“People could die,” I said when he came back.
“And you staking out the drop site will prevent that?” He put the basketball into the small of his back and used it to lean against the rusty fence. A cut from that fence needed a tetanus shot. “Look, I checked around as you asked. Chernek’s lost some clients, and a couple of his analysts have quit, but those things happen when the market takes a tumble. Financial guys get blamed, they lose clients, and the junior associates take off for other pastures.”
“The Bohemian is hurting for money.”
Leo wiped his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve. “Like almost everybody, including thousands of brokers. But they’re not going around setting off bombs. Besides, you’ve got a direct link with the bomb that went off in 1970. Same paper for the note, same kind of explosive. Why not concentrate on that?”
“I don’t like the way the Bohemian’s so willing to fork over half a million dollars to whoever it is. Maybe he doesn’t mind because he’s giving the money to himself.”
“He’s doing what he’s told. He’s taking his orders from the board of rich people, like you are taking orders from him.”
“What if the bomber is one of them?”
“One of who?”
“One of the Members. I told the Bohemian the bomber could be an insider, a Member.”
“I’ll bet he loved that.”
“He brushed it off.”
“Of course he did.”
“I don’t like it, Leo. The Bohemian should be looking at everybody as a potential suspect.”
“He’s doing the obvious, paying off the guy like last time, hoping he’ll go away for another few decades.” Leo shook his head and pushed himself off the fence. “What are you going to do tonight when it’s collection time? Jump out of your garage and yell, ‘Stop, bomber’?”
“I’m going to take a few pictures. Get the license plate number, maybe follow the car.”
“What if he spots you? What if he’s got a gun?”
“I’ll stay well back. The important thing is not the tail, it’s the license plate and the description of the man.”
Leo stepped in front of the basket and prepared to shoot. “Dek, half the things I see are forgeries. I do my analysis, make my report to the people who hired me, and that’s it. What they do with the information is up to them. Sometimes, a bad piece I’ve examined pops up later at a different house, with a fake attribution. I don’t second-guess my clients, I don’t rat them out, don’t announce they’ve passed off a forgery. I just do what I’m hired to do.”
“No one dies because of that.”
Leo aimed the ball and fired. It hit the backboard and dropped onto the metal rim, where it teetered for a full five seconds before, incredibly, wobbling and falling through the hoop.
“Yes,” Leo shouted, waving his skinny white arms like a scarecrow on speed. “Game called on account of victory.” He snatched the ball before I could grab it, tucked it tight against his stomachlike a wide receiver hugging a miracle catch, and started running for the opening in the fence. I hustled to catch up with him.
“Didn’t you tell me Chernek has increased security at Gateville?” he asked as we slowed across the hard dirt and tufts of crabgrass.
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that doing the right thing?”
“Of course.”
“Isn’t paying off the bomber the most reasonable thing they can do? Especially since the last time they paid off, the guy stayed away for close to forty years?”
There was nothing to say because he was right. We got to Endora’s purple Grand Am.
Leo’s worried eyes scanned my face. “You’re sure it’s wise to watch the drop behind their backs? What if you scare the guy away, and that causes him to blow up another house?”
“What’s my alternative?”
“Let it alone. You’ve done what you were hired to do, which was to have the letters examined.”
I held out the keys to the Jeep. He shrugged, shook his head, and gave me the keys to Endora’s Grand Am.
I got to the parking lot behind Ann Sather’s at five thirty. Though the temperature was still in the upper eighties, I wore my blue Cubs cap, dark Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a tan jacket with the collar turned up. I looked like a pervert.
I pushed up the overhead door, drove the car in, got out, and pulled the door down. The mold cultures in the garage were fetid from steaming in the sun all day. I took off my jacket, cracked open the service door for some air, and tried not to breathe. Stanley had said he would make the drop right at dark. I had three hours to kill.
I’d done a couple of dozen surveillances. Most of them were for insurance companies, on people who’d filed false injury claims, buttwo were for runaway kids, and one was on a guy suspected by one wife of having another wife. All were agonizing, hours and hours of looking at nothing. I like surveillance like I like warts.
I pulled out a small, old wood kitchen chair from Endora’s trunk and sat in the shadows of the side window with my beat-up college copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I need to read Thoreau every few weeks because he chucked it all and went to a rustic cabin in the woods to think. For him, life got understandable when he realized that rich people were herd animals. I wondered what he would have thought of people lumbering along in mammoth S.U.V.’s, chatting on cell phones about luncheon plans or tennis games with other people lumbering along in their own big S.U.V.’s. Thoreau was a pacifist, an environmentalist, and a nonviolent person, but I like to think that he would have been mightily tempted to drive the whole herd, still chattering, into Walden Pond.
I read Thoreau until eight thirty, when it got too dark to see the words. I put the book back in the car, took out my ancient Canon F.T.Q.L. with the long lens, set it on the folding tripod I’d brought, and checked the focus. It was just about dark. I pulled the chair closer to the window to wait.
At nine, a big, square light went on behind Ann Sather’s, likely from a timer. It flooded the area around the Dumpster with bright light, and I wondered if the bomber had thought to check out the back of the restaurant at night before he sent the note. When he came for the money, he was going to be lit up like Wrigley Field during a night game. It was dumb, and he hadn’t made dumb moves before.
At nine twenty, two kids came out of the shadows of the side alley, bouncing a basketball. It echoed loudly off the brick walls of the buildings. The kids moved diagonally across the empty parking lot, passing the ball back and forth in one-bounce shots, and disappeared down the main alley.
At five minutes to ten, a blue full-sized Chevy van fitted with awheelchair side lift pulled into the east edge of the lot. It cruised slowly behind the buildings until it nosed to a stop next to Ann Sather’s Dumpster, right under the light. The driver’s door opened, and Stanley Novak, wearing red plaid shorts, an untucked dark knit shirt, and a yellow baseball cap, got out. He reached back into the van and pulled out a filled black garbage bag. He carried the bag slowly around the van to the Dumpster, lifted the lid, and set the bag inside. The bag didn’t go all the way down. He bent into the Dumpster and moved things around until the bag disappeared. He closed the Dumpster lid, got back in the van, and drove out of the lot.
All of his actions had been slow and easily visible in the bright light. Stanley had made sure that the bomber, wherever he was hiding, had gotten a good look at him leaving the money.
I peered through the lens to check the camera focus once more and sat back to wait.
At eleven fifteen, an old green Ford sedan with a faded cardboard temporary license taped inside the rear window pulled into the lot and rolled to a stop in the shadows a hundred feet from the Dumpster. I swung the telephoto lens on the car, but it was too dark to read the numbers on the temporary license. I turned the lens back to the Dumpster sitting isolated in the white light, double-checked the focus, and lifted my head to watch the Ford.