The walk was a short one, just down the hall to an office nearly the size of my entire restaurant, only with more expensive carpeting and the look and smell of wax-polished pale wood. To my right was a wall covered by a loooong floor-to-ceiling bookcase with a matching rolling half-ladder, the better to reach even the highest glass-covered leather-bound scripts and books. The wall to my left featured two large oil paintings—of a crusty old bird in a general’s uniform that seemed to be giving me the stinkeye no matter where I stood in the room, and a truly handsome dowager in a pale-blue ballgown who looked remarkably like I imagined Gretchen would in her sixties. The commander’s father and mother.
Farther down the room was a waist-high cabinet constructed of the same wood as the bookshelf, its surface jam-packed with shiny industry awards, along with framed accolades and certificates of merit.
At the far, far end of the room off-white draperies had been drawn, exposing a bank of six windows. The commander sat at his massive desk with the windows to his back. He was staring at a framed photograph in his hand.
He raised his head suddenly and said, “That you, Marv?”
Marvin gave me a stay-there hand gesture and walked toward the commander. “Billy’s with me,” he said, “but we can come back later.”
“No, it’s okay,” the commander said. He placed the photograph on his desk, pulling his display handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at his eyes.
Marvin waved me forward.
I dragged my feet, trying to give the commander more time to pull himself together. He blew his nose and put the handkerchief away. He managed a wan smile, but his eyes were red and wet as he looked at us expectantly.
“I think we owe Billy an explanation for putting him in the crosshairs,” Marvin said. The metaphor sent a chill down my spine, and I quickly scanned the multi-window space with some apprehension. All I saw were empty rooftops and workers in their offices going about businesses probably more conventional than ours.
“I suppose we do owe you that, Billy,” the commander said, bringing out his handkerchief again, folding it, and wiping his eyes. “Please sit.”
Marvin had already taken a soft leather chair on the commander’s right. I sat on its twin to the left of the huge desk.
A silence settled on the room. The commander lowered his head, apparently gathering his thoughts. Marvin was staring at me. He gave me another of his winks, this one seeming to say, Relax, everything will be fine. I’d known other men and women who could chase away your fears and worries with just a simple gesture. They were usually on the con. But as cynical as I’d become, especially the last few days, I thought Marvin was exactly what he appeared to be, a wise old man.
The commander cleared his throat and, looking straight ahead, began his explanation. As I’d assumed, it involved his son, who’d died in Baghdad five years before when his vehicle lost a battle with a land mine. “Bud’s death was … devastating,” the commander said, his voice weakened by emotion. “But time does have a way of dulling the jagged edges of painful memories. Until something happens to sharpen them again.”
He paused, pressed a button on his desk, and asked someone for Evian water. He turned to Marvin, who evidently communicated a soundless request, “And a Yoo-Hoo,” the commander added, turning to me and raising his eyebrows. I thanked him but declined both water and Yoo-Hoo.
The room was silent again, until a young man wearing a blue blazer with a WBC patch on its breast pocket brought in the liquids in two tall glasses and departed.
“I prefer my Yoo-Hoo straight from the bottle,” Marvin said, frowning at the chocolate drink in his glass. “It’s the curse of the underprivileged. But don’t mind me, Vern. Please continue.”
The commander took a sip of water and turned to me. “Last month, I received an overseas call from a man who told me he had information about my son’s death. He said that Bud had thrown some Touchstone civilian soldiers off of his base after they were caught acting as enforcers for a Baghdad moneylender and black marketeer. Three weeks later, the vehicle carrying Bud exploded. My caller said it had not been an accident, that Touchstone’s CEO, Carl Kelstoe, the son of a bitch who was in my studio just a few weeks ago, personally ordered Bud’s death and arranged to have the dismissal of the five mercenaries expunged from the logbook.”
“Let me make a wild guess,” I said. “Your caller was a Touchstone merc named Deacon Hall.”
The commander looked surprised. “That’s right.”
“What kind of proof was he selling?”
“Recordings of telephone calls he received from Kelstoe, one of them ordering the death … the murder of my son.”
“Recordings can’t be used as courtroom evidence.”
“I don’t care about that. They can be used to destroy Kelstoe’s reputation and, with luck, his business, leaving him in disgrace and ruin.”
“If Hall was leveling with you,” I said, “he had to have been involved in your son’s murder. Wasn’t he concerned that some of that disgrace and ruin would rub off on him?”
“He said the money would make up for that,” the commander said. “But I was suspicious, and I wanted to be certain the recordings were authentic. That’s why I sent Rudy to meet with Hall. He was familiar enough with recorded material to know if the phone calls had been faked or edited.”
“What kind of price tag did Hall put on the recordings?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars,” the commander said. “It would have been cheap at that price. Once Rudy authenticated the recordings, I was to wire the money to an account Hall had in Belize. But we never got that far. Hall was murdered before he had a chance to show Rudy the recordings.”
I wondered about that. The blurred shiny object Phil Bruno and I had seen on his film footage could have been a flash drive containing copies of the phone calls. In that case, Hall had passed them on to Rudy. And Rudy had lied about it. He’d told Melody Moon he was coming into money. He’d scheduled an important meeting the night of his murder. And Carl Kelstoe had been in the city. It all seemed to fit, but it was still much too speculative for me to suggest to the commander that his prospective son-in-law, now deceased, may have been a liar, a thief, and a sellout.
“I doubt we’ll ever know what happened to the recordings,” the commander said.
“They may not have even existed,” Marvin said. “I never put much stock in what that Hall fellow had to say. Why’d he record his boss in the first place? And why’d he wait so long to put the bite on you?”
The commander nodded. “You’re right, Marv. If I’d listened to you, I’d have told Hall to go fly a kite and Kelstoe wouldn’t have sent his pet killer after Rudy and Phil Bruno.” He shifted in his chair and faced me. “And now you, Billy.”
“You’re making a lot of pretty big assumptions, Commander,” I said.
“It seems pretty cut-and-dried,” he said. “A: Kelstoe found out about his man Hall’s betrayal and had him killed. B: Once he learned that Rudy and Phil had spent time with Hall that night, he couldn’t take the chance that one of them might have the phone recordings. And C: From what Marv tells me, you’ve been collecting information on this Felix, hoping to clear your name with the police.”
Marvin looked a little sheepish. “I was worried you might be buying trouble, Billy.”
“Marv wants me to tell the police about … everything,” the commander said. “Get you clear of this mess. As loath as I am to provide fresh food for the gossip hounds, I see now that this is the correct course. I’m glad it isn’t too late.”
Without any physical proof to back it up, I wondered how much his statement would matter to Solomon. Well, it wouldn’t hurt.
“I appreciate this, Commander,” I said.
“As I mentioned, Billy, until this Felix thug is brought to justice, you’ll be given ’round-the-clock protection.”
“After your session with the cops, you’ll be needing some of that protection, too, Vern,” Marvin said.
“We’ll see,” the commander said. He stood, which was a signal for me to be going.
He walked me all the way to the door. Probably needed the exercise. “Soon this whole ugly mess will be behind us,” he said.
I doubt he believed that any more than I did.