Brian Freemantle - Two Women

‘Find her lawyers. It’s Geoffrey Davis at the firm. There’s another named Burt: I don’t know his surname. She spoke to both from the motel.’

‘She spoke to Davis from Morristown, too,’ said Hanlan.

‘I don’t know how she got there. What she was doing there?’

‘How about you took her there?’ challenged Barbara.

‘We split up. She took the car.’

‘Why’d you run from the cabin?’

‘Jane tricked me into running her into town. Persuaded me into letting her drive back but then took off…’ She hesitated. It was all going to come out so there was no point in avoiding it. ‘She wanted me to tell her about John and I. About what I knew about the firm and the Mafia. I’d told her bits but tried to keep some back. It didn’t make sense, I guess.’ Was she making any better sense now? It didn’t seem like it, from the attitude of these two in the cramped interview room with the tape machine with its blinking light, recording everything. ‘Please!’ she said, urgently. ‘Let me tell you what it’s about.’

Hanlan looked at Barbara, in whose Manhattan jurisdiction the kidnap had occurred, even though it was ultimately a federal crime. She shrugged. He said to Alice: ‘OK, from the beginning.’

Which was how Alice told it, from her first visit to Wall Street to interview George Northcote. She held nothing back about her affair with Carver, even repeating, to Barbara Donnelly’s visible scepticism, that she was never a threat to the Carver marriage. Alice expected some interjections when she began talking of John’s initial discovery of Northcote’s organized-crime connection and of Northcote’s insistence that he could extricate himself, but none came.

‘And then I got involved,’ declared Alice and stopped. No way back, if she continued talking. It was commitment time and she didn’t have a lawyer to advise her and she’d been read her Miranda rights, making what she said admissible in court or before a Grand Jury and from this moment on she’d be at the mercy of these unsympathetic investigators if she said anything more, or at the mercy of gangsters who didn’t know mercy if she said anything less.

‘Go on,’ encouraged Hanlan.

‘I found out how it worked,’ insisted Alice. ‘I did it illegally and I know I’ve committed criminal offences – technically kidnap, even, although it wasn’t – but everything I did was to understand and try to sort out what happened to George and Janice and then to John. I want to co-operate in every way and I want to be taken into the Witness Protection Programme because if I’m not I know, as you know, that I’ll be killed.’

‘Let’s hear the story and then we’ll talk about witness protection,’ said Hanlan. She’d jerked him around, made him look ridiculous, and he didn’t intend offering anything until he was as positive as it was possible to be that she wasn’t holding out on him, not by so much as a single crumb.

Alice eased the canvas bag up from her lap and tentatively put it on the desk between them. Initially unspeaking she unpacked all the duplicate printouts she’d assembled at the cabin with her hurriedly replaced laptop. As Hanlan and the New York detective frowned down at the jumble, Alice announced: ‘IRS records that show how the Mafia laundered their money over a very long time.’

‘Obtained how?’ pounced Hanlan, determined against any more embarrassing foul-ups.’

‘Hacking,’ admitted Alice, at once.

‘Legally inadmissible,’ rejected Hanlan. ‘An illegal act, which hacking is, does not provide acceptable evidence of the further illegal act it exposes.’

‘I know that! John and I knew that: discussed it! I’m showing you how it was done and how, properly and officially, you or your financial experts – I don’t know who, for fuck’s sake – can work with the IRS and the company registry authorities and get exactly what I got but in a way that is admissible!’ She shouldn’t have said fuck. She shouldn’t have come here like this, to be confronted hostilely like this, without lawyers telling her what to say and what not to say. It irritated her that Jane had been right and she had been wrong. Jane hadn’t been right, Alice decided at once. She’d kept the baby – hers and John’s baby – safe and Jane was missing. With her own and John’s baby.

She wouldn’t tell them about England, Alice decided. They weren’t impressed by – weren’t accepting – what she was offering. Admitting any involvement whatsoever in bomb-outrage murder would get her publicly charged and publicly exposed. A target, even if she were in custody, which was never an obstacle to the Mafia, before she could appear before a court to get any sort of public, protective stage.

‘Tell me something I can legally use,’ insisted Hanlan.

‘The names of the companies through which the laundering worked, worldwide,’ snatched Alice, feeling a flicker of relieved hope. ‘I didn’t get them by hacking.’

‘Neither did we,’ said Hanlan. ‘We got them from John’s severance letters. The Bureau’s finance and fraud division have been working on them for almost two days now.’

‘They’re offshore, you can’t get to them!’ insisted Alice. ‘The IRS route, through their supply-chain subsidiaries, is the only way. And you wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t shown you!’

Hanlan knew she was right. Was aware, too, of Barbara Donnelly’s shifts of impatience at what he guessed to be irritation at his persistent obduracy. ‘What’s in Carver’s safe deposit?’

Alice patted the printouts between them. ‘A much larger selection of these, showing the worldwide spread of the system: Europe, the Far East. And original stuff that George Northcote kept back. And a tape recording of John talking to a mob lawyer who wanted it all back.’

‘Which mob?’ came in Barbara. ‘Give us names!’

‘I don’t have any names,’ admitted Alice. ‘John started to hold back, thinking that the more I knew the greater danger I would be in.’

‘But there are names in the safe deposit?’ persisted the detective lieutenant.

‘Yes,’ guessed Alice. She had the right to a lawyer. It didn’t matter that she’d waived her Miranda rights by agreeing to talk on the record. She had to have an attorney to negotiate for her, get her the protection she deserved. And without which she – and John’s baby – would die. ‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer.’

‘What more have you got to say?’ asked Hanlan.

‘I’m not going to say any more. Not without a lawyer,’ doggedly repeated Alice. She hesitated, looking at the recording apparatus. ‘Except that I think you’re a bastard son of a bitch!’

As Ginette Smallwood led Alice away to another room, to make her lawyer’s call in private, Barbara Donnelly said: ‘I agree with her. You’re a bastard son of a bitch. She’s shown you the way, legal or not. And you know damned well the Bureau and the IRS will take it.’

Hanlan said: ‘Do you think we got it all?’

‘We got enough.’

‘I want it all.’ It was, Hanlan thought, about time.

It was the courtesy that frightened Jane Carver the most. The threat to cut off part of her tongue, which she hadn’t the slightest doubt the man had meant, had been made politely and during what little conversation there’d been during the journey the one who did the talking had always addressed her as Mrs Carver. The two men sitting either side of her in the rear of the car did so without crowding her and the one who’d winded her had apologized. Unasked, the man in the front had said she was being taken to meet someone who would tell her what they wanted and that if she co-operated there wouldn’t be what he called unpleasantness. No one wanted unpleasantness.