The Chessman (7 page)

“The cocksucker that handled my divorce, for instance, charged me $800 every time he walked across the room to pick up a paperclip. In fact, the only guy who ever got his money’s worth out of any attorney was O.J. Simpson.”

Mr. Clean certainly had some heartfelt convictions.

And so, against his better judgment, Stouder sat still and periodically nodded his complete agreement with Mr. Clean and wondered how much longer he should give it before he scampered the hell out of The Brass Rail.

“Truth be told, I’d done some things—things that in the light of day I ain’t proud of—that killed the marriage. I’m big enough to own that. Now my ex ain’t necessarily over it, but we get along. Hell, I stopped by her apartment last month for some drinks and got the balls licked. But that’s not my point. My point is the bills this fucker kept serving at me were unconscionable. Talk about kicking a fellow when he’s down.”

Stouder nodded, deeply wishing to the core of his existence that he were anyplace but here.

“And that really
irked
me,” the drunk continued. “That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore, but it irked the living shit out of me. Every time I cut him a new check, it was like twisting corkscrews into my eyeballs. But I kept a stiff upper lip, patted him on the back when the papers finally came through. I even bought him a drink—he even ordered some of that red piss you’re drinking—when I cut him his final check at a tavern not unlike this one. All amiable and ain’t you just done me the biggest fucking favor in the world and all that kind of shit because you’ve got to do things right and let a little time go by. You know what I mean?”

Stouder nodded by rote.

“I even passed along some business referrals. You know, to dicks I could care less about. I even sent the shyster a Happy Holidays card that first Christmas after the divorce. All happy times are here again and bullshit. But, you see, I didn’t forget his gouging. I just couldn’t move on, I guess. So after a proper amount of time had passed, I came to visit him late one night, and woke his ass out of bed with an invoice of my own, know what I mean?”

Stouder started to nod, but paused and stared at Mr. Clean.

“A little something that needed to be paid in full, an account that needed settling. You should’ve seen that fucker’s pale face. Sonofabitch—that’s right!” Mr. Clean got excited, dug something out of his pocket and slapped it on the top of the bar, right next to Stouder’s glass of Merlot. “That’s how I came about this little coin purse.”

Stouder looked at the poor excuse for a coin purse sitting on the counter in front of him. Oddly shaped, the slit down the middle warped open, and looking more like one of those rawhide pig ears his mother bought for Tanzy, the poodle, than any coin purse Stouder had ever seen before.

“That’s one hundred percent yam sac, that is,” Mr. Clean said. “One hundred percent.”

Stouder felt the bile rise in the back of his throat and struggled to keep it down.

“You’re going to want to head into the back parlor, beyond the pool tables.” Mr. Clean now sounded sober. “They’re ready for you.”

Stouder stood still in the parlor’s entryway, trying to recoup from an overly invasive frisk by Mr. Clean. Not a big room, certainly nothing to host any type of event Stouder could think of outside a biker gangbang. A single circular table sat in the middle of the room. It was covered with a lime-green tablecloth that may have been new during the Kennedy Administration. A speakerphone sat atop the table. Next to it an inch-thick manila folder labeled with Stouder’s name. One wooden chair sat in front of the table. It appeared fairly obvious where he was meant to be seated.

“Do come in, Deputy Attorney General Stouder. Please, sir, make yourself at home.” A voice emanated from the conference phone. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”

Stouder took three steps into the room when the door to the back parlor slammed shut. He almost hit the ceiling, and twisted about to see if there was anyone in the room with him. Completely empty.

“Sorry about that, sir, but we need to have a little pow-wow and it just wouldn’t do for anyone to listen in, wouldn’t you agree?”

Stouder remained standing. He bit his lower lip, tried not to tremble, and recited the lines he’d rehearsed on the drive over. “If you think you can intimidate a New York State Executive Deputy Attorney General with these juvenile antics, you are sadly mistaken. If I don’t call my secretary in fifteen minutes, she’s to turn over an envelope to my team of prosecutors containing our correspondences, my thoughts on the issue, as well as the address of this…” Stouder looked around the room disdainfully and continued, “…establishment.”

“By all means, Deputy Attorney General, by all means you’ll be able to call your secretary. I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.” The voice sounded impossibly mellow, like a midnight deejay on a jazz station telling the audience about the mild night temp before putting on another track of Miles Davis. “And we probably shouldn’t have used St. Nick as a greeter.”

St. Nick must be Mr. Clean, Stouder thought. “Your man is a drunkard!”

“Now, now, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, before we go casting aspersions at St. Nick—who truly does play Santa Claus for the kiddies in December—did you know that Ulysses S. Grant ordered a barrel of whiskey to always be on hand for his beck and call? The good general would dip his cup into it to quench his thirst. Shall we discuss how Winston Churchill drank a bottle of wine with breakfast?”

Stouder stared at his fingernails. “And your point is?”

“St. Nick has special talents, sir. Let’s just say he gets the sausage made and leave it at that. Give me a handful of functional alcoholics like St. Nick and I can rule the world.” The voice on the speakerphone sounded more and more like one of those neutered hosts on NPR, no longer a late-night jazz deejay. “Deputy Attorney General, you’ve heard of the carrot and stick approach? You know, for rewarding good behavior and punishing bad?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good, sir, because, and I hate to brag, but the file in front of you is one hell of a big stick. By all means page through it if you don’t believe me.”

“If you’ve done your homework, you will know that nothing concerns me more than the health and welfare of children. I have been a child advocate for years, well before I was appointed to my current position. I’ve donated thousands to child shelters across the United States.”

“Of course you have, Deputy Attorney General,” the NPR jazz deejay voice said slowly, as though signing off for the night. “Of course you have.”

“Then let’s dispense with this ridiculous masquerade. I’ve been researching how sexual predators utilize the Internet to prey on unsuspecting children. I will shortly be announcing the formation of a task force to tackle this very issue. I have respected colleagues by the dozens who know about my advocacy in this area.” Stouder had hit upon most of his rehearsal points. “Nothing in that folder will mean a thing to anyone.”

“Humor me, Deputy Attorney General Stouder. You really don’t want St. Nick to walk through these pages with you, do you, sir? I have a queasy stomach.”

At the mention of St. Nick/Mr. Clean, Stouder opened the folder and paged quickly through the first section, which contained transcripts of his chat room talks with Ricky and the others.

“Meaningless.” Stouder threw up a hand. “And very likely doctored.”

“Page on, Deputy Attorney General Stouder,” the NPR speaker voice pushed.

The next section contained side-by-side pictures of him, both in and out of his costume. Stouder turned white. But that wasn’t what sent him into shock. What nearly sent Executive Deputy Attorney General P. Campton Stouder into a state of anaphylactic seizure was that the pictures had been taken of him in his master bathroom. The bastards had been in his house.

“Amazing what those Nanny Cams can pick up, isn’t it, sir?”

Stouder felt his hands begin to quake, but he did his best to stay in character. “You’ve just tacked on several more felony counts to your blackmail scheme.”

“Once you see a pattern, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, everything else is a cakewalk.” The NPR voice no longer sounded casually ironic.

Stouder ceased speaking as he paged through the remainder of the folder. Pictures of him on the prowl, outside Ricky’s house, at a theatre restroom, next to a boy at a urinal.

“If you see any you’d want for holiday cards, I can get you a discount at Proex,” the NPR voice remarked.

Stouder continued to page through the photos, one after another after another. The last were a series of pictures of the boy who had been next to him at the urinal. The last document was taken from that morning’s paper, which had a picture of this same boy, who had been missing since Tuesday, since he’d gone out to play with the local kids and never returned. Nor had any of the neighborhood kids seen him that day.

“It does seem odd to call it an AMBER Alert when there’s a little boy involved, doesn’t it?”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Now, now, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, don’t say things to which I could take offense. That little Connelly boy is in no real danger. Certainly not from the likes of you. He’s currently in a South American country—what the heck, for the sake of our chat, let’s say Guatemala—working in a sweatshop that makes Nike knockoffs.”

“Bring him home now,” Stouder mumbled.

“No need for the long face, sir. Consider it summer camp. He’s learning a trade, and the guards have been instructed to give him extra rice and beans.”

All pretenses were gone; all the wind out of his sails. He was screwed, stewed, and tattooed. He knew exactly how this would play out. He’d be jailed as the lowest of the low. Stouder wilted like overcooked spaghetti flung on the wall, began to shake as if he were seated bare-assed in a drafty igloo.

“All you have to do, Deputy Attorney General Stouder, is a little favor, for me and St. Nick and the handful of other fellows who have come to know you so intimately this past week or so, and the Connelly boy will be dropped off at the library near his house with an amazing tale to tell. But before the Connelly boy left for South America, he played a little game of hide and seek with the fellows in your house. You know, some hair here, some fingerprints there. St. Nick tells me the Connelly boy may have even pricked his finger and touched a few items before the bleeding stopped. But don’t worry about the mess, sir. St. Nick said it’d take one of those CSI lights for anyone to even notice anything amiss. So tell me, Deputy Attorney General Stouder—as a legal scholar—if that file were sent to the investigating detectives, would that be enough to merit a search warrant?”

“What is it…you want from me?” Stouder whispered, barely audible.

“Just a little favor, Deputy Attorney General. We need an extra set of eyes and ears. That’s all. Just an extra set of eyes and ears.”

Executive Deputy Attorney General P. Campton Stouder then did something he’d not done in over forty years, not since he was the Connelly boy’s age.

Stouder began to weep.

Washington, D.C.

Three Years Earlier

Chapter 7

“L
et me see if I am able to wrap my wee little mind around this,” a red-faced Assistant Director Roland Jund said to a conference room full of special agents. “Alain Zalentine had the great misfortune of getting his brains blown out the back of his skull in a truck stop restroom.”

“A rest area restroom, sir.”

“Yes, Agent Cady, thanks for sharing your grasp of the finer nuances of outhouse semantics,” Jund said, sighing. “Then, the following day we find his twin brother, Adrien Zalentine, dead on his sailboat with his brains blown into the Chesapeake. Now these two boys are not just Leo and Schmuck Pimpledwarf from Dogpatch Lane—no, of course not. These two young lads are the heirs to the biggest fortune in North America this side of Bill Gates. And damned if both of the boys don’t have these glass chess pieces jammed deep into their wounds.” The AD tossed a stack of 8x10s down the conference room table. No one reached for a copy. They all had the same graphic pictures inside their own folders, the folders Cady had distributed to everyone before the AD’s arrival.

“Then we have K. Barrett Sanfield, D.C.’s uber lawyer—
the Magician
for Christ’s sake—stabbed to death in his own office some five weeks back, to wit a case that has yet to move forward one square inch. But finally we have a clue, a link actually, and a none-too-subtle link at that, on account of a glass chess piece having been pried out of Sanfield’s solar plexus.”

Jund looked around the table and then continued, “And now we discover, upon opening some kind of hidden wall safe in Adrien Zalentine’s kitchen, which sounds like something right out of the Hardy Boys by the way, we discover that the Zalentine twins—of the
Zalentine, It Rhymes with Valentine
dynasty—that these two degenerates may just be the biggest serial killers to hit the East Coast since the Boston-Fucking-Strangler!”

There was a hushed silence. Cady knew that Jund took the deaths of women and children hard, and personally, but he had never seen the AD this intense before and suspected none of the other attendees had either. He glanced quickly around the table. There was Elizabeth Preston paging through her packet of materials as if in search of a miracle; to her right was Special Agent Tom Hiraldi. Hiraldi was young, fairly green, and involved in the Chessman investigation due to his having taken state in high school chess club two years in a row—the bureau’s resident chess expert. Before Jund had arrived, Hiraldi had been theorizing about what the queen and bishops meant, what chess moves they might signify, what clues they might provide. His dissertation on the King’s Gambit came to an abrupt end once Jund stormed into the meeting and sat down.