Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  “How could I have guessed?” she said, smiling. At Max.

  “Want to go someplace with me?” I asked Loyal, later that night.

  “Someplace nice?”

  “Afterwards.”

  “Do I get to dress up?”

  “You’re always dressed up.”

  “Yeah?” she said, deep in her throat.

  “This isn’t so much fun,” she said later, doing it in baby talk to take the sting out.

  “I thought you loved acting.”

  “Well, I do. But this isn’t…I mean, all we’re doing is driving around.”

  “Why are we driving around?”

  “We’re tired of paying a fortune to rent in Manhattan, and co-op prices are just ridiculous. We heard this neighborhood has real value in it,” she said, in the bored tone a schoolgirl uses to tell you, yes, she did do her homework.

  “That’s good!”

  “It’s only good if someone asks us,” she said, pouting. “And who’s going to ask us anything if we just keep driving around?”

  “I was thinking a cop.”

  “A cop? You mean…Oh my God! Are we, what do you call it, casing someplace to rob? Is that what you really—?”

  “I don’t do things like that,” I said, my tone indicating that a criminal of my stature didn’t do manual labor. “We’re just…scouting, okay? You know what eminent domain is, little girl?”

  “Yes!” she said, suddenly interested. “I once had a…friend who was a lawyer. A real-estate lawyer, in fact. He told me all about how it works.”

  “Good. See all these houses?” I said, turning my head from side to side to indicate I was talking about the whole area. “They’ve gone up in price like a rocket, the past couple of years. Nobody knows where the top floor is. Everyone here thinks they’re sitting on a gold mine, okay?”

  “Okay….” she said, interested despite her pose.

  “What if the rumor got started that the city was going to cut a big swath right through this area, to sell to some private developer? The Supreme Court says they can do that now.”

  “The government never pays fair market value,” she said, firmly.

  “Right. And…?”

  “And people would want to sell before the word got out so that…Oh!”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the kind of thing you do?”

  “One of them.”

  “I hate these seat belts,” she said, crossing her legs and taking a deep breath. “They make me feel all…restrained, you know?”

  “I eyeballed the house,” I said. “Nice size, solid, set close to the sidewalk.”

  “Look like anyone was home?” the Prof asked.

  “Couple of lights on, behind curtains. And one out front, but that was more for decoration.”

  “My man got burglar bars?”

  “In that neighborhood? They’d probably run him out of town for messing up the decor.”

  “Might be going electronic.”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you see the yard?”

  “In front, there isn’t much of anything at all. I got some old City Planning maps of the neighborhood. Near as I could tell, if those houses have back yards, they’re postage stamps.”

  “He could still have a hound on the grounds.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve been thieving since way before you was born, Schoolboy.

  Any crib can be cracked. But that one’s in a bad neighborhood for B-and-E. If Charlie’s holed up there, it’s a mortal lock that he’s got the place wired.”

  “I’m not thinking about going in, Prof.”

  “Then what’s with all the—?”

  “I’m not thinking about going in,” I repeated. “But I have been thinking. If Charlie’s there, he’s been there for a long time. He might have a wife, kids, who knows? But, whatever he’s got set up, he’s got a big investment in it.”

  “How does that help us, mahn?” Clarence said.

  “Motherfucker’s not bringing his work home,” the Prof announced, holding a clenched fist out to me. I tapped his fist with mine, acknowledging that he’d nailed it.

  “I do not understand,” Clarence said, without a trace of impatience.

  “Charlie’s been at this forever,” I told him. “If he’s still at the same place, it means he went to a lot of trouble to keep one life separate from the other. Charlie never goes hands-on, remember. He probably leaves his house to go to work, just like everyone else in his neighborhood. Which means…?”

  “He has an office, somewhere else.”

  “Good!” the Prof said to his son.

  “And if that’s true, what?”

  “Then his home would be sacred to him, Burke.”

  “Yeah,” I said, slowly. “This is starting to look less like a muscle job every minute.”

  “If your man’s info is still good,” the Prof cautioned.

  The next morning, the sun came out of its corner swinging. It didn’t have a KO punch in its arsenal—not this time of year, not in New York—but it came on hard enough to drive the Hawk back against the ropes. My breakfast was a hot mug of some stuff that Mama gives me to microwave. It’s almost as thick as stew, and smells like medicine, but it unblocks your nasal passages like someone went in there with a rototiller.

  I checked the paper to see if there was anything new on the dead man, and came up empty. Some half-wit—or, maybe, bought-and-paid-for—columnist had a piece about how the Bush administration was finally winning the war on drugs. Seems all that money poured into Colombia was paying off. Or maybe God really is on his side.

  The writer had an orgasm over how the number of acres under coca cultivation was down 75 percent. That’s like dipping a yardstick into the Atlantic and reporting back that it’s three feet deep.

  There’s only one way to measure how “the war” on any contraband is going—street price. When the Taliban was running Afghanistan, they banned poppy farming. No more opium, on pain of death. Being such devout Muslims, they were strictly against the evils of heroin. Sure. Poppy production dropped like a safe off a building. Only thing was, the street price of H didn’t trampoline in response like you’d expect—it stayed as steady as a sociopath’s polygraph needles.

  You didn’t need a degree in higher mathematics to figure out what was going on. The Taliban banned poppy farming because they already had huge stocks on hand. Same way OPEC gets together and reduces oil production—to keep the barrel price high…and stable.

  Colombia doesn’t have one gang ruling the country, so there’s no price-fixing. Both the pseudo-liberation guerrillas and the right-wing death squads run on money, so they were all madly pumping product, widening the pipeline. How could I know that? Because the street price for coke—grams to kilos—was even lower than it had been years ago.

  The only war on drugs the sanctimonious swine are winning is the one to keep old folks on fixed incomes from filling their scrips in Canada or Mexico. And Ray Charles could see who was making out on that deal.

  Why was I even bothering with the damn newspaper? It was a chump play to keep looking for Beryl. I wished I could just walk away. That job Charlie Jones had brought me was turning out to be the worst kind, the kind where you end up spending money instead of making it. No choice, though: I had to pay whatever it cost to make sure Charlie hadn’t been the one who put the man in the camel’s-hair coat on the spot. Because that might mean the shooting team knew about me, too.

  The dead man wasn’t going to pay me to find the woman he knew as Peta Bellingham anymore. And even if she really had all the money showing on that CD, that didn’t necessarily add up to a dime for me.

  I don’t like looking for my money on the come, but that’s where I was stuck now.

  I sipped some more of Mama’s brew while I thought it through again. All that money didn’t mean anything by itself. Her father had been a rich man—maybe it was from an inheritance.

  But what would have made her disappea
r? If the dead man had been stalking her, there would have been other ways to deal with that problem. For a woman as rich as she was, anyway.

  I used to do a lot of that kind of work, about the same time I was looking for missing kids. I didn’t have much finesse back then.

  And even less self-control. But I learned.

  I got schooled good the time a soft-spoken man in an undertaker’s suit came to my office. I didn’t know him, but he had a message from a guy I’d done time with. A solid, stand-up guy who wasn’t ever coming home. The soft-spoken man told me this guy had a little sister. And the little sister had a husband.

  The husband turned out to be a big man, with a bad drinking habit and a worse temper. That made it easy.

  The celluloid crunch of his boozer’s nose brought both his hands up to cover his face. I hooked to his liver with the sap gloves, and he was on his knees in the alley, vomiting, bleeding, and crying at the same time. I leaned down quick, before he passed out, said, “Next time you beat on your wife, we’ll snap your fucking spine.”

  When the soft-spoken man came back with the other half of my money, he was shaking his head apologetically.

  “What?” I said.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  “We?”

  “The girl. Our…friend’s sister. She saw her husband in the hospital and she just went off. Started screaming.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s the problem.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Your…friend, there’s nothing anyone can do to him, okay? But your friend, he’s our friend, too, understand?”

  “No,” I said, lying.

  “Then let me spell it out for you,” the man said. “The sister, she knows more than she should. Instead of…appreciating what her brother wanted to do for her, she’s decided that her husband is this innocent victim. So she made a phone call.”

  “To the cops?”

  “To my boss. But her next call will be to the cops, unless things get made right.”

  “Which means…?”

  “An apology. And some money.”

  “So apologize. And pay her the money.”

  “It’s not her,” he said. “Him. He wants ten large to forget the whole thing.”

  “Why tell me all this?”

  “Because you didn’t do the job right.”

  “I did what I got paid to do.”

  “You got paid to fix it so he stops using the girl for a punching bag, not to bring heat down on my boss.”

  “It’s not me who’s doing that.”

  “Exactly,” the man said, soft-speaking the threat.

  I lit a cigarette. Watched the smoke drift toward the low ceiling. Pansy shifted position in her corner, the movement so slight it might have been the play of light on shadow. The soft-spoken man was trapped. But nowhere near as bad as I was.

  “She’s my only sister,” the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass said to me through the phone.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I told him. “But I didn’t pick the people you sent to me, you did. And it’s me they’re putting in a cross.”

  “I can talk to them,” he said.

  “You already did that,” I told him, guessing, but real sure of the guess. “It’s her you have to talk to.”

  “She missed her last two visits,” he said. “And she didn’t answer my letter, either.”

  “Call her.”

  “I did. She wouldn’t accept the charges. She never did that before.”

  “You understand what they asked me to do?”

  “I can figure it out,” he said.

  “I’m not doing it,” I told him. “But there’s plenty who would.”

  “What if…?”

  “If she went as far as she already did behind what happened, what do you think she does if something heavier goes down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So?”

  “I only wanted to help her,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

  I thought I had more time, but I was wrong. While I was visiting the prison, the soft-spoken man’s boss was making a phone call. To Wesley.

  Husband and wife went together. Two surgical kills the papers called “execution-style.” The apartment had been ransacked. That made it “drug-related.”

  I was sad about everything. But I learned from it.

  Just because I’m good at waiting doesn’t mean I like to do it. I’d been good at doing time, too.

  It took me another three full spins through the CD before I snapped that, for all the info this “financial planner” had put together on his target, he had nothing from her past. If he didn’t know her birth name, he didn’t know where she had grown up.

  I’d met Beryl when she was a runaway. Now, maybe, she had run back home.

  People with records learn not to keep records. I’ve got a memory so sharp and clear that, sometimes, I have to wall off its intrusions before they finish the job the freaks started when I was a little kid.

  Every one of us feels those spidery fingers sometimes. There’s no magic pill. Therapy works for some of us. Some self-medicate: everything from opiates to S&M. Some of us go hunting.

  I knew I could find Beryl’s house again. I probably couldn’t give directions, but, soon as I started driving, the sense impressions would flood my screen and guide me, the way they always do.

  The Plymouth wasn’t the correct ride for where I had to go. Clarence had what I needed—an immaculate, restored-to-new ’67 Rover 2000TC, in classic British Racing Green. Just the kind of expensive toy someone in Beryl’s father’s neighborhood would have for Sunday drives. But Clarence was as likely to allow his jewel out in this weather as Mama was to file a legitimate tax return.

  I could get something out of the Mole’s junkyard, but he specialized in shark cars—grayish, anonymous prowlers that no witness would be able to recall. Except that what blended into the city would stand out in the suburbs.

  Renting was always an option, but I hated to burn a whole set of expensive ID just for a couple of hours’ use.

  So I made a phone call.

  “Hauser,” was all the greeting I got.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Whatever you want, the answer is—”

  “You still leave your car at the station when you take the train in to work?”

  “Yeah…” he said, warily.

  “I’d like to borrow it. Just take it out of the lot, use it for a couple of hours, put it right back.”

  “Use it for what?” Hauser demanded. I’ve known him a long time; it wasn’t so much that he gave a damn, it was that being a reporter was encoded in his genes, and he always needed to know the story.

  “I have to visit someone tomorrow. Not in your neighborhood, but close by. I’m looking for a runaway.” Only the very best liars know how to mix a heavy dose of truth into their stories. And which buttons to push. Like I said, Hauser knew me going all the way back. And he has a couple of teenage sons.

  “It’ll be there when I get back?”

  “Guaranteed,” I promised. I’m the rarest of professional liars—unless you’re the one I’m playing, my word is twenty-five-karat.

  The next morning, I was riding the Metro-North line, one of a mass of reverse-commuters heading out of the city. The car was about three-quarters full. I sat across from a scrawny, intense-looking man with short, carelessly cropped, no-color hair, indoor skin, and palsied hands. A pair of tinted trifocals dominated his taut, narrow face. Behind them, his eyes were the color of a manila envelope. He looked me over like a junkie who’s afraid of needles, his need fighting his fear.

  The two of us were probably the only ones in the car not jabbering into cell phones. The fool next to me, clearly annoyed that the racket might actually render his own conversation private, compensated by damn near shouting the “Just checking in!” opening he’d already used half a dozen times in a row. Some of the howler monkeys tried to sound businesslike, asking if there
had been any calls—apparently not—but most of them dropped the pretense and just blabbered what they thought was important-sounding crap. They weren’t talking, they were fucking broadcasting—using volume as signal strength. We were all captives.

  I caught the paranoid’s eye, made a “What can you do?” face. He studied me for a split second, then nodded down at the thick briefcase he had across his knees and twisted his lips a millimeter.

  The fool next to me said, “Hello. Hell-o!” before pushing a button on his phone to disconnect. He hit another button—my money was on “redial”—then stared blankly at the little screen, as if it would explain some deep mystery. All over the train car, people were shouting into their phones but not getting a response.

  “Dead zone,” I heard someone say, smugly. “We’ll pass through it in a minute.”

  I locked eyes with the paranoid across from me long enough to realize that the smug guy had it all wrong. Portable cell-phone jammers are expensive—good ones go for a couple of grand—but they’re a reasonable investment for a lunatic who wants to make sure nobody watching him can report back to HQ. I would have offered the jammer a high-five, but I suspected that would start him suspecting me. So I leaned close, whispered, “You should carry a phone, too. Just in case one of these morons ever looks around and does the math.”

  He nodded sagely. After all, I wasn’t one of Them.

  Who says therapy doesn’t work?

  Hauser’s car was waiting just where he promised—a dark blue ten-year-old Lexus ES300 with a spare key in a magnetic box under the front fender. It had Westchester tags, with registration and insurance papers in the glove box, plus a today’s-date note on the letterhead of the magazine Hauser works for, saying that Mr. Ralph Compton was using the vehicle with his permission.

  I never felt more like a citizen.

  I didn’t remember exactly what Beryl’s father did for a living—if he’d ever actually told me—but I figured the odds on my finding someone home at the residence were good, even if it was only the maid.

  The Lexus was front-wheel drive, but I didn’t need that extra safety cushion—the roads had been precision-plowed, and it was too sunny for black ice to be a problem. I drove around until I found a reference point, then went the rest of the way on autopilot, guided by the signals from my memory.