The Mongol Reply

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  “No.”

  “Geez, you sound angry. Just like that other boy. Are you angry at me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I do to make you angry, Tommy?”

  “You’re bothering me. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry, Tommy. I don’t want to make you angry. I have a problem, though. This little boy is so unhappy. I just don’t know what to do. What should I do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know, when I don’t know what to do, that’s when I need help. I need a hero to help me. Do you know any heroes?”

  “My dad.”

  “Your dad. That’s right. Do you think your dad can help us with this?”

  Tommy shook his head. He looked terrible.

  “Why not Tommy? Heroes help people.”

  “My dad can’t do it. He’s not big enough. The bad man is bigger.”

  “Really.” Reece flicked his eyes at Serena. Her lifted brows said that she had no idea what Tommy was talking about.

  “You know one good thing. No matter how big the bad guys are, there’s always a bigger hero. You just have to know which one to get. Who is the biggest hero you know?”

  “’Credible Hulk.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty big. Is he big enough?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell you what. I know lots of heroes. To get the right one, we need to know how big the bad guy is. Can you draw him?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “Okay, how about if I draw him? Can you help me?”

  Silence is not a no, Reece reminded himself as he went to get his sketchpad and pencils.

  “Okay. First, let’s draw me.” Reece sketched himself, with his thinning hair and beard. “Okay, now your dad. Is your dad bigger than me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Let’s see, he’s got no hair on top and his beard is different from mine. Is that right?” Reece sketched Tom Tully as a slightly larger, more muscular figure, trying to get the proportions right.

  “Now, how about the bad guy? How tall is he?” Reece put his pencil to the paper and moved it as Tommy nodded his head until it was right. He drew an egg for a head. If Tommy was a good judge and not relying entirely on “the feel” of the man, he was a giant, easily six-foot-eight or more. “How big? How wide, Tommy?”

  Again Tommy nodded and Reece adjusted. The man was huge, fully half again as wide as his father. Reece started to draw him with the same wedge-shaped muscularity.

  “No. He’s fat. He’s got a big tummy.”

  Reece doodled another larger egg for the torso.

  “Does he wear a uniform? Or just regular clothes?”

  “Regular clothes. They’re all black. He has sneakers. I saw them.”

  “Black ones?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reece covered the shape in black.

  “How about his head? Does he have hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Light like your mom’s or darker like mine?”

  “Darker than yours.”

  Reece scribbled hair, but Tommy said it was shorter so he re-did it.

  “Does he have a beard?”

  “No. He had black on his face.”

  “Black on his face? Is he a black man? Is he black all over?”

  “No. He has black dots on his face.”

  Reece drew generic lips, nose and eyes, then peppered the face with black dots for heavy stubble.

  “Anything else? Is that him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, does he have a name?”

  “No.”

  “All right. I think I know a hero who’s bigger than that. I’ll call him and tell him we have to stop this bad guy. All I have to know is what the bad man did, so we can stop him.”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  “He didn’t? Why is he a bad guy then?”

  “The other man did it. His friend.”

  “Oh, his friend. What did his friend do?”

  Tommy buried his head in his mom’s lap.

  “You know, moms can be heroes, too. Can you tell your mom what he did?”

  More head shaking.

  “Are you afraid, Tommy?”

  The head bobbed up and down.

  “What are you afraid of, Tommy?”

  Nothing.

  “Did the bad man say he’d do something to you if you told?”

  Nothing.

  Reece went over everything the teacher had reported.

  “Did the bad man hurt an animal?”

  Tommy was burrowing into his mother’s lap.

  “Did he hurt the rabbit?”

  Tommy burst into tears. Reece leaned back in his chair, counting the questions answered against the ones raised. Serena stroked her son’s head and told him the oldest lie of all, that things would be all right.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  When Reece gave Tommy some toys to play with, he was willing to stay by himself in the waiting room. Reece returned to the office and closed the door. He sat down and picked up his notepad.

  Reece wished he’d been able to interview Tommy alone, see if he’d confirm what Hurtado said about Serena. Not this time. Maybe after the home visit he’d try interviewing him again.

  “When you were out, I had an opportunity to speak with Ms. Hurtado. How do you feel about having her in the house?”

  “She’s a lot of help. I’m glad to have it.”

  Reece studied her face. Her eyes were deeply shadowed. Problems sleeping?

  “What does she do to help out?”

  “A little bit of everything. She’s really quite good with the kids.”

  “You weren’t comfortable with her taking care of the kids before. What changed?”

  “That was before. This is now.” She pulled her jacket tight around her and jammed her hands in her pockets.

  “That’s right. This is now. Let me tell you how now looks to me, Mrs. Tully. Maybe you can help me with it. I see a woman who looks pretty bad right now. Your looks have been very important to you. Even after you were thrown out of your house, you came in here made up, accessorized. Not now. You’ve got your kids with you. You’re in your home. Things should be looking up and you look worse. I’m confused.”

  “Maybe it’s just a delayed reaction,” she said, her chin quivering with the effort of that evasion.

  “I don’t think so. Ms. Hurtado says you’re always tired. You have no energy. She’s been helping with the kids. You aren’t taking care of yourself. Sounds like depression to me.”

  “So maybe I’m depressed. I’ve got a right to be depressed, after what I’ve been through.”

  “True enough. However your depression seems to be affecting the children.”

  “That’s not true. You heard what Tommy said. Some bad man hurt a rabbit. Probably one of Tom’s macho asshole friends. If he’s having problems it’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything to scare him.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. What do you think you should do?”

  “About what?”

  “Indeed.” Reece smiled sadly. “Mrs. Tully, have you discussed what’s going on with Dr. Tepper?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your recent depression. Are you discussing this with Dr. Tepper?”

  “I’m not seeing him anymore. We’ve terminated things.”

  “And whose decision was that?”

  “It was mutual. I thought it made me look bad, like I was the crazy person Tom said I was.”

  “And Dr. Tepper agreed with this?”

  “It was my decision. He didn’t have any right to keep me there. It’s not like I was committed.”

  “Mrs. Tully, why didn’t you call me on Monday? After you saw Tommy, after the teacher suggested it to you?”

  “I told you. I thought it was just a reaction to all the changes. I was waiting to see if it passed.”

  Reece rubbed his beard, struggling to stay calm. “I can see not wanting to
rush out and put him in therapy, but why not call me? Just let me know what was going on, see what I thought?”

  “I don’t know. Okay? Is there anything else, or can I go now?”

  “Mrs. Tully, I don’t often do this, but I’m going to make an exception here. I strongly recommend that you get Tommy to a therapist right away. He’s been traumatized and apparently very recently. The sooner efforts are begun to help him deal with it, the easier it’ll be to help him recover. I’ll be glad to give you some names or you can get a referral from Dr. Tepper. I’ll let both attorneys know that this is coming from me and why.”

  “Fine. I’ll call for those names tomorrow. It’s late and Tommy needs his dinner.”

  Serena stood up and left, pulling back the door so hard she barely kept it from hitting the wall. Reece rose and followed her out. In the waiting room, she told Tommy it was time to go home. He left the Legos he was playing with and dutifully took the hand she gave him. Reece watched them from his doorway. When they left the building, he went into the waiting room, knelt down and began to clean up after them. A very angry woman, Serena Tully. Morgan Reece wondered why.

  He went into his office, flipped through his Rolodex and wrote down the names of three child therapists. He’d follow up and make sure the Tullys executed consents for him to talk to the therapist. What was the secret Tommy held? Had someone hurt a rabbit to ensure his silence? He’d run it by Child Protective Services in the morning.

  Reece knew that this was a borderline case. No real disclosure. They’d send out an investigator, probably get no farther than he did. Hopefully a therapist over time would get all of it from Tommy. He didn’t mention his father doing anything to him or anyone doing anything to him at all. Maybe he saw some slasher film and it scared him, or someone kill a rabbit for food.

  What had he said? Reece flipped the chart open and went over his notes from the teacher. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want the rabbit’s foot, and ‘red luck.’” Red luck? Good luck? Bad luck? Reece kept looking. Hurtado said he’d had a bad dream about his father losing his foot and having “red luck.” Reece hated dreams. Royal road to the unconscious. Fat lot of use that was to him. That was the easy half of the trip. If he couldn’t connect it back to reality it was a dead end.

  This case had gone out the window. Reece had been leaning towards primary physical custody with Serena Tully. Right now, foster care was starting to look pretty good. Why had she gone south now? She’d hung in through tougher times.

  Tommy’s acting out all over the place and she’s sleeping in and handing off to the nanny. Reece wondered if this was the craziness her sister described in the transcript or what Tom said she’d been like.

  Why screw this up now? Maybe she didn’t really want the kids? Maybe it was Lou Carlson storming into court for the kids and she just bobbed along in his wake. She seemed pretty vulnerable to the influence of powerful men. That’s what attracted her to Tom. Lou Carlson could be very persuasive. Maybe he needed a cause to go back into court, to “unretire,” without choosing it.

  Reece felt like he’d just run over something in the road. Nothing big. Just a little bump. No swerve, no screech of tires. He began to back up slowly.

  An hour later he hadn’t found a thing. He called out for pizza and started a new pot of coffee. Thirty minutes later, the pizza arrived as promised. Reece sat at his desk, took the entire file apart, got a new notepad and began to examine every page. He went over all the collateral records, the transcripts, the questionnaires, the test results, his interview notes. He ate pizza. He drank coffee.

  Every once in a while he scribbled a note. When he was done, he reassembled the file and closed it. He stacked the pizza box on the file and poured out the rest of the coffee.

  Reece scanned his notes, tore the pages off and began to copy them, rearranging and numbering them as he went along. Reece looked at what he had. The dark, wet shape of what he’d run over earlier in the evening. Late at night, in this light, who could tell? Was it a dog, or just a pile of rags? Only one way to find out. Walk over, squat down, put your hand on it and turn it over.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Don Blake pulled to a halt on Toone Street. He was in Highlandtown, home of the marble steps in East Baltimore. Each block looked like a medieval castle, unbroken stone from end to end, anchored at one corner with a church and by a bakery at the other. One block German, then Slovak, the next Russian, then Ukrainian.

  Retired Detective Emil Radechenko opened the door to Don Blake’s knock. Radechenko was a tall wiry man with a prominent Adam’s apple and a flat top that looked as stiff as quills.

  “Lieutenant Radechenko?”

  “Retired. You Blake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on in.” Radechenko stepped back and let Blake enter the foyer. Blake, seeing the immaculate interior, took an extra second to wipe his shoes on the mat.

  Radechenko pointed to the living room. “You said you had a tape you wanted me to see, that right?”

  “Yeah. Here it is.”

  Radechenko held out his hand and took the tape.

  “TV’s in here. Go ahead, sit down. You want a beer?”

  “Thanks.”

  Radechenko disappeared into the back of the house and returned with two bottles of beer and frosted mugs.

  Blake poured his carefully, watching the head rise like a pompadour. It crested before he had to take a pull and Blake set it on a coaster.

  Radechenko inserted the tape and hit Play.

  “Where’d you shoot this?”

  “In an alley behind ‘The Block.’ It’s the back entrance of a strip club called the Passion Pit. I need to ID two of the guys in the tape. My friends say you knew all the bad guys and never forgot a face.”

  “Well, let’s give it a look-see here. Then we’ll know if I’m as good as your friends say.”

  Radechenko leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, his chin tucked behind his closed fists. Blake sipped at his beer and scanned the room as Radechenko watched the tape. The walls next to the TV were covered with commendations and a mirror. In the mirror, Blake saw a picture of suffering Jesus hung over the velvet sofa.

  Radechenko spoke, “Those the two guys, right there?”

  “Yeah, that’s them. You know ’em?”

  Radechenko went over to the VCR, hit Stop and Rewind.

  “Yeah, I know ’em,” he said. He returned to his seat and took a long draw on his beer.

  “And?” asked Blake, who had not retired, and wanted to get back to D.C. before he did.

  “Let’s start with the big one. That’s Carmine. Carmine used to be even bigger. Had this disease, Pickwickian Syndrome. He used to fall asleep standing up, sitting down. So much weight pressing on his heart and lungs, it cut off the oxygen to his brain. Not that he needed a whole lot. Out like a light. Pretty fucking funny. Sometimes Vinnie ‘The Bat,’ he’d scream and yell, threatening to kill somebody, and he’d point to Carmine, and there’s Carmine snoring away, sounds like he’s fartin’ out his mouth.

  “They did this thing, they staple your stomach, so you can’t eat so much and you lose weight. Worked for a while. Looks like he’s putting it back on, though.”

  “This guy trouble, or just big?”

  “Oh, he’s trouble. A regular juggernaut. He’s inhumanly strong. I’ve seen street bulls break nightsticks on him, three or four at a time. He didn’t even know they were there. We tried to tag him for three killings when I was on the force. All three were hits ordered by ‘The Bat.’ Know how they died? Their heads were twisted around one hundred eighty degrees. Medical examiner said a human being couldn’t do that. Rumor was that there were witnesses, that a lesson was being taught. Guess what? Nobody saw a thing. Lesson learned.

  “Only good thing about Carmine is he’s too stupid to play with himself. Unless Vinnie tells him what to do, he eats, he sleeps, he watches the girls and he shits. That’s it, start to finish.”

  “What about Vinnie? Why�
��s he called ‘The Bat’?”

  “Vinnie ‘The Bat’ Colabucci. Story is one of his girls was gonna go down on him, so she unzips him, pulls out his lumber, takes one look at it and says no way. She says it’s as big as a Louisville Slugger. So he became ‘The Bat.’ Personally, I think he paid her to say that. I used to call him ‘The Pencil.’ Boy did he hate that.” Radechenko chuckled. “Vinnie’s a pretty big player here in town. He’s connected to one of the New York Families.”

  “What’s his action down here?”

  “You name it, Vinnie’s got a piece. Gambling, loan sharking, whores, money laundering, drugs.”

  “He ever do time?”

  “When he was a kid. He went down a couple of times. Nothing major. Since then, he’s been arrested half a dozen times. Never spent a day in jail. Vinnie’s a scumbag but I couldn’t ever prove it. Not to convince twelve of his peers beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “They got a file on him downtown?”

  “Big as this room.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant. You’ve been a big help. I’d like to pay you for your time.”

  “Hell no. You gonna stick something on Vinnie?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Good luck. Being retired doesn’t mean I quit hating Vinnie or Carmine or the rest of them. Just let me know what happens, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  The next morning Don Blake rolled out of Crys Cassidy’s embrace, quietly closed the bathroom door and took a shower. She’d been out all night watching Tiffany Ames. He dressed, put some cream cheese and smoked black drum on a bagel, brought the paper in for her and fixed himself a road mug of coffee.

  Blake went back into the room and looked down at her. He reached out and traced a line with his finger along her elegant swan’s neck. Blake remembered the story about Carmine’s handiwork, shuddered and pulled back. He’d felt so vital and young with her; now he felt old and vulnerable again.

  Crys stirred and curled up into a tuck with one hand under her cheek. Blake kissed her cheek and left for work.

  Sid Bowman was deeply tanned, tall and pot-bellied. He rose when Don came in and gave him a big hug.

  “Nice to see you, Don. How you been?”