Death's little helpers

22

I spent the rest of the afternoon at home, waiting for word from Neary and thinking about Billy. I thought about the tension in his narrow frame as he looked down from the steps of my building, and of the hurt and confusion etched around his eyes. I remembered what he’d said about his mother, and how, when he knew he’d said too much, he’d made excuses for her and looked to me for agreement. I recalled Ines’s advice to him- to simply fade away- and I clenched my fists. I thought about parents and children, and about how kids survive and at what price. I thought and I waited, but no answers came to me and Neary never called.

Jane appeared late Monday night, bleary-eyed and subdued, and bearing Indian food. She hung her suit jacket on a chair and kicked off her shoes, and we ate mostly in silence. When she did speak it was in angry fragments about her deal, which had hit an eleventh-hour snag over her participation in the company after its sale. The buyers wanted her to run things for two more years, but Jane wasn’t interested. They were insistent and threatening to make it a deal-breaker; Jane was getting mad.

“I don’t come with the copier and the paper clips,” she muttered over her tandoori. “I’m not a piece of fucking office furniture.” She got tired of talking about it halfway through dinner and flicked on the television. She surfed through the channels and leafed angrily through the pages of another fat travel magazine and finished her meal in silence. I carried the trash to the chute down the hall, and when I got back Jane was sitting on the sofa. The travel magazine was in her lap and the TV was off. She was staring at me.

“So, have you figured out what you want to do about this vacation thing yet?” she asked. Her words were quick and taut, as if she’d had too much coffee, and her eyes- though tired in her tired face- were looking for something. Like a fight.

“What do you mean?”

“You said there was a chance your client might reconsider over the weekend- that your job might come back. Are you still waiting for that to happen, or has something else come along?”

I sighed. “Is this really the best time? Don’t you want to get some sleep?”

“Sleep’s overrated,” Jane snorted. “I just want to know where I stand with this trip. How much time can that take?”

I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. I drank some of it and cleared my throat and looked at her over the counter. “We’ve talked about this. We-”

“No, we haven’t. We’ve talked around it- for weeks now. Now I actually want to talk about it.” Her dark eyes narrowed and color rose in her face. “Did your job come back?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s nice and direct,” she said. Her laugh was short. “Is there an explanation to go with that?”

“Sachs hasn’t changed her mind, but there was a breakin at Pace-Loyette over the weekend, in Danes’s office. I’m looking into that.”

“They hired you?”

“Not exactly.”

Jane’s brows came together. “Has anyone hired you?”

“I told Irene Pratt I’d look into it. And I told Nina’s kid, Billy, that I’d keep looking for his father.”

“So they’re your clients now?”

“It’s more of a pro bono thing.”

Jane shook her head. A tiny smile, equal parts incredulous and bitter, played on her perfect lips. “Pro bono is right. The question is: good for who, them or you?”

“They need-”

“What do you need, John? What is it that you want?”

I put my glass down. “I’ve told you, I don’t think a trip is a bad idea, I just-”

“I’m not talking about the trip anymore,” Jane said. The silence afterward was ringing.

“I was starting to suspect that,” I said, after a while.

Jane’s face darkened. “Don’t be funny,” she said quietly. “Not now.”

“What do you want me to say, Jane?”

Jane looked down at her stockinged feet for a while. Then she raised her head and locked her eyes on mine. “You can say what it is we’re doing here, for starters. You can tell me what this is supposed to be. Whether it’s just something convenient, that fits into the time you can’t fill up with work, or… something else.” Jane’s fingers were white at the edges of the magazine, and a pulse was beating quickly on her neck.

“I’ve never thought of this as just handy,” I said softly.

She took a deep breath and dragged a hand through her cropped hair. “And was there some way I was supposed to know that? Was there a sign I missed? Maybe it’s the lack of sleep- or maybe I’m just no good at parsing the oblique stuff- because the only signal I get from you says convenience.”

I drank some more water, but it didn’t relieve the churning in my gut. My ears were full of a rushing sound. “Convenience is a two-way street,” I said.

Jane’s mouth tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that your work is important to you, and you like your life organized a certain way, and all of this is pretty convenient for you too. It fits nicely into what little free time you give yourself. It’s close to home and to the office, and-”

“You really think that’s why I’m here, because of… geography?” she asked. Her magazine had fallen to the floor but she didn’t seem to notice. Her face was very still.

I shrugged. “I think we’re alike, Jane. Both of us like things neat, and we like them on our own terms.”

Jane looked at me, and after a while she sighed. “I think that’s facile bullshit,” she said. “And what’s more, I think you know it.” She went to the table and picked up her jacket and slipped her feet into her shoes. “I think you know there’s a difference between being dedicated to your work and hiding inside it. And an even bigger difference between being self-sufficient and… whatever it is that you are.”

She slung her bag over her shoulder and turned when she reached the door.

“But you were right about one thing,” she said. “This wasn’t a good time to talk.” She closed the door softly behind her.

I ran long on Tuesday morning, and worked my way through the weight stations at the gym a few times, and stood under the shower afterward until the wobbly feeling in my limbs passed. I called Irene Pratt from a diner on Eighth Avenue, over my first cup of coffee. She answered right away, but when I told her who it was she said she couldn’t talk and to try her later. I finished my oatmeal and read the paper, and over my last cup of coffee, I called again. She kept me on hold for five minutes.

“Just checking in,” I said, when she came back on the line.

“Uh-huh. Well… thanks, I guess.”

“Everything all right with you?”

“Me? I’m fine- great, in fact.”

“Any more signs of that guy?”

“I haven’t seen anything or anybody. In fact, I’m thinking now that I was just being paranoid.”

“The breakin wasn’t paranoia.”

“Yeah, but the business of people watching me-”

“A black Grand Prix followed me too. I don’t think you imagined that.”

“How do you know? There are probably hundreds of cars like that in New York- maybe thousands.”

I was quiet for a moment. “What’s wrong, Irene?” I asked finally.

“Nothing- nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just need to get some work done, that’s all. I think I was being paranoid, and now I need to cut it out and get back to work.”

“I won’t keep you, then. I’ll call if I hear anything.”

“Don’t bother,” she said quickly. “I mean, not on my account. Like I said, I’m fine and I just want to get back to work. I don’t want to think about this stuff anymore.”

“I can understand that, but these guys may have other ideas.”

An edge came into Pratt’s voice. “These guys? You talk like there’s some big conspiracy, but I’m telling you I’m not sure I even saw anything, okay? Now let me get back to work.” The line went dead.

I pocketed the phone and the waitress dropped a check on the table. I sat there and looked at it and thought about Pratt. On Monday morning she’d been scared and worried and had taken comfort in hearing from me. Twenty-four hours later, she wanted me to go away. I had no idea why.

Plenty of people have taken sudden dislikes to me before, but I didn’t think that was Pratt’s problem. Fear was a possibility. Fear of getting any more involved in whatever was going on, perhaps, or of having anything more to do with me. Fear of Turpin finding out. Fear of losing her job. Pratt had had a bad case of nerves when I’d seen her on Saturday, and I was willing to bet it had only gotten worse and more corrosive with each passing day. Maybe she figured to put it all behind her with a hearty dose of denial. Or maybe she just had a lot of work to do.

I paid the bill and walked home. And kept right on walking, past my building. I didn’t feel like sitting in an empty apartment just then, or hearing the echoes of Jane’s voice, or the silence upstairs, so I headed east- to Union Square- and spent much of the day roaming in a very large bookstore. I wandered the science fiction and the history aisles, and read some essays on contemporary politics and world affairs, and when I was sufficiently disheartened I drank a lot of coffee.

I checked my voice mail when I got home. There was nothing from Neary, but there was a message from Paul Gargosian.

“Don’t know if you still want to talk, but I’m home now. You have my number.” I did and I used it, and left him yet another message. Then I checked my e-mail. At long last, Gregory Danes’s phone records had arrived. I clicked on the attachments and scanned through the reports and felt my heart sink.

“Shit,” I whispered.

Neary called on Wednesday morning, and I was downtown in twenty minutes. DiLillo and Sikes were sitting on his office sofa. I leaned on the windowsill and Neary nodded at DiLillo.

“There’s surveillance at all the locations,” she began. “Four out of four. They’re using a lot of people, and they must be burning through a lot of cash. They’re running three eight-hour shifts at each site, and a round-robin deal with the cars, switching them from site to site, so the same one doesn’t show up at the same place two days in a row. As far as we could tell, the surveillance is static; we don’t think they’re tailing anybody. But we’d have to work it with more guys to be sure.” She held up a fat manila folder. “I’ve got the stills for you.”

I opened the folder and leafed through it. It was full of photographs, of men and cars. There were crisp daylight shots and grainy nighttime ones, from long distances and from close up and at odd angles, but all of them were clear enough to ID faces and read plate numbers. The men in the pictures were of various types: white and black and Hispanic, young and old, fat and lean. They didn’t look like brain surgeons, but then again they didn’t look like junkies or flashers or racetrack touts, either. Except for a certain wariness around their eyes, they were a mostly unremarkable bunch. There were a lot of different men in the pictures, and I stopped counting after a dozen. I didn’t recognize any of them, though I saw a black Grand Prix, a brown Cavalier, a dirty red hatchback, and a light-blue van that all looked familiar.

I was quiet for a while, and the three of them looked at me. My jaw felt tight and I heard a pulse thrumming in my ears. It wasn’t a surprise; I’d known they were out there. Still, it galled.

“At my place too?” I said. My voice sounded far away.

DiLillo nodded. “Uh-huh,” she said. “But they’re being real careful about it, if it’s any consolation. At least two cars, and they never park on your block.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“We’re still working on IDs for some of them, but what we have so far is that they’re all independents- small-time, one-man shops, like you. No offense.”

“We think they’re subcontracting,” Neary said.

“For who?”

Neary looked at Sikes, who gazed out the window as he spoke. “I know a few of these guys, and one of them owes me. I braced him last night. He doesn’t know the client- he swears up and down he doesn’tbut he knows the prime contractor, the guy that signs his check. It’s Marty Czerka.”

My brow furrowed. “Who’s that?”

Sikes shook his head regretfully, and he and DiLillo exchanged sour smiles.

“Marty?” DiLillo said. “Marty’s the guy who put the sleaze in sleazeball.”

Sikes’s laugh was almost a whisper. “Yeah. The guy who put the douche in douche bag.”

DiLillo giggled. “The guy who put the fat in fat fuck.”

Neary shook his head. “Thanks,” he said to them. “That was helpful.” He turned to me. “Marty’s a PI. He’s got a small agency, him and a brother-in-law and an idiot nephew, all in an office on Canal Street. About a thousand years ago he was on the job uptown, working vice. His fifteen minutes of fame came when he busted some aging rock star in a suite at the Carlyle, with a carry-on full of coke, two semiautomatics, and an underage hooker with a busted arm. Got Marty on television and everything. It took him all of a week to fuck it up.

“First, he gets caught peddling pictures of the bust to some supermarket tabloid. Then another of those rags claims he promised them an exclusive on the photos, and they sue the shit out of him. And finally it comes out that Marty and the hooker have a longterm thing going, and the two of them maybe set up the whole show. He’s lucky they didn’t fry his large ass, but as it was that was his ticket to the private sector.

“Since then he’s made a specialty of any slimy thing that comes along: ugly divorce cases, ugly custody fights, ugly sexual harassment claims- a real dog parade. And whatever side of the shitpile Marty is on, it’s never the right one. He’s a fixture in some circles, the way Fresh Kills Landfill is, only Marty smells worse. I’m surprised you’ve never run across him.”

“I don’t breathe the same rarefied air as you big corporate types,” I said. “Who’s he working for now?”

Neary shook his head. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

I turned to Sikes. “Your pal didn’t know, but what about these other guys? Think one of them might have a name?”

Sikes lifted a skeptical brow. “I’d guess Marty would keep that card pretty close to the vest; he wouldn’t want any of these geniuses going direct to the client and cutting him out of the deal. But shit does happen, especially in a group this big; the hens get together and get to gossiping. I wouldn’t bet on anybody talking, though- not without some serious leverage.”

“They’re all such good soldiers?” I asked.

DiLillo shook her head. “Marty buys a lot of freelance help, so he’s a regular meal ticket for a lot of these guys. They won’t want to fuck that up. And half of what they’re selling is their ability to keep their mouths shut. Nobody wants a rep for being a talker; it sucks for business.”

She had a point. “Anybody have leverage with one of these guys?” I asked.

“I shot my wad yesterday,” Sikes said. DiLillo shook her head.

“Think some cash would motivate them?”

Sikes smiled. “They’ll all take your money- no doubt about it- the problem is knowing who to give it to and what the hell you’re getting in return. Finding that out could be expensive.”

“How about Czerka himself?”

“You never know with Marty,” Neary said. “He’s a creep, and as a general rule you’ve got to figure he’s always for sale. On the other hand, he can’t afford to burn too many bridges. I think with Marty it’ll depend on how much he’s making off the client, what he thinks the blowback would be from burning him, and how much you’re willing to grease the rails.”

I thought about that for a while. “Surveillance still going?” I asked.

“Until you say otherwise,” Neary said.

“A couple of days more, then.” I looked at Sikes. “You think that friend of yours will give Czerka a heads-up?”

A chilly grin spread across Sikes’s face. “He’s not that stupid.” He and DiLillo got up and left. Neary sat back in his chair.

“Somebody’s spending a lot of money on this,” he said.

“You mean besides me?”

“Besides you. And that means somebody with deep pockets and motivation. It also means that Marty will suck at this tit for as long as he can.”

“If buying him doesn’t work, there’s always charm or deceit- or both.”

“Charm’s no good on Marty; he’s got no receptors for it. And I wouldn’t put too much faith in trickery either. He’s no rocket scientist, but Marty has a sewer-rat kind of shrewdness.”

“How about a nice beating, then?”

“You’re not paying nearly enough for that. No, I think we take a walk up to Marty’s office and have a talk. He’ll either negotiate or he’ll tell us to fuck off. And if he does, we can still make a run at the hired help.”

We were quiet for a while and Neary gave me a speculative look.

“I figured you’d be a little more excited about this,” he said.

“I’m smiling on the inside. I got Danes’s phone records last night- his home and his cell.”

“Were they worth the wait?”

I nodded. “They cover a thirty-day period starting about five weeks ago, just a few days before he last called in for his messages.”

Neary nodded. “And?”

“The home number was no surprise; no calls made from there during that time. The activity was on his cell. There were a couple of calls to Reggie Selden, the lawyer representing him on the custody thing, and calls to his own home, to get messages. There was a call to Nina Sachs’s number-”

Neary cut me off. “I thought she hadn’t heard from Danes.”

“So did I, but according to Billy his father left a couple of messages for him on the answering machine. He didn’t mention them to his mother.” Neary nodded, and I continued. “Then there’s that final call to his home number- which corresponds to the date and time on his caller ID- and that’s it. There are no other calls.”

Neary’s brows came together. “That was the last one?”

I nodded. “Not only did he stop calling in for his messages, he stopped making calls altogether.”

Neary sat back in his chair. He tapped a finger lightly on the edge of his desk. “He could have another phone,” he said.

“I guess so, but I haven’t turned up another number in his name.”

“It could be one of those prepaid throwaway things.”

“It could be.”

“You talk to Sachs about this?”

“She’s made it pretty clear she’s not interested.”

Neary shook his head and drew a big hand slowly down his jaw.

We walked north on Broadway. A skim coat of pearly cloud had spread itself across the sky, and glare and heat and intimations of summer had begun to build beneath its shell. Bus fumes and car exhaust and the smell of ripening trash stayed close to the pavement, and I was sweating a little when we turned east on Canal. Both of us were thinking about Danes’s phone bill and what it might mean, but neither of us put it into words.

Czerka’s office was in a soot-gray building near Centre Street, and convenient to the House of Detention. The lobby walls were green and the linoleum floor was sticky underfoot. The lone desk guard barely glanced at our IDs when we signed in. We took a dim elevator up.

The ninth-floor corridor was fluorescent-lit and painted a nasty blue. It was empty and quiet and smelled powerfully of disinfectant. The doors to the office suites were metal-clad and bristled with locks. Czerka’s office was to the left, tucked between a bail bondsman and a bathroom. The plastic sign on the door read CZERKA SECURITY BUREAU. There was an intercom box mounted on the wall, and Neary leaned on the buzzer.

Nothing happened for a while and then a storm of static erupted from the speaker and abruptly stopped. Neary hit the buzzer again and was rewarded by another burst of noise and then nothing.

“If you’re talking, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he shouted into the box. A feeble buzzing came from the vicinity of the doorknob. Neary pushed and we went in.

It was a cramped, windowless room with fluorescent lights and a smell of cigarettes, old food, and flatulence. The walls were lined with battered metal file cabinets and most of the floor space was taken by two metal desks, facing each other across a narrow aisle in the center of the room. There was a computer on the left-hand desk, with a huge monitor, a modem, and a rat’s nest of cabling that snaked away behind the cabinets. The right-hand desk was covered in food wrappers and magazines- Burger King, KFC, and Krispy Kreme, Soldier of Fortune and Maxim. A sound mind in a sound body. There was no one in the room, but there was a doorway straight ahead, and a voice shouting out from it.

“Who the fuck is it?” It was a man’s voice, deep, wheezy, and wet and with a strong Long Island accent. I followed Neary in.

The inner office was larger than the outer one, and was graced by a dirt-fogged window, but it was no less crowded and smelled even worse. It too was lined with file cabinets, and all of them were topped by dusty heaps of newspapers and magazines. To the right was another big workstation, perched on a frail-looking card table, and in the corner was a half-sized refrigerator with a coffeemaker on top. In the center of the room was a scarred oak desk. Its surface was obscured by layers of file folders and newspapers and glossy catalogs, and by an immense glass ashtray that overflowed with cigarette butts and spent matches. In front of the desk were two plastic guest chairs, and wedged behind it was the man I took to be Marty Czerka.

He was spread out in his green leather chair like a toad on a lily pad. His big head was liver-spotted and mostly bald, and the fringe of hair at the sides was coarse and gray. His skin was mottled pink and white; it fell in deep folds around his eyes and meaty nose and flowed over his shirt collar. More gray hair bristled over his hooded blue eyes and above his thick upper lip.

His shirt had once been white, and from its size it might also once have been a spinnaker. Now it had French cuffs and gold cuff links shaped like little nightsticks. A stained yellow tie hung limply down its front, the knot obscured by Czerka’s double chin. His pale hands were veined and speckled, and his fingers looked like bad sausage. He stubbed out a cigarette, and ash dribbled over the sides of the ashtray. He looked at Neary and his thick brows came together.

“Neary, right- ex-Feeb, with Brill?” he said. Neary nodded.

Czerka shifted his big head and looked at me. There was a spark of recognition and surprise in his hooded eyes, but he doused it quickly and put on a game face of indifference and lethargy. It was deftly done. He looked back to Neary.

“Who’s he?” he asked.

Neary smiled and sat in one of the guest chairs. I sat in the other. Czerka didn’t seem to mind not getting an answer to his question. He found a cigarette in the wreckage of his desk and lit it with a wooden match. He sighed in some smoke and coughed wetly. He rolled the cough around in his throat and savored it, as if it were the best part of smoking.

“You’re not on my calendar today,” Czerka said.

“I thought I’d drop in,” Neary said, “just on the off chance.”

Czerka nodded. “Sure,” he said slowly. He looked at me again. “And you?” I smiled and said nothing.

“I thought maybe you could help me out, Marty,” Neary said.

Czerka took another drag and coughed a little more. “Help,” he said absently. He shifted in his seat, and a greasy popping sound issued from somewhere below his desk. A moment later, a noxious sulfurous smell filled the room. Charming. I looked at Neary, who kept on talking.

“I have a friend who’s feeling a little bit crowded lately.”

“Crowded, huh? What, he needs a bigger apartment? Or a laxative maybe?” Czerka’s blue eyes glittered. He cleared his throat loudly and for a long time. “You the friend?” he asked me, when he finished. I was quiet. Neary ignored the question too.

“We’re in the market for a name, Marty,” he said. “We can buy it or swap for it or whatever, and nobody has to know where we got it from.”

Czerka played one of his fat fingers along the edge of his mustache and then slid it into his nose. “What name?” he said finally.

Neary was full of elaborate disappointment. “Come on, Marty. The name of whoever’s paying for the small army you’ve got on the street these days.”

Czerka treated himself to another drag and another ripe cough and was about to speak when the outer door opened and banged shut. There were heavy footsteps and a man stood at the office door.

He was young, no more than twenty-five, and medium height, but with the neck and shoulders of a serious gym rat. He wore shiny gray warm-up pants and a black T-shirt from someplace called the Platinum Playpen, and a heavy odor of sweat and leathery cologne preceded him. His dirty-blond hair was buzz-cut on his small head, and his eyes were pale and vague and set close below a bony brow. The left eye was blackened. There was a bandage across his pulpy nose, stitches at the corner of his undersized mouth, and bruising along his jaw. There were foam-and-metal splints on three fingers of his left hand. He held a couple of paper bags in his right, and he put them on Czerka’s desk.

“I got the smokes, Uncle Marty, and the sandwich and the lottery tickets,” he said. His voice was cracking and adolescent. He looked at us and wondered who we were, and it seemed like a lot of work for him. He fixed his gaze on me, and after a while a dim light came into his eyes. He didn’t try to hide it, or even realize that he should. There was irritation on Czerka’s face and in his voice.

“Yeah, great work, Stevie. Now go watch the front room- and close the door behind you.”

Stevie stared at us harder, in what I realized was supposed to be a tough look. “You got a problem here, Uncle Marty? Something I could help with?”

“Go!” Czerka barked. Stevie colored but did as he was told. Czerka stubbed out his smoke and looked at Neary and chuckled. It was moist and mocking.

“Since when are we such old pals that you waltz in here calling me Marty? And since when do I give a shit about you or your friends or their problems or whatever the hell you’re in the market for? You may not be a Feeb anymore, but you still got that Feeb attitude, that’s for damn sure.”

He took a loud breath and laughed some more.

“You got a lot of fucking nerve coming in here, thinking I got something to sell you. What, you think you’re the only stand-up guys in the world? You think the rest of us lowlifes are just looking for a chance to roll on a client?” Czerka got winded and his laughter dissolved into a racking cough.

Neary nodded at him. “I didn’t realize your sensibilities were so refined, Marty,” he said. “You have my deepest apologies. And now we can talk cash money, or I’ve got some business I could push your way, or we could do some of each. Or maybe you’re interested in something else. But if you are, you’ve got to tell me, because I can’t read minds.” Neary paused and smiled. “So, do you want to do yourself some good here or not?”

Czerka flicked at us dismissively and dug through the bags on his desk. He pulled a brick-sized package in white butcher’s paper from one, tore back the wrapping, and hoisted a sloppy pastrami on rye to his mouth. Grease bled down his hands and left his chin and mustache wet, and the smell of meat and fat rose to mingle with the other delicate aromas in the room. He put the sandwich down and pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it even as he chewed, open-mouthed, on the pastrami. Jesus.

“Forget it, Neary,” he said, and bits of food fell from his mouth to the desk. “Your pockets aren’t deep enough to make it worth the trouble.” He glanced at me and shook his head. “Even his aren’t deep enough. Now get the fuck out of here and let me eat my lunch.” He picked up his sandwich again.

Neary looked at me and shrugged. I took a deep breath and tried not to choke. I spoke quietly. “Mesmerizing as it is to sit here while you smoke and fart and smear yourself with lard, I’d be more than happy to go get myself steam-cleaned and leave you in peace, believe me. But I’ve got a client who’d really like to know what’s going on, and frankly so would I. I know you don’t give a shit about who wants what, but my client has some resources, and I do too, so maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss. Maybe you should get your brains out of your fat ass and reconsider.”

Czerka stared at me, his sandwich poised above his desk. He was quiet and his blue eyes were hard beneath their folded lids. Red patches spread over his cheeks, and his shoulders and fat arms began to shake, and then a gurgling sound came from his open mouth. Czerka put his sandwich down and shook and laughed for almost a minute, until his face grew dark and there was a hissing in his breath. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Son of a bitch!” Czerka laughed, “Fucking steam-cleaned, huh?” He looked at Neary. “See- your pal thinks I’m dog shit, just like you do, but he comes out and says it. He can barely stand to breathe the same air as me, but he puts it right out there. I got to say, I kind of like that. But sweet talk won’t get you into my pants, March.” He looked at me as he said my name, but I managed to keep my composure. Czerka laughed a little more and took hold of his sandwich again. After a while he glanced up.

“Door’s right there, boys,” he said.

We walked out of Czerka’s office, past Stevie and his bandages. He tried to give us another hard stare as we went by, but it came off looking like constipation.

On the elevator, Neary sighed loudly. “Not just another pretty face, is he?” he said.

“But a great personality. My guess is he won’t have a lot of second thoughts.”

“He won’t have any. We’ll pull together a list of the people my crew has ID’d and see if anybody in my shop knows any of them. If they do, that might give us a place to start.”

It was warmer outside, but compared to Czerka’s office the air seemed fresh and clean. We walked back to Broadway in silence and stopped outside the subway station.

“What do you think happened to Stevie?” I asked.

“Tripped over a barbell maybe?”

“Maybe it outsmarted him.”

I was still trying to clear my lungs when I pushed open the glass and wrought-iron door of my building and stepped into the entry vestibule. And then I stopped. There was a large manila envelope taped to my mailbox. It was blank except for my name, which was printed in capitals, in black marker. I peeled it off the mailbox door. It was light. I opened the flap. There were just a few sheets of paper inside. I slid them out and felt a rush of heat in my face and a surge of blood through my temples.

They were photographs, in color, printed on plain paper. Their quality was mediocre at best, but the subjects and their surroundings were clear enough and so were the little date-and-time stamps in the corners.

“Jesus.” My legs felt shaky and my heart was pounding, as if I’d just run a long way. I leaned against the wall for a moment. “Jesus.” I pulled out my cell phone.

My fingers felt clumsy as I punched her number. Jane’s phone seemed to ring forever, and I looked down at the photos while I listened. Her assistant finally answered.

“Jane Lu’s office.”

“Is she there?” My throat was tight and it was hard to get the words out.

“Hi, John. I’m afraid she’s not available right now.”

I ground my teeth. “Is she in, though- actually in the office now?”

“Oh, yes. She’s in the conference room, in a meeting.”

“You’re sure of that? You’ve seen her?”

“I just saw her go in.” She sounded puzzled. “Is something wrong, John?”

Something loosened in my chest. “No, nothing. Just have her call me when she gets out. First thing, okay? Tell her it’s important.” I hung up and punched another number. Janine answered.

“Johnny- you must’ve read my mind. I was just about to give you a call.”

“Are the boys at home, Janine?”

“They just this minute walked through the door,” she said.

I let out a deep breath.

“They’re still washing up, so they haven’t opened them yet.”

My throat tightened up. “Opened what?” I said.

Janine laughed. “The presents you sent. They came about an hour ago. But what’s in them, Johnny? And what’s the occasion?”

Peter Spiegelman

JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home