Known to Evil

47

McGill?" Alphonse Rinaldo said, answering his special cell phone at 3:17 in the morning. I must've disturbed his sleep, but his voice sounded clear and awake.

"Yeah."

"Go back to sleep, honey," he said to someone in the room with him. "It's just something I have to take care of about work."

I had never expected to be so close to the Important Man's family life. Even at that intense moment I was impressed by how low the great could come.

"I got a name here that I want to put past you."

"Go on."

"I'm told that a person named Terry Lord ordered a hit on the woman you call Tara Lear."

Silence.

Diego came back into the observation room while I waited. "We have to meet," Rinaldo said.

"Fine," I said. "But can you tell me if that claim makes sense. We have the operator here."

"I don't understand it, but it could very well make sense," Alphonse said. "And no one in his right mind would give you Terry's name as a ruse."

"I'll meet you at six at Grimaldi's Diner, at Fifty-sixth and First," I said. "And do you have some connection with law enforcement without using Christian?"

"Of course. What do you need?"

I gave him some coordinates near Columbus Circle.

"Have your police search a dark-green Dodge that will be parked there in an hour. Tell them to arrest and hold the man they find for as long as they can."

He repeated the position and said it would be done.

I gave Diego a syringe loaded with a sedative.

"Only give him half," I said. "Considering all the blood he's lost, the whole thing might kill him."

AT 5:00 A. M. I was seeing Diego off on an airport bus shuttle across the street from Grand Central. We'd bandaged the assassin's wound and left him unconscious in the backseat of his Dodge, under the coarse burlap, on a side street in Midtown.

"How'd you know he'd talk?" I asked my comrade.

"He knew too much about killing. He knew where I would go if he didn't bend."

I shuddered, visibly. Diego stared at this with his innocent, ruthless gaze.

"You should have killed him," he said. "Alive, he will try to find you."

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe so. See you, my friend."

We clasped hands and Diego smiled, his broad face expressing friendship combined with something like pity.

I WAS FIFTEEN MINUTES early to Grimaldi's but Alphonse still beat me. It wasn't the first time that he reminded me of Twill… and Hush.

The suit he wore was Italian, in a price range that was akin to middle-class family vacations. It was dark, dark red, with a white shirt that hinted at a scarlet blush. His hands were manicured. The bluish silk tie he wore simulated snakeskin perfectly. His presence transformed the booth into a kind of portable papal chamber you might find in some corner in a vast room of the Vatican.

I suppressed the urge to make a sarcastic bow and moved in across from him.

We stared at each other for a few moments and I was reminded of Diego and Patrick. The feeling was unsettling.

I expected the Big Man to get right down to the matter at hand. That's how he had always conducted business before. But the last week had been full of revelations.

"I want to thank you for this, Leonid," he said. "I know I haven't given you much support."

Before I could respond, another voice said, "What can I get you, bud?"

It was a nut-brown white man dressed all in cook's white. He was small, wiry, and pretty much emotionless at his job.

"Black coffee, scrambled eggs, and ham," I said.

"Hash browns?"

"No thanks."

The cook/waiter turned away.

"Terry Lord is called 'the Impresario' in his field," Alphonse said. "He's a freelancer of the highest caliber, an entrepreneur who, how shall I say, leverages events."

"What kind of events?"

"Like you used to do," Alphonse said, "but on a much larger scale."

There was subtlety to Rinaldo's description. I was surprised that he remembered how my life had shifted from being a crook to trying to make amends in some way. My life seemed like such a small thing compared to the world in which he traveled. For my circumstances to fall under his purview seemed… improbable-like a mountain claiming to feel the passage of a caterpillar.

"So you think Lord might be, um, leveraging Tara?"

Rinaldo sucked in his lips and then tried to cover the faux pas with his left hand.

"I don't know," he said. "It makes sense that if he was going after me he might approach her. I suppose he could decide to kill her, but I can't think why. At any rate, it's nothing personal. He's working for someone else. I need to find out who that is."

"I take it that you can't do something so delicate through Strange or Latour," I speculated.

"No."

"What about Tara?"

"What about her?"

"What does she have to do with you?"

Alphonse Rinaldo winced, if only slightly. He shuddered and looked away. In those few gestures he conveyed to me that this subject, the central purpose of our business, was off limits.

"Then tell me what you know about Lord," I said.

"There was once a congressman," Rinaldo began, on confident footing.

"Here's yer eggs and ham," the nut-brown cook said. He set down the food and coffee and left.

"There was once a congressman…" I said, to restart the story.

"… who was looking into the pricing practices of the oil companies. He was a brash midwesterner who didn't understand the protocols necessary in taking such an action. The process of bringing to light these practices… was protracted. Terry Lord was hired to follow it from inside a shadow.

"Her name was Alana Ash, and she was everything a happily married man could want in a prostitute. The arrangement went on for eleven months. Just before the congressman was to bring the case of the oil companies to his fellows, Alana moved to Virginia, not far from downtown D.C. One day the congressman sent his car for her. The FBI had him in custody for interstate sex trafficking before the sweat had dried."

It was a simple scenario, one that I might have arranged myself, on a slightly smaller scale.

"So he's got a lot of clout, huh?" I said.

"He could crush you without a second thought, Leonid."

A smile I could not suppress slid across my mouth and I said, "No one is safe from anyone else in this world."

"Is there anything else you need from me?" he asked.

"What do you know about an ADA named Broderick Tinely?"

"I know the name. Why?"

"He's pressing the investigation of Soa's murder, going above and beyond."

"I'll look into it."

"There's a guy named Grant. He was looking into Angie's whereabouts when Wanda Soa was murdered."

"Forget him. He was working for me through Sam Strange."

"What about Lamont Jennings? He represented Soa at one time."

"Same thing. Anything else?"

"No, not that I can think of."

"Will you continue the investigation?" Rinaldo asked.

"Right after I eat these eggs."