Meno sat at the far end of a long table, the rear exit a few steps behind him. He was tall, fine-boned, almost frail. Somewhere in his early sixties. He wore an ascot and silver cuff links. Like a man on his way to the symphony, Raney thought. A second bodyguard, identical in stature to the first, stood beside him with his arms neatly folded, his gut arched forward. There were empty cups and full ashtrays scattered across the table. The air was all smoke. Raney had either interrupted a meeting or arrived at the tail end of one. Stone’s death seemed the only possible topic.
The first bodyguard gave him a thorough search, tossed his badge, handcuffs, wallet, and keys on the table in front of Meno.
“The handcuffs are for me,” Raney said.
“A fetish?” Meno asked.
“I want us to talk alone. I thought they might make you more comfortable.”
Meno drummed on the table with manicured nails, twisted in his chair, pulled a derringer from inside his suit jacket and aimed the barrel at Raney’s head.
“Cuff the detective’s hands behind his back,” he said. “And give the cuffs a good tug.”
To the second bodyguard he said:
“Take his shield and call our friend downtown. If Detective Raney isn’t Detective Raney, then drive him out to the Pine Barrens and leave him in as many locations as possible. I’ve had enough headaches for one day.”
Bodyguard 2 palmed Raney’s badge and stepped from the room. The bodyguard who’d escorted Raney in attached the cuffs, pulled until Raney felt skin tear from his wrists.
“They’re solid,” he said.
“Then go,” Meno said. “But don’t stray far.”
Meno set the gun on the table in front of him, waited until he heard the door click shut.
“Talk,” he said.
“Can I sit?” Raney asked.
“No. Move from the spot where you’re standing and I’ll teach you a hard lesson. Say what you have to say.”
“You’ve listened to the tape?”
“Obviously.”
“Then you know your nephew is planning a move against you.”
“Just a moment,” Meno said.
He pulled a second handheld recorder from his blazer pocket, set it on the table beside Raney’s and pressed a button.
“I almost forgot: I want to make a little album of my own,” he said. “This will give me some insurance. As I see it, there are two possibilities: either you really have gone rogue or this is some kind of double-edged entrapment meant to bring conspiracy charges against me and my nephew both. Or maybe my nephew is cooperating, and this is one big ruse.”
“You think he’d leave you alive in prison?”
“Depends on how much trouble he’s in and who he’s in it with. My question is: Why haven’t you arrested him? You clearly have enough. And it wouldn’t take much to turn the boy: I can’t remember ever saying a kind word to him. I know your coming here must have something to do with Stone’s death, but I can’t quite make all the pieces fit. It must be the headaches. Why don’t you help me out?”
“Stone was building a case against you. I reported directly to him. My job was to cozy up to Dunham, get him to talk. Everyone knows there’s bad blood between you. But it took Dunham a long time to make up his mind about me. We cleared houses, threatened bookies, made collections, and he never said who we were doing any of it for. Stone wouldn’t make a move until we had Dunham on tape saying your name. When he finally did, it came too late.”
“Not by much. That must be very frustrating for you.”
“I’m not sure it’s sunk in yet,” Raney said.
Meno ran the tip of his tongue over a cracked bottom lip. His skin was withered, peeling—a devotee of sunlamps.
“It seems to me it hasn’t,” he said. “Aren’t you showing your hand prematurely? There will be other district attorneys.”
“The case is messy. I doubt anyone but Stone would touch it. If his replacement wants to go after you, he’ll start fresh. And it’ll take him a long while to get up and running. In the meantime, Dunham will start to figure things out.”
“What kind of mess did you make?”
“Your nephew goes too far. There are things I did, things I allowed him to do in order to keep my cover. Stone saw smaller crimes as part of a bigger picture. My sense is the new DA will burn the file and either bury me in archival work or shit-can me altogether.”
“So you have my nephew’s trust?” Meno said. “Because of these things you did?”
Raney nodded. “For now,” he said.
“He’s never had a friend before. I take no small pleasure in seeing him deceived in this way. Still, I don’t understand what you want from me.”
“I want your permission to kill him.”
Meno leaned back, crossed his legs.
“I understand the impulse,” he said. “But why kill him when you have the power to make his life so miserable? Dunham’s been to jail before. It didn’t go well. He didn’t like people touching his things, or maybe his thing. Isolation nearly killed him. He took to playing with his own excrement. He’d line his turds up in a row and sing to them. If you want to hurt the boy, arrest him.”
“I can’t risk bringing him in. Not now. Chances are I’d end up in the cell next to him.”
“And why do you need my permission?”
“From what I understand, your wife raised him. I don’t want to put a bullet in his head and then find out you’re coming for me.”
“All you want is permission? You weren’t hoping to sweeten the pot a little?”
“We can talk about that, too.”
Meno pulled a thin cigar from a pack on the table, held it in his mouth, lit it without inhaling.
“No,” he said. “We can’t talk about that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t have my permission.”
“I thought you listened to the tape.”
“I did. But the irony is that it’s you who’s given me permission. I’ve always had the desire, but never the ironclad reason. He’s a relation. Not a blood relation, but, as you said, my wife raised him. She did her best, but he came to her flawed. Now, thanks to you, I can claim self-defense. The imbecile has made a real threat against me.”
“So you’re saying…”
“I’ll kill him myself. Break etiquette on a thing like this and everyone falls out of line.”
“Then I’m out?”
“You were never in. But you do seem to have my nephew’s ear. I’d be willing to pay you a finder’s fee for delivering him. He knows I despise him. I’ve gone to great lengths to keep from ever seeing him in person. If I call for him out of the blue, he’ll know what it means—or at least he’ll suspect. He’s a caged animal on his best days. Having his little Judas buddy in tow might put him at ease.”
“What about your three-car detail?”
“I know how to keep my federal chaperones entertained while I go about my business.”
“Where do you want to do it?”
“Somewhere quiet. I want to take my time. Where would you suggest? You seem to be a man with ideas.”
“My first thought would be the club. Tell him you need it for a private event. But he’d see through that. So why not tell him you need another building cleared? He’ll want to go in at night. You get there first.”
“That might work,” Meno said. “Give me a day to consider it. If Dunham gets a call, you’ll know what it means.”
“All right,” Raney said. “And you can keep the tape. I’ve got plenty of copies.”
“I thought you might. Don’t forget I have a tape of my own.”
The bodyguard who’d taken Raney’s badge opened the door and stuck his head in.
“He’s legit, boss.”
“Very good,” Meno said. “Come and uncuff the detective. Give him his wallet and keys and then show him out.”
“I need my shield,” Raney said.
“And you’ll have it,” Meno said. “
Just as soon as our business is concluded.”
He tapped the recorder.
“You can’t have too much insurance,” he said.
“I suppose that’s true,” Raney said.
He stopped short of invoking Ferguson’s name.
Outside, he felt the benzos, the blow, the caffeine swirling in his head and turning in his gut. He vomited into a trash can, made it back to his car, sat waiting for his blood to settle. By the time he reached the Triborough Bridge his clothes were soaked through. He flipped the air conditioner to high, mopped his forehead with each sleeve. He promised himself, promised Sophia, that he’d get clean once Meno and Dunham were gone.
Sophia. How much did she know? How much would he have to tell her?
34
Bay’s judge came through. By late afternoon they were standing outside Grant’s home, watching SWAT surround the house, then take the door. Men and women dressed in combat helmets and body armor filed inside. A volley of shouting jumped from room to room. Then quiet.
“He’s alive if they got him,” Bay said.
“He wouldn’t come alive,” Raney said.
The street was nondescript, not unlike the one Vignola had lived on: semidetached bungalows, the upkeep varying from yard to yard—manicured beds of cactuses beside mounds of used car parts. No people on the porches, no faces in the windows.
SWAT came back out, guns at their sides, chin straps unbuttoned. The major addressed Raney and Bay.
“The house is empty,” he said.
“Any sign of him?” Bay asked.
“When I say empty, I mean empty. Everything’s gone. Furniture, appliances. There’s nothing. You want to go in and take a look?”
“I guess we better,” Bay said. “We should have forensics do their thing, too.”
“Thanks for your help,” Raney said.
“Want us to stick around?”
“No,” Raney said. “He won’t be back.”
The rooms were barren, but the home appeared lived in. There were holes in the walls where pictures had hung. The linoleum was peeling back in the kitchen, the concrete cracking in the basement. Anything that grew had been ripped out of the backyard and replaced with gravel and a chin-up bar. Bay found a dead mouse in the attic.
They were sitting on the curb, Bay smoking, Raney drinking the remains of a coffee he’d bought that morning, when the forensics van pulled up. Bay stepped forward to greet them, spoke with a thin, gray-haired man in a blue jumpsuit.
“There ain’t much in there,” Bay said. “But give it all you got. This guy is a special kind of dangerous.”
Raney watched them lug their supplies inside.
“They look like a cleaning crew,” he said.
“I could use a goddamn nap,” Bay said.
“We should talk to the neighbors. Find out how long it’s been since they’ve seen him.”
“If we can find any neighbors. No one’s come or gone all day.”
“They’re here,” Raney said. “They’re laying low.”
“Why, if they know Grant’s gone?”
“Doesn’t mean they stopped being afraid of him.”
“They can relax. He’s gone for good. Cleaning out the house was a final ‘fuck you.’”
“Nothing’s final until we find that supply,” Raney said.
“Seems less and less likely, don’t it?”
They canvassed the opposite side of the street first, targeting houses with empty mailboxes and cars parked in the driveway. The few people who responded claimed not to know Grant.
“Maybe he kept a low profile,” Bay said.
“Maybe,” Raney said. “But this isn’t a neighborhood built for privacy.”
They crossed back to Grant’s side of the street, started with the house to the east of his, a small bungalow with a second-floor add-on, an A-frame loft that made Raney think of his cabin. A flowerless trellis hung over the walkway. The house had sight lines into Grant’s kitchen and master bedroom.
“Seventh time’s the charm,” Bay said.
An elderly man in a walker came to the door, looked hard at Bay’s uniform, then Raney’s badge.
“This’d be about Grant?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Bay said. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you have a moment.”
“You might have asked before you sent in the Delta Force. Grant cleared out weeks ago.”
The man was ninety, maybe older, voice clear but dim, spine badly curved, eyes alert behind thick glasses. He wore hearing aids that looked like tiny megaphones.
“Want us to come in?” Bay asked. “Might be easier to talk sitting down.”
“We can talk here. I’m supposed to stand ten minutes out of every hour. That’s my exercise. I used to climb the fourteeners in Colorado. Now I wouldn’t make it from the car to the trailhead. My two-year-old great-granddaughter falls less than I do.”
“This will work fine,” Raney said. “What can you tell us about Grant?”
“I can tell you what you already know—he had the whole block shitting their pants. I’ve been watching you knock on doors. You didn’t get more than two or three people who answered, and my guess is they didn’t say a thing worth hearing.”
“Good guess,” Bay said. “What’d he do to frighten everyone?”
“The man’s a scowl come to life. You couldn’t squeeze a drop of friendliness out of him. He used to sit out on his stoop cleaning his guns. There’d be kids playing stickball in the street. If the ball got loose and rolled over to him he wouldn’t toss it back. He’d just sit there, daring them to come get it. There was always something with him. Once someone blocked his driveway and Grant slashed the guy’s tires. Now that don’t make sense to me, cause how is the guy who’s in his way supposed to move after his tires are slashed?”
“Did you have any personal dealings with him?” Raney asked.
“With Oscar? No, never. Molly did, though. Get her in the right frame of mind and she ain’t afraid of no one.”
“Molly?”
“My live-in nurse. Caretaker, I think she calls herself. I’m not just old, I’m riddled with cancer. That’s how my doctor put it: ‘riddled with cancer.’ Hell of a bedside manner. So my daughter dumped that triangle on top of my house and hired Molly to live in it. She’s a godsend, really. Feeds me, gives me my meds, runs me through my physical therapy. Sometimes she sits and watches TV with me. It’ll be her who finds me. I hate knowing that.”
“You say she talked to Grant?” Raney asked.
“A few times. She was close with his boy.”
“Jonathan?”
“Yeah. That’s one apple landed miles from the tree. Real sweet kid. Life keeps making less sense the older you get. Me living to my age, him dying at his.”
“I know the feeling,” Bay said.
“Molly wouldn’t happen to be home now, would she?” Raney asked.
“She’s up in her triangle, taking a nap. If I want her this time of day I’m supposed to ring a buzzer.”
“Would you mind if we talked to her?” Bay asked.
“No, sir. My ten minutes are about up anyway. And I feel it, too. You know what they say: getting old ain’t for the faint of heart. And I’ve been old for a long time.”
They followed him into a well-lit and sparsely furnished living room—armchair and couch against one wall, television against the other, no sharp edges, ample room for a walker to pass through. The old man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pressed a button on an intercom, shouted into the receiver.
“Lund to angel of death,” he said. “You have gentlemen callers.”
He took his finger off the button.
“She’ll think I’m hallucinating. Sometimes if I skip my meds I see little robots chewing on the baseboards.”
Molly came hustling down the stairs, stopped short when she saw Raney and Bay standing there.
“Told you,” Lund said.
He turned, started off, then turned back.
“Thank you for your help,” Bay said.
They watched him navigate a doorway leading to the back of the house, heard the legs of his walker clicking against linoleum.
“What can I do for you?” Molly asked.
She was flushed, not from running down the stairs, Raney thought, but because her hair appeared slept on and she was dressed in sweatpants and a flannel shirt.
“Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you,” Raney said. “We won’t need much of your time.”
“At least have a seat,” she said.
Raney and Bay took the sofa. Molly pulled the armchair to the center of the room.
“What is this about?” she asked.
“We’re looking for Oscar Grant,” Bay said.
“No surprise there. The man ran off in the dead of night. I watched him load up the rental truck. Seeing him carry away Jonathan’s things broke my heart all over again.”
“Mr. Lund told us you were close with Grant’s son,” Bay said.
“I loved that boy. He was gentle, kind. The opposite of his father in every way. He used to come and sit with Tommy…Mr. Lund. He’d play checkers with him when Tommy’s mind was still up for it. No one asked him to—he just did it. That was when I first started working here. Jonathan was fourteen. How many fourteen-year-olds would give up their time like that?”
“Not many I know,” Bay said.
“Is it possible he came here to get away from his father?” Raney asked.
“There were other places he could have gone, but maybe that was part of it. Jonathan was sensitive. Oscar tried to beat it out of him.”
“Literally?”
“Literally and figuratively. Jonathan was always turning up here with scrapes and bruises he tried to explain away. One day he came over with a huge lump on his forehead. I told him enough was enough, I was going to talk to his father, but Jonathan threw himself in front of the door. He was right, of course. I’d only have made matters worse. A woman coming to fight his battles—Oscar would never have let up.”
“What about figuratively?” Raney asked.
“Oscar tried to make Jonathan into someone he wasn’t. He’d drag him on these weekend-long hunting trips. If Jonathan failed to kill something, Oscar would spend the week inventing ways to punish him. Once he made him get up at two in the morning and wax the car. Another time, he pulled Jonathan out of bed at four a.m., drove him up to Carlsbad, and made him run five miles with a sack of rocks on his back. He had Jonathan out on that chin-up bar every night. He’d blow his idiotic whistle and count down at the top of his lungs. He’d call Jonathan names when his arms gave out. It was horrible to watch, because that just wasn’t Jonathan. No matter how hard Oscar pushed, that was never going to be Jonathan. And when Oscar finally did realize it, he cut his son off altogether, treated him like he was already dead.”
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