by S. J. Rozan
I thanked him and hung up, reaching for something in the back of my mind. The faint bell was ringing again, but whether it had been struck by Louis Spano or Fatima O’Reilly, or was coming from a totally different place, I wasn’t sure. I poured more coffee, tried to focus. The ringtone on Linus’s phone—“Call Me”—cut into that. “Yeah,” he said. “Uh-huh. Yeah. No shit? Got it. Thanks, dude.” He thumbed off. “That was Verizon Dude. The phone Mr. Crazy called you on? It’s not Verizon. It’s one of these.” He tapped a prepaid cell. “But ’cause you were on it, he could trace that tower, and it’s the same as before.”
“Good, Linus.”
“And something else. Mr. Crazy’s phone, my guy got interested. He called some guys. The service on that, it’s a bundler called SpeedFone. Verizon Dude talked to someone over there.” Linus glanced at Mary, who looked exasperated but said nothing. “That phone, Mr. Crazy didn’t make any other calls from it except to you and to the cops, like he said. But he got one.”
“He did?”
“Went through a tower in Red Hook. Just about when you were in Fatima’s.”
“Damn. Someone is working with him. That’s how he knew I was there. Do you have the number?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods? And dig, dude. That phone that called him, it has a GPS. And it’s on.”
I’d been set to dial. I stopped, said, “Can you find it?”
“I can’t,” Linus answered with disarming humility. “But my dude’s dude can.” Linus swung to the screen again, zooming in on a streetmap. “Union Street. Near Henry. At least, ten minutes ago he was.”
“Still in Brooklyn.” I grabbed my jacket. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t think so,” Mary said.
“Mary! For God’s sake! This is it, the break! What did you think, once we found something I’d just sit here?”
“Better than going there.” She pointed to the red star on the map. “That’s the Seven-six Precinct.”
7
I STOPPED COLD. “Shit.”
“Shit for real, dude,” Linus said softly.
Mary took out her phone.
“Hey!” I said. “What are you—”
She raised a warning hand, turned away. Behind her back Linus mimed grabbing the phone, lifted eyebrows asking me. I shook my head. I didn’t doubt Mary would take me in, take this whole thing in if she thought that was the right move. But we had a deal. If she was breaking it, she’d let me know.
“Yo, Patino!” Mary shouted into her phone. Manny Patino, a fellow detective in the Fifth Precinct, a guy I’d met a couple of times over the years. “What? Gee, couldn’t you find a louder place to eat? Yeah, okay, that’s better. Listen, I need a favor. I’m working something privately, a cousin, you know how it is, I don’t want to bring the Job in … Well, if it does, I’ll be walking it beside you, so I’ll buy the doughnuts. Okay, thanks. It’s like this: The seven-six has a cell phone over there.” She gave him the number. “They had a homicide in Red Hook this morning, it might be they picked it up at the scene. But it also could be just someone’s … Uh-huh. I need to know. The vic was a pross, Chinese, so maybe some line about Chinatown Vice, you heard—yeah, I know you can, sorry. Oh, come on, you know I’m not a cowboy. Cowgirl, fine, whatever. If it turns out to be more than just this cousin thing I’ll bring it in. Yeah. Thanks. This number, anytime. I owe you.”
She clicked her phone shut, turned around, eyed us silently, one by one.
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded.
“Aunt Mary?” Linus tiptoed. “You can do that? Work, like, privately? A cop?”
“Of course not!” Mary snapped. Gruffly: “But everyone does. Favors for family, friends. Patino probably thinks my cousin’s kid’s on the stroll and I’m trying to find her.”
“Well, you just about told him that,” Trella said.
Mary shrugged, and Trella answered with a tiny smile. Which Mary returned. Linus caught that, glanced quizzically at me.
“I need a cigarette,” I said, and stepped outside.
Woof bounded over, wanting to show me his tree, his porch, his rubber ball. I picked up the ball, fingered it. Quivering, he watched me. How would I start the game? What would his move be? I could heave the damn thing over the fence, I reflected. Send it soaring where you can’t get at it, dog. It would bounce, roll, come to rest out where you could see it. You’d charge stupidly back and forth inside this fence, never getting any closer. It would be lost to you forever. And you’d never know why.
I cocked my arm. Woof tensed, eager eyes riveted. Spinning, I flung the ball up onto the porch. Woof chased after it, snarfed it up and brought it back to me, dropped it so the game could happen again.
My cigarette was almost gone and Woof was pawing the ball from the roots of a rhododendron when Linus stuck his head out the door. “Dude! News.” I crushed out the smoke and strode past Woof, who gave a few hopeful swishes of his tail, then dropped the ball and followed me in.
“The phone was the vic’s,” Mary said. “Not a cop’s.” She was trying for neutral but her relief was clear. “Or at least, Crime Scene found it under her on the couch.”
“Could it have been put there? One of the first cops on the scene?”
“Bill, you assaulted the first cop on the scene! You see him call anybody before you broke his arm? No other cop went up there until Crime Scene came.” With less heat, she went on, “Odd thing about the phone, though. That number it dialed, that was the only number in it.”
“And let me guess: when they tried it, it didn’t answer.”
“No.”
“Well, obviously Lei-lei didn’t make that call. Someone else had to be in the building. Someone I missed. Goddamn it! How did he get out, though? He couldn’t—”
“Dude!” Linus held up a hand. “No way.”
“What?”
“I mean, way, it could be, but it doesn’t hafta. Coulda been wired.”
“Meaning?”
“Simple pressure thing. You move her, shift the weight, it presses the button, some speed dial number. Phone makes the call.”
“Wouldn’t the cops have found the mechanism?”
“Coulda been her. Stud on her bracelet, something like that.”
I thought about that. “So he wasn’t watching and he didn’t have help. All he had to do was wait for that call.”
“Correct,” Linus said.
“Though Brooklyn Homicide has a simpler explanation,” Mary said. “They think it was you.”
“Why the hell would I call someone from an anonymous phone, then stick it under a dead girl’s body?”
“They’re anxious to ask you.”
I sat, rubbed the back of my neck. Woof put a paw on my knee, dropped a rope toy at my feet. I rubbed his neck, too. “Mary?” I said softly. “As long as you’re in …”
“I’m not in!”
I looked pointedly at her phone, still in her hand. “The time of death. If we knew that …”
She flushed, she frowned, but she lifted the phone, jabbed at it, and put it to her ear. I gave Linus a quick glare to stop his embryonic grin.
“Hi, Joanne. Mary Kee, from the Oh-five. Yeah, not so bad, you? Listen, they got the vic from Red Hook on the table yet? No, but I heard, and we had something like it here, cold now, about a year back, that one was rat poison … I know, that’s what I heard, I was wondering if maybe … Yeah, good. No, I’ll wait.” A silence stretched, all of us looking at Mary, Mary looking at the wall. “Oh, good, thanks. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. What? Son of a— You have? They do? Damn. No, it’s a new one on me. Yeah, really, huh? Okay, anything else, I’m here. Thanks.” She pocketed her phone, and now looked at us. “Time of death, about midnight last night. Probably at the scene.” To me: “I don’t suppose you have an airtight alibi? I didn’t think so. Preliminary cause of death, brodifacoum, rat poison, final after they run a tox screen. Joanne gave me the vic’s identifying scars and tattoos, but personally,” she said sardonically,
“I’m betting she’s a hooker named Lei-lei. Joanne doesn’t know her name. But the hooker part, that was her take, too.”
“Why?” I asked. “We know that from Lu, but the way she was dressed, you couldn’t tell that.”
“For the same reason Lu knew how to find you. For what it’s worth. She had a GPS.”
“That phone? Sure, but how does that—”
“No.” Mary touched her hairline behind her ear. “Here.”
“What?”
“Joanne’s seen it twice before, on Chinese hookers. Most of them are illegals working off passage. They think they’re being brought over as seamstresses and nannies. Even mail-order brides. When they find out what they’re really here for sometimes they run away. Their pimps hunt them down, cut them or kill them as a lesson to the other girls. That’s easier if you can find them. And it cuts down on running away in the first place if they know you can find them.”
“So they implant a chip?” Trella gestured at Woof. “As though they were dogs?”
“Even Woof doesn’t have that,” Linus said uneasily.
“Joanne says the ones they use broadcast for about a year, then they replace them. When girls aren’t where they’re supposed to be, if the pimp can swing into action before the girl finds someone to remove it, they can’t hide.”
“So when Lei-lei disappeared,” I said, “Lu knew right where to come.”
“Dude. That’s so wack.” Linus looked at Trella, who, her back to us, was snapping endless teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.
“It won’t take Brooklyn Homicide long to figure out who Lei-lei is,” Mary said. “Even if she worked Manhattan. They’ll go looking for the blocks she worked, the last guy she went with.”
“But that’s breaking the rules! Cops!” Linus yelped. “They figure out who he is and go looking for him, he’ll think—”
“No,” I said. “He was the one who called them. He must have that covered.”
Linus’s panic faded. “Oh. Duh. Sorry. Right. Probably he just picked her up on some empty street, where no one saw.”
I regarded him. “ ‘Some empty street.’ She wasn’t dressed to work the street. She was dressed like Lydia.”
Trella spun to face us. “He told her to.”
I thought back to the Escalade, Lu’s snarled words. “Lu said she was valuable. Maybe she was too high-class for the street. A whorehouse. With a mama-san, and upscale clients. If Lu was chasing down her GPS, he was slow about it. She’d been dead half a day by the time he turned up. But say she’d gone off with a client who paid for the whole night and promised to have her back by maybe nine A.M.—”
“Then around eleven’s when the mama-san would’ve called the boss,” Mary finished.
“I want to talk to Lu.”
“Brooklyn Homicide will turn him up eventually. They’ll ask the mama-san who Lei-lei went off with.”
“But they’ll show her a photo of me. He’s a big guy, graying hair. He may even look enough like me, she’ll say it was. Especially if she can see that’s what the cops want to hear. And if the boss already thinks so.”
Mary, after a long, pressed-lip pause, took out her phone. “Hey, Patino. Yeah, me again, sorry. About a whoremonger name of Lu. With two big bad seconds. A bald one called Ming, and a hairy one, Strawman. I know, but you can find him for me, Patino, you’re good like that. And as it happens, I have his plate.” She flipped her book open, read him the number off the Escalade. “See how helpful? Okay, thanks. Oh, come on, where am I going to get playoff tickets? Yeah, okay, I’ll try.” She thumbed the phone off.
I started to thank her. She cut me off. “Don’t say it. Don’t say anything. You’re right at the borderline here.” She added, “And you need to come up with playoff tickets.”
After that, silence. Now it was waiting: for Patino to come through, for the lunatic’s next call. Linus popped another Coke. Trella and I shared the rest of the coffee. Woof swept his tail slowly across the floor, then lay down with a sigh.
“Dude.” Linus finally spoke. “Can’t be we need to just sit here. Got to be something we can do.”
I’d been thinking about this. Something did need to be done, I couldn’t do it, and it seemed to me pretty safe. Mary wasn’t going to like it, but it might not set her off. “It would help to know how this guy got to Lydia, and when. And where. I want to you guys to go to Chinatown, ask around.”
Mary frowned, but didn’t say anything.
Linus lit up. “For sure!”
I nodded. “Not randomly, Linus. I can’t show my face there, and we can’t risk cops. But he doesn’t know you two. Call Lydia’s mother, say you’re looking for her and she doesn’t answer her phone, does Mrs. Chin know where she is? Ask the ladies at the travel agency she sublets the office from. Tell them”—I looked at the kids, both on their feet—“tell them you were supposed to meet Lydia and this guy and you’re late and now you don’t know where to go. Ask if they saw her with anyone. Here.” I dug in my pocket, took a key off a ring.
“What’s that?”
“It’s to Lydia’s office.”
“Dude! You have her key?” Linus exchanged a glance with Trella.
“In case of emergency. I think this qualifies. Listen: no way he could’ve just grabbed her off the street.”
“Totally! She’d have messed him up bad!”
“Or at least, made enough of a scene that someone would’ve noticed.” I looked to Mary.
She nodded. “I see where you’re going. Yes, they’d have called me, even off-duty, even if they didn’t know it was Lydia. They think they have a kidnapping, they call in all the Chinese-speaking cops. To talk to the witnesses who suddenly forget their English.”
“But that didn’t happen. So all I can think, she went somewhere to meet this guy, they had an appointment. Maybe he pretended to be a client. So maybe she wrote something down. On her calendar, in her computer. Linus, you can get into her computer, right?”
Linus gave me that look and didn’t even bother with the “dude.”
“Take a car service,” I said. “I’ll cover it. And the one in the shop, that, too. And whatever your Verizon guy’s costing you.”
“Dude, much as I love spending other people’s money, a car service won’t get here for forever. We’ll take my mom’s car.”
“And the one in the shop’s a Lazarus,” Trella put in. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Lazarus?”
“Brought back from the dead already. Twice.”
“And Verizon Dude,” Linus said. “Don’t worry about him, either. He’s working off something else he owes me.”
Linus glanced at Mary but she made no move to stop them. They wouldn’t be doing anything illegal and there was a small chance they’d turn something up. And they’d be safely out of the way when the lunatic called, which hadn’t escaped my attention, either.
Brief cacaphony as three new cell phones rang again and again, each calling each so we’d have the others’ numbers. Then Mary went to move her car so Linus and Trella could take off. Just before he left the garage, Linus scooped a few more cell phones from the drawer and stuffed them in his cargo pocket.
Woof was out bounding around the car before Linus and Trella got there. Linus tossed a set of keys to Trella. Woof climbed in, stuck his face into the wind as they rolled.
Back inside, I turned to Mary. “Thanks. For”—I spread my hands—“for all this. I know how hard it is.”
“No, you don’t! This is a bad tightrope I’m walking. Cops freelancing, it never comes out well. I wonder if I’m really doing Lydia any good. I wonder what she’d tell me.”
I said what I knew. “She’d tell you not to do anything that feels wrong. And not to risk your career.”
Mary’s look was long. “And the fact that you said that, instead of pretending she’d be cheerleading, is one of the few things that could keep me here.”
I nodded, stood. “You want coffee?” I headed to the counter to see if I
could make coffee as good as Trella’s but I didn’t get there. My phone rang. Not Linus’s prepaid. Mine.
“Smith,” I said as calmly as I could.
“No shit?” That robot voice, that laugh.
Heart racing, I nodded to Mary. She jumped up, came over and leaned close. I couldn’t risk putting him on speaker again.
“So, how’s everything? Found ourselves a safe hidey-hole, did we?”
“Let me talk to Lydia.”
“Um, what? Sorry, but fuck you. That’s for when you do something right. Say, after you decipher your next clues. Well, unless you don’t.”
“When we started this bullshit you said the clues would lead to Lydia.”
“God, you’re impatient! They will, they will. Just not right away.”
“You planning on leaving bodies all over New York first? That’s not what I agreed to.”
“Oh. Really?” He gave it a few seconds, as though he were thinking. “Well, I guess I must not give a shit what you agreed to.”
“What kind of a game is it where you keep changing the rules?”
“Oh, listen to you complain! I’m not changing the rules. I just didn’t tell you all the rules. Come on, don’t you like surprises?”
“No.”
“Too bad. I wouldn’t go whining to the refs, though: the no-cops rule, that’s still in effect. Now, you want to keep playing? Or should we just call it off? It’s a big country. I could grab my sneakers, find another game. After I clean up around here, I mean. You know: throw out the trash.”
“No. No, go ahead.”
“You sure? I don’t want you to feel like you’re being forced into anything.”
“I said go ahead!”
“Hey, calm down! You can’t play well when you’re out of control, you know. So speaking of trash, your next clues are in a can on Eighty-eighth and Lex. Right there on the corner. And it needs to be you, my friend. Anyone else makes a withdrawal there instead of a deposit, I’m not gonna like that. And you might want to hurry. Sanitation comes by at one.”
“I’m not close. I might not make it.”
“Hmm. I wonder what happens then? Oh, I remember! Your girlfriend gets whacked! Have a nice day.” And he was gone.