Last Chance for Glory (14 page)

Sowell nodded. “Can you get me out of here soon?”

“No, Billy. Not real soon. You’ve got to hang in there.” Kosinski reached out, took Billy Sowell’s hand, cradled it in his own. “Billy, do you remember a man named Kamal Collars?”

“Kamal? Sure. He was my best friend. After my mom died, I mean.”

“How did you know him?”

“We used to panhandle together. We were partners.” He said it proudly, lifting his head to look into Kosinski’s eyes. “And we drank together. How do you know Kamal?”

“I met him once. It was a long time ago, but he told me that he knew where you were on the night Sondra Tillson was killed.
You
don’t remember where you were, do you, Billy?”

“No. I tried, I
really
tried. And since I came here I tried some more. But they didn’t ask me right away. They didn’t ask me for two weeks, so I can’t remember.”

“I understand. That why I want to ask your friend, Kamal. I want to ask him where you were, but I don’t know how to find him, so I need your help.” Kosinski dropped Billy Sowell’s hand, took out a small spiral notebook and a pen. “Have you heard from Kamal since you came here?”

“No. But I’d like to.”

Kosinski smiled. “I’ll be sure to let him know. Now, what I want you to do is tell me where you used to live, where you used to go, friends you had together. Things like that.”

Blake’s first reaction was anger—Kosinski had held out on him; he should have mentioned Kamal Collars on the way up—but then, to his credit, he remembered that Steinberg had instructed him to pump Kosinski for all he was worth. He, Blake, had chosen to ignore the advice. The lawyer had been right and he’d been wrong; it was as simple as that.

What I have to do, he thought, is make up my goddamned mind. Maybe life in the sewer is too much for me. Maybe I’m not a tough guy. There’s no shame in that, no shame at all. The shame comes from being half-in, half-out. Of course, I could stay with Steinberg while I look for other work. I could stay with the paycheck. But if I do that I have to do it right. I can’t fuck around; I can’t let myself be thrown by the ambience.

“I’m just back from my vacation and I don’t mind telling you I’m hung over so bad I’m tryin’ to crap and puke at the same time. I don’t know anything about Billy Sowell yet, but I do know that the Tillson case is closed. Anyway, I’m at my desk and this giant walks into the squad room. Has to be six-six, two-fifty. Plus he’s black as coal and wearin’ a filthy jacket over six layers of shirts and underwear. Believe me, Blake, this is a guy who makes Park Avenue ladies pee into their bloomers. Which is probably why I remember him.

“As it happens, I’m the only dick in the squad room, so neither one of us had any choice in the matter. He walks up to my desk, tells me his name is Kamal Collars (which is a name you don’t forget), and asks for my partner, Tommy Brannigan. Naturally, I ask him what he wants Brannigan for and he tells me that he called Brannigan about the killing of Sondra Tillson and Brannigan told him to come down to the house. He says he knows that Billy Sowell didn’t kill Tillson because he was with Sowell at the time. Now, as far as I’m concerned, it’s none of my business because it’s not my collar, so I tell him Brannigan’s in the lieutenant’s office and he’ll be back in a few minutes. Meanwhile, he should go by Brannigan’s desk and take a seat.”

They were on the Taconic Parkway, heading south at a stately fifty-five miles per hour. Kosinski’s head was starting to pound and he was sweating, despite the air conditioning. What he needed was a drink, but he read the set of Blake’s face, the tight jaw and withdrawn mouth, to mean that was the least likely of all the possibilities.

“Are you with me here, Blake?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You want me to tell you what I think?”

“I’m all ears.”

“You know they turned the kid out, right?”

“Say that again?”

“Sowell. The kid. They turned him out. The wolves, I mean. A little guy like that? There’s was no way he could fight back, even if he had all his smarts. So what happened is they gave him a choice: put on makeup and peddle your ass for us or die.”

“That’s very pat, Kosinski, but how do you know he doesn’t like it?”

“Simple. If Billy Sowell was gay, he couldn’t very well have killed Sondra Tillson because he was sexually attracted to her. I mean, supposedly it was an attempted rape gone bad. Homosexuality would have been a pretty good defense.”

“Maybe he goes both ways.”

“Guys who wear makeup don’t go both ways, Marty. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

M
ARTY BLAKE DROPPED KOSINSKI
(at Cryders, naturally) just after four o’clock, then went off in search of a phone booth. It was Friday and he knew he didn’t have much time. When he finally chanced upon a working booth on College Point Boulevard, he punched in the number of an old acquaintance.

I’m sorry. You have reached a nonworking number in the New York Telephone area. Please check the number and try again. I’m sorry, you have reached a nonworking …

He muttered the required, “Shit!”, even though he wasn’t surprised. All through what he liked to call “my exile,” he’d stubbornly refused to calculate his losses. Figuring they’d become painfully obvious as soon as he went back to work.

“Time to take the long way around,” he muttered, dialing Manhattan Exec’s number.

“Manhattan Executive.”

“Cynthia? It’s Marty Blake.”

“Hi, Marty. Joanna was asking about you. She wants you to keep in touch.”

“Yeah, well I’ll keep in touch some other time. Right now I need to speak to Conrad Angionis. That is, if he’s still working for Joanna.”

“Conrad practically lives here, Marty. Joanna would never let him go.”

“I should have known. Listen, I’m in kind of a hurry. Can you put me through?”

A moment later, a hoarse, raspy voice muttered a clipped interrogatory. “Who?”

“You haven’t changed, Conrad. Not even a little bit.” Blake pictured the Greek, all six foot, seven inches of him, perched on a hard-backed chair in front of his IBM. With his desk raised six inches off the carpet by a wooden platform, he towered above the other techs, a fitting position for the man who ruled the computer room. Conrad wore his coarse, black hair in a long ponytail; a fierce beard sprouted from just beneath his eyes, rolled down his face, covered his collar and the knot in his tie.

“That you, Marty Blake?”

“It’s me, Conrad. I’m thinking about asking for my old job back.” Blake had run the department before he’d gotten his license and gone into the field.

“Yeah, and Joanna’s gonna make me a full partner. What could I do for you?”

“I got a little problem, Conrad. I need to find someone.”

“That’s a problem?”

“For me it is. It’s been a year and I’ve lost my contacts. Or, at least, I lost
one
of my contacts, the one I need right now. Look, I’m in a big hurry.”

“You got a social security number?”

“No, but it wouldn’t help if I did. The man I’m looking for is homeless. I need to get into HRA’s files. Medicaid, food stamps, home relief, disability, like that. Maybe the Human Resources Administration can give him an address.”

“If he’s homeless, how can he have an address?”

“Glib, Conrad, but not clever. Look, the guy’s name is Kamal Collars. Two years ago, he was living on the street. He might have gone into a shelter since then, or gotten a job, or moved in with relatives. If he’s collecting welfare, he has to have an address, even if it’s just a mail drop. If he’s on Medicaid, maybe they’ll have the location of a clinic he used recently. Look, it’s getting on to five o’clock and it’s Friday, which means we don’t have time for the bullshit. Call your contact at HRA. I want whatever they have, including Collars’ social security number. Remember, I’m a client now.”

“So Joanna told me. How do you wanna write this up?”

Blake took a moment to think it over. He knew that what they were doing was entirely illegal, but that didn’t mean his client shouldn’t pay for it.

“Write it up as a search with negative results. And don’t forget the discount.”

Marty Blake, as he opened the door to his Forest Hills apartment, felt what he liked to call “clean fatigue.” The polar opposite of what he felt coming off a twelve-hour shift in a yellow cab. Maybe it sprang from a sense (undoubtedly false) that he’d made peace with Bell Kosinski; maybe from the fact that Bell Kosinski had fallen asleep twenty minutes into the drive home; or maybe it came to nothing more than his conversation with Conrad Angionis, the first tangible thing he’d done to move the case forward. Angionis was an obsessive type. He wouldn’t leave for the weekend until he’d exhausted every possibility, no matter how remote. All Blake had to do was stay by the phone.

He was still considering his day and how well it’d turned out, as he stepped through the door. Not thinking, really; he was too tired and too hungry for analysis. His mind was drifting from thought to thought, like a canoe on a sluggish river. Still, he was preoccupied enough to hear the grind of a motor and the slap-slap of running feet, and not recognize what they represented. The noise confused him at first, but then he finally realized that somebody was in his apartment, and that somebody was using his treadmill, and that somebody had to be Rebecca Webber.

Blake tiptoed into the bedroom and found Rebecca, her back turned to him, running at a steady pace. Apparently, she’d been doing it for some time, because she was wearing one of his cotton T-shirts over her own silk panties and both garments were soaked with sweat.

She did this for me, he thought. To please me. A special treat for her special pet.

Blake watched sweat drip from the ends of Rebecca’s perfectly frosted, honey-blond hair, hair that now hung in wet, ropy tendrils, hair that would get a two-hundred-dollar reshaping at the Ted Orris Salon in the morning. He watched the drops run along the glistening down on the back of her neck, watched them disappear beneath the T-shirt plastered to the smooth muscles of her back. His eyes tracked the ridges of her spine, following them down to her small, round ass. To where the wet silk of her panties was little more than a beckoning shadow.

He waited until he couldn’t stand it any more, until his lips ached for the dark hollows at the tops of her thighs. Quickly, quietly, he took off his own clothes, folding them carefully, knowing she wouldn’t turn around, that even if she knew he was there, she was committed to the game. Then he yanked the plug.

When the treadmill stopped moving, she turned to face him, taking her time about it, her eyes flashing desire and triumph. Screaming it, really. Blake glimpsed a future in which he wore a diamond-studded collar, in which he was led from place to place on a long, shiny silver leash.

Rebecca reached out to him, nostrils flaring, mouth somewhere between a sneer and a smirk. Blake grabbed her outstretched fingers, and spun her in a half-circle, imprisoning her wrists with his right hand. He twisted sharply and she cried out as she bent away from the pain.

“Don’t hurt me,” she said.

“Do I ever?”

He pushed her forward, curling her waist around the treadmill’s railing, bringing her ass up against his crotch. Even with his eyes closed and that first touch of her sweaty flesh on his, he could feel her opening to him. A parting of waters into which he would descend, in which he would inevitably drown.

“I’m glad you came home when you did,” she said as he pulled the crotch of her panties aside, as he slid inside her. “I don’t have much time.”

Afterward, as Rebecca showered, Blake sat, still naked, still sweat-soaked, on the edge of the tub, contemplating the discarded panties at the bottom of his wastebasket.

“Dior,” she’d said as he dropped them in. “But definitely not
Christian.”

How much? he wondered. Two hundred? Maybe three with the matching bra and slip? Because she’ll throw them away, too. She’ll toss the ensemble out, or give it to her maid. When I go to the bureau, I grab one pair of socks, one pair of underpants, one T-shirt. Right off the top of the pile. Rebecca selects her lingerie as if she was expecting to perform a striptease for her gynecologist.

He’d watched her on the three occasions when he’d spent the night at her East-Side town house, the one tucked between the British and the South African embassies on East Seventy-eighth Street just off Fifth Avenue. In the morning, after her personal maid fetched the coffee, she’d lay out her wardrobe on a carved and gilded Empire sofa—hosiery, panties, bra, slip, skirt, blouse, sweater, shoes, necklace, bracelet, rings, watch. Then she’d step back to view the entire ensemble. As often as not, if she rejected one item, the whole outfit went back into the closet. Not that Rebecca was the one who
put
it back. That chore was left to Sarah, the personal maid who’d been assigned to her on her tenth birthday.

The shower snapped off and Rebecca’s arm emerged from behind the shower curtain. Blake got up and fetched the required towel. His reward: Rebecca Webber, elbows raised as she toweled her wet hair, stepping out of the mist with the brazen confidence of a harem queen.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said. The towel moved from her throat to her breasts, cupping them as she patted the moist flesh. “William and I are going abroad. We’ll be gone for some time. It’s about the estate.”

The estate in question involved ten thousand acres of what used to be East Germany. It had two unpronounceable German names (neither of which Marty Blake remembered), depending on whether you were referring to the property itself, or the seventeenth-century manor house that’d been in William (formerly Wilhelm) Webber’s family for nearly three hundred years. Right up until 1944, when the advancing Soviet army had sent the family scurrying to the safety of the west. Somehow, William had become convinced that repatriation boiled down to little more than passing the right bribe to the right, former-Communist bureaucrat. Naturally, he’d dispatched a New York attorney to hire a Washington attorney to hire a Berlin attorney to find that man.

“When are you leaving?”

“Sunday morning.”