Safe House (24 page)

“You got my package?” Wolfe asked as soon as she heard my voice.

I hand-signaled to Mama, who brought the two envelopes over. I leafed through the contents quickly, holding the phone against my shoulder with my head. “Yeah.”

“The picture is . . . the subject. From his employment application.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s . . . enough there,” she said. “To make the connection. Be sure you look through the thick one first.”

“Got it.”

“Listen, that envelope you wanted dropped off?”

“Yeah.”

“There is no Mr. White at that address. Mick was insistent—he had the apartment number, remember? So they showed him the place. It’s the model suite—the one they use to attract tenants. Nobody lives there.”

“Okay.”

“Anything else?”

“No. Thanks. Hey, did Mick cut his hair?”

“All part of the job.” Wolfe chuckled. “A small sacrifice.”

T
he security guard’s photo showed a man in his thirties, black hair cut fashionably short, generic European face with an unprominent, slightly bladed nose, staring straight into the camera, unsmiling. Nothing there.

He was born on Long Island. Mother’s maiden name was Wallace. On the birth certificate, someone had placed one of those red plastic pull-off arrows that say “Sign Here”—the kind lawyers attach to contracts they want you to sign in a half-dozen places—next to the name. Why? I kept looking. High-school graduate. Unremarkable military career. Associate-of-arts degree in criminal justice from a community college. Employed steadily, but he changed jobs a lot. Process server, credit-collection agency, store detective. All quasi-cop “investigator” stuff. Almost three years as an auxiliary police officer. That fit—authority freaks gravitate to stuff like that.

Credit report showed him as slow-pay. Not enough to discourage a sizable loan on a 1991 Corvette, bought used in 1995. Arrest record was clean, attached to his application for a pistol permit. Must have been before his short stay on Rikers Island—I guess the security-guard companies don’t do periodic rechecks. Once he got the piece, his pay had gone up to $9.50 an hour. Married a few years ago. Divorced. No children.

His medical scanned normal, except for asthma. Attached was a photocopy of a printout from a fertility clinic. He and his wife had been trying to have a baby some years back. Genetic counseling was checked on the form. That was marked with one of the red plastic arrows too.

I went to the second envelope. Just two pieces of paper. The first was an exact duplicate of the birth certificate, only this version had an official certificate embossed into the lower right corner and a stamp on the back indicating it was a “true and accurate copy.” I followed the red arrow—now his mother’s maiden name was Wasserstein.

The other page was a duplicate of the fertility-clinic stuff. The red arrow took me to the genetic counseling section—now it said:
SCREEN FOR TAY-SACHS
. The substitute papers were beautiful work, impossible to distinguish from the originals. Wolfe was more outlaw than I’d thought. And she had access to some fine forgers too.

I removed the red plastic arrows, substituted the new pages for the old and sat down to reread the new, unified version.

The death warrant.

I
’ve heard that plenty of women clean house in the nude, but I’d never seen one do it in lipstick-red four-inch heels. When Crystal Beth showed me into her place, Vyra was wrestling with the vacuum cleaner like it was an artifact left behind by aliens, muttering to herself, her pale skin shining under a thin sheen of sweat. She saw me, bent to find the cut-off switch, a puzzled look on her face. After a minute of hunting around, she ripped the cord out of the wall in one mighty tug, then looked up in triumph.

“I didn’t want to mess up my outfit,” Vyra said to Crystal Beth, nodding her head in the direction of the bed, where a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of red and black and white silk stuff lay in a confused jumble. “Anyway, I’m almost done.”

“Almost done?” Crystal Beth laughed. “You only started a few minutes ago.”

“Well, what else is there?” Vyra demanded, crossing her arms under her breasts. She always did it that way. For the lift—I think she knew they were way too big to look good without a bra.

“There’s the baseboards, the shelves, the bathroom, the—”

“The bathroom? I’m not cleaning anybody’s—”

“Yes you
are,
” Crystal Beth said, advancing on her. “You lost fair and square.”

Vyra turned away from the onslaught, walked over and sat down on the arm of the easy chair, crossing her legs and arching her back as though a camera lurked. “Well, I wouldn’t have lost if you weren’t such a wuss,” she said to me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Yes, well, it’s not you that has to do all this work. It’s your fault—the least you could do is help.”

“And miss a chance to watch you? No way.”

Vyra flashed me a smile, taking it as a compliment. But she didn’t go back to work.

“I’ve gotta go talk to Herk for a bit,” I told Crystal Beth. “Let me know when Vyra’s done.”

“
I’ll
let you know,” Vyra said.

“Better put some clothes on first,” I told her. “It’s drafty down there.”

“
T
his is like in the joint, huh?” Herk said to me.

“The joint? This place is fucking Paradise compared to—”

“I didn’t mean . . . this,” Herk said, making a sweeping motion with his arm. “I mean . . . talking, like. Remember, in there? The Prof was always tryin’ to explain stuff. Like how to do crime good and all?”

“Sure.”

“Well, this is like that. You been explaining to me, right? How I gotta act and everything.”

“That’s right.”

“Only it’s different this time, Burke. Real different.” He took a deep breath, thought showing on his face, the heavy bone structures prominent under the flesh. The white flesh. Part of the passport he’d use to slip past a checkpoint very soon. “In there,” he said, “the trick was, like, not to come back, you know what I mean? We was
gonna
do crime, right? All of us. We was thieves. So we made plans. This time it’s different.”

“How?” I asked him.

“This deal here, it’s my last crime, Burke. I swear to fucking God. We pull this off, it works like you say, I’m done. And you know what else?”

“What, Herk?”

“This ain’t like before. This time I’m listening real good.”

“
Y
ou don’t like my shoes?” Vyra asked Hercules, standing at the foot of the stairs, one red spike heel on the floor, the other propped one step up, posing.

“I didn’t notice ’em,” Herk said, moving past me toward her, standing close. “That first time, the shoes was the first thing I seen. Coming down. This time I was looking at you.”

“At me?”

“At your eyes,” Herk told her. “I never seen a color like that.”

Vyra’s eyes were an everyday brown. She clasped her hands under her breasts, cocked her head, said “Really?”

“Yeah. They’re the same color as . . . Ah, you wouldn’t understand. It wouldn’t sound so good to you.”

“Tell me,” Vyra said, taking her foot down to stand in front of him, looking up from under her eyelashes.

“Peat moss,” Herk told her shyly. “You know peat moss? Like for growing roses? It’s so . . . rich. Rich and strong. That’s the color.”

On my climb upstairs, I figured out how the amorous fool got away with stuff like that. He meant it.

“
I
f I had lost the bet, I would have shined every last one of her damn shoes,” Crystal Beth said ruefully, waving her arms to indicate the pitiful cleaning job Vyra had done.

“I believe you,” I said.

“Ah, that’s Vyra.” She laughed. “She has no discipline.”

“And no purpose?”

“You’re not . . . making fun of me?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Sometimes people . . . tease. They don’t mean anything by it, but it still . . . hurts.”

“Crystal Beth?”

“What?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure, honey.”

“Go sit down. In that chair.”

She did it, a questioning look on her upturned face. I walked over to the bed, sat down myself. “Now get off your fat ass and come over here,” I told her.

She giggled, bounced over to where I was sitting.

“What?” she asked, laughter in her eyes.

“It’s never really the words,” I said softly. “Not the plain words. It’s what they mean. I make a crack about your fat ass, it doesn’t bother you, right?”

“Well, I
am
at my winter weight. . . .”

“Cut it out, girl. It didn’t bother you because you know I think you’re beautiful. If you
really
thought I was making a nasty crack about your weight, your feelings would be hurt, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” she said seriously.

“That’s the difference. I know it and you know it. And I would never rank on you about your purpose. You’re sure I think you have a great butt. . . . You’re not so sure I take you seriously. That’s it, right?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Right?”

“Yes,” she said, head down.

“I do, little bitch. I swear.”

“Oh, Burke. I know. . . . But you’re wrong about Vyra. She doesn’t have a purpose, but she’s looking for one. That’s more than most people ever do.”

“It’s more than I ever did,” I told her.

“Come here,” Crystal Beth said softly, opening her arms.

L
ightning tore the sky that night. It was about nine. Pansy and I were watching TV, some show that had a dog in the cast. One of those perky, cute ones that get to talk in a human voice. Like “Baywatch,” I guess. Across the bottom of the screen, a string of words crawled:
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING IN EFFECT IN SUSSEX AND UNION COUNTIES UNTIL 8:30 P.M. DETAILS AT 11:00
. Even Pansy sneered at it.

I found one of those trash-news shows. They had an interview with some money-for-pussy slut telling the world that she’d written her book about how her politician boyfriend liked to dress up like a French maid and clean her house because she wanted all her fellow Americans to be aware of what kind of man was making important decisions about their lives. The hardest trick that whore ever turned—coming up with a pious reason for selling secrets. Probably her pimp’s idea.

I didn’t like the idea of that politician much either. Who wants a government official dumb enough to trust a whore?

Then they did another “exposé” of strip bars invading middle-class communities. Devoted about three minutes to shots of anonymous thonged buttocks and beyond-genetics boobs, then about fifteen seconds to the winter-dressed picketers outside. I wondered, if surgeons could do brain implants, would anybody get them?

The show closed with some geek who writes incest-torture comic books shrieking that he’s the new John Peter Zenger.

Sure wished I had cable.

T
he cellular rang just before midnight.

“It’s me,” Crystal Beth said. “He just called.”

“He wants a meet now? Don’t say where on the phone. I’ll be—”

“No. Tomorrow afternoon. Can you—?”

“I’ll be there before twelve,” I promised her.

A
s I patted Pansy before I took off the next morning, I felt a tremor. Didn’t know how it was transmitted, from her to me or the other way around. But I felt it, and I trusted it.

So I stashed the Plymouth on Houston. Leaned up against a building to kill some time. Lit a smoke. A woman in a loden-green wool coat with fancy horn buttons down the front walked by, making a sour face at my cigarette. The after-trail smell from her perfume was enough to gag a coroner.

A few minutes later, I took the subway to Bleecker Street. I couldn’t set up a box for any meet with Pryce. Not a tight one, anyway. If he smelled it, he’d disappear. But I could make it hard for him to do the same to me.

On the subway I watched a man with his arms folded inside a dirty white sweatshirt, seeking the comfort of the straitjacket he remembered so fondly, his face going insanely serene when he found just the right position. Like the way a newly sprung convict moves into a one-room apartment even if he can afford more. There’s something soothing about the familiar, even if it’s ugly.

“
W
here’s he want to meet?” I asked Crystal Beth as soon as she let me inside.

“He didn’t say,” she answered. “He’s going to call at three and—”

I nodded, cutting her off. And felt myself relax. That’s what had been spooking me—no way a man like Pryce tells you the address of a meet fifteen hours in advance unless he has enough personnel to keep the place under watch all that time.

As we walked past the second floor, I heard a door open behind us. I didn’t turn around.

“Where’s Vyra lurking?” I asked when we got to her place.

“She doesn’t come every day. Sometimes I don’t see her for a week or so. It depends.”

“I wasn’t trying to get into your business,” I told her. “I just wanted to know if she was going to make one of her appearances.”

“You could, you know.”

“Could what?”

“Get into my business. You’re already in my . . . life. Don’t you want to know about . . . me and Vyra?”

“No.”

“It was my . . . idea, I guess,” she said, as though I’d answered the other way. “She’s not gay. Well, I guess I’m not either. She’s not bi—I was the first time she ever . . .”

“It doesn’t—”

“I love Vyra. She’s not what you think. What you
might
think, anyway—I don’t know what you think. She’s . . . lost. I wanted to help her find . . . herself, I guess. It’s a natural thing.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you didn’t ask, I guess. That’s the way I am. I don’t like secrets between . . . friends. But if anyone tries to
make
me tell . . .”

“I wouldn’t try and make you do anything,” I said.
No, little girl,
I thought,
you can’t be muscled into stuff. You have to be tricked.

“Vyra’s fun. You’d think I’d know more about fun than she would, the way we were raised. So different. But that’s not true. Maybe because I have a purpose . . . I don’t know. I have a pair of shoes like hers. She made me buy them. I mean, she paid for them, but she made me go with her and get them. You want to see them?”