Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“With Dottie,” he said. “And Lenny’s kid, Ray.”

Lenny raised his head from his beer and said, “Shut the fuck up, Dave.”

“The skeevy guy who manned the door?” Angie said. “That’s Ray?”

Big Dave nodded.

“What were they doing in here?” I said.

“Don’t you say another word,” Lenny said.

Big Dave glanced at him desperately, then back at Angie and me. “Just drinking. Helene knew it looked bad enough she left her kid alone in the first place. If the press or the cops knew she was actually ten blocks away at a bar and not next door, it would look even worse.”

“What’s her relationship with Ray?”

“They do each other sometimes, I think.” He shrugged.

“What’s Ray’s last name?”

“David!” Lenny said. “David, you shut the—”

“Likanski,” Big Dave said. “He lives on Harvest.” He took a gulp of air.

“You are shit,” Lenny told him. “That’s what you are, and it’s all you’ll ever be, and all your retarded fucking offspring will be and everything you touch. Shit.”

“Lenny,” I said.

Lenny kept his back to me. “You think I’m going to say a word to you, boy, you are on fucking angel dust. I might be watching my beer, but I know you got a gun, and I know that girl has one too. And so fucking what? Shoot me or leave.”

Outside, I could hear the sound of a siren approaching.

Lenny turned his head, and a smile broke across his face. “Sounds like they’re coming for you, don’t it?” His smile broke into a hard, bitter laugh that exposed a red sore of a mouth with almost no teeth.

He waved at me as the siren grew so close I knew they were in the alley. “Bye-bye now. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

His bitter laugh came out even harder this time and sounded more like the coughing of ravaged lungs. After a few seconds, his cronies joined in, nervously at first but then openly, as we heard the doors of the cop car opening outside.

By the time we walked out the door, it sounded like a party in there.

5

When we stepped out of the bar into the alley, we met the grille of a black Ford Taurus parked a matter of inches from the front door. The younger of the two detectives, a big guy beaming a little boy’s smile, leaned in through the open driver’s window and turned off the siren.

His partner sat cross-legged on the hood, a colder smile on his round face, and said, “Woo, woo, woo.” He held an index finger aloft and rotated his wrist and made the sound again. “Woo, woo, woo.”

“Frighteningly realistic,” I said.

“Ain’t it?” He clapped his hands together and slid down the car hood until his feet rested on the grille and his knees were almost touching my legs.

“You’d be Pat Kenzie.” His hand shot out toward my chest. “Glad to make your acquaintance.”

“Patrick,” I said, and shook the hand.

He gave it two vigorous pumps. “Detective Sergeant Nick Raftopoulos. Call me Poole. Everyone does.” His sharp elfin face tilted toward Angie. “You’d be Angela.”

She shook his hand. “Angie.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Angie. Anyone ever tell you that you have your father’s eyes?”

Angie placed a hand over her eyebrows, took a step toward Nick Raftopoulos. “You knew my father?”

Poole held his palms up on his knees. “In passing. In a member-of-opposing-teams capacity. I liked the man, miss. He had genuine class. To tell you the truth, I mourned his…passing, if that’s the word. He was a rarity.”

Angie gave him a soft smile. “That’s nice of you to say.”

The bar door opened behind us and I could smell stale whiskey again.

The younger cop looked up at whoever stood behind us. “Back inside, mutt. I know someone holding paper on your ass.”

The stale whiskey stench dissipated and the door closed behind us.

Poole jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “That young man there with the sweet disposition is my partner, Detective Remy Broussard.”

We nodded at Broussard, and he nodded back. At closer glance, he was older than he’d first appeared. I put him at forty-three or forty-four. When I’d first come outside I’d pegged him for my age because of the Tom Sawyer innocence in that grin of his, but the crow’s-feet around his eyes, the lines etched in the hollows of his cheeks, and the deep pewter-gray streaked through his curly dirty-blond hair added a decade upon a second look. He had the build of a man who worked out at least four times a week, a physique of solid bulked-up muscle mass that was softened by the double-breasted olive Italian suit he wore over a loosened blue-and-gold Bill Blass tie and subtly pinstriped shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

A clotheshorse, I decided, as he brushed some dust from the edge of his left Florsheim, the kind of man who probably never passed a mirror without casting a lingering glance into it. But as he leaned over the open driver’s door and stared at us, I sensed a piercing calculation in him, a prodigious intelligence. He might pause at mirrors, but I doubted he ever missed anything going on behind him when he did.

“Our dear Lieutenant Jack-the-impassioned Doyle said we should look you up,” Poole said. “So here we are.”

“Here you are,” I said.

“We’re driving up the avenue toward your office,” Poole said, “and we see Skinny Ray Likanski come running out of this alley. Ray’s father, you see, a snitch of snitches in the old days, goes way back with me. Detective Broussard wouldn’t know Skinny Ray from Sugar Ray, but I say, ‘Stop the chariot, Remy. That plebeian is none other than Skinny Ray Likanski and he looks a might distressed.’” Poole smiled and drummed his fingers on his kneecaps. “Ray is screaming about someone waving a gun inside this fine establishment.” He cocked his eyebrow at me. “‘A gun?’ I say to Detective Broussard. ‘In a gentleman’s club like the Filmore Tap? Why, I never.’”

I looked at Broussard. He leaned against the driver’s door, arms folded across his chest. He shrugged as if to say, My partner, what a character.

Poole did a fast drumbeat on the hood of the Taurus to get my attention. I looked back at him, and he smiled up at me with his weathered elf’s face. He was in his late fifties probably, squat, and the hair cropped tight to his head was the color of cigarette ash. He rubbed the bristles and squinted into the midafternoon sunlight. “Would said alleged gun be that Colt Commander I see by your alleged right hip, Mr. Kenzie?”