With Walter flipping us off, Tonya and the Bureau are pretty much at a dead end concerning Frito’s death. As Cornish said, we still don’t even have proof that Blanco was murdered.
Instead, I spend the rest of the day Friday trying to figure out what the Ritz’s interest is in Vox VetMeds. I’m behind on assignments from Rik, but I’ll catch up over the weekend.
I call the outside law firm where Rik sends real estate closings for our clients. I ask one of their paralegals, who I’ve worked with before, for some help. But him and I don’t get very far. All the property in the Tech Park was originally transferred to the city before being sold to the current owners like VVM, as Vox VetMeds is known. The identity of the seller or sellers to the city is behind the blank wall of a land trust, which you can’t get around without a subpoena. Why Ritz was even referred to as the developer of the second round, after Northern Direct took what they wanted, is not completely clear.
As for VVM, there’s not much I can figure out about the firm either. It was incorporated in Delaware, but the shares are not traded on any exchange, and none of the big pharma mutual funds list any ownership in the company. On the incorporation papers, the president/secretary listed an address in Baltimore, and when I search the web, I learn that he’s a former VP with one of the big pharmaceutical companies, who worked in their pet medication division.
I call him at VVM from my TracFone. I say I’m a reporter working on a piece about veterinary pharmaceuticals for a business publication, and he says, very nicely, that they never talk to the press.
“Why so secretive?” I ask.
“This is a regulated industry, as you know. We’d rather communicate with the FDA and the FDA only.”
“But you’re not trying to hide your shareholders, are you?” I ask.
He laughs and says, “We’re privately held,” and adds, “Goodbye.”
Having gotten nowhere, I decide to go out and take a quick look at the place in the daylight. It sits on what I’m sure is regarded as the worst site in the Tech Park. It’s in the rear corner, with the highway roaring directly overhead. To get to VVM, you have to drive all the way around the park, an extra half mile. Northern Direct has such a huge security perimeter that VVM barely has a parking lot. There’s a twenty-foot chain link topped with razor wire between the two companies, and a smaller fence on the highway boundary, which doesn’t need much protection since it backs up to a steep overgrown embankment leading down from US 843.
On the other hand, it’s a great site if you don’t want anybody to see what you’re doing. The rest of the Tech Park stretches several blocks to the north. Direct’s installation obscures VVM’s entrance on the western side of the building. And the southern boundary of VVM’s site is next to the off-ramp from 843—there is more weedy undergrowth and scrub bushes underneath.
There is no place to park if I don’t want to be seen, so I leave the Cadillac at Rik’s office and hike several blocks out of the way, until I can approach on the south side from beneath the off-ramp. I cut through the weeds, finally reaching a point where I can duck in beneath the steel undergirding, and then whack my way forward. It’s an incredibly junked-up area, full of the crap people throw out their windows as they’re flying off the highway, especially beer and soda cans and the wax cups from the Big Gulps that everyone who litters seems to get. There are old cartons of all sizes, and the kind of shit people have nowhere else to dispose of—rusted pieces of rebar, a used air conditioner and a mattress that somebody must have snuck in here after dark. The local dogs have clearly found the place, and it smells of poop, and the ground is a mixture of gravel and mud. I keep an eye out for rats as I camp out on the other side of a heavy bush, so I’m at least partly obscured from the cameras behind Northern Direct. I quickly find that the mosquito abatement people don’t bother with treatments under here—it’s like the bugs have sent out an APB saying, ‘Free lunch.’
I’ve got my hat and mustache again, and have lost my nail, just in case the Direct surveillance cameras pick me up behind the greenery. It’s pretty dim here under the off-ramp, and I doubt that even equipment as sophisticated as what Direct uses can both focus in today’s strong sunshine and simultaneously record clear images in the shadows. If I’m wrong about that, some Fed will be yelling at me shortly, but in the meantime, I have positioned myself on the same line as Northern’s eastern fence, an angle from which I can see the front doors of VVM and the red logo on the building.
A couple cars come and go, but there is not much activity until we approach closing time. With the summer weekend ahead, people start bouncing around 4:15, dribbling out over the next hour, and I photograph all of them with my EOS and a telescopic lens, so I can blow up the faces later. Near five, the night security guard arrives in his blue uniform, and for some reason he catches my attention, maybe just because I figure he’s the one on duty when the panel truck arrives in the middle of the night. Conveniently, he stops to say hello to several of the departing employees in the parking area, and I machine-gun maybe thirty images of him before he disappears. He’s a good-sized white guy with a belly, and he reads as retired law enforcement or something like that, maybe an ex-firefighter. From the start, I have this feeling that I’ve seen him before, and after he enters the building, I flip through the pictures I’ve taken of him on the camera’s digital screen.
It’s five minutes later, while I’m watching the last people depart from the front doors of VVM, when the circuits in my brain finally connect. Now I remember! I’ve seen the security guard out of uniform, ambling across Hamilton in the center of Highland Isle, facing the noontime traffic with the indifference of a moose. He was part of the beefy, too-loud lunch group seated behind Koob. That’s who he is. He’s a member of Ritz’s squad.
“Him?” Tonya says, when she comes to visit me at Rik’s office on Monday morning. “That’s Secondo DeGrassi. Primo’s brother. They call him Sid.”
Whenever I’ve had time over the weekend, I’ve tried all kinds of Internet searches, with no luck putting a name to the security guard’s face. I’m reluctant to ask for Tonya’s help, but when she called to say she was on her way over to talk about something important, I decided that I have no choice, even though I know she’ll demand to know why I was taking his picture.
“Why do you have an eye on him?” is what she says.
“Is he a former copper?” I ask.
“Tried to get on. But he’s”—she roughens her voice and drops it two octaves—“‘not so good with the reading and writing shit.’ Primo is the bright child in that family.”
“No way.”
“Way. I think Sid got sworn in some burg upstate, but he didn’t last long. But second time, Pink: What’s the deal with him?”
“Can’t say.” She’s sitting in a wooden chair next to my desk, and she gets that hard angry face, which is part of the core Tonya.
“Bullshit. This more Secrets of the Boyfriend? I told you I had to hear everything.”
“I told you I’d share everything he said about what happened in Blanco’s apartment. That’s what you asked for, and that’s what I’ve done. And if I connect Sid to Blanco, I’ll tell you why I was sitting on him. But I don’t have that yet.”
Her nostrils flare. “Don’t play me, Pinky. I love your ass and all that shit, but if I decide you’re shining me on, you’ll have a federal grand jury subpoena faster than you can say those words.”
That threat has always been in the background, but she’s never said it out loud.
“Toy, you’re my friend, okay? My good good friend. One of the few I have. You don’t need to shake a stick at me, or whatever you think you’re doing, because I don’t cheat my friends. Period. But let’s be honest. I’m in a tight position here. One dude is dead and this person, my source, he’s afraid that Vojczek will try to kill him, too. And based on everything I know and you know, he’s not thinking crazy. So cut me a break, because I made this guy promises, too, and they begin with saying that I—and you—will try to keep him alive.”
She unclenches her jaw and breathes.
“Okay,” she says, “but I’m the police, you’re not the police, and I’m the one who has to decide what’s reasonable.”
“I can’t tell you anything more about Sid right now.”
She ticks her head a little.
“You said you had something urgent to talk about, right?” I remind her.
“Right,” she says eventually. “And it kind of relates.”
“To Sid?”
“To what we were just arguing about.”
“Okay.”
Tonya shifts her shoulders to get herself back to her subject.
“I went to church yesterday and Paulette Cornish literally stepped on several people so she could sit down next to me before the service started. And she’s all like, ‘Where were you last week? I needed to talk to you.’ And I told her, I had a very late night that Saturday.”
“Like a hooking-up late night?”
“I’m seeing somebody,” says Tonya. She tries to keep a straight face, but there’s a smile leaking through. I reach out and give her a little rap on the shoulder.
“Good thinking, Detective.”
“She’s young,” Tonya says. “In college. Rising junior.”
“Okay, so old enough.”
“And definitely mature.” She stops, seemingly distracted by her feelings about this woman. “I never knew I liked young.”
“That’s because that’s what we were.”
She laughs. That hadn’t quite dawned on her apparently.
“Okay, back to Paulette,” I say.
“Right. She was like super stressed, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ and she was like, ‘I can’t call the station, people know my voice. This is the safest place for us to talk. Only you can’t tell anybody that I told you about this.’ I’m like, ‘Wai-wai-wai-wai wait.’ She had all kinds of conditions, something about her kids, and I have no clue what she wants to tell me, except I ask, ‘Is this about Walter?’ And she says, ‘Definitely.’
“And there is no way I can enroll this woman as a CI. The commander won’t like another CI, because I’ve already enrolled you. And the Bureau will throw a fit, thinking I’m hiding information from them.
“Plus,” she says, “Walter still has friends around the station, like we saw when he showed up on Friday. If Walt learns she was dishing on him, he’d find somebody in a ski mask to break her arms and make sure her jaw was wired shut. Literally.”
“Literally,” I repeat. “Okay, so what’s the answer?”
“She talks to you.”
“The woman who didn’t want to talk to me two months ago?”
“Well, first of all, I told her that it would be for her protection. And second of all, you guys kind of passed the test.”
“Explain.”
“You never revealed where you got the PI’s reports you sprung on Walter on cross. Cornish always believed that Paulette had never seen that stuff. To prevent Walt from going postal on her for having him followed, Paulette’s lawyer told Walter’s attorney that he’d hired the PI and wanted to keep the affidavits counsel to counsel, so he could spare Paulette.”
I’m not following. “Well, how did Walt think we dug up the reports?”
“According to what their son told Paulette, Walter stiffed his own divorce lawyer on most of his fee, so Walter figured this attorney was a pal of Rik’s and got even by handing off the file to you guys, under the table.”
Cops think lawyers are scumbags and will always act like scumbags. I think that’s what they mean by ‘prisoner of your own misconceptions.’
“Okay. So I talk to Paulette.”
“And then you talk to me. But you won’t give me her name or any identifiers; she’s just another source of yours. She’s behind the CI wall.”
This, to say the least, is rather artificial, but it will keep Tonya from having to cough up Paulette’s name to the FBI, who might be less concerned about protecting her from Walter. It will all probably come to nothing anyway, given the crazy suspicions Tonya says Paulette always has about her ex.
About six p.m. that night, I am standing near the entrance of City Market with a shopping cart in which I’ve placed a few cans of dog food, when a tiny lady with short hair and a nose that’s completely red at the tip gently nudges her own cart next to mine.
“You recognized me?” I ask quietly, and she laughs out loud. One advantage of having a nail through your nose. We walk side by side down the aisles. This is the same place where the Chief and Wanda DeGrassi played the supermarket version of demolition derby.
When Paulette turns back from her first stop, a shelf with eighteen different varieties of Cheerios, she says to me, casually, “Here, you can borrow this bag. Just give it back when you can.” She plops a reusable red cloth bag in my basket. I can see the edge of another bag made of green plastic inside, but for obvious reasons, I act oblivious.
Paulette is about five feet tall, and if you were being unkind, you’d say she’s mousy, but she has really good energy—bright eyes and a generous smile. She’s in a shirtwaist dress of pastel plaids and ballet slippers. I always start out with a favorable impression of short women who don’t go for six-inch heels.
“So my son, Rudy,” she says, “my baby, he’s a senior in high school. And he still spends Wednesday nights with his dad, and every other weekend. And Walter’s an okay dad. Even I’ll admit that.
“So our agreement is Walter brings Rudy back Thursday mornings in time for me to drive him to school on my way to work. And Rudy, he’s a kid—”
“Wait,” I say. “What day are we talking about?”
As Tonya thought, Paulette’s referring to the Thursday Blanco’s body was discovered—the morning after Dr. Potter figures Frito died.
Paulette goes on with her story. “We drive half a block and Rudy says he forgot his calculus book. There’s time, so I circle back and—this is weird—Walter’s still there. He’s got the lid to my garbage can open. Rudy runs back inside for the book, and I say, ‘Walt, whatcha doin?’ ‘Just had some trash in the car. You ain’t gonna charge me, are you?’ Ha ha ha. He yucks it up. He thinks he can lie to everybody, but I lived with this guy too long. I just stare him down until he leaves. I can see from the way he’s looking back and forth to the garbage can that he’s thinking of taking whatever he dropped in there with him, but it’s Walt, and that would mean he was giving in to me.
“He drives off, and as soon as he’s gone, I get out of my car and look in the trash and there’s that green plastic bag that’s in your cart now. I was just throwing it in the trunk when Rudy came back, and I’m like, ‘Doesn’t your dad have garbage service at that building?’ And Rudy is like—” She grabs my arm and stops her cart. “Nobody hears about any of this, right?”
“You and I will discuss whatever I’m going to say to Tonya. And I’ll only say what you decide. Just like I told you on the phone.”
“Okay, okay.” She nods and moves ahead. “Rudy says his dad has been kind of running deviant code, as he puts it, since the night before. Rudy was in his room studying late Wednesday night when Walt put his head in and said he had to go out for work. Which happens. He’s a building manager and, you know, nothing breaks at the right time. But Rudy says his dad’s got like a doctor’s bag with him, which is odd, cause this guy, he doesn’t even like doctors. And then Rudy says his dad doesn’t come back until after Rudy’s alarm goes off for school. And Walt’s grouchy as hell at breakfast. You know, ‘Eat your fucking Pop-Tart, I didn’t get any sleep.’”
“Did Rudy say Walter had that bag that ended up in your trash with him when they left for your place?”
“Rudy had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about trash pickup at Walter’s. But can you believe this? The bastard is throwing his syringes in my trash? I don’t know what he’s shooting, but can you imagine that? He wants to get rid of it, and he remembers my garbage gets collected first thing Thursday a.m. So I don’t know if it’s a police matter or not, but if he’s some kind of drug addict now, I don’t want him within fifty miles of my kids. Some of those guys in Narcotics, the Ritz especially, they liked that stuff. Walter always claimed he’d never go near it. But Ritz is a bad influence, right?”
The timing fits, if I’m doing the math correctly.
“I don’t want to look now, obviously,” I say, “but what’s in that bag exactly?”
“You’ll see. A couple used syringes and a pair of those rubberized plastic gloves. I don’t know anything about this stuff, but maybe the gloves can be stretched out so he could use them to tie off? Isn’t that what they call it when they try to get their veins to pop out?”
That doesn’t sound like a good guess to me, but what I say is, “I assume it’s okay if I get this to Tonya?”
“And no one knows it came from me, I mean not on paper.”
“Exactly. We’ll let them analyze it, and then Tonya will get back to me and I’ll get to you.”
I part from her then, since the less time we spend together in public the better. If anybody asks, we met through Tonya and were just saying hello. But before I wave goodbye, she says, “You should come with Tonya one week to St. Stephen’s. You might like it more than you think.”
She’s a nice person, she means this kindly, and it’s important to her, so I just say, “You can never tell.”
I get in the Cadillac and look in the bag, and the air goes out of my tires. What she called ‘syringes’ look like EpiPens, each a white cylinder with the needle inside inserted via a green plunger on the other end. There’s a brand name printed on the pens, and I turn them carefully through the bag until I can read it. After I google, it’s clear that Paulette has unraveled Walter Cornish’s deep, dark secret—he has become an insulin-dependent diabetic.
Dead end again.