A Cool Breeze on the Underground Read online

  Because sometimes it’s just too late, folks. The streets take the child you know and turn that child into someone you don’t even recognize. Neal flashed on the Halperin kid, on that goofy look he had on his face all the time, even after …

  “May I see Allie’s room now, please?” he asked.

  Liz and lombardi took him there.

  It looked like a hotel room: elegant, sleek, comfortable but nobody lived there. No pictures, souvenirs, no posters of rock stars on the wall.

  Walk-in closet, private bath, of course. Bay window, view of the ocean. “This is going to take a while,” Neal said.

  “If we’re not in the way …” Liz answered.

  Neal gestured to the bed. Liz and Lombardi sat down and put their hands in their laps.

  Neal searched the room. It was a relief to be doing something practical, something quiet, something he was good at. He went through the drawers and the closets carefully, slowly.

  “Are you in the habit of searching Allie’s room, Mrs. Chase?”

  “Wouldn’t you be, Mr. Carey?”

  “But you haven’t removed anything.”

  “No.”

  Neal opened the top drawer of Allie’s dresser and ran his hand along the inside top. He felt the edge of the tape and gently pulled it off. He smelled the two joints.

  “Emergency stash,” he said. “Expensive stuff, too.”

  “Money is not Allie’s particular problem in life,” Liz said.

  Didn’t used to be, Mrs. C.

  Searching the contents of the drawer, Neal asked, “Did you used to take away drugs you found here?”

  Liz nodded. “We fought about it.”

  “What about the prescription stuff?”

  “Same thing, once we caught on.”

  Neal finished with the drawers and moved to the closet. Allie had a few clothes. Neal flipped through the dozen or so jackets before he found another strip of medical tape stuck to the inside lapel of a nice little denim job.

  He removed the three joints from the tape and flipped them to Lombardi. “Hawaii Fourth.”

  He didn’t find anything else until he got to the portable Sony TV. He twisted the fine-tune dial off and found the Valium that had been glued to the inside rim.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “They use the same kind of paste you used to make in kindergarten. You can eat a quart of it and you won’t get sick.”

  “I never dreamed …” Liz Chase was shaking her head.

  “You’re not a pro, Mrs. Chase.”

  Neal moved into Allie’s bathroom. The medicine cabinet alone took almost half an hour and yielded nothing very interesting. Likewise, the underside of the bathtub rim. Neal emptied the sink cabinet and crawled underneath. He found Allie’s major stash in a small plastic trash bag taped to the bottom of the sink.

  “Jackpot!” he called out.

  Liz Chase stood in the doorway. “What?”

  Neal sat on the floor, rooting through the bag. “Well, we have your uppers, and your downers, and some grass and hash, and a little coke.”

  “My god.”

  “It’s not all bad news. No needles.”

  Neal handed her the bag and smiled. “May I take a look at Allie’s car, please?”

  “It’s in the garage.”

  It had a lot of company. There were seven cars in the garage. Allie’s was a modest Datsun Z. The others were all sleek little sports jobs that Neal didn’t recognize. That wasn’t too hard, though. Neal didn’t know too many cars that weren’t on the IRT.

  “John was very interested in cars for a while,” Liz explained. “As a matter of fact, so was Allie. It gave then something they could share, I think.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby.”

  Neal started with the glove compartment, just in case there was a note in there nobody had noticed. Maybe a note that read, “I’m in such and such a place and here’s my address and phone number.” He didn’t find it. He found the usual glove compartment crap. A couple of road maps, a service manual, an open package of cherry Life Savers, lipstick, an emergency pack of cigarettes, a comb, a brush, a pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.

  He felt around between the seats for “she went that-away” clues and didn’t find any of those, either. He also didn’t find any dope of any kind, which sort of surprised him. It was dark by the time he finished.

  Neal sank back into the bathtub that came along with the guest room. He had filled it with steaming hot water to try to ease the ache in his body and his soul. The first sip of scotch spread a soothing warmth through his insides, and after a few minutes he was able to pick up his paperback copy of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and lose himself in the eighteenth century. Which was his life’s goal, anyway.

  He relished the quiet. Chase and Jimmy Cricket had headed back to Washington for one of those crucial votes. The missus was preparing herself for yet another fundraiser for an undoubtedly good cause. What had Dickens called it? “Telescopic Philanthropy”?Although Neal had to admit that given a choice between Mrs. Jellyby and Liz Chase, there was no contest. Anyway, she’d hoped that he “wouldn’t mind dining alone.” He didn’t. The cook laid on, with hopefully unintentional irony, a London broil, rice and asparagus, and followed it up with a raspberry tart. Neal washed it all down with the appropriate wine, and was about half-bagged when he hit the tub. After a chapter of Pickle, he laid the book down and thought things over.

  Allie hadn’t planned to take off. No good doper leaves a stash like that behind if she’s thought about it. No, Allie was upset when she left. She’d made the decision in a hurry, impulsively, sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning. She’d given it a little more thought in the car and taken whatever stuff she had with her. But she hadn’t gone back to the house to collect anything else, which meant she was a piss-poor druggie, or she really didn’t want to go home.

  Also, she wanted to stay gone. Most casual runaways, who are fed up with the discipline, or bored at home, or want attention, want to be found. Consciously or unconsciously, they leave clues all over the place. They also find that life out there is a lot worse than life at home, and they come back. Unless life out there is better than life at home. Or life at school, which was something he’d better look into, except he didn’t think he’d be allowed to. The Chases had simply withdrawn Allie in absentia as it were, to avoid a scandal. So forget that. But it impressed him that spoiled little Allie hadn’t reached for the plastic, or wired for money. She was gutting it out, and this was a girl who wasn’t used to gutting it out. So why?

  He fiddled the hot-water tap with his foot. He didn’t feel like sitting up to reach it and it left his hand free to fiddle with the scotch. He wished he’d taped the afternoon’s interview, because there was something back there that was bugging him, really bugging him, and it was rattling around in the dimmer corners of his mind, just out of reach.

  Neal checked his watch when he heard the knock on the bedroom door. It was a few minutes past two in the goddamn morning. He said “Come in,” anyway.

  Liz Chase shut the door behind her. Neal wondered why she was wearing black silk to sleep alone in, but that was her business. The black turned her blond hair gold. She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled her legs up underneath just as she had that afternoon, and tugged the hem of the nightgown down around her knees. Then she just sat there looking at him.

  Neal had read about this kind of thing in detective novels, but it never had happened to him. He didn’t think it was happening to him now, either, but his throat tightened up and he swallowed hard nevertheless.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is not easy for me.”

  She bit her lip and nodded her head several times, as if she was trying to make up her mind.

  “Allie has been with a number of men,” she said.

  “There are worse things, Mrs. Chase.”

  “Apparently … the Senator is one of them.”

  Whoa.

  Allie had left a note—in the car
, where she knew her mother would find it, because she knew dear old Dad wouldn’t come looking.

  It had been going on for years, since she was “old enough,” like ten, and it had started with fondling and extra-special hugs and bonus kisses. It hadn’t been all the time, just every once in a while, and she had been scared to tell. She had tried to tell Grandpa and Grandma that one time, but she couldn’t, she was so ashamed. “Please, Mom, don’t be angry, don’t hate me,” she wrote. And they had never done … you know … gone all the way, until last night and Daddy just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t stop, just wouldn’t … and she didn’t know what to do. She just couldn’t face them, just couldn’t face her mother, and so she was taking off for good.

  So let’s take another look at little Allie, who was never good enough, but good enough for Dad. Allie, who drowned the memories and numbed the feelings, and who went out looking for sex instead of love because she didn’t know the difference, and who maybe had it buried real deep in the past until Daddy took her again, except this time she was old enough that she’d never forget, and old enough to know what it meant. And you thought you knew this kid, Neal. You thought you had her pegged. You never learn, do you?

  “Where’s the note?” Neal asked when Liz was finished,

  “Is it important?”

  “It will be when I take it to the cops, and if you destroyed it, Mrs. Chase, it makes you guilty of a half dozen crimes I can think of.”

  “You’re going to the police?”

  “Soon as I get dressed. You want to come with me?”

  “My husband—”

  “Fuck him.”

  She held up for another second or so and then she lost it. Suddenly. As if she’d been stabbed in the heart and the pain had just hit her. It seemed like the beautiful face aged ten years in the seconds that she held back the tears, and then they came out in wracking sobs.

  “My baby. My poor little baby. She needs so much help. She needs me and I don’t know where she is! I have to tell her! I have to tell her!”

  “Tell her what?” Neal asked, and if she said something like “That I love her,” he was about ready to smack her in the mouth.

  “On top of everything else, what she must be thinking! I have to tell her, at least that.”

  “Tell her what, Mrs. Chase?”

  She settled herself down, he had to give her credit for that. She drew herself back from the edge of hysteria and settled down to help her daughter. She caught her breath and spoke quietly—slowly.

  “He’s not her father.”

  Whoa and double whoa.

  She had turned around while Neal put his clothes on, and she sat patiently while he poured himself a drink and tossed down half of it. If he smoked, he would have lit one up.

  “Does the Senator know that Allie isn’t his?”

  She nodded.

  “Since when?”

  “I suppose Allie was eight or nine. We had a terrible fight. I threw it at him.”

  “But you never told Allie.”

  “I’d been meaning to.”

  “Where’s the note, Mrs. Chase?”

  “In a safe-deposit box—my own.”

  Smart lady.

  “Does anyone else know about it?”

  “No.”

  “So the Senator doesn’t know that you know that—”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t said anything to him about it. If I did, I’d have to leave him, and if I left him, I wouldn’t get the help I need to find Allie, would I?”

  No, lady, you probably wouldn’t.

  “Are you going to the police?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Because you’re right, Mrs. Chase. If I take this to the cops, it’s all over. I’m off the case, the Senator is out of office, Friends loses interest, and Allie gets to read about it in the foreign edition of Newsweek and will bury herself even deeper than she already has. No winners.

  So the basic rules apply. John Chase is a wealthy member of the U.S. Senate, and he might be President someday, and he has money in the bank. So he gets to rape his stepdaughter and get away with it and also get someone like me to clean it all up. Neal Carey, Janitor to the Rich and Powerful.

  And that son of a bitch is counting on Allie’s shame to shut her up while she’s posing for “The Waltons Go to Washington” pictures, and then he’ll stick her away in some really faraway school someplace, maybe one of those Swiss jobs. And I’m going to help him do it. Because it’s better than having that kid out there thinking she’s had sex with her own father and quite possibly dying over it. And because I want to finish college one of these days.

  “There’s something else to think about, Mrs. Chase. If Allie needs drugs, and food and shelter and all that, and she doesn’t have money … she’ll do anything to get it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Allie would never do that.”

  “Yes, she would. You’re doing it. I’m doing it.” And we ain’t even haggling over the price.

  Neal lay awake for most of what was left of the night. He hadn’t had dreams about the Halperin kid for months, and he didn’t want to start again. But when he closed his eyes, he saw the kid again, and thought about the “ifs.” If they had only let the kid be what he was—an amiable, not overly bright gay teenager. If they had treated the case as more than a ground ball and sent two guys instead of just Neal. If only room service hadn’t been closed that night.

  He gave up trying to sleep around five, took a wake-up shower, said a quick goodbye to Elizabeth Chase, and asked for a ride downtown. The driver let him off at an Avis counter, Neal got lost about fifteen times before he found Scott Mackensen’s school in Connecticut.

  5

  Scott mackensen was running to lacrosse practice.

  “Coach will kill me if I’m late again,” he said to Neal Carey, who thought the boy was a little too eager to get going.

  Neal looked behind him to the beautifully tended green fields where several boys tossed the ball among them in studied insouciance.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” Neal lied.

  “That’s worth five minutes of stadium steps,” Scott answered. He was tall, muscular, clear-eyed Jack Armstrong and all that shit, but Neal saw that those clear eyes looked scared. He knew then that there was no hurry.

  “Later, maybe?” he asked.

  Scott waged a brief skirmish with his conscience. Neal had seen it a few hundred times. Duty versus self-interest. Scott was just young enough that duty had a shot at winning, and Neal didn’t want to push a quick decision. He waited.

  “There’s a coffee shop in the village—The Copper Donkey. Give me two hours.” Scott backed away as he talked.

  “You got it,” Neal said as Scott turned and ran toward the practice field.

  Maybe I should have let The Man send me to boarding school, Neal thought as he walked back to his rented car. The Barker School looked pretty nice. “Nestled in the rolling hills of northwest Connecticut,” the brochure had doubtless proclaimed, and indeed, the Berkshire foothills framed the sprawling campus.

  Neal slipped into the rented Nova, put it in drive thinking it was reverse, and smacked the front bumper into a white post placed there precisely for such ineptitude. He hated to drive and had done so only because he couldn’t screw Graham into making the trip.

  “Connecticut?” Graham had said in dismissal. “They got bees in Connecticut.”

  Neal found The Copper Donkey without major mishap, but he took ten minutes to parallel park on the narrow village street. (Twenty bucks had gotten him past that part on the driver’s test.) The village, Old Farmstead, was bona fide New England quaint. Colonial and Victorian houses, all beautifully kept, competed for the oohs and aahs of tourists. Neal didn’t ooh or aah. He had his fill of quaint from the plumbing in his building.

  The Copper Donkey catered to the private-school crowd. The boys came over from Barker, and the girls from nearby Miss
Clifton’s, which Neal thought sounded like an instant muffin mix, but which had been one of Allie’s pit stops on her race through the academic elite. He figured that even the patient folk at the Donkey wouldn’t appreciate him nursing a cup of coffee for an hour and a half, so be wandered off in search of a bookstore. He found Bookes, which surprised him by having the good sense to stock John MacDonald’s latest. He found a quaint sidewalk bench and settled down to commiserate with Travis McGee.

  He and Travis got through a quick hour with no trouble. (Well, none for Neal. Lots for Travis.) Neal went into the Donkey and got a booth at the back.

  Scott arrived almost on time. He had showered and changed, and looked fresh and even younger in a white sweater, stone-washed jeans, and brown loafers. He looked around for a moment, spotted Neal, then looked around again to see who else was there. Nobody was.

  Sitting down, he started right in. “I don’t know, maybe I should never have said anything. First Mr. Chase, then the other guy, now you. I don’t want to get involved with the police. I just got accepted to Brown.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Then I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No. Which other guy?”

  “A big guy. Kind of young. Older than you, though.”

  “Tall, heavyset, curly black hair? Pushy?”

  Scott nodded. “Real pushy.”

  I’ll kill Levine, Neal thought.

  “Do you want something?” Neal asked, gesturing at the menu.

  “I’ll have some coffee. I have an exam tomorrow.”

  Neal signaled the waitress, pointing at his own cup and Scott. She brought the coffee over quickly.

  “I just want to check a few details,” Neal said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like your whole story is bullshit.”

  Scott set his cup down. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been looking at your yearbook, Scott. Track, football, lacrosse, basketball. You say you saw Allie in Hyde Park and ‘gave chase,’ no pun intended. ‘Gave chase’? Nobody talks like that. That’s the sort of thing cops say when they lie on the witness stand.”

  “She didn’t beat me, exactly. She ran into the subway.”