Mask Market b-16 Page 10

  Pepper rolled her eyes dramatically in a “Tell me something I don’t know” gesture.

  “That’s one possibility,” I said, unfazed. “The other is that a cop leaked the info. Some of them have a standing arrangement with the gossip boys.”

  “So?”

  “So I need to find out what was in the actual complaint, Pepper. Supposedly, the wife named the other woman—they called her ‘Ms. X’ in the column, which means either they don’t know or she’s not famous—and that’s info I need. Plus anything else she charged him with—”

  “Like?”

  “Like, especially, anything to do with money.”

  “Why can’t you just go down to the courthouse and—?”

  “I guarantee that’s all sealed up by now. And if it’s not, it’s a baited trap, and the cops will be all over anyone who goes looking.”

  “So you want us to do it?”

  “Pepper, I know you don’t think much of me, but I’m sure you don’t think I’m stupid, okay? Wolfe—”

  Mick made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a threat.

  “I know she still has friends on the force,” I went on, nothing to lose.

  “Friends do favors for friends,” Pepper said, flatly. “What you want, it’s not that sort of thing.”

  “I know what you’re saying. I know money won’t do this. All I’m asking you is to ask her, all right?”

  “Don’t call us,” she said, getting to her feet.

  Mick glided out behind her, his broad back covering her like a steel cape.

  T he calendar said spring, but instead of blossom-bringing showers, the city stayed mired in dry cold. I never considered trying the co-op on West End. Parks was the source of that address, so he’d already worked it over long before he asked Charlie Jones to find him a tracker. Anyway, the info CD he had given me didn’t say anything about the girl I had known as Beryl Preston being married, or even living with someone, much less having kids.

  A three-bedroom in that neighborhood would fetch a fortune for the owner—if the co-op board in her building allowed owners to rent out their units. But the Battery Park apartment was a condo. It wouldn’t have a board. Or a doorman.

  Getting around this town isn’t complicated. You need to go north-south, there’ll be a subway someplace close, get you there quick enough…on days when its crumbling innards aren’t showing their age. You want to go east-west, you’re better off walking. I could spot most crosstown buses a couple of avenues and still catch them before they got to the next river. Battery Park is a nice walk from where I live, but not in bitter weather. And not when I’m working.

  All I had for the pits who guarded my Plymouth was a few sawdust-and-pork-products wieners I picked up from a street vendor, but the beasts went for them like they were filet mignon. Or an enemy’s throat.

  Every time I came, I got another micromillimeter closer to patting one of the females, an orca-blotched beauty who had begun twitching her tail at my approach a few months ago. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said to her. She’s the only one I ever talk to. She cocked her head, gave me a look I couldn’t read, then went back inside her house.

  The Plymouth fired right up. I let the big pistons glide through the engine block on their coat of synthetic oil for a couple of minutes, waiting for the temperature gauge to show me signs of life. Then I motored over to the West Side Highway and turned left.

  The ride lasted just long enough for James Cotton’s cover of the immortal Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart.” Blues covers aren’t the bullshit “sampling” rappers do, stealing and calling it “respect.” When a bluesman covers another artist’s song, he’s not just paying dues, he’s paying tribute. From the moment I’d caught Son Seals live in a little club in Chicago years ago, I’d wished he would cover “Goin’ Down Slow,” following the trail of giants like Howling Wolf and Big Bob Hite. But before that ever happened, he went down himself. Diabetes, I heard.

  I found the complex easy enough; it was only a few blocks west of the blast zone from where the Twin Towers had fallen. Supposedly, the air around what tourists call “Ground Zero” is still full of microparticles from the atomized glass of all those exploded windows. I don’t know what effect stuff like that has on your lungs, but it hadn’t changed the asking—and getting—prices for lofts in the neighborhood. In this city, you could build apartments on top of a nuclear reactor and they’d be full by the weekend.

  The gate to the parking lot wasn’t manned. A speaker box sat on a metal pole at the entrance. I hit the button, told the distorted voice coming through the grille that I was William Baylor, EPA, there to do some ambient atmosphere sampling.

  I couldn’t tell if they understood a word I said, but the gate opened. I backed the Plymouth into the far corner of an open lot and climbed out. I was just taking a six-dial meter with two carrying handles and “EPA” stenciled across its side out of the trunk when a short, broad-chested Latino in a dark blue private-cop uniform strolled up.

  “You’re the guy from…?” he said.

  “EPA,” I answered, holding up the meter like it was an ID card.

  “That’s what they give you to ride around in?” he said, nodding in the Plymouth’s direction.

  “Nah. That one’s mine. If you use your own, you can make out like a bandit. Even with gas the way it is here, at forty-point-five cents a mile, you come out way ahead.”

  But the guard wasn’t interested in the finer points of government reimbursement. “Is that righteous, man?” he asked, pointing at my car.

  “Nineteen sixty-nine Roadrunner,” I told him, proudly. “All steel and all real.”

  “Damn, it’s fine,” the guard said, strolling around the Plymouth like he was examining a prize horse.

  “It’s gonna be, when I get all done with her.”

  “It’s not a hemi, is it?” he asked, hopefully.

  “It was once,” I lied. “But by the time I got it, the whole thing was in pieces. I’m running a 528 wedge.”

  “That’s a crate motor?”

  “Yep. Pulls like a train, and ticks like a good watch when it’s done.”

  “What are you going to do for rims?” he asked, looking at the dog-dish hubcaps on the Roadrunner’s sixteen-inch wheels like you’d look at a potato sack on Jayne Mansfield.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “A ride this size, you could run dubs, bro.”

  “Maybe…”

  “It would be awesome sick, man. Awesome.”

  I looked around the near-empty lot. “You want to try it out? I know you can’t leave your post, but just a couple of laps…”

  He stole a quick glance at his watch. “Oh, hell, yes!”

  I handed him the keys, got in on the passenger side, putting my bogus measuring device in the back. He sat there for a second, taking it all in. Then he fired it up. “Oh, man, you can feel it.”

  He pulled the shift lever into D, delicately eased off.

  “No burnouts,” I warned him, keeping my voice light so he’d know I wasn’t taking him for an idiot.

  He maneuvered around the lot, barely off idle, steering carefully. He wasn’t timid, just feeling his way.

  “When we turn at the end, give it a little down the straight. But watch out—this sucker’s got mad torque.”

  He didn’t say anything, concentrating. Made the turn, carefully straightened the front wheels, and gave the throttle a quick stomp. The Roadrunner squatted and launched, pinning us back in our seats. The guard stepped off the gas. We both listened to the sound of the monster V-8 backing off through the twin pipes. The muscle-car signature, as American as the blues.

  “Oh, you one lucky hombre, esé,” the guard said.

  U nit 229 was a townhouse, the last one in a row of immaculate, white-fronted look-alikes. Pushing the doorbell triggered some ethereal quasi-Asian music. I tucked the meter under one arm and waited, not hopeful.

  The man who opened the door was a compact blond, with delicate
ly precise features. He was wearing a thin black mock-turtleneck pullover that had to be cashmere tucked into cream-colored slacks with elaborate pleats. His pale hands were as neat as a surgeon’s.

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, I was looking for Peta. Peta Bellingham?”

  “I think you have the wrong address,” he said, politely.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, letting a current of concern into my voice. “I’ve been here before. To see—”

  “‘Peta.’ Yes, I understand. But that must have been a while ago.”

  “Not so long ago,” I said, taking the risk.

  “Ah,” he said. “You must mean whoever lived here before I did.”

  “I…guess. I mean, I always thought this was her own place. But I could be…”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” he said thoughtfully, one hand on his hip. “Not with the way the owner has things set up.”

  “Damn.”

  “You haven’t seen her…Peta…in quite a while, have you?”

  “I’ve been away,” I told him, watching his eyes to see if it registered.

  “You’re not some stalker, are you?”

  I shook my head sorrowfully. “No, I’m not a stalker,” I said. “I’m a professional disappointment. Peta’s not my girlfriend; she’s my sister. Maybe if I’d ever answered her letters while I was…away, I’d know where she is now. She’s the only one in the family who stuck by me. I figured, let me…finish what I had to do by myself, not drag her into it, you know?”

  He studied me for a long minute, making no secret of what he was doing.

  “Do you think the owner might have a forwarding address for her? You know, where to send the security deposit and all? All I want to do is send her a letter, tell her I’m…”

  “That wouldn’t be much help, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe not. But it would be worth a try. I’ve got no one else to—”

  “No, I mean…Oh, come in for a minute, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

  I followed him into a living room that looked like a Scandinavian showroom, only not as warm.

  “Just sit down anywhere,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I found a metal-and-leather thing that I guessed was a chair, right next to a wrought-iron sculpture—another guess—and a plain black cylinder that seemed to be growing out of the hardwood floor.

  He came back into the room, a purple file folder in one hand, a black-and-white marble ashtray in the other.

  “You smoke, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yeah, I do,” I lied. “How did you know?”

  “I’m good at things like that,” he said, just this side of smug. He placed the ashtray in the precise center of the black cylinder—at least now I knew what it was for. I took out a pack of Barclays, tapped a cigarette free, and fired it up with a wooden match.

  He seated himself on a severe-looking bench the same color as his hair, and handed me the file folder.

  “This is why I don’t believe the owner would be of any help to you,” he said. “I’ve never met him. Take a look at the lease. Did you ever see anything so bizarre?”

  I opened the folder. It looked like a conventional lease, on a preprinted form. On the last page, just above the line for the tenant’s signature, was a paragraph in large bold type. It specified that the rent was to be paid via wire transfer to a numbered account in Nauru; the tenant was to authorize auto-debit from his own account no later than the third day of each month. Then, in big red letters:

  THIS CLAUSE IS DEEMED TO BE AND SHALL BE THE ESSENCE OF THE AGREEMENT. IT IS UNDERSTOOD AND AGREED THAT ANY VIOLATION OF SAID CLAUSE CONSTITUTES A WAIVER OF ALL TENANT’S RIGHTS TO OCCUPY THE PROPERTY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE RIGHT TO CONTEST IMMEDIATE EVICTION PROCEEDINGS.

  “My attorney told me that’s all nonsense,” the blond man said, as if to calm my anxiety over the prospect of him being evicted. “Absolutely unenforceable. But, as you can see, it’s all so very mysterious, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” I agreed. Thinking, Here’s something that wasn’t on your little dossier, Mr. Certified Financial Planner.

  “I’m truly sorry,” the blond man said. “I wish I could have helped you.”

  “You did,” I told him, grinding out the cigarette I’d allowed to burn down in the ashtray. “If you know a room’s empty, saves you the time of knocking on the door, right?”

  “Well, my door…I mean, if you think of something that I might be able to help you with, please come back.”

  “I just might,” I lied, again.

  P atience. I knew I had to wait for Wolfe’s crew to get back to me with something—like a solid confirm on the address Wesley had for Charlie Jones, or whatever was in the police file on the divorce papers filed by Daniel Parks’s wife—before I made my next move. There wasn’t any point working the rest of the info on that CD. If Beryl still owned the condo in Battery Park—and it felt like she did—she’d had it all locked and loaded way before she got in the wind.

  I was spending money like I was actually working for Parks, but he was never going to settle his bill. In my world, that’s just wrong. But I had a writhing viper by the back of its neck, and I couldn’t just drop it and walk away until I was sure it wasn’t me it wanted to bite.

  I stayed low, waiting. Every time Loyal called, I told her I was trying to put a deal together, and it needed all my attention.

  “Has it got anything to do with…what we talked about, baby?”

  “It…it could, is the best I can say now, little girl.”

  “Well, are you sure you can’t come by? Even for an hour or so? I’ll bet you’d work better if you got your batteries recharged every so often.”

  “I’d work happier,” I said. “But not better. When you’re on top of a deal like this, you can’t take your eye off the ball, or it gets dropped.”

  If she knew that was all deliberately vague snake oil, she didn’t let on.

  “N obody call,” Mama said, in response to a question I hadn’t asked.

  I made an “It’s out of my hands” gesture.

  Max looked down at his own hands, a pair of oversized slabs of bone and sinew, each with a horned ridge of callus along the chopping side, the first two knuckles as dark and bulging as ball bearings.

  I shook my head No. With nobody to answer our questions, it didn’t matter if we came on sweet or sour.

  The Mongol’s face settled into lines of calm. He reached inside his jacket and took out a deck of cards, still in the original box, and put them on the table between us, raising his eyebrows.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  Out came Max’s score pad. Probably Volume 90—we started our life-sentence gin game a million years ago. When we had gotten bored with the steady diet, I taught him to play casino. Now we alternate randomly.

  But it didn’t matter what game we played; we always kept score in dollars. At one point, Max had been into me for six figures, built up over a decade. He was lousy at cards to start with—a hunch-playing, omen-trusting, logic-hating sucker to his core—and Mama’s incessant-insistent kibitzing made him even more incompetent. Then, one day, he caught a streak gamblers only fantasize about. Before we stopped—Max wouldn’t let me walk while he was on his prime roll—it was more than thirty-six hours later, and he was just about even.

  Took me another few years to get it all back.

  I opened the pack of cards as Mama, smelling an opportunity to screw things up for Max, drifted over from her register. Mama worships numbers. Adores them. She can work her way through the toughest sudoku puzzle faster than the Prof can pick a lock—“Not Japanese!” she had hissed at me the first time I noticed her doing one. “Chinese invent, Japanese copy. Like always”—and she keeps three sets of books in her head. But when she gambles, the fever burns up the abacus in her brain like it was dry-twig kindling.

  I held up both hands, fingers splayed, asking if Max wanted to try gin. He shook his head, held up four fing
ers.

  Okay, casino it was.

  I shuffled and dealt. The flop was the queen of spades, ten of clubs, ace of clubs, and seven of diamonds. I was holding a king, a pair of nines…and the deuce of spades, a money card.

  Max studied the table. Mama pounded on his arm with a jeweled fist, hard enough to raise a bruise on a two-by-four. Max ignored her, concentrating.

  Max took the queen with one of his own. I’d given up trying to teach him to count cards and spades; when it came to gambling, Max was a Taoist.

  I dropped my king.

  Max threw the jack of spades.

  That left me with two choices: throw my Good Two on top of the seven, building nines, or put one of the nines, a club, on the table, in case Max was holding a ten. But if Max had been holding the ten of diamonds, he would have snatched the club ten off the table with it in a heartbeat. The ten of diamonds is worth two points; they don’t call it the Big Ten for nothing.

  Or would he? I knew Mama would have; maybe that’s what she was beating on him about….

  I threw the nine of clubs.

  Max slowly and deliberately turned to face Mama. She looked away as the Mongol dramatically produced the Big Ten. He showed it to me, scooped the nine of clubs and the ace of hearts plus the ten of clubs into his hand. Three points, four cards, one move.

  I bowed, and put the Good Two on the seven.

  Max threw down the four of diamonds, and bowed to me as I took in my build.

  Mama looked disgusted.

  One of the payphones rang.

  “P olice girl call,” Mama said, a minute later.

  “You mean Pepper, Mama?”

  “Police girl,” she repeated, adamantly.

  I must have gone blank for a minute. Next thing I heard was, “Burke! You want number?” I nodded. “Police girl” is what Mama always called Wolfe, even years after the beautiful prosecutor had gone on TV to denounce a sweetheart deal the DA was giving to a bunch of frat boys who’d raped a coed.

  Wolfe’s pale, gunfighter’s eyes had been chips of dry ice, the white wings in her dark hair flaring as if in anger. She knew this was going to cost her more than just being Bureau Chief of CityWide Special Victims: She’d never work as a prosecutor again, anywhere. But she never took a backward step.