Carlucci's Heart

by Richard Paul Russo

  “No one, naturally, has any idea why anyone would want to kill her. Everyone we talked to at Mishima who worked with her was very politely cooperative, but no one knew crap. And no one knew her very well. No one at Mishima would own up to actually being her friend, and no one knew of anyone who was her friend.”

  “No boyfriend? Nobody she went out with on a regular basis? Or even irregular basis?”

  Weathers gave him the slight smile again. “Now there’s another interesting bit that hasn’t gone anywhere yet, but just might. Naomi lived in a very expensive condo on Telegraph Hill. Ruben and I have talked to her neighbors in the building. Most of them didn’t know her very well, either, although everyone in the building seems to know everyone else on sight so they recognize anyone who doesn’t belong. But again, no friends. One guy, though, said he talked to Naomi a lot, though never about much that he’d consider personal or intimate. Actually he said he talked to her a fair amount about himself, but she never talked about her own private life. But he did say he’d seen her several times with a woman, leaving or coming in, and a couple of times sitting together on her balcony. Always the same woman. He said he couldn’t be sure, of course, but he had the feeling they were lovers. Nothing very specific he never saw them kissing or even holding hands. He said there was just something about the way they were together, he always assumed they were lovers.”

  “Even if they weren’t…” Carlucci began.

  “Right. We need to talk to her.”

  “No name?”

  “No name. We’ve got his description, and I think the guy’s got an appointment with one of the sketchers this afternoon. But if she hasn’t come forward by now, it’s not going to be easy to find her. We can’t exactly take the sketcher’s image and put it on the evening news, or stick it in the papers, or send it out over the nets.”

  Carlucci smiled. “Why not? We do it at the same time we haul Katsuda in for Ruben’s body cavity search and photo session.”

  Weathers laughed. “Yeah, that’ll keep this case low-profile.” She took one last drag on her cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and crushed it. “Another funny thing about this woman, though. When we asked some of the Mishima people about the woman and who she might be, we got a lot of insistence that there was no way this woman could be Naomi’s lover. They were quite certain that Naomi ‘wasn’t that way,’ as most of them put it. The same people who said they didn’t know her very well, who couldn’t name any friends that she had or men that she went out with, these same people were absolutely certain about her sexuality.” Weathers shook her head. “There’s some kind of hang-up at Mishima about that. Probably doesn’t mean anything, but it’s one more interesting aspect of this damn case.”

  Carlucci stopped and leaned against the railing, rubbing his eyes. This damn case was right. “What about the Cancer Cell line?” he asked.

  “Makes what we’ve learned about Naomi Katsuda look encyclopedic. We bring up the name, and we either get genuine confusion or what Ruben calls the ‘dead fish-face’ look followed by claims of ignorance. You know they know something about it, but they’re not talking. No one’s talking.” She turned and smiled at him. “There you have it. Like Ruben said, we’ve got shit. But I’ve got a feeling, Lieutenant, that this isn’t going to last. We’ll find that woman, or something else will break, somewhere. Tran and Jefferson and Hong and LaPlace are all busting their asses on this.” She nodded once. “We’re going to find something and blow this wide open.”

  “Great,” Carlucci said. “That’ll 11 make Yoshi Katsuda happy.”

  Her smile broadened into a grin. “Fuck Yoshi Katsuda.” He smiled back at her. “Let’s go get Ruben before he decides to take a header onto the docks.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Caroline stopped and leaned against the back of a credit chip gazebo on the corner. The street barriers walling off the Core rose just a block away, warning lights blinking in the hot, damp Tenderloin night. She felt almost overwhelmed by the rush of light and movement all around her, the press of people, the constant noise and the constantly shifting smells, the dazzle of flashing electric color.

  She had come in from the Chinatown side, through Li Peng’s Imperial Imports. There was no way she could use any of the police “gates,” but Louis Tanner, an old friend of her father’s, had given her a way in. She’d made Louis promise not to tell her father about this excursion of hers. The cost of entrance was fifty dollars left in a charity jar on the counter of Li Peng’ s, a large and quiet Chinese herbal pharmacy. Then she’d walked through a back door and up seven flights of stairs, which had exhausted her. Then it was down seven more flights through clouds of smoke and lights, down through restaurants and gambling parlors, a public intimacy club, and finally out onto the street, inside the Tenderloin.

  She had made her way through several blocks of heavy sidewalk and street traffic. Some of the alleys were less crowded, but she was afraid to venture into them; they tended to be darker, filled with steam and cooking fires, wild cyclists, and louder and sharper shouts and banging noises. Message streamers swam frantically through the air above the streets, bright green and red, shimmering with work advertisements, commercial come-ons, recruiting messages, and personal and political announcements.

  And now here she was, a block from the Core, and half a block from the RadioLand Street Clinic; a block from the place Tito had disappeared into, and half a block from the place where he’d died. She could see the clinic sign across the street, simple blue phosphor letters glowing steadily in the night. Caroline continued to lean against the gazebo, gazing at the sign and resting. The night air was hot and heavy with humidity.

  She pushed away from the gazebo wall, stepped toward the curb, then threw herself into a surge of foot traffic that swelled out into the street. She let herself be carried along until she got to the opposite sidewalk; once across, she broke away and moved close to the buildings, where she could walk along at her own pace. She passed a spice bar, a donut shop, a couple of unmarked doors, and a head juicer shop before she finally reached the clinic entrance.

  Unsure of why she had come, she hesitated outside, wondering what she hoped to get out of meeting the doctor who had been with Tito when he’d died. Her father had said this doctor knew something about Cancer Cell, but so what? What was any of that going to change? Tito was dead. But she felt otherwise so directionless with her life right now, without much purpose, and this seemed like the only meaningful thing she could do. In some strange way, she felt she owed it to Tito.

  The door swung outward and a woman emerged holding a baby in one arm, her other hand wrapped around the fingers of a four-year-old boy. The woman stared at Caroline a moment, eyes almost completely without expression, then turned and headed down the street with the children. Caroline caught the door before it closed, pulled it wider, and stepped inside.

  The clinic waiting room was hotter than outside, but several fans blew the air around, which helped some, though it couldn’t dispel the heavy odor of sweat. Ten or twelve people sat slumped around the room, and there wasn’t much talking or movement. Behind the front counter stood a heavy redheaded woman with a pleasant face. Caroline approached her.

  “Can I help you with something?” the woman asked. She smiled at Caroline, very friendly, but looked puzzled, as if Caroline didn’t belong here.

  “I called earlier today, and asked when Dr. Cage would be in. He’s supposed to be here now, and I want to talk to him if he has some time.”

  “Yes, he’s here. He’s with a patient right now. If you want to sit down and wait, I’ll let him know you’re here when he’s free.”

  Caroline nodded. “Thanks, I will.”

  “Do you want any coffee or tea or something to drink?” the woman asked her.

  “No, thanks.” She hadn’t seen anyone else in the waiting room with coffee or tea. Did she stick out that much? “I’m Franzee,” the woman said. “And you?”

  “Caroline.” She and Franzee briefly s
hook hands.

  She found an empty chair next to an old blind man who smiled at her as she sat down; he had only three or four teeth, and his face was quite wrinkled, but his dark, black hair had very little gray, and it was obvious that it wasn’t dyed. She smiled back at him, remembered he couldn’t see her, then said, “Hello.” The old man’s smile broadened, which did not reveal any more teeth, and he nodded a few times, but he didn’t say anything.

  She was exhausted. She didn’t know if it was the heat, the trek through the Tenderloin, or the Gould’s. Maybe all three.

  A baby began to cry, and the boy holding it rocked it gently back and forth, cooing to it, patting and rubbing. Caroline closed her eyes and tried to block out the baby’s cries.

  She sensed someone standing in front of her and opened her eyes. A man stood just a couple of feet away, smiling at her. He was a good-looking man, even with the silly tattoo of a snake and staff on his neck, and his smile gave her a slight shiver.

  “You wanted to see me?” the man asked.

  “Are you Dr. Cage?”

  “I am. And your name is Caroline?”

  “Yes. Caroline Carlucci.”

  An eyebrow went up, and he said, “Oh. The lieutenant’s daughter.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Sounds like the title of a romance novel—The Lieutenant’s Daughter.”

  He nodded, still smiling. “Yeah, it does. Wonder if it would be any good.” When she didn’t reply, he again said, “You want to see me?”

  “I want to talk to you about Tito, Dr. Cage. And I want to ask you about Cancer Cell.”

  The smile vanished from his face, and he opened his mouth as if to say something, but then shut it. When he did finally speak, all he said was, “Forget the ‘Doctor.’ Just call me Cage.”

  “Do you have some time?” she asked.

  He looked around the waiting room. “Yeah, probably. Let’s go somewhere else, all right?”

  “Fine.” She got up from the chair.

  Cage turned toward the front counter. “Franzee, I’ll be across the street at Mika’s. If you need me, buzz me over.”

  “Sure thing, Dr. Cage.”

  Mika’s was an unusual spice and espresso bar across the street from the clinic it ran up all six floors of the building, but only extended maybe thirty feet in from the street on each level, with half the tables out on tiny, individual balconies that jutted out from the building and over the sidewalk. Cage put some money in the hand of the man who greeted them just inside the door on street level. The man, dressed in a spotless white collarless shirt and black slacks, nodded at a woman dressed in exactly the same clothes, who in turn led them up a flight of stairs and out onto a balcony table on the second floor.

  “It’s too damn hot to be inside,” Cage said as they took seats at the table.

  The woman handed them menu cards and immediately left without a word.

  “She’s not our waitress,” Cage explained. “They have a complex hierarchy here.” He laughed. “I still haven’t completely figured it out yet, and I’ve been coming here for two years.”

  Even outside on the balcony it was hot and muggy, but he was right, it would have been sweltering inside, since there was no air conditioning. Blues emerged from speakers mounted in the floor of the balcony above them, the vocals sung beautifully by a woman; the words sounded Russian. Although there were people seated and talking at balcony tables on either side of them, as well as above, the voices were all indistinct, camouflaged by the Russian blues and the sounds of people on the sidewalks just below, the street traffic and the shouts of hawkers, the blasting whistles of a pack of Rebounders wheeling along in the gutters. It was a good place to come and talk if you didn’t want to be overheard.

  “Better take a quick look at the menu,” Cage said. “Someone’ll be here for our order in a minute, and if you’re not ready they don’t come back.”

  “They don’t come back at all?”

  “Nope. Someone else will, eventually, a lower-level waiter or waitress, but it won’t be for a while, and even when they do come and take your order it’ll be a long time before you get it, even if it’s only a cup of coffee. It’s all part of the hierarchy I was telling you about.”

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. She glanced at the menu card, which was spare. Coffee and tea drinks, spice concoctions, and a few imported beers. No food except for deep-fried onion rings and egg rolls.

  A man wearing an old, ragged tuxedo and tennis shoes approached their table and looked expectantly at Caroline. “Green iced tea with lemon,” she said without hesitation. “Sugar milk.” He nodded quickly once and turned to Cage.

  “Just coffee,” Cage said. “Black, dark roast.”

  The waiter nodded again and left.

  “Very good,” Cage said, smiling at her.

  Before she had a chance to ask him about Tito, a girl of about fourteen in a dark green ankle-length dress arrived with their drinks. She set them on the table and quickly left.

  “I just realized something,” Caroline said, reaching for her iced tea. “No one has said a word to us.”

  Cage nodded. “That’s right. None of them will, until we’re done and on our way out. Then Marko, the guy who met us at the front door, he’ll talk to us, as much as we want. He and I have become pretty good friends over the past year.”

  “And you still have to bribe him to get a balcony table?”

  Cage grinned. “That’s why we’re still friends.” He sipped at his coffee, and the grin faded, but his gaze never left Caroline’s face. “You want to talk to me about Tito and Cancer Cell.”

  Caroline nodded. She tried her iced tea, which tasted quite good, just sweet enough and refreshing.

  “Why?”

  “He was my friend.”

  “All right, he was your friend. I guess you’ve talked to your father about all this, then.”

  “Some. Enough to get me here. I know Tito died in your clinic, and not from AIDS. And I know that you and my father think Cancer Cell is involved somehow.”

  “So your father sent you to me?”

  “No. He doesn’t know I’m here. He probably wouldn’t be thrilled. I think he’d just like me to drop it and go on with my life. Put it all behind me.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Cage said. Not a question, as if he understood her.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “So what is it you want to know?”

  “I want to know what killed him. I want to know if Cancer Cell is somehow responsible. I have no idea why they did it, but apparently they were the ones who kidnapped him in the first place, and I guess I want to know why they did that, too.”

  Cage sighed. “I don’t have any answers for you,” he said. “I don’t know what killed him. Probably never will. Your father was going to try to arrange for an autopsy, but the last time I talked to him he hadn’t managed it yet.” He shook his head. “I doubt it’ll give us an answer anyway. And without knowing what killed him, it’s pretty much impossible to know if Cancer Cell had anything to do with it. Hell, even if we did know what killed Tito, my guess is we still wouldn’t know anything about Cancer Cell’s involvement. They don’t exactly advertise what they’re doing.” He frowned. “What do you know about Cancer Cell?”

  “Nothing. As good as nothing, anyway.” It occurred to her that he had been very careful and precise about answering her, and that he hadn’t referred at all to one thing. “You didn’t say anything about my last question,” she said to him. “About why Cancer Cell would have kidnapped him in the first place.”

  He smiled. “You don’t miss much.” He leaned one elbow on the table, slowly turning his coffee cup in circles with his other hand. “Of course, I don’t really have an answer to that, either. But it’s something I can make a guess at.”

  “So make a guess.” He was being very cautious about Cancer Cell. Maybe there were good reasons for that.

  “All right,” he said. He drank more coffee and gave a sort of shrug. “
Tito had AIDS. He was dying. Okay. The word on the street is that Cancer Cell will sometimes put together a ‘contract’ of sorts with terminally ill people. They agree to provide high-quality medications—antibiotics, painkillers, anti-virals, immune system boosters, whatever might help make them comfortable, or relatively symptom-free—in return for which the person agrees to allow Cancer Cell to use them for clinical trials of experimental drugs or procedures during the final stages of their disease.”

  “But Tito didn’t have any high quality medications,” she objected. “All he had was crap he got from free clinics.”

  “Like ours,” Cage said, smiling.

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Fair enough. But how do you know that’s all he had?”

  She didn’t, actually. She’d always just assumed. “I don’t, I guess. He complained about them, said nothing he had did much good.”

  “In the final stages, nothing does much good, high-quality or not.”

  “I suppose.” She remembered sitting with Tito while he lay on the sofa watching TV, hardly aware of her presence, his hands and feet in pain, but his gaze way deep inside the television set, farther in than the flickering images, all the way through them. She would speak to him, and he wouldn’t respond. Like he was already halfway into another world; finding his way into it, learning how to leave this one.

  And she realized that right at this moment she was much the same way, staring into her iced tea, having forgotten for a minute where she was. She looked back up at Cage, who was gazing steadily at her. “So why would he have been abducted?” she asked.

  “Because he didn’t want to honor his part of the contract. I’ve heard of it happening. Cancer Cell will do whatever is necessary to enforce the contract.”

  Caroline shook her head, finding it all a little hard to believe. “He never said anything about Cancer Cell. Never even mentioned them.”

  “He probably wouldn’t have, even if he’d known. And he may not have known who he was dealing with. Most of the time when you deal with Cancer Cell, the name never comes up. I know someone who works for them who doesn’t even know.”