Terminal (21 page)

N
othing makes people more outraged than being wrong. A few years back, I was in a bar, waiting for a man who said he had a job for me. Michelle was there, too—not only is she the perfect cover, the job was the kind of thing she’d be in on if we took it.

We were there early. Too early, as it turned out. Michelle was looking past my shoulder when she saw someone coming, signaled me it wasn’t our man but someone
she
knew.

The woman was big-city pretty, about as fresh-faced as a Kabuki dancer, indigo cocktail dress, black-pearl necklace, perfect manicure, no rings. She slipped into Michelle’s side of the booth, hip-checking her way into the spot facing me.

“Who is
this,
girl?”

“My brother,” Michelle said, sweetly. “My big brother.”

“Oh!” Meaning: she’d heard the stories. But she made a little gesture to summon the waiter, ordered a gimlet—“Absolut Mandarin, please”—and settled in.

I looked at my watch, telling Michelle we had a half hour, tops.

The girl—“If Michelle’s not going to introduce me, I guess I’ll have to do it myself. I’m Tommi”—was asking Michelle about people she hadn’t seen in a while. I tuned out. Until I heard Tommi say, “I voted for Nader. I mean, really, there was no difference between Gore and Bush, anyway.”

“I hope you remember that the
next
time you need an abortion, bitch!”

Michelle was still giving off steam long after Tommi jumped up and split like the place was about to be raided.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Michelle said. “It’s just that—”

I held one finger to my lips, nodded my head up and down to tell her I understood.

And I did. None of us can vote. We’re not citizens. But we can’t figure out how citizens can’t be bothered to. Or, worse, throw their vote away so they can say something they think is precious-special in their blogs.

Like the Prof always says: Nothing you can do about being born stupid, but
volunteering
for that job means you need a proctologist, pronto.

Sure, politicians are whores. But even in a whorehouse, you’d want to pick your own, right?

And certain whores, you pay them enough, they’ll do anything. Even the right thing. I still remember Michelle bursting into Mama’s holding a copy of the newspaper in her hand. She was always beautiful—that day, she was incandescent, glowing with joy.

“Look!” she yelled, too excited to say anything more.

We all gathered around, staring at the story she was pointing to. And felt it pulsate through us all…together. A law had just been passed that closed the “incest loophole” forever. Used to be, in New York, you fuck a neighbor’s baby, you were going
under
the jail. But if you fucked your
own
baby, you’d probably never see the inside of a criminal court. Maybe, if the case was
real
serious, they
might
bring you down to Family Court, that secret room where the predator gets “therapy” and the victim gets fucked. Again. By everyone.

Say some maggot sneaks into a ten-year-old girl’s bedroom one night and tells her to suck his cock or something terrible will happen. That’s Rape One, a Class B felony, with a twenty-five-year top. But if the maggot is smart enough to grow his own victim, and does the exact same thing to his ten-year-old daughter, then the DA could charge him with “incest.” And
that
was a Class E felony…meaning, even if he was convicted, they could still just put him on probation.

Happened all the time. Very clear message: Children are property. You can’t mess with your neighbor’s property—that’s holy—but you can do whatever you feel like doing with your own.

And now that beast was dead.

“How the hell did
this
happen?” I asked Michelle, still shaking inside because New York finally, after all those years, had called incest what it’s
always
been—rape.

“I know,” she said, as gleeful as a little girl with a new doll. “There’s this PAC—you know, political-action committee, like the NRA or the AARP or whatever—and all it cares about is protecting kids. It’s called the National Association to Protect Children, okay? Anyway, they put this huge package together…the whole works. I saw the boss of the New York chapter on TV—
gorgeous
Asian girl—and you could just tell, she was in this to the death. I don’t know how they got it done, but who cares?”

“Amen!” from the Prof.

I looked over at Max. He put both hands over his heart.

Mama came over. Read the story in silence. Then she stood up, walked to her register. When she came back, there was a wad of cash on the table.

“Yes!” Michelle said. And instead of crying about how this came too late for any of us, my steel-hearted little sister said, “Ante up! I saw their site on the Web: protect.org. It shows how to join. We can’t do that. But that machine runs on money, and I’ve got the deposit slip right here.”

She pulled a FedEx box out of her giant purse, already addressed. You’re not supposed to send cash that way, but our kind don’t play by your rules.

I
couldn’t wait much longer, but I couldn’t come up with a way in. A guy with “office help” like Reedy had wouldn’t answer his own door at home. Or even open his own mail.

Going backdoor didn’t appeal to me, which was why I rejected the Chicago guy’s offer to set it up so that one of the others would take my call. Too many ways that could go wrong. Reedy was the only one I had anything on to tie him into the killing, not counting Thornton’s nonexistent tape.

“A straight arrow” is what the Chicago guy had called Bender. Said he was leveraged heavy, too. I get him to take my call, first thing he does is run to Reedy.

I replayed my debriefing of Thornton in my head. All it did was remind me of questions I hadn’t asked. The plans those three punks had for that little girl, was that some sort of collective enterprise, or one leader and two followers? Was this a
folie à trois
crime, or the kind one of them would have done on his own?

If Reedy was the power man in a triad, using Bender as a messenger was all wrong. Prison taught me that. There’s killers who’ll draw the line at torture…but no torturer will ever draw the line at murder. If the whole plan had been Reedy’s, Bender’s family was going to be cashing life-insurance policies.

And if Bender was cash-poor, he wasn’t any good to me, anyway.

The other one—Henricks—was in Europe somewhere. Not relocated; on business. I only knew that because
The Wall Street Journal
had a little squib about him meeting with some big players in the Netherlands—neutral territory?—about putting together a consortium to run a natural-gas pipeline from the Russian icelands all the way down to a Y pipe. One channel to go to countries where they paid in euros, the other to one that paid in anything you wanted, from warplanes to harvested organs.

Reedy.

I thought of something Wesley told me once. “It’s easier to take a man’s life than his money. He don’t always carry his money around with him, but you can put the crosshairs on him wherever he goes.”

I
was walking down lower Fifth, between the New School and the Arch, when I heard a cell phone go off. Knew it wasn’t mine—that one is always set to “vibrate” when I’m working.

I saw a homeless guy, sitting on an old army blanket, his back to a building, holding a sign,
THE VA THREW ME OUT!
, hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard, a dented coffee can in front of him for contributions. He furtively looked both ways, reached inside his olive-drab jacket with a name stenciled on a piece of tape over his heart, and pulled out a fold-flat cell.

“I’m at
work,
bitch!” I heard him growl as I passed by.

“F
eel anything, Gate?”

“Just that it’s wrong, boss.”

“Wrong, like in…off?”

“When is a fucking skinner
not
‘off,’ man?” Gateman half snarled. “I haven’t looked at the whole thing, just what the kid brought down for me, but…I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I don’t know if I’m saying anything,” I admitted. “Just feeling it.”

“This all came out of some evidence locker?”

“Yeah.”

“Cops,” Gateman said. Saying it all. There could be pieces missing. Pieces we’d never see.

“I think they went for it, Gate.”

“I kinda think they did, too, boss.”

“Yeah?” I said, frankly curious. “How come?”

“Nobody ever got jugged, right? Girl like that, crime like that,
town
like that, that’s heavy pressure. If they weren’t really looking to do the right thing, how hard could it be to come up with a George Whitmore?”

I slapped Gateman’s held-out palm; hard, signifying complete agreement. The “Career Girl Murders” had shocked New York back in 1963. Daughters of the rich and famous, found raped and murdered in their own apartment. A headline story, so big that it pushed the surrender of a gutter thug who had helped kill two cops in a bar for the fun of it down to the second lead. That murder had been in Jersey, but the punk had given himself up in New York, where he and his partner had run to, looking for a place to disappear. His partner had made the other choice: they put enough bullets into him to stock a lead mine.

Months went by before some cop got a mentally impaired black man named George Whitmore to confess to the Career Girl Murders. Big press conference. Medals and promotions. But it only took a few more months for some investigative reporters to figure out Whitmore couldn’t have done it. We’re not talking about CSI stuff here—Whitmore was in another state at the exact time the sex murders were taking place. The only “evidence” was his confession, which was about as believable as a used-car salesman deep into a nasty loan shark over his gambling debts telling you the odometer was accurate.

But just in time—before the papers started calling for deep investigations into “police practices”—they caught the “right” guy, a dope-fiend burglar named Robles.

Well, they didn’t actually “catch” him. What happened was that a three-time felony loser got popped for a homicide of another street-level dealer. This was when they still had the electric chair in Sing Sing, and this guy knew he was a prime candidate. He told the law that Robles had confessed to
him,
and he wanted to trade. Told a great story, about bloody clothes and a knife he had disposed of. Did such a great job of it that nobody could ever find them. So the cops wired him
and
his apartment, and waited for Robles to admit everything.

When they got tired of waiting, they arrested Robles. A few months later, New York abolished the death penalty. By then, it was such common knowledge that Whitmore had been framed, people finally realized an innocent man could be executed. The abolition vote wasn’t even close.

Robles was convicted. Nobody down here thinks he did it, either. But, more than forty years later, he’s still up in Attica.

Supposedly, he finally “admitted the whole thing.” None of us bought that one, either. Oh, we believe he said it, but we know who he said it
to
—the Parole Board. By then, Robles had been jugged for at least twenty years, and he’d learned the convict’s Three “R”s for dealing with the Parole Board: Remorse. Repent. Release. If you don’t say the first word, nobody even listens to the rest.

Where I come from, the cops always get their man. Whether it’s
the
man isn’t always top priority.

Anyone who thinks there’s only one law in this city is a tourist. Whitmore had been convicted of other crimes—all on “confessions”—so the man who became district attorney of Brooklyn, Eugene Gold himself, personally petitioned the court for the poor bastard’s immediate release. I still remember reading how Gold said the evidence “renders the case so weak that any possibility of conviction is totally negated.”

Years later, Eugene Gold—yeah, the same one—gets charged with aggravated rape of a child, a ten-year-old girl. Happened in Nashville, when he was attending a convention. The victim was a prosecutor’s daughter. Gold pleaded guilty to “fondling,” and the court gave him “probation and treatment.” He was on the next plane to Israel.

I remember that one because I showed the paper to the Mole. Got a blank stare for my efforts.

Yeah. Citizens read the news. But we know the truth.

“D
ad wants to see you,” Terry greeted me as I walked into my place.

“So why didn’t he just—?”

“Just you,” the kid said, not happy about it.

“What’s with the mope, dope?” the Prof asked him, not looking real happy himself.

“I can’t say anything to Mom.”

“There are things I could never tell my mother, mahn,” Clarence put in, trying to smooth things.

“Did your
father
ever tell you that?” Terry shot back.

“You know I didn’t have no—”

“But I do,” Terry said fiercely. “A mother
and
a father. Never once did my dad tell me not to say anything about…anything. Ever.”

Max touched his heart, made the sign for “child.” Pointed at the daughter who was not there, put his finger to his lips. Nodded forcefully. Meaning: Sometimes, it’s better to keep things from your mother. And he’d asked his beloved Flower to do that himself.

None of this was doing Terry any good.

My turn. “What happens if Michelle finds out I’m going to meet the Mole, kid?”

“She’d have to…Ah, I’m just stupid!”

“The day
you
stupid is the day I join the Klan,” the Prof scoffed. “Listen to Burke, boy. He knows the road.”

“A man’s entitled to his privacy,” I said, in a just-the-facts voice. “So is a woman. You give up that in one of two ways. Voluntarily—that’s why you’re in my house; because
I
gave you the address—or when they take it from you. Those of us who had it taken, we know how precious it is. The Mole not wanting Michelle to know something, that does
not
mean he’s keeping secrets from her, understand?”

“I…guess so,” said the young man, still scared. Even the word “secret” made him tremble in places he wished he didn’t have. But he knew his secrets weren’t secrets to me, so he listened. And trusted.

“Can you even
imagine
the Mole getting some on the side?”

This time, the kid finally laughed. “Mom would—”

“And dig his fool ass up and do it all over again,” the Prof confirmed.

“This isn’t them, Terry,” I told him. “It’s something between me and the Mole. Something we’ve had working for a while.”

“About this?” the kid said, waving his hand to indicate the big room, papered with the photocopies of the police file on the rape-murder of a little girl that happened way before Terry had been born.

“Yes,” I said, lying now. The Mole had already turned over everything. I’d done my part, and his people had done theirs. So I, for real, didn’t know what he wanted. But making sure Michelle didn’t get involved meant it was something that could end ugly.

“But Mom already knows about—”

“Your mother doesn’t know it all,” I said, very quietly. “A man has the right to protect his wife. That’s his
job,
okay?”

“And a good son respects his father,” Clarence added.

Not a single person in that room thought he was talking about bloodlines.

“I’ll drive you,” Terry said.