Inherit the Dead

2 STEPHEN L. CARTER

Perry hated Long Island. Maybe it was the traffic, maybe it was the smells, maybe it was the sense that everybody else mired in the unmoving sea of metal on the expressway was heading out to a five-million-dollar house in the Hamptons in a vehicle worth ten of the aging but faithful Datsun (which was pretty much the only thing he’d been able to salvage from the divorce). Montauk was the far end of the island, so he’d be annoyed for a while. People out that way claimed that their town had been the inspiration for Jaws, and Perry in his sour moments liked to imagine a two-ton great white emerging from the water to gobble up all the actors and investment bankers and their fawning acolytes.

He’d had a client a couple of years ago, an economist at Columbia who thought his boyfriend was cheating. They had a place in Southampton, and the boyfriend lived there full time, while the professor drove out on weekends. Perry must have braved the Long Island Expressway a dozen times over the course of a month. Passersby gawked at his ancient car and took him for common, which he certainly was. Finally, Perry concluded that the boyfriend was true as steel. But the client sent him back to take another look. Perry went along, because in those days he was what his father used to call short funds. It took him another week to figure it out. The boyfriend was clean. It was the professor who was cheating, and hoping to find evidence of a dalliance by his partner to make the breakup easier.

Clients lied. All of them, without exception. Perry pondered this most basic rule of the business as his Northstar V8 allowed him to accelerate past the shiny new Priuses and Audis of environmentally conscious millionaires. Clients lied. There were the clever ones who lied because they were proud, and the shy ones who lied because they were ashamed. There were the mothers who lied about what they’d done to their children, and the husbands who lied about what they’d done to their wives. Clients lied to protect their own guilt or somebody else’s innocence. Lots of the lies were innocuous. But a lot of them weren’t. Half the time, the job the client really wanted Perry to do was a lot grubbier than the job he had supposedly been hired for.

Like his new client, Julia Drusilla. She might not have been lying, but she certainly wasn’t telling the whole truth. Perry had felt it from the moment he walked in. She had sat there beneath that fading portrait of her father and smiled her butter-won’t-melt smile and sipped her tea and told him considerably less than half the story.

Perry didn’t know yet what she was leaving out, but he could make some educated guesses.

Take Norman, Julia’s ex-husband. Whoever heard of a missing-child case in which the mother wasn’t screaming that the whole thing was her ex’s fault? And then there was the ammo. The drinking. But all Julia had to say was that Perry should be sure to talk to him. Then there was her sad confession that she couldn’t actually remember the last time she had clapped eyes on her daughter — an event no mother was likely to forget. Or maybe it was her determination to keep the investigation away from the police. Lots of clients asked for that when the question was whether some relative had a hand in the till. But when a family member vanished, they usually hired the Perry Christos of the world to supplement, not to supplant, the official inquiry.

This was why he didn’t like missing-persons cases: the lies were almost always central to the mystery. Once you solved the lie, the mystery ceased to mystify. Some parent or spouse was always teary, but in Perry’s experience, nine times out of ten the husband or wife or child who was missing had run away voluntarily — and, most of the time, had an excellent reason for not wanting to go back. Usually the reasons involved the very person who’d hired Perry in the first place.

He wondered what Angel was running from. Julia Drusilla had spoken with relative warmth and understanding of her ex-husband, Norman. It would be interesting to learn whether those feelings were reciprocated. If Perry’s own twisted life was any indication, Norman and Julia fought a lot, especially about Angel. He was even willing to bet that Norman saw less of his daughter than he would like. Perry had never met Norman Loki, but he already sympathized with him.

The expressway ended abruptly when one reached the rich part of the island, as though the denizens of the Hamptons and points east wanted to make it as hard as possible to find their weekend McMansions. In summer, the expressway would be clogged all the way to the terminus; although it was winter, and traffic light, Perry exited early by habit and was on Route 27, the Sunrise Highway, which resembled main roads in most towns in America, except that out here the luxury-car dealerships seemed to outnumber the convenience stores. But he’d miscalculated — traffic was nearly at a standstill. Directly ahead of him was a minivan with teenagers hanging out the windows, yelling at a fancier car full of equally drunk youngsters in the next lane. The cop in him knew that before the day was out somebody was going to get hurt. Perry reminded himself, with difficulty, that he was no longer on the force, and that drunk, spoiled, rich kids were no longer his problem.

His ex-wife used to accuse him of never letting his guard down, of always looking at the world with cynical cop’s eyes. He would answer, stupidly but accurately, that the world had a way of living down to a cynical cop’s expectations of it. On vacation Noreen would beg him to turn off his suspicion of everyone they passed for a week or at least a day, and Perry tried. Unfortunately, the hard truth was that in those days he trusted nobody but his family — and, since the divorce, nobody.

Now those cop’s eyes were active again, counting off the landmarks according to their role in his working life as a PI since leaving the force: here the staid golf club where he had teased out the key clue in the Thursby investigation; there the lively garden shop where the serial killer Derace McDonald, under another name, had lived his fugitive existence. That one, he reminded himself with a shudder, had begun as a missing-persons case, too. So many of them did: it was as though America had become a vast network of lonely unhappy people so desperately seeking escape into their pasts that they were willing to spend good money to get there.

As far as Perry was concerned, it was a missing-persons case that had got him booted from the police force — although that wasn’t the way People of the State of New York v. Bayer was filed. If you looked it up, Bayer had nothing to do with any missing person. It was a simple drug-possession bust, and Perry was involved because whenever his lieutenant was down on him, he wound up loaned to Narcotics, with explicit if unspoken instructions that he be assigned to forced-entry cases, preferably no later than second through the door.

And his lieutenant had been down on him a lot.

The case was in all the papers. Theo Bayer was a political firebrand and the pastor of one of the biggest churches in Harlem. Everybody running for office in Manhattan made the pilgrimage to his town house on 145th Street, until the day the Narcotics boys broke down the basement door and found enough money and drugs to put him away for twenty years. Perry wouldn’t have given the case two thoughts had he not gone to dinner at the home of his uncle Jackie, by then retired from the force, who had trained the man who captained the 30th Precinct. Uncle Jackie told him that his protégé found the whole drug bust very strange. There was no narcotics activity to speak of around 145th Street, and he had never heard of a dealer of such prominence keeping a stash in his house. The drugs didn’t make any sense.

Perry had been in on the bust. He assured Jackie that everything was clean and aboveboard. But he wondered. Sure, Bayer was already in plea negotiations. Sure, the brass had assured the press that one of the biggest dealers in Harlem had gone down. Still. Two of the Narcotics detectives on the scene, including the one whose informants had fingered the pastor, were men Perry had long suspected of being on the take. They made a nice side income by arresting dealers and stealing part of the stash. Not too much — always within a counting error, usually less than a tenth. So if the experts said the street value of the haul was a quarter of a million, they might bleed off ten or fifteen thousand — nothing that would ever be missed. Perry had gone to his uncle with the tale, and Jackie had laughed and told him boys will be boys. Not that he approved, the former Captain Christo hastily added. But it’s a little bit like the way the factories recycle their pollution to make electricity.

Said Uncle Jackie.

But Perry couldn’t leave the case alone. He’d been in plenty of drug dens, and the preacher’s well-kept town house had none of the telltale signs: no reinforced interior doors, no hollowed-out mattresses, no sweet sickly smell from the drains. When a public man went down, his fans always denied his guilt, but this time the beseeching had the ring of truth. Bayer didn’t live above his income. He didn’t drive a fancy car. If he was dealing, nobody knew what he was doing with the money. The more time Perry spent going over the records, the more certain he was that the preacher was being framed. But he couldn’t see what the crooked cops would have to gain, and he didn’t know why Bayer wasn’t protesting his innocence from the rooftops. On the contrary: according to what Perry heard, Bayer was in plea negotiations.

And so Perry, never one to turn away from risk, took what the lawyers called an inevitable step: he went to visit the pastor in jail.

As soon as they were alone, the first thing Bayer said was that there was no need to check on him. He was keeping his side of the deal. He would plead guilty “as promised.” And when Perry asked what deal he was talking about, Bayer said he should tell the others not to worry. Then he sent for the guard and went back to his cell.

It took Perry a week and a half, mostly on his own time, to put the clues together. One informant after another had told detectives that a Harlem preacher was moving significant weight. Nobody knew the name of the pastor, but two or three said they’d heard the church was up around 160th Street.

Bayer’s church was on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard near 132nd.

And there was something else. A missing-persons report. A six-year-old black girl had vanished on her way home from school two days before the raid. Looking closer, knocking on doors, Perry discovered what nobody else seemed to know: the missing girl was Bayer’s niece.

So he went to his lieutenant to report that things might not be what they seemed, that it looked as if Bayer was taking the rap for somebody else. Somewhere there was another Harlem preacher who was really dealing, and who had arranged with a couple of the Narcotics boys for Bayer to take the fall. His lieutenant told him to sit tight and give him a chance to look into it. The next day Bayer’s lawyer was on television, reporting that one of the detectives on the raid had been to visit his client in lockup, slapping him around and demanding a bribe.

The press loved it: “Rogue Cop Beats Preacher!” The way the newspapers had it figured, Perry was the bad cop, trying to cover his ass by getting Bayer to inculpate the good ones. That the story made no sense once you thought about it didn’t matter to the guardians of public integrity. The brass preferred to avoid a hearing, and, on the advice of counsel but especially of his wife, so did Perry. Uncle Jackie still had a string or two to pull. Noreen pleaded with her husband to accept the offer of resignation that the department put on the table. They were seated in the television nook of their small house in Flushing. Alex Trebek was apologizing to a contestant whose points were coming off the board because he had mispronounced Bouvier.

I didn’t do anything wrong, Perry had said to the one person in the world who might listen. They knew what I’d been looking into, and they set me up.

So what?

Perry blinked. This was the last response he had expected. He tried to keep his voice gentle, an unnatural act that he committed only in the presence of those he loved. I’m a cop. My uncles were both cops. It’s the family business. I’m good at it. I care about the force. I have to stay and fight so I can find out who really took the money.

Noreen’s face was locked against his entreaties. If you stay and fight, there’s a good chance you’ll lose, she had said.

I know that. I’ve given this a lot of thought, Norrie. I have friends on the force. We’ll get the evidence.

She shifted ground. He had rarely known her to be so adamant. Have you given any thought to your family? To Nicky?

That’s who I’m doing it for, honey. I don’t want her to be ashamed of her father.

She’s too young to understand, Perry. If you fight this — if there’s a hearing — all she’ll understand is that every morning when she goes to school, the other kids will ask her why her dad was on the news last night. Do you really want to put her through that?

Perry was stunned. Not by the argument, although his wife had a point. What broke his determination — and, let’s be frank, his courage — was the look in Noreen’s beautiful dark eyes.

His wife didn’t believe him, either.

Perry had hit the Hamptons at last, but the traffic had not eased, an accident or roadwork, or both. Maybe this was the reason Julia Drusilla hardly ever saw her daughter: driving from Manhattan to the eastern-most tip of Long Island could take an eternity, and Julia was no spring chicken.

Passing an ice-cream parlor with a brace of youngsters outside, he thought again of his own precious Nicky. He knew he had no business criticizing Julia Drusilla; he was angry, really, at himself. Nicky was fifteen, and it was his own fault that he hardly ever saw her. True, he could blame her mother, and like a lot of divorced fathers, he often did. But Perry himself was the one who kept missing those rare weekends because of some case. Besides, even if Noreen used their daughter as a pawn, Perry was the one who let her get away with it. For a while their lawyers had argued, but that had been starting to cost serious money. At some point, he had stopped fighting and given in, letting Noreen control his access to his own flesh and blood.

Had Julia let her husband pull something similar?

Because for all that Perry might have been reviewing his own life in the front of his mind, out back, as he liked to think of it, the case itself had never quite left. Forget the parallels. Forget the divorce angle. Line up the facts. The fortune comes to light, and Angel, the heiress, disappears. Julia seems pretty sure that her daughter was unaware of the money, so it’s not likely that she’s gone into seclusion at the local convent to pray for guidance about how to spend it. Three choices: Angel hasn’t vanished at all and is shacked up with a boyfriend and ignoring her mother’s calls; she vanished voluntarily, for a reason having nothing to do with the money; or she vanished involuntarily, in which case a crime has been committed.

Uncle Jackie used to say at such moments that all you need is a three-sided coin.

If Angel had gone off on her own, then Perry would find her and tell her that her mother needed to see her urgently but not why. Let the girl make up her own mind what to do. If she was with her boyfriend, or her girlfriend, same deal. But if somebody disappeared her — say, to prevent her from signing the papers — well, then, he should turn the case over.

In theory.

A cacophony of horns up ahead shook him from his reverie, the obvious reason for all the traffic. Some fool in a delivery truck had tried to beat the light and wound up in the intersection, and now nothing could move in any direction. While others honked and cursed, Perry, who always had a backup plan, turned right at what looked to others like a dead end, cut through a gas station, and headed down to Hill Street, where he turned left. He would rejoin Route 27 half a mile or so up the road, the jammed intersection behind him.

The traffic snarl brought to mind a casual conversation with that Columbia economist who had hired him to investigate his boyfriend. Perry had remarked that they should widen the expressway. The professor had laughed and told him that widening roads made congestion worse: “Add more lanes and you lower the effective cost of driving. If you make a resource cheaper to consume, people take more of it, not less. The way to cut congestion, narrow the road, or add tolls. Lots of tolls. You have to make it harder, not easier. Then people will use it less.”

Perry supposed that the same wisdom applied to families, too. If you want to see less of your daughter, let the other parent raise her. There, at least, Perry and Julia were in the same boat.

Passing through Southampton, he did his best to ignore the past but couldn’t. It had been almost two years since his last trip to the Hamptons, and he had never expected to come back. He was half tempted to head south and join the brave tourists who, even in winter, dawdled along Meadow Lane gawking at the homes of the superrich. If you hit the water and turned right, you headed for even bigger mansions. If you turned left onto Dune Road, you’d pass the weather-beaten St. Andrew’s Dune Church, and beyond the church was some of the most expensive beachfront in the country. The beach was where, on a moonless winter night two years ago, he had cornered mad Derace McDonald; and although Perry had drawn his gun many times, that was the only time in his life he’d fired at another human being.

Perry rubbed at a sudden pain in his side and drove straight ahead. The events of that night were still a blur, and he saw no reason to jog the memory.

That was the other reason he hated Long Island, at least the eastern end where the rich people lived. The last time he was in the Hamptons was the last time he got shot.