“Mr. Forrester?” the voice on the other end of the phone was tentative. “It’s me, Gladys.”
“Gladys?” replied Steve Forrester, not immediately placing the name.
“Gladys Adams. You know, the daytime hostess in the Cosmic Café?”
“Of course, Gladys. I should have recognized your voice. How are you feeling? That was a terrible thing that happened in the café last week.”
“Well, that’s why I’m calling, Mr. Forrester. Remember how you and that police lieutenant asked me to try and recall who had been sitting at the table before that poor gentleman … died? Well, I’ve been thinking and thinking about it and finally it came back to me. I sort of remember now what he looked like. I don’t know if this will help … .”
“I’m sure it will. And I’ll be glad to pass it along to Lieutenant Marshall. Go ahead.”
“Yes, sir. The best I can remember, it was a big man, tall, kind of heavy. I asked him if he wanted smoking or nonsmoking and he went, ‘I don’t care.’ He had these wraparound sunglasses on, so I couldn’t see his eyes.”
“Good, Gladys. Do you remember what his voice was like? Any accent?”
“No … sorry, Mr. Forrester. I can’t remember his voice.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“Well, there was one other thing. He was wearing this baseball cap, you know, and it mostly covered his head, but …”
“But …?”
“But I could still see a bit of his hair. He had red hair, Mr. Forrester.”
That was it! Suddenly, Forrester felt as if a door had opened in his
mind. This was what had been bothering him ever since Frank Marshall told him about Jurgen Voss! “Thanks a million, Gladys,” he almost shouted into the phone as he banged the receiver down.
“Suzy,” he said to his executive assistant, grabbing his jacket in one hand and his briefcase in the other, “I need you to call Personnel right now. Tell them to pull Buster Malloy’s file. I’ll pick it up on my way out.”
“Right away, boss,” she replied. “And might one inquire as to where you’re going?”
“I’m headed for the Southwest Area Command to meet with Morris Jaworski and Frank Marshall. Call me on the cell phone if you need to reach me.”
“And how long will you be gone, Steve?”
“I dunno, Suzy.” Forrester looked at his watch. Two-fifteen. Less than three hours until Thanatos’s deadline—for a $25 million transfer that he knew the association had no intention of making. “Don’t hang around.”
An exhausted, dirty crew of forensic programmers clustered excitedly around one of Jurgen Voss’s monitors.
“I’ll be damned,” said the technician at the keyboard. “Somehow this guy’s hacked his way into the California DMV database and downloaded a driver’s license template.”
“Obviously for the purposes of creating a bogus ID,” said David Takahashi. “What’s that file with the Photoshop icon?”
“Hold on … let me open it.” The technician double-clicked on the icon. Silence fell over the group as the application was opened automatically by the computer and the file decompressed. A head-and-shoulders scan of a ruddy-complexioned middle-aged man loaded quickly and filled the screen. “Want me to make a hard copy, Dave?” the tech asked.
“Later. Right now let’s download these files to the lab. Time’s running out.”
Dan Shiller waited until the Saturn spectacular was in full blast before he dared approach Buster Malloy at his post near the elevator.
“Psst! Buster!” the con man whispered fiercely, trying to make himself heard over the megawatt THX roar of the holographic rocket’s engines.
The one-eyed security guard turned casually toward the sound, then
froze as he recognized his accomplice. “Shiller! What the fuck are you doin’ here? I thought you said we shouldn’t never be seen together,” he growled out of the corner of his mouth.
“Shut up and listen carefully. They’ve got Jurgen—”
“What?” Malloy wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly over the rumble of the Saturn blastoff. “Did you say they got Jurgen?”
“That’s right. I’ve just come from his apartment. It’s crawling with cops.”
Buster’s ruddy face fell. “Jesus Christ. What’re we gonna do now?”
“Nothing, man. I figured we’d carry on. You know, go through with it anyway. We don’t need him anymore. He’s rigged the electronics for phase three and wired up the boom box for phase four. He’s made the video and written the last letter—”
“What about the bank in Panama? Ain’t you been callin’ ’em on Jurgen’s computer?”
“No problem, my Irish friend. I can call them from hotel-lobby phones. The way I do it, it’s just as untraceable.”
Malloy brightened. “Does this mean I still get to set the fire tonight?”
“Goddamn right you do, Buster—if the association doesn’t cough up the twenty-five million. And I don’t think they will.”
Malloy licked his lips. “All right! Call me at home after—”
Shiller glanced around. The holographic smoke had begun to clear and the noise of the spectacular was fading away. It was time to leave. He couldn’t put off the bad news any longer. “Buster, look, you can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“Voss may have squealed. They may be onto you. In fact, you’d better get out of the Galaxy right now.”
“But my shift ain’t over until—”
“Never mind your fucking shift,” Dan hissed angrily. “Would you rather spend the next thirty years in jail?”
“All right, all right. I’ll go. Where do I meet you?”
“Billy Bob’s. Come around five-thirty. Meanwhile, you better get rid of your truck. They’ll be watching for it.”
“What about you? Ain’t you afraid they’ll come to your place?”
“Let me worry about that.”
Dan Shiller occupied no fixed address. Over the past three decades, he had lived in hundreds of efficiency apartments, hotels, and motels, never in
any one location for more than a few weeks, always registering under assumed names. The constant migration was one of the few annoyances of the grifting business, but a necessary precaution and one he had learned to live with.
Shiller and Malloy left the Galaxy, each by a different exit.
“Welcome back to the Southwest Area Command, Steve,” said Sergeant Morris Jaworski. “That’s quite a sweat you’ve worked up.”
“I kinda rushed over here, Moe. I’ve got something important to tell you and Frank.”
“Sure, come on in. And by the way, thanks again for lunch.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Frank Marshall looked up in surprise as Jaworski ushered Forrester into the police lab. “So you decided to honor us with a visit.”
“Hello, Frank.”
“Did you read my mind? I was just about to call you. You should see what our forensic programmers have dug out of Voss’s computer system. I need you to—”
“Hold on a sec, Frank,” Forrester cut in. “Before we get into that, I’ve got a news flash for you guys. Remember at lunchtime I told you there was something bothering me? Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on? Well, it came to me. Right after Gladys Adams called.”
“Gladys Adams—the hostess in the coffee shop?”
“That’s right. You asked her to try and remember the previous customer at Leopold’s table. Well, she came through. She remembers a tall, heavy man with red hair and wraparound sunglasses. And that description triggered the answer I’d been missing.” The two lawmen looked at Steve expectantly. He continued: “Moe, after your preliminary analysis of the case, you suggested the probability of a Galaxy employee’s being involved in this Thanatos gang. Okay, who is the only Galaxy employee we know of to have had any more than casual contact with Jurgen Voss? Buster Malloy, that’s who! He’s the security guard I assigned to take Voss to the station and sign the complaint after Voss was busted for card counting.
“Now, let’s compare Gladys’s description of this guy to Malloy’s. She said tall; Malloy’s personnel file lists his height as six-two. Heavy—I’m sure he weighs at least two-fifty. Red-haired—that’s our boy. And here’s the clincher: she said he was wearing wraparound sunglasses. Malloy has
only one eye. Normally he wears an eye patch, but the sunglasses would conceal the missing eye just as effectively.
“And I happen to know that Malloy is not altogether a happy camper at the Galaxy. There have been incidents—at least one that I know of. Malloy resents our high rollers, especially Asians. Nothing serious enough to fire the man for—yet. Anyway, I brought Buster’s personnel file with me. His full name is Francis Marion Malloy.”
An electric silence fell upon the room for a moment as Jaworski and Marshall absorbed Forrester’s hypothesis.
Then the police sergeant spoke up. “And I suppose he would have had access to the mailroom to deliver that first envelope?”
“You bet he would, Moe. And to Francisco’s suite. Security guards all have a master key card.”
“Hell, Steve, this guy sounds right,” the police scientist said with controlled excitement.
“Steve Forrester scores again,” Marshall muttered.
Jaworski frowned at his colleague, then shrugged and addressed Steve. “Now here’s what we were going to ask you,” he said. “Our forensic programming people downloaded a photograph from Voss’s computer that they think was used to make up a phony ID. I was going to ask you if you recognized it. Then while you were talking, I was thinking, shit, could it be this fellow Malloy? Could it actually be Malloy’s photograph? That would tie this whole thing up pretty neat, and we’d have two prime suspects to lean on.
“But then you said Malloy was missing an eye. This guy’s got two. Anyway … we’ll show you the picture. Maybe you’ll recognize the subject … .”
Jaworski turned to a nineteen-inch Sony Multiscan 200SX monitor and pressed a button. As the screen slowly brightened and the photograph came into focus, Forrester gasped. “That’s him!” he said. “I don’t know how they fixed his eye, but that’s definitely Malloy.”
Morris looked thoughtful. “That explains why Voss imported the scan into Adobe Photoshop. It’s a retouching program. He gave Malloy a new eye electronically!”
Malloy’s trailer was deserted.
Detective Len Traver rang the bell of the neighboring mobile home. A skinny, underfed mongrel lying prone beside the steps thumped its tail halfheartedly,
raising a small cloud of dust. The stench of cigarette smoke and cheap rum emanating from inside almost knocked him off his feet as a heavyset woman opened the door. He forced himself to brave the effluvium and said politely, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Detective Traver, LVMPD. Have you seen Mr. Malloy from next door?”
“Malloy? I always knew that sum bitch was trouble,” she answered unsteadily. “Haven’t seen him since yesterday. An’ that blond girlfriend of his … haven’t seen her for weeks. What’s he done?”
“Just a routine inquiry, ma’am. Who is this girlfriend you mentioned?”
“Big blond whore. Stric‘ly trailer trash. Name’s Helga … Helga Johnson or somethin’ like that.”
Traver made a note. “I see. Does this woman live here with him? Does Mr. Malloy have any other friends or associates you know of?”
“What am I, his freakin’ social secretary? I don’t know nothin’ about Malloy except he lives next door … an’ mister, believe me, I don’ wanna know nothin’ about him. Onliest thing I can tell you, his truck wasn’t there last night. I know because the thing makes such a God-awful racket.” She paused. “I hope that one-eyed sum bitch is gone for good. There’s somethin’ … weird about him. He scares me.”
“I understand,” said Traver sympathetically, handing her his card. “If Mr. Malloy should come back, don’t even mention that we were here. Just call me. And thanks for your cooperation, ma’am.”
Carl Hansen, Traver’s partner, reported back. “I checked the people on the other side and across the street, Len. DMV says he drives a ’seventy-nine Ford pickup. The men looked around, but it’s not here. Nobody’s seen him or the vehicle since early last evening.”
“Somethin’ must’ve spooked him, Swede. Marshall says he didn’t even finish his shift at the Galaxy yesterday.”
For Buster Malloy the elevated empty lot across Carey Avenue afforded a perfect vantage point from which to view his trailer unobserved. Astride the motorcycle, parked behind some scrub brush, he adjusted the focus of the field glasses to suit his own monocular vision. Inside the crumbling concrete-block wall that surrounded the park, the cops were getting back into their cars.
Malloy had gone home, packed a bag, and abandoned the trailer right
after Shiller had told him of the computer expert’s arrest. So the little scumbag had squealed. Why else would the cops have shown up?
One way or the other, it would all be over soon. Meanwhile, he could live in the desert. The big vehicle was perfectly concealed in a gully, and there was plenty of room inside to stretch out.