Chapter 23 #2
“He goes out most nights. I don’t know if he’s going tonight, but I could find out.”
“Do that. The thing is, if the hit team is going to try to pull him out, they’ll have to kill at least a couple of FBI guys,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to warn them.”
Long silence, then: “I don’t know, Lucas. I mean, the FBI set this trap. They’re looking for the hitters. They should…”
“They don’t have this specific information. They are apparently not good at this—you said a car full of refrigerators. We’ve got to tell them.”
More silence. Then, “Okay, you’re right. You want to call St. Vincent, or should I?”
“I’ll call him. I’m also going to invite myself back in.”
“And me,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
Lucas called St. Vincent’s office, got his secretary, who put him on hold. St. Vincent came up a minute later.
“Lucas,” he said. “You and I, we gotta talk. This is fuckin’ ridiculous.”
“Yeah, I agree, and I’ll talk. But I’ve got something I need to pass on, and right now.”
St. Vincent knew about Lucas’s and Sherwood’s contacts with Russian immigrants, and the immigrant’s “dating” businesses. Lucas told him about the phone call from Bell, and the rumor that something had been delivered to the Nightshade while Bernie was there.
“Sherwood and I think it might have been another burner. That Bernie may know that we’ve spotted him, that he may have asked for a new phone, somehow, might have gotten one, and is talking directly to his handlers. We’re wondering if the hit team might try to pull him out.”
“Oh, boy. You think he’d have the phone on him?”
“No idea. If he believes we found his phone, that would mean that he also knows we shook down his room. So, he could hide it someplace he’s sure has already been searched…
Or, he might have it on him,” Lucas said.
“The key thing is, if he’s going clubbing tonight, the team could knock over your surveillance guys and Bernie’s escorts like a bunch of ten pins.
They’re sure to do some heavy scouting before they’d try to get him. ”
“Or they could try to hit Bernie’s ride to the club, or back from the club,” St. Vincent said. “They’ve got those automatic weapons and if Bernie told them that the escorts are in the front seats, and Bernie’s in the back…hit them at a stoplight.”
“Your guys can figure out the possibilities. I’m not even sure Bernie got a new phone. But: I want back in, if only for this club thing. Sherwood and I want to go up to the club, pry loose some videos, see if we can actually spot a contact.”
“Do it soon.”
“Yeah, real soon, this morning. Before there are employees around to talk about cops looking at videos. I got a guy who probably knows the owner and can get him over to the club this morning.”
“All right. Go. I’ll get my people together. When this is done, we gotta talk.”
· · ·
Lucas called Del Capslock, who agreed to meet at the Nightshade’s front door in an hour. “Who’s the owner?” Lucas asked.
“Bunch of jocks around town, couple Vikings, couple Timberwolves. It’s managed by Jerry Don James, who used to run the Gamecock over on West Seventh.”
“The one that burned down?”
“Yeah. Fire so hot it melted the pots and pans, in ten minutes,” Capslock said. “The fire marshal says it was arson, but he can’t prove it, and neither could the insurance company. They paid off two-point-one million, though I understand the bank got most of that.”
“So Jerry Don James is a dirtball.”
“He prefers to think of himself as an innovative businessman.”
Lucas: “If Jerry Don doesn’t want to cooperate, ask him how interested he’d be in a charge of multiple first-degree murder and maybe treason.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Capslock said.
“See you in an hour.”
Lucas called Sherwood, who would meet them at the Nightshade.
· · ·
Capslock was sitting in a rust-challenged beige Camry, reading a free paper.
Lucas parked, walked down the street toward the club; Capslock saw him coming and got out.
A car slowed and gave them a quick honk as it passed, and Sherwood went down the street and pulled into a parking space a half block away.
When they were all assembled outside the club’s front door, Capslock leaned on a call button, and a minute later the door opened an inch and a thin, young, dark-bearded man who might have been a sixties folksinger peered out and asked, “You the cops?”
“No, we’re Lady Gaga’s backup band,” Capslock said. “Where’s Jerry Don?”
The man stepped back and opened the door. “He’s waiting. He’s at the bar.”
The Nightshade was painted black: floor, walls, ceiling, and tables.
The seating surfaces, booths and chairs, were white, and tiny, star-like LED lights sparkled from the ceiling.
To one side, a raised triangular bandstand, with just enough room for a drum kit and a couple of guitars, bordered on a slightly paler shade of black that delineated a dance floor.
Jerry Don James, a pudgy man with a paper-pale face wearing an Icelandic turtleneck sweater, was sitting at the bar with a Starbucks Venti.
He asked Del, “What the fuck?”
Capslock said, “You still smell like smoke.”
James laughed and he said, “You’re a class act, Capslock. Remind me to put you on the banned list.”
Sherwood, who had been looking around, said, “You’ve got a banned list? Who’d even want to come here?”
“Who the fuck are you?” James asked. “I know who Davenport is, but…”
“He’s a fed,” Lucas said. “Now the question is, how many Russians you got coming here?”
James shrugged and said, “Some, I guess. They have accents, they look like they come from that part of the world. Good dancers, they have a good time, spend money. Does this have something to do with those shootings that have been going on?”
“We’re not sure,” Lucas said. “We want to look at the security video from your club last night.”
James was looking at Sherwood, cocked his head and asked, “You’re not FBI or DEA. Are you CIA? One of those intelligence spooks?”
Sherwood said, “Let’s go look at that video.”
James said to the bearded man, “Jesus H. Christ, we got CIA in the shop.”
Sherwood looked at Lucas: “Why does everybody know this?”
“They’re criminals. They have a sixth sense.”
· · ·
The club had two cameras with wide-angle lenses that covered the main room, and no working cameras that covered a back room, which had two big TV screens on the walls, lounges in a bloodred leather, arranged in conversation pits, and a separate small bar.
They followed James and the bearded man through the back room to a door that led to a stairway to the office.
The office was a long, narrow space on a low second floor, a jumble of three wooden desks and a half-dozen short metal file cabinets.
The bearded man turned on one of the computers and Lucas asked, “What’s your name?” and the man said, “Noah.”
As they were waiting for the video to come up, Noah said, “The video is black and white because we can get better exposure that way, in the dim light. The camera in the back room doesn’t work, but you can see everybody who comes in the front.”
Capslock said, “The camera in the back doesn’t work because that’s where the jocks get blow jobs and cocaine.”
James: “Why are you such a fuckin’ jackass?”
“I’m not a jackass. I report obvious facts to my colleagues, so they can decide who to arrest.”
“Nobody’s getting blow jobs in the back room,” James said.
“What about the cocaine?” Lucas asked.
“Cocaine is so 2000,” James said. And, looking around, “Aren’t we all adults here?”
· · ·
Noah had the video up and asked, “What time?”
“Eleven o’clock to one o’clock,” Sherwood said. “We don’t have to watch every minute in real time; run it as fast as you can pick up the people. We’re looking for a tall guy, thin, blond hair and scuzzy beard, leather jacket, open shirt collar. Arrived around eleven.”
“That’s probably not more than half our customers,” James said.
“Just look,” Sherwood said. “We want to see who he hooks up with.”
· · ·
Bernie walked through the front door at eight minutes after eleven; he was followed, seconds later, by two guys in long coats.
Capslock said, “If you closed your eyes, and imagined two FBI stiffs walking into a nightclub, undercover, that’s what you’d imagine.
They might as well have gunbelts strapped around their waists. ”
Lucas said, “Shut up and watch.”
“The woman will bump him,” Sherwood said.
“What if he goes in the back room?” Lucas asked.
“That’s invitation only,” James said. “He’s not invited. Good-looking kid, though. Doesn’t look like a Russian.”
“Shut up and watch.”
The five of them clustered around the computer screen for an hour, watching the customers come and go; Noah went down to the bar and came back with bottles of cold ginger ale.
In the club, there was more drinking than dancing, but Bernie danced more than he drank and was good at it.
He spent most of his time hustling young women, dancing but not touching.
Just after midnight, Sherwood jerked upright and said, “There! There she is, she just dropped it.”
“I didn’t see it,” Lucas said.
Capslock: “Neither did I.”
Sherwood said to Noah, “Rewind. Slo-mo.”
Noah rewound, started playing it forward in slow motion.
Sherwood picked up a pen on the desk and put it on the back of a young blond woman in a dress that appeared pale in the black-and-white video.
She was dancing several feet away from Bernie, with another man.
She started backing toward Bernie, hands over her head most of the time, or reaching out to the unknown man she was dancing with, her head back, laughing.
Then her hands came down and she turned and seemed to randomly bump into Bernie, and she bounced away and continued dancing.
“Boy, she did it well,” Sherwood said. “She’s had training.”
“I still didn’t see it,” Capslock said.
Lucas, James, and Noah didn’t see it either, but Sherwood was sure. “Classic move,” he said. “Right out of the book. Believe me…I’ll tell you what. She’s having a good time, dancing her little ass off, but she’ll be out of there in less than five minutes.”
More like three minutes. She edged off the dance floor, smiled at the man she’d been dancing with, patted him on the chest, stopped for a coat, had to wait another minute, and disappeared through the door.
James and Noah had never seen her before; if she’d been in, they didn’t remember it. Sherwood said to Noah, “We need that video. Can you put it on a flash drive?”
He could.
When they had it, Sherwood said, sincerely, to James and Noah, “If you speak one word of this to anybody, ever, a man will come to your door and kill you. Look at my face. Do I look like I’m joking?”
James swallowed once, and said, “No.”
Noah shook his head.
· · ·
Out on the street, Capslock said, “Would somebody come to their door and kill them? If they talk?”
Sherwood frowned, shook his head: “Of course not. We don’t do that.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever. But it’s sometimes nice that people think we do.”
Lucas: “Let’s show the video to Lawrence Bell. Maybe he’ll know the girl.”
“I’m going to ship it back to my office,” Sherwood said. “By the time we get to Bell’s place, we should have some enhanced stills of her. Almost like mug shots…Better than the video.”
Capslock said, “Can I come?”
“Sure. The more the merrier.”
“If that piece of junk you’re driving can keep up,” Lucas said.