“What happened to him?”
The Seventh Squad detective looked up at him. “He’s been shot. What do you think happened to him?” He pushed Raymond off the suitcase, rolling him onto his back on the wet pavement. Raymond’s eyes were closed. His hand still gripped the suitcase until the detective pried his fingers loose.
The suitcase was free, lying on its side in the street. Ryan could take two steps and touch it with his foot. He got a cigarette out and lit it. There were sirens coming, getting louder. He saw black people on the sidewalk edging in to get a look past the parked cars. The suitcase lay there. None of the cops touched it. They’d come over and look down at Raymond and say something or shake their heads. Pick it up, Ryan kept thinking.
But maybe there wasn’t anything in it and that’s what started the shooting.
No, Raymond wouldn’t have come out with it. Mr. Perez’s papers were in there. A sheet with Denise’s name on it and the name of the stock.
Nobody paid any attention to the suitcase. Ryan drew on his cigarette. For a moment he wondered about Virgil and Tunafish, if they were all right. He wanted to go inside and find out, but he didn’t want to leave the suitcase. He felt responsible for it. What if somebody walked off with it? He stooped down and set it upright as he rose, then stepped away from it, chickening out with the cops standing around him. There was more noise and confusion than before. Good. But he wished the cops would turn around or walk away for a minute. A van-type ambulance, an Emergency Medical Service unit, was rolling toward them now, its dome lights revolving, siren dying. The van edged past to bring the rear end to Raymond’s body. Ryan picked up the suitcase again, as if to get it out of the way. A cop glanced at him, but didn’t say anything, the cop not sure who he was. Ryan set the suitcase down at his side. The cigarette had burned almost to the filter. He had to do it now or forget it. Open the suitcase and give it a quick look. Not out here, Christ no. He couldn’t walk down the street with it, get on a bus. There was only one place. He picked up the suitcase, not looking at the cops or the medical attendants now and walked around the EMS unit to Dick Speed’s car.
Ryan got in the back seat with the suitcase, jammed himself in there with it, half-turned with his back to the EMS unit outside, feeling hidden and for the moment safe. It passed through his mind the suitcase might be locked and the key in Raymond’s pocket-being loaded into the ambulance-but it wasn’t locked, it clicked open and there were Mr. Perez’s files and letters and legal documents, and a flattened roll of toilet paper, all in a jumbled pile the way they’d been thrown in. Going through the papers at random, without a plan, he found several sheets bearing Mr. Perez’s letterhead, F. X. Perez and Associates, Investment Consultants, his name on agreements and letters to corporations, and blank sheets of hotel stationery. Ryan set aside, on his lap, the letterhead sheets he took out, and dug into the loose papers, hoping to see Denise’s name or Robert Leary’s underlined or circled in red. There were files labeled with names of corporations and others marked Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Chicago, Detroit… a list of maybe a dozen names in the Detroit file… there, Robert Leary, Jr., and the address on Arden Park. There were handwritten notes and initials next to the names that Ryan couldn’t make out. There were notebook sheets with names and addresses: Jay Walt’s, Ryan’s, Denise’s address and phone number in Rochester. He didn’t know what to look for. He needed time to start at the top and go through each sheet of paper if he had to-before they gave it back to Mr. Perez. Would they?
Sure, once he proved it was his. Why not?
Ryan wasn’t sure about that or what Mr. Perez would do now; but he began folding Mr. Perez’s letterhead and the agreement forms with his name on them, and the Hotel Pontchartrain stationery, and sticking them in the inside pocket of his sportcoat. They were bulky in there but flat underneath the raincoat. The siren made him jump, going off right outside as the EMS unit pulled away. He didn’t look around, though. He didn’t turn until somebody opened the door behind him.
“Is that your property?”
Dick Speed was standing there with one of the Seventh Squad detectives.
“I was just looking through it.”
“I can see that. I asked you was it yours.”
“No, not really.”
“Not really. What’s that mean?”
“You know whose it is, for Christ’s sake.” That was a mistake, he shouldn’t have said it.
“You can identify it as who it belongs to?”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“So what you’re doing,” Dick Speed said, being an official smartass now with his hair and leather packet and big gun, “you’re going through somebody’s property that doesn’t belong to you.”
“I guess so,” Ryan said. Act nice. Then when they were alone, driving downtown, he’d talk his friend into letting him go through the papers. Just while they were in the car.
“Detective Olsen here’ll take it in his custody,” Dick Speed said, and Ryan’s hopes died.
He got in the front seat and they took off. He didn’t say anything for several blocks, until they were turning off Livernois onto the Lodge Freeway.
“How come all of a sudden, all the help you’ve given me on this, you want to act like a prick?”
“How come you haven’t asked about your friend Virgil?” Dick Speed said. “You got him into this, don’t you want to know how he is?”
He’d forgot about Virgil. “You saw him-is he okay?”
“He’s dead.”
“Virgil? Come on-”
“You want to know about Tunafish? He’s dead too. Raymond Gidre, from New Iberia, Louisiana. Three guys dead by gunshot over a suitcase, you want to know how come I’m acting like a prick.”
They didn’t talk after that. Ryan thought about Virgil, about the times he’d been with him and the time he’d met Tunafish. He couldn’t picture them dead and was glad he hadn’t gone in to see them. Most of the way downtown, though, Ryan thought about the suitcase, wondering what would happen to it.
24
WHAT HAPPENED THAT time in New Orleans, they’d had a Jew lawyer they were dealing with and Mr. Perez had lost his patience and wound up an accessory to murder. He had been new in the business and had not yet learned to avoid risks by shifting the brunt of them to someone else.
The situation wasn’t unlike the present one: a woman who’d inherited stock and didn’t know it and her adviser, the Jew lawyer, telling her to hold out and get it all. He had promised the Jew lawyer a commission and had paid him in advance by check on two occasions. That was the first mistake. He’d met the Jew lawyer several times in the Jung Hotel and had been seen with him, in the company of Raymond. Another mistake. The Jew lawyer-in his unpressed seersucker suit, talking and chewing with his mouth open, waving his fork around with red-bean gravy stuck to it-had said, “No, it seems to me it’s a question of my client paying you a commission, what we deem is equitable based on the value of the stock.” Raymond had given him what was equitable in the Jew lawyer’s car parked on Lee Circle, five rounds in the chest as the Jew lawyer was shaking his head no for the last time. The final mistake, pissant thinking, having Raymond staying in the same hotel room with him to save money in those early days-and being there when the police busted in and three of them knelt on Raymond, holding his arm twisted behind him, while the fourth cop poked around and found Raymond’s Army Colt .45 in the toilet tank.
Mr. Perez made lists of eventualities now. One column, if everything worked perfectly. The other column, if everything didn’t.
If everything worked perfectly, Raymond would take the suitcase from the two niggers and that was that. How he did it was up to Raymond. Mr. Perez let Raymond do the heavy work any way he wanted because it was Raymond’s business. He knew how to scare the shit out of people and get things done.