Spocatti was about to speak when something in her expression caused him to pause. For a moment, he forgot his anger and listened.
“The book,” she said. “Maggie Cain,” she said. “Everyone on our list is being interviewed by her. We need to call Wolfhagen now and let him know.”
But when they called his La Jolla estate, there was no answer.
CHAPTER SIX
Wolfhagen danced.
He arrived in New York just as the lights of Manhattan were beginning to shine, took a cab from LaGuardia, rented a room at The Plaza, snorted four lines of meth and had wine sent to his room.
He twirled.
No one knew he was here and that’s how he wanted it. He came to play and to cause a little trouble, and he wanted to do so as quietly as he could for as long as he could.
This was an important trip.
He poured himself another glass of wine—his third—sipped it and tripped into the bathroom. He was high, blissfully high, the drug threading like needles through his system. Earlier, he lit candles, several scented candles, and the bathroom now glowed with the rich smells of vanilla and jasmine.
He put the glass down on the marble vanity and began to undress. He reached for the phone next to the toilet, tapped out Carra’s personal number and slammed down the receiver when she answered. He looked at his reflection in the wide spotless mirror and marveled at the shadows stealing like thieves across his arms and chest.
He opened his leather shaving kit and exposed the glimmering gold blade. He wiggled out of his pants and swung his veiny rope of a penis from side to side—smack, smack, smack. He flexed his muscles and knew at this moment that his body was indeed beautiful.
He wouldn’t look at his face.
He drank more wine and did a jig in front of the mirror. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, his mind spinning out and grasping the memory of the little nothing shit who came to his home in La Jolla that morning to tell him in her stupid lilting star-struck voice: “Your wife has decided to sell, Mr. Wolfhagen. We’d like to show the estate at noon.”
He’d shut the door in her face and called Carra, who told him in that fucking controlled voice of hers that if he dropped this ridiculous alimony suit of his, he could have the damned house and everything in it. “But you’ll never get a cent of my father’s money, Max. Not a penny. I won’t let it happen. He made his fortune without your help, he willed it to me and it’s staying with me.”
And so Wolfhagen danced.
He picked up the phone and dialed again. This time the line rang longer, but it was Carra who answered, her voice quick, all business. “What is it, Max?”
“I’ll tell them everything,” he said. “I’ll go to all the papers and tell everyone. I don’t care. I’m in New York now. I have nothing to lose. Don’t you fucking dare sell my home. Don’t you fucking dare try it. I’ll ruin—”
“You’re in New York?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to smash that fucking face of yours.”
The line went dead. Wolfhagen hit the redial button but this time Carra didn’t answer. The line rang and rang and rang—and his rage grew.
He dropped the phone to the marble tile and tripped back into the bedroom. He grabbed the can of shaving cream from his open suitcase, tossed it high in the air, reached out blind hands to grasp it, and laughed, laughed, laughed when it struck his bare shoulder, hit the carpet and rolled toward the television, where CNN played without sound.
Wolfhagen turned up the sound.
He picked up the can of cream and tip-toed back into the bathroom. The high was evening out, but he was determined to maintain it, determined to make it last. He danced and he danced, moving his arms and swinging his head, rolling his eyes and baring his crowded teeth. The shadows on the walls moved with him in wild, jumbled rhythms.
But it was fruitless. He was losing it. He swung his hips harder and turned in complete circles, glimpsing his face once, twice, three times in the mirror. And that killed it. The illusion snapped. He stopped to stare at his face. That face. God, how he hated it. The hooked nose, the crooked teeth, the slanting eyes. This wasn’t him! It was wrong! He was better than that face!
Before he showered, he would shave.
The shaving cream went on easily. He smoothed it on his arms, chest and stomach, rubbed it over his buttocks, through the stubble at his groin and down the length of his legs. He was fastidious in his application. His hands moved slowly and carefully, covering the two-day’s growth with broad, foamy sweeps. Five days ago, he had his back waxed. It would be another week before he needed to go there again.
He rinsed his hands in the sink and left the water running. He took the gold straight razor and went to work, scraping away the hair he hated.
How could he have been born this way? Why had God done this to him? When he was thirteen, he had been taunted in the school showers by the other boys. He was made fun of because of the dense black hair that crawled up his back, covered his forearms and stomach, flourished with the stubborn determination of weeds in the peaks and valleys of his chest. His legs were sheathed with it.
At the time, Wolfhagen’s parents were poor and couldn’t afford a doctor to tell them that their son suffered from an acute imbalance of testosterone. They were uneducated and couldn’t know the psychological scars already carved into their child’s mind. But they were not insensitive. They weren’t blind to the faults of nature. And so in the summer of his fourteenth year, only days before he started a new school year, Wolfhagen’s mother began a ritual that lasted a lifetime—with soap and water, she shaved him.
“It hurts, Mama. Stop!”
“Stand still.”
“But I’m bleeding!”
“It’s either this, or you’ll catch it from those little bastards at school.”
As he matured, his skin toughened along with his soul. While the hair may have vanished, the jeers from his classmates didn’t. They knew he shaved. They could see the stubble on his arms and legs in gym class, could smell it on him as though it were an odor, reeking and awful. They called him a freak to his face. Some spit on him in the halls.
At lunchtime, anonymous arms swung out to strike, while anonymous hands reached out to slap. Through it all, Max learned more than any of them. He learned the darkness of the human heart and just how deeply a person could hate.
His escape became books and literature. He found sanity in the lives of fiction’s characters. He graduated second in his class, earning a four-year scholarship to Yale School of Management, where he redefined himself and became so much more.
He needed to call Carra again. He knew she was having a party tonight and he was going. All it would take was one threat. One potent little threat. Then he could revel in all the shocked faces that greeted him while he humiliated her.
He was slicing away the hair on his chest, maneuvering carefully around the peak of his left nipple, when he heard on the television the news of Gerald Hayes’ death.
Wolfhagen stepped out of the bathroom, his body dripping a mixture of hair and shaving cream onto the Oriental rug. He moved to the center of the bedroom and stared at the television.
Hayes was dead, a possible suicide. There was an eye-witness, Maria Martinez, who was in the opposite building when Hayes fell past her window. The police were questioning Martinez and would make a statement by morning. They were not ruling out murder.
Neither was Wolfhagen.
He reached behind him for a chair and instead caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror on the wall to his right. A thin river of blood was running from his chest down the length of his muscled stomach, stopping to pool in the foam at his groin before dripping from the head of his penis to the carpet.
He looked down at his bare feet and saw that they were speckled with blood and shaving cream. The sight startled him. He usually was so careful. He couldn’t remember a time when he had last cut himself. As he
stood there, watching, he felt a sudden, deep rush of shame and embarrassment.
He put his free hand over his slippery, bloody penis and the shame turned to rage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spocatti paced.
He walked past the window, walked past Carmen, walked back to the window, paused and looked across at Hayes’ office. In silence, he watched the police rifle through the man’s desk, bag folders, make notes, say little. He saw one of the detectives pick up the marble paperweight on the edge of the desk and wondered again just how carefully Carmen had cleaned it.
He stepped away from the window and looked at her. She was seated cross-legged in the center of the room, his MacBook humming in her lap, her face glowing in the bluish black. She wouldn’t look at him. She knew better. Her fingers raced over keys he couldn’t see.
“What’s the number, Carmen?”
“Almost there.”
“You said that a minute ago.”
“The wireless in this place is shit.”
She typed faster, stopped, leaned toward the screen and read off the number.
Spocatti removed his cell and dialed his contact at the First Precinct. It was late. Chances were she wouldn’t be in.
But the woman answered. “This is Rice,” the detective said.
Spocatti smiled. “Brenda,” he said. “And I thought you’d be home in bed, fast asleep in the arms of your lover.”
Silence.
“You know who this is?”
“Of course.”
“Can you talk?”
“Hold on.”
The sound of a chair sliding back, a door clicking shut. Then her voice, lower than before. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“I need a name.”
“A name.”
“And an address.”
“An address.”
“And whatever else you can find out about the woman who saw Gerald Hayes fall from his office window.”
“Right,” she said. “When?”
“Put it this way,” Spocatti said. “You get back to me in twenty minutes with the information I need, and I’ll personally see to it that money won’t be a problem for you or your family ever again.”
* * *
It took her fifteen minutes to secure her future.
Spocatti picked up the phone and listened. “Her name is Maria Martinez,” Rice said. “Lives on 145th Street. Has a daughter, five years old. Three priors for drug trafficking, two for prostitution. Had an addiction to heroin and crack. This was six years ago. Now’s she’s off welfare, off drugs and has three jobs, one of them cleaning offices in lower Manhattan for Queen Bee Cleaning. Looks as if she’s turned herself into an upstanding member of the slums.”
Rice paused. “And you’re going to kill her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spocatti said. “I’ve never killed anyone. Tell me what she knows.”
“She didn’t see anything,” Rice said. “Said she was cleaning a window when she looked out and saw Hayes hitting the concrete.”
“She didn’t see anyone in Hayes’ office?”
“No.”
“What does our beloved Chief Grindle think?”
“He thinks she’s lying.”
“So do I. Give me her exact address.”
She gave it to him.
He thanked her, hung up the phone and looked at Carmen, who had moved across the room and now was stuffing her blood-stained clothes into a gray duffel bag. Spocatti watched her change into black pants and a black top. She pulled her hair away from her face, secured it with an elastic and lifted her pant leg. She holstered her gun in the calf strap. “Are you expecting an apology from me?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Because I won’t apologize,” she said. “You would have done the same thing had you been there.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“I’ve seen you do worse.”
“I won’t deny that,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have pushed Hayes out that window. It wasn’t necessary. It was juvenile. You’re too proud to admit it and that’s what disappoints me.” He started to walk past her. “But that’s your age and probably your gender, so I can look past it—this time.”
He shot her a sidelong glance, his eyes bright despite the dark room. “It’ll be interesting to see how you handle Maria Martinez.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The van, a slate-blue Ford Spocatti picked up in Queens, farted little clouds of exhaust as it ribboned through the city.
It was rust-spotted and fender-dented, but its engine was strong and it drew no attention on these streets, which, Carmen knew, was the reason he bought it in the first place. He hit a string of green lights and sailed to 145th Street, just off the Harlem River, where he parked across from Maria Martinez’s tenement and sat waiting with the engine off for the police to bring her home.
Carmen rolled down the passenger window and watched the activity on the street. It was almost midnight and the sidewalks were alive with the homeless, whores and pimps, pushers and addicts, their sunken faces occasionally caught in the trembling headlights of passing cars. Here, the streetlamps were dark. The city refused to pay for bulbs that were constantly being smashed by gunfire. Instead, the major source of light came from a storefront, where a couple was freebasing coke.
“Stay here,” Spocatti said.
He opened the door and stepped out. Carmen looked in the side mirror and watched him move down the sidewalk until the shadows and the night slid over his back and engulfed him. She didn’t know where he was going or what he had in mind, but his trust in her had weakened and she was surprised by how much that bothered her. She’d been in this business seven years and she’d never been caught. Her hits were as daring as his, her reputation just as solid. She had nothing to prove and yet she obviously tried to impress him when she pushed Hayes out the window. Why? What was it about him that made her want to be viewed as an equal in his eyes?
What was it about herself?
She leaned against the seat. What had Martinez seen? Anything? It all happened so quickly, Carmen couldn’t be sure. She played the movie of her memory through her mind and saw only a badly edited, disappointing blur—Hayes kneeling, mouth bleeding, head lowered, falling through. Everything else was lost in the dizzying rush of adrenaline that had overwhelmed her at that moment and she realized now just how wrong she’d been to go against the plan.
She looked for him in the side mirror, but all she could see was a dim stretch of empty sidewalk fading into darkness. It occurred to her that being here was not about killing Maria Martinez or learning what she might have seen. Rather, this was about saving face, fixing the past, re-instilling faith in Spocatti, and moving on with what they’d been hired to do. If she failed? Spocatti might shut her out completely.
The door swung open and he stepped inside. Carmen cupped a hand over the interior light and waited for it to dim. She glanced down at his hand and saw in it a tiny plastic bag, a spoon, a syringe. He tossed it all onto the dash and looked across the street. “Anything?” he asked.
She looked at the gleam of that syringe and shook her head.
Spocatti reached for the bag and the warped metal spoon with its blackened tip. The bag was filled with white powder. Cocaine or heroin, she couldn’t be sure. He emptied it into the spoon and told her to hold it.
She held it.
He heated the spoon with a lighter. The powder liquefied and boiled. A curl of smoke swirled. He dropped the lighter in his lap, reached for the syringe, filled it.
He gave it to Carmen. “Martinez was once addicted to heroin,” he said. “Tonight, she saw a man commit suicide. She saw his head explode and she saw what was left of him while she was questioned by the police. She’s lost her faith in God and mankind. She’s tired. She lives in this wasteland. She works three jobs and still she struggles. No one’s going to be surprised if they find her pumped full of this shit.”
Car
men nodded. It would work. And then something—a glimmer, a flash of light—caught her eye and she looked across the street, where a patrol car was slowing to a stop alongside Martinez’s apartment building.
Carmen watched a woman open the passenger door and step out. She was a cop and she was immediately followed by the driver, a tall man in uniform. The people on the street parted and walked their separate ways. Maria Martinez, seated in the back of the cruiser, made her appearance last. She was still in her pale blue work uniform. She was saying something Carmen couldn’t hear.
And then Spocatti’s voice, low, closer to her ear than she would have liked: “This is a simple hit,” he said. “Nothing but an accidental overdose. Don’t disappoint me again.”
* * *
They waited for the police to leave before alighting from the van and moving across the street. Martinez lived on the second floor. Carmen followed Spocatti up two flights of stairs and down a dim hallway. The building seemed exhausted in the August heat, as though its slanting walls and sinking ceilings, desperate for relief, were trying to lean against one another for support. Here, the temperature was well past eighty and the air, heavy with humidity, stank of something sour.
Martinez’s apartment was at the end of the hall, last door on the right. Spocatti moved past it and stepped into deep shadow. He drew his gun, cocked the trigger and tapped his foot.
Carmen knocked twice on the door and waited. There was a silence followed by a woman’s voice, so high and thin that Carmen questioned whether it belonged to the heavyset woman who just emerged from the cruiser.
“What?” the woman called. “What is it?”
Carmen checked the hallway, saw in a thin tunnel of light a cat strolling in her direction—golden eyes flashing, white paws padding, tail held high against the stained wall. Dangling from the cat’s jaws was a mouse, its wiry gray tail flicking at the very tip.
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