Mask Market b-16

by Andrew Vachss

  “Why do you call him that?”

  “Call him…what?”

  “‘Burke.’ It seems strange to call your brother by his last name.”

  “Oh,” I said, chuckling. “I see what you’re saying. Well, that’s what I always called him—a private thing, just between us. He always called me ‘Logan.’”

  “I always called him Mr. Burke.”

  I shrugged, as if to say my brother’s ways were a mystery to me.

  He rocked gently in his chair. “So your brother’s records indicate he did some job for me?” he said.

  “That’s right. There isn’t a lot of information there, but, whatever he did, it concerned your daughter. Beryl, right?”

  “I had a daughter named Beryl,” he said, planting his feet to stop the rocker from moving. “But you’re going back a very long time. She’s a grown woman now.”

  “So everything turned out for the best?”

  “That’s what your brother wanted to know?”

  “I guess so. He left…bequests to several of the children on his caseload. Not very much,” I said, holding up my hand as if to disclaim any big-bucks potential, “but…Well, like I said, we weren’t close. I couldn’t begin to tell you what was in his mind. He left some property he owned to me, and his car—that’s it, sitting out there in your driveway—too. But all the rest of his estate, and, like I said, that wasn’t much, he wanted divided up among five people. From the instructions he left, I could tell they were all old cases of his.”

  “And you started with my daughter?”

  “Actually, I’m finishing with your daughter. The other bequests have all been disbursed.”

  “Well, as I said, Beryl’s not a child anymore. So why not just go straight to her?”

  “That is what I did, for the others,” I said. “It took me a while—I don’t have to be a private detective to know that some women change their names when they get married. And the only addresses I had were for the parents, anyway.”

  “I haven’t lived at the address Mr. Burke had for me for many years.”

  “I found that out when I tried to visit. Luckily, your number was listed.”

  “So why didn’t you just call?” he said, a flash of color showing under his grayness.

  “I don’t believe this is the kind of thing people would take seriously if they heard it on the phone. With all the con men and scam artists running around today—you’d be amazed at what you learn, managing a motel—how would you have reacted if a stranger called and said he had money he wanted to give to your daughter?”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  I took a sip of the hot chocolate. “I couldn’t find a Beryl Preston in any phone book—I used the Internet to search. So I thought I’d drive up, answer any questions you have, and you’d tell me how to get in touch with her.”

  He cupped his mug closely, as if warming his hands.

  A minute passed.

  “You think I’m nothing now, don’t you?” he said.

  A beam of sunlight bent itself through the skylight, standing between us like the third rail on train tracks.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, buying time.

  “This house, the land it sits on, the furniture you see here, it’s mine. Truly my own. I never knew what that felt like, back when I was…back when I first met you.”

  “Me? I—”

  “I wasn’t just a dog on a leash,” he said, bitterness etching his thin voice like vitriol on glass. “Not just an actor playing a role, either. I ran the company, even if I didn’t own it.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You know what my strength always was? My secret strength? I was a good listener. I paid attention. A person’s voice, it’s like an instrument. You can hear if it’s out of tune, whether it’s under stress. The FBI even has machines now, for listening to voices. It’s supposed to be better than a polygraph. I’ll bet it is.”

  I sat back on the couch, waiting for whatever he was going to come at me with.

  “Feel free,” he said, pointing at a shallow brass bowl on a coffee table made from a cross-sectioned piece of timber, varnished to a high gloss. “That’s an ashtray.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Gave that up when you had the plastic surgery, did you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Your voice,” Preston said, two fingers on his chin in a smug, pedantic pose. “It’s completely distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. I couldn’t be sure at first; maybe not smoking changed it a bit. But there’s a special…timbre to it. As if every word you say is wrapped around a threat.”

  “You’re the one doing all the talking,” I said, just barely loud enough to carry across the room.

  “Perfect!” he said, happily vindicated. “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.”

  “S he always blamed me,” he said, an hour and a half later. “And she would never tell me what I’d done wrong.”

  “When did that start?”

  “I…don’t know, exactly. It seems it was ever since she was a little girl. It was so…bizarre. I mean, I loved her so. She had to know that. No matter what she did, I always forgave her. The way she talked to me sometimes! My wife said I should put her over my knee, for being so disrespectful, but I never did, not once.”

  I didn’t like the way his face morphed when he said “my wife,” but my own face showed him nothing.

  “She was in trouble all the time?” I guessed.

  “All the time,” he agreed, misery and mystery swirling in his voice. “She was smart; my goodness, was she smart. Her teachers said she could be anything she wanted, but she never applied herself, not to anything.”

  “She went to public school?”

  “And private school. And a residential facility…for troubled teens. Nothing made a difference.”

  “That time I brought her back…?”

  “She just ran away again. Not from us, from that…program we sent her to. The last resort. When she ran from there, she just disappeared. Fifteen years old, you wouldn’t think she would have the wherewithal to survive on her own.”

  “Why didn’t you—?”

  “What? Hire a man like you again? What good would it do? Beryl made it clear that she was not going to stay with us. A lawyer told us we could have her locked up—have her declared a ‘person in need of supervision,’ I think he called it—but that would just mean a state facility instead of a private one.”

  “You never saw her again?”

  “Oh, certainly I did. I’ll never forget that day. It’s an easy date to remember: nine, nine, ninety. Her eighteenth birthday. She drove right up to the house—the one in Westchester. Actually, I don’t think she drove herself; I had the sense that someone gave her a ride, and was waiting for her outside.”

  “Did she—?”

  “I asked her how had she managed to be on her own for all that time. She laughed at me. It was a nasty laugh. I can still hear it: ‘You think I was the only one to run away that night, Daddy?’

  “I didn’t know what she meant, and it must have shown in my face. She told me she ran away with one of her teachers. I hadn’t heard—nobody told me about any such thing. She thought that was hilarious. ‘She didn’t run away from school, Daddy,’ she said. ‘She ran away from her husband.’”

  He sat there, his expression stunned, as if hearing Beryl’s words again.

  “I couldn’t…believe it for a minute,” he finally said. “What my daughter was telling me.”

  “That she was gay?”

  “No! I would never have cared about such a thing. Beryl knew that. We used to have very frank discussions. I talked to her about all the things I was supposed to: sex, drugs, drinking…. It wasn’t that Beryl was gay, it was that she wasn’t, do you understand?”

  “She was just using that teacher to support her while she was on the run?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice trembling at the memory. “Using her, that�
��s right. And Beryl was proud of it, like it was a new game she had learned, and she was already the best at it.”

  “That’s all she came to tell you?”

  “No. That just came out,” he said, looking down at his lap. “What she came all that way to tell me was that I was a spineless coward.”

  “Because…?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy Preston said, wretchedly. “When I asked her what she was talking about, she just laughed that nasty little laugh of hers again.”

  “W hy are you really looking for her?” he asked, later.

  “I ran across some information—more like a rumor, actually; I can’t speak for its accuracy, considering the source—that she might be in danger. This was in the middle of another case, nothing to do with her. Or you. But I remembered her from that time when I brought her back. And I thought…I’m not sure what I thought. I guess I just wanted to be sure she was safe.”

  “So why did you come here with that story of yours?”

  “She’s changed her name,” I said, flatly. “There’s a lot of reasons people do that. But in my business it usually means they don’t want the family’s brand on them.”

  “You mean, you thought I was the reason?”

  “No way to know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

  “I didn’t know she changed her name. What does she call herself now?”

  “Peta Bellingham,” I told him, watching his face for a tell.

  “What kind of name is that?” he said, almost angrily. “I mean, it doesn’t connect to…anything I know.”

  “I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

  “You thought I might know where she is…but that I wouldn’t want to tell you?”

  “Right. I thought she might be…aware of the situation. That the rumor I’d heard had some truth to it. I thought she might be staying underground until things got straightened out. Maybe staying with you, I don’t know.”

  “You wanted to help her?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did. I still do.”

  “Because…?”

  “I don’t have a good answer for that one. Maybe I’m just chasing down things I did when I was young.”

  “Things you did wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t know that until I talk to her.”

  “Bringing her back to me!” he said suddenly. “That’s what you thought you might have done wrong.”

  I didn’t deny it.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Jeremy Preston said. He stood up, paced in front of the cold fireplace for a minute, then turned to face me. “I don’t know where she is,” he repeated. “But I’ll pay you to find her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want the answer to your question, too, Mr. Burke. A lot more than you ever could.”

  P reston told me he met the woman who would become his wife when he’d been a student at Harvard—“That’s right,” he interrupted himself, sharply, as if I had challenged his words. When I didn’t respond, he visibly relaxed, then went on again. All ponderous and pedantic, like a celebrity twit being interviewed.

  “Those were tumultuous times. Not just Vietnam. The civil-rights movement, feminism, music…When they talk about a ‘counterculture,’ that’s very accurate. I was a senior, my wife was a sophomore. At BU, just across the river. I met her at a teach-in. Later, she told me that she wanted to marry me from the minute I stood up and…well, made a little speech, I guess.

  “We had an understanding. A contract, even. We weren’t going to be dropouts, we were going to be…participants. Change-agents. Not by living on some commune, or marching in protests. It’s all very well and good to talk about the inevitable rise of the proletariat, but we knew revolutions need financing to move forward, the same way a car needs gas.

  “Her father brought me into his company, but I was never the son-in-law,” he went on, as hyper-vigilant to attacks on his credentials as an abused child is to a subtle shift in a parent’s voice tone. “I hadn’t studied business in college—I don’t think anybody studied business back then—but I had an aptitude for it, and it came to the surface quickly. Before I was thirty, I was virtually running the company. And when my father-in-law died—heart attack; he wasn’t a man who ever listened to doctors—the segue was as natural as if I’d been groomed for the position since birth.”

  “But your wife was the actual owner? Is that what you meant earlier, when you said—?”

  “That this was mine?” he said, sweeping his hand in a gesture meant to encompass the whole house. “Yes, that’s exactly right. When we divorced, the prenup—I remember us laughing when I signed it: just a piece of paper her bourgeois father insisted upon, it was never going to matter to us—kicked in. There was never an issue of child support. Beryl had been gone quite a while, and she was no longer a minor, anyway.”

  “Beryl was an only child?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I wanted more kids. Especially later, when Beryl started to…act out. I thought, if she had a little brother or a little sister, it would be…I don’t know, a good experience for her. For them both, I mean.”

  “Did she ever have a pet?” I asked. Remembering that she hadn’t when her father had first come to me, wondering if they’d ever tried that.

  “You mean, like a dog or a cat? No, my wife was highly allergic.”

  “She couldn’t be around animals?”

  “Well, she could tolerate them in small doses. Like when we visited a friend’s house and they had a dog, she would pat it and everything. But to have one in the house, well, that would have been impossible for her.”

  I shifted position to show I was listening close, said, “You were still together when Beryl came back to visit you, that last time?”

  “Together? We were still married, yes. But the life we planned for ourselves had already disappeared.”

  “You never got to be bankrollers?”

  “Oh, we certainly did that. You wouldn’t believe some of the people who were guests in our home. That was part of what we wanted from our…contributions, I suppose. For Beryl to be exposed to the finest thinkers of our generation. The best minds, the best causes. And she was. My wife and I funded some major initiatives. And plenty of them weren’t tax-exempt, either.”

  “Did you attract government attention?”

  “Oh, I’m sure we did. Everyone in our circle was under some form of surveillance—it came with the territory.”

  And made you feel like a real player, too, I thought, but kept it off my face.

  “By the time Beryl was, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years old, it seemed like the revolution was dying. You know, the Age of Reagan and all that. The country changed…and so did our…raison d’être, you might say. Oh, we still contributed—the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example—but we weren’t dealing directly with the principals anymore. Instead of sitting around our living room, being in on the strategy, we were going to galas and writing checks.

  “If you study history, you come to understand that everything changes in cycles. A wave crests, breaks, and the water is calm again. I knew, eventually, we would return to a time of…involvement, I suppose you’d call it.”

  Good fucking luck, I thought. But my expression told him I was paying attention to every word he spoke.

  That’s technique. Professionalism. And it’s going out of style. If America is a nation of sheep, TV is the shepherd. Jurors think CSI is a documentary. They’ll vote to acquit even when three witnesses saw the defendant shoot the victim, because there were no fingerprints on the recovered pistol—the one with checkered wood grips. Defense attorneys sum up in child-molestation cases by shrieking, “Where’s the DNA?” at juries who just know every human contact leaves traces a lab can detect. After all, the TV told them so.

  Cops get infected with the same virus. They overdose on Law and Order reruns and end up thinking they have to “win” every interview. It’s not about the information anymore; it’s about the r
epartee.

  I don’t care what side of the law you work: You never want to confront your subject while he’s still talking. In fact, you don’t want to interrupt him at all. Threats are for amateurs; verbal dueling is for fools. A pro knows there’s no reason to get your man talking if you’re not going to listen.

  Good interrogation is like panning for gold. You let everything the other guy says pass through the mesh of your attention, encouraging him to keep it coming, knowing that the little nuggets won’t be obvious until you’re done sifting.

  There’s a rhythm to it. When the flow slows, you have to tap the right nerves to get it moving again.

  “You don’t think that Beryl…I don’t know…felt let down when things changed around your home?” I probed. “When you stopped…participating so actively?”

  “Beryl? She was hardly ‘political’ at that age. And, the truth is, she never seemed to care. Oh, she got along well enough with the people we had over, and she understood why her mother and father were so committed to social change. She knew racism was wrong. She knew Vietnam had been an ongoing war crime, perpetrated against innocent citizens. She knew about the grape boycotts. About apartheid. About…well, a whole range of progressive movements. And she seemed, if not enthusiastic, at least supportive. But it was never her passion.

  “She had a wonderful collection of…mementos, I suppose you’d call them. Special little gifts that people who came to visit would bring to her.” He gestured toward a chest-high shelf hung on two wrought-iron brackets, standing against the wall to his left. The shelf was crowded with small objects, a random sprinkling of wood, metal, and stone. I wasn’t close enough to see more.

  “She never took them with her,” he said, sadly. “Even that last time.”

  “So when you and your wife stopped…?”

  “It was fine with Beryl,” he said. “She had plenty of activities. Piano, dance, art lessons, horseback riding—I let her do anything she wanted to try. Except that karate. That was going just too far. I mean, we were all for young women growing up with self-confidence, but the only place she could have gone for classes was run by a man my wife said made her very nervous. People didn’t talk about it back then, but we all knew some…pedophiles deliberately put themselves in a position to have access to children.”