Mask Market

Pepper rolled her eyes dramatically in a “Tell me something I don’t know” gesture.

“That’s one possibility,” I said, unfazed. “The other is that a cop leaked the info. Some of them have a standing arrangement with the gossip boys.”

“So?”

“So I need to find out what was in the actual complaint, Pepper. Supposedly, the wife named the other woman—they called her ‘Ms. X’ in the column, which means either they don’t know or she’s not famous—and that’s info I need. Plus anything else she charged him with—”

“Like?”

“Like, especially, anything to do with money.”

“Why can’t you just go down to the courthouse and—?”

“I guarantee that’s all sealed up by now. And if it’s not, it’s a baited trap, and the cops will be all over anyone who goes looking.”

“So you want us to do it?”

“Pepper, I know you don’t think much of me, but I’m sure you don’t think I’m stupid, okay? Wolfe—”

Mick made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a threat.

“I know she still has friends on the force,” I went on, nothing to lose.

“Friends do favors for friends,” Pepper said, flatly. “What you want, it’s not that sort of thing.”

“I know what you’re saying. I know money won’t do this. All I’m asking you is to ask her, all right?”

“Don’t call us,” she said, getting to her feet.

Mick glided out behind her, his broad back covering her like a steel cape.

The calendar said spring, but instead of blossom-bringing showers, the city stayed mired in dry cold. I never considered trying the co-op on West End. Parks was the source of that address, so he’d already worked it over long before he asked Charlie Jones to find him a tracker. Anyway, the info CD he had given me didn’t say anything about the girl I had known as Beryl Preston being married, or even living with someone, much less having kids.

A three-bedroom in that neighborhood would fetch a fortune for the owner—if the co-op board in her building allowed owners to rent out their units. But the Battery Park apartment was a condo. It wouldn’t have a board. Or a doorman.

Getting around this town isn’t complicated. You need to go north-south, there’ll be a subway someplace close, get you there quick enough…on days when its crumbling innards aren’t showing their age. You want to go east-west, you’re better off walking. I could spot most crosstown buses a couple of avenues and still catch them before they got to the next river. Battery Park is a nice walk from where I live, but not in bitter weather. And not when I’m working.

All I had for the pits who guarded my Plymouth was a few sawdust-and-pork-products wieners I picked up from a street vendor, but the beasts went for them like they were filet mignon. Or an enemy’s throat.

Every time I came, I got another micromillimeter closer to patting one of the females, an orca-blotched beauty who had begun twitching her tail at my approach a few months ago. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said to her. She’s the only one I ever talk to. She cocked her head, gave me a look I couldn’t read, then went back inside her house.

The Plymouth fired right up. I let the big pistons glide through the engine block on their coat of synthetic oil for a couple of minutes, waiting for the temperature gauge to show me signs of life. Then I motored over to the West Side Highway and turned left.

The ride lasted just long enough for James Cotton’s cover of the immortal Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart.” Blues covers aren’t the bullshit “sampling” rappers do, stealing and calling it “respect.” When a bluesman covers another artist’s song, he’s not just paying dues, he’s paying tribute. From the moment I’d caught Son Seals live in a little club in Chicago years ago, I’d wished he would cover “Goin’ Down Slow,” following the trail of giants like Howling Wolf and Big Bob Hite. But before that ever happened, he went down himself. Diabetes, I heard.

I found the complex easy enough; it was only a few blocks west of the blast zone from where the Twin Towers had fallen. Supposedly, the air around what tourists call “Ground Zero” is still full of microparticles from the atomized glass of all those exploded windows. I don’t know what effect stuff like that has on your lungs, but it hadn’t changed the asking—and getting—prices for lofts in the neighborhood. In this city, you could build apartments on top of a nuclear reactor and they’d be full by the weekend.

The gate to the parking lot wasn’t manned. A speaker box sat on a metal pole at the entrance. I hit the button, told the distorted voice coming through the grille that I was William Baylor, EPA, there to do some ambient atmosphere sampling.

I couldn’t tell if they understood a word I said, but the gate opened. I backed the Plymouth into the far corner of an open lot and climbed out. I was just taking a six-dial meter with two carrying handles and “EPA” stenciled across its side out of the trunk when a short, broad-chested Latino in a dark blue private-cop uniform strolled up.

“You’re the guy from…?” he said.

“EPA,” I answered, holding up the meter like it was an ID card.

“That’s what they give you to ride around in?” he said, nodding in the Plymouth’s direction.

“Nah. That one’s mine. If you use your own, you can make out like a bandit. Even with gas the way it is here, at forty-point-five cents a mile, you come out way ahead.”

But the guard wasn’t interested in the finer points of government reimbursement. “Is that righteous, man?” he asked, pointing at my car.

“Nineteen sixty-nine Roadrunner,” I told him, proudly. “All steel and all real.”

“Damn, it’s fine,” the guard said, strolling around the Plymouth like he was examining a prize horse.

“It’s gonna be, when I get all done with her.”

“It’s not a hemi, is it?” he asked, hopefully.

“It was once,” I lied. “But by the time I got it, the whole thing was in pieces. I’m running a 528 wedge.”

“That’s a crate motor?”

“Yep. Pulls like a train, and ticks like a good watch when it’s done.”

“What are you going to do for rims?” he asked, looking at the dog-dish hubcaps on the Roadrunner’s sixteen- inch wheels like you’d look at a potato sack on Jayne Mansfield.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“A ride this size, you could run dubs, bro.”

“Maybe…”

“It would be awesome sick, man. Awesome.”

I looked around the near-empty lot. “You want to try it out? I know you can’t leave your post, but just a couple of laps…”

He stole a quick glance at his watch. “Oh, hell, yes!”

I handed him the keys, got in on the passenger side, putting my bogus measuring device in the back. He sat there for a second, taking it all in. Then he fired it up. “Oh, man, you can feel it.”

He pulled the shift lever into D, delicately eased off.

“No burnouts,” I warned him, keeping my voice light so he’d know I wasn’t taking him for an idiot.

He maneuvered around the lot, barely off idle, steering carefully. He wasn’t timid, just feeling his way.

“When we turn at the end, give it a little down the straight. But watch out—this sucker’s got mad torque.”

He didn’t say anything, concentrating. Made the turn, carefully straightened the front wheels, and gave the throttle a quick stomp. The Roadrunner squatted and launched, pinning us back in our seats. The guard stepped off the gas. We both listened to the sound of the monster V-8 backing off through the twin pipes. The muscle-car signature, as American as the blues.

“Oh, you one lucky hombre, ese,” the guard said.

Unit 229 was a townhouse, the last one in a row of