Chapter Thirteen: BURNING BRIDGES

I went upstairs to Tigger’s door, knocked, and answered her “Who’s there?” with “Me, returning your set of keys.”

The door opened.

She said in a hushed voice, “Quiet, everyone’s sleeping. Nana and papa fell asleep on Rue’s floor by her bed. Retz nodded off on the can, so shhh.”

As soon as I saw her, I got a lump in my throat.

She’d been my neighbor in this top-story loft apartment for over ten years, was here when I moved in. We’d had an instant connection, pals at first sight. Maybe if I’d been younger, I’d’ve tried to make it more. But she was seventeen at the time and I was too old for her. Funny I used to think twenty-eight was too old.

I still didn’t know the whole story of how she’d come to New York City, she’d never put forth the information, but she’d dropped enough hints for me to sketch in the outlines. She’d come to the city at fourteen or fifteen, running away from a home life that made resting her head on the hard edge of a sidewalk a more comfortable cushion. She’d mixed with rough people in those early years and become one herself. She began working raves when she was sixteen; it turned out she had a natural talent as a techie. By the time I moved in she was going on eighteen and already had her union card, working Broadway shows in the city and sometimes on tour.

Deeper than that I’d never dug. I deliberately avoided it. Tigger knew what I did for a living, invading people’s pasts and ferreting out the truth. It was work in the pursuit of which you developed certain “skills” of mistrust, deceit, emotional insulation, and healthy paranoia. But what’s healthy professionally can be poison in a friendship. Stay in the business long enough and these skills harden into personality traits you can no longer turn on and off. After a while, you can’t meet someone new without dissecting them; you start assuming all the faces you meet are masks.

But I had never done that with Tigger. And never wanted to. Somehow it was important having one person in my life I didn’t treat as suspect, not even the least-likely variety.

Of course we’d also both been young back then, and the temptation to probe hadn’t been so great. The past hadn’t been that important to us; too much was going on in the now that needed sorting out. But soon the past was all I would have of her.

She must’ve seen some of the thought on my face, because her bushy brows knitted.

I swallowed the lump and forced a smile. Be happy. I needed her help, not her sympathy. And most of all I needed her computer.

Tigger had a much more sophisticated computer setup than I ever would—a NASA console by comparison. The whole thing was separately powered by a solar panel unit she’d mounted up on the roof. Con Ed never saw a penny. She could set up shop on a desert island, that one.

In the past year, after becoming a new mother, she’d quit working in theater and turned to graphic design, something she could do from home. She’d been successful at it, too. Too successful. It was enabling her to buy a house in the country and leave the city, and everyone still in it, behind.

Part of my discomfort over losing Tigger was selfish: I used her on a regular basis as a sounding board and procurer of information. She was my Huggy Bear. She knew parts of this city I didn’t know existed and the sort of people who inhabited them. I would miss that almost as much as I’d miss her.

To make up for that impending deficit, I was going to wring as much out now as I could.

She must have seen the greed in my eyes.

“Is this for a case? Finally got a client?”

A client? Just to show her up, I gave her a tally of my clients so far that day. Four in all. If she was shocked, her face didn’t betray it. She was the quintessential New Yorker, never batting an eyelash. Though she did squint hard when I was telling her about Mr. and Mrs. Dough knocking my stuffing out and interrupted me to ask, “Wait, is this true?”

“Dunno, I’m just telling you what happened.”

I stopped giving her the rundown of my day at the point where Matt walked out, for fear of lapping myself.

“Four clients in one day,” I said. “That’s more than I’ve had all year. And it all started with George Rowell. Everything that’s happened…there’s got to be something that connects it all. I can’t chalk it up to coincidence.”

I got no argument from her. I was a little disappointed. Never could anticipate what her reaction was going to be, but usually she was contrary.

This time she said, “You’re right. There is something that connects all these things. Links all of them together.”

That tone of voice—complete conviction, complete self-confidence…she saw something, she knew the answer! I could feel my heart start thudding like a boot kicking the back of my chair in study hall.

I asked, “What is it?”

“It’s you, Payton,” she said. “You’re the connection. Your perception frames them all and imposes a pattern, which precludes you from ever perceiving them as what they might well be, merely a random set of unrelated events.”

“Oh,” I said. It was a letdown. “Well, thank you, sensei. But that doesn’t really help me.”

“I call ’em as I see ‘em,” she said, and leaned back in her rolling chair. “So let’s get to the important part: Which of these women is it that’s got you panting?”

“What?”

“Come off it, I’ve seen that look in your eye before, like the pilot light’s gone on. You don’t get that look over a man. Only a woman. And not an ugly one either. So give—is it Little Miss Pilates with the nice bum and the fake name or is it the Suicide Girl with the Ninotchka accent and the scars?”

I gave. “Neither,” I said. “It’s the bad guy.” I’d told her about following Sayre Rauth from Yaffa and then speaking to her outside her townhouse, but I’d confined myself to the what, where, and when. This time around, I added in the how. And what a how it was. I hadn’t realized how much she’d made my blood boil or how obvious it was that she had. Tigger smiled as I told her of the effect Ms. Rauth had had on me.

“Who’d’ve thought one of the city’s hottest women would be working as a realtor?” she said. “Not one of your top ten sexiest jobs. Which firm did you say she’s with?”

“I didn’t say. She’s got her own, Rauth Realty. That’s what the townhouse is, their office.”

Tigger’s smile vanished. “No such company.”

I grinned. “Sez you. I was there a few hours ago.”

Tigger shook her head resolutely. 99% of the time there was no arguing with her, because 98% of the time she was right.

“I know all the registered realtors in the area. Trust me, for the last year I’ve been talking to half of them, the other half I e-mailed. And I never heard of a Rauth Realty, at least not here in the city. Certainly not in this neighborhood.”

“Oh. Well, maybe I got the spelling wrong. Or maybe she’s not registered.”

“Uh-huh. You want to tell me a little more about what she’s like?”

“I…she…”

“Oh, so it’s like that, huh? Well, be careful, Payton, you know how you get. Don’t stick your neck out too far over her—or any of your other parts that are liable to get chopped off.”

“Don’t worry. I think she’s okay.”

“So you think this Elena’s just lying about her?”

“Not lying, necessarily—but not telling the whole story.”

“Sure you aren’t just thinking with your dick again?”

“And what’s wrong with that? It’s my divining rod.”

Tigger snorted and turned to one of her computer screens. “More like a compass needle.”

“Pointing dewy south.”

She laughed. While I had her in a good mood, I started asking her what she knew about some of the other people and names I’d come across. “You ever hear of a girl named Michael Cassidy?”

“Hear of her?” Tigger said. “I saw her last night.”

“Excuse me?”

“Michael Cassidy: red hair, green eyes, famous daddy, fourteen minutes into her allotted fifteen? That Michael Cassidy?” I nodded. “She was at that premiere afterparty where Craig Wales overdosed.”

“You were there?”

“I set up the lights, favor for a friend. Left before the big foofaraw went down, but I’ve been checking it out this morning on the web.”

She rode her swivel chair like a magic carpet over to her desk and the bank of computer monitors. There were three. They shared the same screensaver, an elaborate Lionel Train set-up with tracks that extended across all three monitors. When the engine passed from one to the next, it entered a mountain range and disappeared, a suspenseful moment as it traversed the empty gap between screens, only to appear finally on the next one over, chugging renewed puffs of greasy smoke. Tigger rattled the mouse and the little world of perfection vanished from the monitors.

Tigger’s computer was already logged onto the Internet, constantly online. It was freakish, but in this regard Tigger was no longer the freak. Not that I’d ever dream of saying something like that to her face.

“There, look.” She pointed at the center monitor.

A site containing a transcript of the late Craig Wales’ text-message blog accompanied by cell phone snapshots of the party that people had uploaded. In the background of one shot I could see Michael Cassidy arguing with a short woman with a deep tan and peroxide blonde hair.

“That’s Coy d’Loy,” Tigger said.

“Coy d’Loy? Sounds French.”

“If by ‘French’ you mean made-up. She’s one of a current crop of It girls.”

“What, you mean It, like popular young women of the moment, or IT, like Pennywise the clown?”

Tigger laughed. “Bit of both. She runs this rabid public relations firm called The Peer Group. Almost went under a few months ago—she was one of those who got taken in by that crooked money manager, Addison—but she took money from a silent partner to stay afloat, some bruiser with ties to the Russian mob.”

I was only half-listening. Another face in the background had gotten my attention, at first only because he looked so out of place. The crowd was mostly composed of people in their twenties, but this man was in his late sixties, a stubby old man with bulbous features and no chin, black hornrim glasses, and a stiff gray pompadour. I’d seen him someplace else and it bugged me I couldn’t remember where.

That image was the last picture of the night taken by Craig Wales, followed by his final live-blog entry, a message that he was going off with “MC.” “OMG, used to spank to her TTS. ML!”

Guess ML stood for “more later” but that was the last he ever note. Twenty minutes later, he was dead.

“They went off to shoot up together,” Tigger said, “but he didn’t come back from it. Stuff was too pure or else it was doctored with something.”

A hot bag. Elena’s words echoed in my head. “Where did you hear that?”

She clicked over to a site called D-O-A.com. It linked to a leaked preliminary M.E. report on the death of Craig Wales. She printed it out for me. Then we skimmed a stream of blogs commenting on the actor’s death, from Perez Hilton and Page Six to Smoking Gun and Hooded Armadillo, but no one had picked up yet on Michael Cassidy in that photo.

It was exhilarating, knowing that little bit more than was being reported. It’s why I never trusted what I saw or read in the news. Not that what was reported was wrong, just nearly always only a sliver of the truth.

Now for part two of my little quest. I handed Tigger the iPod.

“Can you take a look?” I said. “Supposedly Owl used it as a portable hard drive, sucking down info off Sayre’s computer.”

“And you want to look at it,” Tigger said, “because nothing says love like spying on a lady’s files.”

“I want to look at it because what’s on it might help explain how Owl wound up dead.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on it.” She plugged the iPod into a USB shell in front of the right-hand monitor and her computer began a virus check on the device.

Tigger flashed me a grin, her nose ring tinkling in contact with her two front teeth, giving off a silvery ping.

She said, “I feel like Nancy Drew.”

“The Clue in the Crumbling Cock,” I chimed in.

“Get out, that isn’t one.” She laughed. I was a bad person, but still my bad jokes tickled her. Hell, I’d miss her.

After a few more seconds of chugging away, her computer gave the device an all-clear. We leaned our heads together as the contents of the iPod opened up on her screen.

Stacks of files folders appeared, 183 in all.

Tigger blew a feathery lock of hair from her brow.

“So, you know what you’re looking for here?”

“Nope.” I looked and looked and kept looking, reading the names of the folders one by one. Many were just meaningless series of characters like L77JPLEQIN.

Tigger said, “Look, I’d like to help, but my peeps will be waking from their naps soon, and I know someone’s going to want her snack.”

“I hear you. Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “Can you sort all the folders by date? Oldest first?”

It was done before I’d finished asking her for it. Tigger studied the screen and said, “Interesting. The two oldest are from 2001, but after that there are none that are older than last year.”

I had her open the first folder, the oldest one, dated 2 /4/2001. It contained one item, a single Excel file.

Tigger double-clicked on the icon and a spreadsheet opened up. The field headings were all in Cyrillic characters, except for a logo at the top: TWEENSLAND. The alphabetical entries in the columns below were written in English, though. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, e-mail and IP addresses. The names all looked to be male; the addresses covered some two dozen states. There was a column of dates (1999 through 2001), another showing durations in minutes, and one containing what appeared to be usernames, aliases like yancy77 and popeyespappy. The final column was what looked like a comments field filled with tidbits like “school principal,” “deputy sheriff,” “doctor,” “seminarian,” and more, entries like “softball coach,” “scout master,” and “two boys, Mike & Joseph.”

It all looked so innocent, unless you knew what you were looking at. Which Tigger didn’t—I’d told her about seeing Elena, but not what Elena had told me about the childhood Owl had rescued her from. For all Tigger knew, Tweensland was second cousin to McDonaldland.

Tigger started printing up the spreadsheet for me.

“Shit, Payton, there’s ninety-two pages of this. You’re going to owe me a ream.”

I smiled at her. “Saucy wench, and you a mother now.”

She giggled through her nose, it came out a snort.

“Let’s see what’s in the other 2001 folder,” I told her.

She clicked to open it. Inside were over forty mpeg files. Video. Before I could say anything, Tigger double-clicked one at random. “Wait!” I yelped.

Had it been my computer, there would’ve been a time lapse of anywhere from five seconds to fifteen minutes during which I could’ve stopped it or at least given her a more coherent warning. But Tigger’s computer was a hundred times faster and more modern, and so with ruthless efficiency the video clip sprang to life on the screen.

In the upper-right corner of the picture appeared superimposed the same logo from the Excel file: TWEENSLAND. A line at the bottom said Copyright 1999. The time-counter on the computer’s media player showed that the clip ran just over nine minutes.

A rangy twelve-year-old girl with shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair entered the frame beside an afghan-covered couch. She mumbled something, but it wasn’t in English, nor was the reply she got from a coaxing female voice from behind the camera’s lens.

Sweeping her hair out of her face, the girl looked into the camera, then unbuttoned and stepped out of her loose-fitting blue jeans. They fell in a heap at her bare feet. She tugged her brown sweater up over her head in a single cross-armed motion, ruffling her hair and revealing early breasts, small and nubby. Her skin was pale and smooth and iridescent; the curving innerwall of a seashell. Behind her on a small table stood three narrow cylinders on end—one flesh-colored, one kitchen-utensil white, one silver-enamel like a child’s toy missile—and an uncapped bottle of baby oil. She lay down naked on the couch and reached for—

Tigger shut down the media player and the image instantly vanished—from the screen, at least. I had expected something like it but still been unprepared. I was frozen, transfixed—like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board.

Only 20 seconds into the clip, longer if measured in heartbeats. I felt wrung out, twisted.

Tigger didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare say anything.

Her printer went on spitting out the 92-page document.

She pushed back her swivel chair, steadied it, and stood up. She walked into her kitchen, where I saw her bend to take something from under her sink. She came back carrying a claw-head hammer.

I was tempted to defend my head with my hands, but she walked right by me, plucked the iPod out of the docking cradle and dropped it on the floor. She squatted beside it and smashed it with the hammer. I didn’t stop her. After five direct hits, it was ground up pretty good.

I said, “I think you got it.”

She turned on me in a flash, such a look of black fury on her face, I did cover my head suddenly with my hands, afraid that she might lash out indiscriminately.

She shook the hammer like Thor.

“Payton, whatever you’re involved in, take it out of here!”

“Look, I had no idea—”

She raised the hammer and I shut up. I heard her baby-daddy groan in the bathroom, but if any of the others had woken up, they remained quiet.

Tigger said in a tense whisper, “People lose their kids for having shit like that on their computer, and you brought it in here—”

The last page sent to the printer stopped abruptly. The sheet of paper came out only three-quarters complete. The machine made a frustrated grinding sound, like a gnashing of teeth, before finally spitting out the interrupted page unfinished.

I took the pages from the tray, squared them on the desk like a deck of cards. Tigger put her hammer down on the nearest mousepad. We both just breathed in and out for a bit.

She said, “Sorry, Payton, but—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Everyone has lines they don’t cross. Or they should.”

Tigger asked, “Was it important evidence?”

I shrugged. “I saw more than enough.”

The girl’s nakedness flashed in my mind again and I re-squared the printed pages.

“What’s going on anyway?” Tigger asked. “All the dates are like seven or eight years ago. Is the outfit that made those videos still in business?”

I shook my head. If the stories I’d heard were true, the head of the modeling agency had been arrested shortly after Owl left the country and the whole operation shut down.

“I think we’re looking at a different sort of business now,” I said. “I think someone’s using this info to contact former customers. Maybe asking them how much they value their wives, their bosses, their parishioners never finding out what sort of videos they like looking at.”

“Someone,” Tigger said.

“Sayre,” I said.

“Well, I’m no fan of blackmail normally, but if your girl’s out there blackmailing pedophiles, making their lives hell, she’s aces in my book.” Her voice dropped. “But I don’t know, Payton. I don’t much like this. I just hope you’re on the right side of it.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Listen, Tig. I’m sorry about—”

“—the mess? I made it.” She prodded some of the fragments that had once been an iPod. “But do you see now why I’m moving out of New York? I don’t want my daughter growing up in the middle of…all this.”

There are bad men in the suburbs, too, I almost said. But didn’t. Why piss in her bouillabaisse?

I thanked her, apologized again, told her I’d call her later. But I wouldn’t, not unless she called first. I’d brought kiddie porn into her home—unintentionally, but I done it. I’d tainted her sacred trinity of computers with it. A stain, worse than any physical one I could’ve left. She would have found it easier to forgive me puking on her rug.

It felt like my bridges were burning, behind me as well as in front. But more important to me than making sure I landed on the right side when the smoke cleared, was not getting stuck anywhere in the middle with flames rising at either end.

I scooped up the bits of smashed iPod onto the stack of printed pages. I felt like that hapless rube left holding the bag at the end of the magic trick involving the handkerchief, the pocket watch, and the mallet. May I have a volunteer from the audience? Now, sir, we’ve never met before…

I walked away, leaving Tigger in front of her computers. The screensaver reappeared on the monitors, but the little train would have to roll over a lot of track before that other image was completely erased.

I went back down to my office.

No more Googling for answers. I was sick of what the Internet had to offer. I was going to get my information the old-fashioned way.

Earn it.