“For criminals, then?”
“Yes.”
“And everybody knows?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any contacts there?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
He made some noise. I wasn’t sure what the word was, but I knew it was a single syllable.
I wasn’t holding good cards, but I wasn’t down to drawing dead, either. Not yet. Beryl’s picture was circulating all over the city. Favors were being called in, pressure was being put on.
You can’t really do surveillance on houses as isolated as her father’s, or in neighborhoods as ritzy as her mother’s. Not unless you have a government-sized budget and government-level immunity for felonies. I know how to get in touch with some sanctioned black-bag boys, and I know what it takes to turn their crank, too. But telling your business to people like that will guarantee you go on a list. The bone-and-pistol package Morales had planted had gotten me off a bunch of those, and I didn’t want to start new ones.
With the kind of money that Daniel Parks had made disappear, Beryl could have disappeared, too. She could be anywhere. But it didn’t feel like that to me. And I’d found her once….
“You know where I used to work? There’s a parking lot, the public one. The upper deck is outdoors.”
“Got it.”
“I’m there now.”
“Give me an hour.”
I thumbed off the cell phone, slipped it into the pocket of my jacket.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” Loyal said.
“‘Her’?”
“Yes, ‘her.’ Not that fake ‘wife’ of yours, the one woman you really love.”
“This is just business,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, soft and somber, like in church. “When you’re done with your ‘business,’ you come right on back here, sugar, and I’ll fix whatever she broke. That’s the kind of woman
The Chrysler’s passenger door opened and Wolfe got out. Instead of moving toward me, she opened the back door, and a thick black shape flowed onto the ground.
Wolfe snapped on the Rottweiler’s chain and stepped over to where I was parked. Her shiny lime-green raincoat was tightly belted at the waist, blazing in the night.
I got out of the Plymouth. Slowly.
Not slow enough. The Rottweiler let out a threatening growl.
“Bruiser!” Wolfe said. “Enough.”
“Hey, Bruiser,” I greeted him.
He said something like “Go fuck yourself!” in Rottweiler. The barrel-chested beast had decided to hate me the first time he saw me. And once he locked his bonecrusher jaws around a feeling, he never dropped the bite.
“Your dog’s a real party animal,” I said to Wolfe.
“Bruiser? He’s a sweetheart,” she said, patting the monster’s huge head. “You’re the only one he doesn’t like.”
Wolfe walked over to the edge of the lot, leaned her elbows on the railing, and looked down at the dark. I stayed where I was.
“Down!” she told the Rottweiler.
He did it in slow motion, his “give me a reason” eyes pinning me all the way.
I moved over to the railing, my hands already coming up with a flared match for Wolfe’s cigarette.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’m the one who needs to be thanking you. You found—?”
“Maybe not much,” she said. “Maybe enough.”
“How did you—?”
“That little tombstone was a perfect surface for prints.” I didn’t bother telling her that that was why I’d pocketed an item from the shelf full of artifacts bestowed on little Beryl by professional revolutionaries grateful to her parents for their financial support. It was a lead-cast miniature of a clenched fist rising from the engraved tombstone of Fred Hampton. “You’re lucky nobody had polished it.”
“Just how lucky did I get?”
“There were three different partials that could be lifted. One of them matched to a Beryl Eunice Preston, DOB nine, nine, seventy-two. That’s her, right?”
“Right,” I said, not surprised to see Wolfe’s hands holding nothing but her cigarette—I’d seen her cross- examine expert witnesses for hours without ever glancing at her notes.
“She was in the system,” Wolfe said. “Arrested eleven, twenty, ninety-seven. Attempt murder, CCW, whole string of stuff.”
“All one event?”
“Yes,” she said, exhaling so that smoke ran out of her nose. “This was in Manhattan. She was working for one of the escort services, claimed the john had demanded she do something she didn’t want to do, then got violent with her when she refused.”
“A self-defense case?”
“It might have been, if it had ever gone to trial,” Wolfe said. “The escort service said they’d never heard of her, big surprise, but she posted bail and walked. Then the complaining witness stopped complaining. When the detectives leaned on him, he said the whole thing had been a mistake. He was showing her the knife—said he was some kind of collector, and this was a fancy one he’d just bought—and he slipped and fell on it. The hotel never should have called the cops.”
“Anyone buy that?”
“Why would they?” Wolfe said. “But what were they going to do, threaten to tell his wife he was using his credit card to have some fun? Bluff the girl into taking an assault plea? This is real life, not a TV show. They dropped it like it was on fire.”
“Nothing since? For Beryl, I mean?”
“As far as the system’s concerned, she could have joined a convent.”
“You pulled an address?”
“Sure,” she said. And gave me the condo in Battery Park.
When I didn’t say anything, she said, “You had that one, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, not trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“The arraignment judge played it like it was a stand-up assault with a deadly weapon,” Wolfe said, grinding out her cigarette with one precision stab of her spike heel. “Set bail at a quarter-mil. Your girl, she didn’t use a bondsman.”
“She put up that much in
“No,” Wolfe said. “A friend put up his house.”
“Must have been some house.”
“Oh, it was.” Her white teeth flashed in the night. “Want the address?”