Godchild (7 page)

Chapter 10

I dialed Tony.

He answered after the third ring. Music in the background, some voices spilling across the earpiece. Men and women.

“What’s up?”

I said, “I’ll take the job.”

He breathed. “I thought you wanted to sleep on it.”

“I can explain tomorrow.”

“I’ll get started,” he said.

I hung up.

Chapter 11

In the dream she holds the newborn Charlie in her arms. She is crouched at the knees, the baby cradled over her shoulder while she runs the hath, holding her free hand under the warm—getting warmer—water. She feels the good feel of Charlie’s warm face cuddled into that sensitive space between her shoulder and neck, feels his warm breath. She can’t remember ever being so happy. So happy, she hasn’t even thought about writing. Her computer just sits there on the desk in the bedroom, idle. And she doesn’t care.

What a trip. Having a little baby. What a fantastic trip.

And as she sets the baby into the water, she feels the bathwater soaking her cotton shirt sleeves, feels it soaking her entire shirt, as the baby slips under the water, headfirst. .

She awakes in a pool of wet.

Startled.

The mustached man is back in her cell. He’s alone this time and he’s just tossed an entire bucket of water on her.

“1 hope you’re ready to talk,” he says
.

Chapter 12

At half-past seven in the morning I was sitting at the counter of the downtown Dunkin Donuts. While the early-bird suits rushed past the picture windows, briefcases in hand, on their way to their office cubbies, I was attempting to sort out my intentions regarding the Barnes job over black coffee and two blueberry cake doughnuts. The Dunkin Donuts was set between a Burger King and Breugger’s Bagels and was located only a short walk from Tony’s Pearl Street office. The place was new and it occupied what had once been a Buster Brown Shoes back when I was a kid. Back before all the downtown shops were forced to vacate the empty city streets and move out to the mall, where they died an even slower death. Before people could eat doughnuts at plastic-covered tables inside window spaces that once displayed the newest in children’s footwear.

The night had been a long one.

What little sleep I got had been interrupted by long interludes of lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, at the red neon letters that reflected backward against the ceiling, thinking the same thoughts I was thinking now. Thoughts about the Bald Man, thoughts about Barnes and Renata. Thoughts about connecting the three together. If the man in the photo was actually the Bald Man, what had he been doing at Charlie Barnes’s funeral? Were the Barneses and the Bald Man friends? Were they family? Was I out of my mind for even making the connection? Or was I just plain reaching for something that didn’t exist?

Without a name or identification of some sort, I had no idea who the man in the photo really was. What I did know was that he looked an awful lot like the man I saw driving the black Buick. But in a real way, it was reason enough to take on the job of going after Renata Barnes.

I sipped some coffee, took a bite of doughnut, and pulled the newspaper clipping out of my pocket. I spread it out over the pink Formica counter, stared down at it, past the clearer images of Richard and Renata, two rows of mourners back, to a somewhat blurrier image. The bald head, the mustache, the earring, the round John Lennon sunglasses. How many times was I going to go over the description in my head? Countless times. But the fact remained, this piece of newspaper was probably the largest clue I’d been able to come up with in two years of searching. And now I just happened to stumble upon it.

The girl working the counter came up to me. She held a fresh pot of coffee in her right hand. She asked if I wanted more. I did. She poured some coffee into my cup and smiled. She was a young girl with blond hair pulled up behind her head in an untidy bun. A kid really. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. Dressed in a tight pink-and-white dress that matched the vinyl wall finishes, with a Dunkin Donuts logo on her breast and powdered sugar on the little apron that covered her lap. She wore Nike Airs on her feet, with white socks around her ankles.

I asked her if I could smoke.

She reached behind the counter, found a small tin ashtray, set it beside my plate of doughnuts. “Be my guest, sugar,” she said. The “sugar” part made me blush.

I folded up the article, slipped it back in my pants pocket.

I lit one up, let out the initial hit of smoke, followed up with a sip of the-too hot coffee.

There was more to think about and it was no use ignoring it. A whole second side to the equation that I had to consider. I had to calm down, consider the fact that I could very well be overreacting. That the man in the photo could be someone else entirely. After all, I’d only had a fleeting glimpse of the Bald Man. As much as I think I committed his looks to memory, I could have been all wrong about his identity.

The fact of the matter was this: Barnes’s job was dangerous. It would be suicide to go into it with anything on my mind other than the job at hand. Which was to get his wife out of that Mexican hellhole.

The end.

Professionally speaking, it
should
not have made an ounce of difference to me one way or the other just what skeletons the Barneses may have had stuffed away inside their walk-in closets. It should not have made any difference if their marriage was a good one or a bad one, or if Richard was a slimy producer of slash-and-burn political propaganda or if Renata had killed their child and somehow fictionalized it for
Godchild
. More importantly, it should not have made a difference if the bald man in the newspaper photo was my Bald Man.

I no longer worked on the side of the law.

I worked for myself.

In the end, what difference did any of these things make so long as Barnes’s two hundred under-the-table Gs were good? I hadn’t been a PI for long, but I knew that the number-one rule for any detective was to stick to the job at hand. Don’t ask questions that’ll get your ass in a sling. Don’t get personally involved, don’t go off half-cocked on a personal vendetta.

End of story.

As far as my relationship with Barnes was concerned, it could easily be summed up like this: I give you the girl, you give me the money. Thank you very much, have a nice rich life.

I smoked and sipped more coffee. It was cooling off now. Enough so that it didn’t burn my tongue. In the meantime, the counter girl drifted her way back. She carried a pot of coffee in her right hand. Steam rose up from the opening in the top of the pot. She asked me first if she could freshen up my cup. I liked that. I told her no, that I had to get going. I did however order a large cup of black to go. With her left hand, she reached into her apron and set a small slip of paper on the counter. My tab. A whole one dollar and ninety cents. I stamped out my butt, popped the rest of my second doughnut into my mouth, slipped off the stool, and fished for my bankroll in my left-hand pocket. I peeled off a five and slipped the bill under the empty white plate.

On my way out, while I was zipping up my leather, I spotted her across the glass case, where she was in the process of filling a pink box with some muffins.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t forget your coffee,” she reminded me.

I stopped and made my way back to me glass case. She handed the cup to me.

“Forget your head…wouldn’t you, sugar?”

“Exactly,” I said, turning for the door.

Sugar. How sweet it is.

Chapter 13

“I never said I didn’t believe you, paisan. It’s just that I agree with Detective Ryan when he attests that you’ve been under a lot of strain.” Tony, talking from behind his mahogany desk. “It’s easy to let your imagination run wild.”

I had just shown him the newspaper clipping of Charlie Barnes’s funeral, just pointed out the image of the Bald Man. Or
a
bald man anyway. Now Tony was removing the plastic lid from the Styrofoam cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee I brought him. At the same time he was trying to talk me out of believing that the man in the photo could be anything other than a man with no hair and that the battered black Buick I saw driving in and out of the Albany Rural Cemetery on Saturday was anything other than a figment of my over-stressed imagination.

But then something different happened.

Something I never expected.

Tony let out a breath while the color of his complexion went from tan to red to white. Not an easy task for a paisan.

He sat up straight in his swivel chair, planted his elbows firmly on the desk, stared down at his fingers, locked together at the knuckles. “Okay, let’s cut the bullshit,” he said, his voice just one, great big resigned sigh. “I’ve known about the Buick for a while now. A few weeks in fact. So has Ryan.”

I set the article down on the desk.

There was the inevitable adrenaline head rush. The slight dizziness. The anger that started at the tip of your brain stem and didn’t stop until it fried your brain.

“And you never fucking … ” An outburst. I breathed. “And you never told me.” Controlled now. Whispering. Swallowing the anger.

“I didn’t want to alarm you.”

“You didn’t want to alarm me.” I kept whispering.

He nodded. “I was afraid you’d do something stupid.”

“So Ryan tries to convince me I’m imagining things. And you do the same.”

He nodded. “It was for your own good,” he said, by way of explanation. “But then, you can only go on pretending for so long. Then it gets serious.”

“More serious than this?” I asked. “For Christ’s sakes. I missed my own goddamned wedding.”

We sat there silent for a few seconds while Tony sipped the coffee.

My head was spinning, trying to keep up with itself.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “On one hand you’re willing to send me to Mexico on this suicide mission, and on the other you don’t let me in on the Buick until now.”

Tony stared at the steam rising up out of the coffee cup. He rolled up the sleeves on his pressed white shirt, neatly, to the elbows, as if to give him something to concentrate on other than me. My problems with the past and present.

“Okay,” he said. “Just suppose the Buick is
your
Buick. Just suppose the man in the photo is your Bald Man, and just suppose Barnes is somehow connected to him.”

“Just suppose,” I said, “that the Bald Man has shown up with the intent to finish the job he started. To see me dead.”

More thinking on Tony’s part. And then: “Let me ask you a simple question: Who, in your opinion, would like to see you dead, Keeper?”

The answer, of course, was so obvious it took me a few seconds to come up with it. “I was a warden, for Christ’s sakes. Who the hell doesn’t want to see me dead?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Without going over the lists of inmates who’ve been paroled during the past three years or inmates who presently have major connections with the outside, it’ll be impossible to come up with any one name or any one scenario.”

“So what are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is you came down hard on the drug trade at Green Haven, especially in ’94 and ’95, getting in more than a few people’s way, if you get my drift.”

“And?”

“And anyone in the can or out could have found out about your past, about the black Buick. These guys have access to newspapers and the Internet. Somebody could have found out all about your past and has simply initiated a game of emotional blackmail. And you’re just playing right into his hands.”

“What about Wash Pelton?” Pelton had been a former friend
and
enemy. A paunchy, gray-haired, political appointment I personally sent up to Dannemora for life. A former Commissioner of Corrections whom I busted after a particularly dangerous game of catch-as-catch-can, when he tried to pin both a murder rap and a major drug ring inside Green Haven Prison on yours truly.

“Pelton’s stomach cancer took him six months ago,” Tony pointed out while taking a sip of his coffee. “If he’s suddenly interested in tidying things up, he’s got to do it from the grave.”

“Then how the hell do you explain this?” I held up the article once more.

“Coincidence,” he said. “Or bad timing.”

“Or a perfectly logical series of events,” I said.

Tony drinking coffee.

Me looking out over his shoulder, through the floor-to-ceiling tinted glass at the Hudson River on a bright clear, March morning.

“Look,” he said, breaking the silence. “I admit, there is one thing we should consider.”

I caught his brown eyes with my own, nodded.

“The black Buick could be intended as some kind of warning. A message from any number of drug bosses or their soldiers you once incarcerated. It doesn’t necessarily have to be someone like Pelton or even one of his alive apostles.” He took a quick breath. “But there is one thing that’s gnawing at me, though.” He picked up a number-two Ticonderoga pencil from off his desk, tapped the eraser against the furrowed skin of his brow. “If somebody does want to go after you —I mean if somebody is making a serious play—why not just get it over with?” He wrapped the index finger on his right hand around the pencil, held it over his desk, like an imitation pistol. “Bang, one shot to the head and you’re done. Quick, easy, effective. Least, that’s the way I’d do it.”

“Comforting,” I said.

“I mean, why go to all the trouble of sending out a car that matches a description of the one that killed Fran? Or if, on the other hand, it is the real car, why take a chance putting it back on the road?”

“Maybe just a warning, like you said.”

“Or maybe a way to torture you while they bide their time, wait for the right moment.”

“There is something you’re leaving out,” I said.

He set the pencil back down and picked up his coffee. “What would that be?”

“Why now?” I said, setting the article on his desk. “Why after two years of nothing do the Buick and this bald son of a bitch decide to show up at precisely the same time Barnes and his dilemma show up?”

“You saw the car on Saturday, one full day before Barnes inquired about hiring you. If you’re trying to connect this thing with my client, the timeline doesn’t jive, capisce?”

He was right. But that didn’t mean I had to believe in his logic.

“Besides,” Tony went on, “doesn’t make sense for a guy to hire you with a cash down payment only to knock your ass off in the end.”

“Or maybe it does.”

“Damnit, Keeper. If you think you can accept this job just because it’ll lead you to this bald guy, think again. It’s extremely dangerous. You’re going to have to concentrate on one thing, one thing only: getting Renata Barnes out, getting her home, getting two hundred Gs to start over with. After that you can do all the searching you want. Until then, stick to the job and nothing but the job, capisce?”

“You’re leaving me nothing to hang my hat on, Tone,” I said. “And a whole lot of nothing makes me real nervous.”

“I hear your concern, paisan,” Tony said, picking up the telephone receiver, bringing it to his ear. “And I feel for you. But I’ll say it one more time: in the end, it’s probably just someone fucking with your head. And that’s all.”

“And if it’s not just child’s play?”

“I’ve already got that one figured out.” He punched a button on the phone unit. “A little preventive maintenance,” he said, bringing the phone to his ear, hand cupped over the mouthpiece.

“Can’t wait to hear all about it,” I said.

“Get me Albany Medical Center,” Tony said into the phone. “The morgue.”