Mask Market

She’s so gorgeous she can show off just by showing up. Keeps a big mirror on her bed, where the headboard should be. Her favorite way is to get on all fours and wiggle a little first. She wants it so that the last thing she sees before she lets go is herself, watching me doing her.

When I pretend to go to sleep afterwards, she vacuums my clothes with a feather touch. She’s not looking for money, just information.

She thinks my name is Ken Lewis. She calls me Lew. I never asked her why.

There’s a dirty elegance about her. She looks as lush as an orchid, and comes across just about as smart. But that’s just another kind of makeup for her. She’s got the dumb-blonde thing down so slick that trying to get a straight answer out of her is like cross-examining a mynah bird with ADD.

Her name is Loyal.

I never sleep over.

“Call you a cab, sir?” a different doorman asked, as if getting a cab at three in the morning in that neighborhood required a professional’s touch.

“Thanks,” I lied, “but I’m parked around the corner.”

The next day started out like the beginning of a long winning streak. Before I could even take a look at the paper, the TV called to me with a breaking story. A guide dog was walking with his person just before daybreak when a couple of muggers descended. Probably junkies who’d spent the whole night trying to score, I thought. The muggers kicked the blind man’s cane out of his hand. When he went down, they dropped to their knees to rip at his jacket. Apparently, that was a major mistake. When the cops arrived, the blind man still had one of the muggers in a painful joint lock. The other one got away, but left a lot of blood on the sidewalk.

The newscaster said the blind man was a veteran of World War II. They showed a photo of a man who looked vaguely Asian, with a stiff white crew cut and a prominent tattoo on one biceps that I couldn’t make out. As the camera panned down, my earlier guess was confirmed: who but a desperate junkie would try to put a move on a blind man whose seeing-eye dog was a Doberman?

I raised my glass of guava juice in a silent toast to the man and his dog.

The day got better when I saw the race results. Little Eric had gotten away cleanly and settled back in the pack, letting the favorite and another horse battle for the lead. The first quarter went in a blistering .28 flat. While the lead horses dueled on the front end, Little Eric moved to the outside, picking up cover just past the half. The three-quarter went in 1:26.2, with Little Eric still two deep on the outside. He made his move at the top of the stretch, going three wide to calmly gun down the rest of the field, nailing the win and taking a lifetime mark of 1:54.4 in the bargain.

He paid $27.40 to win. Even with the two-to-five favorite hanging tough for second, the exacta returned a sweet $89.50. Our seventy-buck investment was going to net well over four hundred.

Damn!

I switched on the bootleg satellite radio the Mole had hooked up for me, and was instantly rewarded with Albert King’s “Laundromat Blues,” the Sue Foley version of “Two Trains,” and, to cap the trifecta, Magic Judy Henske’s new cut of “Easy Rider.”

Today’s the day to play my number, I remember thinking. Then I made the mistake of opening the paper from the front.

MURDERED MAN IDENTIFIED, BUT MYSTERY DEEPENS, the headline read. I scanned the article quickly, then reread it carefully, culling the facts away from the adjectives the way you have to do to translate the tabloids.

The dead man was a “financial planner” named Daniel Parks. He was forty-four years old, an Ivy League M.B.A. who lived on a “multimillion-dollar” waterfront estate in Belle Harbor with his wife and three children, the oldest a teenage girl who tearfully told the reporters that her father couldn’t have had an enemy in the world.

They hadn’t ID’ed him from prints; his wallet—containing several hundred dollars, the reporter noted—had provided a wealth of information. Not just his driver’s license and the registration and insurance papers for the Audi, but a permit for the “automatic pistol” they found in his coat.

New York’s very stingy with carry permits. There’s only about forty thousand active ones at any time—you’ve got better odds of finding a landlord who voluntarily cuts your rent. Almost all those permits go to celebrities— they’re an important status symbol in a town where status is more important than oxygen. Of course, if you’re one of those “honorary police commissioners”—the “honor” comes from a heavy annual contribution to some murky “police fund”—you get to walk around with all the iron you want. Park anywhere you want, too—another one of the perks is an official NYPD placard for your windshield.

I didn’t like any of that. When I got to the part about Parks being “rumored” to have recently testified before a grand jury investigating money laundering, I liked it even less. If the hunter-killer team had been shadowing him, they might have sent a man inside to see who he was going to meet.

The scenario was bad enough, but it wasn’t worst-case. The federales aren’t the only ones who can tap phones. If the shooting team had a heads-up for where the target had been headed that night, they could have had the place covered for hours before I even showed up. It didn’t look as if they had, so I was probably in the clear.

Probably.

Even if they’d had a man inside, I told myself, they wouldn’t know anything but my face—and you have to get real close to see anything distinctive about it. I didn’t think they had seen my car, and even if they had, the license was a welded-up fake. A trace-back on the number I had called Parks from would dead-end no matter how deep they looked.

So I was clear unless…unless Charlie had been offered enough cash to stray out of his home territory, take a vacation from the middle. If there was a bounty on the dead man, Charlie would know about it. So, when the target came to ask Charlie to put him together with someone who could help with his problem, Charlie could have sold him.

Bad. That little ferret practiced a dark martial art, the kind that lets you kill a man with a phone call. But if I asked him about it…very fucking bad. Word gets out you were looking for Charlie, it could make a lot of people nervous. Where I live, it’s a lot cheaper to kill the hunter than hide the prey.

I went into myself. All the way down the mine shaft where the only ore is truth and pain. Like when I was a kid, and those words were synonyms.

I had one hand to play. I was holding it in my mind, turning it over, seeing the aces-and-eights full house, the only one my ghost brother ever dealt. Then Clarence walked in the door, and made things worse.

“It’s a dossier, mahn,” he said, holding out the CD I’d given him.

“The person who put this together, he had a lot of time on his hands. Spent some money, too.”

“Any money in it?” I asked, hoping for something to get me back to my winning streak.

“Maybe,” the West Indian said dubiously, tossing his cream cashmere topcoat over the back of my futon couch, the better to display a fuchsia satin shirt with black nacre buttons worn outside a pair of black slacks with balloon knees and pegged cuffs. “There’s account numbers and all, but no access codes or PIN numbers.”

“How do I—”

“Got it right here, mahn,” Clarence said, removing a narrow silver notebook computer from a black brushed- aluminum case. “I downloaded the CD to a USB key, so all I have to do is—”

Catching the expression on my face, he clamped down on the geek-speak long enough to hit some keys and bring the machine to life.

The first screen was all vital statistics. Peta Bellingham, DOB September 9, 1972, five foot seven, 119 pounds, and a note to “see photos.” Whoever had put together the package had her home and cell phones, fax, e- mail, Social Security number, three local bank accounts—checking, savings, and a handful of sub-jumbo CDs, all showing balances as of a couple of months ago—plus one in the Caymans and another in Nauru, with a series of “????” where the balances should have been. Two cars registered, a Porsche Carrera and a Mazda Miata…which didn’t make sense, for some reason I couldn’t quite touch. A co-op on West End, recent purchase; estimated value a million four, against a seven-hundred-grand mortgage. A one-bedroom condo in Battery Park, free and clear. A mixed-bag portfolio, weighted in favor of biotech stocks, managed by…Daniel Parks, MBA, CPA, CFP.