Mask Market by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online Page A

for the Animal Control guys.
    Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.
    After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.
     
    “I ’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.
    “You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”
    “I don’t want the police….”
    “I don’t want them, either.”
    “Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”
    “It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”
    He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.
    “My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.
    “How do you know?”
    “What…what do you mean by that?”
    “You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”
    “Beryl is a troubled child,” he said, as if the empty phrase explained everything.
    I blew smoke at the low ceiling to tell him that it didn’t.
    “She’s done it before. Run away, I mean.”
    “How’d you find her those other times?”
    “She always came back on her own. That’s what’s different now.”
    “How long’s she been gone?”
    “It will be two weeks tomorrow. If school wasn’t out for the summer, it would be difficult for us—my wife and me—to explain. As it is…”
    “You did all the usual stuff, right?”
    “I’m not sure what you—”
    “Contacted her school friends, checked with any relatives who might be willing to let her hide out at their place, read her diary…”
    “Yes. Yes, we did all that. Under normal circumstances, we would never—”
    “Does she have a pet?”
    “You mean,” he said, glancing involuntarily at Pansy, “like a dog or a cat?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What difference would that make?”
    “A kid that’s going to run away permanently, you’d expect them to take their pet with them.”
    “Beryl never had a pet,” he said flatly, his tone making it clear that, if they had deemed one advisable, her devoted parents would have run out and gotten her one. The very best.
    “Okay. What about clothes? Did she take enough to last her awhile?”
    “It’s…hard to tell, to be honest. She has so many clothes that we couldn’t determine if anything was missing.”
    “What makes you think she’s in Manhattan?”
    “One of the private detectives we hired was able to trace her movements on the day it…happened. We don’t know how she got to the train station—it’s about twenty minutes from our house, and the local car service hadn’t been called—but there’s no question that she bought a ticket to Penn Station.”
    “Penn Station’s a hub. She could have connected with another train to anywhere in the country. Did she have enough money for a ticket?”
    “I…don’t know how much money she had. None of the cash we keep in the house was missing, but we’ve always been very generous with her allowance, and she could have been saving up to…do this. But the last detective agency we retained was very thorough, and they are quite certain she didn’t catch a train out…at least, on the day she left.”
    “So you hired this ‘agency,’ and…?”
    “Agen cies, ” he corrected. “Two of them rather strongly suggested we call in the police. The third place we consulted told us about you.”
    “Told you what, exactly?”
    “They said you were a man who…who could do things they wouldn’t be comfortable doing.”
    “What makes you think your daughter is with a pimp,