And Sometimes I Wonder About You

18

The meeting with Farth lasted a quarter hour more. He gave me a couple of addresses and informed me that the money I’d been given didn’t have to be reported. He gave me an address or two for witnesses and a phone number where he could be reached.

“There’s a sense of urgency on behalf of the girl’s parents,” he said after rising to leave. “My client would like to limit their friends’ pain and so the sooner you find Coco the better.”

I walked Josh Farth down the hall, through the hole, and out the front door. I didn’t like him and he, I believed, could have easily ended my life without remembering my name in the morning.

After he was gone I levered the heavy door back into place.

“What did you think of Mr. Farth?” I asked Mardi. I’d learned over time that her insight on human nature was at least as keen as my own.

“I don’t know,” she said, considering. “He’s kinda like a ghoul — there in his body but not in his eyes.”

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with Twill?”

“You know Twill,” she said, once again staring me in the eye. “He’s always doing something he shouldn’t. When I was in the tenth grade I stayed away from him because everybody said he was one of the bad kids.”

“And what is my bad child doing today?”

“You’ll have to ask him, sir. He’s my best friend and I won’t tell his stories.”

She was right of course. I looked away because her eyes had gained the power of a woman since she admitted putting her stepfather in his place.

“You should go home,” I told her.

“You’re firing me?”

“No. No, I’m trying to protect you. I won’t have you sitting behind a door that might fall in at any moment when there’s a good chance that the real bad guys might return.” I handed her the black envelope from my outbox and the ten thousand Farth had given me. “Put this in the safe and stay home until I call for you to come back.”

“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

Before I could think up some wise-assed retort the buzzer sounded.

Bells and buzzers had begun to bother me. They seemed like evil portents insinuating themselves between me and my loved ones.

“It’s Mr. Domini and some other men,” she said.

I did my exercise with the front door, revealing a crew of six.

Westley Domini was a short Italian man, though not as short as I. He had white hair and skin as close to white as it could get. He was my Mr. Fixit and a former member of one of the more powerful New Jersey mobs. He’d done some bad things in his life but then met a woman named, of all things, Ginger and decided to leave the mob business to do the thing he loved most, which was, like his immigrant grandfather, working with his hands.

This decision brought him to my office. He’d heard that I’d gone straight and wanted, for lack of a better term, a blueprint for success. We talked and drank and drank and talked for fifty hours. At the end of the session Westley had promised to work for me whenever I needed it.

For my part, I rarely called on him.

“Looks like they took your fancy door off with a firecracker” was the first thing Westley said.

“Yeah. Can you fix me?”

“Quintez, Li,” he said to two of his crew. “Let’s start diggin’ this wall out.”

Domini had a multiracial crew culled from New York. I had convinced him that he had to break daily ties to his old friends in Jersey.

“How long?” I asked the reformed pimp and murderer.

“By nine tonight,” he said. “We’ll get to your back-office door too.”

“Some guys from Seko Security will be here along the way,” I said. “Let ’em do what they need to do.”

Back at my desk I called Zephyra Ximenez, my Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant (TCPA). I rarely saw this pillar of my information jungle; if we met face-to-face two times in a year that was a lot. Most of our work was over the phone or via the Internet. It’s not that I didn’t want to see the Dominican/Moroccan beauty from Queens. She had skin the color of polished onyx and poise that would have put Princess Grace to shame. But Zephyra plied her trade for her many clients by wire, satellite, and microwave beams. She eschewed office work. I couldn’t blame her.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” she said, answering on the eighth ring. She had my number and therefore my name.

“Hey, Z, how’s it goin’?” I could hear the Domini crew banging from down the hall.

“All right I guess,” she said.

“Problems?”

“A little bit.”

“We’ll get back to that in a minute,” I promised. “First I need you to do some research for me.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“There’s supposed to be a law firm in Frisco called Briscoe/Thyme. I think the last name is spelled like the Simon and Garfunkel song but it could be temporal.” I liked talking to Zephyra because she knew all the words in five or six dictionaries. “I can’t find ’em so I thought you could look.”

“Sure thing.”

“Also I’m looking for a young woman named Coco Lombardi. She’s a stripper here in New York but she might be from Boston originally. Celia Landis might be her alias or vice versa. And there’s some other names I’d like you to look up,” I added. “Josh Farth, forty-four, private investigator or security specialist; Alexander Lett, around forty, from down in DC. He’s a strong-arm so probably listed as security too. Then there’s a Marella Herzog. That name is almost definitely a.k.a. but it’s probably used down in DC for a wedding registration at high-end stores. I’d like to know who she’s marrying and what her backstory is.”

“Got it, got it, and got it,” Zephyra said; her voice sounded cheerier when she was working. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, yeah. Check out the social media sites for somebody named Twitcher.”

“Male or female?”

“Man.”

“Age?”

“It’s Twill.”

Silence, then: “Okay.”

“What’s wrong, Z?”

“I don’t think I want to talk about it.”

“Then let me do the talking,” I said in my most avuncular tone. “There was once a fat man named Bug Bateman who lived in a hole clutching a stick of dynamite in one hand and his dick in the other. A Spanish princess named Ximenez dragged him out of there, made him do push-ups and shop at Armani, and then, just when he was exactly what she wanted, she told him that she needed the freedom to see other guys. He found out that there are many women who want a guy like him.”

“He rubs my nose in it.”

“Any guy you know that you wouldn’t mind spending a few weeks with?”

“There’s this man that calls himself Petipor the Younger. A Turkish technology importer. I think his father is a Thracian prince.”

“After you finish with my searches go away with him.”

“And you’ll tell Bug?”

“I won’t need to.”

“Where do you want me to start with your work?”

“Do a cursory on Coco first and get that to me as soon as possible.”

“You got it, boss.”