A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  I don’t know when I started, but I was running now, headed uptown on Second Avenue. The wrong direction from where I lived. I stopped. I was panting, heaving, my lungs too full of smoke from a burning building to support that kind of exertion in sub-freezing air. I bent over, my hand on my knees, my head dangling below them. Would Sam Epstein really kill people? I straightened up, coughed some of the crap out of my lungs, and shook my head to clear it. I was standing in front of a doughnut shop. I wanted more to eat than doughnuts, but right now, something was better than nothing. I went in, ordered coffee and a bagel and cream cheese at the counter, then took a seat at a back booth. I had my cell phone in my hand before I loosened my scarf or unbuttoned my coat. I got Sam’s number from information and dialed. Sasha answered before the phone had completed its first ring.

  “Hi, Sasha. My name is Phil Rodriquez. May I speak to Sam, please?”

  Silence. Then, “Phil Rodriquez who saved Dr. Mason from a murderer?”

  My turn for silence. How the hell did she know about that? “Ah, Sasha, can I speak to Sam, please?”

  “Did you really cut off the guy’s dick?”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. “No, Sasha, I didn’t cut off anybody’s anything. I helped Dr. Mason out of a bad situation, that’s all. Now, can I please speak to Sam?”

  “What do you want with my weird Uncle Sammy? And anyway, he’s not home yet. He had a meeting after work. Although I don’t know what kind of meeting he could have. But he should have been home by now. He said he would be. He’s really late.”

  I ended the call as the waitress dropped my order on the table. Some of the coffee sloshed out of the cup. I touched the bagel. It was hot. I opened the cream cheese packet and spread some on the bagel and watched it melt, then spread strawberry jelly on top of that. Sam wasn’t home, hadn’t been home. His after work meeting was with me, and it had been over for more than an hour, and I was thinking that after he left me, he went and burned down a restaurant. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Sam Epstein had thought that I’d do bodily harm to a teenaged boy and his fourteen-year-old niece thinks I castrated a man.

  Chapter Two

  I walked the eight blocks from home to work just like always the next morning, stopping at Willie One Eye’s newsstand for the three papers I always buy, and at the tiny fruit and vegetable market old Mrs. Campos has operated since she was young, where I buy bottles of fresh orange and carrot juice. Willie, who sees more with his one eye than most people do with both, noticed immediately that I was out of sync, but being a man of the streets, he knew better than to ask the reason. He merely squinted at me and suggested that I take better care of myself. Mrs. Campos attributed my failure to flirt with her to my budding romance with Connie and graciously forgave me. This time.

  My spirits lifted, as always, when I reached my building and let my eyes linger on the brass-plated buzzer box: Y.M. Aguierre at the top, Dharma Yoga Studio in the middle, and Phillip Rodriquez Investigations at the bottom. A small building, perhaps, but it housed big dreams that had come true for the three of us who spent most of our waking hours here. Inside, the lights and heat were on, one of the many advantages of having a partner who lived on the premises. Yo emerged from behind the screens when she heard me enter, her smile brighter than electricity and warmer than steam heat.

  “Peace, Brother Man, and buenos dias,” she said, raising her hands to catch the bottle of carrot juice I tossed her. Our morning ritual, played out once again.

  “Back at you, my Sister,” I said, shedding hat, coat, and gloves.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, and I told her.

  “I saw that story on New York One this morning,” she said. “People died.”

  I nodded. I’d seen it, too. “Any more about the identities of the fatalities?”

  She shook her head, tossed the carrot juice back to me, and headed for the computers. If there was any new information about the fire, she’d find it. I hung up my coat and went into the kitchen. I poured our respective juices into glasses and headed into Yo’s office. She didn’t notice me, so busy was she at her computer keyboards. I cleared a space on the desk top for her juice, though I don’t think she noticed, and headed back to the kitchen. By the time I had a bagel toasted and buttered she was standing in the doorway, glasses riding low on her nose, her brow furrowed. “Nada,” she said.

  “Maybe they don’t know yet,” I said. What I was thinking was that as hot as that fire was burning, any remains would be charred beyond recognition.

  “But if any of the victims belonged to the Patel family, they’d know.”

  “Is that their name, Patel?” Frankie Patel, I thought.

  Yo was right there with me. “If that boy is dead, and it’s because he was the wrong color to date Sam Epstein’s niece, she’ll never forgive him. He might have thought he was doing the right thing, but she’ll hate him forever.”

  “If he killed that boy, I’ll hate him forever.” I finished my orange juice in one long gulp and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand.

  “Are you going to confront him?”

  I hesitated only briefly. “Yeah, I am, but I don’t want to. I don’t want any part of this, Yo. But I can’t just ignore it and I can’t not know . . .” I stopped mid-sentence as a thought came back to me. “And speaking of knowing stuff, how would Sam’s niece know about Jill Mason?”

  Dr. Jill Mason was a psychiatrist who’d moved her practice to the neighborhood a year ago following the deaths of her husband and daughters. Jill was a local girl made good—born Black and poor in our tenement neighborhood, but smart enough to scholarship out to college and med school and into an Upper East Side medical practice. She had married money and earned money and brought the riches and her talent back home following the automobile accident that had forever altered her life. Only somebody didn’t want her back because he thought she remembered what he’d done to her many years before, when she was just a child. I was hired to keep Jill safe, while finding out who wanted to hurt her. I had done that, and I had made the lowlife bastard sorry he’d ever laid eyes on Jill Mason.

  Yolanda gave me one of her looks. “Everybody knows about Jill Mason, Phil.”

  I gave her a look back. “This kid thinks I castrated Itchy Johnson! ‘Cut off the guy’s dick’ is what she said!” That part of last night was just coming back to me and I was feeling its impact for the first time.

  “You didn’t really think those little hoodlums who worked for Itchy would keep quiet about his . . . disability, did you?”

  “But I’m not the one who did it to him!”

  Yo laughed. “But having it be you makes for a much better story. This is the stuff of urban legends, Phil.”

  I was about to protest when it hit me. Smacked me right in the face. Damn near broke my nose. This is why Sam Epstein thought he could ask me to “discourage” Frankie Patel. If I would cut off a guy’s Johnson, surely I’d smack somebody around a little bit. What’s a few bumps and bruises compared to castration? “This shit’s not funny, Yo,” I said in what I hoped was a nasty, snarling tone. She only laughed harder.

  “You should go talk to Epstein, then go do the security assessment profile at that apartment building on Avenue B,” she said, through unsuccessfully stifled laughter. “You do realize that property management company has a dozen buildings. If they like us, that job alone could carry us for a year.” It was amazing how quickly she could return her focus to matters of business, even in the midst of a joke at my expense. Then again, she’s the one who’d had a five-figure bank account when we were college juniors and I could barely afford beer and a burger at the same meal.

  I finished my bagel, washed my plate and glass, and loaded my canvas carryall with the equipment I’d need at the Avenue B building. Thanks to good word of mouth from the Golson sisters who owned half a dozen buildings in the neighborhood, we had picked up the security work for other property owners and managers, but this would be, by far, the largest and most profitable. I
strapped my gun on only because Yolanda was watching, grabbed a cell phone off the charger and dropped it into my pocket, donned the five pounds of winter outerwear, and headed for the door. “Keep an ear on the fire story,” I said. I didn’t wait for a reply. I knew I didn’t need to.

  The air stank of things burnt and burning—of things that never were meant to burn. This was not the scent of cozy fireplaces, but the stench of death and destruction. The police barricade still kept on-lookers at bay across the street from the gaping hole that once had been the Taste of India restaurant. The Fire Department’s arson investigation van was parked on the sidewalk, and a Fire Marshall’s sedan was at the curb. And so was an SUV with the seal of the Department of Homeland Security imprinted on the side. I knew the seal when I saw it because it had become a familiar sight in lower Manhattan in these years following the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center towers. Every time there was a Level Orange alert, Homeland Security vehicles roamed the city, as if their very presence would thwart an enemy attack. But what were the Feds doing at a routine fire in a restaurant?

  I got as close as I possibly could to the burn site, leaning in toward it as if I could determine from the sickening stink whether a kid had burned to death there, and whether someone I knew was responsible.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  I turned around to see a Homeland Security guy standing much too close to me, giving me that hard look that Federal agents seemed to think made them formidable. That’s how I knew he was Homeland Security, because he certainly didn’t extend to me the courtesy of introducing himself.

  “Help me with what?” I answered his stupid question with one of my own and I saw his jaw tighten and the muscles work. He was maybe forty, my height but thinner, with blond hair, pale blue eyes, and crooked teeth. And he was getting mad, not that it took much these days to get a Fed riled up.

  “You seem to be more than a little interested in events here.”

  “The place where I had planned to have dinner last night burned down, so yeah, I’m interested. Maybe you could define ‘more than a little’?” This guy had pissed me off and I didn’t mind letting him know it. Didn’t take much to rile me these days, either.

  “Do you . . . did you eat here regularly?” the Fed asked.

  “What difference does that make now?” I said, and walked away from him. I hadn’t taken three steps when this guy was in front of me. It was either stop or knock him down. I chose the prudent course, and gave him back a version of his own hard look.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “And I gave you an answer.”

  “But not a helpful one,” the Fed said, trying, belatedly, to put something resembling nice in his tone of voice. “What would be helpful for us is if we could talk to people who frequented this establishment on a regular basis.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be me,” I said.

  “So, why were you planning to eat here last night?”

  “Because this is still the United States of America and despite your best efforts to do away with them, we American citizens enjoy certain freedoms. And one of them is the freedom to decide where I want to eat dinner on any given night without having to secure the permission of the Federal government.” I’d taken a step closer to him, crowding him the way he crowded me, and he clearly didn’t like it. But he wouldn’t back up, so there we were, literally toe to toe on the sidewalk across the street from the burned out and smoldering, stinking Taste of India. “It’s none of your business why I chose to eat here last night, or where I choose to eat tonight. But I’ll give you a hint: I just lost my taste for Indian food.” When I walked away from him this time, he didn’t stop me, for which I was grateful, because now I was less mad than worried. What the hell was going on that the Department of Homeland Security cared about a fire in a neighborhood restaurant?

  I headed toward Epstein’s Cleaners with a renewed sense of purpose. I now was confused as well as angry and worried, not a happy mix of emotions on the best of mornings, and definitely a bad mix on one spitting snow flurries in defiance of the morning’s weather forecast. I couldn’t take it out on the happy-faced meteorologist who reminded me, as if I needed reminding, that late winter snow storms were a New York staple, but Sam Epstein was fair game.

  His cousin, whose name I couldn’t remember, if I’d ever known it, was at the front counter. She was a plump, pleasant-faced woman, probably ten or twelve years older than Sam and me. I knew enough about the family to know that she and Sam were related on the Epstein side, and I thought maybe she was the daughter of Sam’s father’s sister—she had the same reddish coloring of the Epsteins. She looked up when the tinkling bell over the door signaled my arrival, and pushed reading glasses off her nose, up into her pretty red-blond hair. She’d been doing something with what looked like receipts, and she pushed them out of the way as I approached, probably to clear space on the counter for the dirty clothes I didn’t have.

  “My name is Phillip Rodriquez. I’d like to speak with Sam, please.”

  “Oh. Of course. How are you, Phil? Long time, no see.” She gave me a wide, warm smile and I think she’d have hugged me had there not been that counter separating us. “Sammy said he was expecting you. He’s in the back, if you want to go on through.”

  I was caught off guard again. This certainly couldn’t become a habit. I’d come here expecting a tooth-pulling session, only to be greeted like a long-lost relation and to find that Sam was expecting me. “Thank you,” I said, and turned sideways to squeeze behind the counter.

  “You probably want to leave your coat up here,” Sam’s cousin said, still treating me like I was a cousin, too. “It’s hot as hell back there.” I quickly shed the coat, stuffed the hat and gloves into the sleeves, and gave it to her. “That was a good thing you did for Dr. Mason,” she said.

  “Does everybody in town know about that?”

  “You know down here. It’s still like a little village. At least it is with the people and families who’ve lived here for a couple generations.”

  I nodded. Yeah, I knew “down here.” It’s how I knew she was Epstein family and not just an employee. She was looking at me, waiting for me to say something. “I’m just glad things turned out all right for Dr. Mason,” I said. “She’s an important part of this community.”

  “She sure is. She’s worked wonders with Sasha.”

  “Sasha?”

  The cousin bobbed her red-gold head up and down emphatically. “You know, Sam’s niece. She’s been seeing Dr. Mason for a few months now. I wish she’d been seeing her, you know, right from the beginning.”

  I didn’t know and I suppose confusion was written all over my face because the cousin hastened to explain that Jill Mason was treating perhaps half a dozen neighborhood children who had lost parents or other relatives in the World Trade Center disaster. When I met Jill, she was treating the young victims of a serial rapist. If this day took any more strange turns, I was thinking I’d call and make an appointment for myself: Confused PI in need of immediate therapy. “The woman’s a saint,” I said, and meant it.

  “She sure is. You go on back, straight through, all the way. Anybody can tell you where to find Sam if you don’t see him.”

  Not only was it hot as hell, it was cavernous and loud and steamy. The chemical smell couldn’t be healthy, and I noticed that everybody but me had on a mask. As I made my way to the rear of the huge space, I recalled that one of the reasons my grandfathers had their uniforms cleaned at Epstein’s was because, as their logo boasted, it had a plant on the premises. Epstein’s is where all the small dry cleaning and laundry operations sent their work. This wasn’t, I realized, just a job for Sam Epstein, it was a major business that employed, by my eyeball best guesstimate, at least a couple dozen hearty souls.

  Sam was at the very back of the room waving his arms at me, waving me forward. I picked up my pace. “This is some operation,” I said when I reached him.

  He nodded and beck
oned for me to follow him up some narrow metal stairs to a glass-enclosed box that afforded a view of the entire floor. When he closed the door, it was like going momentarily deaf. The room was soundproofed. Sam removed his mask and a pair of ear plugs. When the mask came off, I could see the guilt and shame creeping across his face. “I didn’t do it, Rodriquez. I swear to you, I didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did, Sam? If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” If I were keeping score, that would have been points for me. A sick look joined the guilt and shame on Sam’s face. He shook his head back and forth but he didn’t say anything. There was a clock on the wall and it showed me that I had exactly seventeen minutes to get to my Avenue B appointment on time, which meant that I had no time left to screw around with Sam. “If that boy is dead, I’m turning you over to Homeland Security and that’s a promise, Sam, not a threat.”

  Sam jumped, then squeaked, “Homeland Security! What’re you talking about, Rodriquez? What do you know . . . what’s Homeland Security got to do with anything?”

  “They’re crawling all over the fire scene, and you know how they do business: If they decide to take an interest in you, you might as well paint yourself in invisible ink, ’cause that’s how fast you’ll disappear.” I’d wanted to scare him and I’d succeeded. He started to sweat even though the box was cool as well as quiet, and he now looked just plain miserable. He backed up into the corner of the box-room, and dropped his butt onto a stool that was there.

  “The boy’s not dead, that Frankie. He’s fine.”