Collar Robber (22 page)

The Fourth Friday in April

Chapter Forty-nine

Jay Davidovich

Paperwork.

One Declaration of Unloaded Firearm(s) in Checked Luggage, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Form ATF-06-1978, disclosing inclusion in baggage to be loaded aboard Delta Flight 0870 from Reagan National to Las Vegas, Nevada, of one unloaded and dismantled Remington Model 870 12-gauge shotgun for use by passenger at destination.

One authorization for guest admission to Crosby Trap and Skeet Shooting Range in Pender, Nevada, for the one-week period beginning the next day, together with a receipt for the three hundred-fifty dollars Transoxana had paid for the thing.

One Transoxana Corporate authorization for occupancy by J. M. Davidovich of the Model Home in Lot 23 of Plat 8 in the Kroft Development outside Las Vegas for the same one-week period, plus tonight.

I had exchanged all of this documentation by email, ostensibly with Quindel, to give Halkani a chance to read it. In other words, we'd created a paper trail so wide a blind man could follow it. We might as well have posted billboards up and down the East Coast: COME ON, PUNK: HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT.

At eleven-thirty that Friday morning, Rachel and I loaded a roller bag, a large backpack, and a Winchester triple-lock high-impact fiberglass firearms transport case into my Chevy Tahoe's cargo bay. We quickly put our cheerful little red brick neo-Federal home in Alexandria in the rearview mirror. At twelve-eighteen we—well, strictly speaking, I—unloaded this stuff onto the sidewalk outside Terminal 1 at Reagan National. The skycaps had apparently all just won the lottery, but Rachel and I managed to schlep the load inside to the ticket counter and then, except for the backpack, to the TSA secure area. By one-oh-five we were in line for security. The travel vest that I'd used in Pittsburgh actually did speed up the security process a bit. We reached our gate at one-twenty, almost an hour before boarding was scheduled to start.

Now came the scary part. Shouldering the backpack, I fortified myself with a deep breath as I turned toward Rachel.

“All right, angel, here's where we part company. If things go as planned, I'll see you in Vegas sometime Saturday night. Otherwise, I'll pick you up back here at Reagan National Sunday night. Either way, you will have had a weekend in Vegas.”

Rachel's patented pout came right on schedule.

“Vegas has nothing but hookers, strippers, and gambling.”

“One out of three ain't bad. Vegas is batting three-thirty-three, so if it were a baseball player, it'd make the all star team.”

“Very funny.” Sulky line, but she couldn't help chuckling. “But what if this
golem
Jew, whoever he is, actually takes your fake and sashays out to Las Vegas in search of this famous real/fake painting that probably doesn't exist at all?”

“Then he'll try to burglarize Transoxana's model home in the ill-fated Kroft Development. He'll find four veteran Transoxana loss-prevention specialists who'll specialize for three minutes or so in beating the living shit out of him before turning him over to the first guy with a badge who's willing to take him off their hands.”

“But you don't think he's going to do that?”

“No. He's a jackal, not an idiot. He's on the hook for criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, the attempted murder of Dany Nesselrode, and the actual murder of C. Talbot Rand. Not to mention the murder of his partner, which was actually committed by Rand but which they might try to hang on Halkani just for good luck. He may still have the
Eros Rising
scam somewhere in the back of his mind, but job-one for him right now is tying up loose ends.”

“Like Alma von Leuthen.”

“Like her.”

“And you.”

“Don't inflate my sense of self-importance.”

“Don't bullshit me. He'll track you to a place where he thinks you're going to buy a painting from her so that he can kill her there. And, incidentally, you.”

“That's one theory.”

“Not a very comforting theory.”

“The idea is to kill more of him than he does of me, if it comes to that.”

“Does Quindel know this is a kill mission?”

“I said if it comes to that. Besides, we're an insurance company. We don't do kill missions; we do early policy terminations. I'll try to shoot the gun out of his hands first.”

In an eye-blink Rachel's expression did a startling one-eighty. One second I was looking at a petulant teenager who'd just been grounded for prom night, and the next I saw the fiercely burning eyes of a Jew whose people had been living under the shadow of genocide for going on four thousand years—a Jew who would have slit her own children's throats at Masada to spare them Roman crucifixion. She took my right bicep in her left hand. It hurt. A lot.

“Take no prisoners.”

Funny, when Proxy says that, it's a metaphor.

Chapter Fifty

Jay Davidovich

The cab from Reagan National dropped me and my backpack at Town Centre Shops, a strip-mall roughly four hundred yards north of the block Rachel and I live on and, more important for my immediate purposes, about two hundred feet above it. Cross the street bordering the parking lot and you come to a wooded downslope. Maybe I should say “technically wooded.” Stunted scrub pine, mostly, with nothing much over eight feet tall. You'd have to work at it to stage a lynching there. Used now mostly for dope-smoking by kids who think they're fooling someone.

Point is, if you go about halfway down that slope with decent binoculars you can get a fair view of Jay and Rachel's manse. If you're wearing OD digicamis—excuse me, olive drab pants and jacket with digital camouflage coloring—like the ones I'd changed into from the backpack, someone near the house would have to be both sharp-eyed and lucky to spot you.

After side-stepping an abandoned baby carriage and a grocery cart lying on one side in the mud, I flushed a couple of fourteen-year-olds who were actually smoking tobacco. Almost as transgressive as pot these days, but such an important Virginia crop that it practically seemed patriotic. I stumbled over a pretty good-quality aluminum ladder that some idiot had left in the underbrush to keep the stroller and the cart company. Settling in behind a juniper bush with incongruous purple flowers, I brought the binoculars up and started a slow, painstaking pan from the opposite side of the street in front of our property to the back fence.

You can disable most residential security systems without triggering the alarm by cutting two widely separated wires at the same moment. That requires two people working closely together, and Halkani's partners tended to die young, so I wasn't putting a lot of chips on it. Even so I checked every wire coming out of our house. No cuts. No sign of forced entry. So it didn't look like Rache and I had company yet.

Next decision: Wait until twilight or go in right now? Now. First stop: garage. I retrieved a Colt Combat Commander 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol from the locked glove compartment of Rachel's Camry, where I'd stashed it this morning just before we left. Chambered a bullet. Put my thumb on the principal safety. I had satisfied myself that Halkani wasn't in our house—but that wouldn't be much consolation if I were wrong and he turned out to be sitting inside big as life with an Uzi trained on the kitchen door.

I approached the door in a crouch low enough to keep my head below the window in its upper half. Blood pounding at my temples, adrenaline pumping through my veins like horny sophomores streaming into a mixer. Key in my left hand, pistol in my right. Insert the key. Awkward because of the crouch, but I got it done. Turn the key, hear the click, turn the knob, push the door open with the key still in the lock. Hear the steady
beep-beep-beep
of the alarm, telling me I had thirty seconds to punch in our code and keep the alarm from sounding. No burst of fire from inside, no sound of shoe soles scraping on linoleum.

I dove full length through the opening between the door and the jamb with my pistol leveled. Nothing. Scrambled to my feet, made it to the alarm console, punched in the code. Almost got the third digit wrong, but caught myself just in time. The
beep-beep-beep
stopped.

I exhaled. And this was just the beginning.

Chapter Fifty-one

Cynthia Jakubek

Amber called me with the news just after eight in the morning. Willy was out of ICU. No longer in immediate danger. Able to see visitors.

“And,uh, C.J.?”

“Yes, Amber.”

“Willy was wondering if maybe you could come see him? And he's, like, sorry but, you know, right away?”

“On my way.”

I dropped everything and hustled over to Woodland Memorial Hospital. I found him and Amber in a semi-private room with no roommate. Willy had a heavy bandage around his throat and another one on top of his head. The skin on his face sagged in crepe-paper folds. Aside from that he didn't look too bad, considering that it was Willy. His first question didn't surprise me.

“They caught Rand yet?” Aside from a bad-cold rasp, his voice sounded fairly normal.

“Someone did. He's dead. Murdered. Hanged by the neck.”

“Nuts.” Willy turned his face away from me as palpable disappointment washed across it. “I was looking forward to icing him myself.”

“Into each life a little rain must fall. On the bright side, I managed to save Tally's letter to von Leuthen. I have it in the safe at my office. You can't sell it to Rand any more, but Sean McGeoghan might appreciate the effort you made to get your hands on it.”

He looked sharply at me, eyebrows rising in surprise.

“That's right, I never told you what was going on with that, did I?”

“That would be no.”

“No way I was selling that puppy to Rand. Plan was, if he saw it and wanted it, that would prove it was real, and that he was ‘Tabby'.”

“Well, it was real and he was ‘Tabby'.”

“See, what I really wanted was the acta defection whatever itself. That was the mother lode document. Hang that paper on him and we're home free. Couldn't find it, but I figured I could forge one to dangle in front of Rand anyway—you know, con the conman. But a real letter is way better than a forged document. And the sonofabitch bought it.”

“I'd say he did.”
And you almost ‘bought it' too
.

“Way I figured it, see, I flash this paper at Rand and he bids something for it. That proves he was Catholic when he married McGeoghan's squeeze, whatshername, so that ‘marriage' wasn't no marriage, way the Church sees things, so what's Rand got to squeeze McGeoghan with? Nothin', that's what.”

“And Sean would show his appreciation by dropping a few bills in your collection plate.” I tried really hard to sound non-judgmental.

“Absolutely not! That'd be a cheap Brooklyn grifter move. Not to mention against the law.”

“As to cheap Brooklyn grifters, I defer to you—but I'll handle the legal conclusions.”

“All I wanted was a piece of the Woodshed project. Not a free piece, like Rand. I just wanted McG to let me in with only a hundred K. I mean, I was actually going to put up the money. The hundred K. Minimum buy-in for a McGeoghan project is usually a quarter-mil, but I thought he might make an exception if I, like, did this favor for him.”

“Not a bad bet.”

“Turns out I'm in. Whatshername talked to Amber. So it worked.”

“Abbey,” Amber said with an earnest nod. “You really gotta remember her name if her future husband has a hundred-thousand of our money in his pocket.”

Willy's eyebrows arched heroically at “our.” For once in his blessed life, though, Willy self-censored. He kept his focus on me.

“Thanks for comin' over ASAP, C.J. 'Cause I need you to help Amber with something.”

“Shoot.”

“You've got to talk whoever is in charge here out of my car keys and help Amber get the Sable back to the condo. I parked it on Fourth, as close to St. Ben's as I could get, when I came there to meet Rand. So that was how many days ago?”

“Five.”

“Right. It prob'ly has a Brazilian rainforest worth of tickets on its windshield by now.”

“They blew me off when I checked,” Amber said. “Told me they didn't have any keys. There's a spare set at the condo, but I don't want to leave Willy any longer than I have to.”

“No choice, because they really don't have any keys here.” These words came from the door behind us. “No keys with Mr. Szulz when the ambulance brought him here. Plus, the Sable has been stolen.”

Just after I glimpsed the
oh-shit
look that flashed across Willy's face, my head jerked around fast enough to give me whiplash. I saw a guy who looked like he should've been in a hospital as a patient instead of a visitor. Under six feet, compact build, bloodshot eyes, at least a two-day growth of beard, and an odd tattoo on his left wrist.

“I saw you with that big tall Jew in Vienna,” Willy told the visitor. He made it sound like an accusation.

“He knows me as Dany Nesselrode.” The guy shambled the rest of the way into the room. He moved so stiffly that it hurt just to watch him.

“Who stole my Sable? I really love that thing—and it's paid for.”

“Avrim Halkani stole it. Actually, Rand stole it first. He's the one who relieved you of your keys. Halkani took it from Rand, who had no further use for it after Halkani stretched his neck for him.”

“And you know all this—how, exactly?” Willy asked.

“Because some time ago, after that
putz
had convinced himself that you could lead us to Alma von Leuthen and therefore to useful information about an expensive painting, he planted a transmitter-tracking device in your car's undercarriage. During the brief interval between when I hooked him up in New York with Davidovich—‘big Jew' to you—and when he tried to kill me, I managed to get my hands on the receiver tuned to the tracking device.”

“So you know where the car is?” Willy sounded a lot more urgent than clear title to a twelve-year old car would seem to warrant.

“It's somewhere near Washington, D.C.”

“You're bullshittin' us pal. The only tracking dealies with range like that are owned by the CIA.”

“The device he installed was standard issue. I know where the car is because I know where Davidovich is, and I know that a close encounter with Davidovich is on top of Halkani's to-do list.”

That one left Willy fresh out of wisecracks. It sobered all of us up. But Nesselrode wasn't done.

“The
Eros Rising
thing is
kaput
, at least for now. Even Halkani has to realize that. But he wants Davidovich dead for queering the deal. He wants von Leuthen dead for knowing too much. He wants me dead because it turned out we had different agendas and, besides, he hates my guts. And he probably wants you dead, Mr. Szulz, just for the hell of it. He believes in cleaning up his own messes.”

“All right.” I blew out a long, long breath. “Time to call the police.”

“No, thank you very much. I have three broken ribs, a punctured lung, a buzz in my head that won't go away, and a right knee that doesn't work properly. I should be in the hospital where they took me after Halkani creamed me with a Tacoma SUV he'd stolen. I left without waiting to be discharged because I can't afford to be sitting still—in a hospital with nurses, in a squeal room with cops, or anywhere else—until Halkani is accounted for.”

Bullshit. You bailed from the hospital because you
didn't want to be lying there when the New York cops finally remembered where they'd put the FBI's phone number.

Willy favored us with a long, world-weary sigh. He had that expression people get when they have to ask you for a favor they don't want to ask.

“Biggie, C.J.”

“Shoot.”

“I need you to see if you can get the Sable back before it reaches a police impound lot.”

I took a look at Amber, then at Nesselrode.

“Could you two take a hike for about five minutes?”

They looked at each other—quizzically in Amber's case, skeptically in Nesselrode's. Amber shrugged. Nesselrode scowled. Then Amber came over to Nesselrode to give him some support as he limped out of the room with her.

“Okay, Willy,” I said, returning my attention to my client, “I have to know the deal with the car.”

“You sure you wanna know this?”

“Have to whether I want to or not.”

“All right. I smelled a con the second you told me about that ‘free-thinker' crack Rand had made to you at the Museum. Had no idea what the con was, but bullshit is my business and I know it when I smell it.”

“Well, you're ahead of me.”

“So I checked the fucker out. Not just Google. Had a Jersey p.i. who's pretty good do a work-up on him. Found out that a fancy Austrian university he attended for a term was a place American seminarians sometimes get sent to. So I knew something was up, but I still couldn't put it together. Then McG mentions Rand being in the middle of a marriage scam, and I started to get some inkling of why Rand was so anxious to keep people from wondering if he was Catholic.”

“You mean you flew to Vienna on intuition?”

“No, I went to Vienna to talk to an old friend of dad's. He's the one who put me onto Alma von Leuthen. But that looked like a dead end. And that acta document stuff—I didn't know any of that.”

“Yeah, you somehow never struck me as a canon law expert.”

“Amber was the one came up with that. She knew the basic rule about how marriage outside the Church doesn't count for Catholics, but does count for non-Catholics. Which I didn't. That last part, I mean. She talked to this priest she goes to for confession, and learned enough from him to pin down the acta document stuff on the net.”

“But you hadn't come up with it in Vienna, and no telling where you might find it.”

“Yeah. Tell ya what, I had
no idea
what a pile of shit I was stepping into. Anyway, once I come back from Vienna empty-handed, Amber forged the acta
et cetera
. I took a stab at it. She took one look and told me it was for shit. She said it a lot nicer than that, but that's what it came down to. She forged one that really looked good.”

“So Amber can add creative writing to her list of impressive talents.”

“The forged acta whatever is in an envelope inside the rim of the spare tire in the Sable's trunk. I wanted it where I could use it with Rand if I had to on Sunday. Didn't quite get that far with him, though.”

“In other words,” I said, “the Sable is the hiding place for evidence that Amber is the sweetest, nicest co-conspirator you'd ever want to meet. You didn't actually defraud Rand or anybody else. But you and Amber worked together to defraud Rand, and the forged document is an overt act in furtherance of the plan, even though you never brought the plan off. In theory, that puts you both on the hook for criminal conspiracy.”

“I know. Stupidest goddamn thing I ever did, bringing her into it like that. I mean, I wouldn't tell
you
what was going on because I wanted to keep your skirts clean, but I couldn't even of thought the thing up without Amber.”

“I did say ‘in theory.' The potential victim was a bad dude, now he's dead, you never got a penny out of it. Not the kind of thing the average cop would jump at, even on a slow day.”

Laying his head back on the pillow and shaking it slowly from side to side, he stared at the ceiling.

“The connection to the art thing makes it a huge deal, C.J. Sure as hell they're gonna say I was in cahoots with Halkani on the whole thing. Which would mean Amber was lying about Halkani stealing the Taser and put me right back in the soup on that deal.”

“Something to that, all right.”

“Now I can handle that. I'm a big boy and I know the rules. What I can't handle is the Feds threatening to prosecute Amber as a way of getting to me.” Wincing with pain as he raised his head, he propped himself up on his left elbow and looked pleadingly at me. “If they get my Sable with Halkani's prints all over it, they're gonna take it apart bolt by bolt and search every square foot of it. They'll take that letter and shove it right up my ass an inch at a time. Same with Amber. She's tougher than she looks and smarter than she sounds, but I can't put her through that.”

Willy was begging me. He loved Amber more than he hated begging, and that was saying something. On top of that, I couldn't disagree with a thing he'd said about the way the Feds would come after him and Amber.

I stepped outside to summon Amber and Nesselrode back into the room. I wondered whether Nesselrode was technically a fugitive yet. If Davidovich's theories were even half right, Nesselrode was up to his eyebrows in a large-scale criminal plot—and unlike Willy, he was actually guilty of serious crimes. Noble purposes aren't a defense. Halkani had tried to murder him, but that didn't mean they weren't working together on something that had gotten other people killed– probably made it more likely, if anything. On the other hand, theories aren't facts. So I wasn't technically aiding and abetting—yet.

Nesselrode might have been reading my mind.

“I haven't been charged with anything as far as I know. And when I say I want to account for Halkani, I mean, of course, that I want to find him and identify him to the proper authorities so that they can arrest him and provide him with due process of law.”

“Finding him means finding the Sable.” Willy contributed that.

I sighed. I looked down. I took a deep breath. My client needed a service. Not, strictly speaking, a
legal
service, but at least arguably not an illegal service either. Willy had been there for me when I was eating Ramen noodles for lunch and wondering whether I'd be able to pay next month's rent. Plus, Davidovich was in danger and might not know it, and I kind of got a kick out of him. And I liked the hell out of Amber. I looked up at Nesselrode.

“Do you have a valid, government-issued identification?”