Blood and Bone (9 page)

“Excuse me?”

Cummings broke into a genuine laugh. “Angela was here two days ago looking for a clue to put her on her father's trail. Of course, she didn't weave as fanciful a story as you have. Quite creative, really, and you did your research well.”

While Cummings laughed, Hannibal stood up, trying to take it all in. “Angela? The daughter was here? How did she find you?”

“Oh, I imagine the same way you did. She found my name on her birth certificate.”

“Doctor, the laugh here is on you I think,” Hannibal said. “Bobby Newton was married before you knew him, to another woman. It's his son by that marriage I'm trying to help.”

Cummings sobered somewhat. “Young man, if you're looking for Mister Newton for someone else, I'm really sorry for you. Angela has a right to find her family and I wish her the best. But if you've another motive…”

“You don't believe me.” Hannibal made it a simple statement. No problem. He pulled his flip phone and began pushing buttons. “You said you knew Doctor Lippincott. Maybe he can convince you just how serious this is.”

It did not take long. Hannibal exchanged a few words with Lippincott, then handed Cummings the telephone. Then he withdrew while the two physicians talked. It seemed unlikely any Mortimers knew about Jacob's extramarital daughter. Would the old man want to see his unknown granddaughter? And how would Camille react? Did he have the right to introduce her to her family? Or to steer her away? This was not what he was hired for, after all.

“I guess I'll have to believe you,” Cummings said, interrupting Hannibal's introspection. “Sorry I doubted you, son.”

“No problem,” Hannibal said, accepting his phone back. “What can you tell me about Bobby Newton?”

“Not much, I'm afraid,” Cummings said, sitting again. “I can just confirm much of what you already know. He treated his family well. I know he had money, but it probably wasn't really his. He showed me some collector coins once, but it seemed clear he didn't know what he had. Guess that's why he lived in such a slum. He was good to Barbie, but someone
before him had not been. You know about the cigarette burns?”

“Afraid so,” Hannibal said. “I know they disappeared together, but I don't have a handle on when.”

“Well, let's see.” Cummings fished a pipe out of a drawer but never lit it, probably in consideration of future patients. He merely chewed on the stem. “They had a cleaning woman, but she left a couple of weeks after Angela was born. I visited them once a month at the beginning, because Barbie had some problems. So, on my fourth visit, I pulled up and the building had been condemned. Probably should have been when they moved in, but the city is slow.”

“You never heard from any of them again?” Hannibal asked.

“Sorry. They all just disappeared. Left owing me for a visit, too. Didn't think I'd ever see any of them again until Angela walked in here couple days ago.”

“Guess the trail ends at that apartment,” Hannibal said, standing. “Thanks for your time anyway, Doctor.”

Cummings followed Hannibal to his outer office, then went to his reception desk. Two very pregnant women sat in plastic chairs, cradling impatient expressions. Hannibal had the door open when Cummings called to him.

“You know, if Angela will talk to you, you might not need to find her father.” Hannibal turned, his eyebrows raised. “If all you say is true, she's as likely to be an HLA match as Bobby is.”

At first, Sarge thought Jewel was having a heart attack. Her body trembled uncontrollably, her eyes
locked straight ahead, and her mouth hung open but no sound came out. He followed her gaze out the front window and realized she was paralyzed with fear. Three black men climbed out of the Coupe deVille parked across the street. Two looked like professional football players in cheap casual clothes. The smallest man, the one with the scar over his left eye wore a leather jacket and handmade Italian loafers, and rolled a toothpick in his mouth. Not hard to guess who was who.

“Get in the kitchen, girl,” Sarge said, “and push that button I showed you. I'll deal with this.”

After three loud thumps on the outer door Sarge opened it. Floyd stood in the center of the stoop, flanked by his two lieutenants. Sarge smelled alcohol and too much cologne.

“Can I help you?” he asked, holding the door half open, his right hand hidden behind it.

“Hannibal Jones,” Floyd said.

“I take it you're Floyd,” Sarge said, swinging the door an inch wider. “This must be Joey and Lawrence, or vice versa. Sorry, fellows, Hannibal's not here right now, but whatever you're looking for, I figure I can handle it.”

Floyd's expression turned to a scowl, and his followers rolled their shoulders trying to look menacing. Sarge kept his face calm and let his bat slide in his hand until he gripped it almost halfway up. He felt the tension, like when a drunk is about to take his problems out on the bartender.

“You got something in there belongs to me,” Floyd said in movie gangster style.

“You need to read the papers,” Sarge said, addressing Floyd and ignoring his backup men. “They abolished slavery in this country in eighteen sixty-
three.” Then he turned to the man on the right. “Hannibal do that to your nose? That's nasty, man.”

Joey kicked the door open and stepped in with one smooth motion. Only the bouncer's well developed sixth sense for sucker punches got Sarge back out of the way of the swinging door. Joey was a bit bigger than Sarge, but that only counts in the ring. Sarge brought his bat in and down at an angle. Not a hard blow, but Joey's knee went out and he bellowed as he fell. Lawrence dove in behind him, but Sarge drove the head of his bat forward into his midsection, drawing a loud grunt. Sarge had time to see that Lawrence's face was already twisted in pain just before he smashed a fist across the bodyguard's jaw.

“That's enough,” Floyd shouted, stepping inside. His gun was already in his hand. Sarge dropped back onto the center staircase. He noticed how different this one was from the other two. Joey and Lawrence were tough, even nasty, but this one was mean. It showed in his eyes as he waved his pistol in Sarge's face. He would not like using a gun because it was not personal enough, not cruel enough.

“Now,” Floyd said, as if he had to get Sarge's attention, “Now you get that narrow-assed bitch out here before I blow your fucking face off. The bitch belongs to me.”

“Nuh-uh.” A new voice floated down the stairs and Floyd looked up in surprise. Sarge knew what he would see. A tall, white guy with thinning, short cropped hair, an angular face, and a Remington pump scatter-gun sitting on the top step.

“Quaker up there, he won't much mind splattering you all over the hall here,” Sarge said, getting slowly to his feet. “Me, I hate to have to clean up a mess like
that. So why don't you put that pea shooter away and take your friends and get the hell out of here?”

Hatred flared from Floyd's eyes. “You a dead man,” he told Sarge.

“We can end this now,” Quaker said, his lanky form bouncing down the stairs in his jerky gait. “You're a trespasser. I could blow all three of you away.”

“That would be murder.”

Quaker reached the bottom step and pushed the muzzle of his shotgun to within five inches of Floyd's face. “Sucks, don't it?”

Sarge pulled the door wide. “Go, man, before Quaker gets too nervous.” Quaker gave a maniacal smile and Floyd signaled his bodyguards. The three backed out the door. Sarge and Quaker watched closely until their car pulled away.

“You know,” Sarge said, “When Virgil wanted to put that intercom in between the apartments I thought he was nuts. Not now.”

“Yeah,” Quaker said, closing the door, “Neat, ain't it?”

Hannibal watched a group of boys playing half a block away as the limousine pulled to the curb. Ray was not happy about returning to Edmundson Village, and Hannibal knew part of his feelings came from concern for his limo. Ray's limousine service and taxi company was new, and like any young business, its profit margin was razor thin. Hannibal shared his concern, since he helped finance the business.

But Hannibal felt he knew those young men playing cops and robbers down the street. They had no
reason to attack this car, or any other foreign intruder, as long as it did nothing to disturb them.

“Well, here we are again,” Ray said, flicking his cigarette out the window. “The place has been condemned for almost seventeen years. Nobody's been here since that long, including Bobby, or Jake, or whatever he called himself. Everybody says he just disappeared.”

Hannibal popped his door open. “I told you, nobody vanishes without a trace. You never know what might give you a clue where somebody is. A matchbook, piece of letterhead paper, even an envelope with a return address. Odds are nobody's cleaned up in there.”

Hannibal handed Ray one of the long handled flashlights he picked up on their way and headed for the house. Ornate sandstone banisters climbed up either side of the wide steps leading into Jacob Mortimer's old apartment building. Hannibal thought the building must have been beautiful when it was new, the kind of classy brownstone home that upper class genteel urbanites lived in half a century ago. Long before some enterprising soul figured out there was money to be made by housing a dozen families in what was once a single family dwelling.

The door was nailed shut, but one hard yank wrenched it open. Nails squealed as they pulled loose, and the smell of the tomb belched out at them. Ray stared into the shadows dubiously.

“You know, Chico, what Doctor Cummings said about Jake having another daughter that could make this whole thing pointless.”

“Maybe,” Hannibal said stepping into the apartment house. “But I don't trust that kind of coincidence. The missing heir routine is one of the oldest and most
popular scams, because families in search of long lost relatives want to believe. They don't question things closely.”

“But Jacob Mortimer was cut out of his father's will,” Ray said, while looking through the kitchen.

“He was,” Hannibal said, sweeping bits of paper and dirt from under a ragged couch, “but do you really think a previously unknown granddaughter would be?”

Hannibal and Ray looked under every piece of worn furniture, and opened every drawer and cabinet. They searched the crumbling wallpaper for written notes. Hannibal looked inside the toilet tank and the medicine cabinet. With Ray's help, he dragged the moldy bedroom rug aside.

“Look at that stain,” Ray said, shining his light on a shapeless blotch on the linoleum. “It could be blood, eh?”

“Sure,” Hannibal said, “or Kool-aid. I don't think there's anything here, Pizo. I'm going to check downstairs.”

“Downstairs? What the hell for?”

“Because,” Hannibal said on his way, “people hide things in the cellar.”

Narrow, street level windows actually made the cellar brighter than the rooms upstairs with their boarded up windows. The sound of scurrying rats made Hannibal move slowly. They would not attack, he knew, but he would hate to surprise one. The space had cement walls and a dirt floor, with an ancient boiler in one corner which was converted from coal to oil in some distant past. Stacks of boxes occupied him for a few minutes, until he realized he was alone.

“Ray?”

“Right here, Hannibal. Top of the stairs.”

Hannibal smiled and continued his search. The boxes in the far corner turned out to be empty. The air was so still he could smell cardboard rotting. When he moved the last box he saw the dirt was not as smooth as elsewhere in the cellar. Something had been buried here. Irrational hope swelled his heart. If he left in a great hurry, Bobby Newton might have left something of real value here, planning to return later.

“Ray, I think I got something here.”

Something was sticking up out of the ground less than a foot from a partially buried cinderblock. He dropped to his knees to examine his discovery before touching it. It was a straight piece of metal, only two inches showing above the ground. A pipe? No. The handle of a knife. Actually, the tang, with the wooden handle rotted away.