“A professional who isn’t afraid of the law,” Farth explained.
“Do you have an ID, Mr. Farth?”
“Why?”
“Just so that I can say, if asked by the constabulary, that I at least checked that you were who you said you were.”
He smiled and took a wallet from his back pocket. From this he produced a Massachusetts driver’s license. Joshua Farth, DOB December 1971.
“Ten thousand dollars,” I said.
“What?”
“Ten thousand down payment for the search and another ten when I find the girl and facilitate your talk.”
“Twenty thousand dollars for a simple missing person case?”
“That’s the going price for a man not afraid of the law.”
“That’s outrageous,” he said in a tone that carried no outrage whatsoever.
Farth or Shonefeld, or whatever his name was, gave me a frown that ever so slowly turned into a smile. I doubted if this man ever had an honest expression in his life. Everything he said, every response he gave, was planned. Too bad for him his plans were scrawled in crayon.
He reached into the same pocket that held the stripper’s photograph. From this he brought out a stack of hundred-dollar bills bound together in thousand-dollar packets. He counted out ten of these and put them on the desk, returning the rest of the treasure to the all-purpose pocket.
Gathering up the cash I asked, “What else can you give me about Coco?”
“Since she’s come to New York she’s been an artist’s model, a topless dancer, a personal assistant to a painter named Fontu Belair, and once she was arrested for kiting checks. She got out on bail and disappeared.”
“So the police are looking for her,” I said.
“Maybe in their sleep. She’s been in New York nearly a year.”
“What about before then?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Did she live in Boston?”
“Possibly. The only information I have about her is since she moved to New York.”
“What about her family?”
“My client is protecting them from the complete truth about the girl. I haven’t even met them.”
“Is Coco her real name?”
“I doubt it,” Josh said. “Like I said, I don’t even know if she’s originally from Boston. One guy said that she told him she came from out west somewhere.”
“What guy?”
“A man called Buster who worked at the Private Gentleman’s Club on Thirty-ninth Street.”
It’s funny how a word can trigger a deeply felt response. Josh said “Buster” and I suddenly had the strong desire to jump across my big black desk and bust his head. Killing him would have given me great pleasure but that’s not what Hiram had posthumously hired me for. He hired me to get his 10 percent and use that to bring Lois and the kids back into his life, such as it was.
18
The meeting with Farth lasted a quarter hour more. He gave me a couple of addresses and informed me that the money I’d been given didn’t have to be reported. He gave me an address or two for witnesses and a phone number where he could be reached.
“There’s a sense of urgency on behalf of the girl’s parents,” he said after rising to leave. “My client would like to limit their friends’ pain and so the sooner you find Coco the better.”
I walked Josh Farth down the hall, through the hole, and out the front door. I didn’t like him and he, I believed, could have easily ended my life without remembering my name in the morning.
After he was gone I levered the heavy door back into place.
“What did you think of Mr. Farth?” I asked Mardi. I’d learned over time that her insight on human nature was at least as keen as my own.
“I don’t know,” she said, considering. “He’s kinda like a ghoul — there in his body but not in his eyes.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on with Twill?”
“You know Twill,” she said, once again staring me in the eye. “He’s always doing something he shouldn’t. When I was in the tenth grade I stayed away from him because everybody said he was one of the bad kids.”
“And what is my bad child doing today?”
“You’ll have to ask him, sir. He’s my best friend and I won’t tell his stories.”
She was right of course. I looked away because her eyes had gained the power of a woman since she admitted putting her stepfather in his place.
“You should go home,” I told her.
“You’re firing me?”
“No. No, I’m trying to protect you. I won’t have you sitting behind a door that might fall in at any moment when there’s a good chance that the real bad guys might return.” I handed her the black envelope from my outbox and the ten thousand Farth had given me. “Put this in the safe and stay home until I call for you to come back.”
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
Before I could think up some wise-assed retort the buzzer sounded.
Bells and buzzers had begun to bother me. They seemed like evil portents insinuating themselves between me and my loved ones.
“It’s Mr. Domini and some other men,” she said.
I did my exercise with the front door, revealing a crew of six.
Westley Domini was a short Italian man, though not as short as I. He had white hair and skin as close to white as it could get. He was my Mr. Fixit and a former member of one of the more powerful New Jersey mobs. He’d done some bad things in his life but then met a woman named, of all things, Ginger and decided to leave the mob business to do the thing he loved most, which was, like his immigrant grandfather, working with his hands.
This decision brought him to my office. He’d heard that I’d gone straight and wanted, for lack of a better term, a blueprint for success. We talked and drank and drank and talked for fifty hours. At the end of the session Westley had promised to work for me whenever I needed it.
For my part, I rarely called on him.
“Looks like they took your fancy door off with a firecracker” was the first thing Westley said.
“Yeah. Can you fix me?”
“Quintez, Li,” he said to two of his crew. “Let’s start diggin’ this wall out.”
Domini had a multiracial crew culled from New York. I had convinced him that he had to break daily ties to his old friends in Jersey.
“How long?” I asked the reformed pimp and murderer.
“By nine tonight,” he said. “We’ll get to your back-office door too.”
“Some guys from Seko Security will be here along the way,” I said. “Let ’em do what they need to do.”
Back at my desk I called Zephyra Ximenez, my Telephonic and Computer Personal Assistant (TCPA). I rarely saw this pillar of my information jungle; if we met face-to-face two times in a year that was a lot. Most of our work was over the phone or via the Internet. It’s not that I didn’t want to see the Dominican/Moroccan beauty from Queens. She had skin the color of polished onyx and poise that would have put Princess Grace to shame. But Zephyra plied her trade for her many clients by wire, satellite, and microwave beams. She eschewed office work. I couldn’t blame her.
“Hello, Mr. McGill,” she said, answering on the eighth ring. She had my number and therefore my name.
“Hey, Z, how’s it goin’?” I could hear the Domini crew banging from down the hall.
“All right I guess,” she said.
“Problems?”
“A little bit.”
“We’ll get back to that in a minute,” I promised. “First I need you to do some research for me.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“There’s supposed to be a law firm in Frisco called Briscoe/Thyme. I think the last name is spelled like the Simon and Garfunkel song but it could be temporal.” I liked talking to Zephyra because she knew all the words in five or six dictionaries. “I can’t find ’em so I thought you could look.”