Gone, Baby, Gone (18 page)

That whisper—rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else—is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot, the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.

It is my father’s temper.

So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.

The crucial difference between my father and me—I hope—has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.

At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.

So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere—except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.

Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.

“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”

“Then quit your job,” I said.

“We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”

I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.

“What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.

Broussard looked away.

“Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.

“Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.

“You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”

“Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,” I said, “but it ain’t house money either. It’s bribe and property-tax petty cash. For one year. What if he wants to make a moral point?”

Broussard shook his head. “Cheese Olamon has no morals.”

“Yes, he does.” I kicked the bumper with my heel, as surprised as anyone, I think, by the vehemence in my voice. More quietly, I repeated, “Yes, he does. And the number one moral law in his universe is: Don’t fuck with Cheese.”

Poole nodded. “And Helene did.”

“Goddamn right.”

“And if Cheese is pissed off enough, you think he’ll kill the girl and say ‘fuck it’ to the money just to send that message.”

I nodded. “And sleep right through the night.”

Poole’s face took on a gray cast as he stepped into the shadow between Broussard and me. He suddenly looked very old, no longer vaguely threatening so much as vaguely threatened, and the sense of elfin mischief had left him.

“What if,” he said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “Cheese wishes to make both his moral point
and
a profit?”

“Run a bait-and-switch?” Broussard said.

Poole dug his hands into his pockets, steeled his back and shoulders against the sudden late-afternoon bite in the breeze.

“We may have tipped our hand in there, Rem.”

“How so?”

“Cheese now knows we’re so desperate to get the child back that we’re willing to break the rules, leave the badge at home, and step into a money-for-child scenario with no official authority.”

“And if Cheese wants to walk away a winner…”

“Then no one else walks away at all,” Poole said.

“We’ve got to get to Chris Mullen,” I said. “See who he leads us to. Before the trade goes down.”

Poole and Broussard nodded.

“Mr. Kenzie.” Broussard offered his hand. “I was out of line in there. I let that mug get the better of me, and I could have fucked us on this.”

I took the hand. “We’ll bring her home.”

He tightened his grip on my hand. “Alive.”

“Alive,” I said.

“You think Broussard’s cracking under the strain?” Angie said.

We sat parked at the edge of the financial district on Devonshire Street, covering the rear of Devonshire Place, Chris Mullen’s condo tower. The CAC detectives who’d tailed Mullen back here had gone home for the night. Several other two-man teams covered all the other key players in Cheese’s crew, while we watched Mullen. Broussard and Poole covered the front of the building from the Washington Street side. It was just past midnight. Mullen had been inside for three hours.

I shrugged. “Did you see Broussard’s face when Poole talked about finding Jeannie Minnelli’s body in the barrel of cement?”

Angie shook her head.

“It was worse than Poole’s. He looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown just hearing about it. Hands started to shake, face got all white and shiny. The man looked bad.” I looked up at the three yellow squares on the fifteenth floor that we’d identified as Mullen’s windows as one of them went black. “Maybe he
is
losing it. He overreacted with Cheese, that’s for sure.”

Angie lit a cigarette and cracked her window. The street was still. Brooked by canyons of white limestone facades and shimmering blue-glass skyscrapers, it looked like a film set at night, a giant model of a world no real people occupied. In the daytime, Devonshire would be packed with the vaguely joyous, vaguely violent hustle of pedestrians and stockbrokers, lawyers and secretaries and bicycle messengers, trucks and cabs honking their horns, briefcases, power ties, and cell phones. But after nine or so it shut down, and sitting in a car packed between all that vast and empty architecture felt like we were just one more prop in a giant museum piece, after the lights have been dimmed and the security guards have left the room.

“’Member the night Glynn shot me?” Angie said.

“Yeah.”

“Just before it happened, I remember struggling with you and Evandro in the dark, all the candles in my bedroom flickering like eyes, and I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t
invest
any more of myself—not one more piece—in all this violence and…shit.” She turned on the seat. “Maybe that’s what Broussard feels. I mean, how many kids can you find in pools of cement?”

I thought about the pure nothing that had come into Broussard’s eyes after he’d slapped Cheese. A nothing so complete it had overwhelmed even his fury.

Angie was right: How many dead kids could you find?

“He’ll burn down the city if he thinks it’ll lead to Amanda,” I said.

Angie nodded. “Both of them will.”

“And she may already be dead.”

Angie flicked her cigarette ash over the top of her window. “Don’t say that.”

“Can’t help it. It’s a distinct possibility. You know it. So do I.”

The towering quiet of the empty street slipped into the car for a bit.

“Cheese hates witnesses,” Angie said eventually.

“Hates ’em,” I agreed.

“If that child is dead,” Angie said, and cleared her throat, “then Broussard definitely—and Poole most probably—will snap.”

I nodded. “And God help whoever they think was involved.”

“You think God’ll help?”

“Huh?”

“God,” she said, and crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “You think He’ll help Amanda’s kidnappers any more than He helped her?”

“Probably not.”

“Then again…” She looked out the windshield.

“What?”

“If Amanda is dead and Broussard flips out, kills her kidnappers, maybe God
is
helping.”

“Heck of a strange God.”

Angie shrugged. “You take what you can get,” she said.

14

I’d heard about Chris Mullen’s banker’s hours, his determination to run a nighttime business during daylight hours, and the next morning, at exactly 8:55, he walked out of Devonshire Towers and turned right on Washington.

I was parked on Washington a half block up from the condo towers, and when I picked up Mullen walking toward State in my rearview mirror, I depressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie lying on the seat and said, “He just left through the front.”

From her post on Devonshire Street, where no cars were allowed to park or even idle in the morning, Angie said, “Gotcha.”

Broussard, wearing a gray T-shirt, black sweats, and a dark blue and white warm-up jacket, stood across from my car in front of Pi Alley. He sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and read the sports page like a jogger just finished his run. He’d rigged a headset to a receiver strapped to his waistband and painted both the earphones and receiver yellow and black to look like a Discman. He’d even sprayed water down the front of his shirt five minutes ago to make it look like sweat. These ex-vice and narcotics guys—masters of the small details of disguise.

As Mullen took a right at the flower stand in front of the Old State House, Broussard crossed Washington and followed. I saw him raise his coffee to his mouth and his lips move as he spoke into the transmitter strapped under his watchband.

“Moving east on State. I got him. Showtime, kids.”

I turned the walkie-talkie off and slipped it into my coat pocket until my part had been played. In keeping with the disguise motif of the day, I was dressed in the rattiest gray trench coat this side of a subway bum, and I’d stained it freshly this morning with egg yolk and Pepsi. My soiled T-shirt was torn across the chest and my jeans and the tops of my shoes were speckled with paint and dirt. The tips of my shoe soles were separated from the top and clapped softly as I walked, and my bare toes peeked out. I’d brushed my hair straight off my forehead and blown it dry to give it that Don King look, and what remained of the egg I’d used on the trench coat I’d rubbed into my beard.

Styling.

I unzipped my fly as I stumbled across Washington Street and poured the rest of my morning coffee down my chest. People saw me coming and sidestepped my lumbering steps and swinging arms, and I mumbled a whole stream of words I’d never learned from my mom and pushed through the gilt-edged front doors of Devonshire Place.

Boy, did the security guard look psyched to see me.

So did the three people who exited the elevator and cut a wide swath around me on the marble floor. I leered at the two women in the trio, smiled at the cut of their legs dropping from the hems of their Anne Klein suits.

“Join me for a pizza?” I asked.

The businessman steered the women even farther away as the security guard said, “Hey! Hey, you!”

I turned toward him as he came out from behind his gleaming black horseshoe desk. He was young and lean, and he had a finger rudely pointed in my direction.

The businessman pushed the women out of the building and pulled a cell phone from his inside pocket, extended the antenna by gripping it between his teeth, but kept walking up Washington.

“Come on,” the security guard said. “Turn around and go out the way you came in. Right now. Come on.”

I swayed in front of him and licked my beard, came back with eggshell. I left my mouth open as I chewed on it and it crackled.

The security guard set his feet on the marble and placed a hand on his nightstick. “You,” he said, like he was talking to a dog. “Go.”

“Uh-ah,” I mumbled, and swayed some more.

The elevator bank dinged as another car reached the lobby.

The security guard reached for my elbow, but I pivoted and his fingers snapped at air.

I reached into my pocket. “Got something to show you.”

The security guard pulled his nightstick from its holster. “Hey! Keep your hands where I can see—”

“Oh, my God,” someone said as the crowd exited the elevator and I pulled a banana from my trench coat, pointed it at the rent-a-cop.

“Jesus Christ, he’s got a banana!” The voice came from behind me. Angie.

Always the improviser. Couldn’t stick to the script.

The crowd from the elevator was trying to cross the lobby, avoid eye contact with me, and still see enough of the incident to have the day’s best story at the watercooler.

“Sir,” the security guard said, trying to sound authoritative and yet polite, now that several tenants bore witness, “put the banana down.”

I pointed the banana at him. “Got this from my cousin. He’s an orangutan.”

“Shouldn’t someone call the police?” a woman asked.

“Ma’am,” the security guard said, a bit desperately, “I have this under control.”

I tossed the banana at him. He dropped his nightstick and jumped back as if he’d been shot.

Someone in the crowd yelped, and several people jogged for the doors.

At the elevator bank, Angie caught my eye and pointed at my hair. “Very hot,” she mouthed, and then she slipped into the elevator and the doors closed.

The security guard picked up his nightstick and dropped the banana. He looked ready to rush me. I didn’t know how many people remained behind me—maybe three—but at least one of them could be thinking about heroically rushing the vagrant as well.

I turned so that my back was to the horseshoe desk and elevators. Only two men, one woman, and the security guard remained. And both men were inching toward the doors. The woman seemed fascinated, however. Her mouth was open, and one hand was pressed against the base of her throat.

“Whatever happened to Men at Work?” I asked her.

“What?” The security guard took another step toward me.

“The Australian band.” I turned my head, locked the security guard in a kind, curious stare. “Very big in the early eighties. Huge. Do you know what happened to them?”

“What? No.”

I cocked my head as I stared at him, scratched my temple. For a long moment, no one in the lobby moved or even breathed it seemed.

“Oh,” I said eventually. I shrugged. “My mistake. Keep the banana.”

I stepped over it on my way out, and the two men flattened against the wall.

I winked at one of them. “First-rate security guard you got. Without him, I’da busted up the place.” I pushed open the doors onto Washington Street.