by S. J. Rozan
“The clues—”
“Garbage in a plastic bag.”
“It may have his prints on it.”
“It may have a dozen people’s prints on it. So what?”
“If one is someone you know—”
“Then you and I will know who he is. But I’ll be at Rikers. He was wrong about how fast I’d be out and you know it. Bail? Never.”
“We’d find him.”
“And if there aren’t prints? If all we have to go on is his next set of clues and I don’t get them? Clock runs out, game over. Mary? If it weren’t me, if some stranger came to you with a story like this, would you buy it?”
Traffic flowed steadily by. People with a purpose and a way to get there. I watched Mary’s face. Lydia’s best friend, and also a cop: this was tearing her apart.
“So what are you planning to do?” she asked. “Just keep playing and hope something happens?”
“If that will save Lydia, yes.”
“And if the next clues lead to another victim? Are you going to let him just go on killing people, as long as it’s not Lydia?”
Sickeningly, I realized I was ready to shout, YES! Yes, if I have to! I clenched my throbbing jaw to keep that inside.
“I know,” I said softly. “But it may not come to that. He said it would be a while before the new clues. I want to use that time to find the back door. I need to know who he is, what it’s about. Give me time, Mary. Please.”
“And if I say no? You planning to jump me and run, like you did the two other cops?”
I shook my head.
Mary had been leaning over the seat; now she turned away, looked out through the windshield. After a time, she spoke. “I’m on the four-to-midnight today. I report in at three-thirty. You have until then.”
“What if he doesn’t—”
“We decide then. I decide.”
I let out a breath. “Thank you.”
I called Linus, whose half-dozen frantic messages, both voice and text, I’d ignored while I argued with Mary. He picked up on half a ring. “Dude! Where are you? That dead girl in Fatima’s—tell me it’s not Lydia.”
“It’s not.”
“Damn, dude! Hey, Trella, it’s not! So what’s going on? That SUV, what was up with that? Calling Aunt Mary—was that a good thing or a bad thing? Did I jam something up?”
“You saved my butt, Linus,” I told him. “Now I need to keep low. I need to find a place to work from, then I’ll call you.”
“My office in Flushing,” Linus said. “It’s all yours.”
“I’m hot, Linus. More ways than one. I don’t want to bring that down on you kids.”
“What? I’m losing you. Sounded like something about kids.”
“Linus—”
“Nope, can’t hear a thing. All broken up,” he told me, clear as a bell. “Better reception out in Flushing. In my office.”
I ran my hand over my face. “All right. Meet us out there.”
“Us?”
“Long story. Tell you later. We’ll be in Flushing in maybe twenty minutes. Meet us at your place.”
“Can’t. Or, can, but not twenty minutes. Bus to the subway, even a car service, whatever, it’ll take forever from here.”
“What happened to your car?”
“Dude! Probably hasn’t even made it to the shop yet!”
An automotive blur, screeching brakes, tinkling glass. “That was you?”
“Trella. Awesome, huh? We saw them bringing you around in handcuffs. So in case you needed, you know, like a diversion. Trella says buckle up, brace on the dashboard. She stomps the gas! Screech! Whammo! Kaboom! Then, then, dude, she jumps out, I move over, by the time the cops get there she’s gone! Because, dig, she runs faster than me. Everyone’s running toward the crash, she’s running the other way, the way you went. So she saw the Escalade. What was up with that?”
“Where are you?”
“A café on Van Brunt.”
“Wait outside. We’ll be right there.”
Mary swung back into Red Hook, where we found Linus and Trella standing obediently at the curb. Trella slipped in the front. Linus opened the back door, hesitated, made a face, then slid in next to me. “Dude,” he whispered. “This is the ‘us’?”
Pulling away from the curb, Mary said coldly, “Hello, Linus.”
Linus squirmed. “Hi, Aunt Mary.”
“You guys are related?” Trella asked.
Mary said, “Only in that Chinese way where a best friend tries to help her best friend keep her jerk cousin straight. And tries. And tries. And tries. Linus, how come you made your friend here call me?”
“Hey, cut me some slack! I was with the cops, explaining how the gas pedal got stuck. Old junker car, you know how it is, officer dude. I thought I was pretty slick, slipping Trella your number in the middle of all that. She called me from around the block, told me about the Escalade. I told them it was my mom.”
Mary didn’t answer, just tightened her jaw. After a moment Linus shrugged and turned back to me, eyed me critically. “Dude, you don’t look so good.”
“Thanks. For people who just crashed through a building, you two look great.”
“Not through it.” Trella spoke as though I’d said something crazy. “I just nudged it a little. It was all about the noise. Pounded the horn, squealed the tires. Those huge panes sound killer when they break.”
“I had my hands over my head!” Linus grinned. “Waiting for disaster!”
“Chicken,” Trella said sweetly. “The hard part was finding an empty store. I didn’t want to wreck anybody’s stuff.” She turned to Mary: “Hi. I’m Trella. Thanks for believing me.”
“You told me Kid Screwup back there said to tell me Lydia and Bill were in trouble. Why would I not believe that? But driving like that, risking lives—”
“Whose lives? There was no one around.”
“You and him?”
“But that’s ours. We can do whatever we want.”
“Really? Ask your mom. And interfering with police work. It’s a bad road to be going down, Trella.”
“Hey, Aunt Mary?” Linus spoke up from the back. “How about you send us to reform school later? We’re busy here.”
On the rest of the trip to Flushing I replayed for Trella and Linus what had happened since they dropped me off.
“The cops told me,” Linus said. “About there was a body. And when you ran off—I saw that. I knew you kicked the shit out of that one cop, but two! Dude, that’s awe—” He stopped, glanced at Mary. “Dude, that’s really bad.”
“I know. I don’t recommend it.” I went on, gave them Lu, Ming, and Strawman. I played up the pain, played down the rush, but still I saw the glow in Trella’s eyes.
“I wonder how he knew,” she mused. “To come to Red Hook.”
“Maybe the crazy man called him?” Linus suggested. “Like he called the cops.”
“Why?” I said. “Lu could’ve kept me out of circulation for a long time.”
“Yeah, like forever.”
“Right. Where would the game be then?”
Trella looked over her shoulder. “What about the crazy man? You think he was there?”
“I doubt it. If he were, he’d have known about Lu, and if he did he wouldn’t have missed his chance to stick it to me. I think he called to find out what was going on.”
“What about what he did know? About you escaping?”
“You could get that from a police scanner.”
Linus chewed his lip. “I don’t know, dude. How’d he know when you found the girl? So he could call the cops? I think maybe he was watching. From where he couldn’t follow where you went, but he could see in Fatima’s.”
I thought about the grime I’d rubbed off Fatima’s front window. “Maybe. Listen, Linus, your Verizon guy? Can he find where this call came from, the one I just got? It was from a different phone, but if we’re lucky it still could be Verizon.”
I expected Mary to erupt, to
smack me down for the illegal request. Surprisingly, she said nothing, just kept driving.
Linus, meanwhile, was giving me a look I was coming to know, the one that said he wasn’t sure where he’d failed to make himself clear. “Dude? What’s the difference if it’s Verizon?”
“Well, your guy—”
“Seriously? You think the only place I got someone is at Verizon?”
Linus spent the rest of the ride calling and texting. Trella peered out the window, her gaze moving hungrily over the landscape. Mary drove steadily and spoke to no one.
I didn’t speak, either. Something was nagging at me about the lunatic, what he’d said, the way that robotic voice strung words together. I leaned back, closed my eyes. Goddammit! I ran through both calls, trying to force it out. Nothing. The son of a bitch was a shadow in the darkness.
I sat up and looked around when I felt the car roll to a stop. Gold ginkgo leaves carpeted the yard of a small brick house. Unlike its neighbors the house had a garage; good for it, because the street was all parked up. The driveway, too; a blue Mailbu stood there. Maybe the Wongs were a two-car family.
Mary swung into the driveway and parked square across the sidewalk. She got out, shut her door and caught me looking over at her. “What?” she demanded.
“Aren’t you leaving?”
“Why would I?”
“You said I had until three-thirty.”
“I’m giving you the time. If you think I’m going to drive off and let you run around loose until then you’re insane.”
Linus threw me a commiserating glance.
He led us through the gate, but not to the house: to a side door on the garage. It turned out the Wongs were a one-car family, and the car lived outside. “My office,” Linus announced.
Electronic equipment in infinite variety crammed counters and shelves. Monitors, boxes, wires, and blinking lights, all of them from Mars as far as I knew. Plywood covered the windows, and the concrete floor was hidden by vinyl tile, which, near the door, was hidden by a throw rug, which, until we’d come in, had probably been hidden by the large yellow dog now barking and bounding.
“That’s Woof.” Linus held the door. The dog galloped into the yard and barked at the ginkgo tree. Linus reached into a fridge, offered Cokes. Mary took one, but Trella was grinding beans, filling a Mr. Coffee from a sink in the corner. Linus rolled chairs out to face each other, popped his Coke top and asked, “What now, dude?”
A wave of weariness crashed over me. I sank into a chair, rubbed my face, reached for a cigarette.
“Dude.” Linus shook his head. “Not in here. Sorry.”
“Oh. The equipment, right.”
“Nuh-uh. Trella.”
Over her shoulder, Trella grinned and shrugged. “Windows don’t open,” she said.
“This might help, though.” Linus rummaged through a drawer. Trella walked a glass of water over. I wasn’t sure why until Linus came up with a bottle of Advil. What a team.
I downed pills. No one spoke. They waited—Mary dubious, Trella glittering, Linus all eager readiness, just like Woof—waited, for me to deliver. I wanted that cigarette badly. “Okay.” I rubbed my eyes. “We have a couple of things. Not much, but let’s see how far they take us. One, they’re in a basement.”
“Dude, they are?”
“Lydia said so. ‘Almost completely in the dark.’ ‘Trying not to get really down.’ A basement, but not a cellar.”
“What’s the difference?” Trella leaned back, folded her arms.
“Cellar’s underground, basement’s partly above ground. ‘Not really down.’ And, ‘almost completely in the dark.’ So I’m betting on windows, but dim, maybe onto an areaway. And she said ‘still.’ So he hasn’t moved her.”
“So maybe he won’t! So if my dudes can GPS the phone—”
“Right.”
Linus checked his iPhone, as if there were any possibility he’d missed a message. Nothing.
“All right,” I said. “Lei-lei. If we knew exactly when she died, we’d know when this guy was in Red Hook.”
“Unless he killed her somewhere else,” Trella said.
“Possible but less likely. Two people walking into a building, easier to go unnoticed than a guy carrying something. Also, if she were already dead, to arrange her on the couch like that he’d have to wait for rigor to pass.”
“Why would she go, though?” Linus asked. “Wouldn’t she think maybe something was up? She works Manhattan, but this guy takes her all the way to Red Hook, to some closed bar?”
Mary spoke. “He might have had a gun on her.”
We all turned to her. The beady-eyed ref, getting into the game?
“Nah,” Trella said. “I bet he told her he’d pay double if they could do it in his special place. He probably said he used to own it or something.”
I switched my stare to Trella. “Damn! I wonder if he did? Linus, can you—”
“On it, dude.” Linus swept his chair across the floor, jabbed a button, grabbed a mouse.
Trella pressed a mug of coffee into my hand. Maybe she made great coffee. Or maybe I just thought so, when really I was so battered and desperate I’d have downed a bucket of mud. I drank greedily, waiting.
“ ’K, dudes.” Scrolling down his screen, Linus said, “That building’s owned by some dude, Louis Spano. Owns the lot next door, too. Since, like, 1954.” He whistled. “Sounds kind of ancient to be pulling this shit.”
“Maybe he inherited them when he was born.”
“He’d still be, like, around fifty-six,” Linus said, his point unchanged. “You know him? He hate you?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Can you find him?”
“Dude.” A reprimand.
“And what about the bar itself? Who owned the bar?”
“You don’t think it was old man Spano’s idea to set up a hookah bar?” Linus didn’t wait for my answer. After another few minutes, another Coke for him and more coffee for Trella and me, he said, “Well, big surprise. Old Man Spano rented the place to a woman named Fatima. O’Reilly, though. Fatima O’Reilly. Weird names, I dunno, makes it too easy.” He tapped keys, slid the mouse around. “There she is. Sedona, A-Z. Here’s her work, here’s her cell. If I were you I’d call the landline first. If she’s there you’ll know she’s there.”
Linus’s logic was on the nose. A lot of trained detectives, though, would have called the cell, more likely to be answered. I stole a glance at Mary. She looked reluctantly impressed.
I started to dial the number on the screen but Linus stopped me. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a blister-wrapped cell phone, tore it open, thumbed some buttons, and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“Dude? It’s a phone. Three hundred prepaid minutes. Burn through ’em, throw it away. No using yours anymore except to talk to Mr. Crazy. Me and Trella, too.” He tossed a phone to Trella, who swiped it out of the air one-handed. “ ’Cause, dig. I may not be the only one with a dude at Verizon. Now give me yours. Your real one.” He plugged one end of a three-inch cord into an outlet I didn’t even know my phone had, the other end into a matchbook-size device. “To record him.” He grinned. “How glad are you that you know me?”
I nodded. “Thanks, Linus.”
While Linus went looking for Louis Spano, who didn’t have such a weird name and would therefore take longer to find, I called Sedona, A-Z.
“Fatima’s.” The voice was female; the heavy tone implied I was interrupting. I asked if I’d reached the Fatima O’Reilly who used to own the bar in Red Hook. She blew out an impatient breath. “No, that was the other Fatima O’Reilly. What do you think?”
“Can I ask you a few questions?”
“About the murder? You a reporter?”
“You’ve heard?”
“The New York police called. I don’t know anything. Closed that place a year ago. Psycho dumps a body there, has nothing to do with me.”
When a subject hands you a cover, you go with
it. “I’m doing a story on why gentrification failed in certain neighborhoods. Can you tell me about Fatima’s?”
“Tell you what? For all I know it’s a crackhouse now. Going down the toilet with the rest of New York.”
“Why did it close?”
“Oh, let’s see. Because the customers stopped coming! Red Hook was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. Yeah, right. Loyalty doesn’t mean shit, the next Next Big Thing comes along.”
“But Fatima’s was hot for a while.”
“Damn right we were. We had a velvet rope. Turned people away! Even out there in the ass end of Brooklyn, I got the A-list.” She rattled off names, two or three celebrities and a lot of wannabes. “And we caught on with the Knicks for a while.” She snorted. “You should’ve seen them trying to fold themselves up on the cushions.”
As far as I knew, no Knicks or bold-face names had it in for me. “And the rest of the crowd?”
“Club kids. Supermodels. Trust-fund babies playing bohemian. Until they saw something else shiny, then they all ran off that way. Tapas, slow food, some shit. Serves me right for going out on a limb, pioneering in that nowhere neighborhood. The hell with them, with the bar, with New York. Vibe out here is a lot more mellow. Anything else I can do for you, or can I get back to work?”
I hung up, leaving Fatima to her mellow vibe.
“Anything, dude?”
“Not that I could see. Did you find Spano?”
“Check. He lives in a retirement place in Sarasota.” Pointedly, he added, “He’s eighty-seven.”
I called Louis Spano’s Florida number, talked to an old man with a shaky voice, no living relatives, and a perfect memory.
“Fatima’s?” he quavered. “Lasted longer than I thought. Something like nine years, I’m remembering right. Between you and me, sounded damn boring. Sitting on pillows smoking sissy tobacco with a bunch of bankers. You couldn’t pay me.”
“Me, either. Though when I talked to Fatima, she said her clientele was celebrities.”
He cackled. “That would make it better? Anywho, the paying customers were Gordon Gekkos, believe you me. Any celebrities, I guarantee they were on the arm, to decorate the place. Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in the building? I can let you have it cheap.”
