The Importance of Being Dangerous (26 page)

“Come with me, dear,” she said to Sidarra through a warm smile when the meeting was over. “Please ride back with me.”

How she knew who Sidarra was was a small mystery. No one had even informed Sidarra that the event would take place, and she only found out through watercooler rumor. Sidarra fairly bubbled with excitement at the introduction and the chance to sit in the town car with one of her heroes.

When they were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the first pleasantries had already passed, Sidarra spoke up honestly. “Look, Dr. Blackwell, I'm not saying this to jockey for anything. That I want you to know. I've read so much about you. I'm truly honored for the city that we have you. You've done wonderful work, a real model for me personally. I know you'll be making changes, and I may not fit into your plans. I just want you to know that I accept your judgment. I understand how these things work.”

“Thank you, Sidarra. Thanks for your kindness. I could use that now. This won't be easy, you know.” They sat with their legs crossed, smiled in each other's faces, and looked awkwardly out the window for a moment. “Of course, I could also use the names of a few decent restaurants nearby. Maybe you can help me out.”

“That's the least I can do.”

“Terrific.”

 

SIDARRA MUST HAVE DONE QUITE A JOB
on the restaurant list. Somehow it got her early entrée into the chancellor's office, a huge rectangular room with windows on three sides that Sidarra had never actually been inside before. During the first week of Dr. Blackwell's tenure, she was called there for at least two hours out of each day. Once she was surprised to see some of her own reports on Dr. Blackwell's gigantic oak desk. She said nothing about it, and nothing was said to her. She took notes at meetings alongside Dr. Blackwell's out-of-town staff and was often called upon to brief them on various aspects of Chancellor Eagleton's standardized curricula. When Sidarra was finally asked to deliver her own assessment of Eagleton's reforms, she let go without hesitation.

“You know that term they used to use about civilians killed by Central American governments?” she said to nods. “He simply ‘disappeared' underachievers from the rolls.”

There was a brief silence. Dr. Blackwell sighed into her desk and looked up. “That's what I thought,” she said calmly.

Sidarra was even present the day Dr. Blackwell interviewed some of the former chancellor's top advisers. In walked Desiree Kronitz in a short, tight-fitting yellow suit that almost matched her hair. Desiree was all smiles. She spoke in rapid-fire breaths about what a huge fan she was of Dr. Blackwell's work, as she said Sidarra could attest, especially her principled stand on vouchers. Dr. Blackwell could not finish her questions without Desiree interrupting to give the long answer she thought the new chancellor wanted to hear. Sidarra could see Dr. Blackwell growing impatient, and finally gave over the questioning to her deputy, a short Asian man named Stanley. Stanley asked Desiree a few more questions, and Desiree immediately turned her full attention on him. Sidarra saw her pull some of the subtle flirtatious charms she used on Clayborne Reed when she first arrived. But they didn't last long. Stanley wrapped it up in a hurry.

“I've read her stuff,” Dr. Blackwell said a little indifferently after Desiree had left. “What do you think, Stanley?”

“I think she's full of shit, Chancellor.” He didn't even blink. “In Korean we would say that she lacks ‘home-training.'”

“No doubt,” the chancellor agreed. “We got that word too.”

IN NEW YORK CITY
, the newspapers had been silent about the ongoing investigation into Jack Eagleton's murder because it was stalled. That had given Griff time to retrace all the steps he personally knew about. What he found mostly encouraged him. The first dummy shell corporation they had formed offshore had long been dissolved, and foreign governments were slow to release the names of shareholders to any authority for fear of losing future business or getting indicted for money laundering. There were some smaller pots of money Yakoob had put together early on, especially on personal banking hits, and those accounts, now closed, could still have their names on them somehow. If the first shell stayed hidden, Griff was less worried about the second and third. He and Sidarra had created those together, and once they had learned the game a bit, two heads were better than one. The second shell had no name and no shareholders of record; in fact, it was completely illegal under securities laws. But Griff had seen Belinda move
money into provisional holding companies that carried only an acronym for the first six months or until a dividend was distributed. Sidarra had suggested a way for the second to keep inventing itself so that the six months never ran out. As for the third and final shell, that one sat open waiting for Yakoob to deposit any newly liquidated gains, especially from the investments made with the Fidelity money. Beyond all that was the metaphysical problem that what lies in bytes of information never disappears entirely. The ultimate trick was to sever any link to Raul.

Whether by luck or skill, when schools chancellors are murdered, law enforcement has a funny way of getting its collective act together. Two things brought heat. Police forensic teams had pulled the chancellor's mansion apart. When that failed to yield anything that seemed like evidence, they pulled the grounds outside apart. It had been a long time since Raul had enjoyed the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn promenade. There'd been a lot of wind, rain, and snow, not to mention the irregular workings of city cleanup crews. But somebody was eating substantial numbers of chocolate bars in and around the gated door behind the building. Nestlé Crunch in particular. It was far from a trail, but there was one wrapper wedged in a flower bed and another that appeared to match a one-inch-square piece of foil found on the wall of the old servants' entrance where recyclables usually sat. The Brooklyn district attorney who had local jurisdiction of the case didn't find any of this particularly interesting. Then somebody decided to go back and pull the initial dustings of the parlor area where Eagleton died. There, inside a long green velvet drape, remained the smallest trace of a Nestlé Crunch bar, probably left by a fingernail. Which meant there was also a partial fingerprint. And since few people had walked over the scene in a house whose servants were no longer needed and whose bereaved host was moving out, there was still one good unidentified footprint on the
rug. And another just inside a basement doorway. Dr. Blackwell and her family would have to wait to move in.

The second piece meant all the stops were pulled. The Manhattan Tombs is no place to wait for trial unless you're a water bug. Tyrell spent months awaiting his at Rikers Island, where nobody should go unless they're prepared to be stone cold and fearless. Somebody was. The police, with the cooperation of the DEA, placed informants in several cell blocks. Some were cops who had to hope for a quick lead and get out; some were men going nowhere fast. Tyrell happened to get a cop. He was a white guy, burly, with those upturned sideburns cut real short above the ear that only cops and men from a certain part of the city wore regularly. Tyrell paid him and the other half-mad men in the unit little mind until his leg swelled back up. Not moving around as much as usual, having no place to prop it up or ice to bring it down, just made it worse. No amount of nice could get him the infirmary attention he needed. The guards figured it was a healthy shock of detox. So Tyrell winced and occasionally wailed and got beat up for his noise more than once.

“Whaddya need?” Sideburns asked him one especially bad night.

Tyrell looked hard at him, shaken out of his stupor by the strange sympathetic presence standing over him. He was not about to get stomped. The guy seemed to be serious.

“What I need ain't in here, yo,” he gasped.

“You don't always know that,” said Sideburns.

No one else was around for some reason. Tyrell knew better than to trust that fact alone, but the pain was so bad. “WeeWah, motherfucker. You got some?”

Sideburns looked puzzled for a minute, which could have been part of his art. “The fuck is that?”

“C'mon, dog. I be a'ight.”

“Nah, man, what is that shit? I might could get it for you.”

Tyrell took the bait. “It's a painkiller. Street grade. Don't trip.”

“What is that, like a morphine derivative?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Tyrell gasped. As soon as it was out of his mouth he knew.

Tyrell never got his WeeWah. By the time he woke up the next day, Sideburns was gone, never to be seen around Rikers again.

 

THE INVESTIGATION NOW WAS UNSTUCK
and heading straight to Manny's lab, thanks to Tyrell's slip about WeeWah to the informant. The press reported none of these new developments; however, that silence would not last long as the search widened. The Feds were deep into the matter now. Manny's lab evidence was distilled down to the smallest molecule. Suddenly everybody was ready for an education in WeeWah. A special crime lab at New York Hospital enlisted the help of two expert epidemiologists, one from California, the other from MIT. Within days the two had figured out how the stuff was synthesized, how much could put you into a nice painless sleep, and how much could put you to sleep forever.

Griff was always a day ahead of the latest tabloid report, but he was already a day late when he learned that investigators were working Manny over about his customers.

“I fucked up, I think,” Tyrell told Griff when they met again in the pen at the Tombs.

“How so, son?” Griff was back to his old clothes again, a denim suit that flattered but dated him.

“I think I talked to a snitch, an informant at Rikers. A white guy.”

There were white guys at Rikers, Griff knew. Not many, but a few. “What makes you think he was an informant?”

Tyrell sat up with a clarity in his eyes Griff didn't know was possible. “I told him about WeeWah. He asked me was that a
‘morphine derivative.' You know any other motherfuckers out there who talk like that?” Griff surely did not and shook his head. “Plus, the motherfucker straight bounced off a dat. Gone.”

Griff sat down and let out a long breath. He scratched the back of his neck for a second, then folded his legs and clasped his hands over his knee. “That's all I want to know, Tyrell. That might not be so bad.” Tyrell looked only a little relieved. Griff kept thinking to himself. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out an envelope. Tyrell watched him with great interest. Griff put the envelope on the table between them under the light and very slowly, almost as if he wouldn't finish, started to pull out a small photograph. “You got three seconds to tell me if you've ever seen this man before.” Griff allowed the image to peek out from the fold so Tyrell could see it. “One, two, three.”

“Oh shiiit!” Tyrell yelled.

“Shhhh.” Griff slipped the photo back into the envelope, folded it all up, and this time put it in his breast pocket.

“That's the nigga that fucked me up over by that teachuh house.” Griff's eyebrows bent high. “That's how come I got this and this,” Tyrell said, and pointed at his leg and his crooked face.

“Okay,” Griff whispered. “Now, I want you to listen to me, son, and listen real good. His name is Raul. You keep that shit in your
fuckin'
head like it's a vault. You tell no one nothing until I say you do. If you open your goddamned mouth too soon, the attorney-client privilege will
not
save you from the people who want to make you gone. You dig?” Tyrell nodded like a little boy. “You already a snitch, young man. This time it might help you. Just watch your back in there, and keep your head up.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME
, Manny was on the well-guarded fourth floor of Bellevue Hospital with his lawyer, making almost
the same deal with representatives from both the Manhattan and Brooklyn D.A.'s offices. They told him about the scientists they'd flown in and what they'd concluded. They told him that he was one of only three known sources of WeeWah in their entire search of New York City. And they told him that if WeeWah was in fact the substance in Eagleton's blood and that it was in fact what caused his death, he was looking at charges the likes of which he'd never imagined. The Feds wanted the case. Manny's lawyer thought they were bluffing. But Manny thought they knew more than they were telling him. He knew the difference between federal sentencing guidelines and what state judges give out.

“What do you want?” he asked the four men in the room with them.

“We want the guy.”

 

YAKOOB KNEW BETTER THAN TO USE A CELL PHONE
, but when he saw the
Daily News
the next morning he called Griff. Griff pretended it was a wrong number as he stood outside the Criminal Courts Building and called him back a few minutes later from a pay phone. “Just be cool, blood,” Griff said calmly. “Just bring your laptop and a blunt and pick me up in front of the pizza parlor on Chambers in a half hour.” Griff got off, went to the clerk of the court to clear his day, and headed into the early July heat to meet a man who days before was too bad to care.

When Griff got in the Escalade, Koob was already soaked in sweat. “I can't go to jail, brother,” he squealed. “You don't understand, man. I can't do time. I'd lose my woman.”

Griff leaned back in the plush captain's seat and took in his friend's terrified look. “Drive, baby. Just drive.”

Yakoob pulled the black SUV into traffic and headed toward
the West Side Highway. His hands shook on the steering wheel. Griff noticed half a blunt sitting idle in the ashtray and reached for it. He didn't normally smoke when he needed all his wits, but something about Yakoob suddenly losing it suggested it wouldn't be a bad idea this once.

“Somebody's been tracking our shit, Griff.”

“What?” he gasped, and tossed the joint back in the tray.

“I can tell. They were pretty good, but there are ways to know, like fingerprints. Somebody's been trying to get at my trail.”

“What are you saying? Man, pull this car over.” Yakoob screeched a right turn off West Street onto a quiet cobblestone street in the West Village. “For how long?”

“I can't be sure. Not long. Mighta just started. Mighta been a few days.”

Now Griff was pissed going on scared. “Motherfuck!” Before he could see his own life flash before his eyes, he refocused. “All right. What could they possibly put together? Go slowly. Take your time. Calm down.”

“You don't think we should get Sid in on this, dog?”

Griff let out a long, smokeless breath. “Nah. Not yet. Let her sleep.”

In the car, with the computer on but hardly in use, Yakoob and Griff methodically went down a long list of even more possibilities, including whether changes they had made since the last time they traced things could themselves be traced by police hackers.

“Okay,” Griff said finally. “Now, we know what to tell Sidarra. Now, we know the exposure. Next, you gotta tell me exactly where a motherfucker finds Raul—all day, every day—I gotta know.”

 

IT HAD RAINED ALL AFTERNOON
despite the sun-filled July morning. Just as suddenly, about the time Sidarra had climbed the
subway stairs and walked home, the sky bloomed lavender and a clear night commenced. She hurried home, practically running up the stoop.

“Raquel? Aunt Chickie?” she called out. From upstairs came no answer. She searched the parlor floor. Still no one. She knocked on the door to downstairs as she always did, as if her aunt ever required true privacy. No one answered. Sidarra rushed down the dark stairwell, almost stumbling on the way, and opened the unlocked door to the ground-floor apartment. “Raquel? Aunt Chickie?” Still no one answered. Just when her heart started to pound with fear, she peered beyond the little kitchen's windows and saw them with their backs to her on the small patio. They were hunched together over one of her aunt's flower beds, and she could hear Aunt Chickie's voice alone, singing.

“Summertime, and the livin' is easy…the cotton is high…”
Then she broke into humming.

They were very busy, whatever they were doing out there. Sidarra just watched. This was another one of those scenes whose existence she had either forgotten or never knew about, like the people she saw in Belize lying down with the sun. They probably did this every Tuesday night when she was off being a pool queen. Aunt Chickie sang on, her voice so much raspier than Sidarra remembered as a child, still beautiful, possessed of practiced skill and nuance, but weak to the point of airlessness.

“I'm home,” she said, pushing the door ajar.

“Hi, Mommy.”

“Close the door, will you, Sidarra? You'll let the bugs in.”

“Oh, c'mon, Aunt Chickie,” she said. “There are no bugs in New York City.”

Aunt Chickie looked at her as if she'd grown two horns and a tail. “Well, pretend that there are. We're out here picking enough of 'em out from under my tiger lilies that their cousins are bound to take up for 'em.” Aunt Chickie turned back around to redirect
Raquel's fingers through the soil correctly. “There's wine inside if you'd like some, Sidarra.”

“Thank you.” Sidarra stepped back into the kitchen and searched the countertop. Sure enough, Aunt Chickie had some sweet blush wine out of a box. The glasses in her cupboards held the dirt flecks of bad eyesight and best efforts. Wine was just what Sidarra needed and she poured herself a glass. When she returned to the patio, the two were still at it. She sat down on a chair that was still moist from rain, put her feet up, and sipped. The evening air was still a little damp, less so than the grass and the leaves beyond them, but things had cooled and there was almost a breeze.