Nice Place for a Murder (27 page)

“No such thing ever happened.” Ingo’s raspy voice was composed and unemotional. He was very good at this.

“Are you telling me that Brody wasn’t behind Sosenko’s attempts on your life?” I said. “That Sosenko just happened to know when you usually went swimming, the day he drowned Newalis by mistake? Just happened to know when you’d be on the ferry, the day Hector took the bullet meant for you? Tell me, please, how he could possibly have known you and Lisa were driving out with Hector if he didn’t get the word from New York.”

“This Sosenko appears to have been a crafty and resourceful person,” Ingo said. “He had his methods, I’m sure.”

“And I suppose you didn’t get to Sosenko and buy him off, turn him against Brody? Of course, who could blame you for fighting back? I’m sure it’s tiresome when someone keeps trying to assassinate you.  But of course, that’s just another fantasy of mine.”

“It would seem,” he said.

“Now the killer you and Brody both paid is conveniently dead. What a break. A perfect time for you two to strike a new bargain, make a new show of solidarity and save the stock offering. What’s the deal, Ingo? You let Brody stay president and he stops trying to have you killed?”

“Arthur Brody is immensely valuable to my company. There’s never been any plan for him to leave,” Ingo said.

Lisa fidgeted uneasily, looking up at me as I stood beside her. “Think what you want, Seidenberg,” she said. “What I can’t understand is why you’re marching around here with a drink in your hand and telling us your absurd story. In addition to alienating your biggest client, what do you hope to accomplish? Why did you come here again?”

I had some more of the Glenfiddich. “First, I promised Giannone I’d give you his message. He wants twenty-five thousand dollars to go away.”

“And not tell anyone his nonsense about what he says happened in the hospital?” Ingo said.

“That’s right.”

“Don’t do it, Ingo,” Lisa said. “No one’s going to listen to the babbling of a drug addict. And if you give him money now, he’ll be back for more.”

“I could be wrong,” I said, “but I think this is a one-time thing. Giannone just wants to straighten himself out. Give him the money, and I believe you’ll never hear from him again. Don’t give him the money, and it’s likely he’ll embarrass you, even if no one believes him.”

“It’s a bad idea to —“ Lisa began, to Ingo, but he held up his hand and silenced her.

“All right, twenty-five thousand for this Giannone, then.” Ingo said. “I don’t suppose there’s anything else?”

“There is,” I told him. “My friend’s brand new pickup truck got badly smashed on the Long Island Expressway while we were chasing Sosenko. As we were in the process of putting our lives on the line for Julian Communications — “

“We’ll pay for a new truck,” Ingo said. “Anything else?”

“Only one thing,” I said.

“Say it, then. We have to leave for the city.” She rose to her feet, smoothing her skirt.

I wished I were as loose as I’d hoped, with the scotch and all, but the truth was, I was at such a keen edge the drink didn’t matter at all. Didn’t even taste it going down. “You wouldn’t let me in on what was really going on. While I was getting shot at, I was also being lied to and manipulated by experts — Ingo Julian, Arthur Brody and Lisa Harper. Face it, because of you, Hector got slaughtered in the crossfire. And you nearly got my friend shot while we were chasing your killer through Grand Central Station. The sad part is, you really don’t care, any of you. The stock deal will go forward and you’ll all get even richer than you are already. But I want you to know that in the end, I found you out.” I set my glass down on a side table. “I know what you did.”

“Are you finished, Seidenberg, yes?” Ingo said. I did not respond. He went on, “No matter what you may believe, Kenny Newalis and Hector Alzarez were murdered by a man who thought he had a reason to seek revenge against our company. Working for us, you found that man and put a stop to him. I’m truly sorry if that sounds too simple for you, but clearly that’s what happened. Why confuse the issue? Julian Communications will always be grateful to you and to Empire Security. Our debt of gratitude will be even more valuable to you as our company grows, and Empire becomes more important to us.” He stood, and steered Lisa through the archway that led to the front door.  Then, with what appeared to be an afterthought, he stopped, and turned to look at me. “Of course there’s the matter of the fifty thousand special fee Arthur paid you. And another fifty yet to come. No reason for Teague to know about it.”

“You want it back?” I said.

“Of course not,” Ingo said. “Given what was at stake, I told Arthur you were cheap at the price. And now this matter is completed.” He opened the door. They both walked through it without looking back.

CHAPTER XXX

The Elysium was one of ten boats working the incoming tide at Plum Gut, but none of us were doing any good, that I could tell. I hadn’t seen a fish being boated since we got there.

We’d motored through the Gut into Long Island Sound and drifted back into the bay a half dozen times, Wally and I dropping chrome jigs to the bottom and reeling them up fast, trying to entice bluefish to chase the shiny lures. Alicia was at the helm, doing a skilful job of keeping the boat right at the edge of the rip where the blues like to snap up the baitfish and squid. Right place, right time, gorgeous calm day. In a perfect world, the big October blues would be walloping anything that moved, but either they weren’t hungry or they weren’t there.

My experience at the Gut was, if you couldn’t get a strike in the first half hour, chances were you wouldn’t get one all day long. I was ready to move on. “Let’s head out and try Pigeon Rip,” I said. “When they’re not here, they’re at Pigeon Rip.”

“You know that for a fact, right?” Wally’s voice was muted and constrained, because he barely opened his mouth as he talked. The rifle butt Sosenko had smacked him with had left his jaw an unhealthy shade of purple, and the inside of his mouth painfully scored by his own teeth. I didn’t even like to think about it, but Wally never complained.

“Guaranteed bluefish at Pigeon Rip,” I told him. Then to Alicia, “Go around the buoy, then steer zero-three — “

“Zero-three-zero. Yes, I know. Don’t insult me with your directions. I know all the secrets of the sea.” She pulled at the wheel and steered us north out into the Sound.

Pigeon Rip is a bluefish hot spot three miles from Plum Gut, roughly halfway to New London, Connecticut.  Surrounded by water two hundred fifty feet deep, the bottom at the rip rises like an underwater mountain to a depth below the surface of a hundred feet or so, shallow with respect to the rest of the Sound, but still enough water to wear you out when you’re pulling a fighting twelve-pound bluefish off the bottom and up the whole way to the boat.

As I’d promised, the fish were waiting for us, and while Alicia maneuvered Elysium back and forth across the rip, Wally and I had our way with the blues below. They attacked in a fury with every drift, bending our poles over sharply as they struck the lures, then battled for their lives. Shouting encouragement to each other, Wally and I strained against our poles again and again, and soon had eight fat blues thumping away inside the Elysium’s fish-box.

“Enough,” Alicia said. “Who’s going to eat all these fish? Leave some for the poor people. Anyway, I’m hungry for lunch. What a lunch I got. Wait till you see.” She motored Elysium out of the path of the two other boats working the rip and headed back toward Plum Gut. In a few minutes she killed the engines and let the boat drift to a standstill in the calm water off Plum Island. She ducked down into the cutty cabin and reappeared with the cooler box, then opened it to reveal, first, a plate of fresh white figs, halved, with each piece wrapped in prosciutto. “Melon with prosciutto is for tourists. Fresh figs with prosciutto is for royalty,” she told us. “Dried figs you get everywhere, but fresh figs are completely impossible to find.”

“Where did you find these, then?” Wally asked her, wincing with the discomfort of talking.

“I went to the ends of the earth, and I begged for them, ” Alicia said. “To please two such brave men as you, it was just my small gesture.” She uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured three generous portions into plastic glasses. “A cabernet from the Macari winery, over on the North Road. Pressing from the older vines. Makes a difference. Taste.”

The lifted our glasses in an unspoken toast and drank, eating the figs until they were gone. Then Alicia unwrapped sandwiches of roasted red peppers, slabs of feta cheese and capers, on French baguettes, perfumed with fruity olive oil and fresh herbs. Wally ate his with some difficulty, moving his jaws in slow motion, but seemed to savor it, anyway. The combination of tastes was just slightly superior to remarkable. The three of us sat in the sunshine, washing down the last of Alicia’s brilliant lunch with the remains of the cabernet. The boat rocked almost imperceptibly in the slight breeze that was beginning to come up from the south.

“So, Wally,” Alicia said, “you have bought a new pickup truck, then? For the one smashed on the expressway?”

“Actually, no,” Wally said. “Did the next best thing, though. I took the old one to the auto body shop in Mattituck. They said it’ll be as good as new.”

“How much?” I said.

“To the body shop?” said Wally. “Forty-eight hundred.”

“So subtract that from the twenty thousand Ingo handed over to buy you a new truck, and that gives you —“

“Fifteen thousand two hundred dollars is what it gives me,” Wally said. “I figure that part’s my fee for pain and suffering. Little enough. You don’t have trouble with that, do you, amigo? Hell, you got a hundred large, altogether, and you didn’t have to get slugged with a rifle butt to earn it.”

“I get paid for delivering the goods, not for taking a pounding,” I said. “Anyway, you’d been a little quicker, Sosenko wouldn’t have tagged you.”

Alicia leaned toward me and screwed her fist, none too gently, into my arm. “You shut up, you. Without Wally you don’t get that Sosenko, and just maybe Sosenko gets you instead.” She brushed her fingers lightly against Wally’s bruised jaw, squinting at him to show she shared his pain. “You are a beautiful man, Wally Prager. Courageous, and handsome, too. I love you forever.”

Wally smiled a crooked smile, distorted by his tender jaw. “I think I could get to like this investigator stuff. You get adventure. You get money. You get a sexy Italian lady telling you she loves you.  I may sell the marina.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “These twenty thousand dollar payoffs don’t come along every day.”

“And what about that drug addict, the one who used to be a doctor?” Alicia said to me. “They give you money for him, too? What does he do with it.”

“Giannone? I figured if he lived in that warehouse with all that cash on him, somebody’d kill him for it before too long, so I gave it to his sister, “ I said. “He owed her a good piece of it, anyway. And I thought she’ll dole out a few bucks to him when he needs it for clothes, food. Maybe he won’t be able to pump it all into his arm.”

“So sad,” Alicia said. “A doctor. You think he can recover, ever?”

“He wants to,” I told her. “But he’s pretty far gone. He sees little animals. I don’t know. Anybody’s guess.”

“This is such a strange story, all this business,” she said. “Those two men from the company — what are the names?”

“You mean Ingo and Brody?” I said.

“Yes, them. They actually try to kill each other. Now they forgive everything because of all the money. Like it never happened. Unbelievable. In Italy, one of them would be dead a long time ago.”

“They going ahead with the stock thing, then?” Wally said.

“I think they’ll wait now, for a quarter, maybe two,” I said. “Show the world that Julian Communications continues to be a moneymaker, no matter about Sosenko and the killings.”

“And the bottom line is, people get killed, and those guys get rich,” Wally said.

“You did what they asked you,” Alicia said, looking from me to Wally and back again. “You got the killer.”

“I suppose you might say that.” I shielded my eyes from the bright sun and stared across the Sound. Gulls soared far out over the water, and the Connecticut shoreline was sharp and clear in the autumn air.

THE END

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Alicia and Ben’s Lemon Chicken

3-pound broiling chicken, split in half

1 cup fresh lemon juice

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tsp red wine vinegar