"Sometimes it's all we have to go on. A young couple was nearby and heard the shot. She screamed. I figure the killer ran in the opposite direction, toward the river. Not knowing who else might be nearby in the fog, he tossed the gun in the river."
"Any luck so tar?" he quened, showing only mild interest.
"Not yet," I said.
"You say 'he.' Are you sure the killer is a man?"
"Figure of speech," I said. "It could be a woman."
"Humph," he said, and dismissed the subject of murder temporarily. "I was thinking," he said. "Perhaps these mobsters had phony credit profiles. Maybe that's how they got by us. It's not uncommon, you know."
He reached into a small refrigerator, took out a couple of Cokes, popped the tops off them, and handed me one.
"It's possible," I said, although it was obvious I didn't believe it.
"Well, I'm jumping ahead of you," he said. "You should be doing the talking."
"Did you ever find that book with those dates?" I asked.
His eyes rolled with embarrassment.
"My God," he said, "with everything that's been happening, I completely forgot it. I'll make a note to myself to dig it up."
"That's all right," I said. "I may not need the information after all."
Baker slid down over the side of the pier and dropped out of view. Good man, he was making one last effort.
"Do you think Harry's death is connected to these other killings?" Donleavy asked.
"It seems likely, doesn't it?"
"I wouldn't know. I don't know much about police work."
"I thought maybe being a lawyer . . . " I said, and let the sentence hang.
"I went to law school but I never practiced law," he said. "Harry asked me to come on board straight out of college. I've never really worked anywhere else."
"Well," I said, "let's just say I'm not real big on coincidence. It happens, but it isn't logical, it's the long shot. Logic is simply using all the facts you have in order to draw a conclusion."
"Seems to me there's a danger in that," he said. "You tend to look only for the evidence to prove the conclusion."
"I suppose," I said, noncommittally. "Anyway, logically speaking, Harry Raines' death would seem to be connected to the Tagliani massacres."
"That's a rather gruesome way of putting it." He shuddered.
"Gruesome work," I said. "Murder always is."
"Why would they want to kill Harry?"
"It's the way things happen. One thing leads to another. One murder leads to another."
"So you think these mobsters did it all," he said, making it a statement rather than a question.
I looked back at him. The park was growing dark.
"No," I said.
"But you said-"
"I said I thought they were connected. I don't think the same person killed the Taglianis and Harry Raines."
"Oh. Logic again?" he said. His mouth was iron-bent in a smile.
He opened a walnut cigar box on his desk and offered me one of those thin cheroots, the kind riverboat gamblers in costume dramas always seem to prefer, accepted my refusal with a shrug, and peeled the wrapper from his own.
"So what does logic tell you about all this?" he asked as he lit the cigar.
I sat down on the windowsill.
"First, I'd say Raines was obviously coming over here when he got shot," I said.
"That certainly seems logical," Donleavy said. "He was probably parked in the company lot."
"He was parked behind the bank."
"Well, he still maintains his office here. Maybe he was coming over to get something."
I went on. "Second, all the Tagliani killings were well planned. Daring, perhaps, but infinitely well planned and executed. That isn't logic, that's fact. Logic tells me Raines' death wasn't. It has all the earmarks of a sudden move, even a desperate one."
"How so?"
"Because the killer couldn't plan on it being foggy, so he must have decided to use the fog, and that means the killer had to know exactly where Raines was going to be and the exact moment he was going to be there. As our witness said, 'You couldn't see your hand in front of your face.'"
"Perhaps he followed Harry," Donleavy suggested.
"Yeah, except our ear witnesses only heard one person, which leads me to believe the killer was waiting for Raines."
"Interesting," Donleavy said, contemplating the tip of his cigar for a moment. He then added, "Look, Jake, I may as well tell you, Harry was on his way out to my place. He was very angry. He and Charlie Seaborn had words. I called Charlie just after I talked to you. Harry was there. I told him I thought at worst we were guilty of poor judgment and he agreed to come and talk it out, once and for all."
"Did Raines have a bad temper?" I asked.
"Only when he felt threatened. He couldn't stand being intimidated, by anything or anybody."
"How about Seaborn? How upset was he?"
He chuckled. "Charlie's easily upset, a worrywart. But he certainly wasn't distraught enough to kill somebody."
"Perhaps there was a problem beyond just bad judgment," I suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"Ever hear of the Rio Company?" I asked.
His expression didn't change.
"The what?" he said.
"Rio Company," I repeated.
He shook his head. "No, should I have?"
I explained to him about the Panamanian Mirror Rule and Virgin Island accounts and that whole rigamarole. Donleavy was a lawyer, I was sure he knew what it was all about. I guess I wanted to make sure he knew that I knew.
"The Rio Company is what we call a Hollywood box," I said. "It's like a street on a sound stage, all front with nothing behind it. It's usually used as a payoff."
"A payoff? For what?"
"Favors, hush money, politicians, illegal lobbies, bad cops. They have a lot of palms to cross in their business."
"Doesn't cash work anymore?" he said, laughing.
"This isn't the old days," I said. "We're not talking about a few Ben Franklins here and there, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. The trick is how to hide it. The Hollywood box is one good way. They pay off their graft with dirty money and use the banks to clean it along the way."
"And this Rio Company was used for that purpose, eh?" he said.
I nodded.
"Are you implying that Charlie Seaborn was involved in all this?" he said, his face clouding with concern.
"I'm not implying anything. But his bank is being used as the instrument. He helped set up a rather elaborate subterfuge to help make it work. And a lot of the money that went through those accounts is what is called ill-gotten gains. It can be confiscated under the RICO act. I'm not sure how deeply involved Seaborn is. He may be guilty only of stupidity. But he could be on the sleeve. "
"The sleeve?"
"The take, part of the payoff. He could be getting a piece of the Rio Company-that's if he knew what he was doing and Tagliani felt it necessary to put him on the sleeve. I don't know the answer to that yet."
"What do you think?"
"I don't think he was."
"Why?"
"Too much to lose. I think Seaborn's indiscretion was that it looked good for the bank and good for the town and he didn't think about the consequences. Seaborn's a small-town banker. It probably never occurred to him that what he was involved in was illegal until it was too late to get out. That's the way it usually happens."
"Who else was getting paid off?" Donleavy asked, leaning across his desk. "What cops? What politicians?"
"I'm working on that."
"Any ideas?"
"A few."
"Care to share them?" he asked. "I assure you, I am as interested in resolving this mess as you are."
"I'm sure you are," I said.
He was leaning on the desk now, staring intently at me.
"Any more logic?" he asked, still smiling.
"I've been thinking a lot about Raines'
death," I said. "Trying to narrow down the possibilities."
"Have you come up with anything?"
"Yeah," I said. "Logic tells me that there's only one person who could have killed Harry Raines."
"And who's that?" he asked eagerly.
"This is going to sound crazy," I said.
"Try me."
"It seems to me the only person who could have killed Harry Raines was you."
"Me!" he gasped, and started to laugh. "Well, except for the fact that I was at my place on Sea Oat Island twenty miles from here and couldn't have done it, how did you come up with such a notion?"
"Yeah, I know," I said. "You have two alibis, me and Dutch. And yet, I have this thing about the logic of the situation. According to Seaborn, you were the last one who spoke with Harry Raines before he was killed. He left Seaborn's office without even saying good-bye and he was gunned down two minutes later. That makes you the only one who could have known exactly where he was going, and when."
"Now how would I have known that?" he demanded.
"When you talked to Raines, you must have told him to come here, not to your condo. You knew he'd walk straight across the park. All you had to do was go down and wait for him."
His eyes were beginning to bob like fishing corks on the sea. His white shirt front was stained dark gray with sweat. He jumped up.
"Christ, I think you're serious," he said angrily.
"Deadly so," I said.
"You're out of your mind, Kilmer," he snarled. "My God, talk about trying to prove a preconceived notion! Barring the fact that I couldn't have done it, what reason would I have had for killing by best friend? A disagreement over an error in judgment? Don't be ridiculous."
I could have given him a lot of stereotyped reasons—greed, power, fear of Raines-but they would have been simple answers. They didn't cover the abstractions.
He sat back down, put his feet on his desk, and glared at me over the end of his cigar.
"Well?" he challenged.
"Let's forget the obvious and deal with the abstractions," I said.
"What the hell do you mean, abstractions?" he said.
"Look, I understand you, Donleavy," I said. "There was a time when I could've been in the same boat, doing things the way I was told to do them, or expected to do them, running the show in the same old ways, with an occasional pat on the head. I also know that in the end I would have had to make a name for myself, to prove I was worth the trust, that I wasn't just somebody's lover or best friend.
"The thing is, you were smarter than I was. You had it figured out from the beginning. You knew the power was given and you knew it could be taken away. I learned that lesson the hard way. Hell, I never did know the rules.
"You were given the power, the day-to-day business of running Findley Enterprises. You got it from Raines, who got it from Chief, and you ran it the way it was always run, the way the Findleys had run things since Oglethorpe was governor. But sooner or later, Donleavy, you had to prove your value, not only to everyone else, but to yourself. You had to prove you weren't a sycophant, just another jock with a rich friend. And not just any rich friend. Harry Raines lived by the rules. He managed the Findley businesses brilliantly, got himself elected state senator, moved a mountain by swaying public opinion in favor of the pari-mutuel laws, and looked like a shoo-in to be the next governor. A tough act to follow. You had to show Dunetown that Sam Donleavy could move a mountain or two himself."
"Big deal," Donleavy snapped. "Since when is ambition a crime?"
"There's nothing wrong with ambition," I said. "It's all in how you handle it."
"And just what do you know about how I handle things?"
"I know that Raines was a clone of the old guard. I think when the opportunity presented itself, you saw yourself as a harbinger of the new. Dunetown was growing, and suddenly you had a chance to revitalize the town-before the track was even finished. After all, tourist trade was booming; the city was growing faster than flies in a dung heap. What you needed was to pump fresh money into the system that had been passing the same old tired bucks back and forth for centuries. Then a windfall blew your way. A chance to develop the beach with new hotels, condos on the waterfront, subdivisions in the swamplands. Dunetown to Boomtown, courtesy of Sam Donleavy.
"Except the dream turned into a nightmare. Dunetown became Doomstown, because the opportunity was spelled T-a-g-l-i-a-ni -"
"You're plowing old ground," he snapped, cutting off the sentence.
I ignored him and kept plowing.
"And when you found out you were in bed with La Cosa Nostra, you had to make one helluva decision. Tell Raines? Risk his wrath? Or ride it out? What did you have to lose? Tagliani was reclusive, his people were running legitimate businesses, everything was coming up sevens for you, so why rock the boat, right, Sam?"
He hadn't moved. He was twisting the cheroot between his lips, staring straight into my eyes.
"So far, nothing you've said is incriminating, immoral, or illegal," he said.
"Right. But you forgot one thing—the Golden Rule of Findley. They didn't give a doodly-shit whether it was immoral, illegal, incriminating, irregular, or anything else. The unwritten rule of Findley was that Harry was going to be the next governor and your job was to cover his ass, not grease your own. You fucked up, Sam. When you made your deal with Tagliani, you jeopardized Harry Raines' political career and padded your own, and that was an error Raines would never forgive. It was imperative that Tagliani's real identity be protected, not for him, but for you. You needed to keep that power until you established your own power base. Then the war with the Taglianis broke out and you ran out of time. Like I said, the power is given and the power is taken away."
"Nobody has taken anything away from me!" he said, rising up as though he had grown an inch.
It was time to go for the jugular.
"That's a lie," I said. "You committed the big sin. You betrayed Raines' trust. He knew Seaborn was too naive to get as deeply involved as he was on his own, and he really didn't have any hold over Seaborn, anyway. But you? You he had by the short hairs. Harry was the only person in the world who could destroy you, and he was going to do it. It wasn't the killer who said 'You're finished' to Harry Raines down there in the fog; it was Harry Raines, saying it to you. So you shot him."
His expression didn't change. He blew a thin stream of blue smoke out into the room and watched it swirl away in the breeze from the windows, and then he laughed in my face.
"Nobody'll believe that hot air," he sneered. "You couldn't get that story into small claims court if you had Clarence Darrow, John Marshall, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on your side."
I ignored him. I said, "The irony of all this is that Raines might still be alive if it weren't for a horse with a game leg and his crooked owner. It was the death of the horse, the shock of learning that a race had been fixed and Tagliani knew it, that woke Raines up."
The phone gave me a breather. Its buzzer startled Donleavy. He snatched it up, said, "Hello," paused, and then handed the receiver to me.
"Kilmer," I said.
It was the Stick. "You were right," he said. "I dialed the other number."
"Any other news?"
"Not yet. Baker's doing his best. You want me to come up now?"
"That sounds good, thanks," I said. I gave the phone back to Donleavy.
"Now that your course in Psych 101 is over," Donleavy said, slamming down the phone, "maybe you'd like to tell me how I'm supposed to have gotten here from Sea Oat. Did Peter Pan fly me over?"
"You never went home," I said. "You came straight here from the Thomas cocktail party."
I took out the card he had given me the night before, the one with his home phone number on it, and picked up the phone. One of the dozen or so yellow lights on its base lit up as I dialed the number. When it started to ring, the light beside it gleamed.
He stared down at it dumbly.
"Pick it up," I said.
He
hesitated for a moment and then lifted the phone.
"It's called call-forwarding," I said, the two of us staring at each other across the desk. "Courtesy of Ma Bell. If you want to forward your calls to another number, you punch in a code on your home phone, followed by the new phone number. The calls are forwarded automatically. Obviously you use it all the time; your home phone's on it right now. That was your home number I just dialed."
He wasn't talking. The muscles under his ear were jerking with every heartbeat. He tapped the ash off the cigar without taking his eyes off me. I went on:
"When you left the party last night, you came here instead of going home. You knew Raines was in Seaborn's office; you had talked to him when Seaborn called you at Babs' party. You also knew Raines would intimidate Seaborn enough to get the whole story. You probably had your gun there in the desk, or in the car. After I called you, you called Seaborn's office again, told Harry you'd meet him over here. Then you went downstairs and took the walkway through the park toward the bank. When he came up on you and said, 'You're finished,' you knew your career was flushed, so you shot him. The girl screamed, you ran back toward the river, dumped the gun, and came back here in time to get Dutch's call."
He sighed and shook his head. "Well," he said, "I must admit you've got quite the imagination. But I can see why you don't practice law. You couldn't get anywhere with that outrageous bunch of circumstantial bullshit."
The office door opened and the Stick meandered in, his hat perched on the back of his head as usual.
"Who the hell are you?" Donleavy demanded.
"He's with me," I said, and to the Stick, "Did you get it?"
He smiled and took a package out of his jacket pocket. It was a Baggie containing a very wet silver-plated S&W .38, with black rubber pistol grips. I looked at it. There was a number scratched on a piece of tape on the side of the bag.
"The number of your 38-is it 7906549?" I asked Donleavy.
"What .38?" he demanded.
"The one you bought on February third of last year at Odum's Sport Shop on Third Street," Stick said. "Mr. Odum remembers it very well. The only thing he had to look up was the exact day and the serial number."
"This is hard evidence," I said. "There's nothing circumstantial about a murder weapon."