Wolfman - Art Bourgeau (9 page)

After the waiter had gone Erin said, "Do you
really think this is a good time to invest in the stock market?"

"If you have courage," he replied, watching
her closely. She was still twirling the sizzle stick between her
thumb and forefinger. He wondered why she had put the question that
way. Time wasn’t a factor. Time wasn’t going to run out. Not
until you were dead.

"What would you recommend that I invest in?"

"There are many things . . ." he said,
feeling strangely unsure of his judgment. "Blue chips, growth
stocks, bonds, funds, commodities . . ."

"
Tell me your favorites."

She was smiling. Why?

"Right now I'm fond of a Japanese company. An
electronics firm," he said slowly, choosing his words carefully.

"What do they do?"

"The usual — televisions, stereos, tape
recorders, office machines. They also have a computer department . .
."

"Maybe I'm being naive, correct me if I'm wrong,
but they sound like a lot of other companies. I mean, doesn’t
everyone make those things?"

The waiter returned with their orders. Loring turned
his attention to his soup to give himself a moment to decide how much
to tell her. As he brought the first spoonful to his lips he was
assaulted by a smell so putrid he almost gagged. He tried not to show
his surprise. This just didn’t happen, not in one of his favorite
restaurants. A bad dish never came out of their kitchen. He stared
down. The soup looked innocent enough, creamy white with flecks of
green that should have been parsley.

He lowered his spoon and began to talk to cover his
feelings.

"What you say is true, very perceptive. But I
think there's going to be a takeover attempt."

"Could you explain that a little more?"

. . . Maybe I'm imagining again, there's nothing
wrong with the soup. He lifted a fresh spoonful to his lips. Again
the awful smell, and this time he could identify it. It was the smell
of rotten, decaying meat. They must have used a stock as a base in
the soup and the stock was obviously spoiled. That had to be it . . .

"Is there something wrong with your soup?"
he heard her say.

Don't make a fuss, not now. He pushed the soup away
and reached in his pocket for the belladonna bottle.

"No, no, sorry, it’s not the soup, it’s me,
I'm afraid. The old gut, goes with the territory, brokerage business
. . . sorry . . ." He counted the droplets as he squeezed the
medicine dropper into a glass of water. "Like I said, it’s an
occupational hazard. Nervous stomach, most brokers have it. The
strain of dealing with the market . . ."

A good way to handle it, he decided. But on the way
out he would have a quiet word with the manager, be sure they threw
out the soup before some less understanding customer tried it and
suffered the consequences . . .

"As I was saying, I think there's going to be a
takeover attempt by another company — a credit-card company. One of
the real giants. I don't know if you’re aware of it, but a couple
of the international credit-card companies are so strong that they've
virtually created a private, world-wide currency."

"Really? That seems incredible — "

"Are you familiar with the Japanese word honko?
It’s a small seal issued to each citizen, and it's used instead of
a signature on many official documents."

"Like a Chinese chop?"

"
I guess . . . Anyway, what this company is
doing is researching something that will replace the signature, the
honko or chop, and ultimately maybe even currency. It’s a magnetic
implant with a code similar to the bar code, the ISBN number you see
on packages. When it's perfected it will be implanted under the skin
on a person’s hand at birth and all he’ll have to do is pass his
hand by a scanner to record whatever his activity. This isn't public
knowledge, which is why I’m pretty excited about it."

"It all sounds very futuristic to me," she
said. "Almost ominous, something like the mark of the beast.
Isn't that what they used to say?"

Her choice of words startled him, to put it mildly.
 
 

CHAPTER 6

MERCANTO PICKED up the keys to Stanley Hightower's
apartment from police headquarters on Race and drove to nearby
Washington Square. From the file he could see that homicide had not
had a chance to go over it yet.

As he drove he thought about how good it felt to be
back in plainclothes again. He parked in front of the Athenaeum and
walked across the square to the highrise on the South Side near the
Hopkinson House. The desk clerk directed him to the thirtieth floor.

He stopped in front of the door and took a deep
breath. Even though he had plenty of experience working undercover
this was the first time he had ever investigated a murder, and a
great deal was riding on it, especially for him. He had no illusions
about Sloan. One false step, one missed clue and Detective Sloan
would be on his back.

He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door
came open with a soft click. For a moment he wanted to call out,
announce himself, but he felt foolish. No one, of course, was there.
He pushed the door and it swung back, coming to rest against the
stop. Down the hall a woman with a load of dry cleaning got off the
elevator. Somehow her presence made him feel like an invader. He
moved inside and closed the door behind him.

A few steps brought him from the foyer to the living
room, which had floor to ceiling windows on two sides. One side faced
south, the other Cast toward the Delaware River. The floors were a
blue black tile in four-foot squares whose mirrorlike shine reflected
the furniture on it and the sky and buildings outside, giving
everything a ballroom's shadow depth. In the center was a
black-and-beige Oriental rug with a busy design that resembled a maze
of flowers and plants. Sofa and chairs were like he imagined people
in California would have, snow white in color. At each end of the
sofa was a large pillow covered in the same fabric. Facing them were
two uncomfortable looking chairs with dark wood frames and seat
cushions. The coffee table was a polished dark square with books and
magazines underneath. In the east windows was a ficus tree . . . he
recognized it from the time he had dated a woman who owned a plant
store. A black grand piano filled most of the southem windows. The
room, in a word, looked like something out of a glossy magazine.

He took off his trenchcoat and began to walk through
the apartment. The blue black tile floors were throughout. The
kitchen was small, functional, with white cabinets and counters. He
opened the refrigerator. On the top shelf was Beck’s beer and
Perrier. On the bottom several bottles of white wine. Between were
appetizers like cheese, pate, even caviar. He picked up the caviar
and took off the top. The fish eggs were a golden translucence, not
black or red like the ones he occasionally bought himself for a
treat. He put the tip of his finger to them and touched it to his
tongue.

"Stanley Hightower, you sure knew how to live,"
he said, as he put the caviar back in the refrigerator.

The dining room was as spectacular as the living
room, with a chandelier and a round table for six made of the same
blue black tile as the floor. The bedroom was in white too, a sofa
against one window and a king-size bed. The second bedroom looked
like an office. The tour did not give him much of a feeling for the
man who had lived there. The apartment was too impersonal, too
professionally decorated for that. It was like a mask.

"Stanley, who are you? Were you?"

He went back to the kitchen and opened the cabinets.
They were mostly bare except for nuts, chips and the like to go with
the appetizers in the refrigerator. He looked in the coffee, sugar
and flour cans. Nothing hidden there. He checked the freezer and gave
everything in the refrigerator a going-over. Under the stove he found
a copper-bottom set of pots and pans, but from the shine of the
copper he could tell they had never been used.

"Stanley, why do you have all this stuff, that
dining room, if you’re not going to use it?"

In the living room he looked at the magazines under
the coffee table. Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Philadelphia
Magazine, and stuck among them he also found a two-month-old copy of
the National Enquirer.

He smiled. "See, there is a human side to you
after all . . ." he said, trying to picture Hightower reaching
out for a magazine at the checkout line, but when he did he thought
of the mutilated hand.

He walked down the hall to the bedroom. The closet
was filled with suits and sports coats. He took his time going
through the pockets. Most were in bags from the cleaners, others
yielding nothing. The same was true of the shoes lined up on the
closet floor. . . until he got to the black pair of cowboy boots.
Inside one he found a plastic bag, and in the bag was a small silver
spoon and a quantity of white powder.

"What have we here . . . ?" Mercanto wet
the tip of his index finger, touched it to the powder in the bag,
then to his tongue. The bitter taste was unmistakable. Almost
immediately he felt a tingling numbness in the tip of his tongue.
"Cocaine, and high-grade, too." He held the bag up to the
light. "At least  an eighth of an ounce . . . this good,
probably worth nine hundred, a thousand dollars . . . well, well,
well."

He remembered the file . . . the Medical Examiner had
said there were traces of cocaine found in the body. He turned back
to the closet and gave it a more thorough search, checking the walls,
the floor, the ceiling, but found nothing. Next he tried the bureau.
First he looked through the drawers, then he took them out to see if
there was anything taped behind them. Nothing.

In the bedside table he found a bottle of capsules
labeled Seconal, the label from a nearby pharmacy. He tossed them on
the bed alongside the cocaine. "Helps to have something to get
you back down, put you to sleep . . .” There was a second bottle in
the bedside table, this one also half-filled with capsules but the
label read Amyl nitrate" He poured a few into his hand and
looked at them. "Poppers, eh? Stanley, were you gay or just a
swinger. . . ?"

From there he searched the bathroom. He took the lid
off the toilet and looked in the tank, then checked the medicine
cabinet, where he found more prescriptions, all from the same
pharmacy. Valium, Darvon, Percodan. He took these with him too as he
moved to the office.

He sat in the white chair behind the desk and started
to go through the drawers. In one he found an address book filled
with names and flipped through it. At first glance none of the names
meant anything to him, but there were too many to tell for sure. He
put it aside to go over later.

In the middle drawer he found Hightower's checkbook.
As he took it out, the phone rang, startling him. He did not answer
it. Whoever was calling hadn't seen the paper. It stopped after the
sixth ring, but the thought of it left a nagging doubt. Why would
someone be calling Hightower at home in the middle of a workday? You
would expect a businessman to be at his business. When he thought of
that he wished he’d answered the call. This was the sort of slip-up
that Sloan would jump on.

As he went through the checkbook he saw something
that made him sit up straighter . . . starting about four months
before, Stanley Hightower had begun making large cash withdrawals. He
hurriedly went through the checkbook, then started over again. No
mistaking it, four months ago something had changed in Stanley
Hightower's life. The first withdrawal was for five thousand dollars,
the check made out to cash. After that there was a similar withdrawal
every ten days or two weeks. The total came to forty-five thousand
dollars.

"Why did you need so much cash?" In the
bottom drawer he found a file marked "bank statements." He
took it out and began to go through the canceled checks. In a few
minutes he had found seven of the canceled checks. The other two had
not come back yet.

He laid the checks out on the desk in order. All were
the same, made out to cash. The endorsement on each was the same —
Stanley Hightower, in a barely legible scrawl that matched the
signature on the front. He'd cashed them all at the bank himself.

Mercanto walked back into the living room and stood
by the grand piano, from where he could see the Walt Whitman Bridge
in the distance. The afternoon light was beginning to fade, but there
were no lights in South Philly yet. His own apartment was on
Catherine Street a few blocks from here, but it might as well have
been worlds away.

"
What does all this money mean?" Two
answers came to mind: blackmail or drugs. If it was blackmail, it had
to be something pretty heavy to leverage so much money in such a
short time. Something that would ruin Hightower if it was known . . .

With his right hand he idly plinked a chord on the
piano, then sat down on the sofa. Sloan’s speculations about it
being a sex-related crime came back . . . that he'd picked up someone
and taken them there. But it didn’t fit. He thought about the
parking lot and the car. Maybe it started there. That could account
for the place, but once the blackmail began, whatever the sexual
reason would have certainly stopped. It would not have been ongoing,
only the blackmail would.