Down Here (31 page)

“I still don’t see what’s so horrible. I mean, what he
did,
of course. But he still went to prison for life.”

“What if he wasn’t the Strangler?”

“What? Then why would he—?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But a lot of people, today, think he was lying about those crimes. Especially relatives of the victims. There’s a whole new investigation going on now.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, her tone just below angry.

“He was going down for the count anyway. And he wasn’t going to do an extra day for the Strangler’s crimes. Maybe he got some money . . . from a book deal or whatever. Maybe he just wanted to be famous—the cops get confessions like that all the time.”

“Did the crimes stop after he was arrested?” she asked. I caught the faintest whiff of triumph in her voice—the cold-blooded researcher, confronting the “believer” with the hard facts.

“They did,” I said. “But if he got the information—about the crimes—from someone else,
that
person could have been locked up, too. With DeSalvo. Maybe in the nuthouse.”

“What does
he
say?”

“DeSalvo?”

“Yes. Well, what does
he
say about it, now that all that time has passed?”

“He’s not saying anything,” I told her. “A few years after he went to prison, he was stabbed to death.”

“Oh my God. Who did it?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Or, at least, nobody was ever charged with it.”

L
aura bent over to light a pair of candles on an end table. “Can you see me?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Perfectly. But I’d rather have a closer look.”

“You will. But, first, could you close your eyes? Just for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, dropping my eyelids, but leaving a slit open at the bottom. I learned how to do that when I was a kid—the trick is to keep your eyelids from fluttering.

Laura dropped to her knees, pulled out the lowest drawer in a dark wood bureau. She rooted around for a few seconds. When she stood up, she held something clasped in her hands.

She came over to the bed, climbed on next to me, and knelt, keeping her back very straight.

“What do you do when you’re afraid of something?” she said, very softly.

“What do people do, or what do
I
do, personally?”

“You.”

“It depends on what it is that I’m afraid of.”

“Tell me.”

“If it’s something I can avoid, I do that. If it’s something I can’t, I try to overcome it.”

“How?”

“How? I don’t know. It depends on what it is.”

“Give me an example?”

Oh, I could do that,
I thought.
I could give you enough “examples” to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.

But I’m a Child of the Secret. We don’t talk to outsiders. Except when we lie. Because They taught us well. We know we’re never safe.

And just because you’re one of Us doesn’t mean you can’t also be one of Them.

“Public speaking,” I said. “I was scared to death to get up in front of—”

“That’s not fear,” she cut me off, sharply. “That’s a . . . phobia. Didn’t you ever—?”

“A bully,” I said. “How’s that?”

“That’s very good,” she said. Kneeling, with her hands clasped.

“When I was a kid,” I said, feeling the dot of truth inside my story expand the margins of the lie, “I was scared all the time. Of this one guy. He took stuff from me. Just because he was bigger. Just because he
could
do it. And he hurt me, too.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell my parents about,” I said. More truth, wrapped in a mourner’s cloak.

“What did you do?”

“I tried to stay away from this other guy,” I said. “But he made it impossible.”
Yeah,
I thought,
“impossible,” when you’re a little kid, and the other guy is the teenage son of the degenerate freaks who have custody of your orphaned body.

“What happened, finally?”

“I hit him with a baseball bat,” I lied.

“Oh! Did you hurt him badly?”

“Bad enough so he never bothered me again,” I said. The baseball bat was true enough. I didn’t tell Laura how I had followed it with a can of gasoline, and a match. By the time I was done, every human living in that house of demons was, too.

“Good! I
hate
bullies, don’t you?”

“Ever since I was old enough to know what they are,” I said, switching to pure, undiluted truth.

“See what I’ve got?”

I opened my eyes. She was holding up a pair of handcuffs.

“Being . . . restrained has always terrified me. I . . . I keep these as kind of a test. Usually, I’m afraid to even look at them.”

“You were handcuffed once?”

“Oh, no,” she said, way too much certainty in her voice. “Nothing like that. I’ve always been this way. When I was a little girl, and they played cowboys and Indians, I would never let anyone tie me up.”

“Some things, it’s good to be afraid of. Just common sense.”

“Maybe that’s why I went into my line of work. There’s a
lot
of risk—one day, you’re getting a huge bonus; the next, you’re out of a job—but there aren’t any . . . restraints.”

“Maybe you just like the risks. I’ve known people like that.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Do you know how these work?”

^“
S
ee how much faith I have in you?” she purred. “With my hands behind my back like this, you could do . . . anything.”

“If you trust me, you know I won’t.”

“I know you would never do anything to hurt me,” she said. I wondered if she realized how much she sounded like one of the no-research investors she had been sneering at.

“I wouldn’t, Laura,” I said, guiding her shoulders down.

^“
I
could still ask him,” she said. It was much later; the candles were burned out.

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, J.”

“I guess I’m . . . not, actually. I thought
he
was the one who would have been enthusiastic. Most people
want
to tell their stories, especially if they believe it’s going to make them look good.”

“But you haven’t lost interest completely?”

“No, of course not. But I can’t put the whole project on hold waiting for—”

“Oh, I understand,” she said, squirming in close to me.

^“
I
t’s not that big a risk,” Wolfe said. “If Toby’s . . . prediction doesn’t come true, it’s not like the DA has a
better
case against me. Besides, I trust him.”

“Toby?”

“Yes. Who else?”

“Not me, I understand.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“It means you think my arteries are hardening—the ones to my brain. Your pal, Molly? No way
he
made copies of all the files he had in his storage unit. And no way you
didn’t.
You never trusted anyone in administration when you worked there. Probably got copies of every single piece of paper that ever went through your hands, somewhere.”

“It’s Molly who doesn’t trust you,” she said, not denying anything. “He said he was willing to take the chance of you shopping him, but he wasn’t going to give you the chance to do it to me.”

“Very protective of you, is he?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “None of my business.”

“This whole thing is none of your business now,” Wolfe said, quietly. “It’s done. Maybe not wrapped up with a red ribbon and tied with a bow, but it’s done. I appreciate what you did, but . . . but I want you to stop now. Just stop.”

I got to my feet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I was helping.”

“Come on, Burke. Be yourself.”

“You got it,” I promised.

T
he next day, I kept my promise. I sat down with my family, and we made our plans.

If you think a “perfect crime” is some kind of rare event, you probably think all sociopaths are handsome, intelligent, and charming, too. Truth is, thousands of perfect crimes take place every day. Nobody ever gets arrested for them, much less convicted.

And if you think it takes a criminal genius to commit the perfect crime in America, you don’t know anything about incest.

“There’s other players, remember,” I warned my family. “Whoever shot him has to know by now that they didn’t get the job done.”

“He’s a piece of dry wood, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “Lying on the ground, waiting for the forest fire to catch up to him. Why don’t we let the flame take the blame?”

“Nobody needs him dead now,” I said. “Nobody on our side, anyway. Wolfe doesn’t think she’ll even go to trial. Neither does Davidson. If whoever wanted him finds him before we do, there’s no loss, sure. But we can’t
make
that happen. Even if we could stake him out, how would we get the shooter to show up? Besides, it’s not about him anymore. It’s about the money.”

“You think there’s cash in his stash?”

“I don’t know, Prof. But there’s cash
somewhere.
Heavy cash. This whole thing reeks of it.”

“You mean, because he had protection when he was Inside?” Michelle said. “His little sister’s got money . . . and she was the one coming to see him the time he got shot.”

“The sister has some money,” I conceded. “And it doesn’t take a fortune to buy protection Inside. But Silver said the order came from the top, and there’s no way she’d even know how to make a contact like that.”

“He has not called,” the Mole said.

“What? You mean you—?”

“The card opened the garage,” he said, shrugging. “The basement has all the lines. We already had her numbers. It’s a simple relay unit—we record the calls at our end.”

“I didn’t know you were even going to . . .”

“I was in a Con Ed van,” the Mole said. “In and out in under fifteen minutes.”

“You leave any paint behind?” the Prof asked.

The Mole ignored him.

“He could use a lot of other ways to get in touch,” I said. “Or maybe he hasn’t reached out for her at all. I’ve spent a lot of time with her. Consecutive hours. She didn’t get
any
calls. So either her phones were turned off—and that doesn’t seem likely—or he’s not coming through that way.”

“Maybe he only has her work number, or her e-mail address,” Michelle said. “If I was his sister, Satan forbid, I wouldn’t want him to know where
I
lived.”

“Could be. I don’t know. And she never said.”

“So how would we be able to have a strategy, mahn?” Clarence asked. “Either he calls her at home—and he has not done that—or she convinces him to give you that ‘interview.’”

“We’re holding garbage,” I agreed. “But we already anted heavy, so it’s worth staying to see the last card.”

T
he tenants in the Lower East Side building were so old, I got called “boychick” more than once. Four of them stopped their canasta game long enough to tell me that the two girls who had lived in the second-floor apartment had been very nice, but kind of standoffish.

“You would think, coming from such a big family, that Hannah would have been a little more friendly,” an elderly lady with heavily rouged cheeks and an elaborate hairdo told me.

“She had a big family?”

“Well, either her or Jane—that was the roommate—
must
have. I never saw so many boys. Brothers or cousins. I could tell by the way they were acting, all together.”

“And they came after the . . . after it happened, too?”

“Oh yes,” another lady said. “But not right away, a few days later. Maybe they were from out of town.”

“Who can tell anymore?” a third lady said.

“Did Hannah and Jane leave with them?” I asked.

“Who pays attention, a time like that?” the rouged-cheeked lady said.

“And who should be surprised, her moving out, after such a thing?” a different lady said.

“You saw Hannah move out?” I asked.

“Hannah? Hannah never moved out, young man. She was
murdered.
Didn’t you know that? It was in the papers. Horrible! That’s when
Jane
moved out.”

“Like the Devil was chasing her,” the rouged-cheeked lady said. “In the middle of the night. Manny, the super, he said she hardly took any of her clothes, she was in such a hurry. Who could blame her? To have such a thing happen to your own roommate. It would be . . . I don’t have the words for it.”

A
s I exited the apartment building, I had to step back to avoid a pair of skinheads strutting down the sidewalk. As they passed, I saw they had bar-code tattoos on the back of their necks. Couldn’t tell if they were identical.

I drove over to the building in Williamsburg where Hannah had been found hanging. The rehab was long since completed, and I calculated my chances of getting inside about as good as a counterman at Taco Bell buying a condo off his tip money.

Walking away, I felt a tremor in my wake. Just a slight pattern-shift in my visuals, maybe. Afterimages that didn’t match up with my expectations.

That was enough to send me Queens-bound on the subway instead of driving back to Manhattan. I changed trains three times, careful not to box myself, working my way back to Canal Street. When I got to the network of back alleys that leads to Mama’s, I found a place to wait.

And that’s what I did, for over an hour.

Nothing.

S
piders have it easy. When they need a web, they make their own threads. I had to work with the ones they gave me.

Something about those bar-code tattoos . . .

I knew a stripper who had a tiny bar code tattooed on one cheek of her bottom. “It’s a trick,” she said, smiling at the double meaning. “Supposed to mean my ass is merchandise, see? But if anyone gets close enough to
read
it, they’re mine.”

I opened one of my notebooks, found what I had drawn from my memory after I’d left Silver.

V71.01