Pursuit: A Novel

30

It was late summer, and the humidity made droplets of sweat form on Prescott’s glass of beer and run onto the table while he watched Dick Hobart getting ready for the day’s customers. Every afternoon for the past week, the air would grow heavier and thicker, until it took an effort even to sit still, and then a sudden, faint breeze would rustle the leaves on the trees outside, and the droplets would come, big fat globs of water that exploded on the hot tar of the streets and disappeared in a steam that smelled of dust and plants and electricity. The drops came more quickly then, and the rain pounded down, cooling the hot stones and the cracked, dry ground. It lasted fifteen minutes, until the excess had been exhausted, and then stopped. Ten minutes after that, the air would begin to feel close again, but the sun had lost some of its hard, harsh power, and the long, slow decline into evening began. The day-heated air seemed to be old and static, not moving at all.

People were out in the evening this week. Prescott saw them walking up sidewalks or sitting on their front porches after the sun went down, standing in line to get into restaurants that served food that wasn’t as good as they’d have cooked at home if they could bear it, or waiting outside air-conditioned theaters to see movies that they had selected on the basis of starting time. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and as Dick Hobart’s helpers and bartenders lifted cases of bottles over the bar to stock the refrigerators and liquor shelves, Prescott could see that their shirts were already wet down the spines. The sweat was forming on Dick Hobart’s forehead, and each time he bent over, it would drip onto the lenses of his glasses. He came up with four whiskey bottles, set them on the bar, then walked over to Prescott, wiping his lenses on the front of his white shirt, which just smeared them. “I love this weather,” he said.

“It’s an ill wind and all that,” Prescott said.

“That’s the truth,” Hobart agreed. “Ever since the temperature went up, I can barely keep the bar stocked, and we’ve had to keep customers waiting in the parking lot from about eight o’clock until closing.” He grinned. “I’d fit them in somehow, but the damned fire marshals come to see me more in this weather, too.” He leaned forward on the bar close to Prescott’s table and looked significantly at the sport coat Prescott had across his lap. “If you brought me something, I can look at it. I’m ready for a break, anyway.”

They walked to the unmarked door near the stage, along the concrete hallway, and into Hobart’s office, a converted storeroom with no windows. There was room only for a desk and two chairs, because Hobart’s filing system seemed to consist of papers thrown into empty liquor cartons and piled in rows along the wall. Hobart locked the door and turned up the air-conditioning while Prescott sat down. Prescott set the summer-weight sport coat on the desk and reached into the inner pocket. Inside was a small package wrapped and addressed to himself, so that in case of trouble he could drop it in a mailbox. He opened the brown paper and sat back.

Hobart looked at the three ladies’ watches, one by one.

“They all run good?”

“Yes,” said Prescott. “This Rolex retails for two thousand, two fifty. It’s about a year old. The Patek Philippe is thirty-five hundred new, but there’s a scratch on the crystal. The Omega is about fifteen hundred. The diamonds on the dial would be extra, but I’m pretty sure that was some kind of special order, so I’ll let that cancel them out.”

“What should we ask for them?”

Prescott squinted, then stared up at the ceiling. “Let’s say three thousand for the lot. If they have to get split, I’d like fifteen hundred for the Patek Philippe, and I’ll keep the others.” He was aware that Hobart was studiously keeping his eyes from resting on the antique brooch in the center of the open butcher paper.

Hobart lifted each of the watches, listened to it tick, and set it aside. “I’ll try.” He picked up a diamond engagement ring. “Looks like three-quarter carat.”

“That’s what I make it,” said Prescott.

“A thousand?”

“Done.”

He lifted a gold chain, tossed it up and down to feel the weight, examined the jeweler’s mark. “The workmanship is good, not too distinctive. A hundred an ounce?”

“Sounds okay,” Prescott said.

Hobart scrutinized each item, giving estimates and receiving Prescott’s approval. He never wrote down a price or notation of any kind, as though by tacit agreement there should be no evidence that the merchandise had passed into this little box of an office. He kept going until there was nothing left but the brooch.

He poked it with his finger, then picked it up and turned it around and around, examined the clasp, then set it on the desk.

“What do you want for it? Four or five thousand?”

“The center stone is an emerald, and it’s old, so there’s zero chance it’s been cracked and repaired with synthetic bond.”

“You’re sure?”

“The setting is Victorian.” He was silent for a moment. “I know it’ll have to be broken up, but the diamonds alone are worth about four. I’ll take eight for it, as is. If it doesn’t sell, I’ll split the stones myself and sell them off one at a time.”

Hobart shrugged. “Eight it is.” He looked at the jewelry he had moved to the side. “Three for the watches if they sell together, a thousand each for the six, seven, eight rings. Eight thousand for the brooch, I make it seven hundred for the chain. What’s that?”

“Nineteen thousand, seven hundred.”

Hobart stared at the merchandise. “If you’ll let me give you your money tomorrow, I’ll make it twenty even,” he offered.

“Okay,” said Prescott. He pulled his coat off the desk, but Hobart didn’t move.

“Bobby,” he said quietly, “if this is none of my business, I’ll drop it, but I don’t get the feeling you’re a happy man.”

Prescott stared at him thoughtfully, then shrugged.

“Is it Jeanie? Look, I’m your friend and I’m her friend, too. I know that if there’s something wrong, you’ll be able to work it out. She’s—”

“She’s great,” said Prescott. “We get along fine.” His reticence seemed to collapse as he met Hobart’s eyes. “I know you’re a friend, Dick, so I won’t bullshit you. It’s not a permanent thing. I’m too old for her, too old to have that kind of relationship with a woman who’s young enough to think about houses and kids.” He smiled sadly. “I’m a hell of a boyfriend, but pretty soon she’s going to have to put on her clothes and look for a husband. She knows it, and she knows that I know it.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” asked Hobart. “I don’t want to sound like I’m not taking it seriously, because I am. I’m sixty next May, and I’ve been having these thoughts for longer than you have. But I’ll tell you, life is short, and there’s time enough to be dead after the doctor says you’re dead.” He frowned. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”

Prescott was silent for a few seconds. “There is. I guess maybe Jeanie set it off, made me think about it again.” He transfixed Hobart with his eyes. “You already know I’ve been away.”

Hobart nodded, slightly, as though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know more.

“I keep thinking about all that time. Not just the time I spent inside, but the years it cost me to get to where I was doing okay before that, and then losing it all and having to start over.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “I made a mistake once. It made me a graduate of Corcoran State. Ever hear of it?”

“No.”

“It’s an ugly place. The guards used to set up these fights, just let two prisoners go at it until one of them couldn’t get up. Like gladiators.”

“You?”

Prescott shook his head. “No. Not me.” He sighed. “They saved that for guys they thought were troublemakers, and I never got their attention. I was in for four and a half years.”

“What for?”

Prescott smiled. “You didn’t believe it when I told you about the car washes, did you?”

“Hell no. Would you?”

Prescott said, “It was true. What I did was put most of my profits into things like that, so that no matter what I did, I would have a visible means of support that was dull enough to be real.”

“What were the profits from?”

“I had a crew. I would pick the place and case it, then breeze through, taking out the locks and alarms. Five minutes later, I’d send in the crew with a truck. I’d have one guy in a security uniform like a rent-a-cop. He’d drive up, open the gate, and then stand by it. The rest would load the truck and pull out. He’d lock the gate, go to his car, and drive off. We did construction sites, warehouses. Once we did a grocery store that was closed for the night. I paid my guys, made money. I bought the car-wash places.” He paused. “The mistake I made was branching out.”

“Into what?”

“I met a guy. His name was Mike Kelleher. He was a luggage thief.”

“You mean like in airports?”

“Yeah. He was the sneakiest bastard I ever saw. When he first talked to me, I went to watch him work one night. It was like he was invisible. People would be on the pay phones, he’d walk past, and their carry-on bags would practically get up and follow him. He would go to the baggage pickup, and if some idiot would stop on the way there to take a piss, Mike would have claimed his bags and be gone before he got there. He knew every trick. So I talked to him, and found that he was a great thief, but no businessman.”

“Why not?”

“He would get the bags, take them to his apartment, pop the locks with a screwdriver, and go through them. He took jewelry, money, stuff like that. Then he went out and dumped everything else. I say, ‘Mike! What are you thinking? Some woman has five hundred bucks cash and three thousand in clothes in her twelve-hundred-dollar Louis Vuitton bag, so you take the cash and toss everything else?’”

“Sounds stupid.”

“It was. He had first-rate hands and a third-rate brain. But first-rate hands are not a small thing, so I made a deal with him. He steals a suitcase. We open it together, only not with a screwdriver. I pick the lock, or cut the padlock off, or fiddle the combination. He takes the money, just like before, and we split the jewelry. I get the luggage, the clothes, whatever else there is, and pay him twenty-five bucks a bag. That works out for a while. I get enough bags, buy some more wholesale, and open up a shop in San Francisco. I also find lots of stuff Mike missed: electric toothbrushes with hollow handles and the good jewelry inside, secret pockets full of credit cards and traveler’s checks, a surprising amount of drugs. It grows into a good little sideline.”

“It does sound good.”

“I noticed a few inefficiencies, so I worked on those. Mike trains eight people—four women and four men, I insisted on that—to take bags off the conveyors in L.A. These are people who look right. No nineteen-year-olds, no minorities that the cops always jump just on spec. I work it out so every one of them is carrying a ticket for a flight to San Francisco. They go into the baggage claim, see the right chance, grab a bag. Do they go out to the street like thieves? No. That’s when cops grab you. If somebody misses his bag, what does he do? He looks first at that door, and runs out looking to see who took it. So what my people did was pick up a couple of bags, hand them off to another person, who walks back in the other door, checks the bags to San Francisco, and goes up the escalator to the departure gates. He flies to San Francisco, claims the bags, and delivers them to my store.” He stared into the distance. “It worked. Everything we tried worked. I bought the car washes, and made money on them, too.”

“So what happened?”

“Michael Jameson Kelleher.”

“What about him?”

“He never told me that he had a problem, and I didn’t ask him hard enough questions, I guess. He had a conviction. It made sense to me later. The reason he was so good was that he had been doing it a long time. Only nobody starts out being at the top of his game. They learn by making mistakes, and if you’re a thief, a mistake sends you to jail. Mike made a second mistake: not a big one, but big enough. He goes to the airport too often to oversee the way things are being done. The cops spot him, recognize him from his picture, and hustle him off to one of those rooms you see in airports with nothing written on the doors. They bullshit him into thinking they have tapes of him. He figures out that this time his sentence is not going to be a short one. It’s his second time, and this time he’s clearly the boss, and the thing looks very big and organized. He spills his guts, rats us all out, and agrees to keep running the business like nothing has happened until they have enough evidence on us: special bags that are marked with paint that shows up only on ultraviolet light, videotapes, the whole thing.”

“You got convicted. What happened to him?”

Prescott’s jaw worked, the muscles on the side of his face knotting and smoothing out, over and over. “Nothing. He’s not charged with anything. The cops have it all on me, without him even testifying. There’s a tape of them going through my shop in San Francisco and nearly every bag glows in the dark, a tape of me paying a couple of thieves. The state declares my house, my two car washes, my bank accounts, stocks, and bonds to be stolen money, and confiscates them. I have some money hidden, but just about all of that goes to keeping my lawyers paid and working. I get ten years. I serve four and a half, which, with good behavior, counts as nine. Then I serve another six months on probation. So at the end of five years, all I have left is two assets: the Corvette outside, which was registered in the name of a girlfriend—she dumped me, so they never made the connection, but she was honest—and a whole bunch of stuff from suitcases that I’d hidden and never gotten around to selling off before I was arrested.”

“This stuff?” Hobart held up the package of watches and jewelry.

“No, that’s gone. This I picked up around Chicago over a period of a few months before I came here.” He shook his head sadly. “I had to go back to second-story work, just to build up some capital again.” He narrowed his eyes. “I never stop thinking about Michael Kelleher. You know where he is now?”

“Where?”

“Retired. He actually lives on a farm up in Minnesota.”

“A farm? What for?”

Prescott shrugged. “When the whole thing went south—me, the eight thieves, all my businesses—nothing happened to him. He’d made at least a million or two. They didn’t charge him with anything, so how could they take it? I know that the reason he left L.A. was that he thought I’d get out and come looking for him.”

“To kill him?”

Prescott stared at him. “What would you do?”

Hobart considered the question for a moment. “I guess the same. Why haven’t you?”

Prescott’s jaw was working again. “They know it.”

“Huh? Who knows it?”

“Kelleher, for one. That part is good. I hope the son of a bitch has nightmares every night, and can’t eat a meal without getting a bellyache and throwing it up. But the part that’s bad is the L.A. police. They knew it like they could read my mind. My probation officer used to give me lectures about it, after five years. The last time I checked in with him, he said it again.” He frowned. “Anything happens to Kelleher, I’m going away.”

“Would you kill him?” asked Hobart. “I mean if you had a foolproof way to do it and get away with it?”

“In a second.”

“There may be a way,” said Hobart. “If you’ve got the money, I may be able to get somebody to help you.”