gets funneled to terrorist operations.”
“Really,” I said. “Some lady down the street buys a Gucci bag and suddenly we’ve got planes flying into buildings.”
Arthur smiled. “You make light, but I saw the expression on your face, a moment ago, when I mentioned building supplies. You’re a contractor, am I right?”
The words had registered with me, and I may have blinked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Imagine,” he said, “if someone working for you were to install into one of your houses, I don’t know, knockoff electrical components. Parts made in China that look, on the outside, exactly like name-brand ones manufactured and approved for use here, but on the inside they’re just junk. Made with wire of insufficient gauge. They overheat, they short out. Breakers don’t trip. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what might happen.”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth and chin. For a moment, I was back in that smoke-filled basement. “So why are you here? If this is such a big deal, why aren’t the police asking me about this instead of you?”
“We work with the police wherever we can, but they don’t have the resources to deal with this problem. Counterfeit goods are a five-hundred-billion dollar-a-year-business, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. The fashion industry has turned to private security and investigation firms to track down counterfeiters. That’s where I come in. Sometimes, it’s pretty simple. We find a woman who’s been holding purse parties, naively thinking there’s nothing wrong with what she does, and we let her know she’s committing a crime, a federal crime, and that may be enough. She stops, we don’t charge her. Sometimes. When we find shops that are selling these goods, we notify the merchants, and the landlords, that what they’re doing is illegal, and that we’re prepared to bring in the police to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And we often do. But just the threat of it is often enough to get landlords to act. They get rid of those tenants and bring in ones that obey the law, that sell legitimate merchandise.”
“What about just buying a purse? Owning a knockoff? Is that a crime?”
“No. But would your conscience be clear, if you were a woman and were carrying around a knockoff, and knew that this kind of thing could be happening?” He was looking in the envelope for a couple more pictures. He handed them to me.
“What are-oh Jesus.”
They were crime scene photographs. If I was going to have to look at pictures like these, I would have preferred to see them in black-and-white. But these were in Technicolor. The bodies of two women, pools of blood beneath them. All around them, purses. On tables, hanging from the walls, from the ceiling.
“Dear God.”
I looked at the next picture. A man, apparently shot in the head, his upper body sprawled across a desk. I thrust the pictures back at Twain. “What the hell is this?”
“The women’s names are Pam Steigerwald and Edna Bauder. A couple of tourists from Butler, Pennsylvania. In New York for a girls’ weekend. They were looking for bargain-priced purses on Canal Street and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The man is Andy Fong. A merchant, and an importer of knockoff purses manufactured in China.”
“I don’t know anything about these people.”
“I show this to you because it’s an example of what can happen when folks get mixed up in this whole counterfeit business.”
I was angry. “This is disgusting, trying to make a point by showing me something like this, trying to scare the hell out of me. This has nothing to do with Sheila.”
“The police believe our man with the many names, the one we’ll call Madden Sommer, may have done this. The man your wife phoned the day she died.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Madden Sommer sat in his car across the street, and three houses down, from the Garber house.
He had his hand on the door when another car pulled up. A black GM sedan. A well-dressed man got out. Soft looking. The rounded stomach hanging over his belt. The way he carried himself. When the front door opened, the man flashed some ID to Garber.
Interesting, Sommer thought, taking his hand off the door. He didn’t get the sense the man was a cop, but anything was possible. He took note of the car’s license plate, then placed a call on his cell.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. I need you to run a plate for me.”
“I’m not exactly at work right now,” Slocum said. “I’m with family. My wife’s sister is here.”
“Write this down.”
“I just said-”
“F, seven-”
“Hang on, hang on.” Sommer could hear Slocum scrambling to find paper and a pencil.
“Christ’s sake, go ahead.”
Sommer read off the rest of the plate. “How soon?”
“I don’t know. It depends who’s on.”
“I’ll call you back in an hour or so. Have it for me by then.”
“I told you, I don’t know if I can get it right away. Where are you? Where’s this car you-”
Sommer slipped the phone back into his jacket.
Garber had let the man inside his home. Sommer could see shadows in the living room. He’d also been watching the other windows of the house. There was a light on upstairs. Occasionally, a shadow crossed the curtains, and at one point, someone had peeked through them to take a look at the street.
A child. A young girl.
TWENTY-FIVE
I stood up, so angry I was shaking. The idea that Sheila had any dealings, even so much as a phone call, with a thug like Sommer was deeply disturbing to me. And I’d already had enough troubling revelations about Sheila.
“You’re wrong. Sheila didn’t call that guy.”
“If she didn’t, someone using her phone did. Did she lend her phone out to people?” Twain asked.
“No. But-it doesn’t make sense.”
“But your wife has purchased knockoff purses?”
I remembered when I was standing in the closet on Friday, wondering whether it was finally time to do something with Sheila’s things. There were dozens of purses in there.
“There might be a couple,” I said.
“Would you mind if I looked at them?”
“Why?”
“When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you learn to spot certain characteristics. Just as someone could note the differences between a Coach and Gucci bag, I can sometimes notice differences between a bag made in one factory in China versus a bag made somewhere else. It gives me an idea which counterfeiters are making more of a dent in the market, for one thing.”
I hesitated. Why help this man? What difference did it make now? If anything, Arthur Twain was going to tarnish Sheila’s memory. Why help him do that?
As if reading my mind, he said, “I’m not here to hurt your wife’s reputation. I’m sure Mrs. Garber never knowingly broke the law, or intended to. This is one of those things like, like stealing cable. Everyone does it, so no one thinks that there’s anything-”
“Sheila never stole cable. Or anything else.”
