know her and finds out she doesn't. It's just those statistics. At first he feels better but then he starts wondering about them himself. He asks around. Then he asks straight out. You can't lie to him. It was the only time since he first knew Paul that Paul almost yelled. Anyway, he promised he wouldn't do that any more. Not unless Paul or Molly or Anton Zivic said it was okay and how it should be done. Carla's on the council too but she didn't get a vote on this. She'd always say yes because she's a little mean. Also, she'd suggest complicated stuff like letting a guy wake up with his own cock in his mouth. That's games. He didn't like games. When you go to fix something, you fix it. Speaking of which . . .
“Paul?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“All what happened here. It's Palmer Reid, right?”
“He denies it.”
“Right. And he sent flowers.” Billy curled his lip. “What about this guy, Loftus? He doesn't tie Reid in?”
“Not to this. Not to Susan.”
Loftus.
Molly had briefed him. He'd been sent by Reid to watch Lesko. Lesko had spotted him, grabbed him, ended up offering him a way out from under Reid, and probably his life, if he'd cooperate. Loftus told him about Reid and Mama's Boy, also about Reid and Elena. But these, as far as Loftus knew, did not connect. Reid obviously learned that his man was trying to deal. Probably tapped Lesko's phone. Sent two men to silence him. Do it near Westport. Make it look like he, Bannerman, ordered it. But the two men came
too close.
Anton had Loftus now. Gave him sanctuary. Perhaps they'd get more out of him when he could speak again.
“Tell you what,” Billy said. “We'll go home, and me and Johnny Waldo will disappear for a week or two. Time we get back, you won't have to worry about Reid no more/’
”I don't think so, Billy. Not yet.”
“The more we wait, the more he's got the edge.”
”I know.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything about this that just doesn't feel right to you?”
“Like what?”
”I don't know.” They had entered the parking garage. “Roger Clew is on his way over here. Why?”
“To help out, right? Wasn't it him who sprung Carla and the Doc?”
Bannerman waited.
“The girl back there. Susan.” He jerked a thumb in the general direction of Davos. “She's got you thinking too much. It's the one bad thing about liking women.”
”I suppose.”
“Take my word.”
Bannerman had to smile.
“On Reid too,” Billy said firmly. “It's him.”
“Or somebody wants us to think so.”
”I know.’* Billy shook his head. “Things aren't always what they seem. But you want to know something else? Most times they are.”
“Let's just get home, Billy.” Bannerman opened his door.
He had not booked a flight. Better not to announce their intentions. Getting seats on a weekday would not be difficult. Bannerman's more immediate concern was to get through a crowded airline terminal without being shot. Elena's car had been hit on a main highway in broad daylight. Anyone that desperate might not hesitate to shoot up the line at the Swissair check-in counter, especially knowing that the two of them were sure to have discarded their weapons. Bannerman's next concern would be getting through passport control without being detained by the Swiss police. They'd have identified Russo's body by now and connected Russo with him. Urs Brugg had warned him of that. He promised to distract them if he could but he urged Bannerman to waste no time leaving Switzerland. Bannerman would try to call him from the boarding gate. Ask about Elena. See if she's out of surgery. And he'd call Molly. To ask about Susan. And to tell Molly that he'd changed his mind. She should get home as well.
Dropping the car keys on the Eurocar desk, they proceeded to the Swissair counter. Bannerman paid for their tickets with a credit card, checked their bags, and moved directly to passport control. The official there, in his glass booth, examined their passports then stared at each of them with more than passing interest but he made no move to check their names against the computerized stop list in front of him. Now the official's eyes flicked past Bannerman's shoulder. Bannerman saw a tiny nod. He turned, his stomach tightening. He saw a man, thirty paces away, dressed in a leather topcoat, his arms folded. He glanced around the terminal. Two more men, one on either side, stood facing him. He looked back at the man in the leather coat. The man touched a finger to the brim of his hat, smiled briefly, and turned away. It was Willem Brugg.
He was man of middle size, made to seem larger by a broad chest and powerful arms and shoulders, which for twenty years had done the work of legs. A thick Hemingway beard added to the impression of mass. The beard and his hair, worn in a near crew cut, were the color of steel wool. His face was unlined, except at the edges of his mouth and around his intelligent blue eyes, where deeply etched creases gave him a look of sustained amusement.
The room in which he spent much of his existence had been a ballroom in another age. The ceiling, blue in the daytime with painted clouds, became a twinkling night sky at sunset, lit by scores of tiny bulbs. The walls were hung with art, all of it light and summery. Outdoor scenes. A mountainscape done by his niece had recently displaced a Monet a thousand times its value although not as prized. The centerpiece of the room, other than Urs Brugg's desk, was an astonishing Turkish carpet, all silk, 2,000 knots to the inch, forty feet in length. It was set on a parquet floor with ample room around it for the passage of his wheelchair. At each end of the room, matching screens of carved Swiss oak concealed the otherwise jarring notes of an electrically adjustable bed and a small gymnasium of weights and pulleys. His desk was in the center. Behind him, French doors opened onto a stone balcony that ran the length of the room. On it, covered now with plastic tents, were many flower boxes whose cultivation was among his hobbies. It was there that he took his midday meal in all but the most inclement weather.
At the left side of his desk, as he sat, was an antique armoire that concealed an elaborate communications center that included two computer consoles, a telefax machine and telex printer, and a voice-activated telephone system that remembered hundreds of unlisted numbers.
The chessboard was to his right. His opponent, a smaller, balding man with the dress and manner of a rumpled academic, pondered his next several moves while absently signaling, with the stem of his pipe, that the light on Urs Brugg's private line was flashing. Urs Brugg spun his chair and picked up the phone.
“Yes, Paul/’ A short nod to the other man, then he grunted dismissively as Paul Bannerman thanked him for the protection provided by his nephew and for the apparent influence that had been applied on the man at passport control. Urs Brugg gestured toward his opponent and held out a hand for the folder he had brought. The other man pushed it across the desk. Urs Brugg opened it to a photograph of Paul Bannerman, grainy, much enlarged, not recent. His opponent reached to select a second photo, one of several. “McHugh,” he mouthed. “The man with him.”