'What's the name?'
'Lew Whitechurch. And she thinks he might deal pills.'
'Let's get him,' Fell said. As they were flagging the cab, she said, 'If I bust Bekker myself, I'll make detective first before I get out.'
'That'd be nice.' A cab zigged through the traffic toward them.
'More pension. I could probably afford a straight waitress job. I wouldn't have to dance topless,' Fell said.
'Aw,' he said. 'I was planning to come down for your first night.'
'Maybe we could work something out,' she said, and climbed into the cab before he could think of a comeback.
They caught Lewis Whitechurch pushing a tool cart through a basement hallway at Bellevue. His supervisor pointed him out, the hospital's assistant administrator hovering anxiously in the background. Kennett's people had been there earlier, had talked to two employees, she said, but not Whitechurch.
'What?' Whitechurch said.
Fell flashed her badge, while Lucas blocked the hall. 'We need to talk to you, privately.'
Whitechurch shook his head. 'I don't want to talk to anyone.'
'We can talk here or I can call a squad and we can go over to Midtown South.'
'Talk about what?' Whitechurch shot a glance at the supervisor.
'Let's find a place,' Lucas suggested.
They found a place in the hospital workshop, sitting on battered office chairs, Whitechurch spinning himself in quarter-turns with the heel of one foot. 'I honest to God don't know…'
Five hundred cases of paper, they said.
'I ain't gonna talk about nothing like that,' he said, his Jersey accent as thick as mayonnaise. 'You want to talk about this other guy, Bekker, I'd help you any way I can. But I don't know nothing about him, or any medical gear. I wouldn't touch that shit…' He caught himself. 'Listen, I don't take nothing out of here, but if I did, I wouldn't take that stuff. I mean, people might die because of it.'
'If we catch the guy who's helping Bekker… that guy's going down as an accessory. Attica, and I'll tell you what, man: there'd be no fuckin' parole, not for somebody who helped this asshole…'
'Jesus Christ, I'd tell you,' Whitechurch said. He was sweating. 'Listen, I know a couple of people who might know something about this…'
'What do you think?' Fell asked.
'He covered himself pretty well. I don't know. We got names, anyway. We'll come back to him. Let him stew…' Whitechurch had given them two more names. Both men were working.
'Jakes is an orderly-he oughta be around,' the assistant administrator said. She was getting into the hunt, falling into Fell's laconic speech pattern. 'Williams-I'll have to look him up.'
They found Harvey Jakes moving sheets out of the laundry.
'I don't know about this shit,' he said. He was worried. 'Listen, I don't know why you'd come looking to me. I never been up on anything, never took anything, where'd you get my name…'
Williams was worse. Williams worked in the laundry, and was stupid. 'Said what?'
'Said you boosted stuff out of here and…'
'Said what?'
Lucas looked at him closely, then at Fell, and shook his head. 'He's not faking.'
'What?' Williams looked slowly from one to the other, and they sent him back to his laundry.
'We're into a black market-pretty casual, hard to pin down, picking up the occasional opportunity,' Fell said as they ambled down the hall. Like the rest of New York, the Bellevue interior was mostly a patch, painted white with black trim. 'Doesn't feel like a real tight ring. Whitechurch might be bigger, if he really organized a truck to haul that paper out of there. Jakes and Williams are small-time, if they're stealing anything at all.'
'That's about right,' Lucas said. 'Whitechurch might be something, though.'
'Want to go back on him?'
'We should,' he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. 'But I fuckin' hurt…'
'You keep poking at your cheek,' she said. She reached out and touched the bruise, and her light hand didn't hurt at all. 'So what are we doing?'
'I'm going back to the hotel. I need a nap, I feel like shit,' Lucas said.
'We're stuck?'
'Except for Whitechurch, I don't know where we go,' Lucas said. 'Let's think about it. I'll call you tomorrow.'
CHAPTER
11
At the Lakota, Lucas examined his swollen cheek in the mirror. The color of the bruise was deepening, a purple blotch that dominated the side of his face, shiny in the middle, rougher toward the edges. He touched the abraded skin and winced. He'd been hit before, and knew what would happen: the abrasions would scab over while the skin around them turned yellow-green, and in a week, he'd look even worse; he'd look like Frankenstein. He shook his head at himself, tried a tentative grin, ate a half-dozen aspirin and slept for two hours. When he woke, the headache had faded, but his stomach was queasy. He gobbled four more aspirin, showered, brushed his teeth, fished an oversize Bienfang art pad from under the bed and got a wide-tipped Magic Marker from his briefcase. He wrote:
Bekker.
Needs money.
Needs drugs.
Lives Midtown w/friend?
Has vehicle.
Hasn't been seen. Disguise?
Chemist skills.
Medical skills.
Contact at Bellevue.
Night.
He tacked the chart to a wall and lay on his bed, studying it. Bekker needed money if he was buying drugs, and he almost certainly would be. In the Hennepin County Jail he'd begged for them, for chemical relief.
Therefore: he had to be talking to dealers, or at least one dealer. Could he be working for one? Not likely as a salesman: even the dumbest of the dumb would recognize him as a time bomb, if they knew who he was. But if he was working as a chemist-methedrine was simple to synthesize, with the right training and access to the raw materials. If he were running a crank line, that would explain where he'd get money, and drugs, and maybe even a place to stay.
The car was another problem. He was dumping the bodies, obviously from a vehicle. How would he get access? How would he license it? Everything pointed to an accomplice…
He stood, wandered into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The abrasion was stiffening. He probed it with a fingernail, lifting a flake of skin, and blood trickled down his cheek. Damn. He knew better. He got a wad of toilet paper, held it to his cheek, and went back to the bed.
He looked at the chart again, but his mind drifted away from Bekker, toward the other case. Why had they jumped him? And had they really gone after him, or was something else happening? They could have taken him with guns: they had him cold. If they hadn't wanted to kill him, they still could have gotten to him more quickly, with baseball bats. Why had they risked resistance? If he'd had a gun in his hand, he would have killed them…
