The Sniper's Wife (23 page)
It was a shame, and meant the loss of two good extra brains, but even Ogden could only skirt the rules for so long and by so far. The NYPD held its own fully accountable, often unfairly and sometimes with a vengeance. The dinosaur wasn’t going to trade on his hard-won reputation and seniority for a bunch of outsiders, especially when one of them was running the risk of landing some serious jail time. In fact, Ogden was feeling a little uncomfortable that, having stretched this alliance out for as long as he had, he’d not only been carried away by a combination of intrigue, mutual respect, and cooperation, but had fallen prey to a pinch of old-timer’s arrogance. He was still not above thumbing his nose at authority now and then, but in the past he’d usually been a little less obvious about it.
Until they all returned to the office, however, where he would finally lower the boom, he didn’t mind passing along the interesting bits he’d collected. He felt he owed Joe Gunther at least that much, if only as a kindred spirit.
He leaned forward over the top of the ramshackle desk and rapped his knuckles against the glass.
He met Gunther at the front door as the Vermonter was rounding the corner of the house. “Go for a walk?” he suggested. “I need to stretch my legs.”
They fell into step side-by-side and headed west, where the street ran straight to the water at the far end of the block.
“I’m sorry I’ve had to park you on the sidelines,” Ogden apologized. “I think I’ve abused the system all I can on this one.”
Gunther was already waving his hand dismissively. “I appreciate all you did. I know everything past the first five minutes has been pure courtesy. I thank you for that. Not many people would’ve been that generous.”
Ogden laughed. “I wouldn’t overdo it. I think I was more curious than anything, not to say a little embarrassed at having dropped the ball with the initial investigation. If you hadn’t come knocking, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
“Which is where, if that’s okay to ask?”
Ogden immediately set him at ease. “Of course. That’s why we’re taking this walk. I didn’t want to push my luck back there with so many people around. It’s starting to look like Ron Cashman was a high-ranking lieutenant in a major car theft ring, among other things. He ran guns and drugs to a lesser extent, I think mostly to keep his options open and maintain a sense of independence, but the big money was cars.”
“Did you know anything about this ring before now?” Gunther asked.
“I didn’t,” Ogden admitted, “but Customs did. They have a task force with some of our people and they’ve been trying to get a handle on this bunch for a couple of years. Berhle’s been on the phone with them for a half hour or more and they’re about to show up, which’ll pretty much bring our involvement to an end—another reason I’m going to have to cut you folks loose.”
“Sort of frustrating, isn’t it?”
Ogden shrugged. “Yes and no. They need something for all their efforts, too, and it’s not like I don’t have other things to do. Besides, we cracked it for them. I can rub that in if I get in the mood.”
They continued walking a little farther before Ogden added, “It’s not all altruism, either, so don’t go thinking I’m plain old Mister Nice Guy. I didn’t have Jim call the feds till now ’cause I wanted a long look at all that stuff first.” He tapped the side of his head. “The old brain cells may not be what they used to be, but I love filing little factoids up there. You never know when they might come in handy.”
Joe Gunther wasn’t sure if this conversation allowed him to ask questions. He sympathized with Ogden’s position, and while he didn’t want to abuse that, he still had a big investment in reaching the truth.
“You find any reference to Mary Kunkle?” he asked with intentional vagueness.
Ogden smiled. “One thing we did find was a small electric key-cutting jig. Also, a lot of the names on her phone records match what we found in Cashman’s files. Does that make you wonder what her role was.”
“What do you know of the setup?”
“I’m no expert,” Ogden cautioned, “but it looks like Cashman ran a whole crew of spotters, thieves, drivers, choppers, money handlers, and whatever else he needed to identify, steal, and get rid of high-end cars, mostly SUVs. From what I could see, he was shipping them right out of New York to places like Russia, the Dominican Republic, South America, you name it.”
“How did that stay under wraps for so long?”
“He had a cell system. Old trick: You make sure none of your people knows anybody else inside the organization. That way, one of them gets busted, he’s all the cops end up with. Pretty neat, really, but it takes brains and a flair for organization.”
“Which explains why you think Cashman was a lieutenant and not the boss?”
“No doubt in my mind,” Ogden agreed. “The problem with that kind of structure is that sooner or later, one guy is going to have more knowledge than the top man is happy with, unless, of course, that boss is running the whole show, which is pretty unlikely.”
“Why?”
“Skill levels. The real brains with the international contacts is probably not going to be the same man who knows where to find and control the local worker bees. It’s just asking too much of a single individual. Besides, it’s clear from Cashman’s files that he had someone he reported to.”
“And that is?”
Ogden shook his head. “Dunno yet. That’ll probably be up to the task force to figure out. Cashman just used a cipher name. It won’t be hard to figure out, though, not with everything we found. We—or they—just need to turn over that one last rock. Then maybe we’ll all get what we want, including you.”
They’d turned back now in the ebbing light and had almost retraced their steps. Coming up even to Budd Wilcox’s place, they were stopped by the oversized man coming out onto his porch and saying to them in a quiet voice, “I just heard John was killed.”
Ogden reacted without emotion. “Where’d you hear that?”
“One of your patrol people.”
Ogden frowned slightly, glancing at the group of uniforms gathered up the street. Gunther sympathized. No matter how professional the department, people liked to talk.
But Ward Ogden apparently saw no reason to deny it. “Yeah. Sorry you had to find out like that.”
Wilcox stepped off his porch. He was carrying a large envelope in his huge hands. “That’s okay. I guess he knew it might happen.”
“How so?”
“He gave me this,” Wilcox said, tearing open the envelope and spilling its contents out into his opposite palm.
“Whoa,” Ogden burst out, startled at the big man’s initiative. “Let me do that.”
He relieved him of the documents and asked, “You know what this is?”
“Nope. He said to hand it over to the cops in the event of his death.”
The phrase was said formally, and it was clear Budd Wilcox felt he’d just relieved himself of a chore directed from the netherworld. Without further ado, he turned on his heel, retreated to his porch, and said, just before closing the front door behind him, “It’s all yours now.”
Ogden leafed through the contents of the envelope in the light cast by a nearby streetlamp. He chuckled slightly and showed Gunther what he had. It looked like a date book, several letters, an address book, and a sheaf of documents. “Remember that last rock I was talking about? Well, here he is, and proof that Mary Kunkle was blackmailing him. No wonder she never showed up on the welfare rolls and was such a shoo-in to get into the Re-Coop. I guess Cashman was saving up for a rainy day.”
W
illy Kunkle stood in the darkness, as he had so often in years past, watching, waiting, one half of him alert and utterly tuned in to what was happening around him, and the other drifting, almost meditative, like a bird on the wing simply enjoying whatever breeze happened by. It was the part of his spirit that he usually put to sketching on a pad he routinely carried in his stakeout car, clipped to the steering wheel as an impromptu easel.
That struck him now as a quaint self-indulgence, like a combat soldier’s daydreaming about mowing the lawn back home—mundane, incidental, and completely without meaning anymore.
It was close to midnight. He’d been standing outside Casey Ballantine’s upscale brownstone in Brooklyn’s increasingly trendy Cobble Hill district for hours, ever since he’d backtracked her address, rather than Carlos Barzún’s, from the “CB” initials and the phone number on Ron Cashman’s calendar.
Sammie’s passing mention of the Seabee Group had been a lifesaver there, if a little misleading initially. Both the calendar and the legal pad that Willy had stolen from the Broad Channel house had proved confusing, cryptic, and largely counterproductive. Whether cautious or careless, Cashman had apparently been incapable of simply writing something down. Instead, he’d doodled, drawn arrows, circles, and boxes, and filled or connected them with initials and abbreviations whose sense was known only to him. There were dozens of these hieroglyphics covering many pages. Only Sammie saying “Seabee” had supplied the key.
Willy still wasn’t sure what he was in the midst of tracking, though, having never heard of Casey Ballantine, but it was something, and given his growing impatience and his increasingly precarious position, he wasn’t about to let the opportunity slip by. And there had been signs of life inside the brownstone: curtains being drawn and lights going on and off throughout his surveillance, as if someone had been moving around pursuing an evening’s normal pattern.
Nevertheless, as the majority of these lights began to stay off, he started wondering about the benefit of standing there much longer.
Which was exactly when the last two lights died on the first floor.
Willy sighed, wondering what to do next. He’d known when he’d found this address that it was at best a long shot. Still, he thought, might as well wait another half hour.
It didn’t take that long. Not two minutes later, the front door opened and a tall, blond, aristocratic young woman stepped out.
Willy readied his slender pocket telescope to get a closer look.
Keeping the door open with a small case she unhooked from her shoulder, the woman, presumably Casey Ballantine, began ferrying in and out of the house a small mountain of matching suitcases and several bags of what looked like canned and boxed groceries. As she neared completion, replacing the small case on her shoulder and slamming the door shut, an upscale, oversized silver SUV with New Hampshire plates appeared around the nearest corner and came purring to a stop before the piled luggage, followed moments later by a dark, very new BMW with tinted windows.
No one got out of the BMW, but from the driver’s side of the first car, reminiscent of some doting hubby catering to an impatient mate, Andy Liptak emerged, apologizing with hand gestures and virtually leaping to move the woman’s possessions into the back of the larger vehicle. As he did so, however, throwing open the rear door right in front of the other car’s hood, he angrily but inaudibly summoned the driver to help him out. Then, all smiles once more, he went from lugging things himself to directing this second man—large, slow-moving, and transparently a bodyguard—in doing it for him. In the meantime, he chatted with the young woman, pecked her on the cheek, placed her case on the front passenger seat, and generally fussed about.
After all the bags had been put away and the bodyguard had returned to his vehicle, Liptak gave his girlfriend a squeeze and a kiss, helped her into the huge SUV, and waved good-bye as she drove off.
Then, clearly visible through the lens, his expression metamorphosed once more, turning hard and purposeful, and he walked back toward the BMW. Willy quickly memorized its New York plate number, as he had the New Hampshire one, and faded back into the shadows to retrieve his own vehicle, which he’d exchanged for Cashman’s stolen one hours earlier.
He turned on the ignition, but not the headlights, and pulled into the street about a half block behind Liptak’s car.
This final revelation linking Liptak to Cashman was less the emotional jolt it should have been and more the settling of the keystone into an archway of time and events dating back to when Willy had introduced his wife to his erstwhile best friend years ago.
Even in Vietnam, Andy Liptak had been a user. Not of drugs, although he’d certainly indulged there as well, but of people, and of any situation that allowed for the smallest abuse of trust. He’d called it working the system back then, of course, using the age-old cliché of the morally corrupt, and in the context of Vietnam, it had in fact appeared just shy of a virtue. He wasn’t killing anyone, at least, just lying, stealing, and enriching himself—something he almost had to stand in line to do. Willy—the Sniper—immersed as he’d been in far darker exploits of his own, had barely given it a second thought. Andy had been a welcome source of normalcy to him: a drinking buddy, someone who didn’t ask questions and to whom the war had seemed almost a lark.
Only later, when they’d met up in New York, had Willy wondered about those details, if only fleetingly, sidetracked as he’d been by his own demons and poor judgment.
Now, of course, it all came clear to him, like an unnecessary epilogue at the end of a bad play, supplied to those spectators too slow or self-absorbed to have understood the obvious.
As a result, instead of the satisfaction such discoveries usually gave him at the end of his knottier cases, here Willy just felt stupid and used—the last guy in the room to realize that the joke had been on him.
Depressed and distracted as he was by this realization, he didn’t see a third car, its lights out like his own, pull into line down the street far behind him.
They were still in Ron Cashman’s small, weather-beaten bungalow in Broad Channel, so many of them now that it looked like a dentist’s waiting room for short-haired, type-A overachievers. Cars clotted the narrow, dark street outside, and murmured cell phone conversations and the muted squawk and hiss of portable radios supplied a steady backdrop to the inner sanctum meeting in the living room between Ogden and his bunch, and a whole new group from the Customs/NYPD task force that Ogden had mentioned to Gunther. Joe Gunther himself, taking advantage of the comings and goings and the fact that he’d become an unknown but familiar face over the last few days, had tucked himself into a corner, hoping to milk his interloper’s status for all it was worth. After they left this place, as Ogden had told him, his ties to the investigation would finally be severed.
Phil Panatello, a small, intense, dark-haired man from Customs, was in charge of the task force and was occupying the center of the discussion with Ward Ogden.
“Do you have a record on Casey Ballantine?” he was asking.
“Not a thing,” Ogden explained. “Which is obviously why he used her. Having no rap sheet and being the buffer between Cashman’s operations half of the business and Liptak’s management half, she basically became a fire wall. If it hadn’t been for Mary Kunkle knowing both sides, we might still be wandering about in the dark.”
Panatello picked up the contents of the envelope Budd Wilcox had handed over hours earlier. It was now getting close to midnight. “Right. So, what was her story?”
“Kunkle used to be Andy Liptak’s girlfriend. From what we pieced together, after they split up and she got totally hooked on dope, the guilt kicked in and he began covering her basic financial needs, if just barely. That’s obviously something he’d see now as a big mistake. ’Cause while she might’ve been grateful enough when she was scraping bottom—assuming she could think that clearly—after she cleaned up, she decided she was due some compensation.”
“Is that where the Re-Coop comes in?” Phil Panatello asked, consulting another file.
“Maybe in part. Who knows if that was an incredibly ironic money-laundering device, or a deal Mary forced him to set up? There’s a lot more digging to do yet. It’s clear Mary’s life took an upturn about six months ago— the rehab, the enrolling in school, the talk of future plans—which is also when she began contacting Cashman’s people, presumably as a conduit to Liptak and his financing. But there’s a ton of hypothetical thinking in there. We may never know all the details. We think we have a line on a secret bank account of hers that we were hoping might tell us more.” Ogden paused to smile affably before adding, “All yours now, of course.
“You have to admit, though” he continued, “if she did force Andy to finance the Re-Coop, it would show off how complicated the psychology became in all this. It not only got her out of a jam, but a lot of people who’d been in her shoes, as well. ’Cause the Re-Coop deal is a good thing. It’s not a con. They really do what they say they’re doing, which makes Mary the person they should thank. I’m not saying she was just being altruistic, necessarily— another thing that bank account might show—and I don’t guess we’ll ever know what her ultimate plans were for Andy. But, considering her modest lifestyle and what we know she forced Andy to do, it doesn’t look like she was such a bad egg. It might turn out she was blackmailing a crook not just for a little payback, but to be useful, too.”
“Until Ron Cashman killed her, stole what she was holding over Andy, and then kept it for himself. That is what happened, right?” Panatello asked.
Ogden shrugged. “Probably wanted it for a rainy day. I’d almost bet he told Andy he couldn’t find it anywhere. You have a location on Liptak yet?”
The Customs agent glanced over his shoulder at one of his men, who shook his head. “No. We think he’s on the move. We hit his office an hour ago and found the place sanitized. Combining what you found with what we’ve been putting together, we have a pretty good picture of his operation, but not where he is. He has a wife out in Long Island. We’ve been grilling her ever since you called us, but she’s clueless—had no idea what he did for a living, legit or otherwise, much less where he might be hanging out.”
He handed Ogden a file and opened it to what looked like a flow chart to Joe Gunther, who was craning to see from his corner. “That’s a breakdown of what we know so far. Liptak, through Cashman, grabbed cars from wherever he could get them—car dealerships, off the street, airport parking lots, even from way out of town— decided which ones would get top dollar either as parts cars or complete models, and then sent them to chop shops or to overseas and Latin American receivers, shipped right out of New York. Incredibly well organized. One of his people’s favorite hunting grounds, by the way, was on both sides of the GW Bridge, which not only provides a quick getaway to New Jersey or New York when the heat’s on, but where there’re a bunch of limo storage yards to pick through for extra cars. That would explain how Cashman got friendly with La Culebra and how and why he bought the junk that killed Mary Kunkle. And you may be right about the Seabee Group. We found no mention of it anywhere—it was a totally separate deal.”
“How did he keep the stolen cars under wraps?” Ogden asked.
“Empty eighteen-wheeler boxes,” Panatello answered. “You see them in vacant lots all over the city. Some of those are as abandoned as they look, but most are put there by legitimate shipping container brokers. They get a call for a forty-footer, for example, and they spot it at whatever location they’re given, no questions asked, for maybe thirty-six hundred bucks per. From there, the bad guys can either move it or fill it with a couple of cars, rig a dummy shipping document, and put it on a boat. Unless we tear into every big box in every port every day of the week, there’s no way we can separate the stolen goods from the legit stuff. What we do find is almost nothing.”
Ogden returned the file and waved his hand at all the documents and cell phones littering the table between them. “Is any of this going to help?” he asked reasonably enough. “Sounds like you’re still at a loss.”
But there, Phil Panatello looked more optimistic. “No. With Mary’s facts and figures, we’ll be able to shut him down, even if he splits the country. That’s what we’re doing now—using what you found to send people knocking on doors, checking warehouses, and rounding up peons. When the banks open in the morning, we’ll hit him there, too. Guaranteed he knows we’re after him by now, so we don’t want to lose time.”
The cell phone in Joe Gunther’s pocket began chirping, making everyone in the room stare at him.
His face flushing, he removed it and held it up to his ear. He listened briefly, asked for a couple of clarifying details, and snapped it shut, looking directly at Ward Ogden. “I think we’ve got a fix on Andy Liptak.”
The Bush Terminals line the Brooklyn shore below Red Hook like an endless row of abandoned, pre–World War Two beached tankers, lined up nose first to the uneven, broken-backed wide expanse of First Avenue. Dark, quiet, vast, and cavernous, they speak both of an earlier industrial might and of a changing world in which urban powerhouses like New York have yielded to an evolving national identity, leaving in its wake aging remnants, largely empty, in which only the occasional bare bulb advertises the rare, usually short-term tenant.
Willy followed the black BMW from farther and farther away as the midnight traffic thinned to near nonexistence at the north end of First Avenue. Even with his headlamps out, there was the odd security light that threatened to reveal his presence, so he played a game of hit or miss, sometimes letting the lead car get so far ahead that he risked losing it altogether.
It was with some relief, therefore, that he saw the car’s brake lights blaze brightly one last time before suddenly swinging to the right and disappearing into the yawning mouth of one of the pitch-dark pier buildings.