Down Here b-15

by Andrew Vachss

  “That depends on you,” I said.

  “But you’re going ahead, doing a story on my brother, even if I don’t . . . cooperate, I guess is the word I was looking for.”

  “I . . . I can’t say that. Not for sure. My contract is for a book on the consequences of false—or, I should say, ‘wrongful’—imprisonment. I thought your brother would be the ideal way to present the material, but he’s not the only candidate. Let’s face it, if he was, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “If this kind of thing was an isolated incident, it makes a good news story, but it’s not a book,” I told her. “What I’m talking about is a phenomenon. An epidemic. There’s a lot of reasons for wanting your brother to be the centerpiece. I admit, it would be easier for me, with everything based right here in the city, but there are others who would fit the bill.”

  The waiter came back with the leather folder. I opened it. Found a ten-dollar bill, a single, and some change.

  “You’re a gambler, huh?” I said to him.

  “OTB’s right down the street,” he said, flashing a grin.

  I extracted the single, closed up the folder, and handed it back to him.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, nodding as if a deeply held belief had just been confirmed.

  “ Can I give you a lift anywhere?” I asked, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “I have my own car,” she said. “But I’d appreciate you walking me over to it. This neighborhood has changed a lot since I was a little girl.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She walked with a compact, efficient stride, matching my normal pace easily, despite the difference in our heights.

  “Did you and your brother eat at that same place when you were kids?”

  “No. It wasn’t really for family outings. I mean, it is, but I only went there with my father. Like for special treats, just the two of us. There was a Jahn’s close by, too. I always had a sundae I used to think they made just for me—pistachio ice cream with butterscotch topping.”

  “You ate that voluntarily?”

  “I’m a lot more adventurous than I look,” she said, with a little giggle. “I liked eating something the boys were afraid of.”

  “Just hearing about it scares me,” I admitted.

  “That’s mine,” she said, stopping midblock. She reached in her purse and took out a set of keys. A chirping sound identified her silver Audi convertible as clearly as if she had pointed her finger.

  “Very nice,” I said. “You don’t see many of those in the City.”

  “The TT?”

  “Convertibles. Costs a fortune to garage them. And if you don’t . . .”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But where I live, indoor parking’s part of the deal.”

  “I’ve heard about places like that.”

  “You don’t look as if you’re starving,” she said, fingering my new suede jacket.

  “I’m not,” I said. “But this coat’s not part of my wardrobe; it pretty much is my wardrobe.”

  “So I can’t interest you in some of our more . . . adventurous investing prospects?” she said, smiling.

  “Maybe after my book hits the charts.”

  She crossed the street, opened the door to her convertible.

  “I had a very nice time . . . J.P.,” she said, almost formally.

  “I did, too. I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I . . . I don’t want to . . . Look, Laura, I know you’ve got a lot to think about. About what I told you, I mean. Or people to talk it over with, or whatever. But can I ask you just one thing?”

  “What would that be?”

  “Will you call me, either way? I mean, if the answer’s ‘no,’ even then?”

  “If you want, sure. But couldn’t we just say, if you don’t hear back from me by—?”

  “I would much rather you called,” I told her. “And I promise you, if the answer’s ‘no,’ I won’t try to talk you out of it.”

  She climbed into her car, got behind the wheel, looked up at me. “I’ll call you,” she said. “Count on it.”

  “ All right, Schoolboy. You got a look, but did you set the hook?”

  “Tried like hell, Prof. But I can’t know unless I feel a tug on the line.”

  “Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “Your girl, she’s holding the case ace, right?”

  “Wolfe? If I’m right about Wychek already recanting, sure. But we can’t know if—”

  “And we got the boss hoss for a shyster, too, right?” the Prof pressed.

  “Davidson’s as good as there is,” I agreed.

  “But you still got my boy and the T-man working those computers like they trying to find the cure for cancer,” the little man said. “And you, you got no doubt, but you still out and about.”

  “Am I missing something here?” I said.

  “Not you, bro. It’s me that don’t see.”

  “Why I’m still working?”

  “Don’t play dumb, son. Every one of us know what you got in this. And when it looked dicey, dealing us in, that was fine. But now . . . ?”

  “What, Prof?”

  “Tell me there’s some green in the scene,” the little man pleaded. “Tell me you a man with a plan. A scheme beats a dream, every time.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “Don’t have to be no sure score, honeyboy. But there’s a longshot that we got money on somewhere in all this, true as blue?”

  “True as blue,” I promised.

  “ He wants to meet you, again.” Pepper’s voice, over my cellular.

  “Did he say why?”

  “Another file, is all he said.”

  “Couldn’t he just leave it with—?”

  “I got the impression he couldn’t even copy it.”

  “Tell him—”

  “I did,” she cut me off. “Tomorrow night, Yonkers Raceway. In the outdoor grandstand at the top of the stretch. It’s a Thursday; he’ll find you easy enough, he said.”

  I moved the first two fingers of each hand across the tabletop, miming a trotting horse. Not a pacer, a trotter—Max knew the difference. Then I turned an imaginary steering wheel, spread my hands to ask a question I already knew the answer to.

  “ You know how I like it, honey,” Michelle insisted.

  “Word for word,” I acknowledged. Then I started again, from the beginning.

  Michelle made a moue of annoyance when I told her I didn’t recall whether Laura Reinhardt had worn any perfume, never mind what it might have smelled like. But mostly she stayed patient, her long red fingernails resting on the tablecloth.

  “Maybe it’s just her . . . habit,” Michelle said, when I was finished. “There’s no way to tell unless we could talk to someone else she met for the first time.”

  “What habit?”

  “Playing.”

  “Just what she said about flirting?”

  “No, stupid. Talking about her . . . When a woman mentions a body part, she either wants reassurance about it, or she wants you to pay attention to it.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about asking. That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

  “She didn’t ask me—”

  “She didn’t ask you anything, sweetheart. She told you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

  “I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

  “But you couldn’t see what she was talking about, right?”

  “Not with her sitting—”

  “Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something bothers a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised more young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re sup
posed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There is no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t seen it. And you can’t say you like big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

  “So what you said about habit . . . ?”

  “Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

  “She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

  “Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than not that, I mean.”

  “Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That she can’t tell, either.”

  “Huh?”

  “Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl was interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you, being you, don’t do anything.

  “Now she’s confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

  “I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

  “‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

  I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

  “What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

  “And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

  “ You got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

  “Me?”

  “Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

  “Read it to me.”

  “It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

  “Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

  “Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our conversation, and I would like to have another. And to hear more about your project. Call me.’”

  “Was it signed?”

  “Yes. Just the letter ‘L.’”

  “Okay, can we just—?”

  “Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you what else, remember? Okay, first of all, after the word ‘torta,’ there’s the Internet symbol for a smile.”

  “Like one of those happy-face things?”

  “No. It’s just keystrokes, like from a regular typewriter. You take a—”

  “Never mind, kid. Sorry to have interrupted you. What else?”

  “After she says ‘for sure,’ there’s an exclamation point. And where she says she enjoyed your . . . conversation, there are three periods between the two words, like a pause.”

  “Like you just did?”

  “Egg-zact-lee!” he said. Dealing with my slow learning curve, the kid had learned to take his happiness where he found it . . . just like his mother. “The only other thing is, the letter ‘L’ that she signed it with? That was in lowercase, with no period after it.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “Well, it could . . .” he said, doubtfully. “But there’s no way to tell. Some people use that lowercase ‘l’ to stand for ‘love,’ some people use a lowercase initial to be modest, or even to be . . . submissive, I think. But with e-mail, you can never really tell, because people write it and send it off so fast, they never check what they type. So sometimes you think something means something, and all it means it that whoever wrote the e-mail was sloppy.”

  “Not this one,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Whatever she is, she’s not sloppy.”

  “Oh. Well, you want to answer it?”

  “Couldn’t I just call her? That way, she’d know I got her message.”

  “You could, sure. But the message just came in, and it’s almost midnight.”

  “I see what you mean. Anyway, I’m not supposed to have her home phone number—it’s not listed.”

  “The e-mail came from her home account,” Terry said. “So we have that now, too.”

  “What good does that do us?”

  “I don’t know, not for sure. But the Dragon Lady says she might be able to tell us some things from the headers and the IP number—”

  “Terry . . .”

  “Sorry! I just got . . . Anyway, sure, you can answer her. But if you do it now, she’ll know you’re awake, and she might want to IM. You can’t do that from your computer—the one we left there—not without me there. She’d know pretty quick you weren’t used to doing it.”

  “Doing it? I don’t even know what it is.”

  “See?”

  “Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, T. Would she have any way of knowing when her mail was received?”

  “Not unless you have the same . . . Ah, never mind, the short answer is no.”

  “Okay, let me think for a second. I have to go meet someone tomorrow night, so it can’t be then. For her, I mean. How about this? We send her a message around three in the morning . . . like I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the computer and found her e-mail.”

  “That’s easy. All I have to do is queue it to . . . Never mind,” the kid said, cutting himself off again. His learning curve was a lot flatter than mine.

  “All right, how about this, then: ‘Me, too. All counts, except the gym. I’m meeting a source tonight, but I’ll call you at work, okay?’”

  “That’s cool,” Terry said. “You’ve got the e-mail rhythm down just right.”

  “Beginner’s luck.”

  “How do you want to sign it?”

  “Uh, how about ‘J.P.’?”

  “Caps, with periods—like initials?”

  “Perfect. Thanks, T.”

  “Hey, this is fun. And it’ll give Clarence another excuse to talk to the Dragon Lady, too.”

  It was just going on eleven the next morning when I dialed her number.

  “Hi!” she said, when they put me through. “Boy, you keep late hours.”

  “More like erratic ones,” I told her, setting the stage.

  “I was planning to call you if I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “I realized, as soon as I sent the e-mail, that you might not check it for days. Some people don’t.”

  “That’s me,” I admitted. “Only it’s weeks, not days. I don’t get a lot of e-mail at that address; mostly, it just comes to work.”

  “I’m surprised, with that sexy picture of you on the site,” she said, teasing.

  “Don’t remind me,” I groaned. “That was the publisher’s idea. They said there has to be a photo on the book jacket, anyway, so it would be better if . . .”

  “I think it’s cute,” she said.

  “You and my mother,” I said. “That’s about it.”

  “Mothers are like that, aren’t they?”

  “I guess they all are,” I said, thinking that was the biggest lie that had ever come out of my lifelong liar�
��s mouth.

  “‘Meeting a source.’ That sounds so mysterious. But I guess, when you think about it, that’s what I am, too, right? A source.”

  “I hope not.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, softly.

  “It’s . . . kind of complicated,” I said. “I’d rather tell you in person.”

  “All right. Not tonight, I know. Tomorrow?”

  “Just name the—”

  “Can you pick me up after work? I know the traffic is hellish at that hour, but it would be a real treat not to have to ride that miserable subway. Especially this time of the year. Double-especially on a Friday night.”

  “No problem. Is there a place to park around there?”

  “You won’t need one. Just be out front—you have the address, yes?—at seven.”

  “Oh. Sure. I thought you meant we’d eat someplace close to where you worked, and then I’d drive you home.”

  “Would you prefer that?”

  “To what?”

  “To what I have in mind.”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Journalist’s instincts,” I told her.

  Sands hadn’t mentioned a specific time to Pepper, and Max wanted to get there early enough to plot out the first race, anyway. I scored a prime parking spot around back, right near the entrance closest to the grandstands.

  We bought a program and found seats about midway up and over to the left side, facing forward. The grandstand was more than three-quarters empty. Over an hour to post time—all the tote board showed was the morning line.

  I started working on the program, Max watching avidly. I’d taught him to handicap years ago, and he understood all the arcane symbols I used to make notes. But what he was really checking was to see if my scientific method squared with his mystical one. Between gin rummy and casino over the past twenty years, Max was into me for a good quarter-mil. He wasn’t any better at picking horses, but his faith was too pure for him to be deterred by mere experience.

  There was nothing I liked in the first. A sorry collection of pacers going for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse. You could claim any of them for four grand, and the only sure thing was that there wouldn’t be any takers.

  But there was one that drew my eye in the second—a shipper from the Midwest that looked good on paper. I noticed she was a front-runner, with a nice clean stride. No breaks on her program, unusual for a trotter. She always seemed to tie up a bit in the last quarter and get shuffled back, unless the pace was leisurely enough for her to hold on at the end. She was coming out of Sportsman’s Park—a five-eighths-mile track, favoring closers—but Yonkers is a quarter-mile, with a very short run to home.