Par Four, page 19
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
“I know it’s hard,” I said. “Just a couple more questions…”
“She’ll do it,” Schultzy said. “We want this bad boy locked up, don’t we, baby? Huh?” Jessica burrowed into her mother’s shoulder. She snuffled while Schultzy nuzzled her ear and patted her back. Finally Schultzy murmured something and she sat up, blew her nose, and explained to me earnestly, “See, I got scared that day.”
“Of course you did.” That brought me to the question that had nagged at me ever since I carried her down the alley. “Why didn’t you yell when he scared you? You did a great job of screaming later on.”
“He put cloth in my mouth!” she said. “Like this,” she mimicked stuffing something into her mouth, “and then he put another rag around and tied it in back.” Her small capable hands described a knot behind her head. “I was afraid I couldn’t breathe!” She rolled her eyes to her mother to illustrate the panic, adding curiously, “But I could. Did you know that, Mama? That you can breathe with just your nose?” Schultzy nodded, too near tears to speak.
“Were you too scared to try kicking and scratching?” I asked her, remembering the punishment she had given me on the way to Donovan’s car.
She held out her small, sturdy arms side by side. “He put my arms together like that and tied a rag around them too. In the car.”
“Your feet too?”
She shook her head. “He made me walk in the house. You know what he did, Mama? He held me by my hair like this,” she grabbed one of her ponytails, close to the scalp, and pulled to illustrate, gritting her teeth against the pain. “Boy, it hurt! I wanted to cry but I couldn’t! You can’t really cry with your mouth full of rags,” she confided in me, “ ‘cause the sound comes out all mooshy, like uhh, uhh, uhh.” She delivered a show-stopping imitation of gagged distress, and asked her mother. “Don’t you think that was mean, what he did?”
“Yes, it was,” Schultzy said. “We’re gonna have to have some nice treats, I guess, to help you get over that.”
“Like what?” Jessica asked quickly.
“Uh, frozen yogurt, maybe. And a movie, as soon as we can, would you like that?”
“Star Wars?” Jessica pressed.
“Again? So soon? Tell you what, let’s finish Jake’s questions first and bargain after he’s gone, okay?”
“Okay. But I want Star Wars. All three of ‘em,” she flashed me a triumphant grin and I smiled back, pleased to see her normal spoiled brat persona return.
“Okay. One more question. You ready? I understand now why you didn’t fight or yell while he took you in the house. But then why did you start yelling just when we got there?” She looked at me, puzzled and shrugging, and I realized she had no idea when we got to the house. I tried again. “Did the bad boy stay with you after he took you inside?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do while you were there?”
“Just sat there. I hated it!”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. Looked at his watch once in a while.”
“Well, then, what happened? Why did you start yelling when you did?”
“He pulled the rags off my head! Some of my hair was caught in the knot, and he pulled it right out! And then he pushed his hand into my mouth to get that cloth out,”–she imitated a ruthless rip– “and when somebody has junk stuck in your mouth and just grabs it out like that, and it sticks to your mouth and he pulls it out anyway, it hurts, oh, you would not believe…” Her vocal tones and hand gestures were so perfectly copied from her mother that I felt myself sliding helplessly into a laugh and coughed instead.
“You got a bad cough, huh?” she asked me.
“I think I’m getting over it, thank you,” I said. “Where did the bad boy go then? When you started screaming and all the cops and dogs came in?”
She turned her large pale blue eyes on me and said, calmly, “He went in the wall.” I knew about the flush door to the cubby, luckily, so I didn’t waste time, as I surely would have earlier, trying to get her to explain how a person could vanish into a wall. To Jessica, it was no big deal. She was five; her abductor was a big person. Who knew what big people might do?
“Jessica, you’ve done a great job of explaining,” I said. “Thanks to you, I believe I can catch this bad boy now. I’ll let you know when we’ve got him locked up. He didn’t happen to tell you his name and address, did he?” I asked her, winking at Schultzy. Jessica stared rather forlornly out the window, shrugged, and said, “Bad boy is all I know.”
“Good name for him too.” I gathered up my stuff.
“God, Jake,” Schultzy said, following me to the door, “you really think we might get to the end of this nightmare pretty soon?”
“We’re all working on it,” I said. “And Jessica came through like a champ today. You really raised a winner there, didn’t you?” She nodded, beaming. “We’re on his trail, Schultzy. We’ll get him soon.”
Pondering Jessica’s answers, I drove back to the station as fast as I could. She had
identified her abductor with no hesitation. Schultzy was sure about the voice, too. Their certainty gave a big boost to the kidnapping investigation but left me with a new problem: Why was Jessica Schultz’s kidnapper visiting Farah Tur?
Ray Bailey pulled into the parking garage just ahead of me and hurried over to my car. “All my jobs should be so easy,” he said. “My Dad knows exactly where the river gets shallow. He rode out with me, took me right to the place. It’s just above the Adelaide Bridge on Nineteenth Avenue.”
“Terrific,” I said. “If you’ve got your answer, come up and help me with an interview. You can run the tape machine while I ask the questions.” We went up to my office. I called the Adult Detention Center and asked them to bring Farah Tur to my office.
“They say it’ll be a few minutes,” I said. I put my tape recorder on the desk, rewound it, and said, “Listen to this.”
The falsetto voice said, “You in the slammer, numb nuts. Where you think you comin’ from with this allow shit?”
Ray turned toward me, startled by the strange voice. I held up my hand and we listened together as Farah said, “He is my brother and he will do what I say.” .
“That so?” the Mickey Mouse voice said. “You think he gonna keep doin’ wha’chew say when I got his nuts in a vice, asshole? Huh?”
“If you touch my brother my father will kill you,” Farah said.
I turned the tape off and told Ray, “The last voice on the tape was Farah Tur, the man we’re about to interview. He walked in here yesterday and confessed to robbing Rowdy’s Bar. The other voice, the high one, was just identified by Jessica Schultz and her mother as the man who kidnapped Jessica on Wednesday.”
“Hey, no shit?”
“Right. So now we’re gonna talk to Farah Tur, and get him to tell us how to find the man with the baby voice.” I rewound the tape, put the machine on the end of my desk, and said, “Pull your chair up to this. When I nod to you, play it. As soon as you reach the end, rewind and be ready to play it again.”
They brought Farah Tur up in chains.
“Why must I be bound like a slave?” he demanded, his face a mask of contempt. “You people have all the guns.” I looked a question at the deputy, who said, “He got a little feisty coming out of the cell so we put him in restraints.
“You can take them off now,” I said.
When he was free I pointed to the chair in front of my desk and said, “Sit there.” Ray and I sat down across from him. “I want you to hear something.” I nodded and Ray pushed play.
The high-pitched voice said, “You in the slammer, numb nuts. Where you think you comin’ from with this allow shit?”
Farah’s face became an iron mask; his mouth clamped in a straight line below half-closed eyes. Motionless as marble, he listened to his own voice on tape saying, “He is my brother and he will do what I say.”
His composure never wavered as the shrill voice came on again, saying, “That so? You think he gonna keep doin’ wha’chew say when I got his nuts in a vice, asshole? Huh?” and on the tape Farah’s velvety voice responded coolly, “If you touch my brother my father will kill you.”
I nodded to Ray, who turned off the tape. I slid my Polaroid snapshot in front of Farah. “Who is he?”
He took his time over the picture. To be fair, it was a peculiar shot, of himself seated on one side of a table while his powerfully-built friend, caught in the act of rising, peered into the camera’s lens, and Rosie and I clowned around behind them. I watched as he recalled the disruptive intrusion in the visitors’ room. The ruse seemed to please him. He sat back in his chair and regarded me with a spark of new interest. Finally he said, “He calls himself Bad Boy.”
Jessica had said it over and over. I had never guessed that she was reporting a street name, not an opinion.
I asked Farah Tur, “What’s his real name?”
“I do not know.”
“Where does he live?”
“Why would I know that?”
I took a deep breath to hide my anger and said, “Well, see, I think you better know it, Farah, or the shit is gonna hit the fan and fly all over you. This man is a kidnapper. The victim just identified him, positively. You know the penalty for kidnapping? Hard time and plenty of it. And here I have this picture, and this tape, of him visiting you in jail last night. He didn’t come in here just to be sociable, right? He was here to talk business. You’re partners with this guy, right? Which makes that felony charge you copped to for the robbery at Rowdy’s bar the very least of your problems. Now you’re looking at conspiracy to kidnap.”
“That is entirely wrong!” he said, indignantly. “I had nothing to do with seizing the child.”
There was a wonderful, echo-y silence. Ray and I looked at each other and then back at Farah. “Did I say there was a child? What child, Farah?”
“You said–”
“I said I was beginning to think you had something to do with a kidnapping that Bad Boy pulled off a couple of days ago. I never said he took a child. The only way you could know that is if you were in on it.” His eyes were going dead again so I rapped on the desk. “Pay attention! You’re in slime clear up to your eyeballs, Farah, and your life’s not gonna get any better unless I help you. And the only way I’m gonna help you is if you tell me where to find Bad Boy.”
He roused himself just enough to smile ironically with one side of his face and ask me, “Oh, and then what wonderful things will you do for me?”
His incredible arrogance made me want to jump on him and pound his handsome face to mush. People think cops beat the hell out of prisoners all the time but we don’t, at least not in Rutherford. We have a whole manual detailing the evils of police brutality, in addition to Frank McCafferty’s succinct rule, “First guy who abuses a prisoner in my department is out on his ass.”
I got up and went to the window, where I watched a long line of cars frying on hot asphalt in front of the First Avenue stoplight, while I counted backwards from a thousand by tens. By the time I reached seven hundred and thirty I was able to remember the rest of Frank’s dictum on physical abuse, “Anybody who has to beat on a guy to get answers is too dense to be in law enforcement anyway.”
When the light changed, I went back and sat down. “Farah,” I said, “what does Bad Boy want your brother to do?”
“Oh…” He looked into the corner. “An errand…”
“And why don’t you want him to do it?”
“He is a school boy. I don’t want him to have anything to do with Bad Boy.”
“Good thinking. What’s your brother’s name?”
“Ali.”
“How old is Ali?”
“Fourteen. He looks younger. He was a child in the famine and he did not grow.”
“That why you don’t care about him?”
His eyes blazed. “You don’t know anything,” he said furiously.
So there it was. I leaned toward him and said softly, “Well, if you do care about him, you better think about saving his life. Bad Boy doesn’t kid around, Farah; he’s a mean bastard. He tied up that little girl, hurt her, and scared her half to death, probably would have abused her or worse if we hadn’t found him when we did. You want a guy like that grabbing your brother?” Farah looked at the ceiling. His lips moved but no sound came out. “Tell me where to find him, Farah. I’ll put him away and Ali will be safe.” He turned his head away then and closed his eyes. “What’s the matter, you didn’t believe what he said about squeezing your brother’s balls? You want us to play it again?”
I nodded to Ray, who hit play. The ridiculous yet somehow terrible voice came on again, saying, “You in the slammer, numb nuts. Where you think you–” Farah held up one long sender hand in protest and said softly, “Please,” and I nodded to Ray, who turned off the tape.
“He meets people at Rowdy’s Bar,” he said, “or at a store called Kwik-Kash.”
“The pawn shop?” He nodded.
“Not good enough, Farah. Rowdy’s Bar is closed now, and the pawn shop’s only open a few hours a day. You want me to get this Bad Boy before he gets your little brother, you tell me where he lives.”
We gave him time to think. There was evidently a lot to go over. He twisted in his chair a couple of times, scratched his head, opened his mouth once, and closed it. When he was ready he said quietly, “He has a room above the book store.”
“You mean he lives right here in town?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes? What about the rest of the time?”
“Some days he stays in Minneapolis.”
“Where in Minneapolis?”
“I have no idea.” He said it so simply I believed him.
“Okay. Here in town, which book store?”
“The one with the–it is called ‘Play Time’.”
“The adult book store?”
“Yes.”
“Is the entrance through the store?”
“No.” He hated to volunteer anything but at last he did. “There is a stairway outside. In the back.”
“Stay with him,” I told Ray. I went down the hall to the chief’s office. He was on the phone but I made a time-out signal and he asked the person to hold.
“I’ve got an identification on the kidnapper,” I said.
Frank held up his hand, got back on his phone, and said, “Otis, I’m gonna have to call you back, okay?” He hung up and said, “Tell me.”
I told him about the tape and showed him the picture. “Schultzy and Jessica both recognized the voice right away, no hesitation. And Jessica positively identified the picture.”
“You did a regulation lineup?”
“Yes, yes, six photos, six black faces, all fairly young. It’ll hold up. We don’t have his name yet but his street name is Bad Boy. What I want to ask you is can I have some extra help to go after him?”
“Anything you need. You want the ERU team?”
“Maybe, if we can make sure he’s home. If they miss him on the first grab he’s gone, though. Farah Tur says he commutes to the Cities. If he’s gang connected, he could go anywhere from there.”
“So, whaddya have in mind?”
“I’d like to put two or three guys in the North End, around his room and the places he hangs. Bo and Darrell know some of his friends. If we could catch him in the open…Can I call in Clint Maddox, if he’s able? He’ll be on overtime–”
“Do it,” Frank said. “Let’s get this asshole. You starting this up right now? Excellent. Keep me in the loop, Jake, okay?”
I went out and asked Tom Cunningham, who was running the day shift, to page Bo and Darrell and call Clint at home.
“But listen,” Tom said, “is it true, you got an ID on that guy that got away from the ERU and the dogs? No kiddin’? That his picture? Lemme see.”
I showed him my original Polaroid. “I don’t have his real name yet, but his street name is Bad Boy. I’ve got his voice on tape, too.” I played the little segment of taped conversation. “How would you describe that voice?”
“Sounds like Mickey Mouse,” he said.
“That’s what I said. Not very scientific I guess, but–”
“Close enough, though. Got that funny little squeak in there.” Tom studied the picture curiously. “What kinda moves you layin’ on Rosie Doyle, here?”
“That was just an excuse to take the picture.”
“Sure.” He clucked a couple of times, shook his head, and said, “You still don’t get it about sexual harassment, huh?”
He was breaking himself up and I had no time for jokes. “Will you get the description out to all the cars?” I said. “But tell them, ‘No known address.’ ” I didn’t want every cop in Rutherford climbing the stairs at the back of the book store. “Can you get it ready for BOLO’s, too?”
“Oh, for sure. Starting this afternoon.” BOLO stands for Be on the lookout. Patrolmen get a list of them at the briefing that starts every shift. “Lemme see if I can make a decent copy of this picture. Any ideas what weapons he might be carrying?”
“I don’t know about that but I think we better say he’s dangerous.”
“A kid snatcher? I’d say.”
I called for an escort deputy and went back to my office, where Farah sat with Ray in profound silence. While we waited for his escort, I tried asking Farah some more about the conversation on the tape. “What did you say this errand was, that Bad Boy wants your brother to do?”
But he had built a new wall around himself while I was gone. “I should have an attorney, I think,” he said. “I need to talk to Mrs. Glover at the United Methodist Church. Will you call her for me, please?”
“You can call her,” I said. “Use my phone.” I handed it to him and was pleased to see that for once I had startled Farah Tur. He looked up a number that he kept in an inside pocket and dialed it with a shaking hand.
Bo Dooley walked in, saying, “Your shit sniffer is back. Whaddya want?”
I took him out in the hall and said, “You don’t smell bad.”
“Angus fixed it so I didn’t have to crawl through. He’s kinda fun, isn’t he?”
