Tony lifted his coffee cup to salute Gulliver. “You ain’t gonna hear no argument from me on that.”
Gulliver lifted his cup too. He smiled.
He let some time pass, then said, “Okay, Tony. This has been nice. We’ve spoken to each other for a few minutes without throwing a punch or pulling our weapons. We haven’t insulted each other
too bad, and we’ve shared a cup of coffee. Now how about telling me why you’re here.”
Tony’s face flushed. His mouth opened and closed a few times. The words seemed not to want to come out. He just couldn’t seem to say what he wanted to say. Gulliver helped him.
“Come on, Tony. You came this far. It must be pretty important for you to swallow your pride and come see me this way. Just say it.”
“It’s the boss,” Tony said. His voice was strained.
“Joey Vespucci?”
Tony nodded.
“What about him?” Gulliver asked.
Again Tony hesitated.
“Tony, come on already. Don’t make this like pulling teeth. Just say it.”
“The boss needs your help.”
“Fuck him!” Gulliver said.
“You owe him. He helped you before. I know he did. For what Nina did to him, she should’ve gotten whacked. You know it and I know it, but he let her walk away because he likes you. He respects you. And I know he helped you with that thing last year. You know, when your cop buddy got killed on the boardwalk in Coney Island.”
Gulliver clenched his fists. “I owe him nothing.”
“I think you do.”
“Did he send you?”
Tony shook his head. “No way. He’s got too much pride for that. He’d probably kill me with his own hands if he knew I was here asking for your help.”
“Sorry, Tony. If it was for you, I might help. But Joey…nope. Not after what he did to me.”
Tony looked panicked. “But it ain’t really about the boss.”
Gulliver looked at his watch. “I’m listening. Tick…tick…tick.”
“It’s about his youngest daughter, Bella.”
“What about her?”
“She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone,” Tony repeated.
“How do you mean? Did she run away? Was she abducted? What?”
“I don’t think she was abducted,” Tony said. “It would take a big set of stones to kidnap Joey Vespucci’s kid.”
Gulliver plopped himself down in his desk chair. He rubbed his unshaven cheeks. He remembered his trips to Vespucci’s mansion in the Todt Hill area of Staten Island. He remembered Joey proudly showing him the photos of his daughters on the mantelpiece. He pictured their faces. They were all pretty. Though Joey had never named them, Gulliver thought
he knew which one was the youngest. He recalled that she had a full, pleasant face. Sparkling green eyes and dark brown hair. A distant stare. There was a beautiful sadness about her. Sadness was something Gulliver Dowd knew about no matter how it showed itself. Bella’s older sisters were prettier by most standards but with less depth.
He thought on Tony’s request for a long time. It wasn’t Bella’s fault she was Joey Vespucci’s daughter. Her father’s sins weren’t hers to bear or pay for. She hadn’t been part of Keisha’s murder. She hadn’t given Gulliver the impossible choice. Still, he could not bring himself to do this for Vespucci. After all Gulliver had done to dig himself out of his misery, the man had ruined his life.
“No,” Gulliver finally said. “I can’t do it, Tony. Like I said, if it was for anybody else, I would do it in a second. But after
what your boss did to me, I can’t. I can recommend—”
Before Gulliver could finish, Tony had put his head into his hands and started sobbing. Sobbing loudly. His thick body shaking.
“Then do it for me, Dowd,” he said through his tears.
“Why? Look, I know you must be close to Joey’s kids, but—”
“She ain’t his, Dowd.” Tony thumped his chest. “Bella is mine! She’s mine.”
Gulliver couldn’t quite believe the words that had just come out of his enemy’s mouth. Remembering the faces of the women in the photos on Joey Vespucci’s mantel, Gulliver realized that all of them looked at least a little bit like their mother, Maria. He could do simple math too.
“Holy shit!” Gulliver said without meaning to.
“That’s right, Dowd. Joey would have me cut up into little pieces and fed to the pigs on his friend’s farm in Jersey if he knew.
Now you know. That’s three people in the world who do—Maria, me and you.”
“How?”
“How do you think? Me and Maria, we slept together and made a beautiful baby.”
“I figured that part out. I mean, how did you and Maria get together in the first place?”
Tony looked as if he had just swallowed a handful of broken glass. Gulliver guessed this was something Tony had hardly discussed even with Maria. By talking about it here, Tony was handing Gulliver a dangerous weapon. Something Gulliver could hold over the big man’s head forever.
“I’ll do it.” The words came out of Gulliver’s mouth as if by themselves. “I’ll take the case, but first I need to know everything.”
Tony gave Gulliver a look full of mixed feelings. Joy. Relief. Worry. Panic. Pain. Love. It was a look of a thousand things.
“Joey’s older than me, but we been kicking around together since we was kids in Gravesend. Both of our dads were, you know, in the business. Fact is, my dad was higher up the food chain than Joey’s dad was, but I was always better with my hands than my head. I never wanted to be nobody’s boss. I like being strong, but power don’t interest me much.”
“This is interesting, Tony, but…”
“Anyways, Joey always got the girls. Always. He’s such a handsome guy, and he can talk. Man, can he talk. Always could. My mom used to say Joey could charm a snake without a flute. But when we was in high school, Maria and I was always circling each other. You know how it is. I liked her. She liked me. And we even got together once. I was her first.” Tony beamed with pride. “But then Joey noticed her when she got all pretty, and that was that. Joey, he always gets what he wants.”
Gulliver nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“I could live with him and Maria being together. All I ever wanted was for Maria to be happy. And if Joey made her happy, then I would eat it and be glad for them. Thing is, Maria was never enough for Joey. Even when we was kids and he took her away from me, he had other girls all the time. But that wasn’t my business no more. Maria made her choice, and it wasn’t me. After a few years, Joey had worked his way up, and he brung me with him. I been by his side ever since.”
As Tony spoke, he seemed hurt and angry. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists. His top lip twitched. His eyes turned mean and cold. Ice cold. Gulliver guessed these were things Tony had kept inside a long time. And only when he said them did he feel how deeply he was hurt by them and how mad they made him.
“Didn’t it kill you to be so close to Maria all the time?”
He shook his head—hard. Almost like he was telling himself not to answer. “I guess I always hoped she would come back to me or…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Or if something violent happened to Joey, you would be there waiting for her.”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, Tony, I get that much. You went along with it for a lot of years. Then you stopped going along with it. What changed?”
“Like I said, Joey always had other women. But he also never got crazy with it. Never did stuff to risk his marriage or hurt his little girls. Then Joey got real involved with a model he met at one of his clubs in the city. Her name was Azraella Parks. She was barely twenty years old. Maybe twenty years younger than Joey. She was cute, I guess, if you like women that weigh less than one of my legs. But she got to Joey bad. Real bad. He couldn’t get enough of her,
and I was always covering for him with Maria best as I could.”
Gulliver said, “But Maria knew.”
Tony nodded.
“And that’s when the affair started between you and Maria?” Gulliver asked.
“Yep. It was hot and heavy for a while there. I mean, Joey was never around or nothing. And me and Maria had lots of years of catching up to do.”
“What happened?”
“After a few months Azraella kicked Joey’s ass to the curb for that actor. Devon Jenner. You ever hear of him? He has that sitcom about the nasty crippled guy with the two cute nurses who live with him.”
“Sure. The guy who got hurt in a skiing accident and never walked without a cane again, right?”
Tony laughed. “That was no skiing accident, Dowd. That was me. Joey wanted me to kill him, but I wouldn’t do it. I told Joey
it would be too easy to trace back to him. Then, the week after I broke the prick’s legs, Maria found out she was pregnant. You can figure out the rest from there. And for eighteen years now, Bella has been our secret. Making her is the one good thing I done in my whole life. I can’t lose her.”
“Does Maria know you came to me?”
“Yeah. I told her how good you was at this sort of thing, and she gave me her blessing and her help.”
“Does Joey know?”
Tony said no. And that Joey had used all of his contacts and pull, but no one could find Bella.
Then Tony laughed. It was a sad laugh. “He even hired some ex-cop private eyes to help find her. But they ain’t found shit.”
An hour later, Tony walked out of Gulliver’s office. He was just as full of mixed feelings as when he arrived. But they were now somewhat different mixed feelings.
For one thing, he had just handed Gulliver Dowd his life on a silver platter. Maria’s life too, for that matter. He had risked it all, telling the little man about their affair and about Bella. He had no way of knowing if Gulliver would keep his secret. It wasn’t like they were buddies. Beyond that, he was not at all comfortable with the fee the private eye had demanded. Gulliver had refused the large sum that Tony offered him to find his girl. What Gulliver wanted in return for finding Tony’s secret daughter was just as dangerous as any affair Tony had had. Just as dangerous as anything he’d ever done. Gulliver wanted answers. Not just any answers. Gulliver wanted the answers that were in the envelope he’d been forced to burn to save his girlfriend’s life.
Gulliver was good at finding missing things. It was a talent he was born with. He liked to think it was because he was built low to the ground, like a hound. There was some truth in that. He saw the world from a lower vantage point. Not from six feet up. Not even from five feet up. At just over four feet, he had a grown man’s head, a teenager’s wounded heart and a child’s view of the world. Most adults didn’t understand how that made Gulliver special. But it did. Because what Gulliver did best was finding runaways.
The younger they were, the better at it he was. He understood them, and they understood him. Explaining it to Mia, he’d said, I look on the outside the way they feel on the inside.
Bella Vespucci was older than many of the kids he’d been hired to find over the years. That didn’t make things harder. Eighteen-year-old girls had a network of friends. They had credit cards and bank accounts. They bought things. They had cell phones, and they used them. All of that made them easier to trace than younger kids. But one thing was true for all kids, whatever their age. When you are on the street, money runs out fast. Faster than you think possible. And it’s when the money runs out that most kids have a choice to make. They can either go back home or find a way to make their way on the street. It was when they chose to stay on the street that things could get ugly—and they often did.
But Gulliver knew better than to make leaps without evidence. He had to start at the beginning and go from there. Tony had left him as much information as he could. Gulliver had all sorts of photos of Bella. He had a list of names of girlfriends and boyfriends. He had a list of addresses and phone numbers. He had bank-account numbers. Credit-card numbers. He had the reports the other private investigators had written up for Joey Vespucci. Gulliver shook his head in sadness. If only the other parents who had hired him to find their kids had cared this much, their kids probably wouldn’t have run away to begin with. And they would have been much easier to find.
After reading through the other private eyes’ reports, Gulliver called Bella’s phone number. It was always the first thing he did if the missing person had a cell phone. Most of the time it didn’t work, but every once in a while the missing kid would answer.
Sometimes that was all it took. Sometimes all the kid needed was to hear a kind voice and have a shoulder to cry on. Gulliver’s shoulders weren’t very big, but they had stood up to many tears. Teenagers were like human lie detectors. They could tell when adults were being real with them or putting them on. And they never doubted Gulliver’s honesty. They seemed to sense in his voice that he understood their pain. But this time, Gulliver didn’t even get to hear Bella’s voice-mail message. Her voice-mail box was full. Of course it was. That wasn’t a good sign.
According to Tony, it had been over a month since Joey and Maria had heard from Bella. Bella had been painting since she was a child and was a freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology on 7th Avenue and West 27th Street in Manhattan.
Joey offered to send her to any art school she wanted to go to, Tony had said.
Here or anywhere. She could have gone to any school—in New York or Paris or Boston or London, if that’s what she wanted—but she picked
FIT
. Can you figure that? A kid of mine as a painter?
A house painter maybe, Gulliver had joked.
Tony had laughed and actually patted Gulliver on the back.
Gulliver didn’t say anything at the time, but where Bella had chosen to go to school might prove helpful. Though
FIT
was a good school, it was part of the State University of New York. Why would a kid with a rich, powerful dad choose to go to a State University school when she could choose any school she wanted?
New York was full of world-famous art schools. Pratt Institute. Columbia University School of the Arts. Parsons School of Design. School of Visual Arts. Cooper Union. Tisch School of the Arts
at
NYU
. Bella had chosen
FIT
of all those schools. Why? Gulliver thought he might know the answer, but before he went looking for her, there was someone he had to see. He dialed Ahmed Foster’s number.