Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Carlo Balacontano knew how the system worked. In order to get out, he would have to supply the system with someone to take his place. The replacement could be dead, as long as something linking him to the murder of Arthur Fieldston was found with him: a forged suicide note with a confession, the cigarette lighter that Bala had pocketed at Fieldston’s office in the old days, when he had been there to discuss a deal—anything. A reasonable doubt might be enough excuse for someone to sell him a pardon, and would almost certainly be enough to get him a parole after eight years. Then he could get away from this place and from José Ospina, the man who was driving him mad.

Elizabeth Waring sat in the small cinder-block building just inside the gate of the prison, watching the other visitors go through the formalities with the prison guards. There were a pair of lawyers who seemed to know each other, one tall, thin and bespectacled and the other a squat little blond man with a brown suit that looked as though he had bought it cheap in a store that had a fat boys’ department. They kept calling each other “counselor” and “learned colleague,” as though it were a longstanding joke.

Fidgeting nervously on a bench across from her were three women who bore the same dazed, sickly expression on their faces, but had nothing else in common. One was a young, coffee-colored girl who seemed no more than nineteen. She wore a shapeless brown-and-black outfit that seemed to include a kind of sweatshirt and something below that could have been a pair of pants from an Israeli paratrooper’s uniform, but in sizes so large that her shy, cringing posture allowed her to hide in the material. Beside her was a tall, thin blond woman who might have been fifty but had such tight skin on her cheeks and forehead that she might as easily have been thirty-five. Her nose had likewise felt the surgeon’s scalpel, and seemed rightfully to belong to the sort of teenage girl who waited on tables in a short skirt and luminous panty hose. She wore no jewelry except a gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a diamond that might have been two carats. The third woman was about thirty, and Elizabeth had grouped her with the lawyers until she sat down with the other women and her face assumed the same fixed, humiliated expression. She wore a business suit and a white silk blouse with a bow at the neck that wasn’t a good idea. She even carried a briefcase. When the guard called, “Henley,” she stood up, walked to the desk and handed the briefcase to the guard, who opened it and removed a black lace negligee. The guard left the garment on the desk while he went through the briefcase for contraband, and Elizabeth could see that the woman’s ashen face was aimed downward, her eyes not on the guard but on the negligee, as though she were willing it to disappear. The two lawyers stopped talking and stared frankly at the proceedings, then listened while the guard repeated a short orientation speech on the rules of conjugal visits. The young black woman seemed to shrink still deeper into her clothes, but the older woman turned to wood, staring straight ahead like the figurehead on the prow of a sailing ship.

“Miss Waring.” The voice was behind her. She stood up and turned to see a man in a suit waiting for her. He looked like a dentist, serene and well scrubbed, with a shiny bald head. He held the door open and Elizabeth went through it to the concrete steps outside, then shook the man’s hand. “I’m Assistant Warden Bateson,” the man said. “I was told to expect you. Anything special you need?”

Elizabeth would have preferred to hear a list of standard procedures for this kind of meeting. “I’d like to see him alone, and I suppose it would be better if the other prisoners didn’t know about it.”

Bateson smiled. “No problem there. We only have three conjugal visits, so we’ve got a couple of bungalows vacant. He’s been assigned to clean one of them.”

She sighted along Bateson’s pointing finger to a small, low cinder-block building just inside the fence. It looked like a communal bathroom in a trailer campground near a national park. “Can I be of any help?” asked Bateson.

“No,” Elizabeth said.

At the door of the little building, Elizabeth stopped and listened. There was a slow, rhythmic, scraping sound, then a splash and clank, then silence. She opened the door slowly, which set off another clank. She took the scene in at a glance. The mop had been set in the bucket and leaned against the door, so that it would warn Balacontano in time to get up off the bed.

When he saw her, the old man was swinging his feet to the floor, not looking toward the door at all, but reaching for his shoe and pretending to tie the lace. She hadn’t seen even a picture of him in ten years, but he looked about the way she remembered him. He was short and stocky, and wore his hair combed straight back, but close at the neck so that it didn’t touch the collar of his blue work shirt. The prison jeans looked odd and baggy on him, as jeans always do on old men, the unaccustomed informality of them evoking a businessman who had bought them to wear on vacation and never broken them in. Balacontano’s face was pinched and the nose hawklike, his little eyes glaring back at Elizabeth from behind a pair of glasses with a slight brownish tint. He finished tying his shoelace, then put the other foot up on his knee to tighten its lace to show he hadn’t been caught at anything.

“Keep your clothes on,” he said. “Your old man will be out here when I finish.”

“Mr. Balacontano?” Elizabeth began.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Elizabeth Waring.”

“Good for you.” The old man stood up, walked to the bucket, placed the mop in the wringer and prepared to go back to work on the floor.

Elizabeth reached into the inner pocket of her purse, pulled out a little leather wallet and held it out toward Balacontano. “U.S. Justice Department.” He glanced at it, but showed no interest. “I have a couple of questions for you if you’ve got time.”

Balacontano leaned on his mop, and the cold eyes turned on Elizabeth as though he had just noticed her presence and found it peculiar. “Is that some lame witticism?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “Not at all.”

“Save your questions,” said the old man. He didn’t sound bitter or angry. “I don’t answer questions.”

Elizabeth had prepared herself for this. “These aren’t hard ones. They’re about an enemy of yours.”

“Just out of curiosity, what are you offering me?”

Elizabeth sighed. “I don’t usually have much to do with the people who run these places.” She looked around the sparsely furnished room with mild distaste. It looked like motels built fifty or sixty years ago, when they had consisted of six little shacks arranged around a gravel drive. “I plan to tell Warden Bateson that you cooperated. I don’t know if that buys you time off for good behavior or just two desserts at dinner.”

Carl Bala looked at her shrewdly. “Come back when you can tell me which.”

Elizabeth met his gaze. “Last night Antonio Talarese was murdered. The killer was somebody named the Butcher’s Boy. Do you know him?”

Balacontano considered his options in a new way. “You’re from the Justice Department?”

She nodded.

“What do you do there?”

She decided that telling part of the truth would give the right impression. “I’m an agent on temporary duty with the Organized Crime section. I’m here because I think there’s something unusual going on. I didn’t bring my résumé with me.”

“What makes you think I know anything about this Tony Talarese or this other guy?”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. This man must be better at detecting lies than any prosecutor. The fact that he was alive and in his sixties proved it. She would have to work into it slowly. “The charts in Organized Crime show an arrow going up from Antonio Talarese to you. That means you’re his boss. If that’s not true, let me know and we’ll change the chart. It’s no trouble. We have to change it anyway because he’s dead.”