Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

Bad. That little ferret practiced a dark martial art, the kind that lets you kill a man with a phone call. But if I asked him about it… very fucking bad. Word gets out you were looking for Charlie, it could make a lot of people nervous. Where I live, it’s a lot cheaper to kill the hunter than hide the prey.

I went into myself. All the way down the mine shaft where the only ore is truth and pain. Like when I was a kid, and those words were synonyms.

I had one hand to play. I was holding it in my mind, turning it over, seeing the aces-and-eights full house, the only one my ghost brother ever dealt. Then Clarence walked in the door, and made things worse.

“I t’s a dossier, mahn,” he said, holding out the CD I’d given him.

“The person who put this together, he had a lot of time on his hands. Spent some money, too.”

“Any money in it?” I asked, hoping for something to get me back to my winning streak.

“Maybe,” the West Indian said dubiously, tossing his cream cashmere topcoat over the back of my futon couch, the better to display a fuchsia satin shirt with black nacre buttons worn outside a pair of black slacks with balloon knees and pegged cuffs. “There’s account numbers and all, but no access codes or PIN numbers.”

“How do I—”

“Got it right here, mahn,” Clarence said, removing a narrow silver notebook computer from a black brushed-aluminum case. “I downloaded the CD to a USB key, so all I have to do is—”

Catching the expression on my face, he clamped down on the geek-speak long enough to hit some keys and bring the machine to life.

The first screen was all vital statistics. Peta Bellingham, DOB September 9, 1972, five foot seven, 119 pounds, and a note to “see photos.” Whoever had put together the package had her home and cell phones, fax, e-mail, Social Security number, three local bank accounts—checking, savings, and a handful of sub-jumbo CDs, all showing balances as of a couple of months ago—plus one in the Caymans and another in Nauru, with a series of “????” where the balances should have been. Two cars registered, a Porsche Carrera and a Mazda Miata…which didn’t make sense, for some reason I couldn’t quite touch. A co-op on West End, recent purchase; estimated value a million four, against a seven-hundred-grand mortgage. A one-bedroom condo in Battery Park, free and clear. A mixed-bag portfolio, weighted in favor of biotech stocks, managed by…Daniel Parks, MBA, CPA, CFP.

So this woman had—what?—skipped out on a big pile of money she owed to this guy Parks? That didn’t add up. Walking away from all those assets would have to cost her a cubic ton more than any commission she could owe a money manager.

I shrugged my shoulders at Clarence.

He tapped a key, and another screen popped up, displaying a whole page of thumbnails. “Put the pointer on the one you want to see, double-click, and it will blow right up, like enlarging a photograph.”

The first one was a young woman—hard to tell her age without a tighter close-up—standing next to a fireplace, one hand on the mantel. She was fair-skinned, willowy, with long, slightly wavy dark hair. I couldn’t see much else.

I scanned the thumbnails with my eyes, looking for a full-face shot. Found it. Clicked it open.

And went back twenty years.

“Y ou know her, mahn?” Clarence said, reading my face.

“Let me look at a few more,” I told him, moving the cursor and clicking the mouse.

I flicked past the ones with her in outfits—everything from French maid to English riding costume—and the nudes, which were all posed as if she was sitting for an artist’s portrait. It was the close-ups that sealed the deal. Those icy topaz eyes hadn’t changed at all.

“Yeah, I know her,” I said.

B eryl Eunice Preston had just turned thirteen when she disappeared from her parents’ mansion in one of Westchester’s Old Money enclaves. It was her father who came to see me, back when I had an office carved out of what was once crawlspace at the top of a building in what the real-estate hucksters had just started to call “Tribeca.” I lived in that office, in a little apartment concealed behind a fake Persian rug that looked like it covered a solid wall.

Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.

The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.

That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.

Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.

Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.

So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent for the Animal Control guys.

Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.

After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.

“I ’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.

“You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”

“I don’t want the police….”

“I don’t want them, either.”

“Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”

“It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”

He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.

“My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.

“How do you know?”

“What…what do you mean by that?”

“You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”