The newspaper reported February meetings between Hubbard and the owners of both the seafood restaurant and the strip bar, but negotiations hadn’t gone well. Hubbard accused the owners of “outlandish” asking prices; the owners said if Hubbard didn’t want to put up the cash, he was out of luck, because they were in no rush to sell. At the end of the month, it was still a stalemate.
Joe and I learned all this studying Amy’s faxes early in the morning. Cody’s visit the night before had effectively put an end to our surveillance of the Russians, but there was no reason to stop moving on Hubbard. We decided to begin by talking with Dan Beckley.
I made a few phone calls and learned that Beckley had purchased a laundry and dry-cleaning operation in Middleburg Heights after selling out to Hubbard. He apparently had an office in the back. We drove to Middleburg Heights.
Beckley’s shop-E-Zee Kleen-was in a small strip mall on the west side of Pearl Road, just past the Bagley Road intersection. I pulled the truck into the lot and parked while Joe stared at the sign and sighed.
“What the hell is the matter with people?” he said.
“What?”
“E-Zee Kleen? Can you tell me what the point of that is? Is there a reason he can’t spell it correctly?”
“It has more pizzazz that way,” I said. “Catchier.”
He gave me a withering look. “Spare me.”
We went inside. Two women were loading laundry into the washing machines, and a short Chinese man was at the counter, talking in an agitated voice with the clerk, a bored-looking middle-aged woman. Joe and I stood behind him, waiting. He was ranting about a rip that had appeared in a suit he’d left to be dry-cleaned. The clerk was explaining that she couldn’t help him if he didn’t have a receipt and the supposed damage had occurred six months earlier, as he said. This was not the response he’d been seeking, and he let her know that for about five minutes while Joe and I grew increasingly impatient. Eventually, Joe cleared his throat and spoke over the man.
“We’re here to see Dan Beckley. Is he around?”
The clerk nodded her head at the door behind her. “He’s in the office, but he might be on the phone. Go on in, though.”
The Chinese man turned to us and glared at Joe. “Excuse you for interrupting. I was talking.”
Joe stared at him. “No,” he said, “you were babbling.” Then he walked around the counter and opened the door.
I looked at the outraged man and shrugged. “He’s not a morning person,” I said. “But, then again, not so much of an afternoon or evening person, either.”
I followed Joe into the office. It was a small, square room, occupied by an old metal desk and one filing cabinet. A tiny television sat on the filing cabinet, tuned to a morning talk show. The room smelled of beer and body odor. A large, ruddy man with fat cheeks and small, sunken eyes sat behind the desk. He wore a plaid shirt, with the first few buttons undone, revealing a thin gold chain amid a cluster of gray chest hair.
“You here about the dryer?” he asked.
Joe shook his head. “No.”
The man sighed. “Figures. Those sons of bitches have been promising to come out here for days, and they still haven’t showed. Meanwhile I got only four dryers that work. Sucks.” Joe looked at him blankly and didn’t say anything. The man said, “So what do you want?”
“You Dan Beckley?”
“That’s right. Who wants to know?”
I looked at Joe. Who wants to know? There are some things that sound cool when said by Robert DeNiro that sound ridiculous when said by anyone else. Joe gave Beckley our business card, and he looked at it and then dropped it on his desk.
“I figured this day was going to suck,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” Joe said. “We just wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
“About Jeremiah Hubbard.”
Beckley screwed up his face like he’d tasted something foul. “I got nothing to say about Hubbard.”
“You sold a fair amount of property to him not too long ago,” I said. “Originally, you told him you weren’t interested. Then you reconsidered, and from what we’ve heard, you didn’t make out too well on the deal. What happened?”
“What happened? Nothing happened.” He crossed his arms over his ample stomach. “I decided to sell, that’s all.”
I nodded. “I see. You ever hear of a guy named Wayne Weston?”
He frowned. “No.”
“He’s an associate of Hubbard’s,” I said. “An investigator, like us. He was murdered about a week ago.”
Something changed in Beckley’s face-not when I mentioned the murder, but a split second earlier when I told him Weston was an investigator.
“I don’t watch the news shows much,” he said. “I don’t care to hear about murders and drug wars and the rest of that crap. And I never heard of this Weston guy, either.” He tilted his chin up at us, defiant.
“Why’d you reconsider on the property deal?” Joe asked. “There has to be some reason. A guy like Hubbard has plenty of money. You probably could have taken him for a lot more than you did.”
“I made out fine on that deal,” he said. “Just fine, thank you. I got what I wanted to get, and I moved on. I don’t see why it’s any concern of yours.”
Sometimes you just feel it. Call it a hunch, a gut reaction, intuition, an instinct-sometimes you can feel the truth in a way that’s hard to explain, a deep, subconscious tug that tells you when something doesn’t feel right. As I stood in Beckley’s office and watched him glaring at us, with his arms folded over his stomach and his shoulders pulled back in a defensive posture, I had that tug.
“What’d Hubbard have on you?” I asked softly.
He jerked his head back as if I’d given him a jab on the chin. “What did you say?”
“What’d he have on you?” I repeated. It was his reaction to my description of Weston as an investigator that had given me the tug. Somehow, that had made something click in his mind; it had explained something he’d wondered about in the past.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Joe took a half step backward, an almost unnoticeable movement, but he was clearing out of the way, realizing that I was operating on a feeling he didn’t share.
“Dan,” I said, “do us both a favor and don’t bullshit me.”
“I’d like you to leave. Now.” He pointed at the door.
“We’re not leaving, Dan,” I said, my voice still soft. “You didn’t sell out so low to Hubbard just because you felt like it. You’re too smart for that. You’d look at Hubbard, think about how deep his pockets are, and you’d bleed every cent you could out of him. Every last cent. Now why didn’t you?”
“Go to hell.”
I ignored him and leaned forward, placing my palms on his desk and lowering my face toward his.
“Listen to me, Dan. There are two ways of handling this. You can either tell me what Hubbard had on you, or you can let me find it out on my own. One way or the other, I’m going to get the information. And I don’t like being lied to. You’re lying to me now, and until I find out what you’re lying about, I’m going to make you my life’s work. You’re going to be my obsession, Dan. I’m not going away.”
He looked up at me, and the defiant chin quivered slightly. He breathed heavily out of his nose and clenched his hands together. Angry. Then he pulled open one of the desk drawers, removed an envelope, and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest and fell to the floor.
“Go on,” he said, his lip curling up in a snarl, spitting the words at me. “Go on and take a look.”