Wet Work

"Goddamn right it was a mistake. Still, it's not much."

"No, it isn't. Mullen says the thumb and forefinger prints on the cocaine vial were so clean that they looked planted. Plus the door was locked and they can't find the keys."

"That's something."

The ADA nodded. "But the ME put the time of death at between eight P.M. and midnight and Tamarino was with someone at a club from seven-thirty to well after midnight."

"Gulag?" said the DA, reading. "For Christ sake. Where does it end? Discos named after Auschwitz? Dachau? Bergen-Belsen? Sometimes you just want to pull the handle and flush. So that's it?"

"Yes. As far as the Sixth Precinct Detective Squad is concerned."

"What do you think?"

"I think it's… very thin."

"Thin? It's cellophane. It's Saran Wrap."

"But I think it was Tamarino's cocaine. And I don't think keys walked out of there by themselves."

The DA sighed. "Missing keys. Not enough here for 220.3 and even less for a 125.15."

The ADA scrolled up the numbers on his brain screen: sale of a controlled substance, B felony; second-degree manslaughter, C felony. "Mullen said, off the record, that he'd be willing to arrest him and shake his tree to see what falls off, but I didn't think you wanted to go that route."

The DA stared into middle space. "You don't remember the Ke

"April 25, 1984. The Palm Beach police charged two bellhops at the Brazilian Court Hotel with selling cocaine and conspiracy to sell cocaine. Six months later they both copped a nolo to selling and the conspiracy charge was dropped. Eighteen months' probation and expungement."

The DA nodded. "Good, Ed. That's good preparation."

"Thank you, sir. Sir? My name is Bill, actually? Bill Allard?"

"Jesus Christ. I didn't sleep. I'm sorry. Jesus. Of course you're Bill."

"By the way, I thought you handled that question very well."

"Question?"

"On Nightline, about whether you're interested in the AG job?"

"Oh, right. Okay, so the Ke

"It was a very unpopular prosecution. Here are the editorials." He put a manila folder on the DA's desk.

The DA looked at them blearily. "You want to gist them for me?"

"'Prosecutorial zeal' is all over them. There's not a lot of support out there for rich white kids who OD on cocaine. And they had much more to go on in the Ke

"You know who I feel sorry for in all this?"

The ADA shook his head.

"Ethel. What that woman's been through. Well, look, we're not going to let that influence us, but Jesus Christ, Mullen has to make his own decisions, damnit. What does he think this office is? This really, this really pisses me off."

"Yes, sir."

"You tell Mullen to make his own fucking decisions. If he's got a case, bring us a case. If he doesn't have a case, don't bring us a case. And while you're at it, tell him I do not appreciate the way this thing has been handled. Tell him I'm going to speak to Brown about this-personally."

"Yes, sir."

Helen said, "It's Morley Safer, from 60 Minutes."

"All right. We all set on this, Ed?… Morley?"

6

Charley sat by the light of the fire, Spook beside him, staring at the mailbox in the display case on the wall surrounded by all the leather-bound books.

The orphanage was started by Mexican nuns who fled over the border into Texas during the anticlerical hysteria of the revolution when three of their order were raped and crucified on saguaro cacti. They bought an abandoned farm on the outskirts of McAllen. They found him in the makeshift mailbox one cold winter morning, badly dehydrated and the color of plum, swaddled in a week-old comics section of The Star. They named him Karl Becker after the local fishmonger. All the children were named after local merchants. Sister Rosa Encarnacion had hit on the scheme. Herr Becker would show up every Saturday afternoon in his truck with whatever he hadn't been able to sell that week, cases of reeking skate and shark, sometimes a discolored eel or two. They changed his legal name to Charley when America entered the Great War in 1917, but the nuns went on calling him Carlos.

Old Raul looked up and saw Carlos bleeding from his nose and both ears and a tooth was gone, the second this week.

"Aiy, Carlito." He took the boy in and washed his face and plugged his nose and let him swish some homemade mescal around inside his mouth, which left a pleasing numbness on the boy's sore gums. He let him watch him prepare that night's di

Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez came for him again that night, stuffing a gag in his mouth and carrying him, squirming, out of the converted barn that served as a dormitory, to one of the shacks. Lockmuller had a length of barbed wire. He looped it loosely around Carlos' neck while the others held him. "You bite me again and I'll strangle you dead." Carlos watched as Lockmuller unbuttoned his trousers. Gomez kicked him from behind. They'd demonstrated what they'd do to him on a polecat if he told the sisters: gouging out its eyes, cutting off its feet, then hanging it by its tail over a fire.

The next morning one of the nuns noticed Carlos wasn't saying his morning prayers along with the others. At first they thought it was willful and punished him for it, but as the weeks went by without the boy speaking, they began to wonder. They took him to the doctor who had five boys named after him. He poked about Carlos' mouth and couldn't find anything and suggested withholding food and water from him to see if that would get him to talk. Sister Imaculata a

"Ego te expulso!" he shouted. Grappling with the Dark One required strengthening himself with Raul's mescal. Carlos calmly watched, dripping-wet with holy water, as the old priest invoked the Lord to drive out the evil inside him. The Devil was too much for him, however, and after one session the old man passed out on the floor. When he awoke he told of a dream he'd had in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and told him that she had taken away the boy's speech as a sign of Her Favor. Sister Imaculata wondered about this, having smelled his breath, but she knew herself that the ways of God are not to be fathomed, and a priest, even drunk, is a priest, and so kept her suspicions to herself.