"Can you get into a life insurance company's policyholder records?"
"Sure."
"Greg Stiver had a fifty-thousand-dollar policy that Shenango Life apparently weaseled out of honoring. Stiver's sister Jennifer was to have been the beneficiary. I need to 97
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know if in fact it really happened that way. And I need to know if Shenengo's investigator concurred with the police finding of suicide, or if he or she had any other ideas, and if so what they were. And of course I'd like to know whether or not Kenyon Louderbush figured anywhere in the company's report."
"Okay."
"You'll call me?"
"Later tonight."
I retrieved the bag with the Smith & Wesson from the trunk of my disabled car and stretched out on the grass while a few stragglers made their way out of the elementary school and into their cars and out onto the street. I studied the warning note left by the Serbians. It had been hand-lettered with a felt pen on a piece of ordinary copying paper.
Fingerprints? In case the FBI was later involved in the case, pending my gangland-related demise, I placed the note under the front passenger seat of the car, taking care to handle it only by its edges.
The Triple A guy was bug-eyed at the sight of my car with its four flats.
"Who did it?"
"My ex-girlfriend, I think."
"Holy shit. Did you call the cops?"
"No, that would really set her off. I just have to face the fact that the relationship is over."
The guy used a winch to drag the car up a ramp onto his flatbed truck.
I said, "Won't this hurt the wheels?"
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"It might."
I got to sit high up next to the driver for the ride into Schenectady.
"It looks like your ex-girlfriend went to work on you, too,"
the Triple A guy said.
"You noticed."
"You must be glad to be rid of her."
"Tell me about it."
I picked up a Hyundai at the rental agency across the street from the garage. My car would be ready to drive in the morning, but I told the garage, "Just hang onto it."
I needed my laptop, so I drove into Albany and found a parking spot on Dove Street only a block from the house.
Timmy was not yet home from work. I checked the fax machine, and there was the five-page police report on Greg Stiver's death my friend at APD had promised to send me. I folded it and stuffed it into the shoulder bag with my gun. I packed an overnight bag and left with it, the shoulder bag, and my laptop.
I went out the back door, down the steps, across our tiny urban patch of scraggly lawn, and up onto the wooden crate that had housed some statuary we had had shipped back from Thailand. I climbed over the fence into the backyard that abutted Timmy's and mine. I knocked on the kitchen door of Dot and Edith, a lesbian couple I had helped out some years earlier when they lived on a farm and who were now quite old. Dot led me through the house and out her front door.
She was used to this; I'd done it a number of times.
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The rental car was as I'd left it. There seemed to be no need to check it for explosives. Though when I turned the key in the ignition, I held my breath for just an instant, and I could feel my heart thudding.
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Chapter Eleven
I phoned Tom Dunphy and told him I was staying at the Crowne Plaza and that if he looked out his office window up State Street he might see me waving at him from mine.
"The Super 8 was fully booked? What are you doing putting up at the Crowne Plaza on the campaign's meager dime? Christ Almighty."
"This place is convenient to your office. Basically I'm hiding out. Those assholes slashed my tires, and they warned me again to back off." I described my visits with Paul Podolski and Jennifer Stiver and then the vandalism.
"How the hell do they know where you are all the time? I don't get that."
"I don't either. I would like my car checked for a tracking device or for listening devices as soon as I get it back, probably tomorrow. I'm driving a rental car that's parked in the hotel garage. If they track me here, I'm going to be very weirded out."
"So Stiver's sister isn't going to be much help exposing Louderbush? That's a shame."
"She actually seems to think her brother might have wanted Louderbush to become governor."
"That's sick."
"Or something. It does complicate our strategy here. Of course, we don't know what Greg Stiver would have wanted.
To the extent that he confided in anybody at all, he seemed 101
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to leave different impressions with different people and even to tell entirely different stories."
"But it sounds as if you're making headway. Building a narrative."
"A narrative? Yeah, if you consider Naked Lunch a narrative. This is just a lot of ugly confusion and atmospherics and impressions."
"Anyway, I'll tell Shy you're on top of this, or soon will be.
Don, I've heard so much about you and I know we can count on you."
I'd had enough of Dunphy for one day and rang off and called Timmy.
"Are you at home?"
"Yes. Where are you?"
"In room 612 at the Crowne Plaza. Not to worry. Nobody knows I'm here, and I'm resting and popping Tylenol."
"You can get room service and then a good night's sleep.
Would you like me to come over?"
"Thanks, but there's no need. I'll be going over the police report on the suicide, and later I'll be getting briefed on the insurance investigator's report on Stiver's death. And then I'm sure I'll lapse happily into unconsciousness."
"The insurance company is letting you see their report?
Those companies are so protective of that sort of thing. How did you manage to get hold of it?"
"I don't have it yet. I found somebody who has access."
"Wow, who?"
"A guy I know."
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"What? Why are you being so cagey? Is this some guy you used to sleep with? Who is it?"
"No, I barely know the guy. It's just somebody who does research for me once in a while."
"Oh, a leg man."
"Yeah, leg man. Not an ass man, ha ha."
"Ha ha. Is it Bud Giannopolous?"
"Yes. Yes, it is Bud Giannopolous."
A silence. "Bud is eventually going to go to prison, you know. Do you want to go with him?"
"I should never have told you about Bud. You take this kind of thing way too seriously. It's the world we live in, Timothy."
"Yes, it's the world we live in. We being the Russian mafia, the Pakistani intelligence services, the North Korean Politburo, al Qaeda, and Dick Cheney. The rest of us we's still respect the institutional and personal privacy that's one of the cornerstones of what's left of civilization. What Bud does is immoral, and it is illegal."