Known to Evil (15 page)

"Hi, Mr. McGill."

"Mardi. How's it goin'?"

"I've been reading through your files."

"And?"

"I thought the life of a private detective would be romantic, or at least exciting," she said.

"Not hardly."

"I can see that. In this case you sat out in front of a woman's apartment for nearly two weeks and in the end you say that nothing happened."

"Thomas Lavender," I remembered. "Got a job in Boston and was sure that his wife was entertaining some lover whenever he was gone. With his approval I bugged the phone system, put mikes in the bedroom, living room, kitchen, and even the bathroom. Then I sat out in front of the house eighteen hours a day. She never so much as sang in the shower."

Mardi giggled, hearing a joke I might not have made.

"She was looking for a couple'a bucks six months later and found my card in Tom's wallet. She called and asked me why her husband needed a private detective."

"What did you say?" Mardi asked.

"I told her that I'd never heard of her husband or her for that matter. She wanted to know how he got my card if I didn't know him. I asked her was anything written on the card. She said yes, that someone had written a phone number on the back. I said someone had probably used my card to write him some note, that it happens all the time."

"How did you know there was a number on the back?" Mardi asked, much more interested in my story than she was in the file.

"I always scribble some number on the back of a card when I give it to a spouse who shares space with the target of my investigation. I asked him what he liked to do and he said he went to museums a lot, so I wrote down the information line at the Frick.

"Didn't work, though."

"Why not?" my clear-eyed receptionist asked.

"A week later Thomas called me. He wanted to know what I'd told his wife--her name was Laurel. I told him about the call and he said that she must have figured out the whole thing. She said that she couldn't live with a man who would even consider having a detective follow her."

"They broke up?"

For a moment I thought about those long days that Lavender spent over five thousand dollars for. On three different occasions I saw her run into her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Clinton Brown. I could see by the way they'd talk to each other that they harbored a subterranean passion. But they didn't act on these feelings. I was sure about that. Lavender hired me to tell him if his wife was cheating--she was not. But when she found my card in his wallet she left him, and Mr. Brown and Laurel moved in together.

"A few months later, Lavender called me in order to gather some ammunition for the divorce. I told him that he didn't want me in the witness chair."

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because the only thing I could do was corroborate his wife's claim."

In essence, Lavender had hired me to scuttle his marriage. I did just that.

"I'm going to change and go out to a meeting," I said.

"Okay," Mardi replied.

Back in my office I sorted through Angie's mail. Three bills, four requests for money from floundering nonprofits, six advertisements for shows and performances, and a postcard from San Francisco.

Hey Ang,

I'm Out Here On Business For A Few Days And I Remembered The Time We Walked Across The Golden Gate Bridge. I Miss You.

Love, John

DETECTIVE CARSON KITTERIDGE was keeping a desk in the precinct office in the West Twenties that month. I dropped by, hoping that he wasn't there. But even if he was it didn't matter much. I hadn't come to see him on the day he asked because the police have to be reminded now and again that this is America and the people's rights are the rock bottom of the law.

They knew me at the station and didn't care for me much. I was like a werewolf or griffin to most of the NYPD--a mythological demon that did everything from eating babies to shitting on the souls of virgins.

"Detective Kitteridge in?" I asked the buck sergeant at the front desk.

The brown-eyed, pale-skinned man looked at me, sneered as well as he could, and pressed a button.

He motioned with his head toward the waiting area and I went to sit on the solitary bench that the department kept for their visitors. It was made of hard wood and had many stains and gouges from long use and little upkeep. I rested my elbows on my knees and laced my fingers, an apologetic sinner at the gates of the house of damnation.

Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, I began counting breaths up to ten, and then started over. I kept that up until I lost count and drifted. When I felt myself drifting, I went back to counting.

Through it all my headache was pounding. But I was getting used to that.

I kept up that regimen for quite a while, over an hour. I did it to keep my mind calm and keen, because I couldn't afford to get angry.

Detective Kitteridge wasn't beyond petty revenge. I had refused to come to him when he said and so I was going to have a long wait. That way he could have his payback while at the same time he could weigh my interest in the double murder. If I stayed I must have needed something. Maybe that something would indict me in some way.

The cop had his customs and I had mine. So I sat there counting parcels of air and remembering that breath was the most precious moment in any mammal's life.

"LT," he said.

I looked up and smiled.

This mild response was unexpected. Carson Kitteridge, my own personal city-assigned tormentor, grimaced.

Carson's skin was bone white and he had about as much hair as I did--very little. His eyes were pale blue, like an overcast afternoon in late summer. He was even shorter than I. I wouldn't say we liked each other, but, as with so many people in the modern world, our work brought us together more times than we would have preferred.

"A day late and a dollar short," I said. "But I'm here."

"Come on back to my office."

CARSON ENTERED A CODE on an electric lock and led me into the secure section of the precinct. We passed a few offices, made our way through a locker room. From there we went through an exceptionally slender doorway, entering a stairwell that was narrow and steep. We went down four floors, finally coming to a long, dark hallway. If I had been under arrest and in chains that hallway would have had a sense of finality to it.

I've known quite a few advocates of The Life who had entered halls just like this one and were never seen again.

And I knew that I wasn't special.

I could die just like anyone else.

Carson led me to the end of the hall and turned left, continuing on until we came to another turn. Along the way we passed not one door.

"Here we go," the police detective said as we made the second turn.

We had come to a shiny yellow portal for which Carson produced a key.

It was a small office that smelled of mold and stale tobacco smoke. The desk was green metal, as were the straight-back chairs in front of and behind it. The light was very bright and it felt warm and humid in there, like the heat radiating from a wet dog.

"Sit down, LT," Carson said.

He went to the chair behind the desk.

When we were both seated, but not necessarily comfortable, Kitteridge lit up a cigarette.

I smiled and then grinned. A laugh was not far off.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"You went to all the trouble of gettin' an office down here just so that you could smoke at work."

He didn't want to but Carson Kitteridge smiled.

"Some people are just too smart for their own good," he said, tamping down the smirk with the words.

"Not me, man. I just see a kindred spirit, that's all."

"We don't have a thing in common, McGill."

"If we didn't I wouldn't be sittin' in your chair now, would I?"

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"Didn't you call me? Call my answering service and my office?"

"Who's the girl answered the office phone?"

"My new receptionist."

"As long as I've known you you've never had an employee, LT."

"Mardi Bitterman."

That stopped him momentarily.

I had given Kitteridge a lead on a website that Bug Bateman and I created using the pornographic photographs that Leslie Bitterman had taken of himself and his daughter--Mardi.

That bust got Kitteridge a commendation.

"I thought your son just happened on that website," Carson said.

"It's hot down here, man. What do you want from me?"

"All right," the little cop said. "You want to get tough, that's okay with me. What do you know about those killings?"

"I thought this was Bonilla's case."

"The killings are hers, but your ass is mine."

"I guess I might have enough to go around."

"What were you doing there?" Kitteridge asked.

"I already told Detective Bonilla."

"I don't believe it."

"Why not?"

"Because if it was just circumstance like you said, then you wouldn't be here."

"Captain James Charbon," I said, clearly and slow.

Once again the detective's aggression was stymied.

He knew the good captain. The reason Kitteridge didn't have his own bars was James Charbon.

Carson at one time had a partner--Randolph Peel. Randy was bent. He took payoffs in cash and in kind from all sorts of crooks, big and small. And there were two things you had to know about Carson: (1) that he was what I liked to call an Extra-Logical, a breed of human who could see beyond the physical world into a dimension of pure logic--there he could perceive things that normal
Homo sapiens
could not; and (2) Carson was as honest as the day is long on June 22nd a hundred miles north of Stockholm.

Carson was bound to find out what Peel was doing, and he was therefore obligated to turn him in.

That was all good and well. But the problem was that Peel was James Charbon's brother-in-law. So Randy's downfall meant that Carson would never get a serious promotion as long as Charbon was ambulatory.

Kitteridge took a deep breath and sat back in his chair.

"You fuckin' with me, LT?"

"He told Bonilla that he wanted daily reports on my involvement in the crime. She told me about it, thinking that would light a fire under my butt. She was right. That's why I'm here."

Carson nodded. That was all he needed to do. The law, and its expectations, would be suspended for the while.

"I don't know who the button man was, and neither had I ever met, or consciously spoken to, Wanda Soa. But you better believe I have to find out something about both of them, because Charbon hates me more than you hate him."

For what seemed like a long time Carson and I stared into each other's eyes. He believed (and I did, too) that he could tell if a man was lying just by looking at him. I was giving him the opportunity to ply that talent.

28

I
don't know what's going on here, Carson," I was saying.

We were walking north on Eighth Avenue, looking to all the world like two down-on-their-luck salesmen in bad suits. He had called Lieutenant Bethann Bonilla--they were on a first-name basis--and learned that what I was saying was true.

Once he knew for a fact that Charbon was involved, Carson got fidgety. He didn't want to sit in the station anymore. Even in his underground bunker he felt vulnerable.

"So what do you want from me?" he asked.

The sun was going down again, taking with it, it seemed to me, my tentative connection to Reason.

"I don't really know," I said. "I mean, I get a call summoning me to a murder scene. I agree that's suspicious. But I never heard of Wanda Soa, and the button man was a stranger to me, too."

Neither one of us had an overcoat and the temperature was below fifty, for sure. I was certainly feeling a chill, but that was also the scrutiny I was under.

Kitteridge was so good at getting the truth out of suspects that he was on call to all the major precincts in New York. They sometimes lent him out to other cities for convoluted interrogations. If he was freelance I would have used him myself.

"I still don't know what you want," Carson said.

"Yeah. Well . . . what about Soa?"

"What about her?"

"Why is everybody so upset?" I asked. "I mean, I know that it's murder and all, but there usually isn't this much pressure put on a single case, especially if the press doesn't grab on to it."

"I don't know," Kitteridge said. It was a simple declarative sentence, one that I rarely, if ever, heard come from his lips.

Rather than show my surprise, I said, "Let's go in that diner, man. I'm freezin' out here."

There was a coffee shop with a counter and a few tables across the street. If I had been with any other one of the eight million New Yorkers, even those confined to a wheelchair, we would have plunged across the avenue, making our way through the traffic by bravado and stealth. But Carson went to the crosswalk at the corner and patiently waited for the light. I do believe that if his mother was having a stroke in that diner he would have done the same.

His adherence to the law was both laughable and frightening.

SEATED AT THE COUNTER, sipping black coffees, we continued our clandestine talk.

"Is someone putting pressure on the case?" I asked.

Carson stared at me. His left eye nearly closed with the concentration.

"You don't know Soa?" he asked.

"Never heard of her before I got to the crime scene."

"Then why were you there?"

"I got a call."

We waited again for him to redigest my words.

"There's an ADA named Tinely," he said. "Broderick Tinely. For some reason he's got a bee up his butt over the murder. He's been leaning heavily on Assistant Chief Chalmers, and the shit filters down from there."