It was close to midnight. He'd been standing outside Casey Ballantine's upscale brownstone in Brooklyn's increasingly trendy Cobble Hill district for hours, ever since he'd backtracked her address, rather than Carlos Barzun's, from the "CB" initials and the phone number on Ron Cashman's calendar.
Sammie's passing mention of the Seabee Group had been a lifesaver there, if a little misleading initially. Both the calendar and the legal pad that Willy had stolen from the Broad Channel house had proved confusing, cryptic, and largely counterproductive. Whether cautious or careless, Cashman had apparently been incapable of simply writing something down. Instead, he'd doodled, drawn arrows, circles, and boxes, and filled or connected them with initials and abbreviations whose sense was known only to him. There were dozens of these hieroglyphics covering many pages. Only Sammie saying "Seabee" had supplied the key.
Willy still wasn't sure what he was in the midst of tracking, though, having never heard of Casey Ballantine, but it was something, and given his growing impatience and his increasingly precarious position, he wasn't about to let the opportunity slip by. And there had been signs of life inside the brownstone: curtains being drawn and lights going on and off throughout his surveillance, as if someone had been moving around pursuing an evening's normal pattern.
Nevertheless, as the majority of these lights began to stay off, he started wondering about the benefit of standing there much longer.
Which was exactly when the last two lights died on the first floor.
Willy sighed, wondering what to do next. He'd known when he'd found this address that it was at best a long shot. Still, he thought, might as well wait another half hour.
It didn't take that long. Not two minutes later, the front door opened and a tall, blond, aristocratic young woman stepped out.
Willy readied his slender pocket telescope to get a closer look.
Keeping the door open with a small case she unhooked from her shoulder, the woman, presumably Casey Ballantine, began ferrying in and out of the house a small mountain of matching suitcases and several bags of what looked like canned and boxed groceries. As she neared completion, replacing the small case on her shoulder and slamming the door shut, an upscale, oversized silver SUV with New Hampshire plates appeared around the nearest corner and came purring to a stop before the piled luggage, followed moments later by a dark, very new BMW with tinted windows.
No one got out of the BMW, but from the driver's side of the first car, reminiscent of some doting hubby catering to an impatient mate, Andy Liptak emerged, apologizing with hand gestures and virtually leaping to move the woman's possessions into the back of the larger vehicle. As he did so, however, throwing open the rear door right in front of the other car's hood, he angrily but inaudibly summoned the driver to help him out. Then, all smiles once more, he went from lugging things himself to directing this second man-large, slow-moving, and transparently a bodyguard-in doing it for him. In the meantime, he chatted with the young woman, pecked her on the cheek, placed her case on the front passenger seat, and generally fussed about.
After all the bags had been put away and the bodyguard had returned to his vehicle, Liptak gave his girlfriend a squeeze and a kiss, helped her into the huge SUV, and waved good-bye as she drove off.
Then, clearly visible through the lens, his expression metamorphosed once more, turning hard and purposeful, and he walked back toward the BMW. Willy quickly memorized its New York plate number, as he had the New Hampshire one, and faded back into the shadows to retrieve his own vehicle, which he'd exchanged for Cashman's stolen one hours earlier.
He turned on the ignition, but not the headlights, and pulled into the street about a half block behind Liptak's car.
This final revelation linking Liptak to Cashman was less the emotional jolt it should have been and more the settling of the keystone into an archway of time and events dating back to when Willy had introduced his wife to his erstwhile best friend years ago.
Even in Vietnam, Andy Liptak had been a user. Not of drugs, although he'd certainly indulged there as well, but of people, and of any situation that allowed for the smallest abuse of trust. He'd called it working the system back then, of course, using the age-old cliche of the morally corrupt, and in the context of Vietnam, it had in fact appeared just shy of a virtue. He wasn't killing anyone, at least, just lying, stealing, and enriching himself-something he almost had to stand in line to do. Willy-the Sniper-immersed as he'd been in far darker exploits of his own, had barely given it a second thought. Andy had been a welcome source of normalcy to him: a drinking buddy, someone who didn't ask questions and to whom the war had seemed almost a lark.
Only later, when they'd met up in New York, had Willy wondered about those details, if only fleetingly, sidetracked as he'd been by his own demons and poor judgment.
Now, of course, it all came clear to him, like an unnecessary epilogue at the end of a bad play, supplied to those spectators too slow or self-absorbed to have understood the obvious.
As a result, instead of the satisfaction such discoveries usually gave him at the end of his knottier cases, here Willy just felt stupid and used-the last guy in the room to realize that the joke had been on him.
Depressed and distracted as he was by this realization, he didn't see a third car, its lights out like his own, pull into line down the street far behind him. They were still in Ron Cashman's small, weather-beaten bungalow in Broad Channel, so many of them now that it looked like a dentist's waiting room for short-haired, type-A overachievers. Cars clotted the narrow, dark street outside, and murmured cell phone conversations and the muted squawk and hiss of portable radios supplied a steady backdrop to the inner sanctum meeting in the living room between Ogden and his bunch, and a whole new group from the Customs/NYPD task force that Ogden had mentioned to Gunther. Joe Gunther himself, taking advantage of the comings and goings and the fact that he'd become an unknown but familiar face over the last few days, had tucked himself into a corner, hoping to milk his interloper's status for all it was worth. After they left this place, as Ogden had told him, his ties to the investigation would finally be severed.
Phil Panatello, a small, intense, dark-haired man from Customs, was in charge of the task force and was occupying the center of the discussion with Ward Ogden.
"Do you have a record on Casey Ballantine?" he was asking.
"Not a thing," Ogden explained. "Which is obviously why he used her. Having no rap sheet and being the buffer between Cashman's operations half of the business and Liptak's management half, she basically became a fire wall. If it hadn't been for Mary Kunkle knowing both sides, we might still be wandering about in the dark."
Panatello picked up the contents of the envelope Budd Wilcox had handed over hours earlier. It was now getting close to midnight. "Right. So, what was her story?"
"Kunkle used to be Andy Liptak's girlfriend. From what we pieced together, after they split up and she got totally hooked on dope, the guilt kicked in and he began covering her basic financial needs, if just barely. That's obviously something he'd see now as a big mistake. 'Cause while she might've been grateful enough when she was scraping bottom-assuming she could think that clearly-after she cleaned up, she decided she was due some compensation."
"Is that where the Re-Coop comes in?" Phil Panatello asked, consulting another file.
"Maybe in part. Who knows if that was an incredibly ironic money-laundering device, or a deal Mary forced him to set up? There's a lot more digging to do yet. It's clear Mary's life took an upturn about six months ago- the rehab, the enrolling in school, the talk of future plans-which is also when she began contacting Cashman's people, presumably as a conduit to Liptak and his financing. But there's a ton of hypothetical thinking in there. We may never know all the details. We think we have a line on a secret bank account of hers that we were hoping might tell us more." Ogden paused to smile affably before adding, "All yours now, of course.