Gun Machine (19 page)

TALLOW DROVE
his unit out of Ericsson Place, bone weary, abstractly disappointed, and feeling a lot less anchored than he’d let on to the lieutenant. He had no evidence. Just a theory that got wider and more sprawling and ungainly and borderline insane as the days went on. He tried to focus on one thing—other than his driving—and settled on the moments in which he thought he met the man who lived in apartment 3A. Tallow tried to summon up every detail of his experience of the man. The color of his hair and beard. His scent. His body language. The way he took the cigarette from Tallow. The way he pinched off the filter and put the filter in his pocket.

“The bastard,” Tallow muttered to himself. It may have just been the act of a man who disliked a filter on his tobacco. But, Tallow thought, wouldn’t it have been nice to go back and pick that filter up, with a nice clean print on the treated paper that covered it.

Tallow swerved, mounted the sidewalk with one wheel, stamped on the brake, and very narrowly avoided causing a pile-up. He didn’t even hear the chorus of car horns Dopplering past him.

The man pulled off the filter. But he smoked the damn cigarette. He had to have left a butt. As careful as he might have been with the filter, he couldn’t have just pinched off the burning end and pocketed the cigarette butt too. Could he? No. He didn’t smell strongly. That would have stank, in his pocket, and Tallow didn’t make him as the kind of man who’d want you to smell him coming. He had to have crushed out the butt. Or tossed it and hoped it’d burn out.

It was a wild and stupid hope.

Tallow rejoined the traffic and pushed hard for Pearl Street.

He parked across the street from the tenement. He pulled gloves, a ziplock bag, and a tweezers from the glove compartment. He stood where he had stood when he met the man. He looked around, and thought, furiously. He’d walked away before the man had finished his smoke. He shifted his feet into the position he believed the man had occupied. Put his hand in his jacket pocket, to simulate keeping the filter. The tweezers acted as his cigarette. He pushed imaginary smoke up from the burning end, as the man had.

He pretended he was finishing the smoke. The cigarette was burning down toward his fingers. That day, Tallow had already crushed his out. Tallow looked in the gutter. There were three butts scattered there among a few dead leaves, a little crushed glass, a penny, and a small potato chip bag, each butt crumpled and twisted by multiple encounters with things much bigger than itself. They all had their filters on. Tallow crouched and looked. One of them was the brand he had been smoking.

Tallow looked around, scanning for places he might jam a cigarette butt into without burning his fingers.

No.

He crouched to the gutter again. Picked up the potato chip bag.

Tallow looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and quelled the shaking in his fingers.

Over sickeningly slow seconds, disappointment like a snake in his gut waiting to bite through his heart, he untwisted and peeled open the bag. Someone had taken it out of the gutter, folded it, tied it into a knot, stamped on it to make it look more naturally smashed, and tossed it back on the road to be ignored, run over, and swept up.

There was a cigarette butt in the middle of the knot.

Tallow laughed.

He extracted the butt, dropped it into the ziplock, and sealed it. Tallow returned to the car with it and the potato chip bag, which he awkwardly inserted into another ziplock when he got inside.

All I want,
Tallow said to him,
is proof that you’re not invisible too
.

Moving through the main lobby of One Police Plaza, Tallow, still in a mode of hyperfocused noticing, picked up bad air. People were looking at him for the first time since the case had begun bringing him to the place. Tallow picked up his pace, laptop bag in hand, and walked to the farthest elevator he could find.

He moved through CSU in long strides. Bat was mantled over the bench in his and Scarly’s cave of crap and didn’t even look up as he began speaking.

“Bae Ga,” Bat said. “Twenty-four years old. Originally from Incheon, South Korea. Killed in the Kitchen eighteen months ago. Mathematician. The weapon used was a Daewoo DP-51. Which is a South Korean handgun.”

Tallow laid his bag on the bench with care. “A mathematician. Was he studying here?”

“He was working here. Some kind of financial job, for a company called Stratagilex. Mutual funds or something. I don’t have a good grasp on financial stuff.”

“Get me a name at that company. A boss. And a phone number. Where’s Scarly?”

“Behind you.”

“Jesus. Okay. I have something for you. Bat, you’re just sitting there.”

“It doesn’t fit the pattern, John. It’s a wild result. He faked a mugging on some Korean math whiz and shot him with a matched weapon, but the victim has nothing to do with anything else we’ve seen.”

“I don’t agree,” said Tallow, opening the bag. “Scarly, look at this.”

“What the hell have you got there?”

“I told you I thought I met our guy. I gave him a cigarette. He tore the filter off and put it in his pocket. He smoked the cigarette. He can’t have pocketed the butt, because it’d stink, and he’s careful about that. So he threw the butt into a potato chip bag being blown down the street, because who’s going to be crazy enough to come back and check all the litter for a single cigarette butt that’d eventually be blown far from the site anyway?”

Scarly gave him a hard stare. “Who’d be crazy enough to think we could get anything off a cigarette butt that was probably hot when he threw it into the bag and therefore melted plastic onto it?”

“Me. Look. He left a long butt. He had to, right? There was no filter. And he wasn’t enjoying it so much anyway.”

Scarly turned her stare on the evidence. “Shit. We have two shots. Bat, get people the fuck out of the clean room and make sure the plasticware’s been UV’d.”

Bat was at the laptop, scribbling on the back of an old, unstuck coffee sleeve. He passed the thin cardboard to Tallow, walking around. “What have we got?”

Scarly was pulling latex gloves out of a pants pocket. “We’ve got cigarette paper to smoke for prints, and I want to trim the mouth end and try the fast EA1 proteinase method on it.”

“The fast one?” Bat said. Tallow watched them click into professional mode.

“Yeah. I don’t think we’ve got time for anything else.”

“The trim’s going to be problematic. We need a centimeter square of paper for the fast one, and that’s going to cut into print space.”

“No, we cut the end all the way around, gives us a total of a centimeter. We’ll reserve the tobacco in case we somehow get more time.”

“Slow up,” Tallow said. “More time? Fast method?”

Scarly sighed. “My boss has been told by her boss that too many resources are being eaten up by the case. We’re going to get pulled off this, sooner rather than later.”

“And who do I get instead?”

“Nobody, John. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’re not living in the same world we were two days ago. All our sins are forgiven, and the case is going to be sunk just as soon as some asshole finds a big enough anchor to hang on it. Possibly one just your size.”

Tallow leaned against the bench.

Scarly’s face hardened. “So. Yeah. We’re waiting for the word. But in the meantime, we are still doing this. So we’re going to use the fast method, and clear people the fuck out of the clean room, and get as much done as we can as soon as we can. All right?”

“All right. Go.”

“I
was
.”

Bat spread his wings and hustled her out of the room. “The man’s just trying to do his job, Scarly. Don’t snap at him.”

“I
wasn’t
.”

“You were.”

“It’s not my fault, I’m fucking
autistic
—”

Tallow read off the information Bat gave him and dialed the number. Ninety seconds of fairly sharp conversation with secretarial interceptors brought him the voice of an executive named Benson.

“Ms. Benson, thank you for speaking to me. Let me make this very fast: I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation, and it just now looked like it had ties to the death of your former employee Bae Ga. The question is simple. I need to know what the nature of his employment was.”

“Bae? Bae was so brilliant. Bae wrote algorithms for us.” She had, Tallow thought, a voice like Lauren Bacall’s, all cigarettes and brandy, enough age to know the way of the world and enough youth to still be capable of disappointment in it. “He was the new generation. He spoke excellent English—he came from a port city, you know, very international in outlook—and he was so brilliant, so gifted. And such a relief to work with. Before him, we had to use Russian physicists for algo work. Lunatics, for the most part. Bae was going to bring us to the next level.”

“Are you talking about algorithmic trading?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone ever try to hire him away?”

“Everybody did.” She laughed. “Goldman Sachs, Vivicy, Blackrock, you name it. But he wouldn’t go. He was young enough to believe in loyalty, bless him.”

“You liked him.”

That laugh again. “I looked after him. I sometimes wondered what might have happened if I hadn’t opened the closet door for him, as it were. He was going to a party in one of those awful new buildings in Clinton that night, you know, to meet his new boyfriend. He was a lovely young man too, an architecture student. I encouraged Bae to get out of his wizard’s cave from time to time. I said, You found a lovely young man who wants to show off his brilliant boyfriend at parties, so go, go.”

She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was lower and harder. “And then. Shot like a dog.”

“One last thing. And this is just curiosity, but I’d like an answer. How did the loss of Mr. Ga affect your business?”

Ms. Benson laughed. “Andy Machen would be polishing my shoes if I still had Bae today, Detective. He was, and is, irreplaceable. You only luck into one mind like that in a generation.”

“Thank you for your time, Ms. Benson.”

“If you find anything—”

“If anything new comes up, I will of course call you.”

“Thank you. The business doesn’t matter, you see. We soldier on, you know. But I miss him. And he didn’t deserve what happened to him, not even a little bit.”

“Thank you, Ms. Benson.”

Tallow hung up and put the piece of cardboard into his bag before heading for the elevators and down to the map of a murderer’s room in the basement.

Assistant chief Allen Turkel was standing in the emulation.

Tallow ensured that he didn’t break step on seeing the man. “Sir,” he said with a nod, and proceeded to the table outside the emulation.

“Detective John Tallow. This is an impressive piece of work.”

“Thank you, sir. How can I help you?”

“I’m really not sure yet, Detective. I just wanted to see what you’d done down here, with this space you stole from my building.”

Turkel was smiling, creating the suggestion that he was just ribbing Tallow. Tallow was still geared up. He saw the wear on Turkel’s wedding ring. He was a man who took it off a lot. Not just to shower. It got slipped off and into pockets a lot. Turkel regularly paid someone quite a slice of money to cut his hair, and his teeth were fixed in preparation for a job in which he was in front of cameras and audiences often. His shoes were thrown from supple leather with a cultivated grain, a silver chain linked across the throat of each.

“Borrowed, sir. And I couldn’t live in the actual crime scene. It would’ve slowed down retrieval of the evidence even more.”

“Well, that’s evidence of you at least giving half a shit about department resources, Detective. Tell me: Do you ever think about promotion?”

Tallow just looked at the man.

“It’s just a question, Detective. Did you plan on staying a detective all your life?”

“In all honesty, sir, I don’t plan for a lot. But if you’re asking: No, I don’t really think about promotion.”

“I know cops like you,” said Turkel, lifting his chin and smiling with the warmth of a man who thinks he knows where the power in a room is. “I always thought there were three kinds of cops. Police like you, who think they’re born to the job they’ve got, and they’ll do it until it kills them or they walk away from it. And cops like your lieutenant, who want to be promoted because promotion is there, and they figure getting promoted is the job. Police like that, I have no real use for. Oh, your lieutenant’s a good manager, and I’ll make good use of her, but strictly speaking, she’s not here to be a good police officer. She’s here to be a good candidate for promotion.”

Turkel paused, and Tallow accepted the cue with false graciousness. “And the third kind? Sir?”

“The third kind are police like me. Police who need to be promoted because they see what the real job is. A street cop sometimes finds it hard to see it this way, Detective, but police like me are the real idealists in this job. We’re the people who actually have a vision of how the department can adapt and change and serve the city better. That’s why I wanted promotion. Want it still. Because I want to change and improve your life.”

“My life.”

“The lives of the police under my command. Which is you. But I also have a responsibility to the people of this city. They are, after all, paying us, in a roundabout way. And one day they may be paying us directly. So I have to manage resources. Like this one. What purpose is it serving?”

“It’s what the case is all about, sir,” Tallow said.

“I thought it was about a lot of unsolved homicides you reopened.”

“You really want to talk about this, sir? I mean, really talk about it?”

Turkel put a level gaze on Tallow. “Yes,” he said, after a moment.

“All right, then. It’s about the unsolved homicides, of course it is. To us. But to him, it’s about this room. The killings were the means to this end.”

“I don’t understand,” Turkel said. “The killings were the end. He just had to store the weapons afterward, so they weren’t found.”