Three tiny blips sounded and I knew that Roger had hung up on me. It didn’t matter. I had a hook into him now.
WHEN AMBROSE THURMAN came to me all he had was a short list of street names—Jumper, B-Brain, Big Jim, and Toolie—along with a few descriptive details. The last time his client had seen them they were kids, not much older than Twill. He needed their real names and current whereabouts. They all had had records as juvenile offenders but the bureaucracy of New York’s judicial system wouldn’t allow him to invade the privacy of minors.
Ambrose asked me if I could do what he could not.
That’s where Randolph Peel came in. Randy had been a detective in the NYPD until they found him trading favors for sex at a posh midtown hotel. At one time he was the partner of a cop named Carson Kitteridge. Kitteridge was an honest cop, and it had been speculated that he was the cause of Peel’s downfall.
Randy was out of a job but he still had a few friends in the department. For three hundred dollars a head, the former policeman broke the seals of justice and delivered the identities to me; three of them, at least. Jumper, Big Jim, and Toolie had gone on to commit adult crimes, but B-Brain was clean. I had a name, Roger Brown, but there was no practical information, like a current address. There were no adult records on him and the details of his adolescence were all cold as far as an investigation was concerned. His father was nowhere to be found, and his mother, Myra Brown, as far as I could tell, had died in 1993.
THE SEAGULL CRIED three times before I answered the phone again.