Into Thin Air Page 22

  He entered the Blake Building and returned to Jake’s suite, slipping quietly through the front door and into the bedroom. They hadn’t bothered to clean the place. Everything remained as it was, the gowns strewn on the floor, the Chinese food rotting in paper containers, the cocaine spread across the night table, the girl’s body facedown on the bed. The only difference was that her handcuffs had been removed.

  It won’t matter, Colonel, Kurt thought. The coroner will notice the skin rubbed raw on her wrists.

  He covered the nude body with a black satin sheet, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to hold the phone receiver. “Libbie,” he said, “I need to talk to Muffin. It’s urgent.”

  “Sorry, Kurt. Muffin had to dash to Galena Street. There’s been some kind of crazy accident at the bicycle marathon.”

  “This is important, Libbie,” he said. “I want you to beep her and tell her there’s a body in Suite 205 at the Blake Building. A young woman is dead.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

  “Suite 205,” Kurt repeated. “Write that down. It’s Jake Pfeil’s place.”

  After he hung up he looked around the room one more time. The colonel was no doubt very pleased with the way everything had worked out. The two Argentines were dead. Rafael was taking care of a meddlesome intruder who had discovered the family secret. And the demon who was ruining his stepdaughter’s life would soon be brought down as a coke user with a dead girl in his bed. Everything had worked out splendidly.

  Kurt glanced at the clock radio. Twenty minutes past noon. Someone was waiting for him in the Jerome Bar.

  Chapter twenty-one

  As Kurt approached the hotel he spotted a federal agent leaning against the red brick wall near the entrance. Banana Republic shorts, clean new hiking boots, his face buried in a Forest Service trail map like a tourist planning his day. Kurt walked up to the picture window of the Jerome Bar and peered in. The Victorian parlor was packed with architects and city planners from the Design Conference. Neal Staggs sat by himself at a small table in the corner, wearing casual slacks and a short-sleeve Izod shirt, nursing a drink. He looked like a pampered golfer waiting for his caddy to cart him off to the first tee. Kurt noticed two other agents, a broad-shouldered man with a red mustache sitting at the bar and the tough little grunt who was guard-dogging Quiroga’s room when this whole nightmare began. His meaty hands wrapped around a beer stein, chewing gum with the grace of a Jersey hood, the grunt stuck out in the arty crowd like a dime store number-painting in a gallery of Matisses.

  Kurt left the window and walked over to the agent examining the trail map. “It’s no wonder you guys couldn’t find Patty Hearst,” he said.

  The man raised his eyes and looked at Kurt through tinted sunglasses.

  “Tell Staggs I’ll talk to him in the dining room,” Kurt said. “But tell him to leave the kids in the car.”

  At this time of day the hotel’s formal dining room was unoccupied, an ornate still-life in white tablecloths, crystal goblets, preciously arranged silverware. Summer light bathed the corridor outside the frosted glass that isolated this quiet place, but the room itself held the shadowy chill of a wine cellar. Kurt chose a table with a view of the outdoor pool, where tanned hotel guests read The New York Times at umbrella tables and ordered drinks from college waiters in uniform T-shirts. He could remember when the hotel was owned by Jacob Rumpf. The old man allowed the town kids to swim whenever they wanted in a primitive heated pool that was now buried in the foundation beneath a new ballroom.

  In a short while Neal Staggs appeared in the doorway. He looked around the room, assessing its seclusion, then strode across the floral carpet in silent deck shoes.

  “Okay, it’s your party,” he shrugged, pulling aside one of the high-backed mahogany chairs. “I was beginning to wonder if I got all dressed up for nothing.”

  Kurt touched the pointed silver tines of a salad fork. “I had one of those unavoidable delays,” he said. “I had to kill a man.”

  Staggs stopped himself halfway into the chair and gave Kurt a hard look. He seemed to be considering whether to sit or call in his men.

  “He was the first man I’ve ever killed, Staggs,” Kurt said. “He deserved it, but I still don’t feel very good about it.”

  Staggs dropped down slowly to rest on the edge of the seat. His hands were braced against the side of the table. He could get away in a hurry if he had to.

  “I think you probably know the guy,” Kurt said. “I know you know his boss. He’s an old friend of yours.”

  He took the photograph from the manila envelope and slid it across the tablecloth. Staggs stared down at the picture of the military officer. Color left his face. His eyes remained riveted on the image, his jaw grinding, an old habit his wife probably complained about to their marriage counselor.

  “I know who Rostagno is,” Kurt said. “The man I just shot was trying to wash out his dirty socks for him. The fuck killed Omar Quiroga, and he did his best to kill Graciela Rojas. So how do you want to do this, Staggs? I’m about twenty minutes from going to the DA with what I know. But it gets even uglier. There’s this young kid in town who writes for the daily newspaper. Just out of college, read too much Woodward and Bernstein, you know the type. He’s been busting my hump for a year, trying to win his Pulitzer prize. Except now I’ve got a real story for him. It involves South American military creeps and dirty wars and foreign-policy protection for an asshole killer the FBI is helping to live the good life under another identity in America’s poshest resort.” Kurt paused. “Just because the man knows something about chemical warfare.”

  The agent’s eyes flashed up from the photograph. He seemed offended by the suggestion.

  “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Staggs?” he said. He pressed his finger against the sharp tines of the fork until there were four deep indentations. “You people don’t want somebody like Iran or Iraq to get their hands on Panzeca’s dirty little mind.”

  Staggs frowned, the long furrows on his forehead drawing together his thick black eyebrows. He pinched the corner of the photograph and tossed it back at Kurt. “What does it matter?” he said. “We do what we do.”

  Kurt shook his head slowly. “Are you that fucking brain dead it doesn’t bother you when a gumball like Panzeca jerks your agency around by the nose, murders somebody, and then makes you his cover?”

  Staggs slumped back in the chair and scratched at his ear. “Go ahead, break my heart,” he said.

  Kurt leaned forward and gazed into the agent’s face. He knew he was dealing with a man whose soul had been locked away long ago in the deep freeze of his profession.

  “Kill a few spics without green cards, who’s going to weep? That how you figured it, Staggs?” he said, twirling the fork between his fingers. He thought about plunging it into the man’s heart just to see if there was one. “Point a finger at them, fill out the report nice and neat, dot all the i’s, cross the t’s, bullshit the media, and wipe your hands of a murder.”

  Staggs propped his elbows on the chair’s delicate arms and laced his fingers, raising them to his chin. “The problem with guys like you, Muller, is you don’t appreciate a man’s deeply held religious views,” he said. “What you don’t understand about me, my friend, is I believe in karma. Oh, it’s probably not a kosher karma, but I’ve worked it out over the years in this job and I can write a fucking treatise on it. What goes around comes around. You’ve probably said it yourself a couple dozen times with a joint stuck in your mouth.”

  He dropped his hands to his lap. “The way my cosmic karma works is very simple,” he said. “Those little pricks out in Emma were doing something bad, sitting on a bunch of cannabis plants, collecting weapons for who knows what, and their time had come. Nobody was going to punch their clock, sure as hell not a dick-water hippie cop like you. So they got what they deserved, if maybe for reasons that look blurry under the glass. In this job I have to live with that. Your cosmic chit comes up,
you got to pay it.”

  His eyes widened. He was enjoying this.

  “You don’t have to worry about the colonel, my friend. His time is going to come. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back if it’ll make you feel like a hero. We’ll have to move him tomorrow to some other locale so Geraldo doesn’t show up with a camera and disrupt his tennis game, but sooner or later, in some tony country-club hideout, he’s going to fuck up again and somebody will make him pay. It won’t be us, of course. Some little greaser will come up behind him in the manicurist’s chair and slit his throat with a barber scissors. And you know what, Muller? I won’t give a damn. I don’t like the cockroach any more than you do. But I let the bureaucrats on Capitol Hill sort out the policy. I do my job and take my vacations with the little wife and raise my kids to stop at red lights.”

  Kurt set down the fork and looked at him. “How does Jake Pfeil fit into this mystical experience of yours?”

  Staggs cocked his head, a questioning smirk on his face.

  “You couldn’t nail him on the Erickson hit so you tried to drag him in on this one,” Kurt said. “The world of karma according to Neal Staggs.”

  The agent smiled tepidly. “Tell you the truth, Muller,” he said, “I was hoping Pfeil and the colonel would kill each other over the daughter. You can’t imagine how relieved I would feel.”

  Through the picture window Kurt could see a boy about twelve years old bounce once on the diving board and cannonball into the pool.

  “You’ve got a journal I want,” he said, picking up the photograph and studying the image of Colonel Octavio Panzeca. “I told Graciela Rojas I would return it to Quiroga’s family. Give me the journal and you can have the photograph and the negative.”

  Staggs began to laugh, his All-American prep-school face contorted into something hideous. “Okay, fine, Muller,” he said, wiping an eye. “You need a little victory out of all this, you can have it. I’ll get the fucking book laminated for you. We’ve already photocopied it forty times and sent every page to one bullshit expert or another. They’ve picked over every comma to see what it all means. Yeah, sure, you can have it back. If it’ll make you feel like a hero.”

  Kurt knew that retrieving the journal was little more than a gesture. He hated Staggs for making it so explicit.

  “And you can go ahead and keep your pictures and your negatives.” Staggs nodded at the photograph in Kurt’s hand. “I don’t think you’re going to talk to the DA, or to the fucking press, or to anybody else for that matter. You know why, my friend?” he said, the laughter disappearing abruptly from his face, leaving behind an uncompromising hardness that seemed to settle in the bone itself. “Because we know the whereabouts of an old lady living a quiet life in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I personally would get my rocks off calling her up and telling her a few things she wouldn’t want to hear about her darling son.”

  Kurt dropped the photograph onto the tablecloth. “You don’t have any dirt on me, Staggs,” he said angrily. “Those tapes are horseshit. Jake Pfeil is a proven liar.”

  “You?” Staggs said, raising an eyebrow. “Those tapes aren’t about you, my friend. They’re about your brother, the demolitions expert.”

  It was there again, that sudden chill in the blood. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he said.

  Staggs rested his shoulders against the chair and crossed his legs, a man relaxing, ready to exchange pleasantries. “Come on, Muller, it’s time you dropped the Mayberry routine,” he said. “We know what your brother did in Nam. We’ve got a book on the tactics he and his unit were trained for. You want photographs, I’ve got a nice set of black-and-whites showing what happened to an ARVN captain they suspected of collaborating with the VC. Guess where they found his brains when he sat down in his Jeep one muggy morning in Saigon? A beautiful job, Muller. A variation of the old Malaysian Door, a wood projectile set off by the man’s own body weight. Asshole to brainpan in two seconds. I’ve got to hand it to your brother and his buddies, they appreciated simplicity.”

  Kurt swallowed. His throat was dry.

  “I’ve got other pictures too. South Vietnamese politicians leaning the wrong way, hookers who talked too much to their johns. They met with a very messy demise,” he said. “We’ve read your brother’s reports. He wasn’t the best, but he was good enough. Quick, efficient. He showed a lot of promise in biomechanical engineering.”

  “You fucking liar!”

  Kurt wanted to grab Staggs by the neck but instead grabbed the white tablecloth. Silverware and goblets crashed to the carpet. Staggs stood up quickly and backed away, knocking over his chair. The red-haired agent materialized instantly and dropped to one knee, his 9-mm Ruger trained on Kurt. The waiters’ door flew open and the man in Banana Republic shorts dashed in, his weapon raised.

  “It’s okay, fellas,” Staggs said, catching his breath. He rolled his shoulders, straightening the Izod shirt. “Our friend Muller here is just showing a little frustration with something he’s been trying to deal with for a long time.”

  Kurt didn’t move from his chair. His heart was beating so fast his chest felt overflexed and tight. He stared at the mess he’d made on the floor. Something in him had finally broken, floated loose, and he was never going to get it back.

  “You know, Muller, I almost believe you,” Staggs said, composed now. “I almost believe you didn’t know anything about Pfeil and your brother and Chad Erickson. But nobody could be that blind.”

  Kurt couldn’t force himself to look away from the photograph lying in the glass.

  “You got some anger here, take it up with Jake Pfeil. He’s the one who knew how to make use of your brother’s talent. And while you’re at it,” he said, “why don’t you ask your old pal why Bert Muller suddenly fell off a mountain the very day we were going to bring him in?”

  He nodded to the two agents and they holstered their guns.

  “By the way,” Staggs said on his way to the door. “I just came from the morgue. I got a good look at the Rojas woman. You must be a pretty rough date, Muller.”

  His colleagues laughed. Then all three men were gone.

  Kurt sat for several minutes longer, an aching pressure constricting his chest. He breathed deeply, trying to recall the calming rhythm Meg had taught him years ago, but he had a darkening sense that nothing could help him now. All he could see in his mind was a snapshot of two brown-haired boys climbing around sandstone ruins in the shadow of an immense overhanging cliff. They had left behind the tower steps and rope-tied ladders and were scaling higher and higher, digging in with their nails, finding toeholds in the red clay. Their mother called after them, entreating them to come back down. They had gone too far, she cried. They were going to fall.

  Chapter twenty-two

  Kurt went home, collapsed into his father’s armchair, and brooded for nearly an hour in the quiet study, trying to wrap his mind around what Staggs had told him. The phone kept ringing but he didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially Muffin Brown, who would have serious questions about the shootout in the pool hall and the nude corpse of an unidentified young woman. The only person he wanted to see was his son, so he forced himself to get up and go to the kitchen, where he made peanut butter sandwiches and filled a canteen with Gatorade. He packed a change of clothing for Lennon, his sunglasses, the Cubs baseball cap. At the last minute he added packages of trail mix and Ninja Turtle fruit gummies to the backpack. The phone’s message light was still blinking when he left the house.

  Surrounded by an army of fierce sebaceous mutants, Lennon sat on Mrs. O’Carroll’s parquet floor, making explosion noises, lost in play. “Daddy, guess what?” He waved an ooze-covered figure. “Ozone Destructo is the bad guy, but he gets slimed by Eco Man.”

  This was the safest place for Lennon today. Private, unknown.

  “The planet is in grave danger,” said Mrs. O’Carroll, looking up from her book, “but Lennon and Eco Man have it under control.”

  He took his son to Hunter C
reek, one of their favorite hiking trails. The path began behind a large complex of red-roofed condominiums that had once served as employee housing units, the city’s attempt at affordable living quarters for its many worker bees. In recent years the condos had been expensively remodeled and sold off to airline pilots and cold-eyed urologists who used them six weeks a year.

  What Kurt liked about the trail was that once you walked a few yards into the dense grove surrounding the creek, there was no trace of condos or county roads or the Victorian spires of small-town life. Today the only visible hikers ahead of them were three outfitted women from somewhere else, determined nature-lovers with short butch hair and solid bodies and the plain, strong-jawed faces of men they lived happily without. Lennon had established his rituals on this trail, the places he stopped, the things he did every time. Children depended on the familiar. To suggest another way was to threaten the small safe steps they took to claim the world inch by cautious inch.

  “The pirate’s plank, Daddy!” Lennon called out excitedly.

  They left the path where a downed trunk jutted into the creek and ventured out onto its pale barkless surface, holding hands to keep balance over the water, then tiptoed back to look for long sticks and have a mock sword fight. At the boardwalk over a gentle runlet—a finger of spill-off that sloped into a clear shallow pool—Lennon stopped to kneel down on the sagging boards and study the gold flakes glinting beneath the water on a bed of sand.

  “Daddy, maybe we should become miners,” he said. “Then we won’t ever run out of money.”

  Although Kurt had not spoken with his son about resigning as sheriff, the boy had picked up something.

  “There’s nothing to worry about, sweetheart,” he said. “We’re never going to run out of money.”

  They held hands, something Lennon still liked to do, and walked up the path through leafy foliage, hopping from one flat stone to the next across another runlet, brushing away mosquitoes near secret pools of stagnant water in the deep still woods. They eventually emerged into a garden of boulders just before the bridge.