David Ellis - Breach of Trust

Good. Not good for Greg’s wife, who would now be coping not only with her husband’s death but with the notion that he’d been late coming home because he stopped off for a hummer from a teenaged prostitute. But good from our perspective. Charlie’s thugs had dumped Greg at Seagram Hill to give this precise impression, and the morning papers were announcing that their plan had worked. And spending much more time on a dead supreme court justice, at that.

Marie buzzed my phone a few minutes after I arrived. “Charlie Cimino,” she said.

I took a breath and said, “Put him through.”

“Jason, it’s Charlie.”

“Yeah, Charlie-”

“Did you see the paper today? About Greg Connolly?”

I felt a bitter smile on my face. Charlie was playing to anyone who might be listening. He was being careful. Did he still suspect me? Tucker and Moody had both mentioned it to me last night, as we kicked ideas around my kitchen table. Their concern was well founded. Connolly knew that I was working for the government. Had he given up that information under duress? The smart money said no, he didn’t, or else Charlie would have killed me last night. But the smart money doesn’t always win. The truth was, nobody knew what Charlie knew and didn’t know.

“I was just reading about it,” I said.

“Yeah, God, that’s terrible,” Charlie said. “Hey, listen, want to grab a cup of coffee?”

“Sure, Charlie.”

“How’s one o’clock look for you? In the lobby?”

“Great,” I said. I might have to leave the deposition early, but that was hardly my concern at the moment.

I went down to the fourth floor of my building and opened Suite 410. Lee Tucker was there. We’d expected Charlie would be contacting me soon, and we couldn’t be sure what he’d been doing in terms of surveillance on me, so the plan had been that Tucker would park himself in this office until we heard from him. We knew for certain that nobody was watching me last night, as the feds had been covering every side of my house, and presumably everyone working for Charlie had been busy disposing of Greg Connolly’s body. But today was a different story. Charlie had put someone on me two days ago and for who-knows-how-long before that. He could do it again.

“You look like shit,” Tucker pronounced. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I breathe.”

Tucker tossed me my cell phone. “Phone’s clean,” he said. Overnight, federal agents had looked over my cell phone to be sure Charlie hadn’t planted a recording device of his own in my phone.

“Charlie called. Coffee at one o’clock,” I said.

Tucker nodded slowly. “How’d he sound?”

“Cautious. ‘Did you hear about Greg,’ that sort of thing.”

“So he’s still worried,” Lee said.

“Worried about you. Not necessarily about me.”

Tucker seemed skeptical. “You willing to bet your life on ‘not necessarily’?”

It was a legitimate question. “Charlie trusts me,” I said.

“You realize, Kolarich-even if he doesn’t think you’re wearing a wire, he could think that Connolly gave us information about you.

Which means we might come to pay you a visit. Which makes you a liability. If Charlie’s as cautious as we think, it would make sense to get rid of you.”

“Of course I know that. That’s why we have to set his mind at ease.”

Tucker tossed me the F-Bird. It felt like a hundred pounds in my hand.

“You understand my limitations,” said Tucker. “I can’t cover you. I can’t wire you up for real-time monitoring, and I can’t follow you wherever you go.”

“I understand,” I said.

Tucker sighed. He started to say something but thought better of it.

“Talk,” I said.

He struggled for a moment.

“Speak,” I said.

He held up a hand. “Look, when they found Greg-the bullet to his brain? It wasn’t the only. . it wasn’t the only. . injury. You follow?”

I thought I did. Before the end of his life, before the bullet entered his brain, Greg Connolly endured things he probably considered worse than death.

Tucker leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t accustomed to talking people down from taking risks. He’d spent far more time talking people into them. “I’m just saying, we’ve got Cimino on a lot. We can confront him, flip him-get to the higher-ups that way.”

“You think that would work?” I said it like I was doubtful. Because I was. I couldn’t imagine Charlie agreeing to cooperate with the feds. Nor could I imagine him being successful at it if he tried.

At one o’clock, I went down into the lobby. Charlie was there, on his phone. He gestured to me and started walking toward the exit. He liked a coffee shop down the street. I joined him outside, not braced for a cold, gusty wind. We headed due east, my head down against the wind, when he hit my arm. I looked up and saw his Porsche parked at a meter.

“C’mon,” he said.

“Change of plans?”

He got around to the driver’s side and looked at me. “That’s right. Change of plans. That okay with you?”

Charlie trusts me .

“Whatever,” I said. I got into his car.

I would follow Charlie’s lead. He didn’t speak, so neither did I. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was taking me. We were going to his club, presumably for another game of racquetball. For another chance to strip-search me without strip-searching me.

It hadn’t been that hard to foresee. Tucker and I had discussed it. We’d gone back and forth in Suite 410 earlier today about the F-Bird. We finally decided against it. As much as we wanted Charlie on tape, confessing to the murder of Greg Connolly, there was too large a risk that Charlie would search me for a listening device. If he had even the tiniest lingering doubt about my loyalties, the day after Greg’s murder would be the time to test me.

Charlie’s expression was tight. Controlled. He had a lot of worries at the moment. He knew the feds had been looking at someone-presumably him included-and he didn’t know what the shakeout of Greg Connolly’s murder would be.

We went through the same routine as previously. An attendant gave me clothes and a racquet, and I left my clothes in an unlocked locker. Once again, I had dodged a bullet with the decision to leave the F-Bird at home.

“What the hell, Charlie?” I said to him when we were on the racquetball court. It was an isolated court, but my voice echoed. It hardly seemed the place for this conversation. And he hadn’t received confirmation yet from whoever it was who was going through my clothes, searching for an F-Bird.

“Let’s just play,” he said. So play we did. Each of us, in different ways, had a lot of steam to vent, and this was the perfect setting. I was sore at first for obvious reasons, but the flow of adrenaline helped, and soon enough I was playing like my life depended on it. I felt sorry for the little blue racquetball and for Charlie, if he had any pride in how he played, because I showed him no mercy whatsoever. The first game was over in less than twenty minutes. The second, less than fifteen.

Charlie was grabbing his knees. His gray shirt was stuck to his body with perspiration. I had to admit, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d keeled over right there, but justice wouldn’t work that way. In the end, I think it was good for him, the workout. “Three out of five,” he suggested.

I was just getting loose. I shut him out in the third game.

He grumbled about it, but he had weightier issues on his mind than a racquetball game. We retired to the same parlor area for juice. He excused himself, presumably to meet with the person who had searched my clothes in the locker, and who would give me a clean bill of health. Probably Leather Jacket was not that person this time, or if he was, he wouldn’t want me to see him.