Inherit the Dead

10 JAMES GRADY

Another trek out to the Hamptons. It was almost three when Perry finally pulled into the garage. He needed to see and hear what Randy had to say about Angel’s car. Thought if he was smart, he’d have ol’ Randy check out his Datsun, too, all the miles he was putting on it with this case.

“You don’t belong here.”

The woman behind the counter who snarled those words at Perry as he entered the office of Gil’s Gas & Auto wore too much makeup that did too little to cover the hard miles that had plunked her here in this Long Island garage. Her twentieth high school reunion had come and gone, but local gossips often noted she was “still” pretty. Her perfume, white blouse, and dark slacks cost more than necessary for working this auto shop’s computer, credit card reader, cash register, and customer counter. She kept coffin eyes on Perry, shook a cigarette out of the pack on her desk, flicked a blue flame from a lighter.

Swirling cigarette smoke carried Perry’s eyes to the gas station wall, hung with five framed photos faded by sunlight and weighted by dust. He hadn’t noticed them last time, but now he took them in.

Perry saw the five photos were all of the same man as he aged through life, from a high school football player to a soldier in two photos of American soldiers in desert camo fatigues. Soldiers in one photo held a banner: LONG ISLAND NATIONAL GUARD MECH. DIV. ZULU — OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The fourth photo showed the same man, but older and looking lost. The fifth photo showed him even older and standing beside the thirtysomething ghost of the woman smoking at the desk. The ghost clutched a bouquet, wore a workday dress and the brave smile of some last best hope.

Perry nodded to the photos. “So that’s Gil.”

“Like you care,” said the woman. “I got told what you look like. You’re not supposed to be here.”

Perry shrugged. “Free country.”

“Since when.”

“I’m here to see Randy.”

“He doesn’t want to see you again.” She sucked on the cigarette. Made its ember burn traffic-light orange. “He told me. You got nothing for him. Nothing on him.”

“It’s heartening to see a boss who cares so much about her employees.”

She billowed a cloud of smoke toward Perry. “I’m not the boss.”

Perry nodded. “Sure.”

Left her with her smoldering cancer stick and walked into the garage bay.

“Randy!” she yelled past him. “If you need me, I’m here! I’m here!”

Perry found Angel’s ex-whatever Randy standing beside a car lift that held a luxury sedan suspended above their heads.

A gray work shirt hid Randy Hyde’s tattoos, but not the bulge of his muscles. His empty hands flexed with the ambition of fists.

Perry stopped beside an overturned fuel drum covered with tools.

Randy said: “We’re done talking.”

“We’re done with your bullshit, but we’re not done with talking about Angel.”

Randy drew his lips back over his teeth. “So, guess you’re just another hotshot wannabe hooked by that blond cunt.”

That brutally degrading term keyed Perry’s cop savvy of how much multilayered malice could trigger the word. Beyond that alarm, he felt as if an affront had splattered him or someone he loved — someone not like his ex-wife and certainly not like his daughter but… He felt himself shimmer from smart to street.

Perry said: “So, if that’s what she is, guess now you’re just a worthless dick.”

The mechanic lunged like a barroom brawler.

Perry grabbed a two-foot steel pry bar from the oil barrel’s pile of tools and police-baton rammed it into his attacker’s guts.

Randy gasped, shoved Perry under the suspended vehicle. Randy stumbled with him, wrestling for the steel bar. A twist of Randy’s hands flung it from their grasp.

The steel pry bar clanged off the lift control wand hung on a wall hook, hit the wand’s green button marked Lower.

A black steel cloud sank toward the two fighting men.

Perry fired his fist into the mechanic’s ribs. Randy’s head bumped the transmission shaft of the car sliding down from heaven. Perry dodged a knee strike, pulled Randy into the police academy’s ogoshi hip throw. Randy’s legs swept up off the oil-stained concrete but hit the undercarriage of the sliding-down car. That collision sprawled the two men in a heap on the garage-bay floor.

An arm yoked under Perry’s chin. Death smelled like oiled cement as he saw the black car sinking closer. Perry gouged Randy’s eye. Randy yelled.

Perry rolled out from under the sinking steel sky, hesitated — grabbed the mechanic’s flailing arm and pulled the top half of the pain-blinded man out from under the car seconds before the touched-down tires took the weight of that luxury machine.

They sat side by side on the floor, their legs splayed under the lowered car, their faces reflected in the polished black steel doors.

Perry slammed Randy’s face into the car.

Caught him as he rebounded, his eye bloodshot, his nose bleeding.

The woman from the office loomed by the car’s trunk: “Randy! What did you do to him? I’m calling the cops… ambulance—”

“I pulled him out from being crushed under that car — I fucking saved his life!” said Perry. “If you call the cops now, you throw him into trouble!”

The woman froze.

“Wha-what?” said Randy.

The woman said: “Whatever he—”

“Nora!” yelled Randy. “I got this. Go back to where you’re supposed to be.”

“Where’s that?” she muttered.

Left two men sitting on the cement floor with their legs under a rich man’s car.

Slammed her office door.

A radio in the office abruptly blared an old rock song in sound-muffling defiance.

On their feet, Perry splayed Randy against the car for a police stop pat down.

The growl in Randy’s ear said: “What did Angel see in you?”

“I… I’m… ”

“You’re a punk-ass nobody in the last of your glory days.”

A shove bounced Randy off the car. Perry didn’t let him turn around.

“She… she needed me… and wanted me.”

“Maybe, but you led with needed, so that’s the heart of what’s between you.”

Randy wiped goo streaming from his gouged eye.

“Why did she need you?”

“I protected her.”

“From what? Who?”

“Whoever I could. I told you she was scared. But she was always spooked. Like somebody was going to find her or some secret and… I don’t know. Get her.”

“Did she ever say who?”

“No. Just… She said she got weird phone calls.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know, man! Who wouldn’t call her! Ask her!”

“I can’t. She’s missing. Remember?”

“Still?”

“You think I drove all the way back here from Manhattan because I’m hooked on some woman I’ve never met?”

Randy shrugged. “If it’s Angel, makes sense to me.”

“I’m not you,” said Perry. “An East Hampton cop called me this morning, a badge named Arthur Gawain who said they found her car abandoned. But no Angel.”

“Where is she? Is she okay? I got to—”

“You got to be able to sell your story to the cops.”

“You don’t have to sell the truth!”

“What planet do you live on?” Perry frowned. “If you were her protection, why’d she break it off, why’d she leave you behind at the motel?”

The private eye saw the shoulders shrug on the man who stood before him facing a car he could never afford and the radio-filled office that signed his paychecks.

“Guys like me didn’t dare bother her ’cause of me. And big-bucks boys from Wall Street, Harvard princes come up here for two weeks of summer — they figured the score when she walked with me, though they never stopped trying.”

“Tell me what changed,” said Perry. “The woman who dumped you is missing. I’m the only guy who cares about finding her and the truth. You need me to help sell whatever that is to cops, who only care about easy answers.”

Randy’s words came out hard: “She found somebody who’s more.”

“More what? More protection?”

“That’s all bullshit. Nobody’s protected. Not from everything.”

“But this new guy’s closer to some everything?”

“He’s got money. Power. Politics.” The back of Randy’s hand wiped his bloody nose. “Married, but a woman like Angel makes that not matter.”

“How do you know about him and her?”

“After her ‘I need more’ talk… I followed her one day. Saw them.” Randy leered at Perry: “You want to see a picture?”

“I have one.”

“Here’s another.” The bloody mechanic got his cell phone off a workbench, handed it over.

The photo had been stalker-snapped from behind a pine tree by a parking lot. Randy had already zoomed the image as large as his phone allowed so the figures filled the screen in Perry’s hand.

Angel. Her face cupped by a beefy sandy-haired man. His hands made her look up at him. Perry thought: He’s older than me.

“Who is he?”

“A state assemblyman. Might be other guys, but he’s who I caught her with.”

“They know that you know?”

“I e-mailed her the photos to show her I wasn’t no fool.”

Photos.

Perry had owned this same phone two upgrades ago. He finger-swiped the photo to the next stored shot. The beefy politician was bent over kissing Angel. She stood with her hands at her sides. A third photo showed the same kiss, only now Mr. State Assemblyman pawed Angel’s breast.

Randy said: “That’s all I got of them—Hey!”

Perry swiped to the next photo. The phone in his hand trembled.

Angel. Naked. Standing in a steamy shower facing the clouded glass door. Blond hair blurred like golden light. Closed eyes. Her arms bent and vanished behind her head. The clouded glass made her wide mouth a blur of pink. Revealed epic, natural, handful breasts. Angel had a narrow waist. The photo ended where a bikini would have begun.

She didn’t know the asshole was taking this, thought Perry.

He finger-swiped to the next photo: her laughing at the camera, at Randy.

All the other photos were of cars or auto work, except for one taken by a person who’d grabbed the phone to put her portrait in it: office Nora.

“Give me my cell!”

“After I fix it so it’s not rare enough to kill you for.”

Perry e-mailed the photos of Angel and the political animal to his own phone. He sent her laughing portrait. Then the image of her naked behind clouded glass. Each e-mail vibrated the iPhone on his belt. He deleted the naked shot from Randy’s phone. Let Randy keep the others: Preserve your chain of evidence and back up what you got.

“What’s his name?”

“Tweed.”

“Tweed who?”

“Tweed is his last name.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“What’s funny about that shit? He’s Cyrus Tweed, some state legislature guy, got an office here in town. His name is his name.”

Perry tossed the phone back to its owner. “Remember my name — Perry Christo. I programmed my number in there. You hear from, of, or about Angel, call me first, call me fast. Don’t make me figure you for a fall.”

“I got enough trouble.”

They both stared at the garage office where the closed door vibrated from a radio.

Perry said: “That Nora being older and married wouldn’t stop a guy like you.”

“You think I’m stupid?” Randy didn’t wait for Perry’s answer. “I know what I know. Gil’s war hollow. Just stands around their house. She thinks I got what she needs — that’s more than you know—and she lets me know what’s waiting for me. I hunger bad. But I do that, come later when she realizes who I’m not, my ass is tossed out the door. Or worse. I don’t dare even hint about if Gil was gone. What she might do then scares the shit out of me. She’s driving me crazy.”

“There are other jobs.”

“What planet are you from.”

“Does she know about you and Angel?”

“Nora figures my anybody else’s don’t count. Figures she’s where I’ll end up.”

Perry shook his head: “Do your own math.”

He walked away from that brick gas station/garage that felt like the 1940s, smelled of rubber, old gas, expensive perfume, cancer smoke. The chill of the gray-skied afternoon and the smell of the sea reclaimed him to here and now.

The private detective unwound his woolen scarf, sat behind the steering wheel of his car. Worked his iPhone like his professional predecessors had worked the soles of their shoes. Google searches showed him New York State Assemblyman Cyrus Tweed’s gerrymandered legislative district twisted like a rattlesnake on Long Island but covered only a slice of this town. Perry found pictures of Mrs. Cyrus Tweed holding the hands of their two children. She was a pretty woman who knew how and when to smile.

Cyrus Tweed’s legislature Web site listed his district office address on the other end of Main Street. Google Street View showed him its picture: a two-story brick building, offices above yet another trendy coffee shop.

His investigator’s bones made Perry google the address for that building.

Save Our Beaches listed its headquarters at that address. So did the Long Island Jobs Coalition Crew, Liberals United for Victory, Conservatives for American Values Endeavors, Cultural Preservation and Protection League, Congressional Reform Action Program, the Montauk Medical Charities Foundation. Other groups with more vaguely purposed names. All at that land address, but each with a different “suite” number, so any search engine “exact match” profile of one group would not link them.

Fourteen organizations plus a coffee shop and Tweed’s official state office.

All at one address.

Perry rechecked the Google Street View: a few rooms above a coffee shop.

As long as he had his phone in his hand, he looked at the e-mail of Tweed trapping Angel’s face in his hands. Tweed mauling her. Angel laughing. The shower photo where her blue eyes were closed.

He clipped his phone onto his belt, started the car. Hit Seek on the FM radio and landed on the local station’s slogan singing “the place to be since 1963,” back when we murdered presidents and Perry’s parents were teenagers. He was sure this same oldies sound had blared back in that gas station. Not his music. But something about the beat, the rhythm, the dark urgency of what wasn’t being said in that song from yesterdays he’d never known captured Perry’s mood. He drove down Main Street. Traffic was scarce, parking places plentiful, and he just knew he could handle any nor’easter from the climate change monster hiding in the late afternoon’s heavy gray sky.

Vibrations rumbled his right hip where once he’d holstered his 9 millimeter.

Cell phone: e-mail or text message. Illegal to check while driving.

He coasted the car into a parking place in front of a white wooden storefront with a display window painted with ornate script: BETTER DAZE BOOKSHOPPE — NEW & ANTIQUE COLLECTIBLES.

No cynical laugh came from him. This emporium fit with other shops and boutiques on this Main Street. Some stores were closed behind SEE YOU NEXT SEASON! notices. Other sported signs that read: SALE. The “bookshoppe” where he parked had two coffee table books in the window under a SPECIAL DISCOUNT LIMITED EDITIONS sign: photography collections, one a colorful-jacketed volume called Sand Sea Sky by Tria Giovan, and the other a black-jacketed volume called Out of the Sixties by iconic dead Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper, who’d of course been “a close personal friend” to oh so many of the town’s seasonal residents.

The cell phone buzz was a pro forma e-mail update from a Manhattan law firm whose client Perry’d helped shelter from a federal corruption probe of Wall Street.

Nothing about Angel.

Two quaint coin-operated newspaper kiosks stood outside the “bookshoppe,” a blue kiosk for New York Times traditionalists, a yellow kiosk for a local weekly paper.

Perry fed the yellow metal kiosk quarters for last week’s local news.

A bell dinged as an old woman left the bookstore. She seemed too small for her red-and-black-checked wool coat. Her bird hands tied the strap of a clear plastic rain cap under her chin as she told no one in particular: “I hate it when the weather gets like this. Feels like a whole lot of lonely.”

The cold wind blew her down Main Street.

He drove to the far edge of town.

The two-story building fit its googled image. Perry circled the block, spotted the pine trees he thought Randy had hidden behind when he took those rear parking lot pictures of a creep and Angel, wanted to check the photos to be sure, but didn’t. Christo didn’t look at any of the photos. Then. He parked on Samadi Street, where he could see the front of the building. Surveilled its door to upstairs and the front windows of the espresso café.

Ten minutes came and went without anyone entering the expensive coffee shop. The café windows showed him three bored employees and no customers.

No one used the door to the upstairs rooms where lights shone in the windows.

He drove his car to the rear lot, walked around to the Main Street front. The doorknob to the upstairs suites turned in his hand and put Perry in a yellow-walled vestibule with brown wooden stairs. A sign tacked on the vestibule wall read: NO HANDICAP ACCESS — SORRY! A label that read NEWSPAPERS was stuck on a wicker basket on the vestibule floor.

That means the door probably stays unlocked. Anybody could drop something in the wicker basket any time of the day or night. Or into the steel box the size of an airplane carry-on suitcase bolted to the vestibule wall. The box lid had a flap big enough for a coffee table book to be dropped through and a built-in lock plus a padlock. The sign on the flap read: MAIL SLOT FOR ALL SUITES IN BUILDING.

Perry climbed the shadowed wooden stairs. Smelled radiator heat and lemon floor polish. He reached the top landing, let the air and quiet settle around him.

Four doors waited, two on each side of the dimly lit hall.

Words on the two doors at the far end of the hall were readable. The solid door on the left held a handmade sign: COFFEEHOUSE OFFICE. Blue paint formed the word SUPPLIES on the also solid wooden door across the hall.

The two doors closest to the stairs were glass.

The glass door on the right held black lettering: DISTRICT ASSEMBLY FIELD OFFICE.

Gilt lettering on the glass door across the hall read: CYRUS TWEED.

Perry glanced into the government “district” office: low-bid desk and computer setup, gray file cabinets, colorful posters for Long Island, New York City, New York State. Three steel chairs waited in a line for someone to come sit behind the big desk.

The “Cyrus Tweed” door showed a woman sitting on the desk, her dress high on sleekly stockinged legs as she straightened the hair of the beefy man in the big chair.

Perry’s blitz entrance startled them. The beefy man jerked back in his chair as the woman whirled to scan the intruder. She wore hennaed hair to her jaw, red lipstick to match, makeup that triumphed rather than hid her forty-some years. The rusty-haired woman beamed seasoned sensuality.

Perry flashed on Angel in a steamy shower.

As the redhead slid to her well-shod feet, the beefy guy behind the desk bellowed: “Hey, we’re about to close up shop for the day, but how are you?”

“Here,” said Perry.

The woman said: “I’ll check on those constituent issues.”

She swayed past Christo on her way across the hall, gave him a crimson smile and the scent of musk.

The door closed behind her as Perry watched Cyrus Tweed watch her go.

The politician felt the stranger’s eyes on him, shot out his right hand: “Call me Cy, Cy Tweed. Cyrus sounds too—”

“Whatever,” Perry said as he claimed the visitor’s chair.

The mahogany desk matched the wood paneling hung with oil paintings, plaques, and spotless framed photographs of Cy playing golf with and sunset beach partying with and backstage rock concerting with and black-tie events with Hollywood stars and billionaires. One photo showed his colleagues on the floor of the state assembly applauding Cy. Portraits of him shaking hands with the current and other-partied former president of the United States hung on his wall. So did a photo of his wife and children.

Cy said: “And you are…?”

Guy like this, thought Perry, his every breath is a lie. Hit him hard, fast, straight.

The private eye said: “Angel.”

The politician peered around the man sitting in front of his desk to look through the glass of his closed office door and across the hall into the public official’s office where the redhead had gone, told his visitor: “I… I’m not sure what you mean.”

“But you know who I’m talking about.”

“Did she send you?”

“I work for people who care about her.”

“Whoever they are, it isn’t her they care about. Me, I—”

“You’re a busy man. Your wife and kids. Your ‘whoever she is’ across the hall.”

“Gwen is… a really public-spirited citizen. Volunteers to run my local office.”

“You mean your office across the hall,” said Perry.

The vision rose in him and came out like the narration of a movie: “You’re the fixer. All those groups who get mail here — left wing, right wing, Wall Street, union lovers, tree huggers, developers: all the groups are shells run by you and your volunteer. Gwen’s probably on what books they keep. You take money from whoever and funnel it to wherever—for a handling percentage, sure, that’s only fair, because you’re the guy who buys results without fingerprints. Sometimes it’s good: a Hollywood star wants to save the planet, so he gives the group you run a check and you pass most of it along to save the whales. Sometimes it’s a big-money boy who sends you a couple hundred thou’ to launder to the national groups who anyway barely need to explain the millions they spend to buy presidential campaigns.

“Plus the cash that gets dropped in that steel box. The real dirty money you wash. Say from a Mexican cartel giving you dollars to support tough-drug-law candidates so the illegal market stays intact.”

Cy said: “I never do nothing for guys like that!”

“Good to know you’ve got lines. Or at least a price that hasn’t been met yet.”

Perry shook his head. “I almost forgot about the coffee shop! No customers, but I bet it bangs out business on the books. Who owns it? Some corporate name? Just like who owns this building where the taxpayers and those political groups pay rent? Your own campaign always has the most dollars, plus you arrange contributions for other officials who do you favors you charge the big boys for. You get it coming and going.”

“You’ve got nothing on me!”

“Don’t make me try… What about Angel?”

“You can’t tell anybody about her! Is this about the pictures?”

“Have you seen them?”

“She said they were out there. I just wanted her to… ”

“What does she want?”

“She… She wanted more from me. For me to… to do more.”

“You mean… marry her?”

“I don’t—No. She said I was blowing a chance to do and be somebody important. Hell, here, like this, I’m bigger than anybody thinks. I am somebody!”

“And you have the thanks of a grateful nation.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Perry tossed his card on the desk, watched as it was scanned then scooped out of sight.

Cy said: “Those pictures… ” Again he peered toward the office across the hall. Said: “They can’t get out!”

“You’re not worried about your wife — you’re worried about your partner, that it?”

“Either one could ruin me. If one does, the other will, too.” Cy shrugged. “Alone, my wife would just force a quiet settlement.”

“But your volunteer… ”

“Gwen.” The elected state official shook his head. “Gwen has to believe—know—that she’s my… that she and I… If she knew about Angel, she’d burn down the house. She accepts my wife: that’s a… a carrying cost. But Angel… ”

“If you dump Gwen, she could cut a deal and send you to jail—”

“What I do is essentially legal!”

“Or just take the empire from you, make you her puppet instead of a partner.”

“She loves me enough to do worse than that. I’ve got to keep it that way. Those pictures, even though Angel left me—”

“When did Angel leave you?”

“When the clocks stopped.” He shrugged. “A week or so ago. Right after she figured out… what you figured out.”

Perry laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“I just left a man who doesn’t dare fuck the woman he has, and now I’m with a man who doesn’t dare not fuck the woman he has.”

“Is that other guy tied to Angel?” Cy smiled. “She doesn’t like amateurs.” He leaned across the desk to whisper: “Where is she?”

Perry leaned forward until their faces were barely a kiss away. “Missing.”

Cy paled under his tan. “How… What happened?”

“The cops found her empty car but not her.”

“Cops? Do they know about — I can squeeze the sheriff. Or State Police, locals.”

Don’t give him Gawain’s name! Perry said: “As far as I know, no badges know about you and Angel.”

Cy stared into lost time.

The private detective said: “Where would she go? Who is she afraid of?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. She was… too disappointed.”

“If she gets in touch, surprise her and do the smart thing: call me.”

“When you find her… Tell her I’m still here for her.”

Perry frowned. “You want her back even though she’s big trouble?”

“She’s worth all that. More.”

Perry left that office. Looked through another door’s glass and caught the redheaded woman sitting behind a cheap government desk staring back at him. He felt the weight of his cell phone on his hip. Envisioned the picture of Angel caught by a creep who saw and wanted and tried to capture the redeeming essence beyond her mere physical beauty, her sensual hunger. A creep like that, that strong of emotion, people killed for less. And the redheaded woman staring at him now, Perry’d seen that kind of jealousy paid out in too many corpses, just like he’d seen the deaths caused by the tangle of desperations embodied in the politician named Tweed who could have found his courage in an explosion of violence in some curtained room. But she can’t be dead, not Angel, not someone that vibrant. Not before I…

Don’t finish that thought. Any of those thoughts.

He walked down the long dark stairs into the dying light of the day.

Walking through that town has made you excited and furious and frustrated all at once, and it’s not just the waiting and following, but the feelings you’ve stored up like a hive of bees buzzing in your brain.

But you’re cool, no one can tell, walking slow, acting normal, smiling when people pass, some smiling back, no idea of the murderous thoughts that are going through your mind, thinking how you will do whatever you need to do, how you will not let anyone get in the way, the whole time tamping down the feeling that you are going to explode.

You watched the PI go to that garage again and then to see that politician, and you wondered what that could be about and if it will help you get closer to your destination — to your destiny. But you just get back into the rental car and drive down the lonely stretch of highway, driving as the sun sets and you hold on, clinging to the idea that soon, soon you will have it all.