Page 170 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

“Never is a long time, Duncan. Did you examine the vehicle in
which he eluded your trackers? Were there similar vehicles reported
for any reason in the neighborhood of Rea Rainger later that night?
Could Napoleon have sustained any of his injuries in the course of
her murder?”
What could I say? I had too much to do to examine theories so
improbable or unprovable that only Labelle could imagine them! But
I simply shook my head.
“No? I will flag this for follow-up. Alexander had a rough night,
too, it seems.”
“Yes, a mobster’s life isn’t risk-free, particularly if his customers are
not satisfied. He had been at his residence that evening, on his
computer again, when he received a phone call. Although we had a
court order for a wiretap, our equipment was down at the crucial
moment, and the number had to be traced. By the time we relayed
the address of the caller to our surveillance team, they were already
on the road, having been dodged by Alexander yet again. He had left
home directly after hanging up, hopping into his car and tearing
down the street at high speed. He must have seen on which side of
the street our car was parked, for he took off in the opposite
direction—away from his destination, as it turned out, but he is
skilled in evasion. That was about eleven p.m.”
“But they caught up with him, anyway, right?—at that caller’s
house.”
“His car was there, but Alexander was not. The neighbors were out
on the street, and a patrol car soon arrived to relieve our
plainclothesmen. It was not a run-down area: nice homes on a tidy
tree-lined cul-de-sac. But shots had been fired. The owner of the
house, the man who had called Mr. Simulian so late in the day, was
the shooter. That individual, one Philo Berbersky, told us the whole
sordid story. One of Alexander’s sidelines, so to speak, was a Russian
mail-order bride business he ran online and through magazine
advertisements. As a modern and quite legal form of white slavery,
these arranged marriages are quite lucrative for the middleman. A
modicum of good faith is required, of course, for the prospective
bridegroom to put down his cold hard cash for what might, after all,
be a pig in a poke.”

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