09.17.2008 / EP. 40
On the Trail
While Milly plotted revenge against Pam, Andreas tracked the person who’d sent Pam the bomb. Neither task was easy. Neither made sense.
Pam was rich. She could shower gold into Milly’s lap. Why irritate Pam? Worse, why kill her? As Milly considered how to slay Pam, its fundamental logic escaped her. From the right thing to do, Pam’s death became an idiotic blunder. This without adding the factor of political influence. Pam held the Governor in the palm of her hand. Milly, as Pam’s confidante and partner, could hope for a senior desk in the White House if not a corner office at an agency reining in career bureaucrats. She’d be on the fast track to a six-figure pension with retirement in a few years to the tropics. And Pam knew plenty of those construction workers who Milly liked to hire for nameless, violent purposes related to discipline in the drug underground, psychopaths, experts in human relations that had kept Pam’s largest building projects on schedule. Pam dealt easily with these men. She could turn them against Milly. A war with Pam was irrational, Milly understood, as she planned the kill. Together they were a force to reckon with. At daggers drawn they’d self-destruct. And Pam was Milly’s only potential friend. Pam was motivated by the same forces: a subterranean urge to succeed, the desire for power, the necessity at all costs not to understand why she did things. By making Pam a target, Milly confirmed that her only community was the company of dolls. Reviewing the rows of impassive faces, like the contemplative rosy cheeks of a Church choir, Milly consoled herself. A break with Pam was inevitable. It would come to death in the end. Best to embark at her own pace for the tragedy that is life and love’s necessary terminus. Only her dolls would never leave. They were the faithful. Pam would betray Milly, if not today then tomorrow. Milly wouldn’t and couldn’t trust her.
And while Milly justified and mulled the mechanics of killing Pam, Andreas sorted through the evidence about the bomb that had arrived at Pam’s doorstep, as an elderly spinster listening to music on the radio might absently stir the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Andreas found Pam’s neighbourhood infested with electrical vans, road repair crews, tree trimmers, surveyors and sundry other manifestations of municipal zeal. The level of activity was frantic. Yes, local homeowners paid a lot of tax. Certainly they contributed to aldermanic election campaigns and the aldermen wanted to reciprocate. But the present hubbub reeked of surveillance. Andreas made telephone calls, purporting to be Pam Carrera’s assistant. He sent emails, wrote memos and made more phone calls. Albany police had ratcheted up its protection in the district, an alderman told him. This was routine. Police varied their presence to ward off observant burglars. Andreas hummed a tune. The unreported bomb had preceded an upswing in plainclothes presence. Life was an even-handed goddess who showered the living with fortune, good and bad. This seemed good. On the other hand, saturating a neighbourhood with observers creates plenty of opportunity for disguise and confusion. Andreas was getting nowhere. And the increased surveillance might signal that his inquiries had filtered back to Brendan Shea. Andreas decided to back off.
Brendan had noticed the same rocketing pulse of urban improvement and assumed that someone had ordered a stake-out, someone on the police force. He considered whether robbery or narcotics were toying with him, but hadn’t encountered that height of sophistication in the force. The police didn’t have a sense of humour. Should he pretend to be riled about the secrecy? Brendan had learned through bitter experience that striking an attitude yielded few dividends. Emotion got you nowhere. He chose the quiet path. Almost covertly, he teased at the knot. The electricians were genuine, it appeared, and so were the road crews. He’d imagined a conspiracy that didn’t exist. The collectors of litter showed up for their paycheques. The surveyors collapsed tripods and reassembled them elsewhere. The curb cleaners advanced along a preset schedule. Brendan couldn’t find the tree trimmers, but he admonished himself to be reasonable; would arborists be point men for criminals? The Carreras were rich, but get a grip. He found the tree surgeons one day near Milly’s house, of all places. Were they dogging his footsteps? Brendan rang a curtain of rationality down on his investigation. There would be strict limits and he would allow only another 24 hours, then the Milly-Pam mystery got deep-sixed.
The tree experts belonged to a fly-by-night operation. Brendan found their van abandoned on the street in the city centre. It was empty save for scraps of old newspaper. Gnawing disgustedly at a meatball submarine sandwich, Brendan spread the newsprint across his table and studied the shock headlines, stereo ads, food discount coupons, and an estate sale list including ‘…antique doll, $500 ono’. He sighed and reread the notice. Lots of women collect dolls, he thought. The list proved nothing. Why would Milly watch Pam’s house or involve herself in delivering a bomb, non-delivering to be exact? But all this was academic. Someone with brains and resources was teasing him. It made him angry. If he could find a pot to stir, a hive of bees to agitate, that is what he would do. Forget the consequences.
Scowling as he entered his office, Brendan discovered that he didn’t have to stir pots or find bees. A letter had arrived, anonymous, addressed to Brendan and confessing to murder. The letter identified the victim as a homeless man with an accent, scooped up for a sexual encounter and abandoned in a deluxe car at the airport. The sex had been exuberant, in the letter’s phrasing. Brendan reread the note with inveterate scepticism. The murderer was safely out of the country and didn’t want the innocent to suffer. I’ll bet, Brendan thought. A man in a bar had paid him $100 to deliver a package to an expensive home. A practical joke, he’d figured. He played along, rang the bell, then ran out of cowardice, taking the envelope. Blackmail or bomb, he figured. The police should know… a man’s conscience is the heart of justice… and so on… Brendan skipped to the end. The writer had buried the envelope in Lincoln Park, next to the pigeon-honoured bronze statue of Daniel Tompkins, New York Governor from 1807 to 1817.
Fantasy, Brendan thought. But he whipped together a handful of uniforms just in case. They dug up the flowerbed and found an envelope. There was nothing in it but blank paper. It might have been a high school prank except for the address, which proved someone was taunting him. Nothing was real about the trail he was following. The address was Milly’s. And yet the buried letter didn’t justify a search warrant. Eccentric, yes. Criminal, no. He’d have to tell the judge what he was looking for and what could he say? Despite everything that had happened, that he suspected, the Judge would call it fantasy.
A trial run, Brendan thought. Someone wanted to provoke Milly. Or the letters were a sham. He’d offended a live wire, maybe put him in jail, and now he was out, yanking his chain. Brendan paced the corridor outside his office. He wanted to take up smoking again, those little cigarillos, but the ban was enforced. Maybe Milly had really stalked Pam. Brendan knew so little, the business could involve anything. Pam and Milly were competing for the Nobel Peace prize and Milly had decided to tilt the scales. There were too many clues. It irritated Brendan not to know what to do. He looked up his horoscope. Maybe it would tell him. You will make progress today, it said. You will solve an important problem. Brendan screwed up the newspaper scraps on his desk and threw them in the garbage. He needed a break, a prosaic and uncomplicated activity. He’d go tune up his car. He told his sergeant and the captain. Sure, they said. We believe you.
Brendan obsessed over his job, putting in 20-hour days, then neglected it. His superiors were pleased with the results and tolerated his absences. His subordinates had no choice. Nobody could predict where he’d be in the bipolar cycle. At his most refined, Brendan refused to let police work interfere with real life. This enlightened attitude had lured two adoring women into marriage. But the view reversed itself after a few months, when the sensitive family man gave way to hardened sleuth. Which is when his marriages collapsed. I don’t recognize you anymore, his wives said, Brendan’s cue to pack a bag. Brendan did, however, always, take care of his car.
“We’ll do that for you right now. It’s just a few minutes,” said the shop-owner with a big commercial smile.
“Fine,” Brendan replied. He let his mind drift through the tranquillizing thwack and blitttttt of mechanics’ tools. “A spike right through the tire wall,” someone said. “You don’t see that anymore.” Two men in overalls were passing. “A freak accident,” one said, to which the other replied, “Accident nothing. Someone hammered the spike deep enough so the car would be moving fast when she went off the road.”
Brendan’s ears perked up.
“She was lucky,” the first mechanic said.
“This time,” answered the second.
Brendan asked the owner, and the owner looked up the job. It was a nuisance and he was busy and everyone had a right to privacy, but you can never tell when you might need a friend with a lieutenant’s badge one day. “A Ms Troie on…” the owner began.
“That’s OK,” Brendan interrupted. “Don’t give me private information.”
“But you asked…”
Brendan stopped him. He asked the owner about an Aston Martin he’d been offered. They talked baseball and how politicians were ruining the country. They tried a roast beef sandwich and beer at Jerry’s, and everyone had favours to ask Brendan and Brendan was glad to accommodate. Until the car repair shop owner had forgotten Milly Troie and the incident passed right out of his head.
But Brendan didn’t forget. There had been two attempts on Milly’s life and neither had made it onto the police blotter. They were real or not, creatures of arcane humour or irrational interpretation or genuine efforts to snuff her. Whatever they were, Brendan didn’t understand them. They caused him to curse his fate, even as he diverted his attention – for the sake of his sanity – to an ordinary case of blackmail and assault. He gave himself a few days in the real world that were like a rest cure. But he didn’t forget.
