half, and Ava is no stranger to Child Welfare; they won’t let a court give Ava power over the kids’ share. Oh, Jesus, what a mess!
That stupid, horny wife! Why did Morty love her?
When Carmine tried to find Corey, he was told that Lieutenant Marshall was out searching for Kurt von Fahlendorf.
“I failed to take adequate precautions,” he told Silvestri a few moments later.
“Nonsense, Carmine! It’s a rare cop who’s killed in the line of duty, though the statistics are creeping up every year, whereas cops who eat their gun are common. The work’s hard, and all too often thankless. How many women do you know who can put up with a police marriage? Damned few! My Gloria, Danny’s Netty, your Desdemona, Abe’s Betty. Looks like Fernando’s Solidad. A few yeah, but it’s worst for the cops with unsuitable wives.”
“You’re right, John, it’s Ava at fault. Screwing cops for a hobby! I wonder what her real name is? Bertha? Gertrude?”
“You don’t think it’s Ava?”
“The only Ava I know is Ava Gardner.”
“A movie star. But stop blaming yourself, Carmine. If a rookie like Helen MacIntosh could see this coming, Corey should have. Helen’s turning out a good girl.”
“Far better than I’d hoped. The NYPD lost a fine detective when it stuck her in Traffic. Resourceful too.”
However, Carmine didn’t inform the Commissioner that her resourcefulness ran to concocting leakproof stories for cell sergeants moved by pity to break the rules for an old friend.
“I’d better find an address for Ava,” Carmine said.
There was a bunker light in the ceiling just to one side of the trapdoor; a dim bulb burned behind extremely thick glass and a steel cage, though Kurt’s keen eyes discerned faint hints of more powerful wiring. The original light hadn’t been this one.
He was hungry, but far thirstier. As best he had calculated, he was somewhere in the second twelve hours of his captivity; his watch was on his wrist, but broken. Vaguely he remembered skidding on Persimmon Street and getting out of his car to see if he had collided with anything. Then came a hard blow to his head, and then-nothing. The most horrifying part of a painful arousal had been the throbbing in his left hand, roughly bound in his own handkerchief-his little finger was gone! Amputated! Dislodging the blood-soaked linen to find this out had started the stump bleeding again, and he had wrestled to seal it using his right hand and his teeth; but it ached badly, and the fabric was wet again. Why had they done that?
There was no food of any kind, but a half-gallon container of water was sitting on the ground in one corner, and an empty bucket in another. Without thinking he had drunk deeply, even spilled some of the water down his shirt front before suddenly realizing that when it was gone, he had no guarantee of more. His head pounded, his eyes felt gritty and sore.
He could hear nothing. No wind whined or howled, no fluid coursed through pipes or a stream bed, no traffic roared either near or far, no 60-cycle hum came from overhead wires or buried power cables, no rattle of jack- hammers or ponderous grope of caterpillar tracks came to his ears. Nothing.
How long he sat huddled in a corner he couldn’t know, save that he dozed, even slept deeply once. Then he got to his feet and began to pace, up and down, up and down, up and down… A wasted, futile activity! Faltering, he sat down on the concrete floor with a thump that hurt his sacrum, and started to weep. But that accomplished nothing either; sniffling, he rummaged in his hip pocket for his other handkerchief. It wasn’t there, they must have used it on his hand, then thrown it away. A pencil fell out, rolled a tiny distance, and stopped; swiping his face with his bound hand, Kurt considered what the pencil had done, and concluded that the floor was almost perfectly level. At least in that spot.
Checking the level of the floor took some time; he felt occupied, at least. One hand out, he stroked a wall. Plaster, quite smooth. Unpainted, which was interesting. Who would go to so much trouble to plaster a wall, then leave it unpainted or unpapered? Another mystery. From that he passed to emptying out every one of his pockets: three in his jacket, one in his shirt, five in his trousers. No wallet or keys, though he had had them in the Porsche after Buffo’s. His plunder was typical, he thought wryly: a total of fifteen German-made 2B pencils; four red ball- point pens; a Faber-Castell eraser; a notebook on a spiral wire; a Swiss Army knife; a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers in a clear plastic case; and a bottle of Liquid Paper white-out.
A consuming thirst was drying out his mouth and he was finding it increasingly difficult to wet it with a new secretion of spit, so he shut it as tightly as he could. He wasn’t a physiologist, no, but he did understand that an open mouth was drier than a closed one. Since he was alone and had no need to speak, he would keep his mouth permanently shut. Until, he thought ironically, death ensued. For he knew now that he was meant to die.
How to pass the time? That was the worst, the vainest question of all-until he really looked at his treasure trove of pencils and pens, his eraser and white-out.
I will use the walls to do mathematics! he thought, suddenly excited. I will go back over all my equations and check that they are right. Some of my peers insist I am wrong, and I have refuted them in the comfort of my study, using proper blackboards that must be erased. But here, in this place, I cannot do that. I’ll write very small, and not erase one single step. By the time I am too weak to hold a pencil, I will have left my entire career behind on these walls. And when my pencils grow blunt, I will sharpen them with my Swiss Army knife. I may never need the implement that gets a stone out of a horse’s hoof, but I will make great and fine use of the blade.
He stood in the center of the room and surveyed his prison keenly: where to begin? Yes, that far left-hand corner! One wall at a time. He was so excited that he knocked his left hand against a wall as he spun around; the bleeding increased. Sparing it no more than an angry glance, Kurt von Fahlendorf ignored it as he went to the designated spot and started below a very large infinity sign written in red ball-point. His chapters would be in red, a little like Helen and her colored journals.
“When I heard,” said Desdemona, tramping through the forest alongside Carmine, “that almost everybody was working alone, I decided that it wouldn’t do Julian or Alex any harm to spend a few days with Prunella. It’s impossible for me to hike these days, so don’t you dare send me home.”
She had topped the ridge in front of him like a glorious figurehead on a mighty ship of the line, he had thought, winded; as he watched her come down the slope to join him; his knees went weak, it was all he could do to stay upright. What a woman! A goddess! And she’s mine!
“Today is one day I don’t need to be alone,” he said. “I guess you’ve heard about Morty Jones?”
“Yes. Netty Marciano called me. So did John Silvestri, who says you’re blaming yourself too much.”
“How do people box themselves so tightly into a corner that the only way out is to eat a gun?” he asked.
“Suicide is the ultimately selfish act, my love, you know that. Think what a mess Morty’s left behind. No will, even, so Netty says. He and Ava should have made wills on their wedding day as we did. Quitting this earth is complicated when there are children and property involved, and worse with a vengeful, greedy wife. Though Ava is going to have to look elsewhere for lovers than the Holloman PD, according to Netty. The ranks have closed against her. The poor little children are in a bit of a limbo-Ava’s more interested in what money she can get.”
“And here was I thinking that when Danny retired, Netty’s sources would dry up. I’m glad they haven’t. Many’s the time she’s given us a lead.” Carmine sighed. “Like you, I grieve for the kids. I sometimes think people should have to have a license to produce them. Whatever, it shouldn’t have happened to Morty, he didn’t have the strength to deal with Ava. The thing is, how do I approach Corey?”
She paused, shading her eyes; the sun was past its zenith. “Is that a shack down here?”
“It is. It won’t yield anything, Desdemona, but we leave no stone unturned.”
“You approach Corey as you ought,” she said as their pace increased. “He’s earned some censure, no doubt of that.”
“I dread bad feelings. Stay back behind this tree until I make sure the coast is clear.”
“Of course you dread bad feelings!” she shouted at his back. “You’re a good boss, and good bosses are soft as well as hard. I suffer because I have to watch you suffer, but I’ll do what I can to help. Like a favorite dinner,” she said slyly.
“Terrible woman! Food is not uppermost in my mind.”
“It will be, by dinner time.”
They examined the shack, long decayed; it had no cellar or stouter compartment.
“We’re working toward North Rock, aren’t we?” Desdemona asked as they walked on.
