He typed it in, European style: 25.04.75.
And thus he entered the secret world of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.
20
They met at Soleil, a tapas restaurant popular with the lunch crowd in the redeveloped sector of SE. It was a gaudy, mock-peasant place, full of young government workers and journalists and others who considered themselves quite fascinating. David Banjax was evidently well known enough here to command a table in the window, and Nick and Phil Price were escorted into the great man’s presence.
Banjax, about thirty-five, with a goatee and otherwise short hair, in a suit without a tie and a pair of Italian architect glasses, rose and put out a hand as Price handled the intros. Then they sat, and it turned out that thankfully Banjax was not one for small talk, didn’t offer an opinion on the Redskins or the new president or the war in Afghanistan or any other topic of the day. He commenced immediately with his sucking up.
“So, Agent Memphis, I hear you’re quite the hero. You shot it out with those bad guys in Tennessee last year or so. Is that why you limp?”
“That is why I limp, Mr. Banjax. But I wasn’t quite the hero. I was with a very skilled undercover officer who handled the gunfight. My only contribution was that I stopped a bullet that might have hit him, and I did manage to shoot a car twice in the right rear fender, which cost the Bureau over seven thousand in repair costs. But I think we’re countersuing now. Don’t mess with the Bureau.”
“Nick is known for his modesty,” Phil said smoothly, showing some minimal gift for the job. “Nick ran the team that broke up what could have been an eight-million-dollar heist and put seven men in prison for the rest of their lives.”
“Wow,” said Banjax. “No wonder everyone I talk to thinks so highly of you.”
“They’re a resilient mob. I’m sure they’ll have escaped and be drinking Jax beer and sporting with the gals this time next year. You can’t keep the Grumley boys down,” Nick said.
Banjax laughed, as if he got Bureau humor, or knew who the Grumleys were.
“Nick’s a kidder,” said Phil. “He has a lot of fans in the Bureau. Nick’s integrity and honesty are treasured in the Bureau, but it’s his sense of humor that makes him beloved.”
“I guess it’s not a laff-riot kind of place,” Banjax said.
“Not much shtick, no,” said Nick. “In fact there hasn’t been a good pie fight in years. But I’m not that beloved. Phil exaggerates, which is his job. I’m loved and I’m hated and I try to do my job and I wish I were smarter and I’m glad I’m not dumber. So, I know why we’re here, Mr. Banjax. Would you do me the favor of fast-forwarding to the hard part of the conversation? I have heard the word ‘Tulsa’ mentioned.”
“Oh, that,” said Banjax, smiling easily. “It was just something that came up. You know, what you do and what I do, it’s similar. You’re investigating a killer. I’m investigating a man investigating a killer. An agency, I should say, but that agency happens to be represented by a man. I’m very sorry for what happened in Tulsa, and I’m not here to make noises about it. It’s just that I’m in a very competitive news situation, and in my bureau there’s a lot of pressure to produce. There’s an awful lot of smart people there and we all want to do well. So I ask as many questions as I can and I throw out a very broad net, and somehow, this stuff about Tulsa came in.”
“Phil, help me, I’m not clear on the rules here. Is it fair for me to ask him how he found out about it? I mean it wasn’t part of any official release, so he had to hear about it from someone. Can I ask him who?”
“Probably not a good idea, Nick. The press values its right of confidentiality and feels that if it gives up sources to law enforcement inquiries, it becomes an arm of the Bureau. Nobody wants that.”
“Agent Memphis, if you must know, and I hope you’ll appreciate my candor here, it was a guy I know, one of those gray elder types; he knows everybody and everything. I’d prefer not to give you his name, but he said he heard about this from someone he knew.”
“You don’t have to give me Bill Fedders’s name, Mr. Banjax. I already know it quite well.”
“Well, there you go. Anyway, ‘someone’ forwarded through ‘my friend’ an envelope with a set of Tulsa front pages and the unidentified FBI sniper marked heavily in highlighter, with question marks. Crude, but effective. Anyhow, I called the reporter who wrote the story fifteen years ago and he knew your name, even if he didn’t release it then. I don’t think he was sworn to any confidentiality agreement, and I don’t think I’ve skirted any confidentiality issues. I got it fair and square, nothing dubious. I take it you’re not denying it.”
“Is this off the record?”
“Of course. Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I’ll let you know when we go on.”
“Well, obviously, I can’t deny it. Yeah, I took that shot and missed and all sorts of terrible things happened. And some good things: I got seven years with Myra.”
“I heard that part too. Extraordinary.”
“Anyhow, it’s not going to do the Bureau any good to get this all mixed in with the ongoing investigation. It’ll cloud matters. I’ll tell you, man to man, that I have no beef with snipers, as the implication seems to be, based on my unfortunate tour as one. My job is not to find the sniper innocent by some trick, it’s to find out who’s guilty and put him away or prove the case so totally that even if he’s dead, there can be no doubt he was the guilty party, sniper or not. But it’s more complex than it seems. We have to be diligent. We can’t be nervous about media pressures or outside political pressures. If you look at the Kennedy thing, you’ll see that Warren was rushed, made mistakes, and there was hell to pay for it. I don’t want that happening here. That’s my only concern, not my career in the Bureau, my next promotion, the book contract I’ll get when I go, how 60 Minutes will handle it. If I have to leave the Bureau because doubts are raised about me, then that’s what I’ll do. It happens in Washington all the time.”
“I haven’t published yet. I don’t know that I will.”
“What is it that you want? I mean, exactly.”
“Well, look, we’re not kids here. We’re all professionals and we’re all under great pressure from management to produce. Now, I have to come up with something. I have to publish something. I can’t go in and say, ‘Oh, I spent three weeks and I came up with nothing.’ That’s just not good. So if I have to, I suppose I could go with the Tulsa episode. It does seem like legitimate information that the public needs to have. There is a great deal of interest in this case, and you folks did such a good job and worked so fast and got there in time to prevent any other killings, but it seems to have come off the tracks since then. We thought we’d get that report in a couple of weeks. Now I hear that as of last week, you came up with a whole new area of investigation and that you’ve sent a lot more people into the field. If that’s true, maybe we could put it on the record, explain it, put it in some kind of context, and get it into the paper. Get it into the paper the way you want it, not picked up thirdhand from a variety of other sources.”
“See,” said Nick, “from a PR point of view and a career point of view, that would be the right thing to do. But the direction and thrust of our investigation has to remain confidential. In fact, details may alert some people we have to look at. They act differently when they know they’re being looked at, and it clouds the issue. We have to make preliminary inquiries confidentially to see if this is even worth pursuing. I’m not saying there are other persons of interest than Carl Hitchcock, but I have a duty to be diligent. Is that all right, Phil, what I said to him?”
“It’s your call, Nick. I won’t tell you how to operate.”
“Okay,” said Banjax. “I hear you. That’s fine. But I don’t have much wiggle room myself. I can only say, I’ll try and keep Tulsa out of the paper, but if I get in a jam, I may have to go with you. I’d have to put it in the record and come at you with hard questions.”
“I will be very happy to discus
s Tulsa with you, Mr. Banjax. Here, I’ll give you my direct number, call me anytime you want. If I have some development, maybe I’ll give you a heads-up. That’s all I can say.”
21
Bob finally slipped out of the house Wednesday morning at
2 a.m. and Denny Washington was waiting for him.
He climbed into the car.
“Man, am I hungry,” he said. “Anyplace still open?”
“You look like a homeless guy,” Washington said. “I’d bust you for looking like that in the old days. Today I have to call you sir and ask you if you need assistance.”
“Welcome to modern times.”
“Ain’t it the fucking truth, bro? Okay, I know an all-night eatery, a cop place. You don’t mind eating with cops?”
“If they don’t mind eating with me.”
They headed to a joint called Johnny’s, outside of which a lot of blue-and-white cruisers idled. The place was bright, first from the lights, and second from the more than a few white faces among the black, unusual in this part of town. Everywhere Swagger looked, he saw the blue-and-white checkered hatbands that were the unique signature of the Chicago officer’s cap. He was in a blue-and-white universe. Washington made his way down the aisles to a booth in the rear, nodding to the other pilgrims as he led Swagger through but making no intros, and Swagger recognized the faces, all tough urban warrior mugs, under hair either short and frizzy or a little vain. Why did some cops have such elaborate hair? Anyway, he and Linebacker Washington sat in the booth, ordered coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, enough for a battalion, and waited for the food to come.
“So are you going to tell me anything, Gunny? Or is it need to know?”
“It is need to know, but you’re on the team, so you need to know,” said Swagger. “First off, guess what? Mr. and Mrs. Crusader for Peace and Freedom were broke.”
“Broke?”
“Broke, as in ‘broke.’ Broke, as in, We can’t make no payments. He’d had an inheritance—that’s what they’d been living on—but they’d been into the capital for years and now it was down to nothing. They lived big, did you know? Always a houseful of guests, always the hosts, spent a fortune on wine and food and big dinners out. You’d think he was rich; wasn’t that part of the joke, the rich protesters, them rich people who believed in the rights of the poor? But they way overspent their salaries, which weren’t great, and his book royalties and speaking fees were down. He spent six years working on a book for a big New York outfit, and in the end they turned it down and sued him to get their money back.”
“Boo fucking hoo. You’re breaking my heart.”
“Yeah,” said Bob, “and here this was the land of opportunity. So they were desperate, or so it seemed.”
“I guess being a revolutionary isn’t that high-paying a job.”
“Oh, and he had to pay a girl three hundred thousand a few years back because he fucked her after promising he’d leave Mitzi. Then he changed his mind. They didn’t want it getting out, didn’t want any publicity, so that ate up a big chunk. So much for bringing higher morality to the world.”
“How did you find this out?”
“I cracked the computer code, and he had a combination on file. I didn’t know there was a safe the first time I went through the house, but it was in the corner of his office, under the floorboards. If you know there’s a safe, you can find it. All this stuff was in there, the letters to the lawyers about the three hundred K payment, all that. In the safe.”
“Hmm. So to hit the house without the combination, you’d need a safecracker, right?”
“Yeah,” said Bob. “Yeah, yeah,” seeing how Washington’s insight seemed to lead to another development, a safecracker who could maybe be convinced to talk. “So there’d be a safecracker who—”
“Not so fast, bro. There was a guy in this town named Willie Beazel. Very good fingers. Could open anything.”
“Past tense?”
“That’s where he lives now, in the past tense. He was found floating in the Chicago River with a twenty-two through the ear three days after the hit on the Strongs. I’m thinking they paid him big upfront, brought him into the house, and he popped the box for them. They knew whatever it was they needed was in that safe. Of course, once he’s done his job, he’s a liability. He’s a loose end. Tidy motherfuckers.”
“These people ain’t messing around. If they want you dead, you get dead, fast.”
“And of course nobody would ever think to link Willie to the Strongs, no reason to. But he had colleagues, pals. I can run ’em down. Maybe he said something before he went for a float. You left the records in the safe?”
“Yeah. If we can get a warrant, we can get all that stuff into play legally, I’m thinking. But that might be for later.”
“So back to the Strongs: they were poor?”
“Running out of dough. But, but, but there’s a big but coming up.”
“I’m listening.”
“Just a month before they were hit, they opened a Swiss bank account. It sounds like a movie, but it was an actual Swiss bank account, number 309988762554. They were expecting some big money coming in. They didn’t want to pay taxes on it, they didn’t want to pay their creditors with it, they just wanted to spend it on themselves. They wanted the big life somewhere off in Europe. They were nuts about Europe. They thought they belonged in Europe. I think—well, no matter what I think, it’s clear they were getting ready to go underground again.”
“On the lam?”
“Yeah, but in a different way. Not on the run but under new identities. They had spent money they didn’t have, that they owed various relatives and friends, to get new identities. They had phony passports in that safe, under the names William and Mary Ives, of Dayton, Ohio. Very good phonies, and I’m thinking they used some old radical contact to get into underground culture to come up with that sort of high-end merchandise. I mean, you just don’t go to a phony passport shop in the mall; you’ve got to know somebody, you’ve got to be wired into the organization, you’ve got to have your bona fides up front to get stuff at that level.”
“Don’t it seem they was anticipating a big payoff of some sort, a getaway, a new life of ease and luxury somewhere?”
“It does.”
“Any idea what the scam was?”
“I only know that all this started around September first. There was a big flurry of activity the first week in September. That’s when they got the passports, that’s when they opened the Swiss bank account. I found an invoice from Amazon for a batch of books they’d ordered: Europe on $5,000 a Day, Castles of the Rhine, Luxury Tours of Europe, dated September third, then another one for September fourth. With all his money problems, Jack bought some kind of Italian Armani suit for six thousand bucks September eighth. Can you believe that? Jack Strong in a six-thousand-dollar suit.”
“Maybe he was turning her out for trickin’, and he was making his pimp hand strong.”
Swagger laughed. Washington was cool. Big, black, dead face, fists that should have been nicknamed ‘Thunder and Thunder,’ but he had a street wit to him.
“I hadn’t thought of that. But anyway he didn’t have the money in his account, but he bought it. He’s to pick it up from the tailor next week, after the alterations. He expected to have the dough by then.”
“You ought to pick it up, Gunny. Shame to see it go to waste.”
“I could. Man, my daughters would have a laugh at the old goat in a fancy suit!”
The food came, and Bob shoveled it down, though he stayed off the coffee, because he was dangerously blurred with fatigue and needed sleep next.
“Don’t leave any for the poor people in China, Gunny,” Washington said. “They don’t need it.”
“I am a hungry guy,” Bob said, beginning to feel more or less whole again. “Sarge, can you drive me back to my hotel? I need to sleep.”
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four.
“Sure. You sleep. I go to mass, I tak
e my kids to school, I go be a policeman for twelve hours, then what?”
“Tomorrow I call my guy at the FBI and I lay my stuff out for him, the Willie Beazel connect, where I think we should concentrate, what I think should happen next. He argues, we yell, eventually it comes around. I fly out to DC and lay it out for them people, and suddenly there’s a new lay to the land. And now we have a really good chance of getting Carl Hitchcock out of the murderer’s box. Maybe even putting the real shooter in it. That ain’t a bad night’s work.”
“Swagger is the man,” said Washington.
The big detective got him efficiently enough back to the hotel room, and he fell into bed and felt the rush as unconsciousness overtook him. He slept and slept and slept, and when he woke it was near three. How could he have slept so long?
He rose, rushed through a shower and the other ablutions, then picked up his cell and pushed Nick’s number.
No answer.
He tried three or four more times, never connecting.
Finally he called the other number, the task force working number that he had, got some earnest intern, asked for Nick, waited, and finally a young woman’s voice came on.
“Agent Chandler, can I help you?” she said.
The one called Starling.
“Agent Chandler, it’s Swagger, you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“I have to reach Nick. I can’t seem to raise him.”
The pause told him bad news was incoming.
Finally she responded.
“Where have you been the last ten hours?”
“I was asleep. I was working three days without rest and I had to catch up, and now I have some things I—”
“Oh. Well, there’s been a shake-up. You didn’t see the Times this morning?”
“I’m in Chicago.”
“Well, it’s national news. Anyhow, some Times reporter broke a big story on something in Nick’s background. Some botched shooting twenty years ago.”