JM03 - Red Cat (5 page)

“Getting directions back to town,” I said, “and a recommendation of someplace for lunch.”

“Well, we’re not the auto club, and Herbert has better things to do with his time, I’m sure.”

I smiled to myself and shook my head. The garage doors dropped before I made it to my car.

* * *

It was nearly three when I got home. Much of Sixteenth Street lay in shadow, and the slush had begun to refreeze underfoot. The lobby of my building was empty and the hallways were quiet. My apartment was filled with winter light, like a vast gray sheet over the furniture. Nobody home. I put my jacket on the kitchen counter and poured myself a glass of water, and started when I heard music from upstairs.

A lawyer moved in up there a year ago, on a two-year sublease. He’s generally pretty quiet, and even when he’s not his music is inoffensive, but I jumped every time I heard it. Every time, I thought of Jane Lu.

It was two years last November that she’d bought the place upstairs, and shortly after that we’d become lovers. It wasn’t even six months later that Jane had gone away, first on an extended vacation to Italy and then to another of her CEO-for-hire gigs, this time in Seattle. She’d wanted me to go with her, on the vacation part at least, and if I had, she might still be living upstairs. But I hadn’t gone and she hadn’t stayed and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Maybe it was doomed from the start.

Certainly there wasn’t much left of me by the time I met her. By then it had been three years since my wife, Anne, had been killed— shot neatly and precisely and left to die within yards of our front porch, the last of many victims of a man who wouldn’t live to see the end of that day. It was my biggest case by far as a sheriff’s investigator up in Burr County, and my last one, and I’d fucked it up from start to finish. My stupidity and ego had let Morgan Furness run loose for too long, and let him turn the investigation around on me and into an elaborately constructed suicide by cop.

For months afterward I was consumed by chaos— by anger and guilt and annihilating grief, and a hurricane of alcohol and drugs. When the storm passed, I was no longer a policeman and I’d succeeded in burning down most of my life. From the charred bits that remained I’d fashioned something else, something small and simple, made of work and running and solitude. It was modest craftsmanship, but it was all that I could manage.

It was nineteen months since I’d seen Jane last, and listened to her last scratchy message on my telephone.

“I can’t do this, John. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I tried to keep things at arm’s length— tell myself you were like Nick Charles or something, and your work was clever and glamorous, and somehow separate from you. But that’s bullshit, and I can’t pretend otherwise.

“There’s nothing amusing about being followed. There’s nothing witty about beatings and guns and emergency rooms. There’s nothing funny about getting shot. I don’t know why you want that in your life, John, but I know I don’t.

“Maybe it would be easier if I knew what you were looking for from all this— from us. Or maybe there’s no mystery to it. Maybe you’re not looking for anything at all. Maybe your life is already just the way you want it.”

Doomed from the start.

I ate some aspirin and drained my water glass. I took out my notes from Wilton and carried them to the table and started reading. I was dozing over them when the intercom buzzed and I jumped again. I went to the wall unit and watched the grainy image emerge on the tiny video screen. It wasn’t memory that disturbed me this time, but a more surprising visitor: my sister-in-law Stephanie. David’s wife.

5

I hit a patch of black ice coming off the curb at East Third Street, crossing Avenue B, and my ankle turned and I almost went down. But not quite.

“Shit,” I hissed as I caught myself, and the middle-school kids crossing the other way laughed. Not even four miles gone and I was panting like a hound. It served me right for laying off so long. A wet snowflake landed on my eye. I brushed it off and huffed forward, headed west and sometimes south.

The snow had made it that much harder to drag myself up the deep well of sleep that morning, and to drag my ass onto the road, but snow was only part of it. The night had been filled with dreams I couldn’t remember, but that left behind a nagging sense of something unfinished or mislaid or abandoned. And then there was the nightmare I couldn’t forget: Stephanie’s visit.

She’d stood in my doorway for a full minute, legs together, arms at her sides, hands jammed in the pockets of her navy blue coat. Her wiry hair was shorter than I recalled and bound precariously by a tortoiseshell clip. Her pale face was pinched and stiff, and her overlarge eyes skittered around me and all around the apartment. Her little mouth was twitching.

“Why don’t you come in,” I’d said finally. My voice made her flinch, but she came. Her steps were tentative and rigid, as if onto thin ice. I offered to take her coat but she seemed not to hear. She’d picked her way around the room, teetering first by the kitchen counter, then by the bookshelves, then the windows, and finally by the sofa. Then she sat. I sat too, at the table, and closed my laptop and my notepad.

I knew she was working again, as an equity analyst at a firm downtown, and she looked as if she’d come from the office— black pumps, dark hose, dark striped skirt, ivory blouse. She kept her bony knees together and kept her coat wrapped around her narrow body like a cocoon. Her eyes hopped around for another minute and she clutched her hands together and finally spoke.

“What are you doing to him?” she asked. Her voice was brittle.

“Stephanie, I don’t know—”

“Oh, don’t even bother to lie! Just don’t, John. What are you doing to him?”

“I’m not doing any—”

“Of course you are! Why else would he come here? Why would he visit you?”

I pulled a hand down my face and sighed. “I think David’s the person to ask about that.” But she wanted no advice.

“You’ve never liked me.”

Jesus. “That’s been mostly a two-way street,” I said.

She waved that away. “And you never made a secret of it, and now that I need something from you, you’re just going to lord it over me.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stephanie. I’m not lording anything over any—”

“Then answer my goddamn questions,” she said. “What are you doing to him? What kind of thing have you gotten him involved in?” Her voice was like breaking glass.

I bit back my first three answers. “You need to talk to David,” I said again. She ignored me.

“It wouldn’t be the first time you dragged your family into the gutter, though, would it? But I won’t let you do it to David.”

My breath caught in my throat and I think even Stephanie knew she’d gone too far. “You should go now,” I said quietly. But she didn’t. Instead she walked to the window and stood stiffly where David had stood.

“Or are you saying he came to you for help of some sort? Is that it? But what kind of help would that be?”

“The only thing I’m saying is that you should go,” I repeated.

Stephanie bent her head and a shudder went through her back. I heard sniffling. Shit. After a minute, she hitched her coat higher on her shoulders, did up the buttons, and headed for the door. She paused when she got there and turned to me.

“It’s about that woman, isn’t it, and those phone calls?” she’d said. She hadn’t waited for an answer.

I had another mile and a half in by the time I came lumbering up Sixteenth Street to the wrought-iron steps of my building. I was still winded and soaked in sweat, but my headache was gone. I crawled up the stairs and into the shower, where I stood for a long time with the spray in my face.

After Stephanie had left I’d phoned David, to tell him about her visit and about my trip to Wilton. We never got to the Wilton part; his questions were all about Stephanie. “How much does she know?” “How did she find out?” “Did that crazy bitch call her?” “Tell me again what she said.” After the third go-round I stopped answering.

“I don’t want to be in the middle of this,” I told him. “I didn’t hire on to lie to your wife.”

“Who’s asking you to lie, for chrissakes? I just expect some confidentiality.”

“Slice it as fine as you want, I don’t want to be in that position with Stephanie again.”

“Who knew you were so sensitive?” he said, and hung up.

I fumbled for the faucets and turned up the heat.

* * *

An hour after my shower I was riding the L train to Brooklyn. Though the real-estate people keep moving the borders, the address Nikki Cade had given me was more Bushwick than Williamsburg, and not convenient to any subway station. I picked the Montrose Avenue stop and worked my way south along Bushwick Avenue, leaning into the wind all the way. It was a short walk from trendy to just getting by; vegan bistros and handbag ateliers gave way to bodegas and auto parts shops and boarded-up shells in the space of a few blocks. By the time I got to Holly Cade’s street, there was nary an artisanal cheese market in sight.

Her building was five stories of dirty red brick, with a gray stone stoop, friable-looking fire escapes up the sides, and liberal coats of graffiti all around. There was a smell out front like burnt garbage, which beat the hell out of the festering-wound odor in the vestibule. There was an intercom box on the wall, with a mangled speaker grate and worn plastic buttons with apartment numbers next to them. The name next to 3-G was written in green ink on a strip of masking tape. Cade.

I leaned on the button for a while and got no response, and I was thinking about what I might do to the massive lock on the inner door when a pack of teenaged girls came boiling off the elevator and down the short hallway toward me. I didn’t ask why they weren’t in school, and they paid me no mind as they passed in a swirl of perfume, hair-spray, bubblegum, and cigarette smoke. The inner door was gaping in their wake, and I walked up to three.

The stairwell was narrow and dark and smelled like a urinal, and the third-floor corridor wasn’t much different. The door to 3-G was at the end of the hall to the left, adjacent to 3-F and the trash chute. The door was metal-clad and once upon a time it had been painted black. When I put my ear to it I heard someone moving around on the other side. I knocked hard and the moving stopped but no one answered. On my third try I heard a bolt slip and hinges squeak behind me. I turned in time to see a narrow gap in the door to apartment 3-F close quickly. When I turned back to 3-G, the door was opening.

The man in the doorway was an inch or so taller than I and maybe forty pounds heavier, none of it fat. His shoulders barely cleared the doorframe as he stepped into the hall. He closed the door behind him, locked it with a key, and put the key in the pocket of his gray parka.

“What do you want?” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft. He crossed massive arms on a massive chest and strained his sleeves to tearing. His blond, crewcut head was large and square, and affixed to the rest of him without benefit of neck. His face was broad, pale, and smooth, and his close-set features looked stunted and abandoned in the center. His mouth was a pink ripple below a pinch of nose, his brows no more than sketch marks above blue eyes that were empty of curiosity and everything else. His hands were like steaks and there were blurry green tats on them that looked like prison work. I put his age at thirty, tops.

“This your place?” I asked.

“I got the key,” Babyface said. “Now what the fuck do you want?”

“I’m here to see Holly.”

“She’s not here,” he rumbled. “What do you want her for?”

“Who are you, the husband? The boyfriend? The secretary, maybe?”

Color rose on his flat cheeks. “I’m the guy who’ll plant his boot up your ass, you don’t say why you’re banging at the door.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Let’s not get stupid too fast,” I said, with more nonchalance than I felt.

Babyface squinted at me and a wrinkle formed on his smooth forehead. “You a cop?”

“Why would a cop be looking for Holly?”

“You’re a cop, lemme see some ID.”

I smiled some more. “You didn’t answer my question: why would a cop be looking for Holly? Or maybe it’s you they’re looking for. Maybe you’re the one who should be showing ID.”

The wrinkle deepened and his big face got dark. “You’re no fucking cop,” he said. “And you’re pissing me off.”

“Get Holly out here and you won’t have to talk to me anymore.”

Babyface shook his head. “You don’t listen,” he growled. “Now, you say who you are and what the fuck you want or we’re gonna have trouble.”

He flexed his large hands. I looked at the ink on them and took a deep breath and took a chance. “Do you talk to your PO like this? I don’t expect it goes over too well.”

Surprise, anger, and fear flickered through his eyes at the mention of his parole officer; I figured I’d struck a nerve. I was sure when he hit me.

His forearm was a tree trunk in gray nylon, and it whipped around like it was driven by a storm and banged me on the side of the head. I bounced off the door to 3-F on my way to the floor, and I caught a glimpse of Babyface’s biker boots and the frayed hem of his jeans flashing by.

“Asshole,” he muttered. I heard his footsteps down the stairs, and then all I heard was a ringing in my ears and all I saw was dirty linoleum.

I took a few deep breaths and prodded at my temple and slowly hoisted myself up. My head stayed where it belonged and so did the rest of the world, and I was reasonably sure that nothing was broken. I looked up and saw the door close again on apartment 3-F. I stepped over and knocked.

The voice that answered came from somewhere near the peephole. It was a man’s voice, reedy and old and with a faint Spanish accent. “Get the hell away,” he said. “Get away or I’m calling the cops.”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Holly Cade,” I said. “You know how I might do that?”

“I don’t know nothing, except I’m tired of all the noise and shouts and comings and goings, and the next time this shit happens I’m calling the cops.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “Do you know who that guy was?”