Spares (14 page)

Howie was sitting over at a table in the corner of the bar, surrounded as usual by a pile of paperwork. I nodded at him and then had a brief contretemps with the bar droid, who insisted on serving me what it deemed to be my favorite drink. Every time I’d talked to it so far I’d had a whiskey, and so it had decided that’s what I wanted now. I didn’t. I wanted a beer, and said so. The droid reminded me that in its experience I’d always had Jack Daniels, and I’d probably prefer one now. I said I wanted a beer. The droid suggested that I was mistaken, and mused that my Preferences file might have become corrupted. In the end, I pulled my gun on him, and he served me a beer with relatively good grace.

“I’m considering getting rid of him,” Howie said as I joined him at his table. “What do you think?”

“Do it,” I said. It must have been great when computers could only fuck you up at work, by pretending they couldn’t find the printer. Now they’re so intelligent they can fuck you up all the time.

Howie shoved a lunchtime news sheet toward me. I scanned the two-line reports and saw that a Minimart in the Portal had been firebombed an hour ago. I pressed the MORE INFORMATION icon and the sheet shimmered blank for a moment before feeding up the rest of the details. There weren’t many: a grayscale photo and six lines of text. It was the same Minimart I’d been to, and the owner was missing presumed dead. No witnesses, naturally. It probably only made the paper because a piece of shrapnel smashed the car window of a passing
high-lifer. Howie knew the guy had recognized me on my way back to Mal’s the night before. He hadn’t known what the report’s final line made clear: The Minimart owner had in the past been a known associate of Johnny Vinaldi.

“It wasn’t me,” I said.

“Didn’t think it was,” Howie said, though it had obviously crossed his mind. “Just shows Vinaldi’s problems aren’t getting any better,” he added, trying to look bland as he said it. He knew that I understood he was distantly connected to Vinaldi, and that I appeared not to hold it against him. Other people, notably those going round whacking small business owners, might take a different view.

“Yeah, Mal said something similar. He was equally vague.” I didn’t know whether I was trying to encourage the conversation or end it. Hearing the name from Mal had been one thing; from anyone else it was different. It sparked a mixture of hard-won calm and wordless rage that I didn’t know what to do with.

Howie seemed to want to talk about it. “In the last two weeks, five of Vinaldi’s closest associates have been clipped. I don’t mean losers like the Minimart stooge,” he said, “I’m talking guys who ran most of the thirties and forties. The latest was last night.” I nodded, remembering the report I’d seen on the morning news. “He gets new people in immediately, of course, but it’s rattling him. Also, the new guys are having to learning-curve it, and someone seems to be pushing him pretty hard on all fronts. Deals going sour, DEA agents turning him, the works.”

“So it’s some other lowlife trying to take over his rackets. Vinaldi can cope with that.” I knew from experience just how capable Vinaldi was of dealing with outside interference, and I didn’t want to discuss it.

Howie shook his head. “It looks organized. Bottom line is he’s fine until confidence starts to go. Then the rats will start jumping to whatever new ship hoves in view.”

“Who the fuck could take him on?” I’d tried, with all the so-called resources of the NRPD behind me, and my life would never be the same again.

“That’s what I’d like to know. When I go to the John I have to give his guys twenty per cent of my turds, so I have a vested interest. Probably Vinaldi’d like to know too.”

“And Jack Randall makes three,” I said. “So he can buy them all a cigar.”

Howie smiled painfully. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I finished my beer in a swallow, stood up, and left the bar.

At four o’clock I was on 54, rapping impatiently on my third door of the afternoon. There was singing coming from behind the scarred panel in front of me, so I knew someone was in. A collection of corner boys had gathered fifty yards down the corridor, so I didn’t want to be hanging around outside any longer than I had to. I’d already been to 63 and 38, and both had been a waste of time. The lower of the two apartments had already been looted, and nobody within walking distance would admit to having heard of the victim. I’d walked back to the elevator, eye-fucked all the way, and counted myself lucky just to have gotten back out again in one piece. On 63, I’d talked to the second victim’s parents, both still blank-eyed with shock. They didn’t demand to see a badge, or ask if I thought their daughter’s murderer would be caught. They didn’t know anything about their daughter’s friends, or her job, or her life. She just came and went, sometimes early, sometimes late, until one night she hadn’t come back at all.

Standard responses, no better or worse than usual. I wasn’t expecting anything different on 54, but I kept banging on the door anyway. Eventually it opened, and a stringy black woman in her early twenties stood blinking vaguely at me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

The woman’s eyes were pinned and a muscle in her
cheek pulsed gently. She stopped singing slowly, and internalized my question.

“Fuck that shit,” she said. “I live here. Who the hell are
you?”

My real question was answered: She was fucked up, but not so much that any answers she gave me wouldn’t be worth listening to. Always assuming I could get her to tell me anything. She didn’t look too tough, but her heart-shaped face was already beginning to hollow out, and junkies don’t trust anyone at all.

“I need to talk to you about the death of Laverne Latoya,” I said. “Can I come inside?” I glanced up the corridor. The guys on the corner were still there. They weren’t coming any closer, but they were standing and watching carefully. Either they knew the woman I was talking to, or they were on a day-trip up from the 40s, and considering robbing both me and the woman’s apartment. Something told me it was the latter, and that they were only holding off because they thought I was a cop.

The woman’s shoulders slumped. “I already told about Verne,” she said, but she took a step back and let me inside. “I’m Shelley,” she added, vaguely. “Verne was my sister.”

The living room looked like shit. The back half was piled high with stuff, and covered with dirty sheets. I knew why; six days ago Laverne had been spread over it in a mess about one inch deep. Shelley was evidently camping in a small area of the remaining floor; witness a pile of clothes, a half-empty bottle of cheap wine, and some hastily hidden works.

“Did you live here with her?”

Shelley shook her head. “Only been here two days. I found her ’cos I came to borrow some money off her but I wasn’t living here then. Came here because I lost my apartment ’cos I’m not working at the moment. I’m a dancer,” she added, trying to be helpful, before tailing off sadly, “like Verne.”

I looked at her. She was dancing now, in a small and
helpless way. She was trying to stand upright, but her legs were doing their best to undermine her. Each time one sagged she compensated with the other, in a tiny weaving side-step. Maybe she had been a dancer once, perhaps even a good one—in her state I’m not sure I could have stood up at all. I briefly considered shaking her down for whatever she was holding, but she didn’t look like someone who carried much spare, instead, I offered her a cigarette.

Easy question first: “Who did you talk to?”

“Two guys. Then one guy by himself.”

“The last guy, was he different from the others?”

Shelley nodded, smoke curling up out of her mouth. “Yeah. He was okay. He seemed…” She paused for a moment as if about to say something she barely credited. “He seemed like he wanted to know who did it.”

“He did,” I said. “He was a friend of mine. What about the others?”

“They was police.” She shrugged. I knew what she meant. They came down here because they had to, they called people to vacuum the body up and take it away and then left, never bothering to leave the impression that anything very much would be done about the fact that someone had dismantled her sister.

“Were you good friends with Laverne?” I asked. A calculated question. Over the course of the previous two addresses I seemed to have started remembering how things were done.

Shelley seemed to crumple. She gave up the attempt to stand, and wove toward the one chair which wasn’t covered in crap. The sleeve of her shirt rode up as she sat, revealing a long series of marks. Possibly the reason she lost her job—but if so she had to have been dancing somewhere at least moderately smart. Most places won’t care too much about needle tracks so long as you’ll take everything off and shake yourself in the right directions.

“Yes,” she said eventually, head down.

There followed the kind of story I could probably have filled in for myself. Two girls, growing up in the
40s. Only one of them sexually abused, but the other regularly beaten to shit. Laverne the former—sometimes volunteering to prevent Shelley from getting hit. Mother escaped the 40s through death, and her daughters followed as soon as they could by climbing a couple of floors as strippers. Laverne the better dancer, better hustler; Shelley traipsing behind, pulled in her sister’s tiny, doomed wake.

Then, a month ago, Laverne hooked up with someone. Shelley didn’t know the name, only that the guy had money and that her sister had met him dancing in the 130s. She didn’t see so much of Laverne after that, and started falling deeper into the habits her sister had always somehow kept her out of; doping, and turning tricks to pay for it. As I listened, I could tell that Shelley had known, while she was doing it, that she was starting herself rolling on a slope which got very steep very quickly indeed: and that there’d been nothing she could do about it. Seven days ago a missed shift had left her with no money, and she’d come to Laverne to see about a twenty-dollar loan. She’d found the mess at the far end of the room and nearly run straight back out.

Instead she stayed for a moment, torn between terror and knowing that no one else in the world would bother to report what she was seeing. Then she spotted Laverne’s purse lying down by the wall. Two hundred dollars inside.

“That wasn’t mentioned in the scene report,” I said. Shelley started crying, and I waited until she could hear me. “She would have wanted you to have it,” I added gently.

Shelley looked up, hoping for absolution. Her eyes were coping with her life much better than the rest of her, were still big and clear and brown. I wished for a moment that I could meet this girl’s father, lean in close and teach him a couple of home truths. “You think so?” Shelley asked.

“She was your big sister, wasn’t she?” I said. I watched her eyes as they flicked away, and saw that in
time she’d feel okay about it. On the one hand I was glad; on the other I knew that part of what I was doing was getting myself into her confidence, the way you do when you want information out of someone. I didn’t feel great about it. I never had. But that was what the job was about.

In the end there wasn’t much more information to be had. Shelley had called the police, they turned up and went away again. Their questions were perfunctory, and they hadn’t been back. Then yesterday Mal showed up, and that had been different. He tried to find stuff out, got frustrated at Shelley’s answers. Problem was, Shelley really didn’t know much. All you had to do was look at her to see she barely knew anything at all. Like me, like everyone, half the code for her life had been written before she was old enough to know what was going on. All she could do now was watch the lines of instructions play themselves out.

I stood up. Shelley was still perched on the edge of the chair, staring into nothing. It didn’t look like she’d be singing again this afternoon.

“There much of the two hundred left?” tasked.

Shelley gave a small, tight smile without looking up and kept staring at the half-bottle of wine. I took my wallet out and found a hundred-dollar bill.

“Remember what Verne would have told you to do with this,” I said. “What were good things, and what were bad.” I put the money on a shelf in the hallway and left.