The Lasko Tangent

Twenty-Eight

Martinson sat in an armchair, reading a copy of Sports Illustrated. He half-dropped the magazine, and stared at me with fearful unrecognition. His eyes asked who I was, but his mouth couldn’t form the words.

“I’m Christopher Paget, from the ECC. I’ve been looking for you.”

“My God,” he exclaimed, and his tone wasn’t grateful. I looked him over then. Tracy’s picture was a good likeness. He was tan and wiry, with black curly hair and chiseled features. The plaid slacks and oxford cloth shirt went with the expensive loafers. A well-preserved college boy from the early sixties, catnip for gullible women. What was wrong in him began in the myopic foxiness of the green eyes and bled subtly into his features, making them spoiled and vaguely weak.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he blurted.

I hadn’t expected this. I remembered the running footsteps in the corridor. “Why don’t you tell me on the way out?”

“Where are we going?”

“To the police.”

He shook his head. “Look, if I keep my head down, I won’t get hurt.” The words mixed fear and calculation. “You’re the one who got me into this mess.”

Tension raised my voice. “We’ll argue that later. Come on.”

Martinson’s hands clamped the chair as if it were a life raft. “They’ll kill me. They’ve already killed Alec Lehman.”

That stopped me for a moment. But there wasn’t time for questions. “Then you’re in a jam,” I said, “because now that I’ve found you, they’ll do just that.”

He hesitated, stiff with fear and resentment. I grabbed his forearm and pulled him up. He stumbled with me out the door, gaping at the bleak empty corridors. His voice was a savage whine. “Did Tracy tell you where to look?” I nodded and pulled him with me. “Stupid bitch,” he mumbled.

My grip tightened. “You know, Martinson, rescuing you is a real disappointment.” But I understood, in a way. He was a frightened man. I was frightened too.

The walk up the corridor seemed treadmill slow. The nurses’ station was empty. I looked quickly around. Except for Martinson, the wing was vacant.

Then I heard a drum roll of footsteps. A clump of figures appeared suddenly at the end of the corridor. I picked out Loring and the guard and two large men I didn’t know. The other man was tall and broad-built. Lasko. Whatever Martinson knew had flushed him out.

I felt Martinson blanch. “Jesus.”

I tried to put up a front. “Just let me handle this,” I said, without looking at him. Lasko was standing ahead of the group, waiting. Ahead must be the only way out.

We were within thirty feet of them now. Lasko’s face was a mask of controlled anger. Something I didn’t quite understand had pushed his plans awry, and it showed in his face. The two large men fanned out to either side of him, blocking our way. Loring and the guard hung back as if lost.

We got within ten feet and stopped. Lasko stared at us, eyes hard and calculating. The man to his left was bald, and watched us with a greyhound’s watery eyes. The other man was younger, with a mustache and thick brown hair. I wondered if they had guns. No one moved. I wished fiercely that I hadn’t come.

Lasko’s voice rang commandingly in the hall. “You’re very persistent, Mr. Paget, and you don’t pay attention when you should. But you’re not leaving.”

My brain pumped words in some panicky reflex. “We are unless you’re planning a mass murder.” I didn’t like my voice. My mouth felt artificially dry, as if the saliva had been sucked out.

A spark of interest crossed Lasko’s face. “All right. You’ve got my attention.” The carefully controlled voice made it sound as if we were discussing a business decision.

“You should have killed Martinson in the first place. But now I know what he knows.” Which wasn’t true. Lasko’s eyes snapped toward Martinson. But Martinson didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything. “So when you kill Martinson, you have to kill me too. And there’s a Boston cop who knows where I am.”

I shot a glance at Loring. He gaped at the word “murder” like a man listening to a foreign language, hoping he had somehow misheard. I went on. “You can’t trust Loring either. Kill us and the cops will be here tomorrow, poking around. He’s got his license to consider, not to mention his freedom.”

My voice had turned advisory. Lasko paused, as if he could hear my words coming from Catlow’s mouth. The two men at his side were cool and relaxed, waiting for orders. It could go either way, I thought. I was feeling the cold reality; for whatever reason, Lasko wanted us dead.

Lasko picked for words that could never hurt him. “You’re talking nonsense, Mr. Paget,” he said casually. “I doubt the people in your agency have ever authorized this.”

I pointed to the guard. He froze in stupefaction. “The cops will track him down too. So I figure you have to kill four people anyway. I probably left someone out. I saw a couple of nurses a while ago.”

Lasko’s eyes turned inward, as if he were deciding whether to wait. He said nothing more; there were witnesses all around him.

I started walking, steering Martinson to the right. Five feet between me and the mustached man. My stomach felt empty. The mustached man looked back, hand in his pocket, his eyes completely blank. He stepped back three feet, to see Lasko and me at once. We kept moving. The man took in Lasko with the corner of his eyes. Then a signal moved through them.

We reached him. His hand stirred in his pocket. Then he turned sideways. We passed him and turned the corner, heading for the entrance.

Loring stood to our left in an angular slouch, like some lone desiccated bird about to become extinct. We swept by. He stared at his feet.

The inner set of doors was a few feet ahead. Silence behind us. Our footsteps echoed in the corridor. Martinson looked white. My back burned with imagined gunshots.

We burst through the first set of doors. They closed behind us with a slow sigh. I grabbed the outer door. It opened. Fresh air splashed our faces.

We walked to the car and drove away.

Twenty-Nine

“Jesus,” Martinson kept saying. I steered back onto Route 9, my mind on automatic pilot. My hands were clammy, and my mind was numb with disbelief. Martinson was shivering uncontrollably next to me, like a malaria victim.

We rolled through Brookline toward Boston. It was still light out. I was glad; I would have flinched at each taillight in the dark. Martinson was jabbering this and that, about to break into a talking jag. I reached for the car radio, trying to collect my thoughts, but all I got was a folk song that was going nowhere and feeling sorry for itself doing it. I switched it off.

“How did Lasko get there?” Martinson’s voice was blaming me.

“Loring kept me waiting long enough. He probably called him.”

“Then why did he let us go?”

“Two possibilities. One is that Lasko decided to chance beating the Lehman thing and whatever you know, rather than kill someone else. Notice he didn’t say an incriminating word back there. The other is that he’ll take a shot at us, but away from witnesses, so he has some chance to walk away. I wouldn’t mind if you’d keep an eye out the back window.”

“For what?” he asked anxiously.

“For whatever looks like it’s following us.”

“Jesus,” he said again. He turned sideways and rested his chin on top of the car seat. His eyes seemed to strain clear back to the sanitarium.

“What happened?” I asked, as much for diversion as anything else.

“When?”

“Between St. Maarten and now?”

“What’s today?”

“Monday.”

His eyes crinkled. “Last Tuesday morning two guys who were with Lasko show up…”

I interrupted. “The ones from the sanitarium?”

“No, a crew-cut guy and one with a big, puffy nose. They said you were looking for me about the Carib deal. I asked why.” His voice cut loose. “They said never mind why-that I had to take off, right then. I said I didn’t want to-that I wanted to know what the story was. They said Lasko would talk to me later-not to make trouble. I said I wanted to call him. Then they told me I was in trouble too, if I didn’t move. Yeah, and they threatened my wife.” The last sounded like an afterthought. I suspected she always had been.

Martinson stopped to concentrate on the rear window.

“See anything?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Go on.”

“Oh yeah, well, they kind of hauled me to some rented car they had, like a prisoner. The bald one stepped back in the warehouse to talk to a guy named Kendrick.”

“I met him. Why did you hire him, to bite mailmen?”

“They stuck me with him. Anyhow, we drove to the airport. On the way out I was sort of complaining and one guy said I was just going to Boston, to be safe. We drove up to this Lear jet, and they said to call Tracy so she wouldn’t send out a search party. The mustached guy listens to make sure I don’t say anything out of line. I just tell her that I have to leave. The bald guy comes up to talk to his buddy while I’m still on, so I sort of whispered to Tracy that I’d be safe in Boston, so please not to make trouble. I wasn’t supposed to tell Tracy about Boston, and she wasn’t supposed to tell you.” He still sounded aggrieved.

I ignored that. “What happened next?”

“They flew me to Boston, with a stop in Orlando, I think. Anyhow, they took me out to the sanitarium. The room was all set up to be locked from the outside, in an empty wing-you saw it.”

“When did Lasko show up?”

“We got there at night. Lasko came out next morning. He said the Carib deal had some illegal aspects and that I was in it up to my ears. He scared the hell out of me. He can do that.”

“I know.”

“Then he said I just needed to keep my head low for a couple of weeks until he fixed the case. I kept saying I wanted to leave. He got angry then and hinted around that he’d already had Alec Lehman killed. I shut up after that.”

It still shook me. Believing it was bad. But hearing it was worse. “I can see why he was concerned,” I finally said.

His voice tightened. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re a witness now.”

Martinson lapsed into glum silence, staring out the back, while I tried to get a handle on it. Lasko was a bright man. But his actions had a harassed quality, as if something beyond his control were pushing him. I wondered what it was. Green, Martinson, and Lehman had been bad risks. The payoff was a murder and a kidnapping, and it kept getting worse.

We were closing in on Boston; Route 9 was getting ready to become Brookline Avenue again. City neighborhoods and traffic. Martinson started talking. “You know, Dr. Loring is very strange. He used to come in and want to talk about my anxieties, like I really was nuts. And then he’d start saying he had troubles too-that his hospital wasn’t making it. But he kept acting like I was his patient.” His voice rose indignantly. “I think he’s a fairy too.”

That amused me somehow. “That’s the least of his problems.”

Then I saw a black Cadillac, coming in the opposite lane. I tensed, knuckles white on the steering wheel. It came closer. I hunched, waiting. It moved abreast. I caught a glimpse of the driver. An old woman. It cruised serenely past. Damn, I thought.

Martinson had seen it. “What was that?” he croaked.

“Just my own shadow.” I wanted to talk now, bury my embarrassment. “How did you get caught up with Lasko in the first place?

“Look, am I going to be a witness?” he protested.

“About Carib? Yeah, unless you want to be a defendant.” Assuming the unlikely, I didn’t add, that I still had a job.

Martinson complained to the rear windshield. “It’s my damned wife that got me into all this. She didn’t need to talk to you. You know,” he burst out, “she can’t even have kids.”

“I guess that makes you the only child of your marriage.”

He stared at me. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

I eyed him sideways. “Look, you’re frightened. I understand that. I’m scared witless. What I can’t take is your bitching about Tracy.”

His ears perked at “Tracy.” “What’s my wife to you?” His voice italicized “my wife.”

“I met her. I liked her.”

“How much did she like you?” he snapped.

“Don’t be a fool. She’s in love with you, Lord knows why. But we were talking about the Carib deal.”

We were in Boston now, heading toward Fenway Park. Martinson brooded for a moment. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything, from the beginning.”

He turned back to the rear window. “I was working for Yokama Electric as a manufacturer’s rep for the American trade. We lived in Japan. The Yokama thing was my last job.” The phrase made it sound like the end of a very long list. “I’d been looking for a big opportunity, something where I could use my talents.”

I got a picture from Martinson’s eyes, glinting with shortsighted guile. A short-cutter scrambling for the main chance, outsmarting himself. I could see him rambling around Europe from one gamble to the next, until his excuses turned threadbare from overuse. And then Tracy would patch them up again.

He went on. “Part of the job was selling to Lasko Devices. Last June, Mr. Lasko came to Japan and asked for me. I’d never met him but he seemed to know about me. He said that he needed someone to help set up an import company on St. Maarten. I said I was interested. He offered me a two-year contract at seventy-five thousand a year and a hundred thousand bonus. It looked good and”-his voice admitted reluctantly-“it was more money than I’d ever seen.”

“How did you end up shown as the founder of Carib?”

Martinson’s tone got touchy. “It was part of the deal,” he said hurriedly. “Mr. Lasko wanted me to be the paper owner of Carib, so he could buy it from me. He had his people find the warehouse and set up all the paper work. Tax reasons, he said.”

“You believed that, naturally?” He didn’t answer. “Lasko’s corporate records show a sales agreement paying you a million-five. Did you think that was for tax reasons too?”

“Look, he was paying me a lot of money.”

“Dr. Loring told me pretty much the same thing.”

He digested that for a moment, still turned to the rear. I went on. “You got the money, I take it?”

Silence. I glanced sideways. He was staring down. Lasko’s money, and the greed for it, ran through the case like a dirty string. My tone was quiet. “Mr. Martinson, you’re not Lasko’s bonus baby anymore. Putting him away is your best means of self-defense. You’re also party to a laundering scheme which can land you in jail. You got in this mess courtesy of Lasko, with a big assist from yourself. It’s up to you to get out.”

He slumped silently against the seat. “All right,” I said, “let me help you out. This July, Lasko buys Carib from you for a million-five. Carib supposedly deals in chips. But Lasko was already getting chips from Yokama, so why did he need anything in the Caribbean? The company is a shambles, one pug ram-rodding two natives in a corrugated warehouse. You supposedly sold to Lasko in July, but you didn’t even sign the papers starting the company until earlier that same month. In fact, you didn’t own the company at all, but were hired by Lasko to run it. Yet, the corporate records show you as having received one-point-five million. The guy in charge, Kendrick, told me he’s never heard of Yokama. But the chips Carib was getting are Yokama chips. Only instead of getting them direct, they’re routing them through the Caribbean, which is expensive and just plain stupid from a business standpoint.

“Lasko set up the worthless company, came up with you as the bogus owner, and paid you off. As a laundering scheme, it’s beautifully simple. For some reason, Lasko needed money, a lot of it. He wanted to get a million-five out of his own company in a way that looked legitimate. He wanted to do it in a foreign country where we couldn’t trace the cash, and where he could take care of any tax complications from the sale. So he set up a dummy company, then bought it. The chips are a cover. But to make it work, you had to get the money.”

He was still slumped. “I got the money,” he acknowledged finally.

“What did you do with it?”

“Lasko”-Martinson’s voice demoted him-“arranged for me to cash the check at a bank in Curacao. So I did.”

“When was that?”

“About the third week of July.”

“What did you do with the money?”

“Lasko told me to fly it to Miami.”

“Did you do that?”

“Yeah. I put it in a briefcase, flew to Miami Airport, and put it in a locker. Someone else was supposed to pick it up.”

The reality of what had happened began to hit me. We were driving toward the fens, the broad grassy field near the ball park. Twilight now. I didn’t much notice. The facts formed and marched into place like well-drilled soldiers. I couldn’t believe it. But I did. And then the other fact hit me. I had made the big time. I knew enough for Lasko to need me dead.

“Goddamn it,” I said to the dark.

Martinson didn’t say anything.