Читать книгу: «Payback», страница 2

“I’m not dating her.” Under his sister’s unrelenting gaze, he expanded his answer. “Not anymore. We broke up a while ago.”

“Before her father was murdered?”

“Yes. A few weeks before, in fact.” To be precise, not long after their argument as to whether Luke respected her professional ambitions enough to take time off from the opening of his newest restaurant to fly to Lyon and watch her compete in the most important contest of her professional life. The preparation and endless hours of practice for the Coupe du Monde were so arduous they had both known Kate would be unlikely ever to enter the contest again. Seven months after their breakup, he was finally able to admit that his decision not to fly to France had probably contributed to the chain of events leading to their final, hideous confrontation.

Anna looked hurt. “Quite apart from all the times we discussed Ron Raven’s murder, why didn’t you ever tell me you were dating somebody special?”

Because he’d worked his ass off to keep the affair quiet. Because while he and Kate were dating, he’d been desperate to develop the relationship minus the analysis of his parents, his five siblings and all the assorted in-laws and cousins who might decide to stick their noses into this latest interesting piece of Savarini family gossip. Ironically, the spectacular emotional storm that ended his relationship with Kate had taught him the hard lesson that there were far more ways to screw up a relationship than subjecting it to benevolent interference from a close-knit family.

“There was no point in talking to you about Kate. It wasn’t serious and we didn’t date all that long.” Eight months wasn’t very long, he soothed his conscience, so he wasn’t exactly lying. Luke hurried on, dodging more sisterly questions. “The thing is, I do know Kate and her mother well enough to be fairly sure that if Ron Raven is alive, they would want to hear about it.”

A gruff, rumbling voice greeted them from across the room, saving him from further cross-examination. Thank you, Jesus.

“Anna, mia piccola, come stai, carina?”

“Bruno! Che sorpresa piacevole! Sto bene, grazie. E tu?”

“Eh, cosi, cosi. No, no, don’t get up, Anna.” Cousin Bruno squeezed her shoulder. “What a treat to find you here! I’m glad I decided to stop by the restaurant after my daughter dragged me to the movies. We saw this horrible, boring movie about blowing up cars. If there was anything more to the plot, I must have missed those two lines of dialogue.”

Anna laughed and stood up to hug him, ignoring his command. “Bruno, stop complaining. You know you love movies with lots of car chases.”

“Yes, providing there’s a plot squeezed in between the chases.” He patted her shoulder. “You should have told me you planned to eat here tonight. I would have skipped the movie and been here to welcome you both.”

“I wasn’t sure what our plans would be. Luke’s only in town for twenty-four hours. By the way, do you remember my brother, Luke?”

“We never met.” Bruno shook hands. “But I ate at your restaurant last year when I was in Chicago. Luciano’s on Chestnut. I inquired after you, Luke, but the sous-chef told me you were at one of your other places that night. You can be very proud of what you’ve achieved with Luciano’s. The meal my brother and I ate was spectacular.”

“Thank you. It’s a relief to know you were there on a night when we didn’t screw up.”

“Somehow, I get the impression that you and your team don’t screw up very often.” Bruno pulled out a chair and sat down. “Well, I can’t compete with Luciano’s—we don’t even try to cater to that level of sophistication—but I’m proud of the desserts we make here. What can I get the two of you? Our tiramisu is made from an old family recipe handed down by my grandmother, and it’s the best ever, if I do say so myself. The panna cotta with caramel sauce is mighty fine, as well. We use buttermilk in addition to the cream and it’s not as bland as the traditional recipe.”

“I love your amaretto ice cream,” Anna said. “It’s my personal favorite.”

“Then amaretto ice cream it shall be for you, cara.” Bruno gave her hand a fatherly squeeze. “Luke, how about you?”

“The panna cotta would be great,” he said. “I’ve never made it with buttermilk and it sounds interesting.”

Their desserts arrived along with tiny cups of aromatic espresso and Luke chatted politely with his cousin, who seemed both a kindly man and an experienced chef. Maybe the ravioli has just been an unfortunate exception to generally good food, Luke mused. The panna cotta was certainly first-rate, and the buttermilk made for an intriguing variation on an old standby.

Bruno excused himself to have a word with his staff, and Anna worked hard to keep Luke from reverting to their previous conversation about Ron Raven. Since Luke was working equally hard to prevent her picking up their conversation about Kate, the atmosphere around the table was unusually strained. They were both relieved when Bruno returned after a few minutes and sat down across from Luke.

“Merrie, one of our servers, asked me to give you this,” he said, handing Luke a thin, crumpled credit card receipt. “She said you were inquiring about a couple that was seated at one of her tables. Apparently, they left this behind.”

Luke picked up the flimsy slip of paper. “I appreciate Merrie thinking of me. But she told me that couple paid their bill in cash.”

“They did. This isn’t one of our charge slips,” Bruno said. “If it was, I couldn’t pass it on. But Merrie found it tucked in among the stash of twenties they left behind to pay their bill. She was about to toss it away when she saw me ordering your desserts and realized you really are my cousin. Since this charge slip is nothing to do with us or the meal they ate here, and there’s no way to return it to the couple, I figure there’s no harm in handing it over to you. Merrie says you were interested in this man.”

There was a definite question in his cousin’s voice and Luke repeated his story about seeing an old friend he’d lost touch with. “I’m not sure if I’m enthusiastic enough to track him down through a credit card bill, but I appreciate Merrie’s gesture. Tell her thanks from me, will you?” He deliberately downplayed his interest, since he could only imagine how Bruno would react if Luke repeated his claim to have seen a supposed murder victim eating dinner on the other side of the dining room.

Bruno seemed satisfied with Luke’s explanation, and left to go back to the kitchen after another profuse round of good wishes and goodbyes.

Luke smoothed out the charge slip, scrutinizing the scanty information as he and Anna made their way back to her car. The charge of forty-three dollars and change had been made earlier in the day at an establishment called Sunrise. There was no indication of what sort of establishment Sunrise might be.

“What’s the name on the charge slip?” Anna asked, clicking her key to spring the locks on her car.

Luke held the slip up to the light. “Stewart M. Jones.”

“You see!” Anna looked relieved. “I told you the man you saw wasn’t Ron Raven. Now you can relax and stop obsessing about seeing dead people. I feel as if I spent the past hour living in an outtake from The Sixth Sense.”

The fact that the name on the charge slip read Stewart Jones proved nothing at all about the identity of the man Luke had seen in Bruno’s, as his sister must realize. If Ron had faked his own death, he wouldn’t be opening charge accounts under the identity he’d just been at great pains to get rid of.

Anna must be afraid that he was seeing visions of Ron because he was hung up on his failed relationship with Kate, Luke decided. As it happened, his sister was way off the mark. He wasn’t fixated on Kate—far from it. Their affair had ended in nothing less than misery and he sure as hell wasn’t wasting any time regretting its end. Kate might be beautiful and sexy and have the same career interests as he did, but their personalities were polar opposites. Not to mention the fact that her concept of faithfulness bore no relationship to his.

He realized now that their character differences had mattered almost as much as the betrayals. As their affair started to unravel, their differences worked to the surface, causing unbearable friction. His frustrations had boiled over into the sort of noisy Italian explosiveness he’d spent most of his adult life learning to control. Kate had reacted to each of his displays of temperament with a deeper and deeper retreat into icily silent WASP disapproval.

Even the memory of those last few weeks was enough to make Luke feel slightly sick, quite apart from the horrors of the final denouement. Allowing his sister’s comments about the real identity of Stewart M. Jones to slide past unchallenged, Luke tucked the charge slip into his billfold and took his seat next to Anna in the car. He returned the conversation to family, food and the imminent birth of their youngest sister’s first baby and made sure he kept it there.

For all his silence, Luke’s conviction that he’d seen Ron Raven remained strong. But six months had already passed since Ron disappeared, and Luke decided he could afford to wait until he got back to Chicago before notifying the authorities that, far from moldering in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, Ron Raven was alive and well, and seemingly enjoying life in one of the more prosperous suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Three

Chicago, October 10, 2007

The Miami police department didn’t even bother to be polite when Luke called to inform them that he’d seen the supposedly dead Ron Raven eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, a week earlier. Dismissed by a bored clerk—his call never made it as far up the hierarchy as a real cop—he tried again with the Chicago police.

Smarter this time around, he directed his call to a detective sergeant whom he’d met eighteen months earlier when Luciano’s was being remodeled. The cop had been assigned to find out who was stealing construction materials from the restaurant site and Luke figured the two of them had a good rapport.

Their rapport apparently didn’t extend far enough for the cop to believe Luke’s claim to have seen Ron Raven. His tale was received with greater politeness, but with the same bored disbelief demonstrated by the police department in Miami. The bottom line was that cops in both places had fielded hundreds of reports alleging that Ron Raven was alive, and the fact that Luke described himself as an old friend and business acquaintance of the deceased carried no particular weight.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve received so many reports because Ron Raven is alive and people really are seeing him?” Luke finally asked, no longer bothering to hide his frustration.

“No,” the cop responded baldly.

“That’s it?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Just no?”

“What do you want me to say?” The detective sighed. “We receive reports like this every time there’s a murder that attracts a lot of TV coverage. And when there’s no body to be buried, you can guarantee that half the weirdos in the state are going to claim they’ve seen the deceased.”

It was sobering to realize that from the detective’s point of view he was simply one more wing nut craving notoriety. “But you’ve dealt with me before!” Luke protested. “You know I’ve met Ron Raven because it was right in your report about the thefts from the construction site. You needed a record of who was providing financing for the restaurant and I told you then—almost three years ago!—that I had a revolving line of credit with Ron Raven.”

“That’s true.” The cop’s voice added a layer of impatience to existing boredom.

“And it isn’t as if I’m calling you when Ron Raven’s disappearance is being hotly reported by the media. They moved on to fresh meat weeks ago. Months ago, in fact.”

“I’m sure you believe what you’re telling me, Mr. Savarini—”

“But you don’t believe me, and you have no interest in conducting any sort of follow-up investigation.”

“No, I don’t.” In view of their past acquaintance, the cop relented enough to expand on his reply. “Look, here are the facts. I pulled up the case notes while you were talking and I’m reading them right off my computer. In the three months the investigation was on active status, we took reports from a hundred and twelve people claiming to have seen Ron Raven. Do the math. That’s around ten supposed sightings a week. Miami police have taken hundreds more. On top of that, six callers told us they’d committed the murder, and another three identified themselves as the woman who’d been in the hotel room with Mr. Raven. We followed up on all six confessions and interviewed all three women who claimed to have been in the Miami hotel room. Our detectives concluded the closest any of those people had come to seeing Ron Raven was via the TV screens in their living rooms. That was your tax dollars at work, Mr. Savarini, from May until the end of July. A complete waste of time and police resources. Be grateful the case has been put into inactive status. Except for the warrant outstanding against Julio Castellano, of course. Now, if you thought you’d seen him, I’d be more interested.”

“The fact that crazy people like to confess to murders they didn’t commit proves nothing about whether I saw Ron Raven in Virginia last week.”

The cop no longer sounded bored, only impatient. “We have forensic evidence that proves Julio Castellano, a twice-convicted murderer, was in Ron Raven’s hotel room,” he snapped. “We have bullets and blood-spatter patterns in the hotel room, in the exact places forensic experts would expect if the victims were shot while they were running from the bed. We also have security video of two bodies being wheeled onto a yacht. Based on discrepancies between the ship’s log and data collected from the yacht itself, experts have calculated that the boat traveled a total of thirty-five nautical miles that night without knowledge or permission of the owners. Trust me, Mr. Savarini, we know exactly what happened to Ron Raven the night he disappeared. He was murdered. He’s dead and his body—what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

It was depressing to hear Anna’s arguments repeated more or less point by point. Luke realized that announcing he had the number of the car in which “Ron Raven” had driven away from the restaurant was going to get him nowhere. The chance of the Chicago police department agreeing to run the numbers was somewhere south of zero. He cut short what was clearly a useless exercise by thanking the cop for his explanations and hanging up.

It was approaching 11:00 a.m., almost time for him to leave for work, and way past time for him to stop obsessing about a sighting that apparently nobody cared about except him. He was sweaty after his morning run, and he retreated to the bathroom to take a shower in preparation for the long hours ahead. He’d be lucky if he was back in his Lincoln Park condo before two or three in the morning, and that was assuming the night produced no major crises at any of his restaurants.

Luke let the water pound in a scorching stream over his head and body. The cops were convinced they had the case of Ron Raven’s disappearance wrapped up, despite the minor detail that they hadn’t actually managed to arrest the alleged murderer. Who was Luke to persist in the claim that he’d seen Ron eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, when the rest of the world was happy to accept that the guy had long since become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Atlantic fishes?

Even if he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he had no good reason to hurl himself against the brick wall of police indifference. The eight months he’d spent dating Ron’s daughter didn’t justify sticking his nose into Raven family business months after his affair with Kate had ended. God knew, he had enough problems within his own family to keep him occupied for the next lifetime or two. He sure as hell didn’t need to take on anyone else’s family problems.

But, dammit, he’d seen Ron Raven! The annoying conviction remained, despite his efforts to wash it down the shower drain. Luke reminded himself of all the reasons why this was a totally lousy time for him to set off on some idiotic quest to convince the world that Ron was alive. The sous-chef at his newest restaurant in suburban Winnetka had sliced open his thumb yesterday, which meant that Luke would be putting in ten long hours of intensive labor tonight, instead of merely checking in for a couple of hours before transferring to his flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago. The Food Network had called yesterday and asked him to tape a show for their upcoming series on America’s most exciting new chefs. Somehow, his already crammed schedule for next week had to be expanded to include eight hours of interviews, with a camera crew trailing him while he cooked and the network expert analyzed everything from his fall seasonal recipes to his underlying technique.

Luke turned off the shower and shook water from his body. Clearly, he didn’t have time right now for pursuing ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Nevertheless, he found himself grabbing a towel and padding wet-footed back into the spare bedroom that served as his home office. Tucking the towel around his waist, he grabbed his Palm Pilot and retrieved a phone number for George Klein, a private detective he’d hired over the summer to identify a dishonest Luciano’s employee.

George greeted him warmly, a soothing change after the indifferent cops. “Luke, it’s good to hear from you again. How are you?”

“I’m fine, but I need your help. Nothing to do with the restaurants, thank God. Either the security systems you put in place are working or I’ve managed to hire some really loyal and honest employees. I hope it’s the latter.”

“I do, too. There’s nothing I like better than to install protective systems that never get activated. So, how can I help you?”

“I’m hoping you can run a license number for me. It’s a Virginia plate, and I need to know who the car is registered to. Do you have any contacts in Virginia?”

“A couple. Hopefully, they’ll come through for me. Give me the plate number and I’ll give it my best shot.”

“I’m not sure of the final digit. I was reading the license in the dark and I couldn’t see whether it was AB7 4K3, or AB7 4K8. What I want to know is the name and address of the owner. The car was a silver gray Mercedes coupe, by the way. I don’t know if that makes a difference.”

“Absolutely. It’s a big help.” George Klein was far too discreet to inquire why Luke wanted to track down a Virginia license plate. “I’ll have both sets of numbers run through the DMV database, and if my contacts are still good, I should be able to get names and addresses for you before the end of business tomorrow.”

George called early the following afternoon, tracking Luke down at the smallest and least formal of the three Luciano restaurants, a trattoria in Oakbrook. He informed Luke that the vehicle registered as AB7 4K3 was a Hyundai, owned by a woman. Her name was Jennifer Parker and she lived in Reston, Virginia.

“Based on your description of the vehicle as a gray Mercedes, I assume that’s not the person you’re looking for,” he said.

“No, I’m trying to trace a man,” Luke said. “He’s an old friend and we…um…lost touch.”

George Klein was kind enough to ignore Luke’s lame attempt to justify his snooping. “The vehicle registered as AB7 4K8 is a Mercedes CLK 550 coupe,” he said. “The color is listed as Evening Pearl. That sounded more like the vehicle you’re looking for.”

“Yes, it sure does.”

“Apparently it was sold last week. The system caught up with the change of ownership only a couple of hours before I checked, so we got lucky. It’s currently registered to a Mercedes dealer in Arlington, Virginia. I figured you’d want to know the name of the previous owner—”

“Yes, I sure do.”

“It was a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

Luke’s breath caught at the now-familiar name. It might be sheer coincidence that Mr. Jones had sold his car right after Luke chased him down in the restaurant parking lot. But the hasty sale could also mean that Ron Raven was so determined not to be traced that he’d been willing to part with an almost-new Mercedes to avoid discovery.

“Do you have an address for Mr. Jones?” Luke asked the detective.

“I do. Mr. Jones gave his place of residence as McLean, Virginia—2737 Elm Court to be precise.”

“Thanks, George. I really appreciate the swift service. Can you do one more thing for me? Find out if Stewart Jones is still living at Elm Court.”

“I figured you might want that information.” George Klein sounded pleased with his forethought. “I already checked with the owners of the building. According to them, Elm Court is a short-term rental place but it’s pretty upscale, mostly catering to diplomats and international businessmen. Unit 6, which is where Mr. Jones was living when he registered his car, rents for five thousand bucks a month, furnished, weekly maid service included. That’s not out of sight for the D.C. area, but it’s obviously not cheap, either. Mr. Jones stayed there for only one month and left three months ago, with all his bills paid up. From the point of view of the management company, there was nothing in the least remarkable about his stay or his departure. They screen all tenants, of course, and Mr. Jones passed the screening without a hiccup.”

If Ron Raven were alive and wanted to conceal that fact, then Washington, D.C. would be an ideal city for him to hide in, Luke reflected. Nobody noticed strangers or transients in the D.C. area because the city was full of them. From Ron’s perspective, there were few cities in the United States that would offer better prospects for lucrative business deals, combined with plenty of comfortable places to hide.

The fact that “Stewart Jones” had passed a standard credit check didn’t surprise Luke in the least. Ron Raven had been running background checks on prospective clients for three decades and he would certainly know all the danger points he needed to protect himself against. On top of that, he’d been concealing his bigamous lifestyle for twenty-eight years. Never confiding fully in anyone, procuring duplicate documents and spinning stories to obscure the truth would be second nature to him. Now that he thought about it, Luke realized Ron Raven was almost uniquely qualified to disappear and reemerge with a new identity.

Unfortunately, the more convinced Luke became that Stewart Jones and Ron Raven were the same person, the more difficult it became to imagine how he was going to track the guy down. On top of that, he would soon have to consider the issue Anna had raised last week: Would he be doing the Raven family any favors by telling them he’d seen Ron? Or would he be heating up an emotional pot that had just started to cool down from the traumatic news of Ron’s death?

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that Mr. Jones left a forwarding address,” he said to George Klein.

“He left an address, but it’s in Australia. In Adelaide, to be precise. I haven’t followed up. I figured I’d talk with you first before going to that expense.”

“Stewart Jones’s forwarding address is in Australia?”

“Yes. You sound surprised.”

“I am.”

“I take it you didn’t know that Mr. Jones is an Australian diplomat?”

“An Australian diplomat?” Luke stared blankly at the contract with a seafood vendor that he’d been reading before he picked up the detective’s call. Ron Raven clearly had acting abilities his family didn’t know about if he’d managed to pass himself off as an Australian.

“Luke? Are you there?”

“Sorry, you surprised me, that’s all. I assumed…Mr. Jones…was an American.”

“Perhaps he is. If you’re a person trying to hide, adopting a foreign identity is a great first step.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because superficial identity checks in the States are all set up around social security numbers. An Australian diplomat doesn’t have an American social security number, meaning that credit checks are a lot more difficult. Not to mention more expensive.”

“And that would make it harder for somebody to identify Stewart Jones as a fraud,” Luke said.

“Absolutely,” George agreed. “But if Stewart Jones isn’t really Australian, we can soon find out. Do you want me to check the Australian address he gave the rental company?”

Luke’s first instinct was to stop this investigation right now. What the hell was he trying to achieve by chasing a chimera across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean? In the end, though, he couldn’t quite let go.

“It can’t hurt, I guess, since we’ve come this far so quickly. Thanks, George. Some information about Mr. Jones’s forwarding address would be useful. Can you dig deep enough to find out if we’re talking about a mail drop or a residence?”

“Sure thing. I could also check with the Australian foreign ministry and confirm whether or not they have a Stewart M. Jones on their diplomatic roster.”

“That would be great. Although Mr. Jones passed the background check conducted by the Elm Court management company, so I’m not sure that we’re going to unearth any discrepancies without going to a lot of trouble.”

“You’d be surprised—make that alarmed—at how easy it is to pass a standard credit check. I’ll just peel back a couple more layers and see what we uncover.” George paused. “It would help if I knew what I’m trying to find out.”

“For now, I’d prefer just to tell you that you’re right, and I think Stewart M. Jones is a stolen identity someone has adopted.” Luke gave up on the unrealistic pretense that he was conducting a simple search for an old friend. “If the Australian authorities acknowledge they have a diplomat called Stewart Jones, could you get a description of him? That way, I can compare the man I saw with the Stewart Jones employed by the Australian government. I don’t want to make any accusations or leap to any wild conclusions until I’m sure I didn’t just see a hardworking Australian guy who happens to look like somebody else.”

“I’ll do my best. In fact, if I tell the Aussies that I’m investigating a suspected identity theft, they’ll probably be quite willing to cooperate.”

“Thanks for all you’ve done so far, George. I’m very grateful.”

“Glad I could be of help. I’ll hold off on sending you a bill until I’ve contacted the Australian authorities and traced this address in Adelaide.” The investigator’s voice took on a tinge of laughter. “If I give you the damage in one fell swoop, you’ll only be shocked once.”

Luke avoided thinking about Ron Raven for the rest of the night, which wasn’t hard, chiefly because the pressures of serving top-quality food in three crowded restaurants, one with an injured sous-chef, occupied every scrap of his attention. He assumed George would take at least a couple of days to get back to him and he was almost glad of the delay. However, he’d underestimated George’s efficiency. Luke opened up his e-mail the next evening and found a note from the detective already waiting for him.

Thought it might be easier to put this in writing, instead of interrupting your work schedule. Mr. Jones’s forwarding address in Adelaide turns out to be for an abandoned warehouse. I’ve attached an aerial picture of the site, which as you can see is surrounded by a chain-link fence and appears deserted. I spoke to a local cop (local to Adelaide, that is) and he assures me that any mail forwarded to this warehouse from the States during the past six months would have been returned to sender or delivered to a dead-letter box, since the ownership of the site is in dispute between two companies.

I checked again with the superintendent of the apartment building in McLean, Virginia. He has no memory of any mail either being forwarded to Stewart Jones or being returned from Australia. It seems likely, therefore, that no first-class mail for Mr. Jones ever arrived at Elm Court after he left there in late June.

I also contacted the Australian embassy in Washington, D.C. I informed them somebody might be fraudulently using the identity of a supposed Australian diplomat, Stewart M. Jones. The embassy informed me that there has been no diplomat of that name serving in any capacity in the United States for the past two years. They wouldn’t comment on whether they have a diplomat of that name assigned elsewhere.

The management company for the Elm Street rental properties at first declined to share with me how they checked the credentials and references for prospective renters. After some persuasion, a clerk parted with the information that all applicants are required to provide a security deposit equal to three months’ rent. If the applicant’s check clears, the rest of the credit check is cursory. Renters are required to provide a work phone number, and this number is always called. However, since applicants provide the work number themselves, they—in this case, Mr. Jones—have complete control over how the call is answered. Mr. Jones could pretend that a caller had reached the Australian embassy, and then provide himself with a glowing reference. Child’s play for anyone with experience in setting up a scam. Sometimes I wonder why anybody in this country bothers to be honest, when deception and fraud are so easy.

Bottom line: Anyone wanting to rent accommodations at the Elm Street location could use almost whatever name they pleased with little risk of having their alias exposed.

Let me know if you need to investigate further. Sincerely, George Klein.

P.S. Invoice attached.