No One Rides for Free Read online

  It had gone irrevocably wrong for Edgar Wood. And looking in at his face, as gray as the rain falling around me, I wondered when, not if, I would find my way to taking the wrong kind of fall.

  Still, there was the thirty-dollar bottle, the logs glowing like sentiment in a frame of Old Dominion stonework and the fifty-thousand-dollar car outside. Those thoughts restored me to a healthy glow of cynicism. Judge McCarthy would keep sending guys up the river for stealing fifteen-dollar radios. Guys like Wood would simply retire, with luxury sufficient to compensate for any sense of shame they might feel. All was right with the world.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But by the next day or the one after, there would be an extra ear in the room, and I would find a place to put an extra set of reels to record what the ear heard, and Lawrence Choate Haven would have a copy as clear as Mel Brodsky’s.

  I made my way back to the woods and along the road to my deserted driveway.

  Which wasn’t deserted.

  A lean young fellow with a gun lounged against my rental car. A nice new silver Cadillac Coupe de Ville was parked about six yards away.

  It must have been the twig I snapped.

  “Hi, guys,” I said and waved cheerily.

  The lean fellow smiled his best “gotcha” smile. He didn’t look like a rising young attorney from the Securities and Exchange Commission, so I held my arms away from my sides, hands open and facing outward. I really felt it was best if he felt unthreatened.

  Having little else to do, I went through the options in my mind. I could flee. I didn’t think I’d even get as far as a fifteen-yard penalty. I could go for my own gun. Except that I didn’t have one. I could fall on my knees and beg and plead. I decided to keep beg and plead as my ace in the hole. If they got really nasty, I would whip it out on them.

  He beckoned me forward. I kept coming, slow, open-handed, pleasant.

  A window on the Coupe de Ville slid down, electrically smooth. Another gun peeked out. My lean buddy gestured me to assume the position on me side of my car. He patted me down, thoroughly, professionally. But that still didn’t make me think he was a member of one of our many law-enforcement agencies.

  He opened the back door of me Caddy and gestured me toward it.

  There were two men in the front seat. When they looked at me they began to argue.

  “He’s gonna get the backseat wet.” The accent was Spanish.

  “So what,” his partner replied in me same accent, “you want to get out in the mud?”

  “Hey, this is custom leather upholstery, the real thing.”

  “Fuck it, he messes up the upholstery, get another car,” me second man said. It clicked because the attitude matched me accent. I had heard it from some very heavy hitters in me cocaine trade; the accent was Colombian. My reaction to the recognition was twofold: confused and scared shitless.

  “Get in,” the first said. I did and tried my best not to drip.

  “What do you want with me man in the farmhouse?” he asked, not unpleasantly.

  It was too soon for truth. I couldn’t think of a good lie fast enough. I would have tried wise-guy, but the cocaine cowboys I have known have been excessively touchy and quicktempered. I didn’t answer.

  The gun that I had first seen through the window now rose over the back of me seat. It came up as slow and big, fat and round as a harvest moon.

  “Someone hired me to find him.”

  “Go on,” me man without the gun said. The man with the gun gazed at me lazily. All I could hope for was that he really did care about the upholstery and wasn’t ready to trade in for the new model.

  “And to find out, if I could, what he’s saying.” What a pushover I was. I knew they wouldn’t respect me in the morning.

  “Don’t,” he explained.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Get out,” he said. That was it? That was all? All those guns and not even a meaningful conversation. I got out.

  There was more.

  My lean buddy gestured me to lie down on the ground. I couldn’t think of any reason why not. I lay facedown. A stone dug into a rib. The rest of the ground was soggy mud. But there are worse things than wet and dirty. Then I heard the front door of the Caddy open. Someone got out and walked over to me. I could feel his presence. Then he knelt with one knee in the middle of my back. It was time to use my ace in the hole. I got ready to hit him with a good beg-and-plead when I felt his gun pressed against the back of my head. It left me speechless.

  He had a question. “You understand?”

  “I understand,” I said and got muddy twigs in my mouth. The gun shifted.

  Then he fired. The world exploded in my ear. Dirt and stone splattered against my face like blood and bone. My body jerked in reflex and fear. The side of my head pounded. But I was alive. He had fired alongside my skull and I could feel the scorched trail through my hair and scalp.

  “Good,” he said with charming simplicity, and stood up.

  I heard him walk back to his car. The front door slammed shut. Then the back door closed. The noises were faint through the ringing in my ears and the pounding of my blood.

  I thought I heard the big wheels start to move out through the sodden track. I was afraid to look. But I did. I watched the Caddy roll smoothly and smugly away, its real custom leather interior still dry and clean. The plates were District of Columbia diplomatic. I got the number.

  Dear God, it’s great to be alive.

  6

  SIX

  I CALLED LAWRENCE CHOATE Haven on his private line, as he had requested, and told him that I had found Edgar Wood.

  “That’s quite expeditious,” he said and asked where he was. I told him and began to explain my plans to put in a sound system. He didn’t want to know about that.

  “Was Wood ever involved with Colombians?” I asked.

  “Colombians?” He sounded as genuinely baffled as if I had asked about South Moluccans.

  “Yeah, like Peruvians or Ecuadorians, but one country over.”

  “To the best of my knowledge, Edgar Wood had no clients who were from Colombia.”

  “What about cocaine? Was Wood involved in cocaine?”

  “Absolutely not.” Choate Haven sounded as if he were defending his own integrity, or the integrity of Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn & Moore, whichever was greater, as if he didn’t know that he could waltz down his decorator corridors and, with only one ear cocked, hear the wind in the straws as dozens of young associates snorted their way to Paradise Lost.

  “Wood was a thief,” I reminded him. “And cocaine and money go together like Abelard and Heloise, or Cagney and Lacey.”

  “It is certainly true that Mr. Wood is severely flawed; that is a matter of record and not to be denied. However, I cannot conceive …”

  “That he would violate,” I interrupted, “the most basic ethic of his profession, maybe the only ethic of his profession …”

  “In my opinion,” he said with a voice that made clear who the client and who the employee was, “the nature of his flaws, and they are great, is not the sort to lead to involvement with narcotics. Certainly there has been neither evidence nor indication of such an involvement.”

  He went on, in full paragraphs, and I began to understand that it was really not something he wanted to hear. It was something I could keep to myself until such time as it was necessary to share.

  My initial reaction to the encounter with our Latin neighbors had been one of elation, even though I think that someone who enjoys pain, busted kneecaps and bullet wounds is a certifiable psycho-sicko. As for death, as far as I’ve been able to determine, I’ll only get to do it once. So I want to save it for last. Like dessert. Maybe I’m an adrenaline junkie.

  By the time I checked in with Joey D’ back in New York, I was coming down, like any other junkie on any other kind of rush, and he could hear the stress, the fear and the anger in my voice. He asked if I was all right, and I guess my yes didn’t have conviction.


  “Look it, kid, did you shit in your pants?”

  “No.”

  “Did you let go your bladder?”

  “Gimme a break,” I said. “Whaddya think I am?”

  “Then you did all right. You came out alive, with all your parts, plus your pants clean and dry. Can’t ask for more’n that.”

  “Is that the measure of a man where you come from, Joey?”

  “It’ll do, till this women’s lib thing blows over,” he said. “Listen, you thinkin’ of maybe gettin’ some backup?”

  “Yeah, sure, what am I gonna do? Call in Uncle Vincent?”

  “It sounds to me like you got different things going in different directions down there. And nobody can watch their back and front and keep moving all at the same time. That’s why the army, they got different guys taking point and the rear.”

  “You know what the toughest thing is gonna be,” I said, thinking out loud, “it’s gonna be checking out those Colombians. They had dipple plates. So when that Caddy goes home, home is gonna be an embassy, or something like that. The thing to do, normally, is to sit out front, take some pictures, show ’em around to the kind of folks who might know something about them. So there I am, me, my rental car and my telephoto, just relaxing on the street. Except I’m outside the embassy. So embassy security will right away notice me. Unless D.C. cops, cruising Embassy Row, find me first. Then phones are gonna ring and here comes the FBI; and if the FBI are there, can the CIA be far behind? Meanwhile, the ambassador is on the red phone to the state department.”

  “We got a lotta money on this job, right?”

  “Oh we surely do,” I said, warmed by the thought.

  “So don’t be scared to spend some of it. Share the wealth. Like for instance, you get a guy who is into surveillance, someone who has a panel truck that says ‘Shmuck the Plumber, No Pipe Can Resist Us’ like that, that can sit there all day.”

  “And you of course have someone in mind,” which by then I knew he did, and I knew that whoever he recommended would be Italian, have no imagination and have been doing whatever they did longer than I’ve been alive.

  “Yeah, I have someone in mind.”

  “And another good idea,” I said before he had to suggest it to me and make me feel stupid, “is that I get someone to back me up when I go back to the farmhouse.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and gave me the names and phone numbers he had in front of him.

  Gene Tattalia’s company was called Ace Investigations, as imaginative a name as I expected. I sighed but went to meet with him anyway. He proudly showed me a snapshot of the truck he used for just this sort of situation. I was pleasantly surprised. It looked exactly like a phone company van. When I found out that it was a real phone company van that he rented from a phone company dispatcher, I was genuinely impressed. It was something I had to respect.

  It took him less than ten minutes to discover that the Coupe de Ville was registered to the trade mission. I agreed to his rates, which were high, we shook hands and he promised to start surveillance the next day.

  I looked at the powder burn on the side of my head and the small cuts from flying rock on my cheek in me hotel-room mirror, and I could see that the distance from life to death was somewhat shorter than I usually like to think it is.

  When I called home, Wayne answered.

  “It’s E.T., Mom,” he screamed to wherever Glenda was. She might have been no farther from him than the inside of my skull was from the burn and he would still have delivered the news at max volume. “He’s phoning home.”

  “What,” I asked him, “if it’s not E.T.?”

  “Awww, who else could it be?”

  “Maybe it’s Dick Tracy.”

  “Mom, Mom, it’s the dick tracer,” he yelled, giggling madly with the notion that he had said something at least vaguely dirty.

  Back in my early twenties all my friends were single, except Don O’Malley. O’Malley lived with a cozy little wife, on a cozy tree-lined brownstone street in Brooklyn Heights. They had two kids at the rug-rat stage crawling and climbing over furniture and guests with equal interest. His wife actually cooked home-cooked meals and baked bread and made homemade pies. Whenever I visited, I felt like a miner, fresh from the hasty wood shacks and frozen wastes of the Yukon, coming in from the dirt, the muck, the cold. Into a real home, made warm and bright by a woman’s love, snug with happiness and growing life.

  I felt the same whenever I came home to Glenda and Wayne. Even if she didn’t bake and we split the cooking. She was shelter from the storm.

  My own marriage was only a two-year stint, but our divorces coincided. We drew closer, as victims of similar disasters do. Then I discovered that the cozy little place in the Heights was, and had always been, filled with hostility, anger and sexual frustration. O’Malley stuck it for ten years for the idea of marriage and for the children. He visited prostitutes when the need for a substitute for love overwhelmed him.

  Glenda got on the phone. She asked me how it was going. I told her I had spent the morning in the woods playing cowboys and Indians.

  “Wayne is more mature than you. I’m living with two six-year-olds, not one.”

  “Five and a half and a quarter,” I heard Wayne yell, insisting on the precision that people do who have few enough years behind or ahead to make those distinctions.

  Glenda was not my wife, which I regard as a positive statement. Emotionally intelligent, mature, she fought fair and was sensible about more things than not. Generally she was as eager to make love as I was, often more so. If she had a headache, she would lie and say she felt fine.

  She could not, however, stand the idea of my being unfaithful. She didn’t even like the idea that it might be difficult for me to be faithful. She operated on a different emotional logic, and for her fidelity was as natural and normal as lunch.

  Some people think of that as a man-versus-woman thing. Maybe it is. Yet no woman I’ve ever been involved with has treated it as a philosophic-psycho-gender issue. Nary a one has said, “Oh well, men are just like that, I understand.” The dialogue is always formed from curses and tears.

  This time I wanted the center to hold, so this time I was trying it out their way, or her way. It was working out OK, more or less.

  Sandy could look at the powder burn on my head and my chopped-up face and the nearness of my mortality, and together we could use that as all the excuse we needed. We could make a sweet and sweaty storm of thrusting, crying bodies. Would I feel better for it? The voice inside said, “You bet.” The voice was probably correct and the hotel placed the phone right next to the bed. But if I picked it up and dialed, it might be more dangerous to me than the man with the gun.

  7

  XJ-12

  IN THE AFTERNOON SUN, it was easy to read the signs on the twin pickups parked alongside the suburban residence in Alexandria—Polatrano & Sons. The papa Polatrano, an ex-cop named Franco, was waiting for me by the front door. He had put in his twenty years, retired with a pension and started a landscaping business. It kept his big body fit, made a fair sum of money, and alternately soothed him with the pleasure of growing things and bored him. So he free-lanced at a variation of his old trade.

  He carried a canvas bag, and when he got in the car offered me coffee from the thermos inside.

  “I favor a .38, standard police .38,” he said as we rode. “But every year, the punks, they get more and more firepower. So I got me a rabbi.”

  He pulled a short, stubby machine gun, an Israeli Uzi, from the same bag that carried his coffee and doughnuts, offering it up for admiration.

  “I call it Rabbi Begin. I respect that man. He’s tough. He was a guerrilla fighter against the British. They called him a terrorist, of course. Well, this”—he patted it—“is my own personal terrorist.”

  Gene Tattalia’s stakeout had gone well; forty-eight hours after our conversation I was looking at contact sheets of my Colombian friends. A few hours after that, I had blowups of my favorites.
Now I had him doing two things, finding names to go with the faces and keeping an eye on them to make sure they stayed in the District while Franco and I went into Virginia.

  I checked with Gene from a pay phone a few miles before the farmhouse. The bad guys were still in town.

  Still, I found a different parking place. It was a two-mile walk, at least, but walking is healthy. Certainly as compared to being shot at. The rain had finally blown out, the late sun glowed and I noticed the trees were beginning to bud. Ah, spring.

  Brodsky worked Wood during the day. Wood did not seem like the type to cook for himself, so I guessed that he would go out for dinner most nights, if not every night.

  When we arrived, the Rabbit, boxy and bright in yellow, was beside the Jaguar, so low and sleek in British racing green. Each was a definite fashion statement.

  Franco and I settled in behind a screen of brush to wait. If Wood left, I would go in, Franco would guard the outside. If Wood stayed, we would return the next night, then the night after, until the way was open.

  When Mel left, Edgar escorted him to his Rabbit. In the stillness I could hear Wood asking, obviously again, for Brodsky to join him for dinner. Brodsky refused, citing the wife and babies waiting in Gaithersburg.

  Wood stood and watched the little diesel drive off, his face dead. When he turned and looked at his own car his expression changed.

  One night, several years ago, I had been in bed with Simonet, a high-fashion model. When she had four or five good reasons to assume that I was too exhausted for anything but a sleep as sound as death, she slipped from the bed and moved silently to her living room. It was her favorite place, an unobstructed wall covered with a mirror. I watched her watch herself. She examined her skin for pore size and her flesh for tone, missing nothing from her toes to the underside of her buttocks; pirouetting and pouting, gloating and biting her lip, she went around, back, and beneath, stroking the sleekness of belly, tentative at the danger zone under the chin, proud of the purity of her inner thighs. It was as if she was watching her past, present and future all at once. Which she was. Nothing that had happened in the hours between the sheets had aroused the intensity that her mirror reflected.