Standing with her back to the whirl of activity, stripping off her gloves and then pulling off her long woolen scarf, Penny noticed that the door of her tall, narrow, metal locker was dented at the bottom and bent out slightly along one edge, as if someone had been prying at it. On closer inspection, she saw the combination lock was broken, too.
Frowning, she opened the door—and jumped back in surprise as an avalanche of paper spilled out at her feet. She had left the contents of her locker in a neat, orderly arrangement. Now, everything was jumbled together in one big mess. Worse than that, every one of her books had been torn apart, the pages ripped free of the bindings; some pages were shredded, too, and some were crumpled. Her yellow, lined tablet had been reduced to a pile of confetti. Her pencils had been broken into small pieces.
Her pocket calculator was smashed.
Several other kids were near enough to see what had tumbled out of her locker. The sight of all that destruction startled and silenced them.
Numb, Penny crouched, reached into the lower section of the locker, pulled out some of the rubbish, until she uncovered her clarinet case. She hadn’t taken the instrument home last night because she’d had a long report to write and hadn’t had time to practice. The latches on the black case were busted.
She was afraid to look inside.
Sally Wrather, Penny’s best friend, stooped beside her. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“Of course not. I... I’m afraid my clarinet’s broken.”
“Who’d do something like that? That’s downright mean.”
Chris Howe, a sixth-grade boy who was always clowning around and who could, at times, be childish and obnoxious and utterly impossible—but who could also be cute because he looked a little like Scott Baio —crouched next to Penny. He didn’t seem to be aware that something was wrong. He said, “Jeez, Dawson, I never knew you were such a slob.”
Sally said, “She didn’t-”
But Chris said, “I’ll bet you got a family of big, grody cockroaches in there, Dawson.”
And Sally said, “Oh, blow it out your ears, Chris.”
He gaped at her in surprise because Sally was a petite, almost fragile-looking redhead who was usually very soft-spoken. When it came to standing up for her friends, however, Sally could be a tiger. Chris blinked at her and said, “Huh? What did you say?”
“Go stick your head in the toilet and flush twice,” Sally said. “We don’t need your stupid jokes. Somebody trashed Penny’s locker. It isn’t funny.”
Chris looked at the rubble more closely. “Oh. Hey, I didn’t realize. Sorry, Penny.”
Reluctantly, Penny opened the damaged clarinet case. The silver keys had been snapped off. The instrument had also been broken in two.
Sally put a hand on Penny’s shoulder.
“Who did it?” Chris asked.
“We don’t know,” Sally said.
Penny stared at the clarinet, wanting to cry, not because it was broken (although that was bad enough), but because she wondered if someone had smashed it as a way of telling her she wasn’t wanted here.
At Wellton School, she and Davey were the only kids who could boast a policeman for a father. The other children were the offspring of attorneys, doctors, businessmen, dentists, stockbrokers, and advertising executives. Having absorbed certain snobbish attitudes from their parents, there were those in the student body who thought a cop’s kids didn’t really belong at an expensive private school like Wellton. Fortunately, there weren’t many of that kind. Most of the kids didn’t care what Jack Dawson did for a living, and there were even a few who thought it was special and exciting and better to be a cop’s kid than to have a banker or an accountant for a father.
By now, everyone in the cloakroom realized that something big had happened, and everyone had fallen silent.
Penny stood, turned, and surveyed them.
Had one of the snobs trashed her locker?
She spotted two of the worst offenders—a pair of sixth-grade girls, Sissy Johansen and Cara Wallace—and suddenly she wanted to grab hold of them, shake them, scream in their faces, tell them how it was with her, make them understand.
I didn’t ask to come to your damned school. The only reason my dad can afford it is because there was my mother’s insurance money and the out-of-court settlement with the hospital that killed her. You think I wanted my mother dead just so I could come to Wellton? Cripes. Holy cripes! You think I wouldn’t give up Wellton in a snap if I could only have my mother back? You creepy, snot-eating nerds! Do you think I’m glad my mother’s dead, for God’s sake? You stupid creeps! What’s wrong with you?
But she didn’t scream at them.
She didn’t cry, either.
She swallowed the lump in her throat. She bit her lip. She kept control of herself, for she was determined not to act like a child.
After a few seconds, she was relieved she hadn’t snapped at them, for she began to realize that even Sissy and Cara, snotty as they could be sometimes, were not capable of anything as bold and as vicious as the trashing of her locker and the destruction of her clarinet. No. It hadn’t been Sissy or Cara or any of the other snobs.
But if not them... who?
Chris Howe had remained crouched in front of Penny’s locker, pawing through the debris. Now he stood up, holding a fistful of mangled pages from her textbooks. He said, “Hey, look at this. This stuff hasn’t just been torn up. A lot of it looks like it’s been chewed.”
“Chewed?” Sally Wrather said.
“See the little teeth marks?” Chris asked.
Penny saw them.
“Who would chew up a bunch of books?” Sally asked.
Teeth marks, Penny thought.
“Rats,” Chris said.
Like the punctures in Davey’s plastic baseball bat.
“Rats?” Sally said, grimacing. “Oh, yuck.”
Last night. The thing under the bed.
“Rats...”
“... rats...”
“... rats.”
The word swept around the room.
A couple of girls squealed.
Several kids slipped out of the cloakroom to tell the teachers what had happened.
Rats.
But Penny knew it hadn’t been a rat that had torn the baseball bat out of her hand. It had been... something else.
Likewise, it hadn’t been a rat that had broken her clarinet. Something else.
Something else.
But what?
5
Jack and Rebecca found Nevetski and Blaine downstairs, in Vincent Vastagliano’s study. They were going through the drawers and compartments of a Sheraton desk and a wall of beautifully crafted oak cabinets.
Roy Nevetski looked like a high school English teacher, circa 1955. White shirt. Clip-on bow tie. Gray vee-neck sweater.
By contrast, Nevetski’s partner, Carl Blaine, looked like a thug. Nevetski was on the slender side, but Blaine was stocky, barrel-chested, slab-shouldered, bull-necked. Intelligence and sensitivity seemed to glow in Roy Nevetski’s face, but Blaine appeared to be about as sensitive as a gorilla.
Judging from Nevetski’s appearance, Jack expected him to conduct a neat search, leaving no marks of his passage; likewise, he figured Blaine to be a slob, scattering debris behind, leaving dirty pawprints in his wake. In reality, it was the other way around. When Roy Nevetski finished poring over the contents of a drawer, the floor at his feet was littered with discarded papers, while Carl Blaine inspected every item with care and then returned it to its original resting place, exactly as he had found it.
“Just stay the hell out of our way,” Nevetski said irritably. “We’re going to pry into every crack and crevice in this fuckin’ joint. We aren’t leaving until we find what we’re after.” He had a surprisingly hard voice, all low notes and rough edges and jarring metallic tones, like a piece of broken machinery. “So just step back.”
?
??Actually,” Rebecca said, “now that Vastagliano’s dead, this is pretty much out of your hands.”
Jack winced at her directness and all-too-familiar coolness.
“It’s a case for Homicide now,” Rebecca said. “It’s not so much a matter for Narcotics any more.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of inter-departmental cooperation, for Christ’s sake?” Nevetski demanded.
“Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy?” Rebecca asked.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Jack said quickly, placatingly. “There’s room for all of us. Of course there is.”
Rebecca shot a malevolent look at him.
He pretended not to see it. He was very good at pretending not to see the looks she gave him. He’d had a lot of practice at it.
To Nevetski, Rebecca said, “There’s no reason to leave the place like a pig sty.”
“Vastagliano’s too dead to care,” Nevetski said.
“You’re just making it harder for Jack and me when we have to go through all this stuff ourselves.”
“Listen,” Nevetski said, “I’m in a hurry. Besides, when I run a search like this, there’s no fuckin’ reason for anyone else to double-check me. I never miss anything.”
“You’ll have to excuse Roy,” Carl Blaine said, borrowing Jack’s placating tone and gestures.
“Like hell,” Nevetski said.
“He doesn’t mean anything by it,” Blaine said.
“Like hell,” Nevetski said.
“He’s extraordinarily tense this morning,” Blaine said. In spite of his brutal face, his voice was soft, cultured, mellifluous. “Extraordinarily tense.”
“From the way he’s acting,” Rebecca said, “I thought maybe it was his time of the month.”
Nevetski glowered at her.
There’s nothing so inspiring as police camaraderie, Jack thought.
Blaine said, “It’s just that we were conducting a tight surveillance on Vastagliano when he was killed.”
“Couldn’t have been too tight,” Rebecca said.
“Happens to the best of us,” Jack said, wishing she’d shut up.
“Somehow,” Blaine said, “the killer got past us, both going in and coming out. We didn’t get a glimpse of him.”
“Doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” Nevetski said, and he slammed a desk drawer with savage force.
“We saw the Parker woman come in here around twenty past seven,” Blaine said. “Fifteen minutes later, the first black-and-white pulled up. That was the first we knew anything about Vastagliano being snuffed. It was embarrassing. The captain won’t be easy on us.”
“Hell, the old man’ll have our balls for Christmas decorations.”
Blaine nodded agreement. “It’d help if we could find Vastagliano’s business records, turn up the names of his associates, customers, maybe collect enough evidence to make an important arrest.”
“We might even wind up heroes,” Nevetski said, “although right now I’d settle for just getting my head above the shit line before I drown.”
Rebecca’s face was lined with disapproval of Nevetski’s incessant use of obscenity.
Jack prayed she wouldn’t chastise Nevetski for his foul mouth.
She leaned against the wall beside what appeared to be (at least to Jack’s unschooled eye) an original An-drew Wyeth oil painting. It was a farm scene rendered in intricate and exquisite detail.
Apparently oblivious of the exceptional beauty of the painting, Rebecca said, “So this Vincent Vastagliano was in the dope trade?”
“Does McDonald’s sell hamburgers?” Nevetski asked.
“He was a blood member of the Carramazza family,” Blaine said.
Of the five Mafia families that controlled gambling, prostitution, and other rackets in New York, the Carramazzas were the most powerful.
“In fact,” Blaine said, “Vastagliano was the nephew of Gennaro Carramazza himself. His uncle Gennaro gave him the Gucci route.”
“The what?” Jack asked.
“The uppercrust clientele in the dope business,” Blaine said. “The kind of people who have twenty pairs of Gucci shoes in their closet.”
Nevetski said, “Vastagliano didn’t sell shit to school kids. His uncle wouldn’t have let him do anything that seamy. Vince dealt strictly with show business and society types. Highbrow muckety-mucks.”
“Not that Vince Vastagliano was one of them,” Blaine quickly added. “He was just a cheap hood who moved in the right circles only because he could provide the nose candy some of those limousine types were looking for.”
“He was a scumbag,” Nevetski said. “This house, all those antiques—this wasn’t him. This was just an image he thought he should project if he was going to be the candyman to the jet set.”
“He didn’t know the difference between an antique and a K-Mart coffee table,” Blaine said. “All these books. Take a closer look. They’re old textbooks, incomplete sets of outdated encyclopedias, odds and ends, bought by the yard from a used-book dealer, never meant to be read, just dressing for the shelves.”
Jack took Blaine’s word for it, but Rebecca, being Rebecca, went to the bookcases to see for herself.
“We’ve been after Vastagliano for a long time,” Nevetski said. “We had a hunch about him. He seemed like a weak link. The rest of the Carramazza family is as disciplined as the fuckin’ Marine Corps. But Vince drank too much, whored around too much, smoked too much pot, even used cocaine once in a while.”
Blaine said, “We figured if we could get the goods on him, get enough evidence to guarantee him a prison term, he’d crack and cooperate rather than do hard time. Through him, we figured to finally lay our hands on some of the wiseguys at the heart of the Carramazza organization.”
Nevetski said, “We got a tip that Vastagliano would be contacting a South American cocaine wholesaler named Rene Oblido.”
“Our informant said they were meeting to discuss new sources of supply. The meeting was supposed to be yesterday or today. It wasn’t yesterday—”
“And for damned sure, it won’t happen today, not now that Vastagliano is nothing but a pile of bloody garbage.” Nevetski looked as if he would spit on the carpet in disgust.
“You’re right. It’s screwed up,” Rebecca said, turning away from the bookshelves. “It’s over. So why not split and let us handle it?”
Nevetski gave her his patented glare of anger.
Even Blaine looked as if he were finally about to snap at her.
Jack said, “Take your time. Find whatever you need. You won’t be in our way. We’ve got a lot of other things to do here. Come on, Rebecca. Let’s see what the M.E.’s people can tell us.”
He didn’t even glance at Rebecca because he knew she was giving him a look pretty much like the one Blaine and Nevetski were giving her.
Reluctantly, Rebecca went into the hall.
Before following her, Jack paused at the door, looking back at Nevetski and Blaine. “You notice anything odd about this one?”
“Such as?” Nevetski asked.
“Anything,” Jack said. “Anything out of the ordinary, strange, weird, unexplainable.”
“I can’t explain how the hell the killer got in here,” Nevetski said irritably. “That’s damned strange.”
“Anything else?” Jack asked. “Anything that would make you think this is more than just your ordinary drug-related homicide?”
They looked at him blankly.
He said, “Okay, what about this woman, Vastagliano’s girlfriend or whatever she is ...”
“Shelly Parker,” Blaine said. “She’s waiting in the living room if you want to talk to her.”
“Have you spoken with her yet?” Jack asked.
“A little,” Blaine said. “She’s not much of a talker.”
“A real sleazebag is what she is,” Nevetski said.
“Reticent,” Blaine said.
“An uncooperative sleazebag.”
“Self-contained, very composed,” Bla
ine said.
“A two-dollar pump. A bitch. A scuz. But gorgeous.”
Jack said, “Did she mention anything about a Haitian?”
“A what?”
“You mean... someone from Haiti? The island?”
“The island,” Jack confirmed.
“No,” Blaine said. “Didn’t say anything about a Haitian.”
“What fuckin’ Haitian are we talking about?” Nevetski demanded.
Jack said, “A guy named Lavelle. Baba Lavelle.”
“Baba?” Blaine said.
“Sounds like a clown,” Nevetski said.
“Did Shelly Parker mention him?”
“No.”
“How’s this Lavelle fit in?”
Jack didn’t answer that. Instead, he said, “Listen, did Miss Parker say anything to you about... well... did she say anything at all that seemed strange?”
Nevetski and Blaine frowned at him.
“What do you mean?” Blaine said.
Yesterday, they’d found the second victim: a black man named Freeman Coleson, a middle-level dope dealer who distributed to seventy or eighty street pushers in a section of lower Manhattan that had been conferred upon him by the Carramazza family, which had become an equal opportunity employer in order to avoid ill-feeling and racial strife in the New York underworld. Coleson had turned up dead, leaking from more than a hundred small stab wounds, just like the first victim on Sunday night. His brother, Darl Coleson, had been panicky, so nervous he was pouring sweat. He had told Jack and Rebecca a story about a Haitian who was trying to take over the cocaine and heroin trade. It was the weirdest story Jack had ever heard, but it was obvious that Darl Coleson believed every word of it.
If Shelly Parker had told a similar tale to Nevetski and Blaine, they wouldn’t have forgotten it. They wouldn’t have needed to ask what sort of “strange” he was talking about.
Jack hesitated, then shook his head. “Never mind. It’s not really important.”
If it’s not important, why did you bring it up?
That would be Nevetski’s next question. Jack turned away from them before Nevetski could speak, kept moving, through the door, into the hall, where Rebecca was waiting for him.