“He’s one of those guys—you know the kind I’m talking about—he wants something to be true so bad, he needs it to be true so bad, that it turns into truth in his mind. He needs me to be an Aryan of Honor—my word is my bond. In his mind, I’d never cheat him.”
“’Cause he’s with you,” I said, letting the AB man know I understood the difference.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice as cold and unyielding as an iceberg. “He knows what I am; his kind is always studying mine. I let him tell me everything he knows, make a ton of money out of it, and walk away without giving him his cut, that wouldn’t be honorable. Wouldn’t be merciful, either.”
“That door you talked about, it swings both ways.”
“You mean, what’s to prevent you from burning me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do you care? What should it matter?”
“If you were to cross this guy, what could he do about it? Nothing, right?”
“Right,” he agreed.
“So?”
“Ah, I get it. You want to know what I think I’m holding that I could use if you crossed me.”
“You were me, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“I would. But I wouldn’t want you to take the answer the wrong way.”
I made a “come on with it” gesture.
“Silver.”
“Silver? You’re saying you got plenty of soldiers on the streets? And if I walked away with the money, you could find me. Or…?”
Not saying it aloud—the one threat that could change everything. If this guy was what he said he was—and he must be something close to it, for Silver to have reached out for me, and vouched for him in the bargain—and any threat to my family came out of his mouth, he wasn’t going to die of cancer.
“No, no. Not that,” he said, raising his hands as if he was warding off evil spirits. “Do I know bad guys? Absolute fucking psychos who’d take a week to kill you, and come a thousand times while they were doing it? Sure. But they’re not…they’re not with me any more than this other piece of shit is.
“That’s what I was telling you. That long story I made you listen to. Silver’s my ace. Not because he’s down with the Brotherhood—the old-school Brotherhood, when our honor was our life—but because he says your word—your real word, the one you give to your own people—makes one of those girders holding up a bridge look shaky.”
I cocked my head at an “I’m listening” angle.
“Look, you got a guy with you,” he said. “Black guy. Silver says people Inside call him the Prof. Used to be a preacher or something? Little guy, always talks in rhyme? Silver told me he heard him say this: ‘Lying to a sucker is just playing a role. But lying to your own is giving up your soul.’”
“I’m listening,” I said, out loud this time.
“No, you’re not, man. You’re not tuning in. See, Silver says this Prof, he’s got everyone’s respect: all the time he put in, he always walked it righteous. So, when he talks, everybody listens. But you, it’s much more than that. It’s like he was your father or something.”
I didn’t say a word. Just watched. Watched a man walking across a tightrope in a high wind, suspended over a shark tank.
“Silver, he says you and him, you’re brothers. For real, brothers. One of your own, see? You’d never lie to him. It just wouldn’t be you.”
“And?”
“And it’s not me you’d be giving your word to, it’s him. Silver.”
“If I did that, what’s in it for him?”
“He doesn’t want anything,” the AB man answered, knowing I’d check for myself. “Silver said you already did things for him he wouldn’t trust another man on earth to do. He says you know things about him that could get him done in a heartbeat. And you never would. He says you already fixed him up with a great lawyer. And, if he ever needed anything, you’d take care of it for him. He knows he’s risking all that by saying you can trust me.
“Now, me, I figure a man doesn’t get to be your brother behind what he says, or some silly-ass tattoo, or just hating the same people you do. A man gets to be your brother because of what he does. Am I right?”
“By me you are.”
“And Silver, he’s your brother?”
“He is.”
“And that’s my insurance. I want to be able to get a message to him—my own way—and tell him you gave your word. To him, I mean. Nothing cute: so long as I play it laser-straight with you, I get my cut. Can I do that?”
“Yeah. You can do that.”
“I’ve got a satchel with me. I know you already went through it. Nothing in there but paper, and a cassette tape. I’m leaving it here when I go. All you need to check out everything I told you. Everything except the guy himself, of course. You go through it. Decide if the peach is as ripe as I say it is. You think it is, you think it’s worth climbing the tree to get it, you call me, and I’ll do whatever you say after that. You don’t think so, just call and say one word, and I’m out of your life forever. Your name will never come out of my mouth again.”
Meaning: no matter what I decided, he was going to take the shot, play the only cards he was holding. And if he couldn’t pull it off, so be it. He was going out the same way he came in. Because there’s one thing you do take with you when you go: your rep.
I walked over, shook his hand.
“Close your eyes,” I told him. “Your drink will be here in a minute.”
“He worked on this,” Michelle said, standing with her hands on her hips, looking down at the Kong-sized table we had made out of rough planks laid across seven thick sawhorses. It took up just about all the space in what used to be my living room. No easy feat: the living room had been constructed by knocking down non-load-bearing walls that had separated all five of the flophouse “rooms” on that floor.
“He had plenty of time, little sister,” Clarence said, pointing with a shooter’s index finger at the array of brightly colored file folders. Each was labeled in block printing as anonymous as the pasted-up words in a ransom note.
“Time ain’t worth a dime,” the Prof said. “He was Inside, son. Ain’t no kind of space in that place.”
I nodded. Looked up to see Max doing the same thing. That “satchel” was more like a small suitcase. “Forty-point-nine kilos,” the Mole said, after he was done putting it through his machines.
Inside, it’s not space that’s the biggest problem; it’s privacy. The hacks—that’s what we called them in New York, back when I was locked up; they call them “cops” in Jersey, “screws” in Massachusetts—who knows what they called them where the cancer-ridden man had done his time—could turn your house upside down just for the fun of it. They liked doing things like that, but they were always careful who they did it to.
If you were someone they hated—and it never took a lot to get on that list—they didn’t just search, they destroyed. Tore up precious photographs, letters you would never see again, an art project you’d been working on. Just because they could. Those “soldiers” who played torture-power games with Iraqi prisoners, you think they were from one of the elite fighting forces, like the Rangers, or the Green Berets? Forget that: former prison guards is what they were. They’d had their own off-the-books training, spent their days in a subculture the World never sees. They’re not allowed to bullwhip prisoners anymore, so they learned new tricks.
All the power-boys do it. They don’t change their attitudes, they just adapt them to fit the times. Ever notice how the cops always scream “Stop resisting!” while they’re gang-beating some poor bastard into permanent paralysis, just in case there’s some good citizen with a videocam lurking nearby?
A convict can spend years, decades even, planning a job. But he’s not going to draw diagrams of it, not while he’s a captive. Unless he wants to stay one.
“He’s not an impatient man,” I told them. “Even with that cancer clock ticking inside him, he wasn’t going to panic. He talked tough in that war
ehouse, but we’re his last chance. His last real chance, I mean. He could put together another crew, but where would he find one he could trust? Not in the time he’s got left.”
“It’s only a plan, man,” the Prof said. “You got the time to make one, you got the time to fake one.” Not arguing for one side or the other, just saying it like it was. He and Silver had a friendship of sorts—shared respect, more, actually—but even if it had been Silver himself pushing the score, the Prof would have wanted his own look first. Trusting a man doesn’t mean you trust his judgment.
Max reached over, tapped the face of my wristwatch, held up one finger.
“First thing,” I answered him, and everybody else, “is we check out everything that’s got an independent source. So, for openers—”
“I can do all the newspaper stuff, mahn,” Clarence volunteered, his Island voice expressing pride in his recently acquired computer skills. “There is a database—LexisNexis, it is called—that I could look through. Very quickly, too. If all those articles he collected are true—not true in what they say; true copies of what was in the papers, or the magazines—I can tell you.”
“Perfect,” I told him, as the Prof nodded approvingly. “Remember, though: this case was never solved. So there’s no court proceedings. And there’s a lot of stuff in the police files we’re never going to get a look at.”
Michelle exchanged a look with the Prof.
“Forget it,” I told them. I wasn’t going back to Wolfe’s network, not after the last time. Wolfe. An angel’s face, and eyes that matched her name. She’d walk through hell wearing a gasoline dress to put a freak down for the count, but she never considered ass-kissing part of that job. Or looking the other way, either. Because she hadn’t come up through the clubhouse—in Queens, the Democratic machine doesn’t just control judgeships, it runs the whole show—she never participated in the “voluntary” fundraisers, or tacked up campaign posters, or kept a photo of the DA in her office. The only mistake I’d ever known her to make was thinking that being the best sex-crimes prosecutor the city had ever seen would be enough to let her keep her job as head of the Special Victims Bureau.
She never understood the “go along to get along” mentality of the political appointee, so she was probably the only one in the city who was surprised when they finally fired her. After that, she’d gone outlaw. Not committing crimes, but going places she wasn’t supposed to go. She ran the best info-trafficking cell in the city. And she still had a lot of friends on the force.
I thought I had a chance with her once, but I waited too long. Crossed too many borders, too many times.
“You and me, it’s not going to be.” That’s how she’d ended it between us.
Last year, I’d taken some risks to show her I was back to myself—the man who…well, the man who she once…Hell, I didn’t know, but I wanted to be that man again, if only in her eyes.
I’d sworn to her that I was doing the right thing, for the right reasons. That wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t all of the truth. The whole job had reeked of money, and I was looking for some of that, too. So she’d used up a big favor, gotten me some stuff from inside police files.
But she’d made it clear I couldn’t go there again. I kept hoping word of the last thing I’d done would get back to her. Kept hearing Johnny Adams wailing “Reconsider Me” in my head, hoping she was tuned to the same station.
If she’d reach out to me, any excuse would do. But she hadn’t, and I wasn’t going to break my word not to contact her again. Sure, I could get to her crew, buy some information, like anyone else. But police files, only Wolfe herself could get that kind of thing done. Not an option.
“We’re not trying to solve a case here,” I told everyone. “If the guy Silver sent is telling the truth, the case is already solved…only nobody ever paid for it.”
“Writing a check won’t clear that deck.”
“I know, Prof. Look, I’m not saying we should do this. We’re family for real, not some fucking TV show. So, straight up, this is an extortion job, okay? If—if—this guy is telling the stone truth, there’s guilty people—rich guilty people—who’ll pay major bucks to get their hands on something that proves they killed a little girl. That’s the job. The girl herself, she’s been in the ground for thirty-some years. There’s nothing we can do for her. Thing is, do we want to do this for ourselves?”
“I…don’t think I do,” Michelle said, softly.
“How come, sis? It’s not like we never—”
“Just stop it!” She whirled on me. “You know perfectly well what those…degenerates who killed her want. There’s only one way they can ever be sure whoever has the goods on them never comes around again, no matter how much they pay.”
“That’s Silver’s pal’s problem, not ours.”
“We’d still be helping them get away with it.”
“They got away with it, honeygirl. You think there’s still an investigation going on? This case is as buried as that little girl’s body.”
“Look at me!” my sister commanded.
I held her eyes as best as I could—my eyes don’t work together anymore, not since that gunshot wound a few years back, and the learning-on-the-job surgery that followed. The two eyes aren’t even the same color anymore. But Michelle had been reading the truth in them since we were street children together.
“I see,” she finally said.
Everybody looked at her, waiting.
“And I’m in,” Michelle said.
“The copies were authentic,” Clarence said, “every single one.” It was four days later, all of us in the war room. Like before, the makeshift table was covered with paper, but none of it had come out of the satchel that the AB man had handed me.
The walls were now plastered with white oaktag, fastened with pieces of duct tape, covered with writing in different-colored Sharpies. Everyone had their own color, so you could tell at a glance who made the comment. I don’t know where Michelle had found a lilac one.
Clarence’s voice was deliberately flat, showing us he could be professional about…even this: “On August 17, 1975, the body of Melissa Welterson Turnbridge was found in the woods north of the Merry Meadows Country Club golf course. The child”—Clarence stumbled a little over the word, but didn’t look up from his computer screen—“was thirteen years old. Born August 27, 1961. She would have turned fourteen in a few days. Reported missing by her parents when she had not come home by ten at night on August 4. The police had been looking for her ever since.”
“Teenage girl breaks curfew and the parents call in the police?” I said.
“And they rush right out and start looking for her?” Michelle put in, laying her suspicions over mine.
“Different schools, different rules,” the Prof said, sweeping away our doubts. “Walk into a big-city precinct, tell that same story, parents get the brush-off. Up there, the cops rush off. You call from the Projects, say your little girl hasn’t come home, the blue boys think she’s probably up on a roof somewhere, giving blow jobs to gangbangers. But when you call from a town where being a millionaire puts you on the wrong side of the tracks, they call out the SWAT team if you tell ’em there’s a possum in your backyard.”
“There had been a big storm the night before,” Clarence went on as if nobody had said a word, his voice still as impersonal as the screen he was reading from. “One of the men who works for one of the owners—the Shelton Estate, the papers called it—was out checking for damage. From knocked-down trees and things like that. It was that man who found her. Just her leg, sticking up. The storm had uncovered her.”
“So she wasn’t buried?” I asked.
“No, mahn. It was like someone rolled a big log over her, then covered it with whatever they could find. She was never actually under the ground.”
“Huh!” the Prof said.
Everybody waited, but he didn’t say anything more.
Finally, Clarence picked up the thread: “She had been dead fo
r days, the coroner said. Probably killed the same night she hadn’t come home.”
Max tapped the table to get Clarence to look up, then made the sign of a pointed gun.
“No,” the West Indian said, his Island voice so hard and tight that the lilt had been squeezed out of it. “She wasn’t shot, and she wasn’t stabbed. Beaten to death. Strangled, too. ‘Multi-sexual assault,’ they also said.”
“Before or after?” I asked.
“It does not say,” he answered. “There is a lot more. It was the biggest story in the local papers for months. A lot of national coverage, too. All I am saying is—the clippings this man brought to you?—he did not make them up. Or change them. Even the pictures—there are lots of those, mostly from her junior-high school; she was supposed to start the ninth grade in a couple of weeks—those are the same. Not Photoshopped or—”
“Photo—?”
The Mole waved away whatever ignorant question I was going to waste his time with.
“You started at the other end?” I said to Max, gesturing as I spoke. He can read lips as easy as he reads print, but the sign language we’d taught each other was ours, and I was never giving up that part of our bond.
The Mongolian nodded.
“They ever get specific about the cause of death?”
He shook his head. Shrugged his shoulders. Then slammed one steel chunk of a fist into an open palm. Over and over again. As we watched, he mimed a beating. A vicious, systematic beating. And the kind of rape maggots do with a broomstick or a beer bottle. The mute Mongol pointed at the pile of paper, and shook his head. Then he pointed to his own temple, held up a “number one” gesture.
We all nodded, following along. The papers had never said so, not out loud, but the little girl had been strangled after the kind of beating that might have killed her anyway.
Some freak had pain and sex twisted together into a single wire, a wire he had wrapped around that little girl’s neck. The actual cause of death didn’t matter. We didn’t know who, not for certain-sure, but we all knew why.
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