“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.”
31
Varney walked toward the office, wary of the world around him, reading the sights as though he were working. For many paces he kept his eyes ahead and unfocused, so they would not be looking directly at anything, but receiving messages from the matrix of sights. Anything that moved was alive or dangerous, and his eyes would focus and evaluate it, then release it and go unfocused and receptive again. He used tricks to check behind him: reflections in windows, pauses and turns that were studied and small and unthreatening but gave him a chance to sweep the street behind. He did not limit his view to the street level but scanned roofs and upper windows while they were still far enough away to make turning or raising his head unnecessary, then swept them again as he passed. His ears were attuned to the sounds of motion and life—footsteps, sudden changes in the pitch of a car engine, a click or slide of metal on metal—because motion and life were the sources of all possible trouble.
He felt his pride in his senses, his cunning, his strength slowly returning, but he was restless and dissatisfied. He had been in a terrible period of his life ever since he had heard of Roy Prescott. He felt as though he had come upon a mangy, growling dog in the sidewalk, and on an impulse—not even a decision—given it a half-hearted kick to get it out of his way and teach it a lesson. It had not yelped and slunk away with its tail between its legs. It had clamped its jaws on his ankle and held on. After that, everything had turned painful and hard. He felt as though he still could not get loose. Everybody that he had met since then had gotten the better of him, because he had not come to them whole and well. He had been feeling the steady grinding of those teeth on his ankle, already through the flesh and into the bone, and dragging the dead weight of that big, filthy, mangy dog. He had let his control of his life go—not in a decision, but in a fit of preoccupation—and had not been able to clutch it again. He was nearly broke, his money leaking away in Tracy’s complicated assessments that made him pay for every second he was in Cincinnati, every moment of invisibility.