The Zero Hour

“Ah, yes.” Peter laughed mordantly. “Eat like an elephant, shit like a bird.” It was the old police refrain: the FBI always asks questions, sucks up information, never gives it out.

In truth, Sarah owed her ex-husband a debt of gratitude for putting her in touch with Valerie Santoro, who’d turned out to be a valuable FBI informant. About a year and a half ago, Peter had mentioned a call girl he knew named Valerie Santoro, who’d been hauled in on a drug bust and “jammed up” by the locals, and wanted to deal.

Prostitutes, because of their unique access, make good FBI informants. But you always have to be careful with them; you can never direct them to commit prostitution, or the case is blown. Everything must be done subtly, many things left unsaid.

Sarah had invited her to lunch at the Polynesian Room, a horrifying pink shrine to bad taste on Boylston Street. Val’s choice. The restaurant’s interior was blindingly pink and scarlet red, decorated with golden dragons and fake-oriental gargoyles. Some of the booths were upholstered in early 1960s red leatherette. Val preferred to sit at one of the straw booths fashioned in the shape of a sampan. Here and there were potted, dried palms spray-painted green.

She was five foot eight, had honey-blond hair, long legs. She ordered a White Russian and the Pu Pu Platter. “I may be good for nothing,” she said, “but I’m never bad for nothing.” She had a client who owned a lounge in Chelsea that was used for drug-trafficking and money-laundering. She figured Sarah might be interested. Another client of hers, one of the highest elected officials in Massachusetts state politics, had mob ties.

So a deal was struck. Following standard procedure, Sarah drafted a memo to get Valerie Santoro into the Bureau’s informant bank, requested an informant number and a separate file number. This was a system devised to keep the informant’s identity confidential and yet ensure she got paid.

Valerie heard enough gossip-enough boasting from the men she serviced, who needed to impress her-to allow Sarah to wrap up several major organized-crime cases. She’d been worth all the White Russians the government had ever bought her.

Running an informant, Sarah had been told by a potbellied good-old-boy supervisor in her first office, in Jackson, Mississippi, is like having a mistress on the side: she’s always giving you trouble, always wanting something. Never put them on retainer, or they’ll spin, invent information, keep you on a string. They bring in a nugget, it’s evaluated, and then they get their chunky nut.

At Quantico they gave lectures on running informants, on what motivates them (money, greed, a desire for revenge, even once in a blue moon a flash of conscience), on how to develop your relationship with them. Unlike local law-enforcement agencies, which are perennially strapped for cash, the FBI has plenty of money to dispense for informants. You’d get as much as five thousand dollars to “open” an informant, more if you were courting a major player. You were encouraged not to be stingy. The more generous you were with the cash, the more dependent upon you the informant became.

You were warned about how tangled the relationship inevitably became. You became a proxy authority figure, a parent or a sibling, an adviser. By the end of the relationship, it was like a love affair gone sour. You wanted to throw them away, never see them again. Yet you had to wean them, or they’d keep calling.

Most of all you had to protect your informants. They placed their lives in your hands; the game you were inducing them to play was often dangerous.

***

Sarah snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Was there forced entry?”

“No sign of it.”

“But you printed the door anyway.”

“Sure.”

The photographer, snapping away, called out to Peter: “You check out the hood ornament?”

“Classy broad, huh?” Peter replied.

“Place doesn’t look ransacked,” Sarah said. “Probably not a burglary. Any neighbor report the gunshot?”

“No. A friend of hers called 911, reported her missing, didn’t give a name. District office determined she lived alone, got the key from the apartment building supervisor. Who, by the way, wasn’t exactly grief-stricken about this. Wanted her out of the building.”

“Well, now he’s got what he wants,” Sarah said with a grim half-smile. “Where’s the ME-what’s her name, Rena something?”

“Rena Goldman.” Peter beckoned to a woman in her early forties, with long gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a long, pale face, no makeup. She wore a white lab coat. She and Sarah, both wearing surgical gloves, shook hands.

“Do we know anything about time of death?” Sarah asked the medical examiner.

“Lividity is fixed, so it’s at least eight hours, and she hasn’t been moved,” Rena Goldman said. She consulted a small, dog-eared spiral notebook. “No evidence of decomposition, but there wouldn’t be any in this cool weather. She’s out of rigor, so it’s got to be at least, say, twenty-four hours.”

“Semen?”