A String of Beads

Anything after that could have been thought out, a conscious decision. She had taken the flowers, and walked away from him to the kitchen. She was easily old enough and experienced enough to know he would be watching her, his eyes naturally taking in the shine of her golden hair, the graceful white shoulders, the narrow waist, the rounded hips and bottom. She had walked very appealingly, swaying a little from side to side. Could that have been anything but intentional? Women, alone among all creatures, practiced their walks. And then, when she had leaned herself against the counter her ass had been pushed outward, her lower back and midriff bared by the stretch to reach up into the cupboard. The pose had shown him parts of her ivory skin that most people never saw. Could any of that not have been choreographed? She had been trying to entice him.

 

He considered the possibilities. Maybe she was simply one of those women who wanted all men to see how beautiful she was, and found it pleasant to know they were feeling the pain and sadness of not being able to touch her. But Chelsea wasn’t flirting with all men. She wasn’t even going out anywhere to be where men could see her. She wasn’t going to work or visiting or shopping. She was only displaying herself to Dan Crane. So why was she doing that? She pointed out today that Nick had only been dead a few weeks, and that explained why she didn’t want to go out with another man. Maybe she didn’t want people—other women, really—to be critical of her for getting over Nick too quickly. Or maybe she really didn’t feel any interest in other men yet. That couldn’t be right, though. If she felt that way, she wouldn’t be flirting with him. She seemed to draw him in, then push him away. She had used the flowers as an excuse to say nice things about him and kiss him, and then shut him down when he had asked her to have a simple lunch in a public place.

 

Another idea began to form in his mind. What had she shown that she liked? She had liked Nick Bauermeister. Who was he? He was a big, muscular, dumb guy who had the manners of an ape and treated her as though he owned her and she wasn’t especially valuable. In the few times when he had seen them together, Nick had paid no attention to her for long periods, talking mostly to the other guys. On one night he remembered her reminding Nick that she had to work the next morning, and asking if he could please take her home so she could get some sleep. He had laughed, told her to go get him another beer, and slapped her on the ass when she had left to get it. Crane had heard somewhere that women loved men who had confidence and took charge. They pretended that men who were concerned about their preferences, and sensitive, and asked permission for everything, were the only ones who were behaving acceptably. But they never fell in love with them. They practically stood in line to throw themselves at men like Nick.

 

Crane drove to his storage facility, stopped at the gate, pressed the button and took a ticket, then pulled the Range Rover forward as the barrier rose to admit him. He parked between the two electric golf carts plugged in and charging beside the office, and stepped to the door. The office was the only two-story building on the property. The bottom level held special storage bays like closets, where customers stored things they were especially worried about. Two men occupied the office twenty-four hours a day, so there was an added layer of protection. He opened the door and climbed the staircase. One of the things he liked about the storage business was that it didn’t require many people. He had only a dozen men working for him. All of them worked on his break-in crews, and also worked shifts here, renting out storage bays and watching the place. He didn’t have a secretary or bookkeeper, salespeople, or any other office workers. He handled his own books, and let his ads and website do his selling. Whoever was on duty answered the phone.

 

He reached the second floor, where the office was. He could see Harriman was the one sitting at the desk watching the long, narrow storage buildings through the office windows. There were also eight television screens showing what the security cameras aimed up and down the drives between the storage buildings could see, but those were most useful for looking closely at things too far from the windows. Harriman had heard Crane climbing the stairs, and now he glanced over his shoulder to see him. “Hey, Dan.”

 

“Hi. Anything up?”

 

“My friend Carl is in the Erie County lockup for ninety days. He had his girlfriend in court to say he beat her again.”

 

“Carl. Which one is he?”

 

“Carl Ralston. The biker. You remember the big guy, a little overweight, with the tattoos up both arms?”

 

“Uh, yeah,” said Crane. “Will he actually do it?”

 

Harriman said, “I’m thinking Carl Ralston is the most likely to succeed. He’s been in jail a few times, and he knows the routines. Like when the guards are likely to toss a guy’s cell to look for stuff, and where the blind spots of the cameras are.”

 

Crane shrugged. “It doesn’t add up to much unless he’s willing to actually kill the guy who shot Nick.”

 

“If he gets a decent chance at him, he’ll do it. He’s not going to shank him in front of a guard, but he’s killed people before. He’s one of the few guys around who will get a benefit for doing it. The bikers he hangs out with will respect him for it. Respect matters to bikers.”

 

“I suppose it would,” said Crane. “And you told him what it pays?”

 

“I told him twenty-five thousand.” Harriman suddenly looked worried. “That was right, wasn’t it? I really don’t want to wait until he’s done it and then tell him different.”

 

“No, no. Don’t worry. Twenty-five is right. And even if it wasn’t, I’d cover for you just so you wouldn’t need to get word to him now while he’s inside. Any communication between you and him could bring attention to us. You did your job. Now let him do his.”

 

“I will,” said Harriman.

 

“Good. Are the guys back from Orchard Park yet?”

 

“They got back a while ago. They went out again to repaint the sides of the truck so it won’t say Sears on it.”

 

“All of them went?” asked Crane.

 

“No. Steel and Slawicky stayed back to do the inventory and put the stuff in storage.”

 

“Maybe I’ll go down and take a look.” Crane took off his sport coat and hung it on a wooden hanger, then put it in the closet, rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, and walked to the stairs. He descended to the first floor and walked past the small-size units in the hallway. They looked like narrow closet doors, but they were deep enough to hold most things that were really valuable, and they had built-in four-button locks that made customers feel safe leaving things they might not want to entrust to a garage door with a padlock on it.

 

He went out the door and walked down the long roadway between two storage buildings, past bay after bay. He could see J-17 from a few hundred feet away. The roll-down door was open a couple of feet from the bottom so there was air inside, but no passerby could see anything that was going on in there. He approved of that precaution. In the summer those bays could get pretty hot, and with this humidity, they could be awfully uncomfortable.

 

When he reached the bay, he pulled up the door and watched the two men spin toward him. Steel was taller than Crane, thin and dark with close-set dark eyes, and Slawicky was wider and older, with thick, muscular arms. He had blond hair and a small, round nose. Crane said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He had, actually. If they were hiding something from him, he wanted to know.

 

“No problem,” said Steel, but he looked a little sheepish because he had jumped.

 

“Right,” said Slawicky. “Harriman would have called us if he’d seen a customer or a cop heading down here.”

 

Crane wondered. Had Harriman called them to let them know that the boss was on his way out to the bay? Possibly. If he had a chance he would check Harriman’s phone for recently called numbers. He stepped closer. “What did we get?” He realized he had said it in a way they would resent. “I really mean what did you get? I was driving around wasting my morning while you guys did all the work.”

 

Slawicky waved toward a coffee table a few feet away, where small objects were piled in neat rows. “The best stuff is on the table.”

 

Crane picked up a stack of money with a thick rubber band around it. He read the slip of paper under the band. “Three thousand four hundred and sixty. Not too bad. It pays for expenses, anyway.” He set the money on the table and turned his attention to a jewelry box that was made to look like a hardcover book. He opened it and lifted a thick chain necklace, bounced it up and down on his palm to feel the weight, then looked at it more closely. “Feels like gold.”

 

“We haven’t tested it yet.”

 

“I’ll bet I’m right.” He picked up a tennis bracelet studded with small diamonds. “This is all pretty good stuff. Assuming the diamonds are real, this would be about five grand new.”

 

“That’s about what I figured,” said Steel. “There are a couple of pairs of diamond earrings too, and an emerald ring.”

 

“What else have you got?”

 

Slawicky said, “The furniture is all good—all new and high-end. We also got a couple of Apple laptops, both over there.”

 

Crane said, “That could be really good. Salamone’s got people who might be able to hack their way in and see if anything on their hard drives leads anywhere. They might be able to do some online banking or something.”

 

“That pillowcase over there is full of financial stuff we found in the little home office they had. We took it without looking too closely, but there’s a tax return, and that will have social security numbers and all that. We also brought the paintings and sculptures because they looked real.”

 

“Salamone’s people will have to decide about that stuff. They don’t usually want anything that’s one of a kind, but maybe they can sell it in another country or something. Good job, you guys. And you didn’t have any trouble?”

 

“No,” said Slawicky. “It was the usual thing. We backed the truck into the driveway all the way to the house, opened the cargo bay, and brought big cardboard boxes down the ramp and into the house on a dolly, like we were delivering a refrigerator, stove, washer and dryer. Everybody worked fast, wore gloves and hats, and cleared the place. If anybody saw anything, they don’t know what they saw.”

 

“Great,” said Crane. “I’ll leave you guys alone, and go do some work in the office.”

 

The others didn’t offer any more information, and as he walked back to the office neither of them ran after Crane to tell him anything he needed to hear privately. He would see each of them alone over the next day or two.

 

Crane climbed back up to the second floor and into the office, and went to sit at his desk. He was still thinking about Chelsea. She was always in the back of his mind the way there were always a few programs running on a computer behind what he saw on the screen. He had thought of a few theories about her, but he had made no progress figuring out what she wanted. The one idea he’d had that seemed promising was to remember everything he could about her relationship with Nick Bauermeister. Thinking about her with Nick wasn’t pleasant for him, but whatever Nick had done, she must have liked it.

 

“Car coming in,” said Harriman. He was looking out the front window toward the street.

 

Crane raised his eyes to the color security monitor for the camera at the gate and saw the dark gray Mercedes stopped at the front gate. The driver reached out his window and took a ticket from the machine, the barrier went up, and the car glided into the lot. Crane knew the car, which had always seemed a little eerie to him. The color was exactly the dark gray color of the road, so it was practically invisible except for the chrome parts. Crane saw that the driver’s arm still hung out the open window, and the hand released the ticket to flutter to the pavement. The car pulled up to the building and parked directly behind Crane’s Range Rover, blocking him in.

 

Crane said, “You can go down and help Steel and Slawicky for a bit.”

 

Harriman got up and went down the stairs. Crane could hear him open the side door, and he looked up at the monitor to watch him start walking along the drive between two long rows of storage bays.

 

Crane waited. He always felt a twinge of fear when Salamone showed up this way. Some time ago Crane had begun to think that the last sounds he would hear on earth might be the footsteps of Salamone and a couple of his guys on the stairs. The idea had bothered him for such a long time that he had tried several ways of lessening the anxiety. He had tried talking to Salamone on the telephone so he wouldn’t have a reason to drive all the way out here in person. But Salamone wouldn’t talk to him on the telephone. He said he liked to be able to look into a man’s face while he talked business, but Crane suspected it was because so many men of Salamone’s acquaintance had been the victims of wiretaps.

 

He had also tried keeping a short-barreled shotgun in the coat closet behind his desk. The shotgun hadn’t been a good idea. Salamone came in one rainy day, took off his coat, and opened the closet door to hang it up. He said, “What’s the shotgun for?”

 

Crane said, “Protection. People know we have duplicate keys to all the bays, and we take in cash and checks. I don’t want some holdup jerk to come in and kill one of my guys so he can steal some customer’s stamp collection.”

 

“If your guy is smart enough to give him the keys, nobody gets killed. Get rid of the shotgun. If your place gets robbed, we’ll get it all back. I promise.”

 

Crane knew that Salamone was telling the truth, that it had been the truth for over a hundred years, and that it would still be true after they were both gone and forgotten. Salamone wasn’t just some guy. He was speaking as a member and representative of the organization, which in Western New York was called the Arm.

 

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