Known to Evil (7 page)

"The information in here was gathered before all the problems started. Some of it might be out of date but a lot will be helpful. There's some money for expenses and special contact information for me. You are not to contact me through regular channels, Leonid. Do not talk to Christian or Sam, and know from me that I will not have them, or anyone else, call you. I will pay you personally."

He reached for his pocket again and I held up a hand.

"That won't be necessary," I said.

"No?"

"This is like any other transaction between us. A favor, that's all."

"That's it, then," he said.

"You don't have anything else to say?"

"I don't want you talking to her, Leonid. Whatever you do should happen in the background of her life. Find out what's wrong and fix it. If that proves too difficult, come to me."

"You wanted me to make contact with her last night. Why the change?"

"I didn't want her to know what you did or that you worked for me. And . . . and this murder makes things even more difficult. I want her to experience as little trauma as possible."

I didn't like it but his tone left no room for complaints.

"Anything you'll need is in here," he said, tapping the briefcase with the middle finger of his left hand.

"Was the man who killed Wanda Soa after Tara?"

"I honestly don't know. As I said, Tara disappeared three weeks ago--she only showed up at this Soa's apartment yesterday . . . maybe the day before."

"What's your relationship with the girl?"

"There is none."

I tried to come up with some kind of question that would have opened up a further dialogue but there were no words I could think of.

"So that's all?" I asked.

He nodded.

We both stood. I came around the desk to see him to the door and received my fourth or fifth shock of the day: Alphonse Rinaldo held out a hand to me.

"Thank you," he said.

I had to bite my lower lip not to repeat the words.

I WATCHED HIM WALK down the long aisle of empty cubicles, waiting until he exited through the brown metal door. At least he didn't hesitate and turn to see if I was there--at least that.

12

W
hen a boxer's game plan is shot he has to come up with something new on the fly. The classic boxer turns into a brawler, the habitually offensive fighter goes into his shell.

I'm not a passive man by nature. Don't get me wrong--I have been devious and underhanded from time to time. Often, when I was still working for what seemed like half of the New York underworld, I'd taken down people who never even saw my face. But as a rule I'm usually more than willing to take on any job, or opponent, head-to-head.

I gave up my dirty tricks with the intention of doing the right thing in my business and my life. But that never changed my brawling style--a style that I knew instinctively would not see me to the end of this period in my life.

So I refrained from opening Rinaldo's briefcase right away. Instead I sat there, allowing the details of the past twenty-four hours to filter through my mind without feeling pressed by the need to impose my will on them.

I had learned a thing or two. For instance, I now knew for a rock-solid fact that I loved Aura Antoinette Ullman. Seeing her kissing George Toller made me lose control--something I never did.

That was a detail I could put to bed. It didn't matter if she came back to me or not--I'd still have that wild love inside me.

I smiled a real smile and then laughed a little. Small victories are sometimes the hardest earned.

I turned the briefcase around so that the front latches were facing me. But still I held back.

Twill, my excellent son, had put Dimitri on the phone and then left so that I couldn't question him further. That meant he was hiding something. Twill didn't have the little secrets of most adolescents. He wasn't smoking marijuana in the basement laundry room or worried about a girlfriend's missed period. Whatever he was concealing needed to be exposed before the two young men who shared my name, if not my blood, got too deeply into whatever mess they'd created.

And so another detail fell into place.

I called Gordo's cell phone but a voicemail recording in his raspy words just said, "Leave a message," and provided a span to do that in.

"I hear you got the sniffles, G-man," I said. "Call me if you need some chicken soup."

I turned my attention back to the briefcase.

And then, for no reason, I wondered what kind of flowers I'd get for my office if I were to buy flowers. Now that I had an assistant, I could send her to the florist downstairs and order orchids or roses . . . or wildflowers.

"Mr. McGill?"

She was standing at the doorway in her fifties business suit, smiling painfully.

"Yes, Mardi. Come on in and sit down."

Putting off the job at hand was becoming pleasurable.

The child moved quickly to the chair as if she were afraid I might rescind the invitation.

"I got online and went through all the drawers and stuff," she said. "I put all your take-out and delivery menus in order."

"Thank you."

"That's okay," she said, pushing her ash-blond hair over the left shoulder.

"How long have you been back in town?" I asked.

"Five weeks."

"Twill never told me. Did you just call him lately?"

"No. He came down to the airport and picked us up."

I remembered him borrowing my car.

"So you've seen a lot of him," I said.

"Yeah. Him and D helped us move into Mrs. Alexander's place."

"You see much of Dimitri?"

"Sometimes he comes around with Twill. At first I thought he liked me. I mean, he's a nice guy, but I don't like him like that. But now he has a girlfriend and I can see that he's just shy around girls and acts like that."

"Is the girlfriend nice?"

"I guess. I've only seen her a couple'a times. I think her name's Tanya--something like that. She's Russian or something."

"You met her yesterday?"

"No. She came over with D a few weeks ago."

Mardi squirmed a bit in her chair. I leaned back, raising my hands.

"So," I said. "What can I do for you?"

"I've never had a job like this before."

"And I've never had a receptionist," I said.

"But Twill was always saying how you had this big empty office and the only thing you ever wanted was somebody at the front desk."

"Dimitri won't talk to me, and Shelly never shuts up long enough for me to get a word in," I said. "But Twill, if nothing else, pays attention."

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

I took out the reddish-brown leather wallet that I bought at Macy's in 1976. It was old, nearly shapeless, and falling apart. But I loved that billfold. I took out the credit card that I had gotten for my little corporation.

"Take this and start an account with one of the online office-supply stores. Get what you need to do anything secretarial that I might ask. Spend the next few days going through the files and putting them in order.

"There's a number for Zephyra Ximenez in the Rolodex. You spell her last name with an X instead of a J. She's been my girl Friday from her office for a while now. You two should get to know each other. You'll also find a card for Tiny Bateman. He's my software expert. Trouble with the computer or anything electronic and he'll set you straight. If anything doesn't make sense, just ask me."

A true smile from Mardi Bitterman was like the kiss from any other young woman. I could see in her pale eyes that she was going to be perfect as my assistant--the wounded leading the wounded, as it were.

MARDI LEFT THE OFFICE with an extra set of keys for the front door. I had no more distractions to keep me from opening Rinaldo's briefcase. I tapped the coal-gray leather and winced, placed my thumbs on the latches, and was about to flip them when my cell phone made the sound of migrating geese.

"Have you spoken to them?" was Katrina's response to my hello.

"No," I lied, "but Twill left a message on my voicemail half an hour ago. He said that he was up at school with D and that they were going to some kind of party tonight. I think he's afraid to talk to either one of us."

"But he sounded okay?"

"Oh yeah. They're just boys on the prowl, honey."

The ensuing silence was her relief.

"I got some business I have to take care of, Katrina."

"Tell me when you've spoken to either one of them," she said. "And tell Dimitri to call me."

I PHONED THE ATTENDANCE office at Twill's school to report that he had an intestinal flu. After that I told his social worker the same lie.

"How is he doing?" I asked Melinda Tarris, assistant subagent in the Juvenile Offenders office.

"I've never met anyone like your son, Mr. McGill. He could become the president of the United States if we got his record expunged."

13

H
er full name was Angelique Tara Lear. She'd turned twenty-seven on October 7th. The address Rinaldo's briefcase had for her was different from the one where the murders occurred. Tara lived on Twelfth Street, on the East Side, at the edge of the Alphabet Jungle. There was a photograph of her sitting at an outdoor cafe. It was probably taken with a telephoto lens without her knowledge. I say this because she seemed to be in the middle of a conversation.

She was a raven-haired wild-eyed thing in spite of her pedestrian, almost reserved, attire. She wore a white blouse that buttoned up like a man's dress shirt. I imagined that she had a navy skirt that came down below the knees to go with that blouse. But no matter how much she tried to be normal and reserved there was an abandon to her expression and also the kind of carelessness that drives the male animal, of all ages, wild.

I looked at the picture for a long while. She was leaning forward, laughing. There was mischievousness in her gaze and a tilt to her head that was saying,
Am I hearing something else behind your words?
After a while I came to believe that the wildness wasn't that of a party girl--she would have been wearing makeup and something more provocative if that were the case. No. Angelique was just happy--almost, and hopefully, unsinkably so.

There was another picture that caught my attention. She was all in black, at a funeral, crying. She stood next to a fair-sized headstone that read IRIS LINDSAY. True sorrow is hard to gauge, but I believed her pain.

The young woman, however, was less interesting than the fact of the photographs. Someone had followed Angelique and taken many dozens of pictures--these being only a few. And if those two shots were representative of the whole roll, or memory card, then the surveillance wasn't about who she was with but the woman herself. Someone seemed to be studying her.

Was that Rinaldo? Had he hired a private detective to take pictures of her on the street, at work . . . in the shower? Was he her protector or her stalker?

She had an undergraduate degree from Hunter College and an MBA from NYU. The latter diploma would have cost a hundred thousand dollars, minimum. There was no credit report on her. Was that left out on purpose or didn't it matter? I could get a credit report on my own, of course, but I wanted to tread softly around Tara until I knew why Wanda got half her face shot off.

Tara had been recently hired as a "fellow," whatever that meant, at Laughton and Price, an advertising firm on Lexington, not Madison. Her mother lived, at least at the time of the report, in Alphabet City proper, east of the East Village. Her brother, named Donald Thompson, was only a name with no address, or even an age.

Under the neatly typed pages was a layer of cash wrapped into bundles. Twenties, fifties, and hundreds that stacked up to thirty thousand dollars--money for my expenses. This told me that Mr. Rinaldo would spare no resource in finding the woman with whom he claimed to have no relationship.

I went through the pages again. There was no criminal record included.

It wasn't much but it was enough to go on.

When the buzzer sounded I was no longer surprised.

"Yes, Mardi?"

"A Miss Aura Ullman?"

"Uh . . . send her in." I wanted to stay focused, to keep my mind in the world of Tara Lear, but just the mention of Aura's name and I was at sea, in a fog, with no sense of direction.

"LEONID," SHE SAID.

"Aura." I managed to get some lightness into my greeting.

She frowned a bit. Every other time she had come into the office I stood up and, if we were alone, kissed her.

Now, however, those lips would have tasted of George Toller.

Aura was a woman of the New World. Golden-brown skin, natural and wavy dark-blond hair, and pale eyes that Nazi scientists tried to create in what they called the inferior races. She was forty and beautiful to me; of African and European lineage, she was completely American.

Aura lowered into the closest chair, giving a wan smile.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Thankfully busy," I said.

"A case?"

"A whole shipload."

She smiled. Aura liked my jokes.

"Who's that at the front desk?"

"Mardi Bitterman."

"The child who was raped by her father?"

"Yes." In the days when we were passionate lovers, and then platonic lovers, I told Aura everything.

"I thought she moved to Ireland with her sister."

"Where there's heat," I said, "there's motion."

"I came to see how you're doing."

"I'm fine."

"You didn't look fine yesterday when I, I told you."

"Listen, honey," I said. "You're a gorgeous woman and you deserve to have real love in your life."

"I wanted you."

I tried to start counting my breaths but got lost after one.

"Leonid."

"Yes?"

"Will you forget me now?"

"No."

"Will you ever talk to me again?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"You can give me a week, right?" I asked, once again managing a jaunty attitude.

She looked into my eyes and, after a moment or two, nodded. Then she stood up and went out the door.