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.

“The angry guy picked up right where he left off with the Spanish kid: raising hell. The one on the stool started laughing, but he slid off the stool, pulled a knife, and threw it at Wasserman. The old bastard started shooting. The gunshots covered the sound of another four rushing up the stairs. We walked into the building just ahead of them. That’s what the man on the stool was laughing about.”

Guthrie rubbed his chin and pointed through the windshield down toward the Harlem River at something that wasn’t there. “The cook was wearing a white apron. He threw a saucepan full of hot something at me. I spun around to dodge and missed with a shot. We ended up facing each other. He had a boning knife and the saucepan. He cut the buttons off the sleeve of my suit coat and almost smashed my face with the pan, but I hit him in the belly with my second shot. He dropped.

“Then the rest of them barreled through the door. One rushed me. I caught an inside grip on his knife hand with the outside edge of my hand and stepped inside him to keep the hold. He circled around me and rammed the kitchen counter, and I stepped back out. One of the new ones was flying toward Wasserman’s back like an ax dropping on stove wood. I shot him through the hips. He bent in half and lost his knife.

“Wasserman slid a little deeper into the living room. He switched pistols and kicked the coffee table at them. The living room was already a mess. The TV was dead, along with the angry Chinese guy. The other one was still standing by the window, but he was propped on the wall with both hands and covered with blood. The guy who went out and came back ran for one of the inside doors. I chased him. The one I rammed into the kitchen counter swung his knife as I was taking the first step. He split my suit coat open and it slid down my arms. Probably the leather strap on my shoulder holster saved my life.

“That knife-in-a-gunfight thing is crap, unless you’re twenty feet away,” the little detective said. “That Chinese guy notched four of my ribs. Wasserman shot him as he chased me across the living room. I wanted to duck when the old man swung that forty-five auto past me. I had three bullets left in my forty-four. Going by, I shot the other little guy who was after Wasserman. He had on a button-down shirt and tan pants, with plastic-framed sunglasses and his hair slicked back 1950s style. The blade of his knife was as long as his forearm. His shirt turned bright red when the bullet hit him.

“The bathroom was cheap plaster, with a claw-foot tub and one pebbled-glass window up high. The tub was converted to a shower, with a stand-up brass railing, and Li Wei’s granddaughter was hanging by her wrists, a gag in her mouth. She was a little marked up already. The triads like heavy knives, to cut off anything held up to ward them away—fingers, hands, even arms. The last one rushed to chop her.

“Li Wei’s granddaughter was brave. He meant to chop her across the throat, but she lowered her chin and took it on the face. I shot him twice. She didn’t look good, but I was out of bullets and couldn’t shoot him again. Wasserman came in and cut her down. She slid down into a puddle in the tub, and then a few seconds later she stood right back up. She wanted the gag out, but even after, she couldn’t talk. That girl was brave. She looked like the walking dead. We had to run out of there and dodge the cops.” The little detective shook his head.

“You saved her.”

“She saved herself. Or Wasserman did. I couldn’t have found her that fast. I doubt I could even now.”

Vasquez pretended to look out at the river with him, but she was watching the little man. She wondered why he needed to be perfect, why good enough wasn’t quite enough. He began brooding again; his jaw worked like he was chewing something. He climbed out of the old Ford and walked down to the shore of the Harlem. After a minute, Vasquez followed him. The bank of the Harlem was a concrete retaining wall and sheet pilings wracked with rust. Instead of reeds or sedges, a litter of empty bottles slowly bobbed around an old tire with part of the sidewall missing.

“Things come out of the past,” Guthrie said before turning back to look at the bridge. “The killer had to hate Olsen. This’s the beginning. He chose this spot for a reason. We have to look again.”

“This can’t be the beginning,” Vasquez said. “It’s gotta be the end. Whoever it is hates Olsen for something he did.”

“We have to find what ties it together.” The little detective walked slowly back toward the abutment. He paused several times, studying the bridge and the loop of asphalt beneath it. Empty trailers were massed in a transfer park on the far side. A bobtailed Mack growled softly, slipping between them as it moved back out toward the city. Beneath the bridge, a Dumpster was tucked tight against the retaining wall of the abutment, and a colonnade of piers supported the bridge on its way to arch over the Harlem. A loop of asphalt ran north beneath the bridge, connecting the transfer park to an alley onto Eighth Avenue.

The Mack hadn’t used the loop—it headed south, directly into the city. The fence line along the transfer park was a strip of ragged weeds sprouting from an illicit dump. Old, rotten cardboard and pallets formed crooked stacks. Bottles and cans filled the creases above a litter of grimy multicolored pebbles made of shattered glass. Inside the colonnade, fire pits dotted the bases of the piers. The retaining wall and Dumpster were marked with graffiti in a multitude of colors. Jumbled together in overlay, they looked more like a visual grille than an attempt to communicate, obscure, or vandalize.

Guthrie paced the distance from the asphalt loop to the remnants of NYPD yellow crime tape for the body. Faint stains remained. The bridge arched above like a shield. The killing had happened ten or twelve steps from the Dumpster. The little detective grunted. No attempt had been made to hide Bowman’s body, even by tipping it into the Dumpster. The murder was meant to be discovered—a confirmation—but the site itself was tucked away. The site required either a search or familiarity.

“The killer knew about this spot,” Guthrie muttered.

“Someplace secluded, where nobody could see. No houses or apartments nearby, no kids hiding nearby,” Vasquez said, glancing out around them.

Guthrie pointed at the graffiti. “What’s that stuff mean?”

She shrugged. “Ain’t tags. Don’t even look like words.”

The little detective pulled out his phone and took several snapshots.

“I’ll float it on the Net and see if we get a bite.”