Catch As Cat Can

13

Sunny and Will spent some more time fencing with Deke Sweeney, but in the end they had to admit defeat. This obviously wasn’t Sweeney’s first rodeo when it came to interrogations. He just kept that masklike smile and stuck to his alibi while they tried their best to trip him up—and failed.

“Well, I don’t know how much help I was, but I was glad to give it,” the shark of the Portsmouth Fish Market said blandly as he headed to the door. “Good luck on your case.”

Will glared at Sweeney’s retreating back. “We’ll damn well need it, if he’s the guy we’re after.”

“Doesn’t look like it, though.” Sunny sighed. “He seemed like such a good suspect from a distance, somebody who leans on people for a living. But that’s the problem—distance. I used to go up to Dartmouth for games and stuff during my school days. It’s at least a two-hour ride.”

Will gave her a moody nod. “Not to mention that our estimated time of death would fall just about in the middle of that hockey game. That cuts the margin even thinner. No way could Sweeney get from here to Hanover in time to see his son in the locker room.” He considered that for a moment, then smiled. “Of course, maybe this is a carefully constructed alibi, placing Sweeney a hundred and twenty miles away while somebody else did the deed.”

“That sounds like the theory I suggested about Charlie Vane,” Sunny said.

“Of course, that theory has a little drawback now that Vane is dead.” Will grimaced. “Two murders a week apart. We have to figure they’re connected.”

Sunny nodded. “But the only connection seems to be Deke Sweeney and the fish market.”

Will rose from his chair to work off a little frustration by walking around the office. “This stupid storm delay with the crime-scene people is driving me crazy. If we got a ballistics match, at least we’d have something solid tying in the two killings.”

“But are you sure the bullets came from the same gun?” Sunny asked. “You told me Charlie Vane had a house full of them.”

Will halted in his tracks and gave her a look. “Thanks for cheering me up.”

“Just pointing out that Vane’s murder could be a crime of opportunity,” Sunny said. “With all those weapons around, someone with a totally unrelated grudge against Vane could have killed him.” She paused for a second. “He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who left business partners with warm fuzzy feelings toward him.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that?”

Sunny shrugged. “Well, of our three strongest suspects in the Treibholz killing, two of them are excluded from this one by the ice storm—and the third is the victim.”

“We really don’t have a time of death for Vane,” Will argued, but Sunny suspected he was clutching at straws. “The murder could have happened before the weather got too bad.”

“I guess that will depend on when those trees fell on the road to Sturgeon Springs . . . and when the bridges from Portsmouth got too icy for traffic—that usually happens a lot more quickly than on the roads.” She glanced at Will. “Figuring that he would hire a killer from his side of the river.”

From the look on Will’s face, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or start hollering. “So you think we’re back to square one?”

“I think that at least for this murder, we need some new suspects who are closer to the scene of the crime.”

Will frowned. “You’re saying someone in town.”

Like Val Overton, in her motel on the main road, Sunny thought. Aloud she said, “I don’t think we can go farther out than my neighborhood.” Which would let in Abby Martinson, depending on how early she and her mom hit the hay.

Will looked as if he’d just bitten into a big, fat bug burger.

Well, it can’t get much worse, Sunny decided. “How well do you know Val?” she asked.

“What?” Will seemed thrown by the shift in the conversation. “Why do you ask?”

“She came on pretty strong with Ollie,” Sunny pointed out. “I’m still wondering if she has a thing for older guys. Because Neil Garret is an older guy, and he’s a lot better-looking than Ollie the Barnacle.”

“Garret is her witness, and it’s her responsibility to keep him from getting killed,” Will immediately objected. “She would never—”

“It never happens?” Sunny asked. “An attractive witness, a marshal who’s on the road so much, there’s no room for a private life?”

“I don’t—it’s not—” Will floundered around for a moment, then said, “You’re making a big jump from bad judgment to murder.”

“Well, this hypothetical person with bad judgment carries a gun,” Sunny pointed out.

“And what’s the motive for killing Treibholz?” Will challenged.

“The crooked detective from California who was playing mind games with Neil?” Sunny shrugged. “Treibholz could put him in the crosshairs for a bunch of contract killers.”

“But that’s not a reason to kill the guy,” Will said. “If Neil’s new identity was in danger of being exposed, the WitSec people would move him again.”

“And would Neil still be Val’s witness? Or would he just disappear out of her life into still another new identity and never see her again?”

Will’s expression turned grim. “You’re throwing a lot of stuff on Val.”

“I’m just asking some questions,” Sunny replied. “We’ve had to ask them about friends of mine in the past.”

That got a stiff nod from Will. “Okay. So how do you tie in Charlie Vane?”

Sunny spread her arms. “Suppose he found out about Neil’s past. Maybe Treibholz came around asking questions that got Vane suspicious. Old Charlie was a guy who cut a lot of corners and needed a lot of money. I wouldn’t put it past him to try a little blackmail on Neil.”

“And then it would be the same situation as Treibholz.” Will really wasn’t liking this line of thinking.

Sunny took a deep breath. “It’s not just your friends I’m wondering about,” she said. “How about Abby Martinson? She had a prior relationship with Neil when he was Nick Gatto, and it seems a hell of a coincidence, her turning up here after being away for so long. What if she was in contact with Neil?”

“That’s a big WitSec no-no.” Will still looked serious, but some of the grimness leaked away as he considered Sunny’s suggestion. “Although the program has been a hundred percent effective when people follow the rules, that’s the one that gets broken most—and gets people killed.”

Sunny nodded. “What if Abby found that Treibholz was sniffing around and came to warn Neil?” Now she frowned. “The guy died the day after she got off the plane.”

“So, motive and possible opportunity,” Will said. “What about means?”

“Abby’s dad was an outdoorsman,” Sunny replied. “A real huntin’ and fishin’ guy. He had guns.”

Will strode around a little more, silently stewing. “You’ve got the start of a case—for both of them,” he abruptly admitted. “But there’s no evidence.”

“Maybe the crime-scene people will get lucky,” Sunny suggested. “They managed to recover the bullets that killed Treibholz, didn’t they?”

He nodded. “One got pretty messed up after exiting his head—a lot of metal in that freezer. But the other is in decent shape. The slug came from a nine millimeter pistol—which, yes, is kind of government issue these days.” His hand made an absentminded gesture toward the Glock holstered under his coat. “But I need something stronger before I’d ask for ballistics on Val’s piece. Think you can find out anything about the late Mr. Martinson’s gun collection?”

“I can try.” Sunny was pretty sure her face wasn’t a picture of joy. “Can you let me out of my promise to keep playing dumb about Nick Gatto? That would let me talk to him about that part of his life.”

Will stared at her. “Why would you want to do that? We just about cleared him as a suspect.”

“Yeah, we cleared Neil Garret, but Nick Gatto got involved with both of our new suspects. I’d like to see how Nick talks about each of them.”

Will laughed. “You think your feminine instincts can turn something up?”

Sunny shrugged. “Something is better than the nothing we’ve got now.”

Will grudgingly gave his okay. Then he leaned in to give Sunny a quick peck on the cheek before heading up to Levett to report on his meeting with Deke Sweeney.

Better than when he came in, Sunny thought. But still distracted with work.

She sighed and returned to her keyboard. Speaking of work, I suppose I’d better get some done.

But as she went through the day’s activities, Sunny kept an ear out for the sound of the gate next door opening. It finally rattled up sometime after lunch. Sunny actually found herself jumping to her feet but then forced herself to sit down again. Let him get settled first. I’ll want to work my way into this.

Sometime later, she decided it was time to put her plan into action. She slipped into her parka and headed next door, just another shopper looking for something out of the ordinary to make for supper.

Immediately, her plan hit a snag. Someone else was at the counter, shopping ahead of her. Sunny noticed that the display cases were pretty bare. Between the ice storm and Deke Sweeney’s embargo, Neil must really be hurting for merchandise.

He brought out a tray with triangular pieces of pink, grooved flesh resting on the crushed ice. “Have you ever tried skate wings?” Neil asked the older woman on the other side of the counter. “I’ve already prepared it, so you have no skin or bones to remove. Actually, it’s not a bone, but a piece of cartilage. Anyway, you can see it’s nice and thin, you can sauté it quickly. I can give you some recipes—”

“Does it smell fishy?” the customer, obviously a meat-and-potatoes type, interrupted.

“It shouldn’t, because this is fresh.” Neil held out the tray and waved a hand over it. “If you’re worried, though, I’d suggest soaking the fish in water and lemon juice. Skates are related to sharks, and like them, they urinate through their skin. The soak will neutralize the slight trace of ammonia that sometimes turns up in even fresh skate—”

The woman shook her head.

I suspect you lost her at “urinate,” Sunny thought.

Neil’s other offerings didn’t pass muster either, and the shopper left, heading in the direction of Judson’s Market. The shopkeeper stared after her. Sunny wondered whether the fury on his face was aimed at her or at himself.

It turned out to be aimed at the fish. Neil jammed the tray of skate into the display, muttering, “This is what I get for going into this business. Trying to sell people on something we used to cut up for bait.”

“Maybe you cut it up for bait on the west coast,” Sunny said, “but we New Englanders have been eating it—probably since we arrived here.”

“Yeah, but you New Englanders are cheap.” Neil had the grace to look embarrassed for letting that slip out. Then he did a double take. “Wait a minute. How do you know I’m from California?”

Sunny smiled. “How do you think, Nicky?”

Garret deflated behind the counter. “I guess your friend Price told you.”

“Well, I was looking into things, after that California detective tried to kill my cat.” She leaned across the counter. “That made a lot more sense when I learned your real name—Gatto.”

Neil gave an embarrassed shrug. “Guess there was a cat involved somewhere in the family tree. My grandfather’s people were fishermen in the Mediterranean, and he’d take me and my dad on fishing expeditions. That’s where I learned the business.” He gestured around the shop.

“But you wound up in the stock market.”

“My dad was a blue-collar kind of guy, like a lot of the folks around here,” Neil said. “I wanted the things a white-collar job could bring.”

Like a stint in prison for white-collar crime, Sunny thought.

“Dad couldn’t pay my freight through school, so I tried a little entrepreneurship—pharmaceutical sales.” He smiled at the reminiscence, but then his expression went sour. “Until somebody got caught with a bag of pot. Then those fine legacy students got a stern talking-to, while the blue-collar kid got a couple of years as a guest of the California penal system.”

Neil carefully rearranged the trays of fish on display. “By the time I got out, my old school buddies were starting careers as brokers and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. But I made a couple of connections in the joint.”

“Jimmy DiCioppa?” Sunny asked.

“Nah, someone way down on the totem pole. But he got me in the door. When I met Jimmy, he was still in the dark ages. He thought robbing banks was a big deal. But he saw where the other crews were going, and he didn’t want to be left behind. I came along at just the right time.”

“To do what?”

Neil actually laughed. “That’s the funny thing. What I did for Jimmy was what a lot of my honest, upstanding classmates were doing. Pump and dump—singing the praises of a particular stock to investors so they’d buy and push the price up, then selling out at the top of the market and making a killing. They had B-list small customers they could play that with, while we had to do boiler rooms, selling over the phone, like that Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Nowadays, I suppose they do it over the Internet. Cold calls. It got easier when we had our own stock-trading firm. We could get the ball rolling on a hot IPO then get out fast when the price inflated enough. Or a few guys could control the market for a stock by trading it among themselves—”

“I thought the stock market was a little more sophisticated than that,” Sunny said.

“Back in the day, small-capital shares moved around more like a flea market than the stuff you see in the movies. Guys would offer a price that they’d hope to get for a stock—the ask. Guys representing buyers come in with a bid, the price they want to pay. A broker is supposed to go around to every stall in the flea market and find the best ask they can. But here’s the thing. The difference between the ask and the bid in big financial represents the brokers’ profit. So if you run the sales between you and your friends, you can keep the spread wide and make some nice change.”

“That’s what you did?” Sunny asked.

“That’s what a lot of guys in the market did,” Neil said. “But when I brought Jimmy into the market, we didn’t threaten to blackball people at the country club like the so-called legit brokers did. We smacked heads.”

Sunny stared. “As simple as that?”

Neil smiled. “You ever hear the saying, ‘The market is driven by fear and greed?’ Well, we used fear. After getting roughed up, a lot of those big, bold masters of the universe peed themselves and fell in line. As for greed, a lot of them wanted to know what their cut would be.”

“That’s all you needed to make a lot of money.”

“Oh, there are more wrinkles. We could use offshore accounts to buy stocks at special low prices for foreign investors. Then we’d sell it to make big profits.” Neil went silent for a moment. “At least Jimmy the Chopper made big profits. The rest of us got crumbs. At first I figured he brought the money into the deals.”

And the leg-breakers, Sunny silently added.

“But as time went on, I realized I was never going to see much out of this. Maybe you’ve heard another saying about the market, how there are bulls, bears, and pigs. Jimmy really turned into a pig. He wanted tribute, he wanted kickbacks, and he thought the market was like his turf. We had a situation where another crew was trying to sell short on a stock we were playing with, driving down the price when we wanted it to go up. They leaned on one of the brokers we had, um, persuaded to help us, and Jimmy went crazy. I saw him lose it completely and order a hit on the guy.”

“That’s how you wound up in witness protection?” Sunny asked.

“That, and the fact that I knew where a lot of Jimmy’s money was parked,” Neil said. “Jimmy should have had a sit-down with the other crew rather than start shooting. But instead he had to be a pig about it.”

And some broker got killed, Sunny thought. A crooked broker, but he got killed.

“Still, I’d have probably kept my mouth shut, but he took the one legitimate thing I had and ruined it,” Neil went on. “I used my little cut from all these various deals to open a restaurant. It was a nice little place. I know a lot about fish, I had some recipes, got a good chef, and we were doing pretty well. But Jimmy wouldn’t leave us alone. He started hanging out there, with all his friends. They drove off the other customers. And Jimmy, well, you just couldn’t hand him a bill.”

Neil’s expression went dark. “Then Jimmy got interested in one of the hostesses, a nice kid trying to make it in Hollywood. That got really dangerous. You don’t say no to Jimmy the Chopper. I managed to get her out of town, out to the Valley, but Jimmy wasn’t happy. After that, he screwed me on some deals I set up for him.”

“Sounds as though you kind of liked this girl,” Sunny said.

Neil’s face softened. “She was a good kid—bright, talented. But she wasn’t getting anywhere. I managed to find her a job in a different field. At the time, I was going through a nasty divorce. Then some federal prosecutor thought it was time to do something about the various crews getting involved in the market and decided to make an example out of me.”

His shoulders rose and fell. “I could see the handwriting on the wall, so I let my ex-wife Terry have everything, the house, the restaurant. Then the feds floated the idea of testifying against Jimmy. Hell, what did I have to lose?”

“Everything you were,” Sunny said. “Your name, your family . . .”

Neil shook his head. “My father wanted nothing to do with me after I threw in with Jimmy. My wife just wanted my blood after she got everything else. The only one who might miss me was Abby—the girl I helped. But let’s face it, she was better off without me, and in her new line of work, being involved with a mobbed-up guy wouldn’t help her career. I did my best to keep my other business away from the restaurant, and a lot came out in the trial that, well, it wouldn’t impress a girl.”

“And you came from sunny California to here.” Sunny glanced through the store’s plate glass window to the leaden skies outside. Nothing more had fallen after the ice storm, but the clouds remained.

“Yeah, it’s a shock for a guy with thin blood, but I managed. The feds helped out with some money, and I opened the shop here. They keep an eye on me.”

Sunny smiled. “You mean, Val Overton does.”

Neil laughed. “Yeah, she’s a real pistol. Makes me wonder what she’d be like if she ever let her hair down. But she’s all business with me. They’ve got her stretched pretty thin, managing a bunch of us witnesses. Got to hand it to her, she works hard—and you wouldn’t believe how little money she makes. And what are the guys in Washington doing? Cutting the budget.”

Sunny watched Neil’s face. He seems a lot fonder of Abby than he does of Val, she thought. Unless this is all a line of BS.

“Still, you got in trouble,” Sunny prodded.

“Hey, I tried to push the market a little after I got settled in. It should have been good for the local fishermen and for me. I knew the restaurant business. If I could supply some of the big buyers around here, everybody would have benefited.”

“Except Deke Sweeney,” Sunny said. “Will had a talk with him.”

“That guy’s a piece of work, from what I hear.” Neil shook his head. “If he had a problem he should have sat down and talked with me. Instead, he tries to kill me—businesswise, I mean,” he quickly clarified.

“And what about Charlie Vane?”

“I don’t know what happened with that guy.” Neil shook his head vigorously. “He was a local contact, a guy who was eager to sell a little off the top of his catch for a better price. I treated him square, but after Sweeney lowered the boom, he kept his distance.”

Sunny took a shot in the dark. “You said you had breakfast with some fishermen the day before Phil Treibholz was murdered. Didn’t that include Charlie Vane?”

“He was willing to eat on my dime,” Neil said bitterly. Then he broke off, staring at her. “Hey, he pretty much blew me off, telling me I was on my own. You’re not trying to tie him in with Treibholz, are you?”

“They’ve both ended up dead, and the only thing that seems to connect them is you.”

“That’s crazy. Vane always talked about his pirate ancestor, and I figured he chiseled around the edges of some shady stuff. Maybe he got in over his head on some deal, but it wasn’t with me.”

“And how about Treibholz?” Sunny pressed. “Will tells me you’ve been playing dumb about him, but he suspects there’s stuff you’re not telling him. And now, with Vane getting killed . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

“You can’t lump the two of them in together,” Neil protested. “Charlie Vane was small-time all the way. Treibholz was dangerous, dirty as hell.”

“Who was he working for?” Sunny asked the question Will couldn’t get answered. “Was it Jimmy the Chopper?”

Neil surprised her by laughing. “No, Phil was afraid of Jimmy. If he’d been working for him, Phil would have never tried to pull what he did.”

“So who was he working for?” Sunny pressed.

“George Foster, esquire,” Neil replied. “My ex-wife Terry’s lawyer. A real lightweight. That’s why Treibholz figured he could play the two of us off each other. He tried to put the bite on me. Hell of a time to do it. I was pretty much broke.”