Mask Market Page 11

  Meaning she had to ask a cop. Ask him personally. I wondered if it was the same sex-crimes detective who was so in love with her that he’d committed a half-dozen felonies to protect her when Wolfe had been false-arrested a while back. Sands, that was his name.

  I don’t know what he got for going out on that limb for her. Me, I went a lot further out than he did. And when it was over, all she had for me was a goodbye.

  “How do I get it?” I said.

  “I don’t know where you are now,” she said, not expecting me to tell her. “You know the short piece of Park Lane, on the northeast edge of Forest Park? Not Park Lane South, or Park Lane North, the little connecting piece, just up from Queens Boulevard?”

  “Yeah. I was—”

  “Can you get there in an hour?”

  My watch said ten-twenty. “Give me to eleven-thirty?”

  “Okay. Look for a light-colored Chrysler 300.”

  “Finally traded in that old wreck of yours—” I started to say. But she had already cut the connection.

  Forest Park was in Wolfe’s home territory, just up the hill from the courthouse-and-jail complex on Queens Boulevard where she’d once had her office.

  At that hour, I didn’t play with side streets, just grabbed the BQE to the LIE to the Van Wyck to the Interborough. When I exited at Union Turnpike, I was only a few blocks from the meet, twenty minutes to the good.

  The big Chrysler was sitting at the curb next to the park, steam burbling from its tailpipes. I drove past, glanced over to my right, saw a bulky male shape behind the wheel. Wolfe might still have her old car somewhere, but she sure had a new friend.

  I spun the Plymouth into a U-turn, crawled along back the way I’d come until I found a place to pull over. I got out, started walking toward the Chrysler. The passenger door opened, and Wolfe stepped out into the spray of light. She was wrapped in a grape-colored coat with a matching toque, moving toward me quickly, as if to keep me from getting too close to the Chrysler.

  I let her make the call, stopped in my tracks. She closed the ground between us, as sure-footed in spike heels as a Sherpa on sandpaper.

  “It’s too cold to stand around out here,” she said. “Let’s sit in your car.”

  I did an “after you” gesture. She strolled over to the Plymouth, let herself in. By the time I got behind the wheel, she had lowered her window and fired up a cigarette.

  “You’ve got something for me?” I said, matching her all-business posture.

  “Not with me. Pepper has it. I told her to bring it over to that restaurant of yours by one.”

  “One in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not a lot of time for me to—”

  “You’ll have plenty of time,” she said, dragging on her cigarette. “This won’t take long.”

  I didn’t say anything, not liking it already.

  “That other thing you asked for? It’s not going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not what we do,” she said. Her voice was gentle, but hardcored. “Information, that’s what we deal in. You know that. I won’t put my people in risk situations.”

  “All I wanted was—”

  “You wanted my people to get you a photo…or some other kind of confirm on a certain person at a certain address.”

  “Right. And what’s so—?”

  “You think I don’t know what Charlie Jones does, Burke?”

  “He’s just a—”

  “What? A ‘businessman’? I don’t think so. And the only reason a man like you would be looking for him is if he put you into something and it went wrong.”

  “A man like me?”

  “A man like you,” she repeated, turning to face me. “You used to be…something else, once. When we first met. You had, I don’t know, a…code of some kind.”

  “I still do.”

  “Is that right?” she said, snapping her cigarette out the window. “Remember that first time, what you were doing? Why you were doing it? When’s the last time you worked a kid’s case?”

  “I’m working one now,” I said, hurt in a place I didn’t know I had.

  “No, you’re not,” she said, sadness thick in her voice. “That’s not the kind of stuff Charlie Jones deals in.”

  “Do you want me to tell you about—?”

  “No. I don’t want you to tell me anything. I came here to tell you something, and I want you to listen. Listen good, Burke. This is the last time you put my people in harm’s way, understand? You think I don’t know what you brought Mick into last time you went off the rails? From now on, it’s like this: You want information, you can buy it from us, like anyone else. But no side deals, or you’re cut off. Are we clear?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got it. No matter how careful I wipe my feet, I’ll never be good enough to walk on your carpet.”

  “You want to feel sorry for yourself, go for it, Burke. You can’t be a mercenary and expect to be treated like a patriot.”

  I stared straight ahead as she got out. I felt the door close behind her.

  I was back at Mama’s by a quarter of. At one, Pepper walked through the front door, Mick looming behind her right shoulder. She came over to my booth, studied my face for a second, then said, “You didn’t expect her to come herself, did you?”

  “No.”

  She sat down across from me. Max was having an animated conversation with Mick, using playing cards to make some kind of point.

  Mama brought Pepper a plate of assorted dim sum, and a pot of tea. They spent a few minutes trying to out-polite each other. Then Pepper slid a dark-brown nine-by-twelve envelope over to me.

  I thumbed open my sleeve knife.

  “It’s not original,” Pepper said. Meaning, don’t worry about opening the envelope delicately.

  Inside was a sheaf of photocopied court documents. Mrs. Daniel Parks—née Lois Treanor—charged her husband with separate counts of adultery and “cruel and inhuman treatment.” The meat of the complaint was the wife’s affidavit. “Upon information and belief,” Parks had been maintaining a “long-term illicit relationship” with a woman “whose specific identity is not, at this time, known.”

  The key word was “maintaining”…and as I read through the affidavit I could see why the cops were sitting on this one. According to his wife, Parks had been systematically looting the assets of the private hedge fund he managed, “with estimated diversion of no less than seven million dollars.”

  That didn’t sound like a lot—hedge funds charge a percentage of assets under management as their fee, so Parks wouldn’t have come close to emptying the vault with those numbers. But then came the kicker: The complaint charged that Parks had stolen the money to “artificially inflate the management results for his paramour.” Like a Ponzi scheme, where you pay dividends to old investors with new investors’ money, syphoning off the cream until the pyramid collapses. Only this one wasn’t set up to benefit the manager; according to the complaint, it was set up to “impress and fascinate” one of the investors.

  “Ms. X” was a siren, all right.

  I read it over a couple of times. Most of it was lawyerese: lots of heavy adjectives bracketing slender facts. Whoever drew it up was careful not to accuse “Ms. X” of being in on the scam with Parks. Stripped to its core, it came down to this: Some guys will use presents for seduction, trading a piece of jewelry for a piece of ass. But this guy’s idea of a present was way off the charts; he was pumping himself up as a financial-management genius by pumping cash into the mystery woman’s account.

  I went over the chronology. Parks had been served with the papers on Valentine’s Day—the kind of touch lawyers who keep press agents on staff think is very, very special. By the time Parks had gotten desperate enough to ask Charlie Jones for a referral, over a month had passed.

  There was no indication that Peta Bellingham had been subpoenaed as a witness. And neither she nor Parks had been charged with a crime. Not yet, an
yway—the forensic accountants would have to pick through the paper first.

  And it wasn’t the cops who’d been looking for Peta; it was Parks.

  I read through the papers again, but it was like trying to buy a Big Mac in a health-food store. Whatever I needed, I wasn’t going to find it in there.

  Why would Peta Bellingham get in the wind? Even if Parks had diverted funds to her, she could always claim she was just an investor who thought her money manager was doing a great job…especially if she paid taxes on the gains, and had her own CPA do the returns. Plus, even if all the skimmed money really went to her, she had walked away from damn near that same amount in assets she left behind.

  Or had she? Anyone with the contacts and connections to set up banking in Nauru might have been getting ready to vanish for years. Co-ops can be sold through agents, money can leave one account and appear in another without any human hands touching the cash.

  And who had the hunter-killer team been working for when they X-ed out Daniel Parks?

  Wolfe’s package was full of info, but it was a mutant hydra, birthing five new questions for every answer it disgorged.

  “Thanks, Pepper,” I said, looking up.

  She was nowhere in sight. I must have gone somewhere in my head—that happens when I hyperfocus.

  I looked at my watch. Damn. Almost three in the morning.

  “Where’s Max?” I called over to Mama.

  “He go back home. Friend go with him.”

  Friend? “Mick? The big guy who was here with—?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  I knew Max trusted Mick—the big man had been on the scene when we canceled the ticket of the guy who had made up the case against Wolfe—and I knew Mick was a kung-fu guy, but I never imagined the two of them working out together, especially in Max’s temple.

  “Did Pepper go with them?”

  “Little girl, big smile?”

  “Yes, Mama,” I said, patiently. “You know who Pepper is.”

  “No. She stay with me, we have tea.”

  “So where is she now?”

  Mama pointed instead of speaking. She doesn’t like the way the word “bathroom” sounds in English.

  When Pepper came back out, she glistened as if she’d just bounced out of a shower.

  “What are you so happy about?” I asked her.

  “Well, you may find this hard to believe, Burke, but Mick doesn’t make friends easily.”

  “A charmer like him?”

  “He’s very charming when he wants to be. He just doesn’t like…”

  “People?” I filled in, helpfully.

  “Oh, stop that! You know what I mean. Anyway, he and Max are, like, real pals now. I told them I’d just wait here until they were done working out, or whatever it is they do. You know, the karate?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I had a great time talking with Mama! Did you know her husband was an architect?”

  I answered her with a noncommittal facial gesture—I didn’t know Mama even had a husband.

  Max floated in behind me, Mick at his side.

  “Did you have fun?” Pepper asked, brightly.

  Mick and Max exchanged looks. “Yes,” Mick said. Yeah, I could see where all the charm came from, all right.

  “We have to go,” Pepper told me, holding out her hand, palm up.

  “How much?” I said.

  “She said there was no charge,” Pepper said, lifting my heart a little. “But I have to take everything back with me,” she finished, putting it back where it belonged.

  By the time I got up the next morning, every channel had some version of the same story: Some young kid, a reservation Indian out in Minnesota, had walked into the local high school with a shotgun, a pistol, and a bulletproof vest. He killed a bunch of people at random—a security guard, a teacher, and a lot of students—before he took himself out.

  The kid had been “troubled.” I guess that’s the new word for a born-to-lose with a father who committed suicide, a mother who was severely brain-damaged, raised by a grandmother who constantly called him a “human mistake” when she wasn’t beating him. The kid became a Nazi—in his own mind, anyway. He preached racial purity to anyone who would listen—no one ever did, but he was used to that—and posted endless shrieks to his personal blog, too. At school, he wore black clothes and eyeliner, as if to make sure nobody ever forgot he was an outcast.

  Producers spun their Rolodexes, and the lucky winners got to be on television, “analyzing” what happened. None of them went near the truth. I knew that truth. The kid was a member of a bigger tribe than you could ever find on a reservation. My tribe. The Children of the Secret. We know.

  The experts droned on about “communication” and “reaching out” and “peer rejection.” But this kid hadn’t flown under the radar. Everyone around him knew he was buried in despair. They probably figured they knew the outcome, too—the suicide rate on reservations is right up there with the alcoholism level.

  That kid was just another of the invisible ones—bullied, beaten, and belittled every day of his marginalized life. If anyone had the slightest idea that he might be a danger to someone other than himself, they would have unleashed a snowstorm of “services.”

  Suicide, well, kids do that kind of thing. Homicide—now, that’s serious.

  Every high school in America has them, the invisible ones. They all silent-scream the same warning: If you won’t see us, you’ll never see us coming.

  But nobody ever starts the analysis until after the autopsy.

  One of the cell phones trilled. I looked at the label on its holster:

  Ralph P. Compton. I’d only given that number to…

  “Compton,” I answered, in a brisk, businessman’s voice.

  “Mr. Compton? My name is Sophia…Sophia Ginsberg. You were at my house looking for—”

  “Oh, I remember you,” I said, my tone of voice telling her she’d made a reverberating impression.

  “Well, you’ll be glad I called, in any event. I did speak to the broker, and I got an address for Mr. Preston. I don’t know if it’s still a good one, of course. But it was certainly good at the time we bought the house.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Let me just grab a pen….”

  “Oh, I can give it to you tomorrow,” she said, quickly. “I’m going to be in the city, and I thought you might like to buy me lunch.”

  “It would be my pleasure.”

  “Oh, good! I didn’t want to come off as too—”

  “I would have called you anyway,” I told her. She took the lie like a deep-tissue massage. I gave her the address of a midtown bistro where I knew Michelle could get me treated right, even on short notice.

  “I don’t see where she gets her attitude from, after what you did for—”

  “Let it go, honey,” I told Michelle, gently. Knowing she wouldn’t. Ever.

  “You don’t need to know the reason to feel the season,” the Prof said. “Wish the weather was better, but…”

  “I could be a Bible man again,” Clarence volunteered. He had a door-to-door routine down pat, came across as a bright, sincere young man on a mission to spread the Word.

  “Wrong neighborhood,” I vetoed.

  The Prof walked out of the room without ceremony. Came back with a chilled can of Red Bull and a small bottle of blueberry juice. Michelle poured the two together over a tall glass of shaved ice, sipped it delicately. My sister had a new personal drink every week, but the Prof and Clarence never strayed from their Red Stripe. I went with pineapple juice and seltzer.

  We all sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Charlie’s a night man,” I said, finally. “How about I just pick a day, around noon, okay? I walk up to his front door and ring the bell, ask for Mr. Siegel?”

  “I don’t like it,” the little man said. “What if he’s not home? What if his wife—got to have one, if he’s been there that long, I’m thinking—says he’s a traveling salesman,
been on the road for months? He don’t come to the door himself, in person, we’re not making him pay to see our hole card, see?”

  “It would be the same thing if I went there,” Michelle said. “It’s all chance, all luck.”

  “Couldn’t you reach out for him, Burke?” Clarence asked.

  “Anyone ever asked to meet with that motherfucker, he’d take off like a hellhound was on his trail,” the Prof said. “That’s not the way Charlie works it. He knows where to find you; you don’t never know where to find him.”

  “That’s the truth,” I agreed.

  “Next time he has a job for you, we follow him to his home?”

  “That play won’t pay, son,” the Prof told Clarence. “One, could be months—years—before Charlie calls Burke again. Two, odds are, he don’t go home when a meet is over. Strike three, no way to shadow a man like Charlie Jones. Takes more than skill to do something like that; you got to have powers.”

  The Prof and I shared a look. Wesley had powers. He was as relentless as obsession itself, a remorseless land shark. Not a great white, or a mako—no, Wesley was a bull shark, the deadliest of them all. A bull shark can work the deep ocean or shallow fresh water. It can take prey even in knee-high depths. And it’s the only shark with a memory.

  It hit me then, why Wesley was the consummate shadow. He was one of the Invisibles. And nobody had ever seen him coming.

  “Could we ask the Dragon Lady?” Clarence said, hopefully.

  “To do what?” Michelle said, a slight tinge of sharpness in her voice.

  “Hack the Con Ed records,” I answered for him. “Or Brooklyn Union Gas. Charlie probably never makes a call from that house, but he has to have the utilities turned on.”

  “So, if this ‘Benny Siegel’ guy is still there…”

  “Yeah. It won’t pin him down, but it might tell us if we’re wasting our time.”

  “Or we could ask the Mole,” Michelle said.

  “Ask him what?” said Clarence, retaliating.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a “don’t be dumb” tone. “He’s only the most brilliant scientific genius in the whole world, that’s all. If anyone can figure out how to—”