Fare Play (25 page)

“Oh, my goodness!” The priest was mortified. “How could that have—I've never—”

“Father Kuzak,” Marian said, low, “go get the right vows.”

“Go … yes. I'll go get the right vows.” He scurried off.

A murmur ran through the congregation. Marian looked over her shoulder at the wedding guests; they looked puzzled, concerned. All except Holland, who was sitting there with a big laugh on his face. And Kelly and Ian, the professionals, who were maintaining perfect poker faces. She caught sight of Mrs. Yelincic, who looked ready to die.

“I can't
believe
this is happening!” Claire hissed.

“It's just a little delay,” Ivan said. “He'll find them.” He shot a look at Marian. “Well, you told me this would be a day I'd remember the rest of my life.”

“I gotta pee!” the little flower girl announced. Shushing sounds. Father Kuzak came hurrying back with the right vows. “We shall resume,” he announced with as much dignity as he could muster.

This time they made it. Ivan and Claire were well and truly wed. The musician gave them a jazzy exit, none of the women tripped on their long gowns, and Bingo managed to escort his bridesmaid-partner down the aisle without falling on his face.

Marian dashed off to the little waiting room and grabbed her coat and purse. The musician was gathering up his sheet music when she handed him his envelope. “Thanks, Sally,” he said.

She found Father Kuzak sitting on a hall bench fanning himself with a prayer book. “I don't know how that happened,” he said when he saw her coming.

“Don't worry about it,” Marian said. “It worked out just fine.” She handed him his envelope. Her feet
really
hurt.

He opened the envelope. “Oh, that's very generous, I'm sure—but I was rather expecting more.”

“Mrs. Yelincic said you'd say that.” She hurried out to the church entrance.

There was no receiving line, for which Marian was grateful. On the church steps, a photographer was trying to get everyone in the wedding party together. Marian heard a snore; she found Bingo asleep on one of the pews. She woke him up and got him out front for the picture.

The photographer kept trying to move Marian over with the bridesmaids until Ivan made him understand she was
supposed
to be standing in the best man's spot. The picture was finally taken.

Marian gave Claire a hug and whispered, “I think Ivan is one lucky man.” Claire was glowing.

The crowd outside the church started breaking up, going to their cars for the procession to the reception hall. A small group of admirers was gathered around Kelly and Ian, who were both laughing and chatting away. Marian saw Holland heading toward her.

He was looking at her dress. Marian's hands formed into fists.
If he tells me how soft and feminine I'm looking, I may hit him
.

“Well, well,” Holland said with a smile. “I see you can dress just as conventionally as everyone else when you put your mind to it.”

She kissed him.

“That's nice,” said Mrs. Yelincic, passing by.

“Must we to go to the reception?” Holland asked.

Marian said yes. “I have to toast the bride and groom.” Kelly and Ian wouldn't be going; they had a performance that evening. Marian slipped into her coat. “We're in the first limo.”

One final check to make sure all the wedding party had rides. “Are we ready?” she called out.

“Ready!” a dozen happy voices sang.

Holland was standing by the open door of the limo. As Marian climbed in, the driver said, “Hey, that Mrs. Yelincic is really something, ain't she? She invited me to the reception.”

“So glad you hit it off,” Marian said, and collapsed.

35

Marian dragged into her office the next morning both looking and feeling as if she had a hangover. But she'd drunk very little at the wedding reception; it was the day itself that had been the intoxicant.

Captain Murtaugh stuck his head in the door. “How'd it go?”

Marian sighed. “Well, we got through it. And Ivan established a new wedding tradition by dancing with his best man.”

Murtaugh grinned. “Did the guests know about you ahead of time?”

“Only a few. There was lots and lots of staring.”

“But did you have fun?”

She thought back over the previous day's craziness. “Yeah. I had fun.”

He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Told you you would.”

When he left, Marian took out a thermos of black coffee she'd had filled on her way in. She was pouring her first cup when Sergeant Campos appeared in the door. Marian swallowed her coffee and looked at him balefully.

Campos said, “I just wanted to know if Walker and Dowd have been working out okay.”

“Absolutely. They're doing good work.”

The sergeant actually smiled. “I told you they were good detectives.”

I never said they weren't
. “And you were right.”

“Well, uh, that's all I wanted to know.” He left.

Perlmutter came in.

Marian gave him the bent eye. “If you came in here to say ‘I told you so,' you're going to be walking a beat before the day's over.”

“But I didn't tell you so,” he said worriedly. “That's what's bothering me.” He sat down. “When we were doing background checks, one little thing popped up that I didn't pay any attention to at the time, but now—”

“What is it?”

“Unger's secretary … name's Iris—”

“I met her.”

“She was afraid O.K. Toys would close and she'd lose her job. Both the police and the IRS poking around—you know. But here's the part that's worrying me. She said, ‘Mr. Unger even closed the Zurich account he'd just opened—he wouldn't do that if the business wasn't in trouble, would he?'”

“So? Big-time criminals have numbered Swiss accounts as a matter of course. You mean he's accumulating as much cash as he can? Planning to disappear?”

“No, Lieutenant. She said
the Zurich account he'd just opened
. A new account.”

“Huh.”

“I don't know what it means.”

“Nor do I,” Marian murmured. “Okay, Perlmutter, let me think about it. Thanks.”

She sat pondering this new detail and drinking her coffee. When she'd worked out a possible explanation, she went to see Murtaugh.

“A new account?” he said with a frown. “Why now?”

“Perhaps because he never needed one before. Because he didn't have anything to put in the account.”

“I don't follow.”

“Captain, what if the reason we haven't been able to find out what O.K. Toys is doing is that they haven't done it yet?”

He shot her a look. “They've just been setting it up?”

“Could be, don't you think?” She sat down, facing him across his desk. “It would take a lot of time just to build their cover—the falsified financial records, the phony invoices they had printed. If it's a new scam, then Oliver Knowles didn't have anything to do with it. Unger couldn't start until after Knowles retired. Then on one of his infrequent visits to the office, Knowles could have stumbled across something—invoices he knew couldn't be right or whatever. And so Unger had to get rid of him.”

“Which leaves Zook out of it?”

“Unger's the only one who could have manipulated the switch from toy distribution to whatever illegal enterprise he had in mind. He's the man in charge. And it has to have been a big operation, to require this much preparation. Big operations require records-keeping. He'd have to set that up as well as the phony books.”

“But the IRS has been there all this week. They would have found those real records.”

Marian leaned her forearms on his desk. “Captain, those IRS agents are accountants—they're not computer people. There are all sorts of ways to hide files electronically. If Unger used a computer security specialist to set up his system, the IRS wouldn't even know that other stuff was there.”

Murtaugh pulled at his lower lip. “Maybe we ought to get our own computer people in there.”

“That's what I'm thinking. The dates on the files would be significant. They'd tell us whether the illicit system was set up before or after Oliver Knowles retired.”

The captain nodded. “All right, let me find out if the police computer people are equipped to handle a case like this. It sounds pretty specialized to me.”

Marian went back to her office feeling uneasy and irritated. That theory she'd just put to Captain Murtaugh could turn out to be a rough approximation of the truth … or it could be a fairy tale. She had no substantiation for any of it. It angered her that eleven days after his murder, she still didn't know whether Oliver Knowles was a criminal or an innocent victim.

And then at noon, Virgil called.

The meet was set for three that afternoon at the Guggenheim. By two the Spiral Gallery was filled with NYPD detectives wearing wires and showing an intense interest in the new “Art of the Future” exhibit.

The phone call had not instructed Thomas “Hook Nose” Schumacher to carry or wear anything special to identify himself; that meant the courier he was meeting was known to him. Known by sight only, Schumacher stressed; names were never exchanged. Four of the many cops in the Guggenheim had only one assignment: Make sure Schumacher doesn't bolt.

The plan was not to arrest the courier but to follow her, or him. Robin Muller's procedure had been to deliver her envelope of murder instructions and then go straight to meet the paymaster. It was the paymaster the police were interested in; he was one step closer to Virgil. Detective Walker had argued for picking the paymaster up rather than risk losing him in the crowd. Detective Perlmutter said they'd be blowing a chance to get all the way to Virgil if they picked him up prematurely. Marian decided to continue the tail.

It would be a close tail, with someone sticking next to the paymaster at all times. The detectives doing the following would shift positions constantly, so the paymaster wouldn't notice any one face more than he ought to. Marian and Murtaugh were cruising in one car; Sergeant Buchanan and one of his detectives in another. Both cars were equipped with radio receivers tuned to the frequency used by the mikes the detectives were wearing.

“Where's Captain DiFalco?” Murtaugh asked. “I'd have thought he wouldn't want to miss this.”

“Gloria Sanchez says she left a note on his desk,” Marian replied. “Right under the big stack of papers she found there.”

Murtaugh looked away and smiled.

Marian ran a radio check. Someone in the Guggenheim might wonder at so many visitors wearing earplugs, but the courier wouldn't be there long enough to spot anything. The radio communication checked out, so long as Marian didn't drive too far from the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street.

Three o'clock.

A radio voice spoke. “Woman approaching Schumacher. Forty, kinda dumpy, shoulder-length brown hair. Tan all-weather coat and black boots.”

Silence.

“She's the one. She just handed Schumacher the envelope. Now she's going out.”

Another voice: “I got her.” A pause of two minutes. “She's going into the park.”

Gloria Sanchez: “I'm on her.”

A longer pause.

“Guy sittin' on a bench in Central Park in February. Our paymaster?” Gloria paused a moment. “Yep, that's him. Just gave the courier an envelope. Dark hair, sallow complexion, wearin' just about the ugliest coat I've ever seen. Mustard-colored. Dirty mustard. The guy's nothin' to remember, but that coat's gonna stand out in a crowd.”

Another minute passed.

“Just got a closer look at that coat. 'S well-cut, material's good—he musta paid plenty for it. Mebbe the guy's colorblind.”

Marian clicked on her transmitter. “Gloria, you're talking too much.”

“Yas'm.” Two minutes later: “I'm droppin' off.”

“I got him,” a new voice said.

They followed the man in the mustard coat as he paid off another courier, in front of a Times Square camera shop—a second death ordered for that day. The paymaster next led them to an ordinary-looking office building on the West Side.

“Roberts is riding up in the elevator with him,” a voice said.

Then after what seemed like a hundred years, Roberts reported: “He went into a place called Twenty-first Century Consultants.”

“That's it,” Murtaugh said with satisfaction. “Let's go get 'em.”

36

When the police burst into Twenty-first Century Consultants—weapons drawn, yelling “Freeze!”—all they found was one terrified paymaster and one even more terrified woman.

The one inner office was empty. “Dust,” Detective Dowd announced. “Place isn't used.”

“Where's Virgil?” Marian demanded of the woman.

“I don't know!” she replied tearfully.

“
Who's
Virgil?”

“I don't know that either! I've never seen him!”

Marian turned to the paymaster.

“Don't look at me,” he said. “This is as close as I ever got to him.”

“That's crap,” Sergeant Buchanan said. “You gotta know who he is. You work for 'im!”

“A lotta people work for 'im! You know why I came here today? To tell
her
I wanted to meet this Virgil.”

“That's true,” the tearful woman confirmed.

The paymaster had decided to try bluffing his way out. All he did was pay people off. Nothing illegal in that, was there? He picked up the pay packets here and met some couriers at different places and paid them. He was hired by phone and he received his instructions by phone. And that's all there was to it.

So why this sudden urge to meet Virgil?

Nothing sudden about it. He'd been trying to meet his employer for a long time, but he was sure the other woman hadn't been passing his messages on.