I, Sniper

21

Bob finally slipped out of the house Wednesday morning at

2 a.m. and Denny Washington was waiting for him.

He climbed into the car.

“Man, am I hungry,” he said. “Anyplace still open?”

“You look like a homeless guy,” Washington said. “I’d bust you for looking like that in the old days. Today I have to call you sir and ask you if you need assistance.”

“Welcome to modern times.”

“Ain’t it the fucking truth, bro? Okay, I know an all-night eatery, a cop place. You don’t mind eating with cops?”

“If they don’t mind eating with me.”

They headed to a joint called Johnny’s, outside of which a lot of blue-and-white cruisers idled. The place was bright, first from the lights, and second from the more than a few white faces among the black, unusual in this part of town. Everywhere Swagger looked, he saw the blue-and-white checkered hatbands that were the unique signature of the Chicago officer’s cap. He was in a blue-and-white universe. Washington made his way down the aisles to a booth in the rear, nodding to the other pilgrims as he led Swagger through but making no intros, and Swagger recognized the faces, all tough urban warrior mugs, under hair either short and frizzy or a little vain. Why did some cops have such elaborate hair? Anyway, he and Linebacker Washington sat in the booth, ordered coffee, eggs, bacon, toast, enough for a battalion, and waited for the food to come.

“So are you going to tell me anything, Gunny? Or is it need to know?”

“It is need to know, but you’re on the team, so you need to know,” said Swagger. “First off, guess what? Mr. and Mrs. Crusader for Peace and Freedom were broke.”

“Broke?”

“Broke, as in ‘broke.’ Broke, as in, We can’t make no payments. He’d had an inheritance-that’s what they’d been living on-but they’d been into the capital for years and now it was down to nothing. They lived big, did you know? Always a houseful of guests, always the hosts, spent a fortune on wine and food and big dinners out. You’d think he was rich; wasn’t that part of the joke, the rich protesters, them rich people who believed in the rights of the poor? But they way overspent their salaries, which weren’t great, and his book royalties and speaking fees were down. He spent six years working on a book for a big New York outfit, and in the end they turned it down and sued him to get their money back.”

“Boo fucking hoo. You’re breaking my heart.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, “and here this was the land of opportunity. So they were desperate, or so it seemed.”

“I guess being a revolutionary isn’t that high-paying a job.”

“Oh, and he had to pay a girl three hundred thousand a few years back because he fucked her after promising he’d leave Mitzi. Then he changed his mind. They didn’t want it getting out, didn’t want any publicity, so that ate up a big chunk. So much for bringing higher morality to the world.”

“How did you find this out?”

“I cracked the computer code, and he had a combination on file. I didn’t know there was a safe the first time I went through the house, but it was in the corner of his office, under the floorboards. If you know there’s a safe, you can find it. All this stuff was in there, the letters to the lawyers about the three hundred K payment, all that. In the safe.”

“Hmm. So to hit the house without the combination, you’d need a safecracker, right?”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “Yeah, yeah,” seeing how Washington’s insight seemed to lead to another development, a safecracker who could maybe be convinced to talk. “So there’d be a safecracker who-”

“Not so fast, bro. There was a guy in this town named Willie Beazel. Very good fingers. Could open anything.”

“Past tense?”

“That’s where he lives now, in the past tense. He was found floating in the Chicago River with a twenty-two through the ear three days after the hit on the Strongs. I’m thinking they paid him big upfront, brought him into the house, and he popped the box for them. They knew whatever it was they needed was in that safe. Of course, once he’s done his job, he’s a liability. He’s a loose end. Tidy motherfuckers.”

“These people ain’t messing around. If they want you dead, you get dead, fast.”

“And of course nobody would ever think to link Willie to the Strongs, no reason to. But he had colleagues, pals. I can run ’ em down. Maybe he said something before he went for a float. You left the records in the safe?”

“Yeah. If we can get a warrant, we can get all that stuff into play legally, I’m thinking. But that might be for later.”

“So back to the Strongs: they were poor?”

“Running out of dough. But, but, but there’s a big but coming up.”

“I’m listening.”

“Just a month before they were hit, they opened a Swiss bank account. It sounds like a movie, but it was an actual Swiss bank account, number 309988762554. They were expecting some big money coming in. They didn’t want to pay taxes on it, they didn’t want to pay their creditors with it, they just wanted to spend it on themselves. They wanted the big life somewhere off in Europe. They were nuts about Europe. They thought they belonged in Europe. I think-well, no matter what I think, it’s clear they were getting ready to go underground again.”

“On the lam?”

“Yeah, but in a different way. Not on the run but under new identities. They had spent money they didn’t have, that they owed various relatives and friends, to get new identities. They had phony passports in that safe, under the names William and Mary Ives, of Dayton, Ohio. Very good phonies, and I’m thinking they used some old radical contact to get into underground culture to come up with that sort of high-end merchandise. I mean, you just don’t go to a phony passport shop in the mall; you’ve got to know somebody, you’ve got to be wired into the organization, you’ve got to have your bona fides up front to get stuff at that level.”

“Don’t it seem they was anticipating a big payoff of some sort, a getaway, a new life of ease and luxury somewhere?”

“It does.”

“Any idea what the scam was?”

“I only know that all this started around September first. There was a big flurry of activity the first week in September. That’s when they got the passports, that’s when they opened the Swiss bank account. I found an invoice from Amazon for a batch of books they’d ordered: Europe on $5,000 a Day, Castles of the Rhine, Luxury Tours of Europe, dated September third, then another one for September fourth. With all his money problems, Jack bought some kind of Italian Armani suit for six thousand bucks September eighth. Can you believe that? Jack Strong in a six-thousand-dollar suit.”

“Maybe he was turning her out for trickin’, and he was making his pimp hand strong.”

Swagger laughed. Washington was cool. Big, black, dead face, fists that should have been nicknamed ‘Thunder and Thunder,’ but he had a street wit to him.

“I hadn’t thought of that. But anyway he didn’t have the money in his account, but he bought it. He’s to pick it up from the tailor next week, after the alterations. He expected to have the dough by then.”

“You ought to pick it up, Gunny. Shame to see it go to waste.”

“I could. Man, my daughters would have a laugh at the old goat in a fancy suit!”

The food came, and Bob shoveled it down, though he stayed off the coffee, because he was dangerously blurred with fatigue and needed sleep next.

“Don’t leave any for the poor people in China, Gunny,” Washington said. “They don’t need it.”

“I am a hungry guy,” Bob said, beginning to feel more or less whole again. “Sarge, can you drive me back to my hotel? I need to sleep.”

He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four.

“Sure. You sleep. I go to mass, I take my kids to school, I go be a policeman for twelve hours, then what?”

“Tomorrow I call my guy at the FBI and I lay my stuff out for him, the Willie Beazel connect, where I think we should concentrate, what I think should happen next. He argues, we yell, eventually it comes around. I fly out to DC and lay it out for them people, and suddenly there’s a new lay to the land. And now we have a really good chance of getting Carl Hitchcock out of the murderer’s box. Maybe even putting the real shooter in it. That ain’t a bad night’s work.”

“Swagger is the man,” said Washington.

The big detective got him efficiently enough back to the hotel room, and he fell into bed and felt the rush as unconsciousness overtook him. He slept and slept and slept, and when he woke it was near three. How could he have slept so long?

He rose, rushed through a shower and the other ablutions, then picked up his cell and pushed Nick’s number.

No answer.

He tried three or four more times, never connecting.

Finally he called the other number, the task force working number that he had, got some earnest intern, asked for Nick, waited, and finally a young woman’s voice came on.

“Agent Chandler, can I help you?” she said.

The one called Starling.

“Agent Chandler, it’s Swagger, you remember me?”

“Of course.”

“I have to reach Nick. I can’t seem to raise him.”

The pause told him bad news was incoming.

Finally she responded.

“Where have you been the last ten hours?”

“I was asleep. I was working three days without rest and I had to catch up, and now I have some things I-”

“Oh. Well, there’s been a shake-up. You didn’t see the Times this morning?”

“I’m in Chicago.”

“Well, it’s national news. Anyhow, some Times reporter broke a big story on something in Nick’s background. Some botched shooting twenty years ago.”

Swagger knew the story; the shot that hit the woman, not the robber, and paralyzed her. He thought it was all over, forgotten. Whose business was it?

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s caused a big stew. Some congressman is threatening hearings on how the Bureau is handling this. Nick’s been upstairs all day.”

“He’s all right, isn’t he? Jeez, he’s their best guy.”

“He is. But we don’t know what’s happening. There hasn’t been any news. There’s a rumor he’s resigned-”

“Resigned!”

“For the good of the Bureau. It’s all a mess, a typical Washington thing-politics, influence, lost time, anger, recriminations-and the press is eating it up.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Bob.

“Do you want to talk to anybody else? Ron is here.”

“Oh-No, I’ll wait and see how it shakes out. If you see Nick, give him my best and tell him, well, that I called.”

“I will,” she promised.