Mask Market b-16 Page 15

  “Did you ever meet the guy?”

  “Well, I did, actually. Beryl was just so insistent, and I could never really say no to her, so I drove over there myself one night. Frankly, I couldn’t see what my wife had gotten so worked up about—the instructor seemed like a perfectly innocuous individual.”

  “Was he Asian?”

  “That’s right,” Preston said, defensive again. “But that had nothing to do with my wife’s decision, I assure you. His English wasn’t all that…precise; I guess that would be an accurate assessment.”

  “He didn’t try and sell you anything, then?”

  “You mean for Beryl? No. In fact, he said he personally didn’t teach the children’s classes. But he did suggest I might want to study with him myself.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. Do you find that so strange?”

  “Not at all. I was just wondering if you listened to him.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The way you explained it to me when I first got here. How you’ve got a gift for—”

  “I didn’t say it was a gift,” he cut me off, somewhere between aggressive and defensive again. “I said it was a technique, listening for qualities in a person’s voice. And that I discovered I had some aptitude for it.”

  “Okay. So when you were talking to the sensei…?”

  He closed his eyes, going back there. I could see him listening then.

  “No,” he said, slowly, dragging out the syllable. “There wasn’t anything there I would…mistrust.”

  “But your daughter never did go for lessons?”

  “No. As I said, her mother was opposed. And she was entitled to her own instincts. I always respected that.”

  “A re you still in touch with your wife? Your ex-wife, I mean?”

  “She knows where I live. I know where she lives. That’s about the extent of it. We’re not enemies or anything, but there’s really nothing left between us. Nothing to talk about.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “In Virginia. Not too far from Washington, D.C.”

  “Did she ever remarry?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said, not faking his lack of interest. “But she could have, for all I know.”

  “Did she ever resume her maiden name?”

  “Oh yes. Summerdale is her name now. Beryl Summerdale.”

  “Your daughter was named for—?”

  “Yes,” he said, adding a dash of unhappiness to his depression cocktail. “But she always had my name, too. Beryl Preston.”

  “Look,” I told him, “all I wanted to do was to see if she’s doing okay. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I’m just getting older, and I wanted to…look back, see if I ever really accomplished anything back then.”

  “You don’t do that sort of work anymore?”

  “I…do. But not very much of it. I don’t know if I could find her—”

  “But you’ll try?”

  “Yeah. But if I do, she’s an adult now. I’m not bringing her back.”

  “I understand,” the gray man said. “I want the same thing you do, Mr. Burke. Just to know she’s all right. That’s worth something to me. It always has been.”

  I spent another couple of hours there. Half a dozen cups of coffee for Preston, another couple of hot chocolates for me. I kept panning until I was sure there wasn’t another nugget in the riverbed.

  He offered me money. I told him that if I did turn something up, it would be the same as last time: COD.

  Darkness was dropping by the time I left. It didn’t feel like city night to me. There wasn’t a hint of menace in it. Softer, like a blanket of comfort.

  I knew better than to trust it.

  I knew how to run different programs in my head at the same time way before anyone heard of “multitasking.” Any kid who’s been tortured learns how to do it. You can call it splitting off. Or compartmentalizing. Dissociating, if that makes you happy. It all comes down to the same thing: not being there while it’s happening. You watch them doing…whatever they want…to you, but you don’t feel it.

  Not physically, I mean.

  Not every kid learns it the same way. Some learn it so good that pain loses all meaning. It just doesn’t register. Prison guards call guys like that “anesthetics.” When they go, they go. Clubs bounce off their heads; they wear mace like it was a coat of sweat; they pull stun-gun wires out of their bodies and strangle you with them.

  You can’t hurt them. It takes death to stop their pain.

  Other kids split off for good. When it’s happening to them, they’re not there. It’s not that they go somewhere else like the splitters do; they are someone else.

  There’s names for them, too.

  I found another way. When it was happening, I watched it. Watched them, watched me. And in a little corner of my mind, a place they could never go, I was watching another movie, on a different screen.

  That’s where I found my religion, watching that other screen.

  I prayed and prayed. No one answered, but I never lost faith. I had to believe my god was true. Because I knew, if there was no god for kids like me, if the real God was the one the people who beat me and raped me and hurt me for fun had pictures of in their houses, I was lost.

  I was still trying to understand when Wesley found me.

  We were both just kids, locked-up, powerless kids. But where I had fear, Wesley had hate. I cried; Wesley plotted.

  One night, he showed me how to do it.

  Years later, I finally had something to show him, too. I had a family. One I made for myself. They chose me; I chose them. I wanted him with us. But it was too late for Wesley. He never came close to the campfire. He watched from the shadows until the day he checked out.

  I know Wesley loved me, in the only way he could. When he crossed over, he left me the only thing that ever had meaning for him in life: a weapon.

  I drove on autopilot, rerunning the session with Preston in my mind, looking for a loose thread to pull.

  Beryl’s mother wasn’t hiding; she had a listed phone number. If I could just 411 her, Daniel Parks could have, too. A man like him would have exhausted every possibility before he ever went near the places where you could find a Charlie Jones.

  But the CD Parks had given me hadn’t had a single line of info about parents. He knew where Peta lived, where Peta kept her money, where Peta shopped. He had to have been close with her. Intimate, anyway—those nude photos of her didn’t look commercial.

  Daniel Parks had known a lot about Peta Bellingham. But he hadn’t known Beryl Preston. Not even that she existed.

  B y the time I got the Plymouth docked and walked over to the flophouse, it was too late to do anything but check in with Mama.

  “Gardens,” she answered the payphone, the way she always does.

  “It’s me, Mama.”

  “Baby sister say you call her, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  “I t’s me, girl.”

  “You took your time,” Michelle said, indignant without asking for my reasons.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “Don’t you be sarcastic with me, mister. I knew you’d be anxious to get what I had, that’s all. And I didn’t want to leave anything on a tape.”

  “Okay, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “My boy says his father wants to see you.”

  “Now?” That was plausible. A man who lives underground doesn’t use a sundial.

  “No. Tomorrow. In the afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You’ll pick me up first,” she ordered.

  “Two o’clock?”

  “Very good,” she said, back to being sweet-voiced. I’m not smart with women, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell her I had finally snapped to why she hadn’t just left a message.

  T he next morning, I dipped into my cache of dead-ended cell phones and dialed the number I had for Beryl’s mother. Three rings, a click, then…
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  Sounds of a baby, gurgling happily. Laid over it, a woman’s pleasant voice: “Hi. This is Elysse and her mommy. If you have a message for either of us, we’d love to hear it. Have a wonderful day.”

  Nothing so unusual—a lot of people think it’s precious and special to have their kid record the outgoing message on the answering machine. But Beryl’s mother had to be in her early fifties. And her father said Beryl had been an only child….

  A grandchild? Beryl’s child, being raised by the mother? That happens. Girl finds herself pregnant, but can’t find the father. Or doesn’t know who he is. Or does, and wishes she didn’t. So she comes home with the baby—“just until I get on my feet.” Sooner or later, she makes tracks, leaving the baby for her mother to raise. Goes back to the life that put her in that trick bag to begin with.

  If you think that only happens in ghettos, get yourself tested for cataracts. Rich folks may live on never-touching parallel tracks, but the same train runs on both of them. For some unwanted kids, there are “state homes.” For others, boarding schools. Some humans dump their children on the grandparents. Some sell them.

  If that baby was Beryl’s, could Daniel Parks have been the father? Is that why he was diverting cash to her?

  I went back to the CD, using the search function Clarence had shown me. Not even a hint that Beryl might have a child, much less that Parks might be the father.

  Was Beryl Summerdale the mother and the daughter? Had Peta Bellingham just gone back home, with her child, and taken her mother’s maiden name as her own? Hiding in plain sight, separating herself from whatever mess Daniel Parks had gotten himself into, waiting for it to blow over. Or for him to be blown away.

  “Y ou got pals in D.C., don’t you, honey?” I asked Michelle, on the trip up to Hunts Point.

  “Good pals,” she assured me.

  “Good enough to lend a car to a stranger?”

  “Oh, please,” she said, waving away such pettiness. If Michelle called them good pals, they’d drive a man in a ski mask to the nearest bank…and wait outside, with the motor running.

  “That’s some outfit,” I said, not lying. She was wearing a lilac business suit over a plum-colored silk blouse trimmed in black around the collar. Her ankle-strapped spike heels were the same color as the blouse. So were her nails. A jet-black pillbox hat with a half-veil completed the picture, and it was a box-office smash.

  “Well, I’m glad someone noticed.”

  “Girl, how can you get on the Mole’s case before he even gets a chance to drop the ball?”

  “Why wait?” she said, grinning wickedly. “I know my man.”

  M ichelle had brought a for-once/for-real spring day with her. The Mole’s junkyard lanai was drenched with sun, transforming the random shards of metal and glass that surrounded the area into a glistening necklace.

  “You look gorgeous, Mom,” Terry told her, adroitly cuing his father, who still couldn’t come up with the required compliment in time. Michelle generously settled for the blush that suffused the Mole’s pasty skin.

  The kid opened a laptop computer with a gigantic screen and fired it up, canting the screen so that I could see, blocking the sunlight with his shoulder.

  The screen flashed too quickly for me to follow. A row of what looked like different-colored balloons popped up. Terry played the cursor over a red one and double-clicked. A photo snapped open, as clear as a movie-screen image.

  A man in a dark overcoat, caught mid-stride moving down a sidewalk, a bulky briefcase in his right hand. A businessman, returning from a hard day?

  “What’s this?” I asked Terry.

  “Hold up,” he said, fingering the touchpad.

  Another picture. The same man, just turning in to the front walkway of a house.

  Click. Close-up of the house.

  I’d seen it before.

  In Briarwood.

  “Got it?” Terry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay…” He clicked again.

  Close-up of a man carrying a briefcase. Three-quarter profile.

  Charlie Jones.

  “Are you sure he wasn’t just—?”

  Before I could say “visiting,” Terry had clicked again. This time, the man was standing on the front step, talking to someone whose back was to the camera. Click, click, click; each one a tighter close-up.

  Charlie Jones.

  “I never thought those camera phones could get anything like that,” I said, impressed.

  “They can’t,” Terry said, proudly. “But when Dad makes one…”

  “You see?” Michelle said, preening.

  “What’s on the rest?” I asked Terry, indicating the unopened balloons on the screen.

  “More of the same,” he said. “He usually comes home from…well, from whatever he does, around two, three in the afternoon.”

  “When does he leave?”

  “We didn’t have infrared,” the Mole said, answering my question. “You said you only needed—”

  “Ah, this is perfect, brother.”

  The underground man blushed again.

  I n New York, a new restaurant opens every seven minutes. Then Darwin takes over, and most disappear within a few months. But they keep coming, like a stampede off a rooftop.

  Loyal was all pumped up about trying this Italian joint she’d heard about. It was on Ninth, in the Forties. Way too far to walk, especially in the high heels I’ve never seen her without. It was raining, so getting a cab was a crapshoot, and I didn’t feel lucky.

  “Is this your car?” she asked, looking around the interior of the Plymouth like a girl who expected to find a baby-grand piano hidden in a tarpaper shack.

  “One of them,” I said. Then I gave her the whole restoration-hobby routine.

  “It’s nice,” she pronounced. “Nice and big.”

  N ew York parking lots charge more per hour than some hookers, and they both end up doing the same thing to you. Loyal had a red vinyl raincoat and a little matching umbrella. It didn’t really cover the both of us, but she insisted, molding herself against me as we walked the two blocks to the restaurant.

  An olive-skinned woman in a black cocktail dress who’d spent way too much time on her hair tapped an open ledger book with a silver pen and looked at me expectantly. I was about to tell her we didn’t have a reservation—it was only a few minutes past seven, and I could see a dozen empty tables in one glance—when Loyal said, “Lewis,” as she squeezed my left arm with both hands.

  A hatcheck girl took Loyal’s raincoat, handed me the ticket and a half-wink.

  “Bitch,” Loyal said under her breath.

  “She was just working me for a tip when we pick up the coat later.”

  “There’s all kinds of tips,” she said, grimly.

  A guy in black pants, white shirt, and a black vest showed us to a table for four.

  “Will you be joined by—?”

  “Just us,” I said. That’s the way guys doing time spell “justice,” but I didn’t share that gem with him.

  The waiter looked like he’d been betrayed, but manfully went on to recite a list of specials. Endlessly.

  When he was done, Loyal gestured at me to go ahead, she was making up her mind.

  I ordered shells and sauce, although they called it something else. Loyal had one of the specials, and a glass of red…although they called it something else.

  “To drink?” the waiter said to me.

  “Water, please.”

  “Perrier? Or—?”

  “Just plain water.”

  “You want tap water?” he said, as if asking me to confirm I was too miserly to be at large.

  “Unless you’ve got something cheaper,” I said, smiling.

  As soon as he was gone, Loyal leaned forward.

  “You scared him, Lew.”

  “Me?”

  “You scared him,” she repeated. “And you scared me, too, a little bit.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You
have an ugly smile,” she said, very seriously. “Is that why you never use it?”

  “That’s a nice thing to say, with all the money I’ve invested in these teeth.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, hazel eyes steady on mine. “That was an ugly smile. And your voice was ugly, too.”

  “I guess that goes with being an actress. You pick up all these subtle little things that someone like me would never—”

  “Be like that,” she said, closing the subject.

  M y plate of shells was all-the-way tepid. The pasta was mushy, the sauce had no bite. Even the basil leaf was extra-limp. But maybe I was prejudiced.

  “It’s not that good?” Loyal said.

  “I didn’t come here for the food.”

  “You think I like food too much?” she said, archly.

  “I like to watch you eat,” I said, truthfully. Loyal didn’t put away much food, ever, but when she enjoyed something, she let you know.

  “You know why I love going out to eat so much?”

  “Because you hate to cook?”

  “I hate to cook for myself,” she corrected. “What fun is that? But I’m really a damn fine cook. Not fancy stuff,” she said, hastily, “just regular food. Bacon and eggs, roast beef and potatoes, things like that. And I bake, too. Not cakes, pies. That’s really my specialty.”

  “Do you scratch-bake?”

  “I do,” she said, smiling widely. “Oh, I might cheat a little on the filling, but I never went near one of those crusts you can buy in a store.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “What kind of pie do you like, Lew? I’d love to bake one for you.”

  “Chocolate.”

  “Chocolate? What kind of a pie is that? Oh, you mean like chocolate-cream pie?”

  “French-silk chocolate pie,” I said, on sure culinary ground for once.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding gravely, as if confirming a suspicion.