Inherit the Dead (16 page)

The mechanic lunged like a barroom brawler.

Perry grabbed a two-foot steel pry bar from the oil barrel’s pile of tools and police-baton rammed it into his attacker’s guts.

Randy gasped, shoved Perry under the suspended vehicle. Randy stumbled with him, wrestling for the steel bar. A twist of Randy’s hands flung it from their grasp.

The steel pry bar clanged off the lift control wand hung on a wall hook, hit the wand’s green button marked Lower.

A black steel cloud sank toward the two fighting men.

Perry fired his fist into the mechanic’s ribs. Randy’s head bumped the transmission shaft of the car sliding down from heaven. Perry dodged a knee strike, pulled Randy into the police academy’s
ogoshi
hip throw. Randy’s legs swept up off the oil-stained concrete but hit the undercarriage of the sliding-down car. That collision sprawled the two men in a heap on the garage-bay floor.

An arm yoked under Perry’s chin. Death smelled like oiled cement as he saw the black car sinking closer. Perry gouged Randy’s eye. Randy yelled.

Perry rolled out from under the sinking steel sky, hesitated—grabbed the mechanic’s flailing arm and pulled the top half of the pain-blinded man out from under the car seconds before the touched-down tires took the weight of that luxury machine.

They sat side by side on the floor, their legs splayed under the lowered car, their faces reflected in the polished black steel doors.

Perry slammed Randy’s face into the car.

Caught him as he rebounded, his eye bloodshot, his nose bleeding.

The woman from the office loomed by the car’s trunk:
“Randy! What did you do to him? I’m calling the cops . . . ambulance—”

“I pulled him out from being crushed under that car—I fucking saved his life!” said Perry. “If you call the cops now, you throw him into trouble!”

The woman froze.

“
Wha
-what?” said Randy.

The woman said: “Whatever he—”

“Nora!” yelled Randy. “I got this. Go back to where you’re supposed to be.”

“Where’s that?” she muttered.

Left two men sitting on the cement floor with their legs under a rich man’s car.

Slammed her office door.

A radio in the office abruptly blared an old rock song in sound-muffling defiance.

On their feet, Perry splayed Randy against the car for a police stop pat down.

The growl in Randy’s ear said: “What did Angel see in you?”

“I . . . I’m . . . ”

“You’re a punk-ass nobody in the last of your glory days.”

A shove bounced Randy off the car. Perry didn’t let him turn around.

“She . . . she needed me . . . and wanted me.”

“Maybe, but you led with
needed,
so that’s the heart of what’s between you.”

Randy wiped goo streaming from his gouged eye.

“Why did she need you?”

“I protected her.”

“From what? Who?”

“Whoever I could. I told you she was scared. But she was always spooked. Like somebody was going to find her or some secret and . . . I don’t know. Get her.”

“Did she ever say who?”

“No. Just . . . She said she got weird phone calls.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know, man! Who wouldn’t call her! Ask her!”

“I can’t. She’s missing. Remember?”

“Still?”

“You think I drove all the way back here from Manhattan because I’m hooked on some woman I’ve never met?”

Randy shrugged. “If it’s Angel, makes sense to me.”

“I’m not you,” said Perry. “An East Hampton cop called me this morning, a badge named Arthur Gawain who said they found her car abandoned. But no Angel.”

“Where is she? Is she okay? I got to—”

“You got to be able to sell your story to the cops.”

“You don’t have to sell the truth!”

“What planet do you live on?” Perry frowned. “If you were her protection, why’d she break it off, why’d she leave you behind at the motel?”

The private eye saw the shoulders shrug on the man who stood before him facing a car he could never afford and the radio-filled office that signed his paychecks.

“Guys like me didn’t dare bother her ’cause of me. And big-bucks boys from Wall Street, Harvard princes come up here for two weeks of summer—they figured the score when she walked with me, though they never stopped trying.”

“Tell me what changed,” said Perry. “The woman who dumped you is missing. I’m the only guy who cares about finding her and the truth. You need me to help sell whatever that is to cops, who only care about easy answers.”

Randy’s words came out hard: “She found somebody who’s more.”

“More what? More protection?”

“That’s all bullshit. Nobody’s protected. Not from everything.”

“But this new guy’s closer to some
everything
?”

“He’s got money. Power. Politics.” The back of Randy’s hand wiped his bloody nose. “Married, but a woman like Angel makes that not matter.”

“How do you know about him and her?”

“After her
‘I need more’
talk . . . I followed her one day. Saw them.” Randy leered at Perry: “You want to see a picture?”

“I have one.”

“Here’s another.” The bloody mechanic got his cell phone off a workbench, handed it over.

The photo had been stalker-snapped from behind a pine tree by a parking lot. Randy had already zoomed the image as large as his phone allowed so the figures filled the screen in Perry’s hand.

Angel
. Her face cupped by a beefy sandy-haired man. His hands made her look up at him. Perry thought:
He’s older than me
.

“Who is he?”

“A state assemblyman. Might be other guys, but he’s who I caught her with.”

“They know that you know?”

“I e-mailed her the photos to show her I wasn’t no fool.”

Photos
.

Perry had owned this same phone two upgrades ago. He finger-swiped the photo to the next stored shot. The beefy politician was bent over kissing Angel. She stood with her hands at her sides. A
third photo showed the same kiss, only now Mr. State Assemblyman pawed Angel’s breast.

Randy said: “That’s all I got of them—
Hey!
”

Perry swiped to the next photo. The phone in his hand trembled.

Angel. Naked. Standing in a steamy shower facing the clouded glass door. Blond hair blurred like golden light. Closed eyes. Her arms bent and vanished behind her head. The clouded glass made her wide mouth a blur of pink. Revealed epic, natural, handful breasts. Angel had a narrow waist. The photo ended where a bikini would have begun.

She didn’t know the asshole was taking this,
thought Perry.

He finger-swiped to the next photo: her laughing at the camera, at Randy.

All the other photos were of cars or auto work, except for one taken by a person who’d grabbed the phone to put her portrait in it: office Nora.

“Give me my cell!”

“After I fix it so it’s not rare enough to kill you for.”

Perry e-mailed the photos of Angel and the political animal to his own phone. He sent her laughing portrait. Then the image of her naked behind clouded glass. Each e-mail vibrated the iPhone on his belt. He deleted the naked shot from Randy’s phone. Let Randy keep the others:
Preserve your chain of evidence and back up what you got
.

“What’s his name?”

“Tweed.”

“Tweed who?”

“Tweed is his last name.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“What’s funny about that shit? He’s Cyrus Tweed, some state legislature guy, got an office here in town. His name is his name.”

Perry tossed the phone back to its owner. “Remember
my
name—Perry Christo. I programmed my number in there. You hear
from, of
, or
about
Angel, call me first, call me fast. Don’t make me figure you for a fall.”

“I got enough trouble.”

They both stared at the garage office where the closed door vibrated from a radio.

Perry said: “That Nora being older and married wouldn’t stop a guy like you.”

“You think I’m stupid?” Randy didn’t wait for Perry’s answer. “I know what I know. Gil’s war hollow. Just stands around their house. She thinks I got what she needs—that’s more than
you know
—and she lets me know what’s waiting for me. I hunger bad. But I do that, come later when she realizes who I’m not, my ass is tossed out the door. Or worse. I don’t dare even hint about
if Gil was gone
. What she might do then scares the shit out of me. She’s driving me crazy.”

“There are other jobs.”

“What planet are
you
from.”

“Does she know about you and Angel?”

“Nora figures my anybody else’s don’t count. Figures she’s where I’ll end up.”

Perry shook his head: “Do your own math.”

He walked away from that brick gas station/garage that felt like the 1940s, smelled of rubber, old gas, expensive perfume, cancer smoke. The chill of the gray-skied afternoon and the smell of the sea reclaimed him to here and now.

The private detective
unwound his woolen scarf, sat behind the steering wheel of his car. Worked his iPhone like his professional predecessors had worked the soles of their shoes. Google searches showed him New York State Assemblyman Cyrus Tweed’s gerrymandered
legislative district twisted like a rattlesnake on Long Island but covered only a slice of this town. Perry found pictures of Mrs. Cyrus Tweed holding the hands of their two children. She was a pretty woman who knew how and when to smile.

Cyrus Tweed’s legislature Web site listed his district office address on the other end of Main Street. Google Street View showed him its picture: a two-story brick building, offices above yet another trendy coffee shop.

His investigator’s bones made Perry google the address for that building.

Save Our Beaches listed its headquarters at that address. So did the Long Island Jobs Coalition Crew, Liberals United for Victory, Conservatives for American Values Endeavors, Cultural Preservation and Protection League, Congressional Reform Action Program, the Montauk Medical Charities Foundation. Other groups with more vaguely purposed names. All at that land address, but each with a different “suite” number, so any search engine “exact match” profile of one group would not link them.

Fourteen organizations plus a coffee shop and Tweed’s official state office.

All at one address.

Perry rechecked the Google Street View: a few rooms above a coffee shop.

As long as he had his phone in his hand, he looked at the e-mail of Tweed trapping Angel’s face in his hands. Tweed mauling her. Angel laughing. The shower photo where her blue eyes were closed.

He clipped his phone onto his belt, started the car. Hit Seek on the FM radio and landed on the local station’s slogan singing “the place to be since 1963,” back when we murdered presidents and Perry’s parents were teenagers. He was sure this same oldies sound had blared back in that gas station. Not his music. But something about the beat,
the rhythm, the dark urgency of what wasn’t being said in that song from yesterdays he’d never known captured Perry’s mood. He drove down Main Street. Traffic was scarce, parking places plentiful, and he just knew he could handle any nor’easter from the climate change monster hiding in the late afternoon’s heavy gray sky.

Vibrations rumbled his right hip where once he’d holstered his 9 millimeter.

Cell phone: e-mail or text message
. Illegal to check while driving.

He coasted the car into a parking place in front of a white wooden storefront with a display window painted with ornate script:
BETTER DAZE BOOKSHOPPE—NEW & ANTIQUE COLLECTIBLES.

No cynical laugh came from him. This emporium fit with other shops and boutiques on this Main Street. Some stores were closed behind
SEE YOU NEXT SEASON!
notices. Other sported signs that read:
SALE
. The “bookshoppe” where he parked had two coffee table books in the window under a
SPECIAL DISCOUNT LIMITED EDITIONS
sign: photography collections, one a colorful-jacketed volume called
Sand Sea Sky
by Tria Giovan, and the other a black-jacketed volume called
Out of the Sixties
by iconic dead Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper, who’d of course been “a close personal friend” to oh so many of the town’s seasonal residents.

The cell phone buzz was a pro forma e-mail update from a Manhattan law firm whose client Perry’d helped shelter from a federal corruption probe of Wall Street.

Nothing about Angel.

Two quaint coin-operated newspaper kiosks stood outside the “bookshoppe,” a blue kiosk for
New York Times
traditionalists, a yellow kiosk for a local weekly paper.

Perry fed the yellow metal kiosk quarters for last week’s local news.

A bell dinged as an old woman left the bookstore. She seemed too
small for her red-and-black-checked wool coat. Her bird hands tied the strap of a clear plastic rain cap under her chin as she told no one in particular: “I hate it when the weather gets like this. Feels like a whole lot of lonely.”