Terminal (8 page)

“H
e
worked
on this,” Michelle said, standing with her hands on her hips, looking down at the Kong-sized table we had made out of rough planks laid across seven thick sawhorses. It took up just about all the space in what used to be my living room. No easy feat: the living room had been constructed by knocking down non-load-bearing walls that had separated all five of the flophouse “rooms” on that floor.

“He had plenty of time, little sister,” Clarence said, pointing with a shooter’s index finger at the array of brightly colored file folders. Each was labeled in block printing as anonymous as the pasted-up words in a ransom note.

“Time ain’t worth a dime,” the Prof said. “He was Inside, son. Ain’t no kind of space in that place.”

I nodded. Looked up to see Max doing the same thing. That “satchel” was more like a small suitcase. “Forty-point-nine kilos,” the Mole said, after he was done putting it through his machines.

Inside, it’s not space that’s the biggest problem; it’s privacy. The hacks—that’s what we called them in New York, back when I was locked up; they call them “cops” in Jersey, “screws” in Massachusetts—who knows what they called them where the cancer-ridden man had done his time—could turn your house upside down just for the fun of it. They liked doing things like that, but they were always careful who they did it to.

If you were someone they hated—and it never took a lot to get on
that
list—they didn’t just search, they destroyed. Tore up precious photographs, letters you would never see again, an art project you’d been working on. Just because they could. Those “soldiers” who played torture-power games with Iraqi prisoners, you think they were from one of the elite fighting forces, like the Rangers, or the Green Berets? Forget that: former prison guards is what they were. They’d had their own off-the-books training, spent their days in a subculture the World never sees. They’re not allowed to bullwhip prisoners anymore, so they learned new tricks.

All the power-boys do it. They don’t change their attitudes, they just adapt them to fit the times. Ever notice how the cops always scream “Stop resisting!” while they’re gang-beating some poor bastard into permanent paralysis, just in case there’s some good citizen with a videocam lurking nearby?

A convict can spend years, decades even, planning a job. But he’s not going to draw diagrams of it, not while he’s a captive. Unless he wants to stay one.

“He’s not an impatient man,” I told them. “Even with that cancer clock ticking inside him, he wasn’t going to panic. He talked tough in that warehouse, but we’re his last chance. His last
real
chance, I mean. He could put together another crew, but where would he find one he could trust? Not in the time he’s got left.”

“It’s only a plan, man,” the Prof said. “You got the time to make one, you got the time to fake one.” Not arguing for one side or the other, just saying it like it was. He and Silver had a friendship of sorts—shared respect, more, actually—but even if it had been Silver himself pushing the score, the Prof would have wanted his own look first. Trusting a man doesn’t mean you trust his judgment.

Max reached over, tapped the face of my wristwatch, held up one finger.

“First thing,” I answered him, and everybody else, “is we check out everything that’s got an independent source. So, for openers—”

“I can do all the newspaper stuff, mahn,” Clarence volunteered, his Island voice expressing pride in his recently acquired computer skills. “There is a database—LexisNexis, it is called—that I could look through. Very quickly, too. If all those articles he collected are true—not true in what they say; true copies of what was in the papers, or the magazines—I can tell you.”

“Perfect,” I told him, as the Prof nodded approvingly. “Remember, though: this case was never solved. So there’s no court proceedings. And there’s a lot of stuff in the police files we’re never going to get a look at.”

Michelle exchanged a look with the Prof.

“Forget it,” I told them. I wasn’t going back to Wolfe’s network, not after the last time. Wolfe. An angel’s face, and eyes that matched her name. She’d walk through hell wearing a gasoline dress to put a freak down for the count, but she never considered ass-kissing part of that job. Or looking the other way, either. Because she hadn’t come up through the clubhouse—in Queens, the Democratic machine doesn’t just control judgeships, it runs the whole show—she never participated in the “voluntary” fundraisers, or tacked up campaign posters, or kept a photo of the DA in her office. The only mistake I’d ever known her to make was thinking that being the best sex-crimes prosecutor the city had ever seen would be enough to let her keep her job as head of the Special Victims Bureau.

She never understood the “go along to get along” mentality of the political appointee, so she was probably the only one in the city who was surprised when they finally fired her. After that, she’d gone outlaw. Not committing crimes, but going places she wasn’t supposed to go. She ran the best info-trafficking cell in the city. And she still had a
lot
of friends on the force.

I thought I had a chance with her once, but I waited too long. Crossed too many borders, too many times.

“You and me, it’s not going to be.” That’s how she’d ended it between us.

Last year, I’d taken some risks to show her I was back to myself—the man who…well, the man who she once…Hell, I didn’t know, but I wanted to be that man again, if only in her eyes.

I’d sworn to her that I was doing the right thing, for the right reasons. That wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t all of the truth. The whole job had reeked of money, and I was looking for some of that, too. So she’d used up a big favor, gotten me some stuff from inside police files.

But she’d made it clear I couldn’t go there again. I kept hoping word of the last thing I’d done would get back to her. Kept hearing Johnny Adams wailing “Reconsider Me” in my head, hoping she was tuned to the same station.

If she’d reach out to me, any excuse would do. But she hadn’t, and I wasn’t going to break my word not to contact her again. Sure, I could get to her crew, buy some information, like anyone else. But police files, only Wolfe herself could get
that
kind of thing done. Not an option.

“We’re not trying to solve a case here,” I told everyone. “If the guy Silver sent is telling the truth, the case is already solved…only nobody ever paid for it.”

“Writing a check won’t clear
that
deck.”

“I know, Prof. Look, I’m not saying we should do this. We’re family for real, not some fucking TV show. So, straight up, this is an extortion job, okay? If—
if
—this guy is telling the stone truth, there’s guilty people—
rich
guilty people—who’ll pay major bucks to get their hands on something that proves they killed a little girl.
That’s
the job. The girl herself, she’s been in the ground for thirty-some years. There’s nothing we can do for her. Thing is, do we want to do this for ourselves?”

“I…don’t think I do,” Michelle said, softly.

“How come, sis? It’s not like we never—”

“Just stop it!” She whirled on me. “You know perfectly well what those…degenerates who killed her want. There’s only one way they can ever be
sure
whoever has the goods on them never comes around again, no matter how much they pay.”

“That’s Silver’s pal’s problem, not ours.”

“We’d
still
be helping them get away with it.”

“They
got
away with it, honeygirl. You think there’s still an investigation going on? This case is as buried as that little girl’s body.”

“Look at me!” my sister commanded.

I held her eyes as best as I could—my eyes don’t work together anymore, not since that gunshot wound a few years back, and the learning-on-the-job surgery that followed. The two eyes aren’t even the same color anymore. But Michelle had been reading the truth in them since we were street children together.

“I see,” she finally said.

Everybody looked at her, waiting.

“And I’m in,” Michelle said.

“T
he copies were authentic,” Clarence said, “every single one.” It was four days later, all of us in the war room. Like before, the makeshift table was covered with paper, but none of it had come out of the satchel that the AB man had handed me.

The walls were now plastered with white oaktag, fastened with pieces of duct tape, covered with writing in different-colored Sharpies. Everyone had their own color, so you could tell at a glance who made the comment. I don’t know where Michelle had found a lilac one.

Clarence’s voice was deliberately flat, showing us he could be professional about…even this: “On August 17, 1975, the body of Melissa Welterson Turnbridge was found in the woods north of the Merry Meadows Country Club golf course. The child”—Clarence stumbled a little over the word, but didn’t look up from his computer screen—“was thirteen years old. Born August 27, 1961. She would have turned fourteen in a few days. Reported missing by her parents when she had not come home by ten at night on August 4. The police had been looking for her ever since.”

“Teenage girl breaks curfew and the parents call in the police?” I said.

“And they rush right out and start looking for her?” Michelle put in, laying her suspicions over mine.

“Different schools, different rules,” the Prof said, sweeping away our doubts. “Walk into a big-city precinct, tell that same story, parents get the brush-off. Up there, the cops
rush
off. You call from the Projects, say your little girl hasn’t come home, the blue boys think she’s probably up on a roof somewhere, giving blow jobs to gangbangers. But when you call from a town where being a millionaire puts you on the wrong side of the tracks, they call out the SWAT team if you tell ’em there’s a possum in your backyard.”

“There had been a big storm the night before,” Clarence went on as if nobody had said a word, his voice still as impersonal as the screen he was reading from. “One of the men who works for one of the owners—the Shelton Estate, the papers called it—was out checking for damage. From knocked-down trees and things like that. It was that man who found her. Just her leg, sticking up. The storm had uncovered her.”

“So she wasn’t buried?” I asked.

“No, mahn. It was like someone rolled a big log over her, then covered it with whatever they could find. She was never actually under the ground.”

“Huh!” the Prof said.

Everybody waited, but he didn’t say anything more.

Finally, Clarence picked up the thread: “She had been dead for days, the coroner said. Probably killed the same night she hadn’t come home.”

Max tapped the table to get Clarence to look up, then made the sign of a pointed gun.

“No,” the West Indian said, his Island voice so hard and tight that the lilt had been squeezed out of it. “She wasn’t shot, and she wasn’t stabbed. Beaten to death. Strangled, too. ‘Multi-sexual assault,’ they also said.”

“Before or after?” I asked.

“It does not say,” he answered. “There is a lot more. It was the biggest story in the local papers for
months.
A lot of national coverage, too. All I am saying is—the clippings this man brought to you?—he did not make them up. Or change them. Even the pictures—there are lots of those, mostly from her junior-high school; she was supposed to start the ninth grade in a couple of weeks—those are the same. Not Photoshopped or—”

“Photo—?”

The Mole waved away whatever ignorant question I was going to waste his time with.

“You started at the other end?” I said to Max, gesturing as I spoke. He can read lips as easy as he reads print, but the sign language we’d taught each other was ours, and I was never giving up that part of our bond.

The Mongolian nodded.

“They ever get specific about the cause of death?”

He shook his head. Shrugged his shoulders. Then slammed one steel chunk of a fist into an open palm. Over and over again. As we watched, he mimed a beating. A vicious, systematic beating. And the kind of rape maggots do with a broomstick or a beer bottle. The mute Mongol pointed at the pile of paper, and shook his head. Then he pointed to his own temple, held up a “number one” gesture.

We all nodded, following along. The papers had never said so, not out loud, but the little girl had been strangled
after
the kind of beating that might have killed her anyway.

Some freak had pain and sex twisted together into a single wire, a wire he had wrapped around that little girl’s neck. The actual cause of death didn’t matter. We didn’t know who, not for certain-sure, but we all knew why.

And a white supremacist with no reason to lie said he had a man who could tell us the part we didn’t know.

“We have to—”

The Mole doesn’t interrupt, unless he needs to get the train back on the track. This time, he pointed to a large, flat piece of equipment, with four VU meters on the front.

We all turned to watch as he stood up and pushed a button.

“T
his is ‘pause,’” the man with the subterranean complexion and Coke-bottle glasses said. “When I activate it, what you will hear is not the original. The signal-to-noise ratio was very poor—probably just a cassette recorder in the pocket of one of the people talking. There are only two voices. I put them on separate tracks”—he pointed at a pair of cone-shaped speakers, placed equidistant from the thing with the meters on the front—“so there will never be a doubt as to which one is talking. Here is a transcript my son made.” His pale-blue eyes met Michelle’s lilac contact lenses; the pride of parenthood lanced between them, so clear you could actually see the beam.

He handed Max a thick sheaf of paper, bound along the left side and coated in heavy, transparent plastic.

Then he pushed a button.

“H
ow come you give me the full search, and I don’t get to do the same to you?”

I didn’t recognize the Tootsie Pop voice—hard around the edges, soft in the core—but I put the speaker’s age around fifty.

“You think I’m working for the Law, walk out.” The cancer-man’s voice: low in volume, too self-assured to waste effort on threats.

“It’s not that,” the other voice said, whining with resentment. “It’s just…well, you know, I haven’t had a finger-wave since I got out.”

“You think that was a thrill for me?”

“No. You know I didn’t mean that. Only…”

Nothing but a throbbing silence for several seconds.

“Okay, forget it. But something like this, a man has to be careful.”

“I was.”

“Not you. Me.”

“You said a man,” the AB old-timer said, his voice the opposite of the other guy’s. “There’s only one of those here, in this room. You asked for me. There had to be a reason. Whatever it is, I know it’s not Brotherhood business. So it better be money. Lots of money. Something you want done, but you don’t have the stones to do on your own, maybe. Or, maybe, something you need a crew for, and you don’t have one. So you’re going to say something. Something you don’t want anyone else to hear.”

“If it was, you could understand why I’d want to check for—”

“You don’t need to check for what you already know. You know me. You know my name. You know my pedigree. You know I don’t talk.”

“Sometimes, when people get…desperate, they—”

“Look at me,” the AB man commanded. “Look at me the way you looked at me Inside. What do you see,
punk
? I’m the man who stood between you and a ram job from every nigger in the joint. Right?
Right?!
”

The tape was silent for a few seconds. Long enough for the other man to nod, I was guessing.

“You were supposed to be some kind of long-con guy,” the AB boss said. “A paper man. So you must have done your homework. Before you got word out to me, I mean. You know I don’t have paper on me. No wants, no warrants. No parole, no probation. No arrests, no charges. You could confess to more killings than that sack of shit Henry Lee Lucas, what could I use it for? The Law’s got nothing I want. And I sure as fuck wouldn’t waste my time blackmailing
you.

“I searched you to make sure you’re not here working for the Feebles, trying to get Brotherhood info, make some kind of deal for yourself.
Me,
I got no deal to make. So now we’re done with this. Talk, or walk.”

The sound of a cigarette being lit. Exhalation.

“I’ve got something,” the stranger’s voice said.

Another exhalation.

“A murder.”

“Call 911,” the AB man said. I could hear the dismissive shoulder-shrug in his voice.

“This is an old murder. More than thirty years old. Three men—boys they were then, but that doesn’t matter—did it. Rich boys. Rich boys who got richer.”

“The ones you told me about when we were Inside? They’re still alive?”

“Yes! All three of them. I’ve got
everything
on them. And every single one could pull millions in cash out of safe-deposit boxes alone.”

“So what changed since you first told me? You’ve got some suspicions—”

“Proof,” the stranger said, confidence adding strength to his voice. “Absolute, rock-solid, stand-up-in-court proof. What’s changed is that
now
I realize that I can’t turn it into the kind of money it’s worth, not by myself.”

“This proof—you saw it for yourself?”

“I…Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“This murder’s never been solved?”

“Never. And the girl they killed was no throwaway, either. Her family was rich, too. They still have muscle. Thirteen years old. Raped to death. You think they forgot? I’m telling you, this is worth a fortune. Millions.”

“So you say.”

“No. I mean, I
will
say, if it comes to that. But I’ve got a lot more than that.”

“What? DNA? Fingerprints?”

“Not DNA…probably. It was a long time ago, like I said. Fingerprints? They probably left some, but how could they still be around now? It doesn’t matter. Even without any of that, I’ve got something that nails their coffin.”

Sound of another cigarette being lit.

“I got pictures. I got one of the bats they used on her. And the kicker: a piece of paper. An
old
piece of paper—they’ve got all kinds of ways now to prove how old it is—with them all but admitting it. This club they had, they kept a journal. I made them give it to me, to protect myself, from what they asked me to do. Plus, for all they know, I got them on tape, too. I always had a lot of that recording stuff in my place back then…and that’s where we were when they told me about it.”

“So you want to give them what you have in exchange for—?”

“A million apiece. That’s three. And all I need is a half.”

“Half of—?”

“No, no. Half a million. The rest is yours, all yours. I know there’s expenses with something like this.”

“How come
you
never just—?”

“These are rich men,” the stranger’s voice said, fear threatening to break through the thin membrane of his voice. “
Really
rich. Who knows how they might react if I was to—”

“So you want me—”

“The Brotherhood. I want the Brotherhood. That kind of…operation, it’s not part of their world. If they even
saw
some of the men you’ve—”

“They might just call the cops.”

“Not a chance,” the stranger said, confidently. “Not when you put certain stuff—stuff I’m going to give you—on the table.”

Another exhale.

“Then it’s done,” the stranger said. “Done for everyone. They’re not coming after
you
guys, not people like them. And me, I’ll be in a place where they could never find me.

“See how sweet? You get paid. I get paid. And they get the Sword of Damocles removed from hanging over their heads all these years. Everybody wins.”

Sound of another cigarette being lit.

Exhale.

“I’ll listen,” the cancer-ridden man said. “If you’re playing straight, there might be a move here. If you’re not, I can find you a lot easier than you found me.”