Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

She slung her bag over her shoulder and turned when she reached the door.

“But you were right about one thing,” she said. “This wasn’t a good time to talk.” She closed the door softly behind her.

I ran long on Tuesday morning, and worked my way through the weight stations at the gym a few times, and stood under the shower afterward until the wobbly feeling in my limbs passed. I called Irene Pratt from a diner on Eighth Avenue, over my first cup of coffee. She answered right away, but when I told her who it was she said she couldn’t talk and to try her later. I finished my oatmeal and read the paper, and over my last cup of coffee, I called again. She kept me on hold for five minutes.

“Just checking in,” I said, when she came back on the line.

“Uh-huh. Well… thanks, I guess.”

“Everything all right with you?”

“Me? I’m fine- great, in fact.”

“Any more signs of that guy?”

“I haven’t seen anything or anybody. In fact, I’m thinking now that I was just being paranoid.”

“The breakin wasn’t paranoia.”

“Yeah, but the business of people watching me-”

“A black Grand Prix followed me too. I don’t think you imagined that.”

“How do you know? There are probably hundreds of cars like that in New York- maybe thousands.”

I was quiet for a moment. “What’s wrong, Irene?” I asked finally.

“Nothing- nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I just need to get some work done, that’s all. I think I was being paranoid, and now I need to cut it out and get back to work.”

“I won’t keep you, then. I’ll call if I hear anything.”

“Don’t bother,” she said quickly. “I mean, not on my account. Like I said, I’m fine and I just want to get back to work. I don’t want to think about this stuff anymore.”

“I can understand that, but these guys may have other ideas.”

An edge came into Pratt’s voice. “These guys? You talk like there’s some big conspiracy, but I’m telling you I’m not sure I even saw anything, okay? Now let me get back to work.” The line went dead.

I pocketed the phone and the waitress dropped a check on the table. I sat there and looked at it and thought about Pratt. On Monday morning she’d been scared and worried and had taken comfort in hearing from me. Twenty-four hours later, she wanted me to go away. I had no idea why.

Plenty of people have taken sudden dislikes to me before, but I didn’t think that was Pratt’s problem. Fear was a possibility. Fear of getting any more involved in whatever was going on, perhaps, or of having anything more to do with me. Fear of Turpin finding out. Fear of losing her job. Pratt had had a bad case of nerves when I’d seen her on Saturday, and I was willing to bet it had only gotten worse and more corrosive with each passing day. Maybe she figured to put it all behind her with a hearty dose of denial. Or maybe she just had a lot of work to do.

I paid the bill and walked home. And kept right on walking, past my building. I didn’t feel like sitting in an empty apartment just then, or hearing the echoes of Jane’s voice, or the silence upstairs, so I headed east- to Union Square- and spent much of the day roaming in a very large bookstore. I wandered the science fiction and the history aisles, and read some essays on contemporary politics and world affairs, and when I was sufficiently disheartened I drank a lot of coffee.

I checked my voice mail when I got home. There was nothing from Neary, but there was a message from Paul Gargosian.

“Don’t know if you still want to talk, but I’m home now. You have my number.” I did and I used it, and left him yet another message. Then I checked my e-mail. At long last, Gregory Danes’s phone records had arrived. I clicked on the attachments and scanned through the reports and felt my heart sink.

“Shit,” I whispered.

Neary called on Wednesday morning, and I was downtown in twenty minutes. DiLillo and Sikes were sitting on his office sofa. I leaned on the windowsill and Neary nodded at DiLillo.

“There’s surveillance at all the locations,” she began. “Four out of four. They’re using a lot of people, and they must be burning through a lot of cash. They’re running three eight-hour shifts at each site, and a round-robin deal with the cars, switching them from site to site, so the same one doesn’t show up at the same place two days in a row. As far as we could tell, the surveillance is static; we don’t think they’re tailing anybody. But we’d have to work it with more guys to be sure.” She held up a fat manila folder. “I’ve got the stills for you.”

I opened the folder and leafed through it. It was full of photographs, of men and cars. There were crisp daylight shots and grainy nighttime ones, from long distances and from close up and at odd angles, but all of them were clear enough to ID faces and read plate numbers. The men in the pictures were of various types: white and black and Hispanic, young and old, fat and lean. They didn’t look like brain surgeons, but then again they didn’t look like junkies or flashers or racetrack touts, either. Except for a certain wariness around their eyes, they were a mostly unremarkable bunch. There were a lot of different men in the pictures, and I stopped counting after a dozen. I didn’t recognize any of them, though I saw a black Grand Prix, a brown Cavalier, a dirty red hatchback, and a light-blue van that all looked familiar.

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’tbut 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.