Fresh Kills (37 page)

“How did you know?”

He picked up half an onion ring that remained on his plate and examined it, then put it back.

“I knew from my mom that people from Russia are scared of the cops, so I told Luda the cops would be looking for her because she was illegal.”

“Was that why she kept asking for me?” I said, watching the two fat guys pay their check and waddle out of the diner.

“Maybe she thought you could protect her,” Billy said. “Right from Wednesday morning when we went to Tolya's house, she wanted to be around you.”

“What about the dolls?”

“I wanted to warn her.”

“About what?”

“About what could happen to her if she got caught,” Billy said.

“Go on.”

“I took the baby dolls from the toy store, I thought it would be a kind of like good warning. I heard Mr Lippert talk about the little girl that was killed in Jersey, and that she had her doll with her and they cut off the doll's foot, which gave me the idea.”

“You listened in on the phone?”

“I don't remember. Maybe you mentioned it or something.”

“You got the dolls out of the toy store that night? Wednesday night?”

“Yeah. We were having such a good time at the ball game that day, you and me, and then we had to go to Luda's stupid party. It was easy just to take some of those dolls. Things aren't that hard, Artie, if you give them like some thought. Right? I mean it's sort of what they teach us at school. Just think things through. I put them in a shopping bag and left the store, and I sort of expected an alarm to go off because they had those store tags, but nothing happened,” Billy said. “I had this idea I could scare Luda with them, you know?”

“You were going to show her a doll with its foot cut off?”

“I wasn't sure. Something like that. I didn't have time. I got a little nervous.”

In Chinatown, Billy found a warehouse with the door unlocked. He put the dolls into the fridge. Pretty easy stuff, he said. But after that, he couldn't get Luda to come see, which was frustrating – that was the word from his vocabulary book. He made a call to the cops using a fake Russian accent. He found Sonny Lippert's number on my desk. He called the local precinct. It was all kind of fun, he said. Like a puzzle.

But afterwards, he started worrying, mostly about the fat guy from Brooklyn – he meant Stan Shank – who was following him.

“What were you going to do with Luda?”

Billy looked up, his blue eyes soft now, and said, “I wasn't going to hurt Luda or anything, I didn't want to hurt her, you know, I just wanted her to go away. I need to smoke,” he added. “Can we go outside, please?”

I put some money on the table, and followed him into the parking lot.

“Do you want to call someone?” said Billy for the third time, voice not threatening or challenging, just wondering what I would do.

“Why don't you finish your story?”

“I think I'd like to go back to the house with you, Artie, if that would be OK,” Billy said, digging in his pocket for a cigarette, and not finding one.

I passed him a pack I had, he extracted a cigarette, lit up and handed the pack back. I took one.

“I was kind of hurt when you stole my phone, you know, Artie, it was like you didn't trust me, or whatever,” said Billy. “I'm OK with that now.”

I inhaled as much nicotine as I could, sucking the drug deep in my lungs because I figured it would calm me down. I felt
sick. From the moment Billy knew he could get away from the facility in Florida, he had worked on his plan.

Maybe the plan went wrong when Billy told his grandfather he was going to New York. Maybe the old man told his friend Stan Shank. Maybe Vera Gorbachev, whose stepson Frank Laporello was married to Debbie, Shank's daughter, was involved. Gorbachev had worked on Rhonda Fisher's guilt so she asked Sonny Lippert to send me over there. I had been chasing my own tail. It scared me, the whole thing, how one favor, Sonny asking me to visit Vera, led to so much horror. A little thing. The kind of thing you did every day. What if I'd never gone at all?

“I'm sleepy,” Billy said now. “Can we just go back to the house a while? I'd like to take a nap, Artie.” He tossed his cigarette out onto the ground of the parking lot.

“Where is Luda?”

“I don't know,” Billy said. “Honest. I don't know. I just asked her to come and meet me, and she said OK, and I said where to go, I told her how to take a taxi and what to tell them, and then I didn't see her. She didn't show up.”

“Didn't you think she could get lost? Or scared? Or something bad could happen?”

Billy got in the car, put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He didn't wait to see if I got out of the car to use a phone. He seemed to trust me. I got in.

“I just didn't want her to take you away from me,” Billy said.

There was no place left for us to go. Billy fell asleep in the car. I drove away from the diner, back to the house because there was no other place I could think of. If we crossed Staten Island, one of the Russians might see us, someone connected to Vera or the beauty salon; I didn't know if Sonny was still holding Stanley Shank. Sonny wouldn't let me off the hook either, not this time.

Johnny and Genia were probably home or on their way, but Genia didn't want her own kid. And Luda was still missing. I wasn't sure now I could even get Billy to the airport. For all I knew Lippert might have put the word out to pick him up. But if I got him on a plane, and to Florida, then what?

At best, Billy would be locked up in the hospital ward. I couldn't send him there. Anyway I knew he wouldn't go to Florida. He had never meant to go back. I couldn't keep him here for long, I couldn't take him home.

Maxine was coming back the next day to our apartment over by the river, and I'd be there waiting. Somehow, I'd be there.

The onions we ate at the diner made me feel so sick, I was sweating and light-headed and I felt dehydrated, like there was no water in me at all, like I was dried out, dried up.

Around me, there was more traffic. People packed in cars and vans, some with boat stuff on the roof, kids inside giggling or hitting each other, all of them on their way to beaches or barbecues. In the street, a kid reeled around on a skateboard. The sun was high and hot. You could hear music from people's backyards. My mouth was dry as dust.

I was on my own on this huge island, part domesticated, part wild, with its rows and rows and rows of bungalows and mobile homes, semi-detached houses, condos and mansions, the lawns mown, or scruffy, the strip malls baking in the summer heat, and the swamps and creeps, garbage dumps, bird sanctuaries, oceans, bays, ports, docks.

In the most isolated part of New York, there was plenty of wide-open space where you could lose yourself, but I felt trapped. Billy had wanted it that way. He fixed it up to get me here with him where we'd be alone.

I drove until I got back to the house, and thought about calling Hank Provone. I could talk to Hank. Hank would never refuse, but if I called him it meant putting him in deep.

In front of the mobile home and not thinking, I slammed on the brakes and it jolted Billy awake. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, got out of the car, and stumbled inside where, like a little kid, he fell onto the bed in the bedroom and went back to sleep.

I left the bedroom door open, and sat at the kitchen table. Billy wasn't going to hurt me. Even if he could, he wouldn't hurt me. He knew I wouldn't leave him or turn him in.

In the little house near the water, we were alone and a while later he came out of the bedroom and sat with me at the kitchen table and told me straight out that it wasn't him who beat up the kid in Brooklyn with a skateboard on Tuesday. I asked him about the homeless boy in Chinatown, but Billy told me no, that wasn't him either.

I couldn't ask about the baby in the freezer, not then, not yet, maybe not ever, because if he had done it, if he had killed the baby and put her in the freezer – if he had put her there before she was dead – what would I do?

I couldn't just throw Billy away. I wouldn't let them lock him up again. If you loved someone, you took care of them. Wasn't that all that mattered?

I loved him, and I held onto that, taking a last deep drag on my cigarette. Billy was bent slightly forward, whistling to himself, tunelessly like he sometimes did. He looked up at me and grinned because he knew he couldn't carry a tune and neither could I. We had agreed we were both shitty singers. We laughed about it again now. Then Billy yawned and said he was going to get some more sleep. Somehow he never got enough sleep. Growing fast, maybe, he said. He ruffled my hair as if he was the grown-up and then went to the bedroom.

I started making plans for where I could take Billy if I couldn't get back to the city safe, and he wouldn't go back to the school in Florida. Then I heard the sound of car tires on the gravel in front of the house.

“Where's the boy? Where's Billy?” said Hank Provone who got out of his car, followed by Tolya Sverdloff climbing down from his Hummer.

They were a crazy-looking posse. In a giant pair of red and green flowered swim trunks still wet from a dip in the ocean, his belly hanging over them, a pink towel around his neck, Hank wore thick white socks and big white sneakers. I wondered if he had an ankle holster with a weapon under the bulky socks.

Sverdloff looked like he hadn't slept for a long time. Heavy bags hung under his eyes and his shoulders seemed to slump under his own weight.

“Billy's inside asleep,” I said to Hank.

“I'm sorry, Artie. I had to bring Tolya because of the little Russian girl,” Hank said. “He told me and I had to bring him.”

“Sure,” I said.

I expected Sverdloff's fury, but he just put his hand on my shoulder.

“Are you OK?”

“I don't know.”

“We found Luda.”

“She's dead.”

“No,” Hank said. “She's not. She's not dead. Sit down,” he said and I stumbled onto a plastic lawn chair then got up and sat on a redwood bench that put me between Tolya and the front door of the house.

“Tell me why you're here,” I said to Tolya.

“I came to see Billy. To help you,” he said. “Do you want to go get him?”

“You can't help me this way.”

Hank said, “I tried calling you on your cell and the landline out here, I couldn't get any answer.”

“I thought you disconnected the phone.”

“No,” he said. “Lily Hanes called me, she said she knew we had seen each other recently. I told her I thought you could be here. Do you want me to stay, Artie?” Hank said. “I'll do what you want me to, whatever you need.”

“One thing.”

“Yeah, anything.”

I dug in my pocket for a scrap of paper with Vera Gorbachev's address on it and gave it to Hank.

“Try to find out how this woman is connected to a guy named Stan Shank or his family in Brooklyn, ex-cop.”

Hank looked at it. “Gorbachev?”

“No relation.”

He nodded. “You know how to get hold of me,” Hank said.

“Yeah. Of course. Thank you. Hey, Hank?”

“Yeah, Artie?”

“Yesterday, how come you left my place? You took Billy there and left before I got back.”

“Lily came over,” Hank said.

“I don't mean that, I know you didn't leave Billy alone, but what made you need to go?”

“Don't ask me, Artie. Just say I wasn't comfortable around
the boy. So, you need me, just call.” He turned and got into his car and pulled away.

“What about Luda?” I said to Tolya, when Hank had gone.

“Valentina is with her,” Tolya said. “Lily also. Artyom, what made you come to my place last night? You knew, didn't you? You knew something happened to Luda.”

It was a picture in Billy's phone that had made me run to Tolya's late the night before. The picture showed Luda posing at the toy store with one of the dolls that looked like her. On her face was a look of pure terror.

“Lily's with Luda where?”

“St Vincent's,” Tolya said.

“God, what happened?”

“It's not completely clear, Luda doesn't want to talk, but it seems she left the house last night because the kid – Billy – got on the phone with her and scared her about her being not exactly legal here, and said he would help her if she met him. He told her to take a taxi. Luda just left the house and tried to get a cab but she didn't have any money. She's ten, Artyom, and she's lived most of her life in a fucking Russian orphanage and now she's on the New York streets wearing shorts and flip-flops and it's dark and she doesn't have any money.”

“Let's walk,” I said. “Just up to the water. I want to smoke.”

“Where is he?”

“He's asleep, I told you. He's not going anywhere,” I said, but I went and got the keys out of the car.

There was a rough plank bench near the water, and we sat on it.

“She cut someone, Artyom. This is almost worst part.”

“Who?”

“Luda.”

“Christ, tell me.”

“When she goes out, she takes only one thing, a knife from
the kitchen. This is how Russian children are after a whole life in orphanage.”

“How did you know she took it?”

“I left it on the cutting board in kitchen, I was slicing a lemon, I left the room, when I came back, the knife was gone. I knew exactly what knife as soon as I heard what happened. Maybe I knew even before.”

“What made you think about it?”

“I could see this fury in her, I saw it, and I heard it,” said Tolya. “I could read in her the things she never talked about, the orphanage, the kids who died from radiation poisoning after Chernobyl, the kids held hostage and killed by terrorists at the Moscow theater and in Beslan. Her own twin sister. All they have left is rage, and they feed on it, and they will grow up only to think about revenge.”