Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  “Ah, damn,” Ralph Gaines said, and stopped wrestling against Guthrie’s grip.

  The brothers were about the same size as Guthrie: the middle of five feet and square in the 130’s—right in the middle of Harlem. At a distance he might have passed as a third brother, but without the signature mustache and speckled clothes. The difference was in the face. The little old detective had a face as hard and flat as a brick; the Gaines brothers were younger, and their eyes darted like goldfish looking for a way out.

  Guthrie doubled up his grip on Ralph Gaines’s dirty black jacket and marched him across the street. Rodney Gaines mumbled a string of curses as he followed. Vasquez trailed them, hand burrowed into her jacket pocket. Guthrie pushed Ralph into the backseat of the old Ford, and Vasquez climbed into the driver’s seat. Rodney stood outside the car for a few seconds, undecided, before he climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Look, if it’s about that place on Seventy-eighth, I can explain,” Ralph said. “Anyway, you never said stay away from there.”

  “Ralph, you need to steal some toothpaste. If you find a place on Seventy-eighth with any, be my guest. And get some soap while you’re at it.”

  Gaines sidled away on the bench seat as far as Guthrie’s grip allowed. “Ain’t nobody told you to touch me.”

  “This ain’t about a score, Ralph. This’s a chance for you to do me a favor, so don’t blow it. I’ll pay off, like usual.”

  “You mean quick money, or a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

  “Your choice.”

  The brothers exchanged a sly glance across the car seat. “We’ll take that upfront,” Ralph said. “Never know where you’ll be tomorrow, you know?”

  “When you prove out, naturally, not for cooking up a good lie to feed me.” Guthrie flashed a smile. “The other night I caught a look at the two of you dropping into the ground on One Fifty-first. You going someplace down there?”

  “You’re asking about the carousel.”

  “Tell me about it, then.”

  “A million years ago, the subway lines didn’t all run the same as now. The old rail companies were always looking to beat each other—didn’t even use the same kind of tracks. There was a Bronx line that came under the river, and back then it was for real special, but it got pushed under by another company—”

  Guthrie twisted Ralph Gaines’s jacket collar until he squeaked. “When you start studying history? Are you high already? You’re cooking this up?”

  “No, man! Take it easy! The man down there studies up on this shit. He runs the squat, and it’s real cool. Some of them old leather cushions are still comfortable, you know?”

  “If you’re shitting me, this could go bad,” the little detective said.

  “Not our problem your people are on you,” Rodney said. “That’s your lookout for working for them.”

  “Shut up, Rodney. You’re stupid,” Ralph Gaines said. “He don’t got to get it, Guthrie. I get it. The carousel was this fancy place for switching trains, with bars and kitchens and all. The man found it in a book, buried in a library somewhere. The place ain’t really for lightsiders, you know? The man’s got people. The families can come, and people can bring business, but his people will waste you. They’ll wall you up in a hole and forget where they put you.”

  “Anybody can go there?”

  “Yeah, but, you know.” He glanced at Vasquez. “You two would stick out stupid, no offense.”

  “We’ll fix that,” Guthrie said. “I’m not looking for the place, see; I’m looking for a guy I know went underground. He was aboveground, all the way uptown on the river, but he’s dodging. You heard of Ghost Eddy?”

  “That guy’s a nutcase. He don’t want nothing—”

  “Shut up, Rodney.”

  “What’re you saying?” Guthrie demanded.

  “All he does is sit in the dark and drink. No women, no dope, no cards. He could do his thing in an overturned trash can, if he could stand all that racket he makes when he’s sleeping—”

  “I don’t think that evil son of a bitch sleeps,” Ralph said. “I think he just pitches those fits when he’s deep in the bottle.”

  “So he’s down there?”

  “Oh yeah,” Ralph said. “I could point you where he lays, but I’m not getting my head twisted off for no money.”

  “You don’t mind that part. I just need you to get me down in the carousel and give me some bearings.”

  “All right. Then drive on up to Trinity, and—”

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow at midnight.” Guthrie pulled a bundle of money from his pocket, peeled ten fifties slow enough for Ralph to count, and handed them to the grimy little man. “This is tonight, for talking. Tomorrow, midnight, I lay this on you five times.”

  Staring at the money, Rodney Gaines let out a yodel that startled the people walking by the old Ford on Forty-seventh Street. He jumped out of the car as soon as Ralph dragged his leg free from the backseat. The Gaines brothers hurried up Forty-seventh and Guthrie moved to the passenger seat. He left the door open to air out the stench.

  On the way back to the office, they stopped at a secondhand store. The rain shower had wet the streets enough to dry the dust, but the heat glowed back through quickly. Guthrie bought a few sets of mismatched army fatigues and two pairs of boots in their sizes. The clothes and shoes were throwaways, because he wasn’t sure what they would find underground. He knew enough dusty, unswept corners in New York to accept Ralph Gaines’s story, without being sure how much faith to place in the description. He wanted to be ready. The darkness under the city wasn’t inclined to forgive mistakes.

  At the office, the little detective showed Vasquez his holdouts. On both wings of the back wall, the wainscoting was a facade covering lockboxes.

  The little detective locked the outer door, drew the shades, and brought out a small toolbox. He used needle-nose pliers to draw the finish nails from the wainscoting, which lifted out to reveal a removable section of plasterwork that made the holdout sound solid. Guthrie used one lockbox for guns and the other for anything else.

  “Wasserman used a gun cabinet, right over there by the window,” he said. “He had a class-three permit—grandfathered automatic weapons and everything. He left the artillery behind, but I got rid of the cabinet.” He pointed along the wall toward the windows looking down on Thirty-fourth Street.

  “You would rather take the extra trouble,” Vasquez said dubiously, studying the little man’s tools and the carefully arrayed boards.

  Guthrie shrugged. “That sort of paperwork attracts attention,” he said, and smiled. “Then sometimes you shouldn’t put something you want in a bank or storage. Maybe it ain’t open when you need it. Maybe people watch you go back and forth, and check on what you’re doing. Being a squirrel is a good thing when it gets you through a winter, but not if it’s too easy to find the tree where you cut nuts.”

  Vasquez frowned. The little detective had a thing with animals, but that didn’t always help her understand what he was trying to say. He compared the situation to Ghost Eddy’s; the gray drifter had habits that made it possible to locate him. All people did predictable things, and you could discover anything if you watched patiently. Some things were just simpler than others, like with drug dealers. Whatever disguise they attempted, three things always stood out: The dope had to come from somewhere, it had to be stashed somewhere, and the money had to go somewhere. When people did things, they had a purpose. The dealer went to pick up his dry cleaning, went grocery shopping, or slipped over to his girlfriend’s house. When he did something where the purpose wasn’t obvious, or maybe did something obvious too often, a watcher found something.

  “You make that sound too easy, viejo,” Vasquez complained.

  Guthrie laughed. “Drug dealers don’t get caught, because nobody’s really watching them,” he said. “Anyway, hand me those laptops from Bowman’s apartment in the village. They’re going in the box with this hard drive.” He unwired Bowman’s hard drive
from the office system and slid it into the strongbox. He stacked the laptops with it.

  “What’s the problem there?” she asked.

  “Something Tompkins said about pictures, up at the university. She said there’re pictures out there. Those files are huge—probably video, graphics, whatever—and the names were alphabet soup. Then I remembered, there was alphabet soup in the trash can in the Village. We could be talking about something somebody wanted.”

  “Then wouldn’t they just take the drive?”

  Guthrie shrugged. “Criminals ain’t all supergeniuses. Sometimes you get the Gaines brothers. And sometimes a supergenius makes a mistake, just like Wily. I know a guy in Brooklyn who’ll look at this stuff for me.”

  That night, Guthrie and Vasquez drove downtown to haunt Chinatown. The little detective wanted to stay on a night cycle, so he would be alert when the Gaines brothers took them to the carousel in the underground. He let Vasquez cut back and forth among the downtown business districts, switching between abandoned streets and those still thrumming with life. As the hours ticked by, he occasionally looked at his wristwatch and called out a distant address, timing how long Vasquez needed to drive there. He questioned her each time why she chose her route, like Seventh Avenue instead of Park, or the Manhattan Bridge when he sent her into Brooklyn. When he had introduced her to driving the Ford, he made her drive routes the same way, but in the daytime. After each outbound that night, he always sent her back to Chinatown. She guided the old blue Ford slowly through the quiet streets, watching. Sometime before dawn broke, like an egg yolk bleeding yellow into a dark pan, she discovered the difference between watching and watching for something. Suddenly, they were two different things, when before it had been impossible to tell them apart.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  With their meeting with the Gaines brothers set for midnight, Guthrie and Vasquez didn’t go into the office until six o’clock the next evening. The day’s heat was beginning its slow slide down. The Garment District was still busy with rolling racks, and shouts accompanying last-minute deliveries. A message waited for them on the old-fashioned answering machine Guthrie kept in the office, signaling laconically with a blinking red light.

  “Guthrie, this is Mike Inglewood. You remember me, right? The guy who works for NYPD in the big building downtown. Say hello to—what’s her name, the new one? Vasquez! Say hello to Vasquez for me. Tell her she should go to the Academy if she wants to learn how to do real police work. Unless she likes that Peeping Tom stuff you got her doing.” He laughed roughly. “I been trying to get hold of you all day, Guthrie. Too bad. I had to talk to your client—Olsen. Maybe you would’ve liked to be there to take notes, or something. I think Rikers agrees with him. People say the air is cleaner, but knowing what I know about the East River, I ain’t so sure.” He laughed again. “I don’t know which one of him I talked to. I think it’s the one that dummied up and asked for a lawyer. But like I was saying, we should get together. I’ll be down at Mako’s after hours. Come on by; we’ll laugh at the Angels game. Talk shop. You know.” More laughter was amputated by a disconnect.

  “He’s waving the other murders in my face,” Guthrie said. “That don’t really matter, though. He’s asking us down there, so we go and have dinner on the city. We got time for an extra meeting in front of midnight.”

  Vasquez drove downtown and parked by the old Custom’s House. They walked down to the sports bar off the park. People lounged like cats on the waterfront, catching a breeze off the bay to unwind. Mako’s was dark inside, noisy with diners and a half-baked crowd jeering the Angels on the large screen behind the bar. The NYPD detectives had a booth in the back; Inglewood shouted and waved like a lunatic when he saw Guthrie. On the way to the back, the little detective slowed a waitress long enough to order steak sandwiches, fries, and a pitcher.

  The little detective poured himself a mug of beer from the pitcher waiting on the table. Landry was there, too. He shot him a sour look, then scowled when Inglewood grinned and reached beneath the table to produce a folder. All of Inglewood’s work was on paper. He was a man determined to avoid the computer revolution, along with anything else new, exciting, or championed by somebody under the age of forty. He pushed some dirty plates aside, dabbed at a puddle of beer with a napkin, then spread his folder on the table.

  The front part of the folder held crime-scene pictures. A doll-like blonde, pretty in a battered way, was splattered with blood. Beneath her the ground was a mess of crumbled asphalt, dust, and gravel. Her blouse was messy with blood, dead center. She was faceup, with her legs bunched up but her arms askew. A second, less messy wound decorated the base of her neck between the collarbone and spine.

  “Pictures of Camille Bowman?” Guthrie asked. “Before these, I’ve just seen glamour shots.”

  “She was a beauty,” Inglewood said. He dipped a cold steak fry in sauce and folded it into his mouth. “Keep going.”

  Glaring light illuminated the photos. In each one, Bowman was very dead. Wound photos with measurements and layouts of the scene accompanied photos of trace evidence gathered by ISU. Guthrie became impatient and flipped photos faster. Soon he came to the point where the photos began a fresh sequence.

  The second fashion show also starred a pretty young blonde—an eerie similarity that could’ve been a remake of the same movie. Guthrie extracted the topover shot of the second girl—body faceup, with bunched legs, arms askew, a messy wound in the center of the chest, and a second bullet hole in the base of her neck. Guthrie flipped back to find Bowman’s matching picture. He grunted.

  “GI Ken didn’t have much reaction, either,” Inglewood said, pushing his taped-together glasses back up his nose. “Anyway, I heard you found a wit didn’t turn up on canvass. That right?”

  “Sure,” Guthrie said. “His handle’s Ghost Eddy; it fits. I ain’t cornered him yet, but I’m gonna get another interview to see if he eliminates my guy.”

  “Well now!” the ginger-haired detective said, then smiled. “Let me level with you, Guthrie. I got no feelings about GI Ken, myself. Then you’re not even sure what your witness says? How’s that gonna help?” He rapped a fingertip on the stack of pictures, then folded them away and tucked them beneath the table. “Now this is coming soon. Where are you?”

  The little detective shook his head, and spent a few minutes making a steak sandwich vanish after the waitress set it on the table. The quiet at the table made the bar seem louder. To Vasquez, they seemed like a table of old guys studying hard on a draw of dominoes. The hard eyes, the scowls, and sharp glances were only missing a slam and a click to punctuate the points.

  Guthrie shrugged after wiping steak sauce from his mouth with a napkin. “I should start at the beginning,” he said. “Down there at Major Case, your guy Barber was never working the Bowman case. He was working the other case all along. I know this because I’m working the Bowman case, and I got fresh trail. I think Olsen’s clean. After I’ve looked around for a while, maybe I pinpoint him elsewhere when Bowman gets killed—I’m not even done with that much, Mike. You see where I’m going?”

  “I never thought you were gonna lay down on it, Guthrie,” Inglewood said.

  “Here’s my theory—somebody framed Olsen on sexual jealousy. Maybe this happens to be Barber’s killer, who crossed paths with Olsen. Or maybe somebody lucked into a good copy while they were placing the frame. Those are guesses. What I’m not guessing about is this: some serious heavyweights are involved, from uptown. They’re gonna line up for a crack at whoever fucked this one up. I don’t think it ever goes to trial, unless the ADA has a sick desire to be kicked repeatedly where the sun don’t shine.” The little detective paused to finish his beer. “That brings me to my problem. If I give you a list of suspects, you could get stuff splattered all over you. It ain’t gonna wash off easy if it goes in the air.”

  Inglewood shrugged. “I was born dirty,” he said. “But I gotta say, if you don’t want it out, you better find another way to cl
ear Olsen.”

  “All right, Mike. We appreciate the beer and sandwiches. I’ll let the bigwig get you next time.”

  Across the hazy bay, Brooklyn lay humpbacked and slumbering beyond Governor’s Island. Daylight drained from the sky like bathwater. Standing outside Mako’s, Guthrie called Justin Peiper. After a disjointed phone conversation loaded with exasperated pauses, the college student gave Guthrie an address for a midtown club where he would be available all night.

  “I think that kid gets high,” Guthrie said to Vasquez as they walked back to the Custom’s House for the car. “Or maybe he’s got some nervous tic.”

  The club was on Third Avenue. Coming into midtown, the big buildings hovered overhead like pregnant clouds. They towered above Everland, a redbrick building squatting behind a chain-link fence and a narrow parking lot. A row of loading-dock doors into a stepped-down sublot on one side suggested brewery. Fresh entrances had been carved through the brickwork, but paint and a smeared patina of decorations didn’t hide the grilles of industrial windows near the roof.

  Everland’s vast interior space was wrapped in a mezzanine disguised as a crenellated wall, and crudely divided with rough-sawn lumber. Wide cloth banners drooped in ranks from the high ceiling, dampening the sound. The gamer club still had the bones of industrial machinery thrusting through its medieval facade like the knobby knees and heavy boots of giants. Banks of computers lined side bars and filled booths. Music washed over the crowd, but they were talking, not dancing.

  Vasquez spotted Justin Peiper at a side bar, tapping flurries on a keyboard and talking to himself. A cheap tapestry of a dragon hung above his head on the high wall. He wore blue jeans and a collared shirt, but the crowd swirling around him was decked in medieval pageantry—gowned ladies, armored knights, bards, robed wizards—while two tall men in armor battered each other with padded staffs on a raised platform. The crowd hooted and jeered each blow.

  Guthrie and Vasquez pulled chairs from nearby tables to sit on either side of Peiper, and discovered that his conversation was with an earpiece, not an invisible friend. Vasquez prodded him with a fingertip, but he only glanced at her before returning his attention to the computer.