A Cool Breeze on the Underground (6 page)

It had been going on for years, since she was “old enough,” like ten, and it had started with fondling and extra-special hugs and bonus kisses. It hadn’t been all the time, just every once in a while, and she had been scared to tell. She had tried to tell Grandpa and Grandma that one time, but she couldn’t, she was so ashamed. “Please, Mom, don’t be angry, don’t hate me,” she wrote. And they had never done … you know … gone all the way, until last night and Daddy just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t … and she didn’t know what to do. She just couldn’t face them, just couldn’t face her mother, and so she was taking off for good.

So let’s take another look at little Allie, who was never good enough, but good enough for Dad. Allie, who drowned the memories and numbed the feelings, and who went out looking for sex instead of love because she didn’t know the difference, and who maybe had it buried real deep in the past until Daddy took her again, except this time she was old enough that she’d never forget, and old enough to know what it meant. And you thought you knew this kid, Neal. You thought you had her pegged. You never learn, do you?

“Where’s the note?” Neal asked when Liz was finished,

“Is it important?”

“It will be when I take it to the cops, and if you destroyed it, Mrs. Chase, it makes you guilty of a half dozen crimes I can think of.”

“You’re going to the police?”

“Soon as I get dressed. You want to come with me?”

“My husband—”

“Fuck him.”

She held up for another second or so and then she lost it. Suddenly. As if she’d been stabbed in the heart and the pain had just hit her. It seemed like the beautiful face aged ten years in the seconds that she held back the tears, and then they came out in wracking sobs.

“My baby. My poor little baby. She needs so much help. She needs me and I don’t know where she is! I have to tell her! I have to tell her!”

“Tell her what?” Neal asked, and if she said something like “That I love her,” he was about ready to smack her in the mouth.

“On top of everything else, what she must be thinking! I have to tell her, at least that.”

“Tell her
what,
Mrs. Chase?”

She settled herself down, he had to give her credit for that. She drew herself back from the edge of hysteria and settled down to help her daughter. She caught her breath and spoke quietly—slowly.

“He’s not her father.”

Whoa and double whoa.

She had turned around while Neal put his clothes on, and she sat patiently while he poured himself a drink and tossed down half of it. If he smoked, he would have lit one up.

“Does the Senator know that Allie isn’t his?”

She nodded.

“Since when?”

“I suppose Allie was eight or nine. We had a terrible fight. I threw it at him.”

“But you never told Allie.”

“I’d been meaning to.”

“Where’s the note, Mrs. Chase?”

“In a safe-deposit box—my own.”

Smart lady.

“Does anyone else know about it?”

“No.”

“So the Senator doesn’t know that you know that—”

She shook her head. “I haven’t said anything to him about it. If I did, I’d have to leave him, and if I left him, I wouldn’t get the help I need to find Allie, would I?”

No, lady, you probably wouldn’t.

“Are you going to the police?” she asked.

“No.”

Because you’re right, Mrs. Chase. If I take this to the cops, it’s all over. I’m off the case, the Senator is out of office, Friends loses interest, and Allie gets to read about it in the foreign edition of
Newsweek
and will bury herself even deeper than she already has. No winners.

So the basic rules apply. John Chase is a wealthy member of the U.S. Senate, and he might be President someday, and he has money in the bank. So he gets to rape his stepdaughter and get away with it and also get someone like me to clean it all up. Neal Carey, Janitor to the Rich and Powerful.

And that son of a bitch is counting on Allie’s shame to shut her up while she’s posing for “The Waltons Go to Washington” pictures, and then he’ll stick her away in some really faraway school someplace, maybe one of those Swiss jobs. And I’m going to help him do it. Because it’s better than having that kid out there thinking she’s had sex with her own father and quite possibly dying over it. And because I want to finish college one of these days.

“There’s something else to think about, Mrs. Chase. If Allie needs drugs, and food and shelter and all that, and she doesn’t have money … she’ll do anything to get it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Allie would never do that.”

“Yes, she would. You’re doing it. I’m doing it.” And we ain’t even haggling over the price.

Neal lay awake for most of what was left of the night. He hadn’t had dreams about the Halperin kid for months, and he didn’t want to start again. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the kid again, and thought about the “ifs.” If they had only let the kid be what he was—an amiable, not overly bright gay teenager. If they had treated the case as more than a ground ball and sent two guys instead of just Neal. If only room service hadn’t been closed that night.

He gave up trying to sleep around five, took a wake-up shower, said a quick goodbye to Elizabeth Chase, and asked for a ride downtown. The driver let him off at an Avis counter, Neal got lost about fifteen times before he found Scott Mackensen’s school in Connecticut.

5

Scott mackensen was running to lacrosse practice.

“Coach will kill me if I’m late again,” he said to Neal Carey, who thought the boy was a little too eager to get going.

Neal looked behind him to the beautifully tended green fields where several boys tossed the ball among them in studied insouciance.

“It’ll only take a minute,” Neal lied.

“That’s worth five minutes of stadium steps,” Scott answered. He was tall, muscular, clear-eyed Jack Armstrong and all that shit, but Neal saw that those clear eyes looked scared. He knew then that there was no hurry.

“Later, maybe?” he asked.

Scott waged a brief skirmish with his conscience. Neal had seen it a few hundred times. Duty versus self-interest. Scott was just young enough that duty had a shot at winning, and Neal didn’t want to push a quick decision. He waited.

“There’s a coffee shop in the village—The Copper Donkey. Give me two hours.” Scott backed away as he talked.

“You got it,” Neal said as Scott turned and ran toward the practice field.

Maybe I should have let The Man send me to boarding school, Neal thought as he walked back to his rented car. The Barker School looked pretty nice. “Nestled in the rolling hills of northwest Connecticut,” the brochure had doubtless proclaimed, and indeed, the Berkshire foothills framed the sprawling campus.

Neal slipped into the rented Nova, put it in drive thinking it was reverse, and smacked the front bumper into a white post placed there precisely for such ineptitude. He hated to drive and had done so only because he couldn’t screw Graham into making the trip.

“Connecticut?” Graham had said in dismissal. “They got bees in Connecticut.”

Neal found The Copper Donkey without major mishap, but he took ten minutes to parallel park on the narrow village street. (Twenty bucks had gotten him past that part on the driver’s test.) The village, Old Farmstead, was bona fide New England quaint. Colonial and Victorian houses, all beautifully kept, competed for the oohs and aahs of tourists. Neal didn’t ooh or aah. He had his fill of quaint from the plumbing in his building.

The Copper Donkey catered to the private-school crowd. The boys came over from Barker, and the girls from nearby Miss Clifton’s, which Neal thought sounded like an instant muffin mix, but which had been one of Allie’s pit stops on her race through the academic elite. He figured that even the patient folk at the Donkey wouldn’t appreciate him nursing a cup of coffee for an hour and a half, so be wandered off in search of a bookstore. He found Bookes, which surprised him by having the good sense to stock John MacDonald’s latest. He found a quaint sidewalk bench and settled down to commiserate with Travis McGee.

He and Travis got through a quick hour with no trouble. (Well, none for Neal. Lots for Travis.) Neal went into the Donkey and got a booth at the back.

Scott arrived almost on time. He had showered and changed, and looked fresh and even younger in a white sweater, stone-washed jeans, and brown loafers. He looked around for a moment, spotted Neal, then looked around again to see who else was there. Nobody was.

Sitting down, he started right in. “I don’t know, maybe I should never have said anything. First Mr. Chase, then the other guy, now you. I don’t want to get involved with the police. I just got accepted to Brown.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then I don’t have to talk to you.”

“No. Which other guy?”

“A big guy. Kind of young. Older than you, though.”

“Tall, heavyset, curly black hair? Pushy?”

Scott nodded. “Real pushy.”

I’ll kill Levine, Neal thought.

“Do you want something?” Neal asked, gesturing at the menu.

“I’ll have some coffee. I have an exam tomorrow.”

Neal signaled the waitress, pointing at his own cup and Scott. She brought the coffee over quickly.

“I just want to check a few details,” Neal said.

“Like what?”

“Like your whole story is bullshit.”

Scott set his cup down. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been looking at your yearbook, Scott. Track, football, lacrosse, basketball. You say you saw Allie in Hyde Park and ‘gave chase,’ no pun intended. ‘Gave chase’? Nobody talks like that. That’s the sort of thing cops say when they lie on the witness stand.”

“She didn’t beat me, exactly. She ran into the subway.”

The kid was lying. Person looks up and to the right when they’re telling you something, they’re making it up as they go along.

“The subway? In Hyde Park?”

“Hyde Park Corner. There’s a station there.”

A hint of that wonderful teenage defensive whine had snuck into his voice. Neal didn’t answer him.

“I didn’t have a token,” Scott continued.

“You mean a ticket.”

“Yeah, okay, a ticket.”

Neal played with the salt and pepper shakers on the table, moving them in lazy figure-eight patterns.

“I’m not a cop,” he said. “If you tell me that’s the story, we finish our coffee and it’s over. But we’ll both know you’re holding back.”

Scott took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.

“You won’t tell anyone?”

“The dean of admissions will never hear it from me.”

“If this ever got out—”

“It won’t.”

“A friend and I—he doesn’t go to this school—stayed over a few days after the school trip. We got kidding around one night…”

“Go ahead.”

“We called one of those services. You know, they have phone numbers in the paper? We called one of them.”

Neal’s heart bounced. “And they sent a couple of ladies over,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And did you…”

“Yeah.”

“And was one of them Allie Chase?”

Scott looked shocked. “No! No way! Really!”

“Okay, okay. I believe you.”

“After we … we got talking a little, and we asked these girls if they knew where we could get some hash.” This last tidbit came out in a rush and Neal could see the kid relax.

“Hey, Scott, I’ll bet they knew, huh?”

“Yeah.” He sort of chuckled. “They called this guy who said to come meet him.”

“And you went?”

“I know it sounds dumb, but it was right out in public. Right by this movie theater in Leicester Square. We even knew the place, because we’d seen the new Bond movie there.”

“Where does Allie come in?”

“She was with him.”

“With who? The dealer?”

“Him and two others. A guy and a girl.”

“Did you talk to Allie?”

“No. When she walked up with this guy, she was laughing and all, but then she saw me and she turned away real quick, behind the other girl, and they backed off into the alley.”

“Scott, are you sure it was her?”

Scott nodded. “Real sure.”

“How come?”

“Allie and I … you know … we’d partied.”

“Then what happened?”

“We bought the hash and took off.”

“Did you try to approach Allie?”

Scott blushed. “Her friends were pretty punk-looking. I didn’t want to push it.”

“You were right. You did the right thing.”

“Anyway, when I got back, I thought I should tell Mrs. Chase, but I didn’t want to—”

“Tell everything. Sure.”

“So I made up the story about seeing Allie in the park.”

“How did Allie look? Okay?”

“Yeah, I guess so. A little ratty maybe. Sweatshirt and jeans.”

“Was she stoned?”

“Yeah, maybe. She was laughing a lot.”

“What about the dealer? What did he look like?”

“Cool. Very cool.” Scott smiled.

Some detectives can deal with “civilians,” others can’t. They get impatient and scream things like, “‘Cool. Very cool.’ What the hell does that mean?” Such detectives love to get clothing-store robberies, because the witnesses are perfect. (“This forty-two long in a cheap maroon blazer, gray polyester slacks, and Buster Browns comes in and …”)

“What was cool about him?”

“He had real short hair and was wearing a double-breasted suit with a T-shirt! He was real slick with the money and the dope, like it was all a big joke, like he was selling hot dogs, or something.”

“Big guy? Little?”

“About your size. Bigger-boned.”

“If he plays football, what position is he?”

“Halfback, maybe a small tight end.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Not that I heard.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, he had three safety pins stuck through his ear.”

I’m glad you brought that up, Scott. That might just help identify him. “Three safety pins?”

“Yeah,” answered Scott with unmixed admiration.

“What about the girls? You remember their names?”

“Ginger and Yvonne.”

Swell.

“The name of the service you called?”

“Sorry.”

“C’mon. You do this a lot?”

“No! We were drunk! You know.”

“How about the hotel?”

“The Piccadilly Hotel.”

Never ask a witness more than two questions in a row he can’t answer. Make sure you pitch him a watermelon every once in a while. Builds his confidence. The Gospel According to St. Joseph. Graham.

“Did the two hookers seem to know Allie? They say hi or anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did the dealer say anything to her?”

“No. Not a word.”

“Anything else you remember or you want to tell me?” “It was kind of a blur. You know?” Neal nodded. He knew.

“Thanks, Scott,” he said, going through the ritual “You’ve been a big help.” “Can I go?”

“Hey, you have an exam tomorrow.” Scott started to slide out of the booth.

“One more thing,” Neal said, realizing he was doing a Columbo imitation. “The hash, how was it?”

Jack Armstrong Ail-American Boy grinned. “Primo.”

Neal‘s motel room was nothing special, but it had the essentials—a bed with a rationally placed reading light, a phone within easy reach, and a color TV that brought in the Yankees game. It also had clean glasses. Neal was feeling semicivilized, so he used one of them to belt down three slugs of scotch before dialing the phone.

Ed Levine answered after seven rings. He said hello with the voice of a man who doesn’t like being called at home.

“Ed?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep your fat fingers off my fucking case.”

Neal hung up the phone and sat back in bed as Guidry smoked another Angel. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could find the aptly named Alison Chase if she was still with this dealer.

The dealer was a pro, no question. He had good technique and some connections. He screened his first-time customers coming in and did small-time courtesy deals for business connections. And if he had turned Allie on, he hadn’t turned her over—yet. Definitely a yet, because a businessman doesn’t waste a commodity as valuable as a beautiful young girl. Unless he really loves her, then it will take a little longer.

So there was a place to start. Find the dealer and you have a shot at finding Allie. A long shot, indeed, but you’ve seen them hit before.

Just to encourage him, Guidry threw a curve that didn’t, which the batter pulled right and put over the fence as the base runner trotted contemptuously home.

Neal consoled himself with chapter seven of
The Making of the English Working Class
and another scotch.

Neal spent a very boring day and a half waiting for the FedEx package from Graham to arrive. He killed time with chapters eight through fifteen, Travis McGee, and
Mr. Ed
reruns. The desk rang him when the package came.

In it were three Xeroxed pages from a rag called the London
Daily Leveller.
the classified ads for May 7, the night that Scott Mackensen and his friend had let their fingers do the walking. Most of the ads were of the “for a good time, call” variety, but there were a number of specialty acts: mother/daughter teams, B&D mistresses (“Imelda knows you’ve been a bad boy”), a wide world of ethnic specialties (Neal wondered what a “full treatment Bulgarian hour” could possibly entail). There were bad little girls who wanted to be spanked first, some who wanted to be spanked afterward. Many had cute names. There were three Bambis, but to Neal’s intense relief, no Thumpers. A goodly number had French names, and not a few had threatening ones. Neal thought that any man dumb enough to call up a woman named Stiletto and invite her into his room deserved whatever he got.

There were also a lot of agency listings. Most used sophisticated names like Erotica and Exotica, and Neal yearned for an agency of frigid hookers called Antarctica. His personal favorite, though, was Around The World In Eighty Minutes. Of course, there was no listing for “Ginger and Yvonne: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” because nobody ever got that lucky.

“You said last time was it,” Scott Mackensen protested over the phone.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Will this really help Allie?”

“Could.”

There ensued one of those long, irritating silences Neal was getting used to on this gig. And not a grape in sight. He settled for a bite of his Hershey bar—the healthy kind, the one with almonds.

“I have a test tomorrow,” Scott said.

I know the feeling, kid. “On what?”

“Macbeth.”
He sounded mournful.

“I’ll help you with it. I’ve taken a few exams on
Macbeth
myself.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The witches did it.”

Scott stared at the ads laid out on the counter in Neal’s motel room. He moved his index finger slowly down the page, then shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Try again.”

“I can’t remember!”

“Jesus Christ!
How many call girls have you been with?”

“I was drunk!”

Attaboy, Neal, he told himself, browbeat a witness who’s really trying. That’ll help.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both tired. Try it this way. In your hotel room in London, where was the phone?”

Scott pointed to a spot on the counter. Neal moved the phone there and put a chair in front of it.

“Okay,” he said. “Sit down. Where was the paper? Okay. Which hand do you dial with? Good. Now look at the paper. Don’t think. Just point.”