Dead Money (44 page)

We could hear the sirens coming.

She struggled to contain the tears. She took a deep breath. She looked at me apologetically.

What was the argument about? I asked.

About Veronica, she said. I told Jules we had to let her go. It was so stupid. The whole thing was so stupid. But he wouldn’t do it. I told him we could go to Mexico. Wherever. Just get away. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted to …

Wanted to? asked Dorita.

Get revenge.

Against whom?

His father. Mr. FitzGibbon. God, he hated his dad so much. It was like, it was like a sickness. Like he was crazy with it.

And how was he going to get revenge? By killing Veronica?

Sort of, she said.

A crowd of blue shirts appeared in the doorway. They were led by a tall detective with a hawk nose and tiny black eyes. I thought I recognized him. From some hooker bust a few years ago. I’d been hired to help out some john with connections to a senator.

Butch leapt up to intercept the horde. Lisa looked up. No reaction registered on her face. She was beyond reaction.

Butch conferred with Detective Nose in a hushed and urgent voice. The Nose kept glancing up at Dorita and me. I saw him note our shoeless feet, raise an eyebrow.

It was clear what was going on. Butch was trying to explain that we were getting a full confession. Learning everything. And any little upset of the balance might tip Lisa over. Into silence.

Dorita was whispering into Lisa’s ear. She was crying again.

Butch won the argument. A couple of uniforms with evidence kits quietly went upstairs. The rest backed off. Including the Nose, though not without a baleful glance in my direction. Butch closed the door and sat back down across from me.

Dorita was still talking quietly to Lisa. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Butch put ten fingers up, then five. Fifteen minutes. Detective Nose was giving us fifteen minutes.

Dorita, I said, as softly as I could manage.

She looked up impatiently.

Fifteen, I whispered.

She nodded.

How was he going to get revenge? Dorita asked, getting Lisa back on track.

I don’t know the whole thing, said Lisa. But they were going to get control of everything, somehow.

Get control? asked Dorita.

They? I asked.

Of Mr. FitzGibbon’s money. He was doing it with Raul and Ramon.

Dorita looked at me. I looked at her. The phone calls.

I don’t know how, exactly, Lisa went on. He was using Veronica to get to his father. And Raul and Ramon were, like, there. With his father, all the time. They told Mr. FitzGibbon that his wife was kidnapped. That he had to play along, pay the ransom, or she’d be dead. That they might come after him, too. The kidnappers. So Ramon had to be with him every second of the day. Ramon never left his side. Unless Raul was there to take over for a while. But Ramon was the security guy, supposedly. So it was almost always him.

I looked at Butch. He got up quietly. He went out the door.

Dorita looked at Lisa, still with the kindly air. Let’s go back a little bit, she said. How did Veronica die?

She …she suffocated, said Lisa.

Suffocated?

From the … the duct tape.

Okay, said Dorita, taking Lisa’s hand again. It’s okay. We know you didn’t mean that to happen.

I didn’t, sobbed Lisa. Oh God, I surely didn’t.

Surely
. It dawned on me that Lisa, for all her punked-out trappings, hadn’t always been a street kid. She’d come from somewhere. She had a family. A dad. A mom. Whoever they were. What they’d been through.

They hadn’t seen anything yet.

So when I came over the second time? I began to ask.

When I sat on you? she anticipated, with a tearful sneaky smile.

Right.

I wanted to distract you. To keep you from looking around. Seeing something. Before Jules got there.

Damn. I wasn’t irresistible after all.

Besides, she said, you were kind of cute.

That was better.

That sneaky smile gave me something to think about. This little girl was far from helpless.

Seeing what? I asked.

I don’t know, she said. I was afraid, that’s all.

I looked at my watch. We were running out of time. Butch came back in. He gave me a Look. I knew what it meant. We weren’t getting an extension.

What about Larry Silver? I asked.

Oh, him, she said with a sneer. That fucker got what he deserved.

How’s that? I asked.

Jules needed somebody to do the actual snatch, she told us. He couldn’t do it himself, of course, because Veronica knew him. Jules knew Larry from the streets. He knew Larry was a mean and angry guy. Somebody who could be violent. And he was stupid. Jules thought he could control him. So he got Larry to do the job. When Veronica got back to New York, Larry grabbed her, brought her to the loft. Blindfolded, so she wouldn’t see Jules. He paid off Larry. Two thousand bucks.

And that was the beginning of the end.

Because Larry wasn’t going to settle for a lousy two thousand bucks. On the day of his murder, as we knew by then, Larry hadn’t come to the loft to talk about a poker debt. He’d come to shake down Jules. They’d gotten into a fight all right. That much was true. But after they were lying there exhausted, Jules had to find a way to make sure Larry didn’t leave angry. He couldn’t risk that. So Jules started to negotiate, at some point managing to put a call in to Raul, who sent over Mr. Security with a baseball bat. Jules gave Larry some cash. Promised more. Larry wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Left the loft happy with his victory. Put one over on that little prick Jules, he was no doubt thinking. Until Ramon grabbed him by the neck, dragged him to the Dumpster.

The baseball bat did the rest.

But Ramon unfortunately left Larry’s body where it could easily be found. And when the police figured Jules as a suspect for Larry’s murder right away, the whole thing started to unravel. It was a fucking disaster.

They’d barely had time to get Veronica out of the place before the cops showed up. Took her to the empty loft upstairs.

And then Veronica’s death. From then on it was damage control.

Funny, I thought. This didn’t jibe with Jules’s sudden calm and arrogance, the fourth time I’d gone to the loft.

So, I hazarded, why did Jules …do what he did? Upstairs. Just now.

I couldn’t think of a nice way to put it.

The tears welled up in Lisa’s eyes again. He’d always been obsessed with the samurai thing, she told us. He’d played with the idea many times. And the night before, it seemed that he had some kind of breakdown. Or maybe it was a revelation. He finally figured out that everything was coming apart. Raul was going to let Jules take the hit for Larry Silver’s murder. Or pin FitzGibbon’s death on him. Get rid of him some other way. Whatever. Maybe just have him hit by a truck. Jules had become irrational, afraid. He’d lost his inner Superman. He’d heard the buzzer ring when we’d arrived. He’d looked out over the balcony, seen who it was. When he saw us, he figured the end was coming. He took the honorable way out. As he saw it, anyway.

Jesus. I was batting four hundred. Five times I’d been to the loft. Twice people died. I was the Grim fucking Reaper.

As my watch ticked off the final seconds, Dorita asked Lisa why she didn’t get out of it at some point. Call the cops. Or at least get the hell out of there.

She couldn’t get away from it, Lisa explained. Not only was she so involved that she couldn’t get out, she was actually enjoying it. She’d gotten caught up in the whole James Bond thrill of it. Nothing in her life had ever been so vital, so close to the bone. She felt alive. Free, in a complicated kind of way.

Alive by death, I thought. Nice.

Which was the cue for the door to slam open, the Nose to stride back in. He didn’t have a compromising air. Enough with the goddamn lawyers. This was going to be his investigation. Butch rose to meet him. Detective Nose brushed him aside.

Lisa Mueller? he said.

She looked up at him with a defiant air.

You’re under arrest for the murder of Veronica FitzGibbon.

Sure, she said, her hard edge back again. No sweat.

We’d lost her.

On the way out Butch asked one of the CID guys whether they’d found Veronica.

In the other building, the guy said.

What other building?

The one next to the alley.

THE SCENE WAS GUARDED
by yellow tape and blue uniforms. A skinny cop with a bad facial condition pointed me and Butch to a dark staircase at the end of a narrow hallway.

Down there, he said. But be careful. They’re dusting for prints.

Okay, we said.

The staircase was dimly lit by small orange bulbs. We went down slowly. At the bottom they’d set up high-powered floodlights. Every dust ball and dead cockroach was starkly lit, outlined by a harsh shadow.

Careful, shouted one of the CID guys.

I looked down. I’d almost stepped on an evidence kit.

Sorry, I said.

Butch grabbed my elbow.

Just follow me, he said.

Butch conferred a moment with the guy who looked to be in charge. Nodded his head a few times. Beckoned to me. Led me to the farthest reaches of the basement space. Past lines of storage spaces. Each was about four feet wide. Made of ancient spruce laths floor to ceiling, lashed together with chicken wire. The cubicles were endlessly deep in broken tricycles, rusting roller skates, old high chairs. The doors were held shut by a potpourri of dime-store locks. They looked just about secure enough to keep out a paraplegic rabbit.

Perpendicular to the end of the row was a high tin-covered door. I recognized it right away. The inside image of the door in the alley.

I felt sick. I’d never gotten around to checking where it led. Had I only followed through with my intuition, then …what? I might have found a corpse? Well, maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad. Maybe if I had, FitzGibbon would have been spared the ignominy of throwing himself out of a thirty-third-story window – or being pushed – the thought
reminded me that we didn’t have all the answers yet.

Would that have been a contribution to the collective welfare?

I thought not.

So maybe it was okay that I was such a solipsistic fool.

Or maybe not. Time would tell.

In the meantime, Butch led me forward. Took a left at the metal door. We ducked down. Peered into the crawl space. The one in which, until a moment earlier, the rotting remains of the good Veronica FitzGibbon had reposed.

It was dark.

It was ordinary.

In the way that extraordinary places often are.

AFTER OUR TOUR
of the grotto we picked up Dorita. She had stayed behind. Not having a strong desire to look at dead bodies.

We retired to the closest eatery. I had a double Glenmorangie, straight up.

There are still things we don’t know, said Dorita.

I can’t argue with that, I said.

Me neither, said Butch.

There’s stuff that Lisa didn’t know, I said.

Couldn’t know, said Dorita.

Stuff that only Ramon or Raul can tell us.

You want to talk to them, good luck, said Butch.

I knew what he meant. I knew what Butch’s little trip outside the loft had been for. They’d probably picked up the twins before we’d even finished talking to Lisa.

If you’re with us, I said, you’ll try to get me in.

You’re going to have to go through the ADA, he said.

Russell Graham? No sweat. I’m tight with him.

Sure, Butch laughed. I knew that.

Hey, I said. Let’s give it a shot. We’ve got some leverage, you know. I’ve got something to trade.

Yeah?

Information. If nothing else.

True, Butch said. It’s worth a shot. Come down with me. I’ll try to get him to talk to you.

We grabbed a cab.

It smelled of success.

Butch called the ADA from his cell phone. Gave him the goods. It took some doing, but he got the up-and-coming Russell Graham to agree to see me. He’d give me ten minutes to talk him into it.

At the station house Butch led me into the back. He told Dorita to wait outside. She didn’t like it. But there were only so many civilians we could throw at the ADA all at once.

He was waiting in a small room. It smelled of mold.

I didn’t have a dog in the fight, I told him. I didn’t have a client anymore. I just wanted to get to the bottom of the whole thing. Finish the job we started. See justice done. Which put me on their side now. And I could do it faster than they could. I knew these guys. I knew what buttons to push. And anyway, I had a lot of information. Some maybe they had already. But I was willing to wager they didn’t have it all.

The ADA wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about it. But he knew that I knew stuff he wasn’t going to get anywhere else. So he cut me a deal. They were still working on Raul. He wasn’t talking. They hadn’t gotten to Ramon yet. They’d give me twenty minutes with him. But the cameras would be on. I needed to know that. No funny shit. They were letting me in solely for their purposes. To see what I might get. After the twenty minutes were up, I had to be debriefed by the ADA. Give up every squib of information I had. Not just whatever I got from Ramon. Everything.

It felt like a deal with the devil.

I took it.

Ramon was sitting in a stark and empty room. Four metal chairs. A flimsy table. Him. Me.

I sat down right next to him.

Hey, Ramon, I said. I hear you’re in deep shit.

He gave me the patented Ramon blank look.

I leaned in.

Listen, I said. We got a good situation here. You know what it is?

The brick wall stayed brick.

We got a dead guy, Ramon, I confided. You hear me?

He looked at me with a flicker of interest.

I feigned shock and dismay. I leaned back. My mouth fell open.

You mean they didn’t tell you?

He gave me a wary look.

Shit, man. You really
don’t
know. Those pricks. Jules. Jules killed himself. Stuck a knife into his gut. Hara-kiri. You know, that Japanese shit? You know that shit?