Jericho's Fall, page 17
“Our conversation was confidential.”
Sheriff Garvey nodded, one hand on his belt. Behind him, they had Pesky up on the gurney and were rolling him toward the ambulance. “Is that why you were at Mr. Navarro’s office this afternoon?”
“That was another confidential matter.”
“And what about having another drink with my deputy? Which I distinctly told you not to do? Was that confidential, too?”
She spread her hands. “I really can’t help you, Sheriff.”
“May I give you a word of advice? Stay away from him.”
“Because of his—theories?”
“Because Pete Mundy is a married man and it’s a small town.” He spoke softly, the way the executioner does when he knows you have nowhere to hide. “A woman like you can wreck a man’s career.”
She stifled about sixteen different retorts. “Thank you for the advice,” she said coldly.
“Just doing my job,” he said, unsmiling. “I understand you’re leaving us day after tomorrow.”
“Probably.”
“I think that’s a very good idea.” Garvey turned away, but before he did, Beck caught his glance. He was looking up above her head, toward the house. She swung around. The windows of Jericho’s suite. Although in the darkness the sight could easily have been her imagination, Rebecca thought for an instant that she saw his rigid face, glowering down at the mess on his lawn, before receding into the shadows.
(iii)
Beck crouched on the window seat of her bedroom, curtains wide open, staring up at the plateau from which she had, just hours ago, looked down at the house. Pesky had been up there, taking photographs. Pamela had downloaded the images from his digital camera. The investigator had been all over the property, unseen, snapping photos of everything in sight. Pete Mundy had arrested him. Sheriff Garvey had let him out again because some honcho had called.
And he had returned to the scene to snap more pictures.
All this for a magazine, and fifty thousand dollars?
Some of the images were the same as the ones Lewiston Clark had left behind when he left Mrs. Rennie’s boarding house in a hurry. It did not take a genius to see that the two men had been working together; or that Pesky had to be the man who had visited Clark, causing him to leave in such a rush.
After his release. After the call from the honcho.
Doing her sums, she put the events in the proper order. Pesky and Clark, working together, Pesky as outside man, Clark as inside man. When Clark could not talk his way in, Pesky doubled his efforts with the camera. When Pesky got arrested, somebody had him sprung, and that somebody obviously lit a fire under them both. So Pesky returned to the house, and even climbed on the roof in his desperation.
As for Clark, she had no idea where he was. If he had any sense, he had fled. It occurred to her that there was a Keystone Kops quality to the episode. If these two were the best that Pete Mundy’s strangers could muster, then Jericho had nothing to worry about.
And yet she wondered.
Dak’s presence suggested another, more malevolent force at work. The old spy was concerned, and the likes of Pesky and Clark would not concern him.
She wondered whether Jericho has reached her boss’s boss’s boss, to extend her stay at Stone Heights. She hoped not. In any event, this time, Beck decided, she would not allow Jericho to dictate events. She had promised him only that she would be here until Thursday, and so Thursday it would be. To leave any later would be to allow her ex-lover to manipulate her. But to leave earlier would be a breach of her promise, and a sign of panic besides.
Dak had assured her she was not in any danger, and Jericho had told her the same thing. She assumed they knew what they were talking about. Nevertheless, sitting there on the window seat, gazing out into the darkness, Rebecca experienced a sharp surge of gratitude for the unexpected gift she had found on Sunday night under a false bottom in the bamboo basket that held extra towels in her bathroom. Searching in odd places had become second nature to her during her time with Jericho—whenever they would check into a hotel, she would join him in peeking under furniture and behind cabinets for hidden bugs—and even after fifteen years, now that Beck was back at Stone Heights she had reverted automatically to old habits.
A good thing Audrey was less suspicious, because what Beck discovered, courtesy of Jericho’s paranoia, was a Glock 9mm, Model 19, complete with extended magazine—the compact version of the gun he had once taught her to shoot, up in these sad, brooding mountains.
Not that she would need it, of course. In two days, she would be gone from Stone Heights, presumably forever. Nevertheless, she locked both doors to the suite, then sneaked the Glock from its new hiding place beneath the mattress. She stood in front of the mirror, practicing her grip, and remembering her second-biggest fight with Jericho, after he marched her into the woods one afternoon and made her fire off an entire magazine at a family of squirrels.
She killed one.
When they come, he had murmured, leading his weeping lover back to the house, your aim will have to be better than that.
She could hardly fire a gun in the guest room, but she could work on her grip and her draw. And so, silently acknowledging Jericho’s long-ago instruction, she practiced and practiced, on into the wee hours.
WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER 19
The Lawyer
(i)
On Wednesday morning, everything was fine. Pamela was monopolizing the computer, and Audrey prepared a huge breakfast too healthy for anybody to eat. Swallowing the slithery remains of whatever is left of an egg after you take the good stuff out, Rebecca found herself longing for those carb-heavy meals of pasta and bread. The nun said excitedly that she had a line on a handyman to take Mr. Lobb’s place, and also that she was making headway in persuading Jericho that the house needed a full-time nurse.
Beck sat in the kitchen and picked at her food, then turned the conversation where Audrey obviously did not want to go: toward the events of the previous night. And Audrey, after initially resisting, yielded, and joined her at the table.
“He wasn’t trying to break in,” the nun pointed out. “He was taking pictures.”
Beck swirled the egg whites with her fork. She watched Audrey’s cautious eyes. “And that doesn’t seem strange to you, Aud? That a man would climb on top of your father’s house with a camera to take pictures?”
Audrey crinkled her nose. “Of course it’s strange. That’s why I’m glad they arrested him. I’m sorry about his leg, though. I hope he heals soon.”
Beck choked back a wave of sympathy. “I’m sorry too. But he shouldn’t have been on the roof.”
The house phone rang, but neither of them moved, because they knew it would be for Pamela, who would pick up the extension in the study.
The nun shook her head. “Everybody who gets hurt by somebody else, there’s always a reason. A lot of them are good reasons. But the people are still hurt.” She was fingering the cross around her neck, and Beck knew she was remembering the work she had fled. “Sometimes I think that’s the main grudge Sean holds against Dad. He thinks Dad made the world worse.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think he made mistakes, and some of them were costly. But we all do that. He did the best he could, same as we all do when we—”
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” snapped Pamela from the doorway. “It’s for you. Not you. For Rebecca.”
(ii)
“I’m not calling too early, am I?” said Tish Kirschbaum. “I figure you guys get up early out west.”
Beck took the portable phone out onto the deck, enjoying the mountain chill. For three or four minutes, the old friends exchanged pleasantries. Tish was every bit as divorced as Beck, and was raising a son alone, but seemed to suffer less.
“Scondell Bloom,” said Tish, when Rebecca finally got around to the reason for her call. “Wow. I totally forgot your guy was there.”
“He’s not my guy.”
“Used to be, though.”
“What can you tell me?”
“Not much. I assume you know how the firm collapsed— Wait. Do you know how private equity works? They raise money to buy companies—not stocks, whole companies—and then they make the companies more efficient, stripping them of a lot of valuable assets on the way, and restructure them, and sell them back to the public, usually at a profit. And the partners, well, they make out like fat rats. The guys who founded Scondell Bloom paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars each.”
“What went wrong?”
“Nobody really knows. I have a friend at the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan, and from what he says, I would guess that the firm did a lot of investing overseas, and a lot of that money just vanished. What has them puzzled is that these weren’t dicey Third World investments. This money was in countries with serious financial regulation, transparency, whatever you want. It still vanished. It’s as if the foreign regulators were all looking the wrong way. But a lot of them are upstanding citizens, wealthy in their own right. Not the sort to commit crimes, and not the sort to take bribes. The prosecutors don’t know what happened. That’s why they just indicted Bloom and Scondell for wire fraud and mail fraud. They can’t prove what happened to the money, so they accused them of continuing to raise funds when they knew the money was gone.” A laugh over the line—Tish loved to find the flaws in capitalism. These days, she had a lot of company. “A billion dollars might be missing. Maybe more. We’re not talking losses. We’re talking money that just disappeared.”
Beck was sitting where she had sat with Jericho yesterday, looking up at the peak. She could not figure out what Lewiston Clark thought he knew. Jericho had not been indicted and was not the subject of an investigation. It was absurd to think that he had a billion dollars squirreled away somewhere.
“Doolie Bloom killed himself after he was indicted,” said Rebecca, half to herself.
“That’s right,” said Tish. “Only Scondell is facing trial.”
“What about Jack Notting? He didn’t get indicted.”
“True. And nobody knows where he is, although the smart betting is that he’s on the lam. He’ll turn up someplace with no extradition treaty, and spend his life counting his money.”
“Who is he? Where did he come from? I hear he was in the Foreign Service.”
Tish hooted. “Come on, Beck. Don’t be naïve. I bet when your guy was in Vietnam, in the sixties or whenever, his résumé said ‘Foreign Service,’ too. As a matter of fact, I’d bet it still does.”
“Are you saying—”
“Jack Notting was CIA. I thought everybody knew that.”
Tish made her promise to come for a long weekend when she got back. “Oh, and bring Nina. Maybe we’ll matchmake them one day.”
Rebecca hardly heard herself agreeing. She was remembering how Jericho had described his work for Scondell Bloom, and, just like that, she knew part of what he was hiding. Now all she had to figure out was where he had put it.
(iii)
Her appointment with Brian Navarro, the lawyer, was at ten. She would have preferred to talk to Jericho before she left for town, but Audrey said her father was resting and could not be disturbed. Beck was upstairs putting on her good shoes when her cell phone rang. The screen said UNKNOWN NUMBER.
Not again.
She considered not answering, but the phone went on ringing. She went to the window but saw no helicopter. She picked up the phone and turned it off.
The ringing stopped.
“Okay, then.”
She decided to take her briefcase so that she would look professional. She was checking her face in the mirror when the phone rang again.
It had switched itself back on.
There are people, these days, who write viruses for cell phones. Yours could be infected.
She answered. The fax tone, and the whine.
She hung up and turned the phone off. The screen went blank, then recycled, brightening again. The phone began to ring. She hesitated. If the phone was malfunctioning, the problem was getting worse. If not, somebody somewhere was feeling rather…urgent.
Beck reminded herself that she was leaving tomorrow. She was just opening the back to take the battery out when she was startled by a knock, hard and peremptory, on the door connecting to the bathroom and the study.
Pamela’s voice: “Will you please stop playing with the damn phone? Some of us have actual work to do.”
Out on the landing, Beck ran into Audrey.
“He’s awake,” the nun said. “He’s asking for you.”
(iv)
“They tell me you’re running off again,” said Jericho with a frown. He was lying down. The body seemed strong but the energy was fading. “They tell me you’re collecting men like—oh, I don’t know.” He pushed himself up on his shoulders. “I’m the one who’s dying, Becky-Bear. When is there time in that busy schedule of yours for me?”
“Whenever you want,” she said, very surprised.
“Good. Let’s go out.”
She blinked. “Out?”
“You know. A date.”
“Jericho—”
“I’m told you’re heading for town. You told the girls you’d be back at noon. Fine. I have some calls to make anyway. I’ll be ready to go at one, and we’ll go for a little drive. How does that sound?”
Rebecca was, for a moment, wordstruck. She had promised Pamela that she would try to get Jericho out of the house, but, deep down, she wondered whether he was healthy enough. Then it occurred to her that this might be her only chance to get him alone, and away from the house—
“Jer-Bear?”
“Yes?”
“You mean, just the two of us?” Squeezing his hand. He squeezed back. “No Pamela? No Audrey?”
“Just the two of us.” He flopped back onto the bed. “I have to get away from them.”
She smiled. “I’d be honored.”
“That’s right,” said Jericho. “You would.”
Halfway to the door, she had a thought. “Jer-Bear?”
“Hmmm?”
“Do you know anything about—about people planting viruses in cell phones?”
One eye opened. “Are you planning to plant one?”
“Just tell me how it works.”
“It happens,” he said. The other eye opened, and Jericho was all professional again. “If you just want to wreck a phone, it’s easy as pie. If you want to cut a phone off from the network, so it can’t make calls? That’s even easier. On the other hand, if you want to hack it—use it as a GPS, say, to follow somebody with—or a listening device? Technically possible, but a lot harder. The phone companies take lots of precautions against that kind of thing. The equipment you would need you can’t just buy on the street.” He laughed, then coughed. “The good thing about living up here is, you don’t have to worry about them bugging your cell phone. There’s no service.”
Down in the kitchen, she announced the plan to the sisters. She would pick up Jericho at one, and they would go driving. Audrey was adamant: the risk was too great. Pamela was dubitante: after all, she was the one who had asked Rebecca to get her father out of the house. As the sisters quarreled, it dawned on Beck that the outcome didn’t matter.
“You know what?” she said. “It’s not up to you.”
The sisters were startled. “Try to keep it to an hour,” said Audrey.
“It’ll take as long as it takes.”
And, very pleased with herself, Beck left for town.
(v)
Brian Navarro was broad and sixty and brown and voluble, a man delighted to be a power in his town, and not particularly concerned about what others thought. His gestures were wide. He filled a lot of space. He dressed beautifully. He insisted on showing her his ego wall, the scattering of poses with the state and congressional representatives from the district, then toured her through his wife and five children, delightedly following their photographs as they grew, and wedded, and brought forth children of their own. She oohed and aahed at the right moments, and, probably, meant it. Then he sat her in the conference room adjoining his office, and chose the side of the table with the sun at his back. He asked if she minded his smoking, and lit a cigar like a gas bomb. Then he waited while Beck, sufficiently softened up, and squinting and occasionally coughing into the bargain, explained what she wanted, all the while thinking that Brian Navarro was more clever than she had thought.
Yes, he said. Sure, he hung around with Jericho. He was Jericho’s friend, he said proudly, as well as Jericho’s lawyer. She noticed that no receptionist was present. She wondered how large a practice an attorney could maintain in a town like this. She didn’t have the heart to tell him about the duo who had driven up from Denver to take possession of the will.
“He talks about you all the time, Miss DeForde. You’re very important to him. I hope you know that, because that old coot isn’t much on showing he cares.”
“Beck,” she said.
“Fine. Beck. I’m Brian.” He blew smoke rings. “Jericho came to me a few years ago with a tax question. I hope I’m not giving anything away. He said he’d given you a gift, and that you gave it to charity. He wanted to know if he could get a deduction. I told him no. I hope you took one, though. For the full value. Doesn’t matter if the cost basis was zero.”
Beck dropped her gaze, momentarily embarrassed. “I never thought about it,” she confessed.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. You can file an amended return. Just talk to your accountant.”
“That would be H&R Block.”
They shared a laugh, slightly strained. Each was waiting for the other.
“The two of you spend a lot of time together,” she said at last.
“Some. Not as much as we used to, of course. He’s been sick, and even before that, he hadn’t been coming to town quite so much. He used to play in the mayor’s poker game, but I don’t think he’s been there in a year or so.”
“But I understand he spends a lot of time at the library.”
