Choice of Evil (17 page)

“Yeah, well, maybe you should put your ear a little closer to the ground. If you did, you’d hear something real interesting.”

“Like what?”

“Like a body-count fund.”

“Are you for real? What kind of—?”

“All I know is they call him the Trustee.”

“Like in prison? One of those guys who—?”

“No. Like from an estate. The word is, some crazy rich old queen left a fortune in cash to this ‘Trustee,’ all right? And his only instructions were he wanted fag-bashers murdered. So the Trustee reached out to Wesley and. . .”

“Offered him so much a head? Change your medication.”

“
You
explain it,” she challenged. “And you may have to. . . in court. Watch your back, Mr. Askew.”

“Huh?”

“Your new ID,” she said, handing over the briefcase. “If your. . . partner is back in town, or back from the dead, or whatever. . . it doesn’t matter. The way they’re thinking, they already know who’s doing all this. And you’re the only connect. Don’t worry. You’re about as bust-proof as a diplomat. For now. They’re letting you dangle. Understand?”

“Yeah. But I—”

“Don’t even tell me,” Wolfe said, voice cold. “If it’s not what it looks like, I’ll have plenty of time to apologize.”

I just stood there while she got back in her car, her face grim. As the Audi pulled away, the Rottweiler looked at me like he was just waiting his turn.

“
F
rom where I sit, I like the fit,” the Prof said. “You want that kind of fun, Wesley’s the man to get it done.”

“He’s dead, Prof,” I said. Tired of saying it.

“What do we know, bro? I mean, we wasn’t there. All we saw was a bunch of stuff on TV. Explosions. That green cloud of whatever crap he let loose. Wesley, he was never like. . . people, you know? There’s an old hoodoo. . . ‘Reaching Back,’ they call it. But even if you believe in that stuff, someone has to
want
you to come back. And they have to bring one to get one too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Just what it sounds like, son. The legend is there’s supposed to be a Gatekeeper. Could be a man, could be a woman. Could be anyone, anyplace. And nobody knows how to find ’em either. But, if you look hard enough, they’re supposed to appear. Anyway, you want to bring someone back, you got to bring some to get some, understand?”

“No.”

“The way it’s told, you can’t bring no
good
people back, okay? Just the evil ones. And the way you got to do it, you got to bring them one soul for every soul the evil one took, see?”

“No,” I said. And not because I couldn’t understand what the Prof was saying.

“Burke, mahn, my father is telling you true,” Clarence put in. “There is the same legend in the islands. If a man has killed many times, and you want to bring him back across, you too must kill as many times as he has. So the Gatekeeper will allow the passage. A trade, understand?”

“Yeah, I understand. Bujo bullshit is what I understand. I want that, I’ll go shopping in a botanica. You ever see it happen?” I asked him.

“See this? No, mahn. It is not to see. Not for me. My loss was my. . . mother, mahn. And if I thought I could return her by taking a life, I would have done that. You know I would. But it cannot work that way. My mother was good. In her heart and in her spirit. Where she is, the Gatekeeper has no power.”

“If that was true. . . and it isn’t, for chrissakes. . . but if it was, somebody’d have to kill a whole
ton
of motherfuckers to bring Wesley back.”

“And this Homo Erectus guy, he ain’t doing that?” the Prof challenged.

“Not enough. Anyway, why would he want Wesley back?”

“Sometimes, if the killer dies too easily, the family. . . the family of the people he killed. . . they want him back,” Clarence said.

“So they can—?”

“Yes, mahn. So they can send him over again. But with much pain.”

“That would make them as bad as. . .”

“Sure,” the Prof cut me off. “That’s why it so crazy. Don’t make no sense. I ain’t arguing with you ‘bout that. Not saying it true. But I know this. Some people
believe
things. And if they believe things, then they
do
things.”

“So you think this maniac is trying to raise Wesley from the dead? Because he wants him to die all over again? Only. . . hard this time?”

“It ain’t strong,” the Prof conceded. “But it may not be wrong neither. What we gotta do, we gotta find out more about the guy who died.”

“You mean the guy in the park? With Crystal Beth?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Not the others, that’s not Wesley. Some of those guys this new guy did, they died slow. Wesley did a lot of hits, sure. But they was like. . . surgery, okay? He wouldn’t torture nobody—he was a killer, not a freak. Except for that one. . . on Sutton Place, remember?”

I did remember. Impossible to forget an image that I never saw but that was still whispered about. This was back when Wesley had the only kind of dispute he ever cared about—he hadn’t gotten paid. So he started killing people. When that wasn’t enough, he decided to spook them, start them running wild. Same way a stalking cheetah shows itself to a herd of antelopes—the stampede reveals the cripples. He got into the Sutton Place apartment of a connected guy’s daughter. When her husband came home from work, he found what was left of his wife. . . arms and legs spread wide on their bed, wired to the posts. With her severed head propped up between her legs, staring at him. They say he’s still in a padded room.

That started the stampede Wesley wanted. He’d left a message—on the bedroom wall, in the woman’s own blood—saying the butchery was the work of some lunatic cult, but that was just to dazzle the cops. The wiseguys knew he was promising a whole lot more.

And he kept it up, right to the end. They never found him. Wesley went out by his own hand. Not because they were closing in—they were too busy hiding to look for him. And not because he was afraid—the ice-man didn’t have any of that in his once-in-an-eon DNA. He left because he was tired. Sick and tired. He didn’t want to be here anymore, it was that simple.

A lot of us felt like that. Some of us all the time. And some of us went out that same way. But only Wesley decided he knew who the “them” was that we—all of us State-raised kids—blamed for what had happened to us.

Wesley was pure hate. The kind that metastasizes, year after year. The kind that never goes away, no matter what treaties are signed, no matter whose hands are shaken, no matter who intervenes. Permanent. As deep as your father’s father’s father’s father’s firstborn.

Only difference is, Wesley’s father was the one he hated. The one we all hated—the State. That viciously uncaring, humiliating, experimenting, lying, exploiting, torturing, unstoppable juggernaut. Wesley’s hate was a match for all that. He was us—distilled, crystallized, hardened beyond comprehension, focused past megalomania.

When Wesley went out, he wanted company: the seeds “they” were cultivating for the next generation.

So even if the poor insane bastard on Sutton Place who’d come home to that horrible greeting wanted to bring Wesley back, to give him a greeting of his own. . . and even if the legend was true, and even if he could find this Gatekeeper. . . he couldn’t ever bring enough for the tolls, like the Prof said.

It didn’t leave me anywhere.

W
olfe wouldn’t help me anymore. Maybe she wasn’t sure. . . but I could tell, from the way her gray eyes looked at me just before we parted, that the weight was mine to carry. And I’d have to carry it a long way before we could ever be. . . whatever we were to each other. . . again.

She’d given me all I was going to get. The new ID. And the information.

So I made the phone call.

“
W
hy do you want to come here?” Nadine asked me. “You didn’t seem so. . . fascinated the last time.”

“You said you wanted to be in on it,” I told her. “There’s more to do now.”

“You mean you—?”

“Not on the phone.”

“Can you come tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“
W
hat happened?” is how she greeted me, still wearing her business clothes, even though she’d had plenty of time to change.

“I may have found a way to—”

“Find him and—?”

“No! To get a message to him. And to put enough in it so he’ll read it, anyway. Now, what I need is to put something in the next one so he’ll want to
see
me.”

“And you want me to. . . what?”

“Your friend on the force?”

“Yeah. . .?” she said, warily.

“I need some other stuff. Not about the murders, okay? She doesn’t have to go near any of that. Not anymore. But there’s another case. The one that kicked all this off.”

“The drive-by?”

“Yes. But I don’t want anything about that one either. At least, not anything direct. The cops. . . they know a lot more than they’re letting out. Not because they got a sudden dose of class, or because they want to play it professional. This piece, the one they’re holding back, the media would have them for lunch if they knew about it.”

“And you want her to. . . get it?”

“Not ‘it.’ Not the whole thing. Just a name. And whatever information they have about the name. That’s all.”

“How is that going to—?”

“I’ve got a. . . theory. Probably a long shot, I don’t know. But it’s the only card I have to play. I’ve been looking everywhere,” I lied, “asking everyone. But there isn’t a trace of this guy. He’s about as lone a wolf as it gets. No partners. Whatever stuff he’s using he got a long time ago. Like he’s got a warehouse full of it or something. Like this isn’t anything new.”

Her eyes flickered when I said that. Flickered, not flashed, the blue going from cobalt to cyanotic and back, switching on and off for just a split-second. If she noticed me staring, she didn’t react.

“Anyway, she can do that, right?”

“I. . . don’t know.”

“I thought you said she’d do anything you—”

“Anything she
can
do,” Nadine snapped back. “I’m not insane. If it’s there, and if she can get it, I’ll get it, sure. But I don’t know. . . . She told me they have, what do they call them, ‘firewalls’ or something, inside the department. ‘Access Only’ places, when they’re working on stuff. Mostly political, I guess, but she doesn’t know. And I sure don’t.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I told her, with a confidence I didn’t feel. “I even know where it probably is. NYPD has the same thing as the feds—some Organized Crime unit, whatever they’re calling it this week, I don’t know, but it would be the same thing.
That’s
where she has to look.”

“He would never. . .”

“
He?
I thought you said—”

“Not my. . . friend. Him. He would never have anything to do with organized crime.”

“Not even to kill a few of them?”

“Oh! But why would he. . .?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true. But before I can ask my questions, I need what I told you.”

She stood up and started to pace, unbuttoning her jade silk blouse, leaving the off-white blazer on over it. The black bra underneath was frillier than I expected, for some reason I didn’t focus on. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe in all this stuff,” she said. “When it’s hard to breathe, it’s hard to think.”

There was so much truth in what she said that I focused on that, slitting my eyes as she walked back and forth. She stopped at one point, stood on one leg, and pulled off her shoe, then switched legs to do the other, so she was in her stocking feet. By the third circuit, she was down to sheer pantyhose.

“Men hate these, don’t they?” she said suddenly.

“Huh?” I’d been somewhere else. Not far away, but just. . . apart.

“Pantyhose. Men hate them, don’t they?”

“Hate? That’s a pretty strong word for clothing.”

“Okay, fine. Men don’t
like
them, all right?”

“I’m not following you.”

“You ever see pantyhose in a skin magazine?” she asked me. “It’s all garter belts and fishnet stockings and thongs, right? Pantyhose, it’s too. . . practical. Like shoes. You think men would wear spike heels? They
hurt
once you have them on for a while. But they make your legs look good, so what the hell, right?”

“What do I—?”

“That’s, of course, if they’re interested in
big
girls, right?” she snarled, angry beyond anything I could imagine having done to her. I couldn’t figure what had ignited all that, so I just rode it—waiting, knowing there’s always a reason in the eye of the tornado. . . if you’re around long enough to take that look.

“Some of them like little plaid pleated skirts and Mary Jane shoes and white socks. . . and white cotton panties too. A garter belt would spoil all that, wouldn’t it? The. . . image, I mean. That’s what it’s all about for. . . them. Whatever they see. Their
eyes.
You know even blind men are like that? I have a friend. A dancer. She says they get blind customers in there too.”

“And this is all about. . . what?” I asked her, as neutral as I could, no sarcasm anywhere near my voice.

“It’s all about. . . this!” she snapped at me. “This. . . killer, you call him. What
ever
name you call him. He’s a man. But he’s not like the rest of you.”

“Because he’s gay?”

“You think
that’s
a difference? You think gay men don’t look at us the same way? Oh sure, maybe they don’t want to fuck us. Or maybe they do and just. . . I don’t know. But who do you think runs the damn fashion industry?”

“Frederick’s of Hollywood isn’t exactly Versace,” I said.

“It’s the same thing,” she shot back. “It’s all about what men want.”

“So. . . these women who silicone their chests out to all hell, the ones who rake in a couple of grand a night under the same tables they dance on, they’re all fashion victims?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m not saying it
isn’t
true, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying. . . the way things are. And any of us can feel it. We know. Some of us play along. Some of us just play. But we all know. And I’m telling you something about him. Something important, if you’ll listen. He’s not like you.”