Inherit the Dead (22 page)

So you drive up and down the streets searching, your heart in your throat and burning hatred in your soul, and together they keep you going until you see it, that junk heap of a car with the license plate you have memorized, making its way down the Brooklyn street, and you thank God because He is obviously on your side.

This time you keep enough distance because you can’t risk his spotting you again, because you think this might be it, exactly what you have been waiting for, and you steel yourself because if you are right, if this is the moment, you must be ready to act, must be ready to kill.

T
raffic had eased, and no one felt the need to curse at Perry or flip him off as he drove. Still, he had the same itch between his shoulders since losing the tail, one eye on the rearview mirror as he made his way into Fort Greene.

Washington Avenue was a wide street of mostly five- and six-story brownstones and a few big old houses with front yards featuring black metal fences and garden gnomes wading hip deep through the swiftly melting remains of last week’s snowfall. The address Henry had given him, 354, was one of the old houses, the door painted bright red with a fanlight and brass fittings and a coachman’s lights placed precisely at each corner. He knocked with the feeling that there were eyes on him from behind every lace curtain on the street.

The woman who answered the door was dressed in designer jeans and a boat-necked, three-quarter-sleeve sweater in a crimson that nearly matched the door. She had skin the color of eggplant, teeth like JFK, and hair like Michelle Obama’s. The only things sixtyish about her were her eyes, guarded and suspicious, carrying a memory that had neither forgotten nor forgiven the fire hoses and the attack dogs.

She had herself planted in the doorway like a glacial erratic, and
short of dynamite he didn’t see any way outside of honesty to move her from it. “I’m as white as you can get without bleach and I’m on your doorstep uninvited,” he said. “I figure, one more strike, I’m outta here, probably on the toe of your boot. How could you turn down that opportunity?”

There was an infinitesimal relaxation in the muscles around her eyes. She didn’t ask him in, but at least she hadn’t slammed the door in his face, and he took that for assent. “My name is Perry Christo, and I’m a private detective. You Athena Williams?”

“Her mama send you?”

There wasn’t any point in acting surprised and even less in denial. “Yes, Mrs. Drusilla says her daughter has been missing for more than two weeks. She’s concerned—”

He stopped abruptly when Athena Williams’s expression shifted beneath the black, polished skin. There was no bullshitting this woman. “Her daughter stands to inherit a lot of money, but only if she shows up to sign for it, and time is running out.”

Athena Williams’s eyes narrowed. “How much does Ms. Julia get?” The “Ms.” was heavily accented, and not out of respect.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Athena Williams snorted. “And I’m not saying anything at all.”

“But you worked for them?”

“I was Angel’s nanny, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Have you seen Ms. Loki recently?” he said.

“No,” she said.

He didn’t believe her, but then she wasn’t trying to convince him all that hard. “Ms. Williams—”

“Mr. Christo,” she said, “I haven’t seen Angel, and I wouldn’t tell you if I had. Now, is there anything else? My mama raised me not to slam doors in people’s faces, but I’m always willing to make at least one exception to every rule.”

“You sound like you graduated from Bryn Mawr,” he said unwisely.

“Black folks ain’t supposed to talk English right?” she asked.

He sighed. “Ma’am,” he said, “all I’m trying to do is find Angelina Loki.”

“And if she doesn’t want to be found?”

He looked at her for a moment. “Yesterday, the East Hampton police found Angelina Loki’s car abandoned on a deserted road.” He paused. She didn’t twitch so much as an eyebrow. “The only good news—if you can call it good news—is that she wasn’t in it.”

“Plenty of public transportation,” she said.

“I didn’t know anyone from the Hamptons ever had to learn how to walk,” he said.

She almost smiled.

He waited.

After a long moment, she stepped back, holding the door wide. “Come in, then, if you won’t go away when you’re told to.”

The living room was comfortably furnished with a dark blue overstuffed couch and matching chairs. There was a thirty-two-inch flat-screen television mounted on one wall, and the area rug had not been bought at Home Depot. Nannying must pay better than he’d thought.

She went so far as to bring him coffee on a tray with cream and sugar. It was a hell of a lot better than the industrial-strength cleaner Henry Watson had served up that morning, and he drank gratefully and felt the better for it.

He set his cup down and looked across at her. She sat with a straight back, her knees and ankles together and her hands loosely clasped in her lap, but she looked a lot more approachable than she had seemed at the door. “Why are you looking for Angel, Mr. Christo?” she asked.

Her voice was a little louder than it had been on the doorstep. He wondered if someone else was in the house, also waiting to hear his answer. Who it was could determine his answer, which might or might not be a long way from the truth.

There was a collection of photos on the wall, all children, all white. Three of them were snapshots with Athena Williams, swinging, building a sand castle, riding a merry-go-round. The fourth was an eleven-by-fourteen studio portrait in what looked like a solid gold frame. Even at, what, thirteen—fourteen at most—Angelina Loki’s sheer physical presence made itself felt. She stood barefoot on a wooden parquet floor, looking directly into the camera, unsmiling. A mass of tousled hair the color of a Saint-Gauden’s double eagle, wide blue eyes, a full ripe mouth, skin like cream velvet.

Most people would have stopped at the personification of rich white privilege, but if you looked a little longer, the photographer had caught an air of vulnerability about the eyes, a hint of desperately held control in the line of the mouth, a chin more defiant than determined. Perry looked a little longer, and then he looked at Athena Williams, saw her narrowed eyes, and sat back in his chair. It was a very comfortable chair. “The easy answer is, because I’m paid to,” he said.

She waited, her eyes steady on his face.

He shook his head. “Look, Ms. Williams, it doesn’t take a genius to see that she’s in trouble. Her mother says she only wants to be reunited with her estranged daughter, whom she hasn’t seen in a year. Her father, with whom she has been living, hasn’t seen her for two weeks and doesn’t appear to be too concerned about it. Her best friend says she hasn’t seen her and told me to check with Ms. Loki’s boyfriend. The boyfriend says he hasn’t seen her in a week and to check with a new boyfriend, and either he isn’t the jealous type or he never gave a shit in the first place.”

He took another appreciative sip of his coffee. “The new boyfriend comes with so much baggage they wouldn’t let him on a seven forty-seven, even if he was flying up front. As in he’s married with three children and more than the swing vote on the local town council. And he won’t admit to having seen her in the last two weeks.”

He felt his voice beginning to rise and cut himself off, taking another deliberate pull at his coffee. “All I know is she’s missing,” he said, “and nobody I talk to knows or will say where she is.”

“You’re that concerned over a girl you haven’t even met?” There might have been pity in her voice, although it might equally have been contempt, or maybe it was a combination of the two.

“You knew she wasn’t in her car,” he said. “You didn’t even blink when I told you the cops found it. So where is she, Ms. Williams?”

Her face closed up again. No sale. The silence stretched out between them.

“She’s just a kid,” he said.

“She’s not just a kid,” Athena Williams said. “She’s never been just a kid. But she’s smart—smartest child I ever took care of—because she had to be.”

She looked annoyed, more with herself than with him, probably for volunteering information.

“Seems like somebody ought to be looking out for her,” he said mildly, “and nobody is.” He thought of Nicky, and again he felt the oppressive guilt of the absentee father press down on his shoulders. But his ex, Noreen, wasn’t Julia Drusilla, thank God, and he wasn’t Norman Loki.

“I looked after her,” Athena Williams said.

The words wrenched themselves out slowly, one phrase at a time. “I looked after her as best I could. As best as they would let me.”

He kept his own voice low and without expression. “How did you come to be Angelina Loki’s nanny?”

“A woman with my education, did you mean?” But she closed her eyes on a sigh, and for a moment only looked her age, and tired. Her eyes opened again, and the moment was gone. “I got my degree from Brown University. And then my mother got sick.” Her smile was twisted. “It turns out that a professional nanny, especially one with a master’s degree, earns a lot more than a high school history teacher. Angel was my fourth job.”

“How long were you with her family?”

“From the week Angel was born,” she said, “until her graduation from high school.”

“So you spent time with her after the divorce?”

“Yes. Mama died when Angel was eight, and I could have quit, but by then . . . ” She shrugged.

He looked around the well-appointed room. “You’re retired now?”

She followed his train of thought with no difficulty. “I have feathered my own nest nicely, haven’t I?”

He thought of his employer, the thin, bitter matron in her big, sterile penthouse on Park Avenue. “I have no doubt you earned every penny twice over, Ms. Williams.”

She almost looked over her shoulder and stopped herself, but not before he noticed. “Only the best butter, Mr. Christo.”

Again, he wondered who else was in the house. “I’m not asking you to betray any confidences, Ms. Williams,” he said, raising his voice a little. “When I find Ms. Loki, if she doesn’t want me to, I won’t tell anyone I have.”

“I thought that was what you were paid to do.”

He smiled. “I didn’t say I was any good at it.”

She did smile this time, reluctantly.

“At this point, I’d be happy to know she was all right. And if I can help her, I will.”

He pulled out his wallet and extracted a card. “You can call or text me twenty-four/seven at that number, or e-mail me at that address.”

She took the card gingerly, as if merely by holding it between finger and thumb meant that an agreement of some kind existed between the two of them, and she was far from willing to accept anything of the kind. “I haven’t seen her,” she said, and this time even she could hear the lack of conviction in her words.

“When you do,” he said.

He stood on
the doorstep and took a deep breath. The air pollution in Brooklyn wasn’t as bad as it was in Manhattan, and you could still smell the ghosts of the roses of summers past. He looked down the street both ways, and saw the curtain at the first-floor window across from 354 fall hastily back in place.

That could account for the feeling that he was being watched. It would not account for the tail he’d shaken that morning, or the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t so much shaken the tail as the tail had done a better job of following him the second time.

He checked his watch, not quite ten thirty, as he came down the steps and turned left to head for his car.

“Mr. Christo! Mr. Christo, please wait!”

He turned and saw the girl from the photograph standing on Athena Williams’s front step.

His first feeling was relief that the first time he saw her in person she wasn’t looking up at him from a body bag.

His second was the sudden realization that whoever was following him could have followed him right to Angelina Loki’s hiding place.

T
he photographs had been no preparation for the reality. The full impact of Angel’s beauty was available only in the flesh. Perry was so occupied with scanning his personal database for comparisons he lost all sense of urgency and just stared.

It soon came to him. The impossibly young Lauren Bacall of
To Have and Have Not,
but without the carefully constructed coiffure. Angel’s toffee-blond hair had a tousled, bedhead look that the prudish Hollywood studios could never have tolerated. But the feline eyes, the full-lipped mouth with the tilt of a smile even in this moment of distress—all of it a dead ringer for Bacall at her most vulnerable.

She’d stopped short a couple of feet from him after shouting, “Wait,” in a frantic voice just the right side of a scream. She drew her breath in sharply, emphasizing the full breasts beneath her skimpy black T-shirt. She had a coat on, but she’d only draped it over her shoulders. She folded her arms across her midriff, but not so fast that Perry didn’t notice the tremble in her long fingers. She tucked her chin down and gave him the up-slanted look that Bacall had made her own.