C.T. Brown - Second Time Lucky? Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked why he hadn't been
driving the limo himself, he told me he had been driving the Range Rover to
take his boss to a meeting he refused to tell me anything about except that it
was "well out of town". When I asked him about the actual driver that
night he got even more cagey , it took some pushing,
and a reminder from Davey that cooperation was not optional, to find out he was
relatively new. Apparently he had been a bit of a brown noser, the boss had not
been interested but a couple of his lieutenants had taken to the guy's
compliments and he had become a popular driver for them. I made a note of which
lieutenants in particular. Wheels had not left instructions for this guy to
pick Carmen up from the party, in fact he had left no instructions for anyone
to do so - her plan had been for a quiet night-time stroll home with me it
seemed. On that evening I had seen her speak to the driver before she came and
told me she was getting a lift home but I assumed she was just telling him she
would be a few minutes while we said our goodbyes, I now wondered if she had
questioned what he was doing there. That brought up another question, why not walk home with me anyway? It was not like the driver could order her to
get in.
    Next
up was the first of the lieutenants who had allegedly been complimented by our
brown nosing driver. Kaseem Smith, his real name by all accounts, was
immaculately dressed in a very expensive suit and not much older than me. Given
the way Davey carefully kept his natural arrogance under control around him I
got the impression Kaseem was someone to be very careful of. Anyone this young
in a position of power in the Spigarelli operation had to have done some
serious violence on the way. I asked him about the driver.
    "Sure,
he seemed ok at first, but I didn't trust the man."
    "Why
not?"
    "He
didn't want to pick a winner."
    "A
winner?"
    "Everyone
here picks who in the level above them is going to win, at each level there's
fewer and fewer as you go on up so only certain one's is going to win a place
to go up. You pick the right geezer and you can step up behind him. Once you
get to where I am there ain't no further up because the boss ain't going
nowhere so you try to be the one he trusts the most instead."
    "And
this driver was kissing up to way too many people."
    "Yeah. But
he also got it all wrong."
    "How?"
    "A
driver is several levels below someone like me. Even Davey's got to show me
respect, that's how high up I am. He should have been looking way lower down
the food chain. Plus he got carried away."
    "Carried
away?"
    "Yeah. He
kept asking if there was any favours he could do,
anything needed moving, extra jobs to help us out and all that. Even things we
wanted no-one else to know about. Once he started in on that I told him to get
lost, I don't want to know nothing about anything going on on the quiet. The
boss gets upset when he finds out about that sort of thing. Upset and often
quite . . . unfriendly."
    "I
can imagine what you mean."
    The
other three lieutenants were not going to be free until after lunch so I
suggested to Davey that we go and speak to one of their tamed Police officers.

 
    Detective
Chief Inspector Donaldson sat hunched over his double mocha frappachino in
Starbucks as if he could somehow make himself smaller and thus stand less chance
of being seen with Davey and me. Pretty quickly it was obvious he had something
to hide, whether it was directly related to the murder or not I did not know. I
got the impression he was the type of copper who had risen to his current rank
not so much through hard work and breaking tough cases as by doing favours and cosying up to the right people. However, while I could see
that the man was clearly telling us porkies Davey seemed to be accepting every
word. Even he was not that stupid. From the DCI's story the car had somehow
avoided being caught on any traffic cameras or any other CCTV in the area,
no-one had seen the car either - it had just vanished