Sacred: A Novel (11 page)

“So my daughter’s in Tampa,” Trevor Stone said.

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “did you hear what we said?”

He tightened his smoking jacket at his throat, looked at her through bleary eyes. “Yes. Two men believe she’s dead.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “But from what we’ve heard of this Jeff Price, he doesn’t seem like the type who’d keep a woman as noticeable as your daughter with him while he tries to lie low. So the Tampa lead…”

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. His eyes clenched shut and he seemed to be biting back against something acidic. His face was slick with sweat and paler than bleached bone. Yesterday morning, he’d been prepared for us, and he’d used his cane and dressed smartly and presented the figure of a frail but proud and resilient warrior.

Tonight, however, with no time to prepare for our arrival, he sat in the wheelchair Julian told us he used three quarters of the time now, his mind and body exhausted by cancer and the chemotherapy trying to combat it. His hair stuck out in wispy static tufts from his head and his voice was a thin whisper soaked in gravel.

“It’s a lead, however,” he said, his eyes still closed, tremulous fist pressed to his mouth. “Maybe that’s where Mr. Becker disappeared to also. Hmm?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“How soon can you leave?”

“Huh?” Angie said.

He opened his eyes. “For Tampa. Could you be ready first thing in the morning?”

“We’d have to make flight arrangements,” I said.

He scowled. “Flight arrangements are unnecessary. Julian can pick you up first thing in the morning and take you to my plane.”

“Your plane,” Angie said.

“Find my daughter or Mr. Becker or Mr. Price.”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said. “It’s a long shot.”

“Fine.” He coughed into his fist, closed his eyes again for a moment. “If she’s alive, I want her found. If she’s dead, I need to know. And if this Mr. Price is behind her death, will you do something for me?”

“What?” I said.

“Would you be so kind as to kill him?”

The air in his room suddenly felt like ice.

“No,” I said.

“You’ve killed people before,” he said.

“Never again,” I said as he turned his head toward the window. “Mr. Stone.”

He turned his head back, looked at me.

“Never again,” I repeated. “Is that understood?”

He closed his eyes, lay his head back against the headrest in his wheelchair, and waved us from the room.

“You see a man who is closer to dust than flesh,” Julian said as he held Angie’s coat in the marble foyer.

Angie reached for her coat and he motioned for her to turn her back to him. She grimaced, but did so, and Julian slid her coat up her arms and over her back.

“I see a man,” he said as he reached into the closet for my jacket, “who towered over other men, who towered over industry and finance and every world he chose to place his foot upon. A man whose footfalls caused trembling. And respect. Utmost respect.”

He held out my jacket and I stepped into it, smelled the clean, cool scent of his cologne. It wasn’t a brand I recognized, but somehow I knew it was out of my price range anyway.

“How long have you been with him, Julian?”

“Thirty-five years, Mr. Kenzie.”

“And the Weeble?” Angie said.

Julian gave her a thin smile. “That would be Mr. Clifton?”

“Yes.”

“He has been with us for twenty years. He was Mrs. Stone’s valet and personal secretary. Now he helps me with property upkeep and maintenance, attending to Mr. Stone’s business interests when Mr. Stone himself is too tired.”

I turned to face him. “What do you think happened to Desiree?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I only hope it’s nothing irreparable. She’s a divine child.”

“And Mr. Becker?” Angie said.

“How do you mean, Miss?”

“The night he disappeared he was en route to this house. We checked with the police, Mr. Archerson. There were no reports of any disturbances or strange incidents along Route One-A that night. No car accidents or abandoned vehicles. No cab companies which drove a fare to or toward this address at the time in question. No rental cars rented to a Jay Becker that day, and his own car is still parked in his condo parking lot.”

“And this leads you to assume?” Julian said.

“We have no assumptions,” I said. “Just feelings, Julian.”

“Ah.” He opened the door for us and the air that flowed into the foyer was arctic. “And those feelings tell you what?”

“They tell us someone’s lying,” Angie said. “Maybe a lot of someones.”

“Food for thought. Yes.” Julian tipped his head. “Good evening, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro. Do drive carefully.”

“Up is down,” Angie said as we drove over the Tobin Bridge and the lights of the city skyline spread before us.

“What?” I said.

“Up is down. Black is white. North is south.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Do you want to pull over and let me drive?”

She shot me a look. “This case,” she said. “I’m starting to get the feeling everyone’s lying and everyone has something to hide.”

“Well, what do you want to do about it?”

“I want to stop taking anything at face value. I want to question everything and trust no one.”

“Okay.”

“And I want to break into Jay Becker’s place.”

“Now?” I said.

“Right now,” she said.

Jay Becker lived in Whittier Place, a high-rise overlooking the Charles River or the Fleet Center depending on the placement of your condo.

Whittier Place is part of the Charles River Apartments, a horrific complex of modern luxury housing built in the seventies along with City Hall, the Hurley and Lindemann Center buildings, and the JFK Building to replace the old West End neighborhood, which several genius city planners decided had to be razed so Boston in the 1970s would look like London in
A Clockwork Orange.

The West End had looked a lot like the North End, if a bit dustier and dingier in places due to its proximity to the red-light districts of Scollay Square and North Station. The red-light districts are gone now, as is the West End, as are most pedestrians after five o’clock. In the place of a neighborhood, city planners erected a cement complex of squat sprawling erector-set municipal buildings, no function and all form, and the form hideous too, and tall cinder-block apartment complexes that look like nothing so much as an arid, characterless hell.

“If You Lived Here,” the clever signs told us as we looped around Storrow Drive toward the entrance to Whittier Place, “You’d Be Home Now.”

“If I lived in this car,” Angie said, “wouldn’t I be home, too?”

“Or under that bridge.”

“Or in the Charles.”

“Or in that Dumpster.”

We ran with that until we found a parking space, another place we’d call home had we lived there.

“You really hate modern, don’t you?” she said as we walked toward Whittier Place and I looked up at it with a scowl on my face.

I shrugged. “I like modern music. Some TV shows are better than they’ve ever been. That’s about it, though.”

“There’s not a single modern piece of architecture you like?”

“I don’t instantaneously want to nuke Hancock Towers or the Heritage when I see them. But Frank Lloyd Wrong and I. M. Pei have never designed a house or building which could compete with even the most basic Victorian.”

“You’re definitely a Boston boy, Patrick. Through and through.”

I nodded as we walked up toward the doors of Whittier Place. “I just want them to leave my Boston alone, Ange. Go to Hartford if they want to build shit like this. Or L.A. Wherever. Just away.”

She squeezed my hand, and I looked in her face, saw a smile there.

We entered the visitors’ foyer through a set of glass doors, came face-to-face with another set that was locked. To our right was a bank of nameplates. The nameplates bore three-digit numbers beside them and there was a phone to the left of the entire bank of names. Just as I’d feared. You couldn’t even do the old trick of pressing ten buzzers at once and hoping someone would buzz you in. If you used the phone, the person who picked it up could see you through a security camera.

All those darn criminals have made it awful hard on us private detectives.

“It was fun watching you get worked up out there,” Angie said. She opened her purse, held it over her head, and dumped the contents on the floor.

“Yeah?” I knelt beside her and we began scooping things back into the purse.

“Yeah. It’s been a while since you got worked up over anything.”

“You, too,” I said.

We looked at one another, and the questions in her eyes probably lived in my own right then:

Who are we these days? What’s left in the wake of all the things Gerry Glynn took? How do we get happy again?

“How many sticks of lip balm can one woman have?” I said and went back to the pile on the floor.

“Ten’s about right,” she said. “Five if you gotta travel light.”

A couple approached on the other side of the glass. The man looked like an attorney, sculpted salt-and-pepper hair and red and yellow Gucci tie. The woman looked like an attorney’s wife, pinched and suspicious.

“Your play,” I said to Angie.

The man pushed open the door and Angie moved her knee out of the way, a long strand of hair falling out from behind her ear as she did so, swinging down by her cheekbone and framing her eye.

“Excuse me,” she said, chuckling softly and holding the guy with her eyes. “Clumsy as always.”

He looked down at her and his merciless boardroom eyes picked up her gaiety. “I can’t walk across an empty room without tripping, myself.”

“Ah,” Angie said. “A kindred spirit.”

The man smiled like a shy ten-year-old. “Coordinated people beware,” he said.

Angie gave it a short, hard laugh, as if his uncommon wit had surprised her. She scooped up her keys. “There they are.”

We rose from our knees as the wife moved past me and the man held the door open.

“Be more careful next time,” he said with mock sternness.

“I’ll try.” Angie leaned into the words a bit.

“Lived here long?”

“Come, Walter,” the woman said.

“Six months.”

“Come, Walter,” the woman repeated.

Walter took one last look in Angie’s eyes and went.

When the door closed behind them, I said, “Heel, Walter. Roll over, Walter.”

“Poor Walter,” Angie said as we reached the elevator bank.

“Poor Walter. Please. Could you have been any more breathy by the way?”

“Breathy?”

“‘Sex months,’” I said in my best Marilyn Monroe voice.

“I didn’t say ‘sex.’ I said ‘six.’ And I wasn’t that breathy.”

“Whatever you say, Norma Jean.”

She elbowed me and the elevator doors opened and we rode them up to the twelfth floor.

At Jay’s door, Angie said, “You got Bubba’s gift?”

Bubba’s gift was an alarm decoder. He’d given it to me last Christmas but I hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. It read the sonic pitch of an alarm’s call and decoded it in a matter of seconds. The moment a red light appeared in the tiny LED screen of the decoder, you pointed it at the alarm source and pressed a button in the center and the alarm’s bleat stopped.

That was the theory anyway.

I’d used Bubba’s equipment before and usually it was fine as long as he didn’t use the phrase “cutting edge.” Cutting edge, in Bubbaspeak, meant it still had a few bugs in the system or hadn’t been tested yet. He hadn’t used the phrase when he gave me the decoder, but I still wouldn’t know if it worked until we got into Jay’s place.

I knew from previous visits that Jay also had a silent alarm wired into Porter and Larousse Consultants, a security firm downtown. When the alarm was tripped, you had thirty seconds to call the security firm and give them the password, or Johnny Law was on his way.

On the way over, when I mentioned that to Angie, she said, “Let me worry about that. Trust me.”

She picked the two door locks with her kit while I watched the hall, and then she opened the door and we stepped inside. I closed the door behind me, and Jay’s first alarm went off.

It was only slightly louder than an air raid siren, and I pointed Bubba’s decoder at the blinking box above the kitchen portico, pressed the black button in the center. Then I waited. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, come on, come on, come on…Bubba was pretty close to losing his ride back from prison, and then the red light appeared on the LED and I pressed the black button again and the air raid siren died.

I looked at the small box in my hand. “Wow,” I said.

Angie picked up the phone in the living room, pressed a single digit on the speed-dial console, waited a moment, then said, “Shreveport.”

I came into the living room.

“You have a nice night, too,” she said into the receiver and hung up.

“Shreveport?” I said.

“It’s where Jay was born.”

“I know that. How did you know it?”

She shrugged, looked around the living room. “I must have heard him mention it over drinks or something.”

“And how’d you know it was his code word?”

She gave me another little shrug.

“Over
drinks
?” I said.

“Mmm.” She moved past me and headed for the bedroom.

The living room was immaculate. A black leather L-shaped sectional took up a third with a charcoal smoked-glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table lay three neatly stacked issues of
GQ
and four remote controls. One was for the fifty-inch wide-screen TV, another for the VCR, a third for the laser disc machine, and a fourth for the stereo component system.

“Jay,” I said, “buy a universal remote for crying out loud.”

There were several technical handbooks in the bookcase, a few Le Carré novels, and several by the surrealists Jay loved—Borges, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar.

I gave the books and then the couch cushions a cursory once-over, found nothing, and moved into the bedroom.