Known to Evil

28

I don't know what's going on here, Carson," I was saying.

We were walking north on Eighth Avenue, looking to all the world like two down-on-their-luck salesmen in bad suits. He had called Lieutenant Bethann Bonilla-they were on a first-name basis-and learned that what I was saying was true.

Once he knew for a fact that Charbon was involved, Carson got fidgety. He didn't want to sit in the station anymore. Even in his underground bunker he felt vulnerable.

"So what do you want from me?" he asked.

The sun was going down again, taking with it, it seemed to me, my tentative connection to Reason.

"I don't really know," I said. "I mean, I get a call summoning me to a murder scene. I agree that's suspicious. But I never heard of Wanda Soa, and the button man was a stranger to me, too."

Neither one of us had an overcoat and the temperature was below fifty, for sure. I was certainly feeling a chill, but that was also the scrutiny I was under.

Kitteridge was so good at getting the truth out of suspects that he was on call to all the major precincts in New York. They sometimes lent him out to other cities for convoluted interrogations. If he was freelance I would have used him myself.

"I still don't know what you want," Carson said.

"Yeah. Well… what about Soa?"

"What about her?"

"Why is everybody so upset?" I asked. "I mean, I know that it's murder and all, but there usually isn't this much pressure put on a single case, especially if the press doesn't grab on to it."

"I don't know," Kitteridge said. It was a simple declarative sentence, one that I rarely, if ever, heard come from his lips.

Rather than show my surprise, I said, "Let's go in that diner, man. I'm freezin' out here."

There was a coffee shop with a counter and a few tables across the street. If I had been with any other one of the eight million New Yorkers, even those confined to a wheelchair, we would have plunged across the avenue, making our way through the traffic by bravado and stealth. But Carson went to the crosswalk at the corner and patiently waited for the light. I do believe that if his mother was having a stroke in that diner he would have done the same.

His adherence to the law was both laughable and frightening.

SEATED AT THE COUNTER, sipping black coffees, we continued our clandestine talk.

"Is someone putting pressure on the case?" I asked.

Carson stared at me. His left eye nearly closed with the concentration.

"You don't know Soa?" he asked.

"Never heard of her before I got to the crime scene."

"Then why were you there?"

"I got a call."

We waited again for him to redigest my words.

"There's an ADA named Tinely," he said. "Broderick Tinely. For some reason he's got a bee up his butt over the murder. He's been leaning heavily on Assistant Chief Chalmers, and the shit filters down from there."

"Why?"

"I don't know," Kitteridge said again. "I got a call from downtown telling me to lean on you. I didn't know about Charbon. He'd rather cut off his left nut than bring me in on anything he's doing."

I sipped my coffee, thinking that it tasted of metal and the chemical cleaners used on metal.

"What's the deal?" I asked.

"Are you involved with these killings or the people killed?" Carson asked.

"If I am I don't know how."

He thrummed his fingers on the countertop.

"It doesn't make any sense," he said at last. "None of it. The killer has no name, his fingerprints don't show up in any database. He had a wad of thirty-seven hundred dollars in his pocket and that was all. His last dinner was tilapia, brown beans, white rice, and plantains fried in peanut oil. The residue on his left hand and sleeve says that he probably fired the shot that killed the girl, but there was no gun in the apartment. There's no way in the world that he could have stabbed himself. The knife was shoved in just under his left armpit, all the way to the handle. They say that the killer wiped off his prints but it looks to me like the shooter probably jerked away from his assailant when he was stabbed and any prints were wiped clean."

"Did anybody hear anything?"

"A young man in the apartment upstairs might have heard a girl screaming around the time the killings occurred."

"And Soa?" I asked.

"Can I get you anything else, gentlemen?" a young Hispanic man with a sparse mustache asked.

"You got an espresso machine?" I asked him.

"Yes, sir."

"Make me a triple with some steamed milk."

"You don't like your coffee?" Carson asked.

"Do you?"

The young man smiled and moved off to fill my order.

"What's wrong with the coffee?" Kitteridge demanded.

"It tastes like toxic waste."

"I don't taste anything."

"Do you have something on Soa?" I asked.

"I could fill up a phone book on her. Her father's a businessman from Colombia and her mother's a Parisian socialite named Jeanne Oure. Mother splits up her time between Nice and Salvador."

"Bahia?" I said.

"Say what?"

"Salvador is either a country or a city in the state of Bahia in Brazil."

"Brazil," Carson said. "She-Wanda-went down there pretty often. For a while there they thought that she was smuggling drugs."

"Was she?"

"Depends on how you look at it."

"What's that mean?"

"They had fourteen agents on her-city, state, federal. Scoped out four trips she made in a nine-month period. Didn't find a thing. Finally they grabbed her at customs coming into the country and searched her down to the spaces between her toes."

"They find anything?"

"Less than a gram of hashish wrapped up in some chewing gum aluminum foil in the back pocket of a pair of dirty jeans. She said somebody gave it to her at a concert and she forgot it in the pocket. But by then they had spent over eight hundred thousand investigating the girl, and so she was facing prosecution in three different courts. Three different courts."

"So she was on trial when she was killed?"

"No."

"No?"

"Somewhere along the way a lawyer named Lamont Jennings gets involved. High-priced attorney. Knows all the right people. Three weeks before she is to be indicted, all charges are dropped."

"Just like that?"

Carson nodded. "I'd say maybe that someone put a hit on her because they thought she might have given information to the feds or something, but I doubt it. Her folks have money, and she had no drug connections at all."

The waiter delivered my espresso and milk.

"Damn," I said after the server had gone. "It doesn't make any sense."

"No, no it doesn't. But there's power behind the investigation. Tinely wants somebody to go down for the murders. His assistant calls me every morning for an update."

Carson Kitteridge glanced at me while bringing the rancid coffee to his mouth.

"I have no idea who the hit man was or why he'd kill Wanda Soa," I said. "Those are facts."

"I didn't think so. Tinely said that you probably knew something. I told him that this wasn't your M.O., but he doesn't care. He wants to burn somebody, and if you're anywhere around, he'll set fire to you."

"So… you're protecting me?"

"That's just not the way I do things."