The Glass Factory (35 page)

“Like what?”

“Like mafiosos holding meetings in the library.”

“What?”

“The place was a cash drop, too.”

“And all the local rich kids saw what was happening?”

“Sure.”

“And never told anyone?”

“And risk losing the best place for secret screwing on the Island?”

“Thanks. Morse and his thugs can’t kill a dozen prominent children of the local elite, can he?”

“I’m not sure I—”

“When
did it burn down? Exactly?”

“Eight years ago. July.”

“Let’s go.”

“Fil—where are you going?”

“There’s a pay phone back at the public beach.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Revenge is sweet, but not fattening.
—Alfred Hitchcock

I CALL VAN SNYDER.
Collect. The Precinct switchboard operator starts to give me shit, but I shut him up good.

Van says, “Hello?”

“Jack in, old boy, find out if there are any unsolved disappearances from July, eight years ago.”

“That’s quite a job, babe. Got any search fields at all?”

“Start with New York and New Jersey.”

“Thanks, I considered that in my first statement.”

“Then may I suggest you try major mob underbosses and their favorite union heads, ward officers and delivery boys—you know, big enough to count. I bet
that’s
not too big of a list.”

“No—it’s not. What you on to, girl?”

“I don’t know. Just a hunch.”

“What kind of hunch?”

“Just a feeling, Van.”

“Of what?”

“That I might be able to bring you a murder.”

“Hot damn, just what I need: Another murder.”

“A big one, Van. A real big one.”

Pause.

“That’s quite a hunch, girl.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Pause.

“Van, I’ve got an
instinct
about this.”

“Oh that’s just great. I can’t justify an investigation based on a hunch or a feeling, but an instinct—well, that changes everything.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. You know, the use of reason over ‘instinct’ is supposed to be one of those things that makes us better than animals.”

I snarl my most feral growl at him. Kelly looks around to make sure nobody else heard it.

“Trust me, Van.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So?”

“Give me a couple of days.”

“No.” And we have our usual exchange where he tells me it’s impossible and I end up talking him into doing it by tomorrow morning.

“Where you gonna be?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll call you.” I hang up the phone and tell Kelly, “Thanks. I think you may have saved my life.”

“How?”

“By giving me hope.”

Kelly drives me to the university library and goes with me to ask to see the Shore Oaks blueprints again. Prunella’s not there. It’s the creep who didn’t like Antonia.

He says, “Again? You must be mistaken. We don’t have any such blueprints.”

Kelly begins to protest but I shut her up and take her out of there. “It doesn’t matter,” I explain. “Now I
know
we’re onto something.”

Kelly smiles. “Neat.”

“‘Neat’?” I laugh. It’s time to go back to Minoa.

Kelly says, “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“In case I haven’t said it—Filomena, I—I learned a lot from you. Good luck. Go with God.”

“Thanks. You too.” We hug. Close. Tight. Together.

It takes Van eight straight hours to check up, sniff out, chase down and squeeze blood from, but he gets it: Three guys who weren’t “made” themselves but who worked for the mob on Long Island. He gets their sheets, with the town names. Two of them—Paulie “The Greek” Kratides and Alan Goldstein—are concentrated in Queens and Nassau, but one has got a little more time in Suffolk: Abe Slaney. A Chicago-based grifter who headed east when the wind shifted.

Van says, “It’s time to play that hunch.”

It’s time to see Kate again. I call her office to ask if Gates is in. When I’m told, “He’ll be in a meeting until three o’clock,” I say good and go in to see Kate. I tell her what we need, which involves inventing a bit of “evidence,” loudly and publicly, and then planting it where it will make the most noise.

At a quarter after three, Phil Gates and his clone Frank Schmidt come back from their meeting and find me leaning over Kate’s shoulder at her computer design console.

“There’s no more traces because of the fire,” I tell her. “Only police photos. The message makes no sense. He was on his back, and therefore writing ‘upside down’ relative to the lighting in the photo, which actually highlights the features from below.”

“Well, what I can try to do is scan in the image, then manipulate it once it’s on screen to light it from ‘above.’“

Gates says, “May I ask what
you’re
doing here?”

I flash my badge (I get it right this time): “Official police business. Ms. Minola has consented to help us with a crucial piece of evidence in a murder case. I’m sure you won’t mind.”

And I’ve just committed another felony. They’re starting to add up.

I give Kate the photo. She turns it into megabytes in about five minutes. Her disk is pretty full, so it’s bulky and slow, but it works. Katherina inverts the image, then gets to work on the patterns of light, telling the computer what to do to reverse the values, pixel by pixel. It takes twenty minutes before we can start to make it out. It’s still a messy pattern, a scrawl, but suddenly the name “DiMaggio” forms out of the random fragments before our eyes.

“Goddamn, will you look at that?”

“Now what did you say this photo was?”

“It was found scratched into a piece of green felt at the Shore Oaks estate,” I say.

“Why wasn’t it destroyed in the fire?”

“I don’t know.”

“And where is the original? Since you can’t use
this
as evidence,” she says, pointing to the computer screen.

“Nobody knows. It disappeared when they were cleaning the place out. Maybe it’s in your plant.”

Katherina chuckles.

“Or something else that was saved from the fire.”

I get the image to Van Snyder, who has the story printed in the local papers. Then we sit and wait. For two nights we stake out the storage closet on South Campus holding the Shore Oaks grandfather clock. Nothing. Then, on the third night …

A shape comes creeping through the storage drums, gingerly keeping a penlight aimed at the ground directly in front of him. He knows right where to go, though he trips noisily on a box and curses. He waits. Several minutes go by. When he’s sure all is still, he takes out some keys—
keys—
I can hear them jingling, and opens the door to the inner closet. He goes right up to the slightly scorched grandfather clock and opens the pendulum chamber. Nothing. His breathing gets a little frantic. He searches, then seems to think of giving up, like it’s all too improbable. Then he discovers the second drawer under the pendulum and forgets himself: “Aha!” he exclaims in triumph, holding up the tattered fragment of dirty green felt. I can see it from here. It says, in big letters,
FREEZE,
SUCKER.

“That’s it,” says Van Snyder, at regular volume, and the lights go on, and Frank Schmidt stands wide-eyed and open-mouthed, trying to cover himself up like a teenage Portnoy caught with a slice of liver.

“You still going to take all the flak for your boss?” says Van.

Schmidt’s still clutching the message. I ask Van, “You put that in there?”

“Shucks, yes, ma’am.”

“You scamp.”

Gates’s defense is that the mob started meeting at Shore Oaks with Vaughan Carter back in the fifties, but that plea has more holes in it than the junior senator’s memory. New York looks down rather harshly on misuse of state property. Of course, Gates isn’t guilty of murder, just guilty of being a shithead. Schmidt was just his gofer. Gates knew what Old Man Carter had been up to and saw no reason to discontinue the tradition, taking his cut like a good little boy. And when the fly went foul all he wanted to do was protect all his nice images and endowments, so he withheld evidence from investigators relating to a mob murder. That doesn’t go over well at all.