Resolved (24 page)

Among the places she had visited was the language collection at Columbia, the office of a professor of Semitic languages, and the offices of the Lucia Foundation. At the first she had learned the identity of the language on the tape her mother had made of the man who called himself Gonzales. At the last, she had experienced a somewhat spiky interview with Father Dugan. Giving away millions of dollars had eroded his pastoral chops, or maybe he was less interested in her problems than he had once been, since his daily work now consisted of sticking Band-Aids of various sizes on the world's festering, incurable wounds. She had brought up the demon and been told to stop being silly; she'd had her exorcism, the man wasn't hanging around anymore, a little less mysticism, please, just now. And there was no such person as Sharon Larsen in child protective services, so she could forget about the swine in good conscience. The romance issue, her sacred virginity? Gosh, here was a project to get Thai preteens out of the sex trade, made it kind of hard to focus on Lucy Karp. Maybe it was time she stepped up to the plate—drop the guy as an occasion of sin, or do the sin and take the consequences, but for the love of Pete, stop this endless shilly-shally. She had not exactly walked out in a huff, but he'd received a call and taken it, and she'd slid away while he was on the phone with someone who had two hundred and fifty thousand starving children on hand.

So she was in the process of kicking herself for being a spoiled brat, but dragged up a smile nonetheless for the whores hanging around outside the brothel just south of her front door. The girls were cheerful Fujianese for the most part, their clients, men of the same nation, sweated labor shipped across the oceans to the Gold Mountain in containers, like spare parts. Lucy, while officially disapproving both as a Catholic and a feminist, thought it rather distinguished to have a whorehouse on her street; and since she was the only local available who spoke their language, she had become a great favorite among the soiled doves. She explained a littering ticket, described the procedures at a free clinic, warned against a Ponzi scheme. Amid giggles, then, the girls informed her that she had a boyfriend, a man asking them about Lucy, where she was, when she would return. They knew enough American to understand what he wanted, although of course they had said nothing. They pointed, laughing.
That
man.

He was lurking in a deep entryway across the street. Even in the shadows she could tell it was the guy from the soup kitchen, Larry or whatever his name was, the demon. She left the group of women, moving toward Grand Street and her door. He spotted her and accosted her just as she was getting her keys out. She saw at once that he had been sleeping rough, for he was unshaven, dirty, and there was a peculiar scorched smell about him, as if he had rolled into a trash fire.

“Lucy, could I talk to you a second?” She looked him in the face and what she saw there prompted a faint nausea: violence and terror roiling behind a scrim of pathetic sincerity. She swallowed heavily and said in what she meant as a cheerful tone, “Sure, Larry, what's up?” Going to the prom, Larry? Want to split a milkshake? He must see it in my face, she thought, the horror—but no, clearly empathy was not Larry's strong suit.

“Look, I'm in trouble,” he continued. “I really need some help.”

“Why? What's wrong?”

“Oh, man, I got myself into a jam. I been out on the street for two days.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn't do anything!” he said indignantly. “Why do you think I did something? Jesus!”

That's incredible, she thought, he's working on my liberal Catholic guilt and sure enough, I feel guilty. She said, “So what happened?”

“I was just looking for work, you know? So a guy I knew told me to hang out on Eleventh and Fortieth with all the illegals, I figure I could get some day work. So a guy shows up, says his name's Carney, he's got a job unloading trucks. I go with a couple of other guys, Spanish, Latinos, you know? In his pickup truck. We go down to a warehouse in Chelsea and we unload semis all day, appliances, stereos. Then Carney pays the other guys off and the split. And he says to me, ‘You want to make some extra?' And I say yes. What else, right. So he says, ‘Settle down, it's not for a couple of hours.' I get something to eat and go back. Now it's like ten at night. A semi pulls up and I start unloading. It's all cigarettes, and I figure, Uh-oh, this can't be legal. I'm about to go to the guy and tell him I can't afford to get mixed up, because of my parole thing, when all of a sudden, this big black SUV screams up and four guys get out. I'm in the truck, and the driver says, ‘Wait a second,' and he goes out and I hear yelling, so I like, peek around the side, and I see these guys have got Carney and the driver up against the wall, and they're hitting them with pistols. Then I hear shots, and man, I just took off. They saw me and they shot at me, but I got away. I went right up a razor-wire fence, tore the shit out of my clothes and my back. I've been staying in a burnt-out building, scared out of my mind. They were yelling in Spanish. I figure Dominicans, they're into cigarette smuggling.”

“You have to go to the cops, Larry,” she said. Her voice sounded strange in her ears, strangled.

He shook his head violently. “Nah, I can't do that. I can't get busted. I mean, I was working an illegal scam. They'd put me back in jail.”

“But you'd be safe.”

He laughed bitterly. “What, are you kidding? You think these guys don't have people in the jail? I'd get shanked the first day.” He snapped a look over his shoulder, the universal gesture of a confidence to be offered. “Lucy, I don't know, I'm really in trouble now. I got a sister in Plattsburgh I could stay with, me and the girl, I could get away from this fucking city…but I got zilch, man. I got no cash at all. They killed him before I got paid.”

“How can you do that?” The words blurted out without thought, almost without volition. She meant the lies, but he didn't understand. He said, “What? Do what?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled. She felt the violence cruising beneath his skin, like a shark under turbid waters. Lucy was already reaching into her bag. She knew the man was lying, but his terror was genuine. He had the true look of someone on the run, but she suspected he was closer to the source of the evil than he had let on. It didn't matter. She was seized by a visceral passion to be free of him, to not occupy the same air. She plunged her hand into her bag, brought out her wallet, and snatched all the currency out of it. She thrust the sheaf of bills at him. As he took it from her, there appeared on his face a mask of sincere gratitude. Little tears glistened in his handsome eyes. “Gee, Lucy, thanks! God, I'll never forget you for this, I mean it, and I'll pay you back, I swear it, every penny…”

She felt the pressure of a fixed smile on her cheeks. She couldn't wait for the elevator car. Instead, she inserted her key, murmured a quick good-bye, slipped inside, and slammed the door on his professions of eternal gratitude. Then she ran up four flights of stairs, faster than she had ever run them before, as if the devil were on her tail, until, at the last landing she had to sit, panting and nauseated, with her head down between her knees.

 

“What's wrong?” her mother said instantly upon seeing her. Lucy would have tried to sneak by her room, but the dogs caught her, which was one of the problems with having dogs. Besides, she desperately needed a cold drink.

“Nothing,” she said as she got a bottle of mineral water out of the refrigerator, with the dog Maggie whining hello and nudging at her thigh.

“Not nothing. What happened?”

“I said nothing, Ma.” She poured water into a large glass full of ice, and added a chunk of lime. She drank and wiped the dribbles from her chin with the back of her hand. The dog rested its hot head on her knee, and got the desired scratch between the eyes. “I gave all my cash to a street person with a sob story, is all. And then I ran up the stairs to punish myself for being such a sap. Still. It's hot. I almost got heatstroke.”

The mother inspected her, using a surface-penetrating sonar more accurate than anything the Pentagon had. “You weren't mugged, were you?”

“No, Mom, just conned.” To change the subject she pointed to the kitchen table. This item, its surface mottled with a century of immigrant life, had belonged to Marlene's grandmother and was the largest horizontal surface in the house, far larger than the table in the dining room. It was covered with legal folders and papers. “What's all this?”

“Paul Agnelli's case. I told you about this?”

“The butcher, uh-huh, the statutory rape. Are you going to get him off?”

“It's looking a little better. This is the material I got from the DA, and from Paulie's old fart attorney. I can't believe he didn't see this right off.”

“See what right off.”

“There's no rape kit. The alleged vic didn't go to the hospital. In the Q and A she says she was so upset she went home and showered off. She didn't report it until the Wednesday after the Friday it allegedly happened.”

“I love the way you always say ‘alledgedly' even when you're talking to me.”

Marlene cast a sharp eye on her daughter to see if she was being needled, but Lucy had nothing on her face but frank interest, and could that be a hint of admiration?

“Yes, well, it's a good habit to get into in this business. Anyway, aside from the girl's testimony, their whole case is forensic—his car showed hair, fibers, and fluids from the girl on the backseat, plus matching semen on the girl's underwear and skirt. Paul says he can't imagine that any woman he slept with during the right span of time would have participated in a scam against him. Which is a problem for us, because we know there had to be a scam, and the girl had to be in on it. Do you know a real estate guy named Fong?”

“Hiram Fong?”

“Is he in local real estate?”

“I guess. He has an office on Mott with a big-character sign out front. A tong guy.”

“You know this?”

“Everybody knows this, Mom,” said Lucy, meaning everybody who spoke the half-dozen most popular dialects of Chinese and had lived in Chinatown her entire life, and knew the sociology thereof.

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just a notion. This Fong made an offer on the building Paulie owns and Paulie turned him down. I'm trying to think of an angle here. Why would anyone go through all that trouble to frame a Mulberry Street butcher? A rival Italian butcher? A grudge from way back? A spurned lover? All possible, but not likely. Somebody had to get to Cherry Newcombe and get her to make the complaint in a fairly elaborate and risky way, and somebody had to get to a source of Paulie's semen, and absent any evidence that Paul Agnelli is such a monumental son of a bitch that two women would go out of their way to shaft him for free, it means that someone put up a nontrivial amount of cash, or put the scare in, to make them do it. Fong sort of fits the picture as the kind of fellow who could do either or both.”

“So, you're saying what—he sends his yellow minions secretly after Agnelli, finds out who he's been balling, gets a fresh sample from her by threat or payoff, and frames the guy so that he'll sell the butcher shop? It doesn't sing to me.”

“Me, either. There's a missing piece, but I don't know what it is. I should go see McKenzie, the arresting officer, see what he has to say for himself.” She regarded her daughter with a considering eye. “Would you like to be momma's little helper on this one, too?”

“I'd be glad to help in any legal endeavor.”

“Is that
legal
as in pertaining to the law, or
legal
an in noncrimonous?”

“What do you need, Mom?” asked Lucy, ducking this jab.

“Fine out what Fong is up to, his rep, and would he pull something like this? Just pick up on the street stuff. Nothing involving break-ins, torture, or bribery.”

“Like you usually do, you mean? Okay, Mom, not a problem.”

“There'll be per diem expense money.”

“Fine. Oh, and that guy the other day, not really Gonzales? He was speaking Tamazight.”

“Tama-what?”

“Tamazight. It's spoken by about three million people in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria.”

“Arabs.”

“Berbers. These guys were raised in Tamazight, and then went to Spain at a fairly early age, or else they were raised in Spain with Tamazight as a cradle tongue.”

“Guys? We only saw one guy.”

“Well, him plus whoever he was talking to on the phone,” said Lucy.

“Thank you, and
duh!”
said Marlene. “The old lady's brain has half-rotted away, but she passes the falling torch to the next generation. Which God forbid.”

 

Felix went into a restaurant on Lafayette and counted his money under the table. It came to sixty-seven dollars. He had been so astounded when the little bitch yanked the cash out that he hadn't done what he should have done, which was getting her to go to the bank and cleaning out her account, and then going with him to pick up his supposed daughter. He'd had her eating out of his hand for a while there, he could see it in her eyes. The plan had been, once he had some serious money and her credit card, to rent a car with her, drive to some alley, tonk her on the head, into the trunk, and over to his storage locker. Then after he'd had his fun, and she'd told him what he wanted to know about this slope Rashid was so interested in, he'd see what the information was worth. A bonus in more ways than one.