Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Part 6

"I was going to do the half-a.s.sed torture bit on you," I said. "I was going to scare you till you peed your pants. But you fight like a man, so let's skip the bulls.h.i.t."

I took one step toward Dufresne, still p.r.o.ne on polished concrete, and set my left foot on his left shoulder. Applied steady pressure, watching pain flow to his eyes. He tried to kick me in the nuts, but it was halfhearted. I pulled the P35 and set it against his left temple. "You chambered a round yourself," I said, "am I right?"

"f.u.c.k you." He looked me in the eye as he said it. I liked him.

"Tell me everything you can tell me about Tander Phigg and his Mercedes," I said, "or I'll put one of your own souped-up bullets in your head and walk out the door and drive home and sleep like a baby."

CHAPTER FIVE.

You have to mean it.

I thought I meant it. I tried to get a good mad on. I thought about getting whacked in the head and lied to and dragged to a Dumpster, thought about Tander Phigg hanging from a pipe stub.

But as Ollie stared at me, studying my face, I got that feeling again-sitting above myself and to my left, looking down at the whole scene. Knew I wasn't going to blow a man's head off, wondered if he knew it, too. I killed my flashlight and left us in sudden dark so he couldn't read my eyes.

We were silent a full thirty seconds.

"Can't do it, can you?" he said.

"Done it before," I said.

"But can you do it now, friend? Do you have it in you?"

He was a man, a fighter. "I'm not going to do it now," I said. "Not to you." I took the P35 from his temple.

"In that case," Ollie Dufresne said, "let's have a cup of tea and talk."

Ten minutes later, a bandage from the shop's first-aid kit covered Ollie's gashed nose-blood stained through, but only a little. He was hard to figure out. Short, round, looked soft, sat sipping tea he'd made on a hot plate. But he fought like h.e.l.l, even with his arms pinned.

I leaned on a counter with his gun loose in my hand. "Tander Phigg died this morning," I said.

"Jesus. How?" His surprise seemed genuine. I wondered why Josh knew about the hanging but Ollie didn't.

"They say he hanged himself."

He shook his head. "That's rough. An old friend of yours, I presume?"

"He was a horse's a.s.s."

"On that we can agree, though I hate to speak ill of the dead." He hesitated. "Given that a.s.sessment, what's your role? Your mission?"

"I promised to get his car back," I said, nodding toward the covered Mercedes. "And the thirty-five hundred he paid you up front."

"And now that he's gone," Ollie said, "you might as well help yourself. Spoils of war, eh?"

"No."

"No what?"

"No, I won't help myself. Still helping Phigg."

"Phigg's dead."

"I said I'd help him. I'll help him."

Ollie looked at me awhile. "We have here a rara avis," he said. "What's your intent? Send Phigg a money-gram care of the great beyond?"

"I'll sell the car, give the dough to his next of kin if he has any."

"And if he doesn't?"

"I'll donate it to AA. I think Phigg would be okay with that."

"Fair enough," Ollie said. "Let's move on to the next problem: I don't owe the late Tander Phigg a f.u.c.king nickel. He lied to you about what was going on with his car. Through his teeth he lied."

"So straighten me out."

Ollie folded his arms, pulled at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger, said nothing-a man considering his options. I took that as confirmation there was something dirty going on. Ollie had painted himself into a corner where he had to either tell me about it or let me keep believing he'd scammed Phigg. Maybe killed him.

"Or I could just point the cops your way, let them straighten it out."

His silence dragged. I needed to get him going. "I used to own my own shop," I said. "European cars, mostly German."

"I know," he said. "You invented tools for working on transmissions. You held patents and ran training seminars for Mercedes USA."

I popped eyebrows.

Ollie said, "I attended one of the seminars."

"Small world."

"Remarkably."

I spread my arms. "I'm guessing you used to do some good work here."

"I still f.u.c.king do!" he said. But then he looked around, dropped his shoulders. "Well ... maybe not so much lately."

"What changed?"

He stared at nothing for a long time. I let him. I noticed the quiet and realized the rain had stopped.

Finally Ollie said, "What changed is that I got into something else."

"Chop shop?"

He shook his head, met my eyes. "Runs up to Canada."

"Cocaine?"

He said nothing.

"Heroin?"

"I'm not going to say it out loud," he said. "Not here, not to you. We made runs."

"Tell me."

"It's a long story."

"Shorten it."

Ollie half laughed. "That's not a bad idea, actually." He looked at the floor and rolled his chair in little circles while he organized the story. Then he told it.

Two years ago, Ollie had been running Motorenwerk, getting by on local projects but not building the big rep you need to get high-dollar restoration work. His shop was on a slow downhill slope, and he knew it. He could picture an eventual s.p.a.cE FOR RENT sign across the plate gla.s.s.

That's when Ollie got a visit from an old friend of his father. The visit was out of the blue: Ollie's father, a Quebecois, had died of cirrhosis fifteen years prior. The friend drove up in a Cadillac Escalade. He had a killer suit on, a layered haircut, a ma.s.sive bodyguard.

At first, the dude tried a friendly-uncle bit-said he'd always kept track of little Ollie, had loved him since he was a pup, had made his dad a deathbed promise to keep an eye on him.

Ollie said that was a load of horses.h.i.t and they both knew it. He asked what the friend really wanted.

The friend's eyes went dark a few seconds. Then he laughed, slapped Ollie's shoulder, said he liked a blunt man, and got to it. He sold things in Montreal, he said. He'd done well. But after nine-eleven, it was hard as h.e.l.l to get merchandise into Canada. He had an idea, a way to get back on top, that was right up Ollie's alley. Everybody'd win.

Ollie looked into my eyes. "We both knew what he was selling," he said. "Obviously, n.o.body wanted to say the word."

"Like now."

"Exactly."

"Jesus, it's just a word," I said. "Heroin or cocaine?"

Long pause. "The former."

The dealer had done homework. Everybody thought drug-sniffing dogs were impossible to fool, and cops liked to keep people thinking that way. In truth, the dealer had learned, mutts were mutts. If you wrapped heroin carefully and didn't leave sloppy residue everywhere, you could fool them pretty well. If you wrapped it very carefully and buried it deep enough inside the car that carried it across the border, you could fool them every time.

I said, "That's where you came in."

Ollie sat straighter. "You wouldn't believe the work I did. I could hide ten kilos in a brand-new Dodge Caravan. Turn the minivan over to the very engineer who designed it, I swear it would take him a week to find anything."

"Just a guess," I said. "Cut the gas tank in half, put the wrapped drugs inside, weld it back up?"

He wagged a finger. "Amateur hour, friend. That's the first place they look. Besides, a lot of gas tanks are plastic these days."

"Like everything else in cars."

He smiled. I'd won him over. Proud now, Ollie talked about his tricks. He stuffed thin ropes of plastic-wrapped heroin in a car's stiffening rails, covered by a panel that was sprayed and undercoated to match the body. He hollowed out truck batteries, stuck tiny motorcycle batteries in the sh.e.l.l, and packed the rest of the cavity with drugs. In some cars, he found he could stash a kilo in each windshield pillar. "It's all in the details, in how you cover your work to make it look factory," Ollie said. "In that sense, it's not so different from a true restoration."

I signaled "speed it up" with my finger. "Tie it all in to Phigg."

As the drug-packing business pushed aside the legit restorations, Ollie grew nervous. So did the Montreal dealer. After all, Motorenwerk was supposed to be a snooty, Germans-only shop. How long before somebody noticed most of the cars in the garage were now two-year-old Camrys, Accords, Caravans? Ollie needed a beard or two-genuine resto projects that could sit around the shop a long time.

On cue, along came Tander Phigg with his rare Mercedes.

Ollie touched the bandage on his nose, winced. "It was perfect," he said. "I saw immediately he was a rich sucker, the kind of guy who wants to be your pal so badly he'll swallow any line of bulls.h.i.t just to keep the peace. You ran a shop yourself. You must know the type."

I knew. Nodded.

"That's when I hired Josh," Ollie said. "I told him he was going to lead the work on Mr. Phigg's Mercedes, and I encouraged him to take his sweet time. He was an eager beaver. So eager, in fact, that I began taking in dull little maintenance jobs."

"You keep Josh busy with the maintenance," I said, "so he never really gets anything done on Phigg's car."

"Indeed."

"He knows something stinks here."

"He does," Ollie said, "he does at that. Smart young man, and curious to boot. I'll deal with him when I absolutely must, and not before."

"Back up," I said. "You were making good money with this Montreal guy?"

"Of course. That's why the restorations ground to a halt."

"So why'd you ding Phigg for thirty-five hundred bucks?"

"I didn't!" he said. "With all due respect to the deceased, your friend was full of s.h.i.t on that point." As he said it, Ollie's eyes cut down and left. He wasn't telling me the whole truth.

"Strange detail to lie about," I said.

"Care to see my copy of the original work order? It's three feet behind you."

"Sure." If it was a bluff, I was calling it.

Ollie stepped around me to a two-drawer filing cabinet that he must have stuffed in here when the office filled up. He rifled through the top drawer, pulled a manila folder, flopped it on the bench in front of me, and folded his arms.

I opened it and saw right away that Motorenwerk used the same software I used to. At the bottom of the eighteen-month-old work order was Tander Phigg's authorization signature. There was no record of any deposit, no credit-card receipt, no staple where such a receipt had once been.

If Ollie was faking me out, he was doing a h.e.l.l of a job.

I shut the folder. Ollie gave me a "Well?" look.