Tell No One (20 page)

“This way,” Tyrese said.

We started walking through the wounded. Brutus led. The dearly reclined parted for him as though he were Moses. I fell in behind Tyrese. The ends of pipes would light up, popping through the darkness. It reminded me of going to the Barnum and Bailey circus as a kid and twirling those tiny flashlights around in the dark. That was what this looked like. I saw dark. I saw shadows. I saw the flashes of light.

No music played. No one seemed to talk much either. I heard a hum. I heard the wet sucking sound of the pipes. Shrieks pierced the air every once in a while, the sound not quite human.

I also heard groaning. People were performing the lewdest of sex acts, out in the open, no shame, no attempt at privacy.

One particular sight—I’ll spare you the details—made me pull up in horror. Tyrese watched my expression with something close to amusement.

“They run out of money, they trade this”—Tyrese pointed—“for hits.”

The bile worked its way into my mouth. I turned to him. He shrugged.

“Commerce, Doc. Makes the world go round.”

Tyrese and Brutus kept walking. I staggered alongside. Most of the interior walls had crumbled to the ground. People—old, young, black, white, men, women—hung everywhere, spineless, flopped over like Dali clocks.

“Are you a crackhead, Tyrese?” I said.

“Used to be. Got hooked when I was sixteen.”

“How did you stop?”

Tyrese smiled. “You see my man Brutus?”

“Hard to miss him.”

“I told him I’d give him a thousand dollars for every week I stayed clean. Brutus moved in with me.”

I nodded. That sounded far more effective than a week with Betty Ford.

Brutus opened a door. This room, while not exactly well appointed, at least had tables and chairs, even lights and a refrigerator. I noticed a portable generator in the corner.

Tyrese and I stepped inside. Brutus closed the door and stayed in the corridor. We were left alone.

“Welcome to my office,” Tyrese said.

“Does Brutus still help you stay off the junk?”

He shook his head. “Nah, TJ does that now. You know what I’m saying?”

I did. “And you don’t have a problem with what you do here?”

“I got lots of problems, Doc.” Tyrese sat down and invited me to do the same. His eyes flashed at me, and I didn’t like what I saw in them. “I ain’t one of the good guys.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I changed subjects.
“I have to get down to Washington Square Park by five o’clock.”

He leaned back. “Tell me what’s up.”

“It’s a long story.”

Tyrese took out a blunt blade and started cleaning his nails. “My kid gets sick, I go to the expert, right?”

I nodded.

“You in trouble with the law, you should do likewise.”

“That’s some analogy.”

“Something bad’s happening with you, Doc.” He spread his arms. “Bad is my world. I’m the best tour guide there is.”

So I told him the story. Almost all of it. He nodded a lot, but I doubted he believed me when I said I had nothing to do with the murders. I doubted he cared either.

“Okay,” he said when I finished, “let’s get you ready. Then we need to talk about something else.”

“What?”

Tyrese did not answer. He moved to what looked like a reinforced metal locker in the corner. He unlocked it with a key, leaned inside, and withdrew a gun.

“Glock, baby, Glock,” he said, handing me the gun. I stiffened. An image of black and blood flashed in my mind and quickly fled; I didn’t chase it. It had been a long time. I reached out and plucked the gun with two fingers, as though it might be hot. “Gun of champions,” he added.

I was going to refuse it, but that would be stupid. They already had me on suspicion of two murders, assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and probably a bunch of stuff for fleeing from the law. What’s a concealed-weapon charge on top of all that?

“It’s loaded,” he said.

“Is there a safety or something?”

“Not anymore.”

“Oh,” I said. I slowly turned it over and over, remembering the last time I held a weapon in my hand. It felt good, holding a gun again. Something about the weight, I guessed. I liked the texture, the cold of the steel, the way it fit perfectly in my palm, the heft. I didn’t like that I liked it.

“Take this too.” He handed me what looked like a cell phone.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Tyrese frowned. “What it look like? A cell phone. But it’s got a stolen number. Can’t be traced back to you, see?”

I nodded, feeling very much out of my element.

“Got a bathroom behind that door,” Tyrese said, gesturing to my right. “No shower but there’s a bath. Wash your smelly ass off. I’ll get you some fresh clothes. Then Brutus and me, we’ll get you down to Washington Square.”

“You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about.”

“After you get dressed,” Tyrese said. “We’ll talk then.”

E
ric Wu stared at the sprawling tree. His face was serene, his chin tilted up slightly.

“Eric?” The voice belonged to Larry Gandle.

Wu did not turn around. “Do you know what this tree is called?” he asked.

“No.”

“The Hangman’s Elm.”

“Charming.”

Wu smiled. “Some historians believe that during the eighteenth century, this park was used for public executions.”

“That’s great, Eric.”

“Yeah.”

Two shirtless men whipped by on Rollerblades. A boom box played Jefferson Airplane. Washington Square Park—named, not surprisingly, for George Washington—was one of those places that tried to cling to the sixties though the grip kept slipping.
There were usually protestors of some sort, but they looked more like actors in a nostalgic revival than genuine revolutionaries. Street performers took the stage with a little too much finesse. The homeless were the type of colorful that felt somehow contrived.

“You sure we have this place covered?” Gandle asked.

Wu nodded, still facing the tree. “Six men. Plus the two in the van.”

Gandle looked behind him. The van was white with a magnetic sign reading B&T Paint and a phone number and a cute logo of a guy who looked a lot like the Monopoly man holding a ladder and a paintbrush. If asked to describe the van, witnesses would remember, if anything at all, the name of the paint company and maybe the phone number.

Neither existed.

The van was double-parked. In Manhattan, a legally parked work van would be more apt to draw suspicion than one that was double-parked. Still, they kept their eye out. If a police officer approached, they would drive away. They would take the van to a lot on Lafayette Street. They would change license plates and magnetic signs. They would then return.

“You should go back to the van,” Wu said.

“Do you think Beck will even make it?”

“Doubt it,” Wu said.

“I figured getting him arrested would draw her out,” Gandle said. “I didn’t figure that he’d have a meet set up.”

One of their operatives—the curly-haired man who’d worn sweat pants at Kinko’s last night—had seen the message pop up on the Kinko’s computer. But by the time he relayed the message, Wu had already planted the evidence at Beck’s house.

No matter. It would work out.

“We have to grab them both, but she’s the priority,” Gandle said. “Worse comes to worst, we kill them. But it would be best to have them alive. So we can find out what they know.”

Wu did not respond. He was still staring at the tree.

“Eric?”

“They hung my mother from a tree like this,” Wu said.

Gandle wasn’t sure how to respond, so he settled for “I’m sorry.”

“They thought she was a spy. Six men stripped her naked and took a bullwhip to her. They lashed her for hours. Everywhere. Even the flesh on her face was ripped open. She was conscious the whole time. She kept screaming. It took a long time for her to die.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gandle said softly.

“When they were done, they hung her on a huge tree.” He pointed to the Hangman’s Elm. “One just like this. It was supposed to be a lesson, of course. So no one else would spy. But birds and animals got to her. Two days later, there were only bones left on that tree.”

Wu put the Walkman back on his ears. He turned away from the tree. “You really should get out of sight,” he told Gandle.

Larry had trouble wresting his eyes from the massive elm, but he managed to nod and go on his way.

I
put on a pair of black jeans with a waist the approximate circumference of a truck tire. I folded over the slack and tightened the belt. The black White Sox’s uniform shirt fit like a muumuu. The black baseball cap—it had some logo on it I didn’t recognize—already had the bill broken in for me. Tyrese also gave me a pair of the same up-yours sunglasses Brutus favored.

Tyrese almost laughed when I came out of the bathroom. “You look good, Doc.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is
phat.
”

He chuckled and shook his head. “White people.” Then his face grew serious. He slid some stapled sheets of paper toward me. I picked it up. On top it read Last Will and Testament. I looked the question at him.

“Been meaning to talk to you about this,” Tyrese said.

“About your will?”

“I got two more years on my plan.”

“What plan?”

“I do this two more years, I got enough money to get TJ out of here. I figure I got maybe sixty-forty chance of making it.”

“What do you mean, making it?”

Tyrese’s eyes locked on mine. “You know.”

I did know. He meant surviving. “Where will you go?”

He handed me a postcard. The scene was sun, blue water, palm trees. The postcard was crinkled from too much handling. “Down in Florida,” he said with a soft lilt in his voice. “I know this place. It’s quiet. Gotta pool and good schools. Nobody to start wondering where I got my money, you know what I’m saying?”

I handed him back the picture. “I don’t understand what I have to do with this.”

“This”—he held up the photograph—“is the plan if the sixty percent happens. That”—he pointed to the will—“that’s if the forty plays out.”

I told him that I still didn’t understand.

“I went downtown six months ago, you know what I’m saying. Got a fancy lawyer. Cost me two grand for a coupla hours with him. His name is Joel Marcus. If I die, you have to go see him. You the executor of my will. I got some papers locked up. They’ll tell you where the money is.”

“Why me?”

“You care about my boy.”

“What about Latisha?”

He scoffed. “She a woman, Doc. Soon as I hit the pavement, she be looking for another cock, you know what I’m saying? Probably get knocked up again. Maybe
get back on the stuff.” He sat back and folded his arms. “Can’t trust women, Doc. You should know that.”

“She’s TJ’s mother.”

“Right.”

“She loves him.”

“Yeah, I know that. But she just a woman, you know what I’m saying? You give her this kind of cash, she’ll blow it in a day. That’s why I set up some trust funds and shit. You the executor. She want money for TJ, you have to approve it. You and this Joel Marcus.”

I would have argued that it was sexist and that he was a Neanderthal, but this hardly seemed the time. I shifted in the chair and looked at him. Tyrese was maybe twenty-five years old. I had seen so many like him. I had always lumped them into a single entity, blurring their faces into a dark mass of bad. “Tyrese?”

He looked at me.

“Leave now.”

He frowned.

“Use the money you have. Get a job down in Florida. I’ll lend you more if you need it. But take your family and go now.”

He shook his head.

“Tyrese?”

He stood up. “Come on, Doc. We best get going.”

“We’re still looking for him.”

Lance Fein fumed, his waxy face almost dripping. Dimonte chewed. Krinsky took notes. Stone hitched up his pants.

Carlson was distracted, bent over a fax that had just come through in the car.

“What about the gunshots?” Lance Fein snapped.

The uniformed officer—Agent Carlson hadn’t bothered learning his name—shrugged. “Nobody knows anything. I think they were probably unrelated.”

“Unrelated?” Fein shrieked. “What kind of incompetent idiot are you, Benny? They were running down the street yelling about a white guy.”

“Well, no one knows nothing now.”

“Lean on them,” Fein said. “Lean on them hard. I mean, for crying out loud, how the hell does a guy like this escape, huh?”

“We’ll get him.”

Stone tapped Carlson on the shoulder. “What’s up, Nick?”

Carlson frowned at the printout. He didn’t speak. He was a neat man, orderly to the point of obsessive-compulsive. He washed his hands too much. He often locked and unlocked his door a dozen times before leaving the house. He stared some more because something here just did not mesh.

“Nick?”

Carlson turned toward him. “The thirty-eight we found in Sarah Goodhart’s safety-deposit box.”

“The one the key on the body led us to?”

“Right.”

“What about it?” Stone asked.

Carlson kept frowning. “There’s lots of holes here.”

“Holes?”

“First off,” Carlson continued, “we assume the Sarah Goodhart safety-deposit box was Elizabeth Beck’s, right?”

“Right.”

“But someone’s paid the bill for the box every year for the past eight years,” Carlson said. “Elizabeth Beck is dead. Dead women pay no tabs.”

“Her father maybe. I think he knows more than he’s letting on.”

Carlson didn’t like it. “How about those listening devices we found at Beck’s house? What’s the deal there?”

“I don’t know,” Stone replied with a shrug. “Maybe someone else in the department suspected him too.”

“We’d have heard by now. And this report on that thirty-eight we found in the box.” He motioned toward it. “You see what the ATF came back with?”

“No.”

“Bulletproof had no hits, but that’s not surprising since the data doesn’t go back eight years anyway.” Bulletproof, a bullet-analyzing module used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was used to link data from past crimes with more recently discovered firearms. “But the NTC got a hit.” NTC stood for the National Tracing Center. “Guess who the last registered owner was.”