"We mostly use Victorious," said the voice. "Sometimes Town Septic. I can't remember who it was last week. It's a big truck, that's all I can tell you."
"Thanks," said Ray.
Next he dialed Fareed Gelfman.
"Yo," came a voice with rap music in the background.
"I'm trying to reach Fareed Gelfman."
"He's in the hospital."
"What?" said Ray.
"Yeah, some dude went upside his head, beat him down
bad."
"Why?"
"Oh, you know Fareed, man. He's alway poppin' on the women. Seems he gave his business card with his cell number on it to some girl who had a boyfriend and the dude went apeshit on him."
"Where'd she live?"
"With her boyfriend. Queens, Brooklyn, some shit like that."
"Thanks." Ray hung up. He dialed the Petrocelli number. A little girl answered.
"May I please speak to your mother or father?"
"Wait a minute."
"Yes?" came the voice of a busy woman in her forties.
"Mrs. Petrocelli, I'm calling from Town Septic."
"Yes? So late?"
"I'm wondering if you would consider using our services."
"We always use Victorious. Says Vic's on the side of the truck. Annie, go wash your face."
"I realize that, but I hope you'll consider our services."
"Vic's has same-day pump-out. We have pipe problems in the basement, and with all the kids, it clogs up."
"I see."
"We been using them for years. Also, Richie plays on my husband's softball team. Annie, you're a
mess."
"Richie?"
"The driver for Vic's."
He sipped his coffee. "I see."
"So I'm sure your prices are like competitive and all, but we're not interested." She hung up.
Crawl around in some shit and you learn some things, he thought. He went back to his father's phone books. There were eight Vic's in Queens, but none were sewage operations. Brooklyn had twelve businesses with the name Vic, including barbershops and deli and pizza places, and one of them was Victorious Sewerage, located in Marine Park—not exactly close to the service addresses in Queens.
He dialed the household he'd called earlier.
"Hello?" came the voice of an exasperated mother. "What is it?"
"Hi, I called from Town Septic, earlier."
"I thought we were done."
"I'm just calling to clarify. You use Victorious Sewerage in Brooklyn?"
"Something like that. They got trucks all over out here. I have no idea if it's Brooklyn. Now please don't call again, I got kids to put to bed."
He hung up.
"I want the report," came a voice from the living room.
He found his father lying back staring at the ceiling.
"I crawled in, found some stuff. They suggest a Brooklyn company called Victorious Sewerage."
"Local?"
Ray told him about the map and phone calls. "Maybe I should tell Pete Blake."
His father waved a disgusted hand. "He'll figure it out sooner or later. Plus, you don't know much, anyway."
"I know the shit probably came from pipes or septic tanks cleaned by this Victorious operation."
"You go there tomorrow, ask questions, find this Richie guy."
"Just walk in?"
"Yeah, just walk in, Ray. Find him, follow him. Exactly what I would have done."
Ray studied his father. This was the face my mother kissed as a nineteen-year-old, he thought, this was the face that had walked the beat, voted for Nixon in '72, with most of America, then been glad when he resigned, who had questioned hundreds of suspects, heard every line of bullshit and weaseling, was an awkward dancer and a moderate drinker, a man who often visited his wife's grave, took a little fold-out chair and battery radio with him, sat there an hour listening to the Yankees game, his hand on the tombstone.
"Dad, you need a shave."
His father grunted. "You drinking coffee?"
"Yes."
"Gimme some of that. Haven't had coffee in—"
"Is it all right?"
"What's it going to do, kill me?"
He handed his father the cup. He drank slowly. "Mmn."
"What'll it be, electric razor or a blade?"
"Blade. Who is the barber?"
"Me."
He got a basin of hot water and a towel and shaving cream and a safety razor. He wet half the towel and softened up his father's face. His father closed his eyes and sank back into his pillow. "Feels good," he muttered.
Ray lathered up his father's neck and cheeks. It had been many years since he'd touched his father's face so much, maybe since he'd been a boy.
"You know, I worked a lot of missing persons cases," his father began, as if he'd been thinking of Jin Li since the morning. "Maybe forty or fifty. And what you see with them is that the people who are missing because they are hiding don't stay hidden for very long. They start moving around, they get restless. Folks get—"
"Hold still." Ray went under the chin with the safety razor.
"—lonely. I used to map out who a person knew, who the family was, the best friends, the old girlfriends."
The coffee was making his father talkative. "So how does this apply to Jin Li?"
"There's no family in the city?"
"No. She's from China."
"Friends?"
"I didn't know her very long before she broke it off."
"Boyfriends?"
"I have no idea."
"How long from the moment you met her until the first event in the bedroom Olympics?"
Ray remembered. "Two days."
"Don't think you get any credit for that, either." His father rolled his eyes toward the window. "Has orgasms easily?"
He nodded, feeling too embarrassed to say this to his father. "Do I get any credit for that?"
"No, of course not. It's the woman, always. How long was she in the country before meeting you?"
"Three, four years, maybe."
"Pretty girl, new in town, lonely. There've been plenty of guys, is my guess. She might have gone looking for an old boyfriend."
The idea made him wary. "Maybe."
"Easy on the cheek there. You see her apartment?"
"Little place way up in the nineties on the East Side. Very small."
"Not in Chinatown."
"Hated Chinatown. Too Chinese."
"Anything in her apartment?"
"Usual stuff. Dresses. She spent most of her money on clothes."
"No car?"
"No."
"Did you ever stay in her apartment?"
"Lots of times. Ate breakfast out."
"What did she read?"
He patted his father's cheek. Smooth. "Everything. She reads English perfectly."
"But spoken not so good."
"Spoken very good. It's the pronunciation that is hard."
"The palate hardens at some young age."
"She can understand any spoken English, except perhaps any really hard accents, like a deep Southern accent."
"So really she could go anywhere in the States easily enough." His father lifted the coffee cup again.
"That's what I'm saying."
"Did she have a secretive nature? Don't think, just answer."
"Well—"
"Just answer yes or no."
But before he could, Wendy came in, her long shift about to end. "Coffee!" She turned on Ray. "He can't be drinking coffee!"
"I asked for it," said his father.
"I am
sorry
!" the nurse said to Ray. "I think you just don't
understand
here. I think you need to be a little more sensitive to the situation. I realize that you have not spent much time with people who are"—she glanced at Ray's father—"who are sick and dying, yes, we can say that, but—"
"What was that?" croaked Ray's father suddenly. "What did you say about my son?"
The pretty young nurse turned to him and spoke more gently. "I said, I
know
he has not spent much time around people who are—"
"That's exactly what I thought you said." His father lifted both arms in excitement, pulling on his tubes, turning his fevered eyes directly upon her. "Let me tell you something, lady, my son Ray there has spent
years
around the dead and dying, he has seen
fields
of the dead, laid out in rows by the
hundreds,
burnt, crushed, drowned, he has seen the dead buried by the
thousands,
he has held the tiniest little babies that were—"
"Dad, Dad, that's enough!"
His father glared at the young nurse, who, for her part, looked at Ray in stunned wonder, at last realizing—as had another woman a few nights earlier—that she had no idea who he was.
They'd been happy once.
And this was just the kind of rainy spring Manhattan evening he used to like. "Your wife is in the car downstairs," his secretary would say. Then came a quick brush of the hair in his private washroom. Adjust the silk tie in the mirror, shoot a look at Tom Reilly, guy on his way up. Then, downstairs, the company car would be idling by the curb, Ann waiting expectantly, and soon they'd head to yet another swanky dinner party. He'd let his hand slide along Ann's long firm thigh, eager to show her off, eager to hit the evening hard, plunge unabashedly into all the falsely earnest conversation, the self-congratulatory mannerisms, the grinning and groping, the money ogling and power sniffing, drinking neither too little nor too much, all on the happy glide path of intimacy with people
who made things happen.
He still remembered the night when Bill Gates was in the room—
the richest man in the world is in this room, Ann, right now, the richest man who ever lived
—and the time Jack Welch dropped by to pay his respects . . . but now, tonight it was different, now both of them were lost in their thoughts as the wet night slid by the windows outside, Ann next to him but with zero idea what he was walking into, that he was feeling weird spiders of pain crawl over his chest and left shoulder. Should he tell her, his doctor wife? She'd ask him what was wrong, why he was so stressed out. Nothing, sweetie, just a dinner party at Martz's mansion in the sky, twenty rooms thirty stories up in the air. Martz, the man who is stalking me. Tom had to go, no matter what, pretend
nothing was wrong. The invitation had come yesterday. A straight-up test to see if Tom was avoiding Martz. Well, fine. He'd just swallowed a couple of beta-blockers at the office to zap out his anxiety. Martz would find the opportunity to take Tom aside and say, six months ago you were begging me to buy your stock and I do and so now what? Sniffing him for the anxiety that had been zapped out. There was something diseased and awful about Martz. Predatory, vulturish, his many hundreds of millions made by buying and selling the work of others, never had created or produced or invented anything himself, just slithered in when companies were weak or underfunded or down on their luck and sunk in his money-sucking fangs. And that was when Tom was going to look him in the eye and say,
Bill, you know as well as I do that the market is irrational sometimes, and the best we can see somebody has been driving down the price, maybe selling on the way down in order to buy back everything at a lower price later. Now you must stop hounding me . . .
Well, he'd say something like that, flat-out lie, just knock it back at Martz in a moment of high-stakes poker . . .
But Tom was unconvinced by his own line of bullshit and so felt around in his head wondering if he could feel the absence of anxiety. How long did beta-blockers take to kick in? He should know the answer, given all the drug efficacy reports he'd read. He could ask his wife, but she'd want to know why he was taking them, how he'd gotten them. Why was he so worried? It was not just Martz, no sir. There was more, much more,
bad more.
His fate, Tom understood all too well now, teetered upon a mere four words, words that were vague and deeply unimaginative:
send them a message.
Yes, he had said something like that,
send them a message,
send CorpServe, the office-cleaning and paper-shredding service, a message that he did not want them snooping around in his executive suite or anywhere else at Good Pharma. They were very thorough and got their cleaning done between the hours of seven and four every night as per the contract, but over the last few months several of his people had reported that they wondered if their papers had been pushed around a bit on their desks. The service's workers seemed unresponsive to a few casual questions. Like they were trained to be that way. Were they stealing? Looking for inside
information? Hired by a Good Pharma competitor? It was all subtle, unprovable stuff, unless you installed hidden cameras, hired corporate espionage experts, the whole nine yards, a paper trail that eventually could be subpoenaed by a disgruntled, big-shoes investor like Martz or the neat freaks at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had ordered that the IT department actually enforce the mandatory shutdown of all network workstations after six-thirty p.m., as well as upgrade the instant encryption of intracorporate and outgoing e-mail. Did this give him a margin of security?
Not necessarily.
So when a new report came that there was a particular question—just a question, mind you—about the service, something about some of the bags of paper for shredding maybe not quite all getting into the big mobile shredder parked at street level, he told his building services chief the words he had repeated to himself nearly every hour since he had vomited under his seat at the Yankees game: "I don't want people screwing around with our information! Send them a message that we want cleaning and paper waste removal and if we have to worry about them, we will tear up the contract and not pay them a dime. But frankly, I don't want to have to go find another service at this time of year. This outfit is cheap. So have a talk with them. Send them a fucking message they won't forget."