Mask Market b-16 Read online

  “I’m not alone here,” he said. “You don’t think I would have just let you come over if I was, do you?”

  “You don’t think, if I wanted to do something to you, I’d call first, do you?”

  He folded his arms across his chest, eyes involuntarily darting over my left shoulder. “Point-blank, I didn’t know Hector was going to go psycho on you, Burke. Polygraph that.”

  “Oh, I believe you. I just figured you’d feel bad about how it turned out. And you’d want to make it up to me.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  I looked over at the wall of glass to my right. “You know how people talk about a ‘window of opportunity’?” I said. “You know why leaving it open a little’s always better than keeping it shut?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Because that way the glass never has to get broken.”

  He touched his temples, tuning into whatever frequency guided his ship.

  “I can’t promise anything,” he said.

  W hen I got up the next morning, the whole right side of my head throbbed. A quick glance at the mirror showed me my right ear was inflamed. I get that from grinding it against the pillow all night. Only happens when I dream so deep and dark that it’s a blessing not to remember any of it.

  I stepped out of the flophouse into the red-and-gold blaze of a chemical sunset. That’s this city for you, a toxic-waste garden, full of beautiful artificial flowers.

  The pit bulls let me reclaim my Plymouth, even though all I had was a couple of gyros I bought from a vendor on the walk over.

  It wasn’t about the quality of the bribe for them; they just wanted to be shown some respect.

  The orca female sat and watched me for an extra minute. I tossed her a cube of steak I had saved from Mama’s. She snapped it out of the air without a sound. We both looked at the other two pits. Neither of them had seen a thing. Our secret.

  T he windowless, slab-sided building in Sunnyside had a fresh display of swastikas, spray-painted by some glue-sniffing member of the master race. I thought how nice it would be to introduce him to my new pal, Yitzhak. Or dip him in a vat of meat gravy and throw him over the fence that surrounded my car.

  The bouncer looked like a recycling project from wherever they dump disbarred bikers: greasy hair pulled back into a Shetland ponytail, jailhouse tattoos across the knuckles of both hands, bad teeth, wraparound shades. If he had a name, I didn’t remember it.

  The first time I’d been there, he had followed me out into the parking lot.

  “Hey!”

  “What?” I had said, turning to face him.

  “You a cop?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t want to fuck with me,” he growled, moving in.

  “That’s right, I don’t.”

  “We don’t like motherfuckers coming in here asking questions.”

  “I’m not a fighter,” I said, edging backward.

  “I heard that one before,” he taunted. “You’re not a fighter, you’re a—”

  “—shooter,” I finished for him, showing him the .357.

  “Hey!” he half yelled, spreading his arms wide. “I was just—”

  “No, you weren’t,” I told him, cutting off the “just doing my job” speech he was going to launch into. “Go back inside, call your boss on the phone. You handle it right, he’ll think you’re being smart, just checking out this guy who was acting suspicious. Instead of shaking down the customers, that is.”

  “You don’t know my boss.”

  “Tell Jiffy, Burke said hello,” I told him.

  The next time I visited, the bouncer had pointedly ignored me. He did the same tonight.

  “Hello, Dolly,” I said to the waitress who came over to my table. It wasn’t a line; that’s her name.

  “Hey!” she said, giving me a smile as genuine as Ted Bundy’s remorse.

  “Sit down with me for a little bit.”

  “You know I can’t do that, baby. Only the dancers…”

  I spread five twenties on the tabletop. “So you’ll share,” I said.

  D olly had been a dancer once. A drop-down after she started sagging too much to work escort. She’d kept sagging all the way down to table hostess in a Grade C strip joint. I didn’t want to think about what was next for her. Neither did she. Cocaine helps her with that.

  “Nope,” is all she’d said when I showed her Beryl’s picture. It had been a long shot, but that’s what you do when you’re killing time.

  “Show it around,” I told her. “I’ve got a grand for an address.”

  “These girls,” she said, glancing at the stage, where a scrawny brunette with ridiculously huge breasts was humping a pole, next to a cellulite blonde who was fingering herself and moaning from boredom, “they’re all on drugs. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

  “An address,” I said again. “Not a story.”

  “I got to get back to work,” Dolly said.

  E ven in springtime, the basement apartment was cold. Not A/C cold, but the clammy cold of damp, moldy rot. The man who lived there was dressed for his role: He wore enough layers of clothing to pass for the Michelin Man. Had the right skin color for it, too. Fingerless gloves on his hands—hands he warmed over the glow of the money he had stashed somewhere in the place.

  I knew about the money, but I didn’t know how much it really was, never mind where he had it hidden. It would take a team of greenback-trained bloodhounds years to dig through the fetid swamp of that basement to find it.

  If it was even there.

  A long time ago, a no-neck mutant named Harold who lived in the same building figured out that the man in the basement must be hoarding something. After all, he never went out. Never. Lived on take-out food passed through a slot cut into the steel door to his den, the same way they do it in supermax prisons. He hadn’t needed the landlord’s permission to put in that door—he owned the building.

  The mutant didn’t know that; he wasn’t the research type. His idea of a complex extortion scheme was to pound on the man’s door and scream, “Give me money, motherfucker!” When that didn’t work out for him, he remembered a technique he’d heard about in prison. So the next time he came back, he had a plastic squeeze bottle full of gasoline with him. Told the man inside that he was going to roast him alive unless he got paid.

  I was the one who got paid instead. I used some of the money to buy my partner Hercules a nice suit. Had to go to a tailor for it—department stores don’t make suits to fit guys who spend most of their time Inside hoisting iron.

  “What?” the mutant yelled in response to my knock.

  “Open the door, Harold,” I said. “Mr. G. sent us.”

  “Who the fuck is Mr. G.?”

  “Harold…” I said, my voice clearly losing patience.

  He flung open the door like a Bluto cartoon. “What the fuck are—?”

  The sight of Hercules calmed him right down. I guess he remembered more about prison than just the burnouts.

  We had a nice talk. I explained that the man who lived in the basement was the crazy old uncle of a very important individual. Harold the Mutant never asked who “Mr. G.” was; maybe he thought he knew. In fact, he seemed to be getting smarter by the minute. When I told him if he ever went near the basement again he was going off the roof without a parachute, his comprehension was perfect.

  “H ow many steps?” the man in the basement asked me, through the slot in the door.

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. I counted them,” I told him, connecting us.

  The door swung open soundlessly. That always surprised me—I expected it to squeak like the ones in horror movies—but I guess he kept it lubricated, somehow.

  I didn’t offer to shake hands; I knew he didn’t like that.

  He didn’t offer me a seat, just looked at me with the beyond-disappointment eyes of an orphan staring into a shopwindow at Christmastime. I don’
t know how he ended up where he is now. But I know he knows money.

  “Is it hard to set up an account in Nauru?” I asked him, without preamble.

  I waited for him to count the syllables in my question. I knew it had to be an even number, or he wouldn’t respond. He doesn’t care how the dictionary breaks up a word, only how it comes out of someone’s mouth.

  “No,” he said, playing out his ritual: questions are even, answers are odd.

  “Why do people do it?”

  “Secrecy.”

  “Like a Swiss bank account?”

  “Liechtenstein.”

  “Like that?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked, knowing he’d hear “difference” as two syllables.

  “Government.”

  “You need big money to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they make money doing it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s like a big laundry job?”

  “Yes.”

  “For criminals, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “And everybody knows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any contacts there?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you.”

  He made some noise. I wasn’t sure what the word was, but I knew it was a single syllable.

  I tried other places. Other people. Other possibilities. Even a “journalist” who spent his slimy life pawing through garbage looking for morsels to peddle to the sleaze-sheets. He promised he’d sniff around. I believed him—that’s just what dung beetles do.

  I wasn’t holding good cards, but I wasn’t down to drawing dead, either. Not yet. Beryl’s picture was circulating all over the city. Favors were being called in, pressure was being put on.

  You can’t really do surveillance on houses as isolated as her father’s, or in neighborhoods as ritzy as her mother’s. Not unless you have a government-sized budget and government-level immunity for felonies. I know how to get in touch with some sanctioned black-bag boys, and I know what it takes to turn their crank, too. But telling your business to people like that will guarantee you go on a list. The bone-and-pistol package Morales had planted had gotten me off a bunch of those, and I didn’t want to start new ones.

  With the kind of money that Daniel Parks had made disappear, Beryl could have disappeared, too. She could be anywhere. But it didn’t feel like that to me. And I’d found her once….

  “S ay where and when.”

  “You know where I used to work? There’s a parking lot, the public one. The upper deck is outdoors.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m there now.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  I thumbed off the cell phone, slipped it into the pocket of my jacket.

  “That’s her, isn’t it?” Loyal said.

  “‘Her’?”

  “Yes, ‘her.’ Not that fake ‘wife’ of yours, the one woman you really love.”

  “This is just business,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, soft and somber, like in church. “When you’re done with your ‘business,’ you come right on back here, sugar, and I’ll fix whatever she broke. That’s the kind of woman I am.”

  T he Chrysler was standing by itself in the farthest corner of the lot. I parked at the other end, backing into the open space. At midnight, the lot was empty. The courthouse was closed, visiting hours were over at the jail, City Hall was shut down.

  The Chrysler’s passenger door opened and Wolfe got out. Instead of moving toward me, she opened the back door, and a thick black shape flowed onto the ground.

  Great! I thought. Just what I need, another one of my big fans.

  Wolfe snapped on the Rottweiler’s chain and stepped over to where I was parked. Her shiny lime-green raincoat was tightly belted at the waist, blazing in the night.

  I got out of the Plymouth. Slowly.

  Not slow enough. The Rottweiler let out a threatening growl.

  “Bruiser!” Wolfe said. “Enough.”

  “Hey, Bruiser,” I greeted him.

  He said something like “Go fuck yourself!” in Rottweiler. The barrel-chested beast had decided to hate me the first time he saw me. And once he locked his bonecrusher jaws around a feeling, he never dropped the bite.

  “Your dog’s a real party animal,” I said to Wolfe.

  “Bruiser? He’s a sweetheart,” she said, patting the monster’s huge head. “You’re the only one he doesn’t like.”

  Wolfe walked over to the edge of the lot, leaned her elbows on the railing, and looked down at the dark. I stayed where I was.

  “Down!” she told the Rottweiler.

  He did it in slow motion, his “give me a reason” eyes pinning me all the way.

  I moved over to the railing, my hands already coming up with a flared match for Wolfe’s cigarette.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “I’m the one who needs to be thanking you. You found—?”

  “Maybe not much,” she said. “Maybe enough.”

  “How did you—?”

  “That little tombstone was a perfect surface for prints.” I didn’t bother telling her that that was why I’d pocketed an item from the shelf full of artifacts bestowed on little Beryl by professional revolutionaries grateful to her parents for their financial support. It was a lead-cast miniature of a clenched fist rising from the engraved tombstone of Fred Hampton. “You’re lucky nobody had polished it.”

  “Just how lucky did I get?”

  “There were three different partials that could be lifted. One of them matched to a Beryl Eunice Preston, DOB nine, nine, seventy-two. That’s her, right?”

  “Right,” I said, not surprised to see Wolfe’s hands holding nothing but her cigarette—I’d seen her cross-examine expert witnesses for hours without ever glancing at her notes.

  “She was in the system,” Wolfe said. “Arrested eleven, twenty, ninety-seven. Attempt murder, CCW, whole string of stuff.”

  “All one event?”

  “Yes,” she said, exhaling so that smoke ran out of her nose. “This was in Manhattan. She was working for one of the escort services, claimed the john had demanded she do something she didn’t want to do, then got violent with her when she refused.”

  “A self-defense case?”

  “It might have been, if it had ever gone to trial,” Wolfe said. “The escort service said they’d never heard of her, big surprise, but she posted bail and walked. Then the complaining witness stopped complaining. When the detectives leaned on him, he said the whole thing had been a mistake. He was showing her the knife—said he was some kind of collector, and this was a fancy one he’d just bought—and he slipped and fell on it. The hotel never should have called the cops.”

  “Anyone buy that?”

  “Why would they?” Wolfe said. “But what were they going to do, threaten to tell his wife he was using his credit card to have some fun? Bluff the girl into taking an assault plea? This is real life, not a TV show. They dropped it like it was on fire.”

  “Nothing since? For Beryl, I mean?”

  “As far as the system’s concerned, she could have joined a convent.”

  “You pulled an address?”

  “Sure,” she said. And gave me the condo in Battery Park.

  When I didn’t say anything, she said, “You had that one, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, not trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  “The arraignment judge played it like it was a stand-up assault with a deadly weapon,” Wolfe said, grinding out her cigarette with one precision stab of her spike heel. “Set bail at a quarter-mil. Your girl, she didn’t use a bondsman.”

  “She put up that much in cash.”

  “No,” Wolfe said. “A friend put up his house.”

  “Must have been some house.”

  “Oh, it was.” Her white teeth flashed in the night. “Want the address?”

 
; “S he had that hideout in place for a long time,” Michelle said. “Even before she met that Daniel Parks guy, you think?”

  “Yeah. That is what I think. She bought the property in ’94.”

  “She would have been…twenty-two years old then,” Clarence said, looking up from his laptop.

  “Pretty young to be that smart,” Michelle said. “She must have had a crystal ball, too, buying a house in that neighborhood back then. I’ll bet it’s worth five times what she paid for it.”

  “It wasn’t leveraged, either,” I told them, tapping a stack of paper in front of me. “She put a hundred down, leaving her with a twenty-one-hundred-dollar-a-month nut for everything—mortgage, taxes, insurance, the whole thing. It’s a two-family, and she was getting eight fifty for the first floor, seven hundred for the second. The C of O for the building says it’s strictly a two-family, but I’ll bet the basement’s another apartment, off the books.”

  “You sure it’s our girl?” the Prof said.

  I looked around the table, ticking the points off on my fingers: “One, the name on the ownership papers is ‘Jennifer Jackson.’ That’s a motel-register name. Two, whoever owned that property put up the whole thing, deed and all, to make bail for Beryl when she was arrested. Three, we know she knows how to change her name, and how to move money around, too. And, four, she’s the kind of operator who never builds a house without a couple of back doors.”

  “Park Slope’s gone way upscale, but it’s no gated community,” Michelle said, looking over at the Mole.

  I love these,” Loyal said, fitting the blue leather bustier over her breasts. “But you can’t get into them without help.”

  “At your service,” I said, slowly pulling the laces tight.

  “That’s what you think I am, don’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know what I mean, Lew. I’ve been so honest with you.

  Now it’s coming around to hurt me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You know what? I thought you loved me. I don’t mean I was your great love. Not that special, once-in-a-lifetime-if-you-get-real-lucky love. But a whole lot more than…than just liking me, I guess. I guess I just told you too much truth, didn’t I?”

  “No, you didn’t. You told me just enough. And you showed me a lot more.”