Hard as Nails

CHAPTER FIVE

Kurtz knew that Arlene was happy to finally have their office back on Chippewa Street. Their P.I. office before he'd gone to Attica had been on Chippewa, back when it was a rough area. Last year, after he'd been released from Attica, they'd found a cheap space in the basement of the last X-rated-video store in downtown Buffalo. Last spring, after that whole block had been condemned and demolished, Kurtz had considered an office in the Harbor Inn or one of the nearby abandoned grain elevators, but Arlene had come up with the money for Chippewa Street, so Chippewa Street it was.

Their P.I. business here thirteen years ago had consisted of just him, his partner Samantha Fielding, and Arlene as their secretary. The street had been run-down but recovering then—a lot of local coffeeshops, used bookstores, one gunshop—which was handy for Kurtz—and no fewer than four tattoo parlors. In the seventies, when Kurtz was growing up, Chippewa Street had been all X-rated bookstores, prostitutes and drug dealers. Kurtz had spent a lot of time there then.

Now Chippewa Street was the only happening place in the entire rotting corpus that was the greater Buffalo metropolitan area. If one never left this stretch of Chippewa Street one might be able to imagine that Buffalo, New York, was still a viable entity. For three entire, short city blocks, between Elmwood and Main, there was a heartbeat: lights, wine bars, nightclubs, limousines sliding to the curb, trendy restaurants, and pedestrians on the street after six P.M. After two A.M. as well, when the clubs let out. And a Starbucks. Kurtz thought that the locals were inordinately proud of their Starbucks.

When Arlene had found the money for this office, Kurtz had stipulated only that it not be above a Starbucks. He hated Starbucks. The coffee was all right—Kurtz didn't really pay attention to his coffee as long as it didn't have cockroaches or something worse floating in it—but whenever the Starbucks shops showed up, it meant that the neighborhood had gone to shit—admittedly, upscale to shit—until the area was just a Disney parody of itself.

Arlene had agreed to avoid that particular coffee haven, so here they were a block and a half east of and two stories higher than the Starbucks. But there were rumors that another one was coming in just across the street.

Now, as Kurtz went up the two flights of stairs to the third-floor office and in the door, he saw why Arlene had wanted to locate here. His secretary had first lost her teenage son to a traffic accident and then her husband to a heart attack while Kurtz had been in jail. Both of those males had been computer whizzes and Arlene was the best hacker—or whatever the hell you called them—in the family. She was still using access codes to files and funds for the Erie County District Attorney's office, and she hadn't worked there for five years.

But she worked too hard and smoked too much. Her only hobby was reading detective thrillers. This SweetheartSearch and WeddingBells-dot-com gig brought her into her office—even though she could just as easily access the servers from her suburban Cheektowaga home—at all hours of the day, night, and weekends. Even at two A.M., Kurtz realized, the view out the big south-facing window just beyond her desk was full of life—lights and people below and traffic sounds—just as if they lived in a real.

He paused in the doorway. He wasn't sure how she'd react to his head wound, bandages, raccoon blood-mask, road rash, and devil's eyes.

"Hey," he said, walking past his cluttered desk to her immaculate one.

"Hey, yourself," said Arlene, tapping the keyboard, her eyes intent on the screen even while a Marlboro dangled from her lip. Smoke curled around her head and then drifted through the small screened window next to the big glass window.

Kurtz perched on the edge of the desk and cleared his throat.

She paused in the typing, flicked ashes, and looked at him from less than three feet away. "You're looking good, Joe. Lose some weight?"

Kurtz sighed. "Gail called you?"

Gail DeMarco, Arlene's sister-in-law and good friend, was a nurse in the pediatric ward of Erie County Medical Center where Kurtz had been handcuffed mere hours earlier.

"Of course she did," said Arlene. "She's only working mornings now because of Rachel and saw your name on the admissions list when she came in at eight. But by the time she got up to see you, you'd flown the coop."

Kurtz nodded.

"Besides," said Arlene, typing again, "the cops have already been here this morning hunting for you."

Kurtz took off the fedora and scratched his head above the bandages. "Kemper?"

"And a female detective named King."

Kurtz looked at her. He and Rigby had been over before he started up the agency with Sam and hired Arlene. And Sam hadn't known about Rigby. So Arlene couldn't know about her. Could she?

Suddenly the floor and desk rose like a small boat on a broad swell. Kurtz took a breath and walked to his own desk, dropping into the swivel chair more heavily than he'd planned. He dropped the fedora—blood on the sweatband—onto his desk.

Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and came over to stand next to him. Her fingers began pulling back the tape and bandages. He started to push her away, but his arm felt as if it were handcuffed again.

"Sit still, Joe."

She peeled away the crusted dressings. Kurtz bit his lip but said nothing.

"Oh, Joe," she said. Her fingers hurt him as they probed, but everything hurt him. It was just more noise amidst the jet roar.

"I think I can see the skull itself between these wide stitches," Arlene said calmly. "Looks like somebody took a chunk out of it. No—don't touch. And don't move—just hold this tape here."

She tossed the bandage into his wastepaper basket. Kurtz noticed that the gauze was furred with hair as well as dried blood. She rooted in her lower left drawer and came out with the big first-aid kit that she'd always kept there, just as she'd always kept a.357 Ruger in the top right drawer.

Kurtz closed his eyes for moment while she painted the wound with something that burned like kerosene and then set fresh dressings in place, cutting strips of adhesive off the roll with her teem.

"So what are we going to do, Joe? Do you know who shot you?"

"I can't remember the shooting."

"You think they were after you or O'Toole? Gail said that the probation officer was in bad shape."

"I don't know which of us they wanted to kill," said Kurtz. "I don't think they came after both of us—we just don't have any common enemies. Odds are it's me they wanted."

"Yeah," said Arlene. She was finished with the rebandaging. "Don't mess with it for a few minutes." She went back to her desk, brought out a bottle of Jack Daniel's and two glasses, poured for both of them, and handed him his glass.

"To luck," she said and drank hers.

It tasted like medicine to Kurtz, but the warmth helped the headache for a minute.

"I need to get some stuff off a computer," he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his desk. Sweetheart-Search manilla file folders crinkled under his arms. He stared into the empty glass.

"How much stuff?" Arlene lit another Marlboro.

"Everything that's on it."

"Whose computer?"

"Parole Officer O'Toole's," said Kurtz. He gingerly set the fedora back on, tugging the brim down gently.

Arlene squinted through the smoke. "The cops probably took it already. Searched the hard drive for clues."

"Yeah, I thought of that," said Kurtz. "But the machine's right there in the County offices. It's already County property. There's a chance they just… did whatever you have to do to copy the files. Would that leave information still on the hard disk?"

"Sure," said Arlene. "But it's still possible they lifted the hard disk out and took it to some forensic lab to do the searching."

Kurtz shrugged. "But if they looked at it there… or haven't got around to it yet…"

"We can copy everything in it," said Arlene. "But how do you expect to get into O'Toole's office in the middle of the day? In the same building where they shot you? There are bound to be forensic guys and cops still milling around and her office will be yellow-taped and sealed."

"Tonight," said Kurtz. "Can you give me the stuff I need to copy her files?"

"Sure," said Arlene, "but you'll screw it up. You can barely get online or download a file."

"That's not true."

"Well, you'd screw up copying to a backup drive, even though it's simple. I'll go with you tonight."

"The hell you will."

"I'll go with you tonight," said Arlene. "Was there anything else we have to do now?"

"I'd like you to pull up everything you can on Peg O'Toole's old man. Big John O'Toole. He was a…"

"Cop," said Arlene. She flicked ashes. "Killed in the line of duty about four years ago. I remember all the fuss in the papers and on TV."

"Yeah," said Kurtz. He told her about his two middle-of-the-night visitors. "Dig up what you can about Big John's brother, Major O'Toole, the guy in the wheelchair. And an Asian man, probably also in his sixties, maybe Vietnamese, Vinh or Trinh. There's a connection between the two. Vinh might work for the Major."

"Vinh or Trinh and a major," said Arlene. "Any first names?"

"You tell me."

"All right. I'll have what I can find by tonight. Anything else you want now?"

"Yeah," said Kurtz.

The list took only a few minutes for Arlene to Google-search and print and a few more minutes for Kurtz to look over. It included one hundred and twenty-three amusement and theme parks in New York's 716 area code and adjacent regions. It began with Aladdins Castle (with no apostrophe) on Alberta Drive in Buffalo and ended with Wackey World for Kidz (with no "s") on Market Street in the town of Niagara Falls, NY.

"So what'd you get out of it?" asked Arlene.

"That these people can't spell for shit."

"Other than that?"

"The abandoned amusement park O'Toole was interested in isn't on this list," said Kurtz. "These are mostly shopping center arcades and waterslides."

"And Six Flags out in Darien."

"Yeah."

"Fantasy Island on Grand Island is a real amusement park," said Arlene. She flicked ashes into her glass ashtray and looked outside as an autumn wind buffeted the big window.

"It's still up and running," said Kurtz. "The photos I saw showed a very deserted place. Probably deserted for years, maybe decades."

"So you want me to do a serious search—zoning, county building permissions, titles, news articles—going back how far?"

"Nineteen sixties?" said Kurtz.

Arlene nodded, set her cigarette down and made a note on her steno pad. "Just the Buffalo area?"

Kurtz rubbed his temples. The pain throbbed and pulsed now, sometimes worse than others, but never giving him even a few seconds of relief. "I don't even know if the place she was looking for was in New York State. Let's look in Western New York—say from the Finger Lakes to the state lines."

Arlene made a note. "I presume you're going to look again at the photos she showed you tonight when we go in to copy the hard drive."

"I'm going to steal them," said Kurtz.

"But you have no idea if they're important?"

"Not a clue," said Kurtz. "Odds are that they mean nothing at all. But it was weird that she showed them to me."

"Why, Joe? You are… were… a good P.I."

Kurtz frowned and stood to go.

"You're not driving are you?" asked Arlene.

"Can't. The cops have my Pinto—either impounded or wrapped up in crime-scene tape in the garage."

"Probably improves its looks," said Arlene. She stubbed out her cigarette. "Want a ride?"

"Not yet I'll grab a cab. I have some people to talk to."

"Pruno's on his October sabbatical, remember?"

"I remember," said Kurtz. One of his best street informants, the old wino, disappeared every October for three weeks. No one knew where he went.

"You should talk to that Ferrara woman," said Arlene. "Anything dirty goes on in this town, she usually knows about it. She's usually part of it."

"Yeah," said Kurtz. "Which reminds me, some mobster in Armani is going to drop by here with a folder full of paperwork. Don't shoot him with that cannon you keep under your desk."

"A mob guy in Armani?"

"Colin."

"A mob guy named Colin," said Arlene. "That head injury made you delusional, Joe."

"Pick me up at nine-thirty at the Harbor Inn," said Kurtz. "We'll go to the Civic Center together."

"Nine-thirty. You going to last that long?"

Kurtz touched his hat brim in farewell and went out and down the long stairway. There were thirty-nine steps and every one of them hurt.