"I'm sorry, it hasn't. I just wanted to let him know that there are delays through Chicago, but we're doing everything we can under extremely difficult circumstances. Mr. Mackie is planning to pick up his parcels, have I got that right?"
"That's what he told me. It's Fay-Mack Fay's his right name."
"Oh, yeah, I see it here now. Well, if we haven't called yet, I suggest Mr. Fay check back with us early this evening. Could you relay that message, please?"
"Yeah, I'll tell 'im."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"Okay, sure."
I wrote the name in my notebook, Mack Fay, dug out my Troy phone directory, and copied down Flo Trenky's street address. I checked, but no Mack Fay was listed in the Troy, Albany or Schenectedy phone books.
When I called the Federal Building I was told by the duty officer in the drug-enforcement office that my friend the narc wouldn't be in until Monday morning but that I might reach him at home in Clifton Park. When I called there a tiny voice said to try again around six. I said I would and left my name.
I called American Airlines and was informed that O'Hare was expected to reopen in midafternoon and the first flight into Albany would arrive around 7:30 P.M., provided that Albany Airport itself didn't shut down. This was good. I had a few hours, at least, to get organized.
Except for the occasional lunatic, traffic crept along at a realistically fainthearted thirty-five in the fast lane of the interstate going north along the river. Near Menands a car had slid off the roadway into the median gulley and the tow truck trying to pull it out looked stuck in a drift. I eased in behind a plow and sand truck and followed it to the Green Island bridge.
The snow was still coming down in flakes the size of pages from the Farmers' Almanac.
Florence Trenky's place on Third Avenue was an old three-story row house with white aluminum siding on the flat front wall and a sign in the window that said ROOMS. I cruised four houses up to the end of the block and parked across the street at a Cumberland Farms convenience store. I bought eight dollars' worth of gas, a sodium-nitrite sub made with a stale bun, a foam cup of black vinegar the clerk casually referred to as coffee, and dined in the car with the engine idling, the lights off and the heater humming. The snow had begun to let up a bit by then, and I had a clear view of Florence Trenky's front door and the vehicle parked in front of it the green pickup truck that had followed me from Crow Street to the Albany main post office on Thursday.
I watched the lighted windows of the Trenky house, ate, drank, and listened to Garrison Keillor's good jokes about the weather in Minnesota. Whenever anybody began to play a dulcimer, I switched over to the six-o'clock jazz show on WMHT. At 6:40 I phoned my DE A contact from the pay phone in front of the store.
"Mack Fay. Name ring a bell?"
"Not offhand. I can check. Give me twenty minutes. I'll have to call in."
"Also, Robert Milius and the other entrepreneurs who were busted along with Jack Lenihan in '82. Present place of incarceration and known associates who might still be in the Albany area."
"Twenty minutes."
Back in the store I bought a pint of grapefruit juice and sloshed it around inside my head to mask the taste of the cold cuts, which in fact had been cold and cut off something. With a pocket full of quarters for the pay phone, I went back to the car and watched the Trenky house until a little after seven, when I made my call.
"Robert Milius, Jacob Farnum, Alton 'Boo' Waggoner, and Leonard 'Ringo'
Romeo will remain in Sing Sing State Correctional Facility until the year 2002 at the earliest. Mack Fay, born Albany, 1931, convicted of felony auto theft in 1976, paroled from Sing Sing November seven of last year, currently residing Troy, New York. No previous convictions." He gave me Fay's address on Third Avenue while I watched its front door. "No known associates of Milius and company remain in the area. The rest of them took off for parts unknown in '82, and of course Jack Lenihan is dead. Anything else?"
"Can you find out if Fay knew Milius or any of the others at Sing Sing?"
"That'll take a little longer. Why do you ask? It's time I found out what you were mixed up in, Strachey."
"No, it's not time, yet. Soon."
"Uh-huh. I think you owe me, however. I've been more than generous. Give me a simple explanation and we'll call it even."
"A simple explanation is too much to ask. How about if I sent you four dollars?"
"Are you in trouble?"
"Sure."
"I hope whatever you expect to get out of this is worth it?"
I said, "You can't put a price tag on good government," and, before he could call me a pompous fool, hung up. I had no time for cynics.
I'd missed Keillor's monologue but got back in the car in time for some good stride piano playing, to which I tapped my sweating feet. I tapped them off and on for another forty minutes, at the end of which time the front door opened at the Trenky residence and a man emerged.
Stocky, fiftyish, wrapped in a heavy green parka, the man quickly wiped the snow from the roof and windshield of the pickup truck, started it, waited half a minute for it to begin to warm up, and pulled out onto the avenue. He made a U-turn in the intersection in front of me and headed south. I followed.
Traffic was light on account of the storm, and I stayed well behind the truck through Troy, across the river, out Route 7, down the Northway, and into the Albany County Airport access road. When the pickup slowed and turned right by the AIR FREIGHT sign, I went on by, circled past the main terminal, and parked on the verge along the exit road. Ten minutes later the pickup passed me, moving back east again, and I followed.
When the pickup stopped for a red light on Route 7, I pulled up close behind it. Its bed appeared to be empty except for two feet of snow, but through the rear window I could make out what looked like suitcases stacked on the seat beside the driver. So much for any attempts at sleight of hand from the truck bed.
I let the truck move ahead of me again, pulled into a McDonald's, drove around the building to an exit, then followed the taillights of the pickup through the light snow back into Troy. I turned up First Avenue, went three miles an hour faster than I should have, and was parked in the Cumberland Farms lot when Mack Fay came up Third and pulled up in front of the Trenky house. He got out and hollered something in the front door and, one by one, handed the five bags up to a middle-aged blond woman who stood in the entryway in a pink housecoat. Fay followed the woman into the house then and shut the door.
I sat. I thought about calling APD and spilling it all to whoever Bowman had left in charge of the murder investigation during his trip west. Fay's possession of the five suitcases, presumably from Joan Lenihan and presumably containing the two and a half million, would be circumstantial but powerfully so. As a parolee, Fay could be asked to account for his sudden vast wealth, and other relevant information might be made to shake loose.
On the other hand, if Fay was in fact Jack Lenihan's killer, anything short of an immediate arrest and incarceration without bail might set him running in the company of the suitcases-and the DA might consider the circumstantial evidence too flimsy to justify holding Fay. I had seen that happen.
What I needed was more evidence connecting Fay to Jack Lenihan. There had been the phone call from LA to Flo Trenky's number on Monday, when Jack was alive-this, I thought, was Jack notifying Fay of his flight number and arrival time on Tuesday. And there had been the call from LA to Flo Trenky's number Friday afternoon-this presumably was Joan notifying Fay that she was returning the cash via Air Freight. But it was all so circumstantial that it seemed possible Fay might cook up an explanation and a set of alibis that would get him off the hook just long enough for him to bolt with the five suitcases, whose contents I intended to possess.