'Hmm. Thank you, these look great.'
She let her hand linger on his shoulder. 'I like old rich bums, by the way, just to finish the conversation.'
'What about young rich bums?'
'Not charming enough.'
He ate with gusto. At least he hadn't lost his appetite. When he paused, he looked up and said, 'Seriously, Connie. I say this all the time but I am serious.'
She was waiting for him. 'You say that all the time, too. I'm very happy, Bill.'
'That's because you are wasting all your maternal energies on a sixty-nine-year old baby. I've had four children. I know how great they are. A few more years go by you can't have kids and I'm out there at the wheelchair showroom.'
She smiled, but her eyes were wet. 'Please, Billy, this does kind of hurt me when you say this.'
'I'm sorry.'
'It makes me happy to be with you. Maybe I'm not so wrapped up in the future like you are.'
'Probably because you have a lot more of it.'
She looked at him straight. 'Yes, I do. But so?'
He went back to his eggs. It was an old conversation. Not an untrue conversation but unsolvable, almost comfortable in its familiarity.
'What's really bothering you, Bill?'
He tasted the coffee. Perfect. 'Bothering me? I'm bothered by the fact that I've taken a huge bite out of Good Pharma, expecting it to be a takeover candidate. I thought it was cheap. No, not cheap, but reasonable. They have half a dozen drugs in the pipeline. Some will bomb but we think two are huge. But it's too early to get good information yet. We just have inklings. And the market is craving new products. You get the right new product, you get a new demand, okay? People want something that never existed before! I know the number-two guy, Tom Reilly. He's not the CEO but he's the guy who knows what's really going on. Real slick fuckwad, let me tell you. Good Pharma's stock is down thirty-seven percent in the last few weeks. I want to know why. I've asked, and nobody can tell me or will tell me.'
'Why don't you ask this Tom Reilly?'
'I have.'
'Well?'
'He's avoiding me. Hiding in the weeds.'
'So?'
'I'm starting to make his life difficult. I had him followed to a Yankees game two nights ago and messed with his head. Sent him a little message from old Billy-boy.'
'Has he called you?'
'No, he's scared. I expected him to call me after the game, but he didn't.'
Connie frowned at him, pressing her breasts forward aggressively. 'You need to kick some ass, sounds like.'
'Think so?' It excited him to hear her say it.
'You're good at that, Bill.'
'I can be.'
'No, you listen to me,' she told him. 'Nobody fucks with Billy Martz, right? I've heard you say this to me a thousand times. You're tougher, you're smarter, and you're definitely meaner. You are a mean old bastard, Bill! Get that information out of him so that you can fix the problem. You hear me, Bill? Frankly I don't think you've really given it much effort yet.'
He nodded. 'I could turn up the heat.'
'You could?' she said, her voice disgusted.
'I will turn up the heat. I'll roast the asshole.'
'Then go do it, Bill, and stop telling me how fucking miserable I am!' His beautiful wife put her hands on her hips and looked ferociously at him, and in that moment they both knew, again, happily, why he had married her.
6
She was in more danger than he realized. Ray put down the phone. One of his father's old friends from the job, Detective Pete Blake, now on the brink of retirement himself, had filled Ray in on the murder of the two Mexican girls. A loner who'd never married, Blake used to come to the house for Thanksgiving dinners, throw a football in the alley with Ray while his father raked leaves before going inside for the feast Ray's mother had cooked. 'Yeah, we found them laid out on the parking lot,' Blake had said. 'Couple of days ago. Aerosol mace dispenser on the pavement. Somebody filled the car with sewage. The guys had to have a pump-out truck, some kind of vehicle that holds septic waste.'
'I thought the whole city is tied in to the sewers.'
'It is, but people still need pump-outs when their pipes are clogged or break. Plus you got some old septic tanks still in operation here and there.'
'So you look for one of these trucks?'
'The thing of it is that the state Department of Environmental Protection shows computer records for 918 such vehicles licensed to operate in Brooklyn, Queens, and western Suffolk County. Take a long time to knock all those out. Course, the truck could be unlicensed, too, maybe even be from Jersey or north of the city. So maybe it's smarter to work it through the girls. They'd been drowned before being pulled out of their car. Smart way to kill somebody in some respects. There's no DNA. I mean, there's too much DNA, all of it contaminated. Plus we don't really know who these Mexican girls were. They had ID but it was all fake, fake green cards, everything. No driver's license, of course. No bank accounts, used one of those check-cashing places, probably. Telephone is in the name of somebody who doesn't live there anymore, utility bills paid by money order. It's like that with all these people. Might be a drug thing, girls smoked a bit, there were boyfriends in the trade. Lots of Mexicans selling drugs in Brooklyn these days. We know who some of them are. The thing of it is that all these organizations are always fighting for turf, showing how fricking vicious they can be. The Albanians are very tough. So are the Salvadoran kids. Last month we had a dead guy, they put him through a band saw, put the top half on a pole like some kinda Mexican scarecrow. So killing a couple of wetback girlfriends is good advertising. Your girlfriends are shit, you are nobody-this is the way these people think. We found traces of stuff in the trunk of the car, glove compartment. Car is still drying, we'll see if there's anything else. We got people to talk to, snitches, rats, nice people like that.'
'Didn't see it in the news.'
'Didn't nobody tell you, Ray?'
'What?'
'There's no news in Brooklyn. You want news? Commit your crimes in Manhattan, and try to do it south of, like, Ninety-sixth Street. No, actually we kept it quiet, to help us with any informants. One of the tabloids got it but ran it small. Anyway, someone broke the two front side windows with a chunk of asphalt to open the doors, failed to save the girls, then disappeared. That means the car was locked from the inside, and that means that either the girls were already incapacitated or were trapped in the car and someone locked the doors after they were incapacitated. There was a wine bottle in the car, maybe they had passed out, we don't have complete toxicology and autopsy body weight back yet, which is disgraceful, if you ask me.' Blake made a coffee-sipping sound. 'Still too hot. Anyway, whoever tried to save them is probably too scared to get involved, and who could blame them? Rain fell pretty steadily on the bodies for maybe an hour, washed out the car like that.' Blake paused, and when his voice came back, it was professionally softer, a little slower, slipping in a question. 'Why you interested, anyway?'
Ray wasn't going to mention his evening with Chen and his men-not yet, anyway. 'My old girlfriend works at the same company they did. I think she saw them earlier that night.'
'Then we might want to talk to her.'
'That makes two of us. She's not around, if you know what I mean.'
'You find her, let me know. She's a person of interest. What's her name?'
