11
GTwo Hundred + Composure = Child
“Gee two hundred?” Angie said.
“Two hundred grand,” Broussard said quietly.
“Where’d you find that note?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder at the house. “Curled up tight and stuck in the waistband of Kimmie’s lacy Underalls. An attention grabber, I think.”
We stood in the backyard.
“It’s here,” Angie said, and pointed at a small mound by a dry and withered elm tree. The dirt was freshly turned there, the mound the only ridge in a plot of land that was otherwise as flat as a nickel.
“I believe you, Miss Gennaro,” Broussard said. “So now what do we do?”
“Dig it up,” I said.
“And impound it and make it public knowledge,” Poole said. “Tie it, through the press, to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”
I looked around at the dead grass, the burgundy leaves curled atop the blades. “No one’s touched this place in a while.”
Poole nodded. “Your conclusion?”
“If it is buried there”—I pointed at the mound—“then Wee David kept it to himself even though they tortured Kimmie to death in front of him.”
“No one ever accused Wee Dave of being a candidate for the Peace Corps,” Broussard said.
Poole walked over to the tree, placed a foot on either side of the mound, stared down at it.
Inside the house, Helene sat in the living room, fifteen feet from two bloating corpses, and watched TV. Springer had given way to Geraldo or Sally or some other ringmaster sounding the cowbell for the latest cavalcade of carnival freaks. The public “therapy” of confession, the continued watering down of the meaning of the word “trauma,” a steady stream of morons shouting at the void from a raised dais.
Helene didn’t seem to mind. She only complained about the smell, asked if we could open a window. Nobody had a good enough reason why we couldn’t, and once we did, we left her there, her face bathed in flickers of silver light.
“So we’re out of this,” Angie said, a note of quiet, sad surprise in her voice, a sudden confronting of the anticlimax that comes when a case ends abruptly.
I thought about it. It was a kidnapping now, complete with a ransom note and logical suspects with a motive. The FBI would take over, and we could follow the case through the news like every other couch potato in the state, wait for Helene to show up on Springer Time with other parents who’d misplaced their kids.
I held out my hand to Broussard. “Angie’s right. It was nice working with you.”
Broussard shook the hand and nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at Poole.
Poole toed the small ridge of dirt with his shoe, his eyes on Angie.
“We are out of this,” Angie said to him, “aren’t we?”
Poole held her gaze for a bit, then looked back at the tiny mound.
No one spoke for a couple of minutes. I knew we should go. Angie knew we should go. Yet we stayed, planted, it seemed, in that tiny yard with the dead elm.
I turned my head toward the ugly house behind us, could see Wee David’s head from here, the top of the chair he’d been bound to. Had he been aware of the feel of his bare shoulder blades against the cheap wicker backing of the chair? Had that been the last sensation he’d acknowledged before the buckshot opened up his chest cavity as if the bone and flesh were made of tissue paper? Or was it the sensation of the blood draining to his bound wrists, the fingers turning blue and numb?
The people who’d entered this house that last day or night of his life had known they’d kill Kimmie and Wee David. That was a professional execution back in that kitchen. Kimmie’s throat had been sliced as a last-ditch effort to get Wee David to talk, but she’d also been killed with a knife, out of prudence.
Neighbors will almost always attribute one gunshot to something else—a car backfiring, maybe, or, in the case of a shotgun blast, an engine blowing or a china cabinet falling to the floor. Particularly when the sound may have come from the home of drug dealers or users, people who are known by their neighbors to make odd sounds at all times of night.
No one wants to think they actually heard a gunshot, were actually witness—if only aurally—to a murder.
So the killers had killed Kimmie quickly and silently, probably without warning. But Wee David—they’d been pointing that shotgun at him for a while. They’d wanted him to see the curl of the finger against the trigger, hear the hammer hit the shell, the explosive click of ignition.
And these were the people who held Amanda McCready.
“You want to trade the two hundred thousand for Amanda,” Angie said.
There it was. What I’d known for the last five minutes. What Poole and Broussard were unwilling to put into words. A cataclysmic breach of police protocol.
Poole studied the trunk of the dead tree. Broussard lifted a red leaf off the green grass with the toe of his shoe.
“Right?” Angie said.
Poole sighed. “I’d prefer that the kidnappers not open a suitcase full of newspaper or marked money and kill the child before we get to them.”
“That’s happened to you before?” Angie said.
“It’s happened to cases I’ve turned over to the FBI,” Poole said. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, Miss Gennaro. Kidnapping is federal.”
“We go federal,” Broussard said, “the money goes into an evidence locker, and the Feds do the negotiating, get a chance to show how clever they are.”
Angie looked out at the tiny yard, the dying violet petals growing through the chain-link fence from the other side. “You two want to negotiate with the kidnappers without the Feds.”
Poole dug his hands into his pockets. “I’ve found too many dead children in closets, Miss Gennaro.”
She looked at Broussard. “You?”
He smiled. “I hate Feds.”
I said, “This goes bad, you’ll lose your pensions, guys. Maybe worse.”
On the other side of the yard, a man hung a throw rug out his third-story window and started beating it with a hockey stick that was missing the blade. The dust rose in angry, ephemeral clouds, and the man kept whacking without seeming to notice us.
Poole lowered himself to his haunches, picked at a blade of grass by the mound. “You remember the Jeannie Minnelli case? Couple years back?”
Angie and I shrugged. It was sad how many horrible things you forgot.
“Nine-year-old girl,” Broussard said. “Disappeared riding her bike in Somerville.”
I nodded. It was coming back.
“We found her, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” Poole snapped the blade of grass between his fingers at both ends. “In a barrel. Soaked in cement. The cement hadn’t hardened yet because the geniuses who killed her had used the wrong ratio of water to cement in the mix.” He slapped his hands together, to clear them of dust or pollen or just because. “We found a nine-year-old’s corpse floating in a barrel of watery cement.” He stood. “Sound pleasant?”
I looked over at Broussard. The memory had blanched his face, and several tremors spilled down his arms until he put his hands in his pockets, tightened his elbows against the sides of his torso.
“No,” I said, “but if this goes wrong, you’ll—”
“What?” Poole said. “Lose my benefits? I’m retiring soon, Mr. Kenzie. You ever see what the policemen’s union can do to someone trying to take away the retirement money of a decorated officer with thirty years in?” Poole pointed a finger at us, wagged it. “It’s like watching starving dogs go after meat hung on a man’s balls. Not pretty.”
Angie chuckled. “You’re something else, Poole.”
He touched her shoulder. “I’m a broken-down old man with three ex-wives, Miss Gennaro. I’m nothing. But I’d like to go out my last case a winner. With luck, take down Chris Mullen and bury Cheese Olamon deeper in jail while I’m at it.”
Angie glanced at his hand, then up into his face. “And
if you blow it?”
“Then I drink myself to death.” Poole removed the hand and ran it through the hard stubble on his head. “Cheap vodka. The best I can do on a cop’s pension. Sound okay to you?”
Angie smiled. “Sounds fine, Poole. Sounds fine.”
Poole glanced over his shoulder at the guy whacking his throw rug, then back at us. “Mr. Kenzie, did you notice that gardening spade on the porch?”
I nodded.
Poole smiled.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
I went back through the house and got the spade. As I came back through the living room, Helene said, “We outa here soon?”
“Pretty soon.”
She looked at the spade and the plastic gloves on my hands. “You find the money?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
She nodded, looked back at the TV.
I started walking again, and her voice stopped me at the doorway to the kitchen.
“Mr. Kenzie?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes sparkled in the glow from the TV screen in such a way they reminded me of the cats’. “They wouldn’t hurt her. Would they?”
“You mean Chris Mullen and the rest of Cheese Olamon’s crew?”
She nodded.
On the TV a woman told another woman to stay away from my daughter, you dyke. The audience hooted.
“Would they?” Helene’s eyes remained fixed on the TV.
“Yes,” I said.
She turned her head sharply in my direction. “No.” She shook her head, as if doing so would make her wish come true.
I should have told her I was kidding. That Amanda would be fine. That she’d be returned and things would go back to normal and Helene could drug herself with TV and booze and heroin and whatever else she used to cocoon herself from just how nasty the world could be.
But her daughter was out there, alone and terrified, handcuffed to a radiator or a bedpost, electrical tape tied around the lower half of her face so she couldn’t make any noise. Or she was dead. And part of the reason for that was Helene’s self-indulgence, her determination to act as if she could do whatever she chose and there’d be no consequence, no opposite and equal reaction.
“Helene,” I said.
She lit a cigarette, and the match head jumped around the target several times before the tobacco ignited. “What?”
“Are you getting all this finally?”
She looked to the TV, then back at me, and her eyes were moist and pink. “What?”
“Your daughter was abducted. Because of what you stole. The men who have her don’t give a shit about her. And they might not give her back.”
Two tears rolled down Helene’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her wrist.
“I know that,” she said, her attention back on the TV. “I’m not stupid.”
“Yes you are,” I said, and walked out to the backyard.
Standing in a circle around the mound, we blocked it from the view of any neighboring row houses. Broussard pushed the spade into the dirt and overturned it several times before we saw the wrinkled top of a green plastic bag appear.
Broussard dug a little more, and then Poole looked around and bent over, pulled at the bag, and wrenched it free from the hole.
They hadn’t even tied the top of the bag, just twisted it several times, and Poole allowed it to revolve in his hand, the green plastic crinkling as the tight lines spread apart at the neck and the bag grew wider. Poole dropped it to the ground and the top of the bag opened up.
A pile of loose bills greeted us, mostly hundreds and fifties, old and soft.
“That’s a lot of money,” Angie said.
Poole shook his head. “That, Miss Gennaro, is Amanda McCready.”
Before Poole and Broussard called in the forensics team and medical examiner, we shut off the TV in the living room and ran it down for Helene.
“You’ll trade the money for Amanda,” she said.
Poole nodded.
“And she’ll be alive.”
“That’s the hope.”
“And I have to do what again?”
Broussard lowered himself to his haunches in front of her. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss McCready. You just have to make a choice right now. Us four here”—he waved his hand at the rest of us—“happen to think this might be the right approach. But if my bosses find out I plan to do it this way, I’ll get suspended or fired. You understand?”
She half nodded. “If you tell people, they’ll want to arrest Chris Mullen.”
Broussard nodded. “Possibly. Or, we think, the FBI might put the capture of the kidnapper before your daughter’s safety.”
Another half nod, as if her chin kept meeting an invisible barrier on its way down.
Poole said, “Miss McCready, the bottom line is, it’s your decision. If you want us to, we’ll call this in right now, hand over the money, and let the pros handle it.”
“Other people?” She looked at Broussard.
He touched her hand. “Yes.”
“I don’t want other people. I don’t…” She stood up a bit unsteadily. “What do I have to do if we do it your way?”
“Keep quiet.” Broussard came off his haunches. “Don’t talk to the press or the police. Don’t even tell Lionel and Beatrice what’s going on.”
“Are you going to talk to Cheese?”
I said, “That’s probably our next move, yeah.”
“Mr. Olamon seems to be holding the cards at the moment,” Broussard said.
“What if you just, like, followed Chris Mullen? Maybe he’d take you to Amanda without knowing it?”
“We’ll be doing that as well,” Poole said. “But I have a feeling they’ll be expecting it. I’m sure they have Amanda well hidden.”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Who?”
“Cheese. Tell him I didn’t mean nothing bad. I just want my kid back. Tell him not to hurt her. Could you do that?” She looked at Broussard.
“Sure.”
“I’m hungry,” Helene said.
“We’ll get you some—”
She shook her head at Poole. “Not me. Not me. That’s what Amanda said.”
“What? When?”
“When I put her to bed that night. That’s the last thing she said to me: ‘Mommy, I’m hungry.’” Helene smiled, but her eyes filled. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. You’ll eat in the morning.’”
No one said anything. We waited to see if she’d crumble.
“I mean, they’d have fed her, right?” She held the smile as tears rolled down her face. “She’s not still hungry, is she?” She looked at me. “Is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
12
Cheese Olamon was a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d somehow arrived at the misconception that he was black.
Though his flesh jiggled when he walked and his fashion sense ran toward the fleece or thick cotton sweats favored by overweight men everywhere, it would have been a large error to mistake Cheese for a jolly fat guy or confuse his bulk with a lack of speed.
Cheese smiled a lot, and there was a very real joy that seemed to overtake him in the presence of some people. And for all the wincing that his dated, pseudo Shaft-speak could induce in people, there was something strangely endearing and infectious about it. You’d find yourself listening to him talk and you’d wonder if his adoption of a slang very few people—black or white—had ever truly spoken this side of a Fred Williamson/Antonio Fargas opus was misplaced affection for black ghetto culture, deranged racism, or both. In any case, it could be damn catchy.
But I was also familiar with the Cheese who’d glanced at a guy in a bar one night with such self-possessed malevolence you knew the guy’s life expectancy had just dropped to about a minute and a half. I knew the Cheese who employed girls so thin and skagged out they could disappear by ducking behind a baseball bat, took rolls of bills from th
em as they leaned into his car, patted their bony asses, and sent them back to work.
And all the rounds he bought at the bar, all the fins and sawbucks he pressed into the flesh of broken rummies and then drove them to get Chinese with it, all the turkeys he handed out to the neighborhood poor at Christmas couldn’t erase the junkies who’d died in hallways with spikes still sticking out of their arms; the young women who turned into craven hags seemingly overnight, gums bleeding, begging in the subways for money to spend on AZT treatments; the names he’d personally edited from next year’s phone books.
A freak of both nature and nurture, Cheese had been small and sickly through most of grade school; his rib cage had shone through his cheap white shirt like an old man’s fingers; he sometimes had coughing fits so violent he’d vomit. He rarely spoke. He had no friends that I remember, and while most of us ate lunch from Adam-12 and Barbie lunch boxes, Cheese carried his in a brown paper bag that he carefully folded after he was done and took home to use again.
Both parents walked him up to the schoolyard gate every morning for the first few years. They’d speak to him in a foreign tongue, and their brusque voices carried into the schoolyard as they fussed with their son’s hair or scarf, fiddled with the buttons on his heavy peasant’s coat, before setting him free. They’d walk back down the avenue—giants, both of them—Mr. Olamon wearing a satin fedora at least fifteen years out of fashion with a weathered orange feather in the band, his head cocked slightly, as if he expected taunts or trash to be hurled down on him and his wife from second-story porches. Cheese would watch them until they were out of sight, wincing if his mother paused to pull a sagging sock back up over her thick ankle.
For whatever reason, the memories I have of Cheese and his parents seem trapped in the saber-blade sunlight of early winter: snapshots of an ugly little boy at the edge of a schoolyard pocked with half-frozen puddles watching his gigantic parents stoop their shoulders and walk under shivering black trees.