The Man Who Killed His Brother (13 page)

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Authors: Stephen R. Donaldson

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A minute later he was gone.
I stayed where I was. Go to el Señor for help. Sure. That sounded like a polite way of telling me to go to hell. El Señor was what the newspapers probably would have called “the crime czar of Puerta del Sol,” if they’d known of his existence. A man of honor. Oh, absolutely. He would chew me up into little pieces and spit me in the gutter. No thanks. I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
So I didn’t go looking for el Señor, even though I knew where to find him. I left the bar and started for home. Feeling
like shit. Because I’d failed Alathea. I’d played the only hand I had, and lost. Now the only thing left was to be Ginny’s errand boy while she tried to crack this case her own way.
My depression must’ve showed in the way I walked, because this time the
muchachos
felt free to notice me—which they don’t usually do, even when I’m drunk. Most of the time I’m a little too big for them. But not tonight. They weren’t exactly aggressive about it, but they whistled from across the street and muttered obscure Spanish insults at my back as I went past. The whole community seemed to know that I hadn’t been able to get what I needed out of old Manolo.
When you’re in that kind of mood, it’s hard to stay away from the stuff. Alcohol is the only magic in the world. When you’re working, you’re trying to change things around you so that you fit into them better. But when you’re drinking, the fit comes from inside. And if it isn’t real, at least it’s easier than straining to figure out puzzles when no one will tell you the secret. On my way home I had a tough time staying out of the bars.
But I did stay out of them—for Alathea. Because the one thing alcohol would never do was help me find her. Until she was found, being Ginny’s errand boy was better than nothing, and it was probably about all I was good for.
I ignored the bars. I ignored the
muchachos
and their insults. I just lumbered my way up Eighth Street in the direction of home.
As I approached my apartment building, I noticed a long black Buick parked at the corner of a side street. All the lights were off, but the motor ran softly. Three men sat inside.
Just when I got abreast of the car, its doors thunked open, and the men got out. They wore neat businessmen’s suits, with crisp businessmen’s ties and shiny businessmen’s shoes. At that time of night in that neighborhood, they might as well have worn sandwich boards saying, “Plainclothes Cops.” They were all big, and the biggest one was a chunky individual about my size and maybe thirty pounds heavier.
He said, “Axbrewder,” in the kind of voice you’d expect if you taught a bulldozer to talk.
The muscle with him stayed back and didn’t say anything—and the light was bad, so there was a chance I might not recognize them if I saw them again. But the goon with the diesel voice I got a good look at. He had a jaw hard and square enough to set rivets, a nose that could moonlight as a can opener, and a forehead that looked like it was made out of reinforced concrete. He flashed his badge at me and said, “Detective-Lieutenant Acton.”
But he wasn’t trying to introduce himself, or even prove he was a cop. He just wanted to get close to me. As he put the badge away, his other hand came up to my chest and shoved.
I wasn’t braced for it, and it wasn’t exactly a gesture of undying friendship. He got his weight into it. It sent me backward, smacked me hard against the wall of the building.
I was already rebounding at him when I saw that his backups had their guns out. Acton grinned like the blade of a plow, and suddenly I could picture him writing his report. “Shot while resisting arrest.”
I stopped with a jerk.
“Acton,” I said, trying not to show how much breath he’d knocked out of me. “What a pleasant surprise. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“Is that a fact?” His hand came up again, but this time he just poked me with one finger. He aimed to jab me in the solar plexus, which is a nice way to hurt someone when you don’t want to leave any marks. He missed, but that didn’t stop him. “Well, I want to talk to you, too”—he poked again—“Mick.”
Mick.
Instantly a wind began to blow inside my head, and my balance shifted. Nobody calls me Mick. Nobody. Not since my brother died. The night seemed to congeal at Acton’s back, and I lost sight of the two cops with the guns. My chest was so full of rage and pressure that it felt like my ribs were going to crack.
“What’s the matter, Mick?” Poke. “Don’t you like being called ‘Mick?’” Poke. Any second now, he was going to
rupture my self-control, and then I’d have to take his face off with my bare hands.
But then his partners registered on me again. They had guns. If I touched Acton, they’d probably beat me half to death before they threw me in jail. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have cared much about being locked up, but if it happened now I wouldn’t be able to help find Alathea. Right this minute, she was somewhere in the city prostituting herself to get money for drugs. If we didn’t find her, she was going to end up dead.
Just holding the knowledge in hurt so bad that I thought I was going to pass out. But I stood there. Let Acton do whatever he had in mind.
He must’ve seen me make the decision, because he eased off with his finger. “That’s nice, Mick. That’s a good boy. Swallow your pride. A drunk like you should be used to it by now.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Give me the notes, Mick.”
The notes—That surprised me. Who the fuck told him about the notes? But I was already clenched, and I didn’t show anything. Through my teeth, I said, “I don’t have them.” If I’d opened my jaws, I wouldn’t have been able to hold in my rage.
“Where are they, Mick?”
“The safe. Fistoulari Investigations.”
“Ah, that’s too bad.” He never stopped grinning. “That means I’ll have to get a warrant. What a shame. It’s a good thing you’re a liar, Mick.”
I couldn’t do anything about it. I had to stand there while he searched me. When he found the notes, he glanced through them, counted them, then stuffed them into his coat pocket.
I stopped looking at him. Instead I stared into the darkness past his shoulder. That grin of his was going to give me nightmares.
“Now, Mick. I’m going to let you have a little friendly advice. Get off my case. Stay off it. I hate your guts, Mick,
and if you get in my way I’ll slap you down so hard you’ll have to reach up to touch bottom.”
Staring into the darkness was a good way to watch his shoulder muscles. If he intended to hit me again, I wanted to know about it. “Why?”
He laughed, but it wasn’t because there was anything funny. “Rick Axbrewder was a good cop. He was also a friend of mine.”
I shrugged. What else could I do? “How did you know about the notes?”
He stepped closer, and I almost flinched. But he didn’t hit me. His tone was soft and bitter as he said, “That bastard Stretto lit a fire under the commissioner. Now the commissioner wants my hide. I’m in trouble because I didn’t make the connection with those notes. So I’m warning you. This is the last time a punk drunk like you is going to make me look bad.”
“I don’t have to,” I said. “You’re already doing it to yourself. Why did you scare the Christies like that?”
That did it. His shoulder bunched, and he swung at me hard, fingers stiff, gouging for my solar plexus. I blocked it as best I could, but his fingers still dug deep into my gut.
I hunched over, staggered back to get out of the way of another hit. However, he didn’t swing again. He and his goons got back into their car and drove off, roaring the engine and squealing the tires to convince me that they meant business.
For a couple of minutes, I stayed where I was, almost retching. Then I went the rest of the way to Cuevero Road and struggled up the stairs to my apartment.
Losing the notes made me a whole lot sicker than just one jab in the stomach. But there was no way around it—I had to face Ginny. While I was still mad enough to make decisions, I yanked up the phone and called her service. As it turned out, she was at home, and they patched me through.
“Brew. What’s happening?”
Almost puking with self-disgust, I told her, “I just had a run-in with Acton. He took the notes.”
My fault entirely. A Mongoloid idiot could’ve warned me to take better care of the evidence.
She must’ve heard most of the story in my voice. She didn’t ask me how it happened. Or how I could’ve been so stupid. She asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m not in jail.”
“Thank God for small blessings.” Somehow she made her tone just right for my mood. “How did he even find out about them?”
“Stretto. It seems he went to the commissioner. Apparently he doesn’t think the cops are doing their job. The commissioner took it out on Acton.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Ginny muttered. “I wasn’t sure the illustrious Mr. Stretto had that much in him.”
“Anyway”—I gritted my teeth and said it—“I’ve pretty well blown our case. Now we’ve got nothing.”
“He’s a cop,” she snapped. “What could you do, eat the damn things?”
“I shouldn’t have been carrying them around.”
She dismissed that without hesitation. “Forget about it. They were safe enough. We just didn’t know Acton was going to get desperate. Anyway,” she went on before I could object, “we don’t need them now.”
I said, “Huh?” Always the brilliant conversationalist.
“Acton won’t destroy them. Too many people know about them. And I’ve already got what I need out of them.”
“Which is what?”
“Brew, I finished checking out the other schools.” My head must’ve been clearing—I finally started to hear the vibration of excitement in her voice. “I’ll spare you the details. The point is that everything fits. Every one of these girls disappeared from school at a time when she was scheduled to be alone.”
“You already knew that. It’s in the school board files.”
“Exactly!”
“Exactly what? It still doesn’t prove anything. Why call attention to yourself running away when you’ve got a perfect chance to sneak off every day of the week?”
“Well, that’s true, of course,” she admitted, “if you look
at it that way. Let me ask you a different question, Brew. Is there any proof in those notes? Proof the girls didn’t write them, or wrote them under duress? I’m talking about hard evidence, the kind that stands up in court.”
I thought about it for a long time. Then I said, “No.”
“Damn right. As far as we know, they were all addressed correctly. But that’s minor. The main thing is that all the notes were addressed to the right parents.”
I said, “Huh?” again. It was getting to be a habit.
“Marisa Lutt wrote, ‘Dear Mom and Dad.’ So did Esther Hannibal. So did Ruth Ann Larsen, May-Belle Podhorentz, Dottie Ann Consciewitz, Carol Christie. We don’t know about Rosalynn Swift. But Alathea wrote, ‘Dear Mom.’ Mittie wrote, ‘Dear Dad.’”
It still didn’t mean anything to me. “So what? Most kids know how many parents they have. If they’ve only got one, they can usually tell if it’s male or female.”
“Of course! That’s the point!” She was hot on a trail I couldn’t see. “Just look at it from the other side. We know those notes are wrong. We have good reason to believe they were all dictated by the same person. Well, nine girls who live in nine different neighborhoods and go to six different schools aren’t going to end up having the same person dictate their notes by accident. So what does that tell you?”
“Kidnapping.” I grated. I already knew that.
“Right! But if that’s true, then the girls didn’t run away at all. So it isn’t a question of figuring out why the girls ran away while they were alone. The question is, how did the kidnapper know they were going to be alone? How did he know they were going to be somewhere that he could get at them without being seen? For that matter, how did he know he could get them to come with him? And how did he know their addresses? How did he know how many parents they had?”
I said, “Research?” Feeling like an idiot.
“Now you’re getting it. Tell me, Brew. If you wanted to research nine different girls in six different schools, and find out the answers to all these questions, where would you go?”
That was it. Finally I understood. “The school board. The files.” She was right, I could feel it. The bastard we were looking for got his information from those files. It was the only answer that made sense.
Maybe he was even on the board.
Thursday Night/Friday
O
f course, it all rested on the assumption that the girls were being kidnapped. I had no problem with that. But it had one crucial flaw.
There didn’t seem to be any payoff. No ransom demands. And in any case, half the families involved couldn’t have scraped up a self-respecting ransom to save their souls.
Which brought me back to drugs. Some pusher in town was hot for new business. A very particular kind of new business.
Some pusher old Manolo had never heard of.
There must’ve been a hell of a lot of money in it to make it worth a possible kidnapping rap. Or a hell of a lot of hate. The kind of hate that makes serial killers.
I didn’t say anything to Ginny about that. Instead I said, “That’s going to be a big job. How many people are on the school board these days? Twenty?”
She said, “Fifteen.”
“And then there are all those secretaries. And on top of that, some people from the individual schools may have access to the general files. You’re talking about thirty suspects.” Or more. “Where do we start?”
“By whittling down the list.”
I said, “Oh.” Heavy on the sarcasm. The sense that we were finally getting somewhere made me feel a little better about Alathea, but it didn’t do much for my opinion of myself. “That shouldn’t be too hard. We’ll just call people up and ask them how they feel about stuffing dope down thirteen-year-old girls.”
“So we’ll have to work at it,” she said evenly. “Where did you get the idea it was supposed to be easy?” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “There’s a lot we can do, but
to save time we’ll start with the obvious, the full-time people: Stretto, Scurvey, Greenling, and the secretaries.”
I couldn’t argue with her, so I asked, “What about Acton?”
“I’ll check on him tonight. Find out if he was lying about the commissioner. If he was telling the truth, we’ll have to assume he’s in the clear—and Stretto, too, for that matter. Until we know more, anyway.”
I couldn’t argue with that either. If Stretto was involved, he wouldn’t have called the commissioner. As for Acton—If he was dealing drugs, we’d put him in a real bind. As long as the commissioner knew about those notes, Acton couldn’t risk destroying them.
If
the commissioner knew. After chewing it around for a minute, I asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Get some sleep,” she said promptly. “At this point, there’s nothing more we
can
do until morning. Get a cab and come to the office tomorrow early. By then I’ll have something set up.”
After that, it was too late to argue. I didn’t have anything else to offer. It was her case now. When she hung up, I went to bed.
And I went right to sleep. Being sober makes you more tired than you’d expect. But I spent the whole night dreaming about amber, and the next morning I was up with the birds. My face ached as if I’d been grinding my teeth for hours. Nevertheless I ignored it, ignored the feeling of stupidity that filled my chest, ignored the dry wish for alcohol in my mouth. Someday I’d have to find a way to feel proud of being sober, but right then I wasn’t up to it. By eight A.M. I was out on Cuevero Road looking for a cab.
Which was not a good time of day for cabs, but I finally found one. Then it wasn’t long until I was riding up the elevator of the Murchison Building to Ginny’s office.
She was there already. When I went into her back room, I found her on the phone. I dropped into a chair. Whoever she was talking to, it didn’t take her long. A couple of minutes later, we had an appointment with somebody or other for nine thirty.
“That was Dr. Sandoval,” she said. “Camilla Sandoval, pediatrician. How long has it been since you voted?”
I shrugged. How can you answer a question like that?
“Well, you probably don’t know she represents your district on the board of education. This is her fifth term—she’s very popular. One of the part-time members.” She looked at me sharply, as if she expected me to be surprised. “Your friend Encino speaks highly of her.”
If she wanted a reaction out of me, she was going to be disappointed. We errand boys try to keep our opinions to ourselves. Especially when we’re ashamed of our own bitterness. I got out my pocketknife and pretended to clean my fingernails, letting her hang for a moment before I asked, “What else did he have to say?”
She frowned, but she didn’t look serious about it. I wasn’t fooling her any. “Not much about Dr. Sandoval. But he told me a little something about Acton and the commissioner. Apparently Acton was giving it to you straight. Encino wasn’t there, but when the commissioner personally goes to see a lieutenant instead of sending for him, and chews him out in front of half the duty room, word gets around pretty fast. Stretto called the commissioner, all right. We can count on it.”
“Politicians,” I muttered, mostly to myself. They know how to talk to each other. If I’d gone to the commissioner with those notes myself, I would’ve gotten in trouble for “obstructing an official investigation.” Paul M. Stretto makes one phone call, and all of a sudden the air’s full of shit. “So scratch the chairman of the board. Put Acton on the back burner. What’s next?”
Ginny frowned again. This time she meant it. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and everything we do takes time. I can’t find Ted, so I bit the bullet and hired some help. I called fat-ass Smithsonian.”
All things considered, that probably shouldn’t have surprised me. We had between ten and thirty suspects lined up, and every passing day put Alathea in that much more trouble. But Ginny is an independent cuss, and she doesn’t like farming out work to other agencies. And of all the private
investigators I know, Lawrence Smithsonian is the one she actively hates. He isn’t all that fat, but he as sure as hell looks fat, probably because his fees are overweight. And on top of that, his way of condescending to Ginny sends her blood pressure through the roof. Hiring his help probably cost her a pound of flesh. I had to stare at her for a while before I recovered enough to ask, “Why him?”
“Because he knows money.” She was practically spitting. “He can learn more about the personal finances of our suspects in one morning than we could in a week. He’ll start with the full-time board members and the secretaries, try to find out if any of them are getting rich in private, or living over their heads, or gambling with money they haven’t earned, or rolling too high on the stock market. Anything. He has half the bank presidents in this town in his back pocket. I think he blackmails them.”
After a minute I said, “Lona can’t pay you.”
“I know that.” She wasn’t thinking about money. She was still steaming about Smithsonian.
“I can’t either.”
That made her look at me. “Who asked you?”
I got up, went over to her. Cupped her head with both my hands and kissed her on the mouth.
She didn’t kiss me back. She just sat there and took it. When I stopped, she looked at me like the barrel of a gun and said, “The next time you do that, you better mean it.”
Well, I meant it all right. My shoulders were trembling, and my pulse beat in my head so loud that I could hardly hear her. But that wasn’t what she was getting at. What she had in mind was something even more serious than the way I felt about her. We’d been through it before. She wanted me to quit drinking. Completely. Forever.
That was something I couldn’t do. I wasn’t worth it.
I went back to my chair and sat down, trying to hold myself so that she couldn’t see me shake. When I thought I could control my voice, I asked, “When is he going to call back?”
“When he finds something. Or this afternoon. Whichever comes first.”
“And in the meantime?”
“We’ll go talk to Dr. Sandoval. Then we’ll go back to the school board and see what we can run down this time.” Her composure was too perfect. I’d confused her and probably hurt her—which was something I had definitely not meant to do. While she got herself ready to leave, I spent a few minutes trying to think of a new way to curse myself.
She was still holding up her wall of businesslike professionalism as we rode the elevator down to the garage and took the Olds out into the morning glare. But after that she unbent enough to tell me what her plans were. They sounded reasonable, and if they worked, we could probably cross half the people off our list today. I let it go at that. I’d already pushed my luck too far with her.
The office of Dr. Camilla Sandoval was on the opposite side of the old part of town from where I lived. It was in a squat dull-red adobe structure that looked like it moonlighted as a bordello. Already the waiting room was full of mothers with babies in various stages of stupor or hysteria. Most of them were either Chicano or Indian, and all together they gave a pretty good capsule summary of what life was like in the old part of Puerta del Sol. After half an hour in that room, Ginny and I’d seen every degree of squalor, sickness, flamboyance, passivity, color, resentment, joy, hunger, love, and rage. A real education, if you can stand to hear babies squall. And see mothers hit them.
When Ginny told the nurse we had an appointment for 9:30, she just shrugged and gestured at all the people ahead of us. It looked like it was going to be a long wait, and I didn’t see any way around it. In this part of the world, the Anglos have spent the past hundred fifty years or so barging in line ahead of Chicanos and Indians, and I didn’t want to add to the resentment in those faces. But in situations like this Ginny has a thicker skin than I do. She stood it for that first half hour. Then she dug some paper and a pen out of her purse, wrote a long note, and gave it to the nurse. Her way of presenting it didn’t leave the nurse much choice. Three minutes later, Dr. Sandoval called us in to see her.
She was a chunky little woman, too small to be a football
player and too big to be a fireplug. If she was married, she didn’t advertise it by wearing a ring. In fact, she didn’t wear any jewelry at all. Her manner was tough, but it was a particular kind of tough, the kind that can look pain straight in the face and make it hurt less without being hurt herself. Or without showing it, anyway. By the time she asked Ginny and me to have a seat in the square cubicle she used for an office, I liked her.
She sat down behind her desk and studied us for a second. Then she picked up Ginny’s note and slapped it with the back of her hand. “Nine junky whores,” she said, “thirteen or younger. Seven of them dead. What do you want from me? Do you think they were my patients?”
“Dr. Sandoval”—Ginny matched her tone evenly—“we’re private investigators.” She flipped the photocopy of her license onto the desk. “We’ve been hired to find the two girls who are still alive. I don’t think you know anything about them. That’s why we want to talk to you. We want to ask you some questions about the people you work with on the board of education.”
That was confusing enough to short-circuit some of Dr. Sandoval’s hostility. She didn’t exactly retreat, but she eased back a bit. “I don’t understand.”
“I know it’s complicated,” Ginny said, “and I can’t tell you much without violating the confidence of my clients. But I can tell you this: We have reason to believe these girls were kidnapped. And we suspect the kidnapper has some sort of connection with the school board. We’d like you to give us background information about a few of the people who work there.”
Now that the first surprise was over, Dr. Sandoval had started to fume. “This is insane. Do you understand what you’re saying? Perhaps you don’t know what the school board does. It exists to help children, to provide them with an education. Not all the members are idealists, of course, but they believe in education. We all believe in children. What you suggest is inconceivable.”
Ginny didn’t falter. “Criminals come in all disguises, Dr. Sandoval.”
“I repeat. It is inconceivable.”
“Then you believe Paul Stretto is pure as the driven snow?”
The doctor hesitated. Not a long hesitation, but a hesitation nonetheless. When it was over, she answered the question with a question. “If you’re right,” she asked, “why aren’t the police involved in this?”
“They are,” Ginny drawled. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you have cops on your doorstep before the day’s over. The only difference is, they’re trying to catch a pusher. We’re trying to find two little girls.”
“I see.” She scanned both of us, and after a minute she looked like she really did see. “I have patients waiting. Please be as quick as you can.”
Ginny’s gaze didn’t shift an inch. “Paul Stretto?”
“Mr. Stretto is a politician. I doubt that he has so much as glanced at a textbook since fifth grade. He is on his way to an exalted career as a public servant.” Her mouth twisted sourly around the words. “I can’t believe that he would risk his future by involving himself in kidnapping.”
“Maybe he has friends who just ask him for information.”
“How would I know that?”
“Have you heard any rumors?”
“The rumor,” Dr. Sandoval said, “is that Paul Stretto wants to be president. Of the United States.”
“All right,” Ginny said, “How about Astin Greenling?”

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