The Nicholas Linnear Novels (25 page)

Croaker turned to leave but, as his fingers grasped the knob, Finnigan said, “Oh and, Lieutenant, you know how things function around here. Next time don’t make me explain S.O.P. to you as if you were some rookie just off the streets, okay?”

It was at that point that Croaker had decided to continue with the Didion thing. Now he knew that he had to do it all on his own. He could confide in no one at the office and, if he used their resources, which he surely would, he would have to camouflage his intent. He looked at his watch, then at the dregs of old coffee in the stained plastic cup on his desk. He was late for the Linnear pickup but right now he did not much care; his mind was still on the Didion thing. Finnigan was right in one respect—he had nothing. But only up to a point. The girl had friends somewhere, it had just proved to be a bitch unearthing them. Now he was close to at least one of them. Matty the Mouth had come up with a lead. But he needed a name, an address, or it was useless to him. This was what he was waiting on now; this was why he was so sensitive to being pulled off the case. It was no good telling Finnigan what he had now; no good at all. It would be like talking to the wall. Which was why Croaker always kept his cases to himself; it was part of the reason why he got Finnigan his mayor’s citations each year. So it was the one thing Finnigan did not question. In any case, Finnigan could care less about M.O., it was results he craved: Talk about your gluttons! Croaker grunted as he swiveled around in his chair. Those results gave the whiskey a fine race for the captain’s undivided attention.

Croaker cursed and got up. Time to pick up Linnear.

At approximately the same time, Vincent had been at work in the autopsy room. He had not, of course, been on duty when they had brought Terry’s and Eileen’s corpses in late last night but he had been called right away—Tallas had thought he should know; she had the soundest judgment of all the associates, he thought. Consequently he had arrived in time to hear the tail end of the argument between the two precinct patrolmen who had responded to the call and the detective. He was a big burly son of a bitch and he was giving them a tongue-lashing.

Vincent had not concerned himself with the noise or the rising tempers. He had wanted to make certain. Perhaps it had all been a ghastly mistake—one of the
dōjō’s
instructors at Terry’s apartment—or… but it had been Terry and it had been Eileen. Dead. It was then that he had remembered the frozen-line call. No one there. Could it have been Terry phoning him? He turned sadly away. It did not matter now.

He put them away for the morning, made sure all their clothes and personal effects were properly tagged and bagged for the detectives who would take the case. Then he had gone home to spend an uneasy night.

It had gotten to the point where he was content only down in the morgue. There he could work, logically problem solving, sleuthing his way through the silent mayhem. Sometimes it worked and his report led directly to the arrest of the murderer; at other times he was the only one who could be of solace to the families of the dead who rolled past him each day.

They were like massive hieroglyphs, mute monoliths, waiting to have their arcane messages unearthed. And he the archaeologist of their past.

It was immensely satisfying to him to work here in the dead house, as many physicians called it. But it was such a misnomer, for here, every day, he and his colleagues were hard at work wresting secrets from death’s cold grip. They hacked at it, bringing it down to size, demystifying it, bit by bit, until much of its fear was dissipated. What job could claim more importance for the living?

This morning Vincent now stood in the central room, his back to the tiers of stainless-steel doors. A black man, naked and cool, his head at an angle, lay on a gurney to one side. He stood staring at the swinging doors leading into the autopsy room. Behind that barrier, he knew, lay his friend, Terry Tanaka; next would be Eileen. For the first time since coming here, he wondered whether he really wanted to push through those doors. It seemed, all at once, one death too many and he did not feel the same inside anymore. He knew that he wanted to return to Japan. But he felt that to be impossible now, as if he had contracted some dread disease in the West, in the city, in New York, and now transformed inwardly as well as outwardly, he felt as if the culture shock would be the death of him.

Yet, deep inside, he perhaps understood that his only salvation now was to go on. Death had returned to him as it had as a child, a solid wall too high for him to climb over. He knew that he must tear that wall down or go mad and his only path lay within the bright, tidy room inside. There death could be quietly dissected, the wall pulled down one brick at a time until, at last, he would understand what had done this to his friends. For, he found, he wanted desperately to know.

Vincent shook himself and, pushing aside the swinging doors, went in to work on the body. Japan, once a dream, had now departed.

The limo pulled out of the traffic flow in the low Fifties, slid quietly to a stop at curbside. Frank got out first and opened the rear door for them.

They were on a block dominated by the steel exoskeleton of a building that seemed perhaps three-quarters complete. It was set far back from the street and the pavement had been torn up in order to install brick-red tile. A wooden companionway had been erected so that pedestrians would not be inconvenienced by the construction. On the south end of the block an enormous cement mixer was drawn up. Multicolored polka dots had been painted on its revolving barrel. Beside it, an angular crane was in the process of elevating a number of girders.

Part of the building’s fashionable black stonework facade was up; chalk marks still crisscrossed some of the blocks, the white and yellow glyphs of the modern world. Still, fully one side was skeletonized like a transparent cocoon beneath which the chrysalis could be seen forming.

They walked along wooden planks laid out while, in the rubble beneath, men with bulging muscles and oil-streaked faces drilled with jackhammers like sullen dentists.

They came into the shade of the roofed walkway. The air was filmed with dust which hung chokingly, settling on their hair, and their shoulders like dandruff.

A man with a lean dented face approached them. He wore a bright yellow hard hat. “Lubin Bros.” was stenciled across the front in blue. He smiled broadly when he recognized Tomkin, extended his hand. He led them off to the right into a mobile home which served as construction headquarters. Tomkin introduced him laconically as Abe Russo, the building foreman. Russo shook Nicholas’ hand with a firm cool grip. He handed out hard hats for all of them and they left.

Frank led them into the innards of the structure, through the enormous atrium lobby, then along a corridor where bare light bulbs hung on flex threads and the damp smell of raw concrete filled their nostrils.

Olive-green mats still hung on the walls of the elevator. They took it to the top. In the hall a man as big across as Frank but slightly shorter met them. They went silently down the corridor.

The ceiling was finished, as was the interior wall, in a deep blue fabric, slightly nubby, giving the effect of raw silk. To their right, the outer wall was glass down to the level of their shins, or at least it would be when all the plates were in. Mostly it was a latticework of thin-seeming metal, stained orange by the rustproofing. Beyond was the breathtaking panorama of Manhattan, west and north. First the thick buildings on the opposite side of the avenue, then onward, marching in square-cut rows toward the Hudson River. Looking north, he could make out the depression in the elevated surface of Manhattan that was the south end of Central Park.

The corridor gave out on metal-façaded double doors with ostentatious brass doorknobs in the center of each. To the left, bare wooden doors opened on small offices, floored at this stage only by rough concrete. In several Nicholas could see the huge rolls of carpet, ready to be stapled down.

A warm wind whipped at them, intermittently. It was still hot up here; one could not so easily escape the heat of a summer’s day in Manhattan. Soot and grime raced along the bare floor like spindrift, borne on the breeze. The corridor seemed very exposed at this point.

Tomkin paused before the metal doors and looked outward. His arm lifted as if he were about to begin an aria. “Do you see what I see, Nicholas?” He turned for a moment. “I
may
call you Nicholas.” But it was a rhetorical question and he continued apace. “That used to be a big world out there. Used to be something for everyone—at least for anyone with guts enough to go out and get it.” His arm came down, the fingers curled at his side. “Now it’s nothing but a goddamned industrial farmyard. There’s no space anymore and no time. Do you know what that means, hmm? I’ll tell you. There’s not enough out there anymore. We’re all strangling each other in an effort to survive. Oho, yes, you heard me right. It’s survival now, not just a matter of making a profit. And the world’s homogenized.” He squinted sideways at Nicholas. “You know what I mean? No? How’d you have liked to’ve been Marco Polo, eh? Traveling for two and a half years across the endless deadly expanse of Asia; to at last come upon Cathay, a land where no Western man had ever dreamed of, let alone set foot in? Could there be anything in this world to equal such an extraordinary experience? No, I’ll tell you a thousand times. No.”

He moved forward as if in a trance, put his hands on the spider-web tracery of the steel superstructure. “Do you know,” he whispered, “that I don’t know how much money I have. Oh, I could hire a staff to figure it out, except by the time they did the figure’d be totally out of date. Anyway, the sum’s far too big to think about comfortably.” His face glistened now with a thin film of sweat. “There is virtually nothing in this world I can’t have if I wish it. Do you believe that?” He turned on Nicholas. His tone of voice had become savage and the veins stood out on one side of his temples, pulsing. “I could have you heaved over the side of this building. Now. Just like that. I could do it with complete immunity. Oh, I might have to suffer through a cursory investigation but that’s all.” He waved a hand. “But I wouldn’t.”

“I’m relieved,” Nicholas said but Tomkin went on as though he hadn’t heard him.

“That would be a rather despotic way to act. A flaunting of my power. It doesn’t interest me.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“What?” He came back from his reverie slowly. “Oh, of course not. But let me tell you, like all great men before me I am concerned by mortality—my mortality.” He hesitated. “I want the best for Justine—for both my daughters.”

For some reason, Nicholas had the distinct impression that Tomkin had been about to say something else entirely. “Then I’m sure they’ll get it,” he said.

“Don’t patronize me,” Tomkin said harshly. “I am well aware of my failings as a father. Justine has problems relating to men and Gelda just divorced her fourth husband and I can’t hire enough men to keep her away from the liquor. I keep jumping into their lives. In and out. That’s the way it is. If it’s hard for either of them to bear, too bad.”

“Justine, at least, doesn’t seem to want you jumping in at all,” Nicholas pointed out.

“She’s got no choice,” Tomkin snarled. “I’m still her father whatever she cares to say to others. I still love her. I love them both. We’re all fucked up, one way or another; their problems are just more visible than most, that’s all.”

“Look, Mr. Tomkin—”

“Don’t screw up now, Nicholas. Not when we’re getting along so well.” He spat the words out as if they were burning the lining of his mouth. “Sure she hated it when I jumped in two years ago. But what did she know? Christ, she was up to her armpits in shit.” He made a quick violent motion with his head. “She was following that bastard around like he was God himself.”

“She told me—” Nicholas began.

“Did she tell you that he ran a male stud service? That he was a speed freak? That he liked men more than women? Did she tell you that he tied her up and beat her before laying her? Did she tell you any of that?” His face was mottled with anger and shame and spittle flew uncontrollably from his lips.

“No,” Nicholas said softly. “She didn’t.”

Tomkin laughed harshly, humorlessly, an animal-like sound. “I’ll just bet she didn’t.” His head was thrust forward and in that position he looked remarkably like a hunting dog on point. Nicholas found himself wondering if he were the prey. If so, Tomkin had bitten off more than he could chew this time.

“You had no business telling me all this,” he said. His voice rose dangerously.

“What’s the matter? Is your stomach turning at the thought?” He smirked. “Does she disgust you now that you know what kind of woman she really is? Do you hate yourself for ever getting involved with her?”

“It doesn’t matter what she did in the past,” Nicholas said slowly. “And unless she’s living in the past, it has no bearing on either of us.” He stared at Tomkin, at the sweating face hovering close in front of him. “I know what kind of person Justine is, Tomkin. I just wonder whether
you
do.”

For just a moment, Tomkin’s eyes seemed to bulge. Then, abruptly, he seemed in total control of himself once again and all signs of anger slipped away from him. He smiled, clapped Nicholas on the back. “I don’t suppose I can be condemned for making certain, can I?”

Nicholas realized just how weak Tomkin was. That was why he made such an overt show of disenfranchising his daughters, because they were so important to him—his immortality. Nicholas wondered whether he was reconciled to not having a son to carry on the line.

Oddly, it was this weakness which prevented Nicholas from disliking the man. He had been taught, at the Itto
ryu
, to seize upon an opponent’s weakness and thereby bring him crashing down. But outside the
dōjō
, Nicholas had learned that people often lived their lives, or at least a good part of them, out of weakness. It was what made them human, what made them vulnerable; what made them interesting. Take Musashi, for example. If one believed entirely the
Go Rin No Sho
, one saw not a man but a steel monument, invincible and emotionless. However, there were many stories concerning Musashi. The one Nicholas never forgot was the one where Musashi was defeated by a ninja using a paper fan. Ninja were notorious for their harnessing of odylic forces and this, it was commonly believed, was what made Musashi’s defeat so effortless. Nicholas, of course, knew that there was more to it than that. Still, it warmed him to know that the great Musashi, the Sword Saint, had after all tasted defeat.