Those to be Forgiven

Published: 7 Dec 2017

Tell me more about your relationship with Freddy Bianchi.

Freddy was my father’s best friend. As a kid he was like an uncle. That’s what I used to call him. Uncle Freddy. We’ve all got people like that in our lives. Friends of the family who are relatives by proxy. He was a good cop by all accounts. A terrible husband but a good cop and a good friend to my dad.

You said that you didn’t believe that he was telling you the whole truth that first time you went to see to him. Why was that? Where did that hunch come from?

I’ve known Freddy my whole life. He was in the waiting room with my father when my mother gave birth to me and came round to take my father to the bar every night after that. Every tick and twitch of Freddy’s was as well known to me as my own. So like I said. That shadow that crossed his face… I knew he was hiding something.

Would you care to elaborate?

Would you like me to tell the story my way or would you like me to spoil the ending for you now?

You’re not a natural storyteller Mr Quaid and I’m not looking for a Pulitzer Prize winner here. I’ve already been through your paperwork. I just want the truth. I just want to understand.

Yeah, you said at the top of our conversation, but you’ve been reluctant to say who benefits from me rehashing all of this.

The truth benefits Mr Quaid. The truth. That’s all we’re looking for here.

The truth and how this shit show of an investigation made me feel? There’s more to this little interview than you’re letting on.

Is that another hunch of yours? What did you think, at that time, that Mr Bianchi was hiding from you?

You don’t need anything like intuition to see that you’ve got a dog in this race too. Even if I can’t see them all lining up at the starting gate just yet. You’re too keen and that betting slip in your hand is crunched and crackled and you’re nervously awaiting the traps to open.

(…)

Nothing to say to that?

(…)

OK. OK. I assumed that Freddy was covering for someone. Or a bunch of someones in the department at that time. Asking me not to investigate any further and then to turn over anything I found to the PD… I assumed that someone had fucked up – and like they always do blue closed ranks around blue.

You didn’t suspect him of any direct involvement?

Fuck no! Freddy’s a lot of things, a drunk, a cunt hound, a little too loose with the the money at the dog track… but I’d never even think that he might have been involved with kidnapping Donny Baldwin.

What about Mikey O’Hare? You said that he believed that the police at that time didn’t take his full statement seriously. That they secreted some of his testimony from the official investigation. Do you believe that to be true?

I’ve a good nose for bullshit. Mikey wasn’t lying. I confirmed that with the brother, Thomas, when I phoned him a couple of days later to give him a rundown of where I was at. Mikey had gone to their house just like he said he did and he told the Mom and Dad just what he told me.

So you believe him. That they were covering something up?

At the time I didn’t know whether they were covering up or just being racist pigs to one of the few black kids in Willowbrook.

And?

And a little of column A a little of column B. But we’ll get there when we get there.

(…)

We’ll get there… when we get there.

Very well Mr Quaid. Your reports said that the next day you went to see a Mister Darnell Cooper?

Darnell is an old friend who I thought could help with something. We’d met at college.

And he’s assisted you in investigations before?

A few times…

Darnell Cooper and I were in the same dorm at Ithaca College. He was doing some Computer Science course and I was wasting my time reading English lit. I still hadn’t decided what I wanted to do with my life but teaching didn’t seem like too shitty an idea at the time.

The first time I met him was in the common room. The RA had called a dorm meeting and only about five or six of us actually turned up. Darnell was sitting with his laptop open on the grey cushioned couches while I was busily deciding what kind of candy I wanted from the vending machine. A Mars bar by the way. If you’re interested.

The RA, I don’t remember his name, had had a complaint from another student about someone not flushing the toilets after they’d taken a crap and he’d made it his job to find out who the phantom shitter was. In fairness; big loads were left in there every day. Someone was eating a little too much protein. Darnell made some wisecrack, without looking up from the screen of his laptop, about the possibility that the dorm was haunted by a great shitting ghost and I was the only one to laugh. He looked over at me and we’d been friends ever since.

We’d bonded first over our mutual distaste for the RA’s sense of seriousness, then over a shared interest in gaming. He was more into it than me, I had a PS3 but he was more into PC games. Friendship crosses boundaries huh? Ha! The final lock in our friendship was that we were the only two gay kids in our dorm and we didn’t know anyone else at Ithaca. Yeah I thought about joining the LGBT group but to be honest, they were quite the political bunch and I wasn’t interested in joining any rallies.

He was, is, a real handsome motherfucker: Darnell. Kinda like if Taye Diggs and Idris Elba could’ve had a baby. One of the things I really liked about him though is that he didn’t seem to notice it. Or didn’t care. If you’re going to ask me if I found him attractive then the answer to that is a boat load of yes. David was studying in California and we only really saw each other on holidays so we’d made a deal that during term time we could fuck around with other guys. Like I said, we’d been together since I was sixteen and he was eighteen and we both knew that after college we’d end up together. But neither of us wanted the other to miss out on the whole “college experience.”

I didn’t by the way… Fuck around with other guys. And as far as I know neither did David. I might have wanted to but the thought of being with anyone else but my husband to be only made feel guilty… even if I wanted to.

But back to the case in hand… Darnell opened the door with one of those big handsome ass smiles that makes people go weak at the knees and we hugged before going through to his office – which, by the way, is like something out of a computer geek’s wet dream. He has a desk that lines three walls and maybe what? Ten or twelve monitors and a shit ton of hardware. Some have projects he’s working on, some are purely for personal use and others are just there because they do something ever so slightly different to the one sitting next to them. He has tried to explain to me (several times) in the past about their various functions and uses and although I’d usually hang on his every word like a love sick puppy I tend to glaze over when gets too techy.

We caught up a little over instant coffee and a couple of danishes, he told me about a new contract that he’d signed with Black Rock Sands… you know the video games studio? They were about to launch a serious expansion for The Lurking Terror… You never heard of that huh? Best selling game of last year? OK, so you’re not a gamer… I was pretty fucking impressed anyway. So he told me about that and I told him about the case. The name Donny Baldwin didn’t mean anything to him.

We speak maybe once every couple of weeks, he’ll come over to the house for dinner and David will fawn over him and I’ll kick his ass at whatever game we’ve got on the go or maybe we’ll watch a movie. Darnell is like family. Family that both me and my husband wouldn’t have minded sleeping with if we hadn’t met each other first.

I handed over my laptop and the USB drive that Thomas had given me and told him that the security he designed had missed a trick and how I wanted him to check it over.

“You sure?” he asked, kinda dumbfounded that his system didn’t catch it. “You been applying the updates from the cloud I set up?”

“Everytime I get your email. I don’t know if it was the USB or the laptop or what… but the screen kinda buzzed out too.”

“Buzzed out?”

“For like a second. It kinda flashed and then went back to normal.”

“Well let’s see what we got.” He opened the laptop and booted it up into safe mode before trawling through the thing. I won’t pretend to know exactly what he was doing so I won’t even speculate but he looked pretty pleased with himself as he tapped away on the keyboard.

“Hmmmmmm.” he narrowed his eyes and stared at the screen.

“Hmmmmmm?”

“It doesn’t look malicious but there’s something on here. How long can you go without your laptop?”

“Everything’s backed up and I keep a spare notebook in the office.”

“Can I keep a hold of it a while?”

“Take as long as you need.” I sat down across from him as he connected my laptop to one of the many hard drives that lined the desk in his office.

“This one’s off line and as secure as anything you’ll find. We’ll find out what went wrong.” He winked at me and my heart jumped a little. Sometimes I can be such a girl.

“I’m more interested in the files on that USB and what you can tell me about them. I checked the properties but they’d been wiped.”

“Okey dokey.” Christ he’s such a dork! He plugged the USB into his ‘secure’ setup and opened up the partition before checking and scanning the file.

“Hmmmmmm…”

“You’re doing that a lot.”

“That’s a nasty little worm on here. No wonder the security missed it.”

“What happened to your ‘infallible security suite’?”

“People are always coming up with new ways to sneak past firewalls and crack security. Again, I’ll need a little more time with it. You didn’t back this up too did you? I wouldn’t want this on anything clean.”

“Not a chance!” I scoffed. “Open up the files and you’ll see why.”

He clicked into the first .jpeg and the image of the nearly naked Donny Baldwin bound and gagged came up on his oversized monitor.

“Shit!”

“Exactly my reaction.”

He clicked the second and shook his head: “And this is the kid you’re looking for?”

“Donny Baldwin. Thirteen years old in 1977, the year he went missing.”

Darnell just shook his head at the images on the screen. His reaction wasn’t the same as mine, he wasn’t torn somewhere between admiration for the beauty of that golden haired youth and shame for the feelings that those images flared. He outright knew what he should be feeling.

He clicked the .avi file and the video spang to life: the three boys by the pool in front of a glass and ceramic mosaic wall.

“What have you gotten yourself into?” He asked looking at me as the screen next to him showed the bruised brunette boy leaning in to kiss Donny’s lips.

“I’d be lying if I said I knew.”

When he turned back to the screen he rewatched the video – pausing it on the image of the three boys looking directly at the camera. “Hold up, hold up!” He spun his chair away from his desk and turned on the monitor of a second computer to his right. I didn’t watch what he punched into the keyboard but a gay video site came up on screen.

“This site hosts user uploaded clips, rarely anything more than ten to twenty minutes long. You know the sort of stuff, guys jerking off infront of their webcam and scenes ripped from porno’s mostly but it has a small selection of what the site calls ‘vintage’ pornography.” Darnell clicked through the pages until he found what he was looking for before double tapping on a video. He pulled it up to full screen and hit play.

The clip started out with a black title card “Cine Boys No. 32” written in white. The music kicked on as the titles cut: Donovan’s ‘The Hurdy Gurdy Man.’ I always found that to be one of the creepiest track’s I’d ever heard – the 1970’s kiddy porn it was playing over didn’t help rehabilitate it in my mind. Two boys who I would have aged about fifteen or sixteen were sitting naked on a towel laid out across overly green grass – prodding each other in the ribs while smiling. The boys were both brunettes, one with a mop of dark curls and the other with long hair that fell down over his bare shoulders. Like the video of Donny it was filmed on 8mm and digitized but the quality here was poorer, the colours bleached and the scratches on the film more severe, As the mop-top stood the camera zoomed out and revealed them to have been sitting in front of swimming pool… a mosaic of ceramics and glass on the wall behind their backs.

Darnell paused the clip and looked at me as I stared at the two images on the separate screens.

“Huh!”

“Man, I knew I’d seen that somewhere before. Now this isn’t my usual haunt for jerking it you understand but I’m pretty sure that that location turns up a bunch of times in clips on this site.”

“They’re just kids! How can the site get away with keeping these up online?”

“You’re asking the wrong man. I know the site is run by some crazy far right nut, you just need to check the blogs to see what insane alt-rght bullshit the admin posts. But I’m just there for the porn man. The legal stuff. Not this shit.”

“Can you send me a link?”

He turned back to the computer and copy and pasted the web address into an email and hit send. My phone buzzed in my pocket.

“Thanks…” I couldn’t take my eyes off of the screens. It wasn’t just similar. It was exactly the same, right down to the mottled splash of pieces of green glass curling around the yellow ceramics on the wall and the leafy green branches poking out above the top.

“When you bring it up switch to the ‘similar videos’ tab below and you’ll find a few more that use that location.”

“You know anything about this?”

“Nope. But you’re a detective right? You’ll figure something out.” He closed the web page and shut off the monitor pulling me out of my daze. “You wanna stay for lunch?”

“Shit!” I looked at my watch: it was half eleven. “I can’t. I need to get back to the office to get a package from a courier… then I need to go and see someone else this afternoon. Rain check?”

“Certainly.” He stood and smiled at me and for a moment I forgot all about the video’s and the computer virus and young Donny Baldwin.

“Are you coming over for dinner on Saturday? You know David’ll go all moody with me if you don’t.”

“Yeah yeah, I was promised risotto so I’ll be there.” That smile again.

We hugged it out once more and I ran for the subway to try and get back to the office for twelve.

It was only as I got out of the elevator that I saw the UPS guy walking away from my office door. After a brief exchange about what constitutes afternoon deliveries I showed him my ID and took the padded envelope.

Sitting down at my desk, I sighed before reaching for the Strathisla and pouring myself a glass. I pulled out the spare notebook and started it up. It was considerably smaller than my laptop but it did pretty much the same stuff and if Darnell wanted to keep a hold of my main computer for a few days then I needed something that I could work with.

I opened the packet that Freddy had sent me and pulled the manila file, a copy of the one that would be sitting in some basement in Shaolin. To say it was thin would be an understatement. The file had one copy of the report: a single sheet of A4, a couple of photo’s of Donny that I hadn’t seen before and a second single sheet for Mikey O’Hare’s witness statement.

The photo’s were just a couple of shots that the Baldwin family must have handed over to the police. One was a regular at home shot of a smiling happy kid playing with tin soldiers on the floor of a family room, the other would have been a copy of the most recent school portrait. His blonde hair was parted to the left and the smile was a little more forced showing the braces on the boy’s bottom teeth. Mikey’s statement was exactly what he had said. Everything from witnessing him talking to a man in a silver Ford LTD on Caswell Avenue to last seeing him on Batten Street. There was no mention of the Iowa plates or the description that Mikey gave me: of a man in his thirties, dark hair, glasses, little goatee… But then the witness statement wasn’t written in Mikey’s hand and lay on my desk unsigned. Only his name typed along the bottom.

The report though… shit! I don’t know how to start. A brief description… last place he was seen… who he was seen by and… yeah… that was that. Except in the final comments as bold as you like was: “Report made in Error”. They had figured the kid for a runaway and discounted everything else.

“Report made in Error”. Ain’t that a kick? The assumption that the kid had, as Freddy had put it “…just took a notion and ran away.”

So the first thing I do is call the old son-of-a-bitch.

“Yeah?”

“Freddy? It’s Ramsay.”

“Oh… yeah… How you doing kid?”

“You sound tired Freddy. Did I wake you?”

“Nah kid… I’m just a little… I’ve just had a few drinks is all.”

I looked at the clock on the wall, it was only a little after half twelve. Early even for Freddy: “You think that’s such a good idea?” I asked as I looked at the glass of Strathisla I had poured myself not twenty minutes before.

“Have I ever questioned your choices?” he snapped.

We sat silent for a moment just listening to each others breath over the phone. His was heavy – laboured. He was breathing through his mouth. “I got the file you sent over. It’s er… a little light?”

“It’s all they had kid.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

“What can you tell me about the ‘Report filed in Error’ schtick? Why is there no investigating officer named?”

“Look, it’s like I told you yesterday. The assumption was that the kid was a runaway… I mean there was nothing at the time like those photo’s you showed me. No idea that the kid had been snatched. No leads other than what’s in that file. That was it. Case closed. The investigating officer? I dunno, maybe someone just forgot to fill out the form properly. It happens more than we’d like.”

“Mikey O’Hare’s witness statement is a little light on detail too. He told me last night that he gave a hell of a lot more information to you guys than what’s available in this file. And I can tell that he isn’t stretching the truth.”

“It is what it is… Look Ramsay,” he sighed into the phone. “I was just a beat cop in seventy-seven. I have no idea who the interviewing officer was and I can honestly say that I know as much as you do at this point. Less it would seem.”

“Who was running the precinct in seventy-seven?”

“Shit… That would’ve been… Assistant Chief Raganella.”

“He still with the force?”

“No.”

“You know how I could get in touch with him?”

“Heh! Your best bet would be through a medium…”

“What?”

“He’s dead Ramsay. Shot himself in the neck in his backyard in the Summer of ‘79. Bled out all over the perfectly manicured lawn that he’d spent every hour he wasn’t at the station on.”

“Shit!”

“Yep.”

“Any reason?”

“Just rumours.”

“You gonna tell me any of those?”

“You’re the detective… If you think it’s important you’ll find out for yourself.” Everyone who had been dismissive of my work in the past was calling me a detective all of a sudden…

Freddy sighed once more into the receiver and left a pregnant pause hanging down the phone line as thick as fog. I could’ve filled it sure… but the old bastard was being cagey and although I still had that niggling little doubt, pecking away at the back of my brain like a woodpecker drumming on a tree trunk, that he was being something less than honest with me, at the time I put it down to the fact that he was drunk just past midday.

“Look. I gotta go Ramsay. I’ve got… I dunno… make something up.” Then he hung up. Irascible at the best of times he was being downright ornery with me then. But like I said, I put it down to the drink.

It was literally the moment that I ended the call with Freddy that my phone started ringing. Pickman’s name flashed across the screen.

“You’re not here yet? You are still coming right?” He was still sounding squirrelly.

“Look Pickman! I don’t really wanna travel all the way to Jersey City just because…”

“Shit! I told you man. Don’t say where I am! Fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuck Fuck!” He hung up on me. Thirty seconds later my phone buzzed again with an unrecognized number.

“Hello?”

“Fuck you Ramsay! Seriously fuck you! Are you trying to get me killed?” I really wasn’t. I couldn’t afford to lose the contacts in his little black book.

“Are you calling from a different number?”

“It’s a burner! I’m leaving. I’m going to E. You can meet me there in an hour. I’ve gotta make sure that I’m not tailed.” He’d wasted no time and was on the move already – I could hear the goomba routines being played out in the Jersey traffic.

“OK I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Good! Don’t forget to bring food!”

Hanging up I rolled my eyes at him. Pickman ellicits that reaction a lot. I threw the police file in my briefcase, downed the whisky and threw on my coat before heading for the door.

I arrived at Pickman’s ‘Safehouse E’ a little over an hour later and carrying a bag of McDonalds. He must have smelled it because no sooner had I opened the door with the key than he had leapt on me and swiped the bag from my hand. He scurried over to a small card table and a fold-up chair he had set up beside the window and tore into the bag.

“Thank you Ramsay,” I began, “that was very kind of you to bring me food.”

“Thank you?” The sauce from the Big Mac was dribbling down his chin. “Thank you? Nah man, Fuck you! Fuck you is what you get for making me go out onto the streets.”

I sat across from him and smiled. Pickman was a weird looking guy at the best of times. Put a dot of magic marker on the end of his nose and he could be mistaken for a weasel in human form. Maybe he is… Some kind of weasel spirit I mean. He’d wriggled his way out of enough tight spots over the course of his ‘criminal career’ for it to be true. I’d sometimes wonder about that… about whether we somehow took on the physical aspects of our personalities or whether our personalities are somehow moulded by the way we look.

“You’re safe aren’t you?” I said to him reaching into the bag and helping myself to a handful of of fries. “You’re here. You have food.”

“Barely. I’m sure I was being tailed. Had to ditch two guys in Hoboken. Mean looking bastards too.”

Pickman wasn’t prone to flights of fantasy but he was paranoid. It’s partly what’s kept him alive so long. I mean, with the business he’s in, he deals with some pretty shady people. More so than me. Up until the Donny Baldwin case my life was mostly insurance fraud and adulterous husbands. Even if occasionally I needed to pick at Pickman’s pocketbook.

“So are you gonna tell me what’s got you so spooked?”

He finished his Big Mac and started in on the fries: “I fucked up man! I really fucked up.”

“I gathered.”

“No, seriously this time.”

“So… What’s the problem?”

“It’s Christian! I’m fucking done for man. I’m fucking done for!”

“Christian?” I hoped to God it wasn’t who I thought it would be.

“Christian!” He took a swig of the large coke, the ice rattling in the cup. “Christian Christiansands!”

It was.

You know when you hear certain kinds of bad news how you develop that big ball of gristle in your gut! Like suddenly every nerve ending in your stomach metastasizes into a single cancerous tumour with the weight of a medicine ball? That’s how I felt when he said that name.

Christian Christiansands was a fairly new player in the City. But just the whisper of that name would give even biggest and baddest motherfucker the shivers.

The legend goes that he’d started as a low level enforcer for the Moretti Crime Syndicate in Chicago during the early oughts – creeping his way up the ladder with a reputation for a particularly sadistic brand of violence. It was Tony Moretti himself who eventually cut him loose. I say cut him loose, he tried to have the guy whacked after his ‘extracurricular’ activities brought too much attention to the family… but it was Christian who took out the three guys who came gunning for him. He chopped off their trigger fingers and sent them to Tony Moretti and cut out their tongues and sent them to their families – all by bike courier. And then he disappeared for eighteen months. You can imagine the rumours that circulated after that little stunt right? About the time that he was supposed to have resurfaced, Tony Moretti was found in the bed of his Bucktown apartment laid out like Jesus on the cross. The index fingers from both of his hands cut off and forced down his throat. His tongue sent to his father, the retired don Vinnie Moretti. You must have heard of that?

You ever hear of Tricky? No? English Trip-Hop artist? He had a track called “Christiansands”. Killer tune and a fat bass pocket that’s capable of giving any grown man a lazy soft lob. Anyway. The rumours were that Christian had fled to Helsinki. I know right? Crazy. But it came about because of that song. Some scared motherfucker thought that Tricky had met him there and wrote about it because the lyrics were: “I met him/Christian Christiansands/Oh, The Devil in Helsinki.” But the thing is that that’s not the lyrics. It actually goes: “I met a, Christian in Christiansands/And the Devil in Helsinki”. There’s also the fact that the song was released like twelve or thirteen years before any of that happened. But people don’t tend to like when fact gets in the way of a good urban legend. So the story has kinda stuck.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” I think I actually put my head in my hands. “How the fuck?”

“A meeting man. This Dutch dude was looking to move a shit ton of hardware that he’d scored while he was in town and wanted to move it at a more than fair price before he returned to Dutchland or wherever. You know that Christian has a choke hold on that market at the moment so I thought I’d set up a meeting with Christian’s crew. Get in good with the big boys you know. Maybe make a few bucks while I was at it.”

Hanging out on the periphery of this scene I hear lots of things and see very little. But Christian had supposedly made some serious moves since he turned up in the City. You want any kind of blackmarket weaponry, from revolvers to fucking surface to air missiles you go through Christian’s crew. He has his fingers in all sorts of pies, drugs, prostitution, racketeering… but arms are where his main income is sourced. The market, as I understand it, was a little more open before he turned up but Christian Christiansands does not like competition. Free market ethics don’t apply to everything that’s for sale.

“It’s called the Netherlands by the way. Not Dutchland. So what happened?” I asked him looking up through my fingers..

“I turn up with this Dutch dude at the arranged meeting place with Christian’s crew in Red Hook Grain Terminal. You know, the guy likes to keep it as creepy as fuck.”

“And?”

“And everyone’s there at the right time, me and the Dutchman and two of Christian’s lieutenants with a handful of goons with guns. It wasn’t a handover or anything like that it was just to make a deal, flesh out the specifics you know. No money was gonna trade hands here and no one was gonna walk away with a truck full of firearms.”

“How did you find the Dutchman?”

“He found me.”

“Did someone put him in contact with you?”

“Barney over at O’Toole’s Bar. The Dutchman was making enquiries.”

“And did he tell you how he happened to come into this stash of hardware?”

“Barney?”

“The Dutchman!”

“Not specifically.”

“Jesus Christ Pickman! Did he even have the weapons to sell to Christian?”

“Well… that wasn’t the problem…”

The long and short of Pickman’s story was that as they entered Red Hook, he had started to get nervous, like he could feel something was off in the air, real sweaty by Pickman’s account of things. And as introductions were made, one of the lieutenants, I don’t have any names, seemed to recognize the Dutchman… and not in a “Oh it’s my buddy Bob” kinda way – but scared. “Like he’d recognised the devil behind the Dutchman’s eyes” is how Pickman put it.

So, my squirrely friend say’s that the Dutchman reached into the inside pocket of his dark blue suit jacket and pulls a handkerchief. He blows his nose real slow and deliberate and then drops the handkerchief… and the moment that that square of pale blue silk hit the dusty ground: guns started firing! Emerging down the rusted metal steps from the floor above and bringing with them a hail of kalashnikov and shot-gun fire were, what Pickman would swear, thirty or more guys. And their bullets tore through the bodies of Christian’s men like they were paper.

Now Peter Pickman, despite his long career, had never seen a man get shot before. Neither had I at that point. So naturally, he shits himself at the sight of six men getting gunned down and he hit the floor, covering the back of his head with his hands as bullets whizzed all about him. The noise was so loud, he claims, that everything went silent except for the sharp ringing in his ears. The only reason he lifted his head up at all was because the Dutchman had tapped his shoulder.

Opening his eyes, to the walls and floor of Red Hook painted with blood, Pickman said that he vomited at the sight of the bodies. He wasn’t trying to make himself sound more macho in this story… I guess he knew that I wouldn’t believe it.

“The Dutchman stood me up and dusted me off himself while his men, these big motherfuckers with big fucking guns, kinda circled me like if I didn’t behave I’d be next and he handed me a business card.”

“The Dutchman?”

“Of course the fucking Dutchman!”

“And what was on the business card?”

Pickman went into the inside pocket of his leather jacket hanging off the back of his chair and handed it over to me: ‘Daan Dieprink’ I flipped it over and on the other side was a cell number. It was a real nice card too. Good quality, nice weight, felt a little like treated canvas. Embossed in the left corner was a strange symbol – three swirls like irregular question marks sparking from a blotch in their centre. Don’t ask me why but as I ran the pad of my thumb over it I suddenly felt incredibly nauseous – something like standing on the ledge of a tall building and peering over the edge…

What?

You’re looking at me funny.

It’s the name’s isn’t it? I get it… Peter Pickman, Christian Christiansands and the Dutchman Daan Dieprink. They all have the quality of having been written by a 1960’s comic book creator… it’s all a little Stan Lee isn’t it? Yeah well there are no superheroes in this story. In fact I’d argue that there aren’t any heroes in it period. It’s like that line from Grapes of Wrath: ‘There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff that people do.’

“He wants me to hand it over to Christian myself.”

I looked up from the card at Pickman and shook my head: “Seems like an awful lot of bother to go to in order to get your business card into another man’s hands.”

“Tell me about it!” Pickman sat back down in his chair and swiped his finger around the inside of the burger box, getting every last ounce of fat and salt onto his skin before putting it into his mouth. “I mean… I’m not gonna do it. Can you imagine what someone like Christian Christiansands would do to me? I set up that meeting. Me! I need my index fingers man. I need my tongue…”

“When was this?” I handed him back the Dutchman’s business card, suddenly feeling a whole lot better that it was no longer in my possession, and he turned it over in his greasy wet fingers

“Sunday night.”

“So you’ve been hiding two and half days. How do you know that anyone’s after you?”

“My apartment was turned over when I got back on Monday morning. And I don’t just mean ‘turned over’. It was a wreck!”

“Could have been the Dutchman.”

“He’s got no reason to do that unless I don’t hand over the card.”

Pickman was prone to embellishment but normally only if there was an extra buck or two to be made out of it. The same way a realtor will tell you that you’ll hardly hear the airplanes when trying to sell you a house under a flightpath. I had no reason to doubt his story but…

“A gangland massacre in Brooklyn on Sunday would have made the news. I mean the way you describe this horror at Red hook… How come I’ve not heard anything?”

“Beats me man. Maybe the Dutchman cleaned the place up before he left. Maybe Christian’s crew did it so word wouldn’t get out that you can take his guys out so easily.”

“And the gunfire?”

“The only people hanging around Red Hook other than us at that time of night were junkies and bums. No one would have heard a thing… I mean we were so far back and so far down that I doubt…”

“So why are you asking for my help? What do you think I can do?”

“You can hide me.”

“Hide you? Hide you where? You’re the one with a series of safe houses all over the city. You’ve got enough money in your accounts to split and start over somewhere new. I’m not exactly of this scene Pickman.”

“But that’s the beauty of it. You’re a nobody.” He obviously caught that I was staring at him, hard. “In the good sense of the word! No one knows you… You’re smart, capable and just as… ‘morally ambiguous’ as the rest of us but you move in entirely different circles.”

‘Morally ambiguous’ stung a little to be honest. I’ve never claimed to be anyone’s white knight but I mostly operate within the law and always within the best interests of the people who’ve paid me for my skills. I’ve habitually considered myself to be on the side of the angels, so to speak. As if picking up on my displeasure at what he had said, Pickman spoke before I could disagree with him: “That woman last year… The one who was looking for her son… I helped you with that… pearls before swine… remember?”

Mrs. Joan Symms had waddled into my office one wet Wednesday afternoon. Her son had been missing for two weeks and she was worried. The cops didn’t seem interested because the guy was a junkie and this wasn’t the first time that he’d failed to arrive at her apartment, where they would have dinner every Sunday. During their last engagement together they’d fought, like they always do, and he had walked out of the door. But only after helping himself to her only items of value: a pearl necklace and earring set – that the now dearly departed Mr. Symms had gifted his wife on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. She didn’t want to go to the police about the theft but she did want the pearls back. In tears she told me about them being the last gift from her husband before pancreatic cancer took him. She didn’t want her son punished though, she just wanted to know that he was alive and she wanted him to know that she forgave him. That kind of love is a kicker isn’t it? I dunno… maybe she felt guilty about raising such a shitty son, maybe she did actually love him in that way where she could forgive his constant betrayals. They say that there’s nothing like a mother’s love… so maybe.

There was nothing in his empty apartment that gave any clue to where he was hiding, but I did find a receipt for the pearls from a place called ‘Eazily Pawned’ a block and a half down from his front door. Shit name right? After shaking down the owner, I bought the pearls back for a fraction of what they were worth and locked them up in the safe in my office. Eventually I tracked him through a few of his ‘friends’ or maybe… maybe associates is a better word. I don’t know what the correct term is for what junkies are to each other. When you’ll stab your ‘best friend’ in the eye for a half tenth of a gram baggy could you call each other BFF’s? Any way… The junkie son was at a flop house in Queens surrounded by other less than healthy bodies in their own states of decay. When I mentioned his mother he flew into a rage and offered to give me head if I’d kill her with him – we could split the proceeds of his inheritance he insisted.

Can you believe that shit? I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll probably say it a thousand times more but… people are the fuckin’ worst.

I had left it a couple of days and kept an eye on him. I was worried that he’d do harm to his old lady and didn’t want her knowing that the apple of her eye would trade head for a hit. He made it back to his apartment after scoring with, what I presume, was the last of the pearl money. After a few more days when he hadn’t made his way back out, as far as I could tell, I broke in through the bathroom window from the fire escape.

I don’t know how long he’d been dead, but from the smell it could have been from the first hit after I saw him enter his building. He had definitely OD’d – the needle was still in his arm and foam had dried to a crusted yellow paste over his lips and chin. That was my first dead body by the way. Like I told you, my life as a Private Eye had been less than the thrill ride that Dashiell Hammett had led me to believe.

After sitting on the fire escape, to escape the smell, for a couple of hours thinking about what to do next I ended up calling Pickman and damn it if the little weasel didn’t come right over. I asked about body disposal and he told me he could cover it. We loaded the junkie son’s body into the trunk of his beat up piece of shit Ford Pinto and he drove us out of the City and into Schenectady County. After about three and half hours and a hundred and ninety miles he pulls up at to pig farm just outside of Duanesburg. Pickman spoke to some grizzled old bastard in a pair of dungarees, a truckers cap, and not much else, and after a bit of to and fro we took the body from the trunk and dumped it into a barn.

I didn’t see what the old guy did with the body but I did hear the bone saw start whirring as soon as the barn doors slammed shut. He runs a pig farm so you can hazard a guess. I’d read that certain types of swine will chew right through bone.

The next day I went to Mrs. Symms small apartment for my payment. I handed her back the pearls and told her that her shitbag son had asked me to return them to her. I also told her that after I’d had a little heart to heart with him, he had said that he was going to be away for a while to get himself clean and that he was really sorry. I didn’t lay it on too thick because I needed her to believe that the words were her sons. In tears she thanked me, gave me the money she owed me and I went on my way.

What?

No. I don’t regret what I did. The way he talked when I mentioned his mother… it was always gonna be her or him, even if she didn’t know it. In the worse case scenario he’d have had her killed and then OD’d a week later on the inheritance. This way at least she got her pearls back and some peace of mind that the loathsome little creep wouldn’t be upsetting her anymore. If I’d have reported the body the old broad would have blamed herself and I’d’ve felt bad about that. Which is not to say that I don’t feel a certain amount of bad about my short career in body disposal. Just less so I guess.

Anyway, where were we?

Oh yeah! My ‘moral ambiguity’ as Pickman put it.

“You know,” I said as I watched him suck up the last of his cola through the straw. “if you don’t give Christian the card, you’re gonna have The Dutchman after you too. Isn’t it better to only have one of the bad guys chasing you down? Christian could give you protection until he’s dealt with whatever Daan Dieprink is up to.”

“He could also tie me to a table, cut off my fingers and pull out my tongue.”

In fairness, that was the more likely end result.

“How long do you think you can stay here for?”

“I dunno. A day, two, three at the most maybe.”

“OK,” I said standing. “You do that. I’ll think about what to do and we’ll move from there.”

“Come by tomorrow. Bring more food.”

“Yeah, yeah.” As I closed the door behind me and walked down the stairs and back out into the evening air of the open street I became very aware of every person on it and where their eyes moved. I guess Pickman’s paranoia was rubbing off.

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