The Finishing School (29 page)

“He says Carmen.”

Bud was silent for a moment.

“
Well
?” Jay demanded.

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” He sighed. “What’s the kid look like?”

“Real freak. Pierced up the wazoo, dreads, the whole nine yards.”

Okay, him. Now Bud had a clearer picture of what was going on.

“Did he say anything else?” Bud asked.

“Yeah, actually. Wants to score some H.”

“You should really be more careful what you say over the phone, you know, Jay.”

“Far as I’m concerned, anybody listening can suck my dick.”

“Ha, ha, very funny. You better hope nobody is.”
We both better
, Bud thought. His mind was racing, thinking about what the kid’s angle might be here. He had his suspicions, and if they were on target, action needed to be taken. Fast. “Listen, Jay. If the kid’s into all that, you think maybe he wants to make a quick buck?”

“What, like Friday?”

“Why not?”

“I thought you had a girl lined up.”

“It’s always good to have a fallback. This is why I was a better Boy Scout than you. Be prepared.”

“You were a fucking pansy, is what you were.”

“It was a joke, for Chrissakes. But about this pierced kid, I think we should chill out. It doesn’t mean anything, him asking around about shit. Whitney hung out at the club, maybe some of her friends did, too. So what?”

“That’s
it
? I coulda thought of that myself.”

“What do you want me to say? Ice the kid?”

“Nah, you’re right. That would draw unnecessary attention.”

“You bet your ass it would.”

“Were you serious, though, about Friday?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I mean, why the fuck not?”

“It’d never work! You gotta see this kid. He’s a walking advertisement for profiling.”

“What if you cut his hair?”

“He’s got a real crazy tattoo down the side of his face.”

“So? If the feds are watching, they’ll be looking for rich girls, not freaks with dreadlocks.”

“Huh. Well, you got a point. Okay, maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all. We can at least give it a shot. I’ll have Lamar chat him up, see if he bites.”

“Good. Now, what about that other thing we talked about before?”

“I sent Pavel to take care of it. He’s out now. Haven’t heard. It might not go because of the weather.”

“Huh.
That’s
not good.”

“I don’t know why you’re so hot to take action on that front. Talk about drawing unnecessary attention.”

“That one’s worth worrying about.”

“Like I said, I don’t see it, and I don’t get why the rush all of a sudden. But if it makes you happy, Buddy boy, I’ll indulge ya for old times’ sake.”

“I appreciate it, Jay,” Bud said calmly.
And it’ll be one of the last things you ever do, you condescending prick. I fucking
make
you, with all the ideas I feed you, and this is how you talk to me? You’ll get yours
.

CARMEN SAT at a perfectly ordinary kitchen table, slurping chicken noodle soup ravenously from a green plastic bowl.
He
sat next to her, guarding her as she ate. Normally she would’ve been too self-conscious to eat this way in front of anybody. But she was too hungry to care. She remembered something she’d read in English class last semester. A story about Jews getting shipped off to concentration camps, how the Nazis purposely fed them salty soup right before packing them into sweltering cattle cars with no water. She looked up at her captor, into his cold gray eyes, and understood that the Jews would’ve drunk the soup even if they’d known about the Nazis’ diabolical plan. Hunger made you do things. So did fear.

He reached into his pocket unexpectedly, and Carmen dropped her spoon, cowering.

“Relax,” he said with a chuckle. “You think I’m gonna shoot you
now
? How stupid would
that
be? I have something I need to show you, that’s all.”

He tossed a necklace onto the table with a clatter. A silver peace sign on a tan cowhide string. Carmen recognized it immediately and started to whimper.

“Calm down, for Chrissakes, or I’m putting you back in the cage,” he said, irritated.

“You killed my sister!” Carmen shouted as her shoulders shook with small, coughing sobs.

“No, but I could have. You need to understand that. And I could kill you, too, if you make problems. But I’m sure you already know that.”

Carmen’s sobs grew to a keening wail.

“Shut up! You saw what happened to Whitney. You wanna be next?”

But that reminder only served to push her over the edge, and she began shrieking wildly. He leaned forward and clamped his hand over her mouth. Carmen bit hard, her teeth sinking into the soft flesh of his palm.

“Aagh! You little twat!” He stared at the blood seeping into the ugly red wells made by her teeth. Seeing the rage on his face, she drew a breath and started screaming again, hysterically, at the top of her lungs. He raised his fist and punched her in the face. He was stronger than he looked. The blow sent her crashing over backward. Carmen’s head hit the sharp edge of the granite countertop with a sickening thud, and she collapsed motionless to the floor.

“I feed you, and this is how you fucking repay me?” he spit at her inert form. “You go and fuck everything up? What am I supposed to do on Friday if you’re dead?”

MELANIE SCREAMED with terror as the giant SUV hurtled straight for the spot where she sat. She threw herself sideways, rolling over and over on the cold, hard pavement as fast as she could until she reached the subway entrance. The Escalade screeched to a stop mere inches from the stairs, its driver throwing it into reverse to get into position for a second go at her. Melanie leaped to her feet and bolted down the icy steps two at a time, gasping for breath and praying she wouldn’t fall. The familiar, pungent odor of the New York City subway rose to greet her like an old friend.

She reached the turnstile and swiped her MetroCard with a shaking hand. As she sprinted for the ramp to the uptown express, the presence of the clerk in the glass token booth gave her little comfort. What could he do except call the cops to come collect her dead body?

Thank God! An uptown number-four train sat waiting on the platform. Melanie bounded aboard just as the doors closed, then turned around and leaned against the glass, catching her breath, looking back at the empty platform. Just as the train pulled away, she spotted him. Bulletface, running down the ramp she’d just come from, his head swinging back and forth as he scanned the station for her. Until that very moment, she’d been cherishing the illusion that this whole ordeal was nothing more than some paranoid overreaction on her part. Well,
qué lástima
, it wasn’t. Jay Esposito had just tried to have her whacked.

IT WAS HARD TO SAY what made Melanie carry on with her plan to confront Luis Reyes about his false statement. Maybe she was in a state of shock. Maybe she was just plain stubborn. If somebody was trying to kill her for doing her job, then she’d damn well do it just to spite them. Nobody was going to stop
her
.

At the Sewards’ Park Avenue building, Melanie flashed her creds at the doorman. A minute later she was leaning on the Reyeses’ buzzer down in the basement. It was after eleven now, but a sliver of light under the door told her that she wouldn’t be waking anybody up.

“Yeah, who’s there?” Reyes called gruffly.

“Melanie Vargas, Mr. Reyes. May I come—”

He ripped the door open before she could finish her sentence, a wild look in his eyes. “
You find her
?” he asked desperately.

“No, no, nothing like that. Please, I need to speak to you.”

“Come.”

She followed him into the living room. Reyes turned to her as they sat down on the threadbare sofa, and she saw that he’d been crying.

“I can’ stand it no more,” he said. “I don’t eat or sleep since she gone. At first I waiting for her to walk in the door, but now, a coupla days gone by, and I don’ know, I got a very bad feeling.” He put his head in his hands. “Please,” he said through his fingers, “please tell me she okay. Because I don’ know how I’m gonna go on if sonthing really happen to her.”

Now, how was she supposed to confront a man in this condition? Only by reminding herself that getting the facts was key to finding Carmen.

“Mr. Reyes,” Melanie said gently, patting his shoulder, “you have to be strong. I promise you, I’m doing everything in my power to locate your daughter. But I need your help.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, straightening and wiping his eyes. “Anything I can do, I do.”

“What you can do is be completely truthful with me,” Melanie said, giving him a hard look. “I’m concerned that when you gave your statement the other night, you lied.”

Reyes didn’t even try to deny it.

“Ma’am, I very, very sorry about that. Yes, I lie to you, but I swear it wasn’t about nothing important. I wanna tell the truth, but I stuck, like they say, with a rock and a hard place.”

“It’s not
up
to you to decide what’s important in this investigation, Mr. Reyes. For all you know, the things you lied about may have a direct bearing on what happened to Carmen.”

“I never lie about sonthing with
mi hija
! Never. The only thing I do is cover for Mr. Seward, because he ask me to. What I supposed to do? I need my job!”

“Cover for him for what?”

“Please don’ tell him I tell you this, but he got a little sonthing on the side. I’m not saying is okay, but a lotta guys do that. He don’ want it in the newspapers, so he ask me be quiet about how he with his lady friend when I tell him about Whitney.”

Wait a minute now. There was more to this than she’d originally thought.

“So when you first called Mr. Seward, you actually spoke to him?” she asked, keeping her voice calm, as if this were no surprise. But, man, she was pissed.

“Yes. Maybe ten-thirty I fin’ the girls dead, then I call him and speak to him. So, okay, I lie about that part, when I say I only leave a message. I told him wha’ happen, but he say he can’ come right then, he
busy
. I know what he mean, because I seen him with his lady friend before.”

“Did he actually say he couldn’t come because he was with another woman?”

“No, he never say that. But what else, right?”

“So you’re just guessing.”

“Yeah, okay, but…” Reyes waved his hands and gave her a knowing glance, implying they were both worldly creatures who understood these things.

“How long was it before Seward showed up?”

“Like I say, maybe a coupla hours. A while.”

“Doesn’t that seem strange? You tell a man his stepdaughter and her friend are lying dead in his apartment, and he wastes two hours on some tryst?”

Reyes shrugged. “
Amor
.”

Please
. As a betrayed wife herself, Melanie felt like smacking Reyes.

“You say you’d seen him with this woman before?” she asked.

“One time she come here when Mrs. Seward away for treatment. See, I got a little sympathy, because Mrs. Seward, she drinkin’ too much all the time. Is very difficult for a man to have a drunk for a wife.”

Or maybe Charlotte Seward drank
because
James Seward cheated? Steve’s infidelity would’ve driven Melanie to drink if she hadn’t gotten her act together to leave. But Luis Reyes didn’t see things that way. It was the woman’s fault.

“By the way,” Melanie asked, “where
was
Charlotte Seward while all this was happening?”

“Okay, I not tell the truth about that either, and I’n very sorry. Mrs. Seward was pass out in her bed. I go in there and find her. I wake her up, and she run in the bathroom to throw up. I come back later and fin’ her pass out again on the bathroom floor.”

To be so wasted that your daughter dies in the next room and you don’t even know? Melanie couldn’t begin to imagine the grief and humiliation. But the bottom line was, Charlotte Seward had been at home during the events in question. She needed to be interviewed—the sooner, the better.

“This other woman. What does she look like?” Melanie asked.

“Oh, very nice. A real lady. She older, too, maybe forty, forty-fibe, blond hair, dress real expensive.”

“What’s her name?” Melanie asked.

“Patricia.”

Melanie’s jaw literally dropped. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I hear him say it to her.”

“And you’re sure they were…involved?
¿Amantes
? ”

“Oh, yes. Because that time before, she was here, like, four o’clock in the morning. I working in the basement getting the recycling ready for the Sanitation, and he sneaking her out the back door. He wink at me, so on the way back, I give him high fibe. You know, like a guy thing. He give me an extra-big tip for Christmas this year, because he know he can trust me.”

Barf. What a thing to be proud of.

“So, just to make sure I’ve got this all straight, you called James Seward around ten-thirty, right when you discovered the bodies. He said he was too busy to come home immediately, but he asked you not to call the police. Two hours went by before he showed up, at which point he called the police himself.”

“Yes.”

“Did Seward specifically ask you to lie about the missing two hours?”

Reyes avoided her eyes.

“Mr. Reyes, answer my question!
Truthfully
.”

“Yeah, okay. He never say to me, lie. He say he always appreciate how trustworthy I am. I got a lotta discretion. That kinda thing. But I know what he asking me to do.”

So she had James Seward on obstruction. It was leverage, at least.

“You not gonna tell him I say that, are you?” Reyes asked nervously. “I lose my job.”

“Mr. Reyes, has it ever occurred to you that since Mrs. Seward was at home when Carmen was abducted, she might have seen or heard something that could help find your daughter?”

Reyes opened his mouth and then closed it again. Confusion and grief chased each other across his face. He dropped his head into his hands again and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. When he finally looked back up at Melanie, though, he was resolute. “You right,” he said. “Go tell Mrs. Seward what I say and get her to talk to you. God help me if she know sonthing and I coulda find Carmencita faster.”