Linnear 01 - The Ninja (45 page)

Croaker looked up, puzzled. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

Vegas laughed good-naturedly. ‘What I gots downstairs in the wagon is one piece of high-priced property, man. C’mon, follow me.’ Croaker swung his jacket off the chair-back, followed Vegas down the hall.

‘This better be worth it,’ he said shortly. ‘I ain’t got time for any of your jive.’

‘Oh, no jive, man. No jive.’ Vegas laughed again, stabbed the elevator button. ‘What I got on ice down in the alley is goin’ make your day. Trust me.’ He gave a hearty laugh and slapped Croaker on the back as the elevator doors opened and they rode down. They shared the car with a uniform bringing a scruffy-looking Puerto Rican collar down for prints and pics and nothing more was said until they went out through the side entrance.

They came abreast of the police van in the cool dimness of the concrete alley. In this tightly enclosed space, Vegas’s body-size was magnified; he was as big as Paul Bunyan amid the White Mountains.

He put an enormous hand on Croaker’s shoulder and Croaker was automatically reminded of one of the cases on which they had been teamed. The Atherton thing. Christ, he thought, but that was a bitch ! Thought sure we were gonna float away on a sea of blood and never see this goddamned world again. Jesus I He could see it as clearly as if it had just happened: he down with his shoulder shattered by a .45 slug and Vegas rising from the shadows of the burned-out car like an avenging angel. Croaker had fired on his assailant, spinning him around, his second and third shots a useless reflex aimed at the stars. But there was this mountain of a black man with the tyre chain and the snub-nosed pistol the bastard had modified so that it could blast a hole in a brick wall at ten feet; and Vegas took him on with just his bare hands and I never saw anyone go down so hard or so fast “from one blow as that motherfucking hood. There were three other corpses that night; Jesus, what fucking mess! Croaker felt the pressure of the other’s grip.

‘Don’t you worry none,’ the big man said softly. ‘We look out for each other, don’t we? I don’t give a rat’s ass for anyone around here, you know that? They’re all a bunch of goddamned

hypocrites. I got my job to do, I do it. The rest of them, well, they all got an axe to grind, one way or another. There’s always an angle to play out here, ain’t that right. War’s a perfect place for angles, you know that. The smart make out in wars. They ain’t got no conscience, they ain’t got no emotion. All they got to worry about is keeping their tails on straight; after that, they got all the time in the world to look for the gravy rollin’ in under the dirt and the scum and the -‘ Vegas stopped abruptly, aware that his grip had tightened painfully on his friend’s flesh. He shook his head like a wounded animal. ‘Sorry, Soldier, it’s been a heavy day.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Real heavy duty.’

‘It’s okay, Spook.’ They had given each other nicknames long ago when they had first met; it gave them both a comforting feeling of privacy amid the openness of their days and nights on the force. At times, Croaker thought that this was the falsest feeling in the world, on those days when he felt completely invaded by his job. ‘We’re two fucking heroes who think that shovellin’ shit is heroic.’ He laughed. ‘But cheer up. What the hell, it could be worse. We could be the ones ma1(in’ the shit.’

Vegas threw back his head and laughed, the rich sound rolling off the high walls. ‘Now, look, here’s the dope,’ he said. ‘We been working, like I said, on this Scarsdale bust for three months, no less. We get a tip to move. We move. Lots of stuff there - enough pills to keep the goddamned Chinese Army awake for a year, a whole lotta horse, carload o’ coke an’ about a half a ton of reefer madness. Okay, not so bad. That’s going on in the back of the place. In the front they got a party going on and everyone gets busted, you know? That’s when I saw her. Thought I’d bring her in myself, just in case. I think she’s clean but’ - he shrugged - ‘you know how that is sometimes. Anyway, she’s yours if you want her - I can straighten them out upstairs.’

‘How can I know if I want her,’ Croaker said, ‘if I don’t

know who she is?’

Vegas transferred his hand from Croaker’s shoulder to the lever of the back door to the van. ‘Sittin’ in the. dark right in here, man, is Raphael’s elder daughter, Gelda Tomkin.’

Croaker felt a jolt race through him just as if he had been doused with ice water.

Vegas leaned on the lever, grinning; the reinforced-steel door swung outward and Croaker stepped in. The door slammed shut behind him.

He stood for a moment in the dimness unmoving, letting his eyes adjust to the low light seeping in through the windshield, washed to a pale grey by the mesh screen dividing the blessed from the damned.

She sat on one of the plain metal benches riveted along either side of the van. Her head was tilted back, resting against the wall. This put her profile into prominence so that he could see the arch of her long forehead, the straight patrician nose, the flair of the highly sensual lips, the long cool sweep of her curving throat. He knew without having to see them now the dark sparks of her eyes, the rather heavy torso with its thrusting breasts and ample hips. Knew, too, the long sweep of the perfect legs from thigh to calf to slim exquisite ankle palely outlined as they stretched out before her; those magnificent legs which, quite inexplicably, made her heaviness an overwhelm-iogasset.

‘Well …’ He felt a great weight about his body and an inarticulateness that obliged him to clear his throat and begin again. ‘Well, Gelda, what have you been up to now?’

The sharply delineated profile dissolved into sweeping shadow as she turned her head to look in his direction.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Even in anger there was a rich lustre, a “silkine^s to her voice that made it seem as if he had spoken to her yesterday instead of several months ago. Even alarm could not diminish its effectiveness.

‘Croaker,’ he said, moving towards her. ‘Lieutenant. Remember me?’

‘Should I?’ The tone had turned aqueous, soft and languid. The air between them seemed to tremble.

‘Maybe. I met you once before.’ He stood over her now, not seeing anything in the twilight except the pale sheen from the whites of her large eyes. But he felt her presence acutely and it gave him pleasure to stand thus. ‘I interviewed you at the beginning of the summer regarding the Angela Didion murder; we talked about your father.’

‘That shit!’ Even though she spat it out, there remained an

elegance to it. He heard her take a breath. ‘Yeah. I remember

you. Big dude with a face like Robert Mitchum’s.’ His laugh was a brief bark. ‘How flattering! Thanks.’ ‘Don’t get cocky. His face looks like it’s waged World War

Three. So does yours.’

He waited for a moment, then said, ‘Mind if I sit down?’ ‘You mean I’ve got a choice?’ When he didn’t answer, he

felt her shrug. ‘Suit yourself. This isn’t my house.’

‘That’d be on Sutton Place, right?’ he said, sitting down next

to her.

Abruptly her head came away from the wall. ‘What the hell’s going on, anyway?’ she snapped. ‘Am I going to be booked?’

‘That depends.’ ‘

‘On what?’

But his hand, having dipped into his suit jacket pocket, was a blur and he was already moving. His left hand reached across the space between them. He grasped her wrists together, pulled. At the same time, he flicked on the pocket flash, searching the pale flesh on the inside of her elbows. He tried not to think of the softness of the skin here.

He let her go, sat back. ‘I could check the insides of your thighs, too,’ he said softly. ‘Or you could tell me.” He had used a fair amount of pressure and her wrists must hurt but she made no move to rub them; he liked that. She had a great deal of pride.

‘I shoot up through the eyeballs,’ she said acidly. ‘You’ve heard of that, I’m sure. Leaves no tracks.’ Her head turned then and her cheek lit up as a grillwork of grey and black fell obliquely ‘across her face. She looked like a heroine out of a fifties’ film noir. Some of the air seemed to go out of her all at once. ‘I don’t do anything any of you guys don’t do. Probably a good deal less. I don’t blow coke, for instance.’

He said nothing, sat beside her smelling her scent silently until she turned her head and she was in absolute darkness again. He felt like a blind man, wanting badly, irrationally to see her again. ‘Do you believe me ?’ Her voice had turned small and he wondered how much of an act she was promoting.

He decided to be honest with her; anything less would be useless and potentially dangerous. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘I believe you.’

Then I’m free to go?’

‘In a minute.’ He didn’t realize how gentle his voice had become. ‘Why the hell are you involved in all this?’

‘What, you mean break my poor old father’s heart?’ She laughed sardonically. ‘Come on, what do you want me for?’

‘I’m just talking to you,’ he said reasonably.

‘Yeah, sure. In a police van, home from a bust.’

‘That was your choice, not mine.’

She was silent for a moment and, though he couldn’t see her, he knew that she was studying him. It could all break apart now, he knew, and held his breadi.

She laughed again, a bell-like sound, slightly echoey within the confines of the metal van. ‘All right,’ she said softly, ‘I’ll tell you why I do it. I like it, it’s as simple as that. It’s fun to get paid to fuck. I’m an actress, a model, selling things, just like Angela Didion was. It’s all come on, there’s no involvement.’

‘Never?’

Her head tossed like a bridling horse’s and he saw a flash of light across her eyes. ‘Sometimes,’ she said truthfully, ‘with a woman.’ She was thinking of Dare. ‘Does that shock you?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Did you think it would?’

‘I don’t know what kind of man you are.’

‘I’m just your plain ordinary New York slob.’

‘Yeah, I can see that.’ She had hurt him and she knew it; she felt he had asked for it.

‘What about the booze?’ Croaker asked her.

‘What about it?” He could hear her voice go hard as her defences came up.

‘Still hitting the bottle hard ?’

Perversely, she felt herself wanting to tell him the truth, stopped herself in time. ‘Not so much any more,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my work to keep me warm.’

‘No men?’

‘What is this, twenty questions?”

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘I don’t want to call it anything,’ she said shortly. ‘I want to get out of here.’

‘I can’t detain you any longer.’

‘You mean I’m free to go?’

‘There are no charges.’

‘Now I’m supposed to thank you?”

He knew it was over; that he might just as well have not begun this at all. He felt tired and depressed. ‘You’re not guilty of anything. You’re free to go.’ He deliberately used her phraseology.

Still she made no move to go.

He sat stiffly with his back against the wall, his buttocks jammed up against the joining of the bench to the wall. His wrists lay loosely on his thighs. He stared at his hands, could barely make out the pale sheen of his nails.

‘What do you want from me?’

Her voice was so soft that for a moment he thought it might be a whisper from his own mind.

‘Nothing,’ he said. His voice sounded dead. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’

‘In a horses’s ass.’

‘All right.’ His head swung round and he saw that she was staring at him. She blinked once and it seemed that she did so in slow motion. ‘I can help you, Gelda.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He knew then that he meant what he said, that it was not just his desire to probe for information about Raphael Tomkin; he knew that he had been dreaming about her for the past two weeks. A current of electricity went through him and he half turned towards her. Her eyes seemed to be searching for some-diing in his face.

‘Just what it says.’

‘I wouldn’t trust you if I were drowning and you had the only line.’

‘But you are drowning,’ he said softly. And then, after a time, ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. The booze and the pills and the - work.’ He paused. ‘You could go away somewhere.’

‘Go away!’ she exploded. ‘Christ, there’s no place far enough to get away from myself.’ She put her head back against the metal wall and he saw her soft diroat again. ‘You want to know how I got my name? Gelda.’ She said that last word as if it had a bitter taste. ‘I got it because my mother hated.’ She laughed humourlessly, the first ugly sound he had heard her utter. ‘Oh,

not me personally. She would never stoop to anything so personal. She was far too busy detesting the life which bound her like a jealous lover. Being so powerfully rich had been her one dream in life, her overriding goal… Yes, I guess you could call it that: her goal. Anyway, she found it with my father. Found, too, mat it was not what she’d expected it to be - not by a long shot. Oh, she had all the power she had dreamed of and all the money, but living with my father was pure hell and with every moment of their marriage he ground her down.’ She sighed. ‘I think, in the end, it became a game with him, to try and see how much he could take away frpm her. Not material things, of course. My God, she had more than enough of those. No, it was in the area that matters most to my father that he denied her: in the mind. I suspect dial if she had fought back, she would have eventually emerged bloody but victorious, as they say.

‘But she would not. She wanted to hold on to her dream so desperately that she forfeited any kind of courage. She was my father’s slave, a slave, more accurately, to his wealth. She was Ajveak-willed bitch who must have loved the pain which my father inflicted on her. I mean she put up with it, didn’t she? Even after -‘ She stopped suddenly, putting the palm of her hand over her mouth for a moment. ‘Christ, what am I saying? And to a cop of all people.’ She stifled a nervous laugh. ‘I must be out of my mind.’

His heart beat faster as he heard himself say, ‘What does all this have to do with how you were named?’

‘What?’ she said almost absently.

‘You were going to tell me about your name.’

‘Oh. Oh, yes.’ She folded her hands one over the other. She rubbed them against her long thighs, back and fordi in a hyno-tic rhydim. ‘I really believe mat about the last thing my mother wanted was a child. But my father, as always, insisted on what he wanted. And what he wanted was children. Strangely enough - or not so strangely’ - here she gave an odd little laugh - ‘he didn’t care whether they were boys or girls, just as long as he became a sire. He’s old-fashioned that way; he feels it’s a sign of manhood.