Mask Market b-16 Page 4

  “Then my face should look like a piece of graph paper,” I said, putting my coat in her outstretched hands.

  “I’m not dressed yet,” she announced, as if coming to the door in a lacy red bra and matching panties hadn’t been enough of a hint. “Go sit down; I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  She turned and walked down the hall with the confidence of a woman who expects to be watched and is ready for it. I sat down in a slingback azure leather chair and watched tropical fish cavort in the flat-screen virtual aquarium on the far wall. I slitted my eyes against the vibrant pixel display until it became the kind of kaleidoscope you get when you press your fingers against your eyelids. I don’t mind waiting; it’s one of the things I do best.

  The lady I was waiting for was a zaftig blonde without a straight line anywhere on her body, like a pinup girl from the fifties; the kind of woman who turns a walk to the grocery store into an audition. A sweet little biscuit, bosomy and wasp-waisted, with big hazel eyes like a pair of jeweler’s loupes. Her idea of foreplay is what she calls “presents,” and the right ones make her arch her back like a bitch cat in heat.

  I met her in a BMW showroom on Park Avenue. I was there to see a guy who does beautiful custom work…on VIN numbers. She was just window-shopping, keeping in practice.

  I was dressed for the part I was playing, all Zegna and Bruno Magli. She was wearing white toreador pants, a fire-engine-red silk plain-front blouse, and matching spike heels with ankle straps, holding a belted white coat in her right hand. As soon as she was sure she had my attention, she turned around to caress the gleaming fender of a Z8. Instead of back pockets, the white pants had a pair of red arrows, pointing left and right. I wished she’d get mad at something, and walk away.

  Instead, she walked over to where I was standing.

  “Want to buy me a car?” she said, flashing a homicidal smile.

  “I never buy cars on the first date,” I said.

  “Ooh!” she squealed, softly.

  That’s where it started. She doesn’t know what I do for a living, but she’s sure it’s something shady. She’s real sure I’m married—you wear a wedding ring long enough, when you take it off it leaves a telltale mark a woman like her could spot at a hundred yards.

  She’s so gorgeous she can show off just by showing up. Keeps a big mirror on her bed, where the headboard should be. Her favorite way is to get on all fours and wiggle a little first. She wants it so that the last thing she sees before she lets go is herself, watching me doing her.

  When I pretend to go to sleep afterwards, she vacuums my clothes with a feather touch. She’s not looking for money, just information.

  She thinks my name is Ken Lewis. She calls me Lew. I never asked her why.

  There’s a dirty elegance about her. She looks as lush as an orchid, and comes across just about as smart. But that’s just another kind of makeup for her. She’s got the dumb-blonde thing down so slick that trying to get a straight answer out of her is like cross-examining a mynah bird with ADD.

  Her name is Loyal.

  I never sleep over.

  “Call you a cab, sir?” a different doorman asked, as if getting a cab at three in the morning in that neighborhood required a professional’s touch.

  “Thanks,” I lied, “but I’m parked around the corner.”

  T he next day started out like the beginning of a long winning streak. Before I could even take a look at the paper, the TV called to me with a breaking story. A guide dog was walking with his person just before daybreak when a couple of muggers descended. Probably junkies who’d spent the whole night trying to score, I thought. The muggers kicked the blind man’s cane out of his hand. When he went down, they dropped to their knees to rip at his jacket. Apparently, that was a major mistake. When the cops arrived, the blind man still had one of the muggers in a painful joint lock. The other one got away, but left a lot of blood on the sidewalk.

  The newscaster said the blind man was a veteran of World War II. They showed a photo of a man who looked vaguely Asian, with a stiff white crew cut and a prominent tattoo on one biceps that I couldn’t make out. As the camera panned down, my earlier guess was confirmed: who but a desperate junkie would try to put a move on a blind man whose seeing-eye dog was a Doberman?

  I raised my glass of guava juice in a silent toast to the man and his dog.

  The day got better when I saw the race results. Little Eric had gotten away cleanly and settled back in the pack, letting the favorite and another horse battle for the lead. The first quarter went in a blistering .28 flat. While the lead horses dueled on the front end, Little Eric moved to the outside, picking up cover just past the half. The three-quarter went in 1:26.2, with Little Eric still two deep on the outside. He made his move at the top of the stretch, going three wide to calmly gun down the rest of the field, nailing the win and taking a lifetime mark of 1:54.4 in the bargain.

  He paid $27.40 to win. Even with the two-to-five favorite hanging tough for second, the exacta returned a sweet $89.50. Our seventy-buck investment was going to net well over four hundred.

  Damn!

  I switched on the bootleg satellite radio the Mole had hooked up for me, and was instantly rewarded with Albert King’s “Laundromat Blues,” the Sue Foley version of “Two Trains,” and, to cap the trifecta, Magic Judy Henske’s new cut of “Easy Rider.”

  Today’s the day to play my number, I remember thinking. Then I made the mistake of opening the paper from the front.

  M URDERED MAN IDENTIFIED, BUT MYSTERY DEEPENS, the headline read. I scanned the article quickly, then reread it carefully, culling the facts away from the adjectives the way you have to do to translate the tabloids.

  The dead man was a “financial planner” named Daniel Parks. He was forty-four years old, an Ivy League M.B.A. who lived on a “multimillion-dollar” waterfront estate in Belle Harbor with his wife and three children, the oldest a teenage girl who tearfully told the reporters that her father couldn’t have had an enemy in the world.

  They hadn’t ID’ed him from prints; his wallet—containing several hundred dollars, the reporter noted—had provided a wealth of information. Not just his driver’s license and the registration and insurance papers for the Audi, but a permit for the “automatic pistol” they found in his coat.

  New York’s very stingy with carry permits. There’s only about forty thousand active ones at any time—you’ve got better odds of finding a landlord who voluntarily cuts your rent. Almost all those permits go to celebrities—they’re an important status symbol in a town where status is more important than oxygen. Of course, if you’re one of those “honorary police commissioners”—the “honor” comes from a heavy annual contribution to some murky “police fund”—you get to walk around with all the iron you want. Park anywhere you want, too—another one of the perks is an official NYPD placard for your windshield.

  I didn’t like any of that. When I got to the part about Parks being “rumored” to have recently testified before a grand jury investigating money laundering, I liked it even less. If the hunter-killer team had been shadowing him, they might have sent a man inside to see who he was going to meet.

  The scenario was bad enough, but it wasn’t worst-case. The federales aren’t the only ones who can tap phones. If the shooting team had a heads-up for where the target had been headed that night, they could have had the place covered for hours before I even showed up. It didn’t look as if they had, so I was probably in the clear.

  Probably.

  Even if they’d had a man inside, I told myself, they wouldn’t know anything but my face—and you have to get real close to see anything distinctive about it. I didn’t think they had seen my car, and even if they had, the license was a welded-up fake. A trace-back on the number I had called Parks from would dead-end no matter how deep they looked.

  So I was clear unless…unless Charlie had been offered enough cash to stray out of his home territory, take a vacation from the middle. If there was a bounty
on the dead man, Charlie would know about it. So, when the target came to ask Charlie to put him together with someone who could help with his problem, Charlie could have sold him.

  Bad. That little ferret practiced a dark martial art, the kind that lets you kill a man with a phone call. But if I asked him about it…very fucking bad. Word gets out you were looking for Charlie, it could make a lot of people nervous. Where I live, it’s a lot cheaper to kill the hunter than hide the prey.

  I went into myself. All the way down the mine shaft where the only ore is truth and pain. Like when I was a kid, and those words were synonyms.

  I had one hand to play. I was holding it in my mind, turning it over, seeing the aces-and-eights full house, the only one my ghost brother ever dealt. Then Clarence walked in the door, and made things worse.

  “I t’s a dossier, mahn,” he said, holding out the CD I’d given him.

  “The person who put this together, he had a lot of time on his hands. Spent some money, too.”

  “Any money in it?” I asked, hoping for something to get me back to my winning streak.

  “Maybe,” the West Indian said dubiously, tossing his cream cashmere topcoat over the back of my futon couch, the better to display a fuchsia satin shirt with black nacre buttons worn outside a pair of black slacks with balloon knees and pegged cuffs. “There’s account numbers and all, but no access codes or PIN numbers.”

  “How do I—”

  “Got it right here, mahn,” Clarence said, removing a narrow silver notebook computer from a black brushed-aluminum case. “I downloaded the CD to a USB key, so all I have to do is—”

  Catching the expression on my face, he clamped down on the geek-speak long enough to hit some keys and bring the machine to life.

  The first screen was all vital statistics. Peta Bellingham, DOB September 9, 1972, five foot seven, 119 pounds, and a note to “see photos.” Whoever had put together the package had her home and cell phones, fax, e-mail, Social Security number, three local bank accounts—checking, savings, and a handful of sub-jumbo CDs, all showing balances as of a couple of months ago—plus one in the Caymans and another in Nauru, with a series of “????” where the balances should have been. Two cars registered, a Porsche Carrera and a Mazda Miata…which didn’t make sense, for some reason I couldn’t quite touch. A co-op on West End, recent purchase; estimated value a million four, against a seven-hundred-grand mortgage. A one-bedroom condo in Battery Park, free and clear. A mixed-bag portfolio, weighted in favor of biotech stocks, managed by…Daniel Parks, MBA, CPA, CFP.

  So this woman had—what?—skipped out on a big pile of money she owed to this guy Parks? That didn’t add up. Walking away from all those assets would have to cost her a cubic ton more than any commission she could owe a money manager.

  I shrugged my shoulders at Clarence.

  He tapped a key, and another screen popped up, displaying a whole page of thumbnails. “Put the pointer on the one you want to see, double-click, and it will blow right up, like enlarging a photograph.”

  The first one was a young woman—hard to tell her age without a tighter close-up—standing next to a fireplace, one hand on the mantel. She was fair-skinned, willowy, with long, slightly wavy dark hair. I couldn’t see much else.

  I scanned the thumbnails with my eyes, looking for a full-face shot. Found it. Clicked it open.

  And went back twenty years.

  “Y ou know her, mahn?” Clarence said, reading my face.

  “Let me look at a few more,” I told him, moving the cursor and clicking the mouse.

  I flicked past the ones with her in outfits—everything from French maid to English riding costume—and the nudes, which were all posed as if she was sitting for an artist’s portrait. It was the close-ups that sealed the deal. Those icy topaz eyes hadn’t changed at all.

  “Yeah, I know her,” I said.

  B eryl Eunice Preston had just turned thirteen when she disappeared from her parents’ mansion in one of Westchester’s Old Money enclaves. It was her father who came to see me, back when I had an office carved out of what was once crawlspace at the top of a building in what the real-estate hucksters had just started to call “Tribeca.” I lived in that office, in a little apartment concealed behind a fake Persian rug that looked like it covered a solid wall.

  Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.

  The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.

  That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.

  Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.

  Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.

  So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent for the Animal Control guys.

  Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.

  After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.

  “I ’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.

  “You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”

  “I don’t want the police….”

  “I don’t want them, either.”

  “Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”

  “It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”

  He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.

  “My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.

  “How do you know?”

  “What…what do you mean by that?”

  “You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”

  “Beryl is a troubled child,” he said, as if the empty phrase explained everything.

  I blew smoke at the low ceiling to tell him that it didn’t.

  “She’s done it before. Run away, I mean.”

  “How’d you find her those other times?”

  “She always came back on her own. That’s
what’s different now.”

  “How long’s she been gone?”

  “It will be two weeks tomorrow. If school wasn’t out for the summer, it would be difficult for us—my wife and me—to explain. As it is…”

  “You did all the usual stuff, right?”

  “I’m not sure what you—”

  “Contacted her school friends, checked with any relatives who might be willing to let her hide out at their place, read her diary…”

  “Yes. Yes, we did all that. Under normal circumstances, we would never—”

  “Does she have a pet?”

  “You mean,” he said, glancing involuntarily at Pansy, “like a dog or a cat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “A kid that’s going to run away permanently, you’d expect them to take their pet with them.”

  “Beryl never had a pet,” he said flatly, his tone making it clear that, if they had deemed one advisable, her devoted parents would have run out and gotten her one. The very best.

  “Okay. What about clothes? Did she take enough to last her awhile?”

  “It’s…hard to tell, to be honest. She has so many clothes that we couldn’t determine if anything was missing.”

  “What makes you think she’s in Manhattan?”

  “One of the private detectives we hired was able to trace her movements on the day it…happened. We don’t know how she got to the train station—it’s about twenty minutes from our house, and the local car service hadn’t been called—but there’s no question that she bought a ticket to Penn Station.”

  “Penn Station’s a hub. She could have connected with another train to anywhere in the country. Did she have enough money for a ticket?”

  “I…don’t know how much money she had. None of the cash we keep in the house was missing, but we’ve always been very generous with her allowance, and she could have been saving up to…do this. But the last detective agency we retained was very thorough, and they are quite certain she didn’t catch a train out…at least, on the day she left.”