Free Thick as Thieves by Peter Spiegelman Page B

another fifteen secondsbefore he pulls the gray painter’s van away from the curb. Carr calls Latin Mike.
    “We’re gone,” he says into his cell.
    “We’re in,” Mike replies, and in the side mirror Carr sees Bessemer’s front door swing shut.
    This stretch of Ocean Boulevard is flat and straight—a corridor of stucco walls, hedges, and gated drives, whose usual quiet is deepened by a sense of off-season abandonment. Traffic is sparse, and Carr can see Bessemer’s BMW blocks ahead, shimmering in the heat. The Atlantic appears to their left in flashes, in the alleys between properties—white, heaving, covered in sunlight.
    Bobby tugs his painter’s cap lower. “Got another doughnut?” he asks. Carr hands him a powdered sugar, rolls down his window, and lets in the salt breeze and the smell of ripening seaweed.
    Bessemer is nimble for a thickset man. He tosses his keys in a neat arc to a valet in a pink polo shirt, hitches his tennis bag on his shoulder, trots up the steps of the Barton, and disappears into its Spanish colonial facade. The valet slides into the BMW and wheels the car around the crushed shell drive. On another Tuesday he would head due west, fifty yards down a service road to the club’s parking lot—but not today. Today, half of that lot is being resurfaced, and only the cars of Barton members are being parked in the other half. The cars of staff, and of guests like Howard Bessemer, go around the corner, to the unattended lot of an Episcopal church. Carr and Bobby are parked across the street when the BMW arrives.
    The valet drops it into a slot next to a Porsche and sprints off toward the club. Carr takes a black box smaller than a deck of cards from the backpack at his feet.
    “Two minutes,” he says, but he doesn’t take that long. When he returns he has another small box in his hand, like the first but caked in mud and dust.
    “Korean crap,” Bobby says, disgustedly. “Second one that’s died on me this year. The fucking Kia of GPS trackers.”
    Bobby drives around another corner and down an alley. They park beside a dumpster and Carr takes a camera from the backpack. He sights through the viewfinder, and through a gap in the green court windscreen, and finds Bessemer and Brunt on their usual court. He has plenty of picturesof Bessemer—the benign, round face, the watery, perpetually astonished blue eyes, the ingratiating smile—and of the tanned and simian Brunt, but just now Bessemer is talking to someone Carr hasn’t seen before, a tall, knobby man, awkward and embarrassed-looking in tennis whites. Carr takes half a dozen photos and checks the results on the camera’s little screen.
    Bobby picks through the doughnut box. “Used to be, a guy like Howie did a little time, laid low awhile, then hooked up with a charity board,” he says. “Raised money for cancer or something. Now he can’t even get membership in a fucking tennis club—has to be like a permanent guest. Fraud and embezzlement—you’d think he was skinning live cats. I guess that fucking Madoff really queered it for guys like him.”
    Carr smiles and passes the camera to Bobby. “Do we know this guy?” he asks.
    Bobby looks at the screen and speaks through a mouthful of Boston cream. “Howie had a lunch and a dinner with him last week. I call him Ichabod. Don’t know his real name.”
    “Time to find out,” Carr says.
    Time, in fact, to pick Howard Bessemer’s pockets and rifle through his sock drawer, down to the lint and the last stray pennies. The dossier from Boyce has given Carr and his crew a head start: the basics of Bessemer’s story. The early chapters are straightforward enough: a young man of mediocre intellect and even less ambition—not to mention a DWI arrest on his eighteenth birthday—finds a spot at the university that generations of his family have attended, and where his grandfather has recently built a gymnasium. Not much new there.
    The middle passages are similarly predictable: