Night Raider (9 page)

“I might have once. You just don’t see that, do you?”

“You might have once but now you’re not in the system anymore, you don’t have to look up a black man for social reasons. That’s all right with me,” Williams said quietly, “that suits me fine. It’s all business.”

“If you want it that way.”

“If I can help you in your business, you give me a call.”

“I don’t have any business.”

“Good deal,” Williams said, “good deal. Have it your way and we’ll sink the ship.”

Slowly, solemnly he winked, balanced himself on the threshold of the room and then went out closing the door gently.

He left Wulff alone.

Slowly, carefully, Wulff put his things together and worked his way down the hall like a blind man. He went into the stinking little bathroom containing the single rusty shower outlet. The accommodations, like the system, left a good deal to be desired.

The system indeed sucked.

But so did his life. Explain
that
to Williams.

Peter Vincent got news of the Marasco fire early the next morning. News simply filtered into Peter Vincent without his having much to do with getting it. It was like affairs being offered to a beautiful woman. You turned down fifty for the one that you picked up but that didn’t mean that you minded the other ones. They kept you in the center of things, improved the feeling of self-worth. Vincent got this news on the phone from a contact on Wall Street who liked to call himself a stockbroker. At least the contact did have an office and a phone; there were a lot who didn’t.

Peter Vincent sat surrounded by possessions and impermeable locks on the fourth floor of a townhouse. The third floor was his office space; the first two floors were supposed to be offices too but he had had them sealed off a long time ago. One staircase with blind entrances carried the visitor up to the third floor, a small, self-controlled elevator would take him up to the fourth if Peter Vincent desired. Two housemen lived off the corridors of the third floor, another lived on the fourth directly across from Peter Vincent although with his own entrance and exit. Peter Vincent valued his privacy. There was no reason why he should not. Didn’t everyone want privacy? Wasn’t that what man struggled for; the increasing bit of living space that was his own?

He was sealed in and he liked it that way. The call came in at ten o’clock from the man he preferred to know as Gerald. Vincent was alone on the fourth floor at the time and thought about letting one of the housemen take it downstairs before he figured the hell with it and took the button himself. It was a slow morning anyway. And there was no question that anybody who knew the number on which the light was flashing was not there to invade his privacy. Very few people knew that number. The few who had without Peter Vincent’s permission and continuing approval were mostly dead.

“Marasco’s dead,” the voice said almost instantly. Gerald cut corners wherever he could; the man was all business. Vincent could admire that. “There was a fire there last night. The place is ruined; a four-alarmer. His wife got out but she’s in the hospital. Nobody else got burned up but everything’s lost.”

“Everything?”

“Looks that way. The place is a total loss from what I pick up.”

“Arson?” said Peter Vincent.

“Probably. Of course for the police it’s an open and shut accident. They’ll be happy to leave it that way on the books.”

“I can imagine.”

“Marasco wasn’t exactly their favorite person in the Eastern District.”

“No,” Vincent said, holding the phone delicately against his ear with his shoulder, taking a toothpick out of his pocket and placing it in his mouth. He had given up smoking two years ago in the interest of long life and health; toothpicks helped a little although they were not the same. Nothing was the same, “I can’t say that he was.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” Vincent said, “I’ll have to think about it a little bit.”

“Don’t think too long,” the voice said. It acquired just a little bit of an edge which made Vincent wince; for the first time that morning he seemed or would have seemed if there had been anyone else in the room to have lost his composure, “We respect your brain but something’s got to be done fast.”

“I know that,” Vincent said.

“There’s a shipment yesterday that fell through. We wanted to have that checked out even before this happened.”

“Sure.”

“Terello,” the voice said, “you’re going to have to get hold of him.”

“I will. It’s just morning now. Give me a couple of minutes to get organized.”

“It’s not good,” Gerald said sharply. “There were two men pitched off on the Harlem River Drive yesterday too. Small time guys.”

“You think that ties in with the fire?”

There was a pause; Vincent could hear the man breathing. “We think maybe,” Gerald said finally, “but mostly we don’t want to think. That’s your job.”

“That’s right,” said Vincent, “I’ll be in touch.”

“Don’t wait on it,” Gerald said and broke the connection.

Vincent sat, still holding the phone meditatively, placed it finally in the cradle and sat back on the chair, letting the sense of the situation build within him. Sealed in as he was from the world or at least that part of it which would have made things confusing and difficult, he was able at least most of the time to do his thinking in a vacuum. Feed in the material as input, like a computer he would come out with
modus operandi
as output. But as he sat there, Vincent could feel the first stalking unease hit him.

It didn’t look right. It just did not look right. The fire at Islip was a possibility and Vincent had had to deal for a long time with the fact that Marasco was pushing his authority a bit and might have to be dealt with someday. In that sense the fire only solved a problem before it truly arose, always a satisfying thing to a man like Vincent who kept his options open. Marasco would have to be replaced and that meant work of course but what the hell; he could solve it with a couple of phone calls. The missed shipment was another problem, it was inconvenient and it could make for complication but, hell, in this business missed shipments, deliveries that fell through, were all part of overhead. They almost had to be considered as part of the basic cost of doing business. You would amortize them right in.

But the business of the two bodies on the Harlem River Drive. Small time Gerald had said. Good enough; to Gerald of course almost everyone was small time. Peter Vincent was probably called small time himself by Gerald to other people. But the bodies on the drive the same day as the arson and the shipment that had not come through—

Vincent could feel his senses prickle. His skills were limited, he knew perfectly well that in the outside world he would be lucky to be in middle-management. If that. But he had gotten this far because he had one invaluable ability and it was respected, however grudgingly, by the Geralds and the people up the line who gave Gerald the orders. Vincent had sound instincts.

Things that would not have come together for an ordinary man came together in a terrifying way for Vincent: random factors, chance puzzles, little coincidences of time and circumstance could build to him a meaning as compelling and beautiful as an artist might find when a work, finally, began to take shape. And now he had that feeling again: almost with excitement he understood at some basic level below words that the bodies on the drive and the disaster in Islip came together. Neatly and irrevocably at some level they hooked in perfectly.

He picked up the phone and by memory dialed To-rello’s number. “Get him there,” he said to the woman who answered.

“He not home now. Who is this calling?”

“Get him to the phone.”

“I told you,” the woman said, “he went out a long time ago. Maybe he be back tonight maybe tomorrow morning. Who is calling?”

“This is Peter Vincent,” he said, “get the son of a bitch to the phone, please.” With news of the fire, Terello would be holed up in his apartment, he knew. Too cunning to expose himself but too frightened to run he would lock himself up like a rat.

“Oh,” the voice said, “Peter Vincent?”

“I said who it was. Get him to the phone right now.” He kept his voice level, calm, played his fingers over the desk. Show no emotion. Show no emotion ever and particularly to the lower echelons play it like a machine. If there was no
personna,
they could never touch him.

Terello came on the phone, his voice open and breaking. Peter Vincent simply did not call the Terellos of this world; the man must have been terrified. “Yes?” he said, “Mr. Vincent.”

“This is Peter Vincent. What went wrong yesterday?”

“Well I don’t know,” Terello said after a choked pause, “I just don’t know anything about it. I mean, to talk over the phone—”

“Are you trying to tell
me
how to talk?”

“No,” Terello said desperately, “no. Never.”

“What happened to Marasco?”

“I don’t know,” Terello said. He sounded bleak, stripped now of energy. “I just don’t know.”

“When did you last see him?”

“I was there yesterday afternoon. I left early though. I had to tell him about this thing—”

“I know about that,” Vincent said shortly. “What happened?”

“I tell you, I just don’t know. We were there; the stuff just wasn’t. The guy supposed to be making the transfer—”

“Did you take it?”

“Are you crazy?” Terello squealed. His voice modulated instantly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I apologize, I really do. But you should know me better than that. I’d never do anything like that at all. I do my work.”

“What about the two ditched on the drive?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you? Are you sure?”

“Honest to Christ,” Terello said, “what two on the drive? What is this?”

“Two men I know were found on the Harlem River Drive yesterday afternoon, very dead.”

“I don’t know anything about that at all,” Terello said, breathing raggedly, “this is the first I hear about it. I’m not into that kind of work at all—”

“I didn’t say you were. Then the fire.”

“I know about the fire. I told you, I left there in the early afternoon.”

“When did you last see him?”

“About four o’clock,” Terello said. “Jesus Christ, you don’t think I’m messed up in this, do you? He was my
boss
for God’s sake.”

“So maybe you’re an ambitious man.”

“I’d have to be crazy to think like that. I would have been
dead,
years ago, if I thought like that. I came home about six o’clock and I was home all night. Ask my wife.”

“Spouses can’t testify in court,” Peter Vincent said dryly, “inadmissible evidence.”

“You’re calling this a court?” The man was babbling now. “Listen, Mr. Vincent, I beg of you. I didn’t want to see him die, I’m just sick about this. I didn’t love the man, I can’t lie to someone like you but I liked him and he was my boss and that was all there was to it. I wouldn’t ever do anything like that, I’d get myself killed. And the two on the drive, I don’t even know who they could be. I’m not into that.”

“What about the shipment?”

“What about it? I was there; the stuff wasn’t. You can’t hang me on something like that for shit’s sake! Please, give me a break, will you?”

Vincent took the phone away from his ear and regarded it for a moment. He had a vivid picture of Terello at this instant even though he had never seen the man: he would be a short, fat, balding character sitting now in a bathrobe, hunched over the phone, smoking, huge beading droplets of sweat pouring off him as his wife looked at him frantically from the bedroom door. He would be waving his wife away, trying to tell her to get the hell out of there but she would not be moving because she had no idea what was really going on and would be afraid that the man was having a heart attack. Vincent sighed. Good instincts didn’t mean that you had to necessarily enjoy the pictures they painted in your mind. He brought the phone back to his ear.

“All right, Terello,” he said, “you sit tight.”

“You mean stay indoors?”

“That might not be a bad idea.”

“I got things to do and I did hope to make the funeral—”

“Don’t worry about the funeral. Going to the funeral won’t do you any good and it sure as hell won’t help Marasco where he’s at now. You stay at the apartment and wait for word.”

“How long? When will I get word?”

“I don’t know,” Vincent said quietly, “that depends on what I decide. It could be five minutes from now and then again you could be sitting around in your bathrobe for ten years. Take up crossword puzzles. Learn solitaire. Watch some television.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Stay underground and be reachable at all times.”

“Oh I will,” Terello said, “I will.”

“And don’t you ever try to get in touch with me,” Vincent said. “I have something to say, you’ll hear. Otherwise you just sit because if you don’t hear I’ve got nothing to say.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to reach you,”

“That’s good,” Vincent said, “that’s real, real good,” and put the phone down abruptly, took the toothpick from his mouth and considered it.

He guessed that if he wanted he could project his instincts again and see Terello now; the man had barrelled the phone into his gut like a midwife might hold a baby, the cold surfaces were chilling him, the cigarette dangled from his mouth, smoke burning his eyes, he was weeping in terror.
What the hell is this?
his wife was saying,
I thought that you were in sporting goods.

Well, that could wait. Terello was clean at least in the sense that he had had no part of this and had no information. It might be necessary to have him removed simply in the interests of keeping things neat at the end but that would depend upon other factors and strictly speaking might be avoided. There was no way to decide how to deal with Terello, however, until he understood the full picture and Vincent knew that he was a way from that, a long long way.

He sighed and threw away the toothpick. A strange, rolling constriction spread through his own gut: Peter Vincent had a feeling that he was in for it. He picked up the intercom and told the houseman that he had better bring up a pack of cigarettes right away. Also, divert all calls away from him; he was going to be tied up here for a while.

The houseman said sure. He asked Vincent if he really were going to go back to smoking after all the good work he had done to kick the habit. Vincent let him get away with it because the man was a good employee who also knew karate at the seventh level. He said that yes he was going back to smoking. He had tried smoking and that was good and he had tried quitting which was even better so now he would go back to smoking again so that he could have the satisfaction of quitting from the start.

The houseman seemed to understand this. Vincent concentrated on the phone, sharpened every singing nerve, and got down to serious work.