The Twelfth Card

all this other stuff, gas or whatever you’re saying. I—”
    “You were lookin’ for Geneva Settle. You bought a gun and you showed up at her school yesterday,” Sellitto pointed out.
    “Yeah, that’s right.” He looked mystified at the level of their information.
    “An’ you showed up here ,” Dellray continued. “ That ’s the job we’re waggin’ our tongues about.”
    “There’s no job. I don’t know what you mean. Honest.”
    “What’s the story with the books?” Sellitto asked.
    “Those’re just books my daughter read when she was little. They were for her.”
    The agent muttered, “Wonnerful. But ’xplain to us why you paid somebody to deliver ’em to . . . ” He hesitated and frowned. For once words seemed to fail Fred Dellray.
    Rhyme asked, “You’re saying—?”
    “That’s right.” Jax sighed. “Geneva. She’s my little girl.”

Chapter Thirty-Five
    “From the beginning,” Rhyme said.
    “Okay. What it is—I got busted six years ago. Went six to nine at Wende.”
    The DOC’s maximum security prison in Buffalo.
    “For what?” Dellray snapped. “The AR and murder we heard about?”
    “One count armed robbery. One count firearm. One count assault.”
    “The twenty-five, twenty-five? The murder?”
    He said firmly, “That was not a righteous count. Got knocked down to assault. And I didn’t do it in the first place.”
    “Never heard that before,” Dellray muttered.
    “But you did the robbery?” Sellitto asked.
    A grimace. “Yeah.”
    “Keep going.”
    “Last year I got upped to Alden, minimum security. Work-release. I was working and going to school there. Got paroled seven weeks ago.”
    “Tell me about the AR.”
    “Okay. Few years back, I was a painter, working in Harlem.”
    “Graffiti?” Rhyme asked, nodding at the picture of the subway car.
    Laughing, Jax said, “ House painting. You don’t make money at graffiti, ’less you were Keith Haring and his crowd. And they were just claimers. Anyway I was getting killed by the debt. See, Venus—Geneva’s mother—had righteous problems. First itwas blow, then smack then cookies—you know, crack. And we needed money for bail and lawyers too.”
    The sorrow in his face seemed real. “There were signs she was a troubled soul when we hooked up. But, you know, nothing like love to make you a blind fool. Anyways, we were going to be kicked out of the apartment and I didn’t have money for Geneva’s clothes or schoolbooks or even food sometimes. That girl needed a normal life. I thought if I could get together some benjamins I’d get Venus into treatment or something, get her straight. And if she wouldn’t do it, then I’d take Geneva away from her, give the girl a good home.
    “What happened was this buddy, Joey Stokes, told me ’bout this deal he had going on up in Buffalo. Word was up there was some armored car making fat runs every Saturday, picking up receipts from malls outside of town. Couple of lazy guards. It’d be a milk run.
    “Joey and me left on Saturday morning, thinking we’d be back with fifty, sixty thousand each that night.” A sad shake of the head. “Oh, man, I don’t know what I was doing, listening to that claiming dude. The minute the driver handed over the money, everything went bad. He had this secret alarm we didn’t know about. He hit it and next thing there’re sirens all over the place.
    “We headed south but came to a railroad crossing we hadn’t noticed. This freight train was stopped. We turned around and took some roads that weren’t on the map and had to go through a field. We got two flats and ran off on foot. The cops caught up with us a half hour later. Joey said let’s fight and I said no and called out we were giving up. But Joey got mad and shot me in the leg. The state troopersthought we were shooting at them . That was the attempted murder.”
    “Crime don’t pay,” Dellray said, with the intonation, if not the grammar, of the amateur philosopher that he was.
    “We were in a holding cell for a week, ten days ’fore they let me make a phone call. I couldn’t call Venus anyway; our phone’d been shut off. My lawyer was some Legal Aid kid who didn’t do shit for me. I called some friends but nobody could find Venus or Geneva. They’d been kicked out of our apartment.
    “I wrote letters from prison. They kept coming back. I called everybody I could think of. I wanted to find her so bad! Geneva’s mother and me lost a baby a while