Blood Ties (22 page)

“Okay, okay. What is it?”

“Trevor called me this morning with more prints. This is from the furniture, not the beer cans. He really, really, wants to date my sister.”

“I'm beginning to want to meet her myself.”

“Let's not go there.”

“She wouldn't date an old man?”

“Actually, she'd probably think you're cute. She's very weird.”

“I'm sure you didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

“Of course not,” she said innocently. “Anyway: There's lots unidentified, and there are some of the same people I gave you yesterday, from the beer cans. Then there's Max White and Marshall Nelligan. They're sophomores. The bogus ones are the man next door, the cleaning lady, Tory's cousin Heather, and Paul Niebuhr.”

“This is sad,” I said, “but Jim Sullivan beat you to at least part of that, too.”

“Sullivan's still speaking to you?”

“I have charms that aren't apparent.”

“For sure. Actually,” she admitted, “Trevor says he likes you.”

“Trevor doesn't even know me.”

A theatrical sigh. “You really did go to school with my father, didn't you? Wait, I know, the School of Hard Knocks. Are all sources like you?”

“Most are worse. It's our moment of glory. We like to milk it. But tell me why this information is bogus.”

“Because those people weren't at the party.”

“The guy next door and the cleaning lady I can see. But how do you know the cousin and Paul Niebuhr weren't there?”

“Heather Wesley lives in Cincinnati. Last time she visited was over the summer. If her fingerprints were there, it just means the cleaning lady was goofing off. And Paul Niebuhr, no way.”

“He wouldn't have been invited?”

“What part of ‘no way' don't you understand?”

“What if he found out about it and just came?”

“To a jock party? No one would've let him in. They'd have poured beer in his pants and pushed him down the porch steps. You're talking about a guy Randy Macpherson locked in a locker once.”

“So his prints must have been there from some other time?”

“Very
good
. And that means some of the others may be bogus, too, except if they're actually on the beer cans.”

“Or the broken dishes. Well, that's certainly helpful.”

“And now for me you have . . . ?”

“My phone number, for your sister.”

“I have your phone number already. And you'd have to, like, fight a duel with Trevor.”

I gave Stacie the same promise I'd given her before, hung up, paid for breakfast. Lydia and I walked out into the gray day, and I told her what Stacie had said.

“Are you going to tell Sullivan?”

“Tell him what? That Stacie Phillips has a crystal ball about who really was and wasn't at the party, based on the Warrenstown High pecking order? Besides,” I said, “she's passing me information she's not supposed to have. Sullivan would be pissed at me, Stacie might get in trouble, and Trevor could lose his job.”

“And all because Trevor wants to go out with Stacie's sister. Men are so amazing.”

“You're saying you wouldn't jeopardize your career for a date?”

“I probably wouldn't even jeopardize my evening.”

“It's that aloofness,” I said, “that elegant disdain, that unapproachability, that makes men fall at your feet as numerous as leaves from the autumn trees.”

She toed a clump of leaves tangled with newspaper and cigarette butts, wet with gutter water, as we stepped from the curb.

“Yes,” she said, “and mostly, just as attractive.”

twelve

The sun never showed that morning, so I had no real sense of the passing of time. In diffuse gray light that was always the same, Lydia and I covered the places where kids were. We walked past the flashing colors and disorienting, rushing perspectives of arcade video screens, bought coffee for thin, dispirited girls in greasy Alphabet City diners near the squats they lived in. We interrupted loud crowds of boys impressing each other in the skateboard corners of city parks or the plazas of office buildings where signs told you skateboarding was among the many things not allowed. We talked to kids over the blasting bass beat of CDs in Tower Records and Virgin Megastore, on windy street corners near Cooper Union and NYU and Columbia. We didn't find Gary in any of those places; we weren't expecting to. What we hoped for was someone who'd seen him, or someone who would; someone who'd tell him his uncle was looking for him, that it was safe to come in.

We both had our phones with us and neither of them rang; we each handed out flyers and got no results. The light was the same and the guarded faces of the kids were the same and the answer was always the same. No, don't know him. He in trouble? Sure, if I see him. Hey, man, got a cigarette?

Once or twice, we got a variation on the answer: Yeah, some cop was here already, asking about him. But from there, the answer always went back to, No, sorry, don't know him.

Finally, in Union Square, Lydia stood at the top of the curved steps looking out over Fourteenth Street and announced, “I'm tired. I'm cold. I'm hungry.”

I climbed the steps to stand beside her, checked my watch. “It's a quarter to two.”

“There,” she said, as if my statement had proved hers.

“Okay,” I said. I pointed at a restaurant called Hong Kong Bowl, a block away. “Noodles?”

“Sure.”

“And then let's go back to Queens. It'll be about the same time your volunteer with the van saw Gary yesterday. Maybe some of the same people will be around.”

We went and ate steaming big bowls of noodle soup, mine with beef, hers with shrimp and vegetables, and then we did go to Queens, though, as it turned out, for a different reason.

As we were chasing the last of the noodles around in our bowls, my cell phone rang. I put down my chopsticks, flipped the phone open, said, “Smith,” and heard, “Linus. Got something, dude.”

“What's that?”

“Chill, because it's not your boy and it's not Premador. But I got a place where he went.”

“Who?”

“Like,
Premador
, dude. On one of his boards, he posted. He had an appointment. Dude calling himself Sting Ray. Yesterday.”

“Who's Sting Ray?”

“I don't know who. But Premador, he was all excited, he was telling everyone on the board that Sting Ray, he has all good stuff, he's gonna hook him up. And I remembered I heard that name before. In your boy's e-mail.”

“Gary's?”

“Premador said, meet me at this place, it's like beaucoup cool, and your boy said no thanks. But, see, he told him the address. The guy, the Sting Ray guy, he's in Queens someplace.”

Electricity sizzled up my spine. Linus gave me the Queens someplace address.

It was two blocks from where the One to One volunteer had seen Gary, yesterday.

“Subway,” I said to Lydia as we gathered ourselves up, dropped cash on the table. “It's right here.”

Twenty minutes later we were back where we'd been last night, only this time we came pounding down the steel stairs from one of the train platforms that shadowed the streets. Pigeons circled and reroosted; a car horn blasted as I crossed the street on the cusp of a changing light. I walked like a man in a hurry, cutting corners, striding fast, and Lydia, wordless, did the same, although there was no reason for it. Premador, whoever he was, and Gary had both been and gone a day ago; speed can't make up for missed chances. Still, we rushed, and found the address, stopped at the building and met each other's eyes. The top buzzer said
BRUCE RAY
beside it on a press-on plastic label.

“Yeah?” a man's voice growled from the dented speaker box. The building was a three-story brick walk-up, a locksmith and a pizza place on the ground floor, apartments above. The street door was steel; peeling paint flaked from the wood window frames.

“Premador sent me,” I said.

“Oh, fuck,” said the voice. “He wants the rest? You got my money? I told that shit, no credit. Fucking Visa card, bite me. You got it?”

“I've got it.”

No more words; the buzzer buzzed. Lydia and I walked up curling-linoleum stairs to the top floor, smelling garlic and pizza sauce, mold and old dampness, all the way. The door at the end of the one-bulb hallway wore the same number as the buzzer. When I knocked, there was action at the peephole. Then nothing. Then heavy iron clanks as multiple locks opened. The door moved as if by an invisible hand. Lydia stepped through first, me right behind her; the man behind the door pushed it shut, locked it, stood facing us with red-rimmed eyes.

He hadn't shaved today and he probably hadn't yesterday, a medium-height, thin man in a gray tee shirt that might have once been white. He wore jeans so greasy they shone, no shoes, stood smoking a cigarette in an apartment that reminded me of what Jim Sullivan had said about cigarettes when he lit one up at the Wesleys'. Chinese food containers, a grease-stained pizza box, crushed take-out coffee cups and aged magazines surrounded a sprung, worn couch where the pattern on the upholstery might have been flowers, or horses, or Jesus Christ and all the saints; there would never again be a way to tell. A doorless doorway on the right showed a galley kitchen with brown-spattered walls and tottering piles of dishes held together by congealed grease. An indeterminate number of socks, another tee shirt, and a jockstrap huddled exhausted on the floor, as though they'd been so overworked they couldn't make it to the laundry basket. The place was dim and it stank and I could hear water dripping from the kitchen faucet. Across the room a computer sat incongruously on a card table, its putty-colored case streaked with greasy fingerprints, coffee stains blotting its mouse pad, a layer of dust veiling its screen.

“Sting Ray?” I said. The man stood, waiting, hand still on the doorknob, making it clear that opening the door again and throwing us out was as attractive a proposition as any other.

“Yeah, sure,” he said around his cigarette. He looked not at me, but at Lydia, a small, predatory smile on his cracked lips. “That'll work. Who the hell's this?”

“My driver,” I said. “Security. Don't worry about her. She doesn't speak English.”

“Why would I worry?” Ray said. “She know some hot shit Oriental moves or something?” With a sudden earsplitting yell he crouched into a kung fu stance he must have learned from a Steven Seagal movie, knees bent, hands chopping the air in front of him.

At the sound Lydia stepped back fast, took a defensive position, body set sideways, arms up, leg ready to kick Ray's head off. Then she assessed him. She relaxed. In a gesture of complete contempt, she straightened up, looked him in the eye, slipped her hands in her pockets.

“Ah, shit,” Ray said, grinning, standing upright. “I don't hit girls anyway, unless they want it. Wantee hitee?” he said to Lydia. She gave him a stare that could have freeze-dried a lava flow. He laughed, turned to me. “So what'd you come for? All of them, just one, something else, what?”

I had no idea what we were talking about, so I countered with, “I don't have enough cash for them all. I need to choose.”

“Oh, fuck that, man,” Ray said without particular emotion. “He and I went over this last fucking week.” He took the cigarette from his mouth, pointed it at me. “I told him how much. He said he could get it.”

“Didn't work out,” I said.

“He's a fuckup. You shouldn't be letting him out, do business on his own.”

“He needed to get experience somehow.” I wondered how long I could keep this up.

“You his old man, what?” Ray asked, seeming to look me over for the first time.

My heart pounded. I said, “Do I look like him?”

Ray gave me a leer. “Not even a little. Maybe his old lady was doing nooners with the milkman.”

“Well, the guy with him,” I said. “The one who looks like me. That's my nephew.”

“What guy? That Premador asshole, he was alone, just like last time, just like I told him to be.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess maybe the kid waited downstairs. Premador didn't say?”

Ray shook his head, mashed his cigarette into a pile of butts that may have had an ashtray under it, maybe not. He turned, walked into a bedroom even more disastrous than the room we were in. He threw back a tangle of moth-eaten blanket and yellowed sheet, grunted as he yanked a long metal box from under the bed. He ran a combination, opened the lid. Looking back over his shoulder, he said, “Well, don't expect me to fucking bring 'em out.”

I moved aside so Lydia could go into the bedroom first, which she did with a muttered, “You owe me big,” as she passed me. Ray crouched next to his box, smiling up at us, and Lydia and I stepped up and looked into it and my first thought was that there was more and varied ordnance in that box than I'd seen together in one place since my years in the navy.

Numerous handguns, mostly automatics but also a revolver or two, formed a disorganized metallic bed for five rifles—two with night sights—and a couple of shotguns, a sprinkling of supressors and long magazines, and three automatic weapons, one an Uzi and two I didn't recognize. None of them were particularly clean and many were scratched; whether from previous use or their stay at Sting Ray's was not clear.

“This is like the one he took,” Ray said, shoving a shotgun aside, lifting the rifle that lay next to it. “And one of these.” He showed me a 9 mm automatic pistol. “You want to see the others he wanted? Visa card, what an asshole.”