Lee Vance - The Garden of Betrayal

“I know. I’m not blaming you. Even at the time, I was glad you were doing what you were doing, and that you’d taken Kate with you. It was important for our family, and I felt terrible that I wasn’t strong enough to help.”

“I never judged you or thought less of you.”

“No. You and Yolanda and Kate, you all took care of me. And then you went back to work, and Yolanda went home to the Dominican Republic, and I woke up one morning and realized that I had to get Kate off to school, and shop for dinner, and pick up the dry cleaning. And I felt better, because I had responsibilities, and I wasn’t just thinking about Kyle all the time. That’s when I decided to volunteer here at the hospital. Being here, helping people who needed my help-it keeps the feeling of panic away.”

“And being with me makes the panic come back,” I said, feeling as if my heart might break.

She nodded.

“Sometimes. More than I can bear. I’m sorry.”

My phone rang in my coat. I ignored it, but Claire took the phone from my pocket and checked the display.

“It’s Reggie,” she said. “Answer it.”

“I don’t want to,” I choked.

“You have to. I’ve thought about us a lot. The only way we can be together is if you’re at peace, and the only way you’re ever going to be at peace is to learn the truth.”

She held the phone out to me. I wiped my face with my hand and took it from her.

“Reggie,” I said.

“Hey. I’m out front. You got a minute to come outside and talk?”

I looked at Claire beseechingly.

“Go,” she said. “For both of us.”

Reggie’s car was parked at a hydrant just outside the main entrance. I opened the door and climbed in, letting my head drop back against the rest as I sat.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

Everything, but I wasn’t ready to get into it with him.

“Smells like puke in here.”

“Gave a runaway a ride home this afternoon. Bought him a thirty-two-ounce orange Slurpee and a foot-long Snickers bar to keep him quiet. Live and learn. But you looked unhappy before you got in.”

“Family trouble,” I said, scrabbling for the window switch.

“With Kate?”

“Maybe,” I replied, thinking of the angry look she’d given me. I lowered the window halfway and turned my face to the opening, inhaling a lungful of cold, fresh air. The car really stank.

“I saw her canoodling with some Asian kid on a bench down the block. They going out?”

“I guess so.” I hadn’t considered her relationship in quite those terms before. It was another subject I didn’t feel ready to pursue. “So, what’s up?”

He struck a match and lit a cigarette. It was the first time I could recall being grateful for the odor.

“I think I found the guy who stole the car.”

I jerked upright, galvanized as if by an electric shock.

“You talk to him?”

“Not yet,” he said, stuffing his crumpled pack of cigarettes and matches into a cup holder. “Tonight.”

“So, what are we waiting for?”

He gave me a baleful glance.

“Who’s ‘we,’ paleface?”

It was the punch line to an old joke, Tonto’s reply to the Lone Ranger when he observed that they were both about to be killed by hostile Indians.

“There’s some kind of problem because I’m the wrong color?” I asked, confused.

Reggie laughed.

“Nah. There’s some kind of problem because you look like you work in an office on Park Avenue. The guy I found will be more talkative if he’s scared.”

“Trust me,” I said forcefully, “I meet the person who might’ve murdered my son, and I’m going to look like what I am-someone who wants to fucking kill him.”

He nodded, perhaps conceding the point.

“Which brings us to the second issue. You’re involved here.”

“And you aren’t?”

The rebuttal popped out before I had time to think about it. Reggie chewed on it for a minute, one thumb drumming on the steering wheel, and I realized it had been exactly the right thing to say. He’d dedicated his life to finding people who were lost or taken, and he was honest enough with himself not to pretend it was just a job. He’d never given up on Kyle, because he cared.

He took a hit from his cigarette, sighed as he exhaled, and then dropped the car into gear. We made an illegal U-turn across four lanes of traffic and headed south on York Avenue. I kept quiet as we passed Rockefeller University, not wanting to accidentally dissuade him from his apparent decision to let me ride along. The sun was already down, and the Rockefeller campus was a floodlit oasis, a grassy fifteen-acre chunk of Harvard or Princeton transported to the Upper East Side. I fleetingly wondered where Kate would be at school next year-and where Claire and I would be, and whether we’d be together.

“You’ll do what you’re told, right?”

“Of course,” I replied immediately. “Where is this guy?”

“Staten Island.”

“How’d you find him?”

“Remember I told you that most stolen cars in this part of the world get reregistered with fake VIN numbers or chopped for parts?”

“Right.”

“If you’re going to reregister a car, the easiest way is to pretend it’s coming in from out of state. That way there’s no paperwork for the local DMV to match to.” He clucked irritably as he made the left turn onto the descending ramp for FDR Drive. The highway was jammed in both directions. “I checked out-of-state registrations in the tristate area for the six-month period after Gallegos’s car was stolen. A couple of potentials but nothing that really rang any bells. Again, it’s lucky as hell for us that the M5 is limited production.”

We reached the bottom of the ramp. The cars before us had alternated into traffic, but a shiny black Hummer with chrome running boards was refusing to give way, tailgating the vehicle in front of it. Reggie closed to within eighteen inches, the roofline of his beat-up Chevy level with the bottom of the Hummer’s windows. Shifting his cigarette to his right hand, he popped open the driver’s door and slammed it hard into the side of the Hummer. The driver screeched to a halt, and Reggie accelerated smoothly into the resultant gap.

“Somebody’s going to take a shot at you one of these days,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder. The Hummer owner was out of his car and walking around to the passenger side to inspect it. He looked perplexed. I could hear horns sounding behind him.

“Happened before. At any rate, the other thing I did was to go back through the records and look for chop-shop busts. There’s usually a couple a year. Then I went through the seized property lists to see if anything matched the M5. Again, nothing really jumped out.”

“That’s not much of a surprise, is it? The detectives investigating Carlos’s murder would have been looking for Gallegos’s car also. They must have left some kind of flag in the system.”

“True,” he said, sounding offended. “But the department computer is three monkeys in an orange crate. You got to try the data a bunch of different ways to make sure you’re getting good answers, and you got to be creative.”

“So, what’d you find?”

“I’m getting to it,” he muttered, checking his side-view mirror intently. I hoped he wasn’t sizing up another victim. “Don’t rush me. The next thing I did was to pull the plate numbers of all the tow trucks owned by the busted chop shops.”

“Why?”

“BMW and other high-end cars have good security systems. Sophisticated thieves don’t bother messing with them. They just hook the car to a tow truck and haul it away.”

“Your point being?”

He reached up and tapped the small white box Velcroed to his windshield below the rearview mirror.