Mask Market (32 page)

“And everybody knows?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any contacts there?”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

He made some noise. I wasn’t sure what the word was, but I knew it was a single syllable.

I
tried other places. Other people. Other possibilities. Even a “journalist” who spent his slimy life pawing through garbage looking for morsels to peddle to the sleaze-sheets. He promised he’d sniff around. I believed him—that’s just what dung beetles do.

I wasn’t holding good cards, but I wasn’t down to drawing dead, either. Not yet. Beryl’s picture was circulating all over the city. Favors were being called in, pressure was being put on.

You can’t really do surveillance on houses as isolated as her father’s, or in neighborhoods as ritzy as her mother’s. Not unless you have a government-sized budget and government-level immunity for felonies. I know how to get in touch with some sanctioned black-bag boys, and I know what it takes to turn their crank, too. But telling your business to people like that will guarantee you go on a list. The bone-and-pistol package Morales had planted had gotten me off a bunch of those, and I didn’t want to start new ones.

With the kind of money that Daniel Parks had made disappear, Beryl could have disappeared, too. She could be anywhere. But it didn’t feel like that to me. And I’d found her once….

“S
ay where and when.”

“You know where I used to work? There’s a parking lot, the public one. The upper deck is outdoors.”

“Got it.”

“I’m there now.”

“Give me an hour.”

I thumbed off the cell phone, slipped it into the pocket of my jacket.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Loyal said.

“‘Her’?”

“Yes, ‘her.’ Not that fake ‘wife’ of yours, the one woman you really love.”

“This is just business,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, soft and somber, like in church. “When you’re done with your ‘business,’ you come right on back here, sugar, and I’ll fix whatever she broke. That’s the kind of woman
I
am.”

T
he Chrysler was standing by itself in the farthest corner of the lot. I parked at the other end, backing into the open space. At midnight, the lot was empty. The courthouse was closed, visiting hours were over at the jail, City Hall was shut down.

The Chrysler’s passenger door opened and Wolfe got out. Instead of moving toward me, she opened the back door, and a thick black shape flowed onto the ground.

Great!
I thought.
Just what I need, another one of my big fans.

Wolfe snapped on the Rottweiler’s chain and stepped over to where I was parked. Her shiny lime-green raincoat was tightly belted at the waist, blazing in the night.

I got out of the Plymouth. Slowly.

Not slow enough. The Rottweiler let out a threatening growl.

“Bruiser!” Wolfe said. “Enough.”

“Hey, Bruiser,” I greeted him.

He said something like “Go fuck yourself!” in Rottweiler. The barrel-chested beast had decided to hate me the first time he saw me. And once he locked his bonecrusher jaws around a feeling, he never dropped the bite.

“Your dog’s a real party animal,” I said to Wolfe.

“Bruiser? He’s a sweetheart,” she said, patting the monster’s huge head. “You’re the only one he doesn’t like.”

Wolfe walked over to the edge of the lot, leaned her elbows on the railing, and looked down at the dark. I stayed where I was.

“Down!” she told the Rottweiler.

He did it in slow motion, his “give me a reason” eyes pinning me all the way.

I moved over to the railing, my hands already coming up with a flared match for Wolfe’s cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I’m the one who needs to be thanking you. You found—?”

“Maybe not much,” she said. “Maybe enough.”

“How did you—?”

“That little tombstone was a perfect surface for prints.” I didn’t bother telling her that that was why I’d pocketed an item from the shelf full of artifacts bestowed on little Beryl by professional revolutionaries grateful to her parents for their financial support. It was a lead-cast miniature of a clenched fist rising from the engraved tombstone of Fred Hampton. “You’re lucky nobody had polished it.”

“Just how lucky did I get?”

“There were three different partials that could be lifted. One of them matched to a Beryl Eunice Preston, DOB nine, nine, seventy-two. That’s her, right?”

“Right,” I said, not surprised to see Wolfe’s hands holding nothing but her cigarette—I’d seen her cross-examine expert witnesses for hours without ever glancing at her notes.

“She was in the system,” Wolfe said. “Arrested eleven, twenty, ninety-seven. Attempt murder, CCW, whole string of stuff.”

“All one event?”

“Yes,” she said, exhaling so that smoke ran out of her nose. “This was in Manhattan. She was working for one of the escort services, claimed the john had demanded she do something she didn’t want to do, then got violent with her when she refused.”

“A self-defense case?”

“It might have been, if it had ever gone to trial,” Wolfe said. “The escort service said they’d never heard of her, big surprise, but she posted bail and walked. Then the complaining witness stopped complaining. When the detectives leaned on him, he said the whole thing had been a mistake. He was showing her the knife—said he was some kind of collector, and this was a fancy one he’d just bought—and he slipped and fell on it. The hotel never should have called the cops.”

“Anyone buy that?”

“Why would they?” Wolfe said. “But what were they going to do, threaten to tell his wife he was using his credit card to have some fun? Bluff the girl into taking an assault plea? This is real life, not a TV show. They dropped it like it was on fire.”

“Nothing since? For Beryl, I mean?”

“As far as the system’s concerned, she could have joined a convent.”

“You pulled an address?”

“Sure,” she said. And gave me the condo in Battery Park.

When I didn’t say anything, she said, “You had that one, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, not trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“The arraignment judge played it like it was a stand-up assault with a deadly weapon,” Wolfe said, grinding out her cigarette with one precision stab of her spike heel. “Set bail at a quarter-mil. Your girl, she didn’t use a bondsman.”

“She put up that much in
cash.
”

“No,” Wolfe said. “A friend put up his house.”

“Must have been some house.”

“Oh, it was.” Her white teeth flashed in the night. “Want the address?”

“S
he had that hideout in place for a
long
time,” Michelle said. “Even before she met that Daniel Parks guy, you think?”

“Yeah. That
is
what I think. She bought the property in ’94.”

“She would have been…twenty-two years old then,” Clarence said, looking up from his laptop.

“Pretty young to be that smart,” Michelle said. “She must have had a crystal ball, too, buying a house in that neighborhood back then. I’ll bet it’s worth five times what she paid for it.”

“It wasn’t leveraged, either,” I told them, tapping a stack of paper in front of me. “She put a hundred down, leaving her with a twenty-one-hundred-dollar-a-month nut for everything—mortgage, taxes, insurance, the whole thing. It’s a two-family, and she was getting eight fifty for the first floor, seven hundred for the second. The C of O for the building says it’s strictly a two-family, but I’ll bet the basement’s another apartment, off the books.”

“You sure it’s our girl?” the Prof said.

I looked around the table, ticking the points off on my fingers: “One, the name on the ownership papers is ‘Jennifer Jackson.’ That’s a motel-register name. Two, whoever owned that property put up the whole thing, deed and all, to make bail for Beryl when she was arrested. Three, we know she knows how to change her name, and how to move money around, too. And, four, she’s the kind of operator who never builds a house without a couple of back doors.”

“Park Slope’s gone way upscale, but it’s no gated community,” Michelle said, looking over at the Mole.

“I
love these,” Loyal said, fitting the blue leather bustier over her breasts. “But you can’t get into them without help.”

“At your service,” I said, slowly pulling the laces tight.

“That’s what you think
I
am, don’t you?”

“Huh?”

“You know what I mean, Lew. I’ve been so honest with you.

Now it’s coming around to hurt me.”

“I don’t—”

“You know what? I thought you loved me. I don’t mean I was your
great
love. Not that special, once-in-a-lifetime-if-you-get-real-lucky love. But a whole lot more than…than just
liking
me, I guess. I guess I just told you too much truth, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t. You told me just enough. And you
showed
me a lot more.”

“But I’m not the one you—”

“You
are
the one,” I said. “Not like you think, but…Look, Loyal, to me you’re a princess. A little princess. And I’ve got a plan for this to have a happy ending.”

“But not a
marriage
plan, right?”

“Better.”

“What could be—?”

“Just wait,” I said. “Wait a little bit. You wanted to know what I do for a living, remember?”

“Yes. But I don’t—”

“I’m a gambler, little girl. And I’ve got something going now. The dice are already tumbling. If I can throw the hard eight, you’re going to have your happy ending. That’s all I can tell you now. Is that enough?”

Loyal paused in the act of pulling on one of her stockings. “A coral snake is one of the most beautiful things you could ever see. But one bite and you’re all done. Then there’s milk snakes. They’re just as pretty, but they’re harmless. You know how to tell them apart?”

“Red and black, he’s a good jack. Red and yella, kill the fella.”

“Oh!” she said. She raised her chin, looked down at where I was sitting. “You’ve spent some time in the South, haven’t you? I wondered about that, ever since I told you about people saying I looked like Jeannie, remember? And you said I do favor her. That’s not the way people around here talk.”

“I’ve traveled a little bit.”

“Gambling?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to win me a happy ending?”

“I’m trying.”

“That would be the sweetest thing a man could give a woman, a happy ending.”

“I—”

“I’m a girl who gives as good as she gets,” Loyal said, turning away from me and bending over the couch. “And you don’t have to wait for yours.”

“T
hat’s her?” Clarence asked, pointing at his laptop screen.

“Go through them one more time,” I said.

He trailed his finger over the touchpad, and a new set of thumbnails popped into life. He clicked on them, one by one, and each new image burst into full-screen life.

A woman in a beige parka, so densely quilted that it was impossible to tell if she was a stick or a sumo, walked down a tree-lined street, carrying a large green tote bag with a yellow logo.

The same woman inside a market, the tote draped over the handlebars of a shopping cart. She had pixie-short light blonde hair, bright-red lipstick.

“I can zoom in on that one,” Clarence said.

“Go.”

The woman had china-blue eyes, a beauty mark at the corner of one of them. It looked like one of those tattooed tears gang kids put on their faces, one for each jolt Inside.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Are you sure, mahn? She looks nothing like the girl on that—”

“Her stuff is tough,” the Prof interrupted his son, “but it ain’t
close
to enough. That’s the same girl Schoolboy and me snatched.”

“You have not seen her for—what?—twenty years?” Clarence said. Not challenging, fascinated.

“She’s still got the look,” the Prof said.

“She does not look afraid to me,” Clarence said, respectful but doubting.

“She never did,” the Prof answered. “Ain’t that right, Schoolboy?”