by Ben Sanders
The cat meowed.
‘It’s all right. We’re just figuring out what happened.’
He moved to the bay window. The dew on the glass was decomp gas, slowly condensing on the cold surface. Marshall crouched, and the cat mewed again with the descent. There were indentations in the carpet, three of them, a triangular arrangement, not quite equilateral. Scalene in a strict sense, and lacking symmetry. He figured they’d had a tripod set up here, a camera aimed along the street at the Vialoux house. He couldn’t help wonder how people could operate like that. Configure a thing and then leave it, all the while knowing it wasn’t perfect.
He found nothing in the kitchen that looked useful. Nothing that looked like it might yield DNA. No used dishes or cutlery. He expected the crime scene people would spend a day or two scouring the place, and arrive at the conclusion he’d already made: these guys were pros.
As he went out, he closed the front door as best he could. The odor was an element of the crime scene. He knew the forensic techs wouldn’t thank him for airing the place out. He went down the front steps, and a voice said, ‘Are you another nephew, or are you someone else?’
Marshall glanced toward the noise – leftward, the adjoining house – saw a woman in her seventies standing at the top step beside her open front door. Short, heavy build, and a bit of authority in the way she held the balustrade: a wide, firm grip, like riding a Harley. He figured this was Esther Lopez.
Marshall said, ‘I’m someone else.’
‘Is Lydia all right?’ She had her hair in a bun, so taut it looked like you’d get a tune if you strummed it.
Marshall said, ‘What did her nephews look like?’
‘Excuse me? Who are you? What are you doing with Maurice?’
He wondered if she’d been like this with the ersatz-nephews. More indignation with more haste might have changed something.
‘He’s fine, Esther. He came and saw me earlier. Friend of Hannah’s – the Vialouxs.’
Marshall turned and saw Bruce Linney in the middle of the street.
Esther Lopez said, ‘Yes, but what is he doing in Lydia’s house? Look at the door. My Lord.’
Bruce Linney said, ‘Is she OK?’
Marshall said, ‘What did her nephews look like?’
‘Why, what’s happened? You haven’t said what’s happened?’
She looked over at Linney: a strange one-man tableau, hands on hips in the traffic lane. The worried face at odds with the warm wholesomeness of his silly T-shirt: #DAD.
Mrs Lopez stood there for a couple of seconds, just looking at him. Then she seemed to get it, and her hands went to her face, and her eyebrows went up. ‘Oh my God. Oh my …’
Marshall said, ‘What did they look like? Just relax, it’s OK. Tell me what they looked like.’
She shook her head, as if desperately sorting through memories. ‘There was a …’ She held the rail with one hand and kept the other to her mouth. ‘He was such a polite man. Small, much smaller than you. Very tidy—’
‘What about his face. What did he look like? Hair, eyes.’
‘Black hair – black hair combed back. Always smiling, very polite. So polite. I just didn’t think … what have they done? I thought they were her nephews. He was just … he smiled at me the whole time.’
‘How many were there?’
‘I’m … what?’
‘You said nephews. How many men were there?’
‘I … I only spoke to one. I only saw one man. But he said they were her nephews. I thought … it was more than just him. There was another man.’
‘When was this? When did you see him?’
‘Uh … Weds – no: three days ago. He said they were just leaving. He said they’d helped with some things around the house and now they were leaving.’
Marshall figured that was probably true. He wouldn’t want to be seen there again, having told her he was finished. But three days ago was at least forty-eight hours before Vialoux was killed. Marshall wondered why they’d bailed early on the surveillance.
Esther Lopez said, ‘Please tell me what’s happened?’
He couldn’t keep putting it off. Everyone knew. They were just waiting for him to say it. He said, ‘She’s dead. I’m sorry.’
Esther Lopez’ expression turned completely tranquil. Then she sat down on her top step and put her hands over her mouth. She didn’t say anything. She sat there shaking her head, breathing carefully into her fingers. Bruce Linney was still in the middle of the street, hands on his hips, like a background artist in a stage play.
Marshall said, ‘Sorry, I can’t hang around. Can I give you the cat? He’ll need some water.’
Bruce Linney glanced around, as if surprised for a moment to occupy his own body and not another. ‘Of course, yeah. It’s the least … yeah. Pass him here.’
As he walked toward his house, he kept looking back at Lydia’s, as if gauging distances, working out the safety margin between his own happy sphere and whatever had happened on the opposite side of the street.
The children met them at the door. Bruce Linney went in first with the cat, and Marshall followed uninvited.
The girl said, ‘Does she not want him anymore?’
Marshall found Nevins’ card on the sofa arm beside the wet wipes. It had picked up some peanut-butter smears, but it was still legible. He stood in the kitchen, listening to the kids talking to the cat, working up a list of names: they didn’t like Maurice. Strange to be here in the midst of a family scene because someone was dead. What a tradeoff. He used the Linneys’ landline to call Nevins and tell him what he’d found.
EIGHT
In addition to caffeine, the coffee shop on Fourth offered a limited food menu. Marshall went back and ate some of their fried eggs on ciabatta toast and drank a cup of their specialty brew. Black this time, no frothy dairy additives. He took a stool at the bench along the front window where he could watch the street and the door at the same time. It occurred to him that surveillance of the Vialoux place could be ongoing, in which case there was every chance he was on someone’s radar. But everyone looked like a natural and benign element of the scene. No dark-windowed cars lurking, no one shady hanging out in doorways. He watched a trio of patrol cars head uptown on Fourth with lights flashing, off to see dead Lydia, presumably. Ten minutes after that, a morgue van. Marshall drank more coffee. He was there an hour before Nevins came in and sat down beside him at the window bench.
Marshall said, ‘You working double shifts, making the most of your last few days?’
Nevins said, ‘When you were a cop, did you like it when witnesses just wandered off, or did you generally prefer that they stay around the crime scene?’
‘I told you where I’d be.’
‘Yeah. Very courteous.’ He brought out his notebook. Marshall could imagine him in a couple years’ time, post-retirement: still writing things down, still feeling that connection to the life.
Nevins said, ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
Nevins asked him what had happened, and Marshall ran through his morning. Meeting the Linneys, and then finding Lydia.
He said, ‘I heard they torched Ray’s office.’
‘Let’s stay with this for a moment. Why were you out here?’
Marshall said, ‘Looking for surveillance.’
‘What made you think there may have been surveillance?’
‘I don’t know. Because I thought there might’ve been.’
Nevins looked at him.
Marshall looked back. He shrugged. ‘Why did I think of the thing that made me think of the thing that I chose to do? The antecedents are infinite. You’ll need another notebook.’
Nevins still had room on the current page, but he turned to a new one anyway.
Marshall said, ‘The neighbor, Mrs Lopez. She spoke to one of them.’
He told Nevins about the friendly-nephews ruse. He watched Nevins write SMILEY, and underline it. He said, ‘You know anyone like that?’
>
‘Grinning hitmen? No. What about you?’
He was drawing a box now around SMILEY, pretended not to hear. ‘What did you touch?’
Marshall said, ‘The front door, and the cat.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You didn’t touch the vic?’
‘I didn’t touch the vic.’
He watched Nevins write. On the far sidewalk, a couple of homeless guys were playing chess, cross-legged on the pavement, the board set up between them.
Marshall said, ‘Did you know there’re more possible games of chess than there are particles in the universe?’
Nevins said, ‘More ways for people to be cruel to one another than there are particles in the universe. I’ll have to take your word for it about the chess.’
‘You been through the house?’
‘Briefly. I had to come looking for you, of course.’
‘It isn’t going anywhere. You see the marks by the window?’
‘Yeah. They must’ve had a tripod or something.’
‘So what do you think he was into?’
‘Sorry?’
‘These guys killed a woman, used her house for surveillance, shot Vialoux in a restaurant, and then burned his office. They didn’t go to all that trouble because of a gambling debt.’
Nevins didn’t answer. Then he said, ‘I was her, I’d prefer they killed me when they walked in the door, rather than take the chance someone would find me in time.’ He shook his head. ‘What a way to go.’
Marshall said, ‘These guys aren’t squeamish, though. They could’ve killed her sooner, but they didn’t. So what’s that tell you?’
Nevins didn’t answer. He was leaning forward now on folded arms. The window bench was too low for the posture: the hunch looked too extreme, as if adopted out of physical necessity, the demands of marrow-deep fatigue.
Marshall said, ‘Getting rid of bodies is hard. Would’ve been difficult getting her out of the house in one piece, and then they’d have to take the body somewhere. Really, they’d want power tools, or an acid bath. But there’s no tub in the house, you notice that? And the neighbors would’ve heard a power saw. I think they knew they’d be there three, four, five days, didn’t want to be living with a body slowly turning ripe.’ He shrugged. ‘Better to do it like they did, tape her up, put her on a slow fuse, wait until they were out the door before she died.’
Nevins was good at listening to theories without giving anything away. Nothing in his face to say if he agreed, or if he was holding his finger on the delete button.
Marshall said, ‘The bed in the spare room had been stripped. I think maybe they were sleeping shifts, obviously needed to take the sheets with them. For evidence.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘What did the office look like?’
Nevins shrugged. ‘Soaked and charred. Lucky FDNY got there when they did, could’ve lost the adjacent units, too.’
‘Hannah said they burned his files.’
Nevins nodded. ‘They broke the front window to get in. Alarm went off, obviously. The cabinets were all crowbarred.’
‘So it’s like I said. There’s more to it than just a debt. Destroying files is pretty telling. There’s a big difference between, say, throwing a Molotov through a window, and breaking in to then light a fire.’
‘In what sense.’
‘In the sense that a Molotov could be plausibly dismissed as vandalism. But the forced entry implies something deliberate and targeted.’
‘So if there’s more to it than a debt, why didn’t he tell you about it? If like you say, the whole point of meeting you was to ask for help?’
Marshall didn’t have an answer to that just yet. He said, ‘Did you run those names I gave you?’
‘Which names?’
‘Frank Cifaretti. D’Anton Lewis.’
Nevins shook his head. ‘I can’t discuss it.’
‘Yes, you can. We’re two guys sitting in a coffee shop. No one would know what you’ve said and what you haven’t said.’
‘You would know what I said. That’s the whole problem.’ He looked over. ‘And you were wrong about the car, too. If they dumped it, it’s not anywhere around Thirty-ninth Street, or the railyard.’
‘What happened to you can’t discuss it?’
‘I can’t discuss confidential information. There’s nothing confidential about which cars happen to be parked on Thirty-ninth Street.’
Marshall let that one go. They sat there for a minute or so, looking out the window, cars and people going by: a scene that despite its disparate elements was pleasing to Marshall in its balanced randomness. By virtue of pure fluke, for every direction of movement there occurred a counter-movement in counter-direction.
Nevins said, ‘You got anything else potentially useful you might want to part with?’
‘Anything else? Didn’t realize my theories had any merit. That’s real encouraging.’
Nevins’ head made a slow pass above his forearms, elbow to elbow and then back, in apparent examination.
Marshall said, ‘I’m the one who’s made the break so far. So do you have anything you want to tell me?’
‘It’s not really how it works.’
Marshall said, ‘If you hadn’t run the names yet, you could’ve just said so. There’s nothing confidential about that. So if you can’t talk about it, you must have come across something interesting.’
Nevins said, ‘I thought I was speaking English. I said I can’t talk about it.’
Marshall said, ‘All very well playing it New York Confidential while you have a badge. But this time next week we’re on the same team. You might need to be a bit more collaborative if you want to solve anything. I never met this D’Anton Lewis character, but I ran into Frank Cifaretti while I was undercover. I wouldn’t describe him as particularly law-abiding. And he’s obviously a person of interest now. So if you can’t give me a clear answer about whether or not you’ve talked to him, I’m happy to go see him myself. And this D’Anton guy, whoever he is.’
Nevins was back to looking out the window. He said, ‘Here’s a radical idea. Why don’t you leave me to do my job?’
‘I could do. But we’re making good progress with the current arrangement.’
Marshall stood up and slid his stool in under the bench. The stool was circular, and care needed to be taken. To his eye, perfect placement was the point at which the stool, when viewed from directly above, was fully concealed by the bench, with the bench-edge forming a tangent to the stool-edge. A precise alignment, pleasing to achieve, a small but nonetheless satisfying victory on a day of bad events. He trapped cash under his mug and walked out.
Heading uptown on Fourth, he dug out the card he’d found for Jordan Mora Investigations, and used his burner to call the landline and cell numbers. No answer on either. The cell had been disconnected, and the landline went to voicemail. No greeting, just the beep. Marshall left a message saying he’d try to see him in person, and then took the subway up through Manhattan and east into Queens.
The address on Mora’s card led him to a six-story brick building over in Jackson Heights. The ground floor had a drycleaner’s, and an optometrist’s that appeared to be using promotional material from about 1987. Mora was in unit 501, according to the card. Marshall didn’t get an answer when he tried the intercom by the street door. He hit buttons for random units, and on the fourth try someone buzzed him in. He took the stairs up, and knocked at 501. The door opened two inches, and a lady in her seventies looked out at him with one eye.
‘You the man who left the message? For Mr Mora?’
‘That’s right. Is he in?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Hasn’t been in for two years. Which is how long I been here. I never even met him.’
‘Do you know where he moved to?’
‘No.’ She smiled. The eye looked him up and down. ‘I get all these calls, people leave messages saying their w
ife’s cheating, can I help, all this sort of thing. At first I thought, maybe I’ll get a new number, but then I thought, you know: actually kind of entertaining. Hear all these predicaments. Get ones you’d never think of in a million years.’
‘I bet.’
‘You think you have troubles, but then these people call up, leave a message proves you dead wrong. Anyway. You see the super downstairs, maybe he can help. I got something on the stove, sorry.’
He found the super’s apartment on the first floor. A handwritten notice reading NO SE PERROS was taped to the door. A guy in his sixties answered Marshall’s knock. Tortoiseshell glasses, short-sleeve buttoned shirt tucked into belted trousers ironed razor-sharp: he looked like he’d emerged from a 1972 sales conference in Des Moines.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for Jordan Mora. Used to be in five-oh-one.’
He was shaking his head halfway through the sentence. ‘Jordan moved.’
‘Do you have a number for him? Or a forwarding address or anything?’
The guy smiled.
Marshall said, ‘What?’
‘Wait here.’
He left the door half-open. Somewhere in the room beyond, a TV was playing a sports game. Baseball, maybe. The sound of the commentary oddly jubilant in the dull, dim corridor with its Spanish dog-ban. No se perros.
The guy came back and handed Marshall a Post-it note with a handwritten phone number.
‘Good luck.’
The door closed in his face.
Marshall walked along the hallway and stood looking out at the street while he dialed the number on his burner.
Three rings, and then a woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’
Marshall told her he was trying to reach Jordan Mora.
‘Yes. Speaking.’
The mental gender-swap took him a second. He said, ‘Are you able to meet in person? I’m a friend of Ray Vialoux’s.’
