Sleeping Dogs Page 14

  “Anyway, it’s late at night, and this character has just finished turning my friends’ little ambush into what looked like a busy day on the Eastern front. But he doesn’t go away. Instead he takes a little drive over to Castiglione’s. The rest of it nobody knows much about, because everybody there is, as usual, dead. This includes old Castiglione, his four bodyguards and—get this—a special agent of the FBI who just happened to be there because his job was to sit in a car down the street and take pictures of everybody who came to the old man’s house.

  “So when I wake up the next morning, not only is Senator Claremont still dead, but so are five or six men who worked for me, and the lawyer who set up some corporations for me and who hid Arthur Fieldston so he couldn’t accept a subpoena. So I’ve got millions of dollars in accounts that only Arthur Fieldston can sign on, and no living people on the spot to find him, and my little tax problem has turned into a multiple-murder case involving a federal officer. Then around noon things got ugly. I didn’t get any phone calls; I got visitors. All day and most of the night, lots of very important men pulled into my driveway and came into my parlor and sat in my chairs and asked me what the hell I was doing breaking a truce that had kept Las Vegas open for forty years. Some of them thought I’d killed Castiglione, some of them didn’t know what to think, but all of them knew that when the sun came up in Vegas there were about a dozen corpses lying around out there, and that maybe half of them belonged to me and the others were Castiglione’s.” Balacontano seemed to be out of breath, but he added quickly, “Except for the federal cop, who was going to attract such an army of federal undercover types that even the pay phones would be tapped for the next hundred years.”

  “Why did he go to Castiglione’s? Did he think Orloff was working for Castiglione?”

  “Hell, no,” said Balacontano. “He did it because he knew it was going to create confusion. And it worked. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he had any idea who those guys were working for. But he was sure that as soon as the newspapers printed their names, there’d be people a whole lot scarier than he was who would know. The thing that scared me wasn’t who showed up at my house; it was who didn’t. I spent the next few days kissing powerful asses because I was going to need them on my side if things blew up. Even after I did, it was a near thing.”

  Elizabeth prompted him. “What did you do about the killer?”

  Balacontano studied the little woman who sat across from him and had a thought, but then dismissed it. She was a bureaucrat. “I did what anybody would do. I hunted him with everything I had.”

  He stared at her for a reaction, but she waited in silence. Balacontano shrugged. “He found Arthur Fieldston before I did. I don’t know how far he was thinking ahead. Maybe he knew that I couldn’t get my money back if Fieldston was dead, and then he thought of the rest of it after he’d killed him. He buried Fieldston’s head and hands behind the stable at my farm, then made a phone call to the Justice Department. Nobody ever saw him again until now.” He looked at Elizabeth. “You’ve got to help me.”

  “I’ll do my best to find him.”

  “I’m not talking about him; I’m talking about me. He’s just the way to get me out of here.”

  “I’m not your attorney, but if you do get an appeal, I wouldn’t tell the judge everything,” said Elizabeth.

  “I shouldn’t have to tell the bastard anything,” Balacontano said. “I’m not … wasn’t some errand boy. Does anybody seriously think I went out and shot Arthur Fieldston, then sawed off his head and hands in Arizona and brought them across the country to bury them in my yard? The only two parts you can use to prove who it was? What do you think I am, Edgar Allan Poe? Well?”

  “I’m wondering who you think Edgar Allan Poe was,” said Elizabeth.

  “You know what I mean. I was an important man. When they have those cars with power surges that kill people, do they go to the president of the company and dig up his back yard to see if he’s buried some suspicious carburetors? No. Does anybody even wonder who made the anonymous phone call to the Justice Department?”

  Elizabeth had asked the same question in as many words ten years ago, but her superiors had been too eager to convict Balacontano to listen. She had asked it so many times that they had sent her on a vacation and deleted her name from the record of the investigation so that the defense couldn’t call her to testify. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

  The old man’s anger and frustration were barely controllable now. “If I knew that, do you think I’d be sitting here talking to you? You’re the one who’s got to hunt him down.”

  Elizabeth stood up and glanced at her watch. “Just for the record, do you want to tell me his name?”

  “No,” said Balacontano. “I don’t know his name. What the hell does he need a name for?”

  He hated to throw away the name Charles Ackerman. It had been a comfort since Eddie Mastrewski had given it to him as a child, and it was his oldest possession. Eddie the Butcher had always assumed that someday a lapse of professionalism would put an end to him, and the young boy he had taken in would be alone and running. The first thing he would need was money, and the second was a plausible identity, and Eddie knew how to provide him with both. The money Eddie wrapped in a package that looked exactly like the ones he kept in the freezer for the cat. Like them, it was marked “Giblets and Gizzards for Cat.”

  The identity had been almost as easy in those days. Eddie took the boy for a walk in the sprawling forty-acre Catholic cemetery at the edge of town one sunny Memorial Day when hundreds of other families were wandering over the grass and looking uncertain about exactly where Grandpa was buried. He’d had the foresight to buy a small bouquet of forget-me-nots on the way, which he carried with just the right degree of discomfort. They had taken a pleasant walk in the sunshine to look for the gravestone of a child born in 1950, ’51, or ’52 who had died after the age of five but before the age of twelve. They had found six of them, and Eddie had dutifully copied down the names, the dates and his estimate of the cost of the stones.

  Then they went to look at a couple of graves of men they had encountered professionally, and Eddie had explained his theory of reasonable fees. It was his hypothesis that the cost of a man’s gravestone should be proportionate to the fee Eddie had received for killing him. Important men left lots of money, had lots of admirers—or, at least, associates—and had heirs who would not miss this final chance to remind people that they had been relations of powerful men. Killing these men was potentially more difficult and dangerous than killing the ones with small domestic granite plaques that bore only a name and two dates. Eddie had appeared satisfied, even though two of the men had eight-foot-high Italian marble structures the size of toolsheds, with carved birds, flowers, statues of angels holding trumpets and lengthy passages of verse that might have been copied verbatim from Hallmark Mother’s Day cards.

  The next day Eddie had taken him to the county hall. There Eddie had paid three dollars for a duplicate birth certificate for his nephew, Charles F. Ackerman. He had eliminated the other five possibilities because two had names that didn’t seem likely–he remembered that one of them was Wung Cho Fo; two had graves in the middle of huge empty plots, which meant that they still had lots of living family members the boy might someday meet; and one had a gravestone of such massive proportions and extravagant opulence that it must have been a sign of either conspicuous wealth or a memorable death. Thereafter, Charles Frederick Ackerman used his birth certificate to obtain a social security card, used both to apply for a driver’s license, then opened a bank account in a city a hundred miles away, where he also obtained a library card and a post-office box. Then he began to get on mailing lists, and Charles F. Ackerman took on a kind of life, with credit cards, club memberships and finally even a pistol permit.

  In later years, he had built a dozen other identities that he had used and discarded, but he had never done much as Charles F. Ackerman. After Eddie had died, the name
had begun to seem precious, and he couldn’t think of it without remembering the sunny Memorial Day when he and Eddie had strolled together on the unnaturally lush green grass, playing the game of finding dead children with approximately the right dates of birth.

  Charles Ackerman’s existence wasn’t as well documented as Michael Schaeffer’s, but it was older and deeper, started before the age of computers and well established before a policeman would imagine he’d had the need or the capacity for adopting it. The methods he had used to create the identity were now out of date and impossible, because the trick had been done so many times for so many reasons that the police had put a stop to it years ago. He hated to say good-bye to Charlie Ackerman, but he had to. He had rented the car in Albuquerque under the name, and that had to be the end of it.

  The gun had been easier. He had found an advertisement for a firearms show in the Albuquerque newspaper, clipped it, then gone into a gun shop and looked around for something that would inspire the right amount of greed in the heart of an aficionado. He settled on an antique Italian shotgun with ornate scrollwork carved into the stock. It even had a carrying case that looked like a briefcase. He had taken it to the show and walked past the booths run by dealers, but lingered at the card tables manned by private collectors until he had found the right one. The man was in his fifties and had a pot belly that he kept in check with a wide belt with a silver buckle that had a bird dog on it with turquoise eyes. He had five handguns to sell, three of them nickel-plated modern replicas of Colt .45 single-action revolvers with white plastic handgrips like the ones the good guys used in cowboy movies—and two shotguns, one of them a double-barreled ten-gauge that his grandfather might have used for hunting ducks. The man had eyed his gun case and said, “What’d you buy?” He had opened it, and the man’s eyes had widened, then narrowed. “I brought it with me,” Ackerman said. “I’m trying to see if anybody wants to trade.” The man asked, “What would you take?” Ackerman indicated that the Ruger .38 police special on the table in front of him looked pretty good, but he didn’t feel like hanging around all day filling out papers for a handgun. The man thought for a long time, then set his jacket over the pistol and said, “Meet me in the parking lot.”

  The transaction was quick and simple, but as he was getting into the car, Ackerman was quietly accosted by a skinny young man who looked like an out-of-work car mechanic. “Didn’t you see anything in there you liked?” His mind compared the two possibilities, cop and thief, and neither won. He just shook his head. “No. Same old stuff,” he said, and prepared to start the car. The man said, “Looking for something in particular?” He decided on thief. “Why? You got something?”

  “A few things. I’m a gunsmith. I do modifications, custom work, make a few accessories.” The word accessories interested him enough to get him out of the car. In the trunk of the man’s old Chevy was an oily bath towel, and laid out on it were a few homemade sears for converting M-16’s to full auto, a couple of forty-round banana clips made of two standard twenties welded end-to-end and various devices designed to hold handguns under dashboards and car seats. He took a chance. “I can see why you aren’t at a table inside.” The man grinned sheepishly and then compulsively glanced around to see if anyone was watching. “See anything you like?” He shook his head. “Sorry.” The man looked disappointed. “This ain’t all I got. Give me a hint.” He said, “Ever made a silencer?” The man had.

  William Wolf was watching the effect of the sun coming up, hitting the distant face of the low mesa on his left and giving it a pink glow beneath the deep purple of the predawn sky. Driving felt like a novelty. He loved the feeling of enclosure in the small box hurtling down the smooth highway at sixty-five as the sights around him changed. It wasn’t just one object being replaced by another like it, but a change in the possibilities. He had been in New Mexico several times before, but now it looked new to him. There were low, rolling hills that flattened into unexpected places where the level plains dropped abruptly to reveal that they had been plateaus. All of it was covered with dry, knee-high sage that was almost gray, with dark piñons growing out of it like plants at the bottom of a vast ocean. And along the impossibly distant horizon, here and there a mountain would rise, not a range of mountains but a single one, or a saw-toothed ridge of three, tilted a little as though something big had swept over it to push it aside.

  He had spent a few hours becoming William Wolf in a motel in Albuquerque, and now the name had displaced the others in his mind. He had repeated it to himself a thousand times, rehearsed introducing himself to imaginary strangers and even planned the signature. It would be two big, fast W’s, each followed by low, cramped scrawls that looked so cursory that some letters might appear to be missing.

  The name William Wolf had presented no problem to him. Names were the first accidental training that Eddie had given him as a child. Eddie had never actually taken any legal steps to adopt him, for fear that some public agency would be called upon to visit the home and create a file. Instead he had sometimes referred to the boy as his son, sometimes as his nephew, or even as the child of a friend, as convenience seemed to dictate, and had made up names for him on these occasions. But as soon as he was old enough to learn a trade, the boy had been taught to select his own aliases. Circumstances had never allowed him to attach any interior significance to names. He might be Bob or Ronald at one moment, or “the Butcher’s Boy,” or even “the third one from the end of the line.” It made no difference to him; in a heartbeat he would be the second from the end of the line without experiencing any interior alteration. Names were for other people’s convenience, and their convenience was seldom of any interest to him. For a decade he had found it useful to be Michael Schaeffer; for a day he had resurrected Charles Ackerman; now it was easiest to be Wolf.

  Wolf thought about Santa Fe. It was too small to have a serious airport, but it was always full of tourists. The only reasonable choice was to fade into the amorphous, shifting group that came and went each day. He would arrive the way they did and dress the way they did, and that was as near to invisibility as he could get. People in tourist towns let their eyes acknowledge new people only long enough to be sure they wouldn’t bump into them. There was no reason to remember faces because they would never appear again.

  Wolf felt the early-morning cold as he got out of the car in the parking structure beneath La Fonda. It was a strange, calm and airless chill that seemed to have been stored in the dark enclosure for a long time. La Fonda was the only hotel he remembered from the old days, a seventy-year-old five-story sprawling adobe building on the corner of the ancient city square beside the palace the conquistadors had built for their governors in 1610. There were already three cars exactly like his that he could see as he walked to the swinging door that led into the hall to the lobby. As he turned the first corner he could see into the big dining room, with its uneven ceramic tile floor and the fifty-foot canopy of painted glass that let in just enough light for the potted trees. There were only a few people sitting under the trees and eating breakfast; he knew that these were probably the ones who had come here from the East, where it was already late morning. There were two young couples who wore ski sweaters, jeans and hiking shoes, and a table of five elderly people, three women and two men, who had the manner of a permanent traveling committee. They each spoke to the whole group and then winked and nudged some particular ally, while the others felt comfortable ignoring what was said.

  Wolf could also see a table where four dark-suited businessmen held a serious discussion, looking as though their plane from New York had been hijacked and they had been released, unharmed and unchanged, in the center of this small western town and were now waiting for the answer to their inquiries about whom to buy it from. He glanced around the lobby, first at the registration desk, where a dark-haired woman in her forties made quick, proprietary movements, arranging registration cards and keys to prepare for the morning check-ins. He avoided that side of the room and walked past
two ancient Pueblo Indians, a wrinkled, leathery little man and a woman who undoubtedly was his wife, both of them busy opening modern, black sample cases full of silver and turquoise jewelry for display on the bench by the wall.

  He drifted past a wooden rack of free tourist pamphlets, selected a Santa Fe street map and walked out the front door of the building to the street. There were a few little patches of the early autumn’s first crisp, hard snow in the square, and the air was clear and thin. He would have been tempted to ask for a room in the hotel, but he knew that Santa Fe was too small. He looked up and down the streets that led into the square. There were the stores he remembered, their windows full of intricately painted Indian pots, handwoven blankets of wool dyed with bright vegetable colors and antique pounded-and-burnished silver bought, by tradition, so cheaply from the once-credulous Indians that it was still called “pawn.” But among the stores was a coffee shop with outdoor tables turned upside down as a concession to the first taste of cold weather. He found it by following a couple in their thirties who were tourists but looked purposeful in their gait, reasoning that nothing else could be open yet.

  Inside the door there was a steamy warmth to the air, a comforting heaviness to the dark wooden tables and a glow of hanging antique copper implements that he doubted the employees could even identify, let alone use. Wolf sat at a table and studied his map, while the waitress, a plump blond girl of the type he could imagine leaving college to study astrology, poured him a cup of coffee and left a menu beside him.