THE HEADSTONE Jimmy picked was simple and white. The salesman spoke in a low, respectful voice, as if he'd rather be anyplace but here, and yet he kept trying to nudge Jimmy toward more expensive stones, ones with angels and cherubs or roses engraved in the marble. "Maybe a Celtic cross," the salesman said, "a choice that's quite popular with..."
Jimmy waited for him to say "your people," but the salesman caught himself and finished with "...an awful lot of people these days."
Jimmy would have forked over the money for a mausoleum if he thought it would make Katie happy, but he knew his daughter had never been a fan of ostentation or overadornment. She'd worn simple clothes and simple jewelry, no gold, and she'd rarely used makeup unless it was a special occasion. Katie had liked things clean, with just a subtle hint of style, and that's why Jimmy chose the white and ordered the engraving in the calligraphic script, the salesman warning him that the latter choice would double the engraver's cost, and Jimmy turning his head to look down at the little vulture, backing him up a few feet as he said, "Cash or check?"
Jimmy had asked Val to drive him over, and when he left the office, he got back in the passenger seat of Val's Mitsubishi 3000 GT, Jimmy wondering for probably the tenth time how a guy in his mid-thirties could drive a car like this and not think he looked anything but silly.
"Where to next, Jim?"
"Let's get some coffee."
Val usually had some sort of bullshit rap music blaring from his speakers, the bass throbbing behind tinted windows as some middle-class black kid or white-trash wannabe sang about bitches and hos and whipping out his gat and made what Jimmy assumed were topical references to all these MTV pussies Jimmy would never have known of if he hadn't overheard Katie using their names on the phone with her girlfriends. Val kept his stereo off this morning, though, and Jimmy was grateful. Jimmy hated rap and not because it was black and from the ghetto-hell, that's where P-Funk and soul and a lotta kick-ass blues had come from-but because he couldn't for the life of him see any talent in it. You strung a bunch of limericks together of the "Man from Nantucket" variety, had a DJ scratch a few records back and forth, and threw out your chest as you spoke into a microphone. Oh, yeah, it was raw, it was street, it was the truth, motherfucker. So was pissing your name in the snow and vomiting. He'd heard some moron music critic on the radio say once that sampling was an "art form" and Jimmy, who didn't know much about art, wanted to reach through the speaker and bitch-slap the obviously white, obviously overeducated, obviously dickless pinhead. If sampling was an art form, then most of the thieves Jimmy had known growing up were artists, too. Probably be news to them.
Maybe he was just getting old. He knew it was always a first sign that your generation had passed the torch of relevancy if it couldn't understand the music of the younger one. Still, deep in his heart, he was pretty sure that wasn't it. Rap just sucked, plain and simple, and Val listening to it was a lot like Val driving this car, trying to hold on to something that had never been all that worthwhile in the first place.
They stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and tossed their lids in the trash on the way out the door, sipped their coffee leaning against the spoiler attached to the trunk of the sports car.
Val said, "We went out last night, asked around like you said."
Jimmy tapped his fist into Val's. "Thanks, man."
Val tapped back. "It ain't just 'cause you did two years for me, Jim. Ain't just 'cause I miss your brain running things, either. Katie was my niece, man."
"I know."
"Maybe not by birth or nothing, but I loved her."
Jimmy nodded. "You guys were the best uncles any kid could have had."
"No shit?"
"No shit."
Val sipped some coffee and went silent for a bit. "Well, all right, here's the deal: looks like the cops were right about O'Donnell and Farrow. O'Donnell was in county lockup. Farrow was at a party and we personally talked to, like, nine guys who vouched for him."
"All solid?"
"Half, at least," Val said. "We also sniffed around and there's been no contracts floating along the street for a while. And, Jim, it's been a year and a half since the last time I can even remember a hired hit, so we'd a heard. You know?"
Jimmy nodded and drank some coffee.
"Now the cops have been all over this," Val said. "They're smothering the bars, the street trade around the Last Drop, everything. Every hooker I've talked to has already been questioned. Every bartender. Every single soul who was in McGills or the Last Drop that night. I mean, the law descended, Jim. So it's out there. Everyone's trying to remember something."
"You talk to anybody who did?"
Val held up two fingers as he took another drink. "One guy-you know Tommy Moldanado?"
Jimmy shook his head.
"Grew up in the Basin, paints houses. Anyway, he claims he saw someone staking out the parking lot of the Last Drop just before Katie left. He said the guy definitely wasn't no cop. Drove a foreign car with a dented front quarter, passenger side."
"Okay."
"Other weird thing was, I talk to Sandy Greene. 'Member her from the Looey?"
Jimmy could see her sitting in the classroom, brown pigtails, crooked teeth, always chewed her pencils until they snapped in her mouth and she had to spit out the lead.
"Yeah. What's she doing these days?"
"Hooking," Val said. "And she looks rough, man. Our age, right? And my mother looked better in her coffin. Anyway, she's like the oldest pro out there on that circuit near the Last Drop. She says she sort of adopted this kid. Runaway kid, works the trade."
"Kid?"
"Like eleven-, twelve-year-old boy."
"Ah, Jesus."
"Hey, that's life. Anyway, this kid, she thinks his real name is Vincent. Everyone called him 'Little Vince' except Sandy. She said he preferred 'Vincent.' And Vincent's a lot older than twelve, you know? Vincent's a pro. She says he'll fuck you up you try anything with him, keeps a razor blade tucked under his Swatch band, that sorta thing. There six nights a week. Until this Saturday, that is."
"What happened to him on Saturday?"
"No one knows. But he vanished. Sandy said he sometimes crashed at her place. She gets back there Sunday morning and his shit is gone. He blew town."
"So, he blew town. Good for him. Maybe he got out of the life."
"That's what I said. Sandy said, No, this kid was into it. She said he was going to make one very scary adult, you know? But for now, he's a kid, and he dug the work. She said if he blew town, only one thing could have caused it and that was fear. Sandy thinks he saw something, something that terrified him, and she said that something would have to be pretty bad, because little Vince don't scare easy."
"You got feelers out?"
"Yeah. It's hard, though. The kiddie trade ain't, like, organized. You know? They're just living on the street, picking up a couple of bucks however they can, blowing town whenever they feel like it. But I got people looking. We find this Vincent kid, I figure maybe he knows something about the guy sitting in the parking lot of the Last Drop, maybe he saw the, you know, Katie's death."
"If it had anything to do with this guy in the car."
"Moldanado said the guy gave off a bad vibe. Something about him, he said, even though it was dark, he couldn't see the guy good, he just said a vibe came from that car."
A vibe, Jimmy thought. Oh, yeah, that's helpful.
"And this was just before Katie left?"
"Just before, yeah. The police, right, they sealed off the parking lot Monday morning, had a whole team down there, scraping the asphalt."
Jimmy nodded. "So something went down in that parking lot."
"Yeah. That's what I don't get. Katie was taken off on Sydney, man. That's like ten blocks away."
Jimmy drained his coffee cup. "What if she went back?"
"Huh?"
"To the Last Drop. I know what the prevailing theory is-she dropped Eve and Diane, drove up Sydney, and that's when it happened. But what if she drove back to the Last Drop first? She drove back, she runs into the guy. He abducts her, forces her to drive back to Pen Park, and then it goes down like the cops think?"
Val tossed his empty coffee cup back and forth between his hands. "That's possible. But what brought her back to the Last Drop?"
"I don't know." They walked to the trash barrel and dumped their cups, and Jimmy said, "What about Just Ray's kid, you find anything out there?"
"Asked around in general about him. The kid's a mouse by all accounts. No trouble to anyone. If he wasn't so good-looking, I'm not sure anyone would even remember meeting him. Eve and Diane both said he loved her, Jim. Loved her like once-in-a-lifetime kinda love. I'll take a run at him, you want."
"Let's hold off for the time being," Jimmy said. "Watch and wait when it comes to him. Try to track down that Vincent kid."
"Yeah, okay."
Jimmy opened the passenger door, saw Val looking at him over the roof, Val holding something back, chewing it.
"What?"
Val blinked in the sunlight, smiled. "Huh?"
"You want to spit something. What is it?"
Val lowered his chin out of the sun, spread his arms on the roof. "I heard something this morning. Just before we left."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," Val said, and looked off into the doughnut shop for a moment. "I heard those two cops were by Dave Boyle's again. You know, Sean from the Point and his partner, the fat one?"
Jimmy said, "Dave was in McGills that night, yeah. They probably just forgot to ask him something, had to come back."
Val's gaze left the doughnut shop and his eyes met Jimmy's. "They took him with them when they left, Jim. You know what I mean? Put him in the backseat."