by Brian Selfon
“You asked me to dig.” Starr takes out her phone. “I dug.” A few clicks. “Officer Montenegro. First name: Zera. Assignment: field intelligence officer. That’s old news, but check it—special assignment: Human Trafficking Task Force.” She stops reading, lowers her phone. “Field intelligence, human trafficking. Something’s weird here.”
“Besides her hands?”
“The homicides. What’s she doing with them?”
Henry frowns. “Human trafficking?”
“Prostitutes,” Starr says. “Trafficking usually means brought in from overseas. Vietnam, Russia, Poland, Albania. Most of them are drugged, tricked, or kidnapped.”
Henry frowns, thinking of the Paradise Club. Remembering a rumor he heard years ago. Something about a girl who disappeared, and the Paradise Club needing to move extra money that month.
“Speaking of human trafficking,” Starr says, tapping again on her phone. “Here. Detective Fung is Detective Kurt Fung, badge 7229. That’s the number you asked about.” Off Henry’s nod, she continues: “He was assigned to human trafficking, too, but he’s on admin leave. Which means he screwed up.” She looks up from her phone. “The rumor is he lost his gun. And his badge. So now he’s moving files.”
“Okay, back to the other cop,” Henry says. “Zera whatever-the-fuck. What’s she got to do with anything?”
“I asked around.” More clicking. “First off, everyone’s scared of her. She’s intense. Works nonstop, never smiles. Here.” She holds up her phone and shows a stolen snapshot—terrible angle, horrible lighting—of a pale and angular woman. The woman is in uniform, her hair is chopped short, and it could be the angle or the blur, but some kind of chill seems to be coming off her. Henry remembers Emil’s studio—the shadow twins—and tries to match this woman to the second shadow. It’s possible.
“Question,” Henry says. “That case Emil was tied to, the one on that yellow sticker.”
“The I-Card.”
“Was weird cop working on it?”
“I’d have to check, but…” Starr thinks for a moment. “There’s a case management system, but that’s internal. I’d have to go back to the precinct, and I’m not on duty until Monday.”
“Okay, but someone’s on duty.” He can picture Uncle Shecky shaking his head no, don’t bring in an outsider, but fuck it. “Can you phone a friend?”
Starr smiles. “Carmen.” She pushes buttons. “Huh.” Pockets her phone. “No signal. Come outside with me?”
Henry nods but then feels a tug inside him. “Let’s meet there in ten.” A deep breath. “Some unfinished business upstairs.”
* * *
Henry pushes his way to the coffin. It seems so small and so insignificant, just a little box beneath the grand altar, so far below the stained-glass windows that rainbow up to the belfry. He smells incense and heavy perfume, and everywhere—everywhere—there’s laughter. The closer Henry gets to Lipz’s coffin, the smaller it seems to become, and now he’s beside it, wondering whether he can just slip it into his pocket. Take her away from this terrible place, and keep her with him forever. Overdose. Seriously, Lipz? You did this? Fuck. A dark and massive grief is taking hold of him when someone grabs his wrist.
His body, in motion, can do its own fighting. His left hand grabs a pew, keeps him from being yanked to the floor. His right is a raised fist, but then he sees who holds him, a stranger with grieving eyes. Seated.
“Been looking for you for days. Bring it in.” The stranger releases his grip on Henry’s wrist, then rises from the pew and pulls Henry into a back-slapping hug. The man, withdrawing, wipes his eyes with a black pocket square and looks Henry up and down. “People saying you’re asking questions.” His voice is deep and low. “You watching yourself?”
The man is slim but imposing with a close-to-the-skull haircut. His suit is immaculate, and it looks tailored to his compact body. He has the air of a holy elder, though Henry puts him in his late twenties.
“Who are you?” Henry says.
His smile is sly. “You don’t know who you know.” He extends a hand. “Chancellor.”
Chancellor. It takes Henry a moment. Chancellor Tomlin, the signatory on the Sint Maarten account. Holy fuck.
Moments later, Henry is on a stone bench in a secluded vestry, looking at Lipz’s casket from a different angle. Beside him sits Red Dog, the real thing, and nearby are his four children playing with crayons, Legos, and plastic police cars.
“What you just said,” Henry says. “Watching myself.” He pauses. To watch himself—he feels a profound possibility in this. And there’s a surge of hope blended with fear, and it’s one of those beautiful, dangerous feelings, and it’s in him, so close to the surface. And so he asks, “How?”
“How what?”
“How do I watch myself?”
“Start with looking at that.” Red Dog indicates the casket. “Makes you think, doesn’t it? Who you are, what you do. Something like this happens, one of your people goes, you know you’re due for a reckoning.” He turns back to Henry. Lowers his voice. “You feel me?”
Henry nods.
“A few years ago I didn’t give a fuck. About anything. Everything was business. But now.” Red Dog indicates the children. “I got to think about the place I’m making for them.” The child with the police cars crashes two of them together. “Harder,” Red Dog tells the kid, then turns to Henry with a serious expression. “You watch out. It’ll happen to you. You’ll wake up one day and you’ll look around, and you’re twenty-six years old, and you’ve got four kids, and you’re asking yourself, What the fuck am I?” Eyes back to the casket. “They’re saying she OD’d. I don’t know, man. If she did and it was my product—that weighs heavy. Tell you what, though. We’re due for a reckoning.”
A long quiet, then a change in the air. Henry turns to see Red Dog has been watching him, his expression sensitive and penetrating.
“She talked about you.” Red Dog leans in. “She showed me pictures, two of you when you were kids. She said some heavy shit.”
“She could be pretty smart,” Henry says, “when she wasn’t totally fucking crazy.”
“She said the same thing about you. She said…” He collects his memories, and then speaks fast and with force: “She said you’re smarter than you want to be. She said you feel things more than other people do. You’re sensitive.”
Henry lets out his breath. He’d held it, unknowingly, through the whole pronouncement. He sits in thoughtful silence, sensing that the person he is, the person he has been for years, is just a breath and a blink from transformation.
“She was my people,” Red Dog says, “you were hers. You and me are brothers now. You need something, you come to me.”
Henry sees the clarity in Red Dog’s eyes. The sincerity. He moves in closer and asks, “I need to ask you about Tiger.”
Red Dog immediately backs away. “Never heard of it.”
Henry opens his mouth to respond but hasn’t managed a word before—
“Crayons!”
One of the children has rematerialized. She has her father’s commanding glare, and she waves a fistful of crayons at Henry. Streaks of orange and blue cover her dress, her small fingers, and her plump face. “Crayons,” she tells Henry again, “draw.” Henry looks down on her and, for a fraught and exhausted moment, can’t say whether she is a child or a woodland creature. And before Red Dog can shoo her off, she’s pressed her crayons, warm and sticky, into Henry’s hand.
When she’s gone, Red Dog scans the room. “The fuck is your game,” he says, “throwing that word at me.”
“All due respect,” Henry says. “This is just me talking. We’re here, right? For the same reason.” He nods toward the casket, and Red Dog follows his eyes. When his expression softens, Henry asks, “How did you know he was…?”
A snitch.
Red Dog rolls back his shoulders. Closes his eyes and moves his head, stretching his neck. “It’s just business,” he says. “I’ve got re
cords. I fucking checked them.”
He shakes Red Dog’s hand and walks off to the clatter of Legos. He spots Starr back at the church entrance; she’s waving him over.
* * *
Pushing and wending his way to Starr, Henry gets caught in a current of smiling mourners, and this current carries him to a mounted photograph of Lipz. The image is distorted, her face barely recognizable from the blocky pixels. But standing tall next to it is Aunt Mercedes, glowing before the crowd gathered around her, unable to disguise how much she’s enjoying the attention. “The sink was full of hair,” she shouts, her smile open and toothy. “And I was livid. I mean, this was the morning of my job interview at Bright Horizons, and I was already running late.” At first Henry thinks she’s telling the story of when Lipz, then eleven years old, shaved stripes into her head—thinks Aunt Mercedes is getting the story wrong. Then he realizes she’s telling some other story, not talking about Lipz at all. More strange feelings, and that sense of a great and terrible loss, move within him. He hurries to Starr.
Outside: cool, quiet.
“I spoke to Carmen,” Starr says, waving her phone. “Good news. She’s on duty. She’s alone at the main desk.” She pauses as someone passes between them to enter the church. Then she says, in a different tone, “She wants to talk to you.”
Henry makes a face. “She wants money.”
“Would you trust her if she didn’t?” Starr taps the screen and hands over the phone.
And then the phone is in his hand and the number is on the screen and Henry hears the first pulse of the call going through. He also sees a number lit up on the screen—646-555-0100—and just below are the words Precinct Front Desk.
Henry lowers the phone and extends his arm to its full length, as if to get the screen as far from his face as possible. “What. The jizz. Is THAT!?”
Starr moves to his side. “Henry, what are you…?”
A tinny voice from the phone: “Eighty-Third Precinct. Hello?” A pause. “Starr?”
Starr takes the phone from Henry before he can drop it. He’s fumbling for his wallet, taking out the two businesses cards. He backs up so he’s in the full light from the church entrance, and here are the cards. One side, blank. Flip them over, the same handwritten number: 646-555-0144.
Starr’s voice, a thousand miles away: “Henry, what’s going on?”
Henry thinks: Fuck if I know. But here’s Starr’s hand on his arm, and here’s her worried look, and it hits him: Who better to ask?
“Do cops ever make fake IDs?”
She looks puzzled. “Like for undercovers?”
“Like for an informant.” The word was bitter out of his mouth, but now it’s out and there’s no swallowing it back. “You ever hear anything like that?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know how that would make sense. I know some informants get paid, but it’s all cash, and that’s pretty straightforward. I can’t think of any reason why—” Her expression changes. “The visitor logs.”
With her firm no, Henry had felt a flicker of hope. Maybe he could drop his suspicions and go back to loving his friend. But now comes this wave of nausea. “What visitor logs?”
“Everyone who comes to the precinct signs in at the front desk,” Starr explains. “I work there sometimes. And there’s this old-school clipboard, and you write your name and show your ID.”
Henry tries to fill in the blanks. Can’t. “The informant shows a fake ID at the precinct?”
Starr shrugs. “I’m just thinking aloud. The visitor log is kind of out in the open. If I’m an informant, I don’t want nobody seeing my name and wondering what I was doing at the precinct. Also—hey, where are you going?”
Henry moves and thinks as if through a dream, only dimly aware that Starr is keeping up with him.
chapter 44
They stop at the Thirsty Bear, and when Starr nudges him, he looks up and there, still, is Emil’s unfinished mural. “They haven’t painted it over,” she says.
“Yet.”
“Maybe they’ll keep it.”
They sit at the bar. The bartender brings their drinks without asking. “How long have you been coming here?” he asks. “Regular?”
“Since Banana got cancer.” She drums her fingers on her glass. “I left him alone every few nights. For a few hours. On purpose. I had to get myself ready for, you know.”
“Surviving.” Then he asks, “Have you ever been betrayed?”
Nothing in the conversation has touched on this, but she’s not thrown, and there’s only a short, bitter laugh before she says, “Oh yeah. There’s a list.” Then she looks him over carefully before asking, “You want to talk about it?”
“I wasn’t, like, cheated on,” Henry says quickly. “Not by a woman. Never.”
She turns her wineglass. “But your friend.”
There’s a heavy weight Henry must push inside himself. At last he raises his hand, points his finger at the unfinished mural. “He made that.” But Henry’s not thinking about the mural. He’s calling up all the little warning signs he’s tried to ignore. The yellow sticker on Emil’s incident report. The Pennsylvania driver’s license. The card taped to the top of Emil’s door, and that same card in Tiger’s wallet. And Tiger had a Pennsylvania license, and he got killed as a snitch, and the number on the cards was NYPD.
“He made that painting,” Starr says carefully, “but—he did something else?”
Henry sits on his hands. “I think but I don’t know. But this is the pisser: Uncle Shecky was right.” He draws in his breath. “Fucking Emil. I never should have brought him in. And fuck me, thinking I had everything under control. And I still don’t know.”
Starr taps her glass. “And you can’t sit on suspicion.”
“Because it doesn’t feel right. This wasn’t the guy I knew. He taught me things. On his own time, not just for money. He cared. And now I’m just spinning. Can’t sit still, can’t sleep. I keep thinking there’s an explanation, or a coincidence—some way to make it okay. I mean, does it have to be the worst-case scenario? And here’s what’s making me crazy. I’ve got this hunch, okay? That I can go back to the house—like right now—and open up the records. And I can piece it all together, and I’ll know what’s what.”
Starr fishes out Henry’s hand from under him. “But you won’t be able to unknow it.”
Henry turns to her. “He was my friend.”
“Okay, he meant something to you.” She gives his hand another squeeze. “But you don’t have to have only one feeling about him. You can miss him and be mad at him. No one’s perfect.”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing about imperfection.” There’s a break in the bar music, and over the fragile quiet he says, “Flaws, mistakes, whatever you’ve got—I need to know who I’m with.”
He feels embarrassed, holding hands at this fuck-and-run bar. But his hand is still in hers when she says, “So go find out.”
* * *
In the upstairs office, Henry unlocks his uncle’s desk, pulls open the top drawer, and stops at the sight of his gun. He locked it in the drawer the morning after Tiger got killed. Hasn’t thought much about it since then. Now he takes it out. Feels the weight, the shape, the dense mass of it. He looks it over, squeezes the grip, tests the safety, on off, off on. A breeze rattles the blinds: the window is open. His fascination breaks with a shudder, and he pushes the gun down into the front right pocket of his jeans. Closes the window, smooths the blinds. Another shudder. The gun doesn’t belong in this office. He’ll find a better place for it tonight. He turns off the overhead light, adjusts the gun in his pocket, and goes back to the desk. Settles into the chair, flips on the lamp. The desk is covered with laptops and phones. More are in the drawers, he knows, along with charities’ registration filings, wills, tax records, power of attorney papers, deeds, credit reports, notary stamps, certified corporate records, and keys to safety deposit boxes. Money moves in the dark, and this room is where much of the darkness is created.
Over the past year Henry has come to work in this office almost as much as his uncle does. This is their hub for the daily flow of money and information. Foggy-headed, Henry moves aside the ledger. Picks, absently, through the papers. Soloway Equities, the Toohey Group, the Brecher Foundation. He wonders if these names are purposely false or just seem so to him. The chits and crypt sheets Henry keeps for his runners, the equivalents Uncle Shecky has for the clients—all records listing living people are destroyed or stored off-site. The families, nonprofits, LLCs, and trusts here are all just transactional conveniences. Like Emil, Henry thinks bitterly. Like me.
The drawers closed, the computers locked or shut down, he reaches absently for the gun but instead feels something small and semisoft, like a tube of wax. Puzzled, he digs it out of his pocket—a black Crayola crayon. He fishes out another crayon, this one purple, and remembers the kids at Lipz’s funeral. Remembers the little girl who brought over the crayons while he was talking to Red Dog. That was another life, he thinks. That was less than twelve hours ago. And the pistol is in his right pocket.
Henry puts the crayons on the desk, sets the pistol beside them, and checks his phone: 3:16 a.m. He removes his shoes and pads to his uncle’s bedroom. Doesn’t want to wake him. Kinda wants to talk to him. But the room is empty, the bed unmade. No one keeps regular hours in this house, but it’s rare for his uncle to be out like this. Henry catches himself feeling relieved. Why? Pushing the feeling down, steeling himself, he returns to the office. The gun going once more into his pocket, he sits back at the desk and takes out paper and lets loose the black and purple crayons. He hardly glances down, pays no attention to what his hands are doing. His gaze is drawn instead to the wall behind the desk, which is covered with framed playbills from his uncle’s productions. Though Henry stopped going years ago, he remembers well the mixture of amazement and discomfort he felt whenever he saw his uncle on stage. Who was this man, and who knew he had that inside him? The productions were always so cheap and sloppy, but his uncle went all out. The shouting lawyer in A View from a Bridge, the suicide dad in August: Osage County, the idiot teacher in The Seagull. The different roles, the accents, the ways he moved. The strangers he could become, when he wanted to. And maybe Emil was a little like that, too.