The Second Perimeter (7 page)

* * *

“SO TELL ME,”
Diane Carlucci said, “how’d you land a job with Congress?”
DeMarco had asked a number of people for a nice place to take a lady to dinner and was directed to one in the little town of Winslow on Bainbridge Island. For a small-town restaurant it was pretty pricey, but DeMarco didn’t care. The view was good, the food was good, and Diane Carlucci was very comfortable to be with. There was no first-date awkwardness, no straining to find something to say— until now.
DeMarco hesitated. “I guess you know about my old man?”
Diane Carlucci nodded.
“Well,” DeMarco said, “he made it kind of hard to get a job after law school. Firms weren’t kicking down the door to hire the son of a guy who worked for a mobster and killed people for a living.”
“I can imagine,” Diane said. She hesitated and said, “You know I met your dad once. I liked him.”
“Yeah, he was a likable guy,” DeMarco said. “He was a good father, too. He just didn’t make the best career choice.”
“So how’d you get a job with Congress?” Diane asked again.
“I have a godmother, a friend of my mom’s I call Aunt Connie. She worked in D.C. when she was young and she had some pull with somebody. She talked to him and got me the job.”
What DeMarco had just said was the truth. It wasn’t the whole truth but it was the truth. “And you,” DeMarco said, “how do you like—”
“No, we’re not through with you yet,” Diane said. “I heard you were married, that you married—”
“Yeah, I did, and now I’m divorced.”
“I knew that. I heard that she left you for—”
“Yeah, my cousin.”
“The one who works for—”
“Right. Why haven’t you guys arrested him yet?”
Diane Carlucci laughed. She had a great laugh.
“So now can we talk about you?” DeMarco said.

* * *

DEMARCO WAS THE
only customer in the motel bar.
He’d enjoyed dinner with Diane and had been sorry the evening had ended so early— seven thirty— but Diane was the dedicated type. She had told DeMarco that she needed to get back to her motel, review her case notes, and prepare for tomorrow. She and her partner had found out that Whitfield, who all agreed was a rather contentious fellow, was engaged in a property dispute with a neighbor, a man who had anger-management problems, which meant he tended to beat the hell out of people when he got upset. Although Diane’s partner still thought the homeless guy looked pretty good for Whitfield’s murder, Diane wanted to verify the neighbor’s alibi, which was a girlfriend with a drug habit.
DeMarco didn’t suggest that he accompany Diane back to her room for a nightcap. He wanted to, but he didn’t. He knew a nice Catholic girl from the old neighborhood wasn’t going to sleep with him on the first date. So now he sat, feeling horny and depressed, halfheartedly watching the Mariners get creamed by the Yankees. He glanced up at the television just as Jeter knocked the ball almost into the railroad yard behind Safeco Field and heard the bartender mutter, “Fuckin’Yankees.”
DeMarco realized at that moment that he was no longer alone, that he was in the company of a brother. He and the bartender— a man with a severely peeling, sunburned nose— belonged to the largest, unhappiest fraternity in America: the Benevolent Order of Jealous Yankee Bashers. For the next half hour they repeated the sad litany of the brotherhood: Steinbrenner bought the World Series every year; Joe Torre looked like a dour leprechaun and was just as lucky. And so on. Members of the Order could bitch about the Yankees for hours. The bartender had just begun to decry the immorality of the Yankees acquiring Alex Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers when he looked over DeMarco’s shoulder and muttered, “Oh, shit.”
DeMarco followed the bartender’s line of sight and saw that he was looking at Emma. She had stopped at the entrance to the bar and was looking into her purse. She rummaged in her purse a moment— even Emma had the female tendency to overstuff her handbag— then turned and walked away as if she had forgotten something.
“What’s the problem?” DeMarco said.
“That broad. She was in here last night and orders a martini to take back to her room. I had to make it three times before she was happy. Geez, what a ballbuster. Oh hell, here she comes.”
Emma walked over to the bar, nodded curtly to the bartender, and said to DeMarco, “I should have known this was where you’d be. Let’s go get some dinner.”
“I just ate,” DeMarco said.
“Then you can watch me eat. We need to talk. Settle up your bill and meet me at my car.” With that she turned and walked away, completely confident that DeMarco would follow. Emma could be a very irritating person.
“Sorry,” the bartender said to DeMarco after Emma left, “didn’t know she was your friend.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” DeMarco said. “She is a ballbuster. The biggest, baddest one you’ll ever meet. How much do I owe you?”

* * *

EMMA, LIKE DEMARCO
, had questioned the locals for the name of a decent eatery and had been directed to a place on a scenic bay called Dyes Inlet. DeMarco said it was even nicer than the spot where he’d taken Diane, but as soon as Emma stepped through the entrance she sniffed the air and said, “I smell cigarette smoke. I thought they’d outlawed smoking in restaurants in this state.”
Outlawed?
She made it sound as if smoking was a Class A felony. DeMarco himself couldn’t smell a thing but Emma’s sensitive nose had apparently detected a solitary, illicit nicotine molecule polluting the atmosphere near the door.
“Maybe they have a gas mask you can borrow,” DeMarco said.
This earned him an arched eyebrow for his impertinence, but he was fortunately spared a lecture on the lethal nature of secondhand smoke. Emma did ask the hostess for an outside table on the deck of the restaurant, where a slight breeze ensured the purity of her air supply. DeMarco liked the deckside view. He’d heard that orca whales occasionally swam into the inlets of Puget Sound, and that’s what he wanted to see: a great big orca flying out of the water.
Their waiter— a gangly kid whose name tag said NATHAN— asked what they wanted to drink. Emma described the perfect vodka martini, exactly how it should be made, the exact proportion of both ingredients. The kid nodded while she talked but the only thing he wrote down on his pad was “V. Martini.”
Poor bastard
, DeMarco thought; he was going to be schlepping martinis back and forth from the bar all night long.
“And for you, sir?” Nathan asked DeMarco.
“Uh, I’ll have a martini, too. Make it just like hers.”
“Very good, sir.”
The waiter turned to leave but DeMarco said, “Hey, do you ever see orcas over here?”
“Orcas?”
“Yeah, you know, killer whales. Those black ones with the white spots.”
“I know what an orca is, sir, but they rarely come in this far.” When Nathan saw the look of disappointment on DeMarco’s face he said, “But you might see salmon jumping, and over there,” Nathan pointed, “is an eagle’s nest. That big tree, just to the left of the house with the red roof? Do you see it?”
DeMarco looked over to where the waiter was pointing but couldn’t see anything but tree branches and sky in the fading daylight. Big deal, he thought, a bird’s nest, but all he said to the waiter was, “Yeah. Cool.”
After their drinks were served— to DeMarco’s amazement Emma declared hers to be just right— Emma told DeMarco what she had learned from the DIA researcher.
“So now what?” DeMarco asked her.
“Well,” Emma said, “if Bill Smith won’t help then I guess we have to help ourselves.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought you were going to say,” DeMarco said.

E
mma was picking the lock on Phil Carmody’s back door.
Fortunately, Carmody had a big fence around his backyard. As long as nobody had seen them go through the back gate, they were probably okay. Provided Carmody didn’t come back home. Provided he didn’t have some kind of security system. Provided one of his neighbors didn’t see them through the windows walking around inside of Carmody’s house. DeMarco could just see himself: hands cuffed behind his back, a cop pushing his head down as they put him into a squad car.
And then the dog started making noise, little whimpering sounds like it was hungry or had to shit.
When DeMarco first saw the German shepherd in the backseat, he hadn’t wanted to get into Emma’s car. DeMarco wasn’t a big dog fan— too many stories about pit bulls gnawing off people’s arms— and the German shepherd was
huge
. He could just see it: they’d be driving down the road, and one minute the dog would be sitting there, its big snout sticking out of the window, and the next minute it’d be taking a bite out of DeMarco’s skull because his hair resembled rabbit fur.
“Shut up,” DeMarco hissed at the dog. The dog didn’t obey of course; it just kept making the whimpering noise. He felt like jerking on the leash, but was afraid that might piss it off. “Shut up,” he hissed again at the dog. “And why couldn’t you get some kinda machine for this?” DeMarco whispered to Emma. “They make machines for this, don’t they?”
“There,” Emma said, and she pushed the door open. Turning toward DeMarco she said, “A good dog is more reliable than most portable machines and they’re faster. Now come on. We’ll start on the second floor and work our way down.”
“Should we close the blinds?”
“No,” Emma said and started up the stairs.
They knew Carmody had rented the house and DeMarco assumed it had come furnished— haphazardly furnished. The place was neat enough, but you could sense that it was just a temporary residence for its occupant. There were no personal touches, no family photographs, no memorabilia from Carmody’s time in the service. It was a place where the man slept and ate and not much more.
The second floor of the house had two small bedrooms and a bath. As Emma opened drawers and looked into closets, DeMarco walked around the rooms and let the dog poke its snout wherever it wanted. At least it wasn’t whimpering anymore; in fact it looked like it was having a pretty good time. DeMarco hoped it didn’t raise its leg and pee on something to mark its territory.
They finished searching the second floor in forty minutes then went back to the first floor. Emma was thorough, and the kitchen was particularly time-consuming as she pulled things out of the freezer and poked around inside of boxes of cereal and rice. DeMarco was surprised the dog didn’t try to eat a roast when Emma put a leftover one on the counter. He had to admit the critter was pretty well trained.
DeMarco checked his watch. They’d been inside the house an hour and a half.
“Come on,” Emma said, “let’s do the basement.”
“Aren’t you going to put that stuff back?” DeMarco asked, pointing his chin at the food sitting on the counter.
“No,” Emma said. “He’s going to know we’ve been here anyway.”
DeMarco was afraid the basement would take forever. Basements are where people store boxes and boxes of old crap they don’t need but are too lazy to sort through and throw away. But the basement of Phil Carmody’s rented house was small and almost barren. A hot water heater and a furnace took up half the space, and Carmody had a set of free weights and a bench-press bench in the middle of the room. DeMarco mentally tallied the weights on the bar and concluded that Carmody bench-pressed three hundred and fifty pounds.
There was an old Formica-topped kitchen table along one wall and above the table was a Peg-Board containing hand tools. Clamped to the table was a small vise, the sort fly fishermen use to tie flies, and a magnifying glass on a movable arm was mounted over the vise. On the table was a model sailing ship— a four-masted man-of-war under full sail. It appeared the model was ninety percent constructed, with only a few parts remaining to be painted. DeMarco could imagine Carmody sitting here alone at night, in the dimly lit basement of his silent house, slowly constructing the model. It was an image of a lonely man killing time— not a man passionate about a hobby.
As Emma stood in the center of the room deciding where to begin her search, DeMarco pulled the dog over to the table to take a closer look at the model. It had a zillion parts, little ropes and pulleys and cleats, and DeMarco didn’t see a smudge of glue anywhere. He was wondering if he had enough patience to build something like this when the dog went berserk. It started barking at the top of its lungs and straining against the leash to get at a shoe box underneath the table.
“Jesus!” DeMarco said. “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” he hissed at the dog. He didn’t know why he was whispering since the dog could be heard a mile away.
Emma came over and patted the dog on the head and said, “Good girl, that’s a good girl,” and she pulled a doggy treat out of her pocket and fed it to the dog. DeMarco wondered how come she had the doggy treats instead of him. The dog immediately stopped barking, but it continued to push its nose against the box.
Moving the dog’s head out of the way, Emma pulled the box out from under the table and placed it on the tabletop next to the model. It was sealed in two places with clear packing tape. She studied the box for a few minutes, shrugged, and picked up an X-Acto knife that was lying near the model.
“Hey!” DeMarco said. “What are you doing? What if that’s a letter bomb or package bomb or something like that?”
“Look at the dust,” Emma said. “This box has been sitting here for quite a while.”
“So?” DeMarco said. “That just means it could be a highly unstable package bomb.”
Emma shook her head, dismissing DeMarco’s objections, and carefully sliced the packing tape and slowly opened the shoe box.
“Shit,” Emma said.
DeMarco looked down into the box. It contained a water pistol, a top, a couple of Matchbox cars, and a yo-yo. And a dozen bottle rockets.

* * *

IT TOOK THEM
twice as long to search Mulherin’s place. The guy’s house wasn’t any bigger than Carmody’s but Mulherin had lived there a long time— and he was both a slob and a pack rat. His basement, unlike Carmody’s, contained so many boxes and bins and cartons that there was barely room to move. Mulherin also had a garage, and it too was filled with junk, so much junk that there wasn’t space to park a car. Even Emma, the woman who never admitted to the impossible, admitted it was going to be impossible for them to search Mulherin’s house thoroughly in less than two days— and all they had was about four hours.
The dog reacted twice to objects in the house: a case of marine flares in the garage stored next to a two-gallon can of gasoline, and a box of shotgun shells in the pocket of a moth-eaten hunting vest. The shotgun shells looked so old that DeMarco was afraid they might explode in his hand.
When they finished searching, even the dog looked tired.
“Now what?” DeMarco said when they were back in the car. “It’s too late to check Norton’s place.”
“He lives in an apartment. It won’t take long.”
“Emma, it’s almost four o’clock. They said these guys hardly ever work later than four and usually leave earlier to avoid the traffic.”
“We’ve got time,” Emma insisted, her lips set in that don’t-argue-with-me line.