The Finder: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  6

  She was in more danger than he realized. Ray put down the phone. One of his father's old friends from the job, Detective Pete Blake, now on the brink of retirement himself, had filled Ray in on the murder of the two Mexican girls. A loner who'd never married, Blake used to come to the house for Thanksgiving dinners, throw a football in the alley with Ray while his father raked leaves before going inside for the feast Ray's mother had cooked. "Yeah, we found them laid out on the parking lot," Blake had said. "Couple of days ago. Aerosol mace dispenser on the pavement. Somebody filled the car with sewage. The guys had to have a pump-out truck, some kind of vehicle that holds septic waste."

  "I thought the whole city is tied in to the sewers."

  "It is, but people still need pump-outs when their pipes are clogged or break. Plus you got some old septic tanks still in operation here and there."

  "So you look for one of these trucks?"

  "The thing of it is that the state Department of Environmental Protection shows computer records for 918 such vehicles licensed to operate in Brooklyn, Queens, and western Suffolk County. Take a long time to knock all those out. Course, the truck could be unlicensed, too, maybe even be from Jersey or north of the city. So maybe it's smarter to work it through the girls. They'd been drowned before being pulled out of their car. Smart way to kill somebody in some respects. There's no DNA. I mean, there's too much DNA, all of it contaminated. Plus we don't really know who these Mexican girls were. They had ID but it was all fake, fake green cards, everything. No driver's license, of course. No bank accounts, used one of those check-cashing places, probably. Telephone is in the name of somebody who doesn't live there anymore, utility bills paid by money order. It's like that with all these people. Might be a drug thing, girls smoked a bit, there were boyfriends in the trade. Lots of Mexicans selling drugs in Brooklyn these days. We know who some of them are. The thing of it is that all these organizations are always fighting for turf, showing how fricking vicious they can be. The Albanians are very tough. So are the Salvadoran kids. Last month we had a dead guy, they put him through a band saw, put the top half on a pole like some kinda Mexican scarecrow. So killing a couple of wetback girlfriends is good advertising. Your girlfriends are shit, you are nobody—this is the way these people think. We found traces of stuff in the trunk of the car, glove compartment. Car is still drying, we'll see if there's anything else. We got people to talk to, snitches, rats, nice people like that."

  "Didn't see it in the news."

  "Didn't nobody tell you, Ray?"

  "What?"

  "There's no news in Brooklyn. You want news? Commit your crimes in Manhattan, and try to do it south of, like, Ninety-sixth Street. No, actually we kept it quiet, to help us with any informants. One of the tabloids got it but ran it small. Anyway, someone broke the two front side windows with a chunk of asphalt to open the doors, failed to save the girls, then disappeared. That means the car was locked from the inside, and that means that either the girls were already incapacitated or were trapped in the car and someone locked the doors after they were incapacitated. There was a wine bottle in the car, maybe they had passed out, we don't have complete toxicology and autopsy body weight back yet, which is disgraceful, if you ask me." Blake made a coffee-sipping sound. "Still too hot. Anyway, whoever tried to save them is probably too scared to get involved, and who could blame them? Rain fell pretty steadily on the bodies for maybe an hour, washed out the car like that." Blake paused, and when his voice came back, it was professionally softer, a little slower, slipping in a question. "Why you interested, anyway?"

  Ray wasn't going to mention his evening with Chen and his men—not yet, anyway. "My old girlfriend works at the same company they did. I think she saw them earlier that night."

  "Then we might want to talk to her."

  "That makes two of us. She's not around, if you know what I mean."

  "You find her, let me know. She's a person of interest. What's her name?"

  "Jin Li."

  "Chinese? Real Chinese?"

  "Yes." Ray knew this fact would stick in Blake's brain.

  "Off the boat, I mean?"

  "So to speak." He wanted to change the topic. "So how do you go after the guys who did it?"

  "Tough—nobody saw nothing, so far, anyway. Right before dawn. We'll work the drugs, see what we get. Trucks can't go on the Belt Parkway legally, but if it did, we got cameras. Sometimes they work, sometimes they didn't get serviced. Course, if you know the side roads you don't have to take the Belt." Blake barked a laugh. "Your father'd be tearing up the parking lot drains, looking for whatever he could find."

  "You do that?"

  "Not yet. We can't go into the drains."

  "Why?"

  "Federal wetlands. That's a tide zone. Environmental regulations. We screw up the drains, then we can pollute the ocean, something like that."

  Blake was fastidious, Ray remembered, but also methodical. He collected New York subway memorabilia: hats, badges, uniforms, tokens, subway signs, regulation booklets, all displayed in frames or binders. He had a copy of almost every New York City subway map ever published, quite an accomplishment considering the subway had opened in 1904, its maps updated every year or two as the system grew and the original private subway companies consolidated into the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He'd seen Blake's collection: each document was kept in an archival Mylar folder and thoroughly cataloged. A weird pursuit for a middle-aged man. Maybe not so strange for a detective who lived by himself. "That's the reason, the ocean?"

  "Nah, the real reason is that if we tear up that pipe we got a big traffic problem in that parking lot this summer. People can't park, you got flooding, a mess. Also, no cop is ever going to crawl up a drainpipe stuffed with sewage, especially since it will all wash out into the gulley there anyway." Blake gave a long sigh. "How's your dad doing?"

  "Not too good, Pete."

  "You want me to come around, say hello?"

  "He might like that."

  "Honest with you, he told me he was dying and that he was saying good-bye to me. This was like three weeks ago."

  "Drive by in a couple of days. Mornings are better."

  "You got it."

  After the call, Ray stared at an information sheet that came with the Dilaudid going into his father's arm. He'd grabbed it when the nurse wasn't looking. Effects of Dilaudid to the general and central nervous systems, said the flyer, include "sedation, drowsiness, mental clouding, lethargy, impairment of mental and physical performance, anxiety, fear, dizziness, psychic dependence, mood changes (nervousness, apprehension, depression, floating feelings, dreams), light-headedness, weakness, headache, agitation, tremor, uncoordinated muscle movements, muscle rigidity, paresthesia, muscle tremor, blurred vision, nystagmus, diplopia and miosis, transient hallucinations and disorientation, visual disturbances, insomnia, sweating, flushing, dysphoria, euphoria and increased intracranial pressure."

  I'm going to lose him to drugs faster than the cancer, Ray thought, heading toward his father's bed. But of course Dilaudid was amazing stuff; he'd received it himself, to help with the pain of his stomach burn and the skin grafts. The drug made you feel warm and heavy, removed all hunger and pain. Removed sexual desire, too. Eight times more potent than real morphine. People called it "drugstore heroin." He wouldn't mind sampling a tiny bit again sometime, either.

  In the living room, his father lay in his hospital bed, now a small body under the sheet, his eyes shut, chest rising and falling faster than was natural. It was his heart working hard at the dying. Ray nodded at the morning shift nurse, a young woman named Wendy, and she left the room.

  "Hey, Dad," he said.

  His father opened his eyes, blinked, shifted his gaze toward Ray.

  "I'm sorry you suffered so much last night."

  His father shrugged. "Not suffering now," he whispered. "Fine now."

  "Were you asleep?"

  No, his father mouthed, eyes falling closed.

 
; "Thinking?"

  Yes.

  His father opened his eyes, picked at the morphine tube to be sure it was not pinched or bent. There flickered in his expression a serious intent, a flash of concentration that told Ray that his father was still mostly here.

  "Thinking about what?" Ray asked.

  "Worlds."

  "Worlds?"

  "Yes," his father whispered, "worlds within worlds."

  Ray glanced at the automatic Dilaudid pump. He had a few minutes before it sent another bolus into his father's bloodstream, knocking him out.

  "Dad, the reason that everything happened last night was I have a girlfriend who has disappeared. You haven't met her. She's Chinese. We broke up a few weeks ago. Her brother wants me to find her and what he did was his way of telling me how serious he was."

  His father nodded calmly. "Threatening."

  "Yeah."

  "Studied you, I think."

  "I think so."

  "Figured out your vulnerability. Me."

  Ray exhaled by way of agreement.

  "I was hoping you might meet that nice lady who lives next door there." He cracked a slow-motion smile. "She needs a husband, fast."

  "I did meet her."

  "Oh, then—"

  "I was talking to her when they grabbed me."

  His father's mouth pulled at one side. "You had a long talk."

  Ray ignored this. "These guys weren't messing around."

  "You could call the cops," his father noted.

  "Should I?"

  A long pause. His father shook his head weakly. Licked his lips.

  Ray handed him a cup of juice. "But they could maybe protect you."

  "Not me I'm worried about."

  "I think I should move you, Dad. Somewhere safe."

  "Hospital?"

  "I was thinking, yeah."

  He sipped his juice. "People die in hospitals, son."

  "Dad—"

  "I want to die in my own house, in this room. And I don't really care how I die, Ray, or when, so long as it's in this room, in this bed."

  This was a speech he'd heard before. "Yes, but these guys will come back, Dad."

  "Let them. What's the worst they can do? Murder me? They'd be doing me a personal favor."

  Ray hung his head. Six weeks earlier, when he could still walk a bit in the house, Ray's father had told him he wanted to end it sooner rather than later. Did Ray mind if he shot himself? "Why put you through what's coming?" his father had asked then. "Why put me through it?"

  "Why? I want every minute with you, Dad."

  His father had nodded silently.

  But Ray hadn't been convinced, and so within an hour, he had gathered all of his father's guns and ammunition and taken them out to the shed in their small backyard and hidden them in a waterproof wrap beneath a couple of bags of peat moss. A shotgun, a rifle, two Glock 9 service pistols, always kept oiled and clean, plus the boxes of ammunition. Then he'd put a new lock on the shed and hidden one copy of the key inside the rotten birdhouse outside the kitchen window and put the other on his own key ring. If his father had somehow noticed the absence of the guns, he hadn't mentioned it. Of course it was possible his father had not only noticed the absence of the guns but had also discovered or deduced their new location. Ray had leaned a shovel up over the new lock so that it couldn't be seen from the house, but he knew that his father missed very little. The man had been a detective, after all.

  But that was weeks ago, and his father had gone steadily downhill ever since. Now the Dilaudid pump clicked; the stuff was going into the tube in his father's wrist. Ray wouldn't have much more time to talk, so he returned to the topic of Jin Li's disappearance. "Her brother told me she was in a car with two Mexican girls who died a few nights ago, and I just spoke with Pete, who told me about it."

  "So you did call the cops."

  "Sort of. It's Pete."

  "He's a detective second grade, with thirty years on the job. Method of homicide?"

  "It was a car full of shit. Dumped it in the car, drowned them. Pete said his people hadn't gone into the drains yet, because of environmental issues, traffic—"

  "Bunch of crap. They just don't want to go in. You have to have hazmat suits, dysentery shots. Case like that, you got to go into the drains."

  "Why?" Ray asked.

  "Think about what the cops found . . . two dead girls . . . aspirated human excrement . . . the bus takes them away. Then the FD hoses out the car for them."

  "They found drug traces in the trunk and glove compartment."

  His father shrugged. "Pete's gonna think it's drugs. Maybe. I think the shit is the best clue."

  "How?"

  "What you got to do is find out where the shit came from."

  "I know where it came from, it came from human beings. Pete says there are something like nine hundred septic trucks in the area handling loads like this."

  "No, no, listen to me, there'll be stuff in there, information. There'll be information in the shit."

  Now Ray watched the synthetic morphine course through his father, softening the tension in his neck and forehead. His large fingers, bony and thin now, eased against the blanket.

  "You did hear me, right?" croaked his father.

  "I did."

  "I don't want to be moved. I want to die in this bed in this room in this house. Then I will be with your mother."

  "Dad, we could easily call the precinct and they'd put a car outside the house."

  "Nah."

  "Why?"

  "I got all the advantages, son."

  This made no sense. Mental clouding, the Dilaudid sheet had said, euphoria. "Like what?"

  His father shrugged. "You, for one. Might be interesting. Plus there's another reason."

  "What?"

  "Might give me some satisfaction. I can still think, buddy-boy, when those angels of mercy don't pump too much of this stuff into me."

  "It's so you don't suffer."

  "There's lots of kinds of suffering. Your mother heard you were under that building, that was suffering. I never seen suffering like that."

  "I have."

  "When?"

  "When she was dying, Dad. I saw you."

  His father's eyes drifted upward in remembrance, and he munched his mouth a bit. "Funny how we forget some things."

  "You want anything to eat?"

  His father shook his head. "Not for me. I got a little applesauce." His eyes were closed now, but he smiled, gums yellow. "You know what this is, don't you?"

  "No, what."

  "My last case."

  "This is serious, Dad."

  "I know it's serious," he whispered. "My last case, and I get to do it with my son. Couldn't be better than that." His father pushed the pain button, getting an optional bolus to chase the one just delivered. Upping the dose, wanting more, addicted. "If I were you I would get down in there in those pipes today before the guys down at the precinct maybe decide to do it after all. They won't crawl around in pipes. They'll bring in a backhoe and tear those drainpipes right out of there and look at every inch. But you get in there first, might be just as good."

  His father's head lolled a bit, fading fast, and Wendy reappeared in the doorway.

  "I'm going to clean him now," she whispered. "So he doesn't feel me moving him around."

  Ray nodded. "How's he doing?"

  The nurse tore open some antiseptic pads. She moved down to the foot of the bed. Ray followed her.

  "The kidneys are barely working . . . he's losing weight," she went on. "I think I know what you are asking."

  "That's exactly what I'm asking."

  "He's got a strong heart, which isn't helping now. His hands and arms still have strength, too. Sometimes things can go on . . . but I'd say a week, maybe ten days."

  "He's not eating much."

  "He'll take applesauce, a little yogurt."

  "Gloria told you about the men who came last night?"

  She nodded. "Your dad won't m
ove, you know."

  "What about you? These guys could come back."

  She considered him. "This is what I do, Mr. Grant. I stay with people who are dying and bring them what comfort I can. Your father is a lovely man. I don't see a lot of family, his wife is dead, you are all he's got—"

  "What about Gloria?"

  "We've been in many situations. You'd be surprised what we've seen."

  She returned to the bedside and lifted the covers to expose the nephrostomy tubes that were draining his father's kidneys into clear plastic bags. The sight of these was bad, but not as bad as the original incision from the exploratory surgery running up his father's torso, a huge knife cut. Ray couldn't bear to see this, how poorly it had healed. He had seen things far worse, but those hadn't involved his father. He swallowed his terror and sorrow and stepped outside.

  Like many men of his generation, Ray Grant Sr. had built a workshop in the basement, where he listened to baseball and football games on the radio while tinkering over more or less useless projects. The shelves held screws and nails in old jam jars, tools he used in the minor repairs he made on his rental houses, a hodgepodge of lumber, metal screening, boxes of doorknobs and hinges, cans of unknown metal parts for unknown appliances—in sum, the same loose, useless crud that had accrued everywhere else in the house, shed, porch, and backyard. He had dragged an old armchair down the stairs intending to strengthen it, and after doing so had left it down there as a more comfortable place to listen to the games on the radio.

  Ray poked around in the workshop, gathering the tools he might need in the parking lot drain: gloves, goggles, rubber boots, flashlight, metal saw. Crawling up into a pipe full of shit wasn't exactly a good idea. He'd given himself a shot for either amebic dysentery or Japanese encephalitis in a dust-blown field hospital on the other side of the world six months earlier, but he couldn't remember which. He found the tools but wasn't quite ready to climb the stairs, for whenever he spent any time in the workshop he learned something about his father. It was a room that showed how methodical and disciplined his father had been. Books on real estate management, electrical wiring, plumbing, building management, all carefully underlined, annotated even. Records of his buildings, going back twenty-five years. On the other side of the shop stood a row of rusty file cabinets containing copies of every one of his case records, going back to 1982, the year he made detective, got the gold shield. Completely illegal to have these records, but no one in the NYPD minded. Part of the institutional memory. Old cops remembered things, after all. Ray had read hundreds of these cases, including the unsolved ones. You read a few dozen, though, and soon saw how tedious police work was. He opened a drawer for the 1983 cabinet, pulled out a folder at random. Flopped it open, started to read a DD-5 form, the basic report detectives filled out: "Suspect walked south to Grand Central Station, where he was observed making a call from the last phone on the left in the east exit, and then suspect was observed exiting on 42nd Street, where he stopped at a newsstand for three minutes. He then walked . . ." And so on.