Cuts Through Bone (24 page)

The high clouds drizzled softly on Battery Park now, shrouding Lady Liberty's secrets across the bay. Vasquez watched Guthrie grow tired of walking and settle back into the passenger seat of the Ford. He was brooding. His jaw clenched like he was chewing on something difficult, and his eyes weren't focused on anything she could see. Before the phone rang, Vasquez had decided that she had been wrong all summer long. Clayton Guthrie wasn't crazy. Rachel Vasquez just wasn't old enough to know what he was doing.

“Hello?” Guthrie said, pressing the speaker on the phone.

“Guthrie? This's Sergeant Murtaugh. Are you tucked away somewhere?”

“Battery Park.” The rain falling on the old blue Ford was silent, but the wind was cold, and it hissed through the open doors like a sluice.

“Okay. I had to let you walk away from MTS without saying anything,” Murtaugh said. “Major Case, and some of the brass, would like to have you for lunch, you know?”

“I ain't surprised,” Guthrie said.

“You were solid this
A.M.
, so I figured you were good for a heads-up. OC identified that bruiser in your office as Vitaly Kozlov, formerly of Brooklyn. The other guy has a name, but he just came over by way of France. Kozlov was connected to V.I. Maskalenko, a Ukrainian boss. Naturally, I wonder what the
mafiya
has against you. Any ideas?”

“I've been thinking about it all afternoon,” Guthrie said. “I'll wager a few guesses, starting with its being connected somehow to the case I'm working. There's a dirty college boy, but I doubt he's got stones enough to reach out for the
mafiya.
I'd bet against that. On the other hand, I do know why Major Case wants to ball me up. The lawyer involved, Rondell, he's representing Greg Olsen.”

“GI Ken! No kidding!”

“No kidding. Right now, I think they're running with the Barbie doll murders, seeing if they can fit him up—”

“And you're chipping away at the Bowman murder.” Murtaugh laughed. “Those guys downtown crack me up. You're getting somewhere?”

“Maybe. Could be somebody tried to send me an urgent message, since they were looking for Rondell's investigator. That mess earlier had me stirred up, and I wasn't willing to help out. I should call Mike Inglewood, downtown. You know him? Anyway, they turned up a wit in Morningside, and I think she saw somebody. I got a stack of pictures now that I want to show her, but she's been missing for two days.”

A pause was punctuated with a snapping finger, then the rustle of paper. “That wit have a name?”

“Sand Whitten.”

“I'll pass that along for you,” Murtaugh said.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

Night came early and felt cold. The clouds over the city never broke; the afternoon was a long twilight with spates of drizzle and rushing wind. Guthrie took the keys and drove Vasquez back to Henry Street. He told her to warn her parents, though her name wouldn't be in the newspaper from the police blotter until the next morning. Overnight, he planned to stay in a hotel, and they would lay low for a few days. The little detective figured the
mafiya
to step back after a failure. Even if they meant to try again, they would wait.

Vasquez slid the warning to the back of her mind. She knew that if she wanted to sleep, fighting with her parents wasn't the way to get ready for bed. When she undid her ponytail to take a shower, she found a ragged lock of loose hair tangled in the band. Without her realizing, the Russian's knife had almost opened her scalp, leaving one lock of hair not long enough to reach her ponytail; now it swung loose at the edge of her jaw like a trophy. She was disgusted, but she pushed the thought away. The day had been too full. Right before she went to sleep, she wondered how much of a raise Guthrie would give her. Then suddenly it was morning, she was wide awake, and she could hear her mother in the kitchen.

“You're going to make this a habit again?” Mamì asked when Vasquez walked into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. “I could fry some more eggs.”

Vasquez shook her head. “I gotta go.”

“Too fast for sunny-side up eggs and a slice of melon? With pepper?” She knew how to tempt her daughter. Vasquez teetered on the edge until she continued. “You should eat breakfast with your father.”

“No, I gotta hurry,” she said. “Before I go, though, I gotta tell you something. It'll be in the newspaper today. A thing happened at the office.” Her eyes cut, and beneath the table her feet were already shuffling for the door.

Mamì frowned. “What kind of thing?”

“Some shooting, some guys that tried a robbery uptown.”

“So…” She hesitated, throwing one sharp glance at her daughter, then another toward the back of the apartment. “That's where you were hurrying yesterday.”

“Yeah, the robbery.”

“So it's over?”

“They were Russians,” Vasquez said softly.

“Rachel!” Mamì's cry came out sotto voce, and she shot another glance at the back of the apartment. She attacked the eggs she had in the frying pan. Her spatula rang like a machete. “Okay, I'll tell him. You'd better go.”

Vasquez finished her coffee, then pulled on her gun belt and windbreaker. As she slipped through the front door, her mother called softly, “
Buena suerte.
” She rushed downstairs to get away, then had to wait on the stoop. The morning was cool, and she was glad she'd drunk the hot coffee. She watched a grizzled old man hook cans from the garbage until Guthrie's old Ford rolled up to the front of the tenement.

The little detective wasn't talking. He drove uptown on Park Avenue, ticking along with the traffic. Above the city, the clouds were broken, admitting shattered bars of early sunshine. North of Mount Morris, he turned to get on Eighth Avenue. Along the way he had to fight the traffic, because he seemed to be going no place in particular, while every other driver in Manhattan had someplace they needed to be. Eventually he drove down by the Harlem, and the old blue Ford slid up beneath the bridge where Bowman was murdered.

In daylight, the underpinnings looked less forbidding. Sunlight revealed reality: tired, dirty, and overlooked. Guthrie parked. He took a walk among the piers, his feet crunching on gravel and glass, then returned to sit in the driver's seat with the door open.

“You all right?” he asked. “You sleep?”

Vasquez frowned into the bottom of a cup of coffee that was becoming visible. “Me? How about you?”

The little detective grunted. “Not enough,” he said. “Pieces have been trying to fit together all night. This's coming down to two things. Somehow the
mafiya
is worked into it, and Olsen's caught in a beautiful frame with that gun. Those college boys haven't got that kind of grudge against him. Looking into Bowman turned my head the wrong way.”

“
Viejo,
we only figured that out because we went through it.”

“I'm not saying we didn't need to—we gotta get at Peiper,” Guthrie said. “But Wasserman wouldn't have missed this.”

“He must've been a genius.”

“Maybe. He was an old-school tough guy, even when he was old. He was in his sixties when I started. That seems like a long time ago. HP was still a youngster back then. George Livingston is the new right hand, but he only started a few years ago. Before Livingston was Mr. Morgan, a real sharp guy who was doing for the Whitneys since the
first
war. HP inherited him from the man he took over.”

“Another Whitney?”

“That's right. Wasserman was Mr. Morgan's go-to guy. When I ran into HP in France, he put me together with Wasserman over here.” The little detective frowned. “You weren't even born when Wasserman retired. I guess that means I'm really, really old. Anyway, he did just about everything at one time or another—divorce, bail jumping, repo—the old man would even chase lost dogs and cats.

“I had one big case with Wasserman. That was in '91. That case was ugly. After that, he went on about another six months; then he called Mr. Morgan and told him he was finished. He cradled the phone, fished the office keys out of his pocket, tossed them to me, and walked out. I felt like I burned a hole through the chair.”

“What happened?”

Guthrie glanced out across the river, toward the Bronx. He scowled. “I'm still here.”

“No, the case,” Vasquez said.

The little detective frowned and looked at his watch, but then he settled back into the car seat and sighed. “That was in September. Everyone was wearing jackets—the heat was gone. Wasserman had a friend down in Chinatown, an old tong named Li Wei. He called at about nine o'clock in the morning, and Wasserman's face turned as grim as a rock. I knew Viet before I started with him, so I picked Cantonese up fast. The old man stressed languages.

“I had something better than a sprinkling by then, so I could follow the conversation. Li Wei didn't trust phones except for chitchat—he wanted Wasserman to come meet him on Fulton Street. That was outside his territory, which didn't sound good to Wasserman. Before we left, he took an extra pair of forty-fives from the cabinet, and he made me take an extra pistol.

“The Chinese are different like that. They don't call the police. Chinese gangsters will cut you to pieces, or shoot you a dozen times, then run outside and set off firecrackers to pretend they're having a party for their cousin. The gangs are the law, and nobody talks. We took the subway downtown—did I tell you Wasserman would rather ride the train than drive? Sure. Once we got there, the little old Chinese guy gives me a hard look, then props on his cane while he talks. Messengers went back and forth around us while he spelled it out.

“Early that morning, somebody snatched Li Wei's granddaughter—eldest daughter of eldest son, along those lines. In China, the girls aren't that important, but over here, the old men treat every girl child like she's spun from gold. See, the old men almost died out, because there weren't no women. Up until the second war, Chinese women couldn't emigrate to America unless they were prostitutes. An American-born girl child?” Guthrie nodded absently. Trucks rumbled on the bridge overhead, coming out of the Bronx, headed somewhere in the city.

“Li Wei wanted his granddaughter back. She was gold, tiger sign and everything, and that made it double bad. See, the triads do kidnapping for ransom, but not the way it's usually done over here. They run all of the usual scams—extortion, robbery, whatever—but kidnapping is their ultimate shakedown. The victim has to pay promptly. They don't ask for huge ransoms because they don't wait long. After twenty or thirty hours, maybe forty, it's over. First, they tell you when and where to pay. Then after a bit, if the victim acts stubborn, they do a warning—who they're holding gets beat half to death, or loses some fingers, or gets raped, with some pictures taken. There ain't no second warning—just a body, and maybe not that.

“Wasserman grilled him for the details, and it was your typical seam job. The kidnappers picked just the right moment, and whisked her away, only chopping one guy. The job seemed too clean. Li Wei believed they had somebody on his inside, but Wasserman said different. People just trust their routines too much. They agreed the girl had to be
outside
Chinatown, because nobody would keep quiet about Li Wei's granddaughter—he was an old gangster, with more favors in his pocket than pigeons in the park.

“Then they came to the tough part. Li Wei couldn't pay. If he pays, he loses face. The renegades take his face and go up the ladder. So he has to have the crew. He wants his granddaughter back, but the crew is more important.

“The renegades snatched Li Wei's granddaughter real early. That was bad for them. Wasserman taught me the trick with the street people. Inside the city, that's easy. Sure enough, a florist's van went screaming down James Street at half past seven. By midafternoon, drunks were happy on a path through downtown and we're sitting on a white florist's van: Trammel's Treasury. The renegades were in an old walkup on Rivington, just down from Alphabet City.

“I watched while Wasserman went to call Li Wei. One Chinese guy came out, but I didn't worry, because it'd only been eight hours.” Guthrie laughed. Vasquez had a sour look on her face. “I told you, he never missed anything. Eight hours after the snatch, we were sitting on them. We almost reached their hideout before they did.

“Wasserman came back and explained that Li Wei wasn't coming. He figured the first Asian face on the street got his granddaughter chopped. Then Wasserman asked me which apartment they were sitting inside, and I got the sick feeling you get when you do something stupid. I'd been waiting for him to find out. He didn't say a thing. He just sat down and planted his hands on his knees. I had to sit and think for a minute.

“Some Spanish kids down the block were playing stickball. I bought a stack of newspapers and sent one of the kids door-to-door, passing free newspapers and pretending to sell subscriptions. I made sure he was real persistent at every door.” Guthrie laughed. “On the second floor the kid found a pissed-off Chinese guy who didn't want a newspaper—apartment two C.

“I was proud, like a kid who made his first peanut butter sandwich. Wasserman didn't wait for me to settle down. He went right back up the stairs and kicked in the door of two C. When the door came open, the first thing I heard was a TV. I followed him through the door into a typical nothing little apartment. All of the doors lead out into one room, and the kitchen was on one side. Three Chinese guys were inside. The angry guy who didn't want a newspaper was watching TV. Another one was sitting on a stool to watch the street, eating pistachios and spitting the hulls onto the apartment floor. The last one was in the kitchen, boiling some horrible-smelling soup. Wasserman told me later that the soup was called ‘tiger balls'—not really from a tiger, but supposedly serious
yang.
The renegades were about to do the warning on Li Wei's granddaughter. The man who left before Wasserman came back was a tip-off, but I neglected to tell him.