Hard as Nails

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kurtz insisted on driving Rigby home. They had more to talk about, but Kurtz didn't want to discuss murder in a public place, even in the Blues Franklin, which undoubtedly had been the site for more than one murder being planned.

"Is it a deal, Joe?"

"You're drunk, Rigby."

"Maybe so, but tomorrow I'll be sober and you'll still need my help if you want to find out who shot you and… whatshername… the parole officer."

"O'Toole."

"Yeah, so is it a deal?"

"I'm not a hired gun."

Rigby barked a laugh that ended in a snort. She rubbed her nose.

"Hire the Dane if you're so hot to take a killer to Iran with you," said Kurtz.

"I can't afford the Dane. Word is that he asks a hundred thousand bucks a pop. Who the hell can afford that? Other than Little Skag and these other Mafia assholes like your girlfriend and the faggot, I mean."

"So you want to hire me because I come cheap."

"Yeah."

Kurtz turned up Delaware Avenue. Rigby had told him she lived in a townhouse up there toward Sheridan. "The problem," said Kurtz, "is that I'm not a killer."

"I know you're not, Joe," said Rigby, tone lower now. "But you can kill a man. I've seen you do it."

"Bangkok," said Kurtz. "Bangkok doesn't count."

"No," agreed Rigby, "Bangkok doesn't count. But I know you've killed men here as well. Hell, you went to jail for throwing a mook out a sixth-story window. And every black in the projects knows that you took that drug dealer, Malcolm Kibunte, out of the Seneca Street Social Club one night last winter and tossed him over the Falls."

It was Kurtz's turn to snort. He'd never thrown anyone over the Falls. Kibunte had been tied to a rope and dangled over the edge in the icy water while he was asked a few simple questions. The stupid shit had decided to slip out of the rope and swim for it instead of answering. No one can swim upstream at the brink of Niagara Fails in the dark, in winter, at night. It was unusual that the body was found by the Maid of the Mist the next morning—usually the Falls hold the bodies underneath the incredible weight of falling water for years or decades.

Kurtz said, "Nine years is a hell of a long time to wait to get your kid back. He won't remember you. He's probably sporting a mustache and got a harem of his own by now."

"Of course he won't remember me," said Rigby, not reacting with the fury Kurtz had expected. She just sounded tired. "And I haven't waited nine years. I followed them over there the month after Farouz kidnapped Kevin."

"What happened?"

"First, I couldn't get a visa from our own State Department Senator Moynihan—he was our senator then, not this dim-blonde cuckolded bitch we have now—"

"I don't think that a woman can be a cuckold," said Kurtz.

"Do you want to fucking hear this or not?" snapped Rigby. "Moynihan tried to help, but there was nothing he could do, not even get me a visa. So I went through Canada and flew to Iran and found out where Farouz was living with his family in Tehran and went to the police there and made my case—when I found out he'd been cheating on me, Eftakar just stole my one-year-old baby—and the cops called some mullah and I was kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours."

"Still…" began Kurtz.

"That was the first time," said Rigby.

"You tried again?"

"In nine years?" said the cop. She sounded sober. "Of course I've tried again. When I came back after the first attempt, I moved back to Buffalo, joined the B.P.D., and tried to get legal and political help. Nothing. Two years later, I took a short leave of absence and went back to Iran under a false name. That time I actually saw Farouz—confronted him in some sort of coffee and smoking club with his brothers and pals."

"They kick you out of the country again?"

"After three weeks in a Tehran jail this time."

"But you went back again?"

"The next time, I went in overland through Turkey and northern Iraq. It cost me ten thousand bucks to get smuggled through Turkey, another eight thousand to the fucking Kurds to get me across the border, and five grand to smugglers in Iran."

"Where'd you get money like that?" said Kurtz. What he was thinking was You're lucky they didn't rape and kill you. But she must have known that.

"This was the nineties," said Rigby. "I'd put everything I had into the stock market and did all right Then blew it all going back to Iran."

"But you didn't find Kevin?"

"This time I didn't get within four hundred kilometers of Tehran. Some religious-police fanatics had my smugglers arrested—and probably shot—and I got questioned for ten days in some provincial cop station before they just drove me to the Iraq border in a Land Cruiser and kicked me out again."

"Did they hurt you?" Kurtz was imagining burns from lighted cigarettes, jolts from car batteries.

"Never touched me," said Rigby. "I think the local chief of police liked Americans."

"So that was it?"

"Not by a long shot. In 1998 I hired a mercenary soldier named Tucker to go get Kevin. I didn't care if he killed Farouz, I just wanted Kevin back. Tucker told me that he used to be Special Forces and had been in Iran dozens of times—had been inserted into Tehran as part of the plan to get the hostages out as part of that fucked-up Jimmy Carter raid in April 1980…"

"Not the best thing to list on a resume," said Kurtz. He'd reached Sheridan Road and turned left according to Rigby's instructions, then right again into a maze of streets with townhouses and apartments built in the sixties. Rigby didn't live far from Peg O'Toole's apartment and he wanted to go there next.

"No," said Rigby. "As it turned out it wasn't a good recommendation for old Tucker."

"He didn't succeed."

"He disappeared," said Rigby King. "I got a cable from him in Cyprus, saying he was ready for 'the last stage of the operation, whatever the hell that meant, and then he disappeared. Two months later I got a package from Tehran—from Farouz, although there was no return address."

"Let me guess," said Kurtz. "Ears?"

"Eight fingers and a big toe," said Rigby. "I recognized the ring on one of the fingers, big ruby in a sort of class ring that Tucker seemed proud of."

"Why a big toe?" said Kurtz.

"Beats the shit out of me," said Rigby and laughed. She didn't really sound amused.

"So now you're ready to go back again, taking me with you."

"Not quite ready," said the cop. "Next summer maybe."

"Oh boy," said Kurtz. He stopped at the curb in front of the dreary townhouse that Rigby had indicated.

"And I'll help you as much as I can until then," said Rigby, turning to look at him. The smell of death still wafted from her clothes.

"Just trust me to hold up my end of the bargain when the time comes, huh?" said Kurtz.

"Yeah."

"What can you tell me that would help me with this shooting thing?" said Kurtz. He'd made his decision. He wanted her help.

"Kemper thinks that you're right," said Rigby. "That Yasein Goba didn't act alone."

"Why?"

"Several reasons. Kemper doesn't think that Goba had the strength to drag himself up those stairs in his house. The M.E. says that despite all the blood trail and the blood in the bathroom, Goba'd lost two-thirds of his blood supply before he got to the house."

"So someone helped him up the stairs," said Kurtz. "Anything else?"

"The missing car," said Rigby. "Sure, it'd be stolen in that neighborhood, but if Goba'd driven himself from the parking garage, the seat and floor and wheel and everything must've been saturated with blood. Blood everywhere. That might give even the back-the-Bridge Lackawanna thieves pause."

"Unless the blood was all in the backseat," said Kurtz. "Or trunk."

"Yeah."

"Do you trust Kemper's judgment, Rig?"

"I do," said the woman. "He's a good detective. Better than I'll ever be." She rubbed her temples. "Jesus, I'm going to have a headache tomorrow."

"Join the club," said Kurtz. He made a decision. "Anything else on Goba?"

"We're talking to everyone who knew him," said Rigby King. "And the Yemenis are really clannish and close-mouthed—especially after that terrorist thing last year. But they've told us enough to convince us that Goba was a real loner. No friends. No family here. It appears that he's been waiting for his fiancée to be smuggled into the country. We're looking into that. But a couple of neighbors tell us that they'd caught glimpses of Goba being dropped off once or twice by a white guy."

"A white guy dropped him off once or twice," repeated Kurtz. "That's it?"

"So far. We're still questioning neighbors and people who worked with Goba at the car wash."

"Any description on the white guy?"

"Just white," said Rigby. "Oh, yeah—one crackhead said that Goba's pal had long hair—'like a woman's. "

Like the driver of the car that broke out through the garage barrier, thought Kurtz. "Can you get me some information on Peg O'Toole's uncle?"

"The old man in the wheelchair who slapped you? The Major?" said Rigby. "Yeah, why? We called him and asked how he and his associate, the Vietnamese ex-colonel…"

"Trinh."

"Yeah. We asked the Major how they'd heard about Officer O'Toole's shooting. The Major lives in Florida, you know. Trinh in California."

Kurtz waited. He knew where the two lived thanks to Arlene, but he wasn't going to reveal anything to Rigby unless he had to.

"The Major told Kemper that he'd been back in Neola for a shareholders' meeting of a company called SEATCO that he and Trinh had started way back in the seventies. Import-export stuff. The Major and Trinh are retired, but they still hold honorary positions on the board of directors."

"Which explains why they were in the state," said Kurtz. "Not how he heard about the shooting."

Rigby shrugged. "The Major said that he called Peg O'Toole's house and office Wednesday evening after the shareholders' meeting. He said he likes to get together with his niece when he's back in the state. Someone at the parole office told him there'd been a shooting—they didn't have any family member to contact for O'Toole, just the Brian Kennedy guy in Manhattan."

"Was Kennedy in Manhattan when they contacted him?"

"He was in transit," said Rigby. "Flying to Buffalo to see his fiancée." She smiled crookedly. "You suspect the boyfriend? They were engaged, for Christ's sake."

"Gee," said Kurtz, "you're right. He couldn't have been involved if he was engaged to the victim. That's never happened before."

Rigby shook her head. "What motive, Joe? Kennedy's rich, successful, handsome… his security agency is one of the top three in the state, you know. Plus, we checked—his Lear was in transit."

Kurtz wanted to say are you sure? but stopped himself. The headache throbbed and muted flashbulbs were going off behind his eyes. He set his hands firmly on the top of the steering wheel. "The Major had a son who killed some people down in the Neola high school back in the seventies…" he began.

"Sean Michael O'Toole," said Rigby. "Kemper ran that down. The crazy kid was sent to the big hospital for the criminally insane in Rochester and he died there in 1989…"

"Died?" said Kurtz. Arlene hadn't been able to get into the hospital records. "He would have been young."

"Just turned thirty," said Rigby. For a woman who'd just downed four tequilas and two beers, she was articulating her sentences well enough, but her beautiful brown eyes looked tired. Very tired.

"What happened to him? Suicide?"

"Yeah. Messy, too."

"What do you mean?"

"Young Sean didn't just hang himself or asphyxiate himself with a plastic bag or something… uh-uh. He doused himself and several other inmates with gasoline and set fire to his wing of the high-security ward during visiting hours. Three others died as well as Sean and half the wing burned down. The current director says that he still doesn't know where the boy got the gasoline."

Kurtz thought about this. "The Major must have been proud."

"Who knows?" said Rigby. "He wouldn't talk to Kemper or me about his son. He said, and I quote—'Let the dead bury the dead. Army officers—you gotta love 'em." She opened the door and stepped out onto the grassy curb. Clouds were scuttling and the wind from the northwest was cold. It felt like late October in Buffalo to Kurtz.

"You have tomorrow off?" said Kurtz.

"Yeah," said Rigby King. "I've worked the last five weekends, and now that your and O'Toole's case is officially closed and the dead gay guys have been turned over to the coroner, I get tomorrow off. Why?"

"You want to ride down to Neola with me tomorrow?" Even as he spoke the words, Kurtz was surprised he'd actually suggested this.

Rigby looked equally surprised. "Neola? That little town down near the Pennsylvania border? Why would you…" Her expression changed. "Oh, that's where Major O'Toole and the Vietnamese colonel had their homes and business before they retired and moved to warmer climes. What's the deal, Joe? You looking for a little payback for the late-night slap and want some backup while you brace the sixty-something-year-old in his wheelchair?"

"Not quite," said Kurtz. "There's something else I want to check on down there and I thought it might be a pretty ride. We'd be back by nightfall."

"A pretty ride," repeated Rigby, her tone suggesting that Kurtz had begun speaking in a foreign language. "Sure, what the fuck. Why not? What time?"

"Eight A.M.?"

"Yeah, sure. I'll drink some more and pass out early so I'll be in good spirits for our picnic tomorrow." She shook her head as if bemused by her own idiocy, slammed the passenger door, and walked toward her townhouse.

Feeling some of the same bemusement about himself, Kurtz put the Pinto in gear and drove away.