A String of Beads (32 page)

“Maybe I can talk to him,” said Crane.

“I’ve talked to him on your behalf. I’ve said everything you could say, and more.
But even I have to be careful. You’re used to businessmen like you. They negotiate
everything, and then if it doesn’t work out they sue each other. Mr. Malconi’s options
are much, much wider. I’ve persuaded him to limit himself to creating a simple legal
safeguard. Read the papers and sign them.”

Crane scanned the pages. “This says I give this person my business for five million
dollars.”

“A fair price, right?”

“But I’m supposed to get paid for the sale at the rate of a hundred thousand a year.
That’s fifty years. And the money doesn’t come from Angela Milton. It comes from the
­business—my own business. I’m supposed to run the business and pay myself?”

“She’s not a businessperson, Danny. You don’t want her running it.”

“Who the hell is this Angela Milton?”

“Milton is her husband’s last name. Her maiden name was Torturro. She’s one of Mr.
Malconi’s brother’s grandchildren.”

“Jesus.”

“Mr. Malconi is protecting all of us from the possibility that you have to spend some
time in jail. You could get sued in a civil suit for doing harm to Miss Chelsea, and
lose. This way, your business will not be taken away from you in a forced foreclosure.”

“That’s a very remote possibility.”

“Mr. Malconi has lived to be old by protecting himself and his people from possibilities
other people thought were remote.”

Crane felt acid rise from his stomach to his esophagus, but he fought it back down.
He knew that if he signed the contract his business would be theirs. He would have
to work for the rest of his life to pay himself for the false sale. And because he
could only pay himself a hundred thousand a year from the company, he would have to
keep running the burglary crew to bring Salamone a supply of stolen jewelry and furnishings.
“This is unfair,” he muttered. “He’s just taking it.”

Salamone reached out and patted him on the shoulder, and then touched him on the side
of his face. It was a strange gesture, almost the way a parent caressed a child’s
cheek. “Be glad,” he said. “You could have been found hanging in one of your storage
bays. He would never do that in a business he owns.”

24

J
ane transferred the photographs to the temporary account she’d been given at the business
center in her hotel, and sent them to the e-mail address she’d found on Sergeant Isaac
Lloyd’s business card. Then she checked out of the hotel.

She drove to a big chain drugstore on Niagara Falls Boulevard and bought three more
prepaid cell phones, loaded them with calling minutes, and put two in her backpack
and one in her pocket. She dismantled the cell phone she had been using and threw
the parts into two different dumpsters and a storm sewer. She knew the photographs
she had sent Isaac Lloyd couldn’t be used in a court, but she was showing the police
where to look, so they could find the same evidence themselves.

She used a new phone to call Jimmy Sanders in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Me again. Did you have any trouble meeting her at the airport?”

“
No,” said Jimmy. “We found a picture of her online from a couple of years ago. She
was the twenty-fifth runner-up for some beauty contest. Ow! Okay, she won. Want to
talk to the ex–beauty queen?”

“Yes.”

A second later Chelsea Schnell’s voice came on. “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Jane. “I had to leave the airport in a hurry, so I didn’t actually see
you off. I just wanted to be sure you got there without being followed.”

“Yes. I had no trouble at all. There was nobody in the Albany airport that I’d ever
seen before, and I was on a plane in forty-five minutes.”

“And have you managed to talk to your mother?”

“Yes. I called her in Denver as soon as we got here. Thank you for asking. She knows
I’m safe and I’m not going to be in touch again for a long time. I said I needed to
be away, and that there’s a man who won’t stop trying to stalk me. I said I wanted
time to get my head straight from all the things that had happened. I didn’t tell
her about the hospital and the rest, because that would just make her feel worse.”

“That’s probably wise,” Jane said. “And I take it you’re getting along with everybody
there.”

“Mattie’s been great. And the town is pretty, and relaxed, and nice.”

“And Jimmy?”

“Uh-huh. Same.”

“He’s still right there listening?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you about him another time. I changed phones again. After we hang
up, check the memory on that phone and get my new number.”

“Okay.” She paused. “And Jane?”

“What?”

“Thank you so much for saving my life.”

“Right. Got to go.” She thought about what she had just learned. Chelsea and Jimmy
were, at the very least, flirting. People were a strange species. They could be drugged,
battered, starved, everything but murdered, but something inside them was always striving
to live, to struggle out of darkness toward light. They were utterly incorrigible.

THE POLICE TEAM HAD MOVED
the motor home in Slawicky’s yard back twenty-five feet to uncover the bare patch
that Ike Lloyd had seen the night he’d been shot. Two Caledonia police officers were
doing the digging, while Technical Sergeant Arthur Reid of the New York State police
stood by. He made sure to stand straight, and didn’t sit down or betray a lack of
attention to the work so they wouldn’t think he was lounging around while they labored.

What he was really thinking was that he fervently hoped Ike Lloyd hadn’t taken a bullet
for nothing. Ike had been a close friend of Reid’s for about fifteen of his seventeen
years with the state police. Ike was going to have a split decision on this case at
best. He had gotten shot because once again he had a theory that he’d gone out to
test alone without following the proper procedures. But he had been shot in the line
of duty, so he would get another public citation for bravery, and another private
reprimand for the screw-up. If the search team found something here, then maybe this
wouldn’t be his final reprimand.

Reid was determined to do his best to make Ike’s work count. Reid was supposed to
be taking over an investigation that Ike had stalled, but what he was really doing
was letting his friend direct the investigation from his bed.

Reid’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he answered. “Reid.”

“It’s me,” said Ike.

“What’s up? Did the night nurse show up again?”

“This morning. She also just sent us a whole bunch of photographs with dates and times
and places. I’m going to forward them to you in a minute.”

“Anything we can use?”

“I’m not going to wait to study them before I e-mail them to you, but I think there’s
a lot.”

“I’ll let you know what I can make of them after I—” He stopped in midsentence, and
took a breath.

“What?”

“I think they found something. Let me call you back in a minute.” Reid ended the call
and stepped closer to the spot where the two Caledonia cops had stopped digging. They
were kneeling in the hole now, only about two feet down. His heart began to beat faster.
After questioning Walter Slawicky, Reid had known that if Slawicky had buried anything,
he would not have dug very deep. He just wasn’t the kind of man who would spend several
hours sweating to move five or six feet of earth out of a hole and then back in again.

The two cops lifted and pulled up a black polyvinyl chloride pipe about nine inches
in diameter and four feet long. He was aware that some of the other cops were shaking
their heads in frustration, thinking that the two diggers had just broken the house’s
sewer line, but not the two diggers.

As they lifted the pipe higher he could see it was capped at both ends. They set it
beside the hole and climbed out onto the grass. The lead police detective stepped
up and took charge, while Reid stayed back a few feet. “Okay, great work, you guys,”
the detective said. “It’s capped at both ends, so what we want to do next is take
one cap off. Jerry, can you do that for us? Then take a flashlight and look inside.
Don’t take anything out or touch anything inside, but I want a preview of what it
is.”

A technician, presumably Jerry, stepped up putting on latex gloves, then spread a
tarp beside the pipe and used a tool that looked like a carpet knife to slice away
the plumber’s tape that had been used to seal the cap. He then unscrewed the cap.
He bent forward on the tarp, pressed his forehead to it, and aimed a small flashlight
into the pipe.

He sat up again and looked at the detective. “It’s a rifle,” he said. He leaned forward
again. “And I can see a twenty-round box of ammo. Thirty-aught-six Federal Power-Shok,
one eighty grain.”

“Could this be the rifle?”

“We’ll have to do the test and compare the ballistics. But it’s hard to think of why
he’d bury it if it wasn’t that rifle.”

“Okay, Jerry. Cap it again and take it to your lab. Prints, DNA, anything and everything,
okay?” The detective turned away while the technician obeyed. He looked past the two
diggers and spotted three other cops who had been standing around.

“Bill, Hank. Go to the station and read Mr. Slawicky his rights.” Slawicky had been
in the act of loading suitcases into his new Porsche the night after Ike Lloyd’s shooting
had taken place in his yard, and he had been held for questioning.

The detective saw two technicians folding the tarp and carrying the tube to their
truck. He called out, “Pictures, guys. Lots of pictures.”

Art Reid stepped away from the scene and took out his cell phone. He saw that he’d
received an e-mail, but he knew what it was, so he didn’t stop to look. He called
Lloyd’s number, and let it keep ringing until Lloyd’s voice came on.

“Lloyd.”

“Hi, Ike. They found the rifle. It was right where you thought it would be.”

WALTER SLAWICKY HAD BEEN THROUGH
booking and processing. When the detectives came in to talk to him he said he would
wait until he had talked to his attorney, so he sat in a holding cell for an interminable
period of time, just waiting. They had taken his watch, so he couldn’t even measure
the time. Then there was a van that took him and two other men to the county jail.
The intake ritual was long and unpleasant, a lot of standing on lines painted on the
floor to wait for his forms to be created, for guards to issue him clothes, for a
shower, for a cell assignment. Every single thing that got done took fifty times as
long as it needed to, and all the time he was watching.

Jail was a dangerous place. Slawicky had thought about this many times since he went
to work for Dan Crane. He had always stayed off Crane’s payroll, doing the break-ins
and a few odd jobs. He never liked being an employee, and since he’d fallen off the
forklift when he’d run it into the high shelf at the big box store a few years ago,
he’d been on full disability. He hadn’t wanted to mess that up.

He had assumed his cell would be with the two men who had been transported in the
van with him. Nobody had been allowed to talk, but he had formed an opinion about
them, and he didn’t think they would be a problem. There had been no crazy-eyed stares,
no signs of belligerence.

One of them was a young guy the cops called Oakes who kept watching everybody else
for cues, probably because he thought the older guys must have been through this before.
The other seemed to Slawicky to actually have been in jail a few times. He was at
least fifty and the tattoos on his hands and forearms had not been done by a professional.
He was called Gordon, and he had the lean look of a man who had lived a marginal life
for a long time. His eyes had squint lines and his teeth and fingers were stained
brown from smoking. Slawicky figured that the man’s chain-smoking had probably been
a reasonable decision, because he didn’t seem to be likely to live much longer anyway.

The thing that first struck Slawicky about jail was that it was ugly. There were modules
that looked modern, and open bay sections, but those were filled up already—maybe
given to favored inmates—so he was led to a traditional block with cells and iron
bars. Maybe if the DA’s office scheduled a trial he would be here long enough to move.
For now the guards had Slawicky in a cell alone.

Everything in the jail was made to be plain, bare, and hard. Just looking told you
if you hit anything you’d just break your hand. But he needed less time than he would
have expected to get used to things. He didn’t miss soft furniture or any of that
stuff. He had never wasted much time thinking about any furniture besides his television
set. When he had worked on crews taking furniture out of houses and heard Crane say
how much some of it cost, he’d seen it as wasted money.

It took Slawicky two days to run into the first of the men Dan Crane had hired to
get themselves sent to jail and kill the Indian. He was Carl Ralston, the biker. Slawicky
was in line waiting his turn at the cafeteria counter when he felt someone standing
too close to him. Ralston was big—at least six feet three, with tattoos that showed
through his shaved blond hair and on his neck. When Slawicky turned, Ralston’s face
was about a foot away and grinning horribly at him. It was hard to keep from flinching,
but Slawicky was pretty sure he managed.

But Ralston laughed, so Slawicky did too. They sidestepped dutifully through the line,
received their food, and then Slawicky followed Ralston to a table. They sat, and
Ralston said, “There are five of us now.”

“Us?”

“You’re in here for the Indian too, right?”

Slawicky thought faster than he’d thought in years. “It’s not a competition, is it?”

“No. Whoever gets the first chance at him will do it. We have it worked out that whoever
else is nearby will help—block surveillance cameras, distract guards, make noise,
whatever.”

“He’s not here yet, is he?” Slawicky asked.

“Not yet, but he could be any day.”

Slawicky nodded as he considered his new situation. Crane had told him that the word
had gone to the jail that the killing of Jimmy Sanders was off. Maybe the word hadn’t
gotten around to Ralston yet. Slawicky would certainly never have considered trying
to kill Sanders, especially to save Crane. But he was a new man in a central jail.
Being one of five allies who were prepared to kill somebody was a lot better than
being alone in here. If Ralston and the others would help him kill Jimmy Sanders,
then they’d also help him in a fight with other inmates. “You can count me in,” Slawicky
said. “I used to work with Nick. He didn’t deserve to die.”

Ralston looked at him with mild contempt. “Never met him. This isn’t about Nick. It’s
about money.”

“Well of course. But I was just saying.”

Ralston watched him, but said nothing.

Slawicky said, “How do I know when it’s happening?”

Ralston shrugged. “Maybe you will, and maybe you’ll just hear about it after. But
be ready to lend a hand.”

Slawicky watched Ralston chewing his food. He wanted to ask him about what Crane had
said. The killing was supposed to be off because the Italians didn’t like it. He probed
a little. “I heard that the Mafia has guys in here who kind of make the rules. Ever
run into that?”

Ralston nodded. “I’ve heard that, and I’ve seen them around. There are a bunch of
them awaiting trial for different things. They mostly hang out by themselves. I stay
away from them, and you should too. You really don’t want to get into trouble with
those guys.”

The next night Slawicky slept more soundly on his hard shelf of a bunk. At last he
was protected. He was in trouble, but it probably wasn’t fatal trouble. The police
had found the rifle he’d buried, even though he’d parked the motor home over it. But
they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him of Nick’s murder. There was no way.
He would probably be out of here on bail before any of the stupid bastards like Ralston
who had gone to jail on purpose. After he was out he would have to stay safely out
of sight until the police charged Crane with the murder. But that shouldn’t be hard.
Crane had killed Nick, but he wasn’t likely to be able to hunt down Slawicky and kill
him too. He wouldn’t have time, and he wasn’t the man for the job.