Floyd’s expression turned to a scowl, and his followers rolled their shoulders trying to look menacing. Sarge kept his face calm and let his bat slide in his hand until he gripped it almost halfway up. He felt the tension, like when a drunk is about to take his problems out on the bartender.
“You got something in there belongs to me,” Floyd said in movie gangster style.
“You need to read the papers,” Sarge said, addressing Floyd and ignoring his backup men. “They abolished slavery in this country in eighteen sixty-three.” Then he turned to the man on the right. “Hannibal do that to your nose? That’s nasty, man.”
Joey kicked the door open and stepped in with one smooth motion. Only the bouncer’s well developed sixth sense for sucker punches got Sarge back out of the way of the swinging door. Joey was a bit bigger than Sarge, but that only counts in the ring. Sarge brought his bat in and down at an angle. Not a hard blow, but Joey’s knee went out and he bellowed as he fell. Lawrence dove in behind him, but Sarge drove the head of his bat forward into his midsection, drawing a loud grunt. Sarge had time to see that Lawrence’s face was already twisted in pain just before he smashed a fist across the bodyguard’s jaw.
“That’s enough,” Floyd shouted, stepping inside. His gun was already in his hand. Sarge dropped back onto the center staircase. He noticed how different this one was from the other two. Joey and Lawrence were tough, even nasty, but this one was mean. It showed in his eyes as he waved his pistol in Sarge’s face. He would not like using a gun because it was not personal enough, not cruel enough.
“Now,” Floyd said, as if he had to get Sarge’s attention, “Now you get that narrow-assed bitch out here before I blow your fucking face off. The bitch belongs to me.”
“Nuh-uh.” A new voice floated down the stairs and Floyd looked up in surprise. Sarge knew what he would see. A tall, white guy with thinning, short cropped hair, an angular face, and a Remington pump scatter-gun sitting on the top step.
“Quaker up there, he won’t much mind splattering you all over the hall here,” Sarge said, getting slowly to his feet. “Me, I hate to have to clean up a mess like that. So why don’t you put that pea shooter away and take your friends and get the hell out of here?”
Hatred flared from Floyd’s eyes. “You a dead man,” he told Sarge.
“We can end this now,” Quaker said, his lanky form bouncing down the stairs in his jerky gait. “You’re a trespasser. I could blow all three of you away.”
“That would be murder.”
Quaker reached the bottom step and pushed the muzzle of his shotgun to within five inches of Floyd’s face. “Sucks, don’t it?”
Sarge pulled the door wide. “Go, man, before Quaker gets too nervous.” Quaker gave a maniacal smile and Floyd signaled his bodyguards. The three backed out the door. Sarge and Quaker watched closely until their car pulled away.
“You know,” Sarge said, “When Virgil wanted to put that intercom in between the apartments I thought he was nuts. Not now.”
“Yeah,” Quaker said, closing the door, “Neat, ain’t it?”
Hannibal watched a group of boys playing half a block away as the limousine pulled to the curb. Ray was not happy about returning to Edmundson Village, and Hannibal knew part of his feelings came from concern for his limo. Ray’s limousine service and taxi company was new, and like any young business, its profit margin was razor thin. Hannibal shared his concern, since he helped finance the business.
But Hannibal felt he knew those young men playing cops and robbers down the street. They had no reason to attack this car, or any other foreign intruder, as long as it did nothing to disturb them.
“Well, here we are again,” Ray said, flicking his cigarette out the window. “The place has been condemned for almost seventeen years. Nobody’s been here since that long, including Bobby, or Jake, or whatever he called himself. Everybody says he just disappeared.”
Hannibal popped his door open. “I told you, nobody vanishes without a trace. You never know what might give you a clue where somebody is. A matchbook, piece of letterhead paper, even an envelope with a return address. Odds are nobody’s cleaned up in there.”
Hannibal handed Ray one of the long handled flashlights he picked up on their way and headed for the house. Ornate sandstone banisters climbed up either side of the wide steps leading into Jacob Mortimer’s old apartment building. Hannibal thought the building must have been beautiful when it was new, the kind of classy brownstone home that upper class genteel urbanites lived in half a century ago. Long before some enterprising soul figured out there was money to be made by housing a dozen families in what was once a single family dwelling.
The door was nailed shut, but one hard yank wrenched it open. Nails squealed as they pulled loose, and the smell of the tomb belched out at them. Ray stared into the shadows dubiously.
“You know, Chico, what Doctor Cummings said about Jake having another daughter that could make this whole thing pointless.”
“Maybe,” Hannibal said stepping into the apartment house. “But I don’t trust that kind of coincidence. The missing heir routine is one of the oldest and most popular scams, because families in search of long lost relatives want to believe. They don’t question things closely.”
“But Jacob Mortimer was cut out of his father’s will,” Ray said, while looking through the kitchen.
“He was,” Hannibal said, sweeping bits of paper and dirt from under a ragged couch, “but do you really think a previously unknown granddaughter would be?”
Hannibal and Ray looked under every piece of worn furniture, and opened every drawer and cabinet. They searched the crumbling wallpaper for written notes. Hannibal looked inside the toilet tank and the medicine cabinet. With Ray’s help, he dragged the moldy bedroom rug aside.
“Look at that stain,” Ray said, shining his light on a shapeless blotch on the linoleum. “It could be blood, eh?”
“Sure,” Hannibal said, “or Kool-aid. I don’t think there’s anything here, Pizo. I’m going to check downstairs.”
“Downstairs? What the hell for?”
“Because,” Hannibal said on his way, “people hide things in the cellar.”
Narrow, street level windows actually made the cellar brighter than the rooms upstairs with their boarded up windows. The sound of scurrying rats made Hannibal move slowly. They would not attack, he knew, but he would hate to surprise one. The space had cement walls and a dirt floor, with an ancient boiler in one corner which was converted from coal to oil in some distant past. Stacks of boxes occupied him for a few minutes, until he realized he was alone.
“Ray?”
“Right here, Hannibal. Top of the stairs.”
Hannibal smiled and continued his search. The boxes in the far corner turned out to be empty. The air was so still he could smell cardboard rotting. When he moved the last box he saw the dirt was not as smooth as elsewhere in the cellar. Something had been buried here. Irrational hope swelled his heart. If he left in a great hurry, Bobby Newton might have left something of real value here, planning to return later.
“Ray, I think I got something here.”
Something was sticking up out of the ground less than a foot from a partially buried cinderblock. He dropped to his knees to examine his discovery before touching it. It was a straight piece of metal, only two inches showing above the ground. A pipe? No. The handle of a knife. Actually, the tang, with the wooden handle rotted away.
Not wanting to disturb his finding, Hannibal began brushing dirt away from the area, like an archeologist who does not want to disturb whatever artifacts he may find. Only after considerable digging did he begin to see what he was uncovering.
“Oh my God.”
Ray went down the stairs to stand behind Hannibal. While Ray held his flashlight, Hannibal brushed dirt away with his hands, revealing rotting cloth over a pair of parallel bones. They were ribs, and the knife was standing between them.
“What have you found?” Ray asked,
almost hysterically.
Hannibal considered the cinderblock’s placement, right where the head would have been. “Found? I guess I’ve found a trace.”
-12-
Hannibal hated to be in the middle of a scene. Years of training in the Secret Service made low profile his natural mode of operation. Yet he and Ray stood in the middle of the kind of scene that made neighborhoods like Edmundson Village very nervous. A pair of blue and whites sat parked on either side of the street in front of the condemned building, sirens off but bubble lights revolving. Policemen swarmed around the sidewalk and front stoop-like blue yellow jackets at the outhouse door. Two suits leaned against their unmarked car, pretending to direct the investigation. A police forensic van pulled up. Two men and a woman in white lab coats got out, looked around as if to orient themselves, and headed into the house. A few women in mules and housecoats gathered to watch the show, but Hannibal knew most of the people in this area would rather not draw the attention of the police.
The sun hanging directly overhead reminded Hannibal how much he had done before noon. He was tired way too soon and getting hungry besides. He bent to brush dirt off his knees and when he looked up, another unmarked car skidded to a stop in the street. A door popped open and the car disgorged a blob of fatback wrapped in a gray suit. The detective’s deep brown skin was stuffed almost to bursting, but he managed to waddle over to Hannibal and glower.
“You Jones? Guy who made the call?”
“Glad to meet you,” Hannibal said, watching the light glinting off the man’s bald head. “Yes, I’m Hannibal Jones and I’ll bet you’re the detective in charge.”
“Terry Dalton,” the detective said, not offering a hand. “Yeah, this is my hassle. Now what the hell were you doing poking around in an abandoned building this morning?”
Hannibal stepped down from the sidewalk to the street to even their heights. While he spoke, he displayed his investigator’s license. “Working a missing persons, and I might have found him.”
Dalton pulled out a cigarette and touched the flame of a disposable lighter to it. “How nice for you. You any idea how much work this makes. People got to poke through that place, pull in every bit of bone. Then the identification process. Got to bounce this against every disappearance and murder in this area in the last thirty years.”
“I might be able to save you some time,” Hannibal said. He was walking toward the limo and Ray was already at the wheel. “After I called the cops, I called my client, Gabriel Nieswand. He’s a high-powered lawyer. By now he’s probably got the paperwork through to get those remains DNA tested. I don’t understand it all, but they’ve got to compare the DNA in these bones to a known reference sample. They found some of the missing man’s hair in a comb his widow never got around to throwing out. That ought to pin him down.”
“So you’re helpful, eh?” Dalton said. “Well, that’s good. Drag your ass down to the station. Got a few questions for you, so I can finish my report.”
“I’ll be down later,” Hannibal said, pulling his car door open. “Hot leads to follow up on, and all that.” Before Dalton could say another word, Hannibal slammed the door and Ray popped the clutch. The limo’s engine gave a deep, throaty roar and it charged down the street.
Two blocks later, Ray stared into his rear view mirror and asked “Where to, Hannibal? I mean, I could see you wanted to get out of there, but I didn’t know what was next, you know?”
Hannibal pulled his flip phone out of his jacket. “Next, I need to get hold of Doc Cummings. I want to know where Angela the mystery girl hangs out.”
Quentin Moon jumped as if shot when Hannibal burst into his office. As the door slammed the wall behind him, Hannibal marched across the small room and planted his fists on Moon’s desk. Moon shrank backward in direct reflection of Hannibal leaning forward.
“I need you to come to a late lunch with me,” Hannibal said, a little louder than he meant to. Moon sat silent, as if he thought speaking might somehow drive Hannibal over the edge. His radio played Oldies 100 softly behind him, reminding Hannibal that Moon lived largely in the past. Moving slowly to relax the other man, Hannibal dragged a chair to the front of the desk and sat down.
“Look, Moon, I just left the police,” Hannibal said in slow, calming tones. “I think I may have found Bobby Newton. At least what’s left of him. He may have been buried in the basement of that building he lived in. They’re testing what’s left to confirm his identity. But another possibility has appeared and I think you should see it.”
The little restaurant was within five blocks of Moon’s own club, still well inside the area known as Fells Point. The decor was outdoor olive garden, with murals painted realistically enough to convince urban diners they were in Italy, at least for a little while. It was not very big, but they arrived behind the lunch rush and had no trouble getting a table. The aroma of homemade sauces tugged at Hannibal’s stomach. He and Ray flanked Moon at a small table. He had followed reluctantly, numbed by Hannibal’s words. Now he was slowly absorbing all of what Hannibal said. “You think Bobby is dead?”
“Right now, all I’ve got is a stack of bones,” Hannibal said. “But I’ll bet it’s Bobby, or else Bobby’s the killer and that’s why he ran. The police have the bones, and my client’s lawyer, Gabe Nieswand, is getting tests done to find out if it’s him.”
“Bobby was no killer,” Moon said, staring over a menu. “But I’d hate to think he was murdered. In fact, I don’t want to think about it at all. Why’d you bring me here?”
“You know a doctor named Cummings?” Hannibal asked, sipping his water.
“Nope.”
“He sent me here,” Hannibal said, waving a finger at a waitress. “He got a visit from somebody you might know a couple of weeks ago. She works here now and I wanted you to meet her.”
The hard part, Hannibal knew, would be to sit quiet and watch. The waitress reached their table and asked for their orders. Hannibal thought Moon’s eyes would drop to the table. She was indeed beautiful. A black girl, no darker than Hannibal and not quite out of her teens. Dark brown, wavy hair hung to her shoulders. Her lips were full, and her chin aggressive, but her nose was thin, almost pointed.
“The Alfred special looks awfully good,” Hannibal said. “I think we’ll all have that. And pick us out a bottle of wine, would you?”
She graced him with a smile. Her eyes were very bright, her teeth very even and very white. When she walked away, Moon blinked and returned to motion, as if waking from a long coma.
“It’s the little girl, isn’t it?” Moon whispered. “What was her name?”
“Angela,” Hannibal said.
On Moon’s face, shock wrestled with hysterical joy for dominance. “God, she looks just like Bobby. Well, a little lighter skinned, but the resemblance is amazing. Jones, that has got to be his daughter.”
Ray, usually the opposite of the typical talkative cabby, tapped Hannibal’s shoulder. “Looks like the girl’s the real thing. So what now? You going to hand her to Mortimer?”
“You think they’ll want to meet her?” Hannibal asked.
“You think she’ll want to meet them?”
Before Hannibal could answer, Angela returned with their meals. She politely placed their plates before them, clearly trying to ignore Moon’s stare. Finished serving, she hung beside the table for a moment in apparent indecision. Speaking up might cost her a tip, but Hannibal thought he knew what a person of character would do. To his unexpected pleasure, she did.
“Is there a problem, sir?” Angela’s light brown eyes were like lasers, tunneling into Moon’s face. Physically slight, her body language said she was nonetheless ready for trouble.
After a brief pause, Moon’s face slid into a crooked smile of reminiscence. “I believe I knew your father, Angela.”
“My father?” She took one long step back. “You from Texas? You knew Sam Briggs?” Hannibal had to admit her accent was at least authentic Tex-Mex. Her voice was the surest
giveaway to the Latin side of her ancestry.
“Briggs?” Moon repeated. An invisible weight had caved in part of his face. “Texas? No, no your name’s not Briggs. I mean your real father. You’re Angela Newton from right here in Baltimore.”
While Moon talked, Angela took three small steps backward, then moved forward the same distance. Her face reflected shock, hope, disbelief and joy all at once. Hannibal was a natural skeptic, but could anyone be this good an actress?
“What makes you think, I mean, how do you know this?” Her hands moved in small, opposing outward circles, and her vocal pitch was out of control. Her eyes begged for confirmation. Moon leaned forward, working at sounding sincere.
“Your name is Angela Davis Newton. Your father was a soul singer who used to work at my club. Your mother was a beautiful Spanish girl, small and thin like you. I used to visit your folks in an apartment across town. I actually bounced you on my knee. They were a family full of love, your parents and the blond girl they had there to be your nurse.”
Hannibal was paying more attention to Angela’s face than Moon’s babble, but a few words got through. He turned his lenses on Moon, gripping his arm to get his attention.
“Blond? Bobby Newton’s cleaning woman was white?”
“I didn’t say she was white,” Moon said, percolating a chuckle up from his throat. “This was a black woman, but a natural blond, right down to her roots. You don’t forget a thing like that.”
-13-
Hannibal had seen this police station before, in every old movie he watched growing up. His mother loved Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney and George Raft, and they always seemed to end up in a place like this. And she was fascinated by the gritty humanism of American policemen, so different from the cold efficiency of the German poletzei. Anything American was exotic to her, partly because she never managed to see America. Hannibal thought it a cruel tragedy that his father did not live long enough to show her his homeland.
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