“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“When you’re a working lawman, you get used to every kind of criminal having a pattern. I got to know a very classy thief. I made a practically accidental collar when I was in Beaumont. He did rich people. Private homes. Coins and stamps and collectibles and jewelry. Portable stuff. He went to the big auctions in New York and Los Angeles. He got a line on his marks there. Would track one to, say, Atlanta. Research the house, the floor plan, the alarm system, the movements of the people who lived there. When the time was right and the house was empty, he’d park a rented van in the drive, with a sign he’d taped to the side saying BUGS-OFF INSECT CONTROL, and he’d walk in in his white suit carrying his spray equipment. Fifteen minutes after he’d bypassed the alarm system, he’d walk out with a pillowcase full of good stuff which he could fence for a very good score. Twice a year he did the same kind of job. I was cruising the neighborhood in an unmarked car, looking for an address of somebody we wanted a statement from. He had trouble busting into a safe and his time got so short he came out nervous, backed out of the blind driveway right into the side of my car. He thought I was a civilian. He came on very hard, but when I showed the badge and the gun he just wilted and sat down on the curbing. All the life went right out of him.
“While we were holding him, I used to go in and talk to him. Know what? He had a wife and kids in Cincinnati. He was an investment adviser. He had an office in a bank building. He belonged to a downtown club and a tennis club, the Junior Chamber and the Kiwanis. He did a lot of investment advising, and he was good at it. He washed his own money by feeding it in through the office, as consultant fees. He lived good. He had respectability. He told me that every time he made a good score and got back to home base with the money, he’d say to himself, Never again. He was safe. He could breathe. When he was out on a job, his wife and everybody else thought he was off taking a first-hand look at some of the companies where he was thinking of recommending the stock. He told me that he’d say never again, and in a couple of months it would start to build. He’d begin to get restless. And he’d remember how it‘ was when he was inside a rich home. It was a kind of excitement he never could find anywhere else.”
“I see what you mean,” Meyer said. “This man, Pittler might well have a base somewhere, a permanent identity he goes back to.”
“I think he would have to have,” Sigiera said. “A place to catch his breath. Stash money. Get his ducks in a row. Home base, where they don’t know about his hobby.”
“Would the sister know?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Helen June whatever.”
“Good thought,” he said. “They used to go grill her every few weeks until she moved away. She claimed she had never gotten a card or even a call from Cody. Let me see. Her married name ought to be in here someplace.” He looked and grunted when he found it. “Mrs. Kermit Fox. Kermit was called Sonny. But this address is way out of date. Helen June got to be forty-seven by now. There must be somebody in town still sending her Christmas cards. Old Boomer might know. He’s been working for the city for ninety-nine years. You like a little Mexican hot groceries? It’s about that time.”
He made a call, and then we went out to eat. It was a drive-in called Panchos. We sat at a table in the back. The specialty was chili with chunks of Chihuahua cheese melted in it and on it. Meyer, one of the world’s great chili experts, was under close observation by Sigiera as he tasted it. Sigiera expected a gasp, tears, a mad grab at the ice water. Meyer smacked his lips, looked thoughtful, reached for the Tabasco bottle, put a dozen drops into the chili, stirred it well, tasted again, nodded at Sigiera, and said, “Just right, Paul.”
“Professor, I’m beginning to like you.”
He told us about the trials and foul-ups of working with the border patrol on immigration and drugs, and about his adventures as an undercover man in Beaumont.
We were on second coffees when an erect old man with ample belly, white mustache, white goatee, arid a fifty-nine-gallon straw hat came to the table. Sigiera kicked a chair out for him. “Boomer, this here is McGee and this is the Professor. They’re the ones want to know about Helen June Pittler Fox.”
His handshake was big, dry, and muscular. He must have given his order on the way in. The waitress came with a glass of milk and a small order of tacos.
Boomer crunched a taco and washed it down with milk, wiped his mouth and whiskers, and said, “After Cody shot his step-ma and pa, about a year after, Sonny and Helen June moved clear out of the state. They moved on all the way up north. Sonny’s folks had original moved down from there and he had some kin up there. Rome, New York. No point in giving you that address, because it isn’t any good any more. Sonny and Helen June had but the one kid and it died in the first year from something wrong with its breathing. Sonny is the best auto mechanic I ever come across. He could make a living anyplace at all. They broke up. Can’t say if there’s a divorce. Anyway, she calls herself Helen June Fox and here’s the address.”
He put a scrap of envelope on the table. I held it so Meyer could read it as I did: Route 3, Box 810, Cold Brook, New York.
“Said to be someplace north of Utica,” Boomer said.
“Long way to go to come up empty.” Sigiera said.
“No place is too far,” Meyer said. “And why empty?”
“Because most old cold leads turn out empty, that’s all. The new hot ones pay off a lot more often.”
We bought the lunch over Sigiera’s protests, and we promised to let him know if we learned anything.
Seventeen
THEY LET US check out of the little motel north of Eagle Pass at three in the afternoon without paying for the extra night on the two rooms.
I estimated on the map that we were a little less than three hundred and fifty miles from Houston on Route 57, then I-35 and I-10, and so should make it back to the Houston apartment by midnight.
A brassy sun filled half the sky, and with the air on full blast it was still warm inside the van. At speed the van was just noisy enough to inhibit conversation. We were both involved in independent guesswork. When either of us came up with something, we would yell across to the other side of the seat to check it out.
“Hideout in Mexico?” Meyer shouted. “Got the language. Use the same papers going back and forth to the States. Change identity once he’s across the border?”
“He was using Evan Lawrence down there, working with somebody named Willy in Cancun.”
I glanced over at him. He looked disappointed. Once, when we stopped for gas, he said, “If I had a hide-out I would use trip wires and tin cans and cow bells to let me know if anybody was approaching.”
“If we ever get close, we can expect that. And expect him to be dangerous.”
“I still like the idea of Mexico. Maybe Evan Lawrence is his hideaway name.”
“So why would he call attention to it by arranging to have himself killed?”
“I see what you mean. I’m not thinking well.”
“We’re doing okay. Thanks to you, we know the name he started with. And we know what started him.”
“It seems incredible to me that we could have had dinner with him and Norma, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of violence under that friendly face.”
Then we were back on the highway, booming along through the end of the day, the sunset behind us, our shadow long, angling to one side or the other as the road changed subtle directions. I grunted and pulled into the next rest stop, parked with the motor running, and turned and faced Meyer. “We make it too complicated.”
“How do you mean?”
“It just came to me. He had to destroy Evan Lawrence.”
“Why?”
“The money.”
Meyer frowned and then suddenly said, “Of course! It would be too risky to hang around as the mourning husband and wait for the legal procedures to clean up the details and hand over the money. When he talked Norma into gradually moving all the cash out of the trust, he knew he was going to stage a common disaster. Otherwise, if he could have risked staying right there, he would have left the money in the trust and it would have come to him on her death. But that would have meant a more careful research job on him by the law and the lawyers.”