by Robert Pobi
“Maybe you should go home, get some sleep.”
“That’s not happening.” Until they had a breakthrough, she’d be running on caffeine and adrenaline. “A cup of coffee and a sandwich and I’ll feel a lot better.” Or at least less shitty. She paused again, and realized that she felt like she had died and nobody had bothered to tell her about it. She hung up.
Before she had put the phone down, it rang again. She answered without checking the display.
The voice was reptilian. “Detective Hemingway, someone asked me to call you about a man who bought pink powder.”
Trevor Deacon’s drug dealer.
Hemingway snapped up. “Where can I meet you?”
There was a pause. “I’m not sure that’s such a—”
“All I care about is information about the man you met. That’s all. I can meet you anywhere.”
Another pause. Then, “Twenty-seventh between Tenth and Eleventh there’s a bar called Mitch’s. Come alone. How long for you to get there?”
She checked her watch, looked outside and factored in traffic for this time of the night. “Give me half an hour.” Then she hung up.
Phelps showed up with two paper bags stained with grease.
“Trevor Deacon’s dealer just called. Twenty-seventh between Tenth and Eleventh.”
Phelps put the bags down. “Haven’t been there since it was gentrified. The Minnesota strip. Remember those days?”
“Before my time, Jon.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting that not everyone was around before the Internet.”
Dennet marched in. He had a folder in his hand. “Where are you two going?”
Hemingway was in the midst of threading her arm through her jacket. “Got an appointment with Trevor Deacon’s dealer.”
“It can wait three minutes,” Dennet said, putting the file in Hemingway’s hand. Then he turned to Lincoln and Papandreou. “Linc, Nick, get over here.”
They came over.
Dennet leaned forward, putting his knuckles on the table. “The Rochesters’ attorney sent that over.” He stood up, and began circling the table. “Ten years ago Brayton offered membership to an exclusive unique-donor fertility program at the clinic.”
“Meaning?” Lincoln asked.
Hemingway opened the docket and took out a slick, leather-bound brochure with PAC embossed across the front in foil lettering. She scanned it.
“Instead of a patient picking a donor from a catalogue, which lacked exclusivity, Brayton offered an option where patients could purchase the proprietary rights to a donor.”
Lincoln interrupted. “Some rich broad doesn’t want to pick sperm out of a catalogue because some other woman might have used the same guy?”
Dennet nodded.
Lincoln shook his head in disgust. “Purchasing proprietary rights to a guy’s sauce just ain’t right.”
Hemingway held up the folder. “This outlines Brayton’s vision as one donor, one patient, one pregnancy.”
“Which is bullshit,” Phelps said. “We know the boys are half brothers.”
Lincoln tapped his breast pocket. “But none of the parents did. This explains why.”
Phelps was still sitting with his arms crossed. “What did he charge for this exclusivity?”
It was Dennet who answered. “Two hundred and fifty K for the donor, another two fifty for the paperwork and procedure.”
Papandreou said, “Half a mil is a good motive for murder.”
Hemingway headed for the door. “Linc, start looking at the parents. We’ll be back in a few hours.” Some people were paying a half a million dollars for something she wasn’t sure she wanted for free. “What do you think, Phelps?”
The Iron Giant followed her to the door. “I think I shoulda stayed in school.”
||| SIXTY-FIVE
BENJAMIN WINSLOW lay on the bed, his face buried in the down pillow. He tasted blood from his cheek, feathers and tears. The apartment was silent except for the sound of his father showering.
Benjamin lay in the dark, hurting, crying, hoping for someone to come and take him away from this place.
Someplace beyond Harvard.
He’d even settle on the world swallowing him up.
As long as his father stopped touching him.
||| SIXTY-SIX
IN ITS heyday it had been known as the Minnesota Strip, a place where kids from the sticks with no marketable skills could make it in the city. Twenty-seventh between Tenth and Eleventh used to be lined with boys, from young twinks up through the stereotypical Joe Bucks. Around the block, on Twenty-sixth, was where you could find Coal Miner’s Daughter types competing with Pam Greer wannabes. This chunk of real estate had kept the porn industry saturated all through the VHS revolution.
Now it was just a section of town that gentrification had stripped of most of its character. Hemingway pulled the Suburban up to the curb, across the street from a bar sandwiched between an office supply store and a courier company. Mitch’s Bar had been there so long it looked like a geological formation that had grown up from the bedrock. It reminded Hemingway of Bernie’s; all that was missing were the ancient, greasy piñatas. There were places like it peppered through the city, holdovers that had survived a hundred years’ worth of economic fluctuation. The street looked deserted and what little movement there was came from the dark humps of sewer rats milling around the base of a Dumpster down the street, big black shadows moving slowly in the heat.
Hemingway checked her cylinder, tucked the revolver into the holster at her waist, and said, “Wait here.”
Phelps finished his coffee in one loud slurp. “I could use another coffee—this one’s empty.”
“I gave my word, Jon.”
He was silent for a second. “Okay.”
They stepped out onto the baked asphalt and the air tasted like a ticking engine. There was still no wind. No reprieve from the heat.
Phelps walked down the street, eying the dark corners and alleys. Hemingway walked into Mitch’s alone.
The place was a bigger shithole inside than she had pictured, and she had a developed imagination. They served hobo juice for two bucks a bottle and Motörhead played out of one speaker, a machine-gun bass track that rattled the glasses. The Rockford Files was playing on a television suspended over the ancient feltless snooker table. There were no neon beer signs—this wasn’t the kind of place beer company reps loaded up with free advertising—and she wasn’t sure which was stronger, the smell of sweat or the stink of piss.
Two drunks were staring at empty glasses in a booth and an old woman at the bar looked like she had died in place a few days back but no one had noticed. The general population looked like they were hiding from something, life probably. Business as usual for the down and out.
“She okay?” Hemingway asked the bartender, a skinny kid with an open mouth in a stained Hertz Rent-a-Car T-shirt. He shrugged without taking his eyes off James Garner.
Hemingway found the dealer at the back, his hands on the plywood tabletop—a street fighter’s signal that he meant no harm. As she walked up, he said, “You’re here to talk to me.”
She reached for the chair and he lifted his head. She froze for a second, something that rarely happened.
His face was tattooed with Gene Simmons makeup, bat wings that spread out from his nose, covering his cheeks and flaring up onto his forehead. Male pattern baldness had taken hold and he wore a greasy once-white T-shirt embellished with a rhinestone skull that had lost half its shine. The shirt rode up past his distended belly.
She sat down. “Thank you for meeting me. I’m Detective Hemingway.”
“I’m Roy.” He kept his eyes down, locked on the rings that sweating glasses had branded into the plywood. “You wanna buy me a drink? You don’t hafta or nuthin’ but it would be nice.”
Hemingway waved at the bartender, signaling a round for Roy. He looked over, then turned back to the TV without acknowledging her.
“Ain’t that kinda p
lace,” Roy said. “You gotta go to the bar.”
Hemingway got up and walked over to the television. “Can we get a beer?” she asked.
The bartender shrugged. “You suck my cock if I bring it over?”
At that she stepped forward and grabbed him by the wrist, wrenching it around and forcing him off the stool. She cranked it again and he went to the floor. “How about I make you suck it yourself?” she said, twisting. “Or do you want to skip the dating so you can bring me a beer?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I was just being friendly. Fuck.”
She let go and he fell over.
He stood up, massaging his shoulder. “No means no. I get it.” He walked over to the bar, capped a Pabst and brought it over, the swagger back in his step.
When the bartender had gone back to James Garner and friends, Roy took a draft and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “What you want?”
“I’m not wearing a wire. I’m not interested in any narcotics you may or may not have been involved with. And now that I’ve said that, it would be entrapment if I went back on my word. All I want to know about is—”
“Arnold Palmer,” he said.
“Um, no, actually—”
“That’s what he called himself. That guy on the news. Deacon.” He pulled out the photo she had given to Dwight and slid it across the table. “He told me his name was Arnold Palmer.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
He gave her a sad smile. “Staten Island Ferry.”
And an image of the Simmons boy exploded in her head.
“I took it from Battery Park one night and he sat down beside me. Nobody sits down beside me except maybe fags and those hard-core hipster kids. At first I thought he was gay. He told me that he had been watching me. Following me, even. Knew what I did. Said he was a customer. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He knew what I had, where I picked it up, who I had picked it up from.”
“When was this first meeting?”
“A year and a bit. May, I think. Met him about twice a month after that.”
“On the ferry?”
“No. Never on the ferry. Mostly he just showed up sitting beside me on the subway or a park bench or buying beer. Weird guy.” At that he stopped, looked up at her. “Weirder than me, I mean.”
“You ever catch him following you?”
Roy shook his head. “Not once. Never saw him coming. He was a ghost or something.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He liked watching kids. And I ain’t just saying that because it was on the news. I met him at parks a lot. At first, I thought it was because he was trying to look like he fit in. I do lots of deals in pa—” He stopped, looked up at her. “Look, Detective, I ain’t got a lot of skills. I can cook and that’s about all I know. If this is about busting me, and I go to the joint, life ain’t gonna be easy for a guy that looks like me, you know? How I know you ain’t here to bust me?”
“All I can do is promise. If I was wearing a wire, I’ve been recorded telling you that I am not interested in your narcotics activity and if I later arrested you—or allowed this tape to be used to help arrest you—I would be breaking the law. It wouldn’t hold up in court. You’d win.”
“Not me. I don’t win at nothing.” He paused and took a sip of his beer. “I met him at Randall’s Island a lot.”
Hemingway remembered Dr. Torssennson’s pointer crawling over the patch of earth where she figured Tyler Rochester had been dumped—Little Hell Gate was off the southern tip of Randall’s Island.
Then she remembered the school schedules she had gone over with Phelps—the year-end track-and-field meet that was scheduled for next week—nine thousand private school boys on the same patch of earth. Randall’s Island again.
“What’s a lot?”
His eyes scrolled up as he retrieved the information from wherever he kept it. “Wednesdays for about two months. He liked baseball diamond forty-eight. It took a little while until I figured out that he liked looking at the kids. I ain’t making excuses or nothing—I should have seen it right away—but my brain ain’t wired to see that kind of stuff. Pickpockets, three-card monte—that kind of shit I can figure out. But people that like kids? Not part of my thinking. I may not be the most law-abiding guy out there, but some shit is broken. What I do, selling drugs, is pretty much all a guy that looks like me can do. Every now and then I get a job in some restaurant but something goes missing and they accuse me. Spago’s ain’t hiring a guy like me. So I deal a little tar cut with brown sugar or instant coffee. That’s it. I never wrote a bad check. I don’t steal. And I don’t look at kids. It made me sick.
“I tried to shake the guy. I laid low for a while, changed my schedule, my routes. I thought he was gone. I hoped. Guy like him has a bad smell following him. Worse than failure, know what I mean? Didn’t see him for a bit. Then one afternoon I’m sitting on a bench feeding pigeons an’ he sits down beside me with a box of Chicken McNuggets. Said he was disappointed I didn’t keep up my end of the friendship. Friendship? Jeezus, some people got a way with words. You could tell he thought of himself as some kind of supergenius—you know, the kind of guy thought he was so much smarter than everyone else. I told him the travel time uptown and across the bridge was killing me. I told him to find his own dealer up there. He was pissed. I think he liked that I sat there while he watched the kids. Made him feel like he had”—Roy looked at her—“a friend, I guess.”
“He ever have anyone with him? A real friend, maybe?”
Roy laughed, a loud giggle that overrode James Garner getting his ass whipped by some truckers. “He didn’t even like himself. No friends. Just a knapsack. Black, with a Canadian flag sewn on like he was pretending to be a tourist. And he had a camera. It was digital but it looked like one of those old big cameras, not like the small ones we got now. Had one of those—what do you call ’em? Telephoto lenses.”
She thought about the lenses in Deacon’s bottom drawer and the question of the camera came up again.
And Deacon’s hard drives.
“I saw him talk to kids a lot. He’d mosey up to the sidelines of a game and snap a few photos, pretend like he belonged. And then he’d start talking to some lone kid. At first I thought he was just being friendly. And then I started to see how he looked at the kids and decided that I didn’t need no more trouble than I got.”
“You ever report him?”
“For what? Talking to kids? I never seen him do anything bad to the kids. He never even put a hand on their shoulder or nuthin’. All he did was talk to them.”
“You ever hear what he discussed with them?”
He shook his head. “No. No. No. Whenever he did that, I split.”
“Did he ever tell you anything about his life?”
Roy shook his head. “Said he had a nice house. Big car. Said he liked watching the kids because he was a sports fan. It was bullshit. You know how you can tell when people are bullshitting? They tell you they used to be this and they used to be that when all they are is a bum. I get a lot of that. I attract it like some kind of a magnet.”
“Anything else you remember about him?”
At that Roy smiled. “He said that he was going to be famous someday.”
Hemingway slid one of her cards across the table. “You think of anything else, you call me. I appreciate this.”
“I was told to call you. I do what I’m told.” Roy eyed the card for a moment, as if it held some great meaning.
“You have a number I can reach you at?”
Roy thought about it for a minute. Then he scribbled his number on a piece of cardboard he tore from a pack of cigarettes. “Yeah. Sure. We can have cocktails at the Ritz.”
She stared at him for a moment, and her eyes unconsciously dropped to his belly It was pale. Hairy. She nodded a goodbye. “Thanks for everything.” Then she walked past the old woman who still looked dead, past The Rockford Files, and into the night.
|||
SIXTY-SEVEN
LINCOLN AND Papandreou looked like they had been sleeping in their clothes and Hemingway couldn’t decide if it was the heat or the hours that had done the damage. They limped across the street like a pair of broke-dick dogs and came into Bernie’s.
Papandreou dropped into the booth and Lincoln grabbed a chair, swung it over to the table, sat down and threw his notebook onto the Formica. Then he reached for Hemingway’s plate. “Leaving food behind? That ain’t like you,” he said, grimacing at the taste of the cold fries soaked in catsup.
“My stomach’s acting up.”
“I seen you eat a sandwich with bones in it once. You ain’t got no stomach, you got a valve.” Papandreou waved Bernie over, signaling for two coffees.
“How many of Brayton’s patients did you get to?”
“Quite a few. You gotta meet the Borenstein woman.”
Lincoln swung a fry around like an accusatory weapon. “The real prize is the Morgans. Totally fucking nuts.”
“We’re all nuts. It’s part of the human condition.”
Papandreou pulled the sugar dispenser over in preparation for the caffeine he had just ordered while Lincoln continued to pick at Hemingway’s fries. “Then they’re weird.”
Phelps finished off his soda. “They’re not weird, they’re eccentric.”
Bernie came over with their coffees. After he walked away, Papandreou upended the sugar dispenser into his. “No, Jon, they’re fucking weird. One looks like some kind of freaking lesbian vampire, the other a redneck cop got lucky and inherited a bazillion dollars. Winslow is like that guy from Psycho with all the stuffed birds. Me? I collect shot glasses and back issues of Popular Mechanics. These folks? They collect weirdness.”
Hemingway pushed her plate over so that it was in front of Lincoln; something about the congealing grease was beginning to turn her stomach. “As in?”
Lincoln shrugged. “It’s not the shit we saw, it’s the shit we didn’t see. I don’t know what it was.”
“You’re supposed to be a cop. Short-list it, Linc.”
