The Finder: A Novel (11 page)

"Were you asleep?"

No,
his father mouthed, eyes falling closed.

"Thinking?"

Yes.

His father opened his eyes, picked at the morphine tube to be sure it was not pinched or bent. There flickered in his expression a serious intent, a flash of concentration that told Ray that his father was still mostly here.

"Thinking about what?" Ray asked.

"Worlds."

"Worlds?"

"Yes," his father whispered, "worlds within worlds."

Ray glanced at the automatic Dilaudid pump. He had a few minutes before it sent another bolus into his father's bloodstream, knocking him out.

"Dad, the reason that everything happened last night was I have a girlfriend who has disappeared. You haven't met her. She's Chinese. We broke up a few weeks ago. Her brother wants me to find her and what he did was his way of telling me how serious he was."

His father nodded calmly. "Threatening."

"Yeah."

"Studied you, I think."

"I think so."

"Figured out your vulnerability. Me."

Ray exhaled by way of agreement.

"I was hoping you might meet that nice lady who lives next door there." He cracked a slow-motion smile. "She needs a husband, fast."

"I did meet her."

"Oh, then—"

"I was talking to her when they grabbed me."

His father's mouth pulled at one side. "You had a long
talk."

Ray ignored this. "These guys weren't messing around."

"You could call the cops," his father noted.

"Should I?"

A long pause. His father shook his head weakly. Licked his lips.

Ray handed him a cup of juice. "But they could maybe protect you."

"Not me I'm worried about."

"I think I should move you, Dad. Somewhere safe."

"Hospital?"

"I was thinking, yeah."

He sipped his juice. "People die in hospitals, son."

"Dad—"

"I want to die in my own house, in this room. And I don't really care how I die, Ray, or when, so long as it's in this room, in this bed."

This was a speech he'd heard before. "Yes, but these guys will come back, Dad."

"Let them. What's the worst they can do? Murder me? They'd be doing me a personal favor."

Ray hung his head. Six weeks earlier, when he could still walk a bit in the house, Ray's father had told him he wanted to end it sooner rather than later. Did Ray mind if he shot himself? "Why put you through what's coming?" his father had asked then. "Why put
me
through it?"

"Why? I want every minute with you, Dad."

His father had nodded silently.

But Ray hadn't been convinced, and so within an hour, he had gathered all of his father's guns and ammunition and taken them out to the shed in their small backyard and hidden them in a waterproof wrap beneath a couple of bags of peat moss. A shotgun, a rifle, two
Glock 9 service pistols, always kept oiled and clean, plus the boxes of ammunition. Then he'd put a new lock on the shed and hidden one copy of the key inside the rotten birdhouse outside the kitchen window and put the other on his own key ring. If his father had somehow noticed the absence of the guns, he hadn't mentioned it. Of course it was possible his father had not only noticed the absence of the guns but had also discovered or deduced their new location. Ray had leaned a shovel up over the new lock so that it couldn't be seen from the house, but he knew that his father missed very little. The man had been a detective, after all.

But that was weeks ago, and his father had gone steadily downhill ever since. Now the Dilaudid pump clicked; the stuff was going into the tube in his father's wrist. Ray wouldn't have much more time to talk, so he returned to the topic of Jin Li's disappearance. "Her brother told me she was in a car with two Mexican girls who died a few nights ago, and I just spoke with Pete, who told me about it."

"So you
did
call the cops."

"Sort of. It's Pete."

"He's a detective second grade, with thirty years on the job. Method of homicide?"

"It was a car full of shit. Dumped it in the car, drowned them. Pete said his people hadn't gone into the drains yet, because of environmental issues, traffic—"

"Bunch of crap. They just don't want to go in. You have to have hazmat suits, dysentery shots. Case like that, you
got
to go into the drains."

"Why?" Ray asked.

"Think about what the cops found . . . two dead girls . . . aspirated human excrement . . . the bus takes them away. Then the FD hoses out the car for them."

"They found drug traces in the trunk and glove compartment."

His father shrugged. "Pete's gonna think it's drugs. Maybe. I think the shit is the best clue."

"How?"

"What you got to do is find out where the shit came from."

"I know where it came from, it came from human beings. Pete says there are something like nine hundred septic trucks in the area handling loads like this."

"No, no,
listen
to me, there'll be stuff in there, information. There'll be information in the shit."

Now Ray watched the synthetic morphine course through his father, softening the tension in his neck and forehead. His large fingers, bony and thin now, eased against the blanket.

"You did hear me, right?" croaked his father.

"I did."

"I don't want to be moved. I want to die in this bed in this room in this house. Then I will be with your mother."

"Dad, we could easily call the precinct and they'd put a car outside the house."

"Nah."

"Why?"

"I got all the advantages, son."

This made no sense.
Mental clouding,
the Dilaudid sheet had said,
euphoria.
"Like what?"

His father shrugged. "You, for one. Might be interesting. Plus there's another reason."

"What?"

"Might give me some satisfaction. I can still think, buddy-boy, when those angels of mercy don't pump too much of this stuff into me."

"It's so you don't suffer."

"There's lots of kinds of suffering. Your mother heard you were under that building,
that
was suffering. I never seen suffering like that."

"I have."

"When?"

"When she was dying, Dad. I saw you."

His father's eyes drifted upward in remembrance, and he munched his mouth a bit. "Funny how we forget some things."

"You want anything to eat?"

His father shook his head. "Not for me. I got a little applesauce." His eyes were closed now, but he smiled, gums yellow. "You know what this is, don't you?"

"No, what."

"My last case."

"This is serious, Dad."

"I know it's serious," he whispered. "My last case, and I get to do it with my son. Couldn't be better than that." His father pushed the pain button, getting an optional bolus to chase the one just delivered. Upping the dose, wanting more, addicted. "If I were you I would get down in there in those pipes today before the guys down at the precinct maybe decide to do it after all. They won't crawl around in pipes. They'll bring in a backhoe and tear those drainpipes right out of there and look at every inch. But you get in there first, might be just as good."

His father's head lolled a bit, fading fast, and Wendy reappeared in the doorway.

"I'm going to clean him now," she whispered. "So he doesn't feel me moving him around."

Ray nodded. "How's he doing?"

The nurse tore open some antiseptic pads. She moved down to the foot of the bed. Ray followed her.

"The kidneys are barely working . . . he's losing weight," she went on. "I think I know what you are asking."

"That's exactly what I'm asking."

"He's got a strong heart, which isn't helping now. His hands and arms still have strength, too. Sometimes things can go on . . . but I'd say a week, maybe ten days."

"He's not eating much."

"He'll take applesauce, a little yogurt."

"Gloria told you about the men who came last night?"

She nodded. "Your dad won't move, you know."

"What about you? These guys could come back."

She considered him. "This is what I do, Mr. Grant. I stay with peo
ple who are dying and bring them what comfort I can. Your father is a lovely man. I don't see a lot of family, his wife is dead, you are all he's got—"

"What about Gloria?"

"We've been in many situations. You'd be surprised what we've seen."

She returned to the bedside and lifted the covers to expose the nephrostomy tubes that were draining his father's kidneys into clear plastic bags. The sight of these was bad, but not as bad as the original incision from the exploratory surgery running up his father's torso, a huge knife cut. Ray couldn't bear to see this, how poorly it had healed. He had seen things far worse, but those hadn't involved his father. He swallowed his terror and sorrow and stepped outside.

Like many men of his generation, Ray Grant Sr. had built a workshop in the basement, where he listened to baseball and football games on the radio while tinkering over more or less useless projects. The shelves held screws and nails in old jam jars, tools he used in the minor repairs he made on his rental houses, a hodgepodge of lumber, metal screening, boxes of doorknobs and hinges, cans of unknown metal parts for unknown appliances—in sum, the same loose, useless crud that had accrued everywhere else in the house, shed, porch, and backyard. He had dragged an old armchair down the stairs intending to strengthen it, and after doing so had left it down there as a more comfortable place to listen to the games on the radio.

Ray poked around in the workshop, gathering the tools he might need in the parking lot drain: gloves, goggles, rubber boots, flashlight, metal saw. Crawling up into a pipe full of shit wasn't exactly a good idea. He'd given himself a shot for either amebic dysentery or Japanese encephalitis in a dust-blown field hospital on the other side of the world six months earlier, but he couldn't remember which. He found the tools but wasn't quite ready to climb the stairs, for whenever he spent any time in the workshop he learned something about his father.
It was a room that showed how methodical and disciplined his father had been. Books on real estate management, electrical wiring, plumbing, building management, all carefully underlined, annotated even. Records of his buildings, going back twenty-five years. On the other side of the shop stood a row of rusty file cabinets containing copies of every one of his case records, going back to 1982, the year he made detective, got the gold shield. Completely illegal to have these records, but no one in the NYPD minded. Part of the institutional memory. Old cops remembered things, after all. Ray had read hundreds of these cases, including the unsolved ones. You read a few dozen, though, and soon saw how tedious police work was. He opened a drawer for the 1983 cabinet, pulled out a folder at random. Flopped it open, started to read a DD-5 form, the basic report detectives filled out: "Suspect walked south to Grand Central Station, where he was observed making a call from the last phone on the left in the east exit, and then suspect was observed exiting on 42nd Street, where he stopped at a newsstand for three minutes. He then walked . . ." And so on.

Ray slipped the folder back, shut the drawer. He didn't want this jam-up with Jin Li to be his father's last case. His father had already solved his last case, a blackmail that involved a young woman and a banker in his fifties. He knew because he'd read the file: the older guy had screwed the woman for a couple of months in one of Manhattan's better hotels, and when he got tired of her, she got tired of pretending that she liked him. Happened all the time, except that she expected real money for her trouble. The executive had paid her a few times, then warned her he was sick of it and to back off. By this time she was fucking a lanky, well-spoken Dominican who needed extra funds for his coke habit. At his urging she went back for more money to the banker, who told his wife they were going to New Zealand for the summer. She would fly there first and he'd meet her, which he did, after telling Ray's father everything about the affair. Yes, he preferred it be kept quiet. By the time the girl was arrested, the Dominican had left town for Santa Fe, escorting a young heiress with a drug habit. The girl could afford only a cheap lawyer, and when the banker and his wife finally returned
from their restful sojourn in New Zealand, the girl had already accepted a quick plea bargain and was doing her two years. "A stupid last case," his father had said at the time. "But there it is."

But of course there had been more cases. Once a detective, always a detective. It was a way of thinking about human reality. After his retirement, his father had occasionally helped out his friends who now ran private investigation agencies, mostly by making a few calls or going along on a car ride to talk to someone, his service revolver tucked in his coat. Or setting up on someone, waiting in a car for six hours sipping coffee and pissing into a bottle. But mostly he had run his houses and once a year indulged in a fishing trip down to the Bahamas. He'd had a few girlfriends, after first asking Ray's permission if he could take off his wedding ring. He wanted to keep it on, he admitted, because it made him think of Ray's mother, but he was never going to find any companionship that way. His hand was the first place the women looked. Ray understood that. And so the wedding ring had reappeared in the little silk cuff link box in his father's underwear drawer, where he kept his military and police medals, his gold detective shield, his own father's watch, and other sacred items.