“May well be.”
“This Alta Conseco just let a man die, Moe.”
“Allegedly.”
“Bullshit. Everyone in the restaurant saw it happen. So what’s the point here, Don Quixote? You going to resurrect a dead woman’s reputation or are you looking for a little redemption because you still blame yourself for your first wife’s murder?”
“A little bit of both, I guess.”
“Well, call me when you get up here for the wedding. That’s if you still want to take me instead of your great love.”
“Now you’re just being cruel, Pam.”
“Am I? We’ll see.”
We would have to, because she was off the phone by the time I opened my mouth to say something.
…
O’Hearn’s was one of many bars of its kind in New York City. It was Irish through and through and served a hearty, if not exactly gourmet, lunch for reasonable money. Most of the menu choices were laid out in aluminum pans recessed into two rows of steam tables, the steam bleaching out the color and flavor of nearly all the food. The vegetables in particular seemed most susceptible to the vagaries of over-warming. Somehow, my mother used to achieve the same results without resorting to steam. The best feature of lunch was the carving board. There was ham and corned beef every day, sometimes turkey and roast beef too. Since getting off the job in 1977, I’d only been to places like O’Hearn’s twice: once with Francis Maloney Sr., my former father-in-law, and once with an ex-precinct mate of mine, Caveman Kenny Burton. In fact, I’d met Kenny here at O’Hearn’s. They were both dead now: Francis a victim of old age and his own bile, Kenny a victim of a bullet. Jesus did a lot of dying for their sins. Neither was missed, certainly not by me.
Brian Doyle had a half-empty pint of Harp on the table when I walked in. He was a naturally lean and athletic man and hadn’t put on an ounce since I met him. His hair was graying, but he still had the eyes of a kid. I bought us lunch before settling down to talk. I had some turkey and mashed potatoes and not much of either. Good to his word, he had corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes and another Harp. I’d always wondered how he could eat like that and stay slim. My guess was he had so much energy that he lost weight in his sleep.
“So what’s the deal, Boss?”
I handed over a large yellow mailing envelope with copies of the hate mail that directly threatened violence. “I need you and Devo to trace these back to the senders.”
Doyle took a look. His eyes got big, not from the harsh language or the racism—he’d be used to those—but from the names Alta Conseco and Maya Watson. I couldn’t remember how much of the story he knew about the history between Carmella and me before we hired him, so I simply told Brian that Alta was Carm’s sister.
“Still, Boss, this isn’t a good idea.”
“Don’t worry, you guys won’t be mentioned at all. I’m your client and that’s that. Charge me whatever you have to charge me. No discounts.”
“For swimming in this shit, you weren’t gonna get one. But there’s a problem I see already.”
“What’s that?”
He put one of the emails on the table and pointed at the addresses. “See here? There’s only so much Devo can do with this. If we had access to the actual emails, Devo could probably do what you want.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Look, I’m not as IT-savvy as Devo by a long shot, but there are reveal codes you can use to unmask people trying to hide their email identities. So if you can get her to forward those emails to Devo …”
“I’ll get them for you.”
“How?”
“You let me worry about that, Brian.”
“I almost wish you couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“You know I love you and Carmella. You guys saved my ass and taught me the ropes and everything, but this bitch Alta deserved what she got.”
I thought about saying that no one deserved a violent death, but I didn’t believe it, not for a second. I’d seen too much, lived through too much to think that there weren’t some people, maybe only a very few, who warranted a violent end: Caveman Kenny Burton, for instance. Besides, I thought, when did deserving have anything to do with it?
“I owe it to Carm,” I said, “and so do you. When you get the information I’m looking for, you can wash your hands of it.”
He wasn’t enthusiastic. “All right. Whatever.”
“Another drink?”
“Nah, just let me know when you get what we need.”
He stood to go, but I grabbed his arm.
“I think I’m dying, Brian.” The words came out of my mouth involuntarily.
He sat back down. “What?”
“Stomach cancer.”
“Jesus. Fuck!”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“It’s bad, huh?”
“It’s not good.”
“Why tell me? I was gonna do the job for you anyhow.”
“It’s not that, Brian. I would never manipulate a friend that way. Weird thing is, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, but I think I would have exploded if I didn’t tell somebody. I knew I could tell you. You can’t say a word about it.”
“Not to Devo?”
“I suppose you can tell him,” I said. “But that’s it.”
“Okay, you got my word.”
“Shit, Doyle, lighten up. I’m the one with the cancer. You look worse than me.”
He stared at me for a long few seconds and said, “No, Boss, I don’t.”
After he left O’Hearn’s, I watched him walk away down Church Street. I caught a reflection of myself in the window. He was right.
THIRTEEN
Maya Watson was less than thrilled about doing what I asked, saying that it seemed like getting dirty all over again. I thought that was sort of a strange thing to say, but I wasn’t in her shoes. Reading the hate mail made me feel a lot of things—angry, shameful, disgusted, eventually bored—but not dirty. Then again, I was a third party and the hate and racism weren’t directed at me. Who was I to judge? No matter, Maya said she’d take care of it as soon as she could.
In the meantime, I headed back to Bordeaux in Brooklyn to make sure the wine order for the wedding was ready for shipment up to Vermont. When Sarah and Paul first told me they were getting married in Vermont, I thought it was going to be a relaxed affair in a ski chalet or local bar somewhere. I nearly broke out in hives when they told me it was to be a black tie wedding at Paul’s parents’ country club. The last country club wedding I’d been to was in the early ’80s, just after Katy’s miscarriage. It was at that wedding that the seeds of Katy’s murder were sown. It was impossible for us to know then that those seeds would take seventeen years to sprout and that when they did the world would fall in around us. It frightened me to think I had become my mother’s son. Were we, like she believed, always just one breath short of disaster, one nightfall away from the sun’s refusal to shine? Had she been right all along?
I was also kind of shocked that they had country clubs in Vermont or enough Jews and other ethnic groups to actually form them. What surprised me even more was that tuxedos weren’t contraband. I mean, I enjoyed my time in Vermont. It was a lovely and serene place that made Brooklyn seem like an Earth colony on a distant planet in a far-flung galaxy, but it had its quirks. After only a few trips up there to visit Pam, I was convinced that it was against the law for men to trim their beards or to get a decent haircut. The state police clearly seized most shipments of women’s makeup at the border and banned all fashion magazines from sale. Pam must have smuggled her clothes, jewelry, and makeup in under cover of darkness. The state bird was the Subaru Outback and you could get a thousand different varieties of granola or cheddar cheese at the local convenience store.
I thought about what Rico Tripoli, Paul’s biological father, would have made of all this hoopla, of French wines and country clubs. Rico, like me, had grown up a poor schmuck in Brooklyn. In that Broo
klyn, the Brooklyn of immigrant parents, sewer to sewer stickball games, and ring-a-levio, you didn’t dream of country clubs or black tie weddings. Well, maybe Rico did, which is probably why his appetites destroyed him. That was the thing about Rico, he could never tell you exactly what he wanted, only that he wanted more of it than he already had. It was why he sold his soul several times over and so cheaply. The first time it was for his gold detective’s shield. Then he sold that for cocaine gang money, and, eventually, for the cocaine itself. Funny thing is that when he wound up in prison, he somehow blamed me. I suppose I should forgive him for that. By then he had been so long without a soul that he had forgotten the meaning of love and friendship.
Bordeaux in Brooklyn on Montague Street was our second wine shop and the only one I really cared for at all. The wine business paid my bills, sent Sarah to college and helped buy her vet practice, yet even now, it meant very little to me. The business had been my brother’s dream, not mine. All I did was invest some money and go along for the ride. I hadn’t ever really invested, not emotionally. Over thirty years in the business and I didn’t give a shit. And if I hadn’t cared up to now, dying wasn’t going to make me see the light. All I could see was the time I’d wasted, the things I hadn’t done. When I was gone, all that would be remembered of me was that I had been a shopkeeper. Does anyone dream of being a shopkeeper? Does anyone dream of dying as one?
I’d done a lot of thinking lately about the what ifs in my life. What if I hadn’t slipped on that piece of carbon paper in the squad room in 1977 and torn my knee to shreds? That was the what if that really haunted me. Of the many things that had befallen me, that one careless step changed my life more than any other single incident before or since. Owing to my wrecked knee, the NYPD forced me into early retirement. From that day forward I limped down the road previously not taken until that road had taken me. Where would I be? Who would I be? What would I be? See, it’s like what I said about asking why me? Once you start, you can never stop asking. Signs that read Watch Your Step meant more to me than a simple warning.
The trucking company arrived soon after I finished checking the wine order. I watched it loaded into the semi’s box, then watched it disappear down Montague Street into the wilds of Cadman Plaza and beyond. I thought about heading back into Manhattan—only a very short ride over the nearby Brooklyn Bridge—and over to the High Line Bistro. Since, in spite of my better instincts, it seemed I was buying into the connection between Robert Tillman’s death and Alta Conseco’s murder, I supposed it was time to look into that aspect of things. But no, I wasn’t up for it today. I wasn’t up for pretending, for lying to people who would invest their trust in me when I told them I was a cop or an insurance man or a PI employed by the lawyers representing the Tillman family.
I’m not one of those people who much believes in the truth as an imperative or an elixir. If anything, it had been my experience that the plain truth often made things worse, much worse. It sure as shit didn’t set you free. But I’d come to think that there was a price to be paid for lies. Not a price come judgment day with God as the cosmic accountant, having kept the ledger of sins great and small. Nor am I saying there’s any individual cost to the liar him-or herself. It’s a common cost, a price we all pay. Each uncovered lie is a corrosive thing, eating away at whatever trust there is left that binds us together. Without trust, we have nothing, and I just wasn’t in the mood to add to the weakening of those bonds, not today.
…
McPhee’s wasn’t exactly hopping in mid-afternoon. I don’t know. I guess I went looking for trouble, half-hoping that asshole Hickey would be there and I could embarrass him in front of his friends or better yet, a woman. I also wanted to see Flannery again. I liked the guy for having the cojones to be honest with me when it would have been easier to just let it be. There was something else about him too. He had the sadness in him, the demons. Fuck if I knew that was why he drank. There are a thousand reasons for a man to drink and only some of them have to do with tamping down the demons. I was curious about why he didn’t want to talk about his heroics and why he was so eager to drink to guilt. Guilt, now there was a subject I knew a little something about. Maybe I was looking for answers in him for the questions in me. Short of running into my attacker or seeing Flannery, I hoped the same barman was on duty. He seemed a chatty sort and I was in the mood to chat.
I didn’t see either Flannery or the shithead who’d cold-cocked me, but the bartender was on. The crowd was sparse: no women, not even very many fireman that I could spot. Who would be in a bar at three in the afternoon, anyway? Finbarr McPhee’s, for all of its firehouse cachet, was no different than any other bar at that time of day. It catered to the lonely and the losers, people lost in their drinks or the newspaper or their own thoughts.
I found the same seat I’d sat in the other night. The barman nodded hello, a smile on his face, but it was a salesman’s smile, not one meant especially for me.
“What’ll you have?”
“Same as the other night,” I said to test him.
It took a second, but he remembered. The smile ran away from his face. “You, huh? Guinness, right?”
“Right, but I’ve changed my mind. Make it a Dewars rocks.”
“Not gonna start a fight today, are you?” he asked, scooping ice into a rocks glass and reaching for the Dewars bottle.
“Not on the agenda, no. And for the record, I didn’t start one the other night either. I was just talking to Flannery. What time does he usually come in?”
He put my drink up. “Not till about seven. He works his way down Fourth Avenue. He needs to drink a little before he drinks in here.”
I took a sip. “Why’s that?”
“Ask him.”
“Don’t go all quiet on me now,” I said. “You were quick to volunteer that story about him being a hero the other night, but that wasn’t the whole story, was it?”
“Nope. What’s it to you, anyways?”
“I like the guy. He stuck his neck out for me. I’m curious about someone who would do that for a stranger.”
The barman nodded his head at the Wall of Honor.
“Okay, you got my attention,” I said. “What about it?”
“Walk over and take a look. See if you can find Brandon Fitzgerald Flannery Jr. I’ll make sure no one steals your seat or your scotch.”
I walked over to the wall and found the name listed amongst the three hundred and forty-three members of the FDNY lost on 9/11.
“Flannery’s son?” I asked, retaking my seat.
“His youngest. His only son.”
“I’d drink too if I lost my kid that way.”
“That’s not why he drinks. He drinks because he blames himself. The kid didn’t want to follow in his old man’s footsteps, but Flannery pushed him. And you can tell by how he handled things the other night that when Flannery pushes, he pushes hard. The Flannerys have been fighting fires in this city since they stepped off the boat. They go back to before 1898, to before the job was the job and before the city was the city. No son of Flannery’s was going to turn his back on family tradition.”
“That guilt’s a lot to carry,” I said.
“More than he can bear and that man can bear a lot.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” he said.
“Here what from whom?”
The barman liked that and asked if I wanted another scotch on the house.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be drinking this one. But I’ll tell you what you can do.”
“What’s that?”
“That fireman who started up with me the other night, Hickey, what’s his story?”
“He’s too young to have a story. Leave it alone. I don’t need any trouble in here.”
“Fair enough.” I took a last sip at my Dewars and threw a ten on the bar for a tip.
Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling very well and decided that what I need
ed more than anything was an afternoon nap. Sleep, I found as I got older, was a much better retreat than the bottle.
FOURTEEN
The High Line Bistro was over in the West Village on Little West 12th Street in an area known as the Meatpacking District. The Meatpacking District had for many decades been the hub of the city’s commercial butchery. And, until the eighties, it had also been known for its many gay clubs. Some of the clubs were notorious for catering to the rough trade segment of the community. But the AIDS epidemic and the city’s insatiable thirst for real estate development remade the Meatpacking District into a chic neighborhood of exclusive shops and designer chef restaurants. Rising above the cobblestone streets of the district, north into Chelsea, was the High Line Park or, as it was more commonly known, the High Line: a long-disused stretch of elevated railroad track that had been converted into an elevated park replete with plantings, artwork, and great vistas on the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline.
The High Line Bistro was in an old warehouse. The walls were the original brick and the interior post and beam construction was also original equipment. That’s where the quaintness came to an abrupt halt. The tables and chairs, made of train rails and ties, were more sculpture than furniture and each must have cost a small fortune. The walls were covered with historical photographs of the High Line when it was operational and trains were bringing meat to and from the butcheries. There were also original paintings of the High Line itself and of the views of the city it offered. The bar was simple and sturdy, no rails and ties here. But when I sat down on one of the barstools and looked at the wine list just to pass the time, I nearly swallowed my tongue. Their wine list was pretty extensive and absurdly expensive. A bottle of good old vine Zinfandel, which you could buy on sale at one of our stores for under thirty dollars, was listed at one hundred and forty bucks. At that price, I thought, the waiter should not only open the bottle and pour the wine, but hold the glass and pour it into your mouth for you. The lunch menu prices, while not quite as outrageous, were no bargain. I could only imagine what the prices on the dinner menu would be.
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