by Tim O'Mara
“Absolutely,” I said. “You going to tell us not to leave town?”
He laughed. So did Lynn, after a second or two. “Wouldn’t think of it. Thanks again.”
The two of them went back inside and a couple of uniforms stayed in front of the building. Caroline took my hand and led me up the street. When we were a block away, she turned and wrapped her arms around me. She began to shake and cry and held on to me for a minute. When she was done, she stepped away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was holding that in and didn’t want to do it in front of those detectives.”
“I understand,” I said, and she gave me a look that told me I really didn’t. “You want me to take you home?”
She shook her head. “Just walk me to the car service.”
“Sure.”
As we continued up the street, she told me that the detectives had taken Roberts’s keys and would lock up. When Roberts’s wife showed up at the hospital, she’d get them back.
“What did you tell them back there?” I asked.
“Not much I could tell them. That one guy—the fat one—kept pushing it. Like I knew something I wasn’t saying.”
“Did you tell them about Rivas?”
“Yes, I did. You don’t think—”
“They will check it out,” I said. “Did you mention last night’s break-in?”
“I wasn’t sure if John—” She stopped. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. Let’s hope the cops figure it out before someone else gets hurt.”
She shivered at that thought, and I put my arm around her. When we made it to the corner, I put Caroline in a car and gave the driver a twenty. I leaned in through the window and kissed her on the cheek.
“Get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow, okay?”
She nodded. “Thanks.”
I went back inside the car service. As I waited for the next available driver, it occurred to me that being associated with Roberts’s travel agency was not good for one’s health.
Chapter 29
A HALF HOUR AFTER SCHOOL LET out the next day, I was heading down the front stairs of the school when I noticed Detective Royce leaning up against his car, smoking a cigarette. His jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, and his tie loosened an inch or two.
“Detective,” I said.
He pointed at me and smirked. “Teacher,” he said, and flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “I’m glad we got that straight.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t push it, Mr. Donne.” His smirk was gone. “I got a call from the two detectives you spoke to last night.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve been at more crime scenes these past ten days than most cops I know.”
“Hey, I had no idea that—”
“You just happened to be at Roberts’s late at night with one of his employees?”
“That was a date,” I said.
We looked at each other for a few awkward seconds before I broke the silence. “I’m getting a beer, Detective. You’re welcome to join me.”
Royce grabbed me by the elbow. “You’re coming close, Donne.”
“To what, Detective? Figuring something out before you?”
He threw my elbow back at me. “Fuck you.”
“Always good to have an adult conversation after a day with the kids,” I said. “Is that it?”
He stared at me and then reached up and squeezed the bridge of his nose. With his hand in front of his face, he said, “Get in the car.”
I snorted. “You taking me in?”
“I think I need a beer,” he said. “How about you?”
I smiled. “You know how to get to Teddy’s?”
“I’m a detective. I’ll find it.”
*
Royce finished almost a third of his pint in one gulp. When he opened his eyes he said, “This is brewed in Brooklyn?”
I pointed out the window. “Used to be, you could go outside, walk three blocks north and one block west. Brewed upstate now, I think.”
“Brooklyn Pilsner.”
“Think globally,” I said. “Drink locally.”
And we did. In silence, while we both finished our pints and then ordered two more.
“You didn’t follow my advice, Mr. Donne.”
“I didn’t know I had to, Detective Royce.”
“I’m just about at my desired level of bullshit for the day,” Royce said. “I phrased it as advice out of respect for your uncle. Now I’m going to be a bit more direct. Stay out of the Rivas case and away from anyone who has anything to do with the Rivas case. Is that clear enough?”
“With all due respect, Detective, you can’t tell me who I can talk to and where I can go.”
“I can when it— Jesus Christ, Donne.” He took out a cigarette and placed it between his lips without lighting it. “You’re getting in way over your head here. That guy you described to me, the one who took you for a ride the other day? The short one in the suit?”
“Yeah?”
“I ran his description past some guys at the house, and it sounds to them like it may be Jerry Vega. Small-time trying to become big-time.”
“Connected to Rivas and Roberts?”
“Don’t know. Thing is, Vega’s been off the radar for a while now. At one time, he was connected all over. Name came up with some PRs, some Dominicans, even some Nigerians. Just about anyone having anything to do with stolen IDs and bootleg credit cards, shit like that. Nothing big on its own, but for a little man he had his fingers in a lot of pies for a while.”
“And now?”
Royce took another long sip. “Been quiet for something like two years. Guys at the Nine-Oh thought maybe he took his show on the road. Florida. Maybe West Coast.”
“I wonder how he fits in with Roberts then. Or Frankie’s father.”
“That’s the question I was—” He stopped himself. “That’s the problem with good beer. It makes me chatty. We can’t be having this conversation, Donne.”
“Come on,” I said. “Two guys shooting the shit about work over a few pints.”
“Yeah, but only one of us is a cop.”
“Make you’d feel better if I talked a little algebra? Maybe Walt Whitman?”
Royce didn’t smile. He just took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and rolled it around in his fingers. He leaned back on his stool and took in the atmosphere.
“See those two guys over there drinking longneck Buds?”
Royce nodded.
“Guy on the left writes for Sesame Street. The other one’s a pastry chef.”
“Definitely not a cop bar.”
“Well…” I spun around and faced the back of the bar, where the bathrooms were. “See the tall, white-haired guy at the juke box?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s an investigator for the city health department.”
“Not a real cop,” Royce said.
“We make do with what we got.” I took another sip and raised two fingers in the direction of the bartender. “So,” I said, “Rivas and Roberts and Vega?”
Royce ignored that and took his time finishing his beer. He glanced up at the stained-glass window and said, “Who the hell was Peter Doelger?” He slid the empty pint glass to the side and brought the new one in. “This is it for me,” he said. “I still gotta drive home.” Then he looked me square in the eyes. “You miss it bad, don’t you?”
I placed a hand on the cold pint in front of me and said, “Miss what?”
“The job,” he said. “Police work.”
I took a sip and shrugged. “I don’t think about it all that much.”
“Bullshit.” He took his unlit cigarette out of his mouth and placed it on the bar. “I mighta bought that a week and a half ago. Just some dumb-ass schoolteacher who got unlucky enough to stumble across a DB. But now? You’re the guy who steps in a pile of shit and just keeps on walking.”
I spun my glass around a few ti
mes. “I’m just trying to get Frankie home.”
“If that’s all you wanted, you’d leave it to the cops.”
“Who are doing such a damn fine job of it, right?”
“Fuck you, Donne. You think you could—”
“Do better? Yeah, I do. In fact—” The beer was making me run my mouth, too. “Look, I know you’ve got your hands full, and Rivas is not exactly at the top of your to-do list. I get that. But Frankie should be. He is to me. Frankie needs to be found.”
“And you can’t leave that to the cops?”
“I want Frankie home, Detective. Where he belongs.”
Royce put both hands on his glass. “I know what you’re trying to do, Mr. Donne.”
“I’m not keeping it a secret.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then, please, tell me what I’m trying to do. Please.”
“I know about your accident.” He took another sip. “The kid. Raheem Ellis.”
“Detective,” I said, leaning back and placing both hands on the edge of the bar. “With all due … whatever, you don’t know shit. And I think our little talk is over.” I pushed my stool back to get up, and Royce grabbed my wrist.
“That’s why you left,” he said. “Not because you couldn’t see yourself behind a desk. Because you couldn’t see yourself as a cop anymore. Not after what you thought you’d done.”
“What I thought I’d done?” I got to my feet and leaned into the detective’s face. He tightened the grip on my wrist. “I got a kid killed, Royce. Raheem Ellis is dead because of me.”
Royce held my stare, but leaned back an inch or two. “You followed a juvenile into an abandoned building. You had no way of knowing about the structural faults, the condition of the fire escape. You were doing your job, Donne. You were being a cop.”
“‘Structural faults,’” I repeated. I closed my eyes. Royce let go of my wrist and I sat back down. “All that kid—Raheem Ellis—did was call me a pig,” I said. “It was the end of a long, hot day. I was going back to the house to change out of my uniform and get really drunk on the way home. And this motherfucker—this boy—called me a pig. I kept going and he did it again. ‘Yo, pig. Why don’t you go back to Long Island and watch your own kind.’” I took a sip of pilsner. “A few hours earlier, I’d removed a four-month-old from a bathtub. Barely five pounds. Took her out of the tub after a neighbor finally called when she stopped hearing the baby screaming. I spent the morning canvassing the neighbors, all of whom knew something bad was gonna happen one day. Just didn’t know which day it was gonna be. And this thirteen-year-old boy called me a pig and told me to go back and police my own kind?”
The look Royce gave me made me feel like a rookie. Again. “You’re not the first cop to lose perspective, Donne. The kid got to you. Doesn’t make it your fault.”
“It was my responsibility,” I said. “If I don’t chase him, life goes on as usual.”
“And if he didn’t mouth off—”
“He was a kid!” I shouted. The bartender and a few of the customers looked over. I raised my hand and lowered my voice. “He was a kid. Repeating some shit he’d heard over and over in the projects. He didn’t know better. I did. Or should have.”
“And now you’re trying to balance things out.”
“I’m just trying to get Frankie home.”
“And if playing cops-and-robbers is part of the game, all the better for you.”
We both took sips and pretended to be interested in the other drinkers. After a minute, Royce shook his head and looked at his watch. “So what’d you learn from your date last night?”
“Caroline,” I said, hiding a small grin. “Rivas Senior gave her the willies. And Roberts wasn’t around all that much.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Guy’s doing well. Expanding.”
“I guess. She didn’t seem all that shocked that Rivas got what he got, though. And”—I was being careful now—“did you know Roberts’s place was broken into the other night?”
“No.”
“Yeah, Caroline said he was obviously all upset, but he never reported it to the cops.”
“Curious. You got that from one dinner, huh?”
“I’m a good listener.”
“Maybe it would be worth my while to have a face-to-face with Roberts.”
“That may have to wait a few days, Detective,” I said, trying not to sound too smug.
“Fuck.”
“I’m sure Caroline would be happy to talk to you, though. I could put in a good word.”
“Thanks,” Royce said. “And fuck you. But I’m not going to be able to get a warrant if all she knows is what she told you.”
I was glad to hear him talk about warrants. “What if,” I said, “some more information happened to find its way to your desk?”
“How would that happen?”
“I’m speaking hypothetically.”
“Oh, good. I just love hypothetical shit.” He looked at his watch again. “I suppose, if an interested third party—who was not encumbered by the same Constitutional restrictions as I am—were to come across information pertinent to an ongoing investigation, and that information happened to show up on my desk in an unmarked envelope, I’d be obligated to look at it.”
I smiled. “You speak hypothetical real good.”
“Took it at the academy. Anyways”—he took a sip from his beer and stood up—“I have to head home, play Daddy for a few hours.” He raised his glass to mine and said, “Here’s to the anonymous tipsters in the world.”
“Here’s to ’em,” I said, clinking his glass with mine.
“Don’t be out too late, Mr. Donne. It is a school night.”
“Drive carefully, Detective Royce.”
“I always do,” he said. “Don’t wanna get pulled over by them Long Island cops.”
As I watched him leave, the bartender came over and said, “You okay?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I’m not done drinking yet.” I finished what was left in my pint glass and slid it toward him. As I waited for my next one, I thought about Elsa, and Rachel’s advice to give her a call. I pulled out my cell phone, looked at it, and remembered I didn’t have her number. Just as well. I still hadn’t figured out what to say to her, and three beers weren’t going to help.
The bartender put my fourth beer in front of me and told me it was on the house. I thanked him and went back to thinking about kids. Missing ones, dead ones, and the ones I’d have to teach in the morning.
Chapter 30
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, THREE THIRTY. The school week was over. The halls were quiet, the kids and most of the teachers gone until Monday. Normally, I’d be out of here myself, on my way over to the Northside, ready to sit down at Teddy’s or the Ale House, maybe Mugs if I felt like something from Belgium. Knocking back a few happy-hour pints and making sketchy plans for my well-deserved weekend. That was another time, though. A time before Frankie went missing.
I locked the door to my room and spread out the papers I’d stolen from Roberts the other night. They still didn’t make any sense: the same bunch of numbers and letters I assumed to be initials. I opened the notebook and tried to make a connection between the information in there and the information on the papers. I recognized the symbols, but they meant practically nothing.
I heard a knock on my door and looked up to see Elaine Stiles on the other side of the small glass window. I let her in.
“Working late, Raymond? On a Friday?”
“Catching up on some paperwork.” It’s not a lie if it’s true.
“Well, don’t stay too late. You look like you need some rest.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“Oh,” she said. “Mary upstairs gave me these. They were faxed over an hour ago.” She handed me a few sheets of paper. “You know someone named Emo?”
I looked at the papers. The cover page read, “ATTENTION RAYMOND DONNE!! IMPORTANT!! EMO.” Edgar can
be described with many adjectives, but subtle is not one of them.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Does that have anything to do with Frankie?”
“No,” I said. “Something personal.”
She gave me a look that made it clear she didn’t quite believe me, but she didn’t push it. “Okay, then. Get some rest, Ray. Really.”
“I will, Elaine. Really.”
After she had gone, I went back to the table with Edgar’s fax. One more piece of the puzzle. Edgar had confirmed not only who resided in the buildings Ape and Suit had visited the other night, but also who owned them. Some company called ATH Holdings, and immediately I thought of Around the Horn—ATH. Roberts owned the buildings. Ape and Suit made pickups from the buildings. Somewhere in front of me was the answer—or answers—I was looking for, and pretty soon those answers would show up on Royce’s desk in an unmarked envelope.
Edgar had sent me a separate sheet for each building: addresses and a list of the individual units, broken down by floors. There were either one or two names next to each unit identifying the residents by last name and first initial. It was just a matter of time and patience to match the residents with the initials on the papers from Roberts. I did that successfully for about twenty minutes and realized I wasn’t learning anything much beyond who lived in what apartment and most of the residents had Hispanic last names. According to the dates of birth, most of the residents were senior citizens.
I walked around the room a bit, pushing in a few chairs, straightening some desks. I picked up the sheets of names and went back to pacing. I read them in the order Edgar had sent them and then backward. I mentally tried to put them in alphabetical order, which proved to be difficult, as there were over seventy-five names. I even read them out loud by first initial and last name, and that’s when my mind clicked.
“M and F Villejo,” I said to myself a few times. “Villejo.” The name on the credit cards I had found in the truck rented by Rivas. “First name was … Felix.” F Villejo had to be Felix Villejo, and I had his address right in front of me. Now what? I could give that info to Royce, but then I’d have to explain how I found out about the credit cards and addresses. I didn’t want to do that. And it wasn’t enough. There was only one viable option I could come up with.