Down Here b-15

by Andrew Vachss

  I drove Laura Reinhardt’s Audi back to her place. My cloned card opened the gate. I put her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and took the stairs. Moving slowly, the .357 in one hand.

  When she woke up, she would find herself in her own bed. Alone.

  I looked down at her. Feeling . . . I wasn’t sure what.

  “I never meant to hurt you, Laura,” I whispered, gently adjusting the blanket, touching her body for the last time.

  The book had been where Wychek had promised. Boasted. “You were just another casualty,” I said. “That’s the way it is down here. The way it has to be. I’m sorry.”

  I kissed her beneath one drug-closed eye. And went out the way I’d come in.

  The newspapers said three bodies had been discovered inside a Ford Explorer in the swampland near JFK Airport. All three were charred beyond recognition. The Mole’s package would have been enough on its own; but when the fire hit the gas tank, the whole vehicle had just about vaporized. The police said it was an obvious gangland hit, a “message” of some kind. The Queens DA promised that those responsible would get the maximum sentence.

  Wolfe probably never even saw the papers. She had been somewhere off the Maine coast for the past few days. On a little sailboat, with Pepper and Bruiser.

  Pepper had made all the arrangements. Used Wolfe’s credit card to rent the sailboat. And the car that they drove up in. And the motel where they stayed.

  Pepper’s a real friendly girl. Wolfe’s mostly standoffish. But lots of people saw them. Pepper had some of them take their pictures, the three of them together, for souvenirs of their vacation.

  Whenever the coroner’s office got around to doing the autopsy, all they would have to work with was bones. But if they looked close enough, they would find three .25-caliber slugs rattling around in whatever was left of Wychek’s skull.

  “ You know what was in what you gave us?” the man asked. I knew him only as Pryce, and I hadn’t seen him in years. Not since the last-minute abortion of a plot to blow up Federal Plaza by a “leaderless cell” out of the White Night underground.

  We had planted my brother Hercules in that cell. For him, it was that or go back Inside, forever.

  They had ringed the downtown building that housed everything they hated—from the IRS to the FBI—with trucks stuffed full of enough explosives to level the ground down to zero. The drivers thought the plan was for them to set the timers and run, but the boss—hiding in the van outside the blast zone—held the real detonator. He was still holding it when a close-up blast from a girl he thought was a hooker shattered his neurons.

  The pure-white sheep were still in their trucks when Pryce’s crew went into action. A surgical strike. Only one was left at the end. And when he was clued into what the real plan had been, he sang a canary aria that thinned the rest of their herd, big-time.

  Hercules walked away. I don’t know where he is now. But I know where he’s not.

  The last time I saw Pryce, he was holding out his hand for me to shake. “I’m gone,” he said quietly. “None of the numbers you have for me will be any good after today. And I won’t have this face much longer, either.”

  I took his hand, wondering if the webbed fingers would disappear, too. Watched the muscle jump under his eye. I’d know that one again.

  “I’m gone, too,” I had promised him.

  If my new face threw him, it didn’t show on his new face. The fingers of his hands were still webbed. The muscle still jumped under his eye. I wondered what he still saw in me.

  “I couldn’t make any sense out of it,” I lied. “Just enough to know you’d be interested.”

  “It was all pre-Nine/Eleven stuff,” he said. “There were a hell of a lot more people involved than anyone ever imagined. We’ve been making arrests like there was no tomorrow. True-believers and freelancers, they’re all going down.”

  “It’s hard to think of—”

  “What, Americans working for them? You know the kind of money they’re throwing around? The little princes learned from what happened to the Shah. They eat peacock tongues off gold plates while the rest of their country dies of malnutrition. All the secret police in the world won’t keep them safe from their own people. They know they can’t stay on their thrones unless they provide a shunt for all the pressure building up, a bleed-valve for all the anger and hate.”

  Pryce shifted posture, as if his spine hurt, but his pale eyes stayed chemical-cold. “You think those people wiring up their own children and sending them into crowded markets in Israel are revolutionaries? Wake up. They’re fucking flesh-peddlers, selling their kids for the bounty. It’s the most lucrative form of child labor ever invented. You know what the bounty is up to now? Fifty grand. Fifty thousand dollars, for people who don’t know what an indoor toilet is. For people whose other kids are going to grow up to be cannon fodder, anyway. The car-bombers, the one-way pilots, the . . . For all of them, who’s putting up the money? Not the terrorists themselves, my friend. The little princes who finance them.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I?

  “It’s been more than two years since the World Trade Center,” Pryce said, softly. “I guess the scumbags thought they were safe in their little sleeper-cells. They knew, if we’d had that book, we would have rounded them up a long time ago. So, therefore, we didn’t have it, see?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And the case against Wolfe—”

  “It’s gone,” he assured me. “And it’s never coming back. One of the bodies in that truck they found out in Queens? It was Wychek.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said, no expression on his new face. “That book, it was what he was holding over . . . the agency. That’s why they gave him—”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But if you got the book from . . . ?”

  “I didn’t get the book from him,” I said. “And that’s the truth.”

  “Why did you just hand it over?” Pryce asked me, his eyes everyplace but on mine. “You had to have some idea of what it could be worth. You’re a merc yourself. How come you didn’t try to make some kind of a deal? When you reached out for me, I thought that was what you were angling for.”

  “It’s not true, what they say,” I told him. “You know, that everyone’s got a price. I know people like that. I was raised with them. I’ll never be a citizen. But I’ll never be them, either.”

  “ Mayday!” Hauser, on the phone.

  I met him an hour later, in the park across the street from the Appellate Division courthouse.

  “I was in Atlanta, on assignment,” he said. “Just got back. Turns out, a while back, a woman came to my house in Westchester. It was about four in the afternoon, right after school. My wife was at her Wednesday tennis lesson. One of the kids answered the door. Long story short, when she left, she knew damn well that you’re not me.”

  “She saw a photo of you?”

  “More than that,” he said, ruefully. “I’ve got great kids. They’re proud of their father. So, when a woman shows up and says Daddy’s getting an award . . .”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know exactly when, but it was a while back, only I just now found out about it,” Hauser said, impatiently. “Kids, they forget things. . . .”

  Images of Laura Reinhardt flooded my mind. They turned slowly, like a roulette wheel near the end of its spin. I watched as she built her “business model” as meticulously as she had her bottle tree.

  With her own hands. Unrestrained.

  “Some kids do,” I told Hauser.

  Then I hung up. On all of it.

  The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little tórta,” I said.

  She held up two fingers.

  “Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed
to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

  “Tell me about the book,” she said.

  “You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

  “I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

  “It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

  “How would they—?”

  “Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

  “Innocence?”

  “No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive-force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

  “Prosecutors?”

  “Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

  “I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

  “In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

  “How could it be—?”

  “A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

  “And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

  “But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

  “They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

  “A man like—?”

  “John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

  “I know it ruined his—”

  “Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

  “Laura.”

  “Laura, the fact that you couldn’t be closer to the situation and even you don’t understand the scope of the tragedy, well, that proves why my book has to be written. Look, your brother was convicted of a single crime, right?”

  “Yes. They said he—”

  “In fact,” I interrupted, “he was convicted of more than a dozen.”

  “What? How can you—?”

  “Laura, these cases don’t have to be solved. They just have to be cleared. Do you understand the difference?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “When your brother was convicted of that one crime, the police ‘cleared’ a whole bunch of other crimes, naming him as the perpetrator. I don’t mean they charged him with the crimes. I don’t mean he was ever tried for them. But, as far as the police are concerned, those crimes are closed cases now.

  “They never could have proved those cases against your brother. He was innocent, and I think they must have known that. So they never brought him to trial. But with that one single conviction they announce that all the crimes—all the similar crimes that were committed throughout the entire metropolitan area!—are solved. And John Anson Wychek, well, he’s the guilty man.”

  “They never said—”

  “They don’t have to say anything to you. All that counts is the press. And for the press, it’s an instant no-story. They can’t print that your brother is guilty—he’d sue them for millions. But they can’t pressure the DA to ‘solve’ the cases, either. See how it happens?”

  “My God,” she said, eyes widening.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know just what you’re thinking. Somewhere in this city, maybe somewhere close by, a vicious serial rapist is walking around loose. That’s the hidden penalty society pays every time we stand by and allow an obsessed prosecutor to railroad an innocent man.”

  “And you think John’s story could change all that?”

  “For what I want, I think he’s perfect,” I said, pure truth beaming out of me, like I was radioactive with it.

  The check came inside a small leather folder. The waiter dropped it off and vanished. I opened it up. Much less than I’d expected. I put a fifty inside the folder, closed it back up.

  “Wouldn’t credit cards make a better record for your accountant?” she asked.

  “The only accountant who’ll ever see this bill is the publisher’s. And they’re not going to care.”

  “You’re not one of those guys who pays cash for everything, are you?”

  “Me? No. I use credit cards when I have to, I guess. Probably more of that old-fashioned thing. I’m a long way from paying bills over the Internet.”

  “Because you’re worried about the security?”

  “The security?”

  “You know,” she said, raising her eyebrows just a touch. “Identity theft, stuff like that.”

  “Oh. Well, you can’t work where I do without hearing about it. But . . . no. I guess I just don’t see what’s so great about doing it any new way.”

  “Sometimes, to make things better, you have to try new ways,” she said.

  The waiter came back, picked up the leather folder, and walked off without a word.

  “What’s the next step?” Laura Reinhardt asked me.

  “That depends on you,” I said.

  “But you’re going ahead, doing a story on my brother, even if I don’t . . . cooperate, I guess is the word I was looking for.”

  “I . . . I can’t say that. Not for sure. My contract is for a book on the consequences of false—or, I should say, ‘wrongful’—imprisonment. I thought your brother would be the ideal way to present the material, but he’s not the only candidate. Let’s face it, if he was, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “If this kind of thing was an isolated incident, it makes a good news story, but it’s not a book,” I told her. “What I’m talking about is a phenomenon. An epidemic. There’s a lot of reasons for wanting your brother to be the centerpiece. I admit, it would be easier for me, with everything based right here in the city, but there are others who would fit the bill.”

  The waiter came back with the leather folder. I opened it. Found a ten-dollar bill, a single, and some change.

  “You’re a gambler, huh?” I said to him.

  “OTB’s right down the street,” he said, flashing a grin.

  I extracted the single, closed up the folder, and handed it back to him.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, nodding as if a deeply held belief had just been confirmed.

  “ Can I give you a lift anywhere?” I asked, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “
I have my own car,” she said. “But I’d appreciate you walking me over to it. This neighborhood has changed a lot since I was a little girl.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She walked with a compact, efficient stride, matching my normal pace easily, despite the difference in our heights.

  “Did you and your brother eat at that same place when you were kids?”

  “No. It wasn’t really for family outings. I mean, it is, but I only went there with my father. Like for special treats, just the two of us. There was a Jahn’s close by, too. I always had a sundae I used to think they made just for me—pistachio ice cream with butterscotch topping.”

  “You ate that voluntarily?”

  “I’m a lot more adventurous than I look,” she said, with a little giggle. “I liked eating something the boys were afraid of.”

  “Just hearing about it scares me,” I admitted.

  “That’s mine,” she said, stopping midblock. She reached in her purse and took out a set of keys. A chirping sound identified her silver Audi convertible as clearly as if she had pointed her finger.

  “Very nice,” I said. “You don’t see many of those in the City.”

  “The TT?”

  “Convertibles. Costs a fortune to garage them. And if you don’t . . .”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But where I live, indoor parking’s part of the deal.”

  “I’ve heard about places like that.”

  “You don’t look as if you’re starving,” she said, fingering my new suede jacket.

  “I’m not,” I said. “But this coat’s not part of my wardrobe; it pretty much is my wardrobe.”

  “So I can’t interest you in some of our more . . . adventurous investing prospects?” she said, smiling.

  “Maybe after my book hits the charts.”

  She crossed the street, opened the door to her convertible.

  “I had a very nice time . . . J.P.,” she said, almost formally.

  “I did, too. I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. I . . . I don’t want to . . . Look, Laura, I know you’ve got a lot to think about. About what I told you, I mean. Or people to talk it over with, or whatever. But can I ask you just one thing?”