‘You and your partner, you want to take me to the DA?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Like I’m some kind of fucking trophy.’
‘I told ya the freak wouldn’t like it.’
Potter laughed. ‘In my whole adult life,’ he declared, ‘nobody has ever talked to me like this. It takes some gettin’ used to.’ He settled back in his seat and called out, ‘Hey, Mike, you think you could bring me that one last beer? The beer I been practicing all my life to drink?’
Blair waited for me to nod, then drew off a mug of Guinness. He brought it over to the table, careful to remain out of the line of fire, and set it down. Potter turned far enough to raise the mug in Sparkle’s general direction, then drank it dry.
‘Make up your mind, Linus. Which way do you wanna go?’
Linus answered by rising to his feet, then turning to face Adele and the gun she now held with both hands. Though he was seeing her weapon for the first time, his expression didn’t change. ‘You gonna shoot me, Adele?’ He spread his own hands apart. ‘I mean, I’m not threatening anyone here.’
After a moment, Potter took a step forward, then another, each step measured and deliberate. When they were ten feet apart, Adele cocked the revolver, the sharp click seeming almost obscene in my ears. Linus came to a stop at that point and I hastened to take myself out of the line of fire, circling to Potter’s right. If Potter took another step, I was certain that Adele would kill him.
Potter let his hands drop to his sides as he looked past me to Mike Blair. On the way, our eyes met for just a moment. The rage and the hate were gone now, discarded like a Halloween mask. In their place, I registered layer upon layer of pain, a bone-deep sorrow that revealed everything the freak wanted to hide. Mike Blair stared directly into those eyes for several seconds. I don’t know what he saw, or even if he recognized anything beyond the immediate threat. But Mike’s tone, when he commented, was far from compassionate.
‘If she blows your fucking brains out,’ he declared, ‘I’m gonna claim you made a try for your weapon.’
Potter flinched, the rebuke sharp enough to sting. He had no friends here. Slowly, he let his head come round far enough to face me.
‘More than I don’t wanna go to prison, I don’t wanna die,’ he explained with an apologetic shrug of his massive shoulders. ‘Would ya believe that?’
‘How about more than you want revenge?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘more than that, too.’
I came up behind him, then reached across his body to jerk his automatic out of its holster. As I backed away, I looked over at Adele. What I saw in her eyes was disappointment.
‘Besides,’ Potter said, ‘I swear, I was hardly involved.’
‘Just an innocent bystander?’
He winked. ‘Harry, you’re hell on wheels.’
FORTY-TWO
My first instinct was to put the whole business behind me. After all, the bad guys were knocking on the DA’s door, each begging for an opportunity to testify against the others, and against Paco Luna whose operation was being systematically attacked by a task force that included the FBI and the DEA. About this outcome, I argued to myself, there was nothing not to like.
I made that rationalization last a couple of weeks, but it was like the first time you try to give up cigarettes. Somehow, the cravings just won’t go away. In this case, what I craved was an answer, and not even the mini-honeymoon Adele and I were thoroughly enjoying was enough to sooth the itch.
‘I have to do something about it,’ I finally told Adele.
‘Corbin,’ she replied, ‘are you taking this personally?’
I watched the knowing smile on her lips gradually expand, then came back at her with the wickedest shot in my arsenal. ‘Ya know, Adele, if you weren’t a girl, I’d hit you with this pillow.’
The proof was easy enough to gather, no more than the afternoon it took to track Justin Whitlock to an apartment on Avenue S, in Brooklyn. But I wasn’t satisfied with the proof, not even close. I wanted to know why, and that took a while, forcing us once again to dip into Adele’s old-girl network. As it turned out, we were well into the month of March by the time I fired up the Nissan and started out for Port Washington on the north shore of Long Island.
Bill Sarney was living the good life. His three-story colonial had wings at either end, one newly constructed, by the look of the still-raw brick, and a cobblestone driveway that swept up to the front of the house. Despite the fog, the paint job on an S-Class Mercedes parked in that driveway gleamed as though lit from within.
The money for all this high living came from Bill Sarney’s wife, Rebecca, a senior partner at some Wall Street law firm with too many names to remember. I’d met Rebecca the few times I’d been out to the house, and I only had two memories of her. The first of her small and graceful hand, offered with the palm down, the second of her clear devotion to her husband and her two children.
The front door opened as I walked up the flagstone path, and Bill Sarney stepped onto the porch. He was wearing gray wool slacks, freshly pressed, and a pale blue shirt that fit tightly over the small bulge of his belly.
‘Rebecca took the kids to her sister’s,’ he explained as I walked past him. ‘We’ve got the place to ourselves.’
He closed and double-locked the door behind us, then led me through the living and dining rooms, to that newly built wing on the side of the house which he’d turned into a billiard room. I smiled appreciatively. The green felt on the table was so smooth it might have been combed fur.
‘You want something to drink?’ he asked. ‘A beer, maybe?’
‘Sure, a beer would be fine.’
Sarney opened a small refrigerator, removed two bottles of Bass Ale, poured them into a pair of tall glasses bearing unidentified crests. I got a shield on my glass, flanked by two standing lions who seemed about to break into song.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘how’re they treatin’ ya, Harry?’
‘No worse than expected.’ I hesitated for a moment, then changed the subject. ‘You hear about Tony Szarek?’
That caught his attention. His chin came up for a change and he looked directly into my eyes. ‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Szarek was killed by his girlfriend’s brother, a man named Ryszard Gierek. It was funny, Bill, how it went down. For reasons he took to the grave, Szarek told his lover that she was his sole heir when he didn’t even have a will. Some kidder, that Tony.’
‘How’d you know,’ he asked, ‘about the Szarek arrest?’
‘I got a pipeline into the task force, but that’s not the point. What I’m talking about is the irony. When Szarek’s death came up suspicious, me and Adele, we assumed that it was linked to the David Lodge killing. That got us trying to connect Lodge, Jarazelsky, Russo and Szarek, which we eventually did. Meanwhile, after drinking himself into unconsciousness, Tony was capped by a Polish immigrant who collects baseball memorabilia.’
Sarney smiled, drawing his thin lips into a crooked grimace that seemed more pained than happy. ‘I take your point,’ he conceded, ‘but that’s how it goes sometimes. You try your best to draw a straight line between where you are and where you want to be, only the world doesn’t cooperate.’
I ignored the implications. ‘And Bucky Chavez, that was another one,’ I said. ‘Another irony.’
Maximo ‘Bucky’ Chavez, who had us connecting dirty cops in the Eight-Three with Paco Luna’s drug operation, had re-emerged a few days after my confrontation with Linus Potter. Subjected to an intense grilling, Bucky had finally admitted that he’d seen nothing more than a ‘white man in a suit’ enter Paco Luna’s town house. The rest — the part about a cop from the Eight-Three — was the product of his naturally dishonest imagination. And there was nothing suspicious about Chavez’s disappearing act, either. After a three-dollar hit on the number 437 netted him $1500, Bucky had quit Brooklyn to hang out with his ‘outside woman’ in Jersey City. Nina Francisco, he’d explained, would only have thrown the money away on something foolish. Like clothes for the kids.