Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

“Find him?”

“No, not yet.”

“Good. Good. How many men you got on him?”

“None as yet. We’ve been calling his known numbers and getting disconnects. The insurance guys say he’s behind on payments, which they’re thrilled about.”

“Fucking carrion,” Sam said. “Pardon my Greek.” He stepped around the detective and looked into Sugar’s car. There wasn’t anything inside it now that could ever be tied to anyone-it was just ash and melted leather inside a metal frame. “Stolen, right?”

“VIN is for a Chevy van stolen in Orlando three months ago,” he said.

“Same guy, then,” Sam said. The insurance agent had made his way back and was waiting patiently a few yards away. He had a fancy clipboard, one of those that was encased in metal and had a flip top. Impressive. “Here’s what I need from you, Detective, and I don’t have time to wait around for an official report, you understand? For America?”

“I do,” he said. He stood up a little straighter. No matter the situation, in Sam’s experience at least, you ask cops to do something for America and they have an atavistic response that requires them to be completely honest and to improve their posture by at least twenty-five percent “What’d they use to blow up the building? C-4?”

“Shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Don’t know the make yet. But looks like maybe an M90.”

Shoulder-mounted rocket. Jesus. “Expected,” Sam said. “Same with the car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right,” Sam said. “What’s your name, Detective?”

“James Kochel.”

“You ever think about working in something that is actually challenging?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“Good,” Sam said. “We’ll be in touch.” He stepped away and then did a quick pivot, added a touch of military flair to his persona (while, he noted, tweaking something in his calf) and addressed the detective again. “This Grayson fellow. You got anything on him with organized crime?”

The detective licked his lips in a way that reminded Sam of the guys he played high school football with but who, clearly, were never going to be as important later in life as they were then. Guys like that always licked their lips before something exciting. It freaked Sam out in high school and it freaked him out now. “Fact is,” the detective said, “I probably shouldn’t even be saying anything, but we’re all on the same team, right?”

“America’s team,” Sam said. “Like the Dallas Cowboys. Just one big interdepartmental huddle, Jimmy.”

The detective liked that. He leaned in toward Sam and then lowered his voice. “A year ago we had this place under surveillance. Thought he was running a high-stakes book out of it. Never got him on anything, but he had shady guys coming in and out at all hours.”

“Any Al-Qaeda?” Local cops loved to feel like they were just inches away from finding Bin Laden sitting inside the local Dairy Queen.

“No, no. Local talent.”

Sam looked at his hand and then licked his lips, too. Let him know they both had the same tic, make him think he’d fit in over in Langley. Though his godforsaken Dockers never would. “The name Big Lumpy mean anything to you?”

“It does.”

“The word ‘Hamas’ mean anything to you?”

“It does.”

“Good. Keep away from Big Lumpy for the near future-you got it?”

“I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Kochel said.

“Sleeper cells all over the place.”

“But didn’t he go to MIT?”

MIT? Sam tried not to show any surprise. He couldn’t imagine anyone presently called Big Lumpy ever attending MIT, but clearly Kochel knew something he didn’t.

“You tell me, hotshot,” Sam said. The beauty of ignorance mixed with authority (real or imagined, in this case), Sam believed, was that people tended to feel like they needed to impress you with their own importance. It’s what makes criminals think they can talk their way out of jail or convince a jury of their innocence on the power of personality alone. In the wrong hands, well, it’s clinical narcissism. In the right hands, it’s essentially been American foreign policy since Vietnam.

“When ATF was out here last year, that’s what they told me, anyway,” he said. “That’s how he got the nickname Big Lumpy, because he’s actually very skinny, right? But his brain, it’s big and lumpy, right? I heard he had an MRI when he was in college or something and it just stuck. But that could all be myth, right?”

Big Lumpy was the nickname of his brain? Oh, Sam thought, this is just getting more and more weird.

“That’s right,” Sam said. “Now, how many guys you think are in Hamas who have a degree from MIT and who can get hold of the kind of money he has access to? Starting to make sense?”

“Wow,” Kochel said. “Wow. Yeah. Wow.”

The problem with local cops wasn’t that they were ineffective, because Sam was sure they must be pretty good at solving something, though certainly they’d never put the pieces together on any of the cases he and Michael had worked on, which made them perhaps blind and deaf, particularly since half the time they helped someone, Sam ended up blowing up half a city block. No, Sam thought, the problem with local cops everywhere was the same: They wished they were doing something more exciting. So all anyone really had to do to get them to spill what meager information they might have was to, well, ask them. Cops were the very worst confidential sources on the planet.

“Keep that information on the down low now, okay? It’s national security level. You’ll notice I confirmed nothing. And I was never here, got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Sam could tell Kochel had something eating away at his conscience. His voice had gone all timid. These guys always thought guys like Sam-or, well, guys like who Sam was pretending to be-had all the answers. “Can I ask you a shop question?” Kochel asked.

“Sure, hotshot, but make it quick.”

“Maybe you don’t know this, but I have to ask…”

Sam waved the detective off in midsentence. “It was Oswald. He acted alone. The guy on the grassy knoll was one of our guys.”

Before Detective Kochel could respond, Sam thanked him and then made his way back to Peter Handel and his metal clipboard. No sense prolonging the experience or answering anything about Area 51. “What do you have?” Sam asked Handel once he reached him.

“Bare bones? Guy hasn’t made his last payment, so on the record, this isn’t on us to pay out on the hazard insurance or fire or anything. Now, off the record, he’s been a client for ten years, so maybe he sues and says, Okay, I’ve made enough payments that if I’m forty-five days late, you’re not going to honor my account? Take it to mediation, we’d probably settle, but we’d make him sweat it. It would be a bad beat, but we’d take it.”

“You’re a prince,” Sam said.

“It’s the business,” Peter said.

“What else?”

“Well, again, off the record, he actually took out a life insurance policy three weeks ago. Pays out two million five to his son in the case of his death. Paid the premiums on that two years in advance.”

Two years. Savvy, Sam thought. He also began to rethink how awful he considered Henry to be. He’d left his son to deal with this shit but also left him set up for the rest of his life.

“He just sent in a check?”

“No, paid by credit card over the phone.”

Smart again, Sam thought.

“Off the record?”

“You’re talking to a federal agent, Handel. None of this is off the record.”

“Right. Right. I just… guess… Well, I guess here’s the weird thing. He paid for the premiums using a VISA gift card. It’s basically the same as cash, but he puts close to six grand on it and buys life insurance. It was very unusual.”