Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER EIGHT

When I finished my summarization of the day’s events, Dorsey O’Shea asked, “Who are you, Tommy? Really?” She was sitting across from me in her breakfast nook in her silk hostess dress that looked as if she had nothing on underneath, her chin on one hand, staring at me with narrowed eyes.

“Just a guy in over his head.”

“You don’t expect me to believe all that hooey, do you?” She got up from her chair. “Killers, car wrecks, Russian spies… sounds like something from a movie. Things like that don’t happen in real life. Give me a break!”

The irony of the moment was not lost on me. Why do women refuse to believe me when I tell the truth, yet buy every word when I lie to them? I finished my drink and stood. “Help me unload the car.”

She didn’t want to — that was plain. While she was trying to figure out a way to toss me out of the house on my keester, she reluctantly trailed along behind me. The first thing I pulled from the trunk of the car was the MP-5. I handed it to her. “Carry this. And be careful — it’s loaded.”

I got my soft bag, closed the trunk, then led the way back into the house. She followed along carrying the gun in both hands.

I sat down on one of the sofas near the fireplace, took the gun from her, and laid it on the floor.

“That’s a submachine gun?”

“Yep.”

“Never saw one before.”

“Help me with this suitcase.” It was sitting by the end of the couch. I pulled it around and opened it, then brought out several handfuls of paper, which at this stage of the game were smashed in there like so much trash. I passed her a couple handfuls.

Goncharov had tiny, cramped handwriting, nearly illegible. The fact that he used the Cyrillic alphabet and wrote in Russian didn’t help. It could have been Sanskrit for all I knew. I pondered that verity for a moment — the bodies I had seen that morning had been real enough, and the man I killed hadn’t faked it, yet I had no verification for Kelly’s statement that these notes were purloined copies of KGB files. Were they? Really?

After a minute or two Dorsey put the pages I had given her back in the suitcase. She placed two more slabs of wood on the fire, poked it up some, then sat down beside me on the sofa and stared moodily at the flames.

The silence grew and grew. “Was the guy the fiancé?” I asked finally.

“Oh, no. We broke up months ago.” She shrugged dismissively. “Geoff is an outside artist. I am thinking about sponsoring him.”

“Outside? He does statues in the park?”

“No, silly. He’s outside the establishment. He has no formal artistic training.”

“Oh.” The fire popped a few times, then settled down. “Guess I’m an outside artist, too.”

She gave me a withering look.

“How come you never suggested sponsoring me?”

“For Christ’s sake, Tommy! You killed several men today, and now you’re sitting here in front of my fire trying to be funny.”

“I’m just happy to be alive.”

“I never met anyone so callous.”

I made a rude noise. Then I kicked off my shoes, stretched, wiggled my toes, and indulged in a huge yawn. Frankly, I felt pretty good… tired and mellow. You gotta admit, being alive has its attractions.

“I want a drink,” she said, and stood. “Do you?”

“Sure. Whiskey, please.”

While she was gone I surveyed the room. It didn’t look as if she had changed anything since I last saw it, back when I thought that she and I…

Dorsey’s great-grandfather was a bootlegger, had been mobbed up, bribed cops and judges and county officials, shot it out with the competition, all of that… got modestly rich and retired when they repealed Prohibition. He bought this estate in the thirties and built the mansion. He had only owned it a few years when his ticker stopped dead one night while he slept.

The bootlegger’s only daughter married a fast-talking salesman who thought cars were the coming thing. He used the bootlegger’s money to build a string of car dealerships around Washington in the late thirties. During and after World War II he got rich when Washington’s population exploded and the mass exodus to the suburbs began.

The car dealer’s daughter, Dorsey’s mother, was a hippie. She flitted off to San Francisco, smoked pot, sang peace songs, and stretched the concept of free love nearly to the breaking point, according to Dorsey. She and Dorsey’s father — another hippie who didn’t need to dirty his hands with work after he married Dorsey’s mom — filled their days with manifestos, politically significant demonstrations, general hanging out, and recreational drugs. They joined communes several times. They were in California protesting the Vietnam War and searching for the meaning of life when they drove their car over a cliff near the ocean one morning during the wee hours. Dorsey thought they were probably strung out at the time.

When her grandparents died Dorsey inherited it all, the mansion, the estate, the money, and the dealerships. She dabbled in starving artists and porno filmmakers and hard cases like me.

She came back from the kitchen with the whiskey and nestled beside me on the couch. Amazingly, after the day I’d had, the heat and pressure of her body against mine felt very good.

“Aren’t you chilly in that outfit?” I asked.

“A little.”

I pulled an afghan from the back of the sofa and put it over her.

“So what are you going to do about this mess?”

“Haven’t decided.” I couldn’t help myself. I draped an arm over her shoulder and pulled her close.

“Could call the police, you know.”

“And have a hit team show up instead of the cops? No thanks.”

She rested her head on my shoulder.

The fire burned down as we sipped our drinks. I was acutely conscious of how she felt snuggled up against me. And smelled.

My eyelids grew heavy. Getting up the stairs was going to take some doing. “Sorry to barge in on you like this,” I said.

“I’m glad you came. The artist was a bit of a snob.”

“A big house like this, moldy old money, a beautiful woman? What the hell does he want?”

“It was pretty obvious that I didn’t know much about art.”

“So it was a rescue! Glad I got here in the nick.”

“Oh, Tommy, what’s wrong with us? You and me? Why didn’t it work for us?”

“If I could answer questions like that, woman, I’d be getting rich with my own call-in radio show.” Actually I had a theory, but that didn’t seem to be the time or place. The fire felt good and she felt better, snugglely, with promising bulges and curves.

As I sat there basking in her aura, my mind wandered. Who were those guys?

That was a problem I couldn’t solve just then.

I dropped it and slid my hand inside the afghan. Yep, she was wearing nothing under that slinky thing. A scene from one of those porno flicks shot through my little mind. Feeling guilty, I retracted my stray appendage and used it to put the whiskey where it belonged.

When I finished my drink, the moment could be avoided no longer. “What bed do you want me in?”

“Mine.”

That response made me smile. “I was hoping you would say that,” I told her warmly. I hoisted the submachine gun and carried it up the stairs while she locked up and turned off the lights.

I awoke about three in the morning. I had been sound asleep and a moment later was fully awake. Dorsey O’Shea was curled up with her back against mine, breathing deeply, totally relaxed.

I checked my watch, then lay in the darkness listening to the sounds, wondering why I had come so fully awake.

I sneaked out of bed, and pulled on trousers and a shirt. The submachine gun was where I had left it, propped on its butt in one corner. I put the pistol in my trouser pocket and picked up the MP-5. Dorsey didn’t awaken as I eased the door open and crept out. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood in the darkness listening.

The old house was deathly quiet. The bootlegger built it solid.

I eased open the door to Kelly Erlanger’s room, stood and listened to her breathe as she slept. Finally I closed the door as softly as I could, making sure it latched.

I worked my way slowly down the stairs, stopping frequently to listen.

Okay, maybe I was being paranoid. I didn’t think yesterday’s killers could possibly find us this quickly, but what the hey, I had a lot to be paranoid about. The truth of it was that I was damned worried. I assumed the Russians wanted Goncharov dead. Yet those guys yesterday weren’t Russians. And they knew precisely where to find Goncharov, ensconced in a top secret government safe house and surrounded by armed guards. They arrived armed with serious weapons — you can’t buy MP-5s at your local sporting goods store. These popguns came from an arsenal somewhere… probably a government arsenal.

And who were the killers? What did they do during the day when they weren’t sneaking around in ghillie suits gunning people down? Where did they live? Were they on some kind of retainer, or were they an ad hoc group hired for one job?

Regardless of how those questions shook out, if the assassins wanted to make the job a clean sweep they were still after Kelly Erlanger and me.

I was going to have to find out who was hiring these dudes if I wanted to get very much older. Somehow, some way, I had to put that someone out of action.

I padded around the old house from window to window, cradling the submachine gun in my arms and looking out into the dark, wet night, thinking about the problem.

The guy I needed on my side was my boss, Sal Pulzelli.

Dorsey kept her telephone books in the kitchen in a large drawer under the phone. I rooted through the one she had for northern Virginia. There he was, in Dunn Loring. An apartment building, apparently. I made a note on a piece of scratch paper and put the telephone books away.

Most householders in metro Washington have books of maps; Dorsey was no exception. After locating Pulzelli’s street, I figured out how to get there. I took the map with me, just in case.

At this hour White’s Ferry at Leesburg probably wasn’t running, so I drove southeast to the beltway and crossed the Potomac on the Legion Bridge. Traffic on the beltway was fairly light at that hour of the morning. The eternal rebuilding efforts were apparently occurring someplace else that summer.

As I drove I thought about Salvatore Pulzelli, a career soldier in Washington’s army of paper-pushers. He didn’t smoke, drink, or cuss — a real party animal, I’m telling you — watched his weight, wore conservative department-store suits and drab, uninspired ties, kept his desk neat and shipshape, and, truly, was a decent sort of guy. If he had any hobbies he didn’t talk about them.

I knew very little about his personal life. He never wore a wedding ring, nor had I ever heard him mention a wife. I didn’t know if he had a girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever. When I first got to know him I had wondered if perhaps his demeanor was an act — perhaps he lived a secret life in the Washington kinky sex scene — but finally I realized that was pure fantasy. He wasn’t the type.

I sure hoped he lived alone, though. Without a dog.

It was ten minutes after four in the morning when I found Pulzelli’s building. There were four apartment buildings in a row along the street, each about about ten stories high. The street was a wide one decorated with speed bumps to keep the local auto mechanics fully employed. Pulzelli lived in the first building. I drove on by and parked in the parking lot of the second one.

I got out and locked the car — I left the MP-5 in the trunk — and stood looking and listening. There wasn’t a soul in sight, just a sea of cars under lights mounted on poles. The stark scene was relieved somewhat by scraggly young trees in the ribbon-thin borders.

No security patrol, no early risers or late partygoers that I could see. I walked toward the nearest apartment building, then around it, keeping in the shadows. Once around the building, I angled across the parking lot toward Pulzelli’s tower.

I was hoping the FBI wasn’t watching everyone I knew, waiting for me to break cover. Of course, if a watcher was sitting in one of these cars, I was dead meat. It was a serious risk, but a necessary one. I needed Pulzelli’s help.

The lobby of Pulzelli’s hive was empty. Security cameras were mounted high in every corner. A computer sat on a small podium where perhaps a security guard had once stood vigil. It looked as if the owners had bought a computer and fired the guard. I typed Pulzelli’s name into the computer… voilà! Apartment 310.

I called him on the telephone, which rang and rang. After ten rings I gave up.

Seventeen minutes after 4:00 A.M. Don’t tell me he’s out partying! Pulzelli?

The elevator required a card to activate it. I walked around the elevator shaft to the door to the fire stairs. This door would be fitted with a push bar on the inside so that anyone coming down the stairs could exit through the door, yet there would be a conventional lock securing the door from this side. That lock I could pick.

When I saw the door a cold chill ran up my spine. The door had been forced with a crowbar, which bent the metal so that the lock no longer latched. It had taken a strong man to do that.

The door came open with a groan — the hinges hadn’t seen oil since the building went up. Once inside the stairwell, I removed the pistol from my belt and checked the safety. I went up the stairs making as little noise as possible, which meant anyone but a deaf man could have heard me. Sound reverberated around inside that concrete staircase as if it were a kettledrum.

At the door to the third floor, I paused, checked the pistol again, then eased the door open with my left hand. No one in the hallway.

Pulzelli’s apartment was four doors away from the elevator. The lock appeared intact.

I knocked. Waited… no sound.

Finally put my ear to the door.

The lock wasn’t any big deal. I hoped he didn’t have the chain on, though.

Took me about two minutes to pick the lock and open the door. No chain.

I went in with the gun in my hand.

Salvatore Pulzelli was lying naked on the living room floor. Apparently he had been strangled with a wire garrote. His arms, chest, and crotch were smeared with blood, which hadn’t completely dried. His pajamas were on the floor near him, so I used the top to swab at one arm. Lots of little cuts.

He must have opened the door for them. They tortured him, then killed him.

The apartment wasn’t large. In addition to the living room, which doubled as a home office, there was a kitchen, a bath, and two bedrooms, one of which was obviously for guests. I checked the rooms to see that they were empty — anything was better than looking at Pulzelli.

Standing in the living room with my back to the body, I managed to get my stomach under control and tried to get my brain in gear. Did the killers ask him about me? Was it me they were trying to find?

The killers hadn’t been gone long. Pulzelli’s blood hadn’t dried to a crust.

I used a kitchen towel to keep from leaving fingerprints on the telephone in the kitchen. Willie Varner’s telephone rang and rang. He didn’t answer.

Oh, man!

I remembered to pull the apartment door shut behind me and checked to ensure that the lock engaged.