“You get her name? You run her?”
“I ran the name she had on the library card in her purse. Ginny Wallace. Not on file. Once I called her Ginny and she looked at me, like, who? Then she said, oh yeah, that’s me, right. Duh.”
“But she said super lab?” The skipper looked at Ray Tate. “You know about this? Before?”
“Hey, skip, we were working it. You told us to get out and work and we did. You thought, what? We’d come back with nothing? C’mon, keep some faith.”
Djuna Brown said, “I said super lab to her. I was just fucking with her. She went for it and said this Captain guy’s got a super lab on the go someplace.”
“She tell you about this guy, the Captain?” The skipper didn’t like talking to Djuna Brown; his nose wrinkled as if he could smell the bleach in her hair. “Anything?”
“Nope. She was throwing stuff my way to steer me off, let me get her free. She gave up a pill drop, she copped to the super lab. She’s shitless of him, I can tell you that. He’s gonna pack me to death, she said.”
The skipper mulled. He looked at the photos on his desk. “What have we got on the Phantom of the Opera here?”
Ray Tate had gone through intell reports and leaned forward. “Phil Harvey. Whacko. Cooker, seems like. Looks like he had a pot of stinky red soup bubble up on his face. Either that, or last Halloween he was the dunce bobbing for onion rings. One of the Chinese victims today said the guy that led the guys laying waste in the house looked like this.”
“Ideally, we take the super lab and the Captain, solve the fatal fire along the way. Leave the Staties with their dicks in their hands.” The skipper didn’t know where to go next. “Ugly fuck.”
Ray Tate waited then said, “So, I guess you want us to go back up there, sit on the chick’s place and scoop her up?”
“Exactly.”
“Take Harvey away if he rolls up? In case he takes us to the Captain?”
“You read my mind, Ray.”
“We getting more bodies? We got deps and Feds around and who knows what all else. This thing could grow pretty fast.”
The skipper chewed on his lips. “Let me see. You think we can take down this lab. The super lab? Get the guy behind it? Ray?”
“Well, the way to find out is we get out of here and out there. Start grabbing folks up, lay some torture on them.” He shrugged. “Basic police work.”
“Okay, okay. Go. Keep me in the loop. Continuations at the end of shift.”
Tate stood up.
“Stay a sec, Ray. Some personnel stuff we got to go over.”
When Djuna Brown was out of the room he shut the door. “Nice, pretty good, that. I almost thought you guys were real partners for a minute. If this thing begins to go on its own, we’ll shove her over the side and bring in someone new for you, someone reliable.”
“Naw, skip. Leave her in. She’s got the only lead so far. She’s shaky, anyway.” He made a smirk. “I think she’s gonna drop before this thing is over.”
“No shit?”
“Well, it’s just the first day but I have to tell you: she’s on the edge.”
“Beautiful, beautiful. If we drop her and get the lab, and get this Captain Cook guy, I think, Ray, with this interest from the Swamp, you just might get your own kingdom of cops to terrorize. No promises but I’ll go the distance for you.”
“Can’t ask for more than that, skip.”
* * *
Djuna Brown worked the phones, filling pages of a legal pad with notes. Ray Tate sat across from her at his desk and watched her. Her fingernails were bitten back to the quick and she dug them into her bleached head, scratching. He’d done nothing except let her drive him around and keep the branded Chinamen busy while she cleaned out the girl in the wheelchair. She looked up and caught him looking. She was using a soft voice with a guy in Records, was distracted, and she had a beautiful smile until she looked over his shoulder towards the skipper’s office. Then her face changed, closed, and she looked down.
Chapter 9
The basement smelled of fresh burning flesh and old chemicals, and Phil Harvey had wanted to punch out the covered windows to get away from the smell of seared meat that wasn’t so different from his own pork when it sizzled. The stove was rocking, the electric burners glowing red in the corner. The room was sweltering. Cornelius Cook sweated.
The wreckers had found wads of money stashed throughout the first floor of the rooming house. Cornelius Cook told them to take it. The men had been whooping plunderers earning a square day’s pay until the Captain heated up the branding iron on the red coils and went to work on the Chinamen and the girl. One, the gym owner, had turned away and stared at Phil Harvey when the Captain had taken the double C brand to the girl’s breasts.
Phil Harvey said nothing when the Captain told him to round up the bottles of chicklets. He kept his teeth pressed together against the taste of the air. The Captain took baggies of double C tablets, meticulously ground them up, and washed the powder down the sink. Satisfied, he’d then gone to the stove, muttering. The double C branding iron was red. He spit saliva on the Cs and smiled when it danced off, was steam before it could hit the floor. He pretended to putt.
“We’re outta here, Harv,” the gym owner said, taking Harvey aside. “You need something else, just call. But this guy? No.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the Captain who, with a slow, fat dance, made his way to the Chinese guys and the girl. When the brand hit the girl’s breast and she screamed the gym owner had looked at Harv for a few seconds, absolutely neutral, which to Harv was the most diminishing of raw looks. The three men clattered up the stairs and didn’t look back.
Harv went out and sat on the porch, wrapped in his black sunglasses and leather coat. The chicklets were in garbage bags beside him on the top step. For a long time faint screams came from the leaks around the cellar windows. Once, Harv thought he heard laughing and loud conversation.
Harv had found his limit. When Captain Cook had manipulated him into taking Agatha for a ride to the badlands he’d felt his first spark of change. He had somewhere to go now. There was a possibility of change, of a different life. He’d already made a couple of moves in anticipation, but this, in the basement, was an afterburner that torqued him. On every level this, what was going on in the basement, was wrong. Phil Harvey had once had to take a hammer and begin breaking a guy’s bones from the toes up, but that was to find a stash. Once he had the location he stopped swinging the hammer, even bundling the guy into a car and dumping him a block from St. Francis Heart. That was the game. Even when you had to take someone out, you just did it as a piece of business. Spending an hour terrorizing and tuning a guy who was going to be dead before the day was out didn’t make sense in any way to a normal person.
He knew to the nickel how much he had stashed. He knew how much money he had out on the street with degenerate gamblers and inept small businessmen who tried to keep bistros and boutiques afloat in swanky Stonetown. He had almost enough money and he had the vaguest of dreams, of direction. He’d planned to spend another year, max, with the Captain, then strike out. But the keening thin noises from the basement window got him thinking that a year was a long time.
It was that first step that eluded him, he thought, but a shower wouldn’t hurt.
* * *
At Agatha Burns’s apartment building Phil Harvey scouted out the area and spotted the red Intrepid right away. A beatnik looking guy and a black woman with a wild frizz of blond hair that was almost white. He parked the Camaro with a view and waited for the woman’s head to disappear