Silent Prey

CHAPTER
32

O'Dell sat in his semidarkened office, an air of satisfaction about him, like a bullfrog who'd snapped up a particularly tasty fly. "I really don't give a fuck what you think," he told Lucas.

"Which makes me want to come across the desk and slap the shit out of you," Lucas snarled.

"The New York jails aren't pretty," O'Dell said, mildly. "I could guarantee you a tour…"

Lucas shook his head. "Nah. You wouldn't do that. I spent too much time with Red Reed. We had witnesses. So I slap the shit out of you, you put me in jail, and I tell the papers about Reed, and tell them that you hid a key witness in the murder of a well-known black politician. You'd be right in there with me."

O'Dell seemed to think about it for a minute, then sighed and half closed his heavy-lidded eyes. "All right. But look, if you're gonna slap the shit out of me, why don't we get it over with? I need some sleep."

They sat quietly for a minute, then Lucas said, "You know I won't. But you owe me, God damn it. You got me whacked by Kennett's hoods. What I want to know is, how much was set up? Did you know it was Kennett? Is Lily in it? How about Fell? And who else?"

"Lily's okay-she never had anything to do with it. And Lily says you believe Fell was an alarm. I don't know if I believe it, but I can see the possibility…"

"Kennett?"

"Yeah, I knew about Kennett and a couple more-and frankly, you and Lily should have known that," O'Dell said. "Petty's investigation wasn't a TV show. He didn't sneak off and do all the work and keep all of his conclusions to himself. He came up and sat here every day and told me what he thought. We had Kennett and a couple more people spotted-not Copland, unfortunately. We didn't know that Kennett had his own computer people. We figured we could go into the system anytime, print out our evidence. Then Petty got killed and his printouts were lifted. When I went back into the system, the files had been trashed. All I had were a few names and no way to push."

"So you set us up."

O'Dell smiled, still pleased with himself. "Yes. Lily had talked about you. Said you were smart. And I saw one of your simulations. So I put Kennett on Bekker, and you on Kennett, and brought Fell to work with you, and had Lily running you on the side. With all that pressure, something had to blow. Anyway, I had nothing to lose."

Lucas thought about it, stood, stretched, yawned, wandered to O'Dell's window, pulled back the heavy plush drapes and looked out at the twinkling city. "This goddamn place is one big patch, you know? Have I given you my rap on how the place is one big patch?"

"Yeah."

"And I was another one."

"Yeah."

Lucas stretched again, then wandered across the room toward the door. "Nice game," he said.

O'Dell looked at him, then laughed, low and long, genuinely delighted. "It was, wasn't it?"

Lucas sat behind a round, simulated-wood table the size of a manhole cover, in a plastic bar full of plastic pictures of old airplanes. Through the clear Plexiglas walls, he could watch the people streaming out toward the departure gates. He glanced at his watch: three twenty-seven in the afternoon, more or less. With a Rolex, he'd discovered, more or less had to be good enough. He sipped at his Budweiser, not interested, just holding his seat.

Fell showed up at three-thirty, thin, bird-gawky, tough. And maybe angry or something else. She stopped near the end of a long queue for the security gates, looked both ways, and spotted the bar. She paused again at the door, and Lucas raised a hand. She saw him and threaded her way through the tables. When she saw his suitcase by his leg, she looked from the case to Lucas and said, "So I was a three-night stand, or whatever it was."

"Not exactly," Lucas said. "Sit down."

She didn't sit down. Instead she said, "I thought we might go someplace for a while." Tears rimmed her eyes.

"Sit down," Lucas said.

"You fuck," she said, but she sat down, dropping heavily into the chair across from him, hands dangling dispiritedly between her legs. "You said we…"

"I thought about asking you to come down to the Islands with me," Lucas said. "I even called out to Kennedy, out to United, to find out what islands we could go to."

She looked down at the tabletop. "Tell me," she said.

"Well, I… couldn't." He dug in his pocket and tossed a red matchbook on the table in front of her. The matchbook had a horsehead on it. She picked it up and put it in her purse.

"So you were in the restaurant where Walter Petty got killed," he said. "You told me you weren't."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I saw the matches in your apartment."

"When?"

"Well, when we were up there…"

"Bullshit, I got rid of them. When I thought you might be coming over, I saw them, and I thought, 'I got to get rid of these.' I threw them out. So when did you see them?"

He looked levelly across the table at her. "The first day we worked together, I copped your purse, made molds of your keys. The next day I went in."

"You sonofabitch," she said. Then a realization came to her eyes. "You're wearing a wire?"

"No. I like you too much. But the thing is, I can't trust you. Not completely. I thought about going down to the Islands with you and decided I couldn't. I'd eventually talk to you about this, and then…" He let the thought dangle, and so did she. He went on: "I tried to think up a lie that would get me back to Minnesota. But I couldn't think of one. And I wanted to tell you why."

"Well. I appreciate it. But you'd have been safe enough. A matchbook is pretty thin…"

"There was more than a matchbook. This whole goddamned episode was a game set up by O'Dell. It was so beautiful it makes me laugh. He used every one of us. But anyway-he did a computer run on the victims. You come up way too often. That was a big piece."

She frowned. "Will they get me?"

"No, I don't think so. They think you're an alarm." He explained, and she listened quietly, staring at the floor.

"And you won't tell them different?" she asked, when he finished.

"No. I'm the one who sold them the alarm idea."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "You're a friend."

She looked him over for a moment and then nodded. "Okay."

"If Lily ever found out, though, she very well might kill you. That's another reason I wanted to talk…"

"Did she kill Kennett?" Fell blurted.

"Kennett? No, no, she was downtown with O'Dell all evening."

"Goddamn," Fell said, gnawing a thumbnail. "When I shot Bekker…"

"Bekker knew you," Lucas said. "And that's why, in his letter, he wouldn't say anything about Thin. He didn't want people thinking about women killers…"

"Yeah," Fell said. "But that's not why I shot him. I shot him because of their eyelashes, and that woman… and everything."

"I know. I mean, I believe it. But why Petty?"

"I didn't want to do Petty," Fell said, voice low, out of gas. "I was there, but I tried to stop it."

"You didn't have to be there…"

"Well… I was. If I'd had a couple of more minutes, I think I would've talked… the other guy out of it. But Petty came through the door a minute too soon. A minute later and nothing would've happened. At least, not then. Petty had something on us… I'll burn in hell for Petty."

"I doubt it," Lucas said wryly.

"Well, so do I," she said. Then: "I would've liked the Islands, though. Going down with you."

"Yeah, it would have been nice. But I'm the only one who knows about you. You're quick with that gun… and you might start thinking about it, if I'm there, laying around."

"I wouldn't," she said, but she couldn't suppress a small grin. "It's interesting that you're scared of me, though."

"Yeah, well…"

She sighed. "Fucking trouser-snake cops. So goddamned treacherous."

"And I wanted to tell you about Lily," he said.

"What?"

"She's got a line on a half-dozen of Kennett's shooters. She's gonna be tough, one way or another. But I want you to know two things: they've got no proof of anything. They just want it to stop."

"What's the other thing?"

"The other thing is, if anybody takes Lily, I'll be coming back to town," he said. He'd been watching her, and his eyes had gone hard as granite.

"You oughta be one of us," she said.

"Pass the word on," he said.

"I don't know anybody, except my… pal… and one other guy. But I'll tell them. Maybe they know more. We don't talk about it. That was one of Kennett's rules. Nobody talks about nothin', he'd say."

"Good rule," Lucas said. He looked at his watch again. "Lily's coming pretty soon."

"Here?"

"Yeah, I've got to talk to her too."

"Then I better get going," Fell said, picking up her purse. She stood and stepped away from the table, then turned back. "Remember when you said something like, 'This place is the armpit of the universe,' the first day we were together?"

"Yeah?"

"Kennett's people… we were just trying to make it something else."

"Okay."

"Were we wrong?"

He thought about it for a while. "I don't know," he said finally.

Fell went away and Lucas stared at his beer bottle, making wet O's on the table. After the shooting in the basement, after the dictated statements and interrogations, after the press conference, he'd gone back to the team office. Most of the office staff had gone, but he'd found a computer adept, and said that he needed to look up some information on a couple of cops: Jeese and Clemson.

The computer operator had put him at a vacant terminal, showed him how to call up the files. He'd done it, read through them quickly, then punched in Fell's name. When he'd gotten the file, he'd scanned through to the bottom, found the next of kin: Roy Fell, at an address in Brooklyn. He'd punched in Roy Fell. A file had come up. Retired, it said. Then: Retrieve Retired File? (Y/N).

Lucas had pushed the Y key. A photoscan was a simple matter of selecting the right option on a short menu, and Fell's father's face had come up. Heavy face, gray hair, gray mustache, a smile that looked almost painful. Six feet, two inches tall. Born 1930. Bekker had had him pegged almost exactly.

"Thick," Lucas had said aloud.

The computer operator said, "What?"

"Nothing," said Lucas, and he'd shut the terminal down.

Sitting at the airport now, drawing circles with the bottom of his beer bottle, Lucas thought, You can't walk away from family…

Lily arrived ten minutes later. Like Fell, she stopped by the security queue, looking for the bar. She saw him as she came in, her face ashen, tired, but controlled.

"You talked to O'Dell," she said as she sat down.

"Yeah."

"He fixed the whole thing."

"Yup."

"When did you know?" she asked.

"In Charleston. I suspected before that-everybody was too close together, everything was too convenient. But I didn't know for sure that he wasn't Robin Hood."

"Do you still think Fell was an alarm?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Not positive. But I think she was simply set up by Kennett. I mean, she took those Robin Hoods at Bekker's place. She didn't have to: her piece was right in my ear."

"The word is going around that Robin Hood did get Bekker."

"What'd you expect? He got shot to death."

Lily sat for a moment, staring at the fake grain on the tabletop. "When did you know about Dick?" she asked.

"O'Dell tried to set him up-that thing about a white-haired guy killing the politician. I didn't know it was a setup, so even then, I was thinking about him."

"But when…?"

"When we went to Petty's apartment and that Logan woman said whoever came to Petty's apartment seemed to stop before he got to the elevator, and after he got off the elevator, and to take a long time getting to the door…"

"Sure," she said, avoiding his eyes. "Dick."

"Yeah, but I couldn't figure it. I assumed he couldn't drive-that's what everybody assumed-and saw a driver dropping him off at Midtown South. And if he couldn't drive, it wasn't him. If he'd been driven, by Copland or one of his other buddies, he wouldn't have had to walk up all those steps himself. He could have sent the driver in for the stuff. So that pushed me off him for a while. Until the day on the river and you told me that he could drive. That he sometimes drove the four-by-four, and it pissed you off…"

"So," she said. "I not only betrayed Petty, I betrayed Dick."

"Ah, come on, Lily, stop sniveling. You were doing the best you could in a goddamned rat's nest," Lucas said.

"And everybody winds up dead," she said.

"Hey." There wasn't much else to say. Lucas looked at his Rolex. "I gotta go. They're probably boarding the plane now," he said.

At the end of the security queue, Lucas faced her, hands in his pockets, and said, "If this was a movie, there'd be a big hot kiss right here and everything'd be all right."

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted. "But there's never anything after a movie," she said. "It ends with a hot kiss and you never see the going-back-to-work part."

"The getting-to-be-important part…"

"Yeah. And to tell you the truth, if there was going to be a big hot kiss, I thought Fell'd be getting it. I thought you'd be going out to the Islands with her."

"Nah. She's New York, I'm not. Besides…"

"What?"

"There really aren't any Islands, are there?"

She looked away from him, thinking of Petty and Kennett. "No," she said after a minute, "I guess not."

There was another moment, and she stuck out her hand.

"Give me a fuckin' break, Rothenburg," Lucas said, and leaned into her and kissed her on the lips, almost, but not quite, chastely. He turned and started through the security check. "If you get another Bekker, give me a whistle. You know…?"

"Yeah, yeah. Jesus," she said, not quite believing him. A tiny smile crinkled the corner of her mouth. "I do know how to whistle."