by John Darnton
¨
Jude got up early, fixed himself a cup of strong coffee and checked the want ads for a cheap room. He found three or four and circled the ads, including one around Astor Place that sounded right. It read: 1 bdroom, partly furnished, short-term, no pets/smokers, $800/mo.
He left a note for Skyler, grabbed his jacket and went outside, inspecting the street carefully before getting into his car. Nothing suspicious anywhere. It was one of those beautiful New York June days, a blue sky with wisps of clouds and sunlight shining through the leaves on the side streets, dappling everything on the sidewalks below.
He got to Astor Place in no time, beating the rush hour. A barrel-chested man in a white strap-sleeve undershirt sat in front of the dilapidated brownstone, his chair tilted back to rest against the stucco facade. The wall behind him was covered with graffiti, which seemed to blend with the tattoos on his shoulder muscles. With a dispassionate wariness he watched Jude park the car, waiting for him to walk over.
"Are you the super?" Jude asked.
The man remained tilted back in his chair, grunted noncommittally, and looked at Jude up and down. Finally, he leaned forward, stood up and turned to go inside, motioning with his head for Jude to follow.
The apartment was on the third floor to the rear. The door had so many coats of battleship gray paint it could only be opened with a kick, and the floors, covered in linoleum, slanted and creaked. The first room was the kitchen, with a chipped enamel stove and a refrigerator with a round cooling unit on top. Off to one side was a narrow bathroom with a half tub under a shower and a pink flowered shower curtain. The back room was the bedroom with a square table, an upended steamer trunk that had drawers, and a couch of two large pieces that could be reconfigured into a bed. It looked out over a fire escape leading down to a back alley.
The place was clean, so Jude decided to take it.
"I imagine you'll want references," he said, eyeing the cracks in the plaster ceiling. "I can provide them."
The super looked back with narrowed eyes. "No," was all he said.
"Do you mind if I take it in someone else's name?"
The super grunted again. "As long as she don't smoke," he said.
"No danger of that."
Jude wrote a check for the first month's rent, then another for the same amount as security.
"The name's Smith," he said. "Jim Smith."
"Why not just say John Doe and be done with it?"
"Too obvious."
Two hours later, Jude was at his desk at the Mirror, trying to dodge Judy Gottman, the assignment editor, who paced the aisles holding a piece of paper as if she were stalking game. When he saw her approaching his cubicle, he grabbed the phone and launched into a highly arresting and also highly fictitious conversation. He made it sound as if he were squeezing gruesome details out of a reluctant assistant district attorney. She stood by his desk, chewing gum impatiently.
"I want this to be exclusive—you hear me," Jude barked into the receiver, an undertone of threat in his voice. He looked over and raised his eyebrows, as if seeing Judy for the first time, then covered the mouthpiece with one hand and whispered: "Sorry—can't talk. This could be big."
Judy walked away, and he saw her corral another reporter.
He was putting off the call he knew he had to make. Finally, he inhaled deeply and picked up the receiver.
"Special Ops."
"Raymond La Barrett, please."
"And this is?"
"Jude Harley."
"One moment, please."
Jude used the few seconds to go over what he wanted: he needed to know if the FBI had taken over the New Paltz case and what they made of it.
"Hey, kid, how are you doing?"
Raymond's voice sounded natural. They kicked around some small talk for a while. Jude noticed that this time Raymond did not ask where he was calling from; perhaps he already knew.
"Raymond," he said finally. "I need more help on the New Paltz thing. It doesn't make any sense."
"How so?"
Raymond's voice still sounded nonchalant.
"Once I got the ID on the victim"—he was careful not to say, "Once you gave me the ID"—"I went up there to check it out."
"And?"
"And it's the damnedest thing. The victim's not the victim."
"What do you mean?"
"It was a judge, you remember? Well, he's alive. So someone else is dead who's got the same DNA."
"That's impossible. McNichol must have screwed up, that's all."
"That's what I thought. But he's dead sure he got it right."
"You talked to him?"
"Yeah, and that's not all."
"What else?"
Raymond's voice sounded suddenly guarded. Jude hesitated, then thought: what the hell; in for a dime, in for a dollar.
"Some workmen in front of the judge's house saw a guy they thought was the victim hanging around there some days before."
"Did they describe him?"
"Not very well. Only what he was wearing—a red shirt. That kind of thing."
Raymond paused for half a heartbeat. "What do you make of that?" he asked.
"I don't know," Jude replied. "Maybe he was trying to reach the judge, to contact him for some reason."
"What kind of reason?"
"I don't know. But a lot of strange things have been going on."
"Really? Like what."
"I can't say exactly, but take my word for it."
"Can't say or won't say."
"Maybe a little of both."
"Listen, kid. I don't know what you're smoking, but my advice is to keep away from this whole thing. It's a wild goose chase. You've got an unsolved murder and a nutty M.E. who made a bad call—that's all."
"Are you guys on the case?"
"Let's just say we've been informed about it. A homicide like this—the body all beat to shit and cut up—chances are, it's a Mob job. So we get brought up to date. That's not to say we're running anything, understand?"
"Yes. So you've got nothing to add?"
"Nothing that amounts to anything."
"Okay. Well, thanks anyway. If you get anything, will you call?"
"Sure thing. And, kid...'
"Yeah?"
"Keep your nose clean. It's about time for a beer."
Jude's mouth went dry. "Sure thing. Your place or mine?"
Raymond laughed. "Mine."
"Right. See you."
"Okay. Take care."
When Jude heard the click, he put the receiver down slowly. So Raymond had asked for a meeting. Something was up—something that his casual tone was at pains to conceal. And when had he ever ended a conversation with the admonition to "take care"? That didn't sound like him. Was it just one of those things people said—or was it a warning?
On impulse, Jude called his apartment. He let the phone ring three times, then hung up and dialed again. Skyler's voice came on the line, sounding nervous. He said the phone had been ringing all morning. Jude told him to stay put, that he'd be there soon.
When Skyler hung up, Jude spotted Judy, still on the prowl with assignments, and so he sat there for a moment, the receiver still at his ear. Then he heard it, a distinct sound—a second click. He knew from stories he'd done that that sound could only mean one thing: someone else on the line had just hung up. His home phone was being tapped.
Chapter 15
Jude was anxious to get home and make sure that Skyler was all right, but he had one more thing to do. He called up Nexis from his desktop computer and used a password borrowed from the research department to get into "Deep Nexis," a compilation of clips from all the major newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. As an information-retrieval system, it reached into every publication of importance; Jude needed to cast a wide net. He didn't know much about the creature he was fishing for.
He ran through the names of the major coastal islands, then Valdosta, Georgia. There were literally hundreds of articles—too man
y to read thoroughly—but even when he narrowed the search, he came up with nothing helpful. He then tried the names Skyler had mentioned. "Baptiste" yielded nothing; there were dozens and dozens of listings, but without a first name, it was impossible to pinpoint the search. He scanned them; none appeared to suggest an affiliation with a scientific organization. He tried "Rincon, Dr." There was a single listing—for a Dr. Jacob Rincon of Santa Monica, California, arrested for embezzlement and fraud during a federal investigation into misuse of Medicare funds three years ago. That didn't sound right. A search for the word Lab ended with a small box on the screen, inside of which was written: "Your search has resulted in 0 articles. Please try another category."
Jude signed off. He left his computer screen on, opened an old notebook and put it on his desk, and scattered around some books and papers and a ballpoint. Then he took his jacket from a locker, draped it across the back of his chair, and snuck down the back corridor. He took the freight elevator down to the first floor, cut through the lobby and took a staircase down to the basement, where the old morgue had been relocated. The morgue was the memory bank of the newspaper; it contained stories that had appeared in the Mirror since 1907, laboriously cut out by hand and filed away under scores of topics, by minions long since retired or dead. In times past, the morgue had held pride of place in the main floor of the newsroom, but ever since it had been discontinued in 1980, when Nexis had taken over, it had been consigned to purgatory. Rarely these days did anyone visit the subterranean vault. Its corridors were poorly lighted by dangling green lamps and banked by filing cabinets extending off into the funereal gloom. The files were packed with yellow clippings so brittle that they broke to the touch like ancient butterfly wings.
The morgue had its own Phantom of the Opera. It was presided over by J.T. Dunleavy, a dyspeptic attendant of indeterminate age. His famed attribute was his photographic memory, which, while it did not pretend to reproduce perfectly the contents of hundreds of thousands of files, had penetrated to the inner logic of the system so that he, and he alone, could comprehend it—he could say which oyster was likely to contain the pearl.
The only problem with Dunleavy was that to get good service, you had to get on his good side. Luckily, for some reason he had always liked Jude—maybe because Jude was one of the few reporters his age who had respect for the past. Dunleavy himself went beyond respect, into reverence—he was a Boswell who was compelled to record even the most trivial of human transactions.
He was sorting through a bin of odd clippings, placing them in piles. His bony fingers moved as fast as a Vegas dealer.
"What is it this time?" he demanded, but not in an unfriendly way, scarcely looking up from the counter.
"I need everything you've got on cults—in the 1960s."
"That's an armful. It was, you know, an interesting time."
Jude reflected. "What would you suggest?"
Dunleavy asked a few questions, nothing that probed deeply but enough to get an idea of what Jude was after. He padded off down the central corridor, the cone of light from a green lamp reflecting off the dome of his bald pate. Four minutes later, he returned with a folder marked CULTS SCIENTIFIC, and underneath that a further subdivision—WESTERN STATES. He poured the folder onto the counter; out fell three bundles, each tied with a thin cord that was lashed to a circular fastening stuck on a cardboard backing.
Immediately, Dunleavy frowned. "Something wrong here," he said portentously.
One of the bundles was labeled ARIZONA, and it was skimpy. It held only four articles, which Jude quickly ascertained were of no interest.
"But see here where the cord is bent," said Dunleavy. "That's what I mean when I say something's wrong. The file used to be much thicker. Here, look over the names of those who checked it out—maybe that will tell you something."
He handed Jude a sheet of paper from inside the folder that had names and dates scribbled upon it. Most were from the early 1970s; only one was recent. The handwriting was hard to make out, and Jude tried to read it out loud.
"Looks like Jay Montgomery, Jay Mortimery, something like that."
Dunleavy grabbed the list, looked at it, and cackled low.
"Aha. I knew something was funny. The name doesn't matter. But see that little mark beside the name, the black dot? I made that. I always added a telltale sign when the person requesting the file was a non-Mirror representative."
"You mean, somebody outside the paper using the morgue?"
"Precisely."
"So who was this?"
"We don't know who he was, but we know where he came from."
"Where?"
"Blue for the police. Red for the CIA. Green for NSA. And black for—"
"—the FBI."
"Precisely. And so we deduce that someone from the FBI took this file out—let's see—four months ago, and kept it. A most unorthodox behavior, I might add, and given the fact that there is a Xerox machine not more than twenty paces away, something that was most decidedly not done merely to keep a record of it."
"It was done to deny the file to someone else."
"Or perhaps to deny it to anyone else."
Jude felt he was at another dead end.
"Isn't there any way to track the clips down?"
Dunleavy began unwrapping the other two bundles. The only hope, he said, was that an article or two had been replaced erroneously in the wrong pile—which happened more often that you would think, he added.
He was soon proved right and held up a small piece of yellow paper, four paragraphs from an article that had been accidentally ripped in two. The story had appeared on November 8, 1967, and it concerned a group called "the Institute for Research into Human Longevity," which had fielded a list of candidates to run for local offices, all of whom had been soundly defeated. A spokesman for the group, who the article said refused to provide his name, issued an ungracious statement, saying that the organization was "turning away from politics forever and would pursue its goals through research alone." He said the group had "changed its name to W."
"W." What the hell does that mean? wondered Jude.
The bottom of the story was missing, but that was not essential. Now that the date was known, Jude could retrieve it from the microfilm files. And, besides, the top of the story carried what was the single most important piece of information, the dateline. It was Jerome, Arizona, and as soon as Jude read it, he knew it was right, for it had struck a long-buried chord in his memory.
¨
"Hello. Doctors' office."
The voice on the telephone sounded efficient, with more than a touch of that nasal New York brusqueness that tells the caller to get down to business right away.
"Is Dr. Givens in?" Jude asked. Not that there's a chance in hell that he would come to the phone.
"No, I'm sorry."
Funny, she didn't sound sorry.
"He's out all week."
Jude was glad—he was calling on the off chance that Dr. Givens, his assigned doctor in the HMO United Comprehensive Care, was not there. He wanted any doctor but him. Finally, he thought, something is breaking right for me.
"This is one of his patients, Jude Harley. I need a physical exam right away."
The words "right away"—and the presumption they conveyed—did not sit well with the receptionist, who told him to "hold on." He heard his name being punched into a computer, and then a silence while she read his records. Thankfully, they were short and dull—but they're about to get more interesting.
"What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Harley?"
With a torrent of lies and inventive explanations involving heart palpitations and sudden blackouts, a family history of dreaded diseases and the anxious pleadings of a friend who happened to be a doctor, Jude managed to convey some urgency.
"I'm sorry, but your medical plan does not authorize coverage of a physical exam unless it is performed by your own physician and for a verifiable symptom or complaint likely to lead to a diagnosis."
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That figured—the company health plan that Tibbett had negotiated into the last contract was notoriously skinflintish. But when Jude said he would pay for all of it himself, no questions asked, and wanted "the works," her tone changed to something approaching helpful. She said she could fit him in that afternoon if he didn't mind being seen by a young doctor who had just joined the group.
Jude hung up the pay phone with a feeling of satisfaction and gave a thumbs-up signal to Skyler, whose puzzled expression indicated that he had not the remotest idea what it meant.
Tizzie joined them at the unisex hair salon on Lexington Avenue. Jude had called her shortly after he had smuggled Skyler out of his building through the basement and out the rear exit. Skyler had been outfitted with a golfer's cap and dark glasses, which lay beside the basin in which his hair was being dyed blond.
"You're going to make him look ridiculous," she said.
"No, I'm not. Anyway, the less he looks like me, the better."
"I see. And the way to make him look not like you is to make him look like a fool?"
Jude couldn't think of a retort.
The hair stylist came over, a young woman chewing gum.
"So what is it? You guys are twins and you're tired of looking alike?"
"Something like that," said Jude.
"I can give him a Leo. Or maybe something younger, you want punk? Only thing is, he already looks younger—I mean, you guys still want to be the same generation, right?"
Jude nodded.
The stylist looked over at Skyler, waiting in the barber chair with a white-and-black-striped cloth tied around his neck; he was looking at his new head of blond hair in the mirror and then at Tizzie's reflection.
"He says to ask you," she insisted.
"Give him a buzz cut," replied Jude.
"Not you," she said, then turning to Tizzie. "You."
Tizzie smiled.
"Give him a handsome haircut, like that," she said, pointing to a larger-than-life photograph of George Clooney on the wall.