Back Story (6 page)

Vinnie waited in the car at the curb. Hawk got out with me and leaned against the car while I got out and walked to the club. There were a couple guys hanging outside the doorway, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from the bottle and looking dangerous in the way only bottom-rung wiseguys were able to look while they waited for someone to tell them to do something. I started in the door, and a fat guy with a lot of tattoos put his arm out. "You going somewhere?"

"Am I going somewhere," I said. "I never think of saying stuff like that until it's too late. That's great: Are you going somewhere. Hot dog!"

"What are you, a wiseguy?" the fat guy said.

"I am," I said. "And I'm looking for Sonny Karnofsky."

"Yeah?"

"I'm here to talk with him about Harvey."

The fat guy was getting a little careful. Maybe I was important.

"He know you're coming?"

"Tell him I'm here," I said.

The fat guy hesitated. He looked at Hawk leaning on the car. He looked at the other guy, much smaller, wearing a dirty tank top hanging outside pink Bermuda shorts, and black sandals.

"Find out if Sonny wants to see this guy," the fat guy said.

The guy in the sandals went inside. The fat man had dropped his arm, but stood with his body shielding the entrance. If I wasn't supposed to go in and he let me, Sonny would have his ass. If I was supposed to go in and he didn't let me, Sonny would have his ass. We waited. Hawk seemed to be enjoying it. Vinnie didn't seem to know it was happening. The other guy came back out.

"Okay," he said to the fat guy.

The fat guy turned to me.

"Okay," he said.

"I love a chain of command," I said.

The fat guy jerked his head toward the door, and the guy in the sandals opened it for me and I went in. There was a big shabby open room with a table and an old refrigerator against the wall to my right. Four guys were playing cards. Two other guys were at another table, drinking beer and watching The Young and the Restless on television. A big poster of the New England Patriots Super Bowl team was taped to the wall to my left. And straight ahead, to the left of a half-open door, was a large calendar with the days crossed off.

"Through that door in the back," the guy in the sandals told me.

As I walked through the room, the men stared at me. Probably sick with envy. Through the open door was the quintessential back room: dirty brown walls, brown linoleum floor, dirty window covered with wire mesh that looked out at the back of the next building. Old oak desk, old oak file cabinet, old cane-back oak swivel chair behind the desk, big old sagging armchair covered in shabby brown corduroy. In the armchair, crossways, with his legs swung over one of the chair arms, sat my recent acquaintance Harvey, wearing a white linen suit. In the old swivel chair like an imposing toad, wearing a red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt that gapped between the buttons over his stomach, was Sonny Karnofsky.

Sonny looked at me without expression. Harvey swung his leg sort of indolently and smirked a little. Sonny waited.

"You know me?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Why'd you send this fop around to scare me to death."

"What's a fop?" Sonny said.

I pointed at Harvey. With his white suit, he was wearing a pale blue shirt and a white tie. Flawless.

"What makes you think I sent him to do anything?"

"Oh come on, Sonny," I said. "You think he felt like threatening somebody, and he picked me out of the phone book? What I want to know is why you care about the murder of some woman from California, happened twenty-eight years ago?"

"Corkie says you got some people waiting for you outside," Sonny said.

There was maybe the hint of an Eastern European accent in his speech, but it was so faint that maybe it wasn't there.

"I do."

Sonny nodded slowly. "Good idea," he said. His voice was thick, as if his pipes were clogged.

"Were you a counterculture radical in 1974?" I said. He raised a hand and pointed at me with a forefinger so fat it made the skin taut.

"Anybody knows me will tell you, you fuck with me and you're dead."

"I've heard that," I said.

"And they'll tell you, fuck with my family and you'll wish you fucked with me."

"Family?"

Sonny was so used to being king of the hill these days that he probably didn't watch what he said as much as he used to. His face was expressionless, but his mouth clamped hard shut. We looked at each other for a moment. Without taking his eyes off me, he spoke to Harvey.

"Not here. But as quick as you can someplace else," Sonny said. "Kill him."

Harvey looked like a guy with a low-grade fever.

"Be my pleasure," Harvey said.

That pretty well said it all, so I turned and marched out. I hate to be in a place where I'm not wanted.

"It's. " she looked at Paul, who sat quietly next to her, even more nondirective, if possible, than I was. "It's more, like, how it should have been. You know? How it could have been, if my parents. " "Sure," I said. Paul and I looked supportively at Daryl. Daryl looked at her hands.

"They embarrassed me," she said.

"Your parents."

"Yes."

"Because?"

"Because? Because they were fucking hippies, for God's sake. Were your parents hippies?"

I thought of my father and my two uncles.

"No," I said. "They weren't."

"Most people's weren't. And even if they were, they got over it."

"They were different times," I said, just to say something.

"I'm lucky they didn't name me Moonflower."

"You are," I said.

Paul smiled. It was as if Daryl didn't hear me.

"We didn't come here to visit my aunt," Daryl said. "We came here with some man my mother was fucking."

Paul and I looked at each other. We were thinking of Paul's mother.

I had swiveled my chair a little so I could see out my window. Although it was early afternoon, the sky outside my office was dark and getting darker. Rain was coming. Daryl sat without saying anything.

"Your father know about this man?"

"I don't know what he knew," Daryl said. "I think he was stoned for the first twelve years of my life."

"Were they separated?" I said.

She didn't answer for awhile. She had stopped looking at her lap and begun to look out through my window at the rain that hadn't come yet. I was about to ask again when she answered me.

"Separated?" she laughed. "Hell, I don't know if they were even married. I mean, maybe some long-haired freak in a tie-dyed shirt mumbled something and smoked hemp with them. But separated? From what?"

"Did your father know your mother, ah, fooled around?"

"Oh, yes."

"Did he object?"

"Maybe when he wasn't stoned. But she didn't care. She wasn't going to be somebody's chattel."

"Right on, sister," I said. "Your father fool around?"

"I don't think so. I think he was in love with Mistress Bong."

I could see why she had made up a story. Loosened, her rage was carnivorous.

"The man's name?" I said. "The one she came to Boston with."

"I don't know," Daryl said.

"Did you meet him?"

"Yes, but I don't know what his name was. I don't know anything about him. I hated him."

"Can you describe him?"

"No."

I nodded.

"When I was fifteen," Paul said, "my mother was bopping a guy named Stephen, with a ph. He was about six-one, slim, short hair, close-cropped beard, and mustache, always wore aviator glasses with pink lenses."

"So you remember, and I don't," Daryl said.

"I remember them all," Paul said. "Clearly."

"Well, I don't," Daryl said.

Neither of us said anything. Daryl looked out my window. The rain was just getting under way, a few spatters making isolated trickle paths down the pane.

"He was a black man," she said.

I waited.

"Not too big. I think he was only a little taller than my mother. He had a big afro."

"You remember his name?" I said.

She was quiet, watching the evolving rain through my window. Paul and I watched it, too. It was very dark outside.

"My mother called him Leon," she said.

"Last name?" I said.

She shook her head.

"Just Leon," she said. "I assume it was his first name."

I tried to get as much as I could while the faucet was on.

"Any gray in the afro?"

"No."

"Beard?"

"Mustache," she said. "A big Fu Manchu thing."

"You know what he did for a living?"

"No."

"You ever hear from him after she died?"

"No."

"You know where he is now?"

"No."

"You know anything else about him?"

"No."

"He treat you okay?"

"I didn't see much of him. My mother sort of kept him to herself."

"He didn't mistreat you," Paul said.

"No."

The rain arrived like an explosion against the window, flooding the window pane. There was some lightning and commensurate thunder.

I said, "After your mother died, you went to live with your father?"

"Yes."

"How was that?"

She shrugged. "He tried," she said. "But he wasn't much good at anything but rolling a joint. Mostly we were on welfare."

"How'd you get to be an actress?" I said.

"I always wanted to. From as long back as I can remember. I don't know why. I got in the drama club in high school, and the drama club teacher helped me get into an apprentice program at the La Jolla Playhouse and. " she spread her hands.

"So why are you so dead set on finding your mother's murderer?" I said.

"Well. I. she was my mother, for God's sake."

"And you want justice," I said.

"If I can get it," Daryl said.

"I can't promise it," I said.

"I'll settle for revenge," she said.

I looked out the window at the fully evolved thunderstorm. Blow, winds, I thought, and crack your cheeks.

"Find anything in D.C. about Shaka?" I said.

"They got a file," Epstein said.

"Can you get it?"

"Classified."

"Don't you have clearance?"

"Need-to-know basis," Epstein said.

"You need to know."

"No," Epstein said. "I'd like to know. But I'm not working on a case which requires me to know it."

"And you can't work on the case because you can't get any information about it to work on it."

"That's a little oversimplified," Epstein said.

"They have no reason to classify some two-bit counterculture gunny from 1974 on a need-to-know," I said.

"Apparently, they do," Epstein said. "I'll try to spring it loose. There are some channels to go through."

"I'll bet there are," I said. "What reason would you guess."

"I don't wish to guess," Epstein said. "I'll see what I can find out."

"I'm guessing there was an informant involved."

"I don't wish to guess," Epstein said.

Malone's cabin, on Bow Lake, was alone in the woods. There were neighbors, I had passed them on the way in, but they weren't in sight from the cabin, and, as I got out of the car in the driveway, I could have been in Patagonia. An aging cocker spaniel came around the corner of the cabin and gave me a token bark before she sat with her tongue out, waiting for me to pat her. After I did, we went around to the front of the house, which faced out toward the lake. Malone and his wife were sitting on the deck, looking at the water. A pitcher of iced tea sat on a little tray table between them. We said hello, and I sat in a canvas-strapped folding deck chair. They didn't offer me any iced tea,

"I'm trying to backtrack an old killing," I said.

"Anne told me," Malone said and nodded sideways at his wife.

He didn't look good. His eyes were sort of unfocused. His face had sunk under his cheekbones, and he had the sort of thin, flabby look of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a short time. There was a lot of loose skin under his jaw.

"Emily Gordon," I said. "Killed during a holdup at a bank in Audubon Circle."

"Yeah?"

"I believe you were the lead agent on the case."

"Hard to remember," he said.

"But you know it was long enough ago to be hard to remember," I said.

Malone shook his head and didn't say anything. Malone's wife watched him all the time, as if she were afraid he might fall over without warning. She was short and plump with gray-streaked hair that used to be blond, worn in short bangs across her forehead.

"I know there was a Bureau file on the killing," I said. "But I don't seem able to access it."

Malone sipped his iced tea carefully, as if the glass were hard to hold. When he put it back on the tray table, his wife's hand moved to grab the glass if he had trouble. Neither of them said anything. The spaniel had gone to sleep with her head on Mrs. Malone's left foot.

"I wondered if you might have any recollection of what might be in the file."

Malone was slouched in the deck chair, his chin touching his sternum. He wore tan shorts and a yellow polo shirt with blue horizontal stripes, high white tube socks, and brown leather sandals. His legs were pale and thin and blue-veined.

"Mr. Malone has had some very difficult surgery," Mrs. Malone said. "He hasn't gotten his strength back yet."

"I won't be long," I said. "Anything you can tell me?"

"Nothing to tell," Malone said hoarsely. "Wrong place, wrong time. We never found the shooter."

"Did you know his name was Shaka?"

"No."

It was a splendid summer day, 75 degrees with a breeze off the lake.

"Do you know why she was in Boston?"

"Don't remember, something about a sister." There was sweat on Malone's forehead.

"Did you write a report?"

"Must have." He smiled a frightful, weak, humorless smile. "Bureau's big for reports."

"You recall any connection with Sonny Karnofsky?"

"Never heard of him."

No law enforcement guy in Boston in the past thirty years wouldn't have known about Sonny Karnofsky.

"Any kind of mob connection?"

"No." He looked at his wife. She stood at once.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Mr. Malone needs to lie down now."

I nodded. She sort of hovered around him as he got himself slowly out of the chair. He stood as if his balance were uncertain and began to walk very slowly, bent over as if his stomach were vulnerable and he wished to protect it. She was right with him, ready to catch him if he fell. Though how she thought she'd prevent him from falling, I didn't know. They reached the back door of the cabin. She opened it and put her hand under his arm and steered him through. Then she turned and looked at me.

She said, "Good-bye, Mr. Spenser," and went in after him. I looked at the spaniel. She sat up suddenly and scratched her ear with her right hind foot.

"Enjoy," I said to her, and walked back to my car.