Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) (22 page)

Mallory was offering him another present, something bigger than a bag of peanuts.

—

“
WHAT
’
S IT FEEL LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE
?” Iggy stabbed one of the grilled hotdogs with a fork. It was like that. But, to answer the boy, he said, “You get used to it. Just a job.” He slid the cooked meat from his fork to a bun and laid it on a plate. “There you go. Dig in, kid.”

The boy wanted all the details of doing murder. He was soaking up every word—just like school.

“I keep it simple. No noise, no witnesses, nothin’ the cops can track back to me.”

Iggy saw no need to mention that he had been caught his first time out. An insurance-company investigator had found the neighborhood bar where that first deal was done, where the money had changed hands. Then he had followed the breadcrumb trail out of that place and down the street to the apartment Iggy had shared with his mother. Gail Rawly had pushed his business card under Ma’s door and, later that same day, over a few rounds of beer, Iggy had learned a lot from that insurance man.

“Every job’s got rules, I guess. I never hire out to nobody I know.” Digging up business was Gail’s job. But the big rule? Never
kill
anybody he knew. Well, that one was shot to hell. And so was another one:
Don’t talk to the meat.

Iggy rarely talked to anybody. For these past five years since the girl went away, his longest conversation had been with the old man who owned the garden shop down the road, but they only talked
roses. He sure as hell never thought of socializing with Gail, that smug asshole, who never got his hands dirty, who fancied himself a damn businessman.

After sitting down to his hotdog and beer, and with his mouth full of meat, he gave the little boy more pointers on contract killing. “Oh, yeah, there’s the surprise blitz attack.” That one was a staple of the trade. On the subject of the murder kit, he said, “You don’t wanna get too fancy. For most of it, you buy cheap, untraceable stuff.” Iggy was a Walmart shopper.

When the boy was one bite into his second helping of hotdogs, he asked, “So everybody has the same rules?”

“No idea what the rest of ’em do.” He had never even met another one of his kind. Ah, kids and their cop shows. “It’s not like we all get together and exchange secret handshakes. No exposure. That’s the key thing.”

But had he somehow given everything away to Angie? Did she know how he made his living? The girl had never asked. That was the upside of hookers—no nosy questions. Even so, after coming home to find that the few belongings she kept here were gone, he had spent many a night camped in the woods, watching for cops, wondering if his house was safe—and what
had
she known?

Why had the girl gone away?

Tonight, he would get answers from Mrs. Quill. He was owed an explanation to jibe with what Angie had done on the street that day, the last day of her life.

The kid raised his hand—just like school. He had another question about murder.

 
12

The detective pulled out a chair at the heavy oak table, and he sat down with his back to the wall of a saloon that he called home, though his apartment was upstairs. Riker would not call himself an alcoholic, nothing that grand. He owned up to the lesser title of Garden Variety Drunk, and he had this in common with his former snitch, Chester Marsh. Short on cash these days, Marsh would shop a baby for body parts just to buy more booze. Most drunks would stop short of that, but Riker held a lower opinion of lawyers.

The bartender, a retired cop, stood behind the long plank of mahogany that spanned one side of the room. Off-duty police drank here, and civilians were made to feel unwelcome—with one exception tonight. A former government attorney sat at Riker’s table.

Marsh’s silk suit was showing its age, and it no longer fit him, nor did his cleanest dirty shirt. “So what’s it been? Fourteen years?”

“Give or take,” said Riker. “I hear you landed a job with the SEC.”

“Yeah, but I quit a while back.”

You weasel, they fired your ass
 . . .
but let’s pretend.

Riker set a paper bag on the table, and he lowered the brown wrapping an inch at a time, a striptease for a bottle of single-malt whiskey
beyond the purse of a pensioner who lived in one-room squalor. Marsh smelled like he had gone days without a bath, though he had shaved for this sit-down, and there was evidence of the shakes in every nick of the razor. The disbarred lawyer stared at the bottle just beyond his reach, and his eyes had the shine of true love.

The detective pulled the brown bag back up around the capped whiskey and held it hostage in both hands. If called upon in court to swear to a snitch’s sobriety, the bartender could easily testify that this cockroach had not been served liquor in the presence of police, nor had he been intoxicated when he entered the bar. Though Marsh had tremors in his hands, there had been no weave to his walk.

“I had nothing to do with Andrew Polk’s case. No idea why that guy’s not in jail,” said the thief who had all but pushed the elderly Nora Peety in front of a subway train. “I never saw any paperwork for a settlement.”

“Fine. . . . You got nothin’ for me.” Riker rose from his chair, cradling the bagged bottle in one arm.

“Hang
on,”
said Marsh. “I do remember the buzz around the office . . . gossip, mostly.”

Riker settled down in his chair and set the bottle on the table. “Yeah?”

“Maybe I handled some paperwork—busywork, stuff like that. But it never went to court. No corroboration. Polk’s victims never had a bad word to say about him.”

“But the feds had something on him,” said Riker. “What was it?”

“Hey.” Marsh, spread his hands to say,
How should I know?
“I’m only guessing here, okay? Let’s say Polk copped to a breach of ethics. A pansy charge, but at least they get to pull his license and knock him off Wall Street. From Polk’s point of view—that beats a trial, even one the SEC can’t win. He’d figure that was too messy, too public. It was election time. But I’d bet my pension Polk strung them along—wouldn’t
sign till after he took office. Then maybe our new mayor gets amnesia. Settlement? What settlement? He might need that broker’s license if he can’t cut it in politics. But now? Polk’s going after a second term. He
has
to sign. So I guess he surrendered his license.”

Mallory was right. This man had read some early form of that settlement. And the recent signature date explained why the SEC document was walked out of the mansion in the pocket of the mayor’s aide—one hour before the Crime Scene Unit came knocking on the door. Dicey timing, but all high rollers loved high risk. They
lived
for it.

“So,” said Chester Marsh, “you can bet Polk’s settlement was loaded with a nondisclosure clause. No formal court filing, nothing to mess up the next election.”

The ex-lawyer reached for the bottle.

Riker held it back. “We need a list of Polk’s victims. Pare it down to the ones with open wounds. Who hates the mayor most?”

The lawyer pulled back his hand, as if Riker had burned him—and he
had.

“Oh,
right.
Tell me you don’t have Polk’s client list in your pocket. I’m not buying it, Riker. I
know
what you’re doing. You need details on that scam. The big losers on the list, they still won’t rat him out, right? And the SEC won’t give you squat.”

Close enough, though all Riker needed was confirmation of a suspect list that his partner already had. And to pass the smell test with a judge, only a federal witness would do. The list of scammed investors had to come from a source who was not a cop—and sure as hell
not
Mallory.

Marsh folded his arms against the detective. “So you have to milk dirt from an insider. Like
me.
Like I’m gonna break my severance agreement, lose my pension ’cause I love you so much? How stupid do you—”

“So Polk only burned his own clients—not all of ’em, just the big losers on one stock swindle. That’s my victim list?” Oh, damn right. He had nailed this little bastard on that score. He could see it in that sudden
oh-shit
expression on the ex-lawyer’s face.

And—
bonus
—Chester Marsh felt obliged to reiterate this aloud, saying,
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
accompanied by table pounding. He was
so
loud that heads were turning all around the room.

“So that’s a
yes,”
said Riker. The mayor’s former clients were on the public record, and now their likely implication in murder was also on record. He pushed the bottle toward Marsh. “Enjoy.”

Payment for a snitch.

No need to further wreck the cockroach’s night by disclosing the fact that the detective was wired for sound. Riker had what he came for, a documented, pared-down list of suspects with cause to be insanely get-even angry with Andrew Polk. He also had a witness on a sound track that would back up any warrants they might need for one of those angry people. And with the first warrant served, Chester Marsh’s government pension was good as gone.

Payback for an old lady who took the A Train.

—

“
THE FIRST STAR
.” Iggy Conroy leaned back in his patio chair. “And it ain’t even half dark yet.”

“First mosquito.” The boy smacked his arm, but not quick enough. He must be tired. He was flat out of questions to keep a conversation going. The kid’s fingers tapped the arms of the chair, and he rocked himself like a cradled baby, not liking the quiet.

“Some things about the city I don’t miss,” said Iggy. And the boy stopped rocking. “More stars out here in the sticks. They look like weird little matches floatin’ up there. Flame but no heat. Too bad you can’t see ’em.” He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift until the
rocking started up again on the other side of the table. The kid
needed
noise, and so Iggy said, “Nothin’s
gotta
look like somethin’. I know it’s no good askin.’ If you can’t tell dark from light, then maybe you’re walkin’ around in white soup. But
somebody
should’ve figured this out by now.”

“Someone did,” said the boy, “someone who could see. Try this on. When you close your eyes—”

“Yeah, yeah. I see black.”

“No, I
told
you. You don’t
see
anything—not with your eyes. They only take in what the brain needs to make up a picture inside your head. With your eyes shut, the brain’s got nothing to work with. It has no idea what’s going on out there. So when you close your eyes? When you
think
you see black? That’s the brain lying to you. It’s telling you the story about what life looks like when the lights go out. It’s a trick. But
your
brain knows what black looks like. Mine doesn’t. It can’t fool me that way.”

“So how the hell would you—”

“Just close your left eye. . . . You don’t see black with that one, do you? No, your brain doesn’t need to make up a story for that eye. A stream of real data’s coming from the one that’s still wide open. . . . It’s the
closed
eye that shows you what nothingness looks like.”

With one eye open, Iggy saw everything, even a shadow on the bridge of his nose, but no lights-out blackness in the eye that was shut. He saw
nothing
from that one. The closed eye might as well not be there. “I get it.”

Now he knew what death looked like, too. Nothing. And so he knew where Angie was and where the boy was going.

—

FLORAL OFFERINGS
for the dead nun were enough to fill a cathedral, too many for a neighborhood church like St. Jude’s. The inspired
sexton and his helpers had wound the overflow into garlands that hung from the walls in natural wonders to rival the stained glass.

It was rare for this house of worship to be visited in great numbers at this time of year. Summer was a fallow season for Father Brenner’s trade.

Tonight, there was one more wonder to behold. Should he live to be a hundred, he would never see this spectacle again. His chief suspect in the working of miracles was Cardinal Rice’s emissary, Father DuPont, who had declined a place in the first pew to sit in the last.

Father Brenner turned his eyes toward the raised tier of the altar, so like a stage, where church history was in the making—all for the love of a woman.

By unprecedented permission granted by the cardinal himself, a prioress and ten cloistered nuns stood there, wearing the long black robes and veils of their order. They had journeyed many a mile. No longer sheltered by far-off monastery walls, they bravely stood exposed to a public gathering. In a further breach of centuries-old tradition, they formed a choir and sang Sister Michael to her rest. Their songs were old, but their voices were new to this world. Imperfect performers, they cried as they sang, creating wavers in notes here and there that broke heart after heart in row upon row.

—

DETECTIVES WORE WHITE CARNATIONS
in their lapels and played the parts of ushers strolling to the organ music. Moving down the rows of pews, they searched faces for one to match a rough drawing, and they also scanned all the summer-bare skin for identifying marks.

Beyond tall wooden doors, left open to the night, a crowd filled the church steps, the sidewalk and the street, and everywhere out there were candles and cigarette lighters and matches held high. Amid that gathering of standing mourners, one upraised arm was covered in
tattoos of snakes, hearts, daggers—and a twining vine of red roses to match every cop’s camera-phone image of a dead woman’s naked thighs. This skinny arm was grabbed by the large hand of a uniformed officer, who sang out to nearby detectives, “I
got
him!”

—

IGGY WATCHED
the TV news coverage of the church interior, and he described it to the child beside him on the living-room sofa. “There’s a shitload of flowers. And the
people—
big turnout, kid. Angie would’ve loved it.”