"Double Eye investments."
"You get right to the meat of it, don't you?"
"Who are the two eyes?"
"Double Eye, the Italian and the Irishman. Your dad and I were partners of a sort."
"What sort?"
"Quiet partners. Your dad did all the investing, kept all the papers, made all the filings."
"What did you do?"
"I paid."
"So Double Eye was a way to launder your gambling earnings."
"Clever, aren't you? You know, in this part of town clever usually gets you dead. Let's cut to it, shall we? What is it you're after?"
"I'm looking for a file cabinet of my father's. It is big and heavy and brown, with fake wood grain painted on the metal. I wondered if you might have it along with the partnership records."
"You're looking for a file cabinet of your father's."
"Yes."
"And so you've come to me."
"Yes."
"And that is why you beat the hell out of my men."
"Yes."
"If the cigarettes hadn't taken all my wind, I would be laughing now."
"I'm glad I can be such a source of humor."
"Oh, you are, young Byrne, you are. Your father and I were partners, yes. But things don't always work out the way we would want them to. Have you noticed that most stories end either with a marriage or with death? This story didn't end with a marriage."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"You will, in time. Now, let me have the damn file." Tiny Tony snapped his fingers and then snapped them again.
Kyle looked at the old man's hand, once more outstretched, and the barrel of the gun, still pointing in his direction. He stood, put the file in the old man's hand, sat down again. He watched as Tiny Tony pushed a pair of glasses onto his nose, lifted his chin, and paged through the file quickly.
"What the hell is this?" said Tiny Tony.
"Your last will and testament."
"I can see that. But why the hell would I want this?"
"I thought you might need it in case—"
"In case?" He threw the file atop his desk. "Since your father made this for me, I've had three more. Each new will revokes the last. This is useless to me."
"What about the betting slips?"
"As valuable as yesterday's lottery tickets. If this is all you're bringing to the table, what the hell good is this to me?"
The phone rang. Tony answered, listened. "He's going off at seven to two. You won't make me send Vern this time, right? Okay. Done." He slammed down the phone and made a jot on his pad even as he gave Kyle another accusatory stare.
"You don't care about the file cabinet, do you?" said the old man. "This is something else. The bastard son on a quest to learn the truth about his long-dead father. And you think I have it, or at least some of it. And you may be right."
"How did my father die?"
"I heard it was his heart."
"Were those his slips?"
"No. Your father didn't gamble. At least not on football or the horses. Toth was the bettor. After your father died, Toth took over some of the matters your father was working on for me. And over the years he discovered a predilection for wagering."
"Was he any good?"
"Terrible." Another waft of smoke, a wave of the cigarette. "They're all terrible. That's how I can afford the wives." He looked up to the painting with the breasts. "Eleanor is dead, roaring at the devil in hell, I suppose, but I'm still supporting all the rest. Thanks to fools like that wily Hungarian, I'm on my fourth. In fact, Toth owed me two arms and a leg before his death, which meant he was screwing me more thoroughly than my current wife. But he said he had a way to pay me off, which was good, since Frank had already broken three of his fingers."
"Ouch."
"It happens. Laszlo said he found something, something of your father's that was going to get him off my hook and out of his stinking law office for good. A file that he said had vast worth. He called it the O'Malley file."
Kyle nodded, as if it all made perfect sense, which it actually was starting to. He didn't understand everything yet, but suddenly he knew that O'Malley's name wasn't O'Malley and that as soon as he got out of here, he was giving that fake O'Malley a call.
"I was hoping it was this file that you were bringing to me," said Tiny Tony.
Kyle thought a moment. "If there was a file of great worth, why would I be bringing it to you?"
"You don't know?"
"No."
The phone rang, Tiny Tony answered it. "Even. How much? Done." He hung up, scribbled in his book, flashed another accusatory stare at Kyle.
"Why do you keep looking at me like that?" said Kyle.
Sorrentino stared a bit more and considered the question. "It's just that I see him in you. There's something in your face, in the way you hold yourself. It's uncanny the way the dead continue to haunt us. The son of Liam Byrne," he said, shaking his head. "Funny thing is, all this time I didn't know the son of a bitch had any kids."
The phone rang. Tiny Tony stared at Kyle from behind the desk as it rang again and then again. Finally he answered the phone. "Hold on," he said into the handset, and then put his palm over the mouthpiece. "Listen, Kyle, I need to take this in private, you understand."
"Sure," said Kyle, rising.
"We'll meet again, I promise you, and I'll answer all your questions then. Meanwhile, I'll do what I can to try to find that file cabinet you're so interested in. There are some possibilities I need to check out."
"I'd appreciate that. Thank you."
"We're going to get along famously," said Tiny Tony Sorrentino. "Just like your father and me. I can tell. We're going to do business together. I am certain. Write down your phone number, and I'll give you a call."
Kyle leaned over the desk and scribbled his cell number on a proffered piece of paper and then, to be safe, Kat's number, too. "If you can't get me on the cell, the second's where I'm staying now. I'll be waiting."
Tony watched him as he headed for the door to the outer office.
"Kyle, can I give you some advice? As a dear friend of your father's? I don't think it wise for you to go out the front door. You humiliated my men, which was quite impressive but isn't calculated to make lasting friendships. Perhaps it would be better if you avoid all three by going out the rear. There is a door to the alley behind that curtain that would be safer."
"Thanks," said Kyle.
"It's nothing. We are almost family, you and I. Now go, and be well, and I'll be in touch."
Kyle nodded at the old man, stepped toward the curtain and pushed it aside, revealing two doors, one open, leading down a set of stairs to a basement, and the second closed, leading, Kyle assumed, to the alley. As he opened the second door, he could hear the old man behind him barking into the phone, "Willis. Seven to five. Done."
Kyle looked around, stepped past a few scattered trash cans into an empty passageway leading to the alley. When he reached the alley, he turned to the right, only to see Vern, in his purple velvet sweat suit. Vern was standing in front of him, holding a baseball bat in one hand, pounding it into the palm of his other.
Pound. Pound. Pound.
CHAPTER 20
HENDERSON AND RAMIREZ were at a crime scene when they got the call from the hospital. The crime scene was sordid and familiar and tragic: a little girl on a stoop, a shooting a block away, a stray bullet finding a stray target. For Ramirez this was new and wrenching; for Henderson its very commonness was one of the things shoving him toward retirement. There had been a plague of such killings in the city the past couple of years, as if the cruel calculations of nation-states had descended upon the streets.
The scene had been taped closed, the blood spatters had been marked, but in a crime like this the victim had nothing to do with the solution, so the blood didn't matter. While the uniforms were going door-to-door asking about the shooting, well down the street from the bloodstains Henderson and Ramirez were standing beh
ind the rough line defined by little number placards, each denoting a found cartridge, and trying to figure out where the shots had been headed so they could maybe figure out who was being targeted so they could maybe figure out who was doing the shooting and why.
"Two witnesses said the shooter was in a car," said Ramirez, "black or blue, late-model sedan or small import, muffler busted or the music pumping."
"The specificity of the description is devastating," said Henderson. "If the car was here and the shooter was sticking his automatic out the window, then the shots were in this direction."
"Aiming at one of those houses?"
"Or someone walking along the street."
"Anyone see anyone walking?" said Henderson. "Just a lot of running. After."
"Nothing you wouldn't expect. Any names?"
"No."
"Descriptions?"
"Nothing specific."
"Black or white," said Henderson. "Six feet tall or under five foot. Over forty or just a kid."
"Something like that."
"I am so weary."
"You giving up already, old man?"
"You know what I'm going to get when I retire?"
"What's that?"
"A puppy. Something to lap at my face and soothe the nerves. Something to run on up and jump at my chest when I call. I can close my eyes and see it."
"A Labrador?"
"Nah, a mutt. Something dumb and happy. Just like I want to be. But to answer your question, no, I'm not giving up. Can't give up, not with a girl dead and a killer on the loose. But a crime like this is beyond us. It will get solved only if one of these neighbors talks.
Except they're afraid to talk, because the shooter will come back and we can't protect them. And we can't even pretend that by solving this we can stop the next one, because it's a plague that can't be solved case by case. Something bigger than us has to step in, but they won't, because it's only a little girl who's lying there. So what we really are, you and me, is a salve to the conscience of the city, to make everyone feel like something is being done when nothing is being done."
"You make me want to cry," she said.
"You ever hear of Sisyphus?"
"What is that, an STD?"
"Yeah, something like that."
His phone rang. He stepped away from Ramirez when he answered it, holding the little piece of metal in his huge, latex-covered hands. Henderson had already locked down his emotions, so the words from the uniform, who happened to be in the hospital when the beating victim was brought in, didn't register as anything other than another sad fact on an already dismal day. He thanked the uniform and snapped his phone shut.
"Now, that's peculiar," said Henderson.
"What?"
"You know that kid you were questioning on the Toth murder, the one that broke into his father's old office?"
"Byrne. Yeah?"
"He just got brought into the emergency room at Methodist, beat all to hell."
"What is that about?" said Ramirez.
"Don't know for sure, but my guess is he wasn't minding his own business. Before they discharge him, maybe you ought to find out who he pissed off."
"After we finish here."
"That won't be for a while," said Henderson, looking beyond the placards to the row of houses on the other side of the street. "Lot of stories I got to hear, and then I need to talk again to the girl's family."
"They don't know anything but the grief."
"Maybe, but still, that's what I need to do. Go on over to Methodist and find out what you can about what that boy is up to. And while you're there, see if you can convince him to mind his own damn business."
CHAPTER 21
DETECTIVE RAMIREZ FELT a slight but undeniable thrill as she was let into the working space of the Methodist Hospital emergency room, and it worried her. She hadn't made her fabulous climb up the police department's ladder of success by letting her emotions get in her way. In every post she'd been assigned, from her first beat on up, she had been the hard one, la reina del hielo. It hadn't made her many friends, but she wasn't looking for friends, she was looking to rise, and Lord knows she had risen. Like a rocket ship. And the key had always been the ability to keep her emotions in check. Let burnouts like Henderson weep over the blood and the futility—she had more important things to do. Like rise and rise some more.
But there was something about the big, goofy Byrne kid, the way he smiled so easily, the way he seemed to take nothing all that seriously, especially not her. He was as unrilable as he was unreliable, and both traits appealed to her in a perverse sort of way. And she did have to admit that he was easy on the eyes. Given how things had fallen apart with thin and grim Henry, letting herself feel something for someone like Kyle Byrne would have been sort of nice.
Except for the fact that he was neck-deep in one of their murder investigations.
She stopped outside the curtain wrapped around his assigned bed and took a deep breath before pushing the curtain aside. The bed was empty. She took the pulse of her disappointment, very much as the nurses would take the pulse of the patients surrounding her. It was steady and strong and worrisome, along with a fear that maybe something more serious than a mugging had happened to him. Get it together, girl, she told herself.
She heard a shuffling behind her. She turned, and there he was, struggling across the floor like an old man with a bent and crooked posture, taking baby steps as he dragged along his IV.
"My, how you've aged," she said as he stepped slowly past her and then carefully, and with an old man's grunt, lifted himself gently into the hospital bed. "I haven't seen such a pathetic display since my grandfather had his prostate removed."
"How's he doing?"
"Dead."
"That's too bad. I'm sure he was quite the lively dancer."
"What happened?" she said.
"Well, you see, there was this truck."
"A truck. And did this truck have a name?"
"Vern."
"Well, for a truck this Vern is quite the pro. A concussion, a couple of broken ribs, a bruised kidney, and according to your chart you are pissing blood, which is a lovely image, let me tell you. But your face, which actually could have used the work, is virtually untouched, except for a small mouse under your eye."
"Is it cute?"
"Your face?"
"The mouse."
She stepped toward the bed, leaned forward. She was filled with a strange worry that was almost maternal. She couldn't help herself from reaching and tenderly brushing the swelling under his eye. The skin of his face felt soft and hot, electric—
—but to Kyle the back of her hand felt cool and soothing, until she pressed down hard and he felt a squirt of pain.
"Call it Darryl," said Kyle, jerking his head away and feeling his cracked ribs shiver within his chest. He grunted and gritted his teeth until the pain turned into a dull ache. "I used to have a pet mouse named Darryl."
"What happened to him?"
"My mom buried him in the backyard of my house, next to Swimmy the fish."
"You want to tell me what happened?"
"I think the cat broke its neck."
"I mean to you."
"Not really."
"Why not, baby?"
He smiled and it hurt, but he couldn't help himself. "Baby?"
"Yeah, baby," she said, leaning forward now, staring right at him so that Kyle could see the golden flecks in her pretty brown eyes. "That's what I say when I see fear leaking out of some poor kid's eyes. And right now you are such a baby."
"Then that's your answer right there," said Kyle, turning his head aside, and it was. He wasn't going to tell her what happened, because he was afraid, afraid if he started blabbing those comical goons would come back and finish the job.
The moment he had spied Vern with that baseball bat, he sensed how much trouble he was in. He spun around to run, but as he turned, one of the two squinty guys from the front, standing behind him all the time, threw a
steel garbage can at Kyle's feet. The can flipped his legs into the air and sent him sprawling to the ground, where the other fat man from the front stomped hard on his chest.
Kyle instinctively curled up like a pill bug as the kicks came from all sides, slamming into his chest and back and legs. He closed his eyes and loosened his muscles and waited it out. It was like being on the bottom of a rugby scrum, it hurt like hell, and he could tell there was damage being done, but still there was no out but patience. If they were going to kill him, there was nothing he could do about it, but he didn't think they were going to kill him, or he'd already be dead. They were just pissed off about what he had done to them at the front of the store and were getting in their licks. Fair enough, he thought, until the blows stopped and the sandpaper voice of Tiny Tony Sorrentino sounded in his ear.
"I didn't know Liam Byrne, that son of a bitch, had a son of his own. I didn't know who the hell to take it out on. But now I do, so I'm taking it out on you."
A kick thudded against his side, and Kyle's back clenched involuntarily, opening up his chest for another blow, which landed with a pain-racked thud just above his groin.
"You want to know the truth, you little shit? I hate taking bets. And I had enough saved up to retire fat and happy in Waikiki. So why am I still answering the phone, scribbling down orders from fools with a sports jones? Because your father screwed me up the ass so hard it's still whistling 'Dixie.' And then he died, and poor me, I had no one to take it out on. Until you walked into my joint, and now I'm taking it out on you. And let me tell you, I see your face again before you make it up to me, you better have on a pair of boots, you understand?"
"Boots?" gasped out Kyle.
"So you don't mess up your Sunday shoes when digging your grave," said Vern.
"And I will see you again, count on it," said Tiny Tony Sorrentino. "But you find me that file and maybe our next meeting will be a little more pleasant. Maybe you'll be my partner, just like your old man. And maybe you'll even survive it better than he did."
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