Only Child (30 page)

• • •

T
he kitchen counter was lined with gallon-sized plastic jars of bodybuilding supplements. A stainless steel blender stood next to several bottles of yohimbe and shark cartilage. The hiding place was a cut-out slot in the wall behind the double-wide refrigerator. Not bad, actually— if Max had to strain to wrench it away from the wall, it would take at least two normal men to do the job.
I unwrapped the package like it was a Bomb Squad assignment. "There's only one tape here, pal," I said to the twin, looking at the standard-size cassette. The label showed four naked women, on their hands and knees in rows of two. They were yoked together by some kind of harness. Standing behind them, another woman in porno-regulation black leather, brandishing a whip. The title said:
International Slut Racing Tournament!
"That's the only one he let us keep," he said, annoyed. "It's
proof,
man. That we didn't do anything. It don't show no . . . Hey! What are you going to do?"
"We're going to watch the movie," I said.

• • •

T
he tape opened with a woman standing at an easel on which the rules of the race were printed, taking questions from an audience of "reporters." The race contestants were all chained to a long wall, waiting. Some were facing the wall; others looked at the camera. A couple were lapping up something from bowls with their names on them.
"This is just—" Giovanni said, before I cut him off with a chopping motion of my right hand.
The tape rolled on, as predictable as a fixed fight, then suddenly became a plain gray screen with white lines of static running horizontally. Another few seconds passed; then . . .
A long corridor, mostly dark, with a few pools of reflected light. Looked like an industrial building, maybe an old factory. Abandoned, or maybe just closed for the night. A figure flitted past the far corner, then disappeared— all I could see was some kind of black robe, with a hood.
And a long knife.
A woman zipped across the screen. She was dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt, white sneakers and white socks. A white hair-ribbon flamed from her dark hair as she ran.
Another black robe popped out of a doorway.
The only sound was breathing. Two, three separate tracks, as distinctive as voices would have been.
The woman in white turned a corner. Stopped when she spotted a ladder. Hesitated, as if making up her mind, then started to climb. The camera filled the frame with her from the waist down, coming in tight on her buttocks and thighs, frantic, in sync with her high, frightened breathing.
Somewhere behind her, confident, in-control breathing. Low-register grunting. Getting louder.
The woman made it to a higher floor. A more open space than what she'd left, but still mazelike from the play of shadow against lighter pockets of dark.
The images chased each other for what seemed like a long time, sometimes running, sometimes creeping. It was half-ass- surrealistic, black-and-white-in-color "symbolism." A bad movie with a worse script.
Suddenly, the woman in white turned a shadow corner and ground to a stop in a puddle of diffused light. The black robes, two of them, had her bracketed. The camera rushed in on her face as she opened her mouth to scream, her eyes wide with shock.
Vonni.
I turned to the handcuffed twin, said "Where was the—?" just as Giovanni put his pistol against Heltman's temple and blew skull fragments all over the room.

• • •

"T
he shell casing," I said. "
Find
it, Giovanni."
"I . . ."
"We don't have time!" I snapped at him, and ran for the back bedroom.
The sodomized woman hadn't even twitched. The drugs they'd fed her must have been near-terminal.

• • •

"T
hey were the ones," Giovanni said. "It was them who . . ."
I didn't say anything.
"Burke, he had to go."
"I'm not arguing."
"But I shouldn't have . . . gone off like that, right? We should have made him tell us—"
"It's done," I said, as I slid the Plymouth through wide streets, past landscaped lawns. "Get Felix on the phone, tell him we're coming in."

• • •

"T
here!" Giovanni said, pointing at a substantial brick Tudor, barely visible from the street.
Even as he spoke, the garage door started going up.

• • •

"T
hat was slick, that pull-off stuff you got," Giovanni said. He was talking to keep from going jagged, and I let him run with it. "When I yanked it off, it looked like a different car."
"I must have swapped paint with that Mustang somewhere," I said. "I'm going to need a whole new front end clip."
"I'm good for—"
"I know," I told him. "That's not the problem now. Thing is, can I leave my car here?"
"Felix?" he asked his partner.
"For a couple of days, no problem. I can have someone come by, flat-bed it out, get it to the crusher."
"No way!" Giovanni said. "You should have seen how this—"
"It doesn't have to be disposed of," I told Felix. "Just worked on. The people you're talking about, they're trustworthy?"
"Mi famiglia,"
he said.

• • •

W
e pulled out in the late afternoon, me and Max in Giovanni's BMW, Felix and Giovanni in a cream-colored Infiniti Q45. By Exit 12 on the Jersey Turnpike, we lost sight of them.

• • •

T
he Mustang driver's wallet had nothing in it but cash, a few credit cards, and assorted ID, all in the name of Brett Heltman.
But his gym bag was the other side of the legit coin— a red-zone pharmacy. Dozens of clear plastic sheets of pop-out Dianabol pills, a half-dozen dark little rubber-topped bottles of Testovit, and a huge assortment of different kinds of alleged "andro," flies just under the FDA's radar. Inside the bag's flap pockets were a Rambo knife, a cell phone, a handful of syringes, individually wrapped. And one of those "personal digital assistants," a Palm m105.
I ran through the cell phone's menu. All the stored numbers were 609 area codes, local. The last number the twin had dialed was to a gym.
That left the PDA. "He liked gadgets," I told the crew, remembering his remote-starter trick. "I don't even want to turn this damn thing on. Maybe he's got it passworded or something, nuke everything if you do it wrong."
"Give it to me," the Mole said.

• • •

"I
t's an emergency, Pepper."
"Leave your number, chief. And not a wireless."

• • •

"T
hat one's an NV, too?" Cyn said, tilting her head in the direction of the cassette I'd brought back from New Jersey.
"Yeah."
"Burke . . . Burke, what does it mean?"
"I think I know, now," I told her. "The NV tapes, for some of the people in them it's an acting job, and for some it's the real thing."
"But the guy making the movies . . . ?"
"For him, it's
all
real," I said. "And he's in charge."

• • •

"H
ow
many?" Wolfe, on the phone.
"A hundred and seventy-seven, total," I told her, the results of the Mole's invasion of the Palm Pilot spread out in front of me. "But—"
"You're joking."
"But I only need the 516 and 631 ones."
"And that's . . . ?"
"Seventy-one."
She made a sound of disgust. Asked, "The names on each bill?"
"Names and addresses. But if any one of them made calls to or received calls from
these
numbers," I said, giving her the number from the cell phone in the gym bag, and the one I'd copied off the wall phone in their kitchen, "that's the only one I need."
"This could take—"
"Price no object," I said. "Even a few hours could mean the difference."

• • •

I
became a news junkie: print, radio, and TV going simultaneously, scanning for "Twin Brothers Found Murdered in New Jersey!"
Nothing.
There was always the chance that the cops hadn't connected what they thought was a hit-and-run with what had to be a deliberate homicide— maybe the Mustang's plates dead-ended instead of taking them to the address we'd pulled from the driver's license. Or maybe the woman in the back bedroom gave them enough likely suspects to keep them working local for a long time.
Or maybe they were keeping the media lid down until they tightened the noose.

• • •

"Y
ou understand it's not like the City out there," Wolfe said, on the phone. "You've got 516 for Nassau, 631 for Suffolk, but 516 is also the area code for
all
the cell phones on Long Island. There's no separate cell prefix, like our 917."
"And you can't get into cell phone records because there's so many different . . . ?"
"We got one hit," she went on, like I hadn't said anything. "Out of all seventy-one numbers, only one call was made to either of the Jersey numbers. It went to their house phone."
"When?"
"About six weeks ago."
"Do you have the—?"
"I don't think you're getting this," she said. "What I did, I had . . . some people do a back-check. Instead of pulling all the records for seventy-one customers, they focused on matching any of those numbers with the phone records for the
Jersey
numbers . . . the two you gave me, understand?"
"Yes," I said, wondering how my brain had gone so numb. Grateful that Wolfe's never did.
"And what we found was a cluster of calls," she said, crisp to the edge of impatience. "A pattern. Mostly from the cell, a few from the house. All to the
same
number in Suffolk County. And when we looked at
that
customer's records, we found that single call to the house in Jersey I just told you about. Clear enough?"
"Perfect."
"Not so perfect," she said. "The calling number's a cell phone. The customer's name is Robert Jones. And the address is a PO box. The credit card's a dud, too."

• • •

"B
yron, can you do something for me? With the studio?"
"I only paid the interest, brother." A honeyed baritone voice on the phone. "Just say what you need."

• • •

"T
he Lloyd Segan Company. How may I direct your call?"
"To Mr. Segan, please," I said, pronouncing the name with the accent on the first syllable, like Byron had said to.
"May I tell Mr. Segan who is calling?"
"My name is Burke. I was told he'd be expecting my—"
"Mr. Burke, yes. Hold, please."
A short pause, then . . .
"Lloyd Segan."
"Mr. Segan . . ."
"Lloyd."
"Lloyd. My name is Burke. Byron said you'd—"
"What can I do for you?" the man said, his voice friendly with warmth and sharp-edged at the same time.
"What I need, Lloyd, is a favor. A number someone can call, and someone to answer it, do a little routine. And some . . . coaching, I guess you'd call it. So I can play my role."

• • •

T
wo-thirty in the afternoon. Half past eleven in Hollywood.
I pointed across the room, where Michelle was poised at the desk, a headset buried somewhere in her hair, only the mouthpiece at the end of the wand visible.
She nodded, blew me a kiss, and dialed.
I tried to hear the phone ring at the other end in my mind— we couldn't risk putting it on speaker.
"Good afternoon, I have Mr. Chenowith, from Acidfree Productions, for Mr. Vision."
 . . .
"Oh, certainly, sir. We're at area code 323. . . ."

• • •

"W
hat's he
doing
?" Cyn asked, pacing anxiously.
"Checking out Acidfree Productions," I told her. "Or getting across a border."

• • •

W
hen the direct line rang, I knew Lloyd had come through. Now it was time to see how good a coach he was.
"Acidfree Productions," Rejji answered the bounced call.
 . . .
"Mr. Vision, is Mr. Chenowith expecting your call?"
 . . .
"Hold, please," she said, sliding out of the chair as Michelle slid in, giving Rejji a "Nice job!" pat on the bottom.
"Mr. Chenowith's office," Michelle said.
 . . .
"Oh, Mr. Vision. Thank you so much for calling. May I give you to Mr. Chenowith?"
 . . .
Michelle pointed at me. I took a centering breath, picked up the extension, said, "This is Stan Chenowith. Do I have The Vision himself?"
Rejji dropped to her knees in front of me, hands clasped. Not playing. Praying.
"I can get word to him," the voice said.
"Oh. All right. Can you tell him we would like to take a meeting with him, concerning backing one of his projects?"
"What do you mean, backing?"
"Well, financing, actually. I don't know what you know about our—"
"I know how it works," the voice said, as if I'd offended him. "How did you . . . I mean, have you seen any of . . . the work?"
"To be honest, I have not," I said. "But you know how this industry works. The buzz is that The Vision is going to be
very
hot. And if you think the elevator's going up,
way
up, the ground floor's the best place to get on."
"People are talking about . . . the work?"
"Oh,
everybody's
talking about it. Word is, he's on the edge. New concepts. I've heard
Blair Witch
meets
Fight Club;
is that outrageous? But, I have to tell you, your client isn't the easiest man to get hold of."
"Where would this meeting be?"
"That would be up to him, of course. I'm only calling now because I have to red-eye in tomorrow, and I'd hoped we could get together in the evening. But if that's not convenient . . ."
"You'd meet in New York?"
"At the Helmsley Park Lane. On Central Park South," I said, underlining that I was a Holy Coaster. A New Yorker would have said "Fifty-ninth Street." "If that would be all right. It's where I always stay."
"What time?"
"Any time The Vision wants. We bring more than money to our projects. We bring
flexibility
."
"Like nine o'clock?"
"You got it! Just have The Vision come to the front desk and ask for my suite. One of my people will come down to get him. Or would you like us to send a car . . . ?"
"Okay."
"Okay, you'll ask The Vision?"
"No. Okay, he'll be there. I can . . . I have the authority to make commitments for him."
"Will you be coming, too, Mr. . . .?"
"Just him," he said.