Dying Embers (38 page)

“Have another one of those?” he asked.

I plumbed the package out of my pocket and shook one loose. He took it. Matty tugged at my sleeve.

“Hey,” she said, and took one when I turned the pack to her.

I offered her my pocket lighter. She waved it off and stashed the cigar in her purse.

“When I get home,” she said. “If I ever get home.”

“Don't inhale it,” I said.

“I worked my way through law school as a Miami-Dade patrol officer” she said.

Our Washington visitor took my offer of the light, lit the cigar, and blew a stream of smoke on the hot end so that it glowed cherry red. “God, that's awful,” he said.

“Same aged Chinese newsprint they used for the firecrackers we shot off as kids,” I said.

“Agent Svenson, would you see to it that our guest, Mr. Ayers, is provided with transportation.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Matty shot me a hot glance and stashed the cigar in the pocket of her windbreaker as she turned to walk to the back of the van.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

I told him, “I want to know what's going on.”

He put the cigar to his mouth to take a toke, but thought better of it and held the cigar out to cast a discerning eye on the short brown shaft while he said, “It's all in front of you. And you're a professional. I'm surprised you care.”

“Hey, I'm flattered,” I said. “Pretend I'm stupid.”

“A man of the nineteen-sixties would ask what he could do for his country.”

“Taking your refuge, wrapped in the flag?”

He smiled and said, “Where do I find the man I'm looking for?”

“So we're back to, ‘What's this about?'”

“Scott Lambert.”

“You're right, I had that one,” I said. “Lambert holds several patents which are a sea-change in energy technology. BuzzBee battery is contesting his patents, but I doubt they have the money to front the operation we have been looking at.”

“They were acquired by a Middle Eastern energy consortium. BuzzBee Battery Inc. now consists of twenty-two people occupying an office space in Hackensack, New Jersey. Their manufacturing facilities and research and development laboratories were sold off. BuzzBee batteries are now manufactured by a jobber in Indonesia and distributed, for a fee, through a discount store chain. The remaining staff in Hackensack doesn't have the authority to run a petty cash fund and probably has no knowledge of the ongoing litigation.

“The Middle East? As in oil?”

My friend nodded and took a drag on the cigar.

“Sounds like a fairy tale to me.”

He watched me, smoke escaping his mouth around the cigar. Taking it out of his mouth and using it as a pointer, he said, “If you read the newspapers you know that the Middle East provides only thirty percent of our oil energy needs.” He flicked the ash off the end of his smoke. “What the newspapers don't tell you is that there's a whole generation of young men who grew up quite comfortably in the Middle East. They are now traveled, educated, and from families of dwindling fortune and no prospects.”

“The people running against Lambert were not Middle Eastern types.”

“Pogo,” he said.

“Poco Loco?”

“No. Pogo with a gee.”

“Is that an acronym?”

“Comic strip.”

I asked, “So, who's Andy?”

“ANDI, is an acronym. Allied Nations Defense Intelligence—a private consulting firm that operates from a post box in Jakarta. Their assets are, for the most part, abandoned or fugitive American and British agency types.”

“Mercenaries?”

“We have been reaching out since nine-eleven, looking for sources whose placement was more important than their character. Until now their work has been clean, quick, and efficient, but at some point they decided to use our special relationship as a cover to run against U.S. interests.”

“Great story,” I told him. “The post box in Jakarta was a nice touch.”

“I assure you.”

“Oh, I have little doubt. But that doesn't explain what happened to me and Dixon. The IRS screwed Dixon.”

My friend shrugged, “Dixon had tax problems long before this matter.”

“The IRS screwed Dixon on cue.”

“A coincidence.”

“The post office provided the crap that was planted in my office.”

“The way Cameran tells the story, you've been crowding his client list for years. The pornography was provided by a misguided friend.”

“Cameran knew who Andy was.”

“Cameran thought he was working a legitimate case for BuzzBee Battery.”

“He thought working a legitimate case involved breaking and entering and planting evidence?”

“Cameran's retired, not an employee of any federal agency.”

“Sheep-dipped?”

“No, he's really retired.”

“So, that's your story and your sticking to it.”

“Basically.”

“Probably work,” I said. “But it doesn't explain why you are here. Personally, I mean. And doesn't explain why you bothered to haul me out of the crapper.”

“My work is,” he said and pursed his lips, closing his eyes to search the inside of his head for a word. “Oversight.” He looked at me almost casually and said, “Dixon caught on to the fact that ANDI had been doubled back on us and wrote a report that was more accurately filed than read. Since he was a retired federal officer, an account of his suicide landed on my desk and I found the report. At that point we received your photo of a man we had stopped looking for because we thought he was dead.”

“Seemed like an excellent patsy?”

“With Dixon's report and the shoot-out with the local police, here, the cat was pretty much out of the bag. Nothing to do but tidy up. To use your parlance, I hauled you out of the crapper and hosed you off because it was convenient.”

“Now that I believe,” I said and clamped my molars on the end of my cigar. After all my work he still wasn't surly—guess that's why he was in charge of “oversight.” I exhaled the last palatable toke on my cigar. “The man you're looking for,” I said, “is the only witness to a murder that my client has been charged with.”

“That sword could cut both ways.”

“I need him alive.”

“Fine. You take 'em,” he said. He dropped his smoke on the ground and stepped on it. “But if he gets away from you, he won't get away from me.”

• • •

To say that Bart Shephart
lived
somewhere is a dreadful stretch of the language. What he does is collide with the end of the day in a third floor walk-up above a hardware store near the corner of Alpine and Leonard.

At a quarter to seven I tried the telephone—no answer. I bought him a twenty-ounce coffee at a party store, climbed the steep outside stairwell to his “loft,” and pounded on the door until his neighbors started yelling
“shut up” out their windows. I found a key on the molding above the door.

Yelling in the door yielded more ugly responses from the neighbors. I stepped into a living room decorated in the ancient forgotten warehouse motif—the room being taken up with dusty moving cartons taped shut. A battered recliner attended a TV with a tin-foil-and-coat hanger antenna. Scattered about the room was the truly definitive collection of empty Kessler's bottles—ranging from pints to half gallons.

In the bathroom I followed a path through towels and clothing to the commode where I poured off the top two and a half inches of coffee. In the medicine cabinet I found a pint of Kessler's mouthwash and filled the coffee cup. Bart lay in his bed with his back to me, under a brown army blanket among about four loads of laundry. I shook him.

“Bart, Bart, wake up, Bart.” I started him rolling toward me. He came awake with a five shot Smith hammerless ace-bandaged to his right hand. I grabbed the weapon by the frame and cylinder and managed to save the cup of coffee from the swipe of Bart's left paw. “Stop it,” I told him, trying for a calm voice. “It's me, Art—Art Hardin.”

“Are you fucking nuts?” he said and blinked his eyelids over bloodshot pools that looked like X-rays of chicken embryos. “I could have killed you. How the hell did you get in?”

“I used the key you leave over the door for the housekeeper. I thought you'd like to talk to a man who witnessed the Frampton killing.”

I left Bart the coffee and went down to the car to call Lorna Kemp. The line clicked two or three times as the call was forwarded. Lorna had it before the third ring. In the background I could hear Leonard Jones ask in a sleepy voice, “Did you get it?”

She told me that Brian Hemmings was a registered nurse and had been fired from the state hospital where Sheldon Frampton had been committed. No one was volunteering explanations for the firing.

“Leonard Jones's attorney wasn't able to get the restraining order,” said Lorna. “They're probably going to auction
The Dutchman
this morning.”

“All right,” I said. “I'm bringing Detective Shephart. There's a good chance that a man who witnessed Anne's murder will be there. I need you to meet me at the auction.”

“What time?” she yawned.

“Auction starts at ten,” I said. “Why don't you stop and see if Leonard Jones can give us a hand?”

“Sure,” she said.

After forty minutes Shephart came down, having performed a minor miracle. He'd found a clean shirt, a gray suit, and a red tie. Of the two of us, he looked the less rumpled.

“I'm not an alcoholic,” he said to break the silence after an hour on the road.

“Hair of the dog is all,” I said. “Anything ever come of the knife I gave you in my office?”

“Came back from the lab a zero—fish guts and smoked ham. Where in the hell are we going?”

“South Haven,” I said. “To an art auction at the Frampton estate.”

Detective Shephart nodded off, then growled and gnashed his teeth for the rest of the ride. We found the iron gates swept open. Clouds gathering in the west over the lake promised rain later in the day. A yellow canvas tent big enough for a revival meeting had been set up on the lawn in front of the main house. News vans with tall satellite antenna booms crowded the inside of the fence line.

Cars lined both sides of the highway, including several ominously plain sedans. Parking inside the gate cost half a yard. If I hadn't been on Lambert's nickel, I'd have been some of the riffraff that turned away. Brian Hemmings collected the money and issued me a snotty face. I parked the Jag on a tennis court among a flock of high dollar sedans and liveried chauffeurs polishing limousines.

Detective Shephart hit the porta-potty and I picked up a white numbered paddle to bid. The catalog was eighteen pages and printed in color on slick paper.
The Dutchman
was item twenty-two. We had ten minutes.

“All right,” said Shephart, buttoning his suit coat. “Where is this guy? I'm on my own time and I haven't had much of that lately.”

“See, there's the thing,” I said. “He's on the FBI's short list of things to do. So it's not like he is going to be anxious to talk to us.”

“He might not be here,” said Shephart, making an accusing face.

“He's here. The FBI rolled up his crew this morning.”

“We should be looking for him at the airport.”

“If he can get away with some artwork sold here today, he wins.” I showed Shephart the picture of
The Dutchman.
“If he doesn't, he has nowhere to go.”

“He could have sent someone else.”

“Possible,” I said. “I hope not.”

Leonard Jones and Lorna Kemp walked up trying to look all business,
despite that certain glow which hung over them. Leonard wore a tan herringbone sport coat over khaki pants and blue shirt open at the collar. Lorna was clad in a black shell over white denim slacks, with a dash of very red lipstick and her blond hair tied at the back of her head with a black velvet ribbon.

Shephart exchanged a handshake with Leonard. Lorna folded her arms against a cool breeze off the lake.

“Warmer inside the tent,” I said.

“As long as those dogs aren't loose in there,” she said. “Who are we looking for?”

“Remember the day I left for Brandonport?”

Lorna nodded once.

“The guy who said he had a package for me.”

“Blond guy with the brown delivery jacket and lump under his left arm. The one that opened the door with his hanky.”

“That's the one,” I said. “He bragged to one of his associates that he'd seen the murder. Said the doer was a woman.”

Lorna shifted her eyes to look at the house.

“Only maybe,” I said, “I brought the booking photo you submitted with your report.”

Leonard said, “You mean—”

“We don't know that,” I said, “And—”

“He shouldn't be here,” said Shephart.

Shephart and Jones shared a glower.

“He's a beard for Lorna,” I said. “She's seen the man we're looking for and can probably get close without spooking him. If he does spook, Leonard has the beef to hold him.”

“Civilians,” said Shephart.

“The street is full of plain wrappers which means the tent's full of feds. For now they've agreed to let us make the apprehension, but I think that's only because we can finger him.”

“Just so you know,” said Shephart, “I'm on a ‘frolic of my own.' If this goes to hell, nobody sues the city.”

“Fair enough,” I said. I looked at Leonard and Lorna. They nodded in agreement. We split up and headed for the tent.

We found standing room only, with a beef trust of brown shoes loitering near the doors and trying to look like art connoisseurs. Ladies in designer suits wearing the remnants of small furry animals filled most of
the chairs. Here and there portly middle-aged men sat testing the tensile limits of expensive suits and studying the catalog. The air hung sweet with cologne, albeit tempered with a dash of moth crystals.