The Zero Hour (5 page)

Next to him at the Formica kitchenette counter stood a tech from Latent Prints, a round-shouldered, older black man, delicately applying with a feather brush the fingerprint powder the techs liked to call “pixie dust” to a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. Sarah watched him lift a print from the bottle with a clear plastic Sirchie hinged lifter.

“So who kills a call girl?” Peter asked. “A john?”

“I doubt it,” Sarah said. “She told me she only did outcalls, mostly hotel rooms.”

“Yeah, but these mirrors…” he began.

She sighed. “Who knows? She did have a personal life. But a
sex life
, outside of work? I don’t know. A lot of these girls hate sex. What about her little black book?”

“Nothing. A date book, that’s all. Purse, wallet, cigarettes. A fucking
arsenal
of makeup in the bathroom. Some Valium and a couple of tabs of speed. A Port-a-Print. But no little black book.”

“A what?”

“Port-a-Print. One of those things they use in department stores or whatever to imprint your credit card, you know? I guess she took Visa, MasterCard, and Discover.”

“Most call girls do these days. Though they still prefer cash.”

“Bad form to have the wife doing the bills and discover a Discover Card charge for a blow job.”

“Which is why you used to pay cash, right?”

“Touché,” Peter replied, unperturbed.

CHAPTER SIX

A Latent Prints technician sat on the floor of the dark bathroom wearing foolish-looking orange plastic goggles. An eerie orange light emanated from the Polilight, a heavy, compact gray-and-blue box attached to a flexible metal tube that, using liquid optical technology, emits light in various hues: white, red, yellow, orange. Shone obliquely, it is used to check for fingerprints on walls and other hard-to-inspect areas.

“Anything?” Sarah asked.

Startled, the tech said: “Oh. Uh … no, nothing.” He got to his feet and switched on the light.

More mirrors here, Sarah noted: the medicine cabinet above the sink, and another one, strangely placed, low and directly across from the toilet. Newly, and maladroitly, installed. Both mirrors were dusted with splotches of the gray pulverized charcoal and volcanic ash used to lift prints. In a few places, the gray was overlaid with smudges of Red Wop powder to bring out more ridge detail.

She watched him dust an area of one of the mirrors. “You know,” she said, “a little Windex’ll get those real clean.”

The tech turned around, confused, not getting her joke, but at that moment a voice boomed from just outside the bathroom threshold: Frank Herlihy.

“Is that the famous twenty-thousand-dollar paperweight I keep hearing about?”

“This is it, sir,” the tech said gamely, patting the Polilight as if it were a buddy.

“Oh, Ms. Cahill again. Can we help you with anything?” His tone professed sincerity, but his beefy red face betrayed no desire to help.

“I’m fine,” Sarah said.

“Hey, Carlos, what’s up?” Herlihy said bluffly. “Fuming tank explode on you again?”

The tech laughed and shook his head. “No, sir, but I was up all night charting prints, and then at six this morning the prick pled.”

Herlihy laughed gutturally, malevolently. “You know, Carlos, I’d be careful with that Polilight, there. Semen fluoresces, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t want the little lady here to see how much you jerk off.”

Carlos snorted, and Sarah excused herself, her attention suddenly distracted. She stood outside the bathroom and looked in. Her eyes narrowed. “The mirror,” she said, returning slowly to the bathroom.

“Huh?” asked Carlos.

“It’s that mirror,” she said. More to herself than to Herlihy or Carlos, she murmured: “It’s in a weird place, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re sitting on the toilet, you can see yourself in it. That’s odd. Why would you…”

“Thanks
so
much, Ms. Cahill,” the homicide captain said with a nasty inflection. “Any other observations I can pass on to the deceased’s interior decorator?”

She flashed the captain a contemptuous look and went on, aloud but to herself: “Most women wouldn’t want to look at themselves sitting on the toilet.
Two
medicine cabinets…” Sarah approached the mirror. Carefully grasping the mirror’s edges with her gloved fingers, she pulled at it. It popped off, as she expected it would. Behind it was a crude plywood compartment, in which sat a small, grimy Rolodex.

Sarah cast a glance at Captain Herlihy. “Well, now,” she announced. “The little black book. Could I get some help here, please?”

Astonished, Carlos from Latent Prints helped Sarah tug at the plywood compartment until it too came off, revealing a plaster-and-sheetrock grotto in which sat several neatly wrapped stacks of fifty-dollar bills, unremarkable except that each bill had been cut precisely in half.

*   *   *

“Anyway,” Sarah said to Peter, “she operated in a cash economy.” They emerged from the elevator into the lobby of the apartment building, lit with a garish, stuttering fluorescent light.

“That was almost five thousand dollars,” he said. “With the missing half-bills, I mean. Tells me drugs.”

“Or organized crime.”

“Maybe. Nice work on the mirror thing.”

“Damn, I’m good.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Actually, it wasn’t rocket science,” she said. “We busted a drug dealer in Providence last year who hid his telephone answering machine in a secret compartment built into the floor.”

“Take credit when it’s thrown your way, Cahill. Your friend sure did have an impressive clientele. You have any idea?”

“Yes,” Sarah admitted.

“What was it, five or six CEOs in Boston and New York.
Two
United States senators. One circuit court judge. How much you bet it had something to do with one of them?”

Someone entered the building, not a face either one recognized. They fell silent. Outside he added, “You liked her, didn’t you?” He nodded to the officer with the clipboard, clapped him on the shoulder.

They stepped into the dark street. “Kind of. Not my kind of person, really. But a good sort.”

“Whore with a heart of gold.”

Sarah looked around for her car, but couldn’t locate it, forgot where she’d parked it. “Bronze, maybe. She really took a liking to me. Practically lived for our meetings. Lonely girl—sometimes she’d call five times a day. It got so I had to duck her calls.”

“She tell you anything that might indicate, you know … a client she was afraid of, someone who knew she was ratting for the FBI, something like that?”

“No.”

“But you have theories.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said.

“Care to share?”

“Not yet. But I will, okay? I need a copy of the Rolodex.”

“Well, we own all that, you know.”

“Yeah, and without FBI cooperation you don’t have dog shit.”

Peter gave a strange half-smile. His face reddened. When he was angry, his face flushed like litmus paper. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have met her.”

“Probably not,” she conceded. “But that still doesn’t change—”

“I mean, I took a chance introducing you two, you know. Given your record with informants—”

“Fuck off, Peter,” she snapped.

He beamed as he turned away. “Give the little guy a hug for me, huh?”

She spotted her Honda Civic a moment later, being dragged by a tow truck. And she’d taken the standard precautions against towing: placed her FBI calling card on the dashboard, next to the blue bubble light.

“Shit,” she said, realizing there was no point in running; it was too far down the block already. But she was able to make out a small violet sticker on the tow truck’s bumper:

PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS & SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY

CHAPTER SEVEN

Just after midnight, Sarah Cahill unlocked the front door to her Cambridge house. The only light came from the parlor at the front of the house, where the babysitter, Ann Boyle, snoozed in the La-Z-Boy recliner, the
Boston Herald
tented over her wide bosom.

Ann Boyle, broad and sturdy, with blue-rinsed curls and small, tired eyes, was at sixty-seven a great-grandmother and a widow. She lived in Somerville, the working-class town that bordered Cambridge, and had taken care of Jared since he was small. Now that Jared was eight, she came over much less frequently, but Sarah’s hours were so unpredictable that it was important to have Ann on call.

She woke Ann, paid her, and said good night. A few minutes later she could hear the cough of Ann’s ancient Chevrolet Caprice Classic starting up. Then she went upstairs to Jared’s bedroom. She navigated the cluttered floor by the dim yellow glow of the night-light and narrowly averted demolishing her son’s latest project, a desktop basketball hoop he was constructing with a Styrofoam cup for a hoop and a square of foam core as the backboard.

On the shelf above his bed a platoon of stuffed animals kept watch, including a pig he’d named Eeyore and a bear, Coco, who wore a pair of Carrera sunglasses. Another bear, Huckleberry, kept him company in the bed.

Jared was sleeping in a tie-dyed T-shirt he’d picked out at the flea market in Wellfleet and Jurassic Park dinosaur pajama bottoms. His brown hair was tousled. His breathing was soft and peaceful. His eyelashes were agonizingly long. On his wrist was a soiled yellow rubber band imprinted “Cowabunga!”

She sat there on the edge of the bed, staring at him—she could stare at him for hours while he slept—until he suddenly murmured something in his sleep and turned over to one side. She kissed him on the forehead and went back downstairs.

In the kitchen, Sarah took a highball glass from the cabinet. She needed something to lull her to sleep. Whenever she was called out of the house for work she came back wired. But Scotch had its costs, and she was growing less tolerant of awaking with even a mini-hangover. She set the glass down and decided to microwave a mug of milk instead.

While the microwave oven whirred, she straightened up the kitchen. All the supper dishes were still on the kitchen table; the spaghetti sauce still sat parched in a pot atop the stove. She’d asked Jared to clean up, and of course he hadn’t. Ann should have done it, but probably hadn’t been able to tear herself away from the TV. She felt a wave of annoyance, which merely compounded her foul mood.

Just seeing Peter could depress her, whatever the circumstances. Certainly there were times when she missed having a lover and partner around, and a live-in father for Jared.

But not Peter. Anyone but Peter, whom she’d come to loathe. What had seemed roguishness in the early days of their relationship had revealed itself as simple malice. He was a coarse, self-centered person, and she had only discovered that too late.

Not only did Jared sense her contempt for her ex-husband, but he seemed to feel the same way. There was an odd distance in the boy’s attitude toward his father, who behaved with his eight-year-old son like a Marine drill sergeant. Peter probably imagined this was the only manly way to bring up his son, whom he saw just once a week. The court-ordered custody terms allowed Peter to take Jared one weekend day a week, which usually turned out to be Saturday. Jared dreaded the visits. When Peter did come by, sometimes accompanied by his bimbo
de jour
, he would take Jared to breakfast at a diner and then to watch the pro boxing at Foxboro, above the track, or to his gym in the South End to learn how to fight. Saturdays with Daddy were always sports-related. It was the only way Peter could reach out to his son.

Jared was a creative, lively kid, sometimes moody, and intensely intelligent. Recently he was obsessed with baseball—collecting baseball cards, reeling off baseball statistics. Sarah was afraid this was some misguided attempt to snag his father’s approval. Bright and intuitive though Jared was, he still hadn’t figured out that whatever he did, it would never be enough. He wanted a father, but in Peter he’d never really get one, and the faster he learned that, the better for him.

A month ago, Sarah found herself recalling, Jared had arrived home late one Saturday afternoon after a day with his father, in tears and visibly bruised. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Sarah gasped and ran out to the street to flag Peter down before he drove off in his clattering AMC Pacer.

“What the hell did you do to him?” she shouted.

“Oh, calm down,” he’d replied. “I threw him a left hook and he forgot to duck, is all. I was trying to show him you gotta use your elbows to absorb the blow.”

“Forgot to duck? Peter, he’s a
child
!”

“Jerry’s got to learn how to take his lumps. It’s good for him.” To Peter, Jared was always “Jerry” or “little buddy.”

“Don’t you ever do that to him again!” she said.

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do with my son,” Peter said. “You got him taking piano lessons and writing
poems
, for Christ’s sake. You trying to raise a faggot?” And he gunned the engine and took off down the street.

*   *   *

The microwave beeped, then insistently beeped once more. The milk had boiled over, spilling inside the oven. She mopped up the mess with paper towel, removed the milk skin from the mug with a spoon, and stirred in a little maple syrup.

Then she put on some soft chamber music (the Beethoven piano trios, which, with the Schubert piano trios, she played more than anything else—something else Peter liked to mock her for) and sat in the La-Z-Boy.

She thought of Valerie Santoro, not posed on her bed in the indignity of death, but alive, beautiful, and remembered the last time they’d met. She had talked about quitting “the business,” something she talked about quite a lot recently and getting a “high-powered” job on Wall Street. She’d begun to ask for more and more money so she could quit working—realizing that she was near the end of her career as a call girl and the money wasn’t coming in the way it used to.

Valerie Santoro, rest in peace, was a user who thought she’d finally found her sugar daddy, her ticket out. She affected to disdain the money Uncle Sam gave her, while at the same time angling desperately to get more of it.