He thought about the choices for a minute, then asked, “Would my family be able to live longer as well, or would it just be me?”
Kashen seemed puzzled at first. “Would that really make a difference?” Then, “I can see that with you it would. You’re an interesting man, Frank.” He pressed something on the square table beside the couch, and a moving hologram came to life above a well in the table. Four figures moved about just above the table, playing badminton—the mayor, his beautiful, younger wife, and a teenaged boy and girl, presumably the mayor’s son and daughter. After watching the hologram for some time, Carlucci realized that it was no more than about fifteen seconds of movement, repeated over and over.
“My family,” the mayor said. He turned back to Carlucci. “I understand your older daughter has Gould’s Syndrome.”
Carlucci nodded, wondering if the man was deliberately trying to cause him pain. “Yes, she does.”
“It must be terribly hard on you, knowing you’ll probably outlive your own daughter.”
“Harder for her,” Carlucci said, a sharp edge to his voice. What the fuck was it with this man?
Kashen nodded. “Yes, I imagine so.” He pressed the table again and the hologram snapped off. He looked at Carlucci. “One of my own family members is already dead,” he said. “My nephew.”
All right, Carlucci thought. Here it is, finally.
“We’ve been coming down hard on you,” the mayor said. “On you and LaPlace and Hong.” He paused, nodding to himself, stretching his arms out along the back of the couch. “I want to apologize. It’s been unfair. As I said earlier, you’re a good cop, and I know you’ve been doing your best.” He uncrossed his legs, recrossed them. “I reacted the way I did because William was my nephew. He was family. The way you feel about your family, I’m sure you understand.”
Carlucci wanted to shake his head. He didn’t think there was much similarity between the two families. But he sat motionless, listening.
“The pressure’s coming off,” the mayor said. “You’ll be able to do your job just as you would with any other case. You won’t have Captain McCuller or Chief Vaughn or me coming down on you anymore. We won’t be demanding you do anything you wouldn’t normally do.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “No more crazy overtime, no more extraordinary measures or expenses. We’ll even take most of the slugs off, no sense wasting them. Treat this just as you would any other case.”
There was a long pause, but Carlucci didn’t know what to say. He felt certain Kashen wasn’t quite finished yet. Carlucci continued to sit and wait. He wasn’t going to ask anything, he wasn’t going to make it any easier for the bastard.
“Okay, look,” Kashen said. “The truth is, my nephew was something of a scumbag, wasn’t he? You’re on the case, you’ve been looking into his history, you know what he was involved with. I’m not going to pretend I just recently discovered what the son of a bitch was up to. I’ve known. He’d been in one illegal or immoral scam after another, and he was probably chest-deep in one more, and that’s what got him killed. He probably had it coming. He was a scumbag. A rich one, but a scumbag nevertheless, and probably got killed by other scumbags.” He paused, glancing away for a moment before looking back at Carlucci. “What I’m getting at, is, you don’t need to go out of your way to solve this damn thing. It’s just not worth it.”
Finally, finally, Carlucci thought. “You’re not asking me to bury the case, are you?”
The mayor stared directly at Carlucci, his gaze steady and hard. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Bullshit. That’s exactly what he was asking. Carlucci didn’t say anything.
“Just don’t kill yourself over it.” Kashen waved his hand again, the same gesture. “Like the session you’ve got scheduled with the slug. Nobody likes them, nobody likes to go through those damn interviews.” He shook his head, grimacing. “Just cancel. Don’t put yourself through it.”
Yes indeed, Carlucci thought. He knew just what the mayor wanted. “Too many people know about the session,” he said. “This is the second time I’ve postponed it. If I cancel now, right after I’ve had this meeting with you, it’s going to look bad. Like you are asking me to bury the case.”
The mayor seemed to think about that, and he nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Frank. Don’t cancel.” He paused. “It’s a private session, isn’t it? No one else present, no one else listening, no recordings?”
“Yes. They almost always are. The slugs prefer it that way.”
“Then no one would know if you just went through the motions, showed up, asked the slug a few innocuous questions, then got the hell out.”
“That’s right. No one would know. Just me and the slug.”
Kashen nodded, smiling slightly. “Well. You do what you think is best, Frank. I trust you.”
“What about LaPlace and Hong?”
“Tell them just what I’ve told you. Take the pressure off.”
Yeah, right, and dump on a different kind, a worse kind. “Is that all?” Carlucci asked. He wanted to get out of this man’s house.
The mayor nodded and stood. Carlucci pushed himself up from the couch and followed him back through the main room, across the water, and into the glassed entry. Kashen opened the front door, let Carlucci out, then came out onto the porch with him. The limo was waiting in the drive, the driver standing beside the front door.
“Thanks for coming out to see me, Frank.” The mayor put out his hand, and the two men shook. “I feel good about this meeting. I’m confident we understand one another.”
Carlucci nodded. More than you think “Yes,” he said.
Carlucci started down the walk, when Kashen stopped him. “You never answered my question, Frank.”
Carlucci turned back to him. There was something here he didn’t understand. Almost like some kind of offer. But what? “You never answered mine,” he replied.
“About your family? Whichever you would prefer. With or without.”
“Then it’s not really a choice, is it?”
The mayor smiled and shook his head. “You’re right, Frank. It’s not.” A brief pause, then, “Good night, Frank.”
Carlucci turned away from the mayor and continued down the stone walk toward the limo.
It was nearly midnight by the time they met at Hong’s family flat in Chinatown. Carlucci arrived first, LaPlace less than five minutes later. All of Hong’s family—wife, father, three kids, and his two widowed sisters—were still awake, talking and playing cards and drinking tea in the enormous kitchen. Kim, Joseph’s wife, offered to cook for them, but they declined, and after a few minutes of obligatory visiting, Carlucci, Hong, and LaPlace left.
They walked two blocks through the heart of the Chinatown night, nearly as bright and colorful and loud as the Tenderloin after dark. The smells of cooking food and incense, cigarette smoke and spiced perfume filled the air as they passed restaurants and stores, groceries and herb shops, gambling clubs and bars. They entered Madame Chow’s Mahjongg Parlor and climbed four flights of stairs in the back to a small room with a single window, a table and four chairs, and an overhead light. Carlucci could barely get his breath. An ancient uncle of Hong’s served them tea, then left them in private. Carlucci, Hong, and LaPlace sat at the table, just a few feet from the window, which let in the flashing and blinking colors of the street.
“Bet we’re not going to like this,” LaPlace said, breaking the silence. Hong lit a cigarette and stared at Carlucci, but didn’t say anything.
“You’d win that bet,” Carlucci finally said. He stared out the window, watching the colors shift and flicker, reflecting off glass and metal across the way. He thought about opening the window, letting in fresh air, but decided against it. He looked back at Hong and LaPlace.
“McCuller came by my house this morning with a message. A car would show up to take me to the mayor’s house for a meeting. It did, and I went, and we had the meeting. Just me and the mayor and his milli
on-dollar view.”
“Fuck,” LaPlace said. “More pressure to solve his nephew’s case. Just what we need.”
Hong shook his head slowly, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “No,” he said, speaking through the smoke. “It’s worse than that, isn’t it? Something different.”
Carlucci nodded. “Yes, it’s worse than that.” He paused, glancing from one to the other. “He wants us to bury it.”
“What the fuck?” LaPlace took off his glasses as if he could hear better without them, and stared at Carlucci. “He said what?”
“Not directly. He’s not about to stick his ass out like that. But he made it clear. He apologized for all the pressure that’s come down from him and McCuller and Vaughn, said it would stop, that he knew we were all good cops doing our best, that he got carried away because it was his nephew, but he knows his nephew was a scumbag who probably just got what he deserved.”
“And he wants us to bury it?” LaPlace asked.
“He said we should treat it like any other case. No extra measures, no extra time, no more spending a fortune on expensive lab work, all that. He said we shouldn’t kill ourselves over it.”
“Oh, terrific,” LaPlace said. “That’s subtle.”
“Yes. He even told me to cancel my session with the slug.”
“That would be a little obvious, wouldn’t it?” Hong said.
“I told him that. He agreed, suggested I go through the motions, ask a couple of pointless questions and burn out. Private session, no one would know.”
No one spoke for a minute or two. Hong finished his cigarette and lit another.
“So if we catch the guy who whacked his nephew,” LaPlace finally said, “it causes big problems for the mayor.”
“Apparently,” Carlucci agreed.
“So why the fuck did he come down so hard on us to solve the damn thing in the first place? Two weeks with this shit.”
“He didn’t know,” Hong said.
“What?”
“That’s my guess, too,” Carlucci said. “The mayor didn’t know that solving his nephew’s murder could dump him in the shit. He was doing the political thing, for PR, his family and all that.”
“But somebody’s clued him in,” LaPlace said, nodding. “So what the fuck is going on, and what the fuck are we going to do about it?”
They were all silent again for a while, drinking their tea and thinking. None of them had any immediate answers, and it wasn’t going to be easy to come up with the right ones.
“So what the fuck has that goddamn mayor got into?” LaPlace said. Then he shook his head. “We’re probably better off not knowing. But what happens if we tank this case, after all the screaming about it from the mayor himself, all over the papers and the tube? Demotions? Or we just look like fucking morons?”
Carlucci shook his head. “Probably the mayor will make some kind of statement; he’s checked into it, we’ve done a superb job on an impossible case, praise for the department, praise for us, probably citations, he’s disappointed but understanding. We’d be fine.”
“All right. More important, what happens we catch the guy, and the mayor takes it in the balls because of it? They can’t fire us for doing our jobs—so what happens, somebody cuts off our legs or kills us?”
Carlucci didn’t answer. What the hell could he say? He didn’t know what would happen. But he was damn sure the mayor wouldn’t go down without taking as many people with him as he could, one way or another.
Hong started to light another cigarette—though his last one was only half gone—then stopped, looked at Carlucci. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Some other thing happening in the middle of all this that Pete and I don’t know about. Something you know.”
Carlucci nodded. They had a right to know. Maybe not what it was, but at least that it was out there waiting to blow up in their faces.
“There’s another case,” Carlucci said. “Someone killed about a week before the mayor’s nephew. The case got buried but good. There didn’t seem to be any connection to the nephew, but now it looks like there is.”
LaPlace put his glasses back on and looked at Carlucci. “You buried a case, Frank?”
“No. Someone else did. It doesn’t matter who, someone who had no choice. I only found out about it by accident.”
“And you’ve been poking at it,” Hong said.
Carlucci nodded. “This whole thing is a lot messier than it looks. I don’t know who’s involved, or why all this shit is happening, but it’s turning into a fucking nightmare.” He paused, then said, “One other joker in this deck. Tremaine’s been digging around in all this. I have no idea why. Frankly, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.”
Again there was a fairly long silence, broken only by the clinking of tea cups on saucers and the muted sounds from the street outside.
“I’ve never tanked a case before,” LaPlace said.
Hong said nothing, just stared at the window, smoking.
“I know,” Carlucci said. “Probably the smartest thing for us to do is let the nephew’s case slide, go through the motions, don’t follow up shit, and let the case die from lack of oxygen. It wouldn’t really be burying it.”
“And what about that other case, the one you’re poking at?” Hong asked.
“I’d have to let that go, too. They’re too damn connected. Anything I did might blow open the nephew’s case.”
“Why are you poking at this other case?”
“Personal reasons.”
“But you would drop it?”
“Yes.” It was one thing to risk his own career, another thing to risk theirs as well unless they were with him on it.
“Fuck.” LaPlace got up from the table and went to the window; the colored lights flickered across his face.
“If we don’t tank the case,” Hong began, “we’d need to make it look like we were. Nothing obvious, nothing anyone else would notice, but something for the mayor to see. He wouldn’t want us to be obvious. Maybe back off a little, make a statement or two about the case bogging down, something like that. Frank has his session with the slug, says nothing came out of it, even if the slug gives him gold.” He put out his cigarette, breathing deeply. “We need to look like we’re still working on the case, so we do it for real, and we keep everything we come up with to ourselves.”
LaPlace remained at the window, but now he was looking at Hong, listening to his partner. “And what about Frank’s other case?” he said.
Hong turned to Carlucci. “You’d have to bring us in on that one, too, Frank. If they’re connected, it’s got to be both, or none.”
Carlucci looked back and forth between the two men. He hadn’t been sure which way they would go on this, and he wasn’t completely sure he was happy with the way it appeared to be headed. But it made him feel good, somehow; these two men, no matter how this all worked out, pumped him with something like hope.
“You’re saying you’re willing to jack the mayor on this and go after the case? Both cases?”
Hong turned to look at LaPlace, who shrugged. “We’re not stupid, Frank. If it gets too scorched, we can always back off and pull out, can’t we? None of us wants to get killed.”
“Maybe,” Carlucci said. “That’s what I keep telling myself with this other case. But we can make mistakes.”
No one spoke for a while. There was a strange tension in the air, a feeling they were on the edge. If they went ahead with the two cases, they would remain on the edge, an edge that would get narrower, and sharper.
“Ruben,” LaPlace said, breaking the silence. “He’s the one who buried this other case, isn’t he? He’s looked like shit for almost a month.”
Carlucci didn’t answer. He didn’t really need to.
“I don’t want to tank anything,” Hong said.
LaPlace breathed in deeply once, then slowly let it out and nodded. “I’m with Joseph.”
Carlucci sat thinking. He didn’t want to back away from any of
this either, but he was afraid of what they were letting themselves in for. They still didn’t know what was at stake here, so it was hard to guess how far the mayor and whoever else would be willing to go.
“All right,” Carlucci said. “I’ll bring you in on this other case. But. I’ll tell you all about it, I’ll let you know everything I find out, and I’ll ask for your advice, your judgment. But I’ve got to keep digging into it on my own. Just me. With the mayor’s nephew, all three of us are supposed to be working on it. This other case is supposed to be buried. Nobody should be looking into it. If all three of us start screwing around with it, somebody’s going to notice something. I’ve got to stay solo on it.”
Hong and LaPlace looked at each other, then both briefly nodded and turned back to Carlucci. “We’re in,” Hong said. He took out one more cigarette and lit it. “So tell us about this other murder.”
“All right.” Carlucci ran his hand through his hair. “Just some guy,” he began, recalling Ruben Santos’s words. “Some part-time rocker, petty thief, ex-junkie. His name was Chick Roberts.”
17
MIXER’S ARM WAS on fire. He twisted his body, tried opening his eyes, but they seemed welded shut. Red and orange flares erupted behind his eyes—the flames consuming his arm? Mixer opened his mouth, tried to cry out, but no sound emerged.
Then he felt something cool and wet on his forehead, cool fingers brushing at his face, something pressed against his neck. A patch? Finally, a whisper in his ear.
“Ssssshhhh, ssssshhhhh. You’re fine, Minor Danzig, you’re just fine. Now sleep.”
Mixer thought he could feel the sleep pulsing into him, into his neck, and he had no choice, and it was fine with him; he had no objections at all…
The next time he woke, his arm was still on fire, but it wasn’t so bad. There was other pain, though, in his face, his back, a tremendous pounding in his head. He still couldn’t open his eyes. His mouth, too, was stuck closed, but he managed to pry his lips apart. A short, harsh, coughing sound, scratching at his throat. He tried swallowing, tried again, finally got it. Then, “Is…is anyone th-th—?” Another cough.
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