Godchild (3 page)

He walked up to me, brought his face to within inches of my own, sniffed me up and down with his nose. Like a police dog.

I knew he could smell the whiskey on my breath.

Because he could smell the whiskey on my breath, I knew exactly what he was thinking, although neither one of us said anything about it. In fact, the D word never came up. Not even in passing.

I cleared my throat. “I took a couple of shots.” I said. “You know, to ease the jitters. After I saw the Buick.” But I could tell by the furrows in his brow that he didn’t believe me.

“Tell you what,” he said finally, his gray breath mixing with the snow. “I’ll have an officer take down your testimony. And if we see a black Buick matching the description, we’ll pull it over, question the driver. How’s that sound?”

 “Don’t go out of your way,” I said.

“Call it a courtesy, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “One lawman to another.”

Back at the south-side gates, he called over another plain-clothes cop to take my statement.

As promised. One lawman to another.

The beefy cop dressed in uniform blacks asked if I got “A good look at the supposed black Buick in question…enough to create a composite image, that is.”

He was trying so hard to hold back the laughs, he was making little raspberry noises through clenched lips.

When I finished with my description of the Buick, I made my way back to Ryan.

“Sorry I wasted your time,” I said as he was about to get back inside the cruiser.

I was standing right beside him, the passenger-side door to the cruiser wide open, his left foot already inside, a wave of hot air blowing out the dashboard heater onto my legs.

“You did the right thing,” he said, taking hold of my forearm, giving it a sympathetic squeeze, as though the cops were still my fraternal cousins-in-arms. “Go get married,” he said with a grin. He got in and closed the car door, smiling at me through the lightly fogged glass.

But it was way too late to get married. In more ways than one.

As I walked slowly back to my 4-Runner, I couldn’t help but look into each of the cop’s faces as I passed them, one by stinking one. I couldn’t help but pick up on the way they whispered into one another’s ears, thinking I had to be out of earshot when they referred to me as “One paranoid bastard.”

That’s what I remembered.

The rest was either repressed or just a dream, or both.

I wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at me. Christ, I wasn’t sure how long the entire crowd had been staring at me. But when I came out of my trance, Bill was standing across from me, his chubby face somehow tight, his receding hair slicked back, his customary white bar rag slung over his right shoulder.

“You okay?” he asked me.

My hands were wrapped tight around the empty beer bottle to keep them from shaking. The bottom of the caramel-colored bottle made a
clickety-clack
sound against the solid wood bar.

“Maybe it’s time to go home, Mr. Marconi,” Bill said.

There, I thought. He said it. My name: Jack Harrison “Keeper” Marconi. He knew who I was. Just like everyone else probably knew who 1 was —Keeper Marconi, former maximum-security-prison warden turned unemployed private investigator.

“Tell you what,” Bill went on. “I’ll call you a cab.”

I’m pretty sure it was then, when Bill went for the phone, that I pulled out my Colt. Come to think of it, that’s exactly when I got a good look at my sad face in the mirror behind the bar, pulled the piece out, and emptied the entire eight-round clip, blowing away Jim Beam and Jack Daniels and even managing to nail some Wild Turkey in the process. It was a damned shame too, having to waste good booze like that. But I suppose, in the end, it would have been a worse shame to have wasted me.

Chapter 2

The cops had to be on their way before I decided to blow away my reflection in the mirror. Not those off-duty cops scamming free beer. But on-the-job cops in black uniforms who stood out in the white light of the aluminum-and-glass entryway, black .9-millimeter automatics drawn and poised—combat position.

But then, the cops came as no surprise.

It was the sudden appearance of Tony Angelino that came as the real shocker. He stood square at the head of the pack, dressed in a camel-hair overcoat and a blue blazer, just like mine. His dark gray slacks had been cut and tailored for his medium but stocky build. His white wedding carnation was still pinned to his lapel, and the wide-brimmed fedora on his head matched his threads.

To a T.

He wasn’t smiling.

Neither was I.

“How about a drink,” I said.

He just stood there, staring at me with those deep-set brown eyes of his, the rhythmic flash of red, blue, and white cruiser lights streaking across the wall.

I stood up then, on the rungs of my stool, towered over the entire bar, the faces of all those regulars looking up at me, their hands gripped around their drinks even now.

“Bill!” I shouted. “Whiskey!”

But Bill never moved a muscle. He was still on the floor, covered in spilled booze and shards of glass.

Tony came closer. Slowly.

He raised his fists to chest height. The fists were covered in brown leather driving gloves. He rubbed them together, like a boxer waiting for the bell to sound.

“No drink for me,” he said, eyes on me, going through me.

I sat back down on the stool. “Was it something I said?”

But I guess Tony didn’t have the time for stupid questions. He simply raised his right fist high and knocked me cold.

Chapter 3

I fully expected to wake up inside the county lockup. But when I opened my eyes there was no concrete plank ceiling to close me in, no bright overhead lamps to sting my retinas. There was no concrete floor, no iron bars, no Plexiglas shield. Instead, I saw a white vaulted ceiling and a long wall of glossy black bookshelves filled with colorful volumes.

Without having to look too much further I knew I’d come to on the leather couch inside the living room of Tony’s downtown condo.

Facing me directly: a long, winding staircase that accessed the second and third floors. Embedded in the bottom of the stairwell: a two-way fireplace. I didn’t have to turn over to know that behind me, a wall of windows looked out over Eagle Street and the governor’s mansion, which almost never housed the governor and his family (they preferring to reside “where the action is,” in Manhattan). After all, I’d been inside this room a hundred times over the years. Maybe a thousand.

For now the windows were covered in dark, floor-to-ceiling drapes. And had I not closed my eyes again, I might have screamed out in pain from the splitting hangover. But I suppose there’s something to be said for self-control. Because when I opened my eyes once more, a very stiff-looking Tony was standing in the center of the white-and-black-checkered marble floor.

I knew without asking that he had been responsible for keeping the heat off, keeping me out of lockup. Now he stood there with arms crossed at his chest, staring at me with distant, glassy eyes, as though I’d never woken up on the couch at all but had died in my sleep.

“Morning,” I groaned, the back of my throat feeling like it had been scraped with a razor.

“Exactly,” Tony said.

He had dressed down since the night before, when he’d knocked me cold. Now he wore only the dark gray slacks, along with the white oxford, sleeves rolled up neatly, all the way to the elbows.

Without another word he turned and stepped into the kitchen.

I forced myself up and lit a smoke.

When Tony returned, he was carrying his leather briefcase. He laid the case flat on the lid of the grand piano, thumbed back the spring-released latches, pushed open the lid. He pulled out a number-ten envelope, tossed it onto my lap. When I looked down, I could see that my name had been written on it in Tony’s unmistakable loopy handwriting.

“Don’t open that yet,” he said, while stepping behind the couch, pulling hard on the drawstring that opened the drapes and let the blinding sun shine in.

I knew the envelope must have had something to do with the wedding.

Maybe that’s why the panic alarm sounded, the little voice inside my brain that told me to get up and head straight for the door. No bothering with goodbyes or
It’s been swell, Tone
. Just get up and get the hell out.

But when I stood up I felt a hand grab at my collar. The hand yanked me back down onto the couch. That’s when Tony made a beeline for his briefcase. He reached inside, pulled out a Colt .45.

I patted the space under my left arm where my own Colt should have been.

The holster was empty.

“That’s my piece,” I said.

“You can have it back,” he said, “after you listen to what I have to say.”

“You’re supposed to be my best friend,” I said. “Or did you forget?”

“Who are you to talk about friends,” Tony said, “when you don’t give a rat’s ass about standing them up?”

Tony set my gun down inside his briefcase.

He stood straight and stiff, right foot planted on a square of black tile, left foot on a square of white. His heavy forearms were crossed at his chest. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-eight, but from where I was sitting he looked big and powerful.

“I’ve got a job for you,” he said.

“I’m not working right now,” I said.

“You can’t afford not to.”

“Who says?”

“Your bank account says.”

He went back to his briefcase, pulled out an envelope with a Key Bank logo printed on it. The kind of envelope a bank statement usually comes in. My bank statement.

“You’ve got a couple of C-notes to your name. That’s it. How the hell did you expect to pay for a wedding?”

“Val was footing the bill,” I said.

He laid the statement back inside the briefcase. “Val’s gone now.”

That hard sinking feeling, in the pit of my stomach. “I already know that,” I said. “I should have known.”

“One of my clients has an emergency,” Tony explained a minute later, after handing me a mug of coffee. “Man by the name of Richard Barnes.”

I recognized the name, and said so to Tony. But that didn’t stop him from telling me a whole lot of what I already knew. Barnes was a rich guy, a producer who ran public-relations campaigns. Mostly for politicians, if I remembered correctly. And the only reason I remembered correctly is because I recalled how his Reel Productions worked on the governor’s campaign during the last election. During a time when any employee of New York State worries about job security. Or the lack of it. Which I used to do. Until I lost my job: suddenly, elections meant nothing to me.

I took a drag off the cigarette, drank some black coffee.

I asked Tony to give me the short of it. So I could get back to my motel, get a shower and a shave. Maybe a nap before I headed south to Stormville. From there, who knew where.

Tony looked directly down at the tops of his tassel loafers. Loafers identical to my own. “Richard’s wife, Re-nata, was busted by Mexican police for attempting to smuggle cocaine outside the country,” he explained. “From a border town called Monterrey into Brownsville, Texas.”

I stubbed out my cigarette, sipped more coffee.

“I thought Barnes’s wife was a writer,” I said, while Tony went back into the kitchen and came back out with his own cup.

“That’s part of the point,” he said, blowing into his cup with pursed lips.

I made a time-out T with my hands, shook my head from left to right and back again. “Maybe I’m missing something here, but anyone with half a brain knows the penalties for running dope across the border.”

Tony drank some coffee and set the cup down on the grand piano beside the briefcase. “She wasn’t interested in selling drugs so much as she had an interest in experiencing the
process
of selling drugs.” A bewildered wave of his hands. “At least, that’s Richard’s story.”

“She took a chance like that for a book?” I asked.

“For an article, actually. But that’s not important.”

“What is important?”

“There are two kinds of drug runners presently operating in Mexico,” Tony explained. “There are the so-called burriers, a term derived from burro, or mule, combined with courier. The burriers are usually rich women who like to move cocaine not for the money, but for the sheer thrill of it.”

And the second kind?

“The second group,” he said, “is made up of poverty-stricken women who have no choice but to move small amounts of cocaine paste.”

I drank some coffee. It was getting cold.

“If the burriers are rich already” I asked, “then why risk taking that kind of chance? They need the rush that badly?”

“I suspect Renata was on her way to answering that question, paisan, before she was nabbed at the border.”

It all came back to me in tidal waves: Renata Barnes. A petite woman with short auburn hair and wild blue eyes. I pictured her on the set of the
Today
show a while back, when her best-seller
Godchild
had just stormed the country, thanks to Oprah. I recalled how she was forced to respond to allegations about the suspicious drowning death of her own kid. How it mimicked in absolute detail the fictitious drowning death of the child in the novel—a drowning death that was the result of murder. In my mind I saw Renata once more, storming off the set of
Today
in tears.

When Tony went upstairs I got up from the couch, stretched. I felt silly and somehow dirty, still dressed in my wrinkled wedding blazer and slacks. I wanted a shower and maybe a drink. Both would have to wait.

I stood by the window wall. Outside, a clear blue sky. A layer of fresh snow covered the front lawn of the governor’s mansion. The snow contrasted sharply with the black parking lot directly beside it. It hurt to look at the snow when it reflected the sun. I ran my hand over the small bruise on my chin. It must have formed when Tony walloped me. I looked down on the guard shack at the mansion gates and the tall, wrought-iron fence that spanned the perimeter of the property. Despite what Tony had told me about Renata, he never once pressed the matter of my walking out on him and Val. Not really.

While I fingered the business-size envelope folded up inside my jacket pocket, I half wanted to blurt out what had happened. How the black Buick had just shown up. Then maybe beg forgiveness, as if Tony were in the business of forgiving. But I knew he was smarter than that. In his own way, I knew he’d get to what went wrong with my second wedding in due time. For now the thing to do was concentrate on the business at hand, absorb all he had to tell me about Renata, regardless if in the end I decided not to take on the job.

When Tony came back down, he was dressed in a clean blue suit. He was fixing the sleeves of his jacket by tugging on the cuffs with the tips of his fingers.

“So what is it you want from me?” I said.

“Renata was busted three days ago.”

“In the desert.” A question.

“Just outside Monterrey,” he said. “Far as we know, she’s locked in a holding cell in the basement of the town’s maximum-security prison, where she’s awaiting trial.”

“You’re sure of this.” Another question.

“I have a communication from the Mexican Attorney General. Man by the name of Jorge Madrazo.”

“Anyone tried to contact her?”

“She was allowed one phone call. She used it to call Richard.”

“If she’s indicted?”

“Full indictment will result in a very lengthy prison term. A lengthy prison term could very well be a death sentence.”

I looked out the window once more. A limo was pulling out of the gate beside the guard shack. Probably the governor himself, hightailing it to New York City and civilization.

I turned back to Tony.

“Barnes is a powerful guy,” I said. “Why doesn’t he strike a deal with the Attorney General, negotiate her out? At least try and have her extradited?”

“Richard’s business has already suffered plenty over the negative press Renata received when she published
Godchild
.” He was putting on his camel hair overcoat. “The DA was prepared to indict her for second-degree murder in the death of her own baby boy, Charlie. Only he couldn’t find enough credible evidence to substantiate an accusation of murder by forcible drowning.”

“Then get the magazine to confirm her side of the story. Have them prove she was on assignment in the desert.”

“What magazine? There is no magazine. She was going to sell the piece on spec.” Now he was putting on a blue fedora, pulling the wide brim down over his forehead, cocking it just slightly over his right eye. “Besides, sounds like a weak attempt at a false alibi.” Outside the window, yet another limo pulling up, the electronic gates swinging open. “Barnes fears that if it gets out about Renata being busted on Mexican soil, he’ll have to go through the same kind of public shit storm all over again.”

“If Renata is such a great author,” I said, “why risk writing an article about smuggling drugs? Why not hang out by the beach, pump out a novel once a year or so?”

“Renata is a hands-on writer. Apparently she needs to be in the middle of a battle if she’s going to write about war or in the middle of a homicide if she’s going to write about murder or in the center of a drug-trafficking operation if she’s going to do something on drugs and the women who smuggle them. She’s not content to write a piece based upon outside observations, third-hand accounts and the internet. What she wants is the real experience.”

“Thus all that commotion over
Godchild
”

“She’s what they call a method writer, Keeper. Meaning in order to accurately translate the experience on paper, she must in some capacity participate in the experience.”

“Thank God she isn’t writing about suicide.”

“Save those remarks for me, paisan,” Tony said. “Your future client will not find them the least bit amusing.”

For what seemed a while, I watched the sun shine against the marble floor.

Then, “What Barnes wants from me is to find a way to get her out. Is that it?”

“What he wants is for you to go down there and use any means necessary to break her out. And he’s prepared to pay extremely well for it. Two hundred thousand cash, plus expenses, no questions asked, absolutely no press. Plenty of money to repay me for the repairs at Bill’s and for keeping you out of the joint and for protecting your license.”

I exhaled. “I saw the Buick.” I said. “In the cemetery.”

“I know about what you
think
you saw,” Tony said.

“It happened,” I said. “I was there.”

He nodded, but like the cops before him, I knew he didn’t believe me.

“Did you see a driver?” he asked.

“The windows are tinted.”

“And there was a blizzard,” he said.

I turned back to the window. The two guards who manned the shack were standing outside in the cold, smoking cigarettes and laughing. I was thinking about risk. How I didn’t stand a chance of getting past the visitor’s gates of a Mexican prison without getting shot to pieces. A plan like Tony’s would require connections inside and out, not to mention maps, layouts, guns, ground and air transport, and a safe house. Just for starters. I was certain Tony had to have considered all this and more even before asking me to take the job.

I turned back to him. “This rescue in Mexico,” I said. “It’s a crazy idea.”

He took a breath, secured the closers on his briefcase, and picked his keys up off the grand piano. “I know it’s dangerous. But besides the payday, it could be just the thing you need to put Fran’s death behind you. For good.”

Outside the window, across Eagle Street, the two guards stamped out their spent butts.