Breach of Trust

59

I was in my office the next morning at nine. My back, shoulders, and neck were faring the worst after last night. I couldn’t turn my head in any direction-hell, I couldn’t cough without feeling a searing pain all the way down to my ass. My jaw was sore as hell from Paulie’s forearm, and the side of my head was swollen and tender.

I had a deposition scheduled for eleven on one of the cases that had been handed to me courtesy of Charlie’s and my extortion scheme. I was neither prepared nor interested. I would have shoveled it off to Shauna, but I didn’t want to involve her in any way in the stuff I was dealing with.

The city’s newspaper was on my desk. Greg’s death wasn’t on the front page; it was reserved for another obituary, the death of Warren Palendech, one of the justices on the state supreme court. Justice Palendech was dead of a heart attack? It was an article that would typically captivate me, but I had more pressing concerns.

There it was, across the headline of the metro section, the story of one of Governor Carlton Snow’s top aides and oldest friends, Gregory Connolly, found dead near Seagram Hill from a gunshot wound. The reporter was not afraid to speculate on what Mr. Connolly had been up to in that neighborhood, what most people are up to in that neighborhood. She didn’t directly attribute sexual folly to Greg, but anonymous police sources believed that Mr. Connolly’s reason for being in that area was not original.

Good. Not good for Greg’s wife, who would now be coping not only with her husband’s death but with the notion that he’d been late coming home because he stopped off for a hummer from a teenaged prostitute. But good from our perspective. Charlie’s thugs had dumped Greg at Seagram Hill to give this precise impression, and the morning papers were announcing that their plan had worked. And spending much more time on a dead supreme court justice, at that.

Marie buzzed my phone a few minutes after I arrived. “Charlie Cimino,” she said.

I took a breath and said, “Put him through.”

“Jason, it’s Charlie.”

“Yeah, Charlie-”

“Did you see the paper today? About Greg Connolly?”

I felt a bitter smile on my face. Charlie was playing to anyone who might be listening. He was being careful. Did he still suspect me? Tucker and Moody had both mentioned it to me last night, as we kicked ideas around my kitchen table. Their concern was well founded. Connolly knew that I was working for the government. Had he given up that information under duress? The smart money said no, he didn’t, or else Charlie would have killed me last night. But the smart money doesn’t always win. The truth was, nobody knew what Charlie knew and didn’t know.

“I was just reading about it,” I said.

“Yeah, God, that’s terrible,” Charlie said. “Hey, listen, want to grab a cup of coffee?”

“Sure, Charlie.”

“How’s one o’clock look for you? In the lobby?”

“Great,” I said. I might have to leave the deposition early, but that was hardly my concern at the moment.

I went down to the fourth floor of my building and opened Suite 410. Lee Tucker was there. We’d expected Charlie would be contacting me soon, and we couldn’t be sure what he’d been doing in terms of surveillance on me, so the plan had been that Tucker would park himself in this office until we heard from him. We knew for certain that nobody was watching me last night, as the feds had been covering every side of my house, and presumably everyone working for Charlie had been busy disposing of Greg Connolly’s body. But today was a different story. Charlie had put someone on me two days ago and for who-knows-how-long before that. He could do it again.

“You look like shit,” Tucker pronounced. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I breathe.”

Tucker tossed me my cell phone. “Phone’s clean,” he said. Overnight, federal agents had looked over my cell phone to be sure Charlie hadn’t planted a recording device of his own in my phone.

“Charlie called. Coffee at one o’clock,” I said.

Tucker nodded slowly. “How’d he sound?”

“Cautious. ‘Did you hear about Greg,’ that sort of thing.”

“So he’s still worried,” Lee said.

“Worried about you. Not necessarily about me.”

Tucker seemed skeptical. “You willing to bet your life on ‘not necessarily’?”

It was a legitimate question. “Charlie trusts me,” I said.

“You realize, Kolarich-even if he doesn’t think you’re wearing a wire, he could think that Connolly gave us information about you.

Which means we might come to pay you a visit. Which makes you a liability. If Charlie’s as cautious as we think, it would make sense to get rid of you.”

“Of course I know that. That’s why we have to set his mind at ease.”

Tucker tossed me the F-Bird. It felt like a hundred pounds in my hand.

“You understand my limitations,” said Tucker. “I can’t cover you. I can’t wire you up for real-time monitoring, and I can’t follow you wherever you go.”

“I understand,” I said.

Tucker sighed. He started to say something but thought better of it.

“Talk,” I said.

He struggled for a moment.

“Speak,” I said.

He held up a hand. “Look, when they found Greg-the bullet to his brain? It wasn’t the only. . it wasn’t the only. . injury. You follow?”

I thought I did. Before the end of his life, before the bullet entered his brain, Greg Connolly endured things he probably considered worse than death.

Tucker leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t accustomed to talking people down from taking risks. He’d spent far more time talking people into them. “I’m just saying, we’ve got Cimino on a lot. We can confront him, flip him-get to the higher-ups that way.”

“You think that would work?” I said it like I was doubtful. Because I was. I couldn’t imagine Charlie agreeing to cooperate with the feds. Nor could I imagine him being successful at it if he tried.

At one o’clock, I went down into the lobby. Charlie was there, on his phone. He gestured to me and started walking toward the exit. He liked a coffee shop down the street. I joined him outside, not braced for a cold, gusty wind. We headed due east, my head down against the wind, when he hit my arm. I looked up and saw his Porsche parked at a meter.

“C’mon,” he said.

“Change of plans?”

He got around to the driver’s side and looked at me. “That’s right. Change of plans. That okay with you?”

Charlie trusts me.

“Whatever,” I said. I got into his car.