The Finder: A Novel (10 page)

And maybe Bill would do this. But not
yet.
He had to fix his little huge problem with the hedge fund. He had leveraged his flagship,
Martz New Century Partners Fund, into a goddamn $352 million position on Good Pharma and needed to unwind the position before something bad happened. He no longer cared whether he made money; he just wanted out even, or at worst with just a haircut. Lose $20, $30 million, okay, he could live with that, make it up elsewhere. That kind of money could be hidden from the investors easily enough. But he was down $107 million in just over thirty days on the position, and against the prudent and obvious advice of his young, high-priced princelings, he had doubled the bet late, thinking the stock would bounce up, but it had only drifted down further. The kind of error an amateur made. Pure gambling. Now they were whispering about him, he knew it, talking behind his back, saying
Big Bill is sucking on a land mine right now . . . Big Bill's lost his fastball . . .
Something was wrong with Good Pharma and somebody knew what it was. And wasn't telling Bill Martz. Somebody like that slick fuckwad Tom Reilly. I'm too old to be worrying about being vulnerable to the fate of one small bullshit drug company, he told himself. Too old, too rich, and too smart. Or certainly one would think so, except that he'd taken an unnaturally large position in Good Pharma, expecting that it would give him a fat boost by year's end. All his researchers had reported it was on the verge, great stuff in the pipeline, synthetic skin, cartilage pills, things like that.

Connie put his eggs down. "I put in that dried red pepper we found in Mexico last winter."

"Hmm. Thank you, these look great."

She let her hand linger on his shoulder. "I like old rich bums, by the way, just to finish the conversation."

"What about young rich bums?"

"Not charming enough."

He ate with gusto. At least he hadn't lost his appetite. When he paused, he looked up and said, "Seriously, Connie. I say this all the time but I am serious."

She was waiting for him. "You say
that
all the time, too. I'm
very
happy, Bill."

"That's because you are wasting all your maternal energies on a sixty-nine-year old baby. I've had four children. I know how great they are. A few more years go by you can't have kids and I'm out there at the wheelchair showroom."

She smiled, but her eyes were wet. "Please, Billy, this does kind of hurt me when you say this."

"I'm sorry."

"It makes me happy to be with you. Maybe I'm not so wrapped up in the future like you are."

"Probably because you have a lot more of it."

She looked at him straight. "Yes, I do. But so?"

He went back to his eggs. It was an old conversation. Not an untrue conversation but unsolvable, almost comfortable in its familiarity.

"What's really bothering you, Bill?"

He tasted the coffee. Perfect. "Bothering me? I'm bothered by the fact that I've taken a huge bite out of Good Pharma, expecting it to be a takeover candidate. I thought it was cheap. No, not cheap, but reasonable. They have half a dozen drugs in the pipeline. Some will bomb but we think two are huge. But it's too early to get good information yet. We just have inklings. And the market is craving new products. You get the right new product, you get a new demand, okay? People want something that never existed before! I know the number-two guy, Tom Reilly. He's not the CEO but he's the guy who knows what's really going on. Real slick fuckwad, let me tell you. Good Pharma's stock is down thirty-seven percent in the last few weeks. I want to know why. I've asked, and nobody can tell me or will tell me."

"Why don't you ask this Tom Reilly?"

"I have."

"Well?"

"He's avoiding me. Hiding in the weeds."

"So?"

"I'm starting to make his life difficult. I had him followed to a Yankees game two nights ago and messed with his head. Sent him a little message from old Billy-boy."

"Has he called you?"

"No, he's scared. I expected him to call me after the game, but he didn't."

Connie frowned at him, pressing her breasts forward aggressively. "You need to kick some ass, sounds like."

"Think so?" It excited him to hear her say it.

"You're
good
at that, Bill."

"I can be."

"No, you listen to me," she told him. "Nobody fucks with Billy Martz, right? I've heard you say this to me a thousand times. You're tougher, you're smarter, and you're definitely meaner. You are a
mean
old bastard, Bill! Get that information out of him so that you can fix the problem. You hear me, Bill? Frankly I don't think you've really given it much effort yet."

He nodded. "I could turn up the heat."

"You could?" she said, her voice disgusted.

"I
will
turn up the heat. I'll roast the asshole."

"Then go
do
it, Bill, and stop telling me how fucking miserable I am!" His beautiful wife put her hands on her hips and looked ferociously at him, and in that moment they both knew, again, happily, why he had married her.

She was in more danger
than he realized. Ray put down the phone. One of his father's old friends from the job, Detective Pete Blake, now on the brink of retirement himself, had filled Ray in on the murder of the two Mexican girls. A loner who'd never married, Blake used to come to the house for Thanksgiving dinners, throw a football in the alley with Ray while his father raked leaves before going inside for the feast Ray's mother had cooked. "Yeah, we found them laid out on the parking lot," Blake had said. "Couple of days ago. Aerosol mace dispenser on the pavement. Somebody filled the car with sewage. The guys had to have a pump-out truck, some kind of vehicle that holds septic waste."

"I thought the whole city is tied in to the sewers."

"It is, but people still need pump-outs when their pipes are clogged or break. Plus you got some old septic tanks still in operation here and there."

"So you look for one of these trucks?"

"The thing of it is that the state Department of Environmental Protection shows computer records for 918 such vehicles licensed to operate in Brooklyn, Queens, and western Suffolk County. Take a long time to knock all those out. Course, the truck could be unlicensed, too, maybe even be from Jersey or north of the city. So maybe it's smarter to work it through the girls. They'd been drowned before being pulled out of their car. Smart way to kill somebody in some respects. There's no DNA. I mean, there's too much DNA, all of it contaminated. Plus
we don't really know who these Mexican girls were. They had ID but it was all fake, fake green cards, everything. No driver's license, of course. No bank accounts, used one of those check-cashing places, probably. Telephone is in the name of somebody who doesn't live there anymore, utility bills paid by money order. It's like that with all these people. Might be a drug thing, girls smoked a bit, there were boyfriends in the trade. Lots of Mexicans selling drugs in Brooklyn these days. We know who some of them are. The thing of it is that all these organizations are always fighting for turf, showing how fricking vicious they can be. The Albanians are very tough. So are the Salvadoran kids. Last month we had a dead guy, they put him through a band saw, put the top half on a pole like some kinda Mexican scarecrow. So killing a couple of wetback girlfriends is good advertising. Your girlfriends are shit, you are nobody—this is the way these people think. We found traces of stuff in the trunk of the car, glove compartment. Car is still drying, we'll see if there's anything else. We got people to talk to, snitches, rats, nice people like that."

"Didn't see it in the news."

"Didn't nobody tell you, Ray?"

"What?"

"There's no news in Brooklyn. You want news? Commit your crimes in Manhattan, and try to do it south of, like, Ninety-sixth Street. No, actually we kept it quiet, to help us with any informants. One of the tabloids got it but ran it small. Anyway, someone broke the two front side windows with a chunk of asphalt to open the doors, failed to save the girls, then disappeared. That means the car was locked from the inside, and that means that either the girls were already incapacitated or were trapped in the car and someone locked the doors after they were incapacitated. There was a wine bottle in the car, maybe they had passed out, we don't have complete toxicology and autopsy body weight back yet, which is disgraceful, if you ask me." Blake made a coffee-sipping sound. "Still too hot. Anyway, whoever tried to save them is probably too scared to get involved, and who could blame them? Rain fell pretty steadily on the bodies for maybe an hour, washed out the car like that." Blake paused, and when his voice came
back, it was professionally softer, a little slower, slipping in a question. "Why you interested, anyway?"

Ray wasn't going to mention his evening with Chen and his men—not yet, anyway. "My old girlfriend works at the same company they did. I think she saw them earlier that night."

"Then we might want to talk to her."

"That makes two of us. She's not around, if you know what I mean."

"You find her, let me know. She's a person of interest. What's her name?"

"Jin Li."

"Chinese? Real Chinese?"

"Yes." Ray knew this fact would stick in Blake's brain.

"Off the boat, I mean?"

"So to speak." He wanted to change the topic. "So how do you go after the guys who did it?"

"Tough—nobody saw nothing, so far, anyway. Right before dawn. We'll work the drugs, see what we get. Trucks can't go on the Belt Parkway legally, but if it did, we got cameras. Sometimes they work, sometimes they didn't get serviced. Course, if you know the side roads you don't have to take the Belt." Blake barked a laugh. "Your father'd be tearing up the parking lot drains, looking for whatever he could find."

"You do that?"

"Not yet. We can't go into the drains."

"Why?"

"Federal wetlands. That's a tide zone. Environmental regulations. We screw up the drains, then we can pollute the ocean, something like that."

Blake was fastidious, Ray remembered, but also methodical. He collected New York subway memorabilia: hats, badges, uniforms, tokens, subway signs, regulation booklets, all displayed in frames or binders. He had a copy of almost every New York City subway map ever published, quite an accomplishment considering the subway had opened in 1904, its maps updated every year or two as the system grew and the original private subway companies consolidated into the Metropolitan
Transit Authority. He'd seen Blake's collection: each document was kept in an archival Mylar folder and thoroughly cataloged. A weird pursuit for a middle-aged man. Maybe not so strange for a detective who lived by himself. "That's the reason, the ocean?"

"Nah, the real reason is that if we tear up that pipe we got a big traffic problem in that parking lot this summer. People can't park, you got flooding, a mess. Also, no cop is ever going to crawl up a drainpipe stuffed with sewage, especially since it will all wash out into the gulley there anyway." Blake gave a long sigh. "How's your dad doing?"

"Not too good, Pete."

"You want me to come around, say hello?"

"He might like that."

"Honest with you, he told me he was dying and that he was saying good-bye to me. This was like three weeks ago."

"Drive by in a couple of days. Mornings are better."

"You got it."

After the call, Ray stared at an information sheet that came with the Dilaudid going into his father's arm. He'd grabbed it when the nurse wasn't looking. Effects of Dilaudid to the general and central nervous systems, said the flyer, include "sedation, drowsiness, mental clouding, lethargy, impairment of mental and physical performance, anxiety, fear, dizziness, psychic dependence, mood changes (nervousness, apprehension, depression, floating feelings, dreams), light-headedness, weakness, headache, agitation, tremor, uncoordinated muscle movements, muscle rigidity, paresthesia, muscle tremor, blurred vision, nystagmus, diplopia and miosis, transient hallucinations and disorientation, visual disturbances, insomnia, sweating, flushing, dysphoria, euphoria and increased intracranial pressure."

I'm going to lose him to drugs faster than the cancer, Ray thought, heading toward his father's bed. But of course Dilaudid was amazing stuff; he'd received it himself, to help with the pain of his stomach burn and the skin grafts. The drug made you feel warm and heavy, removed all hunger and pain. Removed sexual desire, too. Eight times more potent than real morphine. People called it "drugstore heroin." He wouldn't mind sampling a tiny bit again sometime, either.

In the living room, his father lay in his hospital bed, now a small body under the sheet, his eyes shut, chest rising and falling faster than was natural. It was his heart working hard at the dying. Ray nodded at the morning shift nurse, a young woman named Wendy, and she left the room.

"Hey, Dad," he said.

His father opened his eyes, blinked, shifted his gaze toward Ray.

"I'm sorry you suffered so much last night."

His father shrugged. "Not suffering now," he whispered. "Fine now."