Hostage Zero

CHAPTER THIRTY

Navarro seemed incapable of sitting. He walked to the rear of the house, to the kitchen, inviting Gail to join him. “Would you like some tea?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” she replied with a smile. She hated tea. It reminded her of childhood sickness, when her mother used hyper-sweetened tea to mask the flavor of whatever foul home remedy she might have concocted. Still, an affirmative answer seemed like the best way to keep Navarro talking.

He filled the copper teakettle from the spigot over the stove and settled it on a front burner. He turned the knob and bent at the waist to verify that the blue flame was exactly right; then he turned to face Gail.

“I was their attorney,” he said, getting right to it. “I dealt mostly with a man named Arthur Guinn, but I did meet Mr. Bell a time or two. They were surprisingly nice people. Very cordial, always dignified. Not at all what you’d expect from people in their line of work. If you didn’t know they were mobsters, you’d have thought they were Ivy League country clubbers.”

“So you knew they were mobsters when you went to work for them?” Gail pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and helped herself to it.

Navarro turned on the sink spigot and pushed the lever all the way to hot. “Of course I knew. The whole world knew. But when I started, I just did corporate work for their legitimate covers.” He filled the teapot with hot tap water and set it aside. “Preheating the pot is very important,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“When making tea. Too many people make the mistake of pouring the heated water directly into a cold pot. Ruins the tea.”

“I’ve always just put a tea bag in a cup of hot water,” Gail said.

Navarro shivered. “Might as well drink from a mud puddle.” He withdrew two cups and saucers from a cupboard over the stove and started preheating those, as well. “Tea drinking and pipe smoking are both as much about the fuss-budgetry as they are about the final reward.”

Gail didn’t care. But she didn’t want to push too hard.

Navarro leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms and legs. “I remember when I was in law school a professor told us how fragile one’s ethics can be. He was an absolutist. His favorite expression was, ‘You can’t be just a little bit dirty.’ It made sense in the classroom, but in practice it’s a hard lesson. Rationalization is a tricky thing. You know you’re working for a criminal, but you justify it by telling yourself that even criminals need legal counsel. It’s the way our system of justice is built. I was working just for the legal side of what they do. After a dozen years or so, the blurry line gets fuzzier and fuzzier. Before you know it, you’re seeing the line for exactly what it is, but you look the other way. In the end, you’re in so deep that it doesn’t matter anymore where the line is.”

The teakettle whistled, and he turned to tend to it.

“What sort of things did you end up doing?” Gail asked.

He killed the flame under the kettle and let it sit while he dumped the water from the preheating pot and cups. He wiped them dry with a dish towel and then measured two teaspoons of loose tea from a tin into the dried pot.

Gail had never seen all this pageantry for a cup of tea, and she found herself oddly fascinated.

Navarro poured water from the kettle into the pot and put the lid in place. “Three minutes,” he said. “No more, no less. In America, we tend to oversteep our tea. Where were we?”

“You were about to tell me what sort of services you performed for Sammy Bell and company.”

“Ah. Well, toward the end, I was the handler of cash. The trusted middleman.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“But you knew.”

“I suspected at first; but yes, sooner or later I knew. I handled payments for services rendered. With my fingerprints on the transaction-literally and figuratively-it all became subject to attorney-client privilege, and therefore untraceable.”

“What was the money for?”

He hesitated. “Just about anything you can think of.” He busied himself with a search of the kitchen drawers.

Gail sighed heavily. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

His head snapped up at that. “It is difficult, Ms. Bonneville. It is extremely difficult, and I’m doing my best not to just shut up and send you on your way.”

Gail looked away, inexplicably embarrassed.

He wasn’t done. “Have you ever done anything you’re ashamed of?”

She felt heat rising in her ears. Lord yes, she thought; but she would never share the details with others.

“If you have, then you know how easy it is to push the awfulness aside.” He closed one drawer and opened another. “I’ve built myself a cozy little life here in exile. I have very nearly reached the point where I can look at myself in the mirror and not feel nauseated.” This time he slammed the drawer in frustration, and went for a third. “So if I am somehow frustrating you by not baring my soul quickly enough, I’m afraid I’ll just have to beg your pardon.”

This time, he slammed the drawer hard enough to shake the floor. “Where the hell is my tea strainer?”

Gail stood to help and saw it right away. “Is that it? There on the counter?” She pointed next to the sink, to a spot in plain sight.

He followed her finger, and his shoulders slumped. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.” He picked it up and rinsed it in the sink. “As I’m trying to introduce you to the wonders of tea, I can’t very well leave it unstrained, can I?”

His voice cracked at that last part. Gail returned to her seat and just watched while he finished the pomp and circumstance. He carried the cups easily, each balanced on its saucer with a spoon on the side. “Sugar’s on the table,” he said. “Would you like lemon or cream?”

I don’t even want the damn tea, she didn’t say. “No thank you.” She opened the sugar bowl and was not the least surprised to find cubes. She helped herself to two lumps and stirred them in, while Navarro took three. She sipped, and was delightfully surprised. The flavor was like no tea she’d ever had. “This is good,” she said, the surprise evident in her voice.

“Let this be a lesson,” he said. “Life is too short and filled with disappointments to deny yourself the best.” He took a sip of his own and savored it. “Tea bags are a sin.”

Gail laughed. She felt as if she’d stepped through the looking glass, tea party and all. This man savored his brew as Jonathan savored good scotch. She allowed the moment to stretch a little more, and then came back around to business.

“A young boy is awaiting rescue, and people are trying to harm him,” she said. “We have to get back to the subject at hand.”

Navarro bowed slightly from the shoulders. “Please,” he said.

“Tell me about Marilyn Schuler,” Gail said. “How does she fit into all of this?”

Navarro sat taller in his chair and shifted his eyes to a spot over her shoulder. She followed his gaze, but there was nothing there.

“Marilyn was a lovely woman,” Navarro said. “Lovely in every sense of the word.” He looked back to Gail and made his eyebrows dance. “Perhaps too lovely for her own good.”

Gail waited for it.

“You know she was having an affair with another young man on my staff.”

She played dumb.

“A fellow named Aaron Hastings. I never did like him much. Never trusted him, really; but he was a recommended hire from my biggest client.”

Gail’s ears perked. “Sammy Bell?”

“The one and only. And it never behooves to disappoint one’s largest client.”

“Especially this one,” Gail said.

“Indeed.” He took another sip. “If only Mr. Bell knew the truth of his friend.”

“What truth is that?”

Navarro looked concerned. “Alice didn’t tell you?”

“You’d be shocked-or maybe pleased-to know how little she shared with me about anything.” Gail told herself that she was going to have to reexamine her whole attitude about tea.

Navarro pushed his chair away from the table and crossed his legs. “I don’t have any real proof, you understand. Common wisdom-now there’s an oxymoron for you-has it that Marilyn’s husband killed her because of her affair with Aaron, but I’ve always felt that poor Mr. Schuler was set up by that young man, and that the young man himself was Marilyn’s killer.”

Gail recoiled. “Why would he do that?”

Navarro’s face twitched. It looked like equal parts smile and wince. “I hope you have time for a long story,” he said.

As Navarro unfolded his tale, it seemed obvious to Gail that he’d been thinking a lot about this over his years in exile.

“Sometimes I found myself in the position of shuttling money,” he explained. “I was never entirely sure what it was for, but you get a feel for these things over time. The amounts were always large. Tens of thousands of dollars. And of course nine times out of ten, the money was flowing toward Mr. Bell’s operation. Rarely away from it.”

Gail detected subtext. “Except sometimes?”

He stabbed a finger toward her nose. “Exactly. Except sometimes. Like, for example, the three days before my life as I knew it was forced to end. We handled an outgoing payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

Gail gasped. “Yowsers.”

Navarro smiled. “My thoughts exactly. We handled the payment in two parts, about a week apart. Half one week and half the second week.” His eyes narrowed. “So, Ms. Private Investigator, what does that sound like to you?”

“Half on contract and half on delivery.”

Navarro gave a conciliatory bow. “I left out a detail. There was no delivery of goods. Just a payment followed by another payment.”

Something clicked in Gail’s head. “A hit?”

He jabbed his finger in the air again. “That’s what I concluded. It’s the only thing that made sense. For that amount of money, it’s somebody damned important. And it certainly makes sense to have a completion bonus. There’s also the fact of the dead drop. I forgot to mention that, too. We weren’t supposed to deliver either payment to a person. Instead, there was a dead drop at a rest stop along the Jersey Turnpike. Lots of money, anonymous recipient.”

Gail found herself nodding. “Definitely a hit.”

“Right. Murder. Cold blood and all that. Be honest with you, that was way beyond anything that I signed up for. Scared the bejesus out of me. It’s one thing to risk disbarment and maybe a year or three in prison, but now we were talking big time.”

“Did you say no?”

He gave her a don’t-be-an-idiot look. “The ‘say no’ ship had sailed long before then,” he said. “I was in far too deep to play that kind of game. So I swallowed hard and made the first payment. Then, on my way back, about three miles from making the drop, I got pulled over for speeding. Seventy-eight in a sixty-five. Funny how some details just stick with you, isn’t it?”

Gail stole this thunder: “That created a record,” she said.

“It did exactly that. It was just a routine traffic stop, I know. Nobody’s going to think twice. But then if someone gets hit, they’re going to start checking records.”

That’s exactly what they’d do, Gail thought. After a murder, one of the first investigative tasks is to check moving violations in the area. “Did you have a criminal record?”

“No, but I had a high profile. When you’re a mobster’s lawyer, people notice. You’d be surprised how many people are jealous, in fact. So that next week, I was a basket case. I scoured newspapers and the Internet looking for something about a murder, but I never saw it. Then I got the order to make the second drop.”

“But no one was ever killed?”

“Not that I knew of. Still, I was spooked. I didn’t want any more blood on my hands, so I sent Marilyn Schuler to make the delivery. She wouldn’t do it unless I told her what was in the package, and when I did tell her, she sort of freaked out. She didn’t know what it was for, of course, but it was still a lot of cash. She insisted that she’d only go if I let her boyfriend come along to protect her.”

“That would be Aaron Hastings?”

“Right.” He leaned forward. “Only the money never arrived. Marilyn and Aaron disappeared. I didn’t realize that things didn’t happen until over a day later when I got word from Arthur Guinn that there was one very pissed off, very bad man who wanted his money.” Navarro closed his eyes and cocked his head, as if the memory had become painful.

“You didn’t tell him about Marilyn?” Gail said.

He shook his head. “Looking back on it, it’s hard to believe I was that stupid; but telling him would mean confessing that I had given the job to my assistant, and God only knows what would have come from that.” He sat straight again and spread his arms wide. “Besides, I didn’t think she could be so stupid as to steal from the Slaters. Then she turns up dead, and the money and Aaron are both missing. Only nobody knows about him. Just like that”-he snapped his fingers-“I’ve got the mob and this ‘very bad man’ looking for me, and I’ve got nothing to give them. So I disappeared.”

Gail scowled as she listened. “You’re a rich guy. Why didn’t you just make up the difference out of your own pocket?”

“Because I was convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. I’m still convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. Every scenario I ran through my head ended up with me dead. Especially because I didn’t come clean with what happened in my very first phone call from Arthur.”

“So you panicked,” Gail summarized.

Navarro shrugged. “I prefer to think that I reacted the only way that made sense at the time.”

Gail took a moment to catch her notes up and then to review what she’d written.

“There’s more,” Navarro said, interrupting her thoughts.

He had her attention.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think through all of this,” he said. “Thank God for the Internet. The amount of the payment I shuffled gnawed at me like an ulcer. That kind of money means something way bigger than any mob hit. That’s special money, requiring the services of a special killer. Expertise is expensive in any line of work, right?”

Gail nodded. “So the Slaters wanted someone dead in a big way.”

Navarro looked horrified. “The Slaters? Oh, lord no, this kind of hit wasn’t ordered by the Slaters. They were merely the middlemen. Someone wants someone else dead, you go to your local crime family and you work out a brokered deal. I laundered the money that they had already laundered once. Presumably, the contractor on the other end of the transaction laundered it a couple more times to make it damn near untraceable.”

Gail was lost. “So why are the Slaters even looking for you?”

“Well, they had to cover the loss, didn’t they? They had to make good on the transaction, or else the very bad man would have an issue to settle with them, and no one needs that kind of heartache. But to cover their hind parts, they’d want to make sure that every stakeholder knew that I’d fumbled the ball.”

Pieces still were not fitting for Gail.

“That’s your government connection,” Navarro said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. When she didn’t get it, he sort of growled in frustration. “The government was the customer.”

A glimmer of comprehension now.

“Well, not the government, per se,” Navarro corrected himself, making a twitchy wave-off gesture. “More like a powerful individual within the government.”

Gail found herself leaning forward in her chair.

“Remember when I said that when they asked for the second payment, no one had been killed? Well, I realized that I wasn’t looking at a big enough picture. I’d been assuming that the hit would happen near the site of the money drop. Then I realized that for that kind of money it could have been anywhere. That’s when it got scary.”

Gail waited for it. The dramatic exposition was wearying, but given the man’s years without human interaction, she tried not to show frustration.

“Do you keep track of Washington politics, Ms. Bonneville?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. I try very hard to avoid them.”

“Then perhaps you don’t remember the South Dakota senatorial campaign from that year. The one between Lincoln Hines and-”

“Didn’t he commit suicide?”

“So you do remember. Yes, the common assumption was that he had committed suicide, but there are those who say that he would never do such a thing. His family, for example.”

Gail rolled her eyes. “Ah, conspiracy theories. You gotta love ’em.”

“What was it that Henry Kissinger told Richard Nixon? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t trying to get you. You should look at some of the theories. Beyond what many say is a lack of suicidal motivation, there were issues with the positioning of the body, and with fibers found on his clothes and such.”

“As is frequently the case,” Gail said. Armchair detectives were the bane of every real investigator’s life. “Trust me. If those fibers and the rest were relevant, there would have been a prosecution.”

“How about if the prosecutor was of the same political party as the dead man’s opponent? And the sheriff in charge of the investigation, as well.”

Gail laughed at the absurdity of it. “So the opponent kills his competition and he just talks everyone into covering up his crime? Forgive me, Mr. Navarro, but it just doesn’t work that way.”

Navarro remained unfazed. “I’m not suggesting a conspiracy, necessarily. In fact, I’ll stipulate that it probably wasn’t such a thing. But perceptions inform assumptions, and assumptions drive investigations, do they not?”

“Of course, but-”

“Hear me out. People suggest that the candidate who officially died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound was in fact murdered. Among the most logical suspects would be the man who stood the most to lose. The incumbent, no less, whose departure would throw the political balance in the Senate to the opposing party. So, your highly placed, very dapper and charming suspect says that the charges are ridiculous, that he would easily have won the race, even though the poll numbers at the time indicated that such might not be the case. Besides, he had an ironclad alibi for the time of the killing. Under those circumstances, where would your investigative instincts likely take you?”

Gail inhaled deeply and let it go as a sigh. In every investigation, there are wild-ass theories that simply have to be discounted or ignored. Otherwise, no case would ever close. It happened, sometimes, that a discarded theory turned out to be the one that defined the actual events, but it was a rare occurrence. Still, more than a few innocents were paying undeserved penalties in American prisons, Frank Schuler among them, apparently.

Navarro smiled and pointed at her. “Not laughing now, I see. Think about what was at stake: A senator had killed his competition using the Slater organization as a go-between. Everything would have been fine. Only the deliveryman”-he raised his hand-“screwed up and left loose ends that needed to be tied.”

“Which senator are we talking about?” Gail asked. “I don’t remember which one’s from where.”

“Oh, he’s not a senator anymore,” Navarro said. “When the president was elected, the guy was selected to be secretary of defense.”

“Jacques Leger?” Gail said.

“Exactly. See, you do pay some attention to Washington politics.”

Gail paused. She didn’t want to believe it; but Navarro’s wild theories did explain some things. “So help me think this through,” she said. “Would Arthur Guinn be in a position to know all of this?”

“Absolutely. All the way down to the little details. He wouldn’t say anything if he hopes to see tomorrow, but he would definitely know.”

Gail didn’t share the fact that he would be sheltered by witness protection. “So, to keep him quiet-if only as added insurance-it would make sense to kidnap his child.”

“Absolutely. That or just have him killed outright.”

Gail nodded. “And Frank Schuler would have to be considered a loose end, too; just in case Marilyn had said something to him. Maybe they even think he has the money. But that’s a loose end that the Commonwealth of Virginia will take care of in a week or so.”

“That leaves his boy. Call it a long shot that he’d know anything, but in for a dime, in for a buck, right?” A shadow of concern fell over Navarro’s face. “You know, that boy is probably dead. If we’re right and this is the scenario, then there’s no reason to keep him alive.”

Indeed there wasn’t, Gail thought. Thus the reason they left him for dead.

“So, do you think I’m right?” Navarro pressed.

Holy shit. Did she think that a sitting secretary of defense ordered the murder of his senatorial rival? Did she think that the cover-up could involve kidnapping and more murder? Did she think that ambition could bring such darkness into a public servant’s soul? To think such things would sicken her.

“Yes,” she said. “I think that’s exactly what happened.”

Navarro smacked the table with both palms, a gesture of triumph. “Yes!” he proclaimed. “So what are you going to do about it?”

Interesting question, to which there was only one appropriate answer: “We set the record straight.”

The triumph drained from his face.

“We?”

Gail shrugged. “Okay. You, actually.”

Navarro laughed. “Like hell. I’ve gotten used to living.”

“The secretary of defense is a murderer. You can’t live with that.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve been living with it. He was every bit as much a murderer yesterday as he is today. The rest is not my problem.”

“I can arrange protection,” Gail said.

Navarro laughed harder. “Oh, you can, can you? That must be some private investigation firm you’re with.”

Gail didn’t retreat. “It is some private investigation firm I’m with. Certainly different than any you’ve heard of. We have connections.”

“Yeah, well, congratulations. I don’t. All I’ve got is me. I’ve come to care about me a lot these past years, and the more committed to me I’ve become, the less I care about anyone else. I gave you what you wanted. Now you take care of the rest.” He stood. The meeting was over. “Do travel home safely.”

Gail didn’t move. “Are you anxious to disappear all over again?”

He scowled. “What do you mean?” The way the color drained from his face, Gail figured he might have already figured it out.

“Mr. Navarro, there are some secrets that I just cannot keep. Not when the stakes are so high.”

“You mean you’d rat me out.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. She tried to keep a pleading tone in her voice. “But what choice would I have?”

“You could respect my openness and generosity and understand that I am in a very difficult position.”

Gail cocked her head. Surely he had to know better.

“I could kill you,” he said. “No one would ever find your body.”

She smiled. “All respect, I’d make you dead three times over before you got your finger on the trigger.”

“I could kill myself, then.”

Gail shook her head. “You’ve had years to kill yourself. The time has come for you to do the right thing.”

Navarro laughed. “Sure,” he said. “At this stage in my life I’m going to start-” His expression changed to one of concern, and he cocked his head. “Do you hear something?”

Gail cocked her head, too. At first, the answer was no, she didn’t hear a thing. Then she did-a very soft thrumming sound in the distance. In a city setting, it would have been inaudible, but out here, not only was it clear, but it was getting louder. “Helicopter?” she guessed.

Navarro shot to his feet, knocking over his chair. He snatched his shotgun from the counter with such speed that Gail found herself drawing down by instinct. “Don’t!” she yelled.

“What did you do?” Navarro yelled. “Who did you tell?”

But he wasn’t interested in an answer. He hurried out of the kitchen, through the living room, and up to the open front window.

“What is it?” Gail said, trailing after him.

“It’s a goddamn helicopter!” Navarro exclaimed.

“So? Maybe-”

“No maybe,” Navarro snapped. “What did you do?”