The Dark Circle, page 6
12
The building was three stories high and filled a corner lot on Edwards Street. Once a rooming or apartment house, it had a boarded-up diner on the first floor. The building was at least a hundred years old and looked every minute of it.
The exterior walls were clapboard and had been repainted so many times that many of the boards were warped and hanging loose. The wooden fire escape had collapsed into the air shaft that separated it from the next building.
All the windows on the second and third floors were covered with plywood. The ones on the first floor were painted black. Graffiti adorned any exterior wall space within reach of a spray can.
The building had to have been condemned for public use, but there were so many others in equal disrepair in the neighborhood that the city building department was probably overwhelmed in trying to enforce the law.
Lauren and I stood across the street in another alleyway where we could watch the building unobserved. For the first thirty minutes, no one went in or came out. I walked around the corner to see if there might be another entrance.
Although there was a door on the side of the building facing the cross street, it was also covered with plywood. The entrance door on the front side looked solid but was slightly ajar. It seemed like the only way in.
When I went back to the alleyway, Lauren said, “Why don’t we call the police and report that there is an illegal crack house operating here?”
“For one thing, all we have is your thousand-dollar tip,” I said. “And I doubt that a small crack house is high on their priority list in this neighborhood.”
As we watched, a fat, middle-aged man wearing a raincoat and a golfing cap with a pompom on top came strolling down the sidewalk. When he reached the building, he shoved the door open and disappeared inside. The door swung back to its original position.
“Something wrong with that picture,” I said.
“A john?”
“Certainly likely. Look, there is probably some kind of thug protection in there, but I doubt it’s serious on a weekday afternoon. Let me go in and see what’s up. If I’m not out in ten minutes, call 911.”
“I’m going in with you,” she said, her eyes daring me to object. There was obviously no use.
“Just stay behind me,” I said, and she nodded.
We crossed the street to the front entrance. As we neared the sidewalk, I saw two signs tacked on the door. The top one was white plastic with purple letters that read “Temple of the Foundation of Light.”
The one below it was handwritten on cardboard and read “HEALING OF THE SOUL—SHAMANISM AND YOU. UR INVITED.”
“I don’t think so,” said Lauren as I pushed open the door.
The vestibule was cloaked in shadow. A single lightbulb in the ceiling spilled out enough light to see that the floor was filthy and littered with discarded food wrappings. The flattened carcass of a dead rat had been crushed underfoot.
The smell was revolting, an overpowering combination of mildew from the damp plaster walls, spoiled food, and backed-up sewage. A plywood barrier blocked the staircase to the second floor.
A man emerged from the gloom of the corridor ahead of us. He was about thirty, a few inches shorter than me and an obvious body builder, with muscled forearms coated with tattoos. He wore a wife-beater T-shirt over Levis. His eyes went to Lauren and stayed there.
“Whaddya want?” he said.
“We’re here for the shaman healing,” I said.
He chuckled and said, “That’s Rasputin. Come back tomorrow night.”
He took his eyes off Lauren and stared at me for a couple seconds.
“You look like a cop.”
“Actually I’m a shaman, second class … always looking to learn.”
Behind us the front door swung open, and another man stepped into the vestibule. He was younger and skinnier than the last one and had a gold ring through his nose. There was a goatee on his narrow chin, and he was wearing a New York Giants jersey. The tattooed guy nodded at him, and he headed down the corridor.
Turning back to us, he said, “You and your bitch take a walk.”
“My bitch?” I said.
“You heard me. Or you can leave her here. She can suck me off.”
“What would your mother say to that?” I said, pointing. “Isn’t that her?”
He glanced down at his tattoos. The naked woman wasn’t his mother.
His response was to pull a spring knife out of his hip pocket and snap open the four-inch blade. Without a word, he started toward me. I shoved Lauren to the side as he lunged.
Juking to my right, I drove a good left hook into his stomach. It was my best punch. It stopped him cold, and he bent over in pain. I hit him hard on his neck with the side of my right hand. He dropped to the floor.
Lauren looked at me with wonder.
“Is that ranger school, basic?”
“A blow to the carotid is like squeezing a garden hose. He’ll be out for a while.”
We headed down the corridor. At the end, one door led to the left and the other to the right. I slowly opened the right door and peered inside. Four men were lying on mattresses in a state of either euphoria or coma. The opium smell reminded me of similar dens in Kabul.
An old Chinese man was sitting in a sprung easy chair, listening to something through the pods of a music player. He looked up at us without interest. Behind him I saw a door on the back side of the room, an entrance I must have missed in my brief recon. I went over and opened it. The door led outside to a vacant lot.
We went back to the corridor. The muffled sound of music was coming through the other closed door. It sounded like the bands that were playing on Slope Day when I’d stopped the fight.
I opened the door. This room was bigger and lit by wall fixtures. It had probably served as a parlor for the rooming house. Mildewed wallpaper was peeling off the outer walls. It reeked of the same bad smells.
Two young Latino men were sitting at a small table in one corner, playing blackjack. They were smoking, and each one had a stack of bills in front of him, alongside open cans of beer.
One of them was dressed only in his underpants. A pelt of black hair covered his chest, arms, and legs. The other one was wearing a white guayabera shirt over white pants. He laughed after winning a pot.
Across the room, a third man was lying down on a sprung couch. A thin, naked woman was straddling his hips and grinding away on him like she was cantering home across the south forty.
The winner of the blackjack hand looked over and saw us. He stopped laughing and got to his feet. The one in underpants followed his eyes and got up too. When they began strutting toward us, I saw a .38 Smith and Wesson sticking out of the waistband of the white pants. I decided it was a good time to show them we had come prepared.
I pulled out the Colt .45, thumbed the safety off, and pointed it toward them.
“Slowly remove the gun and drop it on the floor.”
The guy in white glanced toward the couch and called out, “Rasputin.”
“Rasputin is busy right now,” I said. “Do what I say or I’ll shoot you.”
“Maldito cerdo,” said White Pants, but he slowly removed his pistol and dropped it on the floor.
“Let’s go over and join the fun,” I said, motioning them toward the couch. Lauren picked up the gun and put it in her backpack.
The guy on the couch was seriously stoned. He opened his eyes and saw the four of us standing there. At first it didn’t seem to register. Then he shoved the girl off him, and she landed awkwardly on the floor.
“Get up,” I said.
When he slowly got to his feet, I saw he was at least six and a half feet tall. Aside from a fringed, buckskin Davy Crockett jacket and black socks, he was naked. His greasy blond hair started low on his forehead and reached halfway down his back. His stringy beard was about the same length.
“Where is Deborah Chapman?” I asked.
His sunken brown eyes were still glassy and unfocused, and he just stared at me. A stale cigarette smell hung on him like a skin coating. I turned to the two gangbangers.
“Where is Deborah Chapman?”
“Vete a la mierda,” said the one in his underpants.
“Fuck you too,” I said.
I saw a dark, open doorway along the wall behind them. There were coat hooks in matching lines, which suggested it had once been a cloak room. A double mattress lay inside it on the floor. Solid metal brackets were mounted on both sides of the door. A three-foot length of lumber lay nearby. I thought I knew why.
Pointing the .45 at the two gangbangers, I said, “Get in the hole.”
They didn’t move. I pointed the gun at the crotch of the one in his underpants, and he moved. The other one followed. They slowly backed into the cloak room, watching me the whole time. I closed the door and fit the two-by-four into place between the wall brackets.
“It’s for breaking in the new girls,” I said to Lauren, and she nodded.
I looked down at the young woman on the floor. Her eyes were as glazed as Rasputin’s. She looked back up at me with a slack-eyed weariness that suggested her first nineteen or twenty years had been enough for a lifetime. Lauren helped her onto the sprung couch.
Rasputin’s eyes had begun to regain some focus. He looked at me and grinned.
“Do I know you? I’m not good with names.”
I shook my head.
“You need some ecstasy, man?”
“Show us your girls,” I said.
“What girls?” he asked with a tone of injured innocence.
I backhanded him in the face.
“Deborah Chapman.”
“Young women seek sanctuary with me,” he said. “They have the right to be here without harassment from the outside world. This is sacred ground.”
The thought of Deborah Chapman lying in one of these foul rooms ended my patience. He was holding out his right hand as if to shake and I brought the barrel of the .45 down hard on it. He yelped and cried out, “I don’t know their goddam names.”
“Where are the cribs?”
“Upstairs,” he said, and pointed with his good hand to the door by the card table where the gangbangers had been sitting.
“Lead the way,” I said.
Behind the door was a narrow staircase leading to the second floor. We followed him up the stairs to find another long corridor lit by a single ceiling fixture. The smell of mildew and decay was even stronger.
More doors lined each side of the dark corridor. Most were open, and the rooms empty. The only furniture in each room was a mattress. Lauren opened the first closed door. In the pale glow of a red ceiling bulb, the young man with the gold ring through his nose was on all fours behind another young man. She closed it.
The next room revealed a young woman sleeping alone on the mattress, naked and with bruises on her arms and legs. Moving past, we found Deborah Chapman in the last room along the corridor.
The plywood cover on the window had torn loose, and we could see inside clearly. Like the others, there was only a mattress on the floor. The room smelled of cigarettes. Empty cans and wine bottles lay strewn across the stained, grubby carpet.
The middle-aged man we had seen enter the building was trying to get up from the mattress. The only thing he was wearing now was the golf hat with the pompom. There was a thick layer of fat around his waist, and his skin was pasty white. His limp penis was the size of a cocktail frankfurter. He looked up and saw us.
“Rasputin, this is outrageous,” he declared as he crawled over to his scattered clothing. “Is there no privacy?”
The girl on the mattress was Deborah.
“Stay on the floor, facedown,” I said to the man.
“You can’t …” he began and saw the gun in my hand. He lay down on his belly and turned his face away.
“Move over to the wall,” I ordered Rasputin.
Lauren knelt next to Deborah and checked her pulse at the carotid artery.
“I think she’s comatose,” she said, pulling out her cell phone.
She dialed 911, and ten seconds later was talking to the dispatcher, giving her own name and requesting both an ambulance and the police. Deborah’s sleek black hair was stringy and filthy, and there was no physical response when Lauren gently raised her head and opened one of her eyes with her thumb. Her cheeks were hollowed, her nose was bleeding, and there were bruises on her face and bare chest. Her left hand was lying free. There was no promise ring on the pinky finger.
I pointed the .45 at Rasputin and motioned him out into the corridor.
“Where are we going?” he asked, as if I might be planning to take him to Disneyworld.
“Czar Nicholas needs some information,” I said.
“Sure, man … anything,” he said with another grin.
“How did she get here?”
He thought about it for several seconds.
“I don’t know, brother. They just show up mostly.”
“Who sold her to you? I’ll give you ten seconds, and then I’ll smash your teeth in.”
His voice sped up to meet the deadline.
“I don’t know anything about this girl or how she got here,” he said. “Maybe she attended one of my healing sessions and just stayed.”
“Heal this,” I said, and slammed the butt of the .45 into his jaw, caving in his front teeth.
He tried to cover his ruined mouth with his fingers as the blood began flowing. Over his loud moan, I heard the rising wail of an ambulance siren along with the alternating high and low electronic yelp that signaled the police.
“One more lie and you’ll be sucking Ensure through a straw for the next two years,” I said. In my mind, I saw the photographs of Deborah as a child that her mother had showed me.
“If you don’t give me the truth, I swear I’ll come after you and kill you.”
I raised the gun butt again, and he cringed away from me.
“George,” he said, starting to cry.
“George who? Who does he work for?”
I heard the police moving around downstairs as they searched the big parlor room.
“You’re not gonna believe me,” whined Rasputin, staring at my .45 like it had a mind of his own.
“Time’s up,” I said.
“Washington!” he cried out. “George Washington. Don’t hit me again.”
It sounded ludicrous, but I could hear footsteps coming slowly up the narrow staircase from the parlor.
“He works as a driver at Stoneberry,” added Rasputin. “He sold her to me.”
“The Indian casino?”
His head bobbed up and down as I saw the first policeman emerge from the staircase into the hallway, his gun drawn.
13
Lauren and I stayed at the intensive care unit at Lourdes Hospital until we were told that Deborah had been treated for severe trauma and her vital signs were stable. They would have no further update on her condition until the following day.
It was well after midnight before the police detective assigned to the case was finished with us. His name was Ed Deci. Sitting in the visitor’s lounge, we gave him a complete recap of everything that had led us to the condemned building and what had happened after we got there. By then, Rasputin and the two gangbangers were in the Broome County jail. The guy who I had put down in the vestibule had disappeared.
Deci looked even more beat than I felt. Short and wiry, he was in his thirties, but what was left of his hair was pure white. The fingers holding his voice recorder were stained with nicotine, and it was obvious he was desperate for a cigarette as we sat together under the “No Smoking” sign.
“What happens now?” asked Lauren when he finished recording our statements.
Raising his bloodshot eyes at her, he sighed and said, “You want to know what I’ve dealt with since my shift started this afternoon? So far, a Jamaican heroin addict stuffed his daughter into an incinerator a few blocks from here and held police off with a machete while she burned alive. An hour later, the Ballers threw a rival gang member off the Washington Street Bridge after gutting him with a chain saw. And we’re still looking for a suspect in the stabbing death of an eleven-year-old boy over an electric scooter they stole together.”
Deci’s voice slowed down like a dying flashlight battery.
“Another day at the office,” I said, and he gave me a weary grin.
“This one will be treated as a prostitution case, and we’ll investigate it further if the district attorney decides there is enough evidence to bring charges.”
I had left one thing out of my own account to him, and that was what Rasputin had told me in the corridor. Based on the workload of the Binghamton detective squad, I doubted they would get to it before Christmas. Rasputin had probably lied anyway, and there was so little to go on I decided to follow up on it myself.
“We need to expose the people who did this to her,” said Lauren as we left the hospital.
“I have a good lead,” I said before calling Deborah’s mother in Rochester to tell her that Deborah was safe and recovering from injuries at the Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton. Before the call, we’d decided not to give her what few details we had of how she had gotten there. That part of the story would only bring her more heartbreak. She would learn it soon enough. I could hear the excitement in her voice as she thanked me for finding her daughter and said she’d be leaving right away to join her at the hospital.
I drove Lauren back to her motorcycle in the Walgreen’s parking lot and was surprised to see it was still there. I offered to give her a lift home, but she said she would drive herself. It was nearly three in the morning.
“We both need some sleep,” she said. “I’ll come out to the cabin at around eleven thirty and we can plan what to do next.”
I had a lot of questions for her, but they would obviously wait.
It was almost four when I got home and unlocked the front door to find Bug standing there wagging her tail. Another welcome sign in her cancer recovery, I thought. Her food bowl was empty, but I was too tired to cook, and I knew she wouldn’t deign to eat canned food or kibble under any circumstances. I refilled the water bowl, stripped off my clothes, and fell onto my side of the bed.
