Wallflower (5 page)

"Insulted
me."

"Is that
all?"

"Hurt
me."

"Is that really all he did? Come on, child. Spill your guts."

"He
harmed
me."

"Can't say it, can you?"

"I can say it, Mama. I can say it all right. It hurts me to say it.
But I
can."

"Then say it, for God's sakes.
Say it!"

"What?"

"Humiliated me."

"Don't whimper, child. Say it loud."

"He humiliated me!"

"Yep, that's what he did. So what're you going to do about it?"

"Pay him back."

"How?"

"Use Tool."

"Use Tool to do
what?"

"Kill him."

"And?"

"Fix him!"

"And?"

"Shut him up!"

"For how long?"

"Forever."

"Say it again."

"Kill him and fix him and shut him up forever."

"
There, that's the ticket. You got it, child. Yeah, you got it now."

O
n the Van Wyck Expressway, peering out of Aaron Greenberg's beaten-up Chevrolet, Janek felt malice in the air. Traffic was heavy. People sat rigid and angry in their cars. Cold rain pelted the asphalt through noxious yellow fog, while all around he could hear the biting sound of horns and, in the distance, competing sirens, perhaps a fire truck and an ambulance at odds.

He touched the window. Ice-cold. The wiper slapped back and forth. The city ahead, toward which they were moving at such erratic speed, could not yet be seen, but Janek could feel it, could feel its nasty breath, its rancor.

He turned back to Aaron, who sat straight in his seat, concentrating on the road. A short, taut, wiry man with weather-beaten skin, his eyes and smile were sweet.
My partner and best friend,
Janek thought. Kit would gladly have sent her car, but only Aaron, he knew, would come out to Kennedy Airport on such a day to meet him and bring him in.

"New York's got no gender."

Aaron peered ahead curiously. "What?"

"Venice is a 'she.' New York's an 'it,'" Janek said.

"Well, what do you expect, Frank? I mean, Venice is pretty. New York's not supposed to be."

Janek glanced at him. "You haven't told me anything."

Aaron continued to stare ahead. "Been waiting for you to ask."

"How bad was it?" He held his breath as he waited for the reply.

Aaron exhaled. "I don't know how to put it quite."

"Try." The floor pads in the car smelled wet and old.

"Worse than you think, Frank. Worse than you think."

They rode in silence for a time; then Janek asked Aaron to give
it to him straight. Never mind the niceties. Just straight, like they
were starting out on a case and Aaron was filling him in.

"All I got so far is what I heard around. The detective in charge
didn't get back to me yet."

"What's his name?"

"Ray Boyce."

"Never heard of him."

"Neither have I."

"Well . . . ?"

Aaron winced. "She was done with an ice pick in Riverside Park, not far from her dorm room at Columbia. It was early evening. She went out jogging alone. That wasn't approved; but she did it a lot, and she wasn't the only one. Plenty of other kids run alone in the dark. I don't know where they think they're living. Nicetown, USA? Anyway, it was about seven. No witnesses. Nobody saw nothing. She never returned to her room. She didn't have a roommate, so she wasn't missed. In fact, well I don't know if I ought—"

"Don't try and spare me, Aaron."

Aaron nodded. "Understand, Frank, this is just what I heard. Seems she spent a lot of nights away. She had boyfriends. Again, she wasn't the only one. Other kids—"

"Okay, I get the picture. Go on."

"Every morning, early, the Columbia men's crew goes running as a group. They found her and called her in. Apparently nothing was taken, not that she was carrying much. But she had a watch and a Walkman. If it was a mugger, that's what you'd expect him to take."

"So it wasn't a mugger?"

"Doesn't look like it."

"Who was it then? Pack of animals on a wilding, like the ones smashed up that stockbroker a couple years back?"

"Doesn't look like that either."

"What does it look like?"

"Take it easy, Frank. You're closing in too fast. I don't know what it looks like. Like I said, Boyce didn't get back to me yet."

"Check him out?"

Aaron nodded. "He's okay."

"So-so's what you mean."

Aaron shrugged. "They can't all be stars, Frank. Boyce got the call. So it's his."

Aaron was right, that's the way it worked, and it was a stinking system, too, because a good 20 percent of the detective force was barely so-so, and when it came to Janek's goddaughter, so-so wasn't going to be good enough.

He turned to the back of the car. Aaron had spread the tabloids across the rear seat. Janek's eyes flew across them. The headlines shrieked.

"If it wasn't a mugger or a pack on a rampage, who the hell was it?"

"Could have been a mugger," Aaron said. "He could have gotten spooked."

"Mugger with an ice pick? Where did they find it anyway?"

"What?"

"The pick."

"It was left embedded."

"Oh, Christ!" Janek moaned. Just hearing that made him hurt. "You know how I felt about her, Aaron."

Aaron nodded, then paused a moment before he spoke. "Tell you what I think, Frank, just based on what I heard. There wasn't any reason. It was just, you know, one of those lousy goddamn things. We get them all the time. You know—"

"Yeah. . . ." Janek knew all right. He knew all about them, though they weren't the kinds of cases he ever worked. A unique phenomenon of American cities, of which New York, on account of its population, had a greater share than anyplace else, they were the homicides that were rarely solved because there was nothing about them to solve. They had no point. They were the meaningless murders committed by madmen stalking people alone at night in public parks.

T
here was a TV news unit with a transmitting device on its roof parked across the street from the James O'Hara Funeral Home. Aaron stopped the car; Janek ducked out into the rain, then wound his way between the waiting limos, past the cameras at the door, and into the lobby. A stand on the far wall was stuffed with wet umbrellas. A dour man in a cutaway stepped forward and asked if he was there for the Wentworth funeral.

"The Foy," Janek said.

The man looked him over carefully. "You're the godfather?" Janek nodded. "They waited long as they could. They're about halfway through it now. West Chapel, up the stairs, second door on the right."

When he got there, Janek stood in the back and listened. An intense, frizzy-haired young man in ecclesiastical garments was speaking with bitter scorn of the horrors of New York.

". . . t
his Cultural Paradise, once so gracious, now choked with the downtrodden and the homeless. This Imperial City, once so elegant, now ridden with rape and murder. Just this past week a
grandmother was dragged to her death by a purse snatcher at midday on Madison Avenue. And a brilliant young intern, with a great future before him, was shot at dusk outside New York Hospital because he refused to hand over his coat. And now our dear Jessica, beloved daughter of Laura, beloved stepdaughter of Stanton, and goddaughter of Frank, has been struck down . . . and we ask: What madness has been set loose in our city? Why must such a tragedy happen? For what reason? What cause? How can we allow it? What we can we say? What can we do? And our voices are mute, for we have no answers. . . ."

It was a long, narrow, overheated room, crowded mostly with younger people. Janek recognized a few: Jess's friends from high school and college, her cousins on Laura's side, and Stanton Dorance's two older sons, children from an earlier marriage. He also saw Tim Foy's mother, a thin veiled Irish woman in her sixties who now had lost both son and granddaughter to violence.

Ten or so well-dressed middle-aged men with well-trimmed hair sat together in a row.
Must be Stanton's law partners,
Janek thought. Laura and Stanton sat at the front in the bent, broken postures of the bereaved. There was an empty seat beside them. Janek waited until the minister paused, then crept forward to it. He hugged Laura, shook Stanton's hand, then settled back in time for the final words of the eulogy, which ended unexpectedly, not with a plea for reconciliation but on a shrill note of inexplicability and despair.

Afterward Laura grasped his arm. Even in grief she was a beautiful woman. "Thank God you made it, Frank. You know how she adored you. . . ." And then clinging to him, sobbing: "What am I going to do without her? I can't imagine. I just can't imagine. . . ."

Outside, Janek hustled Laura into the lead limo, while Stanton walked over to the waiting press, stood stoically in the rain and addressed their microphones: "Please, ladies and gentlemen, please give us some room for our grief. .
. .
"

I
n Queens, at the cemetery, just after they left the car, Stanton motioned Janek aside. Gravestones covered the bleak wet earth as far as the eye could see. Stanton's face, always strong, sometimes arrogant, looked weak and blotchy in the rain. His gestures, normally poised, were angular and abrupt.

"Find the animal who did this, Frank. Promise me you'll find him and bring him in."

Janek became aware then of a new wave of pain. It rose out of the center of his belly and spread across his chest. He thought:
Just think of yourself as a detective and then maybe a little of this hurt will go away.

"I'll do my best, Stanton. But you know how these things go."

As Stanton stared at him outraged, Janek felt ashamed; what he'd said sounded so impotent. But then Stanton nodded. He understood. To live in New York was to understand all too well the vagaries of the criminal justice system and the cheap price of young human life.

W
hen Janek met Aaron at 6:00 P.M. in the lobby of the Two-Six Precinct, he didn't have to ask for his opinion of Detective Boyce. Aaron offered it by seesawing his hands.
"
Tell you this, Frank, he ain't no Sherlock Holmes."

Aaron continued imparting his impression as they mounted the precinct house stairs. "He's pissed off. He denies it, but I can tell. Chief Kopta told him you're the godfather, so naturally he's going to extend you every courtesy. But see, for Boyce a front-page homicide like this is a chance to make a big impression. Then the famous Janek walks in. He's afraid of you, Frank, afraid you'll steal his case."

Janek's own first impression was that Boyce wasn't so much dumb as slow. He had a beer belly and not much hair. He'd
combed a few thin brown wisps back carefully across his skull as if he thought they might cover his baldness and make him more attractive—but they didn't. The base of his face had a kind of squared-off look that reminded Janek of the bottom of a paper bag. But though his manner did not proclaim great brilliance, Janek recognized a predatory look. Aaron was right: This was a mediocre detective inflamed by a stroke of luck. The Jessica Foy case could be just the break he'd been waiting for for twenty years.

"
I understand your special relationship to the victim, Lieutenant," Boyce began,
"
but let's not start off on the wrong foot. She's your goddaughter, but she's my case. Long as that's clear, we'll get along."

Jesus!
Janek thought, but he kept his anger to himself. He knew that sooner or later a man who talked like that would blunder his way into Kit Kopta's bad graces.

"What do you really know about her?"

"Me?"

"You're her godfather, so I figured—"

This time Janek didn't bother to control his temper. "What the fuck, Boyce! I know a million things about her. What are you looking for me to say?"

"Know much about her social life?"

"What
about
her social life?" Now Boyce was wearing a cagey look, as if he had knowledge and it wasn't nice.

Aaron casually picked up Boyce's nameplate and tested it for strength. "Way you're acting, Ray, someone might think you're taunting the lieutenant here. Not a good idea, Ray. Why not just tell Janek what you got?"

Boyce shrugged.
"
I got a diary." He reached into his center drawer, pulled out a stenographer's notebook, and tossed it casually on the desk.
"
Read it, Janek. You may learn some things about her you didn't know." He headed for the door.
"
I'm going around the corner for coffee. Stick it back in the drawer when you're finished, okay?"