by S. J. Rozan
He grunted, then asked, “What’s the offer?”
I could feel Bill’s eyes on me. My case, my game, and he was playing it the way we always played, going along with what I was doing because I was doing it, the way I would have if the inspiration had been his; but I could see how tightly he was reining himself in, the effort it was taking to keep himself in that chair.
Well, this shouldn’t take long.
“Everest was getting something from Lewis besides drugs,” I told Krch.
“What?”
“Johns.”
Krch’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell do you mean?”
“They were in the same business. Not on the same scale, or the same level. And part of the deal that goes with this is that nothing you do goes any distance to bringing down the woman Lewis was working for.”
“Was working for him, you mean.”
“No, I don’t. And I want a promise.”
“I can’t promise that. She might come out in the investigation of Lewis’s murder. Hell, she might have done it. Who is she?”
“Do I look that stupid? And if she comes out in that investigation that’s her problem. But I don’t want her exposed because of anything I do, and that includes talking to you.”
“How do I know anything you say is worth a damn?”
“I don’t understand you,” I said. “First you try to intimidate us into talking to you, and now when I’m ready to talk for free you don’t want to hear it. Maybe we should leave after all.”
I looked at Bill and we both started to rise.
“Screw you!” Krch barked. “Sit down. What do you have?”
“Promise?”
He shrugged. “If I can.”
“Try,” I suggested. I sat, but only on the edge of my chair. “All right. It’s this: Lewis was working for this woman. He kept the books and arranged her dates.” It was harder than I’d thought it would be using Dawn Jing’s innocent-sounding words to describe her life. “She’s very high-class, very exclusive. She turns dates down a lot. For a fee, Wayne Lewis was sending those guys to Ed Everest.”
Krch and Francie looked at each other. “Same stock in trade?” Krch asked me.
“Maybe.”
“Okay,” Krch said. “So what good is this to me?”
“I can probably get you one or two names.”
“From?”
“From my source.” Assuming Dawn could remember one or two names of guys she’d washed her hands of. “Then instead of leaning on the girls who work for Ed, you can lean on the johns. I like it better that way anyway. It seems to me they’re the real creeps and criminals in this kind of thing.”
“Spare me the feminist crap, or whatever that is. I’ll lean on anybody I can to get to Everest, and I don’t really give a shit about him, either, between you and me. He’s just a job I want to do. But a name some shaky P.I. gives me from a source she won’t identify is no damn good, sweetheart. Thanks a lot anyway.”
“No good in court. But you can squeeze the guy, tell him you’ll expose him at home, at work, make him panic—you can’t tell me you haven’t done that kind of thing, Detective.”
“Yeah, and you’re just the bleeding-heart type to cry and whine when we do.” He stared at me silently. I stared back, forcing my eyes not to blink and the muscles in my face not to move at all. “Okay,” he said. “Feed me some names and we’ll try it.”
“I’ll call.” I nodded, and turned to Bill, ready to leave.
Bill was looking at Krch with a small, strange smile. “You know, Lydia,” he said to me, not taking his eyes off Krch, “you don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Feed him names. It’s a good idea, as a way to shut down Everest, going to the johns. But you don’t have to get names for him.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Krch, at the same time, said, “Why don’t she?”
“Because,” Bill said, “you have them.”
Krch scowled.
I said, “He has what?”
“He has everything he needs,” Bill said. “He has more than he needs, but he didn’t know until you told him that that’s what he had. Or maybe he didn’t know how to work it.”
Krch growled menacingly. “Shut up, Smith.”
“Shove it, Krch. But I’ll be glad to help you out. I have the manual at home. I’ll drop it over.”
I suddenly caught up. “He has that thing?” I asked Bill. “That Pocket Wizard thing?”
Francie’s look showed she wasn’t clear, either, maybe even less than I.
“What thing?” she asked. “What thing is that?” She shifted her look from Bill to Krch.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Krch snapped.
“Lewis’s datebook,” Bill told Francie. “Address book, daily calendar. A little electronic thing. It looks like a calculator. It’s a relational database.”
I stared at Bill. “Who told you about relational databases?”
“Little birds. I read the damn manual, what do you think?”
That seemed reasonable. But the big question remained, so I asked it. “What makes you say he has it?”
“Lists,” Bill said. “He said there were lists of Lewis’s drug connections. Where, Krch?”
Krch’s face was dark with anger. “The fucking bastard had a computer! He had lists on disks. The detective on the case has them. Any interested cop can get a look. You just got to be smart enough to ask, and then smart enough to know what you’re looking at.”
Bill shook his head. “My partner’s pretty smart, and she didn’t see any lists.”
“What the fuck do you mean, she didn’t see?”
Bill just shrugged. I just sat there.
“Fuck the both of you!” Krch exploded. “Go to hell! Get the hell out of here before—!”
“Wait.” That was from Francie, looking hard at Krch. “I’m part of this investigation; I’m in this, too. If there’s some shit that’s going to land on me, I want to know about it.”
Krch stared at her, unbelieving.
She turned from him. “Tell me what you’re talking about. From the beginning,” she ordered Bill.
Good, Francie, I thought. Green, maybe, but I’ll bet you make it.
Of course, it helps to have a willing witness. Bill nodded agreeably at Francie. “We were there. At Lewis’s. Make whatever you want out of that. We looked around. We didn’t mess with anything and we didn’t take anything except a copy of Lewis’s computer files and the manual to this Pocket Wizard thing. The thing itself was missing when we got there. We figured that was what was stolen when the tape was broken.”
“And?” Francie’s voice was still hard.
“And Krch was the guy who stole it.”
“Smith, so help me—” Krch snarled.
“Krch, put a sock in it, huh?” Bill said. “I don’t know what your problem is, anyway. You’re the cops. Who am I going to go to with this, outside this room? I’m only laying it all out now because I think you always ought to share everything with your partner.”
Well, I thought, what a lovely testimonial.
Francie wasn’t impressed. “You’re accusing a police officer of breaking and entering. And theft,” she said.
“And concealing evidence,” Bill said. “That was the point.”
“Evidence of what?” Francie frowned at Bill.
“Not of something he’d done. Of Lewis’s drug trade. That’s what he thought he was doing, anyway. Because of what he just said, about other cops getting interested if they knew there were drugs involved.”
“Because Krch and Francie knew about that because of Everest, but no one else did?” I asked. “To keep it from the other cops. To keep Everest for himself.”
Krch rose, red-faced, sputtering. “You lying motherfucker!” His hands were thick, white-knuckled fists. “You son of a bitch! You’re fucking under arrest, right now—!”
“Sit down, Krch!” That was Francie. “Godda
mn it! He’s right, isn’t he?”
Krch stopped in midroar. His face darkened to a deep maroon. With his mouth shut like that, I was afraid he might explode.
“Sure I am.” Bill kept his seat, and kept his eyes on Krch. “It was just routine, when you heard about Lewis, right, Harry? At your shift briefing, I’ll bet. A homicide in a neighboring precinct, just something to know about.” He glanced at Francie for confirmation of that, and he got it.
“And you knew it could ice your comeback. You knew the big boys would be interested, narcotics, if they connected it up. You and Rossi were close. You didn’t want them to know.”
Bill slid his hands into his pockets and tilted his chair back, just the way Krch had. He looked up at Krch, who was still standing, still purple. “You didn’t even know what you were looking for. You probably hoped there wasn’t anything. You checked the computer files, and there wasn’t, but then you thought. Rossi was right about you, Krch. You would’ve been a good cop. You saw how organized Lewis was, and you knew he’d have records. He was that kind of guy. So you hunted, and you found what the other cops missed. You can work a computer, which is more than I can do. You could work that thing, too. You knew what it was. What you didn’t know, until Lydia told you just now, was what’s in it. That’s what the lists are, Harry. Not just drug connections. Johns. And they’re yours now. They’re a gift.”
Bill lowered the front of his chair to the floor. He stood. I did, too.
“So that’s it, Harry,” Bill said. “We’re even.”
Krch, jaw tight and eyes bulging, glared wildly at Bill. For a moment, nothing; then a sweep of his meaty hand threw over a chair. “Motherfucker!” he roared as it clattered against the table. He charged past Francie and out of the room.
The three of us left looked at one another. Everything Bill had said I was sure was true, except one thing.
I didn’t think they would ever be even.
TWENTY-FOUR
I kept up with Bill for blocks as, pulling on the cigarette he’d lit the moment we left the station house, he stalked rapidly down Third Avenue. His legs are much longer, so mine worked much harder to move that fast. By Seventeenth Street, I’d had enough.
I clutched at his arm as he was about to step into the street with barely enough time to beat the light. “You have to slow down,” I told him.
He snapped his head around with a startled look, as though he were surprised to find me there. He looked up and down the street, a man getting his bearings, finding his location in the world. Traffic started to move in front of us. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“You don’t have to be sorry. You just have to slow down.”
“Okay.” He threw the cigarette butt, which was nothing except filter now, into the gutter as the light changed. “Buy you lunch?” he offered, as we started legitimately—and more slowly—across the street.
“Sure.”
“Anyplace you like around here?”
“You know what? Can we eat in Union Square?”
Four times a week the city runs a Greenmarket in Union Square. Farmers and bakers and cheesemakers come from all around to sell their vegetables and fruits and bread and herbed goat cheese rolled in ash. It’s fun to go to, and the food’s really good.
And it’s outdoors.
Bill smiled, giving me a sideways look while we walked. “That must have been tough for you, all of us puffing like chimneys in there,” he said.
“It wasn’t tough,” I answered airily. “Easy as pie. Just revolting.”
We wandered through the market, picking this and that, and then found an empty bench in Union Square Park. Squirrels who’d either already eaten the nuts they’d buried last fall or couldn’t remember where they’d put them sat on their winter-skinny haunches waiting for us to drop crumbs from our crusty sourdough loaf or our extra-sharp New York State cheddar. Bill, with the pocket knife he always carries, sliced the bread, spread it with grainy mustard, and topped it with slabs of cheese. I opened our jar of pickled green beans and took one out to munch.
It was a perfect day for an early-spring picnic, the sun spreading yellow warmth under a sky of cloudless blue. Couples leaning against each other meandered by past secretaries briskly shopping in the Greenmarket on their lunch hour. Funny, I thought, extracting another tart and dripping bean from the jar, that this glorious sky color was called blue, the same as the muddy, dull color on the station house walls, in that windowless and smoky room we’d sat in for too long.
“What color were the walls in Nebraska?” I asked Bill.
He looked up from cutting a sandwich. “What?”
“When you were in jail. What color were the walls?”
He cleaned his pocket knife with a napkin and put it away. “Tan.” His voice was almost normal; maybe someone who hadn’t known him as long as I had wouldn’t have heard the strange note in it. “In a certain light,” he said, “right before it rained, the ground outside was exactly the same color.”
He unfolded a napkin next to me and put a sandwich on it.
“I don’t know what made me think it was okay to ask that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “It is okay.”
“It bothers you to talk about it.”
“No. It bothers me to have been there.”
“Did you do what they said you did?”
“You know what I was there for,” he said.
“I know what the charge was,” I answered. “That’s not the same.”
A squirrel bounced up and sat practically on Bill’s foot. Bill broke off a sandwich crumb for him.
“I beat the shit out of a guy in a bar,” he said. “Do you really want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
He looked around the park. Shadows of tree branches swept the paths. “I was set up,” he said. “An investigation I was working was getting too close, so the guy I had my eye on hired some good old boys to start a fight. The point was to get me arrested, to keep me on ice for a while.”
He threw another piece of crust to the squirrel. “I knew that. I goddamn knew it, but the little bastards pissed me off so much I couldn’t keep a lid on it. There were two of them, dirty fighters, young, and I just had to prove I was better. To them it was just a Saturday night bar fight they were getting paid for. They’d probably have done it for free, and then bought me a beer when I got out of jail. To me it was something else.”
I took a bite of my sandwich and waited.
“I was better,” he said. “I messed up one of them so badly that when the sheriff finally came, the charge was felony assault. It took just about everything my lawyer had to bargain it down to a misdemeanor, and I had to agree to serve the whole thing.”
The squirrel was back at Bill’s feet now, with a friend. Bill tossed each of them a piece of cheese.
“Was he all right?” I asked.
“The guy? He was out the hospital in a week. I heard he got paid double.”
“What happened to your investigation?”
“Vaporized. The suspect disappeared. The Cayman Islands, or something. Took all the money with him. My client couldn’t prove a thing.”
He took a swig of apple cider from the jar we’d bought. “Some partner, huh?” He didn’t look at me.
“The best,” I said, taking the cider and taking a swig myself.
Looking at the squirrels, he lit a cigarette. I expected a wise-guy answer, but I didn’t get one.
What I got was a sudden thought. “Hey!” I yelped.
“What?”
“Me, too! Krch got me so mad that I forgot what I was there for.”
“At the precinct? I thought you were there to save my butt.”
“Only incidentally. I was there because that’s where you were, and I needed to talk to you. We couldn’t talk until I’d saved your, excuse me, butt.”
“Talk about what?”
“This.” I pulled my manila envelope, the one I’d found in Roland Lum’s trash, out o
f my shoulder bag and handed it to Bill.
He took it the way I’d held it, handling it only along the edges so he wouldn’t smudge any prints, although who was going to run prints on this for us, and where we would get prints to compare them to, I had no idea.
“I told you I found something,” I said.
He turned the envelope over, scrutinizing the back, then the front again. “Where?” he asked.
“Roland Lum’s.” I told him my story, my visit to Mrs. Chan and how I invaded Roland’s factory. “You’re not the only one who gets set up,” I finished. “I fell for Peng Hui Liang.”
He turned the envelope over again, digesting what I’d told him. “You never really did,” he said.
“I never really believed he wanted her for the reason he said he did. But I believed he was looking for her.”
“And now?”
“Now I think she never existed. He was sending me on a wild-goose chase. He wanted me out of the way.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because of this.”
“What does this mean, though?” Bill mused.
“What does it mean?” I frowned at him. Maybe he was still too distracted by the memory of Krch, or of jail, to get with the program. “It means Roland stole the ransom. It means he either was the shooter or was working with him.”
“And he knew about the ransom how?”
“John told him they were having a problem, and John told him about hiring me. Maybe John tells a lot more than he means to.”
“Possible. But why set you up?”
“Because I was getting close.”
“But you weren’t.”
That stopped me. “I wasn’t?”
“You wouldn’t have been, if Roland hadn’t reappeared in your life with a drumroll.”
“That first time, on the street? He probably wanted to know how much I knew. To see how close I was.”
“Did you give him any idea then that you suspected him?”
“I didn’t suspect him, then.”
“Then why did he feel he had to invent this Peng Hui Liang thing?”
I squinted into the sunshine. “I see what you mean.”
“You’re obviously right about the money: Roland took it, one way or another. But there’s more to this than that. You’d—we’d—never have even suspected that if Roland had just laid low. Something made it worth the risk for him to come out into the open. There’s some reason Roland wanted you distracted and running around Flushing now.”