JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (32 page)

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’t— but 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.