figure.”
“Any line on him yet?” Mike asked Pell.
“Not yet. They’ve staked out his place in Brooklyn, and his parents’ house in Jersey, too. They found a little burned-up hunk of his briefcase in the kitchen, had what was left of his passport in it, and info on air charters from Miami. Turns out he was booked on a late flight there last night. He wasn’t on it, but they’re looking out for him at the airports too. They’ll find him.” I didn’t share his confidence, but I said nothing. I was still trying to get my head around Trautmann being dead, and Mills having killed him. Some part of me was relieved.
Pell turned to DiPaolo. “We done here?” he asked. She nodded, and Pell walked out, leaving the door open behind him. DiPaolo climbed down from her perch and pulled on her coat. Then she looked at all of us, but mainly at me. Her voice was just above a whisper.
“You got lucky here, you most of all, March. You fucked me on those files, and don’t think I don’t know it. But I’ve got enough agita right now; I don’t need to go chasing twenty-year-old crimes, or newer ones where the victims only testify under subpoena. And I don’t need to be dancing around with you and the counselor. You get a pass this time, but my hand to god, you’ll never get another one from me.” Then she left.
“Not a happy woman,” Neary said.
“After chasing Nassouli for three years, and having him turn up dead, she’s looking for some good news. She might’ve thought those files were going to be it-a shot in the arm to her prosecutions. That’s not going to happen, so she’s pissed. We should be very grateful that she’s got a full plate,” Mike said.
“I am,” I said. “Any bets on them finding Mills?”
“I’d think the chances are good,” Mike said, putting on his coat. “As you pointed out, he’s mostly an amateur. Trautmann handled all the heavy lifting.”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t underestimate the guy,” Neary said. “Bernie did, and look what happened to him.” He had a point. Neary slung his coat over his arm and picked up his briefcase. I called to him before he reached the door.
“Where did you tell me they found Nassouli’s body?” I asked him.
“Way out in Suffolk. A place called Cedar Point Park. It’s on the South Fork; I don’t know which town. Why?”
“Just curious,” I said. He looked at me, shook his head, and left.
“What was that about?” Mike asked.
“Nothing. You find Pierro last night?”
“Late last night. He’s in San Francisco. Ecstatic doesn’t begin to describe him. Helene should be calling you.”
“She already has. She’s coming by this afternoon to pick it up,” I said.
“You look inside?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “You want to?”
Mike looked horrified. “Look inside? I don’t even want to know it exists.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Helene wouldn’t be over for a few hours. It was time enough. I poured myself some coffee and cranked up my laptop. I got online and found a map of Long Island, then one of Suffolk County and then one of East Hampton, where I found Cedar Point Park. It was on a knob of land that jutted into Gardiner’s Bay and looked out over Shelter Island. I opened my address book and found Randy DiSilva’s number.
Randy is a small, round, mostly bald man in his middle sixties. He has a bushy gray moustache and a perpetual tan, and looks like he should be fixing dog races in Florida instead of running a small detective agency with his two sons, out in Riverhead. But he was born and bred on eastern Long Island, and he knows his way around the potato farmers and fishermen, and the old- and new-money crowds, too. I use him whenever I’ve got divorce work out there. Usually when I call, it’s a drop-everything, all-hands-on-deck kind of drill. And Randy is always happy to scramble the squadron on my behalf, and overcharge me wildly for it. But he’s thorough and fast, and in two years, neither of us has had cause to complain.
I reached him on the first try. I told him what I wanted and when I needed it. He thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then quoted me a price. It was over twice what it ought to cost-just about right from Randy; I agreed. He told me he’d call in two hours, and I knew that he would.
I went into my bedroom, and from under a pile of clothes that smelled of smoke, I pulled the manila envelope. It was creased and torn in places, but still sealed. I could feel a thick sheaf of paper in there, but its bulk came from the videocassette. I sat on the bed and opened the little metal clasp.
I can’t say I was surprised. I recognized some of the documents from Pierro’s fax. There were others I hadn’t seen before. I read through them. They all followed the same pattern. Six companies, introduced to Rick Pierro by Gerard Nassouli; six sets of faked loan applications, authored by Nassouli and Pierro; six hefty credit lines extended by French Samuelson; then a blizzard of transactions-dirty money to clean.
And, of course, there were pictures. There were eight of them, and they were grainy, like images transferred from video. But they were clear enough to see the players and follow the action. Everyone looked so young-Helene, Nassouli, Trautmann, and a blond girl who couldn’t have been fifteen.
I took the package out to the living room and turned on the TV and the VCR. I didn’t watch much, enough to know that the pictures came off the tape, enough to revise my estimate of the blond girl’s age downward, and to wonder if she’d been there willingly, or if she’d even known where she was. Enough to see that Alan Burrows hadn’t lied about the production values; even the sound quality was good. The dialogue was limited and repetitive, but the voices were distinct.
I hadn’t heard Nassouli speak before, or seen him except in photographs. His voice was medium-deep, with a trace of an English accent, but it was otherwise unremarkable. The sleek, ursine look he had in photos was there on tape too, and so was his camera awareness. Here, he was less an active participant than a director, a manipulator, a watcher. Yet he was also aware of being watched, and he seemed to pose and preen for his unseen audience. Quite a piece of work. I stopped the tape and put everything back in the envelope and sat on my sofa, sick and tired. Disappointed, but somehow not surprised.
I wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head and stay that way for a week or two. But I couldn’t, not yet. I checked the time. I changed the dressings on my wrists. I made a tuna sandwich and heated some soup from a can and ate. I read the paper. I checked the time again. Finally, the phone rang. It was Randy, as good as his word.
“It’ll be three years in April that the place changed hands,” Randy told me. “April 10 was the closing date, in East Hampton. Buyers name of Dooley, from the city; local lawyers on both sides. Need the names?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “You know how long it was on the market before it sold?”
“Hang on a sec, I got that here.” There was a ruffling of papers. “Here we go. It was fast. Went on the market March 14; they got an offer on the sixteenth and accepted it the same day. The way they priced it, I’m not surprised. It was an easy two hundred grand under market for back then. Like they say in the trade, it was priced to move. You need anything else?”
“Let me have the address again,” I said, and he gave it to me. I thanked Randy and promised to put his check in the mail today. We said our good-byes.
I went to my laptop. I pulled up my case notes and read through them and looked at the date Randy had given me. I went back online. It didn’t take long for me to find a detailed map of the area around the address I’d gotten from Randy. I sat there looking at it for a while, and then I pulled up driving instructions from that address to Cedar Point Park. The instructions were short and simple, and why not? The trip was barely half a mile. I pushed back from my table and looked out the windows at the bars of bright sunlight and blue shadow that fell on the buildings across the way. I rubbed my eyes.
It was wild conjecture and circumstantial bullshit, and I knew it-or at least a part of me did. No cop or prosecutor would waste a brain cell on it. Yeah, there was motive, more than enough. It was sitting in an envelope on my kitchen counter. It was easy to imagine a scene, three years back, of Gerard Nassouli waving a sample of that stuff in front of Pierro, in an attempt to finance the fugitive life he was about to embark on. And it was easy to
