“Tony, how many fuckin’ times I gotta tell ya, wiggle the knife to open a slit and then cut around the clam? You don’t do that, ya gonna slice t’rough yer freakin’ palm. Okay?”
I waited for Nick to walk away from the raw bar before approaching him. He saw me coming and I saw the recognition in his eyes.
I held out my hand to him for a shake, but he used it to pull me close and hug the breath out of me. When he was done with that, he playfully shoved me aside.
“Moses fuckin’ Prager! How are ya, ya old cop bastard? It’s been what, five years?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen! Nah, get the fuck outta here.”
“Fifteen.”
“Jesus, time flies.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me. So how you doing, you old Greek prick?”
“Good, good. So ya came to see me, Moe?”
“Not at all. I’m still getting over the fact you’re here. I knew your family owned some pizzerias, but I didn’t know you owned this place.”
“Yeah, sure. We bought in after you did that job for us and then about ten years ago, when the original owners got too old to handle it, we bought the whole shebang. We made a nice deal with them and everybody lived happily ever after.”
“Business is good?” I asked.
“The economy is killin’ some of our restaurants, but this place is recession-proof. People come from all over the map to eat at the Grotto.”
“Glad to hear it, but what the hell are you working the floor for instead of sitting back at headquarters counting your money?”
“I’m no good in an office, Moe. I go into the office a few times a week, but I’m bored there. I need to get my hands dirty. Keeps me alive. So how’s that hot-lookin’ partner of yours?”
“Carmella? Christ, Nick, it has been a long time and it would take a week to explain all that’s happened between then and now. I’m basically retired from the security business and I spend most of my time at the wine stores these days.”
“C’mon, let me get you some lunch or somethin’. You look like you haven’t eaten a good meal or been in the sun since December.”
We sat a table in the shade. I had a slice of Sicilian—pretending to like it—and a beer. Nick had a salad and a dozen clams.
“Between you, me, and the wall,” Nick said, “I always hated the pizza here, but, hey, it helped send a whole generation of Roussis family kids to college. So, now that lunch is done, ya wanna tell me what yer really doin’ here? I know ya didn’t come for the pizza.”
“I’m doing someone a favor, looking into something.”
Nick’s jovial face turned stony cold. “What thing is that?”
“Alta Conseco’s murder.”
Nick’s voice got downright icy. “I thought you were retired.”
“I am. This is a favor and don’t worry, neither me or the client are looking to hurt anybody. This isn’t an insurance thing and I’m not working for a lawyer looking to sue you or the business. You have my word on that.”
I offered him my right hand again and this time he shook it. Of course, the next words out of my mouth were a lie.
“I’m working for the Tillman family, the guy who—”
“I know. He’s the guy that cold-hearted bitch and her partner left to die. Can you believe that shit? I can’t help thinkin’ what if that was my mom or one of my kids. If it was someone from Tillman’s family that clipped her, I can’t say I’d blame ’im.”
“Nice.”
“I’m just sayin’ is all …”
“It’s okay. Will you help me?” I changed gears.
“Anyway I can.”
My instinct was right. If I’d told him the truth, he’d have closed his shell tighter than any clam he had on ice at the raw bar. In New York City, Alta Conseco, even in death, was as popular as Ebola.
“Were you here that night?”
“I was. Wasn’t supposed to be, but my manager called in sick and I filled in,” Nick said.
“Anything unusual about that night … I mean, before the murder?”
“Nah, nothing. Typical night. A little slow, if anything. Then all hell breaks loose.” He stood up from the table and walked toward the entrance of the Grotto. I followed. “She collapsed right here, bleedin’ like crazy. One of my guys called 911, but she bled out before he hung up the phone. The fuckin’ bodies, man, that’s what I couldn’t take when we was on the job. Remember the smell when we’d find some old guy who’d been dead for a week in a hot apartment?” He mumbled something in Greek and crossed himself.
“She say anything before she died?”
“Ouch!” Nick laughed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t make fun. I didn’t know who she was then.”
“Hers wasn’t the first body to turn up here.”
“Nope. She was the first since we bought the place, but there were others. I hate to say it, Moe, but the violence is one of the things that made this place a legend. We get a lot of people who come to sit at the table where Jimmy ‘Dollar Menu’ DePodesta took two in the head. Some of ’em even order what Jimmy was eatin’ that night. There was that biker from the Druids who was beaten to death by the Suicide Kings and that black kid that got hit by the car and landed over there when the Ricans were chasing him outta the projects. If people wanna come here for those reasons and not the pizza, what can I say? It’s sick, but it’s business.”
I just shook my head no, but he was right. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “My brother and I have been in business for almost thirty-two years now and we’ve had to do some stuff to keep afloat that I’m not so proud of. Business is a strange kind of beast: a predator, scavenger, and a prey animal all at once. To keep it going, you’ve got to use what works, even if you gotta hold your nose while you do it.”
We spent about another half hour together. He let me talk to the staff who’d been there the night Alta was murdered. Not surprisingly, none of them heard or saw anything. They were busy. After all, Alta had died at the Grotto, but she wasn’t stabbed there. Nick gave me the cards of the detectives who’d questioned him and burned me a disk of the surveillance video from that night. He sent me on my way with a pistachio gelato and a promise to get together soon. At least the gelato was tangible. The promise was something else altogether, something meant at the moment it was uttered, but something that would soon be forgotten. I’d made a thousand such unfulfilled promises in my lifetime without a second thought. The bill for them was about to come due.
SEVEN
Some things it’s just better not to know. Like about mermaids, for instance. As a kid, I loved the notion of mermaids and of sirens singing suicide songs to ancient sailors. The images of beautiful winged or fish-tailed women luring men to their deaths were potent things in the head of a teenage boy. But somebody’s always waiting to piss on your fantasies. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Mr. Blumenthal, my ninth-grade English teacher, pissing on mine. He delighted in explaining to the class that those svelte and seductive mermaids of myth were really just dugongs, sea cows, manatees. That, as he put it, a peculiar quirk of dugong and human female anatomy combined with the deprivation and desperation of men who had been too many years on the bounding main led to the stories of sea maidens and sirens. So it was with the image of blunt-nosed and blubbery sea cows that I was confronted when I had to walk a beat on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. And now, parked as I was in front of Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue, I was confronted with those images yet again. I hesitated outside the door, remembering that there were some things it was just better not to know.
The detective in charge of the Alta Conseco case was a hotshot named Jean Jacques Fuqua. Fuqua was a dark-skinned black man in his mid-thirties. He was six-two if an inch, with shoulders so broad it looked like the hanger was still inside his light pink shirt. He was handsome, with a mouth full of white teeth, a flat nose, and dazzlingly bright eyes. He spoke fairly formal English with just a pinch of Port-au-Prince. I wasn’t surprised. The
re was a huge Haitian community in Brooklyn and it was only a matter of time until Haitians, like every immigrant group before them, began moving up the ranks of the NYPD.
I hadn’t been looking at a mirror when my oncologist gave me the bad news, but I imagine my expression wasn’t too dissimilar from Fuqua’s when I told him who I was and why I was there. There had been a time when I would have simply whipped out my old badge or my license—still lost in my condo somewhere—or mentioned all my friends who were now bosses in the department, but the shelf life on all of those options had expired. I was over sixty years old and flashing my tin or my PI license would have seemed pathetic, and I wasn’t in the mood to get laughed at. Is anybody ever in the mood to get laughed at? And those friends of mine who had ascended the brass ladder were now either dead, disgraced, or retired. I had about as much pull in the NYPD as a three-legged draft horse.
“So, Mr. … Prager,” he said, voice drifting off as he looked down at my card. “Someone has asked you to look into the Conseco homicide, but you will not say whom nor why. Well, mon ami, I don’t know who you think you are, but that is not the way it works. You have some information for me, I will be quite overjoyed to listen, but this is not a two-way street.”
“Two-way street, huh? Nice to see you’ve mastered the art of the cliché.”
If I thought that was going to endear me to Fuqua, I was wrong.
“Here are a few old phrases you may be familiar with, Mr. Prager. Fuck you and farewell.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard those once or twice.”
“You understand them, non?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you continue standing here?”
“Because a little professional courtesy might be nice.”
“Professional courtesy! You must have wandered into the wrong office. We do not process Medicare claims here.” His mocking laugh was fingernails on the blackboard. “Shoo, Mr. Prager, before I lose my patience and respect for my elders.”
As a last resort, I reached around my back for my badge, but the leather case never made it out of my pocket. Another detective walked over to Fuqua’s desk. I recognized his face. I drew a blank on his name. I wasn’t sure his presence was going to improve things with Fuqua, but I figured, what the hell, they couldn’t get much worse.
“Moses Prager, isn’t it?” He held his hand out to me and said, “Sherman, Detective Sherman. I worked the—”
“—Tierney homicide,” I said, shaking his hand and finishing his sentence. “I thought I recognized you.”
Sherman was shorter, paler, and thinner than Fuqua, but had a few years on him. Detective Sherman was all handshakes and smiles now. It wasn’t that way when we’d met two years ago, when he, two other detectives, and an assistant district attorney took turns interviewing me for hours on end.
“You know who this guy is, Frenchie?” Sherman looked to Fuqua, who frowned at being called Frenchie. Sherman didn’t care and he didn’t wait for an answer. “Mr. Prager here is not only an ex-cop, but a certified USDA hero.”
By the sour look on Fuqua’s face, it was difficult to tell whether he was simply unimpressed or still getting over Sherman calling him Frenchie. Cops are asshole geniuses. They are brilliant at finding their fellow cops’ buttons and then pushing them really, really hard. That much hadn’t changed since I was a cop. On the job, you either get past your sore spots or life can be pretty fucking miserable. Almost everyone toughens to the constant button pushing, but I had my doubts about Fuqua. He looked like a proud son of a bitch who didn’t give up on things very easily.
Sherman was undaunted. “A few years back—you were probably still in uniform, giving out parking tickets—this little girl artist got snatched. Her name was Sashi Bluntstone. You remember hearing about it?” Fuqua deigned to nod yes. “Anyways, we thought we had the guy who did it, some nut job named Tierney who lived over in Gerritsen Beach. Well, Prager didn’t buy it and proved us wrong. He saved the girl and this department a lot of embarrassment, so maybe you wanna give the man a break instead of busting his balls.”
Detective Fuqua didn’t exactly give me a standing ovation, but he did begin tapping his keyboard. Over his shoulder, he said, “Thank you for the testimonial, Sherman.” Then Fuqua stopped typing, turning around to face the other detective. “And Sherman, watch your mouth or we shall have some business together. Now you may leave us alone.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you, Frenchie, and help the man.” Sherman walked away, laughing. It was whistling in the graveyard. He would have been no match for Fuqua. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with him even in my younger, fitter days.
“Frenchie Fuqua was a pretty good running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the ’70s. He was just as famous for his style off the field as his play on the field,” I said when Sherman was out of earshot. “You shouldn’t let him see he gets to you like that.”
“I shall take it under advisement. So, what is it you wish to know?”
“Everything, for starters.”
That got a smile. He pulled a chair over next to his, motioning for me to sit. I hesitated, thinking once again about things it was better not to know.
EIGHT
As usual, I wasn’t following my own rules. I’d been determined to keep Tillman’s death discreet from Alta’s murder, but there I was outside Maya Watson’s condo door.
In the end, Fuqua was very cooperative, but he didn’t actually have much to share. Nobody was talking because, as I suspected, there was nothing much to say. The statements taken by the cops at the Grotto, most of which I’d already seen, were from people who basically watched Alta die. One minute they were eating their pizza and the next minute a woman in blood-soaked clothing collapsed to the concrete. No one had witnessed the crime itself and none of the very few leads Fuqua had developed had come to anything. Most of what the detective had for me was all rather clinical and sterile. Alta, like all victims, had been reduced to a statistic, a batch of test results, a group of crime scene and autopsy photos. Only in the hearts and minds of those closest to them do victims remain themselves. And even then, not always or forever.
“Let us be honest, Mr. Prager, the night of the homicide was my only real opportunity. Now that everyone knows the identity of the victim, no one will come forward. Rightly or wrongly, people feel as if she has received what she had coming her,” said the detective.
“I didn’t know Haitians believed in karma.”
“Haitians believe in pain and suffering. They are experiences we are very familiar with.”
“Do you feel that Alta Conseco got what she had coming?”
“I am not the judge of such things. To me, all victims are equal in murder.”
As ultimately cooperative as he was, Fuqua could not supply a sense of who Alta Conseco had been. There was nothing unexpected in that. A homicide detective handles dozens of cases in a year and even the most dedicated ones don’t really know the victims. I guess maybe because I was a stumbler and didn’t approach cases with a logical game plan, I needed a hook, a connection, a feel for Alta. The saddest part of all this was that I couldn’t go to her sister to get it. For although Alta and Carmella shared genetics and a family resemblance, they had shared very little else for going on three decades. As soon as Carmella could legally change her name and leave her family behind, she did. Her paternal grandmother, her abuela, had been the only person who kept Carm tethered to her family, and her grandmother had died many years ago. In the years we spent together as friends, as business partners, as lovers, Carmella’s self-imposed exile from her family was the one taboo subject between us.
So I was forced to turn to Maya Watson, Alta Conseco’s partner on the job and in infamy. I drew some rather suspicious and unwelcoming stares from her neighbors who had no doubt grown weary and wary of strangers. Many of the TV news reports I’d watched on the net were remotes done right outside this condo. Several of those remotes featured hair-sprayed blondes in makeup masks and million-dol
lar mouths, giving over-rehearsed, falsely earnest spiels in front of rows of protesters. It had probably been a circus around here for weeks. The news vans, blondes, and protesters were gone, but I could still sense them. It was as if they had bruised the atmosphere and it would take time to recover and forget.
Maya Watson came to the door, but did not let me in, not at first. Who could blame her? I felt her eye on me as she spoke to me through the front door.
“Go away. I ain’t got what you’re looking for, mister.” Her voice was somehow tentative and defiant all at once.
“How do you know what I want?”
“What you want is what everybody else wants and I can’t give it. You don’t move away from this here door, I’m dialing 911. You hear me?”
That was my opening, the one opportunity for my old badge to do me some good. By the time Maya Watson processed that I was twenty years too old to be what my badge claimed I was, I’d be inside her apartment.
“No need to dial,” I said, holding my badge up to the peephole.
I listened to her undo the deadbolt and chain and waited for the door to pull back. It didn’t take long, but when the door opened, it opened only slightly so that I had to enter sideways. Maya Watson was nowhere to be seen. The apartment was dimly lit and the shadows stank of stale coffee and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes. Maya Watson had been shielding herself with the door and closed it quickly behind me. Not surprisingly, the burning stub of a cigarette was stuck between her elegant brown fingers. Her hand shook just enough to be noticeable.
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