I called Brooklyn Information and tried to find a listing for a Raymond Callander, or an R or RJ Callander. The operator pointed out that there were other ways to spell that last name, and checked more possibilities than would have occurred to me. Spelled one way or another, there were a couple of listings for R and one RJ, but the addresses were way off, one on Meserole in Greenpoint, another way over in Brownsville, none of them anywhere near Sunset Park.
Maddening, but then the whole case had been like that from the beginning. I kept getting teased, making major breakthroughs that didn't really lead anywhere. Turning up Pam Cassidy had been the best example. From out of nowhere we'd managed to produce a living witness, and the bottom-line result of that was that the cops had taken three dead cases and shoved them all into a single open file.
Pam had provided a first name. Now I had a last name to go with it, and even a middle name, all thanks to TJ with an assist from Bellamy. I had an address, too, but it had probably stopped being valid at about the time the phone was disconnected.
He wouldn't be all that hard to find. It's easier when you know who you're looking for. I had enough now to find him, if I was able to wait until daytime, and if I could allow a few days for the search.
But that wasn't good enough. I wanted to find him now.
IN the living room, Kenan was on the phone, Peter at the window. I didn't see Yuri. I joined Peter, and he told me that Yuri had gone out to look for more money.
"I couldn't look at the money," he said. "I was getting an anxiety attack. Rapid heartbeat, cold damp hands, the whole bit."
"What was the fear?"
"Fear? I don't know. It just made me want to do some dope, that's all. You gave me a word-association test right now, every response'd be heroin. A Rorschach, every ink-blot'd look like some dope fiend bangin' himself in a vein."
"But you're not doing it, Pete."
"What's the difference, man? I know I'm gonna. All it is is a question of when. Beautiful out there, isn't it?"
"The ocean?"
He nodded. "Only you can't really see it anymore. Must be nice living where you can look out at water. I had a girlfriend once, she was into astrology, told me that's my element, water. You believe in that stuff?"
"I don't know much about it."
"She was right that it's my element. I don't like the others too much. Air, I never liked to fly. Wouldn't want to burn up in a fire or be buried in the earth. But the sea, that's the mother of us all, isn't that what they say?"
"I guess."
"That's the ocean out there, too. Not a river or a bay. That's just nothing but water, straight on out, farther than you can see. Makes me feel clean just to look at it."
I clapped him on the shoulder and left him looking at the ocean. Kenan was off the phone, and I went to ask him how the count stood.
"We got a shade under half of it," he said. "I been calling in every favor I got coming and Yuri's been doing the same. I got to tell you, I don't think we're going to find a whole lot more."
"The only person I can think of is in Ireland. I hope this looks like a million, that's all. All it has to do is get past whatever rough count they give it on the spot."
"Suppose we shoot some air into it. If every pack of hundreds is short five bills, you got a tenth again more packs."
"Which is fine unless they pick one pack at random and spot-count it."
"Good point," he said. "First glance, this is going to look like a good deal more than what I handed over to them. That was all hundreds. This has about twenty-five percent of the total in fifties. You know there's a way to make it look like a lot more than it is."
"Bulk it up with cut paper."
"I was thinking with singles. The paper's right, the color, everything but the denomination. Say you got a stack, supposed to be fifty hundred-dollar bills, total of five grand. You dummy it up with ten hundreds on top and ten on the bottom and fill in with thirty singles. 'Stead of five grand you have a little over two grand looking like five. Fan it, all you see is green."
"Same problem. It works unless you take a good look at one of the dummied-up packets. Then you see it's not what it's supposed to be, and you know right away, no argument, that it was phonied up that way to fool you. And if you're a nut case to begin with, and you've been looking for an excuse to murder all night long-"
"You kill the girl, bang, and it's over."
"That's the trouble with anything flagrant. If it looks as though we're trying to screw them-"
"They'll take it personally." He nodded. "Maybe they won't count the stacks. You got fifties and hundreds mixed, five thousand to a stack, half that in a stack of fifties, how many stacks are we talking if we come in at half a mil? A hundred if it's all hundreds, so call it a hundred and twenty, thirty, something like that?"
"Sounds right."
"I don't know, would you count it? You count in a dope deal, but you've got time, you sit back, you count the money and inspect the product. Different story. Even so, you know how the big traffickers count? The guys who turn upwards of a mil in each transaction?"
"I know the banks have machines that can count a stack of bills as quickly as you can riffle through it."
"Sometimes they use those," he said, "but mostly it's weight. You know how much money weighs, so you just load it on the scale."
"Is that what they did at the family enterprise in Togo?"
He smiled at the thought. "No, that was different," he said. "They counted every bill. But nobody was in a hurry."