Basket Case (26 page)

"But your paper said it was an accident."

"Right. And we never, ever make mistakes. Sit down, Charlie." And, by God, he does. "Somebody broke into Janet's house this weekend, somebody who thought she had something of Jimmy's. Now she's missing and—"

"No she's not."

My turn to sit down. "What?"

"She called this morning, Jack. Said some guy she'd been seeing got bombed and busted up her place. She's staying with friends down in Lauderdale or Boca somewhere. Said whatever I do, don't send the inheritance check to her house while she's gone, in case the asshole is still hangin' around." The lawyer chuckles. "I've only told that young woman about a hundred times that her brother's money won't be available for months."

"Did you speak to Janet yourself?"

"One of my secretaries did."

"And they know her voice?"

"Oh, come on."

"Charlie, how many clients do you have—a couple hundred? And your secretaries know each and every voice."

"No, son," he says, "but I've got no reason to suspect it was anyone but Ms. Thrush who phoned my office." The pause is an invitation for me to spit out my theory. I won't.

"Did she leave a phone number?"

"As a matter of fact, no. She told Mary she'll call back," Chickle says. "Now, why don't you tell me what you think you know—"

"I can't." The words catch in my throat like a hairball.

And before he sends me on my way, Charlie Chickle says, "Don't let your imagination run off with you, Jack. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem."

Emma wants to go to lunch and she insists on driving. She takes me to a darkly lit Italian joint, where we choose a booth in the back. She looks exhausted and says she, too, didn't sleep all night. Twenty-seven years old—I'm trying not to obsess about that. It's inconsiderate to project one's loony death phobias onto others; I'll have my plate full with Señor Kerouac soon enough.

The restaurant is chilly and Emma is rubbing her hands to warm up. I switch to her side of the booth and put an arm around her, a courtly deed that improves my mood more than hers. She does perk up when I tell her about that phone call to Charles Chickle—like me, she wants to believe it was really Janet. Neither of us mentions the blood on the carpet. Neither of us touches our wine, either.

In a flat voice she says, "You might be right. Maybe I'm not cut out for newspaper work."

"This kind of stuff doesn't happen every day." Still talking about Jimmy's sister.

"What if she's dead, Jack?"

"Then… I don't know. We chase it down. We get the damn story."

I'm not fooling Emma one bit. She knows I'm rattled.

"Besides the widow, you have any idea where all this might lead? Why people are dying and disappearing?"

"Give me some time," I say.

"A rock singer who hasn't been heard from in years, an out-of-work piano player—"

It sounds as if she's losing her nerve. I tell her we can't give up now. Especially now.

Emma says, "I just don't want anything awful to happen to you. I'm sorry but that's the truth."

She locks on with the jade-green eyes. I hear myself saying, "I wonder who'd write my obituary."

"Write it yourself, smart-ass. We'll keep it in the can."

"All right, but I'll need a good quote from you. Being my boss and all."

"Fine," says Emma. " 'Jack Tagger was a deeply disturbed individual—' "

"—'but a gifted and much-admired reporter. All of us in the newsroom will miss him terribly—' "

"—'for about five minutes—' " Emma re-interjects.

" 'Especially Emma Cole, since she never got to sleep with him and heard he was absolutely spectacular… ' "

"Agghh!" She slaps my arm and pokes me with an elbow and now we're sort of wrestling in the lunch booth, laughing and holding each other loosely. It's nice, bordering on comfortable. Who besides Evan would have imagined—me and my bold plans! The most casual of flirtations and, instead of trying to save Emma, I'm now trying to seduce her. Or hoping to be seduced. In any case, questions of character could be raised.

Emma is saying she phoned her father and told him about the Jimmy Stoma story and Janet's disappearance. He told her to be careful, told her to stay in the newsroom and leave the hairy stuff to the reporters. She says she got mildly annoyed, and I tell her not to take it the wrong way. If I were her dad, I'd have given the same advice.

"Let's talk about something else," Emma says.

"All right. Now don't get upset, but lately I've been having lascivious thoughts about you. And I mean 'lascivious' in the healthiest and most wholesome sense."

"In other words, you want to have sex," she says. "I haven't made up my mind about that yet. Let's try another subject."

"Fair enough. How about this: I no longer have a frozen lizard in my refrigerator."

"Oh?"

"Ever since the night of my burglary. I used it to clobber the guy."

"You're not serious."

"Oh yes. This was one jumbo lizard, too. I'm hoping it messed him up real good."

Emma says, "What's wrong with a good old-fashioned handgun?"

"Hell, anybody can defend themselves with one of those."

Upon returning to the newsroom I find a message on my desk from Griffin, who doesn't believe in e-mail. The coffee-stained note is scrawled in pencil, entirely in capital letters:

COPS DIDN'T GO TO THRUSH HOUSE AFTER 911 BECAUSE SHE'D CALLED THE DAY BEFORE + TOLD THEM NOT TO. SAID IT WAS DRUNK BOYFRIEND WHO TORE UP THE PLACE + IT WAS OVER + SHE DIDN'T WANT TO PRESS CHGS. IF U NEED MORE, LET ME KNOW. G.

When I show the note to Emma, she exclaims: "So she is alive!"

I'm not so optimistic. Janet never spoke of having a boyfriend. She mentioned her ex-husband and her pervo Web-crawlers but no particular guy in her life.

"Maybe she's all right," I tell Emma, "or maybe these phone calls are being made by someone pretending to be her."

"Like who?"

"The widow Stomarti springs to mind. Young Evan's going to do some sniffing around."

Emma emits a worried peep. "Evan? Our Evan?"

20

The kid's name is Dominic Dominguez but he goes by Dommie. His mother leads us to the inner sanctum.

"G'bye," Dommie calls out, having heard us coming down the hall.

His mother knocks lightly. "It's Juan Rodriguez, honey. He had an appointment, remember?"

"What's he got on?" Dommie inquires from behind the door.

Juan has forewarned me that the kid is quirky and short-fused, so I should lay off the wisecracks.

"A Ralph Lauren shirt," Dommie's mother reports, "a nice pale blue. And no neckwear, sweetheart."

The kid has a healthy phobia about grownups in neckties. My Jack Webb model is at the cleaner's. Juan removed his in the car.

"Come on in," Dommie says.

Before slipping away, his mother touches Juan's sleeve. "Would you mind asking if he's ready for din-din?"

Inside Dommie's room it feels about ninety-seven degrees because of all the electronics. There's a low-grade static hum that sounds like one of those coin-operated bed vibrators. I know next to nothing about computers but clearly Dommie is loaded for bear. Walled in by hardware, he toils intently at one of several PCs, his bony back to die door.

Juan says, "Hey, buddy."

The kid doesn't turn around. "Gimme a minute," he mumbles. "Who's that with you?"

"My friend Jack. The one I told you about on the phone."

"Yojack."

"Hi, Dommie."

The kid's speed-shifting a joystick for a video game: dueling skateboarders, set to the vocal stylings of Anthrax. Juan glances my way and shrugs. There's no place to sit. The bed is littered with open boxes: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple. I'm sweating like a stevedore.

Juan says, "Your mom wanted to know if you'd like some dinner."

"Not now!" The skateboarders on the kid's monitor are battling each other on a half-pipe, twirling and seesawing in midair. "Kill him!" Dommie rasps at the animated characters. "Kill that little bastard, Tony!"

I nudge Juan, whose face registers concern.

"Get outta here! Seriously, dudes!" Dommie screeches, apparently at us.

We retreat into the hallway. "You neglected to mention he was a psychopath," I whisper to Juan.

"He's just a little high-strung."

From inside the kid's bedroom we hear a feral yelp, then a sharp crack that sounds like a gun. I lunge for the doorknob but Juan snags my arm. Moments later Dommie's standing there, cool as ice. Now I can see he's wearing Oakley cutaways, baggy surf shorts and an oversized Ken Griffey Jr. jersey. His black hair is buzzed in wedding-cake layers, and a gold stud glints in one pale nostril. He weighs all of eighty-five pounds. He motions us back into his bedroom, where I notice a chemical tinge in the air. Dommie has shot out the tube of his PC with a Daisy pellet rifle. For now he seems at peace.

He glides his chair over to a working monitor, a raspberry-colored Mac. "Dudes," he says, "it's your lucky day."

Juan smiles hopefully. "You cracked the hard drive?"

"Like an egg. But everything was passworded, yo, so it took a while."

"And what was the secret word?"

" 'Detox'!" Dommie chirps. "Now pay attention"—the kid's fingers are flying over the keyboard—"here's a directory of all the files. I'll open one so you can see what it looks like."

The screen brightens with several rows of oscillating waves.

"They're all like that?" I ask.

"What else," says the kid.

"Can't you convert it to text?"

The kid looks at Juan as if to ask: How'd you hook up with this imbecile?

Juan says, "Jack can barely work a car radio. You've got to make things real simple for him, Dommie."

The kid is holding both hands in the air, like a doctor scrubbed for surgery. His fingers haven't quit moving, though, flitting across invisible keys.

"Okay," he says, "in the beginning was Pro Tools. That's software, dudes. High-end software. Lucky I had it, otherwise I couldn't read what's on this drive."

I say, "Dommie, please. Tell me what we're looking at."

The kid reaches for the mouse and guides the arrow to one of the wavy horizontal bands. Then he double-clicks and leans back, pointing to a speaker. "Listen tight," he says.

Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Pause. Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

"What is it?"

"The file name is DRoysteroi," the kid says.

"Yeah, but what is it?"

"Dudes, come on. It's music."

Dommie shuts it down and spins around to face us. "This hard drive you brought me, it's all sessions. What they call a master. That gorky-gork I just played for you is the bass drum part for a cut called 'Cindy's Oyster,' somethin' like that. If you want I can pull up the guitar track, harmonica, vocals—it's all there."

"Only one song?" I ask.

The kid chortles. "Try, like, thirty. Some are already mixed down, some are still in pieces. I didn't sit through all of it because it's not my thing. Plus it would take, like, days."

Juan says, "Dommie's into rap—"

"Nuh-ugh, hip-hop," the kid protests.

"He mixes original stuff for some of the club DJs."

"Yeah, that's how come I can afford Pro Tools," Dommie says. "It's radical bad. Sixty-four tracks. No hiss, no wow, no flutter. Plus I've got AutoTune so it's always on key, even if some stone-deaf mother is singing. State of the art, dudes. Everybody's got it."

"Not us," I say.

"State of the art. Wave of the future. Reel-to-reel be dead and gone," the kid zooms on. "This program can run off a Power Book—know what that means? You can mix a whole record on a laptop, yo, and it's cleaner'n twenty-four tracks of tape. Serious, man."

Juan says, "Jack wants to hear everything on that hard drive. Every single cut."

"Ha, I pity your white ass," says Rapmeister Dommie, twelve going on twenty-nine. It's good that he's wearing sunglasses; I believe I'd rather not see the size of his pupils. He returns to the Mac, closes down Pro Tools and starts diddling with the plug-in board. When he spins around again, the hard drive box is in his hands. He thrusts it at Juan's chest and says, "Hey, they're only eight games out of first."

"Anything's possible, Dommie."

"I really like that rookie shortstop. What a gun, huh?"

"Yeah, and he can actually hit a slider once in a while." From his pocket Juan digs out a couple of tickets to see the Marlins play the Mets. "Hey, buddy, where could Jack listen to all this stuff you found for us?"

"In his car. Duh."

Laughing, the kid stacks a tall pile of CDs on my lap. "I burned these myself, no charge. I'll print out a file directory so you'll sorta know what you're hearing."

"Thank you, Dommie," I say.