Lily put on her sweater, and shifted her bag onto her shoulder, took my hand, and said. “You should call Billy before we go.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason you left him safe with Hank on Staten Island,” Lily said. “You don’t need me to spell it out. Make sure he’s safe.”
“What did you mean before when you said I’d have to take Billy back?”
“I didn’t mean anything. I meant at some point. Let’s go, Artie.”
I meant at some point. I thought about the maroon car and Stan Shank’s ugly voice on the phone warning me to get Billy out of Brooklyn. Was that what Lily meant? Did she know something? She was half out the door, busy with her keys and then the elevator button.
She kissed me. “It doesn’t matter anymore if you’re married to Maxine, or anything, even if we can only be friends, so long as we can see each other, as long as we can talk.”
“Yes,” I said and the elevator doors opened and we went out into the street together.
Lily had a new black Honda, and we sat in it, not talking.
“You have a car now?”
“Go on, torture me about my lack of commitment to the environment. It’s OK. I’m getting old, I need a car. It’s just easier when Beth’s here, I can take her places. The truth is I like having it,” she said, her eyes on the road, turning left on Broadway, driving faster. Lily was a lousy driver.
“Call Billy,” she said, wobbling between a couple of trucks and a taxi. “You’ll feel better if you know he’s safe.”
“Watch the cab,” I said. “Did Lippert say something about Billy to you?”
“Call.”
I got out my cell and dialed Billy, and he answered right away. He told me he hadn’t heard from his parents. He said he was fine. He was sure everything was OK. I asked if Hank wanted to talk to me.
“He’s cooking steaks,” Billy said. “He’s wearing a big apron and a silly hat, and he’s outside grilling steaks as big as my head,” he added. “I’m watching the game, Artie, and we’re all hanging out. The weather isn’t so great. I’m really OK with hanging out here until you come. We can fish later, right? Or tomorrow, we have time, right?”
“You like her, Hank’s daughter, Katie?”
“Artie! Stop asking me. It’s none of your business. Yeah,” he said. “I kind of like her. Mr Provone said we could go to a movie or something.”
“Alone?”
“He said he’d drive us if we wanted, I mean later.”
“Do you want to?”
“Maybe,” Billy said. “Sure. I don’t know. When are you coming back?”
“Soon as I can. So about Katie.”
“Don’t even go there,” he said, laughing. “I don’t need dating advice, for God sake, I’m just going to a movie.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said. “Can I talk to Hank?”
“I think he’s kind of busy, I can see him outside running around like crazy because one of his steaks just caught fire.”
“So what movie are you going to see?”
“War of the Worlds probably,” Billy said. “It sounds pretty cool.”
I had seen it with Maxine the week before, and I said, “I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” but he had already hung up.
“Make a left,” I said to Lily just as my phone rang, and it was Sonny Lippert. He sounded shaky. I said I was five minutes away from the address he had given me. It was in Chinatown. A tip-off, he said. Anonymous.
“Bad?” I said. “The Jersey thing?”
“Where’ve you been, man?”
“I was on my way.”
“You didn’t hear me say it was urgent.”
“So it’s about the Jane Doe from Jersey?”
“Something else,” said Sonny. “We’re just getting ready to go in.”
I heard something in his voice that made me say, “You have a bad feeling?”
“Yeah,” he said.
18
Rotting vegetables and fruit and other garbage overflowed the garbage cans onto the streets on the fringes of Chinatown, where we found Sonny Lippert outside a ramshackle warehouse.
Lily parked half in half out of a tight space on the narrow street. Most of the street was a building site – the buildings would be fancy condos soon – but a few produce warehouses remained, the kind where wholesalers delivered produce the local vendors picked up at dawn to sell from their stalls. I used to buy lichees in season down here.
“Hi,” Lippert said to Lily, which was pretty friendly for him. “Thanks for passing the message.”
“Hi, Sonny,” she said.
I said, to him, “What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure so you called me at Lily Hanes’? You’re not sure and you wanted me to bring Billy with me? You were afraid for me to leave him alone? I thought you were in Jersey on the Jane Doe.”
“I was in Brooklyn,” he said. “Turns out the little girl, the Jane Doe, was only visiting in Jersey when the creeps killed her. Her own parents live over by Sheepshead Bay. Same as May Luca. Same area.”
I looked at the warehouse. “You think this is related?”
“I don’t think this is related,” said Lippert. “But anyone calls me with a tip, I pay attention. This time they gave me three fucking locations. Nothing else. First two, we got nothing, nada, a hoax. This is the last. I got a feeling. But it was a Russian voice, so I called you, man.”
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
Sonny Lippert told a cop in uniform to open the warehouse door and we went in. It was cold and dank.
In the gloomy interior a few people – the cop in uniform, a detective, a couple of people who worked the warehouse – were huddled together in the frigid air for warmth or comfort, like penguins in their Antarctic breeding ground. I didn’t see any news people. I knew Lippert must have put a lid on the story. He was silent, which was not a good sign. When things were really bad, he kept his mouth shut.
Lily’s hand in mine, we followed Lippert past empty wooden crates, which were stacked along the walls. Leafy greens stuck out through the slats. There was another door in the far wall.
In those few seconds, with Lily, and Lippert, and the others, knowing that something bad was the other side of the door, when the air seemed thick, almost solid with horror to come, I slipped on some rotten vegetables on the cement floor, fell on my knees, fumbled for balance in the dark, got up, and knew I was going to quit. I didn’t want to be doing this for the rest of my life.
I didn’t want to be going into warehouses and apartments where dead people waited. Didn’t want to look at children with their limbs cut off. Didn’t want to get beat up by creeps or cut deals with them to solve a case. Didn’t even want to sit at a desk working paper trails when I knew the Russian money guys would always get off.
I’d had it. The thing I had loved best about being a cop, the camaraderie, the feeling part of something, was gone, and the rest was making me feel lousy.
The kind of adrenalin that used to wire me up at times like this, the sense that maybe I was doing something useful, was gone. I was flat. As if she sensed what I felt, Lily gripped my hand tighter.
Behind the second door was a room that was cold as hell and smelled sour and metallic, the way air conditioning sometimes does in a room where the ventilation’s bad or something’s wrong with the chemicals. I was creeped out by the place, the bad smell of rotten vegetables and the lousy air. What bothered me most, though, was I didn’t feel much; I couldn’t care much anymore.
“Artie, man?”
I headed towards Lippert whose face was colorless like a man in a black and white movie. There was hardly any light.
“I’m coming,” I said.
In the corner of the second, smaller room, one of the uniformed cops pulled a dirty cloth off a large high rectangular structure. It was a restaurant refrigerator, stainless steel, with glass doors.
The
motor whirred steadily, then coughed and turned over, and then began to whir again. No one said anything. It was quiet. Lily leaned closer to me.
Somewhere in the room food must have been stored because I could smell cucumbers. Squinting, I moved forward and peered through the dark and wondered why someone didn’t turn on the lights, but maybe there was only the single busted bulb that hung from a string.
The cop turned on his flashlight and shone it at the refrigerator. Instinctively I tried to push Lily behind me. She stayed next to me. I forced myself to look in the direction of the beam from the flashlight.
Through the glass of the refrigerator doors you could see the shapes, four in a row. Lily saw, too; I felt her shudder. The cop moved the flashlight closer. I saw what was inside better. Couldn’t make out exactly how old the babies were. A few weeks. Tiny. Dead. I couldn’t look away; all I felt was Lily’s hand and a smell of rotted cucumbers in my nose.
In the dark cold room we listened to the clunk of the motor on the fridge. No one said anything. Everything suspended, except my own breathing; all I could hear was my own breathing. I listened to it.
“Do it,” Lippert said.
The guy in uniform broke the padlock on the fridge door with bolt cutters. The detective snapped on latex gloves. The sound startled me. He reached in the refrigerator and pulled out one of the bodies, then turned around. He was a huge mountain of a guy. His face was a faint green color. He cradled the baby in his arms like it was alive.
The cop seemed paralyzed. Lippert told him to take the other babies out. Do it. The guy just stood there holding the tiny baby. “Not real,” I thought I heard him say.
Afterwards, in the street, everything seemed too bright. Lily, who had been holding my hand, let go of it, her knees buckled, she sat down hard on the curb. Feet in the gutter, she put her head down on her knees.
People – more cops, forensics – milled around. Lippert was on his phone trying to fend off news crews, but one from Fox was already on the street. Sonny, furious, seemed as sane as he had been in the twenty years I’d known him.
“Fucking fakes,” said Sonny.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “What fakes?”
“The babies. In the icebox.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Then fucking pay attention,” said Sonny. “They’re dolls, man. Dolls. Baby dolls. That little girls play with.”
Still confused, I thought about the party at the toy store the night before and the nursery with the fleshy toy baby dolls.
“Where from?”
“Where from? From a store, from a factory, from China, from some fucking shithole of a city in China, Artie, where everything comes from these days. You want to see one up close? You want to hold it? I can arrange that.”
“How come you’re getting at me on this, Sonny?”
“I’m sorry. I am, man, I’m sorry. I just take it out on you, because, like who the fuck else except family can you take things out on?”
He motioned to the big cop who brought the doll over and held it out for me the way you would a newborn. Except it was fake.
The doll’s flesh felt almost real, like it did at the toy store, except now it felt sticky. Maybe it was the warm humid afternoon, or my own sweat; I was sweating and the sweat got on the baby and made it feel real. Its blanket was pink and so was the little cap on its head.
“Who does this kind of thing, Sonny?”
“There was a similar case in Germany, except over there it was real babies which is what freaks me out, man. I just don’t want this on the front page of the Post. Four newborns, toy babies, stuffed in a freezer, I don’t get it, I don’t even begin to get it, man, I don’t.”
“The little girl in Jersey, you showed me a picture of her doll that had its foot cut off. What kind of doll?”
“Fuck. You’re right, man,” said Sonny. “Oh shit.”
“Take it.” I gave the doll to a cop in uniform. “Just take it.”
Lily was still on the curb, head on her knees. I sat next to her.
“Can you make it home?”
“Yes,” said Lily. “I’ll be at home if you need me.”
“Yes,” I said, and she kissed my cheek and, Sonny Lippert watching, walked to the street and got into her car.
“You got any smokes, man?” said Sonny. “I can’t get rid of the stink.”
“What stink?”
“Everything.”
“Listen, Sonny, I’ll help you out on this, I’ll do what you need, but I have to go get Billy. I left him over on Staten Island.”
“So that’s good,” said Sonny. “I mean he’ll be around Hank’s kids, people his age. He’ll like that, right? I mean he was with you all morning, right?”
“I thought you wanted me to bring him in so you could talk to him about May Luca.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, man. Who’d fucking want a kid to see all this?” He pointed at the warehouse. “You gotta help me clear up this doll thing, Artie, man, I mean who called this in sounded Russian. I got to get at this before the copycats start in. I appreciate you helping me out.”
“What about Rhonda’s cousin on Staten Island?” I said.
“Fuck it,” he said. “This is a lot bigger.”
“You willing to spend some money?”
“What for?”
“So I can get some information for you?”
“How much is someone going to cost me?”
“How much you got?”
“For this thing?” Sonny waved his hand towards the warehouse. “Whatever. I’ll get the department to stump up. You pay what you have to.”
“Only money?”
“Anything,” said Sonny. “Just do any fucking thing you need to. I don’t want to open another door and find out there’s real babies in the icebox, you understand me, man? You know? This is the kind of thing copycat junkies love, they love being the first, they want this, creeps who pick through the news looking for it. Go see your guy, pay the slimebag. Pay him whatever. What’s his name?”
“You want to know?”
“Yeah, share with me.”
“Samson Britz.”
“Jesus.”
“You know him?”
“Kind of guy after you do business with you want to take a bath. I met him once. He’s a shitbag, but I don’t care.”
19
Missing. Has anyone seen this man, this woman, this young girl, missing, it hit you in the stomach, watching the news from London. Missing. Missing. Missing, young woman, man, went to work, last heard from on a cell phone, called at 8.39, to say I’m on my way, has two cell phones, neither one answering, took the bus, did he, or the Tube? The news from London played across the channels, the networks, the local stations, in the newspapers.
It was surreal, seeing Rudy Giuliani in London on a TV in an electronics store in Chinatown as I ran home, and me trying not to feel Rudy somehow got lucky being in London when it happened. Must have been Rudy’s idea of a great trip abroad – relive his one great moment of redemption. But it was the missing posters, and leaflets and flyers, and the people clutching them that made me feel lousy.
It surprised me how many of them were foreigners – African, Russian, Pakistani; at a mosque in London an old man told a reporter how his granddaughter had gone to work at a bank and had not come back, and he tried to say how he had held her as a baby – his son held up her picture and she was a gorgeous girl – while he, the grandfather, wept.
After 9/11, New York had been plastered in pictures of the missing, on fences, on hospitals, on church walls; this wallpaper of the missing became part of the street scene. Months later it had remained, pictures tattered, wet from rain, pictures of people no one ever found.
It was the reason I didn’t want Billy seeing War of the Worlds at the movies. There were scenes in it of people running away from attacking aliens and holding up signs that read: Missing. Anyone seen this man, this woman, this child? Maxine had had to leave the the
ater during the scene. I had followed her out onto Thirteenth Street. “I can’t go back in,” she said.
The news from London was like the far edge of a tsunami: little wavelets of fear reached New York, and made us nervous.
Already I’d had a couple of calls from my own office, telling me to be on stand by, that I might have to go back to work; already they were putting out feelers for who could help and there were plans to put cops in the subway and armed guards back on the streets. All of us thinking about the poor bastards stuck in a tunnel in London who were blown apart, blown into pieces, smashed into dust. Missing.
I ran into my building, still reeling from what I’d seen in the Chinatown warehouse. It worried me plenty that the kid who was killed in Jersey lived in Brooklyn and might be connected to dolls and to the old May Luca case. In the hallway, I stumbled past a woman carrying an empty stroller into the elevator.
I stared at her.
She was new in the building, the kind of self-obsessed yuppie type that had been moving in lately, and I barely recognized her.
“Something wrong?” she said, a little bit aggressive.
“I’m sorry,” I introduced myself, and inquired about her baby to make conversation, but she just looked at me as if she was suspicious of the question, folded up the stroller and rode the elevator facing forward.
By the time I got upstairs and called Hank Provone, he told me that Billy had already gone to the movies.
Alone? I asked, and Hank told me to calm down, a couple of the older cousins were with them. Who? I asked. Two of them, he said, a girl and a boy. Responsible kids, Hank said. And Katie, his own girl. It would be fine.
“Hank?”
“Yeah, Artie.”
“Do me a favor. I mean another one.”
“Anything.”
“Go pick the kids up from the movies yourself, could you?”
Being Hank, he didn’t ask why, just said, “Sure, I will. Sure. Are you OK?”
In my loft, I put on a clean shirt because I had sweated through the one I was wearing. I looked around to see if anyone had been in the place. I folded the blankets Billy had used and put them away. I picked up a sweater he’d left on the couch. His duffel bag was on the floor of my bedroom. Instead of putting the sweater away, I unzipped the dark blue canvas bag and the rasp of the zipper seemed loud in my silent apartment.
Fresh Kills Page 17