They? I asked.
Of Mr. FitzGibbon’s money. He was doing it with Raul and Ramon.
Dorita looked at me. I looked at her. The phone calls.
I don’t know how, exactly, Lisa went on. He was using Veronica to get to his father. And Raul and Ramon were, like, there. With his father, all the time. They told Mr. FitzGibbon that his wife was kidnapped. That he had to play along, pay the ransom, or she’d be dead. That they might come after him, too. The kidnappers. So Ramon had to be with him every second of the day. Ramon never left his side. Unless Raul was there to take over for a while. But Ramon was the security guy, supposedly. So it was almost always him.
I looked at Butch. He got up quietly. He went out the door.
Dorita looked at Lisa, still with the kindly air. Let’s go back a little bit, she said. How did Veronica die?
She…she suffocated, said Lisa.
Suffocated?
From the… the duct tape.
Okay, said Dorita, taking Lisa’s hand again. It’s okay. We know you didn’t mean that to happen.
I didn’t, sobbed Lisa. Oh God, I surely didn’t.
Surely. It dawned on me that Lisa, for all her punked-out trappings, hadn’t always been a street kid. She’d come from somewhere. She had a family. A dad. A mom. Whoever they were. What they’d been through.
They hadn’t seen anything yet.
So when I came over the second time? I began to ask.
When I sat on you? she anticipated, with a tearful sneaky smile.
Right.
I wanted to distract you. To keep you from looking around. Seeing something. Before Jules got there.
Damn. I wasn’t irresistible after all.
Besides, she said, you were kind of cute.
That was better.
That sneaky smile gave me something to think about. This little girl was far from helpless.
Seeing what? I asked.
I don’t know, she said. I was afraid, that’s all.
I looked at my watch. We were running out of time. Butch came back in. He gave me a Look. I knew what it meant. We weren’t getting an extension.
What about Larry Silver? I asked.
Oh, him, she said with a sneer. That fucker got what he deserved.
How’s that? I asked.
Jules needed somebody to do the actual snatch, she told us. He couldn’t do it himself, of course, because Veronica knew him. Jules knew Larry from the streets. He knew Larry was a mean and angry guy. Somebody who could be violent. And he was stupid. Jules thought he could control him. So he got Larry to do the job. When Veronica got back to New York, Larry grabbed her, brought her to the loft. Blindfolded, so she wouldn’t see Jules. He paid off Larry. Two thousand bucks.
And that was the beginning of the end.
Because Larry wasn’t going to settle for a lousy two thousand bucks. On the day of his murder, as we knew by then, Larry hadn’t come to the loft to talk about a poker debt. He’d come to shake down Jules. They’d gotten into a fight all right. That much was true. But after they were lying there exhausted, Jules had to find a way to make sure Larry didn’t leave angry. He couldn’t risk that. So Jules started to negotiate, at some point managing to put a call in to Raul, who sent over Mr. Security with a baseball bat. Jules gave Larry some cash. Promised more. Larry wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Left the loft happy with his victory. Put one over on that little prick Jules, he was no doubt thinking. Until Ramon grabbed him by the neck, dragged him to the Dumpster.
The baseball bat did the rest.
But Ramon unfortunately left Larry’s body where it could easily be found. And when the police figured Jules as a suspect for Larry’s murder right away, the whole thing started to unravel. It was a fucking disaster.
They’d barely had time to get Veronica out of the place before the cops showed up. Took her to the empty loft upstairs.
And then Veronica’s death. From then on it was damage control.
Funny, I thought. This didn’t jibe with Jules’s sudden calm and arrogance, the fourth time I’d gone to the loft.
So, I hazarded, why did Jules…do what he did? Upstairs. Just now.
I couldn’t think of a nice way to put it.
The tears welled up in Lisa’s eyes again. He’d always been obsessed with the samurai thing, she told us. He’d played with the idea many times. And the night before, it seemed that he had some kind of breakdown. Or maybe it was a revelation. He finally figured out that everything was coming apart. Raul was going to let Jules take the hit for Larry Silver’s murder. Or pin FitzGibbon’s death on him. Get rid of him some other way. Whatever. Maybe just have him hit by a truck. Jules had become irrational, afraid. He’d lost his inner Superman. He’d heard the buzzer ring when we’d arrived. He’d looked out over the balcony, seen who it was. When he saw us, he figured the end was coming. He took the honorable way out. As he saw it, anyway.
Jesus. I was batting four hundred. Five times I’d been to the loft. Twice people died. I was the Grim fucking Reaper.
As my watch ticked off the final seconds, Dorita asked Lisa why she didn’t get out of it at some point. Call the cops. Or at least get the hell out of there.
She couldn’t get away from it, Lisa explained. Not only was she so involved that she couldn’t get out, she was actually enjoying it. She’d gotten caught up in the whole James Bond thrill of it. Nothing in her life had ever been so vital, so close to the bone. She felt alive. Free, in a complicated kind of way.
Alive by death, I thought. Nice.
Which was the cue for the door to slam open, the Nose to stride back in. He didn’t have a compromising air. Enough with the goddamn lawyers. This was going to be his investigation. Butch rose to meet him. Detective Nose brushed him aside.
Lisa Mueller? he said.
She looked up at him with a defiant air.
You’re under arrest for the murder of Veronica FitzGibbon.
Sure, she said, her hard edge back again. No sweat.
We’d lost her.
On the way out Butch asked one of the CID guys whether they’d found Veronica.
In the other building, the guy said.
What other building?
The one next to the alley.
109.
The scene was guarded by yellow tape and blue uniforms. A skinny cop with a bad facial condition pointed me and Butch to a dark staircase at the end of a narrow hallway.
Down there, he said. But be careful. They’re dusting for prints.
Okay, we said.
The staircase was dimly lit by small orange bulbs. We went down slowly. At the bottom they’d set up high- powered floodlights. Every dust ball and dead cockroach was starkly lit, outlined by a harsh shadow.
Careful, shouted one of the CID guys.
I looked down. I’d almost stepped on an evidence kit.
Sorry, I said.
Butch grabbed my elbow.
Just follow me, he said.
