CHAPTER 51

“You know, Wus, you really missed your calling. Instead of working for newspapers all this time, you should have been writing fiction.”

Tony’s office was large, spacious, and clean. So clean, in fact, that it was difficult to believe anyone actually spent much time in the room. He sat in a brown leather high-back chair behind a mahogany executive desk that had shaped top edgings and carved base moldings. Only a bronze-finish piano desk lamp sat on the desk. The desktop was polished to a bright sheen and I imagined if I ran my finger across the surface it would produce a screech.

The only other pieces of furniture in Tony’s office were a mahogany credenza--on which sat three beveled crystal orbital decanters holding brown spirits of some type and a round stainless-steel tray containing a half dozen crystal highball glasses--and two brown leather lounge chairs, a shade or two lighter than the desk which they faced. I sat in one of the lounge chairs.

By my side on the floor sat a raggedy old cloth back pack I’d brought with me.

There were no frames holding family pictures on the desk, or, as a matter of fact, mounted on any walls in the office. There were, however, six high-definition television monitors on one wall in a tic-tac-toe pattern, no doubt for viewing and overseeing TSN broadcasts, and on the wall behind him, displayed prominently and obviously holding a place of honor, six Ginsu steak knives were mounted in a fan-like pattern, points toward the ceiling.

“Well, they say the best fiction should always have a tinge of the truth. My story must have had enough to make you want to meet me here tonight,” I answered. “And by the way, it’s Wes.”

He smiled at me, and it was a condescending, smarmy smile. He was wearing a black micro pin-striped long sleeve walking suit with a collared shirt and pleated pants. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands together in front of him, index fingers and thumbs extended. He rested his chin on his thumbs and tapped his nose with his index fingers, studying me for a moment.

“Why did you come back...Wes?” he asked.

“For Stevie’s funeral,” I said.

He leaned forward and rested his hands on the desk. “Oh, come on, don’t bullshit me. That’s not the real reason. When was the last time you saw Stevie? Talked to him? Did you even think about him once while you were living the life of a big-shot reporter in Boston? Of course not, because he was a loser. He couldn’t hold a job. Hell, he couldn’t even cut it as a drug dealer, and who can’t make a living selling drugs? There’s no overhead and your customers are hooked on your product.”

Tony leaned back in his chair and began swiveling back and forth, working his right hand as if it held one of those soft rubber stress-reduction balls. “He thought the world owed him--always coming to Sue Ellen for handouts--thought I owed him.” He stopped swiveling and stared hard at me. “Stevie was a major league fuckup and everyone, including you, knew how it was going to end for him, so don’t tell me you came back because of him. Just admit it, you weren’t satisfied with what you did to my family the last time. You came back to finish us--me--off.”

I hadn’t really thought about Tony too much in all the years since I left East Hastings, but when I did, I often wondered if there was some jealousy behind the way I felt about him. After all, he was popular in school, his family was rich, and he always seemed to get what he wanted. He drove the coolest cars and went out with most desirable girls. Everything just came to him naturally. He never had to work for anything. Did I feel the way I did because he had everything that maybe, deep down, I wanted? When I heard he’d married Sue Ellen, it was if someone had kicked me in the gut. Before Jan, she was the most important person in my life, and he’d gotten her too.

Now, sitting across from him, here in his office, seeing that smile, listening to him, and knowing what I did about him I realized it wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t even the humiliation I endured at the abuse by him and the other members of the Fearsome Foursome. No, it was simply because Tony was an asshole, and that was the reason I’d always despised everything about him.

“You can think what you like, but that’s the truth. If my car hadn’t been stolen, if Tina hadn’t been murdered in my room, I’d be long gone--probably be sitting in some tiki bar on a beach in Florida, darn near broke.” Now it was my turn to smile at him. “Funny how things work out,” I said, lifting the old backpack off the floor, resting it on my lap, and giving it a few gentle, loving pats.

Tony stared hard at it.

“You’ve got nothing that can hurt me. Stevie’s dead, Bones is dead. Hell, even that moron Puddy is dead...if he knew anything.”

“Well, that’s sort of true,” I said. This was enjoyable. I thought I noticed just the slightest bit of sweat appear on his upper lip. “I agree that there may not be anything here--” I patted the backpack again. “--that can necessarily put you behind bars or even that old Hoppy could print in the Chronicle without fear of a libel suit, but there is enough to maybe get people looking in certain directions, or maybe worry some people who may not like loose ends hanging about. People you know very well.”

“And how do I know I can trust that you won’t take this to police or the newspapers anyway, that you haven’t got copies of everything?” he asked.

“Like I said, much as I’d like to write a story based on what I got and get a little glory, there isn’t a paper around that would print it. And as far as the police go...well, my even being here, proposing what I am, is probably a little illegal and the way they feel about me after what happened to those state troopers--why I think I’d be the one they’d put away. Besides, it’s sort of in my best interest to get out of East Hastings as soon as possible and leave this all behind.”

“So the great Wes Byrne--defender of truth and justice--is no more than a common blackmailer, just like that bastard Stevie,” Tony sneered.

“I prefer to see it as just taking advantage of a business opportunity. I thought you, of all people, builder of this great empire, might appreciate that. A little entrepreneurial spirit. I mean, why should I be broke in a tiki bar when, with a little capital to invest, I could have a tiki bar of my own?”

“You blood-sucking bastard,” Tony said.

He got up, crossed over to the credenza, and opened one of its front door panels, revealing a small refrigerator. He opened that, pulled down a top door that housed a freezer section, and removed a small plastic ice tray. He flexed the tray, popping a few cubes up out of their seating, and dropped a few of them into one of the highball glasses. He opened a decanter and poured a healthy amount of brown liquor into his glass, then closed the decanter. He opened the refrigerator again and pulled out a can of cold soda. He opened the can and filled his glass to the top with the soda.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Makers Mark and Coke.”

“Yeah, aren’t you perceptive? What gave it away, the words ‘Coca-Cola’ on the can?” he answered sarcastically.

“Well, that and another thing,” I answered. My jaw tensed for a moment. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be relaxed through all of this. “You know, I’m not much of a bourbon drinker, but I’ll take mine straight with three cubes--about half a glass should do.”

He put down his drink and plopped three ice cubes into a glass. He picked up the bourbon decanter, turned, and stared at me. I could tell that what he really wanted to do was bust me over the head with it, but instead he turned back to pouring my drink. When he finished, he walked over and roughly put down my drink on his desk, far enough out of my reach that I had to sit forward and lean out to pick it up. He sat back down.

“So what’s this going to cost me?” he asked, after taking a long pull from his drink glass.

“We’ll get to that, but first things first. See, deep at heart I still am a reporter and there are a few details I’d like to have fleshed out, even if I’ll never write a word of it. There are some gaps that need filling in--things that might keep me up at night. I just need a little peace of mind.”

“Why should I tell you anything? I don’t give a shit about your peace of mind,” Tony answered.

I took a good long pull from my drink. It tasted of oak and burned a little going down. I really would have preferred the sweet smoothness of Powers. “Because it’s part of the deal, that’s why. I don’t get everything I want, you don’t either. So how did it all start? You need a little extra money getting this business off the ground? Things didn’t work out as planned at first? What?” I said.

I knew from experience that the key was to get a person talking, just get them started on the journey. Once they did, the words usually just kept coming.

We sat in silence for about a minute. Tony stared at his drink, shook his glass gently so that the ice cubes swirled around. He looked at me, then around the room, then back at me. His eyes were vacant, off somewhere else.

“Yeah, I needed money. There were overruns all over the place--the cost of building this place, dealing with unions, guaranteeing inventory, insurance, all kinds of little things that ate up my capital. Then the economy tanked and people didn’t do much shopping and the big box discount stores started opening up everywhere. I was overextended with the banks--”

“So you turned to the Crawfords,” I said.

“Yeah. We’d done a little business before,” Tony continued.

“Right. When you hired that company to dispose of the dry cleaner chemicals. It was run by a Crawford, or one of their relatives,” I interjected.

Tony was back from wherever his thoughts had taken him and he stared hard at me. “Yeah, that was me that hired them,” he said.

“And you knew exactly what they were doing.”

“Yeah,” he screamed. “I knew. What was the big fucking deal anyway? The damn river was already polluted by the paper mill. What? People thought they could swim in it and not get sick? I mean, how stupid were they? We weren’t the only ones, you know. I mean, c’mon, what difference was a little more crap in the river going to make?”

“Kids were getting sick, Tony, real sick. Some of them almost died,” I said.

“And that was my fault? What kind of parent lets a kid swim in a polluted river? Join a swim club, for chrissake.”

I thought back to my days swimming in that river with Sue Ellen and Stevie as a kid, swinging out on a rope hung on a tree branch and letting go, flying through the air, then--splash down. Hot summer days when there was no school and there were no rules, when the river was the only place to go to beat the heat.

“So you went to the Crawfords...” I said, getting him back his story.

He calmed down. His eyes cooled off. He nearly finished his drink with a long swallow. We were just two people talking. “Yeah, and we made a deal. I got through the tough times and the business took off. Only the Crawfords...well, they aren’t the kind of people you can stop doing business with if they don’t want to stop.”

I opened the backpack that was still on my lap and pulled out the sheets of paper Stacey and I had found in the hiding place at Stevie’s and tossed them onto Tony’s desk. Then I reached into the backpack and pulled out a dozen eight-inch-by-ten-inch glossy photos that I’d had developed earlier in the day, photos from the camera we’d found. I tossed them on top of the papers. “And this was your deal?”

Tony picked up the material off his desk and leafed through each page and photograph. The manifests were for containers holding inventory from the TSN warehouse that was loaded onto TSN trucks and intended to be shipped overseas out of a terminal at the Port of Baltimore. Only a stop was made along the way, at an out of the way warehouse on the Pennsylvania/Maryland border. The photos showed the containers on the trucks being loaded at TSN and then being unloaded at the clandestine warehouse and replaced with identical looking and labeled containers, containers that no doubt held tractor and auto parts stolen by the Crawfords and their cronies. Bones was in many of the photos, supervising the activities.

“It was a brilliant idea, really--shipping stolen goods out of the country using the bona fides of an established, respected company. I assume the whole thing was the Crawfords’ idea. It all seems a little bit beyond you. I’m sure they have the ability to reach out and bribe port personnel to look the other way once a week. You had the bar-coded labels on your computer and could send them along to the other warehouse, repackage everything, match the weights of the goods that left your warehouse with the weights of the stolen parts that were being shipped on, so it wouldn’t draw suspicion. Hell, Homeland Security and everyone else is probably more worried about what’s coming into the country, than what’s being shipped out. Long as the paper work matched, why bother to check?”

Tony tossed the material back across the desk toward me, trying hard to feign nonchalance. “Like, I said,” he said, “just fiction. These documents don’t prove a thing. They could easily be created and printed off any computer. And the photos? A bunch of guys loading a couple of my trucks somewhere in the middle of the night. Who knows what’s in the containers? There’s nothing there that ties me into anything. Maybe I’ve got a few corrupt employees. I can’t be held responsible for everybody who works here. And after what happened to Bones, even if any of them know anything, or are involved with the Crawfords, it’s probably safe to assume they won’t cooperate with the cops, just do the time, and live to see another day.”

“Sure, but do you really want to take that chance?” I asked, collecting up the sheets of paper and photographs and putting them back into the backpack. “Stevie apparently didn’t think so. He figured everything out--not sure how. Probably one night he was partying with Puddy and Puddy, like you said, being a bit of a moron and a small man who wanted to look bigger in peoples’ eyes, let something slip about the car theft ring and the TSN connection. So Stevie got the job here. You had no idea he was working here, did you? Like you said you don’t know what your employees are up to, especially on the night shift. He sees Bones working here once a week and knew his connection with the Crawfords, realized moronic little Puddy was telling the truth. It must have been a magic moment for Stevie. He saw a way to make his dreams come true and screw you at the same time. You know he never liked you much, don’t you?”

“Didn’t stop him from coming to me for money whenever he needed it, did it? I finally had enough, cut him off. And then he does this. He was nothing but an ungrateful piece of trailer trash.”

“Yeah, well for a piece of trailer trash, he was pretty damn thorough. Guess you also know about these,” I said, removing a few photos I’d held back when I showed him the previous batch. I also pulled out the spiral notebook that we’d found with the papers. I slid the photos across the desk to Tony and leafed through the notebook until I came to a page I’d earmarked by bending the top corner over. “Now, I’m not sure these photos match up with the entries in this notebook, but it’s enough to give you an idea of what Stevie had,” I said as Tony picked up the photos. “Okay, so let’s just say they do. That top one, showing you with a large man. The lighting’s not great, but I am real damn sure it’s Ferdinand Crawford, and he’s handing you an envelope that appears to be stuffed pretty full with something. Well, here Stevie has written...” I glanced down at the notebook. “‘April, twenty-fourth, seven forty-eight p.m., Old Casper Golf Course parking lot. Tony meets with Ferdie Crawford, receives envelope...”

I looked up at Tony. His face had lost a little of its color. “I was right. It is Ferdinand Crawford, how about that? Now the next photo...”

Tony shuffled the top photo to the bottom of the pile.

“Why, I believe that is you and Ferdie once again. Let’s see what Stevie has written here...‘May eleventh, eight-oh-five p.m., Doylesburg Acme parking lot. Tony meets with Ferdie Crawford, receives envelope...’ Do I need to go on?” I held out my hand and motioned for him to return the photos to me.

“No,” Tony said, sliding the photos back across the desk to me. His shoulders were slumped and he was staring down at the top of his desk.

“So, we’re clear here. Stevie knew about your operation with the Crawfords, he knew you were letting the Crawfords use TSN trucks to smuggle stolen automotive parts out of the country.”

“Yeah,” he said, not looking up.

“So what was Stevie’s play? He might have had enough to take to the police, although like you said, a lot of it is circumstantial. No telling what was in the containers or, for that matter, what was in the envelopes. Besides, if he did that, it would create a scandal--end up hurting his sister as much as it did you. And, for all his faults--and I know he had more than his share--he loved his sister. No, he must have had another plan.”

“You know perfectly well what he planned. Same thing you’re threatening to do,” Tony said before finishing his drink.

“Yeah, give it to Ferdie Crawford. You’d be dead in a heartbeat if he knew Stevie--or I--had this information on you. Of course it’s risky, for Stevie, for me. Ferdie would probably want us dead as well when he found out. Like I said, the man doesn’t like loose ends. But Stevie had--and I have--something going for us. There is no way you’d let it get that far. You know Ferdie wouldn’t just kill you. He’d take it slow and make it painful, just to spread the message that no one--ever--screws with the Crawfords.”

“You know so much, why are we even bothering talking? Just tell me how much you want. You give me the material and you go off and get your damn tiki bar,” Tony said.

I was a bit surprised to see that there didn’t seem to be much fight left in him.

“There’s just one last thing. That night--did you go to the Wayside Tavern intending to kill Stevie?” I said.

Tony looked at me and the look in his eyes wasn’t so much defeat as it was relief.

“No, no, I didn’t. I mean, he was bleeding me, but he said this time was really the last time. That, after that night we’d be through. So I got there early. What a dive. It was so dark. No one even noticed me when I went in. I got a table and waited.”

Tony went to take another drink from his glass and noticed that all the bourbon and coke was gone. He put his glass back down. “Stevie got there, sat at the bar. He was in a great mood. I couldn’t so much see him as hear him, joking with bartender, saying what a big night it was for him. All at my expense. And then--then the bastard buys a round of drinks for the house, with my money, with money he was bleeding from me. And he was spending it on those low-lifes at that shitty dive.

“I mean, I figured he was using my money to buy drugs, pissing it away, but to see it--that money that I took so many risks for. So I waited until the bartender brought my drink, watched him go somewhere toward the back of the bar. I had the knife with me. Brought it for protection. I was carrying a lot of money and who knew what kind of people hung at that bar? I got up and moved toward where Stevie was sitting.

“He was watching the TV. Nobody noticed me. I came up behind him, and I drove that knife as hard and as deep as I could into his back. He straightened up for a moment. Let out a little groan, but no one could hear it over the TV. He turned his head, trying to see who it was doing this to him. I put my hand on his left shoulder, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, ‘This is the last thing you’ll get from me,’ then thrust the knife in deeper. He slumped forward. I pulled out the knife and walked out. That was it. It was that simple. My problem was solved.” He stopped and his eyes stared off into the distance. “I need another drink,” he said, got up, and slowly walked over to the credenza. He fixed himself another Makers Mark and Coke. He didn’t bother asking me if I wanted mine topped off. Just as well. I didn’t want more anyway. I’d gotten what I’m come for.

Tony came back and sank slowly into his chair, swiveled to face me, place his drink on the desk. “Will you take a check? I don’t keep any cash in the office.” he asked, sliding open a top desk drawer.

“Um...sure,” I answered. I hadn’t really planned this far ahead. It was the confession I really wanted, not the money. “I guess I can trust you.”

Tony gave me an odd little smile and nodded his head slightly. Maybe I had him wrong, I thought. Maybe carrying around the knowledge of what he did really was eating away at him. Maybe, yeah, he was a creep and maybe he had very little in the way of a conscience for the consequences of his actions in the past, but murder was such a different animal than polluting a river. Perhaps he wasn’t all bad, maybe there was one tiny iota of decency left.

I was an idiot. Tony pulled his hand out of the drawer. In it was a black Colt 1911 .45 caliber pistol. He pointed it at me.