The Odds (26 page)

“Yes.”

“Murders?”

“Yes. I figured I would just pick a day and vamoose. But then some guy comes for me to do a job. And that was the night it all happened. I never got away.”

“The job was Carl?”

“Yes.”

“You thought you were guilty already, right?”

He seems surprised. “Yeah.”

“You can’t sense yourself making decisions.”

He tries to think what she means. “I don’t … no, I don’t feel I get to make decisions. Things happen to me, always have. I’m just always …” He puts his hands up to illustrate a man trying to say,
Whoa
. That’s what it feels like.

“I’d better get some sleep.”

“You hate me now?” He is almost hoping she does.

“No. No, I don’t.”

   MEG PRETENDS TO GO TO BED at four, but after a while when she thinks she hears steady breathing from the room next door, she goes downstairs to the kitchen table, where she begins to write. It isn’t as if she thinks she will forget anything, not a word of it, but to keep a record seems wise. She dates it, puts down the hours they talked.

For a while she thought he might come to like them so much, he’d stay with them, but now she thinks he doesn’t know how to do anything sensible. The Nick upstairs is a boy, a youngster, with flashing blue eyes and a smile that keeps surprising her.

Her father was a boy, too. Some fathers lead that way, hopeless and innocent, magnets for luck.

   THE OFFICE WAS IN A TIZZY as Christie walked through. It was as if he’d been gone for a month. Two months. “You’re back!” everyone said.

First he met with Potocki and Greer right at Potocki’s desk. “Tell me,” he said.

“I’ve been on the computer a lot,” Potocki said.

Christie pulled up a swivel chair and sat. “What’d you find Farber?”

“The other guy in the pizza shop, K, did prison time when Nick Kissel did. Are you caught up on who Kissel is?”

“Yeah. Greer’s almost date.”

She groaned on cue.

“According to the prison personnel, these two guys knew each other some before. Name of the other guy is George Markovic. He’s gone by other names. Some you’ve heard. George Victor. Mark Victor. Farber’s been watching him, and he’s a bad one.”

“Amen,” Colleen said. She tapped at the picture of Markovic on the desktop and said, “I saw him. Bad vibes.”

“Take it, Greer,” Potocki said.

She lowered her voice. “I do talk to Nellins when I can about the Higgins case. He isn’t giving me much, and I wonder about some things. For instance, he doesn’t have a theory about why Higgins’s pockets weren’t robbed. Higgins, okay, only had five dollars on him, no loose change, but still … Why would the perp not have emptied his pockets? These drug guys will fight over fifty cents. Or … why would they empty the pockets if they did and leave a little something.”

Christie had had his suspicions of the two old detectives in the past. He felt a certain satisfaction that Greer was bumping up against the same thought. “You think our boys are lifting monetary evidence?”

“I hate to say it.”

“I’m going to look into it,” Christie said.

“How?”

“Watch me.”

Her cell phone was flashing. “Sorry, Boss. This is what I’ve been waiting for. There’s a woman at the lab who’s been just— Would you give me a minute.” The flashing stopped. “Missed it.” Colleen punched in a number. She gave them both a series of smiles and high signs as she listened.

When she terminated the call, she said, “It was Ann Cello at the lab. She’s fantastic. We got evidence, all right. Prints for Higgins match prints we took from the Dermott Roux place. And his shoes … they still have some of the powder that’s used for cutting heroin, so … gilding the lily, he was in there. A hundred to one, he killed BZ.”

“Fantastic. Let me work this other thing out.”

He got up and stopped at a couple of other desks on his way to his office.

   WHEN CHRISTIE FINALLY GOT to his office and sat alone for a moment, he tried to take deep breaths. He felt awful, but he wasn’t going to give up just yet. Nellins was at his desk. Now was the time to lay the trap with a tiny lie. That’s all it would take. After he caught his breath, he called Nellins in to see him.

“Hey, Boss, good to see you here.”

“Thanks.”

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, well as can be expected. Sit. Sit. Talk to me a little about this case you got.”

“Man came up on AFIS. Career criminal. Name is Earl Higgins. Actually, Hrznak is the principal on this. You want me to call him in?”

“Eh. No, you sit tight for a minute. I’ll talk to him separately.” Nellins started to look nervous. “Tell me about the canvassing.”

“Didn’t turn up anything so far. People in the hood say they didn’t see this guy. Nobody has reported anybody else using that house.”

“That’s hardly credible, right?”

“How do you mean?”

“Somebody would know.” He wasn’t sure he believed it, but he did want to keep Nellins guessing.

“Somebody somewhere, sure, but we didn’t find him.”

“How are the labs?”

“They’re coming. Faster than usual. It’s amazing.”

“It is, isn’t it? Somebody caught fire somewhere along the line. Tell me about the crime scene itself. What are your best guesses?”

“Two people shot. One dead, one wounded and gone. According to Detective Greer, the lab told her—don’t ask me why—the cartridges are all from one gun. A nine-millimeter, it turns out. I did confirm it. She says maybe a scuffle, that kind of thing.”

“Did the scene suggest a scuffle?”

“Well, you know, it didn’t.” Nellins hurried to indicate that the two of them might choose to disbelieve Greer.

“Drug people up there, you think?”

“Looks like.”

“So what do you make of the five bucks in the guy’s pocket? Who carries a mere five bucks?”

“Oh, this was a lowlife.”

Christie scratched his head. “Meaning?”

“No bank cards, nothing like that, hardly any money, maybe ate a little takeout up there.”

“People without bank cards usually carry cash, no?”

“If they have it.”

“Well, here’s the thing. Whoever killed him didn’t rob him. That’s super interesting, right?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“And the other thing is, there’s a discrepancy between how much the dead guy had on him when Greer first got up there and later. You know, she started the case, but Farber pulled her off because he needed her. What happened to the money
after
, do you think?”

Nellins colored. He began to speak, but stopped himself. He appeared to toss answers this way and that. His lips trembled. Finally he said, “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

“You’re sure.”

“Greer checked the pockets? Before the photographers and the labs got there?”

“Yes,” Christie said boldly. Straighten that one out later. “So you want to tell me where it is?”

“We might have mislaid it.”

“Might have. It’s evidence. How much of it did you get?”

Nellins waited for a long time. “Half.”

“What’d it buy you?”

“Lunch?”

“That’s it?”

“Three little meals. Boss, I’m so sorry. I should never have accepted it.”

“Given to you like a gift?”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean I should have refused it. The vic was such a deadbeat and … I’m sorry. I have no excuse.”

Christie lifted the phone. “Hrznak. Christie. Would you come in here?”

They waited in silence. Hrznak opened the door.

“Nellins was just leaving. Take his seat.”

Let them try to make signs to each other as they passed. He got them. For a mere—what was it going to turn out to be?—fifty bucks, whatever, he got them.

   AN HOUR LATER, SUMMONING all the strength he had left for the day, Christie picked up Potocki and Greer and walked them to Farber’s office. He’d given warning. Farber looked nervous.

He started simply. “I took Hrznak and Nellins off the Higgins case. They raided the corpse for lunch money. I don’t want them back on the case. So far, these two have given me more on it than those other two did, and they’re still coming up with things for you, things you need to know about the drug connection. So, relax your hold. Let these two go.”

“Let my people go,” Colleen mouthed. Christie saw it.

Christie continued, “I want to put them back on as primary and secondary. It’s only right and it’s only just.”

Farber lowered his head and gave a grumpy stare. “You’re back.”

“Just when you thought you could be rid of me,” Christie said lightly.

“Robbing me again,” Farber said, pretending to lightness himself.

“Other way around, if you take a look. If you see a way these two could help that they’re not
already
doing, you show me and I’ll release them.” He sensed Farber needed a compliment about now. “How are you moving? Well, I’m sure.”

Something shifted in Farber, a flash of pride. He rapped his hands on his thighs for a moment. “Okay. Very few people have the pieces of this puzzle. So far we have this K, Markovic, according to Potocki, going to Philly twice a week. We’re tailing. We traced him on the Turnpike going and we picked him up again in Philly, but we couldn’t go the whole way. We think he uses an area, near Temple, but we don’t have the exact location and we don’t know who supplies the supplier. But it’s big.”

Christie studied the lamp for a moment. “And you started out looking at a pizza shop. Very impressive,” he said, “your work.” Farber flushed. “Don’t worry about our end. Anything good, these two will give it to you and they won’t move on any arrests until they figure out what it means to you. But it might be time for them to step it up, put this guy’s picture in the paper, you know, shake things up? Two homicides and there are kids involved.”

“I … can’t do anything to scare them and make them get careful.”

“A business this big, they’re not going to stop for long because of a picture in the paper.”

“I want the people in Philly. Up to the top.”

“Of course. We know that. You’ll get that. I feel sure you will.”

Farber sighed, nodded. Christie stopped short of putting a protective arm around Potocki and Greer as they left. Greer wore a smug smile as they walked down the hall.

“What?” he asked.

“Just good to watch you work.”

“Our daddy is bigger and better than the other daddy,” Potocki said. “And we like that.”

A few minutes later, they sat in Christie’s office to strategize about just how much they would leak to the media and when. They decided to use the Banks name and not to acknowledge that the man had broken parole under another name in Philly. They decided to use only a drawing and not the prison photo. Colleen insisted they account in their phrasing for the possibility that Nick Banks was hurt in a self-defense maneuver.

“This is all trace evidence or what? Your defense of the guy?”

“Labs
and
his history. The old case, he insisted it was self-defense. The man he killed was politically connected, so it went hard on him.”

“You really like this guy.”

“She likes him,” Potocki said. “She sees a victim, not a perp.”

“Sentimental, Greer.” Christie shook his head worriedly. “This worries me.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll watch it, but my gut—”

“Says?”

“Here is a man worth a little something if he could get his life straightened out.”

“I’ve had that thought about an awful lot of people who weren’t worth it in the long run.”

“I know, I mean I guess that’s how it is. See, right now, I’m worried enough about what he might do if we leak his picture. He could run and get himself killed before we ever talk to him.”

Christie said, “Could happen.” Now he had to worry about Greer not keeping her head. The guy was handsome as hell, but she ought to know better. He said, “Order of events is going to be important. You’d better make a visit to the shop first, because if it appears in the paper and nobody tried to find him through his employers, that’s going to look suspicious.”

“I’ll go back. I’ll talk to Markovic,” she volunteered.

Christie said, “Good, good.”

When they left his office, he lay down on the black vinyl sofa for a nap.

   THE SCHOOL NURSE, A LARGE woman who’d gotten the habit of angling her hips to move through the tight space of her office, frowned when she felt Meg’s forehead. She gave her a thermometer anyway and when she studied the result several minutes later, she said, “No fever.”

“Um. I’ll go back to class then.” For the first time in her life, Meg had not been able to stay awake in class.

“But if you’re sick? How’s your stomach?”

“A bit nauseated.” None of this was true. The cot kept catching Meg’s attention. She wanted to lie down on it. Instead she sat and waited, watching the nurse study a chart. The woman seemed kind.

“Just Tuesday you had a stomach problem. Was it just cramps?”

“It turned out to be cramps. I know we’re not supposed to miss for cramps.”

“Here. I’m going to give you a couple of Midol. Then I’m going to send you home. And you can sleep. What?”

“Just I worry about classes. Tests.”

“I’ll write a note so you can make them up.”

“All right.”

When the nurse turned away after having shaken out four pills into her hand, saying, “Two now, two at bedtime,” Meg pretended to take them, slipped all four into her pocket.

With her formal release, a piece of paper in hand, she started for home. The idea of a nap was so appealing that she felt her eyes closing even as she walked home, even knowing she would have to walk back to fetch the others later. Well, she could check on Nick, anyway.

This morning, over cereal, Susannah had said Nick sang to her once. Meg wished she could hear him sing.

Chicken for leftovers tonight. They’d have to add pasta. Laurie had babysitting again. Meg’s next task was to find something to get them through the weekend. She felt hopeful. She felt lucky—Nick had said they were alike, believing in luck.