"Who's the girl answered the office phone?"
"My new receptionist."
"As long as I've known you you've never had an employee, LT."
"Mardi Bitterman."
That stopped him momentarily.
I had given Kitteridge a lead on a website that Bug Bateman and I created using the pornographic photographs that Leslie Bitterman had taken of himself and his daughter-Mardi.
That bust got Kitteridge a commendation.
"I thought your son just happened on that website," Carson said.
"It's hot down here, man. What do you want from me?"
"All right," the little cop said. "You want to get tough, that's okay with me. What do you know about those killings?"
"I thought this was Bonilla's case."
"The killings are hers, but your ass is mine."
"I guess I might have enough to go around."
"What were you doing there?" Kitteridge asked.
"I already told Detective Bonilla."
"I don't believe it."
"Why not?"
"Because if it was just circumstance like you said, then you wouldn't be here."
"Captain James Charbon," I said, clearly and slow.
Once again the detective's aggression was stymied.
He knew the good captain. The reason Kitteridge didn't have his own bars was James Charbon.
Carson at one time had a partner-Randolph Peel. Randy was bent. He took payoffs in cash and in kind from all sorts of crooks, big and small. And there were two things you had to know about Carson: (1) that he was what I liked to call an Extra-Logical, a breed of human who could see beyond the physical world into a dimension of pure logic-there he could perceive things that normal Homo sapiens could not; and (2) Carson was as honest as the day is long on June 22nd a hundred miles north of Stockholm.
Carson was bound to find out what Peel was doing, and he was therefore obligated to turn him in.
That was all good and well. But the problem was that Peel was James Charbon's brother-in-law. So Randy's downfall meant that Carson would never get a serious promotion as long as Charbon was ambulatory.
Kitteridge took a deep breath and sat back in his chair.
"You fuckin' with me, LT?"
"He told Bonilla that he wanted daily reports on my involvement in the crime. She told me about it, thinking that would light a fire under my butt. She was right. That's why I'm here."
Carson nodded. That was all he needed to do. The law, and its expectations, would be suspended for the while.
"I don't know who the button man was, and neither had I ever met, or consciously spoken to, Wanda Soa. But you better believe I have to find out something about both of them, because Charbon hates me more than you hate him."
For what seemed like a long time Carson and I stared into each other's eyes. He believed (and I did, too) that he could tell if a man was lying just by looking at him. I was giving him the opportunity to ply that talent.
I don't know what's going on here, Carson," I was saying.
We were walking north on Eighth Avenue, looking to all the world like two down-on-their-luck salesmen in bad suits. He had called Lieutenant Bethann Bonilla-they were on a first-name basis-and learned that what I was saying was true.
Once he knew for a fact that Charbon was involved, Carson got fidgety. He didn't want to sit in the station anymore. Even in his underground bunker he felt vulnerable.
"So what do you want from me?" he asked.
The sun was going down again, taking with it, it seemed to me, my tentative connection to Reason.
"I don't really know," I said. "I mean, I get a call summoning me to a murder scene. I agree that's suspicious. But I never heard of Wanda Soa, and the button man was a stranger to me, too."
Neither one of us had an overcoat and the temperature was below fifty, for sure. I was certainly feeling a chill, but that was also the scrutiny I was under.
Kitteridge was so good at getting the truth out of suspects that he was on call to all the major precincts in New York. They sometimes lent him out to other cities for convoluted interrogations. If he was freelance I would have used him myself.
"I still don't know what you want," Carson said.
"Yeah. Well… what about Soa?"
"What about her?"
"Why is everybody so upset?" I asked. "I mean, I know that it's murder and all, but there usually isn't this much pressure put on a single case, especially if the press doesn't grab on to it."
"I don't know," Kitteridge said. It was a simple declarative sentence, one that I rarely, if ever, heard come from his lips.
Rather than show my surprise, I said, "Let's go in that diner, man. I'm freezin' out here."
There was a coffee shop with a counter and a few tables across the street. If I had been with any other one of the eight million New Yorkers, even those confined to a wheelchair, we would have plunged across the avenue, making our way through the traffic by bravado and stealth. But Carson went to the crosswalk at the corner and patiently waited for the light. I do believe that if his mother was having a stroke in that diner he would have done the same.
His adherence to the law was both laughable and frightening.
SEATED AT THE COUNTER, sipping black coffees, we continued our clandestine talk.
"Is someone putting pressure on the case?" I asked.
Carson stared at me. His left eye nearly closed with the concentration.
"You don't know Soa?" he asked.
"Never heard of her before I got to the crime scene."
"Then why were you there?"
"I got a call."
We waited again for him to redigest my words.
"There's an ADA named Tinely," he said. "Broderick Tinely. For some reason he's got a bee up his butt over the murder. He's been leaning heavily on Assistant Chief Chalmers, and the shit filters down from there."
"Why?"
"I don't know," Kitteridge said again. "I got a call from downtown telling me to lean on you. I didn't know about Charbon. He'd rather cut off his left nut than bring me in on anything he's doing."
I sipped my coffee, thinking that it tasted of metal and the chemical cleaners used on metal.
"What's the deal?" I asked.
"Are you involved with these killings or the people killed?" Carson asked.
"If I am I don't know how."
He thrummed his fingers on the countertop.
"It doesn't make any sense," he said at last. "None of it. The killer has no name, his fingerprints don't show up in any database. He had a wad of thirty-seven hundred dollars in his pocket and that was all. His last dinner was tilapia, brown beans, white rice, and plantains fried in peanut oil. The residue on his left hand and sleeve says that he probably fired the shot that killed the girl, but there was no gun in the apartment. There's no way in the world that he could have stabbed himself. The knife was shoved in just under his left armpit, all the way to the handle. They say that the killer wiped off his prints but it looks to me like the shooter probably jerked away from his assailant when he was stabbed and any prints were wiped clean."
"Did anybody hear anything?"
"A young man in the apartment upstairs might have heard a girl screaming around the time the killings occurred."
"And Soa?" I asked.
"Can I get you anything else, gentlemen?" a young Hispanic man with a sparse mustache asked.
"You got an espresso machine?" I asked him.
"Yes, sir."
"Make me a triple with some steamed milk."
"You don't like your coffee?" Carson asked.
"Do you?"
The young man smiled and moved off to fill my order.
"What's wrong with the coffee?" Kitteridge demanded.
"It tastes like toxic waste."
"I don't taste anything."
"Do you have something on Soa?" I asked.
"I could fill up a phone book on her. Her father's a businessman from Colombia and her mother's a Parisian socialite named Jeanne Oure. Mother splits up her time between Nice and Salvador."
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