Losers Live Longer (30 page)

“
She told me she wants to help you.”

“
She help me before, when we’re in Ukraine. I know her help, I don’t want it.”

“
Well, she’s not here now, I can tell you that. And I certainly won’t hurt you.”

She shook her head. “Go, please. I don’t want you here.”

“
Sorry, Elena. I’m not going anywhere till I get some answers.”

“
Then at least come to office, I need to be near phone.”

“
Okay, I can do that.” I followed her, keeping my hand lightly on the gun butt in my waistband. She led me to the glass-enclosed office where only a desk lamp was lit, illuminating a blotter with a few pens on it and several pink parking receipt tickets like the one I had in my pocket.

Elena sat behind the desk and commenced to stare at the telephone, willing it to ring.

I shut the door and stood with my back to it, looking out through the glass walls like a fish in a tank, staring into the darkened vacant parking garage and its patches of red gloom.

I said, “Tell me something. What happened after I left your apartment this afternoon? I went back a few minutes later and you were gone.”

“
I wake up in bathroom,” she said. “I hear loud crash outside, feel floor shake. I wait a minute, go out into hallway to look. Nothing. Then I look down in basement, and I see you, you and super, at bottom of stairs. You look like you are dead, both of you. So I run—I pack quick, a few things, and I run.”

“
Yeh, well, I’m not dead. Luis is—but so is the guy who killed him. You don’t have to worry about him.”

She shook her head. “I will never go back to that apartment.”

“
No, probably not,” I said, thinking of Sayre’s description of the building wrapped in crime-scene tape. Thinking, too, that if Addison was in town again he might want his
pied à terre
back. “Did you know the man you’re house-sitting for is a wanted fugitive?”

“
What?” Her eyes shot up from the cradled phone receiver to my face.

“
The police,” I said, “they want to arrest this man, along with anyone who’s been helping him. By house-sitting, say.”

“
We don’t help him,” Elena said. “We don’t even house-sit for him—we sit, yes, but it is for Jeff’s boss, he give us the keys, say go live there free, just pick up mail, pay phone, electric, nobody will know. So we do. But we never once see Mr. Andrew. We don’t help him any. I don’t think he even know we are living there.”

“
Jeff’s boss gave you the keys?”

“
His new boss, yes. The man who buy parking garage, he give them to Jeff and tell him move in, watch over apartment, keep it safe.”

“
When did this new boss buy the garage? Just recently?”

She nodded. “June. He come in, he fire all the workers, everyone but Jeff. So now Jeff works like dog, seven days, all day. I never see him. I don’t think it’s worth it, even with the extra money.”

“
What extra money?”

She tilted her chin down and didn’t say anything.

“
Look, Elena, honest, I’m trying to help you. But I can’t unless you answer my questions. What money?”

She peered at me from under her brows.

“
He give Jeff special bonus, for all the extra work he gonna have to do. Seventy thousand dollars. Too much money, I think, like back home when they pay us extra for modeling because they need us also keep our mouth shut. But Jeff explain to me that things is different here, they sometimes pay you seventy thousand dollar to work in a garage. I don’t know. It’s not sound right to me, but he say, so…” Her English, never great, was getting worse as she became more agitated. I had to strain to make sense of what she was saying.

“
This money,” I said. “The seventy thousand dollars. That’s what got Sayre worried. She discovered how much money the two of you had in the bank, and figured you had to be doing something illegal.”

“
No, nothing illegal, we done nothing!”

Maybe you haven’t, I thought, but what about your boyfriend. I asked, “Where is Jeff?”

I could see it pained her to answer. “He was here, but he leave more than an hour ago.” She glanced over at a clock on the wall. “Hour twenty-five minutes.”

“
Did he say where he was going?”

She shook her head.

“
No, just said he need to see his boss. He said he’d just be couple minutes, or will call me if it’s longer. They talk on phone, Jeff and boss. He was shouting, so I hear.”

“
What were they talking about?”

“
Money. Always money. Jeff say seventy thousand not enough if he got to work all the time, seven days, every week, on and on. He say just close down garage, be better. I think. I didn’t understand. He was shouting and… something about closed-off top floor of the garage. Jeff say boss tell him he pick him up out front and they drive somewhere to talk.”

The closed-off top floor. I thought about the pink ticket in my pocket. Addison’s car had been parked up there.

I told her, “Wait here.”

“
Where you go?”

“
The top level,” I said. “I want to check something out.”

She said, “You need take stairs—Jeff say he turned off elevator for night.”

“
Good.”

I found the stairs by following the red lights of the exit signs. Beyond the door the stairwell was lit by fluorescent fixtures, which made my climb brighter but no more cheerful.

I opened the door at three and came out in a vast, empty space. I couldn’t see a single car. Just concrete walls, concrete floor, concrete ceiling; I was surrounded by giant slabs of it as if in a tomb.

My footsteps echoed in the chamber as I walked along toward the far end. About ten feet in, I found a bend in a dividing wall and on it a junction box with four light switches. The first I tried lit up a quadrant behind me to the left. Empty. I switched it off and tried another. This one lit up an area on the other side of the dividing wall. I went around to look.

In the far corner, a single vehicle was entirely enclosed under a cloth cover pulled down to its wheels, snug as a hood on a kidnap victim’s head.

I circled it until I found a bungee cord release, then loosened the cover and dragged it off the car.

It was a sky-blue Mercedes-Benz.

All the windows were open a crack. I lifted the handle of the driver’s door and it was unlocked.

Both the front and back seats were empty. There was a strong smell of gasoline fumes. I looked down and saw a strip of oily rag on each of the floor mats. Just one strip, deliberately placed on each of the four mats.

I opened the glove compartment. As usual, no gloves—but strangely, nothing else either. No car registration or owner’s manual, not even a pair of sunglasses or a peppermint. I swung it shut.

I sat in the driver’s seat, let my hands hover over the steering wheel without touching it. My feet could barely touch the pedals. The man who drove the car was a good three inches taller than me, making him something over six feet.

I reached under the steering wheel and found the lever that unlatched the trunk.

I watched it rise in the rear view, smooth and inexorable as the coffin lid in a vampire flick.

I walked around to the back of the car and looked in.

“
Shit—” I jumped and did a little sissy-pants jig. “Shit.”

I’d been expecting something like it, but my imagination didn’t do the sight justice. I couldn’t look directly at him at first, had to build up resolve, casting glances first at the periphery, the thickness of the layers of plastic he was cocooned in, the negative space around his body. In the corners at the bottom of the trunk, beside his head and his feet, were several open cans of Raid and other insecticides.

Finally I got myself under control and looked straight at him. Like all horrors, it wasn’t worse than I imagined, just different, more specific, alive with details my mind never could’ve conceived.

I had to unwrap him. It wasn’t the right thing to do, it wasn’t the smart thing to do, and it sure wasn’t the tasteful thing. But I had to unwrap him and know for sure.

The thick sheet of plastic was slick with something oily. I smelled my hand. It stunk of pesticide, insecticide, and—I sniffed again—citronella.

The plastic was folded and tucked under his body and once I shifted him a bit it came open like a flower.

What the plastic revealed was a desiccated corpse. Not much face left to make a positive I.D., it looked like it’d been crushed in, but only after death since there’d been little bleeding. However, I could see that he’d had blond hair, long limbs, and had probably looked a lot like a Swede. No doubt in my mind, it was Law Addison, dead in the trunk of his own car. His daring flight from justice had never gotten off the ground.

There was more of him left solid than I would’ve thought possible after four months. But I saw a possible explanation. Like the outside of the plastic, the body was slathered with insecticides and citronella. It would’ve kept the flies away and retarded decomposition.

He was dressed in a blue shirt. The one wound I could see that
had
bled was in his chest near his heart. The dried blood splotch around it was black and flaky. There were other wounds, about a dozen repeated punctures in the lower chest, belly, and groin, strikes at all the major organs and intestines. But none of those had bled. All had been delivered post-mortem.

Like the insect poison, it looked like another measure to impede decomposition, by releasing the build-up of interior gases which so quickly aid in the corruption of flesh and the reduction of the body into sludge.

It all pointed to workman-like improvisation, but by an informed hand. Someone who knew what he was doing and didn’t want a stinking car trunk full of dead man soup. Instead he had something more along the lines of a modern mummy.

I poked around gingerly, looking for the bulge of a wallet on Addison’s body, but no luck. Shifting his husk, it felt like all his weight was concentrated in the middle, around his waist. He was wearing a brown leather belt. It looked wider than most belts. It had probably been snug back in May, but it was loose now, and I gave it a little tug. It was heavy. Heavier than leather and its brass buckle would explain.

I unhooked the belt and pulled it off him in one motion like someone starting a lawn mower with a ripcord.

Dangling from my fingers, it felt heavier still. Heavy as a deep-sea diving belt. I located a tiny zipper on its underside and opened it. It was lined with gold coins. Krugerrands. By quick estimate twenty of them. By quick arithmetic, over seventeen thousand dollars, if not more. I zipped it back up and draped the belt over my shoulder.

Law Addison had tried to make his getaway, was all ready to flee. But something had stopped him. Someone.

A lot of things made sense in a hurry. This discovery was like the last marble that tips the scale and starts the peppery march of a hundred other marbles cascading. A few minutes ago, I hadn’t even known what had happened. Now I knew what—and I also knew who.

The realization gave me a sickening lurch, like losing your grip while climbing a sheer rock face. Falling backward into utter nothing, a gluttonous void. In front of you, vanishing rapidly, is the view of your last good firm handhold, getting smaller and smaller as you plunge. All around, the air is whistling and just behind you, out of sight, growing larger and larger in the corner of your eye, lies the end of all suspense.

Chapter Twenty-one: ’TIL WHEN-NEVER

Two sounds brought me back to the now. One a sound like dragging and the other like a squeaky wheel. I tried to trace its echo in the desolate top level of the garage. My eyes fastened on the rounded concrete corner of the dividing wall, beyond which was the stairwell.

The dragging sound stopped briefly, but the squeaking continued. Then footsteps began, sharp and direct slaps bouncing off the concrete walls of the chamber. Getting closer.

I unpacked my gun, held it in my right hand hanging loose down by my thigh, and waited, watching that corner.