Pied Piper

“I don’t think so.” The forty came back through the door.

“The guy wears the same eagle as you do, only on his forearm. Yours is on your right biceps. That bird is the only connection to you. I’m not carrying any trouble for you. The artwork was done at your last address.” LaMoia fished the hundred half through. “Take it.” It sat there, and he suddenly saw it not as currency but as Sarah caught in a deadly tug of war.

The door came open a crack. Jimmy wore a goatee and glasses in dime-store frames. His dark hair was pulled into a ponytail. He looked dumb, like so many of them did.

“Three of you got the same tattoo. I checked with the prison. Of the three, they remembered you. You stayed a little longer than was on the original invitation.”

“You gotta be heat.”

“Was once,” he repeated. “The guy-the one with the eagle on the forearm-is laying bad plastic from San Diego to Seattle. He’s late on payments for a Taurus. I’m representing the car dealer.”

“Never knew him.”

“A name would help. That tattoo was seen laying down the plastic, but we got nothing but aliases. Medium security. You had to run into him.”

The man glanced down at the hundred on the floor.

“Plus the forty,” LaMoia said. “Name of a friend. Anything I can use?”

“Never knew him. Not personally. Not so as I knew a name or nothing.”

“Listen, if you’re milking me. … I’m light as it is-”

“It’s not that. I didn’t know him. You listening?” Disgusted, he said, “He was smooth, that’s all I know about him. Talk his way into anything, out of anything. Was a stunt man-”

“Con artist.”

“Right, a stunt man. In for some kind of something. Sucked up to the screws and the chief. Got his way: butts, weed, booze. Didn’t want to know him. You know? Fuck the little kiss ass.”

LaMoia ate up every detail. “But he got the same tattoo as you,” he reminded, hoping to spur some rivalry. Inmates were little more than boys in this regard.

“Got mine first, Goddamn it. Everyone admiring it, like. Hisself included.” He eased the door open wider, more relaxed. Oprah was on a small color set that favored yellow. Jimmy saw LaMoia checking out the TV and he said, “Got hooked on that bitch in the joint. Can’t give her up.”

“Know what you mean.”

“You watch?”

LaMoia shrugged. “You’re saying all the sucking up won him special treatment. That’s why you didn’t hang with him.”

“He got privileges,” the man complained. “‘Jungle visits,’ we called them.”

“Conjugal visits.”

“Only the butt suckers-the brownnosers-pulled off that kinda shit, I’ll tell you what. Doing time and getting cheese a couple times a month. Gimme a fucking break!”

LaMoia knew it went against the rules, meaning the visits had been arranged by the guards as a form of payment. “He’s married?”

“Two, three times a month he’s sucking and banging the bitch who put them both in the joint the first place, way I heard it.”

“She was also incarcerated?”

“A stunt team, they were. She gets driven over here from the slammer in Lamont, drops the lace and spreads ’em. They do the Dippity-Do and she’s back in the van for Lamont.”

Conjugal visits between two inmates was unheard of in Washington State. “Lamont?”

“It’s the big house for chicks.”

“The wife is doing hard time?” LaMoia sensed his chance to identify the two. The conjugal visits were certainly not official, which meant they would not carry any kind of paperwork. They reeked instead of payoffs, or- knowing this team’s record-a con job. A few screws and a transport were involved at a minimum. “He have money, this guy?”

“How you think he rubs up against the screws so good? ’Course he had money, somewhere. And it must have been quite a few yards. But I heard that about him-no one ran a stunt like this guy. He was in for ripping off old hags, I think. Something like that.” He glanced back at the TV where Oprah paced in front of the stage. “I don’t know shit about him. Stayed clear of that shit.”

LaMoia handed him the remaining forty to add to the hundred on the floor. “You sure you don’t remember a name?”

“No way.”

“Looks?”

“Average. Your height. You gonna run stunts on people, you gotta look average, know what I mean? They gotta trust you.”

“Not me,” LaMoia said. “I don’t trust him an inch.”

CHAPTER 56

Boldt and Daphne’s admission to the Bureau of Vital Statistics did not come from Montevette, the director of the boys’ home, nor did it come through the front door. Miss Lucy made the contact-at the back door-and in a matter of an hour instead of what might have taken days or even weeks through proper channels. They had no warrant; they were well out of their jurisdictional authority. They possessed only Boldt’s compelling urgency in his eyes and Daphne’s internal calm. With both barrels loaded, no one could refuse them, least of all Walter, a black man in his early fifties who wore polyester trousers and a starched houndstooth shirt. Walter, whose hair was graying at the temples, walked like a man sacrificed at fullback on an overly competitive high school team. His nose had been flattened several times and left to wilt on his face like the curled thumb of an old leather glove. He wore half glasses that magnified a string of dark moles under his left eye.

Boldt and Daphne were led down a long narrow aisle between gunmetal gray shelves that stretched fourteen feet into the air toward bare-bulb funnel lights and the exposed steel trusses that supported the building’s flat roof. The volume of paperwork overwhelmed Boldt, for this was but one of dozens and dozens of such rows. “I hope this isn’t all adoptions,” he said.

“This here is birth certificates,” Walter replied, his strained voice absorbed like the spoken word in a snow- covered forest. “To your left, death and marriages-same thing, far as I’m concerned. That area toward that far wall is divorces. We got maybe twelve, fifteen stacks filled to the top with ’em.” He turned right, left and right again. A maze of paperwork, marked only by tiny white labels on the shelves and typed stickers on the boxes, the place seemed artificial to Boldt, created simply to overwhelm him. The prospect of dust and gum and paper cuts loomed. His impatience mounted; perhaps he could leave Daphne here to sort through it. But no, he answered himself, two sets of eyes were critical to such an undertaking.

Another right, left and right-they were working their way to this, the top floor’s far corner where a massive chain-link fence isolated the small reception area with its wood bench, wooden counter and black pens on chains. A woman named Amy glanced once when she heard Walter’s approach and a second time as a double take when she saw him in company.

“I need Ole Blue a minute, Amy,” Walter said, indicating the computer.

A computer! Boldt felt a rush of hope. “You’re computerized?”

“I’m not,” Walter replied, “but these stacks are all indexed on Ole Blue, and anything filed after nineteen hundred and eighty-eight is in his memory instead of on the shelves. Thank the lord.” He said, “Although it did cost four jobs up here on the seventh.” He smiled warmly at Daphne. “Seniority do have its privileges.”

Amy came to Walter’s rescue several times over the course of the next ninety minutes. He had trouble keeping the search targeted to all parishes, the system defaulting to citywide searches. The result was that adoption records were sorted parish by parish; neither of them could seem to convince the machine to do a districtwide search. The process was painstakingly slow.