Known to Evil (19 page)

"Let's see it."

"Let's hear what your friend here has to say first."

"Okay," Pete said. "Come on upstairs and we'll talk over a beer."

"I would prefer to take a walk down to the restaurant on the corner."

"You scared?" Pete asked, giving me a triumphant grin.

"I never enter the living quarters of a man who has threatened me."

"How can I be sure you'll pay if I let Lonnie talk to you?"

"You know my name and you know the location of my office. I'm not stupid enough to try and cheat a whole house full of ex-cons."

The three of us stood around for a few seconds more. Everything had already been decided, we just needed a short time for that decision to settle.

33

T
he Cisco Kid Cafe was a dilapidated restaurant-bar with posters of old westerns on the walls. The strawberry-blond waitress wore a very short cranberry skirt over stout shapeless legs and sported clashing tattoos that bore witness to a life of rebellion and failure.

"Hey, Lonnie," she said to the youngest of us.

"China," he responded.

"What can I get for you guys?"

"I'll take whatever you got on tap and they can have anything they want," I said, making it clear that the bill should come to me.

Lonnie ordered a beer, while Pete asked for a double margarita without salt.

"So this is how it works," I said to the men once China had gone. "What I need is information I can work with. Descriptions, license plates, things they said or that Angelique said about them. I need something to help me find her. That's what I'll base the payment on. If you can't give me a few things like that then we can just have our drinks and move on."

Lonnie and Pete looked at each other. It was straight talk and they accepted it.

Pete nodded. "What if you can't find her with what we give you?"

"That's my problem. I'll pay for good intelligence. But I don't want to hear about some black Lincoln and two guys in suits."

"What if you're workin' for the guys after her?" Lonnie asked. He was still an innocent, in spite of his associations.

"Do you know where she went?" I asked.

"No."

"Then anything you give me the guys who tried to grab her probably already know. I need to get to them."

China came back with our drinks and served them. She and Lonnie exchanged a few pleasantries before she wandered off to the bar to chat with the young bartender--who sported a bright-yellow Mohawk.

"I wrote down the license-plate number," Lonnie said when the girl was gone. "It was a dark-green Lincoln . . . pretty late model."

"You got the number on you?"

"In my wallet."

"Anything else?"

"Figg--Figgis--an' me heard the girl screaming when we were workin' on his motorcycle," Lonnie said. "We run out and see these two white guys in business suits tryin' to drag her into their car. They didn't look like cops, so we run over there. Figg took a tire iron. He got there first and told 'em to let her go. They said he better get away and he cracked the passenger's side of their windshield. One guy reached into his pocket and I hit him in the jaw."

"What'd they do then?"

"Figg broke a headlight, and I think they were worried that a cop would pull 'em over, even if they got away from us. There was people stoppin' to look by then. They let her go and took off. That's when I memorized their license-plate number . . . at, at least long enough to write it down."

"What did Miss Lear say?"

"She thanked us. We asked what did they want and she told us that she didn't know but that they were probably workin' for some guy that'd been hasslin' her. We asked her who the guy was but she didn't say."

"Did she say what it was they wanted with her?"

"She said that she wasn't even sure what it was about."

"Anything else?"

"Uh-uh. She just thanked us and went up to her place."

"How long ago was this?"

"Two weeks today. I remember 'cause we had a party that night. We invited Angelique, and she said she'd come by, but she didn't."

"You call the cops?" I asked.

"We don't talk to cops, man," Pete said. "Not never."

"Then why take down the plate number?"

"I gave it to her," Lonnie said. "I thought she might call the police herself."

"Can I have it?"

Lonnie looked at Pete and the elder nodded. The kid had a green wallet made from desiccated plastic that was cracking. From this cheap billfold he produced a grayish- white scrap with a number written on it.

"It was a New York plate," the kid said.

I reached into my right-front pocket and came out with a roll of cash that I had prepared before getting to the house.

"Who do I give this to?" I asked the men.

Pete reached for the wad and Lonnie didn't complain. I let go the money and watched it disappear into Pete's overalls.

"Anything else?" I asked, just to say something.

"Yeah," Lonnie said. "She said that her luck had run out."

"What did she mean by that?"

"She told Figg that she'd had a run of real good luck for seven years, just about. Now she figured she had to pay for it."

I digested that little piece of secondhand editorializing and then stood up.

"You not gonna finish your beer?" Pete asked me.

"Strike while the iron's hot," I replied. "I'll leave fifty with China. You guys have a good time."

34

I
walked westward toward the Village proper, thinking about luck. Wanda Soa was unlucky--definitely. The man who probably shot her shared the same ill fortune. Ron Sharkey and a few dozen others that I'd focused my attention on were luckless bastards who were blindsided by disasters while they planned vacations, retirement, and weekends with their grandkids.

In this way Angie and I had something in common: we were descendants of Typhoid Mary, passing over earth that would one day soon inter the bodies of our luckless victims.

My cell phone sounded, proving to me, for at least that moment, that providence favors the arbiters of evil.

"Hey, Breland," I said into the phone. "What's up?"

"They arrested Ron Sharkey. Have him in that special federal facility down south of Houston on the West Side."

"What's the charge?"

"They don't have one yet, but I was told by the agents who arrested him that they were considering terrorism."

"You're kidding."

"That's what the man said."

"Can I get in to see him?"

"I'll work on it. You in the city?"

"Call me when you got something."

TAKAHASHI'S IS A JAPANESE coffee house on the third floor of a nondescript building between University and Fifth. Twill had found the place when he was only twelve and truancy was his pastime. He liked the people who owned and ran the odd establishment, even learned a few phrases in Japanese. They served good coffee and great tea, had a small menu, free bowls of rice crackers, and various performances in the evening, from workshop poetry to Asian string music.

During the day not many people came around.

It was the perfect place for surreptitious afternoon meetings.

I arrived at 3:53. Twill was already there, seated by the window that looked down on the street.

I waved to the owners, who were at the opposite end of the long, unpopulated room. Angel and Kenji smiled and waved back.

"Hey, Pops," Twill said as I took the seat across from him. "S'happenin'?"

I gazed into my son's dark, handsome face and shook my head. I wanted to be angry with him, but that would be an uphill task. He might not have been honest, but he was a good boy--no, a good man in a boy's body.

"Been down so long," I said, "looks like up to me."

"That's a book, right?"

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"Mardi got me readin'," he said. "One day I told her that I didn't read much because there's millions of books and I never know which ones I should be studying. I mean, teachers talkin' 'bout Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and shit. But I don't understand what they got to say got to do with me. But then Mardi says that it's not what's in the book but just the fact that somebody reads that builds up the mind, like. That sounded good, 'cause then I could read whatever I want and still be ahead of the game."

One of the pitfalls presented by my son was how engaging he was in conversation. He knew how much I loved to play with ideas, especially when those ideas had to do with thinking that ran contrary to everyday beliefs. He knew how much I liked to read.

"Talk to me, Twill."

That brought a broad grin to the young man's face.

"Her name is Tatyana Baranovich," he said. "Baranovich. She comes from a place called Minsk and has won every award that CCNY has to give to an undergraduate. She's a senior, about to graduate. D been talkin' about her for almost a year now. You know how shy he is. Every now and then they got coffee together, and that'd keep him smilin' for two weeks."

"So she didn't feel the same?" I asked.

"I don't know what she felt. I tried to get Bulldog to ask her on a date. I told him we could get your car and I'd take somebody, too. But he said that he just liked talkin' to her. But you should see this girl, Pops. I mean, she got it workin' every which way. Damn."

I felt like a dirty old man cackling at Twill's leering sexual expression.

"So what happened?" I asked.

"One day he sees that Tatyana is all upset. She tells him that she can't go back to her apartment because the man who paid her rent wanted her to do something that would mean she couldn't go to graduate school."

"Gustav."

"Yeah, right." Twill was a little discomfited that I was ahead of him in the story. "Gustav's a pimp. Tatyana is in the country illegally. And she's a hot number with some of his clients out west. He tells her that she can go to graduation but after that she has to work full-time for a few years."

"Did she make good on the million?"

"Damn, Pops, you
are
a private detective, huh?"

"Did she make her nut?"

"She says so," Twill allowed. "And I believe it, too. She doesn't have real fancy clothes or no habit. City College don't cost that much.

"D came to me and I talked to the girl. She told me about Gustav but not how connected he was. It was only later on that I found out he had people all over the place lookin' for her. D been thinkin' that maybe they could go down to New Orleans and start over, like."

"And you were going to help him?"

Twill admitted his involvement with a slight motion of his left shoulder.

"If Gustav is so connected like you say, then you know New Orleans would probably only be a temporary fix."

"Yeah, I know. But when they were gone I knew I could tell you, and then it would only be a matter of time before it was all smoothed out again."

It was the first time I had seen the boy in Twill for at least three years. He showed an unshakable faith in my ability to save him and his brother. I was so surprised that it might have shown.

"So D and this Tatyana are together now?"

"Oh yeah. All night, every night. He thinks they're in love."

"Are they?"

"He is."

"Twill, if you suspect that this girl is playin' your brother, why help?"

"Tatyana's okay. She in trouble, and she a ho' through no fault of her own. Somebody got to break D's cherry, an' you know he will remember that girl till the day his grandchildren die."

"Hyperbole," I said.

"Poetic exaggeration," he corrected.

"What am I going to do with you, Twill?"

"Me? It's D in trouble, Pops."

"Without meeting you she would never even be with him. You're the one that convinced her something could be done."

"Oh, come on, man. Don't put that shit on me. Bulldog's my brother. He asked me to help him. I couldn't say no."

"No," I admitted, "you couldn't."

"So what do you want me to do?" Twill asked.

"Tell Dimitri that two men from Gustav were laying for him out in front of his mother's house. His mother's house. They saw me in the dark and thought it was him. They attacked me, threatened me, pulled a knife on me. You tell him that and then say I figured out what was going on. Then you tell Tatyana that I intend to do something, but she has to come meet with me first."

Twill nodded, a wry twist to his mouth.

"Convince her, Twill," I added. "I can't do this neatly without talking to her."

His assent was in his eyes, even more subtle than the shifting of a shoulder.

When we got up to leave he put a ten and a five on the table. He never ate and rarely drank at Takahashi's, but he always left a tip.

We separated on the street. Him, a boy walking off into a man's life, and me wondering, What if the Gordian knot was someone you loved?

35

I
was already taxiing my way toward the federal detention center when Breland called and said that I had been granted permission to visit the prisoner.

The so-called holding facility was on the seventh floor of a building that had once been a warehouse. Instead of bars there was thick metal grating over every door and window--laced with razor wire along the seams.

The first person I met was a brown woman with a skinny body and a huge round face. She was standing on the opposite side of a small, iron-latticed window that was set toward the left side of a large wall. The waiting room, where I was standing, was nearly empty. The only other applicant was an Arab woman, surrounded by three small children. She was slumped in a chair. The feeling she radiated was that of intense hopelessness.

"Can I help you?" the bureaucrat asked through the haze of crisscrossed metal.

"Leonid McGill for Ron Sharkey."

"Purpose of visit?"

"His lawyer sent me."

Name? Occupation? Relationship to inmate? Citizenship? Weapons? Other contraband? (This was followed by a long list of everything from cash to chewing gum.)

"Any and all actions, comments, and utterances may be recorded while you are here," she said when the list was through.