Mob Princess - Tess DiRosa's Story
Copyright© 2025 by Argon
Chapter 8: Mister Arnold Schwarz
Six o’clock, Thursday morning, found Tess in the parking lot outside the office, watching her boss park his sedan. They took the elevator to the office for a brief look at the email in-tray, but then, Gorman grabbed a car key from a locker, collected his gear from his desk drawers and threw the car key to Tess.
“You do the driving today.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Tess had not expected this, but she was okay with it.
“Any specific street address in Moscow, Sir?”
“Just get us there first, will you?”
“Yes, Sir,” Tess repeated, realizing that her boss was not a morning person.
They collected a riot gun and an MP5 submachine gun and took the elevator down. The long guns were locked in a safe compartment of their Suburban, and then Tess took the driver’s seat, adjusted it and the mirrors, and programmed ‘Moscow, ID’ into the nav system. She maneuvered the big car out onto the street and took off, without asking questions or making remarks. If Gorman wanted to talk, he’d start, she reasoned.
She found RT 195 which she followed until reaching Pullman, then switched to RT 270, threaded the big car through Pullman, and then onward to Moscow. She kept her mouth shut all through the ride while Gorman seemed to have dozed off behind his dark shades. Five miles out of Moscow, she had to speak up.
“Sir, we are close to Moscow now. I need directions.”
“Yeah, find Moscow PD.”
Following regulations, Tess pulled off the highway, reprogrammed the nav system and was back on the road two minutes later. Another fifteen minutes later, she drove the Suburban up to a check point. Producing her badge, the elderly officer in the booth raised the boom, and Tess parked the car.
“What now, Sir?”
“Unbuckle and get out, what else?”
If Gorman intended to rattle her, he was disappointed. Tess just unbuckled and stepped out, checked the seat of her gear and slipped into a coat. When they walked over to the entrance, Gorman suddenly smiled at her.
“At least you can keep your mouth shut.”
Tess shrugged. “I saw that you were tired, Sir.”
“Yeah, a hell of a night. Okay, we have to find a Detective Stromberg. He or she is in charge of the case on the Moscow side.”
A fifty-ish blonde with a monstrous perm hairdo was sitting at the reception desk and, at seeing their Secret Service credentials, became giddy, picking up the phone receiver with a shaky hand.
“Sharon, Hon, they’re here, the Secret Service! Yes, there’s two of them. Yes, you come and pick them up!” She turned to them. “Detective Stromberg will be right down, Sir, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, Ms. Waters, right?” Gorman answered with a winning smile.
“You’re the first Secret Service agents I’ve seen!” the woman fairly gushed.
“And now you’re probably disappointed; an old man and a rookie agent. We can’t all jog along with the presidential limousine.”
Tess noted his effort to coddle the woman, likely to ensure prompt help in case of future calls. It made sense to her, plus it made an underpaid person feel good. Fortunately, Stromberg arrived in the reception area in this moment.
“Hi, Agents. I’m Detective Sharon Stromberg.”
“SAC Gorman, and this is Special Agent DiRosa. Nice to meet you, Detective.”
“And you!” Stromberg smiled, shaking first Gorman’s and then Tess’s hand. “Let me show you to my office.”
Stromberg’s office looked like thousands of detectives’ offices worldwide. A desk cluttered with files, a worn desk chair, two well-aged visitors’ chairs, and two file cabinets. A small coffee maker was sitting on the window sill, already percolating.
“Okay, have a seat please. Coffee’ll be ready in a minute.”
They sat, and Stromberg switched on a TV set on one of the file cabinets.
“We already scanned the available surveillance cam footage from the vicinity of the three mail drops. You may of course look at them yourselves, but our tech found only one person near all those mail drops in the time windows we investigated.” She started a video sequence of five feeds spliced together. “As you can see here ... and here ... this one ... here, it’s the same male Caucasian. He’s always averting his face, but, look at this!”
As they watched the fifth clip, the same man crossed the street, averting his face, but then whipped around to look at an approaching truck, and looking straight at the camera. The driver of the truck offered a rude gesture, and their suspect responded in kind, likely forgetting about the surveillance camera in his surprise and anger.
“Gotcha!” Stromberg smiled smugly. “We can do one better. We identified the driver of the truck, and he’s willing to identify the suspect.”
“Reliable?”
“Retired Ranger staff sergeant. He said he saw the man from up close.” Then, activating the TV set again, she showed footage from another angle. “Dash cam,” she explained with a triumphant grin.
Gorman grinned. “Something tells me that you have a name and street address, too?”
“Yep!” Stromberg grinned. “Arnold Schwarz, without the ‘enegger’ of course. He inherited an outlier farm off county road 17, seven miles out from Moscow. He leases the land out for a living. He served in the Army, but got himself a less-than-honorable discharge. So far, he’s not troubled us.”
“Any intel about his political leanings?”
“Nope. He’s purchased quite an arsenal in the last year, according to the folks at the sporting goods store.”
She handed over a list, and Gorman whistled softly. “He may not respond friendly if we drive up in a black Suburban.”
“Hard to guess, Agent. We don’t know him at all.”
“Any habits you know of?”
Stromberg smiled. “He’s known to stop for a drink at Lucille’s. It’s a dive on the state highway, just outside the town limits.”
“Any probable cause to stop him for a breathalyzer test?”
“He’s not swerving across the road.”
Tess raised her hand. “My uncle is a cop. They use a stoolie to sit in the bar and count the drinks the suspect consumes. Then the stoolie calls the cops to tell them a drunk is heading out.”
Stromberg nodded. “I wouldn’t trust an informer with that.”
Tess shrugged. “The man is possibly linked to a felonious threat against the POTUS. Isn’t it entirely legal for a Secret Service agent to have him under surveillance? If the suspect consumes alcohol under the agent’s eyes, wouldn’t she be compelled to notify the local authorities of her observations?”
“Likely, yes, but you’d stand out like a sore thumb in that dive.”
Tess was not daunted. “You have a salvation army office here in town?”
It took Tess another hour to work out the details, but that evening, she entered Lucille’s wearing slightly too large blue jeans, a T-shirt celebrating a long defunct rock band, ratty sneakers, and a skiing anorak that had seen better days, all from the waste bin of the Salvation Army. Taking a seat at the end of the bar, she ordered a beer and settled down.
When her beer was empty, she ordered another one and a helping of fries. By this time, she’d already brushed off two offers by patrons to get a free meal and more against a ‘little friendliness’. She just shook her head as if troubled and looked away. A shiner around her right eye, applied with a brush and partly covered with concealer, stamped her as one of those girls on the run from an abuser, and surprisingly, the barkeeper signaled his patrons to let her be.
Sitting with her back to the barroom, she looked into the bar mirror whenever the door opened to admit or emit a patron, without ever turning to look directly. For two hours, nobody fitting the description of Arnold Schwarz showed, but when the door squeaked again, she raised her eyes and she saw her mark. Huddling further down over the bar counter, she stole furtive glances at him via the mirror, sitting six stools down the bar from her, and drinking beer from a bottle. That bottle led to a second and then to a third to be emptied in rather rapid fashion, but when he got a fourth, not a half hour since his arrival, the bartender told him off.
“That’s your last, Arnie. Just get in your truck and drive home, and pray the cops aren’t on the prowl tonight.”
“Fuck them jerk-offs. I drive better drunk than them assholes sober. An’ fuck you too, Willie!”
With that, he stood up and swaggered towards the door. Tess got up unobtrusively and went to the ladies’ room, reaching for her cell phone. Calling the Moscow PD, she relayed her observations, before she left, settling her tab with the barman.
“You got somewhere to sleep, hon? I’m not coming on to you. I mean, Lucille and I have a spare bedroom.”
“That’s kind of you, Sir,” Tess told him meekly, “but I’ve got a camper van around the corner.”
“Good luck, kiddo,” the man replied.
Outside, she found the Suburban in a remote corner of the parking lot and got in.
“They already flagged him down,” Gorman related from the driver’s seat, a phone at his ear. “Bingo! He failed the breathalyzer! Let’s go!”
When they arrived at the scene, Schwarz was sitting in the rear of a cruiser, hands behind his back.They ignored him and rather joined the cops who were searching his truck. Stromberg was with them.
“Welcome to the party, and thanks for helping us nail him. He has an oh-point-one-one BAL, so that’s a DUI already.”
“Anything related to our case, Detective?”
“No, Agent, but we’ll get a blood sample from him.”
“That’s right. He licked the envelope,” Gorman smiled.
Tess understood. It was a detail that she had not been told, and it did not speak for the intelligence of Mister Schwarz, assassin-wannabe. Those envelopes must have been really old.
“We’ll get that blood for the BAL test and another sample for DNA typing. I guess you’ll want that for your lab to establish a match?”
“That would be nice. Think he’ll make bail?”
“Yeah, that’s likely. It’s just a DUI after all. You want to interrogate him?”
“I had better. When do you think he’ll be available?”
“Give us an hour to get the blood sample and process him in.”
“Okay, we’ll be there. Thank you for the co-op. You guys run a neat operation.”
“Hey, while we’re at it, I’m kinda stuck here career-wise, and I’ll have to shop around for the next step. Think you can write me a nice recommendation on your beautiful stationery?”
“Sure thing, Detective. When all is said and done, you guys did all the work and handed us our perp on a silver platter. That’s what the reference letter will say, too.”
“Much obliged. Okay, let’s get things started, Agents. I’ll see you in an hour.”
Back in the Suburban, they drove to their motel where Tess changed back into her pantsuit, washed her face and tied her hair back. They made a stop at an all-night diner to fortify themselves before they drove over to the police station.
They waited for another ten minutes before Stromberg showed them to the interrogation room, where Arnold Schwarz was sitting already, his hands cuffed to the table. He was a man of medium height, thin on top, almost neat in appearance, and clearly angry.
“Now who the fuck are you?” he greeted them.
“Special Agents Gorman and DiRosa, United States Secret Service, at your service,” Gorman announced with a nasty grin. For the record, are you Arnold Schwarz, of Moscow, Idaho?”
“Fuckin’ aye! What do you feds want of me?”
“Arrest you and remand you to the Federal authorities on three counts of uttering threats against the President of the United States of America. It’s a federal felony, and it carries up to five years.”
“What sort of crock is that?”
“The well-founded sort. When you mailed those three envelopes, you were caught on surveillance cams.”
“Doesn’t prove a fuckin’ thing.”
“It’s circumstantial evidence. You were the only person who was seen at all three mailboxes in the time frame of the mail drops. Odd coincidence? We don’t think so.”
“Pretty thin then what you have.”
“Well, it’s not all, Arnie. We got your thumb print on one of those envelopes.”
Schwarz laughed with glee. “Hardly. I’ve been wearing gloves. Try that with someone stupid!”
Gorman laughed back at him. “I just did, and it worked, didn’t it? Yeah, you wore gloves, but maybe not when you bought those envelopes, Einstein.”
Schwarz lost his sneer immediately.
“That don’t prove a thing.”
“Too thin for you? It’s enough for a Federal search warrant for your house. Maybe we’ll ask the ATF to join the party, Arnie. They have a hard on for illegal firearms.”
“The constitution says...”
“You mean the Second Amendment to the Constitution, don’t you?” Gorman interrupted him. “Doesn’t cover all types of firearms. We’ll also look for manila envelopes, and for the printer you used. Hell, maybe we’ll find the text files on your computer?”
“What do you want?”
“For starters, a confession, Arnie, Maybe the Federal Judge will let you get away with a black eye if you make a clean slate of what you did, why and with whoever else. Let’s hear that confession, Arnie!”
“I wanna talk to a lawyer.”
“Of course. We’ll get you one. In the meantime, enjoy your lodgings here. Tomorrow, I’ll have a federal arrest warrant for you, Arnie, and you’ll be going places. Oh, and I didn’t tell you of the key piece of evidence we hold. Have a good night anyway!”
It was three a.m. before they returned to the motel to get some sleep. Tess took a brief shower and then hit the mattress after setting her cell phone alarm to 7:30. She still lay awake for a half hour at least, going over the day and what lessons Gorman had given her. She also thought about Schwarz. He would go to federal prison for sending three hate letters by mail to the president while people spewing their hate on the anti-social media against anybody of a different creed, orientation or skin color went scot-free for the most part.
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