Cuts Through Bone (14 page)

“Whatcha doing, old man?” a tall dirty-blond surfer asked. His eyes were invisible behind mirrored wraparound sunglasses; his shirt and jeans were sunbleached to the color of pale sand. The other young men ambled forward to nearly surround them. Other students, who had been hurrying, drifted to a stop like leaves striking the ground.

“Taking pictures for
National Geographic,
” Guthrie said, taking a pan of Peiper at short range before slipping the phone into his pocket. The little West Virginian seemed toylike beside the big young men.

Justin Peiper had hair one shade short of black, and eyes that seemed a mix of green and blue. His features weren't overfine or pretty, but they suggested amusement and sensuality without coarseness. He had the cocky good looks that made Gary Cooper immortal, with a slim, muscular build flawed only by stature. He admired Vasquez and arched a perfect eyebrow. “You want wildlife, I know places,” he offered, then nodded at Guthrie. “Seriously, check his phone.”

The surfer took a step and leaned as if he was reaching for a wayward basketball, but Guthrie caught his wrist and stepped around him. Another of the big men snarled and pushed the little detective when he was bumped, but Guthrie rode the surfer into two more of them and they tangled. Guthrie stopped beside Peiper.

“Justin, there're cameras all around us in the cafeteria,” he said softly, “but you want to worry about mine? Seriously?”

“You're right, man,” Peiper said, holding up his hands. “My bad!” He flashed a grin that had stopped as much trouble as it ever started. The big men shifted around to leave some space. The surfer snatched off his sunglasses to glare down at Guthrie with dark eyes.

“Maybe you can tell me where you were at on Thursday, the twenty-third of July. Maybe you should pay special attention to the night hours.”

“What the hell? You're a cop?” Peiper asked.

“Worse than that,” Guthrie said. “The night Camille Bowman was murdered, where were you?”

“Greg Olsen is in jail for that, dumbass,” Peiper said coolly. “Read the newspaper.”

“That can change, Justin, especially now that the motives are getting clearer,” the little detective said. “She dumped you for him. That's jealousy. Juries like jealous rivals who got spurned for war heroes. Right? Maybe you should get in front of this and talk to me, instead of making me dig for it.” He glanced at the other men surrounding them. “Maybe I could find something on a lot of you. Are all of you Deltas? Been spending time at LMA?”

“I was doing something that night,” Peiper said.

Guthrie laughed. “Studying? Or something better, that you got pictures of, and somebody willing to come forward?”

“No badge, no cop,” the surfer said. “Dude's faking. You don't have to answer his questions.”

The little detective shrugged. “I'm worse than a cop. I work for James Rondell, an ugly-ass lawyer on Wall Street. If making you look bad helps him talk to a jury, count it as done. I'm not so bad, myself. Convince me, and I vanish like a puff of smoke. If you don't answer, I dig; then I throw you to James Rondell. Maybe start with how many times you visited Bowman's apartment?”

“So what! A lot of guys went to that tramp's apartment,” the surfer said.

“You got names?” Guthrie countered.

“Enough fun and games,” Peiper said. “Talk to your lawyer. He can talk to my lawyer. They can get together and talk lawyer shit, late at night, and get pictures for show-and-tell.” He shrugged, turning away. The surfer lingered until last, glaring, then followed the others. The food court was full of people but as quiet as a tomb.

“I thought you got to him,” Vasquez said.

“We can call him later and see,” Guthrie said. “Away from the audience, he might turn helpful.”

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“I spent a long part of this morning thinking that if a man wanted me to call him, then he should answer his phone,” Olsen said crisply. The speaker of Guthrie's cell phone was loud enough to fill the old Ford when the windows were cranked shut to use the air conditioner. Vasquez turned from Broadway to Ninth Avenue, going south. Early afternoon traffic shuttled smoothly.

“I apologize, Mr. Olsen,” Guthrie said. “When I had you call before, I should've given you my cell instead of my office. You had trouble finding that?”

“A bit,” the big man said. “I would be somewhat more comfortable if you would call me Greg. When I hear Mr. Olsen, or Captain Olsen, or Captain, the words are always coming from my men, and they're expecting me to take care of them. In this situation, I would rather find that shoe on the other foot.”

The little detective nodded, then said, “I'll do that.”

“Mr. Rondell provided your number, and that seemed to take some effort on his part,” Olsen said. Faint metallic drumming rattled in the background, like a rushing, tumbling heartbeat. “I had a vague idea from Mr. Rondell that he believes you know some things he doesn't—and maybe I had that vague idea from his saying you might know some things he doesn't, in a tone that didn't suggest the idea that the two of you were all that cooperative with each other. Is something going on out there?”

“I suppose I am holding Mr. Rondell at arm's length.”

“Then I have to say you have long arms for a little guy.”

Guthrie laughed. “We do have a question for you,” he said. “If you call every day, things will be a bit easier.” He gestured to Vasquez.

“What?” she asked, before remembering. “Okay, when Bowman went out at night, how much money did she usually carry?”

Traffic was jammed up at Forty-first Street, where a delivery truck had tiptoed along the sides of some passing cars. Gawkers lined the sidewalks and horns blared into the mess of NYPD getting information from drivers and trying to decide what to do with the truck. The uniformed driver was sitting in a cruiser, leaning out against the open back door, adding more to a puddle of vomit on the street. The old blue Ford crawled by and they had a lingering look before Olsen replied.

“About three hundred dollars,” he said. “She never spent the money—she used cards. I never understood that.”

Vasquez frowned. Ghost Eddy had already spent more than that since the murder, in the bodega on 149th Street. Without Bowman's money, he spent ninety dollars of clean money every week. The drifter was a steady drinker.

“So that was important, then?” Olsen asked.

“I don't know yet,” Vasquez replied.

“Linney warned me that intel would be a hard requisition,” Olsen muttered. “So he wasn't lying, then, and the pair of you aren't talking to anyone. I'll try this the other way. Drive over to Westchester and check on Linney for me. On the phone, he says he's not drinking, but, naturally, I can't smell his breath. He was in a bad way before I was arrested. His mother was killed. Not much worse can happen to a man, for then he started drinking and he called me to bail him from jail. Is it strange that now I'm in jail?”

“I think I can manage that,” Guthrie said.

“
That's
a different answer. Then you could take my calls for me, along with that. I've had a few bad months of late nights, but it hasn't been so terrible that a grave digger would notice. My men call, mostly late at night, when they're a klick past drunk and wondering where their hat was laid by. Linney did that. I spent years trying to leave the service, but even now the calls bring me back.”

Vasquez turned onto Thirty-fourth Street and slid in behind a convoy of empty clothes racks. Switch-thin teenagers pushed one rack and pulled another behind, stepping along like ants escaping with jelly. Traffic going the other way idled, gunning forward a few feet at a time, and honked during the pauses.

“At first they ask questions. What happened to so-and-so? Or ‘Did you really get smashed?' After they talk a bit, something comes out—a new job, a marriage. Somewhere along the way, all of the news turned bad. Cars crash, girls tumble down the stairs, junkies toke their last smoke, dying is written in fire across the sky. I haven't heard about a baby in months. Can you do that for me, then? Can you answer my phone for me and screen my bad calls?”

“I think you're in a morbid mood,” Guthrie said. Vasquez whipped into a space fifty feet from the entrance of their building. “I won't say you don't have reason, but you have to look up. You know whether you're innocent, or guilty. I won't rest until I prove it to myself. Does that make sense to you?”

“That makes sense, but you know you're a voice on a phone, with hardly a face attached to it. I guess that's all you can give me, though.” Olsen paused. “I smell a push-along, so I'll leave you. Do me that favor to check on Linney, like you said.”

After Guthrie cut off the phone, Vasquez said, “You could've given him something. We have some angles.”

The little detective grunted, climbed out of the car, and slammed the door. He walked fast. He was on the steps of the building before she caught up with him. The bright sunshine made her red jacket glow like fire.

*   *   *

That night, they watched the manhole on 151st Street again. They slipped into the lot at twilight and hid in the shadow of the redbrick building. Vasquez picked up her impatience right where she'd left it the previous night, as if there had been no break. The moon peered down from the cloudless sky, dark behind the streetlights. The waiting wore her down quickly, turning her inside herself.

At the beginning of May, her job with Guthrie was exactly what she needed. Carrying a pistol made her important, deadly serious, an immediate adult instead of a teenager with a summer job waiting tables. She needed that, because she was defying her father. No bullshit job could've given her enough strength for that, but the size of her paychecks, and the solid weight of
la pistola
, made her shoulders strong enough to shrug it off. Walking past Papì's frown was no joke. His disapproval was like gravity; he could nail her to the floor.

Even her loco brothers didn't make little of her choice. They knew it was tough to deal with their father. Miguel was glad she wasn't going to school. Indio wasn't sure, but he was with her because she was against Papì for a change. In three months, she had learned some of what they had faced for years. That wasn't easy. She wanted her life back to normal. She didn't want to need to steel herself for an argument every time she walked through the door at home.

Actually, she decided Indio and Miguel had it easier, despite their complaints about Papì. The old man rode them like horses on a merry-go-round; no matter how much they seemed to run, they never ended up very far from him. He shouted at them, but it was still easy to see that he was proud of them. He acknowledged their strength even when he punished them; he backed off after he pushed. He told them, “Think! Don't be stupid!” and clapped them roughly on the shoulder when they were pulling something from the refrigerator he'd put there for them, like the bottled water for Indio. “Who pays for water?” Papì yelled, but he kept buying it because Indio wanted it. Even when they were in trouble outside the house, a place still waited at the table for them, with yells if they missed a meal. “Don't be out all night! Don't worry your mother!” For her brothers, no matter how fiercely her Papì's anger burned, it was always cooled with acceptance.

Since the end of school, she'd been cut off from Papì. When she was lucky, there was grim silence instead of stormy outbursts. He made no secret of his displeasure. His daughter should go to school, and do even better than Roberto. She couldn't; the thought of more school made her sick. Then magically, another option came along, like something from a Márquez novel, as matter-of-fact as the sun rising one morning in May. And just like in the novels, not everything was what it seemed. A thousand jobs, with a thousand paychecks and a thousand pistols, couldn't convince Papì that she was anything but his little daughter, running along the beach at Coney Island and chasing butterflies until she fell into the water. His brooding scowl, and clenched fist tucked onto his hip, showed he was only marking time until he erupted again.

None of that made waiting any easier for Vasquez. The manhole never moved. Shadows from the streetlights never changed. Ten
P.M.
, midnight, and 2:00
A.M.
all looked exactly the same, except that at midnight, two drunks spent a handful of minutes shouting at one another in the alley before shattering a bottle against the brick wall, and then at two, the golden tomcat prowled. Guthrie named him “Piss,” which seemed like an insult to go with the injury of waiting. She couldn't sneak over to the corner for relief. By the time night began lifting, Vasquez had fed her anger everything that would burn, and nothing remained but a bitter pile of ashes and coals in her belly.

Two small, grimy men stopped on the sidewalk. Both wore dark clothes that showed stains as light splotches, and their ratty mustaches split their pale faces into halves. One lifted the hinged top of the manhole, and the other climbed gingerly down. The first glanced around, missed seeing the detectives, then disappeared downward. The lid clanged shut after a rusty belch. Guthrie laughed softly, and Vasquez glared at him.

“Weitz hated stakeouts, too,” Guthrie said. His back and legs crackled when he stood.

They flowed with the early traffic moving downtown. The morning was cool enough for cracked windows. Guthrie drove. He stopped at a diner in midtown for breakfast. His jokes couldn't lighten Vasquez's mood, because she was beginning to understand that a lot of Guthrie's work was like a stakeout, watching videos, or writing reports—slow and boring.

Peering over the top of scrambled eggs and bacon, she said, “We're not getting anything out of that manhole.”

Guthrie grunted and shook his head. “We got the cat's schedule now. We can bag him any night we want. You don't know somebody who wants a piss yellow tomcat?”