The Twelfth Card

out on Dickson and Reed streets in Philly, his only rewards’d be cheese-steak change and a good shot at prison. If he did more or less the same thing in the world of business and hanging out on lower Broadway and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he’d get fucking rich and have a good shot at Albany or Washington. He might even try to fill Frank Rizzo’s shoes. Why not?
    So it was law school at night, a real estate license and eventually a job at Sanford Bank—first on a cash drawer, then moving his way up through the ranks. The money did indeed start coming in, slowly at first, then in a steady stream. He rose fast to be head of the bank’s hottest division, the real estate operation, rolling over competitors—both within the bank and outside—with his bare-knuckle approach to business. Then he’d finagled the job ashead of the Sanford Foundation, the philanthropic side of the bank, which was, he’d learned, the best way to make political connections.
    Another glance at the Jersey horizon, another moment of debate, rubbing his hand compulsively up and down his thigh, solid from his tennis sessions, jogging, golf, yachting. Yes or no?
    Life and death . . .
    Calculating, one foot forever rooted on South Philly’s Seventeenth Street, Bill Ashberry played with the big boys.
    Men, for instance, like Thompson Boyd.
    Ashberry had gotten the killer’s name from an arsonist who’d made the mistake of burning down one of Ashberry’s commercial properties—and got caught in the process—some years ago. After Ashberry realized he had to kill Geneva Settle, he’d hired a private eye to track down the paroled burn-man and had paid him $20,000 to put him in touch with a professional killer. The scruffy man (for God’s sake, a mullet ?) had suggested Boyd. Ashberry had been impressed with the choice. Boyd was fucking scary, yes, but not in some over-the-top, ballsy South Philly way. What was scary was that he was so calm, so flat. Not a spark of emotion behind his eyes, never spitting out a single “fuck” or “prick.”
    The banker had explained what he needed and they’d arranged for payment—a quarter million dollars (even that figure hadn’t gotten a rise out of Boyd; he seemed more interested—you couldn’t say excited—about the prospect of killing a young girl, as if he’d never done that before).
    It looked for a time like Boyd would be successful and the girl would die, and all of Ashberry’s problems would be over with.
    But then, disaster: Boyd and his accomplice, that Frazier woman, were in jail.
    Hence, the debate: Yes, no . . . Should Ashberry kill Geneva Settle himself?
    With his typical approach to business, he considered the risks.
    Despite his zombie personality, Boyd had been as sharp as he was frightening. He knew the business of death, knew about investigating crimes too, and how you could use motive to point the police in the wrong direction. He’d come up with several phony motives to mislead the cops. First, an attempted rape, which hadn’t worked. The second was more subtle. He’d planted seeds where they’d be sure to grow nowadays: a terrorist connection. He and his accomplice had found some poor raghead who delivered Middle Eastern food to carts and restaurants near the jewelry exchange, the building that was across the street from where Geneva Settle was to be killed. Boyd located the restaurant he worked for and staked out the place, learned which van was his. Boyd and his partner set up a series of clues to make it seem that the Arab loser was a terrorist planning a bombing and that he wanted Geneva dead because she’d seen him planning the attack.
    Boyd had gone to the trouble of stealing sheets of scrap office paper from the trash behind the exchange. He’d drawn a map on one sheet and on another written a note about the girl in Arabic-tinted English (an Arabic language website had been helpful there)—to fool the cops. Boyd was going to leave these notes near crime scenes but it’d worked out even better than that; the police found them in Boyd’s safe house before he’d planted them, which gave more credibility to the terrorism hook. They’dused Middle Eastern food for clues and called in fake terrorist bomb threats to the FBI from pay phones around the area.
    Boyd hadn’t planned to go any further with the charade than this. But then a goddamn policewoman—that Detective Sachs—showed up right here, at the foundation, to dig through their archives!