Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  Vasquez rounded the plaza and they slid along Prospect Park. “Less than murder,” she said quietly. As she turned onto Caton, the rain intensified. The sky seemed determined to make up for all the dry, hot dog days at once. Guthrie directed her to a nondescript storefront looking out onto the Parade Ground. Faded paint blended the narrow street entrance of Bob’s Sports into the pavement. Next door, the windows were boarded, with a dusty COMING SOON sign marked with the empty promise of a restaurant.

  The gutters were awash, and the sidewalks covered with splashing puddles. By the time Guthrie and Vasquez reached the door, they were soaked. An old-fashioned hanging bell rang when they went inside. The inside smelled musty; most of the lights were burned out, or buzzing at the end of an ill-used life. An old clerk looked up briefly when they came inside, then sighed and flipped a page on the magazine he had spread on the countertop.

  Vasquez scanned the shelves as she walked along behind Guthrie. The sporting goods all looked used, including muddy baseballs and splintered bats. An ancient leather maskless football helmet leered at her, and she picked it up. The inside smelled like vomit, and the price tag said $4. She decided that her middle brother, Indio, needed to have it. She brushed some loose wet strands of hair away from her face and grinned.

  “Don’t bother the displays,” the old clerk said wearily.

  “You mean I can’t buy this?” Vasquez demanded.

  “Hey, I just work here, you know?” the old man said. He perked up on his stool, suddenly ready to talk.

  “Can it, Mike,” Guthrie said. “She’s with me. Vincent here?”

  The old man shrugged. “In back.”

  Vasquez kept the helmet and followed Guthrie into the back. The clerk gave her a martyred look. Beyond a swinging door, four old men were playing pinochle. Two looked up when the detectives came through the door. One old man’s eyes looked huge behind thick glasses; even sitting down, he was a giant. He could hide his spread of cards behind his palm. His voice was a match, like gravel roaring down a chute.

  “Vincent, we got company,” he said.

  “Just Guthrie. I can see him, you know.”

  “Sometimes…”

  The back room was decorated with old junk and a flimsy card table. A door on the back wall was marked EXIT. Vincent wore a fisherman’s cap and wire-rimmed spectacles. He peered at Vasquez, raising his chin because the glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose.

  “Hey, that’s not Wietz! Who you bringing in here, Guthrie?”

  “I tried to tell you,” the big man said. “You don’t never listen.”

  “Vincent Pagliaroli, Salvatore Lucci, this’s Rachel Vasquez,” the little detective said. “These two are junk dealers—”

  “Bad dealer,” another old man said, flicking the spread of his cards with a fingertip. “Would you believe no marriage?”

  “So?” Vincent asked. “That makes her good people? What’s a name?”

  “Names are words,” Guthrie said. “She made bones a few hours ago. We need some replacements.”

  The old men set their cards down, and they all turned to stare hard at Vasquez. With her hair wet, her ears stuck out even more than normal, and she looked as narrow as a drenched cat. She reddened and held up the old football helmet. “I want to buy this for my brother,” she said.

  Vincent smiled. “You don’t like him, huh? He won’t keep his teeth wearing that.”

  “No, no, I like him. I’ll just hide it in his room to make him clean it.”

  Sal laughed. “Wouldn’t do no good for my brother,” he rumbled.

  “All right. Let’s take a break, guys. I don’t think Guthrie needs long. You know what you want?”

  Guthrie nodded. The other two old men went out to the front of the store. Vincent opened the exit door, grumbled about the puddles, and handed umbrellas to everyone before he went into the alley. Sal followed Vasquez and Guthrie. Vincent opened the alley door to the side and they entered a stockroom piled with cans of tomato sauce, tomatoes, and paste. Sal came in last and locked the door.

  Three wire cages stacked full of wooden crates waited beyond the stockroom’s locked door. Each cage had to be unlocked and relocked. Cameras peered down from overhead into rooms kept uncomfortably cold, like a meat locker. Orange-scented cleaner didn’t cover the sharp smell of oil and metal. The last room was full of standing steel cabinets: Even without couches and reading tables, it looked like a library.

  “I need two more of those Chief’s Specials,” Guthrie said.

  “Those were hers?” Vincent asked, then glanced at Vasquez. “You liked those? Forties, right? I got something with more pop, if you want.”

  Vasquez shook her head. The smell of the ancient football helmet was making her queasy. In the card room, she hadn’t understood what Guthrie meant when he told the old Italians she had “made bones.” The armory was as cold as a mortuary, and she realized the old men had stared to size her up.

  Vincent opened a cabinet. The metal clanged like prison doors. “I only got one forty-caliber. You want to go up, or down?” He looked at Vasquez, one small pistol cuffed in his withered fist.

  Her mouth stayed stuck shut for a moment. “What’s bigger?”

  “I got forty-five, forty-four Mag, forty-four Special, forty-one Mag—”

  “Let me get the forty-five,” she said.

  The old man peered into the cabinet, drew out a second pistol and some empty clips. “Okay. You need something?” He glanced at Guthrie, then frowned. “This was a confirmation?”

  “It’ll be in the papers, Vincent. NYPD took all the iron. So I need a pair of forty-four Mags—Colt, Smith, Ruger, don’t matter as long as it’s four and three-quarters.”

  The old man had a pair of Trooper IIs and a handful of speed loaders. Guthrie bought a double shoulder rig and some boxes of ammo. Sal watched them through his thick glasses while they loaded cylinders and clips, then tucked away their purchases. Vincent marked tallies inside his cabinets.

  “Well, Guthrie, you’re ready for the army,” Vincent said. He ticked items off on his fingertips. “That’ll be thirty-two hundred. And another five for the helmet. I’d give it to you for free, but it used to belong to my mother’s brother.”

  “The tag says four dollars,” Vasquez said.

  The old Italian gave her a surprised look. “You’re cute. I gotta say that. The helmet’s been sitting there since sometime in the 1970s. That’s a lotta inflation. You want me to add it up?”

  “No, thirty-two hundred five is good,” Guthrie said. He pulled bills from one of his pockets.

  “I tell you what you better give her,” Sal said. “An umbrella. She ain’t big enough she can afford to have anything else wash away.”

  Vincent grinned, peering at Vasquez through his spectacles again. “Okay, I throw in the umbrellas,” he said.

  * * *

  On the way back to the city, Guthrie and Vasquez paused to buy a bag of snacks: the grab bag. The grab bag was the ritual that accompanied sitting in a park or on a street corner to watch Manhattan get a few hours older. In Vasquez’s first three months, the grab bag was filled a few times a week. Back in the city, they drifted into a spot in Battery Park, looking out over the bay. The rain wore away to nothing, but the clouds didn’t thin. Guthrie kicked a can several laps around the Ford, while Vasquez just sat in the driver’s seat.

  The first time with the bag, Guthrie hadn’t said anything. He’d sat down on a bench in Tompkins Square Park and ignored Vasquez like she was a pesky fly for four hours. Then he peppered her with questions about what had happened while the time was passing. After she realized he was serious about wanting answers, she began to spin lies to fill the big silence of not having anything to say. The little old man laughed at her. The night before, he hid a camera in the tree beside the bench to catch her if she tried bullshit. On top of that, he knew she was snowing him, because he had been watching, and his eyes were always on record. The camera was just proof.

  Aft
er the first few trips with the grab bag, the little detective had added a twist. He asked her to explain the people they saw: who they were, why they were there, what they were doing, and even why they did what they did the way they did. “Why’d he throw that can down?” he asked, pointing at a Yuppie in Gramercy Park who was tossing litter, with a trash can twenty feet away. Something like that could start a quarter-hour argument—with Guthrie still expecting her to watch at the same time.

  Mixed into the mess were the videotapes. Vasquez got angry when he showed her a black-and-white video and asked her what color things were. That was impossible. Then he brought out a color copy and ran them side by side; he used two cameras just to ask her about the colors. “At night, it’s hard to tell colors apart,” he said, but that was one of his rare moments of explanation. He had loops of tape from robberies, suicides, car wrecks, and fires, with rapidfire strings of questions to go with all of them. Clayton Guthrie was crazy; he paid her to shoot a pistol and do nothing.

  The high clouds drizzled softly on Battery Park now, shrouding Lady Liberty’s secrets across the bay. Vasquez watched Guthrie grow tired of walking and settle back into the passenger seat of the Ford. He was brooding. His jaw clenched like he was chewing on something difficult, and his eyes weren’t focused on anything she could see. Before the phone rang, Vasquez had decided that she had been wrong all summer long. Clayton Guthrie wasn’t crazy. Rachel Vasquez just wasn’t old enough to know what he was doing.

  “Hello?” Guthrie said, pressing the speaker on the phone.

  “Guthrie? This’s Sergeant Murtaugh. Are you tucked away somewhere?”

  “Battery Park.” The rain falling on the old blue Ford was silent, but the wind was cold, and it hissed through the open doors like a sluice.

  “Okay. I had to let you walk away from MTS without saying anything,” Murtaugh said. “Major Case, and some of the brass, would like to have you for lunch, you know?”

  “I ain’t surprised,” Guthrie said.

  “You were solid this A.M., so I figured you were good for a heads-up. OC identified that bruiser in your office as Vitaly Kozlov, formerly of Brooklyn. The other guy has a name, but he just came over by way of France. Kozlov was connected to V.I. Maskalenko, a Ukrainian boss. Naturally, I wonder what the mafiya has against you. Any ideas?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon,” Guthrie said. “I’ll wager a few guesses, starting with its being connected somehow to the case I’m working. There’s a dirty college boy, but I doubt he’s got stones enough to reach out for the mafiya. I’d bet against that. On the other hand, I do know why Major Case wants to ball me up. The lawyer involved, Rondell, he’s representing Greg Olsen.”

  “GI Ken! No kidding!”

  “No kidding. Right now, I think they’re running with the Barbie doll murders, seeing if they can fit him up—”

  “And you’re chipping away at the Bowman murder.” Murtaugh laughed. “Those guys downtown crack me up. You’re getting somewhere?”

  “Maybe. Could be somebody tried to send me an urgent message, since they were looking for Rondell’s investigator. That mess earlier had me stirred up, and I wasn’t willing to help out. I should call Mike Inglewood, downtown. You know him? Anyway, they turned up a wit in Morningside, and I think she saw somebody. I got a stack of pictures now that I want to show her, but she’s been missing for two days.”

  A pause was punctuated with a snapping finger, then the rustle of paper. “That wit have a name?”

  “Sand Whitten.”

  “I’ll pass that along for you,” Murtaugh said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Night came early and felt cold. The clouds over the city never broke; the afternoon was a long twilight with spates of drizzle and rushing wind. Guthrie took the keys and drove Vasquez back to Henry Street. He told her to warn her parents, though her name wouldn’t be in the newspaper from the police blotter until the next morning. Overnight, he planned to stay in a hotel, and they would lay low for a few days. The little detective figured the mafiya to step back after a failure. Even if they meant to try again, they would wait.

  Vasquez slid the warning to the back of her mind. She knew that if she wanted to sleep, fighting with her parents wasn’t the way to get ready for bed. When she undid her ponytail to take a shower, she found a ragged lock of loose hair tangled in the band. Without her realizing, the Russian’s knife had almost opened her scalp, leaving one lock of hair not long enough to reach her ponytail; now it swung loose at the edge of her jaw like a trophy. She was disgusted, but she pushed the thought away. The day had been too full. Right before she went to sleep, she wondered how much of a raise Guthrie would give her. Then suddenly it was morning, she was wide awake, and she could hear her mother in the kitchen.

  “You’re going to make this a habit again?” Mamì asked when Vasquez walked into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. “I could fry some more eggs.”

  Vasquez shook her head. “I gotta go.”

  “Too fast for sunny-side up eggs and a slice of melon? With pepper?” She knew how to tempt her daughter. Vasquez teetered on the edge until she continued. “You should eat breakfast with your father.”

  “No, I gotta hurry,” she said. “Before I go, though, I gotta tell you something. It’ll be in the newspaper today. A thing happened at the office.” Her eyes cut, and beneath the table her feet were already shuffling for the door.

  Mamì frowned. “What kind of thing?”

  “Some shooting, some guys that tried a robbery uptown.”

  “So…” She hesitated, throwing one sharp glance at her daughter, then another toward the back of the apartment. “That’s where you were hurrying yesterday.”

  “Yeah, the robbery.”

  “So it’s over?”

  “They were Russians,” Vasquez said softly.

  “Rachel!” Mamì’s cry came out sotto voce, and she shot another glance at the back of the apartment. She attacked the eggs she had in the frying pan. Her spatula rang like a machete. “Okay, I’ll tell him. You’d better go.”

  Vasquez finished her coffee, then pulled on her gun belt and windbreaker. As she slipped through the front door, her mother called softly, “Buena suerte.” She rushed downstairs to get away, then had to wait on the stoop. The morning was cool, and she was glad she’d drunk the hot coffee. She watched a grizzled old man hook cans from the garbage until Guthrie’s old Ford rolled up to the front of the tenement.

  The little detective wasn’t talking. He drove uptown on Park Avenue, ticking along with the traffic. Above the city, the clouds were broken, admitting shattered bars of early sunshine. North of Mount Morris, he turned to get on Eighth Avenue. Along the way he had to fight the traffic, because he seemed to be going no place in particular, while every other driver in Manhattan had someplace they needed to be. Eventually he drove down by the Harlem, and the old blue Ford slid up beneath the bridge where Bowman was murdered.

  In daylight, the underpinnings looked less forbidding. Sunlight revealed reality: tired, dirty, and overlooked. Guthrie parked. He took a walk among the piers, his feet crunching on gravel and glass, then returned to sit in the driver’s seat with the door open.

  “You all right?” he asked. “You sleep?”

  Vasquez frowned into the bottom of a cup of coffee that was becoming visible. “Me? How about you?”

  The little detective grunted. “Not enough,” he said. “Pieces have been trying to fit together all night. This’s coming down to two things. Somehow the mafiya is worked into it, and Olsen’s caught in a beautiful frame with that gun. Those college boys haven’t got that kind of grudge against him. Looking into Bowman turned my head the wrong way.”

  “Viejo, we only figured that out because we went through it.”

  “I’m not saying we didn’t need to—we gotta get at Peiper,” Guthrie said. “But Wasserman wouldn’t have missed this.”

  “He must’ve been a genius.”

  “Maybe. He was an ol
d-school tough guy, even when he was old. He was in his sixties when I started. That seems like a long time ago. HP was still a youngster back then. George Livingston is the new right hand, but he only started a few years ago. Before Livingston was Mr. Morgan, a real sharp guy who was doing for the Whitneys since the first war. HP inherited him from the man he took over.”

  “Another Whitney?”

  “That’s right. Wasserman was Mr. Morgan’s go-to guy. When I ran into HP in France, he put me together with Wasserman over here.” The little detective frowned. “You weren’t even born when Wasserman retired. I guess that means I’m really, really old. Anyway, he did just about everything at one time or another—divorce, bail jumping, repo—the old man would even chase lost dogs and cats.

  “I had one big case with Wasserman. That was in ’91. That case was ugly. After that, he went on about another six months; then he called Mr. Morgan and told him he was finished. He cradled the phone, fished the office keys out of his pocket, tossed them to me, and walked out. I felt like I burned a hole through the chair.”

  “What happened?”

  Guthrie glanced out across the river, toward the Bronx. He scowled. “I’m still here.”

  “No, the case,” Vasquez said.

  The little detective frowned and looked at his watch, but then he settled back into the car seat and sighed. “That was in September. Everyone was wearing jackets—the heat was gone. Wasserman had a friend down in Chinatown, an old tong named Li Wei. He called at about nine o’clock in the morning, and Wasserman’s face turned as grim as a rock. I knew Viet before I started with him, so I picked Cantonese up fast. The old man stressed languages.

  “I had something better than a sprinkling by then, so I could follow the conversation. Li Wei didn’t trust phones except for chitchat—he wanted Wasserman to come meet him on Fulton Street. That was outside his territory, which didn’t sound good to Wasserman. Before we left, he took an extra pair of forty-fives from the cabinet, and he made me take an extra pistol.