Ice Blues

FOURTEEN

The DC-10 toured the storm-cloud layer above Long Island for an hour and twenty minutes before we banged down an electronic chute and onto the snowy runway. The Kennedy terminal buildings were not visible through the blizzard, though after a while the pilot found them. I had hoped to be back in Albany by ten Saturday morning, but by the time I'd crawled up the snow-clogged Thruway and fishtailed down the exit ramp, it was after noon. I drove directly to the Air Freight office at Albany County Airport.

"I have some bags coming in from LA. They were shipped from there late yesterday afternoon. Any idea when they might arrive?"

"They should have gone out first thing this morning, but they'd be coming through O'Hare, and it's closed. Chicago's completely socked in, so I don't know what to tell you. Tonight, tomorrow morning-it's hard to say. It's touch and go anyway. We might be shutting down ourselves. Why don't you leave your name and somebody can give you a call when the stuff comes in?"

"No, that's okay, I won't be near a phone, but I'll check back later."

"Were the bags for delivery or pickup here?"

Mumble, mumble.

"I beg your pardon, sir?" He was squinting so he could hear me better, but by then I had turned and sped off. So, now what?

I drove toward my office on Central. The odd snowplow was to be seen here and there, but the wind kept whipping snow back onto the roads, which were slick in the eight-degree wet air. An old Ford Fairlane turned out too fast from the Westgate shopping plaza, hula-hula-ed into a new Mazda in the lane next to mine, and the Mazda's front end tinkled to the pavement. When both drivers emerged intact from their crumpled machines, I drove on.

The door to my office was off its hinges and leaned against the wall. Before I surveyed the mess beyond, I re-hung the door. The damage in the office was slight; the intruders were after five good-sized suitcases, not a microdot. So when they hadn't found them readily they'd given up and left.

The pie tin under the leaky radiator valve had been kicked aside, and the puddle of rusty water on the floor looked like about forty-eight hours' worth, which meant Thursday afternoon or thereabouts, back when Hankie-mouth still thought I had the money. I wanted to move about Albany freely now and was counting on Hankie-mouth's having been in touch with Joan Lenihan and lost interest in me-provided, of course, that that part (or any part) of her story had been true and that she hadn't kept the money, if she'd ever had possession of it in the first place. I, among many, had never actually set eyes on the cash.

I parked up the street from the house on Crow Street and slogged homeward for the first time in three days. The front door was ajar. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, the door occasionally falls in.

It did. The hinge bolts were on the floor nearby, so I completed my second door-hanging job of the afternoon. I brushed the blown snow off the hall table and toured the untidiness beyond. Timmy surely would reprimand me for carelessly leaving an overstuffed chair atop the couch, so I lifted it off.

Actual breakage was minimal but the disorder was spectacular, and I spent half an hour setting pieces of furniture upright, returning drawers to their chests and cabinets, and putting books back on their shelves in an order probably not recommended by the Library of Congress. With the front door shut now the place was starting to warm up. I gave the picture of the fire a poke and sat by it for a time.

I thought about the meaning of the housebreaking. Bowman had agreed to have his cops search the place on Thursday. This was a charade to discourage Hankie-mouth from a fruitless-to-him but aggravating-to-me break-in, and to leave the impression that I'd brought in the authorities and the law was on my side. Bowman perhaps had failed to carry out his duties.

Or, it occurred to me, the cops themselves had made this mess, though I doubted that; their sensitivity to property was higher than it was to people.

The other possibilities were: Hankie-mouth had simply gotten there before Bowman did; or Hankie-mouth was utterly unimpressed by the presence of the Albany police department and went in after the cops had left, believing- or perhaps knowing from experience-that the cops' skills as searchers were imperfect and they were likely to miss something. Or Hankie-mouth had been privy to inside police information and knew full well how meaningless and perfunctory the cops' visit had been. That one bothered me.

I showered, got into clothing appropriate for tramping around on the face of a glacier, fixed a plate of eggs, ate them, and made some phone calls.

The first was to Los Angeles, where I learned from my investigative contact there that three toll calls had been placed from Joan Lenihan's number during the period Tuesday through Friday night. Two of them-Thursday at 9:11 A.M. and again Thursday at 11:55 P.M.-had been lengthy calls placed to a number listed under the name Edward McConkey in Albany. I guessed that was Joan speaking to Corrine and reacting to the news of Jack's death. I'd find out. The third call had been placed on Friday at 4:36 P.M., Pacific time, to the same number in Troy, New York, to which a call had been placed on Monday, when Jack had been alive and still in LA. The phone company subscriber at that number was Florence Trenky. More and more, Flo seemed like a person worth getting to know.

Stevenson, Richard

Stevenson, Richard — [Donald Strachey Mystery 03] — Ice Blues

I dialed the Troy number.

"Yes?"

"This is Air Freight calling. Did one of our employees call you a short while ago? There's a lot of confusion down here, what with the snowstorm."

"No, but Mackie's upstairs waiting for you guys to call, been down here every five minutes. Did his delivery come in?"

"To whom am I speaking?"

"Flo Trenky. You the fella Mackie talked to this morning?"

"No, that must have been Bill."

"You want me to get him? Mackie's delivery come from LA?"

"I'm sorry, it hasn't. I just wanted to let him know that there are delays through Chicago, but we're doing everything we can under extremely difficult circumstances. Mr. Mackie is planning to pick up his parcels, have I got that right?"

"That's what he told me. It's Fay-Mack Fay's his right name."

"Oh, yeah, I see it here now. Well, if we haven't called yet, I suggest Mr. Fay check back with us early this evening. Could you relay that message, please?"

"Yeah, I'll tell 'im."

"Thank you, ma'am."

"Okay, sure."

I wrote the name in my notebook, Mack Fay, dug out my Troy phone directory, and copied down Flo Trenky's street address. I checked, but no Mack Fay was listed in the Troy, Albany or Schenectedy phone books.

When I called the Federal Building I was told by the duty officer in the drug-enforcement office that my friend the narc wouldn't be in until Monday morning but that I might reach him at home in Clifton Park. When I called there a tiny voice said to try again around six. I said I would and left my name.

I called American Airlines and was informed that O'Hare was expected to reopen in midafternoon and the first flight into Albany would arrive around 7:30 P.M., provided that Albany Airport itself didn't shut down. This was good. I had a few hours, at least, to get organized.

Except for the occasional lunatic, traffic crept along at a realistically fainthearted thirty-five in the fast lane of the interstate going north along the river. Near Menands a car had slid off the roadway into the median gulley and the tow truck trying to pull it out looked stuck in a drift. I eased in behind a plow and sand truck and followed it to the Green Island bridge.

The snow was still coming down in flakes the size of pages from the Farmers' Almanac.

Florence Trenky's place on Third Avenue was an old three-story row house with white aluminum siding on the flat front wall and a sign in the window that said ROOMS. I cruised four houses up to the end of the block and parked across the street at a Cumberland Farms convenience store. I bought eight dollars' worth of gas, a sodium-nitrite sub made with a stale bun, a foam cup of black vinegar the clerk casually referred to as coffee, and dined in the car with the engine idling, the lights off and the heater humming. The snow had begun to let up a bit by then, and I had a clear view of Florence Trenky's front door and the vehicle parked in front of it the green pickup truck that had followed me from Crow Street to the Albany main post office on Thursday.

I watched the lighted windows of the Trenky house, ate, drank, and listened to Garrison Keillor's good jokes about the weather in Minnesota. Whenever anybody began to play a dulcimer, I switched over to the six-o'clock jazz show on WMHT. At 6:40 I phoned my DE A contact from the pay phone in front of the store.

"Mack Fay. Name ring a bell?"

"Not offhand. I can check. Give me twenty minutes. I'll have to call in."

"Also, Robert Milius and the other entrepreneurs who were busted along with Jack Lenihan in '82. Present place of incarceration and known associates who might still be in the Albany area."

"Twenty minutes."

Back in the store I bought a pint of grapefruit juice and sloshed it around inside my head to mask the taste of the cold cuts, which in fact had been cold and cut off something. With a pocket full of quarters for the pay phone, I went back to the car and watched the Trenky house until a little after seven, when I made my call.

"Robert Milius, Jacob Farnum, Alton 'Boo' Waggoner, and Leonard 'Ringo'

Romeo will remain in Sing Sing State Correctional Facility until the year 2002 at the earliest. Mack Fay, born Albany, 1931, convicted of felony auto theft in 1976, paroled from Sing Sing November seven of last year, currently residing Troy, New York. No previous convictions." He gave me Fay's address on Third Avenue while I watched its front door. "No known associates of Milius and company remain in the area. The rest of them took off for parts unknown in '82, and of course Jack Lenihan is dead. Anything else?"

"Can you find out if Fay knew Milius or any of the others at Sing Sing?"

"That'll take a little longer. Why do you ask? It's time I found out what you were mixed up in, Strachey."

"No, it's not time, yet. Soon."

"Uh-huh. I think you owe me, however. I've been more than generous. Give me a simple explanation and we'll call it even."

"A simple explanation is too much to ask. How about if I sent you four dollars?"

"Are you in trouble?"

"Sure."

"I hope whatever you expect to get out of this is worth it?"

I said, "You can't put a price tag on good government," and, before he could call me a pompous fool, hung up. I had no time for cynics.

I'd missed Keillor's monologue but got back in the car in time for some good stride piano playing, to which I tapped my sweating feet. I tapped them off and on for another forty minutes, at the end of which time the front door opened at the Trenky residence and a man emerged.

Stocky, fiftyish, wrapped in a heavy green parka, the man quickly wiped the snow from the roof and windshield of the pickup truck, started it, waited half a minute for it to begin to warm up, and pulled out onto the avenue. He made a U-turn in the intersection in front of me and headed south. I followed.

Traffic was light on account of the storm, and I stayed well behind the truck through Troy, across the river, out Route 7, down the Northway, and into the Albany County Airport access road. When the pickup slowed and turned right by the AIR FREIGHT sign, I went on by, circled past the main terminal, and parked on the verge along the exit road. Ten minutes later the pickup passed me, moving back east again, and I followed.

When the pickup stopped for a red light on Route 7, I pulled up close behind it. Its bed appeared to be empty except for two feet of snow, but through the rear window I could make out what looked like suitcases stacked on the seat beside the driver. So much for any attempts at sleight of hand from the truck bed.

I let the truck move ahead of me again, pulled into a McDonald's, drove around the building to an exit, then followed the taillights of the pickup through the light snow back into Troy. I turned up First Avenue, went three miles an hour faster than I should have, and was parked in the Cumberland Farms lot when Mack Fay came up Third and pulled up in front of the Trenky house. He got out and hollered something in the front door and, one by one, handed the five bags up to a middle-aged blond woman who stood in the entryway in a pink housecoat. Fay followed the woman into the house then and shut the door.

I sat. I thought about calling APD and spilling it all to whoever Bowman had left in charge of the murder investigation during his trip west. Fay's possession of the five suitcases, presumably from Joan Lenihan and presumably containing the two and a half million, would be circumstantial but powerfully so. As a parolee, Fay could be asked to account for his sudden vast wealth, and other relevant information might be made to shake loose.

On the other hand, if Fay was in fact Jack Lenihan's killer, anything short of an immediate arrest and incarceration without bail might set him running in the company of the suitcases-and the DA might consider the circumstantial evidence too flimsy to justify holding Fay. I had seen that happen.

What I needed was more evidence connecting Fay to Jack Lenihan. There had been the phone call from LA to Flo Trenky's number on Monday, when Jack was alive-this, I thought, was Jack notifying Fay of his flight number and arrival time on Tuesday. And there had been the call from LA to Flo Trenky's number Friday afternoon-this presumably was Joan notifying Fay that she was returning the cash via Air Freight. But it was all so circumstantial that it seemed possible Fay might cook up an explanation and a set of alibis that would get him off the hook just long enough for him to bolt with the five suitcases, whose contents I intended to possess.

Two questions nagged. Why had Jack Lenihan trusted Mack Fay to the extent that Lenihan could phone Fay from LA and ask him to meet his plane? And why, if she knew that Fay could well have been the man who killed her son- and she must have suspected him-did Joan Lenihan turn over the money to Fay instead of notifying the police? She had been vague and unconvincing on that topic, giving me opinions about the wickedness of Albany that lacked illuminating specifics.

I decided there was a lot more I had to find out before I went to Bowman.

He might conceivably identify and even arrest, charge, and convict Jack Lenihan's killer, but the two and a half million might end up in the state's coffers and get spent on bridge repairs and new hats for fish wardens, both worthy expenditures, but Jack Lenihan had a better idea and I was high with the fever to carry it out. I was going to change history, make improvements on it.

I made a plan of action and set out. First, I went back to the pay phone. It was just after six in Los Angeles and I caught Timmy at Kyle Toot's place.

They had just come in from taking the Universal Studios tour, where Timmy said he had witnessed Hump Finkley of Chompin Choppers drinking from a carton of chocolate milk. I said I was sorry I'd had to leave early and miss it.

It took me twenty minutes to convince the two of them to drive to the LA airport and get on the first flight with an O'Hare connection to Albany. But after I described my own plans for the night and promised to cover all expenses from a special account I planned to open soon, they took mild grudging pity and agreed to do it.

I shut off the car, locked it, and explored the neighborhood, which was quiet except for the plop of wet snow plummeting from utility lines. I glanced up at Flo Trenky's heavily curtained front windows, then went around the block and down an alley, counting houses as I went. The snow in the alley was heavy and deep. My feet were cold. I kept wiping my nose and wished Timmy were there to produce a hanky from his sleeve, stitched with the seal of the New York state legislature.

The Trenky property, like its neighbors, had a crumbling board fence walling off the alley from a narrow yard. The gate of the Trenky fence was ajar, lodged in a snowdrift, which I was glad to take note of. I entered the yard, slogged through the drifts, and crouched below the decrepit three-story back porch, which clung to the rear wall of the house feebly, as if it would soon lose its benumbed grip and tumble away. Stairs ran up to the second floor of the porch and on to the third.

I now knew how I could distract Fay and get inside the house. It seemed to me he was making it too easy for me, but I had to admit to myself that I did not know what kind of awful security devices Fay might have arranged for the two and a half million inside the house.

For just an instant it went through my mind that maybe the five suitcases contained no millions at all, but actually held Fay's summer wardrobe or his leather-bound indexed complete set of Hustler magazine, or fifty stolen car stereos, or-could it be? — three hundred copies of Fridays edition of the Los Angeles Times. I tried hard to push these pessimistic and additionally confusing thoughts out of my head.

I moved rapidly back to the Cumberland Farms store, bought another cup of black vinegar along with four plain yogurts and a packet of plastic spoons, and climbed back into the car. I set the heater on medium and tuned in The Jazz Decades on WAMC. I watched Flo Trenky's front door. If Mack Fay went any place, I wanted to know what he was taking along. If he had the bags, I'd follow. If he didn't, I'd stay put. I cranked my seatback down a couple of notches and sat there watching, waiting for help to arrive from across the continent.