Even the Wicked

13

It still didn’t have to mean anything. It had been a dream, after all, and not a message from Glenn Holtzmann in the spirit world. (If his shade had indeed contacted me from beyond the beyond, he’d probably have had more on his mind than some guy who got himself shot on a park bench in the Village. “Hey, Scudder,” he might have murmured, “what’s this I hear about you and Lisa?”) The dream was my own self talking to me, and I wasn’t necessarily all that much sharper while I slept.

Anyway, sometimes it’s just a cigar.

“If,” TJ said, and stopped himself. “No,” he said, holding up his hands as if to stop himself from running into a wall. “No, I won’t say it.”

“Good.”

“But if we did, be no stoppin’ us.”

If we had a computer. That was the phrase he’d agreed not to say, and not a moment too soon, because those five little words played a key role in every sentence out of his mouth. I seemed to have two cases, the shooting death of Byron Leopold and Will’s string of homicides. (What I didn’t have was a client, unless you wanted to count Adrian Whitfield, who’d paid me some money a while back and encouraged me to extend the umbrella of my investigation to cover both cases.) Whichever one I wanted to fool with next, TJ seemed certain a computer would make all the difference.

Insurance records? Just boogie on into the insurance company’s data base. Airline records? Do the same for the airlines. The whole world was on-line these days, and a well-schooled hacker could reach out with ease and touch someone, anyone, and pick his brain while he was at it. All you needed was a computer and a modem and a phone line to plug into and the world would whisper all its secrets to you.

“You also need someone who knows what he’s doing,” I said. “It took the Kongs to crack the NYNEX computer. I’m willing to believe you could learn how to do all that, but not fast enough to do us any good now.”

“Take a while,” he admitted. “Meantime, the Kongs could talk me through it.”

“If they happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“They ain’t the only hackers could do it. Be easy to use them, though, an’ they wouldn’t have to come down from Boston to do it. All they’d have to be is near a phone.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Nothin’ to it,” he said. “I’d be on the computer, and be on the phone with them at the same time. You’d need two phone lines is all, one for the modem and one for the phone. Or you could use a cell phone to talk to them if you didn’t want to run a second line in.”

“In where?”

’In wherever you got the computer. Your apartment, most likely. Or the shop.”

“Elaine’s shop?”

“So’s she could use it for keepin’ books an’ takin’ inventory. I could do all that for her.”

“If you took a course or two.”

“Well, it ain’t rocket science. I could learn.”

’There’s not a whole lot of spare room in the shop.”

He nodded. “Be better off settin’ up in the apartment.”

“We had to set up in a hotel room with the Kongs,” I remembered. “Had to rent one, so that our little invasion of the phone company computer couldn’t be traced back to us.”

“So?”

“Because what the Kongs did,” I went on, “was illegal and traceable. If we pulled anything like that from the apartment, or from Elaine’s shop, we’d have guys with badges knocking on the door.”

“Hackers has learned some tricks since then.”

“And what about the cyber cops? Don’t you think they’ve learned anything?”

He shrugged. “Way it works,” he said. “Build a better mousetrap, somebody else gonna build a better mouse.”

“Anyway,” I said, “technology only takes you so far, even if you’re the Kongs. They couldn’t get into the system, remember? No matter how many keys they punched, they couldn’t find the combination.”

“They got in.”

“They talked their way in. They put technology on hold and called up a human being on the telephone.”

“Some girl, wasn’t it?”

“And they sweet-talked her into giving up the password. They used that technique routinely enough to have a special phrase for it.” I groped around in my memory and came up with it. “Social engineering, that’s what they called it.”

“What you gettin’ at?”

“I’ll show you,” I said.

“Omaha,” Phyllis Bingham said. “To think there was a time when I booked you and Elaine to London and Paris. And now it’s Omaha?”

“How the mighty have fallen,” I said. “But I don’t want to go there. I just want to find out if somebody else did.”

“Ah,” she said. “Detective work?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And if he went there you have to chase after him?”

“I think he went and came back.” I handed her a slip of paper. “Probably flew out there on either of these dates, and returned on either of these.”

“From New York to Omaha, and—”

“From Philadelphia.”

“From Philadelphia,” she said. “I was just going to guess who flies nonstop from New York to Omaha, and I know America West used to, and I don’t know if they still do, but it doesn’t matter if he flew from Philadelphia. But who flies Philly to Omaha nonstop?” She flexed her fingers, frowned, tapped away at the keys. “Nobody,” she announced. “You can get there on USAir via Pittsburgh or you can fly Midwest Express through Milwaukee. Or United if you don’t mind changing at O’Hare. Or any airline, just about, but those are the logical ones. I don’t suppose you know which airline he used?”

“No.”

“And his name?”

“Arnold Wishniak.”

“Well, if we find him,” she said, “we’ll know it’s him, won’t we? Because how many Arnold Wishniaks could be going from Philadelphia to Omaha?”

“I’d say one at the most. I don’t think he would have used his real name.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“But he may have kept the initials.”

“Well, let’s see.” She tapped away at the keys, periodically rolling her eyes while she waited for the machine to respond. “Every computer’s faster than the last one,” she said, “and they’re never fast enough. You get so you want it instantaneous. More than that, you want it to give you data before you can even think to ask for it.”

“Same with people.”

“Huh? Oh, right.” She giggled. “At least computers keep improving. Do you see what I’m doing? I’m starting with USAir, and I’m asking if there’s a Wishniak on Flight 1103 on the fifth, and there’s not, and now I’ll ask about Flight 179 the same day... No. Okay, the other date’s the sixth, right? So we’ll try 1103... Nothing, and now we’ll try 179. Is that the right number, 179? It is, so we’ll try it. Nope.”

“I don’t think he would have used his real name.”

“I know, but I wanted to rule it out because with the name I could access the records. With just the initials I can’t.”

“Oh.”

“Let me try Midwest Express,” she said. She did, and United as well, and wound up shaking her head.

“There’s another name you could try,” I said. “He had a brother who anglicized the family name, and Arnold’s borrowed the name in the past.”

I told her the name and she repeated it and frowned. “Spell it?” I spelled it and she hit keys. “It’s a familiar name to me,” she mused. “Where did I hear it recently?”

“No idea,” I said. “Of course there’s the ballplayer, Dave Winfield.”

She shook her head. “Since the strike,” she said, “I don’t pay any attention. Flight 1103, on the fifth. No luck there. Flight 179, also on the fifth...”

Nothing on any of the flights in question.

“There’s still a good chance he used the initials,” I said. “But you can’t access it that way. Suppose you just pull up the passenger manifests for each of those flights. Can you do that?”

“I can’t.”

“Who can?”

“Some computer genius, probably. Or somebody at the airline who’s got the access codes.” She frowned. “This is important, huh?”

“Kind of.”

She picked up a phone, flipped through a Rolodex, dialed a number. She said, “Hi, this is Phyllis at JMC. Who’s this? Judy? Judy, I’ve got this very good customer of mine who happens to be a detective. He’s on this case that involves a noncustodial parent... Right, you hear about stuff like this all the time. I know, it’s amazing. They don’t pay child support and then they come and kidnap the kids.”

She explained what I needed to know. “He wasn’t on any of those flights under his own name,” she said, “but the detective thinks he may have kept the initials. No, I understand it’s confidential, Judy. You would have to have a court order. Right.” She made a face, then forced a smile. “Look, could you do this much? Without telling me the name, could you see if there’s a male passenger on one of those flights with the initials AW? Yes, Philadelphia to Omaha.”

She covered the mouthpiece. “She’s not supposed to do this,” she said, “but she’ll bend a little. My guess, she’s divorced and not on the best of terms with her ex.” She uncovered the mouthpiece. “Hi, Judy. Rats. None at all, huh?”

“He probably paid cash,” I said.

She was quick. “Judy,” she said, “he probably made up a name, so he probably paid cash. If you could... uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right, I understand.”

She covered the mouthpiece again. “She can’t do it.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t. It’s against the rules, she’d get in trouble, blah blah blah.”

TJ said, “Could you do it? If you had the access codes?”

“But I don’t.”

“But she does.”

She considered, shrugged, and uncovered the mouthpiece. “Judy,” she said, “last thing I want is for you to get in trouble. For curiosity, though, tell me something. Is that information there to be pulled up? Like whether a ticket was purchased cash or charge? I mean, suppose a customer comes in and pays me cash, and... Uh-huh. I see. So anybody could access it. I mean, I could get it myself if I had the access codes, is that right?” She grabbed up a pen, jotted down a phrase. “Judy,” she said, “you’re a doll. Thanks.” She broke the connection, grinned fiercely, and held up a clenched fist in triumph. “Yes!”

We still had a ways to go. What she managed to produce, after a lot of head-scratching and keytapping, was a printout of passenger manifests for flights on the three airlines in question from Philadelphia to Omaha and as many return flights two days later. An asterisk next to a name indicated a non-credit card sale.

“Cash or check,” she explained. “There’s no distinction in the data bank. Also, these are just the cash and check sales made by the airline. Sales through travel agents are just listed that way, with no indication as to how payment was made. That’s not what she told me, but if there’s a way to separate it out, I can’t figure it out.”

“That’s all right.”

“It is? Because do you see the names coded with a C? These are all customers who bought their ticket through another airline, probably because their trip originated with another flight segment on the issuing carrier. For all I know they paid for their ticket with Green Stamps.”

“I think the manifests are all I need.”

“You do?”

“If the same name turns up going and coming back, that’s more significant than how he paid for the ticket.”

“I didn’t even think of that. Let’s check.”

I gathered up the sheets of paper. “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” I said. “The hard part’s done. And, speaking of your time, I want to pay for it.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You don’t have to do that.”

I tucked the money into her hand. “The client can afford it,” I said.

“Well...” She closed her fingers around the bills. “Actually, that was fun. Not as much fun as booking you and your wife on a South Seas cruise, though. Be sure and call me when you’re ready to go someplace wonderful.”

“I will.”

“Or even Omaha,” she said.

“‘The client can afford it,’” TJ said. “Thought we didn’t have a client.”

“We don’t.”

“‘Social engineering.’ What you did is you used a computer. Only thing, it was somebody else’s computer. And somebody else’s fingers on the keys.”

“I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

“Let’s see the lists,” he said. “See how many repeats we got.”

“Mr. A. Johnson,” I said. “Flew Midwest Express from Philadelphia to Omaha on the fifth, changing planes in Milwaukee. He flew back to Philadelphia on the morning of the seventh. Paid by cash or check. My guess is cash.”

“You think it’s him.”

“I do.”

“Whole lot of folks named Johnson. Right up there with Smith and Jones.”

“That’s true.”

“‘Cordin’ to Phyllis, you got to show ID to get on a plane.”

“They’ve tightened up all their security measures.”

“Case you a terrorist,” he said, “they want to make sure it’s really you. They probably do the same when you buy the ticket, if you payin’ cash. Ask for ID.”

I nodded. “Same with a check, but then they always want proof of identity for a check. Of course, it’s not that hard to get ID.”

“Store right on the Deuce, print up all kinds of shit. Student ID, Sheriff cards. Wouldn’t make much of an impression on a cop, but you gonna look too hard at it if you’re behind the counter at the airlines?”

“Especially if the customer’s a prosperous-looking middle-aged white man in a Brooks Brothers suit.”

“The right front gets you through,” he agreed.

“And the ID may have been legitimate,” I said. “Maybe he had a client named Johnson, maybe he hung on to a driver’s license for some poor bastard who wouldn’t need it while he was locked up in Green Haven.”

He scratched his head. “We got a name of a dude flew to Omaha one day and back a couple days later. We got anything more than that?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“I’m glad you brought him in,” Joe Durkin said. “This is the very mope we’ve been looking high and low for. I’ll ask him a few questions soon as I remember where I put my rubber hose.”

“Bet I know where it’s at,” TJ said. “You want, I help you look for it.”

Durkin grinned and gave him a poke in the arm. “What are you doing with my friend here?” he demanded. “Why aren’t you out on the street selling crack and mugging people?”

“My day off.”

“And here I thought you guys were dedicated. Seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, soothing the emotional pain of the public. Turns out you coast just like everybody else.”

“Hell yes,” TJ said. “I didn’t want to do nothin’ but work all the time, I be joinin’ the po-leese.”

“Say that again for me, will you? Po-leese.”

“Po-leese.”

“Jesus, I love it when you talk dirty. Matt, I don’t know what gives me the idea, but somehow I think you’re here for a reason.”

We were in the squad room at Midtown North, on West Fifty-fourth Street. I took a chair and explained what I wanted while TJ went over to the board and thumbed through a sheaf of Wanted flyers.

“When you find one with your picture on it,” Joe advised him, “bring it over and I’ll get you to autograph it for me. Matt, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want me to call the Omaha police and ask them to check hotel records for some zip named Johnson.”

“I’d appreciate it,” I said.

“You’d appreciate it. In a tangible way, do you suppose?”

“Tangible. Yes, I suppose I—”

“I like that word,” he said. “Tangible. It means you can touch it. You reach out and it’s there. Which gives rise to a question. Why don’t you reach out and touch someone?”

“Pardon me?”

“You know the hotel, right? The Hilton?”

“That’s the place to start. I’m not positive that’s where he stayed, but—”

“But you’d start there. Why didn’t you? Use their eight hundred number and the call’s free. Can’t beat that for a bargain.”

“I called,” I said. “I didn’t get anywhere.”

“You identify yourself as a police officer?”

“That’s illegal.” He gave me a look. “I may have given that impression,” I admitted. “It didn’t do me any good.”

“Since when did you become incapable of calling a hotel and conning a little information out of a desk clerk?” He looked at the slip of paper in front of him. “Omaha,” he said. “What the hell ever happened in Omaha?” He looked at me. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Not Him personally,” TJ put in, “but this dude who said he was real tight with Him.”

“The abortion guy. What was his name?”

“How quickly we forget.”

“Roswell Berry. Will got him right in his hotel room, didn’t he? I forget which hotel, but why is it something tells me it was the Hilton?”

“Why indeed?”

“You have reason to think our boy Will’s a guy named Johnson?”

“It’s a name he may have been using.”

“No wonder the Hilton wouldn’t tell you anything. You wouldn’t have been the first caller trying to get something out of them. All the tabloids, guarding the public’s right to know. The Omaha PD must have slammed the lid shut.”

“That would be my guess.”

“You know how many detectives are working on Will? I can’t tell you the number, but what I do know is I’m not one of them. How do I justify sticking my nose in?”

“Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with Will,” I said. “Maybe it’s a simple investigation of a robbery suspect who pulled a series of holdups in this precinct and may have fled to Omaha.”

“Where he’s got relatives. But instead of staying with them we think he holed up at the Hilton. We know the dates, and the name he used. That’s some story, Matt.”

“You probably won’t have to tell it,” I said. “You’re a New York police detective with a question that’s easy to answer. Why should they give you a hard time?”

“People have never needed a reason in the past.” He picked up the phone. “Here’s a question that’s not easy to answer. Why the hell am I doing this?”

“Allen W. Johnson,” he said. “That’s Allen with two L’s and an E. I don’t know what the W stands for. I don’t suppose it stands for Will.”

“I’m not sure it stands for anything.”

“Stayed two nights and paid cash. As a matter of fact, the Omaha cops checked on everybody staying at the hotel as part of their investigation of Berry’s murder. Anybody paid cash, that was a red flag. So Mr. Allen Johnson definitely had their attention.”

“Did they have a chance to talk to him?”

“He’d already checked out. Never used the phone or charged anything to his room.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve got a description of him.”

“Yeah, they got a real useful one. He was a man and he was wearing a suit.”

“Narrows it down.”

“He checked out after Will got Berry with the coat hanger, but before the body was discovered. So why take a second look at him?”

“He paid cash.”

He shook his head. “Not when he checked in. He gave them a credit card and they ran a slip. Then when he checked out he gave them cash. Apparently that’s common. The card simplifies checking in, but you’ve got reasons for settling up in cash. Maybe the card’s maxed out, or maybe you don’t want the bill showing up at your house because you don’t want your wife to know you were over at the Hilton humping your secretary.”

“And when you pay in cash—”

“They tear up the slip they took an imprint on. So nobody ever knows if the card’s a phony, because they don’t run it by the credit card company until you check out.”

“So we know he had a credit card,” I said, “whether or not it was a good one. And he had a piece of photo ID in the same name.”

“Did I miss something? How do we know that?”

“He had to show it to get on the plane.”

“If he had the credit card for backup,” he said, “the other could be any damn thing long as it had his picture on it. One of those pieces of shit they print for you on Forty-second Street, says you’re a student at the School of Hard Knox.”

“Like I said,” TJ murmured.

“Tell me about this guy,” Joe said. “Since you got my attention. How’d you get on to him?”

“From the airline records.”

“New York to Omaha?”

“Philadelphia to Omaha.”

“Where did Philadelphia come from?”

“I think the Quakers settled it.”

“I mean—”

“It’s too complicated to go into,” I said, “but I was looking for someone who flew Philly to Omaha and back again. He fit the time frame.”

“You mean he went out before Berry got killed and came back afterward.”

“It was a little tighter fit than that.”

“Uh-huh. Who is he, you want to tell me that?”

“Just a name,” I said. “And a face, if he showed photo ID, but I haven’t seen the face.”

“He’s just a man in a suit, like the girl at the hotel remembered.”

“Right.”

“Help me out here, Matt. What have you got that I should be passing on to somebody?”

“I haven’t got anything.”

“If Will’s out there running around, looking for fresh names for his list—”

“Will’s retired,” I said.

“Oh, right. We got his word for that, don’t we?”

“And nobody’s heard a peep out of him since.”

“Which makes the department look pretty stupid, wasting manpower and resources chasing a perpetrator who no longer represents a danger to the community. How’s this your business, anyway? Who’s your client?”

“That’s confidential.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t give me that shit.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s privileged. I’m working for an attorney.”

“Jesus, I’m impressed. Wait a minute, it comes back to me. Weren’t you working for the last vic? Whitfield?”

“That’s right. I wasn’t doing much, I advised him on security and steered him to Wally Donn at Reliable.”

“Which did him a whole lot of good.”

“I think they did what they could.”

“I suppose so.”

“Whitfield hired me as an investigator,” I said. “Not that there was much for me to investigate.”

“And you’re still at it? That’s the attorney you’re working for? What are you, billing the estate?”

“He paid me a retainer.”

“And it covers what you’re doing now?”

“It’ll have to.”

“What have you got, Matt?”

“All I’ve got is Allen Johnson, and I told you how I got him.”

“Why’d you check those flights?”

“A hunch.”

“Yeah, right. You know what I do when I get a hunch?”

“You bet a bunch?”

He shook his head. “I buy a lottery ticket,” he said, “and I’ve never won yet, which shows how good my hunches are. You’d think I’d learn.”

“All it takes is a dollar and a dream.”

“That’s catchy,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that. Now, if there’s nothing else—”

“Actually...”

“This better be good.”

“I was just thinking,” I said, “that it would be interesting to know if Allen W. Johnson ever bought cyanide.”

He was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then he said, “Somebody must have checked the records when Whitfield got killed. Especially after the autopsy showed he was terminal and there was all that speculation that he killed himself. But Will’s last letter scotched that line of thought.”

“It proved he killed Whitfield.”

“Uh-huh. It even mentioned cyanide, if I remember correctly. The cyanide had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? It smells like almonds, but you can’t make it out of almonds, can you?”

“I think you can extract minute quantities from peach pits,” I said, “but somehow I don’t think that’s how Will got it.”

“And if he bought it where you had to sign for it, and had to show ID—”

“Maybe he signed in as Allen Johnson.”

He thought it over, straightened up in his seat. He said, “You know what? I think you should find out who’s in charge of the investigation into Will and his wacky ways and ask him to look it up for you. You’re a nice fellow, make a good first impression, and a hundred years ago you used to be on the job yourself. I’m sure they’ll be happy to cooperate with you.”

“I’d just hate to keep you from getting the credit.”

“Credit,” he said heavily. “Is that how you remember it from your days on the force? Is that what you used to get for butting into somebody else’s case? Credit?”

“It’s a little different when the case is stalled.”

“This one? It can be stalled six different ways, it can have a dead battery and four flat tires, and it’s still high-profile and high-priority. You see Marty McGraw this morning?”

“The last time I saw him was around the time of Will’s last letter.”

“I don’t mean him, I mean his column. You read it today?” I hadn’t. “He had a hair up his ass about something, and I can’t even remember what it was. Last line of the column — ‘Where’s Will now that we need him?’”

“He didn’t write that.”

“The hell he didn’t. Hang on a minute, there must be a copy of the News around here somewhere.” He returned with a paper. “I didn’t have it word for word, but that’s how it adds up. Here, read it yourself.”

I looked where he was pointing and read the final paragraph aloud. “‘You find yourself thinking of a certain anonymous letter writer of recent memory, and saying of him what some unfunny folks used to say of Lee Harvey Oswald. Where is he now that we need him?’”

“What did I tell you?”

“I can’t believe he wrote that.”

“Why not? He wrote the first one, saying Richie Vollmer wasn’t fit to live. Which, I have to say, was a hard position to find fault with. But it sure got Will’s motor running.”