No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (5 page)

Fortunately, all the little lanes with arboreal names
gathered together into one main street, and that street was the only
way out. It led to the state highway. The far side was, as yet,
undeveloped scrub growth.

The next morning I was back at 5:30 A.M. with a pair
of cheap binoculars, a poncho and a thermos of the strongest coffee I
could get. I found myself a homey spot on a high rock hidden in the
trees.

The false dawn came at 6:30 and with it, the rain. I
pulled the hood of my poncho up over my head as the fat drops began
to drip through the branches. First they were intermittent. Then they
became regular and steady. Plop, plop. Plop, plop, little thwacks on
the top of my hood. Then faster and irregular. Plonk, plop. Plop,
plop, plop. Plonk, I didn't mind that somehow, gradually, a small
puddle was gathering inside the poncho where I was sitting and that I
felt like a wet-diaper baby. I didn't mind too terribly that my shoes
were not exactly waterproof and I was growing a squish inside my
socks. I could live with an occasional enterprising droplet that
evaded the poncho and found my eyes or neck. I was even willing to
find it amusing when I had to urinate, holding up the poncho with my
elbow, holding my urinator in one hand while keeping the binoculars
up and pointed to the road with the other. But the plops on my head
turned seconds into minutes, minutes into hours.

Brodsky was a lazy bastard; the yellow Rabbit didn't
come out of the warren until 9:30, and I hated him for every one of
the plopping 14,400 seconds of the 4 hours.

He made up for it, slightly, by being an easy tail.

He took 270 to the Beltway like he was going to the
District but continued around the city, then took us southeast on 66
and 28, into Virginia.

About fifteen or twenty miles out, he turned off the
inter state and onto a country road. The landscape was downright
rural. I lost him around a curve and down a hill. When it
straightened out and I should have seen him, there was nothing but
Rabbitless road. I raced ahead, but after ten minutes all l found was
a sense of being lost and too many places where he could have turned.

There had been one narrow turnoff in the section
where I lost him. I went back to it. Fifteen minutes down that road
and I came out four miles from where I came in. But a detective must
be dogged and determined. They didn't call Bulldog Drummond "Bulldog"
because he was short and squat. No sirree bob!

I took the cutoff again. There were six lanes or
driveways off it. The trees were thick along the shoulder and I could
see only two houses. Neither of them had a yellow Rabbit. One of the
lanes was overgrown. I turned and went cautiously into it. Hidden
behind the trees was the shell of a farmhouse that had been gutted by
fire, then finished off by vandals and the weather. My rental car was
nicely hidden there, and I decided to check the rest of the area on
foot.

Thirty minutes and four houses later, I found the
yellow Rabbit. It was nestled in beside a sleek green Jaguar with New
York plates.

The light of the day had a lean blue-gray cast. It
made the yellow-tinged light from the incandescent lamps indoors seem
warm, inviting and homey. It was a solid old two-story house built of
stone and wood. A whiff of smoke drifted from the big stone chimney.
It was a nice place to hide, and a long, long way from Attica.

I drifted around the house, staying close to the
trees. They told me, in grade school, that Indians could walk through
the woods without ever, ever making a sound. Not even the crack of a
dead twig underfoot. Not even a squish as they pulled their moccasins
back after they sank to their ankles in the mud. Back in grade school
I believed them.

I made my way, squishing and twig snapping, up to the
house's blind side, then around under the windows to the living room.

Wood sat hunched over. He spoke haltingly as a small
tape recorder turned languid reels on the table. He sipped from a
large crystal brandy snifter. After each sip he stared into the
glass, looking for an answer that he knew wasn't there. Eventually
the staring took over from the talking. He sat silent. Water dripped
from the eaves down my back.

It had gone irrevocably wrong for Edgar Wood. And
looking in at his face, as gray as the rain falling around me, I
wondered when, not if, I would find my way to taking the wrong kind
of fall.

Still, there was the thirty-dollar bottle, the logs
glowing like sentiment in a frame of Old Dominion stonework and the
fifty-thousand-dollar car outside. Those thoughts restored me to a
healthy glow of cynicism. Judge McCarthy would keep sending guys up
the river for stealing fifteen-dollar radios. Guys like Wood would
simply retire, with luxury sufficient to compensate for any sense of
shame they might feel. All was right with the world.

I couldn't hear what they were saying. But by the
next day or the one after, there would be an extra ear in the room,
and I would find a place to put an extra set of reels to record what
the ear heard, and Lawrence Choate Haven would have a copy as clear
as Mel Brodsky's.

I made my way back to the woods and along the road to
my deserted driveway.

Which wasn't deserted.

A lean young fellow with a gun lounged against my
rental car. A nice new silver Cadillac Coupe de Ville was parked
about six yards away.

It must have been the twig I snapped.

"Hi, guys," I said and waved cheerily.

The lean fellow smiled his best "gotcha"
smile. He didn't look like a rising young attorney from the
Securities and Exchange Commission, so I held my arms away from my
sides, hands open and facing outward. I really felt it was best if he
felt unthreatened.

Having little else to do, I went through the options
in my mind. I could flee. I didn't think I'd even get as far as a
fifteen-yard penalty. I could go for my own gun. Except that I didn't
have one. I could fall on my knees and beg and plead. I decided to
keep beg and plead as my ace in the hole. If they got really nasty, I
would whip it out on them. He beckoned me forward. I kept coming,
slow, open handed, pleasant.

A window on the Coupe de Ville slid down,
electrically smooth. Another gun peeked out. My lean buddy gestured
me to assume the position on the side of my car. He patted me down,
thoroughly, professionally. But that still didn't make me think he
was a member of one of our many law-enforcement agencies.

He opened the back door of the Caddy and gestured me
toward it.

There were two men in the front seat. When they
looked at me they began to argue.

"He's gonna get the backseat wet. " The
accent was Spanish.

"So what," his partner replied in the same
accent, "you want to get out in the mud?"

"Hey, this is custom leather upholstery, the
real thing."

"Fuck it, he messes up the upholstery, get
another car," the second man said. It clicked because the
attitude matched the accent. I had heard it from some very heavy
hitters in the cocaine trade; the accent was Colombian. My reaction
to the recognition was twofold: confused and scared shitless.

"Get in," the first said. I did and tried
my best not to drip. "What do you want with the man in the
farmhouse?" he asked, not unpleasantly.

It was too soon for truth. I couldn't think of a good
lie fast enough. I would have tried wise-guy, but the cocaine cowboys
I have known have been excessively touchy and quick-tempered. I
didn't answer.

The gun that I had first seen through the window now
rose over the back of the seat. It came up as slow and big, fat and
round as a harvest moon.

"Someone hired me to find him."

"Go on," the man without the gun said. The
man with the gun gazed at me lazily. All I could hope for was that he
really did care about the upholstery and wasn't ready to trade in for
the new model.

"And to find out, if I could, what he's saying."
What a pushover I was. I knew they wouldn't respect me in the
morning.

"Don't," he explained.

"OK," I said.

"Get out," he said.

That was it? That was all? All those guns and not
even a meaningful conversation. I got out. There was more.

My lean buddy gestured me to lie down on the ground.
I couldn't think of any reason why not. I lay facedown. A stone dug
into a rib. The fest of the ground was soggy mud. But there are worse
things than wet and dirty. Then I heard the front door of the Caddy
open. Someone got out and walked over to me. I could feel his
presence. Then he knelt with one knee in the middle of my back. It
was time to use my ace in the hole. I got ready to hit him with a
good beg-and-plead when I felt his gun pressed against the back of my
head. It left me speechless.

He had a question. "You understand?"

"I understand, " I said and got muddy twigs
in my mouth.

The gun shifted.

Then he fired. The world exploded in my ear. Dirt and
stone splattered against my face like blood and bone. My body jerked
in reflex and fear. The side of my head pounded. But I was alive. He
had fired alongside my skull and I could feel the scorched trail
through my hair and scalp.

"Good," he said with charming simplicity,
and stood up.

I heard him walk back to his car. The front door
slammed shut. Then the back door closed. The noises were faint
through the ringing in my ears and the pounding of my blood. I
thought I heard the big wheels start to move out through the sodden
track. I was afraid to look. But I did. I watched the Caddy roll
smoothly and smugly away, its real custom leather interior still dry
and clean. The plates were District of Columbia diplomatic. I got the
number.

Dear God, it's great to be alive.
 

6
SIX

I CALLED LAWRENCE
Choate
Haven on his private line, as he had requested, and told him that I
had found Edgar Wood.

"That's quite expeditious," he said and
asked where he was. I told him and began to explain my plans to put
in a sound system. He didn't want to know about that.

"Was Wood ever involved with Colombians?" I
asked.

"Colombians?" He sounded as genuinely
baffled as if I had asked about South Moluccans.

"Yeah, like Peruvians or Ecuadorians, but one
country over."

"
To the best of my knowledge, Edgar Wood had no
clients who were from Colombia."

"What about cocaine? Was Wood involved in
cocaine?"

"Absolutely not." Choate Haven sounded as
if he were defending his own integrity, or the integrity of Choate,
Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore, whichever was greater, as if he
didn't know that he could waltz down his decorator corridors and,
with only one ear cocked, hear the wind in the straws as dozens of
young associates snorted their way to Paradise Lost.

"Wood was a thief," I reminded him. "And
cocaine and money go together like Abélard and Héloise, or Cagney
and Lacey."

"It is certainly true that Mr. Wood is severely
flawed; that is a matter of record and not to be denied. However, I
cannot conceive . . ."

"That he would violate," I interrupted,
"the most basic ethic of his profession, maybe the only ethic of
his profession . . ."

"In my opinion," he said with a voice that
made clear who the client and who the employee was, "the nature
of his flaws, and they are great, is not the sort to lead to
involvement with narcotics. Certainly there has been neither evidence
nor indication of such an involvement."

He went on, in full paragraphs, and I began to
understand that it was really not something he wanted to hear. It was
something I could keep to myself until such time as it was necessary
to share.

My initial reaction to the encounter with our Latin
neighbors had been one of elation, even though I think that someone
who enjoys pain, busted kneecaps and bullet wounds is  a
certifiable psycho-sicko. As for death, as far as I've been able to
determine, I'll only get to do it once. So I want to save it for
last. Like dessert. Maybe I'm an adrenaline junkie. By the time I
checked in with Joey D' back in New York, I was coming down, like any
other junkie on any other kind of rush, and he could hear the stress,
the fear and the anger in my voice. He asked if I was all right, and
I guess my yes didn't have conviction.

"Look it, kid, did you shit in your pants?"

"No."

"Did you let go your bladder?"

"Gimme a break," I said. "Whaddya
think I am?"

"Then you did all right. You came out alive,
with all your parts, plus your pants clean and dry. Can't ask for
more'n that."

"Is that the measure of a man where you come
from, Joey?"
 
"It'll do,
till this women's lib thing blows over," he said. "Listen,
you thinkin' of maybe gettin' some backup?"

"Yeah, sure, what am I gonna do? Call in Uncle
Vincent?"

"It sounds to me like you got different things
going in different directions down there. And nobody can watch their
back and front and keep moving all at the same time. That's why the
army, they got different guys taking point and the rear."