Inherit the Dead (14 page)

“Right. Because when I think of Henry Watson, that’s what I think of—empathy for the hard-lived and downtrodden. You have any contact with this Hunter College thing I’m hearing about?”

Watson shook his head and sighed. In context, he was answering in the affirmative. “Bad guy’s got diplomatic immunity. He claims she OD’d, but we say he dosed her. Turns out it doesn’t matter, because his country won’t waive. That’s what I was talking to the grunt about. Poor girl’s parents are getting hounded by the media. Figured this convoy to babysit the protestors could spare one car to keep watch at the family’s front door.”

“It’s not easy working those cases,” Perry said. “Especially now that you’ve got a daughter.”

“Tell me about it. I was holding Anna’s little hand last night and found myself wanting to microchip her. One tiny GPS tracker under her soft, pale skin, and maybe I’d never have to worry about her again.”

There was a time when Perry had been the young married father, and Watson had been out every night collecting numbers scrawled on matchbooks. Now the tables had turned. Except Perry’s form of bachelordom wasn’t holding up its end of the swap.

Watson fell hard into the chair at his desk. “Jesus. I’ve turned into frickin’ Jabba the Hutt.”

Perry noticed for the first time that Watson had added a good fifteen pounds to his already large frame. “Having kids will do that to you. I remember with Nicky.”

Watson waved off the comment, and Perry knew his friend was saving him from the funk that would come from talking about the old days with the family. “Listen to us talking about weight gain and babies and health regimens. Like a couple hausfraus on
Dr. Phil
. Not what you came here for.”

He gestured for Perry to take a seat in the wooden chair next to his desk and removed a file folder from the top drawer. “I ran all the names you gave me. In no particular order, we’ve got Randall, aka Randy, Hyde.”

Perry took the printout Watson handed him.

“We’ve got juvie pops for a residential daytime burg and starting a brawl at a multiplex. Turns out when you’re fifteen, you’re young enough to take a girl to see a cartoon movie about talking cars, but old enough to bean the head of a kid three rows in front of you with a popcorn bucket for talking smack about said girl. Seven teenage boys kicking the crap out of each other by the time it was over.”

“Who said chivalry was dead?” Perry scanned the rap sheet. “Nothing as a grown-up?”

“Nada. Next on your list are Julia Drusilla and Norman
Lawkey
or
Lowkey
.”

“Loki,” Perry said, spelling it: “L-o-k-i.”

“Whatever. I found him.” Another two printouts. “I swear, I
thought you made up these names to screw with me until I got hits on them. No criminal history, but they were in the system as complainants.”

Perry was still scanning the documents. “Anything recent?”

“Norman Loki had a Rolex swiped last summer, a break-in. Description of the suspect was white male, twentyish. Never turned up.”

“What about Julia Drusilla? You said she also turns up as a complainant?”

“Nothing quite as exciting as Mr. Loki’s break-in, I’m afraid. Her parents died in a car accident a decade ago, and the reconstruction investigators for the New York State Police questioned her for background. Nothing came of it, though.”

“Why an investigation?” Perry asked. “Was the accident considered suspicious?”

Watson shrugged. “Seven o’clock at night. Dad driving, mom in the passenger seat. Car swerved into the wrong side of the road on I-684. T-boned into an eighteen-wheeler. No drugs or alcohol in either tox screen.”

“So why’d they talk to Julia Drusilla?” Julia had told Perry that her parents died in a car accident, but never mentioned an investigation or being questioned by State Police.

“You’d have to ask them,” Watson said. “My gut? You’ve got two dead bodies with a Park Avenue penthouse address in a three-hundred-thousand Maybach.”

“What’s a Maybach?”

“If you gotta ask . . . ” Watson grinned. “A
car
. German. Started before the war, after the war, I’m not sure. But a real status symbol. They just stopped making them—too expensive—soon to be collector’s items.”

Perry got the picture.

“Rich couple like that, State Police are going to cross the
t
’s, dot
the
i
’s, and whatnot. They called around. Tried to see if they were missing anything. The daughter—what’s her name, Julia—was upset but wasn’t able to offer any relevant information. They figured the old man fell asleep. So what gives on these people?”

“Hmm?” Perry was still thinking about the death of Julia’s parents and didn’t register his friend’s question.

“When I was running the names, I was reminded of those tests back in school: How do these three things go together? A thug like Hyde; a socialite like Julia Drusilla; and this Norman Loki, out at the beach. What ties these three together?”

Perry told Watson about the disappearance of Angelina Loki and her relationship to each of the three people Perry had asked Watson to run through the system. “If I find her by her twenty-first birthday, she stands to inherit a big chunk of her grandfather’s estate.”

“Grandfather, as in the dead guy in the Maybach?”

Perry nodded.

Watson let out a whistle. “Major bank. Seems like a good reason for the girl to want to be found.”

“If only I were so lucky.”

Perry had looked into the source of Julia’s family’s money. Her father, Antonio, had come from modest beginnings, the son of a father who worked as a dressmaker in the Garment District and a mother who taught piano in their Forest Hills apartment. But Antonio had more ambitious plans. Thanks to his first marriage to an heiress more than twice his age, by thirty-five years old, he was a widower in control of a $100-million inheritance. Through leveraged buyouts and other investments, he managed to turn that comfortable little sum into a fortune that landed him on
Forbes
magazine’s annual list of billionaires for more than the last decade of his life.

“Well, good luck with the case, man. It’s really great to see you. Been way too long.”

“I don’t want to press my luck,” Perry said, “but any chance I can hit you up for one more favor? That deadline of Angel’s twenty-first birthday is almost here, and it’s not looking good. Plus, I think someone tried to follow me back from Long Island last night, so I’m starting to think she could be in real trouble. Any chance you can track her cell phone for me?”

Perry still marveled at how much more information law enforcement could gather now than when he was on the job. Thanks to technology, police could find out what Web sites people frequented, who they e-mailed, and what books they bought, usually without even having to get a search warrant. By pulling a few strings with Angel’s cell phone company, Watson would be able to determine not only whether Angel was receiving or making phone calls, but also her possible location. A phone’s pings to cell phone towers for service used to give police an area of a few square miles to narrow down a search. Now, with the proliferation of towers and a little bit of luck, cell phone tracking could put you within a city block of the person you were looking for—or at least of her phone.

“Careful, Watson. You do a friend like that a little favor, and the next thing you know, you’re on IAB’s shit list.”

Perry turned toward the intruding voice. It was from a short-haired, pink-faced man in a dress shirt that stretched across his belly. He was no looker, but the Donald Duck tie suggested that even he managed to have a kid in his life. Perry didn’t recognize the man, but the man obviously recognized him.

It was also obvious the man wasn’t done making noise. “Doesn’t matter how many years go by, Christo. You walk into a house, someone’s gonna notice.”

Perry felt his fists clench on impulse. Did this smart-ass think he was the first self-righteous cop to make a wisecrack about the Internal Affairs Bureau at Perry’s expense? Did he believe that his jabs were
any kind of penalty compared to the price Perry had already paid? The job. His wife. His daughter, Nicky.

How many times had Perry seen the dirty looks and heard the snide comments? He’d lost count, but every single time, he found himself wondering the same thing: Did these high-minded cops sit in judgment over Perry for what he supposedly did, or for getting caught supposedly doing it? Invariably, the ones who were loudest in their disdain for him were the ones who used racial epithets, joked about domestic violence, and referred to bribes as “consulting fees.” Perry always suspected that their sole reason for casting dispersions was to mask their true approach to doing the job.

And Perry had learned from experience that there was no point in offering a retort. Instead, he turned his back to the man, like he always did. But today, Perry wasn’t alone to hear the gibes.

He saw something in his friend Watson’s face that was unfamiliar. Embarrassment. Sympathy. Pity.

“I’m sorry, man,” Watson offered. “We should’ve met at a diner or something. But don’t mind that hump, okay? Dude’s one flask away from a liver transplant.”

Perry started to tell Watson not to worry about it. That it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. That he was almost used to it after all these years.

But sensing Watson’s guilt, he did something else instead. He flashed a smile, patted his friend on the back, and said, “So about Angel’s cell phone. Let me write down that number for you.”

T
          
here is,
thought Perry,
nothing like progress.
With Watson on his side, the possibility of finding Angel had at least taken a step from the shadows of improbability without yet emerging, blinking, into the light. This sudden surge of optimism made him glance back at the 19th Precinct, with its blue window frames and terra-cotta trimmings. It looked almost festive when considered in the right frame of mind, at which point he decided that he was getting carried away, and that pretty soon he’d be looking at half-empty glasses in a whole new way.

This part of the Upper East Side had always boasted a dual nature: in a sense, Perry encompassed it in himself through his lineage. At the end of the nineteenth century, the western edges had housed the city’s cigar makers in the new tenements. The tenements doubled as factories, with the cigar manufacturers buying or renting whole blocks and subletting them to the cigar makers and their families. It was, effectively, the industrialization of a process that had been ongoing for years, ever since cigar makers paid to the manufacturers a deposit of double the value of the tobacco supplied before taking their stock home and rolling the cigars in their rooms.

His great-grandfather had been one of those men, although he
had died of tuberculosis long before Perry was born. Perry’s grandfather used to joke that his old man smoked so much tobacco it was a wonder anyone else ever got to try his product. He had been a union organizer, and had been instrumental in pressuring the union to accept women as members in 1867, one of only two national unions to have done so at the time. Perry suspected that his great-grandfather had probably been a hard man: back then, union organizers had had their skulls broken, and had broken skulls in turn. These days they were the whipping boys for everything that was wrong with the economy, as though the days of child labor and dismissal without cause had never happened.

Meanwhile, his great-grandfather’s brother Petros had found less gainful employment in the precinct’s eastern extremes, where the gangs congregated among shanties built among the rocks in the river and made their living from theft and, occasionally, murder. Family lore, possibly sanitized for general consumption, took the view that Petros had never actually killed anyone, although it stopped short of canonizing him as some kind of Robin Hood figure, as Petros had never limited his acts of larceny to the rich, and any redistribution of wealth occurred within his own gang. Perry had found the name of Petros among the old records, and the sole charges leveled against him had been those of pickpocketing and vagrancy, but he had run with a crowd that wasn’t slow to use a blade, and the only photo Perry could find of Petros showed a dead-eyed figure with outsize hands. Petros Christo might not have had a murder charge against his name, but he had the look of a dangerous man.

Perry found it amusing that his apartment in Yorkville was closer to the old stomping ground of Petros Christo than it was to the tenement of Petros’s worthy, left-leaning brother. Those who had hounded Perry from the department probably felt that the link to Petros Christo was not only one of geography but also of character.
He would never be able to convince them otherwise, but it was enough that cops like Watson still believed in him. It also made his job a little easier, particularly when it came to missing persons. The police had access to resources that were beyond the reach of private operatives like Perry, and it paid to have a handful of cops on his side. If nothing else, he hoped they saw in Perry a way of spiting the suits in the department, and the hated Internal Affairs in particular.

Now, as he walked, he thought of Angel. She certainly got around for a twenty-year-old girl, although Perry’s experience of twenty-year-old girls was necessarily limited, and had been even when he was a twenty-year-old boy. At least she seemed happy to spread her favors widely across the social divide, according to Lilith Bates: from rich boys to mechanics. His great-grandfather would have approved, but it didn’t suggest a balanced personality. Had his own daughter behaved in such a manner, Perry would have—

Would have what? He had enough trouble getting Nicky to talk about anything more than Internet memes and the last movies she’d seen. She’d been smart enough to deny him access to her Facebook page as well. Admittedly, she was a good deal younger than Angel, but he sometimes wondered if it might have been more productive to follow his daughter around instead of chasing after the specter of a girl he didn’t even know.