Dead Money

by Grant Mccrea

  Serge? Are you kidding? We’d be lucky just to find him alive. After Sarah you can go cherchez la junkie too, if you like. I’m going home.

  Your French is so bad it’s giving me a hernia.

  So go herniate. Hey, I like that. ‘Go herniate.’ I think I’ll use that. Next time I run into Warwick.

  Dorita laughed. She leaned over. She kissed me. Her mouth was soft and yielding.

  The contrast with her personality was striking.

  105.

  KELLY AND I BAKED BREAD. We watched old episodes of Family Guy. The place was warm. We made some Chinese soup. We loved to make Chinese soup. I tried not to remember that it was four days til the preliminary hearing.

  We laughed. We ate. We joked.

  The investigation could wait. Who was I fooling, anyway? I was no investigator. I was a dad. The little shit probably did it anyway.

  My cell phone rang. It was Dorita.

  Where the hell are you? she asked.

  Home.

  Still? Jesus. I should have known. I’m coming over.

  I’m not sure …

  See you in a few.

  Damn.

  Dorita’s coming over, I said to Kelly.

  Okay, she said.

  You’re sure? I asked.

  Sure I’m sure, she said. Why not? She can have some soup.

  I couldn’t read her.

  By the time Dorita got there we were working on the sorbet. Chocolate walnut.

  We’d kept some soup warmed on the stove.

  Dorita didn’t look to be in a soup and sorbet mood.

  I’ve got it, she said.

  You’ve got it, I replied. Great. Have some soup.

  You’re kidding. Didn’t you hear me? I said I’ve got it. I’ve got the last piece of the puzzle.

  Okay, okay. What is it?

  Here’s the scoop. It took me awhile, but I tracked her down.

  The girlfriend?

  Sarah.

  Sarah. Right. And?

  Quite a number.

  I think you said that last time.

  I may have. Anyway, it still applies. And I got something, darling. Something good.

  You’ve outdone yourself.

  More than I can say for your day’s work.

  I can’t deny it. You win this round.

  Just wait. I think I won the whole damn war.

  I’ll gracefully concede.

  You’d better. Or I’ll …

  She looked at Kelly.

  Okay, said Kelly. You can stop there. I’m going to Peter’s.

  Sorry, I said.

  Don’t worry about it, Dad, she said, heading for the door.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant.

  All right, I said to Dorita. Can we get to the bloody point?

  The point is, said Dorita, that it had nothing to do with poker.

  Meaning?

  Larry supposedly went to Jules’s place to collect on a poker debt. You remember that, don’t you, lunkhead?

  I love you too. Yes, I remember it. Haven’t managed to verify that there even was a game, though.

  That’s probably because there wasn’t one. Poker had nothing to do with it.

  Nothing?

  Nothing.

  Now that is interesting. What did it have to do with?

  Larry knew something.

  Yes?

  Sarah didn’t know what. But whatever it was, Larry thought it was going to make him rich.

  A shakedown? Precisely.

  Yet more interesting. What did he know, exactly?

  You’re not listening. She didn’t know. He didn’t tell her. But it was something big. Something really big.

  Well. I’m not sure that you’ve exactly busted the case wide open here, darling. I’m not even sure you’re right about the poker thing.

  What do you mean?

  So Larry had something on Jules. Why couldn’t it be something to do with poker? Some scam they pulled?

  You really know how to keep your eye on the ball, don’t you.

  Okay. Right. Doesn’t matter, does it. Whatever it was, it does throw a new light on things.

  Whoa. Slow down. Let me catch up with you.

  Oh, shut up. Have some sorbet.

  She had some sorbet.

  Okay, I said. Larry knew something. Who can tell us what Larry knew?

  Jules, for sure.

  He wouldn’t even tell me the truth about the poker game, the telephone calls. I don’t think. He’s either hiding something, or he’s built himself a very thick wall.

  The twins?

  Maybe. But we still don’t have anything concrete to connect them to Larry Silver.

  Lisa?

  Lisa. Yes. How could she not know?

  It explains her protectiveness.

  Well, it’s not clear that needs explanation. But yes. And, she’s definitely a weak link.

  Maybe the only one we’ve got left.

  Let’s go for it.

  We’ve got to get to her away from Jules this time, though.

  Yes.

  I’ll take care of that.

  I knew you would.

  106.

  WE AGREED TO MEET at the White Stallion. Dorita would have Lisa with her. If she didn’t, we’d have to go to Plan B. Whatever that was.

  I got there early. I drank only mineral water. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Just this once.

  I amused myself by taking notes on the other patrons. Pretending they were suspects. Writing down my observations on index cards. Hell, maybe I’d write a book.

  I was intrigued by a tall, thin guy, with a cowboy look. Pointy boots. Well-worn jeans. Deeply tanned face, lined with a road map of serious living. He was rolling his own cigarettes from a leather pouch.

  A guy more out of place in New York City would be hard to find.

  Then I noticed that he was talking to himself. Quietly. But angrily.

  Ah, I corrected myself. He fits right in.

  I was about to interrupt his conversation, to glean more details for my index card, when Dorita arrived. And there with her, looking small and lost, was Lisa.

  Hey, I said to Dorita.

  You know Lisa, she said.

  Hi Lisa. Good to see you.

  Lisa looked at me with pleading eyes.

  Hi, she said softly.

  I’ve filled Lisa in, said Dorita. She’s here to talk with us.

  She gave Lisa a motherly smile.

  Dorita was a woman of many guises.

  Let that be a warning to you, I thought to myself.

  We moved to an isolated table. Lisa had a gin and tonic. This was good.

  Dorita chatted with Lisa. I listened. Dorita was going with the girl stuff. Stuff Lisa could relate to. Nipple piercing. That kind of stuff. They both seemed quite sophisticated in the area.

  This gave me pause.

  But hey, it was working. Lisa was warming up.

  In fact, it was ridiculously easy. In Lisa’s world, somebody engaging and warm, somebody who spoke your language and also cared about what you had to say, was so rare that it came as a revelation. You embraced it, you followed it. Or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, the memory would haunt you forever. The opportunity lost. The warm forgiving world you’d been invited into once, just once, gone in a puff of arrogance born of insecurity, misplaced anger, stupidity.

  So, if you cultivated that. If you nurtured the fear of missing that moment. You could make someone like Lisa do whatever you wanted.

  Which was where the cults came from.

  So we used that thing. The sad and ugly weakness of the lifelong victim.

  Did the ends justify the means?

  I left that for the philosophers. Well, the real philosophers. We needed some goddamn answers.

  I watched with admiration as Dorita pulled Lisa into her orbit. They laughed. They commiserated. They nudged each other. They made jokes at my expense. I was sitting in as surrogate for the male.

  And then Dorit
a sprung the trap.

  And what about Veronica? she asked, out of the blue.

  Lisa looked at me. At Dorita. She looked as scared, as helpless as a rabbit in the clutches of a hawk. I felt bad for her. But I also was elated. In her face was the proof. That we were on to something. That the damn thing might be solved. Right here. Right now.

  I looked at Dorita with admiration. She ignored me.

  Lisa, she said quietly. You’re not answering me.

  Lisa looked at her with a new and sudden loathing. Her face went hard.

  Fuck you, she said.

  Veronica and Larry Silver, said Dorita. They’re connected. We know that, Lisa. Lisa, save yourself. It’s not right, what Jules’s done to you. Lisa, he’s taken over your life. He’s made you his accomplice. It’s not right. You have your own life to live.

  But we’d lost her.

  Fuck you, she spat again.

  She grabbed her bag, her sad, incongruous canvas bag, a cartoon drawing on it. Lisa Simpson. She ran out of the bar.

  I looked at Dorita.

  We seem to have hit a nerve, I said.

  Dorita nodded. She didn’t look happy.

  I knew what she meant.

  We sat in silence for a while. We sipped our drinks.

  I’m not sure I liked the way you were talking about my client, I said.

  He’s not your client anymore.

  Yes he is. He hasn’t fired me yet. He just hates me.

  Dorita rolled her eyes, went into another funk.

  Okay, she said finally. What does it mean?

  Let’s start with what’s absolutely clear. Veronica’s at the center of this.

  Yes.

  Ramon. Lisa.

  Yes.

  I think it’s safe to say that the best working hypothesis is that Jules killed Larry Silver after all. But not over poker winnings. Because Larry Silver showed up to blackmail him.

  Because Larry Silver, somehow, knew something about Veronica.

  Exactly.

  And where to go from here is the question. Tell the cops?

  I don’t think I’m quite ready to do that. Like I said, Jules is still my, our, client. Until he officially fires us. Or we fire him. We’re not doing this for the cops. We’re doing this as part of our obligation to our client. Sure, we suspect he’s guilty, now. But we don’t know that for sure. And even if we did, unless we knew that someone else was in imminent danger, we couldn’t tell them. Even if we wanted to.

  So let’s keep going. I mean, the preliminary hearing’s in two days.

  It is?

  It is.

  Goddamn. I was even more right than I thought.

  Must be a novel feeling for you.

  107.

  WE SLEPT ON IT.

  I slept on it at my place.

  Dorita at hers.

  It seemed like the right thing to do.

  In the morning we met at Starbucks. Being at the office helped me think.

  We reviewed the bidding. We chewed over the alternatives.

  We listed the candidates. We weighed the options.

  We chewed the fat. We crunched the bones.

  We picked the lint off the jacket.

  We ditched the metaphors.

  We sat in silence for a while.

  Butch called with some news. The preliminary autopsy result on FitzGibbon. Death caused by the fall. No doubt about that. No signs of pre-fall trauma. Though after a fall from that height, it was hard to tell.

  No surprises there, I said.

  No.

  Doesn’t rule out being pushed.

  No, it doesn’t, he said. And also …

  Yes?

  The blood work was awfully weird.

  Out with it. You’re killing me here.

  All kinds of shit. Mescaline. LSD. Meth. Whatever.

  What the fuck?

  Yeah. That’s what we all said.

  This was the big cheese on the mayor’s antidrug task force, for Christ’s sake.

  Exactly. And anyway, just not the type in general.

  Man. Another fucking curveball. Wait a minute.

  I pulled out a blank index card. Filled it with scribbles.

  Okay, I said, listen, we need you now. We need you on the team. I know you’ve got your job to do. I’m not asking you to compromise your job. But we need you. Come over and talk to us, anyway. We’ve got to make sense of all this shit. We’re just about there. I know it. But the last step, this is going to be heavy. We need your brain. We might need your muscle, too.

  He hesitated. I argued. He wavered. I persuaded.

  He came to Starbucks. It started all over again. He had a duty to the force. He couldn’t just become a cowboy vigilante. He wasn’t Clint Eastwood. He had a job. A mortgage. Why couldn’t we just go to his boss with the stuff we got from Sarah? They’d follow it up. Hell, it was dynamite.

  Besides the problem of our obligations to our client, which he understood, it wasn’t dynamite, yet, I explained. It was the scent of dynamite. We still didn’t have a shred of real evidence. We had suppositions. Educated guesses. Okay, highly educated guesses, veritable Ph.D.s of guesses. But still guesses. Odd behavior. Conflicting statements.

  We wore Butch down.

  He shook his head in resignation.

  Okay, he said. But on one condition.

  Shoot, I said.

  When I say the word, we call it in.

  I looked Butch in the eye. There were not many people I could trust. Trust not only to not betray me when the chips were down. But to have the judgment to know when they were. But Butch was one of them. We needed him. He was a man of action. Action was coming. I could feel it in my bones.

  The choice was elementary.

  Okay, I said. You’re the man.

  All right, he said.

  Plan time, said Dorita.

  The weakest link, I said. It’s worked so far.

  I’ll give you that, she said. But are there any left?

  By definition, I said. However strong the weakest link, it’s still weaker than the rest.

  I knew that philosophy degree would come in handy one day.

  What makes you think this was the first time?

  Just a wild guess.

  Okay, kiddies, said Butch. Let’s get to the point.

  I had a thought. A very good thought. I was proud of my thought. I decided to string it out. For maximum effect.

  Why, I asked, did Lisa run?

  Because she knew something, said Dorita.

  That she didn’t want to tell you, added Butch.

  And?

  They looked at me.

  That’s not a sufficient explanation, I said. She could have just said nothing. Denied. By running, she told us we were on to something. Why did she run?

  Ooh, said Dorita, you’re so sexy when you’re being mysterious.

  Just the Socratic method. You brought me back to undergraduate days, with that philosophy remark.

  All right, Monsieur Descartes, can we get to the goddamn point?

  Lisa knows something, I said.

  Right.

  She didn’t want to tell us.

  Correct.

  And.

  And.

  And she knew that if she stayed with us, she would tell us.

  Exactly.

  Ah.

  So.

  So, she’s still the weakest link.

  Bingo, said Butch.

  Oho, Monsieur Descartes, said Dorita. If you keep this up, I might even start respecting your intellect.

  You keep threatening.

  All right, children, said Butch, let’s go grab the little bitch.

  I prefer to think of her as misguided, said Dorita.

  Whatever, I said. Let’s grab her.

  By force? asked Dorita.

  Why do you think Butch is on the team? I asked.

  Wait a minute … said Butch.

  Just kidding, I said.

  But we do have to get her away from Jules again, sa
id Dorita. And persuasion isn’t going to work this time.

  Let’s figure that out when we get there, said Butch.

  I couldn’t agree more, I said. But first, I think I’ll finish this tall skinny latte.

  Butch and Dorita got up.

  Okay, I said. Just kidding. Let’s go.

  108.

  THE CAB SMELLED HEAVILY of spilled beer and ashes.

  I had another thought.

  Butch, I said. The note. Did you find out anything about the note?

  Jesus, he said. I totally forgot.

  You’re kidding.

  No, I’m not. Christ, man, you were badgering me so bad I couldn’t think straight. I’m turning into you.

  Okay, I’ll take that as a compliment. What did you find out?

  I couldn’t get a look at it. I’m not officially on the case. It’s locked up. They’re guarding it like Bush’s IQ scores.

  Sure, I said. I get that. But what did you find out?

  I talked to some guys.

  And?

  It wasn’t a handwritten note. It was an e-mail.

  We knew that. To who?

  To whom, said Dorita.

  To whom?

  To his wife.

  Veronica? Dorita and I said in unison.

  Jesus, said Dorita. Get out an index card.

  I already had one in my hand.

  Whoa, I said. This is a blockbuster.

  Might just blow us out of the water, said Dorita.

  All right, said Butch. It’s time to let old Butch in on the fun.

  I had forgotten, in all of the excitement, that we hadn’t shared with Butch everything we knew. We explained the Veronica angle.

  Butch whistled. Perhaps in admiration. Perhaps not.

  Listen, I said, this is definitely weird. But let’s put it in context. All it really adds to what we know is that FitzGibbon thought that Veronica was still alive.

  Pretty feeble, said Dorita. We’ve got to think this through.

  The cab pulled up at Jules’s building.

  Sure, I said. I’m with you. But right now, we’re here.

  Shit, said Dorita. Shouldn’t we hold off on this?

  Forget it, I said. Damn the damn torpedoes. If we can get Lisa to talk, the rest won’t matter.

  I don’t know, said Dorita.

  Let’s do it, said Butch.

  A man of action, I said. I admire that. Dorita, you’re outvoted.

  She wasn’t happy, but she went along.

  We rang the bell.

  No answer.

  We rang again.