"Detective Kitteridge in?" I asked the buck sergeant at the front desk.
The brown-eyed, pale-skinned man looked at me, sneered as well as he could, and pressed a button.
He motioned with his head toward the waiting area and I went to sit on the solitary bench that the department kept for their visitors. It was made of hard wood and had many stains and gouges from long use and little upkeep. I rested my elbows on my knees and laced my fingers, an apologetic sinner at the gates of the house of damnation.
Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, I began counting breaths up to ten, and then started over. I kept that up until I lost count and drifted. When I felt myself drifting, I went back to counting.
Through it all my headache was pounding. But I was getting used to that.
I kept up that regimen for quite a while, over an hour. I did it to keep my mind calm and keen, because I couldn't afford to get angry.
Detective Kitteridge wasn't beyond petty revenge. I had refused to come to him when he said and so I was going to have a long wait. That way he could have his payback while at the same time he could weigh my interest in the double murder. If I stayed I must have needed something. Maybe that something would indict me in some way.
The cop had his customs and I had mine. So I sat there counting parcels of air and remembering that breath was the most precious moment in any mammal's life.
"LT," he said.
I looked up and smiled.
This mild response was unexpected. Carson Kitteridge, my own personal city-assigned tormentor, grimaced.
Carson's skin was bone white and he had about as much hair as I did--very little. His eyes were pale blue, like an overcast afternoon in late summer. He was even shorter than I. I wouldn't say we liked each other, but, as with so many people in the modern world, our work brought us together more times than we would have preferred.
"A day late and a dollar short," I said. "But I'm here."
"Come on back to my office."
CARSON ENTERED A CODE on an electric lock and led me into the secure section of the precinct. We passed a few offices, made our way through a locker room. From there we went through an exceptionally slender doorway, entering a stairwell that was narrow and steep. We went down four floors, finally coming to a long, dark hallway. If I had been under arrest and in chains that hallway would have had a sense of finality to it.
I've known quite a few advocates of The Life who had entered halls just like this one and were never seen again.
And I knew that I wasn't special.
I could die just like anyone else.
Carson led me to the end of the hall and turned left, continuing on until we came to another turn. Along the way we passed not one door.
"Here we go," the police detective said as we made the second turn.
We had come to a shiny yellow portal for which Carson produced a key.
It was a small office that smelled of mold and stale tobacco smoke. The desk was green metal, as were the straight-back chairs in front of and behind it. The light was very bright and it felt warm and humid in there, like the heat radiating from a wet dog.
"Sit down, LT," Carson said.
He went to the chair behind the desk.
When we were both seated, but not necessarily comfortable, Kitteridge lit up a cigarette.
I smiled and then grinned. A laugh was not far off.
"What's so funny?" he asked.
"You went to all the trouble of gettin' an office down here just so that you could smoke at work."
He didn't want to but Carson Kitteridge smiled.
"Some people are just too smart for their own good," he said, tamping down the smirk with the words.
"Not me, man. I just see a kindred spirit, that's all."
"We don't have a thing in common, McGill."
"If we didn't I wouldn't be sittin' in your chair now, would I?"
"Why are you here?" he asked.
"Didn't you call me? Call my answering service and my office?"
"Who's the girl answered the office phone?"
"My new receptionist."
"As long as I've known you you've never had an employee, LT."
"Mardi Bitterman."
That stopped him momentarily.
I had given Kitteridge a lead on a website that Bug Bateman and I created using the pornographic photographs that Leslie Bitterman had taken of himself and his daughter--Mardi.
That bust got Kitteridge a commendation.
"I thought your son just happened on that website," Carson said.
"It's hot down here, man. What do you want from me?"
"All right," the little cop said. "You want to get tough, that's okay with me. What do you know about those killings?"
"I thought this was Bonilla's case."
"The killings are hers, but your ass is mine."
"I guess I might have enough to go around."
"What were you doing there?" Kitteridge asked.
"I already told Detective Bonilla."
"I don't believe it."
"Why not?"
"Because if it was just circumstance like you said, then you wouldn't be here."
"Captain James Charbon," I said, clearly and slow.
Once again the detective's aggression was stymied.
He knew the good captain. The reason Kitteridge didn't have his own bars was James Charbon.
Carson at one time had a partner--Randolph Peel. Randy was bent. He took payoffs in cash and in kind from all sorts of crooks, big and small. And there were two things you had to know about Carson: (1) that he was what I liked to call an Extra-Logical, a breed of human who could see beyond the physical world into a dimension of pure logic--there he could perceive things that normal Homo sapiens could not; and (2) Carson was as honest as the day is long on June 22nd a hundred miles north of Stockholm.
Carson was bound to find out what Peel was doing, and he was therefore obligated to turn him in.
That was all good and well. But the problem was that Peel was James Charbon's brother-in-law. So Randy's downfall meant that Carson would never get a serious promotion as long as Charbon was ambulatory.
Kitteridge took a deep breath and sat back in his chair.
"You fuckin' with me, LT?"
"He told Bonilla that he wanted daily reports on my involvement in the crime. She told me about it, thinking that would light a fire under my butt. She was right. That's why I'm here."
Carson nodded. That was all he needed to do. The law, and its expectations, would be suspended for the while.
"I don't know who the button man was, and neither had I ever met, or consciously spoken to, Wanda Soa. But you better believe I have to find out something about both of them, because Charbon hates me more than you hate him."
For what seemed like a long time Carson and I stared into each other's eyes. He believed (and I did, too) that he could tell if a man was lying just by looking at him. I was giving him the opportunity to ply that talent.
28
I don't know what's going on here, Carson," I was saying.
We were walking north on Eighth Avenue, looking to all the world like two down-on-their-luck salesmen in bad suits. He had called Lieutenant Bethann Bonilla--they were on a first-name basis--and learned that what I was saying was true.
Once he knew for a fact that Charbon was involved, Carson got fidgety. He didn't want to sit in the station anymore. Even in his underground bunker he felt vulnerable.
"So what do you want from me?" he asked.
The sun was going down again, taking with it, it seemed to me, my tentative connection to Reason.
"I don't really know," I said. "I mean, I get a call summoning me to a murder scene. I agree that's suspicious. But I never heard of Wanda Soa, and the button man was a stranger to me, too."
Neither one of us had an overcoat and the temperature was below fifty, for sure. I was certainly feeling a chill, but that was also the scrutiny I was under.
> Kitteridge was so good at getting the truth out of suspects that he was on call to all the major precincts in New York. They sometimes lent him out to other cities for convoluted interrogations. If he was freelance I would have used him myself.
"I still don't know what you want," Carson said.
"Yeah. Well . . . what about Soa?"
"What about her?"
"Why is everybody so upset?" I asked. "I mean, I know that it's murder and all, but there usually isn't this much pressure put on a single case, especially if the press doesn't grab on to it."
"I don't know," Kitteridge said. It was a simple declarative sentence, one that I rarely, if ever, heard come from his lips.
Rather than show my surprise, I said, "Let's go in that diner, man. I'm freezin' out here."
There was a coffee shop with a counter and a few tables across the street. If I had been with any other one of the eight million New Yorkers, even those confined to a wheelchair, we would have plunged across the avenue, making our way through the traffic by bravado and stealth. But Carson went to the crosswalk at the corner and patiently waited for the light. I do believe that if his mother was having a stroke in that diner he would have done the same.
His adherence to the law was both laughable and frightening.
SEATED AT THE COUNTER, sipping black coffees, we continued our clandestine talk.
"Is someone putting pressure on the case?" I asked.
Carson stared at me. His left eye nearly closed with the concentration.
"You don't know Soa?" he asked.
"Never heard of her before I got to the crime scene."
"Then why were you there?"
"I got a call."
We waited again for him to redigest my words.
"There's an ADA named Tinely," he said. "Broderick Tinely. For some reason he's got a bee up his butt over the murder. He's been leaning heavily on Assistant Chief Chalmers, and the shit filters down from there."
"Why?"
"I don't know," Kitteridge said again. "I got a call from downtown telling me to lean on you. I didn't know about Charbon. He'd rather cut off his left nut than bring me in on anything he's doing."
I sipped my coffee, thinking that it tasted of metal and the chemical cleaners used on metal.
"What's the deal?" I asked.
"Are you involved with these killings or the people killed?" Carson asked.
"If I am I don't know how."
He thrummed his fingers on the countertop.
"It doesn't make any sense," he said at last. "None of it. The killer has no name, his fingerprints don't show up in any database. He had a wad of thirty-seven hundred dollars in his pocket and that was all. His last dinner was tilapia, brown beans, white rice, and plantains fried in peanut oil. The residue on his left hand and sleeve says that he probably fired the shot that killed the girl, but there was no gun in the apartment. There's no way in the world that he could have stabbed himself. The knife was shoved in just under his left armpit, all the way to the handle. They say that the killer wiped off his prints but it looks to me like the shooter probably jerked away from his assailant when he was stabbed and any prints were wiped clean."
"Did anybody hear anything?"
"A young man in the apartment upstairs might have heard a girl screaming around the time the killings occurred."
"And Soa?" I asked.
"Can I get you anything else, gentlemen?" a young Hispanic man with a sparse mustache asked.
"You got an espresso machine?" I asked him.
"Yes, sir."
"Make me a triple with some steamed milk."
"You don't like your coffee?" Carson asked.
"Do you?"
The young man smiled and moved off to fill my order.
"What's wrong with the coffee?" Kitteridge demanded.
"It tastes like toxic waste."
"I don't taste anything."
"Do you have something on Soa?" I asked.
"I could fill up a phone book on her. Her father's a businessman from Colombia and her mother's a Parisian socialite named Jeanne Oure. Mother splits up her time between Nice and Salvador."
"Bahia?" I said.
"Say what?"
"Salvador is either a country or a city in the state of Bahia in Brazil."
"Brazil," Carson said. "She--Wanda--went down there pretty often. For a while there they thought that she was smuggling drugs."
"Was she?"
"Depends on how you look at it."
"What's that mean?"
"They had fourteen agents on her--city, state, federal. Scoped out four trips she made in a nine-month period. Didn't find a thing. Finally they grabbed her at customs coming into the country and searched her down to the spaces between her toes."
"They find anything?"
"Less than a gram of hashish wrapped up in some chewing gum aluminum foil in the back pocket of a pair of dirty jeans. She said somebody gave it to her at a concert and she forgot it in the pocket. But by then they had spent over eight hundred thousand investigating the girl, and so she was facing prosecution in three different courts. Three different courts."
"So she was on trial when she was killed?"
"No."
"No?"
"Somewhere along the way a lawyer named Lamont Jennings gets involved. High-priced attorney. Knows all the right people. Three weeks before she is to be indicted, all charges are dropped."
"Just like that?"
Carson nodded. "I'd say maybe that someone put a hit on her because they thought she might have given information to the feds or something, but I doubt it. Her folks have money, and she had no drug connections at all."
The waiter delivered my espresso and milk.
"Damn," I said after the server had gone. "It doesn't make any sense."
"No, no it doesn't. But there's power behind the investigation. Tinely wants somebody to go down for the murders. His assistant calls me every morning for an update."
Carson Kitteridge glanced at me while bringing the rancid coffee to his mouth.
"I have no idea who the hit man was or why he'd kill Wanda Soa," I said. "Those are facts."
"I didn't think so. Tinely said that you probably knew something. I told him that this wasn't your M.O., but he doesn't care. He wants to burn somebody, and if you're anywhere around, he'll set fire to you."
"So . . . you're protecting me?"
"That's just not the way I do things."
29
Kitteridge left me to drink my espresso and consider his words--also to pay the check when it came.
No one was safe where the upper echelons on the NYPD and the prosecutor's office were concerned. The government, even in a democracy, has the power to indict and condemn with impunity--below a certain income bracket, that is. And even though I was working for Rinaldo, that didn't mean he would protect me. My independent status made me expendable, and if I tried to bring him down with me I'd end up one of those lamentable suicides hanging from the bars of a subterranean cell.
They don't call them "the Tombs" for nothing.
As if to accent these dark thoughts, a cold breeze wafted across my neck.
"Hey, Juan," a tall black man said. He was standing to my right, wearing clothes that would turn into rags in most people's homes.
"Chester," my waiter said. "Wait a minute."
Juan reached under the counter and came out with a medium-sized brown paper bag. This he handed to the man he called Chester.
"Thanks, brother," Chester said.
"Go on now," Juan replied. "The boss is in the back."
Chester grinned--he was missing a couple of amber teeth--and mimed the motions of running in slow motion as he made his way back toward the door.
I suppose I was staring because Juan said to me, "He lives in my neighborhood in the Bronx. When nobody's looking I give him some soup and bread."
"What's he doing around here if he's from the Bronx?"
"This time of year people usually g
ive," Juan said, "because of Christmas and Thanksgiving. But not so much this year. This year there isn't enough to go around."
I TOOK A CAB back to my office. Mardi was gone by then.
Hunting up Broderick Tinely using Bug's special browser, I discovered that his specialty was prosecuting real estate cases against abusive landlords mainly. He hadn't tried a violent case in eight years. He was getting on in age, fifty-two the previous April, and wasn't making much headway in the prosecutor's office.
That had to mean something, I just didn't know what.
Lamont Jennings didn't need to have a website. The cases he was related to in the news always concerned wealthy, high-profile clients. In a practice covering everything from DUI to murder, he represented the children of wealthy magnates, and wealthy magnates who lived like children. He rarely lost. His clients were never convicted of the worst crimes they had been charged with.
Neither Tinely nor Jennings had anything to do with Angie, at least not on the World Wide Web. And they had nothing to do with each other. As far as I could see, Tinely was just trying to change his position in the DA's office and Jennings was the right lawyer for a young woman being railroaded by the law.
AT TEN I DECIDED that there was nothing else for me to do, so I pulled an extra trench coat out of my closet and headed down to the street. I took the 1 train uptown to Eighty-sixth and Broadway. From there I walked north and then west to our apartment building on Ninety-first Street, only a stone's throw from Riverside Drive.
I was just getting the key out for the outside door when somebody yelled "McGill!" with a slight Eastern European accent.
As I turned I saw two men--one large and the other of medium build--walking hurriedly in my direction. I dropped the keys and shook out my arms.
When they were two and a half paces from me the smaller man spoke.
"Where's the girl?" he demanded.
They were both still coming fast.
The big man had a longer stride and so stepped within striking distance first. His hand darted out, intending to take me by the arm, no doubt. I squatted down below the hand and came up to hit him in the gut with a right uppercut. He grunted like he meant it and I stood up, hitting him in the nose with my bald crown.
Known to Evil Page 12