"Huh?
"I, m just curious. What kind of car does a guy buy when his old one's blown away? Or maybe he decides not to replace it. If they hit you once, they can always hit you again." "Okay," Janek said, sitting down, "we got off on the wrong foot. I'm no longer in the Detective Division. My squad is working directly for the commissioner. We've got one case.
Clury could be the key. You've already put in legwork. I want to collaborate. I'm serious."
"I notice you don't ask me to join your squad." "If I thought you'd consider it, I would." Stoney smiled. "Tell me about Clury. What do you know about him?" Janek told him everything he knew, and that he'd been given two new pieces of information. The first, from a reliable confidential source, was that someone might have had a reason to kill Clury that had never been explored. The second, from a source in Cuba who had deliberately tried to mislead him, was that Clury had been investigating Jake Mendoza on Edith Mendoza's behalf.
"Well, to me that's all garbage," Stoney said. "I deal in bombs, explosives-who makes ', who sets ' off."
"What did you find in Nassau County?"
"Couple of things. Clury's car was parked in his drive way all night, but none of the neighbors saw anyone tampering with it."
"Is that important?"
"It was ignition-wired, so the bomber had to open the hood. That's taking a chance, with the car right next to the house and the guy you want to kill inside."
"Bomber must have figured Clury was asleep."
"He could have woken up. He's a cop. He's got a gun. He could have shot the bomber. It doesn't smell right." Janek thought about it; he wasn't sure yet how. it smelled.
"What about the bomb signature)"
"That's not exactly like a fingerprint. But I checked it out. From the records it's only shown up twice, once on Clury's car, once on yours."
"What does that tell you?"
"That the bomber isn't a professional. Oh, he makes a good bomb, but he doesn't do it for a living. He only does it when it concerns Mendoza."
Interesting. "Anything else?"
"He wasn't self-taught. Whoever taught him taught him to do it right.
There're not too many places you can learn to make a bomb. Most likely he learned in the military."
"So, that's it?"
Stoney nodded. "Why're you so pleasant today?"
"Was I unpleasant before?"
"You didn't cooperate. I couldn't figure you, Frank. You'd lost your car but you didn't seem all that interested."
"I guess I wasn't focusing on it."
"But you are now. Got any ideas?"
"I'm wondering about something.. "What?"
"Not sure yet." Stoney smiled. "Well, let me know when you are sure.
I'll be here."
He stuck out his stubby hand.
It chewed at Janek the rest of the day-the notion that something about the Clury story was wrong. It continued to bother him after he went back to Detective Division files and read everything he could find on Clury in the Mendoza folders. There wasn't much. Clury, although a cop, had been viewed as the secondary victim. Most of the investigators' time had been spent on Edith; hers seemed a simpler homicide to solve.
When Janek finished reading, he realized he hadn't a clear sense of who Clury was. He called for Clury's personnel file, waited two hours for the clerks to find it. A dead cop meant a dead file; a cop nine years dead wasn't even in the computer. When, finally, they brought him the material, it was after six P.m. Hungry and tired, he decided to give it a quick look, then return in the morning to tackle it fresh.
Two minutes into it he was wide awake. According to Howard Clury's military records, the deceased detective had graduated from the Naval Demolition School at Coronado, California, then served as a demolition specialist in South Vietnam, 1971-1972.
He went out, ostensibly to get coffee, but he was so excited he didn't bother to stop. Instead he walked rapidly down to the Battery, and then just as rapidly back to Police Plaza. It was after seven when he signed back into the file room. Clury's personnel folder was just where he'd left it, on the long wooden table beneath the fluorescent lamp.
Approaching, he was seized by a throbbing anticipation, which reminded him of the excitement he'd felt perhaps a half dozen times in his career when he knew he was about to turn a case around. He thought: Thank you, Netti, for steering me to this.
There were no autopsy photos of Clury. The explosion had blown him into pieces. So, how had his body been IDed? By fragments of clothing, Janek learned-wallet, watch and ring, and, most decisively, a segment of bridge- work authenticated by his dentist. No fingerprints had been taken; evidently no fingers had survived. Janek found that curious. He also found it curious that Clury's wife, Janet, from whom he'd been separated but not divorced, had come up from Florida to attend his funeral, then signed papers authorizing cremation of his remains.
Janet Clury, as survivor of an officer killed on active duty, had been the beneficiary of a substantial lump-sum widow's payment plus pension.
Janek sat back. He wanted to think the implications through:
Certainly someone had been blown up inside Clury's car. But was it Clury?
If it wasn't-as the twice-used bomb signature suggested-then what was the connection between Clury's faked-up death and the Mendozas?
Timmy Sheehan's investigators had theorized that Clury had been blackmailing both Mendozas. Tania had told Janek that Clury had been working for Edith Mendoza, collecting information on Jake's infidelities to strengthen her hand in a planned divorce suit.
But suppose neither of these stories was right. Suppose Clury (who had worked for Jake Mendoza a year before) had played a part in Edith's death. Suppose he'd been paid to kill her. Suppose afterward he set up Metaxas, then arranged his own disappearance.
If that's what happened, Janek analyzed, Mendoza couldn't finger Clury.
If he did he'd also implicate himself. But now that Mendoza was stirring things up in Cuba, Clury might have reason to fear that his nine-year-old charade was about to be exposed.
Clury never met me. Maybe he thought he could scare me by bombing my car.
It was a wild theory, he had to admit, but perhaps it would stand the test. For instance, suppose Clury had had some other reason to want to disappear. If, Janek decided he could discover that, then maybe he could clear up a couple of other little dangles that had baffled anyone who had ever attempted to clear Mendoza-such as whether Phyllis Komfeld's claim that she had forged the Metaxas note was fact or fantasy, and, if fact, whether Komfeld had been killed to keep her from talking or because some drugcrazed burglar got carried away.
It took him hours to get to sleep, and, even then, he didn't sleep well.
He kept waking up with new combinations to be examined.
The great problem of Mendoza, he understood, was that no one who had looked into it had ever been able to figure out the sequence and the "whys."
What had been the motives of the principal players?
What, in the huge body of investigative material, was coincidental or extraneous?