The Wrath of Angels (17 page)

‘You calling to confess a crime?’ he said.

‘Anything to help you maintain your unblemished arrest record. You have something in particular you’d like me to ’fess up to, or should I just sign a blank form and leave you to fill in the details?’

‘You won’t even have to fill in your name because it’s already there. Just put your “X” on it and we’ll do the rest.’

‘I’ll think about it. Maybe if you helped me out with something it might encourage me to make the right decision. You have any friends in the New Hampshire MCU?’

‘No, but I’ll have minus friends there if I set you on them. You’re a walking formula for negative friendship equity.’

I waited. I was good at waiting. At last, I heard him sigh.

‘Come on, give it to me.’

‘Kenny Chan. Killed in his house in Bennington in 2006.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He was broken up and folded into his own safe.’

‘Yeah, I think I remember that one. It was part of a spate of safe-foldings back in the day. Robbery?’

‘Only of his
joie de vivre
. Whoever did it left the cash in the safe with him.’

‘I take it you pulled up the names of the investigating detectives?’

‘Nalty and Gulyas.’

‘Yeah, Helen Nalty and Bob Gulyas. Nalty won’t talk to you. She’s straight edge, and in line for promotion to AUC.’ AUC was Assistant Unit Commmander. ‘Gulyas is retired. I know him a little. He might talk, as long as you don’t interrupt. He’s not patient like I am. It’ll be the usual deal. If you find out something useful—’

– ‘then it goes straight to him, and he whispers it in a sympathetic ear,’ I finished. ‘And if I get in trouble I don’t mention his name. I owe you on this one.’

‘You owe me on more than this one, but you can start paying now.’

‘Go on.’

‘Perry Reed.’

‘The auto shop guy. I watch the news. What about him?’

‘I heard a story that a couple of members of the Saracens motorcycle gang might recently have been relieved of a delivery of narcotics, at gunpoint. That’s a tragedy of course, and they’ve proved strangely unwilling to file a complaint, but the story has it that one of the guys who robbed them might have been black, and the other white, or whiteish. They were very polite. They said “please” and “thank you”. One of them may even have used the words “Would you mind . . .?”, and he complimented one of the Saracens on the quality of his boots. The quantity and description of the narcotics in question is pretty similar to what we took from Perry Reed and his guys.’

‘So Reed ripped off the Saracens? That doesn’t sound wise.’

‘Reed did
not
rip off the Saracens. I don’t think he burned down his own auto lot and titty bar either, even though we found ethyl alcohol in his garage. I think Perry Reed has been set up, and the kiddy stuff is just the icing on the cake. And the description, however basic, of the two men who stole from the Saracens rings bells that seem to echo in your vicinity.’

‘Is Perry Reed a supplier of narcotics?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Perry Reed a pimp?’

‘Yes, and a trafficker of women. And a suspected rapist, both statutory and otherwise: it’s said he and his buddies break in the girls before passing them along.’

‘How long has he been doing all this?’

‘Years. Decades.’

‘And now you have him. What’s the problem?’

‘You know what the problem is. I want to see him in jail, but for stuff that he did do, not for stuff that he didn’t.’

‘I can only tell you what I’ve heard.’

‘Which is?’

‘The drugs were on their way to Reed anyway, but he always uses middlemen for receipt of deliveries. I’ve also heard that if you get a court order for the phone records of the numbers found on the cell phones, you’ll find that Perry Reed and Alex Wilder were both in touch with known traffickers of underage girls, most of them Chinese and Vietnamese, although they had room for Thai and Laotian too.’

‘The gun?’

‘Only what I’ve read in the papers. Pearl grips. Classy, as long as you’re not seen in public with them.’

‘The auto lot and titty bar?’

‘Well, that just looks like arson, but I’m no expert.’

‘And the kiddy porn?’

‘It was in his possession, and he has a reputation.’

Walsh said nothing for a time. ‘Still sounds to me like somebody might have had a personal motive for seeing Perry Reed locked up until his hair turns white. Alex Wilder too.’

I gave him a little: not much, but enough. ‘Maybe frightened Asian girls weren’t the only women they were raping.’

There was the sound of the phone shifting, and I knew that Walsh was making a note.

‘So what am I left with here: that it’s not legal, but it’s just?’

‘Would you prefer it the other way around?’

He grunted. It was as close to acquiescence as Walsh was likely to get. ‘I’ll tell Bob Gulyas to expect a call,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Whatever. Just remember: I wasn’t kidding about that piece of paper with your name on it. If I don’t have it, then somebody else does. It’s only a matter of time. Oh, and you tell your friends that I said hello.’

I left a message for Bob Gulyas, and he returned the call within the hour. In the course of a twenty-minute phone conversation during which it became clear that he knew more about me than I might have been comfortable with, which suggested that he’d been talking to Walsh, Gulyas told me as much as he knew, or was willing to share, about Kenny Chan’s murder.

A gale force wind had set off the alarm in Chan’s home, and his security company had been unable to contact him. His girlfriend was listed as a secondary keyholder: she hadn’t heard from him in five days, and it was she who found the body. Whoever killed him had taken the trouble to leave the combination written in lipstick on the safe, along with Kenny Chan’s name and the years of his birth and death.

‘So you figure a woman was involved?’ I said.

‘His girlfriend had some cosmetics and clothing in a drawer in his bedroom,’ said Gulyas, ‘but the lipstick didn’t match, so unless it was a guy who killed him and just happened to be the kind who carried lipstick in his pocket, then, yeah, we figured a woman.’

‘What about the girlfriend?’

‘Cindy Keller. She was a model. She’d been working on a shoot in Vegas, and only got back the night before the body was found. He’d been in there for a couple of days by then, so she was in the clear.’

‘Sounds like the end of a run of bad luck for Kenny Chan,’ I said. ‘First his wife, then his business partner. All he had to console him in his grief was the money he made from the sale of his company. Still, better than being poor and grieving, I guess.’

Gulyas laughed. ‘Oh, we looked hard at Kenny Chan after Felice was shot, but there was nothing to connect him to the gas station killings beyond circumstantial evidence. Yeah, it seemed his partner was blocking the sale of the company and, yeah, his murder was a lucky break for Chan, but if he planned it then he planned it well. He was so clean even his shit gleamed.’

‘And his wife?’

Gulyas didn’t laugh this time. ‘She was on the One-Oh-One near Milford. Looks like the car skidded, hit some trees, and burst into flames.’

‘Any witnesses?’

‘None. It was late at night on a quiet stretch of road.’

‘How late?’

‘Two thirty a.m.’

‘What was she doing out by Milford at two thirty in the morning?’

‘We never got an answer to that. There was speculation that she might have been having an affair, but that’s all it was. If she was screwing around, then she hid it well.’

‘So it all remains one big mystery with three heads?’

‘I’ll tell you something, Mr Parker. I smelled what you smell, but in the end we were advised to let it lie. The word came from real high up, and that word was “Defense”.’

‘Because Chan’s company had been folded into the Defense Department.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And Pryor Investments?’

‘I had two meetings with them. The first was shortly after Chan died, because we found a batch of papers relating to his dealings with Pryor in a safe deposit box in a bank in Boston.’

‘Not in his own safe?’

‘No.’

‘Odd.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anything in the papers?’

‘Not that I could see. They seemed pretty straightforward, but what I know about business and investments you could write on a stamp.’

‘So you went to Pryor?’

‘And got stonewalled by a couple of suits. Oh, they were sweet as pie, but told us nothing.’

‘And the second visit?’

‘Chan’s death led us to re-examine the Felice killing, and to glance again at the accident that killed Chan’s wife. Pryor obviously cropped up there too.’

‘What happened?’

‘Different suits, same result. We even got face time with the big suit himself, Garrison Pryor. He used a lot of words like “tragedy” and “regrettable” without ever looking like he knew what they meant. Shortly after we heard the invocation of national security, and that was it. It wasn’t as if we didn’t have other major crimes to deal with, and you have to learn when to fade away, either temporarily or permanently. You were a cop. You learn that lesson?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That’s why Walsh said I should talk to you. We done here?’

‘I think so.’

‘I get to ask what this is about?’

‘Not yet. Can I have a raincheck on a beer, and if I find something you can pass on I’ll share it with you?’

‘I’ll make a note of it.’

‘Do that. I appreciate you taking the time to talk.’

‘Talk? Son, I never said a word to you.’

And he hung up.

S
o: could I have walked away from Marielle Vetters’ tale, leaving the plane in the Great North Woods to sink finally into the ground, dragged down, if the testimony of the late Harlan Vetters and Paul Scollay was to be believed, by some intent on the part of nature itself? Possibly, but I knew that it would have come back to haunt me in the end: not simply the nagging knowledge that the plane was out there, nor my curiosity about the nature of the partial list of names that Vetters had taken from the wreckage, but because of Brightwell’s involvement in the search. It meant that the plane was part of the pattern of my life, and perhaps within it might lie some inkling of the greater game that was being played, one in which I was more than a pawn but less than a king.

Angel and Louis, too, had elected to become involved, for Brightwell had killed Louis’s cousin, and anything that concerned the Believers and their legacy was of interest to Louis. His capacity for vengeance was limitless.

But there was one other who had been intimately involved in the matter of Brightwell and the Believers, one who knew more than anyone else about bodies that decayed but did not die, and migrating spirits, more perhaps than he had even admitted to me. His name was Epstein, and he was a rabbi, and a grieving father, and a hunter of fallen angels.

I called New York, and made arrangements to meet him the following evening.

The kosher diner lay on Stanton, and was situated between a deli that was popular with flies, judging by the number of black corpses in the window, and a tailor who had clearly never met a piece of polyester that he didn’t like. Epstein was already at the restaurant by the time I arrived: the sight of one of his goons on the door gave his presence away. This one wasn’t wearing a yarmulke, but he fitted the type: young, dark-haired, Jewish, and built from bricks and protein. He would be armed too, which probably explained why his right hand was buried deep in the pocket of his navy coat while his left was not. Epstein didn’t carry a gun, but the people who surrounded him and ensured his safety most certainly did. The kid didn’t seem surprised to see me approach, but that was probably because I’d passed one of his buddies two blocks earlier, and he’d kept watch on me to make sure nobody was following. Angel, in turn, was a block behind him while Louis shadowed him from across the street. In this way, Epstein and I provided gainful employment for at least four people, and thus ensured that the wheels of capitalism kept turning.

The restaurant was as I remembered it from my last visit: a long wooden serving counter to the right, beneath which was a series of glass cases which would usually have contained overstuffed sandwiches and some carefully created specialties – beef tongue polonaise in raisin gravy, stuffed cabbage leaves, chicken livers sautéed in white wine – but were now empty, and a handful of small, round tables along the left wall, on one of which a trio of candles flickered in an ornate silver sconce. There Rabbi Epstein sat, similarly unchanged. He had always struck me as a man who had probably been old before his time, and so his later years had simply accrued without altering him unduly. Only the death of his son might have added to his white hairs and the fine wrinkles on his face, the young man put to death by those who shared something of the beliefs of Brightwell and his kind, if not their nature.

Epstein rose to shake my hand. He was elegantly dressed in a lightweight black silk suit, and a white shirt with a carefully knotted black silk tie. It was another unseasonably warm evening, but the A/C in the restaurant was off. Had I been wearing something similar to Epstein’s suit in this heat I’d have been leaving puddles on chairs, but Epstein’s hand was dry to the touch, and there was not even a hint of moisture on his face. By contrast, my shirt was stuck to my back beneath my blue wool sport coat.

From the back of the restaurant a woman appeared, dark-haired, brown-eyed, and silent: the deaf mute who had been present on the first occasion that Epstein and I had met here years before. She placed a glass of ice water in front of each of us, and some sprigs of mint. Her eyes turned to me as she did so, and she looked at me with something like interest. I watched her walk away. She was wearing oversized black jeans belted at her slim waist, and a black camisole top. Her hair hung in a single braid down her tanned back, tied with a length of red ribbon at the end. As when last we met, she smelled of cloves and cinnamon.

If Epstein saw the direction of my gaze, he did not acknowledge it. He fussed with the mint, crumbling it into his water, then stirred it with a spoon. There was silverware on the table. Soon food would start to arrive. It was how Epstein preferred to conduct his business.