(Incoming from cell phone)
JULIO ONE-EYE: Yo.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yo, son.
JULIO ONE-EYE: What up?
UM: Put Jasmine on.
JULIO ONE-EYE: She sleeping.
UM: I said put her on! Wake her up, then. Fucking bitch, sleep all day!
JULIO ONE-EYE: Yo, awright.
(Pause)
JASMINE: Yeah, baby, what up?
UM: You got something you want to tell me, bitch?
JASMINE: No. What you talking about?
UM: If you got something to tell me, you know I better hear it from you first. You know that, or you know what happen, right?
JASMINE: Come on, now, don’t talk crazy like that. I don’t know what you mean. I ain’t do nothing.
UM: Yeah, that the problem, you ain’t do nothing. You supposed to do something, but you ain’t do nothing. See, you figured it out. You ain’t as stupid as you look.
JASMINE: Oh.
UM: Oh! Stupid cunt! My dog smarter than you. You don’t do your job, and I catch you fuckin’ sleeping!
JASMINE: Last night was real busy at the club, baby, so I couldn’t do it. But tonight I see him for sure, and I get what you need. Don’t you worry.
UM: You think you got the only pussy in town? You ain’t handling this right. Mighty Whitey gonna lose interest, and then I ain’t got no back door to him. If that happen, you useless to me. Think about what that mean for your survival rate.
JASMINE: Don’t worry, baby. He like me real good. I be his criminal girl, you know? Word, I get you the shit tonight.
UM: You better, or you wake up with me standing over your bed. And I ain’t be there to fuck you.
JASMINE: Okay, baby.
UM: Do it.
JASMINE: Yeah, baby, I promise, okay?
(End of call)
Calm down, Melanie told herself. She shouldn’t assume the “Mighty Whitey” they were talking about was Jed Benson. Just because Rosario Sangrador said Slice had referred to Jed Benson as “Mighty Whitey” at the town house last night didn’t mean anything. He probably called all legit people that, anybody who wasn’t street. Slice and Jasmine were discussing somebody else. Assuming otherwise was taking a huge leap. She’d made an important discovery just by tying Slice to this location. She should be satisfied with that, not jinx it by asking for the moon.
But what if Mighty Whitey was Jed Benson? What if-four years earlier-Jed Benson had had a relationship with a woman who had a relationship with Slice? What if Slice had used Jasmine Cruz to get to Jed Benson, or to get something from him? Then something had gone wrong, and Slice went after Jed? No, it couldn’t be. Impossible. It was completely inconsistent with everything she knew about this victim. Unless, unless, she didn’t know everything there was to know about this victim.
That reminded her. She’d never followed up on that strange incident in the elevator at Jed Benson’s law firm. It seemed less significant in contrast to this exciting new discovery, but still, it would take only a second to cover that base. She hopped on the Internet and pulled up the directory for the Reed firm. The firm’s Web site posted photographs. Bingo. Within seconds she’d identified the woman in the pink suit. One Sarah Elizabeth van der Vere, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School. Sarah was twenty-six, from Grosse Point, Michigan, and she specialized in securities and ERISA law. Melanie clicked “print,” and Sarah’s bio emerged from her printer. She exited the Reed Web site and went to a telephone-directory program. Sarah lived within walking distance of the Reed firm, off Second Avenue in the Sixties. Melanie jotted the address and phone number onto the printout of the bio, grabbed the dog photos, the transcript, and the cassette tape, and stuffed everything into her big black leather shoulder bag.
She turned off her light, lingered for a moment in the doorway to bid a fond good night to her darkened office, then headed for the elevator with a light step. With all these leads, she’d wrap up this case in no time.
WHEN SHE CHECKED HER WATCH IN THE ELEVATOR, it was after ten o’clock. Her finger paused in midair, about to press the “Lobby” button. All she wanted was to go home and watch Maya sleep, put her hand on that little tummy, follow it up and down with each breath. But she’d made a promise to Rommie Ramirez. They were putting a lot of faith in her with this case. She sighed and pressed “B” for the basement instead.
Closed files were stored in a secured room in the basement of her building. The basement stayed lit twenty-four/seven, and Melanie was grateful for this as she walked down a deserted mustard yellow corridor and came to a metal door marked DEAD FILE STORAGE. Even brightly lit, the basement was creepy enough to justify a door with the word “Dead” on it. She swiped her card key through the magnetic lock. The door swung open onto a vast, windowless file room, dimly lit by emergency lights. She would have to hunt for the main switch.
As she stood on the threshold, the room seemed oppressively silent. She imagined getting locked in. Nobody knew she was here. She could be entombed for days until somebody else came looking for a file. The thought thoroughly spooked her. Holding the metal door ajar with her hip, she rifled through her bag anxiously and pulled out her cell phone. No reception. If she did get locked in, she couldn’t even call for help.
She propped her shoulder bag in the doorway to keep the door from slamming shut. There, problem solved. She stepped into the room, located the main switch and flipped on the lights, illuminating the enormous space. The ceiling was low, the room lined from end to end with rows of metal shelves tightly jammed with boxes, creating an enclosed, cryptlike effect. She walked to the central aisle, her heels ringing on the hard concrete floor and echoing back at her like the sharp reports of a pistol. The room stayed cool because it was in the basement, but the ventilation was terrible. The stagnant air, redolent of ancient cardboard and mold, tickled her throat. Melanie walked deeper into the maze of shelves, scanning the dates labeled on each row until she found the Delvis Diaz files-far from the metal door where she’d left her handbag, almost at the opposite wall of the building.
The Diaz files consisted of at least thirty boxes, packed tightly on a lower shelf, running the full expanse of a row. She hauled down the first few and began opening them to see which looked important. A box of evidence about the three teenage gang members who were murdered seemed worthy of more careful study, so she opened it and started going through folders. One file held photocopies of news clippings about the trial. The stories referred to the victims as the “Flatlands Boys” because their dismembered bodies were discovered inside an old refrigerator that had been dumped in the Flatlands, a Brooklyn landfill.
Melanie studied the grainy photographs of the boys, wholesome and smiling in their school pictures. They were so young-two were fourteen and the third fifteen-but still, according to the news reports, they were old enough to guard a heroin stash for the Blades. Several kilos of heroin had gone missing from that stash, and Delvis Diaz was convicted of murdering the boys in retaliation. The boys had been shot execution style at the stash house, dismembered with a hacksaw in the basement, and then transported to the Flatlands in heavy-duty plastic trash bags.
Next Melanie plucked a folder containing autopsy reports from the box. She held it in her lap, opened it, and gasped aloud. Body parts stared her in the face, in a photo stapled to the top of the pile. The victim’s name was Melvin Atuna. He was fourteen when he died, and she was looking at an eight-by-ten glossy of his dismembered limbs. Two arms, two legs, displayed like wares on the green plastic trash bag they’d been discovered in. The limbs looked so real, so normal, except they weren’t attached to anything, and they had several odd-looking wounds. The arms thick and chunky, the legs bulbous. She looked back to the article with the school photos. Yes, Melvin had been a tubby kid. The arms were laid out on the plastic bag to showcase their numerous crude tattoos, belying the broad, childlike face grinning in the other picture. The right biceps bore a clumsily drawn black gun, the words THUG LIFE written beneath it. The left displayed another, more significant home-drawn tattoo-a greenish blue dagger being struck by a red lightning bolt as two green droplets flew from the blade. So young, but not so innocent. According to the news articles, the tattoo meant Melvin was a member of the C-Trout Blades, the two droplets signifying that he’d already, at his tender age, killed two people on their behalf.