Rough Justice (17 page)

“Yeah. But you gotta be there on the dot. Wait out of sight till I open the door, then come in a hurry. I'll let you in.” I heard him sigh. Then he said: “How you get out—that I don't know.”

An hour later, I was in front of Cooper House again. This time, I stood across the street. There was a restaurant there, with a recessed kitchen door. I stood in the alcove, the smell of steak seeping out to me through the door's metal. I leaned one shoulder against the brick wall, smoked a cigarette, waited. I kept my eye on the chiseled tower that rose against the blue sky. I watched its huge wooden entrance. On the sidewalk in front of me, an old woman wobbled past, tugged by her dog. I nodded to her. A cute redhead with two cute redheaded girls hurried down the hill. I tipped a finger from my brow. It wasn't a great hiding place, but it beat crouching behind a tree.

Finally, the wooden doors opened. I tossed my cigarette, straightened. Sam Scar's bullet head poked out into the open. He looked this way and that.

I broke from the alcove, jogged across the street.

“You supposed to be hiding,” he whispered.

“I was hiding, that was hiding.”

“Shit.”

“Would you let me in?”

He stood back and I slipped inside. He shut the door behind me.

“Someone see us, I get my ass fired. Come on.”

The spacious hall was lighted by the chandelier, but there were no people there, no sound. Silence from the drop-in center to my right. Silence from the stairs against the far wall. The door to the offices was shut. I followed Scar to it.

“Now, we got a problem,” he said. He bent over the doorknob, rummaging through the keys on a large ring. “Shit, we got lots of problems, two big ones.” He cast a nervous eye toward the stairs. “Number one, the keys. You gotta take the keys in with you to open the cellar door—and
I
gotta get them back to Security before they missed. That means you got fifteen minutes in there, no more.” He found the key, slipped it into the lock. Froze at a shout from upstairs. Waited, his mouth open, his eyes wide. Then, when the silence came down to us, he opened the lock, pushed in the door.

“What's number two?” I asked.

He looked at me, his face close to mine. I could feel his breathing hard and hot. I could see the fresh wound on his cheek, nestled black in the crevice of his old scar.

“About two minutes after you called, Celia went out,” he said. “She said she got a call on her inside line, said it was an emergency. She said she'd have to come back to finish up her work. Could be anytime.”

I looked through the open door into the office. Saw the shape of furniture standing dead and silent in the light from the window.

“Damn,” I said.

“So you got fifteen minutes—or not. One or the other. I'll go into drop-in and keep an eye out.” He slipped the keys into my hand.

“Thanks, Scar.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Shit.”

I went through the door. Scar eased it shut behind me.

The quiet and the dark closed in at once. Not total quiet. Not total dark. There were plenty of sounds from the street just beyond the window. The whisper of cars, the rumble of them from the avenue, voices of people passing, a barking dog. And there was daylight: soft, sunless afternoon light falling over everything.

But in here, the life of the street, the light of the day, seemed out of reach. In here, the desks were all neat, and the chairs tucked in under them. The phones were silent, the lamps oft In here, the nearby noise and light had a distant, kind of sad quality to it, like birds heard from a prison cell.

It was a long room, big enough for six desks in two rows of three. There were two doors at the far end, one in the wall facing me, the other to the right. I moved slowly up the aisle between the desks, looking back over my shoulder sometimes, feeling the room's emptiness like a presence following after me.

The door facing me led to Celia Cooper's office. I pushed it in, peered through the crack. It was a tidy place, a square with a big wooden desk in the center. There were lots of pictures on the wall, some of Celia with a woman who looked like her sister, a few of the sister with husband and kids, a few others. I pulled out and went to the other door, the door to my right.

That was the one I was looking for. A cramped cubicle. The desk took up the whole thing. There were white shelves built into the walls, with folders piled into them and stacked on top of them, and dated ledger books slanting this way and that, out of order. There were a couple of public-service posters framed under glass. And there was a door, the door to the cellar. I stepped across the room to it.

It took me a second to find the key, another to work it in the old-fashioned dead bolt. But then the door swung in and I saw the stairs. They were chipped, dirty concrete stairs. They led down into blackness, disappeared in it. I found a light switch on the wall, flicked it up. The hard yellow light of a bare bulb went on down there. I saw a small patch of concrete floor, broken into pebbles. I went down to it.

The cellar was a tangled maze of hallways that seemed to go off in every direction. All of them seemed to end in shadow. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes left, I figured. But that nervous sense—of being followed, of being watched—made me feel the crush of time. I took a deep breath, listened to it tremble as I let it out. I headed down the hall to my left.

My fingers trailed over the rough concrete wall as I walked toward the dark end. There was an entranceway. I peered in until my eyes adjusted. I saw the compactor, the black bag stretching from the metal tube. I turned, headed back the way I came.

I went down another hall, following a loud hum. I found the boiler, a tangle of pipes twisting around a husky mass in the dark. I turned and went back. Down another hall to find an old dumpster standing by another entrance. I opened the lid of the dumpster, looked in. There were chunks of concrete in there, and a few planks of plasterboard. It looked as if someone had been doing some light construction. I reached in and shifted some of the stones and boards around with my hand. Then I pulled my head out, closed the lid.

I peeked in the entrance. There was a trunk room, stacked high with old boxes and crates. Anything could have been hidden in there. I would never have found it—but then, neither would Sam Scar in the normal course of things, and there would've been no reason to keep him out.

I shook my head, took a look at my watch again.

“Damn,” I whispered.

Time was almost up. I turned and walked quickly back to the stairs. At the foot of them, under the light of the bare bulb, I paused for a second to dust off my hands. I paused—and then I stopped cold.

My hands were covered with dust. Dust from the plasterboard, dust from the stones. They were white boards, white stones. It should have been white dust.

But some of it was brown. There were flecks of brown on my palm. It looked like dried blood.

I glanced at my watch again. My fifteen minutes were gone. I headed back down the hall to the dumpster.

I found a light switch just inside the trunk room, flicked it on. In the outglow, I opened the dumpster lid again. Reached in. Rummaged through the stones and boards—and found what I was looking for.

A board. A two-by-four. And one edge of it was stained a dark rusty brown. Deeply stained, too, as if something had been seeping into it for a long time. When I rubbed my thumb over the surface of it, brown dust and flecks came off—and there was still more brown underneath. When I laid the board back, I saw other boards and a stone or two that had also been touched by the stain.

I reached in deep, pulled up more stones. More and more, until I could see the dumpster's bottom. But that was it. There was nothing else there.

I looked at the thing another second, my brain running over the possibilities. But I couldn't stay. I'd been in the cellar almost twenty minutes now. I had to get out, get back to Scar with the keys. I flicked the lights off, walked quickly to the stairs. Jogged up them. Hit the lights. Slipped back into the little room where Mikki Snow had worked. Closed and locked the cellar door. Went toward the outer office …

But I never got that far. I was stopped by a picture, one of the photos on the wall. I hadn't noticed it before: it was a group shot taken in front of Cooper House. Celia was at the center of it, with Thad Reich on one side of her and Mark Herd on the other. Sam Scar was in back of Reich, a hand on his shoulder. And standing next to Sam, there was a young woman. She was pretty, in her early twenties, I'd say, with dark brown skin and black, black hair swept straight back. She had a high forehead and big, melting brown eyes that made her smile look sort of wistful and brave.

I thought of Mikki Snow, who had come to New York to look for work and “got homeless” instead. Celia Cooper's bookkeeper, who'd had some business with Howard Baumgarten. Now she was gone, and the cellar was off limits and there was a stain down there, a stain too much like blood.

I stood still in the room and looked around me. Ran my eyes over the stacks of folders, the rows of books. Mikki Snow had worked here, going over the records, the finances … I reached out and pulled a ledger off the shelf. It was a huge book, oversize, heavy. It was dated six years ago. I hefted it in two hands, set it on the desk. I opened it, looked down a page. Flipped through a few more.

The book listed the contributions to the place: the sources, the dates, the amounts. It listed the uses of the money: salaries, maintenance, food, and so on. The operation looked pretty simple, two large city grants, some money from the state for drug counseling, one or two foundations weighing in with large donations. There was plenty of white space on the book's big pages.

I closed the book quietly. Hoisted it again. Started to slip it back onto its shelf.

Then the light went on in the outer office. It leaked in underneath the door. I went rigid, still holding the ledger in my hands.

I heard movement out there. Footsteps muffled in the carpeting. Breathing slowly, I continued sliding the book onto its shelf.

There was a soft metallic click. I looked over my shoulder. The doorknob was turning. I shoved the book into place, moved back to the cellar door.

And my shoulder brushed against another ledger. It tottered as I turned to it, fell from the shelf. Landed with a thud that made the floor shudder. It splayed open on two pages filled from top to bottom in a cramped, careful hand, and while I stared down at it, the door was pulled open.

Then I raised my eyes, still staring, into the fierce eyes staring back.

18

“I would have thought you had more brains, Mr. Wells.”

I sat on the edge of the desk, closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose.

When I looked up, Celia Cooper was picking up the ledger on the floor. She looked at me over the top of it. She clapped it shut. Dumped it heavily back on a shelf.

“Find anything?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

Her eyes flared. Her lips were white. An angry red flush appeared on her cheeks in splotches. Her fists were clenched at her sides. Her arms trembled and her eyes glistened with raging tears.

“I did not deserve this,” she said. She managed to keep her voice even. “I did not deserve this from you.”

I could not speak at all. I nodded.

“I talked to you,” she went on. “Even after you killed my friend, I did what I could. I tried to help you. I did not deserve this … violation of … of my
rights
.”

I stood up, put my hands in my pockets. “Miss Cooper, I didn't mean to violate—”

“You didn't mean!” Now the red came up into her cheeks completely. Now the tears were brimming over, the white lips quivering. “You didn't mean to … to kill Thad. You didn't mean to break into my property. Suppose I call the police and explain to them what you didn't mean to do.”

“Miss Cooper, I was looking for a woman, an employee of yours named Mikki Snow. I'd heard—”

“Oh!” Celia Cooper brought her clenched fist to her mouth. The tears spilled down her cheeks. She shook her head angrily. “What was Mikki Snow to you?” she said.

“She might've—”

“Did you know her?” Her face was contorted, her voice was savage.

“No, but—”

“Had you ever even met her?”

“I thought she—”

“Because
I
did.
I
knew her. I knew her very well.” She ran her hand up through the graying ringlets of her hair. She shook her head—and her eyes were drawn, as mine had been, to the photograph on the wall. She looked at it as she spoke, and I thought about the young woman in it and her soft, sad, courageous smile. “I took her out of the shelters when she'd been raped and beaten,” Celia said. “And I sat on her bed while she nearly died of the drugs she took for … for some kind of stupid, stupid comfort. And I held her while she vomited again and again and while she was racked and twisted with convulsions. I did all that.”