Mask Market b-16

by Andrew Vachss

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She came from money, that much we know. If only her last name was different, maybe she got married. But…”

  “What’s the front name she’s using now?” the Prof asked.

  “Peta.”

  “And it was, what, Sapphire or something?”

  “Beryl.”

  “Middle name, maybe?”

  “Nope. The girl we pulled away from that pimp, her middle name was Eunice. This one—on the CD—didn’t have a middle name at all.”

  “Maybe the guy who wanted you to find her, he didn’t know it.”

  “No, Father,” Clarence told the Prof. “There was a wealth of information there. Very, very detailed. If the woman had a middle name, it would have been there, I am sure.”

  “And the guy who hired me, I don’t think it was money he was after,” I added, more sure of myself than when the Prof had first asked, even though I couldn’t say why.

  Max responded to my rubbing my first two fingers and thumb together and giving a negative shake of my head with a “What then?” gesture.

  “I don’t know,” I told them all. “He did have a whole lot of financial information on that CD, but if he was her money manager, he’d have known all that, anyway. And those photographs…that’s personal, not professional. It’s like the only reason he had all the financials listed was just to help whoever was going to look for her.”

  “You think she played the player?” the Prof said.

  “That would fit. He wouldn’t be the first manager to get himself managed. But let’s say she did—why would she just disappear after that? If the stuff on the CD is true, she had loads of assets in her own name. Legit, aboveground stuff. She gets in the wind, she can’t get her hands on any of that. Who gets to steal so much that they can afford to walk away from millions?”

  “This guy, the one who hired you, he had money, right?”

  “Looked like it, sure. But I only saw him that one time; it could have all been front.”

  Max clasped his hands in front of him, then slowly pulled them apart. His fingers made a plucking gesture, one hand taking from the other. The looted hand balled into a fist as the thieving hand fled.

  “They were a partnership, maybe working some kind of paper scheme, and she ran off with all the cash? Could be,” I acknowledged. “That’d make him spend time and money looking for her, sure.”

  “And if she really had all that coin, she could buy herself major muscle,” the Prof said.

  “But now that the man who was looking for her is…out of the picture, would she not come back to her own home?” Clarence asked.

  “Maybe he wasn’t the only one looking,” the Prof said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Right,” I agreed. “We don’t know anything about the shooters. If they were working for her, that’s one thing. She’s got that kind of protection in place, making too much noise looking for her is a good way to get ourselves dead. But if they were looking for her themselves…”

  “Yeah,” the Prof rode with me. “Same thing. But we can’t go nosing around the dead guy’s life. The cops would get on that like a priest on an altar boy.”

  “I’m not worried about that end of it,” I said. “Not now, anyway. If she stole from the dead guy, she’s got the money. Finding her, that’s what we have to do. But I’m not even going to start looking until we know one thing: How did the shooters know where the guy who hired me was going to be that night? That’s the only way to know if I’m in the crosshairs, too.”

  Nobody said anything for a few minutes.

  Finally, Max got up. He returned with a handful of objects he had pulled off other tables. Identifying each one with gestures, he constructed a triangle on the tablecloth: the guy who hired me, the girl, and the shooters. Then he built another: the guy who hired me, the shooters, and me. One more: the guy who hired me, the shooters…and Charlie Jones. Using chopsticks, he built a matrix. When he was done, a wooden arrow pointed right at the ferret.

  “Charlie tipped off the shooters?” the Prof said, touching Max’s chart.

  Max shrugged his shoulders.

  “Even if he did, he would not have to bring Burke’s name into it, would he?” Clarence said.

  Now it was the Prof’s turn to shrug. “Who we gonna ask?” he said. “We don’t know who the shooters are. And nobody knows where Charlie cribs.”

  “If he’s kept the same place he had years ago, we might know,” I said.

  “How?” the Prof asked. But his voice was already tightening against what he knew was coming.

  “The book,” I told them, gesturing to Max at the same time.

  T he book was Wesley’s once. Mine now. It had shown up in one of my drop boxes after Wesley had canceled his own ticket. What the media called his “suicide note” was a confession to a whole string of paid-for homicides. A couple of those had been mine. Wesley knew how things worked: If he left the cops enough to clear those cases, it was the same as clearing me.

  But Wesley hadn’t told them everything. That was in the book he had mailed to me. The killing machine had recorded it all, the details of every hit: who got done, who paid for it, and how much. That was my legacy, a Get Out of Jail Free card, but I could only play it once. I hoarded it tight, my most valuable possession.

  I knew Charlie Jones had to be in that book. He’d never put a penny in Wesley’s hand, but he was a bridge to plenty who had. And the iceman always covered his back trail.

  “Mama,” I said, when she came over to where we were sitting, “could I have the book?”

  I didn’t have to say anything more. Her eyes narrowed, but her expression didn’t change. Mama was our family’s bank, and Wesley’s book was in what passed for a safe-deposit box. Only, in Mama’s house, you never say the iceman’s name out loud.

  “Now you want it?”

  “Please.”

  “Order food. I get it, okay?”

  Meaning: The book was buried somewhere in the catacombs under the building that housed the restaurant, and it would take a while for her to dig it out.

  “Bring me some duck for luck,” the Prof said to one of the white-coated hard men who passed for waiters in Mama’s joint.

  I t was almost an hour before Mama came back. She put a thick notebook about the size of my hand on the tablecloth and walked away, as if afraid it was going to explode. The book was bound in oxblood leather, with a gold ribbon page-marker, its fine linen pages almost three-quarters full of Wesley’s tiny, machinelike printing. I always wondered where he had found such a book, and what he would have done when he ran out of pages.

  I’d been through the book plenty of times before, but every time I opened it, there always seemed to be more than I remembered, as if my ghost brother was still making entries from wherever he was. There was no real organization or index, but it moved in rough chronological order. From looking at the first date, I could tell Wesley hadn’t started his book when he’d started killing. That would have been a long time earlier, back when we were kids.

  I felt the book throb in my hands. Not like a beating heart; like an oncoming train. I opened it, and started reading.

  I took a drag off the cigarette I hadn’t remembered lighting, put it back in the ashtray that hadn’t been on the table when I’d started reading. “I’ve got him,” I said.

  The Prof and Clarence came back to where I was sitting. I looked up and there was Max, right across from me; he had never left.

  “Charlie hired Wesley four times,” I said. “Not directly, but he made the matches.”

  “Everything go okay?” the Prof asked. He wasn’t asking if the hits had gone down, that was never a question; he was asking if Wesley had been paid. The one time we knew he hadn’t been, the iceman had turned the whole city into a killing ground.

  “Yeah,” I said, still thinking about one of the jobs I’d run across in the book. Looked like Charlie Jones had known some politicians.

  “Must have followed him home,” the Pro
f said. “No way my man pays anyone for info.”

  “It doesn’t say. But he’s got an address here, all right.”

  “Where was the little weasel holing up back then?” the Prof asked, frankly curious.

  “Over in Queens. Briarwood.”

  “Briarwood?” the Prof jeered. “In that neighborhood, Charlie’d stick out like the truth in Jesse Jackson’s mouth.”

  “He might,” I said, my finger on the page where I’d found him. “But Benny Siegel wouldn’t.”

  “T hat boy is big-time slick,” the Prof said, his preacher’s voice garnished with admiration. “You got to give it to him. Folks been trying to pass ever since there was folks, but that’s a one-way street—people trying to move up, not down. Charlie got to be the first time I ever heard of anyone trying to pass for Jewish.”

  “You know how Wesley worked it,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Mama wasn’t close by. “You wanted work done, you never got to see him face-to-face. You hired a voice on the phone, sent the money to wherever he told you. But it was a different number and address for every job. So Charlie, he had to know a way to find Wesley. Or to leave word for him, anyway.”

  “Do you think they ever met?” Clarence asked. He was the only one of us who hadn’t known Wesley, but he’d been hearing the legend since his early days working for a Jake gunrunner in Brooklyn. He always wanted to know more, but he had to balance his curiosity against the Prof’s disapproval.

  “You mean, like, were they pals?” the little man said, bitterly. “Forget that. Wesley, he was about as friendly as a cobra with a grudge.”

  “But if he and Burke—”

  “We came up together,” I said, hoping to cut off the young man’s questions before we had a problem.

  “Still. If he was as—”

  “Look, son,” the Prof said, gruffly. “Wesley was the mystery train. You never knew where he was going, but you always knew where he’d been—dead men be all over the tracks. Nobody knows why he picked Burke out when they were little kids. Ain’t no point talking about it. Nobody knows. And nobody ever gonna know, okay?”

  “Your father’s right,” I told Clarence, gently guiding him away from the edge. “When it comes to Wesley, you ask a question, the answer’s always the same: Nobody knows. But I can tell you this for sure: He wasn’t friends with Charlie Jones. He wasn’t partners with him. That wasn’t Wesley. He was always one up. If Charlie knew where to leave a message for Wesley, then Wesley had to know where Charlie lived; it’s as simple as that. Wesley wasn’t a gambler. The only way he’d play is with a marked deck.”

  “He has been gone a long time, mahn.”

  “You mean, the address might be no good now? Sure, that’s true. But if Charlie went to all the trickery and expense involved in a complete ID, he could still be there. Remember, we know one thing—he never crossed Wesley.”

  “How could we know that, then?”

  Nobody answered. It only took the young man a few seconds to catch up.

  F or some places, a cab is the perfect surveillance vehicle. You can circle the same block a dozen times, go and come back, even park close by and eat a sandwich, and nobody pays attention. A leaf on a tree, a bird in the forest.

  But that wouldn’t work in Briarwood, a community of upper-middle-class houses and even higher aspirations. The only Yellow Cabs you see in that neighborhood are making airport drop-offs, the cabbies seething at the “shortie” trip. For the drivers, waiting on an airport line is a dice-roll. A Manhattan run is a soft six. A carful of Japanese tourists who don’t have a firm grasp of the exchange rate is a natural. Briarwood, that’s snake eyes.

  Walk-bys would be even riskier. In that neighborhood, people were peeking out from behind their curtains decades before anyone ever heard of Neighborhood Watch. The population is aging and house-proud, the kind of folks who keep 911 on speed dial. Nobody hangs out on the corners at night. And the community has enough political clout to ensure for-real police patrols, too.

  But this is still New York, where info is just another peach to pick. If you can’t reach the branches, you have to know how to shake the trees.

  Some do it with research, some do it with subpoenas. People like me do it with cash.

  T here’s two kinds of bribes—the ones where you get asked, and the ones where you offer. A building inspector looking for mordida knows he has to make the first move—too many DOI stings going on today for an experienced slumlord to take the chance. But the pitch is always so subtle you have to be listening close to catch it.

  That kind of bribe, it’s just the cost of doing business, an everyday thing. But if you want someone to go where they’re not supposed to, it’s a lot trickier to put a deal together. The phone company’s wise to employees selling unlisted numbers; the DMV knows what the home address of a celebrity is worth; and there’s always a bull market for Social Security numbers. So there’s all kinds of safeguards in place: You access the computers from inside the company, you’re going to leave a trail. You say the wrong thing on the phone, someone could be listening. Somebody’s always watching, and they’re not anyone’s brother.

  Computers make it a lot easier to check on what your employees are doing. But putting all the information in one place is a party where you have to screen the guest list. Not all hackers spend their time trying to write the ultimate virus or crack into a secure site. Some of them are people like me. Working criminals.

  The best tools to unlock an account are a Social Security number and a date of birth. We didn’t have either one for Charlie Jones, but we had the name he had been living under and the address where he lived at the time. If that info was dead, so were our chances.

  I know a few cyber-slingers, but I don’t trust any of them enough to let them work a name when its owner might wind up deceased. So I had to go to people who don’t trust me.

  P epper is a sunburst girl. She’s got more bounce than a Texas high-school cheerleader, and a smile that could make Jack Kevorkian volunteer to teach CPR. She probably likes everybody on this planet, except…

  “It’s me,” I told her, on the phone.

  “Okay,” she answered, warm as a robbed grave.

  “I want to buy a package.”

  “She’s not going to meet you.”

  Pepper was talking about Wolfe, the warrior woman who headed up their operation. Back when she was still a prosecutor, she had let me hold her hand for a minute. But then the road we were walking divided, and I took the wrong fork. I did it knowing she’d never follow, hoping she’d wait for me to come back. When I did, she was still in the same spot. But she wasn’t waiting for me. She was doing what she always did—standing her ground.

  Not many men get a second chance with a woman like Wolfe. I was probably the only man alive who could have blown them both.

  “This isn’t about her,” I said. “It’s not about me, either. I need a package, that’s all.”

  “Say where and when.”

  “The cafeteria? Tonight? Anytime after eight?”

  “Bring it all with you,” she said, and disconnected.

  S he came in the front door, beamed a “Hi!” to Mama, and breezed over to my booth. Mick was a couple of paces behind her, like he always is. He clasped his hands, bowed to Mama, who returned the gesture of respect.

  Mick’s a big man, broad-shouldered, with a natural athlete’s build. His face would be matinee-idol material if it ever had an expression. Pepper once told the Prof that Mick had gone to one of those colleges where the football coach makes more than the whole science department, but he got disgusted with it and left. Made me curious enough to do a little research. Apparently, fracturing the coach’s jaw was enough to get your scholarship canceled.

  Mick glided behind Pepper so he was standing beside her as Max and I got to our feet. Mick bowed to Max as he had to Mama, caught the return, then gave me mine. Pepper was still smiling…at Max. We all sat down.

  “Oh, could I have some of that s
pecial dish we had last time, please?” Pepper said, as Mama came to our table.

  “Sure, okay,” Mama said, and disappeared into the back.

  “I love fortune cookies,” Pepper said, turning around agilely and swiping a small metal bowl from the table behind her.

  “You don’t want those,” I told her.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re for tourists, Pepper.”

  “So?”

  “So Mama doesn’t like tourists.”

  “Oh, stop!”

  I exchanged a look with Mick. He made a “What do you want me to do?” gesture with his eyebrows that might have been one of Max’s.

  Pepper delicately cracked one of the cookies open. “Oh, ugh!” she said, tossing the tiny scrap of paper onto the table.

  Max picked it up, twisted his lips, and handed it to me. Life is the road to death. All you choose is your speed.

  “Told you,” I said.

  “Are they all like that?” Pepper asked, curious despite herself.

  “Pretty much,” I assured her. One of Mama’s proudest boasts was that no tourist visited twice.

  “But the food here is wonderful!”

  “That’s not customer food,” I said. “It’s just for…people Mama knows.”

  “Then why does she even—?” Pepper started to say, before a look from Mick cut her off.

  A waiter came out with a huge, shallow bowl of…whatever it was that Pepper had eaten the last time she’d been there, I guessed.

  We ate in silence. Mick was a kung-fu man, and it looked like he was questioning Max about some sort of praying-mantis technique. Or maybe he was just practicing his nonverbal conversation skills. Pepper watched, fascinated. One of the prettiest things about her is how interested she always is in things. I wish she liked me.

  The waiter took away our dishes. Max lit a cigarette. Pepper frowned. I reached over and took one for myself. Mick shook his head sadly at my immaturity.

  “I’ve got a name,” I said to Pepper. “Two names, really. We don’t know if either one’s legit. One address, but it’s real old.”

  “What else?”