Surrender, New York

by Caleb Carr

  “It only further proves that theory,” Mike answered, “if you assume that the jerseys and the autographs are real—and I’m not, like I say, ready to do that, because, if they are real, as I’m sure you picked up on, L.T., every one of them’s from a championship season. Which is incredible on its own, I mean—that kid must’ve been dragging around, depending on how many he had, a minimum of…ten or fifteen grand, anyway, in that gym bag. If he had verification of them all, that is. And if he did, why didn’t he cash them in? Couldn’t he have used the money?”

  “Mike, you’ve answered your own question: if they were real, and if he tried to sell them, the buyer would want verification of the provenance, which he’d check with the company that certified that provenance. At which point the law would pick Donnie up for grand larceny. Unless they’d been signed over to him. And I think I can help, on that count. In the bottom of the bag were found a group of documents, which the FIC tech who examined them—”

  Mike sighed heavily. “Who was it?” he droned.

  “Umm…” I flipped the page to look at the signature on the report. “Uh-oh. You’re gonna love this. Anne Meyers.”

  Mike let out another loud groan, as he continued to struggle with his clip-on tie: an unlikely difficulty, yet one that always plagued him, because of his continual refusal to believe that knotting an actual cravat would require less work. “That moron?” he said. “She wouldn’t know genuine evidence if it bit her on the ass and said hello. All right, let me have it, what does she say?”

  “She refers to the documents as ‘seeming papers of identification.’ ”

  “Yeah, and there you go,” Mike concluded in disgust.

  “Whoa, now,” Pete interrupted. “Where do we go? Other than saying that another one of Nancy Grimes’ techs doesn’t know her job, I’m not sure I understand what you’re telling me.”

  “Well, Pete,” I said, looking for any further clues I could find in the work of the unfortunate woman who signed her name “CSI Anne Meyers” as if that had any real meaning outside of a television show, “the strong likelihood is that those documents are not papers of identification at all. That’s a fairly idiotic idea, in fact, because anyone can see that they’re that much. What they are is seeming papers of authentication. Yet if they’re real, meaning a reputable firm prepared them, then Donnie was carrying a small fortune around in that bag. Now, we only have the first page of each paper, here—see the fold-over at the corners?—and we need all of them. Because that’ll tell us…”

  “Still doesn’t make any sense!” Mike warned, as he began to assemble the materials for his class on the desk beyond the black partition. “Before you go sinking back into sorcerer mode.”

  “What doesn’t make sense?” I demanded, again annoyed by Mike’s skepticism. “It puts him right in line with the other three. There’s no way he could have laid hands on that kind of memorabilia legitimately—not without the change of ownership being recorded, anyway.”

  “I don’t deny that,” Mike said, switching on the bank of large and as yet silent video monitors. “But there’s just one thing—Donnie was, what, fifteen, when he died? So let’s say he found himself some sugar daddy—”

  “Or mommy, or daddy and mommy,” I reminded my partner. Then I turned to Pete. “Around here, Pete, we are equal-opportunity skeptics. We’re willing to believe the absolute worst of anyone.”

  “Yeah, don’t I know it,” Pete replied, not quite so amused as was I. “Go ahead, Mike.”

  “Well, those are all players from other eras,” Mike said. “Having Shaq’s jersey I can maybe understand, because he’s a TV star, now, and Donnie probably watched him, at least when he could. But the others? Even Jordan’s is a little weird: I mean, a legend, true, but if somebody offers a boy who’s a basketball freak whatever he wants along those lines, wouldn’t the kid go for the heroes he watches every night, and probably pretends to be in the playground?”

  I had to pause. “It sometimes disgusts me when you have a point,” I said, rustling through more pages of the report, trying to find some basis for battling back.

  Mike, meanwhile, chuckled in triumph. “But you know I’m right. I mean, where’s the LeBron James jersey? The Kevin Durant, the Chris Paul, hell, even the Kobe-fucking-Bryant—”

  “Ha!” I suddenly retorted, slapping a finger down onto the report. By now I had turned around to spread the thing out on the desk upon which I’d been leaning. “I’ll tell you where they were—they were right on him!”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, L.T.?” Mike asked, uneasy at the notion that I might be onto something.

  “The ‘clothes on his back,’ that Pete was speaking of—they included a Carmelo Anthony Knicks jersey—signed by Melo in 2013, the year they made the playoffs with him. In addition, the jersey appears to bear the signatures of at least three of the four people you just named—not Kobe, but everyone else, along with one or two others. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

  Mike took just a few seconds with it. “I’ve got a pretty good idea, yeah.”

  “Come on, fellas,” Pete said. “Just assume I’m lost again and explain it to me, please.”

  “It becomes clear if you assemble the parts, Pete,” I said, ever wishing to avoid insult or condescension with the man, but nonetheless excited. “The stuff Donnie was carrying in the bag, those things bespeak an older person—almost certainly a man, but maybe not—who’s been a fan for a long time and is also a collector, just as Mike says. The jersey the kid was wearing, however, tells us that Donnie got up close and personal with the players who signed it, almost certainly at Madison Square Garden. Which means that the person who owned the first set of jerseys was likely a figure of some note, around the court—maybe a celebrity, but probably someone who just had a lot of dough. The kind of dough that gets you not only the attention of athletes and the media, but political access, as well. A broker, or maybe a lawyer…” I crushed out my cigarette in an ashtray on a nearby desktop. “Yes, young Donnie Butler was working his situation, all right…”

  “But what about that first batch of jerseys?” Pete asked, not unreasonably. “If they’re real—and we still don’t know that they are—how in the world does he end up in an abandoned building in North Fraser with them?”

  “Mike?” I said.

  “The jerseys?” Mike answered carefully. “The most likely scenario there, Pete, is that something happened to piss off young Donnie with his patron. Or patrons. Tough to say just what—”

  “Like hell it is,” I murmured, a bit more angrily than I had intended.

  “No, given the information, L.T., it is still tough to say,” Mike continued. “He may never have gotten over the Butlers abandoning him, and so was angry with all adults. Whatever the case, before Donnie left his latest home, he almost certainly did a little smash-and-grab on the collection. Because I’ll guarantee you, those jerseys were framed carefully, at some point. You don’t leave assets like that lying around casually—unlike most things, their value will only hold or increase, over time.”

  “So the whole business,” I said, eagerly anticipating the conclusion we were reaching, “really comes down to those certificates of authentication. Were they signed over to Donnie? And far more importantly, can they be traced—because, if they can, we’ll get a name, and with a name—”

  “With a name, we get an address, even if the theft—assuming it was a theft—went unreported,” Mike called out. “Which it probably did: the owner or owners would not have wanted the cops to know that Donnie’d been living with him, or her, or them.”

  “But we can find out if he was,” I finished, closing the file, thinking that we had wrung just about all we were going to get from it. “We can determine what no police department or social services department has apparently been able to about Donnie Butler, and in so doing we can drive the first real wedge into this case—not here, but where its secrets truly lie…”

  “In New York City,” Pete s
aid, following closely.

  “Exactly,” I replied, gently patting the stack of papers, exhilarated as I reached the crucial question to which all our reasoning led: “So—” I pronounced, grabbing my suit jacket and starting to pull it on, assuming Pete’s and my departure was imminent. “Whose car shall we take? Yours is the more official, of course, but ours might be more discreet.”

  “You guys aren’t going anywhere without me!” Mike moved to leave the instructor’s desk.

  “No—we ain’t,” Pete said, his voice betraying disappointment.

  “We ain’t?” I parroted. “What do you mean, Deputy? Donnie’s clothes, and especially the complete papers of authenticity—hasn’t Steve got it all back at your office?”

  Pete went from disappointed to dog faced. “Afraid not. That’s an FIC report I gave you, Doc. Meaning Frank Mangold’s got control over that evidence.”

  I stood up, leaning on my cane and navigating around the crowded desks as a substitute for pacing. “I see…”

  “Well,” Mike tossed in, reseating himself in disappointment and feeling (like me) a little outmaneuvered. “That sucks ass…”

  “It does, indeed,” I murmured, in no way ready, however, to so easily surrender what represented the first steps to putting actual names to the theory of the throwaway deaths that Mike and I had developed. And in that defiant mood, I spun on Pete again. “And there’s really only one way to make it un-suck: can you get us access, Pete? Firsthand access?”

  Pete sighed. “I figured you were going to ask me that, though at the time I didn’t know what you’d want the access for. And you’re asking me because you figure there’s no way Mangold’s going to just offer you guys a chance to look that stuff over—”

  “Yeah, I’d say that’s a fairly safe assumption,” Mike pronounced. But that was to be the last we’d hear from him concerning the case, for a bit, being as his next words were, “Ah, here comes the first and the brightest of my students—good evening, Mei-lien…”

  A very soft-spoken young Asian woman answered: the Chinese exchange student with whom I’d often warned Mike not to flirt too overtly, who had come to SUNY-Albany’s School of Criminal Justice from one of the oldest and largest of the Chinese schools of forensic medicine, at Kunming Medical University in Yunnan Province. “Good evening, Professor Doctor Li,” she said rather skittishly: a skittishness that was reflected not only in her name (Mei-lien meaning “beautiful lotus,” or thereabouts) but also in the striking delicacy of her face and frame, which reflected her province and city’s close proximity to the southern border of the People’s Republic. All of these delicate aspects, however, were belied by her skill and courage when working through trace evidentiary lab and field exercises.

  “I’ve told you before, Mei-lien,” Mike said indulgently, “either ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor.’ It’s not the way, to use both in this country.”

  “Yes, of course, my apologies,” Mei-lien answered, embarrassed; and as Mike assured her that there was no need to be apologetic, more students’ faces began to flash up onto the monitors. At that point I urged Pete to follow me quietly out the hatch of the plane and into the warm, humid night.

  “Well!” Pete said, once we were safely down the steps. “Mike is certainly the operator, among ladies of his own kind.”

  It wasn’t really a racist crack; or at least, it wasn’t intended to be. Pete would never have intentionally slighted anyone in that way; but if you grew up in Burgoyne County, you developed certain…tendencies, which could be either malicious or benign in intent. So I thought it a good idea for both of us if I said simply, “Pete, you spend more time with that guy, and you’ll find he’s an operator with women of all kinds. Keep him away from your very pretty wife, for starters.”

  “Really?” the deputy said, realizing that I was (mostly) kidding with my last line, but still more impressed by Mike. “Ain’t that something,” he judged at length. “Well, more power to the guy.”

  “Indeed,” I said impatiently. “Now—you said that you’d been considering how to get us in to see Donnie Butler’s personal effects.”

  “I said I’d been considering a way for Frank Mangold to even consider letting you see them,” Pete corrected carefully. “And trust me, I know that it doesn’t look good, on the surface. But there might be a way around the problem: Frank knows his people screwed up the other night—hell, everybody’s people screwed up the other night, and there’s going to have to be a bitch of an investigation. That boy Latrell was shot forty-six different times, by four different law enforcement agencies—and was never found to have been in possession of a weapon.”

  “Facts known only too well to me,” I said quietly, considering again the mess that so many bullets had made of Latrell’s body.

  “And at any investigation, you guys’re gonna be called to testify—Frank knows that as well as I do,” Pete went on. “So you’ve got a chip—question is, do you want to play it here, on this?”

  I began to smile. “Oh, I think you might find that this is one of those chips that can be played over and over,” I murmured, genuinely surprised and pleased by Pete’s metaphor and by his understanding of the machinations of the departmental politics that were swirling around us.

  “Maybe—and maybe not. You don’t know what it’s like over there right now, Doc. They’re getting things set to arrest this Patrick couple, like you figured, down in their own HQ at the Harriman Office Park in Albany, where the State Police’s academy is. But there’s something weird about it. Neither me nor Steve can figure out just what, and they sure aren’t telling us.”

  “So they haven’t made the arrest yet—that means they’re still getting the pieces in place.”

  “So you’ve said,” Pete answered, “but you haven’t bothered to tell me what those ‘pieces’ are.”

  “Oh, trust me, Deputy—you’ll know them when you see them. The main thing now is whether you think there’s really a way to get us a look at those verification documents.”

  Pete considered it. “I do think there may be. But you’ve got to give me a day or so, Doc.”

  “A day or so, I think we have,” I replied, rejoining him. “Maybe not much more, though. In the meantime, we’re going to work a couple of things from our end.”

  “Yeah?” Pete said. “What kind of things?”

  I half-smiled at him. “I could tell you, but then Steve would have to kill me. Or you. Or both of us—”

  But Pete already had his hands up. “Okay, okay. I don’t want to know.”

  “No,” I said, grabbing Marcianna’s evening meal. “You don’t. Now—how about coming along to feed my ‘dog’ with me?” I laughed lightly. “Face your fears, Deputy!”

  “No, thank you,” Pete replied firmly. Putting his hat back on, he backed away from the hangar toward the path to his car. “I have to face Frank Mangold, that’s about all I’m ready for.”

  In some strange way, I found his fear reassuring. “Oh, come on, Pete,” I called with another laugh, this one more openly tormenting. “You’ll have to get to know her, eventually.”

  “Yeah, so you say!” Pete called, turning to walk faster. “But I got a dog at home—and not my dog nor any dog anywhere sounds like that thing you got up there, I know that much!”

  I turned to start the walk up the hill, already beginning to silently mull over the events that we’d scheduled for Tuesday. “No, Pete,” I murmured with some satisfaction. “No dog you’ve ever heard of sounds like that—and let’s just hope she can continue to work her magic tomorrow…”

  {ii.}

  By the time Mike and I had finished our respective classes the following day, I was feeling more than a little braced and even optimistic about the challenges that faced us that evening. What had seemed like difficult hurdles just a day before—first, convincing Lucas’ sister, Ambyr, of the importance of our investigation (and, even more, of Lucas’ own importance to it), and then the ordinarily intimidating prospect of similarly trying to secu
re my great-aunt Clarissa’s blessing for our undertaking—now seemed more like opportunities, so convinced was I of the righteousness of our cause.

  I received my first wake-up call along these lines from Mike; and I received it as soon as we embarked. Having gotten Marcianna onto her leash and then down to the hangar during the waning minutes of my partner’s last class, I waited with her while Mike got his books and notes stored away; and it would have been tough to say who passed the time in a more heightened state of anxiousness, Marcianna or myself. She began her usual games—bumping up against my good leg with ever-increasing force, searching for Terence’s dog treats in my pockets (I’d filled them with the things for use during our coming excursion), and finally sending loud chirrups up toward the JU-52’s hatch, whence she knew Mike must soon emerge—while I tried without much success to keep her amused. I pointed her attention to the Empress, which sat in the usual barnyard parking area for cars and equipment below us. But Marcianna, despite the fact that she loved a ride in the car almost as much as she did an expedition in the Prowlers, was taking one thing at a time; and when Mike finally did come out of the plane, he and not I became the focus of her head-butting and mock games of trip-bite-kill, amusements that my partner found of limited charm. I tried to calm his irritation, first by inquiring after Gracie—who had emerged from her coma in the wee hours of that morning, and on whom Mike had been keeping careful tabs throughout the day—and soon thereafter with rousing thoughts of what I saw as the clear path that lay ahead of us.

  “Gracie’s improving at about the rate you’d expect a girl like her to recover, which is pretty quick,” Mike answered to the first of my questions. “The doctors are optimistic that the concussion will have no lasting effects, especially if it’s not compounded by another in anything like the near future. Which I assured Pete and Steve that it won’t be—we’re not putting her in a spot like that again, L.T.”