“There have been other incidents,” I guessed.
“There have,” he said, “unless it’s my imagination. It could be I’ve turned into an old maid, checking the cupboards, looking under the bed. Perhaps that’s all it is. That, or else I’ve an enemy and a spy.”
I have a license now, issued by the State of New York. I got it awhile ago when one of my lawyer clients told me, not for the first time, that he’d be able to give me more work if I were licensed. I’ve worked a lot for lawyers lately, and more than ever since I picked up the license.
But I haven’t always had a license, and I haven’t worked exclusively for members of the legal profession. I had a pimp for a client once. Another time, I worked for a drug trafficker.
If I could work for them, why couldn’t I work for Ballou? If he was good enough to be my friend, if he was good enough to sit up all night with, why couldn’t he be my client?
I said, “You’d have to tell me how to find the place.”
“And what place would that be?”
“E-Z Storage.”
“We were just there.”
“I wasn’t paying attention once we got out of the tunnel. I’ll need directions. And you’d better let me have a key for the padlock.”
“When do you want to go? Andy can drive you.”
“I’ll go by myself,” I said. “Just tell me how to get there.”
I jotted down the directions in my notebook. He proffered the roll of bills, his eyebrows raised, and I told him to put his money away.
He said this was business, that he was a client like any other, that he expected to pay. I said I’d be spending a couple of hours asking questions that most likely wouldn’t lead anywhere. When the job was done, when I’d done as much as I felt comfortable doing, I’d tell him what I’d learned and how much he owed me.
“And don’t your clients usually pay you something in advance? Of course they do. Here’s a thousand dollars. Take it, man, for Jesus’ sake! It won’t obligate you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
I knew that. How could money obligate me more than friendship had? I said, “You don’t have to pay in advance. I probably won’t earn all this.”
“Little enough you’d have to do. My lawyer gets as much every time he picks up the telephone. Take it, put it in your pocket. What you don’t earn you can always give back.”
I put the bills in my wallet, wondering why I’d even bothered to argue. Years ago an old cop named Vince Mahaffey told me what to do when somebody gave me money. “Take it,” he’d said, “and put it away, and say thank you. You could even touch your cap if you’re wearing one.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s I should be thanking you. Are you certain you don’t want someone to drive you?”
“I’m positive.”
“Or I can let you have the use of a car, and you can drive yourself.”
“I’ll get there.”
“Now I’ve hired you, I’d best leave you alone, eh? Just let me know if you need anything.”
“I will.”
“Or if you learn anything. Or if you determine there’s nothing to be learned.”
“Either way,” I said, “it shouldn’t take more than a day or two.”
“Whatever it takes. I’m glad you took the money.”
“Well, you pretty much insisted on it.”
“Ah, we’re a fine pair of old fools,” he said. “You should have taken the money without an argument. And for my part, I should have let you refuse it. But how could I do that?” His eyes caught mine, held them. “Suppose some wee fucker kills me before you finish the job. How would I feel then? I’d hate to die owing you money.”
I was up a little before noon, and by one o’clock I had picked up an Avis car and found my way to E-Z Storage. I spent the afternoon there. I talked to the man in charge, one Leon Kramer, who started out wary and turned into Chatty Cathy before he was done.
Elaine rents a storage cubicle in a warehouse a few blocks west of our apartment—she stores artwork and antiques there, the overflow from her shop—but the system at the E-Z facility in New Jersey was different, and a good deal more casual. We have to sign in and out whenever we visit our bin, but E-Z, unattended at night and offering twenty-four-hour access, can’t attempt anything like that level of security. A sign over Kramer’s desk insisted in large print that all storage was entirely at the customer’s risk, and he made the point himself three times in the first five minutes I spent with him.
So there were no records kept of comings and goings, and nothing stronger than the tenant’s own padlock to keep others out of his storage bin.
“They want to be able to come here any hour of the day or night,” Kramer said. “Their brother-in-law needs to store some stuff, they can hand him the key without worrying did they put his name on a list of persons authorized to have access. They don’t want to sign in each time, clip on a security badge, fill out a lot of forms. What we got here is more convenience than security. Nobody’s renting one of our bins to stash the crown jewels. Anything really important or valuable’s gonna go in your safe deposit box at the bank. What we get is your mother’s dining room set and the files from Dad’s old office, before you went and put him in the home. All the stuff you’d keep in the attic, except you sold the house and moved to a garden apartment.”
“Or things you’d just as soon not keep around the house,” I suggested.
“Now that I wouldn’t know about,” he said, “and I wouldn’t want to know. All I need to know’s your check cleared the first of the month.”
“A man’s storage space is his castle.”
He nodded. “With the exception that you can live in a castle, and you can’t live here. There’s a lot of other things you can do. We call it storage, but it’s not all storage. You see that sign, ‘Rooms 4 Rent’? That’s what we’re offering, the extra room your house or apartment hasn’t got. I got tenants’ll store a boat here, boat motor and trailer, ’cause they got no room to garage it where they live. Others, the room’s their workshop. They set up their tools and do woodworking, work on their car, whatever. Only thing you can’t do is move in and live here, and that’s not my rule, it’s the county’s, or the township’s, whatever. No living. Not that people don’t try.”
I’d shown him my business card and explained that I was working for a tenant of his who’d had some goods disappear. He didn’t want to make it a police matter until he’d ruled out the possibility of employee pilferage. That was probably what it was, Kramer said. Somebody who already had a key, went and made himself the boss’s silent partner.
By the time I left him I had a list of the tenants on the side of the building where John Kenny and Barry McCartney had been shot to death. I’d fumbled my way to a pretext—maybe another customer had seen or heard something—and Kramer went along, either to get rid of me or because we were old friends by then. Ballou’s cubicle, I noted, was officially leased to someone named J. D. Reilly, with an address in Middle Village, in Queens.
I had a sandwich and fries at a diner across the road, asked a few questions there, then returned to E-Z Storage and used Mick’s key to have another look at the murder scene. I could still detect all the odors I’d smelled the night before, but they were fainter now.
I’d brought a broom and dustpan, and I swept up the broken glass and dumped the shards into a brown paper bag. There was a reasonably good chance that one of those chunks of glass held an identifiable fingerprint, but so what? Even if it did, and even if I found it, what good would it be to me? A single print will nail a suspect, but it won’t produce a suspect out of thin air. For that you need a full set of fingerprints, and you also need official access to federal records. What I had was useless from an investigative standpoint, and would be useful only when a suspect was in custody and a case was being made against him.
But it wasn’t even good for that. The crime scene had been compromised beyond recognition, with the murders unreporte
d, the bodies spirited away and tucked in an unmarked grave. What I held in my hand was evidence that a bottle had been broken. I knew people who’d call that a crime, but nobody who’d want to run prints to hunt down the man who’d broken it.
I stood inside the doorway, listening to traffic sounds, then lowered the steel door all the way down. I couldn’t hear anything now, but it was hard to say what that proved; the traffic hadn’t been all that loud.
What I was wondering about was the noise of the gunshots. I was assuming the killers had lowered the door before opening fire, but that wouldn’t necessarily render the cubicle soundproof.
Of course they could have used suppressors. If so, that made it a little less likely the incident had been a spur-of-the-moment response to an unexpected opportunity for gain. A couple of resourceful sociopaths could have been on the scene, could have seen all those cases of booze. And they could have been carrying weapons at the time—some people, more than you’d think, never leave home unarmed.
But who routinely carries a silencer? No one I’d ever known.
I raised the door, stepped outside and looked around. Half a dozen units away, a man was shifting cartons from the back of a Plymouth Voyager, stowing them in his cubicle. A woman in khaki shorts and a green halter top was leaning against the side of the van and watching him work. Their car radio was playing, but so faintly that all I could tell was that it was music. I couldn’t make it out.
Aside from my Ford, theirs was the only vehicle on that side of the building.
I decided the killers probably hadn’t needed to muffle their gunfire. The odds were there hadn’t been anyone around to hear it. And how remarkable would a few loud noises be? With the steel door shut, anyone within earshot would write off four or five shots as hammer blows, somebody assembling or disassembling a packing case, say. This was suburbia, after all, not a housing project in Red Hook. You didn’t expect gunfire, didn’t throw yourself on the pavement every time a truck backfired.
Still, why shoot them?
“Names and addresses,” TJ said, and frowned. “These be the dudes renting alongside where the two dudes got shot.”
“According to the storage company’s records.”
“Somebody’s bad enough to shoot two dudes and steal a truckload of liquor, you figure he’d put his real name down when he rents storage space?”
“Probably not,” I said, “although stranger things have happened. There was a fellow a couple of months ago who robbed a bank, and his note to the teller was written on one of his own printed deposit slips.”
“Stupid goes clear down to the bone, don’t it?”
“It seems to,” I agreed. “But if the shooters used a false name, that’s a help. Because if one of the names on our list turns out to be phony—”
“Yeah, I get it. So we lookin’ for one of two things. Somebody’s got a record, or somebody that don’t exist at all.”
“Neither one necessarily proves anything,” I said. “But it would give us a place to start.”
He nodded and settled in at the keyboard, tapping keys, using the mouse. I’d bought him the computer for Christmas, at the same time installing it—and him—in my old room at the Northwestern. When Elaine and I moved in together I’d kept my hotel room across the street as a combination den and office, a place to go when I wanted to be alone, sitting at the window and thinking long thoughts.
I’d met TJ on Forty-second Street long before they prettied up the Deuce, and early on he appointed himself my assistant. He turned out to be not merely street-smart but resourceful. When Elaine opened her shop on Ninth Avenue, he took to hanging out there, filling in for her on occasion and revealing a talent for retail sales. I don’t know where he lived before he took over my old room—the only address we ever had for him was his beeper number—but I guess he always found a place to sleep. You learn a lot of survival skills in the street. You’d better.
He’d since then learned computer skills as well. While I leafed through Macworld magazine, trying to find something written in a language I could understand, he tapped keys and frowned and whistled and jotted down notes on the sheet of paper I’d given him. Within an hour he’d established that all the names Leon Kramer had supplied belonged to living human beings, and he was able to furnish telephone numbers for all but two of them.
“This don’t necessarily mean that all the information’s straight dope,” he pointed out. “Could be somebody rented a bin and put down a real name and address, only it’s a name and address belongs to somebody else.”
“Unlikely,” I said.
“Whole deal’s unlikely. I’m at my storage locker, and I happen to see you got all this liquor in your storage locker, and there I am with a gun in my pocket and a truck parked alongside?”
“The first part’s plausible enough,” I said. “You’re there and you spot the whiskey. But why shoot me?”
“On account of you might not care to stand idly by while I load your booze onto my truck and drive off with it.”
“Why not wait?”
“Come back later, you mean.”
“Why not? I’ve got a station wagon, I’m not going to haul off more than a few cases. The rest’ll be there when you come back with a truck and somebody to help with the heavy lifting. You can even do it at night, when it’s less likely anybody’ll see what you’re doing.”
“You go away and come back, you got the padlock to contend with.”
“So? You drill it out or hacksaw it. Or spray it with Freon and take a hammer to it. What do you figure is trickier, getting past a padlock or taking out two men?”
He tapped the sheet of paper. “Sounds like we wastin’ our time on these here.”
“Unless somebody on the list happened to see or hear something.”
“Long odds against that.”
“Long odds against most things in life.”
He looked at the list of names and numbers, shook his head. “Guess I got some calls to make.”
“I’ll make them.”
“No, I’ll make them. They mostly in Jersey. You make them, they go on your phone bill. I make them, they be free.”
A couple of years ago I’d used the talents of a pair of high school computer hackers, and in gratitude they’d given me an unrequested perk. By doing some backing and filling within the phone company’s labyrinthine computer system, they had so arranged things that all my long-distance calls were free. By leaving their handiwork in place, I was technically guilty of theft of services, but somehow I couldn’t get too worked up about it. I wasn’t even sure which long-distance carrier I was defrauding, and hadn’t a clue how to go about straightening it out.
The free calls went with the hotel room, so TJ inherited them when he moved in. He’d installed a second line for the computer modem, so he could talk and tap keys at the same time.
That’s the future, and I guess it works. I’m old-fashioned, and take perverse comfort in telling myself I’m too old to change. All I know how to do is knock on doors and ask a lot of questions.
“Use your Brooks Brothers accent,” I said.
“Oh, you think, Dink? What I was figuring was I’d try to sound like a dude with a ‘tude.” He rolled his eyes. In the voice of an NPR announcer he said, “Let me assure you, sir, that neither asphalt nor Africa will register in my speech.”
“I love it when you talk like that,” I told him. “It’s like watching a dog walk on his hind legs.”
“That a compliment or an insult?”
“Probably a little of both,” I said. “One thing, though. Remember you’re talking to people from Jersey. If you speak too clearly, they won’t be able to understand you.”
Elaine and I went out for dinner and a movie, and I wound up telling her what I’d been doing. “I don’t think TJ’s going to learn anything,” I said. “It’s not too likely any of the other tenants were around yesterday when the shit hit the fan. If they were, I’d be surprised if they saw or heard anything.”
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br /> “Where do you go from here?”
“I probably give him his money back, or as much of it as I can get him to take. The money’s the least of it. I think he’s afraid.”
“Mick? It’s hard to imagine him afraid of anything.”
“Most tough guys are afraid a lot of the time,” I said. “That’s why they take the trouble to be tough. At the very least, I’d say he’s anxious, and he’s got reason to be. Somebody executed two of his men for no good reason. They didn’t have to shoot anybody.”
“They were sending him a message?”
“It looks that way.”
“But not a very clear one, if he doesn’t know what to make of it. What happens next?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me much and I didn’t ask. Maybe he’s in a pissing contest with somebody. Maybe there’ll be a certain amount of pushing and shoving before things sort themselves out.”
“Gangsters fighting over territory? That kind of thing?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s not really your fight.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re not going to get involved, are you?”
I shook my head. “He’s my friend,” I said. “You like to talk about past lives and karmic ties, and I don’t know how much of that I believe in, but I don’t rule it out. Mick and I are connected on some sort of deep level, that much is clear.”
“But your lives are different.”
“Utterly. He’s a criminal. I mean, that’s what he does. I’m hardly a candidate for canonization, but essentially he and I are on opposite sides of the law.” I thought about that. “That’s if the law is something with only two sides to it, and I’m not sure it is. The job I did for Ray Gruliow last month was designed to help him get a client acquitted, and I know for a fact the son of a bitch was guilty as charged. So my job in that particular case was to see that justice wasn’t done. And when I was a cop I gave perjured testimony more times than I can remember. The men I testified against had done what they were accused of doing, or else they’d done something else that we couldn’t pin on them. I never framed an innocent man, or one who didn’t damn well belong in prison, but what side of the law was I on when I lied to put him there?”