Eddie's Boy Page 8

  Just as the two men reached the table, the kitchen door at the back of the room swung open. A tall, thin man wearing a black suit with a red tie came out, walked to their table, and sat across from Eddie and the boy. He seemed to the boy to be very old. One of the men stepped toward Eddie as though to search him, but the old man said, “Not necessary. I know Eddie. You guys can get a coffee at the bar. Just keep an eye on the door.” As the men walked to the bar, the old man said, “Hello, Eddie. And who is this?”

  “This is my boy.”

  “I heard about you, kid. Un uomo forte, eh? You know what that means?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It means I heard good things about you.” He turned and focused on Eddie. “What’s on your mind, Eddie?”

  “Well, Mr. Castiglione, I came to you because I have a problem. Last night five men came to our motel after us. We had to kill them and the hotel desk clerk who helped set us up.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out five driver’s licenses. He laid them out on the table.

  The old man’s eyes were like the shining black eyes of a crow, taking in the licenses instantly and then flicking back up to Eddie’s face.

  Eddie said, “Taddio got in touch with me and said he was calling on your orders. He wanted me to take out a man who had been plotting to replace you. He said it was important that an outsider do the work to avoid hard feelings. He told me to check into the Starlite Motel and wait by the phone while they located the guy. Instead of calling, he and his four friends came in the night and fired into our room.”

  “What did he offer you for the hit?”

  “Thirty grand. I guess it doesn’t matter, because he was never going to pay.”

  “Taddio knew something you apparently didn’t. There’s a contract on you, both of you. He was trying to collect. He shouldn’t have. You did the right thing to come see me, Eddie. It’s going to keep you alive—for a while anyway. You can go home when you want. I’ve hired you before, and I have a feeling I may need you again before long. All the old stuff is coming out again.”

  The boy saw the old man a few more times after that, when he was grown up and working on his own. There was one day after he had killed a man named Harrow for old Victor Castiglione. He went to the house on Lake Shore Drive that they called “the Castle.” The old man had him brought to the living room to get paid, but caught his thirteen-year-old grandson, young Salvatore, around a corner trying to eavesdrop. The old man had one of his soldiers bring him into the living room to stand there for the meeting.

  “That’s right,” the old man said. “Take a good look. That’s the scariest man you’re ever going to see. Doesn’t look scary, does he?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he is. Look in his eyes. You see now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he like you, or does he hate you?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “That’s because the answer is ‘neither.’ He looks at you the way you look at a fish. It’s alive now, maybe not tomorrow, but it doesn’t matter which.”

  “I get it.”

  “Good. You see another one like him, make sure he’s on your side.”

  Tonight Schaeffer was traveling again with the two guns weighing down his pockets. He had tried all the easy ways of learning what was going on in the world of organized crime, and now he had to try one of the harder ways. He had a pretty good car for the trip, meaning that the engine was sound and that nothing about the vehicle would attract attention or make it memorable, like prominent dents or scratches.

  His phone told him he had 473 miles to go, which would be around nine hours of driving. He would stop for the night at a hotel along the way, just as Eddie would have. This was not a fight to charge into with no sleep.

  12

  He drove past the house in McLean, Virginia, late at night, long after all the commuters had come home, parked their cars, and locked their doors. He had no proof that Elizabeth Waring—E. V. Waring in her Justice Department life—still lived there, but it was a place to start.

  The neighborhood was essentially the same as it had been when he’d first seen it in 1992. He’d seen it again in 2011, when he had sent E. V. Waring a personalized gift and followed the gift from the Justice Department to her home.

  His impression of the area then was that the two-story houses were built in the 1950s for upscale families. They had started out being nearly the same size and shape, but modifications and additions had made them increasingly different. One thing that made them even more different was the landscaping. In a few years the trees had grown much taller and wider. A row of scraggly bushes had become a high, impenetrable hedge.

  He parked a block away from her house and walked to it, then cut behind it to the tall window he had used to enter it the last time. He had known that the contact between the magnet and the alarm system’s sensor was only on the lower frame where the window met the sill. He had been able to lower the upper section and climb in over the two frames, then raise the upper section again without moving the lower section, breaking the contact, and setting off the alarm.

  This time, as he came around the house, he looked for cameras along the eaves but saw none. The windows were the size and shape he had remembered, but they were different. He stepped closer and used his phone to illuminate the corner of the window. The window was now double-pane tempered glass, the kind designed to withstand a flying two-by-four in a hurricane. The frame was steel coated with baked-on metal flake. He could not tell whether it was connected to the current alarm system or not, so he continued on.

  He had not kept up with all the technology and advances in American home security and didn’t know whether she had either. He had never expected to be back in McLean, Virginia, trying to get into her house again. In the light from his phone he looked in the window and spotted a painting on the wall that he recognized from seven years ago. It was an English-style landscape with trees and cows.

  He put his phone away and continued along the outer wall, trying to find a way in. When he had last seen Elizabeth Waring, she was already the highest-ranking nonpolitical official in the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section. She’d advanced to the corner office by outlasting and outperforming any rivals. During that time she must have been pulling in a good salary, and probably received some raises, but she hadn’t moved to a fancier house. He supposed the kids were gone by now, moved out and maybe married.

  He tried to remember the exact look of the windows and doors so he could spot any more ominous changes since he’d last broken in. There had been a couple of times when he’d needed to talk to her and walk away free afterward, so he had simply shown up in her bedroom, spoken to wake her, and asked a few questions. The last time he had arrived this way, seven years ago, they’d had a conversation in which they agreed to trade information. She knew what was going on in the Mafia in the present because she got reports from field agents and investigators about it as soon as it happened. He had been living on another continent, so he knew very little about the things members of the Mafia had done recently, but he knew a great deal about murders they had committed twenty years earlier. He hoped she hadn’t retired.

  He walked close to the walls of the house. Its brick facade went from the foundation to the roof, something he admired because it made it impossible for a drive-by shooter to fire through the wall. Elizabeth Waring would have to be standing in the front window to take a hit. Brick was something he had looked for when he’d bought his own house in Bath years ago. Where his house didn’t have it, he’d added it.

  He stepped to the front door and stood still. Her husband had been an FBI agent. She had been a young widow when he’d seen her the first time, and a widow in middle age the next time. He remembered thinking that she was attractive. That was bad. It had been risky enough to deal with her when she was alone, but she could easily have married another
FBI agent by now, or a marine colonel, or some other unpleasant sort. If Schaeffer made noise, there could be two people coming to see what the commotion was, both of them armed, trained, and in practice.

  Her bedroom—the master suite—was on the second floor in the center of the back wall. He went into the back garden, which he had used twice as an escape route. In those days, there had been a big brick barbecue with a chimney back here. It was gone, replaced by a stainless-steel model with a gas hookup. He supposed that was an upgrade. She had undoubtedly not wanted her children to breathe and swallow the carcinogens from charcoal.

  The path was now paved with flagstones and surrounded by decorative bushes—another reason not to want an open fireplace. He noticed that she had added a second entrance to the kitchen, apparently a door just for carrying things to and from the new grill. He examined the new door and wondered if she’d had it wired into the alarm system. The floor below it was polished concrete, and the frame was steel. He didn’t see any wires or contacts, so he took out his pocketknife, opened the blade, and jimmied the lock. He pushed it inward and no alarm sounded.

  He slipped in and closed the door, then made his way through the kitchen, which had been enlarged. It occurred to him that people did that as soon as they were cooking for fewer people and there was no point. The dining room looked the same, but he couldn’t tell for sure because he couldn’t see the paint color, and the furniture looked like lumps in the dark.

  He made his way up the staircase to the second floor, walking up the wooden steps as Eddie had taught him fifty years ago: holding the rail and placing his feet at the inner edge of each stair, where the nails held the board to the under-structure and prevented bending or creaking. At the top he stood still for a long time, listening for the sounds of the house to tell him what he needed to know.

  In a mid-century house like this one, there were messages. The night was calm and warm, so there weren’t shifting sounds as the boards held up to the wind. He heard no sounds from humans—no radio or television, no voices or footsteps. When the central air conditioner’s thermostat reached its high setting, the compressor and fan went on, and he stepped forward, letting the normal, reassuring sound mask his steps up the hall toward the master bedroom.

  At the doorway he heard a sudden swish of sheets and saw a figure sit up in bed. The figure was in front of a row of windows at the other side of the room. It was a female shape—her. She was naked. She stood, snatched up a thick bathrobe from the chair near the bed, and threw it over her shoulders so that she could get her arms into the sleeves as she hurried through the doorway into the hall.

  She grasped Schaeffer’s arm tightly, pulled him with her into a spare room, and whispered, “Sit tight. Ten minutes.”

  He heard her bare feet making small sliding sounds as she walked back along the hall to her room. Then she clicked on a small bedside lamp. She said in a normal, calm voice, “Okay, David. I just got an alert from the office. I need to get ready. They’re sending a car. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it’s time for you to get up and out anyway. Remember, you’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Schaeffer heard a male voice muttering something.

  She said, “Yes, it was lovely. Now pull yourself together and go.”

  There were lights being turned on, and then a toilet flushing, and the shower running, and a lot of walking around. Their talk was loud enough for Schaeffer to hear but not loud enough for him to understand. Then there was the clomp of a big man in dress shoes going down the hall past the room where he sat and to the stairs, and then the sound of her smaller feet, this time in slippers. She was still talking, so she must be escorting him out. Schaeffer heard the front door close and then a bolt sliding into its receptacle.

  After about thirty seconds, Elizabeth Waring appeared in the doorway of the guest room in the dark.

  Schaeffer said, “Who was that?”

  “Just a guy I know. Don’t you approve?”

  “He’s not good enough for you.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Why are you here?”

  “I think you were expecting me. That’s why you got up and came out to head me off.”

  “I expected you sometime. Not tonight. I’m not clairvoyant. I wouldn’t have risked David’s life if I thought it was tonight.”

  “Why did you expect me?”

  “I’m sure you know that we have informants who tell us what they hear, and we also tap the phones of certain people. We’ve been doing that forever—before I was part of “we.” We’ve heard there was a new contract out for you, and it occurred to me that you might have heard it too. People have been saying that there’s a lot of money being offered.”

  “Why take out a contract on me now? Who’s offering it?”

  “I don’t know yet, because nobody has said the name where we could hear it.”

  “Has something else happened—like somebody important getting killed? Or even a near miss? People could be blaming me for the hit.”

  “I don’t think so. The biggest news going around is that Carlo Balacontano has a parole hearing scheduled for August 1.”

  Schaeffer stared at her. “The last time I heard, he was in a federal prison. You can’t get paroled from federal prison.”

  “Not under current law. Congress passed a law to end federal parole in 1984, and it went into effect in 1987. But Carlo Balacontano was convicted in 1982, and so he’s one of the remaining criminals the system has to treat under the old law. He gets a hearing just as though this were 1982.”

  “I can’t believe he’s still up to that. When I was here seven years ago, everybody expected him to die in a year or two.”

  She said, “More like a wish. I went to see him in prison then. He looked like a very healthy man to me. He was sixty and he’d been in prison for twenty years because of you. He told me a lot about you, and I’m sure you could supply most of the monologue. He was in there on a mandatory work schedule. That day, he was cleaning the small building that the prison used for conjugal visits with wives. I caught him goofing off, but he still had to get that much cleaning work done in a morning. Every morning. He’s had a diet with no alcohol, no creamy or buttery sauces, no sweets, no pastries. It’s all plain, healthy food. He’s probably in better shape than either of us.”

  Schaeffer shook his head. “I still have to take care of myself because of people like him.” He paused. “And I noticed that you do too.”

  Her face turned weary. “That’s by way of reminding me that you just saw me naked?”

  “I did, but I wasn’t. And it doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me. I knew that you wouldn’t be expecting a man here. I couldn’t take the chance that you’d get startled and kill him. He’s a fine, decent person.”

  “I’m not here to harm you or anyone, or make you feel uncomfortable. I just didn’t have any other way to reach you except to show up when nobody would see me. I shouldn’t have assumed you were alone, and I apologize.”

  “Okay, okay.” She looked away from him. “ I don’t want to keep talking about it. What, exactly, do you want?”

  “I was living in a place I thought was safe. A few days ago I got attacked by four men and had to kill them. I went to an airport where nobody should have expected me, but I guess some others must have put a transponder in the car I was driving. I was attacked in the airport parking lot and had to kill two men there. I flew to another country and was attacked there. Twice. I haven’t been doing anything since I lived here, so all of this has to be coming from here, from the past. If somebody is offering a contract, it has to be someone from the past.”

  “I told you, the biggest current news I’ve heard is that Carlo Balacontano is having a parole hearing.”

  “Which means he’s still in prison now. Who is doing this stuff?”

  “I would guess there are people who want to kill you beca
use they think you’ll supply information that sinks his chance for a parole. And there are probably others who think you’ll make a deal with the Balacontano family to give them proof that you framed him for the murder of Arthur Fieldston, so he’ll go free. There must be lots of other people who have their own reasons to kill you, and think that once you know there’s a parole hearing, you’ll be drawn to it. The one who would know most about them is you.”

  He stared at her unmoving silhouette in the dim light. “Seven years ago we helped each other by telling each other a few secrets. I came here to see if I could make a deal to do that again.”

  “What you’re talking about was a terrible risk I took to get you to come in as a protected witness. My superiors at Justice refused to approve it, and you wouldn’t do it. So I was the only one in the deal.”

  “I gave you evidence of an old murder.”

  “And then killed the murderer before we could arrest him. Isn’t that what happened? Nobody ever determined why, when the FBI found Frank Tosca at that resort in Arizona, his throat was cut. That was you, right?”

  He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

  Her sigh was just as frustrated. “You told the truth just to get me to trust you and think we had a deal.”

  He said, “This time it’s different.”

  “That’s nice. Here’s how things are. Nobody will approve a deal that saves you. Get it out of your head. When you came here before, the people who ran Justice were all too idealistic and naive to favor a killer over the creeps who were after him. Now the executive branch is run by people who aren’t troubled much by ethics. Everybody in the Organized Crime Section is barely hanging on and doing whatever semblance of our jobs we can.”

  “Give me a way to talk to you. It’ll be light soon, and I can’t be here.”

  She went to the table beside the bed and opened a drawer. She took out a pen and pad and wrote a number. “That’s a phone that’s private and isn’t from work.”