“Someday you’ll tell me,” she said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why you left home.”
“Okay.”
“Someday,” she said. “But not today.”
Manhattan, May 1984
21
So you think it was a test?” Stone said. “Dunham expected Mora to ID you?”
“That’s my read. Mora saved my life.”
Raney hadn’t slept, hadn’t gone back to the apartment in Fort Hamilton. Instead, he’d walked over the Brooklyn Bridge at 1:00 a.m., then kept walking. He cut diagonals through Central Park, thinking, waiting for the sun to rise.
“But then why call you by name before he pulled off the mask? Why risk tipping Mora?”
They sat on Stone’s couch, drinking coffee, facing a long window that gave onto the pale southern skyline.
“He knows, but he doesn’t want it to be true. He likes having me around. So he slipped Mora an out.”
“But you’re safe now. Mora put Dunham at ease.”
“For the time being. I think Dunham’s stalling. He’ll keep testing me until he can’t pretend anymore.”
Stone turned sideways on the couch, gave Raney a long look.
“I should pull you,” he said. “You sound paranoid. Your eyes are dilated. And you don’t smell very good.”
“You’re not going to pull me.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Just tell me what you need to finish this. What is it I haven’t given you?”
“I need Meno. I need Dunham on tape saying it’s been Meno all along.”
“I can’t walk in there wearing a wire. Not now.”
“Then I’m pulling you.”
“Bullshit. You’ll never get anyone this close again.”
“I’m not sure you are close.”
“I’m close. But I’m walking on eggshells. I need to hand Dunham something big. Something he won’t have to share with Meno. Something that will erase his doubt about me.”
“It can’t be drugs. We can’t give that animal junk to put on the street.”
“Maybe he doesn’t put it on the street. Maybe I turn over a complete package—buyer and seller. Somewhere outside Meno’s turf.”
“That would require product, cash, manpower.”
“You’ve got two out of three sitting in evidence lockers around the city.”
“Look,” Stone said. “Stop stringing me along. What do you have in mind?”
“It’s simple. Someone I knew upstate just got out. He has a sweet operation in place but he’s cash poor, and he’s too hot to run it himself. He’s laying low until his parole is done. All he wants is a taste, enough to keep him afloat.”
“What’s the operation?”
“Stuff comes to us close to pure from somewhere down south. Baltimore or DC, anywhere Dunham has no contacts. We step on it three times over, sell it to a string of dealers up north, where addicts don’t know anything better. Maine, maybe. Or New Hampshire.”
“And you’re bringing Dunham in on this because…”
“He’s the money guy. My jailbird friend needs a bankroll.”
“He’ll know you’re setting him up.”
“He’ll suspect, but he’ll be tempted. He’s looking to branch out on his own.”
Stone stared into the bottom of his cup.
“And you want to stage all this just to gain the man’s trust?”
“Without that, we don’t get Meno. And there’s a good chance I end up dead.”
“All right,” Stone said. “I’ll see what I can pull together.”
“That’s not good enough. I need to give Dunham something tonight. He can’t have time to think.”
“Listen to you,” Stone said. “I thought I was calling the shots. I tell you what: check back with me at five o’clock.”
“There’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Mora wins his fight. That means we wrap this up inside of six weeks. Mora can’t get hurt. No one in his family can get hurt.”
“He’ll testify?”
“If we protect him.”
“Then we’ll make it work.”
Raney hesitated.
“And what about Captain Ferguson?” he said.
Stone raised an eyebrow.
“You mean your future father-in-law?”
“If I’m in, I want in all the way. Someone’s been giving Meno a clear path. This case starts in 1954, doesn’t it?”
Stone shrugged.
“I’m ninety percent sure,” he said. “I need Meno to give me the other ten percent.”
“What do you know about the Bruno shooting?”
“I’ve read the files, talked to a few old-timers. Ferguson claimed to be acting on a tip, said there was no time to call for backup. For reasons unknown, Kee stayed with the squad car. Bruno was ducking a federal warrant, laying low in the Queensboro Apartments. Ferguson shot him in the back. The two other men he killed were just residents of the building, people Bruno paid to put him up in what he thought was the last place anyone would look. They weren’t armed, but you could keep that sort of thing out of the papers back then. Especially if the men were black.”
“And since then?”
“Roy Meno has led a charmed life. Raids on faulty addresses. Missing evidence. Witness suicides.”
“Son of a bitch,” Raney said.
“You told me you wanted in.”
“One thing doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s that?”
“If you knew about Ferguson, then why’d you take me on Kee’s recommendation? Why’d you take me knowing I was engaged to Ferguson’s daughter?”
“I couldn’t veto Kee’s pick without raising the wrong shackles. Besides, when I read your jacket it seemed to me Ferguson was making a sloppy bet. Was I wrong?”
“No,” Raney said. “You weren’t wrong.”
He should have gone home to bed, should have slept for the few hours he had until Dunham expected him at the club, but instead he called Sophia, asked her to meet.
“What the fuck, Wes?” she said. “Why am I at a coffee shop in Jackson Heights in the middle of a weekday?”
She wore a brick-red wiggle dress, sat with her back pressed flat against the bench, looking like a person poised to say no to whatever was asked of her.
“I wanted to talk,” Raney said.
“So we can talk at home.”
“I need to be extra careful right now.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You sound like a teenager. You remember we’re getting married, right? We should be sampling cake and making seating arrangements. We don’t even have a venue.”
“Six weeks,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Six more weeks and I’m done. Maybe less.”
“Can you last six weeks?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you look like you’re about to nod off.”
“I haven’t been sleeping much.”
“What have you been doing instead?”
“Staying awake.”
“How? I’m not blind, Wes.”
“It’s only once in a while. To keep my cover. It’s part of the job.”
“Bullshit. I spend most of my day taking children away from their junkie parents. It doesn’t matter if you’re pretending. The shit you’re doing is real.”
“What do you want from me?”
“What do I want from you? Come home. Now. Not in six weeks. Now. My father’s made calls. There’s an opening in Homicide. In Ozone Park, but still. Isn’t that what every detective dreams of? Homicide?”
Raney stabbed at his salad.
“Your father still has a lot of pull, doesn’t he?”
“He was captain for twenty years. People listen.”
“He must go through Kee now. How well do you know him?”
“Wes, why are you asking about my fat
her’s partner? We have more important things—”
“Did your father ever talk about his work in front of you? Did you overhear things?”
She dug a fingernail into the back of his hand, cocked her head.
“Come home,” she said. “Come home now.”
“I have to finish this.”
“Why?”
“Because I started it.”
He ran his thumbs over the grooved edge of the table, searching for a way into the conversation he wanted to have.
“Wes,” Sophia said, “look at me. You’re bouncing around in your seat like a third grader.”
“Am I a teenager or a third grader?”
“You’re a prick.”
She was crying now, or trying not to, swallowing air, turning her head away. Raney leaned across, touched her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right.”
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“You’re out there, doing things, putting yourself at risk, and you’re not right. Your mind isn’t right, Wes.”
He pulled back.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I don’t need this shit right now.”
“You’re high. This isn’t you, Wes.”
“Then who the fuck is it?” he said.
“Wes, you’re shouting.”
“You know what? You’re right, I’m high. I’m fucking high. Fuck you and your father.”
He dropped a twenty on the table and walked out. Somewhere behind him he heard a woman’s voice say, “Anything you want, sweetie. On the house.”
22
There was no reception in the mountains. By the time they got back to town, Raney’s voice mail was full. At first, Bay sounded upset, like someone struggling to suppress information he’d rather not have in the first place. By the end, he was mad, as if Raney’s absence marked a deliberate betrayal.
“Goddamn it, Raney, I can’t say this shit over the phone. My stomach’s churning. Get to my office now.”
“Everything all right?” Clara asked.
They were sitting in his car, in front of Mavis’s store, Daniel asleep in the backseat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Bay wants to see me. He wouldn’t say why.”
“Back to work, then.”
“Back to work.”
“Thank you,” she said. “It was good to get away. Even just for a morning. Good for me and for Daniel.”
“Shut the door and take a seat,” Bay said.
“What has you so riled?”
“Mavis’s prints came back.”
“And?”
“Her name wasn’t Mavis at all.”
He tossed a manila folder across the desk. Raney opened it, started reading. Cheryl Wilner, born 1940. Six counts of solicitation between ’56 and ’59, two in Philadelphia, four in Boston. In 1960: a warrant for capital murder, still open. She and her pimp, Jonathan Flory, were wanted in the stabbing death of thirty-nine-year-old Mundell Stewart, a bachelor with a trust fund. Stewart’s body was discovered by the cleaning crew in a Roxbury motel on the morning of September 18. Witnesses, including the night clerk, saw both Wilner and Flory exit the deceased’s room at approximately midnight. Stewart’s wallet and keys were not found at the scene, and his 1958 Jaguar was gone from the lot. Subsequent investigation revealed that Stewart’s Beacon Hill loft was burglarized later that morning, though there was no sign of forced entry. Police discovered his Jaguar parked in the building’s underground garage.
“Well,” Raney said. “I guess we know who Jack Wilkins is. And where he got his taste for cars.”
“A pimp and a prostie. Part of me still thinks there has to be a mistake.”
“It’s sad,” Raney said.
“How do you figure?”
“She was sixteen the first time they cited her. Chances are she started younger.”
“Yeah, and she died a drug-trafficking murderess.”
“Some people don’t recover.”
“From what?”
“The hand they were dealt.”
Bay pushed a quarter around the surface of his desk.
“I had no idea who she was, Raney. None whatsoever. Not even when I was sleeping with her. But you had her pegged from the get-go. How?”
“I didn’t have forty years of memories standing in the way.”
“I don’t suppose this changes our case any.”
“It explains some things. Bob Sims told me Jack had a fetish for call girls. Said he did his fishing in Nevada.”
“I believe it. Jack never did care who Mavis was seen with.”
“The good news is we get to help the Boston PD close a forty-two-year-old cold case.”
“Shit,” Bay said. “Right under my fucking nose.”
An hour later, Bay called Raney back to his office.
“They found the Jaguar. And a body lying twenty yards away, with three bullets in its back.”
“Adler?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Bay said.
“Where?”
“About an hour north of here.”
“North?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I figured he’d be taking the dope back East.”
“If it’s Adler,” Bay said.
It was Adler—a tight cluster of bullet holes in the center of his back, his salmon-colored shirt running with blood. The staties had taped off a wide perimeter. Camera crews from across the state gathered on every side. The area was secluded, the road unpaved. Kurt must have been avoiding the highways. The front driver’s side of the Jaguar was caved in. Someone had knocked the car into an arroyo, then shot Adler while he ran for cover. There was blood from a head wound on the steering wheel. Adler, disoriented, had fled without his weapon: a .38 lay under a fold of newspaper on the passenger seat.
The responding officers found 9mm shell casings among the tire tracks and skid marks. The trunk of the Jaguar was left open, nothing but a hand jack and a blanket inside. In Adler’s pockets, a wallet and a hotel key card. No phone.
Raney and Bay stood on opposite sides of the body. He’d fallen forward, landed with his head turned, half his face exposed. Raney bent down, brushed away the ants.
“Pretty spot to die in,” Bay said.
“He couldn’t have been here long,” Raney said. “The animals hadn’t found him yet.”
“Whoever killed him didn’t do much to cover it up.”
“His mind was somewhere else.”
“So he has the coke now?”
“He must. If he didn’t, the key card would be missing. The question is, why come so hard after this supply? The guy we’re chasing is willing to go to war with a Mexican cartel and a Boston crime boss.”
“He seems up to the job, too,” Bay said.
“Someone with military training, maybe.”
Technicians loaded the Jaguar onto a flatbed truck. There would be more processing, more waiting. Raney followed Bay back to the squad car. Bay turned the ignition but didn’t pull out.
“You positive it’s just one guy?” he asked.
“No, but this is starting to feel personal. Like some kind of vengeance specific to this package. Rivera said Mavis was already dead when he found her. He said he was jumped from behind. But if the stocky bald man had the drop on Rivera, then why not just shoot him, like he did Kurt?”
“Maybe he went there to kill a sixty-two-year-old woman. Maybe he didn’t bring his gun. Or maybe Rivera’s a fucking liar.”
“I think he wanted the fight. He wanted to inflict pain. Maybe he wanted to feel pain. Maybe this all starts with his own sense of guilt.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” Bay said.
“What else do we have?”
“We have his DNA. And we have DNA tests that take two menstrual cycles to come back.”
“There might be another way to ID this guy, or at least get a photo of him. Where are the lab techs with Mavis’s computer?”
>
“Nowhere fast. We can force the issue, drive up there ourselves tomorrow. Why? What are you thinking?”
“Clara said Mavis was seeing someone online.”
“You think our guy is the someone?”
“It would fit.”
“If you’re right, he sure had it figured from all angles.”
“Yeah, and he’s not done. There’s still whoever Jack and Mavis sold to.”
Raney sat up in bed, laptop on his knees, downloading the photos of Mavis’s invoices. He found nothing: no code to crack, no trail leading back to the buyer or buyers. Just the purchase and sale of art supplies, the pages out of order, as though Mavis had spilled them across the floor and shuffled them back together.
He called up a search engine and typed in his daughter’s name. He let his ring finger hover over the Return key, a ritual he’d performed almost daily since the county issued him a laptop. Always he resisted, shut the page. There was no upside to watching from afar.
He set aside his computer, lay picking small noises from the silence: a passing car, a dog barking from some distant ranch, a breeze rattling the windowpanes. For the better part of eighteen years he’d slept alone, woken alone. It was a fact of his life he rarely questioned. But now the solitude made him feel absurd, unreal—a creature cut off from every other creature. He thought that Clara, lying alone in her bed just a few short blocks away, must be feeling something similar. He checked his phone to make sure the ringer was turned on, then cursed himself for behaving like a teenager.
He sat up, reached for his suitcase. He remembered a line from The Maltese Falcon, a film he’d watched time and again with his father: I won’t because all of me wants to. He dug out a single bag, flushed it whole.
Staten Island, May 1984
23
The warehouse was brimming, bodies pressing together on every side of the ring. Dunham stood with Raney by the skirts, watching Spike redeem himself, tagging a bodybuilder’s face as though he were working a speed bag.
Dunham wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
“It’s like a fucking sauna for the homeless in here,” he said. “Since you KO’d Spike, every luckless shit sack thinks he can spot a ringer. Fuck my uncle—I’ll retire off this place.”
The Exiled Page 12
