Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories - 3 Read online

  "Why?"

  She nodded at the news clippings. "It's in there somewhere. There was a man maybe working for the Westerfields, the police think. Daniel's worried he'd find out if we started looking for the body. He's probably dangerous."

  Glad you mentioned it, Caruso thought wryly. "Okay, I'll email." He rose.

  Carmel Rodriguez stepped forward and actually hugged him, tears in her eyes.

  Caruso mentally bumped his fee down another twenty-five, just to buy her a little more of his time.

  When she'd gone he booted up the iPad just to see what he'd missed sportswise. The match was over. Senegal had won five zip.

  Five?

  A BBC announcer, beset by very un-BBC enthusiasm, was gushing, "Some of the most spectacular goals I have ever seen in all my years--"

  Caruso shut the device off. He pulled the stack of clippings closer, to take more notes--and to read up in particular on the Westerfields' possible accomplice.

  He was reflecting that in all his years as a privately investigating security consultant, he'd been in one pushing match that lasted ten seconds. Not one real fight. Caruso did have a license to carry a pistol and he owned one but he hadn't touched his in about five years. He believed the bullets had turned green.

  He wondered if he would in fact be in danger.

  Then decided, so be it. Game had to come with a little risk. Otherwise it wasn't Game.

  *

  NYPD DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT Lon Sellitto dropped into his chair in his Major Cases office, One Police Plaza. Dropped, not sat. Rumpled--the adjective applied to both the gray suit and the human it encased--he looked with longing affection at a large bag from Baja Express he'd set on his excessively cluttered desk. Then at his visitor. "You want a taco?"

  "No, thanks," Caruso said.

  The portly cop said, "I don't get the cheese or the beans. It cuts the calories way down."

  Eddie Caruso had known Sellitto for years. The detective was an all right guy, who didn't bust the chops of private cops, as long as they didn't throw their weight around and sneak behind the backs of the real Boys in Blue. Caruso didn't. He was respectful.

  But not sycophantic.

  "You'll guarantee that?" Caruso asked.

  "What?"

  "No beans, so you're not going to fart. I don't want to be here if you're gonna fart."

  "I meant I don't get the refried beans. I get the regular beans, black beans or whatever the hell they are. They're a lot less calories. 'Fried' by itself is not a good word when you're losing weight. 'Refried'? Think how fucking bad that is. But black beans're okay. Good fiber, tasty. But, yeah, I fart when I eat 'em. Like any Tom, Dick and Harry. Everybody does."

  "Can we finish business before you indulge?"

  Sellitto nodded at a slim, limp NYPD case file. "We will, 'cause sorry to say, the quote business ain't going to take that long. The case is over and done with and it wasn't much to start with."

  Out the window you could catch a glimpse of the harbor and Governors Island. Caruso loved the view down here. He'd thought from time to time about relocating but then figured the only real estate he could afford in this 'hood would come with a view even worse than his present one in Midtown, which was a few trees and a lot of sunlight, secondhand--bounced off that Times Square high-rise.

  The detective shoved the file Caruso's way. The Sarah Lieberman homicide investigation. "That was one fucked-up twosome, the perps." Sellitto winced. "They ick me out. Mother and son, with one bed in the townhouse. Think about it."

  Caruso would rather not.

  Sellitto continued. "So your client wants to know where the Dysfunctional Family dumped the body?"

  "Yep, she's religious. You know."

  "No, I don't."

  "I don't either. But that's the way of it."

  "I looked through it fast." Sellitto offered a nod toward the file. "But the best bet for the corpse is Jersey."

  "I read that in the Daily News. But there were no specifics."

  Sellitto grumbled, "It's in the file. Somewhere near Kearny Marsh."

  "Don't know it."

  "No reason to. Off Bergen Avenue. The name says it all."

  "Kearny?"

  Sellitto's round face cracked a smile. "Ha, you're funny for a private dick. Why don't you join the force? We need people like you."

  "Marsh, huh?"

  "Yeah. It's all swamp. Serious swamp."

  Caruso asked, "Why'd they think there?"

  "Ran John Westerfield's tags. They had him at a toll booth on the Jersey Turnpike. He got off at the Two-Eighty exit and back on again a half hour later. Security footage in the area showed the car parked in a couple places by the Marsh. He claimed he was checking out property to buy. He said he was this real estate maven. Whatever maven is. What's that word mean?"

  "If we were in a Quentin Tarantino movie," Caruso said, "this's where I'd start a long digression about the word 'maven.'"

  "Well, it isn't and I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

  Sellitto definitely had Game.

  Caruso flipped through the smaller folder inside the bigger one. The smaller was labeled John Westerfield. Many of the documents were his own notes and records, and a lot of them had to do with real estate, all the complex paperwork that rode herd on construction in Manhattan: foundation-pouring permits, crane permits, street-access permissions. Interestingly--and incriminatingly--these were all multimillion-dollar projects that John couldn't possibly have engaged in without Sarah Lieberman's money.

  "Good policing. When was Westerfield in Jersey?"

  "I don't know. A couple days before she disappeared."

  "Before? Was there a toll record of him being there after she disappeared?"

  "No. That's where the grassy knoll effect comes in."

  "The...?"

  "Dallas. Kennedy assassination. The other gunman."

  "I don't believe there was one. It was Oswald. Alone."

  "I'm not arguing that. My point is that the Westerfields probably did have an accomplice. He's the one who got rid of the body. In his car. So there was no record of Westerfield returning to Jersey."

  "Yeah, my client mentioned there might've been somebody else. Why would he be the one who dumped the body, though?"

  Sellitto tapped the file. "Just after they killed her--Crime Scene knew the time from the blood--the Westerfields were seen in public so they'd have an alibi. They would've hired somebody to dump the body. Probably somebody connected."

  "Organized crime?"

  "What 'connected' means."

  "I know that. I'm just saying."

  Sellitto said, "We think some low-grade punk. The Westerfields had connections with mob folks in Kansas City and they must've tapped some affiliate here."

  "Like Baja Fresh. Mobster franchises."

  Sellitto rolled his eyes, maybe thinking Caruso wasn't as clever as he'd first thought. The detective said, "The Westerfields stole three-quarters of a million from Mrs. Lieberman, cash and jewelry. They would've paid this guy from that."

  Caruso liked it that Sellitto called her Mrs. Lieberman. Respect. That was good, that was part of Game. "Any leads to him?"

  "No, but he was after the fact and nobody in the DA's office gave a shit really. They had the doers. Why waste resources." Sellitto finally gave in. He opened the lunch bag. It did smell pretty good.

  Caruso began, "The couple--"

  "They're mother and son, I wouldn't call 'em a couple."

  "The couple, they say anything about the third guy?"

  Sellitto looked at Caruso as if he'd gotten stupid himself. "Remember, it was gangbangers who killed her. Or she decided to take a cruise and forgot to tell anybody. To the quote couple, there was no third guy."

  "So I go searching in Jersey. Where exactly is this Kearny Marsh?"

  Sellitto nodded at the file.

  Caruso took it and retreated to a corner of Sellitto's office to read.

  "One thing," the detective said.
r />   Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.

  The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. "Stay at your own risk."

  *

  HOPELESS.

  Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield's green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.

  There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

  Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type--tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.

  New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn't laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitoes.

  Slap.

  And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.

  Slap.

  The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.

  He wasn't surprised searchers hadn't found her brutalized corpse.

  And there was plenty of land, too--in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.

  He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.

  A flash of red caught his eye.

  What's that?

  It was a couple of people in a canoe.

  New Jersey Meadowlands Commission was printed on the side.

  Eddie Caruso's first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.

  His second thought was: Shit.

  This was government land, Caruso realized.

  Meadowlands Commission...

  John Westerfield claimed he'd come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There'd be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He'd done that intentionally. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn't get convicted if the body was never found. So they'd left a trail here to stymie the police.

  In fact, they'd buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.

  Where...?

  Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto's office. He believed he knew the answer.

  *

  AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER--thank you very much, New York City traffic--Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.

  He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.

  A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.

  "Sign for these."

  He did.

  "Can I check these out?"

  "No."

  "But the thing is--"

  She said reasonably, "You can read 'em, you can memorize 'em, you can copy 'em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody's been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change."

  "Do you have--?"

  "We don't give change."

  Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.

  These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman's townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield's police file, the one that Sellitto let him look through. They'd been discovered in the man's desk. John had claimed to be involved in real estate work, so who would have thought twice about finding these folders? No one did.

  But Eddie Caruso had.

  Because why would John Westerfield have copies of permits for construction of buildings he'd had nothing to do with?

  There was only one reason, which became clear when Caruso had noted that these three permits were for pouring foundations.

  What better way to dispose of a body than to drop it into a pylon about to be filled with concrete?

  But which building was it? Eddie Caruso's commitment to Carmel Rodriguez was to find out exactly where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.

  As he looked down at the permits he suddenly realized how he could find out.

  He copied the first pages of all three permits, after getting change from another customer because, yeah, his dollars'd all been rejected by the temperamental Xerox machine. Then, returning to the cubicle, he carefully--and painfully--worked the industrial-sized staples from the paper and replaced the originals with the copies.

  This was surely a misdemeanor of some kind, but he'd developed quite an affection for Mrs. Carmel Rodriguez (he had dropped his rate by another twenty-five dollars an hour). And, by the by, he'd come to form an affection for the late Mrs. Sarah Lieberman, too. Nothing was going to stop him from learning where the poor woman was resting in peace.

  To his relief, the clerk missed the theft, and with a sincere smile Caruso thanked her and wandered outside.

  Lord be praised, there was no ticket and in a half hour he was parked outside the private forensic lab he sometimes used. He hurried inside and paid a premium for expedited service. Then he strolled down to the waiting room, where to his delight, he found a new capsule coffee machine.

  Eddie Caruso didn't drink coffee much and he never drank tea. But he loved hot chocolate. He had recipes for eighty different types and you needed recipes--you couldn't wing it. (And you never mixed that gray-brown powder from an envelope with hot water, especially envelopes that contained those little fake marshmallows like dandruff.)

  But the Keurig did a pretty good job, provided you chocked the resulting cocoa full of Mini-Moo's half-and-half, which Eddie Caruso now did. He sat back to enjoy the frothy beverage, flipping through a Sports Illustrated, which happened to describe the Nigeria-Senegal match as the Game of the Century.

  In ten minutes, a forensic tech--a young Asian woman in a white jacket and goggles around her neck--joined him. He'd been planning on asking her out for some time. Three years and four months, to be exact. He hadn't been courageous, or motivated, enough to do so then. And he wasn't now.

  She said, "Okay, Eddie, here's what we've got. We've isolated identifiable prints of six individuals on the permit documents from the city commission you brought me."

  Technicians were always soooo precise.

  "Two of them, negative. No record in any commercial or law enforcement database. One set is yours." She regarded him with what might pass for irony, at least in a forensic tech, and said, "I can report that you are not in any criminal databases either. It is likely, however, that that might not be the case much longer if the police find out how you came to be in possession of an original permit, which by law has to remain on file with the city department in question."

  Precise...

  "Oh," Eddie said offhandedly, "I found 'em on the street. The permits."

  No skipped beats. She continued, "I have to tell you none are John Westerfield's."

  This was a surprise and a disappointment.

  "But I could identify one other person who touched the documents. We got his prints from military records."

  "Not criminal?"

  "No."

  "Who is he?"

  "His name
's Daniel Rodriguez."

  It took five seconds.

  Carmel's husband.

  Sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn't...

  *

  WHATEVER YOU CALL YOUR PROFESSION, security or investigation, you need to be as professional as any cop.

  Eddie Caruso was now in his office, number crunching what he'd found, not letting a single fact wander away or distort.

  Was this true? Could Daniel Rodriguez be the third conspirator, the one who'd actually disposed of Sarah Lieberman's body?

  There was no other conclusion.

  He'd worked in Sarah's building and would have been very familiar with John and Miriam Westerfield. And they had known that Daniel, with three girls approaching college age, would need all the money he could get. He was involved in the trades and would know his way around construction sites. He probably even had friends in the building whose foundation was now Sarah Lieberman's grave.

  Finally, Daniel hadn't wanted his wife to pursue her plan to find out where Sarah's body was. He claimed this was because it was dangerous. But, thinking about it, Caruso decided that was crazy. The odds of the other guy finding out were minimal. No, Daniel just didn't want anybody looking into the case again.

  And whatta I do now? Caruso wondered.

  Well, there wasn't much choice. All PIs are under an obligation to inform the police if they're aware of a felon at large. Besides, anybody who'd participated, however slightly, in such a terrible crime had to go to jail.

  Still, was there anything he could do to mitigate the horror that Carmel and their daughters would feel when he broke the news?

  Nothing occurred to him. Tomorrow would be a mass of disappointment.

  Still, he had to be sure. He needed as much proof of guilt as a cop would. That's what Game required: resolution, good or bad. Game is never ambiguous.

  He assembled some of his tools of the trade. And then decided he needed something else. After all, a man who can toss the body of an elderly woman into a building site can just as easily kill someone who's discovered he did that. He unlocked the box containing his pistol, nothing sexy, just a revolver, the sort you didn't see much anymore.

  He found the bullets, too. They weren't green. Which meant, Eddie Caruso assumed, that they still worked.

  *

  THE NEXT DAY Caruso rented an SUV with tinted windows and spent hours following Daniel. It was boring and unproductive, as 99 percent of tailing usually is.