Choice of Evil

by Andrew Vachss

  “What kind of proof could I show you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if there is any. It’s not the kind of thing where you—”

  “Just think about it, okay?” she whispered, her hand on my forearm, nodding her head sharply to tell me what Pansy’s pricked-up ears had told me a few seconds ago—the rest of them were coming.

  I never turned my back, letting Nadine’s eyes mirror their approach for me. She was the first to speak too.

  “About time!”

  “We are on time.” Lincoln’s voice. “How long have you been here?”

  “About five minutes,” she lied smoothly.

  Lincoln walked around behind me and took a seat next to Nadine. “We want to do business,” he said, no preamble.

  “Everybody wants to do business,” I told him. “It’s the terms and conditions that hold things up.”

  “What do you want?” Lincoln asked, as shadowy figures filled in behind him. Some of them stopped behind me. . . no way of telling how many. Pansy was alert, but relaxed, still within herself, not feeling any heat.

  “I want you to understand what we’re all doing here,” I told him. “Me, I’m a public-spirited citizen. Or maybe I’m a treasure hunter. For the reward. Yeah. . . I like that better. You all, you’re. . . investors. You finance my investigation, and you get a piece of the pie when and if I turn him up. How’s that?”

  “Wait!” A voice behind me, male. “I thought you said we were going to—”

  Lincoln held up his hand for silence. “But since we’re the. . . investors. . . you’d naturally report your findings to us before you. . .”

  “Naturally,” I told him, straight-faced.

  “How do we know he wouldn’t just go to the—?” Another male voice, this one from somewhere in the shadows to Lincoln’s left.

  “I’m sure Mr. Burke has professional standards,” Lincoln said, cutting him off, trying to put an aura of threat around his voice.

  “Oh, I do,” I assured him. “But I don’t have a private investigator’s license. I don’t need one if I’m working for a lawyer, though.”

  “We have—”

  “Me too,” I told him. “And I want to use mine. What you have to do, see, is hire my guy. Then he hires me.”

  “That seems like a good deal of trouble for—”

  “For who? Not for me. And I’m the only one I got to look out for here.”

  “Fine,” Lincoln said. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way we’ll do it.”

  I slid Davidson’s card across the table to him, not saying another word.

  “And the money. . .?” he asked.

  “What money? Me, I’m not taking any money. Not from you. If this lawyer you’re going to hire decides he wants to compensate me for my trouble, that’s his business. Not yours.”

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “Yeah. And forget progress reports. This happens or it doesn’t. Understand?”

  I could feel the electric current crackle around the room, call-and-response, question-and-answer, voting in silence. I went back to patience, watching only Nadine’s hard bright eyes.

  “All right,” Lincoln finally said.

  “How am I supposed to set a fee for something like this?” Davidson asked me later.

  “You charge by the hour, right?”

  “Not for tort litigation. That’s all contingency. And I front the investigation costs. The client doesn’t pay anything until it’s all done.”

  “But in a matrimonial. . .?”

  “Sure. That’s an hourly rate. But if I’m representing the non-moneyed spouse, it all has to come from a counsel-fees award. And that’s never guaranteed, I assure you. The only time I get paid in a lump up front is for criminal defense,” he said, nodding at me to indicate that I should know that part real well.

  “And that’s all cash, right?” I said, reminding him that I’d always paid him that exact way. And that I’d been a lot of things in my life, but IRS-informant was never going to be one of them.

  He nodded, waiting.

  “Let’s say you were approached by someone who fears he might be a. . . target of a police investigation, okay? Let’s say he’s totally innocent. Got nothing to do with whatever the Man is looking at. But, still, he’s worried. Let’s say he knows there has to be a bust soon. The media’s all over the cops, and that means the politicians can’t be far behind. So this guy, he’s worried. He could hire you, right? For a flat fee? And he’d need an investigation too. From your end. Just in case.”

  “That hypothetical has a certain structural validity to it,” Davidson acknowledged warily.

  “And the new IRS rules, they can make you disclose who paid you any fee in excess of ten grand, right?”

  “Yes. That was just ratified by the—”

  “Sure. So, maybe, just to protect a client, you wouldn’t want to report a fee. . . immediately. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I do not,” Davidson said, primly.

  “Let’s just. . . take a number, okay? Say, a hundred thousand, all right? Now, this client, this hypothetical client, he thinks he may be the target of an investigation, okay? But he also has other legal issues. Maybe real complex ones. . . like he wants to get married and—”

  “—he needs a prenuptial agreement?”

  “No. And he’s gay. So he needs some kind of highly complex ‘partnership’ agreement. Something that would protect his interests no matter how it turns out. Let’s say he. . . and his partner. . . they want to adopt a child too. After they. . . formalize their relationship. Raises a lot of legal issues, doesn’t it?”

  “Certainly. Although I must tell you, I would not myself participate in any premarital agreement concerning custody of children. The courts won’t uphold them. . . and they shouldn’t. Children aren’t property, and their best interests cannot be determined prior to—”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, stopping the flow before he got really wound up and spewed for hours. “Pay attention, okay? So this guy comes in and he plunks down a hundred large. In cash. You report it—report it all, no problem. What it’s for is the partnership stuff. And then you need a partner. For the investigation. That costs you, say, fifty. Half.”

  “And that’s for you?”

  “Sure. What do you care? You’re declaring it all as income, and you can freely disclose the name of your client. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I would be declaring a hundred—and paying tax on it—but I would only be getting half of that.”

  “You’d be paying tax on whatever you declare,” I told him. “A hundred large is a pretty big fee for what I described.”

  “So is fifty.”

  “Sure. But you have to get paid for representing me, right?”

  He nodded.

  “And there’s no way you’re declaring that,” I told him, not a question.

  He didn’t move his head an inch, but I took that for what it was.

  “So if a guy calls you, name of Lincoln, then you’ll know what to do?”

  This time he nodded, slightly.

  “Can you find him?” I asked the delicate-featured young woman. She had taxicab-yellow hair, short and straight, with a black X dyed into the left side. Her face was symmetrical, with just a trace of baby fat. She wore a silver ring in her puggish nose. And her dark eyes looked as sharp as the razor-blade earrings she sported. I didn’t know her, never met her before then.

  Lorraine was the only link I had left to Crystal Beth, but it wasn’t a real link until I finally went over to the safehouse and told her I was hunting the humans who’d killed my woman. She didn’t blink, just asked me if I wanted any help.

  “I looked everywhere I could think of,” I told her. “And I drew blanks. I need a tracker.”

  “I don’t know any—”

  “Crystal Beth said you did,” I told her. Then I told her what I meant. And how I knew they’d have what I needed.

 
“Her name is Xyla,” Lorraine finally said. “She’ll be in touch.”

  So now this Xyla was sitting across from me in my booth at Mama’s.

  “Can you find him?” I asked again.

  “If he’s in Cyberville, I can,” she said. Not bragging, confident. “But I can tell you, people are already looking.”

  “Looking?”

  “Posting open messages for him. On newsgroups, bulletin boards, like that.”

  “What kind of messages?” I asked her.

  “The whole range: journalists who want an interview, gays saying ‘Go for it!,’ threats, challenges, target suggestions. . . everything.”

  “And they think he’s going to answer them?”

  “Netizens are real naïve,” she replied. “Most of them are kids. In their minds, anyway. There’s over a thousand profiles with the name ‘Avenger’ in them on AOL alone. That’s what the papers called him. Until he wrote that last letter. So now the geeks will just search under this ‘Homo Erectus’ handle. And there’ll be a ton of matches there too.”

  “And they think he’s got an. . . address?”

  “Sure. Someplace. And it’s already happening—there’s messages posted that are supposed to be from him. As if the FBI isn’t watching all that traffic,” she said contemptuously.

  “So how could you find him?”

  “I think he’s on-line. I think he lurks.”

  “Lurks?”

  “Watches. Hops on the Net and visits these different places. As long as he doesn’t post, he’s pretty safe.”

  “Pretty. . .?”

  “If he stays on long enough, or hits a website with our software on it, we can finger him.”

  I looked a question over at her.

  “Locate him. His cyber-addy, anyway. That wouldn’t find him—he could be using any ISP, and the server could even be out of the country.”

  “So what good would—?”

  “If you found his addy. . . if it was really him, then, if you could hack into the ISP’s own files, you could get his billing info. You know, the credit card he uses—you can’t buy ISP services for cash, you need a credit card just to sign up.”

  “But anyone can get a phony credit card. As long as you pay the bills, they won’t care what name you use.”

  “Sure. And some of the ISPs give out e-mail addys for free just to build their lists too. That’s where. . . someone else comes in,” she said.

  “Okay. You’ll take a shot?”

  “I’m with Lorraine and the others,” she answered, like that was all the answer I needed. “But there’s something else too. Another way, maybe. I don’t know if he’s high-cyber or not. But if he is, I could send a message myself. Send it encrypted, so you’d need a program to open it.”

  “What happens if you don’t have this program?”

  “You just get a bunch of gibberish—numbers and symbols—it wouldn’t mean anything. But if he is lurking, he might be intrigued enough to open it up.”

  “And. . .?”

  “Then I could find him,” Xyla said, flashing a quick smile. “And you know what? I don’t think he’d mind.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look, he writes to the newspapers, doesn’t he? It’s not as if he’s being quiet about the whole thing. But he hasn’t posted to Cyberville yet. How come?”

  “I can answer that one for you,” I told her. “The newspapers are turning over everything to the cops before they print it. This many murders, even the tabloids wouldn’t screw around.”

  “So what?”

  “So he has to be authenticating his communications somehow. Telling them some detail about the crime that wasn’t in the papers, enclosing something from the crime scene. . . like that. No way he could get that done over the Internet.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “Cyberville is nothing but Impostor City. So I’d need something myself. . . some, what did you call it, authentication, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Can you get that for me?”

  “I’ll see,” I told her.

  But she wasn’t done. “You’re not trying to. . . catch this guy, are you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, if you were, I wouldn’t help you.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “I said I was with the network. But I don’t know if anyone asked you that question.”

  “If I was trying to. . . You like this guy or something?”

  “I don’t know if I like him,” Xyla said calmly, dark eyes steady on mine. “I haven’t met him. But I wouldn’t be part of trying to stop him.”

  “You like what he’s doing, then?”

  “Not even. But I sure don’t like the people he’s doing it to,” she said, standing up to leave.

  “Hi.” A woman’s voice answered the phone, soft and sexy. But the disguise wasn’t even a good try.

  “You know who this is, Nadine?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she replied, shifting texture. “You change your mind about wanting a partner?”

  “Maybe. Depends on what you can bring to the table.”

  “I told you. I—”

  “Not now. Not on the phone. Not ever,” I told her. “You got a car?”

  “No.”

  “Want a ride in a nice one?”

  “Is she going to be along?” Like Pansy was the other woman.

  “Yep.”

  “Why? You scared to be alone with me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ah. Okay. You know where I—?”

  “No,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up in front of the same place we met last time, okay?”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “Say. . . midnight?”

  “Ooh. It’s dark then.”

  I hung up on her.

  I was there at a little past eleven, parked across the highway, the Plymouth lost in the shadows, watching the front of the joint through the night-vision spotting scope I’d held out of an order I’d middle-manned. A little inventory shrinkage is something you have to expect when you deal with crooks.

  The scope worked even better than the seller had promised—kind of a greenish wash over the whole scene, but bright and clear enough to pick out individual faces. Nadine showed way early, around eleven-forty-five, the skinny blonde girl with her, Nadine holding her wrist as if she expected the other girl to bolt. Or maybe just making a status statement. Ten minutes later, she said something to the blonde and let go of her wrist. The blonde went inside the joint. Nadine stood there, arms folded under her breasts, shoulders squared, waiting.

  I wheeled around and came from the downtown direction, pulled up just before midnight. Nadine walked over to the passenger side of the car boldly, stuck her face inside as the window slid down.

  “You’re on time,” she said.

  “Just get in,” I told her.

  “Where’s the seat belt?” she asked me as I pulled away.

  “It doesn’t have shoulder straps. There’s a lap belt right on the seat next to you.”

  “Geez. How old is this thing, anyway?”

  “About your age,” I told her.

  “You’re sure not,” she shot back.

  “Damn! You don’t miss much, huh?”

  “Why are you so nasty to me?” she asked as we passed the Meat Market and forked left for the West Side Highway.

  “I play them the way they’re dealt,” I said.

  “So if I was sweet to you. . .”

  “I’d take it for sarcasm.”

  “So, I’m. . . stuck, right?”

  “What’s your beef?” I asked. “This is what you want, isn’t it? You made your point, first time I met you. You want to keep making it over and over, get your kicks that way, it’s all right with me.”

  “You don’t know anything about the way I get my kicks.”

  “And I don’t have to, right?” We were into the Thirties by then, in the sleaze zone that surrounds the Port Authority Terminal. You don’t see much hooke
r traffic there anymore, although it’s still around, but it’s a good place to buy whatever they don’t sell in stores. “You got a friend on the force,” I said, setting her up for what I was going to pitch later. “You got some info, heard some rumors. . . and you made all your decisions. One of those decisions was that I was judging you. . . and you started out with an attitude just for that. Now you want to do. . . what? Flirt with me? Do your little Mae West thing? You don’t like men. Straight men, anyway. That’s your privilege. Me, I don’t give a good goddamn what you are. All I care about is what you do. You’re not pro enough to play it the same, sit there and pout. Or snarl if that makes you feel more top. You said you could do something. Now I want to find out if you can. That’s all this is about. . . all it’s ever gonna be about.”

  “Wow! That’s the most I ever heard you talk.”

  “Don’t get used to it.” We were on the upper roadway by then, Riverside Drive on the right, the Hudson on the left.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace where we can talk. Privately.”

  “I know better places. And why can’t we just talk now?”

  “We can, if you want. I can just cruise around while we talk. Or I can go where I was headed and park. Pick one. But we’re not going anyplace I haven’t been before, case closed.”

  “Oh, go ahead,” she said.

  We drove in silence until the Cloisters loomed ahead. I pulled over. It’s a kind of Lovers Lane up there. Cops wouldn’t pay much attention to a couple talking outside a car. A sex-sniper would. Or any of the wolfpacks that roam occasionally. But I docked the Plymouth back end in first, and I had something else to even the odds.

  “Come on, girl,” I told Pansy, opening the back door. She took off at her usual slow amble, circling, mildly interested in the new turf, but not about to go running off into the woods. Pansy’s a tight-perimeter beast, more comfortable in small circles.

  Nadine let herself out, stood next to me as I leaned against the Plymouth’s flank and lit a smoke.

  “Those make me sick,” she said. “I don’t see how you could poison your body like that.”

  “The doctor prescribed them,” I told her. “There’s a chemical—lecithin—in cigarettes. Improves concentration. My mind kind of wanders sometimes. These help.”