Dr. Knox (24 page)

They were fond of gray at Burnham Fiedler. Smoke, dove, steel, pearl, and charcoal colored the walls, floors, and furniture, along with most of the lawyers I'd met there, and I found it hard to spend time in their offices without feeling that my head was wrapped in fog. But there were no gray lawyers around at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, when Sutter stepped off the elevator with Elena—no one but me and a cleaning woman, who was wrestling with an asthmatic vacuum.

Elena took careful steps, and her dark eyes darted left and right as she came into the reception area. Sutter had conjured a dress and accessories for her from someplace, a simple blue shift that she wore with a gray belt, flat gray shoes, and a kerchief with pale flowers on it around her neck. A blue ribbon held her ponytail in place, and she looked like a Mormon girl setting out on her mission.

The cleaning woman cursed softly in Spanish, and Elena froze. Sutter put a hand on her arm.

“Right on time,” I said. “Any problems?”

Sutter shook his head. “Didn't see anything. Yossi was watching our backs, and he says we're cool. I just wish we weren't quite so close to those PRP dicks.”

I followed Sutter's gaze to the windowed wall and the neighboring office tower that looked close enough to touch. How long since I'd been over there with Amanda Danzig and Kyle Bray? A few days? A year?

“I think their windows face the other way,” I said. “Who's with Alex?”

“Evie, Franco, and three other guys.”

“Have I met Evie?”

“You'd remember if you had.”

“We're down here,” I said.

Anne Crane was at the end of a dark hallway, in a conference room that had a long glossy table, chairs that looked like parts of a spaceship, a legal stenographer in a short green skirt, and a man with tattoos and many black nylon gear bags. The man fixed a camera atop a tripod, and pointed it at the head of the table, at a pair of chairs and a pair of microphones there. He checked the viewfinder, then crossed the room to adjust another camera aimed at the same spot.

Anne was sitting, looking at the pages of a fax, and adding to a long list of notes on a yellow legal pad. She wore tailored navy pants and a pale-pink blouse that was untucked in the back. She looked up at me when I stepped in, and then beyond me, into the hallway.

“That's Elena?” she said quietly. I nodded. Anne lifted the fax pages. “And the notes you sent? This stuff is really…for real?”

“I'm pretty sure.”

“Christ,” Anne said, shaking her head. “Is the little boy with her?”

“He's with babysitters tonight.”

Anne peered into the hallway again, at Sutter this time. “Babysitters like him? He looks like a ninja.”

I nodded. “He's a friend of mine. He does security work, among other things.”

Anne's eyes narrowed. “Is security going to be a problem tonight? Because, besides the building guys, we don't have—”

“It's covered.”

“By your ninja pal, all by himself?”

“He's got a friend downstairs.”

“Interesting social network you've got. How's the little boy doing?”

“He's okay, I think. I hope. He seems to be a pretty tough little guy.”

“He'd better be. You might want to think about DNA testing for—”

“The samples are in the lab.”

Anne nodded. “Should we get started, then?”

Anne made brief introductions, and Elena said a quiet hello and took a seat in front of the microphones. Anne invited Sutter and me to leave.

“The fewer distractions, the better,” she said, and she closed the conference room door.

We went back to the reception area, and then Sutter disappeared down another corridor. He returned a few minutes later, laughing and speaking amiably in Spanish to one of the cleaning guys.

“Later,
hombre,
” he said to the cleaner, who pushed his cart down another hall. Sutter took a seat next to mine, stretched out his legs, and sighed. “We should be good up here. Only access besides the elevator are fire stairs on either end of the floor, and they don't open from the stairwell side.”

I nodded, and looked at our reflections in the big windows. I was pale in the glass, and rumpled, and Sutter looked like weather-beaten totem. In the years I'd known him, I'd seen him look this tired only a few times, and all of them after firefights. He pulled a black semiautomatic from behind his back, checked the magazine, and yawned. He put the gun in his lap and closed his eyes.

“Should I wake you if Siggy's guys come off the elevator?” I said.

“I'm not sleeping—just resting my retinas.”

“When's the last time you actually slept?”

“Not sure. How about you?”

“I think I did last night, but it didn't do much good.”

Sutter smiled. “You got the itch. I got it too.”

“What itch?”

“Between your shoulder blades—from being in somebody's crosshairs. It makes you a little crazy. Used to drive me nuts back in the sand pile. It was between the shoulder blades for me; other guys got it other places. I knew one dude got a purple rash the size of a quarter on his forehead, right between the eyes.”

“So what's the treatment, Dr. Sutter?”

Sutter slouched lower in his chair and smiled. “Me—I find whoever's on the other end of the scope and…” He made a gun with thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“That doesn't work for me.”

“Trust me, brother, it works—but it's the side effects you got to worry about. They build up over time.”

“I imagine.”

“That's why I try not to….” Sutter paused and sighed deeply. “But I tell you, Siggy doesn't make it easy.”

“You think that's what it's going to come to with him?”

“It will if he doesn't get his money. Which is why we're seeing him tomorrow night. With the cash.”

I nodded. “I'll go to the safe-deposit box in the morning.”

Sutter sighed and closed his eyes again. “It sucks, right—paying off a guy like that?”

“A little bit.”

“Think
bridge loan
—you and your girl in there are going to shake some cash from the Brays.”

“I wish I was that confident.”

Sutter opened one eye and looked at me, but said nothing.

Cleaners went to and fro through the darkened reception area, and finally decamped altogether, but still we waited. Lights winked out in the nearby buildings, and jets crossed the sky, and my reflection floated in the black window glass like a rumpled ghost. Sutter was silent and still. It seemed that days passed, but it was two and a half hours. Sutter stood suddenly and the gun disappeared, and a moment later Anne was there, with Elena two steps behind. Anne was bleary-eyed and white, and she caught my elbow and led me to a corner.

“This is the audio,” she said, handing me a flash drive. “I can give you video and a transcript tomorrow.”

“How'd she do?”

“She's…she's a good witness. She keeps things simple and lets the facts do the work. And her English got better as we went along. What you laid out in your notes was bad enough, but when she tells it it's much worse—maybe because she's so matter-of-fact about everything. That makes it more horrible. If I was in a courtroom and she was a witness for the other side, I'd be thinking hard about settlement.”

I nodded. “I hope that comes across.”

“It will. She couldn't care less about the cameras, or who else was in the room, and that makes for a good video.” Anne paused and glanced across the room, at Sutter and Elena, who were standing near the elevators. “Something else comes across too, though,” she said softly. “Something you want to be careful about.”

“What something?”

“She never lost her shit when she was making her statement—nothing even close—but, still, I got the feeling that Elena is a seriously angry girl.”

“How can she not be—given everything she's been through?”

“I'm talking
Carrie
kind of angry, if you know what I mean. Like rage. You want to take care around somebody like that.”

“Thanks, Anne.”

She nodded and disappeared down the hallway, and I joined Sutter and Elena at the elevators. “How're you feeling?” I asked her.

Her voice was empty and exhausted. “I want to go to Alex now.”

In a bathroom that was spartan at best—cracked tile, rust-stained porcelain, and failing grout—my showerhead was the single luxury. The owner of a plumbing supply around the corner had sent it over last year by way of thanks after I'd patched up his son, who'd driven a forklift off a loading dock, and who'd already had one DUI arrest that week. It was a brushed steel bell, and on the right setting it could scour the hide off a rhino at fifty paces. I had it dialed to something more gentle on Thursday evening—no more than a mild sandstorm—and I'd been under for twenty minutes, washing away a long day of people with lice in their hair, voices in their heads, a host of untreated chronic diseases, and a miscellany of maimings and acute infections. I'd been riding a wave of adrenaline and caffeine since early morning, and if I could muster enough energy to turn off the water, I wanted nothing more afterward than to crawl into my bed. But that, I knew, wasn't going to happen. Sutter would be by any minute.

Through a supreme act of will, I spun the handles and climbed out of the shower. I toweled off and pulled on a clean shirt and pair of jeans, and while I was buttoning these I once again looked over the package Anne Crane had sent.

It had arrived this afternoon, with a bound transcript of Elena's statement inside, along with a DVD of her making the statement, a sheet of paper with a URL and password to the online version of the video, a flash drive with excerpts, and a handwritten note from Anne in her neat, Catholic-school script.
Check out the highlight reel. Four stars—impossible not to take her seriously.

I'd watched a few minutes of excerpts between patients, and I watched a few minutes more as I slipped into loafers and buckled my belt. Elena looked young and vulnerable on the laptop monitor. Her skin was pale against the blue of her dress, and faint blue veins were visible in her neck. Her eyes were guileless and shy, and her voice was flat. Her speech was clear, even with her accent, and the accent was endearing, and somehow lent credibility to what she said. I agreed with Anne Crane's review, and hoped the Brays would too. My phone chirped with a text message from Sutter; he was in the alley. I took a bulky yellow legal-sized envelope from the table, and walked downstairs.

Sutter was waiting in another new car—a Lexus RX, in steel gray with smoked glass.

“Where do you get these cars?” I said as he drove down the alley.

“This came from the guy who bought my Simi Valley house. He didn't have all the cash, so he threw in the car. I'm gonna give it to my moms, I think—her Audi's getting raggedy, and she'll like the color.”

“Plus, there are no bullet holes in it. Yet.”

“Let's hope we don't pick up any where we're headed tonight.”

“And where's that?”

“Not far. Siggy just bought himself a lounge downtown—one of those speakeasy theme parks, with artisanal cocktails and ice made from unicorn piss and middle-aged dudes from the Westside playing Humphrey Bogart.”

“That doesn't narrow it much.”

Sutter laughed. “I guess not. It's called Lacquer.” He glanced at the envelope in my lap. “That the cash?” he asked.

I nodded. “A hundred thousand doesn't take up much space.”

Lacquer was on Sixth Street, near Main, and as Sutter drove past he tilted his head at a silver Bentley moored in a no-parking zone at the mouth of an alley. There was a big guy in a dark suit leaning on the driver's door, smoking.

“You like Siggy's ride? His wife's got a matching one in gold.”

“Classy.”

“Nothing but,” Sutter said. He parked on the street, a few doors away. He pulled a backpack from behind the driver's seat and held it open.

“Drop the cash in there,” he said. I did, and we climbed from the Lexus. Sutter locked the car with a remote and spun the key ring on his finger.

The entrance to Lacquer was down an alley, through a metal door beneath a caged lightbulb. Inside was a velvet-lined hallway with a hostess at the end—a sullen redhead in a green silk slip dress, who had a rascally cat tattooed a few inches north of her left nipple. Sutter grinned and coaxed a flickering smile in return. Before she could say good evening, or anything else, two large shapes stepped in front of her podium.

There was a blond guy with cauliflower ears, and a blonder guy with a neck like a fireplug. They knew Sutter, and moved cautiously around him.

“You here to drink, or what?” fireplug asked. His accent was more Oxnard than Moscow.

Sutter laughed. “Are you taking cocktail orders now, Stevie? That's a step up.”

Stevie ignored the remark. He pointed at the backpack. “What's in the bag?”

“It's for Siggy,” Sutter said.

Cauliflower shook his massive head. “We gotta check.”

Sutter lifted the pack from his shoulder and tossed it to Cauliflower. “Sure. But you open it, you guarantee the count to Siggy.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Cauliflower said.

“It means if all of Siggy's money isn't there it's on you.”

Fear and confusion chased each other across the man's thick features until Stevie spoke. “He's messing with you, dickhead. Just check the fucking bag.”

Cauliflower's puzzlement turned into anger, and he snorted. He opened the backpack and rooted inside, then threw it back to Sutter. “Cunt,” he muttered.

“I need to pat you down,” Stevie said. “Both of you.”

Sutter spun his key ring some more. “Knock yourself out,” he said, chuckling, and he winked at the redhead, who winked back.

After the frisk, Stevie led us through the club, which was as Sutter had described. The light was sepia-toned, the walls were bare brick, and the booths were dark leather and wood. The customers were silhouettes, leaning together or posing for each other, or for the lovely bartenders and waitresses, who came from the same casting agency that supplied the dour hostess. The cash register was a chrome beast crouched behind the bar, flanked by battalions of bottles and shining glassware. The music was Edith Piaf, but no one cared. We came to a padded leather door, guarded by Cauliflower's uglier brother. Stevie whispered something and he moved aside, and we stepped from speakeasy fantasy into disco nightmare.

It was a long room, with silver wallpaper and a mirrored ceiling. The carpet was white shag, the furniture Lucite, white leather, and tubular chrome. The music was Donna Summer, and the scent in the air was of cigars, powerful cologne, and sweat. Siggy's lieutenant, Josef, was sprawled on a white love seat near the door, leafing through a catalogue from an auction house, and two more of his soldiers were on an adjacent sofa, watching a soccer game on a flat-screen. Siggy himself was on the far side of the room, at a desk like a wide white mushroom, in pursuit of his own interests.

Fairly conventional interests, as it happened. There was a bottle of Belvedere vodka in a Lucite ice bucket on top of the desk, and some shot glasses, and next to them a half-dozen brightly colored vials of amyl nitrate that looked like prizes from a gumball machine. Next to these was a small berm of cocaine. Beneath the desk was a blond woman in a sports bra and yoga pants, bending her head to Siggy's lap. She was energetic and noisy, if not entirely sincere, but Siggy was responding as he might have to dental work—with a look of impatience and mild discomfort. Our arrival didn't change his expression, but his men looked up, grunted some Russian at each other, and laughed brutally.

Sutter chuckled. “Didn't know it was date night, Siggy.”

Siggy glanced up and murmured to the woman, who ceased her labors, wiped a forearm across a bruised-looking mouth, and rose. She said something in Russian to Siggy, scooped a few milligrams of coke onto a long fingernail and into her nose, straightened her bra, and left.

Siggy looked us over as he did up his fly. His gaze fixed on the backpack and he smiled. It was a nasty thing, with many large teeth. “It's too small for her, unless you made pieces—and I know that's not your thing. So I guess that's my money.”

Sutter nodded and held out the backpack. Siggy pointed to Josef. Sutter swung the pack in a neat arc, and it landed at the lieutenant's feet. Josef unzipped it, tore open the envelope, and dumped the money on the love seat—ten packs of ten thousand. He picked up each one in turn, ran a thumb across the top and made two stacks while Sutter twirled his keys. Josef nodded at Siggy.

The cash—or maybe the vodka, or coke, or the blow job—made Siggy more affable. “You start to listen to reason,” he said to Sutter. “That's good.” He picked up the bottle of Belvedere. “Come on, soldier, sit down and have a drink.”

Sutter and I traded looks. He shrugged, and I followed him to Siggy's desk. We sat on Lucite chairs, and Siggy filled shot glasses. He pushed two toward us and raised his own.

“So—what do we toast?” Siggy asked. “Old days? New opportunities? Endless demand for pussy?”

“Still the poet,” Sutter said. “How about we drink to done deals?”

Siggy tossed back his drink, and Sutter and I did the same. The vodka was a cold wire down my throat, and then a flame.

Siggy made a contented sigh and refilled our glasses. “Except this one's not quite done, is it, soldier?”

Sutter didn't freeze beside me; he played with his keys some more, then reached for his glass. But there was a change in the room, as if the atmospheric pressure had suddenly fallen and a storm was going to break. Siggy's men felt it, and looked over and shifted in their seats.

Sutter sipped his vodka and smiled. He cocked his head toward the sofa and the money. “That was the only thing on my to-do list, Siggy.”

“Then I guess you weren't paying close attention.”

“No?”

“Or else you forgot about me wanting the other whore”—he looked at Josef—“what's her name?”

“Shelly,” Josef called.

“Her. You forget I want her too? 'Cause I don't see her in that backpack.”

Sutter sighed deeply, and sat back in his chair. “Did
you
forget that I said she wasn't on my radar? I'm not looking for her; I have no business with her. I'm—”

“You got business with
me,
and I got business with
her
—the math isn't hard, and you're a bright guy.”

“My business with you is done.”

Siggy pushed the Belvedere bottle around in the ice bucket. “You keep saying that.”

“But somehow I'm not getting through.”

It was Siggy's turn to sigh. “You didn't want to work for me back then; all right, that's something I guess I understand. I was a risky proposition then: it was hard to say how things would break, or if I could make payroll week to week. But now it's not hard. Now everything breaks my way, soldier—everything. So you've got nothing to worry about. A solid payday, and zero risk for you—not to mention for your friend here.” Siggy looked at me as if I was a fish of dubious freshness.

Sutter shook his head. “He's not in this.” His voice was low, and I felt my heart rate spike.

“But here he is anyway,” Siggy said, and turned to me again. “You have an opinion on this, doc—anything you want to add? Some particular way you'd like things to work out, maybe?”

I swallowed some vodka, and the flame in my stomach burned hotter. “Peacefully?” I ventured. “That's better for business, isn't it?”

Siggy pointed at me and bared his big teeth. He made a barking noise that I eventually realized was laughter. “
Peacefully
—that's not bad. Yeah, peace is good for business. Unless you're in the business of war. Right, soldier?”

“But that's not your line of work, Siggy—not anymore. It's not mine either.”

“No?”

“From what I see, you won all the wars. And now you're enjoying the spoils.”

“That's the way it looks to you? Then you don't look hard enough. There's always shit that needs doing. That's how you keep the peace.”

“But it's low-level stuff, right? And you've got Josef and all the Mouseketeers for that. They're more than enough.”

Siggy filled his own glass and offered the bottle to Sutter, who declined. “I decide what's enough,” Siggy said, and then he sipped some vodka.

Sutter sighed. “You're still carrying a torch? Is that what this is about?”

Siggy barked again. “Yeah, soldier, I got a broken heart right here,” he said, and grabbed his crotch.

Sutter laughed too, then leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk. He spoke softly, nearly in a whisper. “Seriously, I'm not worth the heartache.”

Siggy leaned in. “No?” he whispered back.

“Not at all.”

“Because…?”

“You said it yourself—I'm a pain in the ass. My boss from when I was private sector would tell you, so would my old CO, if he was still walking the earth. And, really, nobody needs another pain in the ass.”

“So maybe I just take you off the board.”

Sutter's voice got lower. “We keep coming back to that, and I gotta tell you, Sig, the cost to do it might be steep. Might make it not worthwhile.”

Siggy leaned in closer. “Yeah? See those guys there? I snap my fingers, they'll empty their clips in you and your pal, right here, right now. Wouldn't cost me a thing.”

Sutter looked over at Josef and the soldiers, still lounging on the sofas, absorbed in the soccer game, laughing, pointing, and cursing. He looked back at Siggy and held up his Lexus remote key. “See this button over here—this red one?”

Siggy laughed. “What're you going to do—flash your lights at me?”

Sutter smiled and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Sort of, but instead of the car alarm it sets off a frag charge I tucked in the shoulder straps of that backpack on the sofa. It's small enough that we'll be fine over here—nothing worse than blown eardrums—but those guys will be seriously fucked, and of course your cash will be confetti.”