Daniel Esposito was on top of me before I could stop him. “Rape, goddamn you! Rape! Not assault! Seven little girls have been raped and two of them are dead and the fuckin’ police ain’t done shit!”
I was a changed man and I knew it. Esposito had me by the coat lapels and I hadn’t knocked him down yet. My fists were knotted at my sides and my teeth were grinding but Esposito was still standing, still in my face. I uncurled my fists and took hold of his wrists and waited for him to release me. Which he did, with an apology, which I accepted. Then I tried to explain the limitations the law placed on private investigators, the primary one being that the cops would jack my ass up to the sky for messing around in their business. And a serial rapist was definitely their business.
“Then why haven’t they caught him yet?”
“Why didn’t they tell us about it?”
“I wouldn’t let my kids walk to school if I knew that bastard was out there!”
“What the hell are we supposed to do? Wait until the fucker gets tired of raping little girls? Maybe switches to little boys?”
“Or moves on to another neighborhood?”
“I thought you cared about this neighborhood, Rodriquez. At least that’s what you always claimed.”
First a series of body blows, then the low, sneaky one below the belt, to the nuts. Works every time. I caught my breath and straightened up. “Here’s what I can do,” I said, and laid out a plan that would allow me to nose around and ask a few questions. The fact that the victims all lived in the same neighborhood was useful, as was the fact that they all were in the seven-to-nine year old age range. Selective serial rapist, and a pedophile to boot. I could talk to family and friends of the victims without getting into too much trouble with the cops. I hoped.
“And I’m gonna have to talk to your children,” I said as gently as I could, knowing that was the last thing I wanted to do and they wanted me to do. And even as I felt that dread, I thought of Jill Mason. That’s why she was treating Carmine Aiello’s daughter! Then I realized that even if I could direct all those little victims to the good doctor, she couldn’t and wouldn’t tell me shit about whatever they told her.
I realized that I had a headache, the dull, thudding kind, the kind aspirin didn’t help. I waded into the crowd to get to my desk and got a notepad out of the drawer. “I need every one of you to write your name, address, and telephone number on this pad. If you’re here with your husband or wife, I need both names. If your spouse is not here with you, I still need his or her name. And if your child—your daughter—has been a victim, like Mr. Esposito here, I need for you to speak with Miss Aguierre.”
Yo and I spent the next couple of hours interviewing our new clients and getting contracts signed. I’d counted the money and been overwhelmed to find more than five thousand dollars in cash and checks. I wrote out a receipt for each of the checks and tried, in vain, to account for the cash: Of those who’d contributed in cash, none could recall exactly how much. In true “baby boy” form, I decided to let Yolanda worry about how to account for a couple of thousand dollars in cash. Teach her to get angry and curse at me.
By the time everyone left and we were alone in the office, neither of us had the energy to do anything but sit in numb silence. I wanted a beer but couldn’t will myself to get up and go get it. Yolanda kept flipping through the pages of names and addresses and signed contracts, just turning the pages, one after another. “Pobrecitas,” she whispered to herself. “Siete ninas. Pobrecitas,” she said.
I stood up. I didn’t want them to be poor little things, and I couldn’t think of them as victims. They already were more than that to me. I knew Carmine and I knew Jill Mason, links to one little girl who now was more than a victim. And I knew Arlene Edwards, which made her granddaughter more than a victim. And Daniel Esposito had grabbed me in my chest and screamed in my face and I’d let him. That made him personal to me and, therefore, his daughter more than a victim. Pobrecitas my ass! I began to pace back and forth for no reason other than I could no longer sit still. I wasn’t thinking so much as I was feeling. And feelings always got me in trouble.
“This is a good thing you’re doing, Phil,” Yolanda said quietly, sadness weighing down his voice. “A right thing.”
I didn’t know about all that. “It’ll probably get me in trouble with the cops, so maybe keep the door locked when I’m out. We wouldn’t want any unexpected searches and seizures of files or records.” I was being flip when I said it, then the thought scared me. I really was tap dancing on the high wire and a slip could maim me for life.
“I’ll do a search for all assaults on juveniles for, what do you think, the past year? Eighteen months? Two years?”
I stopped pacing and looked at her.
She looked back at me. “What?”
I couldn’t answer her, didn’t know how. Didn’t know how to understand her interest in this case from the beginning. I knew she could work magic with the damn computers, but why couldn’t she care about everything we did with this same intensity?
“The time is less important than the location. These are cluster crimes. That’s what to look for. Any more rapes of little girls in this area. Any cluster serial rapes of young girls any where in the city.”
She looked at me for a long, hard minute, then turned and faded away behind the Shoji screen. I realized I still wore my overcoat so I took it off and threw it across one of the desks. Then I sat down at my own desk, removed my spiral notebook, and began writing. It had been a long, touch day, and it wasn’t over yet.
Jill Mason greeted me wearing a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses low on her nose and a harried, rushed expression on the rest of her face. She apologized for the latter, waved me in, re-locked the door behind me, and told me to make myself comfortable while she finished at her desk. She said it wouldn’t take long. I told her to take as long as necessary. I could do with a few minutes of calm and quiet.
A cloth-covered folding table sat in the middle of the office. On it were two plates, two wine glasses, knives, forks, and a pile of napkins. I busied myself unloading the bags of food and uncorking the wine and arranging it all on the table. It was an impressive looking spread— a slab of ribs, a whole chicken, sweet potato soufflé, lettuce-and-tomato salad, and a decent Sauvignon blanc, which I uncorked and let breathe. I was beginning to have some appetite. I looked up to see how Dr. Mason was progressing and she was walking toward the table.
“I must admit, Mr. Rodriquez, that I’ve looked forward to this all day.” She smiled and looked much less harried.
“Hope you like sweet potatoes.”
“Love them! My grandparents were southerners— my mother’s parents— and my mother’s Sunday dinners are still the stuff of the South. Best food in the world!”
I was thinking that Itchy had gotten it right about her grandparents being from the South. No lie there. Then I thought, why would he remember such a thing? After so many years, why would he remember something like that? Why did he care? Was he best friends with them? Or maybe that’s just the kind of thing old people remembered—where somebody was born, when somebody died.
I noticed that Dr. Mason had a healthy appetite, and, considering that Yolanda could out-eat the entire defensive line of the Giants, wondered if that was a trait of small women. They must have more in common than appetite, small women, because Dr. Mason stopped eating long enough to ask me why I was watching her eat. Something Yo would do. I told her and she smiled a smile which almost reached her eyes. She said she hadn’t eaten all day and was ravenous. She also said, in her quiet way, that she was just regaining her appetite. She hadn’t eaten very much or very often after the deaths of her husband and children. I told her I could imagine that was the kind of thing that could take away an appetite, and we ate in silence for another few minutes.
She spoke first. “I installed the security system after the break-in. I thought they were looking for drugs. I don’t keep any here, but patient records are here, though
they are well protected.”
“In the computer?”
She shook her head and pointed to what looked like an end table. “In the safe. It would take dynamite to open it.”
I went over to the table, knelt down beside it, ran my hands along its edges, pushing and prodding, and a door opened to reveal the steel casing within. “Clever,” I said.
“The computer is downloaded everyday and the discs go in there. The dictation goes in there. All my notes and files go in there.” She exhaled deeply and shook her head. “I wasn’t worried about the files, and I don’t keep any drugs, but I didn’t like feeling vulnerable.” She shivered a little and drank a sip of wine. I noticed that her hand shook slightly when she put the glass back on the table.
“So then the phone calls started,” I said.
She nodded. “Nasty, horrible things. Calling me a murderer for killing my husband and children. Calling me a drunk driver. I wasn’t drunk at the time of that accident, Mr. Rodriquez. I hadn’t been drinking.”
I raised my hand to stop her. “You don’t need to explain or justify yourself to me, Dr. Mason. I’m here to stop whoever is doing this to you, not to help them.”
“I just wanted you to know.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, collected herself, and continued. “I thought I’d been as devastated as it was possible to be and still live. Until I heard that voice accuse me...”
I stood and walked away from her while she pulled herself together again and marveled at her strength. I wondered who her shrink was, and wondered how she had anything left to give to her patients. How she had the strength to listen to other people’s shit all day, as Yo had described it.
“What can you tell me about your assailant, Dr. Mason?”
“Not as tall as you, or as muscular, but he was strong. He grabbed me from behind so I didn’t see his face. I saw his hands— light complected. He could have been Caucasian or a light Hispanic. No marks that I could see, but he did have chewed, ugly nails, and his hands were dirty. And he smelled dirty, as if he hadn’t bathed in a while, or washed his clothes.”
I watched her remember the attack with all her senses. I could see her nose wrinkle as it recalled the smell, and her eyes narrowed slightly. Then she shook herself, shook off the memory, and I was struck again at how small she was.
“He could have hurt you if he wanted to,” I said.
She nodded. “He told me as much—”
I cut her off. “He spoke to you? What did he say?”
“That he could kill me if he wanted to, but he didn’t, not then. He was just warning me.”
“Verbatim. Tell me exactly what he said, verbatim.” And I knew she could.
She closed her eyes and cocked her head a little to the left. “He said, ‘I could kill you right now. We don’t want you here. Go back uptown where you belong.’ Then he shook me hard and slammed me into the wall and he ran away.”
She had just left her parents’ building when she was attacked. Her assailant had been waiting in the narrow space between two buildings and grabbed her as she walked past, pulling her in toward him, backwards. Mean bastard, and a smart one.
“I’m going to have somebody pick you up every morning and take you home every night, starting Monday. It will be one man in the morning and a different one at night, but the same two men every day. They will always come inside to get you and they will always take you inside and check the location before leaving you.” I raised my hand. She’d tried to interrupt me several times and I wouldn’t let her. “This is crucial, Dr. Mason. You live by a daily routine and whoever is trying to hurt you knows what it is. I don’t want you to change it— I understand that you can’t let other people mess with your life like that. Please don’t argue with me about this.”
She signed deeply and closed her eyes. She walked away from the table, over to her desk and stood there, arms wrapped around herself, looking down at the photographs of her family. Then she came back to the table where I was seated and drank some of her wine.
“Perhaps it would be better if I let him kill me.”
“Better for whom, Dr. Mason? Certainly not the seven little girls from this neighborhood who’ve been raped in the last eight or nine months. They need you alive and well so you can help them become alive and well again.”
Her eyes opened wide but she didn’t say anything.
“Several of their parents were in my office earlier this evening, including Carmine. His daughter is just one of the victims. I’m not sure if it’s correct to call her lucky; two of the other victims were murdered after they were raped.”
Tears filled her eyes but they didn’t spill out. “Will you find him? Whoever is hurting the children?”
God. There was that question again, and my answer had to be the same. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t think I can. But what I can do is try to keep you safe so you can help those little girls. Carmine said you saved his daughter’s life.”
It was her turn. She raised her hand and stopped my words before any more could leave my mouth. “Don’t say anything patronizing or platitudinous, Mr. Rodriquez, I don’t need to hear it and I don’t want to hear it.”
I shrugged and poured some more wine in her glass and she drank it. “There’s something I didn’t tell you.”
I sat still, waiting to hear it.
“The voices were different. The one on the telephone is different from the one on the alley. They weren’t the same person.”
I heard Yolanda’s voice. Shrinks know secrets. The words did back flips in my brain and made me shiver. Suppose that’s why Jill Mason was under attack. The rapist knew she was counseling one of the victims...one who could identify him.
I heard William Robinson’s voice. She testifies in court all the time. Suppose she was about to testify against a perp...or suppose somebody she’d testified against and put away was out now...All the suppositions could be true and it wouldn’t matter one damn bit because Dr. Mason wouldn’t me. Couldn’t tell me.
I sat on my couch looking out at my magnificent view of traffic crossing the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Another Yolanda idea: I’d bought two units in a shit building in a shit neighborhood a few years back. The neighborhood now was being called the new SoHo, my building was a yuppie paradise, and the rent I charged for the smaller unit paid the mortgage on itself and on my top floor digs. Because the building was in a part of the East Village that juts out into the East River, I have this spectacular view to the south, which usually soothes and smoothes out the rough edges of any day. Tonight, it depressed me. The happy crackling of the wood fire made it worse. A bad case of the Friday night blues.
I was tired of being alone and didn’t know what to do about it. I wanted a Susan like Spenser had, but had spent too many years behaving like Hawk when it came to women. Yolanda’s advice was to stop worrying about it and when I least expected it, the woman of my dreams would stumble into my life. Well, she hadn’t yet and I needed somebody to talk to about today. About what I was feeling. But the best I could do was consume the remainder of the bar-be-cue, which Jill Mason had insisted I bring with me, wash it down with Samuel Adams, listen to Carlos Santana talk about his Black Magic Woman, and worry about what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
I knew I had no business stepping into anything as messy as a serial rapist case but the whole thing made me angry. Either the cops knew they had a serial rapist on their hands and for whatever reason didn’t alert the neighborhood, or they didn’t know, which in a way was worse, because that meant seven-and-eight-year old girls were being raped and murdered and nobody cared enough to notice a pattern; meant that every little girl in the neighborhood was in danger. And winter had arrived early.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mike Smith and Eddie Ortiz welcomed the responsibility for keeping Jill Mason alive and well. No matter how long and loudly they proclaimed their joy at being retired, the truth is that they were cops and always would be cops and that meant they bored ver
y easily when confronted with normal, daily life. I’d approached them a bit hesitantly, not wanting to appear ungrateful for the timely fashion with which they dispatched the skip trace job, and not wanting to seem too demanding of their time. They jumped all over the opportunity, refining it beyond my original vision, which had been to have one of them pick Dr. Mason up in the morning and deliver her safely to work and the other do the same at the end of the day.
“Jeez, Rodriquez, ain’t you got no imagination?” This from Mike Smith, a dead ringer for Lieutenant Fancy on NYPD Blue: heavier, more muscular, but with that same dark, intense dignity. Mike had walked a beat in Harlem for twenty years, learning a lot about imagination along the way.
“Yeah,” chimed in Eddie Ortiz, something looking like disgust written all over his hairy face. “You get nothin’ for your money you do it that way.” And he laid out for me a plan that made so much better sense than my own idea that I didn’t bother with embarrassment. I went directly to shame. Even hung my head.
The way Eddie and Mike arranged it, Mike would be Jill Mason’s escort on both ends of her day, and Eddie would lounge in the shadows, looking for somebody who might be looking for a way to get to her. The good doctor would be safe and I could worry about other things. Like what exactly it was I thought I was going to do for a room full of frightened parents, some of whose daughters were rape victims and worse. I was in over my head, but I knew that when I accepted their money. An angry Yo and one side of me and angry parents on the other side. I did the only logical thing: I capitulated. But because it was logical doesn’t mean it was smart. Lots of dumb things happen for good reasons. The question was whether I could salvage the situation without further manifestations of dumb.
I knew that my clients wanted—expected—me to catch a serial rapist, but I had no intention of doing any such thing, not to mention no authority, which was a fact that bore mentioning, except nobody wanted to hear it. I also, truth be told, had no real experience in that area. I hadn’t been an investigator when I was a cop. What I could do was get information for them. Maybe not enough to ease their pain, but more than they had, which was that seven little girls had been raped and two of them murdered, probably by the same low-life piece of shit, and nobody in the police department had cared enough to just sit down and talk to them, even if there was nothing substantive to say.
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