Forget there had ever been any such thing as Keeper and Val. As the sun set on Albany, I folded back the metal clasp on the manila envelope that Barnes had handed me that afternoon at Tony’s office. I flipped it upside down and spilled the entire contents out onto the bed.
There was a paperback copy of Renata’s novel, Godchild along with what looked to be a press kit that had been prepared by her New York publisher. There were also three or four newspaper clippings that Richard must have added to the mix. The press kit had been held together with a heavy black clip. It consisted of a press release announcing publication of the novel, a short Q-and-A piece, and a brief article about the book. There were also three eight-by-ten color glossies. It was these images of Renata that caught my full attention.
Her hair was vivid auburn and cropped short, with little strands hanging over her forehead. Her eyes were deep blue and her nose was small but as pronounced as her lips, which, when they came together, made the shape of a heart.
I can’t say how long I actually sat there and stared at Renata’s image. Let’s just say I looked at it until, at very least, I might be able to spot her on a busy street corner.
Or should I say a cell block in Monterrey, Mexico?
I laid the three photos out, side by side, and picked up the first of the written pieces. There was a fairly involved bio that told me she had been born upstate in Cairo, New York, a small town located just outside Catskill. There she had been reared and raised in the public school system. She went on to Vassar to major in journalism before blowing another two years on a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing at Vermont College. From there she did a stint as a reporter at The Times-Union in Albany and then on to a freelance career with Time, New York Newsday, and some other papers.
It was during this time that Renata began to publish some of her first fiction in a whole bunch of journals I’d never heard of before, nor ever would again. Soon came the marriage to Richard, a short-lived career in public relations and script writing for Barnes’s own Reel Productions. Then, curiously enough, back on the road as a freelancer, this time to some pretty far-off locales like Florence, Moscow, Beijing, and even Benin, West Africa.
She covered the Gulf War for Mademoiselle, reporting on Women in the Front Lines, which resulted in her nomination for the “prestigious” Polk Award for “accuracy and clarity in reporting while willingly placing her life at risk.” She’d later suffer a case of the bends while writing about vampire bats in the underground caves of Sri Lanka for National Geographic, come close to arrest in Kosovo during the Balkan wars, and nearly have her brains blown out by an irate mobster while preparing a feature on the emerging black market in Russia.
She stayed at home long enough to bear and, for a time, raise her little boy Charlie, until the child’s untimely death in 1995. After which she took off again, this time for the south of France where she wrote Godchild, her only novel to date.
I took a few more seconds to look through what remained of the publicity material, all of it either regarding Godchild or the actual writing of the story, all of it stressing the “fiction” as opposed to the “memoir.” Deciding to cut to the chase, I picked up the novel itself and glanced at the jacket copy.
Godchild is a psychological tour-de-force that exposes the madness behind a mother’s recounting of her child’s drowning….
I stopped right there.
Not exactly light reading. No wonder Barnes looked as though he was about to cry when he handed me the copy. I knew that if the emotions he had for his son bore even a fleeting resemblance to the ones I still carried for Fran, then there would be no getting over his kid’s death. It just wasn’t possible. And then his wife has to go and write Godchild. A constant three-hundred-page reminder of the sadness.
I picked up the newspaper clipping. It came from the spring of l995.
BARNES CHILD DROWNED IN BATHTUB!
I read the article. In the end it offered not much more information than the headline itself. Only that the kid had been discovered by his mother after she left the room for two minutes, no more. And in that time — that space of one hundred twenty seconds — Charlie must have hit his head on the ceramic tub and drowned.
As of that writing, Renata had not been charged with negligence or murder. There was another short piece taken from two days later with the heading. AUTHOR BARNES DENIES KILLING CHILD. Under that clip was another, and it was this one that nearly made my heart stop.
It was an item taken from May 5, 1995, the day of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, almost an entire year to the day before Fran would be murdered. But it was not the article that got to me, or the description of the service and the moving eulogy given by Bishop Hubbard himself. It was the U.P. photo that went with it. The one conspicuously placed under the headline, BARNES CHILD BURIED! PARENTS IN MOURNING!
It was a black-and-white photo I had probably seen before in passing maybe back in 1995 while I was still warden at Green Haven Prison. A photo that showed a man who would mean absolutely nothing to me, until a year later when he would mean everything. Just a simple, grainy black-and-white shot of a defeated Richard clutched tightly to Renata’s arm —more for his own support than hers—as they descended the stairs outside St. Mary’s Cathedral, dressed all in black. But it wasn’t them I was concerned with. What concerned me now was the man who stood only a couple of people back. The man walking out with the crowd of mourners toward what must have been a long line of waiting limousines. A burly man with an earring in his left earlobe and a thin mustache that barely covered his lip and a shiny, shaved head.
The Bald Man.
Up close and personal.
Chapter 10
I dialed Tony.
He answered after the third ring. Music in the background, some voices spilling across the earpiece. Men and women.
“What’s up?”
I said, “I’ll take the job.”
He breathed. “I thought you wanted to sleep on it.”
“I can explain tomorrow.”
“I’ll get started,” he said.
I hung up.
Chapter 11
In the dream she holds the newborn Charlie in her arms. She is crouched at the knees, the baby cradled over her shoulder while she runs the hath, holding her free hand under the warm—getting warmer—water. She feels the good feel of Charlie’s warm face cuddled into that sensitive space between her shoulder and neck, feels his warm breath. She can’t remember ever being so happy. So happy, she hasn’t even thought about writing. Her computer just sits there on the desk in the bedroom, idle. And she doesn’t care.
What a trip. Having a little baby. What a fantastic trip.
And as she sets the baby into the water, she feels the bathwater soaking her cotton shirt sleeves, feels it soaking her entire shirt, as the baby slips under the water, headfirst. .
She awakes in a pool of wet.
Startled.
The mustached man is back in her cell. He’s alone this time and he’s just tossed an entire bucket of water on her.
“1 hope you’re ready to talk,” he says.
Chapter 12
At half-past seven in the morning I was sitting at the counter of the downtown Dunkin Donuts. While the early-bird suits rushed past the picture windows, briefcases in hand, on their way to their office cubbies, I was attempting to sort out my intentions regarding the Barnes job over black coffee and two blueberry cake doughnuts. The Dunkin Donuts was set between a Burger King and Breugger’s Bagels and was located only a short walk from Tony’s Pearl Street office. The place was new and it occupied what had once been a Buster Brown Shoes back when I was a kid. Back before all the downtown shops were forced to vacate the empty city streets and move out to the mall, where they died an even slower death. Before people could eat doughnuts at plastic-covered tables inside window spaces that once displayed the newest in children’s footwear.
The night had been a long one.
What little sleep I got had been interrup
ted by long interludes of lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, at the red neon letters that reflected backward against the ceiling, thinking the same thoughts I was thinking now. Thoughts about the Bald Man, thoughts about Barnes and Renata. Thoughts about connecting the three together. If the man in the photo was actually the Bald Man, what had he been doing at Charlie Barnes’s funeral? Were the Barneses and the Bald Man friends? Were they family? Was I out of my mind for even making the connection? Or was I just plain reaching for something that didn’t exist?
Without a name or identification of some sort, I had no idea who the man in the photo really was. What I did know was that he looked an awful lot like the man I saw driving the black Buick. But in a real way, it was reason enough to take on the job of going after Renata Barnes.
I sipped some coffee, took a bite of doughnut, and pulled the newspaper clipping out of my pocket. I spread it out over the pink Formica counter, stared down at it, past the clearer images of Richard and Renata, two rows of mourners back, to a somewhat blurrier image. The bald head, the mustache, the earring, the round John Lennon sunglasses. How many times was I going to go over the description in my head? Countless times. But the fact remained, this piece of newspaper was probably the largest clue I’d been able to come up with in two years of searching. And now I just happened to stumble upon it.
The girl working the counter came up to me. She held a fresh pot of coffee in her right hand. She asked if I wanted more. I did. She poured some coffee into my cup and smiled. She was a young girl with blond hair pulled up behind her head in an untidy bun. A kid really. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. Dressed in a tight pink-and-white dress that matched the vinyl wall finishes, with a Dunkin Donuts logo on her breast and powdered sugar on the little apron that covered her lap. She wore Nike Airs on her feet, with white socks around her ankles.
I asked her if I could smoke.
She reached behind the counter, found a small tin ashtray, set it beside my plate of doughnuts. “Be my guest, sugar,” she said. The “sugar” part made me blush.
I folded up the article, slipped it back in my pants pocket.
I lit one up, let out the initial hit of smoke, followed up with a sip of the-too hot coffee.
There was more to think about and it was no use ignoring it. A whole second side to the equation that I had to consider. I had to calm down, consider the fact that I could very well be overreacting. That the man in the photo could be someone else entirely. After all, I’d only had a fleeting glimpse of the Bald Man. As much as I think I committed his looks to memory, I could have been all wrong about his identity.
The fact of the matter was this: Barnes’s job was dangerous. It would be suicide to go into it with anything on my mind other than the job at hand. Which was to get his wife out of that Mexican hellhole.
The end.
Professionally speaking, it should not have made an ounce of difference to me one way or the other just what skeletons the Barneses may have had stuffed away inside their walk-in closets. It should not have made any difference if their marriage was a good one or a bad one, or if Richard was a slimy producer of slash-and-burn political propaganda or if Renata had killed their child and somehow fictionalized it for Godchild. More importantly, it should not have made a difference if the bald man in the newspaper photo was my Bald Man.
I no longer worked on the side of the law.
I worked for myself.
In the end, what difference did any of these things make so long as Barnes’s two hundred under-the-table Gs were good? I hadn’t been a PI for long, but I knew that the number-one rule for any detective was to stick to the job at hand. Don’t ask questions that’ll get your ass in a sling. Don’t get personally involved, don’t go off half-cocked on a personal vendetta.
End of story.
As far as my relationship with Barnes was concerned, it could easily be summed up like this: I give you the girl, you give me the money. Thank you very much, have a nice rich life.
I smoked and sipped more coffee. It was cooling off now. Enough so that it didn’t burn my tongue. In the meantime, the counter girl drifted her way back. She carried a pot of coffee in her right hand. Steam rose up from the opening in the top of the pot. She asked me first if she could freshen up my cup. I liked that. I told her no, that I had to get going. I did however order a large cup of black to go. With her left hand, she reached into her apron and set a small slip of paper on the counter. My tab. A whole one dollar and ninety cents. I stamped out my butt, popped the rest of my second doughnut into my mouth, slipped off the stool, and fished for my bankroll in my left-hand pocket. I peeled off a five and slipped the bill under the empty white plate.
On my way out, while I was zipping up my leather, I spotted her across the glass case, where she was in the process of filling a pink box with some muffins.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t forget your coffee,” she reminded me.
I stopped and made my way back to me glass case. She handed the cup to me.
“Forget your head…wouldn’t you, sugar?”
“Exactly,” I said, turning for the door.
Sugar. How sweet it is.
Chapter 13
“I never said I didn’t believe you, paisan. It’s just that I agree with Detective Ryan when he attests that you’ve been under a lot of strain.” Tony, talking from behind his mahogany desk. “It’s easy to let your imagination run wild.”
I had just shown him the newspaper clipping of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, just pointed out the image of the Bald Man. Or a bald man anyway. Now Tony was removing the plastic lid from the Styrofoam cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee I brought him. At the same time he was trying to talk me out of believing that the man in the photo could be anything other than a man with no hair and that the battered black Buick I saw driving in and out of the Albany Rural Cemetery on Saturday was anything other than a figment of my over-stressed imagination.
But then something different happened.
Something I never expected.
Tony let out a breath while the color of his complexion went from tan to red to white. Not an easy task for a paisan.
He sat up straight in his swivel chair, planted his elbows firmly on the desk, stared down at his fingers, locked together at the knuckles. “Okay, let’s cut the bullshit,” he said, his voice just one, great big resigned sigh. “I’ve known about the Buick for a while now. A few weeks in fact. So has Ryan.”
I set the article down on the desk.
There was the inevitable adrenaline head rush. The slight dizziness. The anger that started at the tip of your brain stem and didn’t stop until it fried your brain.
“And you never fucking … ” An outburst. I breathed. “And you never told me.” Controlled now. Whispering. Swallowing the anger.
“I didn’t want to alarm you.”
“You didn’t want to alarm me.” I kept whispering.
He nodded. “I was afraid you’d do something stupid.”
“So Ryan tries to convince me I’m imagining things. And you do the same.”
He nodded. “It was for your own good,” he said, by way of explanation. “But then, you can only go on pretending for so long. Then it gets serious.”
“More serious than this?” I asked. “For Christ’s sakes. I missed my own goddamned wedding.”
We sat there silent for a few seconds while Tony sipped the coffee.
My head was spinning, trying to keep up with itself.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “On one hand you’re willing to send me to Mexico on this suicide mission, and on the other you don’t let me in on the Buick until now.”
Tony stared at the steam rising up out of the coffee cup. He rolled up the sleeves on his pressed white shirt, neatly, to the elbows, as if to give him something to concentrate on other than me. My problems with the past and present.
“Okay,” he said. “Just suppose the Buick is your Buick. Just suppose the man in the photo is your Bald Man
, and just suppose Barnes is somehow connected to him.”
“Just suppose,” I said, “that the Bald Man has shown up with the intent to finish the job he started. To see me dead.”
More thinking on Tony’s part. And then: “Let me ask you a simple question: Who, in your opinion, would like to see you dead, Keeper?”
The answer, of course, was so obvious it took me a few seconds to come up with it. “I was a warden, for Christ’s sakes. Who the hell doesn’t want to see me dead?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Without going over the lists of inmates who’ve been paroled during the past three years or inmates who presently have major connections with the outside, it’ll be impossible to come up with any one name or any one scenario.”
“So what are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is you came down hard on the drug trade at Green Haven, especially in ’94 and ’95, getting in more than a few people’s way, if you get my drift.”
“And?”
“And anyone in the can or out could have found out about your past, about the black Buick. These guys have access to newspapers and the Internet. Somebody could have found out all about your past and has simply initiated a game of emotional blackmail. And you’re just playing right into his hands.”
“What about Wash Pelton?” Pelton had been a former friend and enemy. A paunchy, gray-haired, political appointment I personally sent up to Dannemora for life. A former Commissioner of Corrections whom I busted after a particularly dangerous game of catch-as-catch-can, when he tried to pin both a murder rap and a major drug ring inside Green Haven Prison on yours truly.
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