by Alaric Hunt
“So what! A lot of guys went to that tramp’s apartment,” the surfer said.
“You got names?” Guthrie countered.
“Enough fun and games,” Peiper said. “Talk to your lawyer. He can talk to my lawyer. They can get together and talk lawyer shit, late at night, and get pictures for show-and-tell.” He shrugged, turning away. The surfer lingered until last, glaring, then followed the others. The food court was full of people but as quiet as a tomb.
“I thought you got to him,” Vasquez said.
“We can call him later and see,” Guthrie said. “Away from the audience, he might turn helpful.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I spent a long part of this morning thinking that if a man wanted me to call him, then he should answer his phone,” Olsen said crisply. The speaker of Guthrie’s cell phone was loud enough to fill the old Ford when the windows were cranked shut to use the air conditioner. Vasquez turned from Broadway to Ninth Avenue, going south. Early afternoon traffic shuttled smoothly.
“I apologize, Mr. Olsen,” Guthrie said. “When I had you call before, I should’ve given you my cell instead of my office. You had trouble finding that?”
“A bit,” the big man said. “I would be somewhat more comfortable if you would call me Greg. When I hear Mr. Olsen, or Captain Olsen, or Captain, the words are always coming from my men, and they’re expecting me to take care of them. In this situation, I would rather find that shoe on the other foot.”
The little detective nodded, then said, “I’ll do that.”
“Mr. Rondell provided your number, and that seemed to take some effort on his part,” Olsen said. Faint metallic drumming rattled in the background, like a rushing, tumbling heartbeat. “I had a vague idea from Mr. Rondell that he believes you know some things he doesn’t—and maybe I had that vague idea from his saying you might know some things he doesn’t, in a tone that didn’t suggest the idea that the two of you were all that cooperative with each other. Is something going on out there?”
“I suppose I am holding Mr. Rondell at arm’s length.”
“Then I have to say you have long arms for a little guy.”
Guthrie laughed. “We do have a question for you,” he said. “If you call every day, things will be a bit easier.” He gestured to Vasquez.
“What?” she asked, before remembering. “Okay, when Bowman went out at night, how much money did she usually carry?”
Traffic was jammed up at Forty-first Street, where a delivery truck had tiptoed along the sides of some passing cars. Gawkers lined the sidewalks and horns blared into the mess of NYPD getting information from drivers and trying to decide what to do with the truck. The uniformed driver was sitting in a cruiser, leaning out against the open back door, adding more to a puddle of vomit on the street. The old blue Ford crawled by and they had a lingering look before Olsen replied.
“About three hundred dollars,” he said. “She never spent the money—she used cards. I never understood that.”
Vasquez frowned. Ghost Eddy had already spent more than that since the murder, in the bodega on 149th Street. Without Bowman’s money, he spent ninety dollars of clean money every week. The drifter was a steady drinker.
“So that was important, then?” Olsen asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Vasquez replied.
“Linney warned me that intel would be a hard requisition,” Olsen muttered. “So he wasn’t lying, then, and the pair of you aren’t talking to anyone. I’ll try this the other way. Drive over to Westchester and check on Linney for me. On the phone, he says he’s not drinking, but, naturally, I can’t smell his breath. He was in a bad way before I was arrested. His mother was killed. Not much worse can happen to a man, for then he started drinking and he called me to bail him from jail. Is it strange that now I’m in jail?”
“I think I can manage that,” Guthrie said.
“That’s a different answer. Then you could take my calls for me, along with that. I’ve had a few bad months of late nights, but it hasn’t been so terrible that a grave digger would notice. My men call, mostly late at night, when they’re a klick past drunk and wondering where their hat was laid by. Linney did that. I spent years trying to leave the service, but even now the calls bring me back.”
Vasquez turned onto Thirty-fourth Street and slid in behind a convoy of empty clothes racks. Switch-thin teenagers pushed one rack and pulled another behind, stepping along like ants escaping with jelly. Traffic going the other way idled, gunning forward a few feet at a time, and honked during the pauses.
“At first they ask questions. What happened to so-and-so? Or ‘Did you really get smashed?’ After they talk a bit, something comes out—a new job, a marriage. Somewhere along the way, all of the news turned bad. Cars crash, girls tumble down the stairs, junkies toke their last smoke, dying is written in fire across the sky. I haven’t heard about a baby in months. Can you do that for me, then? Can you answer my phone for me and screen my bad calls?”
“I think you’re in a morbid mood,” Guthrie said. Vasquez whipped into a space fifty feet from the entrance of their building. “I won’t say you don’t have reason, but you have to look up. You know whether you’re innocent, or guilty. I won’t rest until I prove it to myself. Does that make sense to you?”
“That makes sense, but you know you’re a voice on a phone, with hardly a face attached to it. I guess that’s all you can give me, though.” Olsen paused. “I smell a push-along, so I’ll leave you. Do me that favor to check on Linney, like you said.”
After Guthrie cut off the phone, Vasquez said, “You could’ve given him something. We have some angles.”
The little detective grunted, climbed out of the car, and slammed the door. He walked fast. He was on the steps of the building before she caught up with him. The bright sunshine made her red jacket glow like fire.
* * *
That night, they watched the manhole on 151st Street again. They slipped into the lot at twilight and hid in the shadow of the redbrick building. Vasquez picked up her impatience right where she’d left it the previous night, as if there had been no break. The moon peered down from the cloudless sky, dark behind the streetlights. The waiting wore her down quickly, turning her inside herself.
At the beginning of May, her job with Guthrie was exactly what she needed. Carrying a pistol made her important, deadly serious, an immediate adult instead of a teenager with a summer job waiting tables. She needed that, because she was defying her father. No bullshit job could’ve given her enough strength for that, but the size of her paychecks, and the solid weight of la pistola, made her shoulders strong enough to shrug it off. Walking past Papì’s frown was no joke. His disapproval was like gravity; he could nail her to the floor.
Even her loco brothers didn’t make little of her choice. They knew it was tough to deal with their father. Miguel was glad she wasn’t going to school. Indio wasn’t sure, but he was with her because she was against Papì for a change. In three months, she had learned some of what they had faced for years. That wasn’t easy. She wanted her life back to normal. She didn’t want to need to steel herself for an argument every time she walked through the door at home.
Actually, she decided Indio and Miguel had it easier, despite their complaints about Papì. The old man rode them like horses on a merry-go-round; no matter how much they seemed to run, they never ended up very far from him. He shouted at them, but it was still easy to see that he was proud of them. He acknowledged their strength even when he punished them; he backed off after he pushed. He told them, “Think! Don’t be stupid!” and clapped them roughly on the shoulder when they were pulling something from the refrigerator he’d put there for them, like the bottled water for Indio. “Who pays for water?” Papì yelled, but he kept buying it because Indio wanted it. Even when they were in trouble outside the house, a place still waited at the table for them, with yells if they missed a meal. “Don’t be out all night! Don’t worry your mother!” For her brothers, no matter ho
w fiercely her Papì’s anger burned, it was always cooled with acceptance.
Since the end of school, she’d been cut off from Papì. When she was lucky, there was grim silence instead of stormy outbursts. He made no secret of his displeasure. His daughter should go to school, and do even better than Roberto. She couldn’t; the thought of more school made her sick. Then magically, another option came along, like something from a Márquez novel, as matter-of-fact as the sun rising one morning in May. And just like in the novels, not everything was what it seemed. A thousand jobs, with a thousand paychecks and a thousand pistols, couldn’t convince Papì that she was anything but his little daughter, running along the beach at Coney Island and chasing butterflies until she fell into the water. His brooding scowl, and clenched fist tucked onto his hip, showed he was only marking time until he erupted again.
None of that made waiting any easier for Vasquez. The manhole never moved. Shadows from the streetlights never changed. Ten P.M., midnight, and 2:00 A.M. all looked exactly the same, except that at midnight, two drunks spent a handful of minutes shouting at one another in the alley before shattering a bottle against the brick wall, and then at two, the golden tomcat prowled. Guthrie named him “Piss,” which seemed like an insult to go with the injury of waiting. She couldn’t sneak over to the corner for relief. By the time night began lifting, Vasquez had fed her anger everything that would burn, and nothing remained but a bitter pile of ashes and coals in her belly.
Two small, grimy men stopped on the sidewalk. Both wore dark clothes that showed stains as light splotches, and their ratty mustaches split their pale faces into halves. One lifted the hinged top of the manhole, and the other climbed gingerly down. The first glanced around, missed seeing the detectives, then disappeared downward. The lid clanged shut after a rusty belch. Guthrie laughed softly, and Vasquez glared at him.
“Weitz hated stakeouts, too,” Guthrie said. His back and legs crackled when he stood.
They flowed with the early traffic moving downtown. The morning was cool enough for cracked windows. Guthrie drove. He stopped at a diner in midtown for breakfast. His jokes couldn’t lighten Vasquez’s mood, because she was beginning to understand that a lot of Guthrie’s work was like a stakeout, watching videos, or writing reports—slow and boring.
Peering over the top of scrambled eggs and bacon, she said, “We’re not getting anything out of that manhole.”
Guthrie grunted and shook his head. “We got the cat’s schedule now. We can bag him any night we want. You don’t know somebody who wants a piss yellow tomcat?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Vasquez muttered. She rearranged eggs around a bite of bacon. “Be serious.”
“Okay, we got the drunk in the alley. He’s been there two nights in a row. Maybe he sees our ghost going in and out, even though he don’t stay all night. I don’t like him. The Gaines brothers are a better chance.”
“Those two scruffy guys?”
“Sure. Lucky we saw them. They’d sell their sister for a dollar.”
“Lucky because you want to buy their sister?”
Guthrie grinned. “See, you never know,” he said. “And you’re probably not going to believe this, but I first ran into them on a stakeout. I was tailing a guy I was trying to make smell bad, seeing what I could find on him.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Politics is dirty business in the city.” He tore off a big piece of bagel with his teeth and spoke around it. “My guy is going to the same place over in TriBeCa, night after night. I can’t squeeze in, so I’m watching the entrance for each time he comes out—hoping there’ll be a girl, or whatever. Then I can run him to ground.
“Along come two guys, these scruffy little nondescript mutts—the Gaines brothers, who I don’t know at the time. They cut over from Hudson, on the far side of the street. Traffic’s not moving much. I’m sitting there, so I can’t miss them. They’re shuffling along, maybe drunk, just two guys on a stroll, and all of a sudden they stop. They huddle up like the Giants trying to call a play. Then Ralph swings over to the door of the warehouse—a street door, not a roller door—and goes inside. A minute later, he pokes out; then Rodney goes in with him.
“This is so stupid.” He paused to drink some coffee. “After a little while, they come out, just the same as they went in, and walk down the street. A half hour later, they come back and stop again at the door. Then they both go inside. I’m watching the club door, with a steady line of peacocks going in and out, so the thing across the street is just happening. As the night goes along, it happens so much that I can set my watch by the Gaines brothers. They need forty-five minutes each time they go inside, leave, and come back. By the time my guy pops from the club, they’ve already quit. On the last trip, Ralph Gaines slaps a lock on the door—he’s closing up shop.
“That’s on Friday. Saturday night is the same thing all night. I watch them take the lock off, in and out, forty-five-minute trips, and they lock up again before I follow my guy away from the club. They do the same thing all night Sunday. By then, I’m pretty sure I had them wrong—maybe they actually work there. But Monday night, I’m trailing my guy again, and the NYPD knocks on my window while I’m sitting outside the club. ‘Hey buddy, whatcha doing?’ I let him know, and they ask if I saw anybody break into the warehouse across the street and rob the loft upstairs.
“Ralph and Rodney emptied the poor bastard’s refrigerator. They took his clothes, and a bunch of crap. They left his plasma, his computer, that stuff. I’m serious. They took the dirty clothes outta his hamper and all. Soap, toilet paper, everything—they cleaned out his domestic shit.”
“They’re going to help us how?” Vasquez asked.
Guthrie laughed. “I know, right? That metro princess in TriBeCa was screaming. They didn’t touch anything that was insured. That killed him. But they know things, and they’re always hot. They’re going underground, so they’ll know what’s down there.”
“Like Ghost Eddy.” She pushed eggs around on her plate.
“I can get in touch with them because they’re predictable.”
Vasquez finished her toast after dropping a dollop of runny jelly on it. “Look, I can hear you explaining that stakeouts do the job—sometimes not even the job you’re doing.” She frowned. “How about the guy you were watching?”
“Ah, I never got him. Maybe he was clean.”
The young Puerto Rican shook her head. “I don’t like sitting still. I know, you don’t have to say—I don’t have to like it. I have to learn how to deal with it. Okay?”
“You could get somewhere with that attitude,” Guthrie said.
Henry Street was already awake when the old Ford cruised up to the front of her parents’ tenement. Garbage was going out, and brooms were dusting sidewalks. A few suspicious youngsters watched them, then ran off. Vasquez climbed out of the car and hitched at her gun belt before she went up the steps. The morning was cool. She paused and looked up at the building. Her long ponytail looked like a black stripe down her jacket, just another vertical line on a slim young woman. Nothing went sideways except the brim of her cap and the bunched-up sleeves of her windbreaker. She wasn’t out of the ordinary. She went inside. She was right at home.
CHAPTER TWELVE
That afternoon, Guthrie ventured onto the Net, looking for Justin Peiper. Vasquez watched him fish out a SSN and a short list of credit cards with juggled balances. Peiper had trouble managing his finances—tossing debts from one card to another—but cleared all of his balances on the second of August. Most New Yorkers couldn’t manage that. Guthrie searched dates, times, and places to cross-check with LMA, Washington Heights, Melrose, and the twenty-third of July. He reasoned that the districts near the crime scene might turn up a timely purchase, or give him proof whether the dark-haired man was at LMA the night Bowman was killed. He found nothing. Peiper was missing, so to speak, on the night of Bowman’s murder. He registered credit-card bills for LMA and in places in the Heights infrequently, but cr
edit-card charges didn’t place him anywhere on the twenty-third.
“That would’ve been easy,” Guthrie muttered. He searched court documents in Utica to examine the assaults. Both were pled down to misdemeanors from ABHAN, a felony that had sent both of Vasquez’s brothers to Rikers before. Peiper didn’t mind waiting for someone to turn their head before he started trouble. Vasquez went back to her own desk with a shrug. While the hunt was on, she’d watched over Guthrie’s shoulder.
After that, the little detective propped his feet up on his desk, moving only to refill his cup of coffee. A succession of frowns marched across his face. He opened his notebook and slowly turned the pages, but it didn’t seem as if he was reading what was there. “We need another look at him,” he said finally.
“Justin Peiper?” Vasquez asked.
“Sure. We’re going up to the university.”
* * *
On the drive up Broadway, Vasquez discovered that Guthrie didn’t mean to stalk Peiper. He called Michelle Tompkins to make sure that she would be on campus. The traffic was moving quickly. Tompkins was in a class, so they would spend a little time on campus waiting for her. They had a long look at a barricade of clouds piled high in the eastern sky. Some invisible wall had the relief penned away from Manhattan, which glowed with ruddy, distorted heat. The dog days were barking along.
The auditoriums of McNamara Hall huddled drunkenly around an atrium roofed with glass. Clever workmanship joined the smaller buildings into a whole but couldn’t quite unite the scattered arrangement. The mezzanine bent in irregular lengths and lolled staircases out like tongues into a disjointed lobby. Guthrie and Vasquez strolled for a quarter of an hour before locating the second-floor door to Tompkins’s auditorium. They waited, watching students also wait and wander. The classrooms attracted fewer customers than the food court, but they seemed the same—a mix of the busy pouring around the slack.