Hurt Machine

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Something wasn’t right. I had that prickle on the back of my neck thing going. What were two EMTs doing in a place like the High Line Bistro for lunch? They’d have had to take out a loan just to walk through the door. Not to judge, but I didn’t see Alta or Maya Watson as two women who were going to take a quick lunch of frisee salad with lardon or Thai duck confit with tamarind and pomegranate drizzle, certainly not at these prices. But the media reports had been absolutely consistent about the fact that Alta and Maya had called into dispatch that they were taking their lunch break at this address. I looked around at the half-full restaurant. There were lots of tourists, business types in expensive lightweight suits, women in lovely summer dresses, and not a single person in uniform.

  The bartender broke my concentration. She was the ultimate Manhattan stereotype: a beautiful early-twenty-something with rich dark skin, exotic features—vaguely Asian and Hispanic—speaking mildly accented English. She was thin as a blade of grass, but with some curves, and her makeup was flawless. A model or actress who, I guessed, hadn’t come to New York to work behind a bar.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “what may I get for you?”

  I showed her my old badge and put it away before she could get a good look at it. Her youth worked in my favor because she would focus on the badge and what it represented, not on me or my age.

  “A glass of sparkling water and lime and five minutes of your time.”

  She looked around the bar for any excuse to get away from me, but I was her sole customer.

  “Look,” I said, “what’s your name?”

  “Esme.”

  “Look, Esme, relax. Just get me the sparkling water and talk to me like I was any older man sitting at the bar hitting on you. I’m sure you’re pretty used to it.”

  She smiled at that and what a smile: welcoming, sexy, shy, and warm all at once. I couldn’t imagine a camera not loving her. She used the bar gun to fill a tall glass, clipped a lime wedge over the rim, and placed it in front of me.

  “What do you do, Esme, I mean besides tend bar? Actress? Model?”

  There was that smile again. “Some of both, but I am a senior at SVA, the School of Visual Arts.”

  “Really? What’s your major?”

  “Film,” she said, seeming to be more relaxed.

  I squeezed the lime, raised the glass to her, and sipped. “Thanks. Were you here in March when Robert Tillman died?”

  She wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked gut-punched, in fact. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I can’t tell you very much because I was behind the bar here. It all happened over there around the other side of the bar by the kitchen entrance,” she said, her head looking down.

  “Did you see the EMTs come in?”

  “Yes, I noticed them right away.”

  “Why would you notice them? Hadn’t they ever been in here for lunch before?”

  Esme, still looking down. “No. We do not get many customers like them at the High Line.”

  I played dumb. “Why not?”

  She held the menu out to me. “I make good money and I get a discount and even I cannot afford food here. And each meal is always cooked to order by Chef Liu. People do not come here for a fast lunch.”

  “But even if you didn’t see what happened yourself, people who work here must have talked. What did you hear about what happened?”

  “People talked, yes.”

  “Come on, Esme, don’t make this like pulling teeth. Just tell me.”

  “The EMTs came in and everyone says they were having an argument.”

  “An argument. An argument about what?”

  “No one said.”

  “Okay, so they were arguing. Where did they go after they came in?”

  “Toward the restrooms,” Esme said, again pointing around the bar to her right. “Then as they were passing the kitchen door, Chef Liu came out of the kitchen screaming for a doctor and for the hostess to call 911. The short EMT looked into the kitchen and saw Rob—him on the floor. The tall one, she ran into the bathroom and the other one told the chef to call 911, that they were off duty and couldn’t help. When the tall one came out of the bathroom, they left.”

  “You said the short EMT looked into the kitchen. Which one was the short one?”

  “The heavier, older woman. The one who was murdered.”

  “Alta Conseco?”

  “If that is her name, yes, that one.”

  “You said she looked into the kitchen. Did she go into the kitchen or just look?” I asked.

  “I did not see for myself.”

  “I know, Esme, but what did the others say?”

  “She just looked at him through the open kitchen door.”

  “That’s it? She didn’t touch him or anything?”

  “That is what I was told. She just left him to die on the dirty kitchen tiles.”

  Except for the argument between Alta and Maya, Esme’s hearsay story pretty much fell into line with the witness statements. I took out a list of names I’d scrawled down before leaving the house. The names were of other restaurant employees who’d given statements to the police. I read the list of names to Esme. None of them were on duty. Most of them, she said, no longer worked there.

  “It is Manhattan,” she said, “no one works here for very long. We get parts or roles or gigs or even better jobs and leave. It is nice to work here, but it is no one’s dream.”

  I asked Esme to introduce me to Chef Liu. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone so happy to be rid of me. Esme’s introduction saved me the trouble of having to scam the chef. If she said I was a cop, I was a cop. His story included more details about Tillman’s collapse—“Robert was just walking to the grill with a pan of diced onions and fell to the floor”—but was otherwise consistent with Esme’s. He said that Tillman, a prep cook, had only started working there the week prior to his death and that he was good at what he did. Robert hadn’t been there long enough for the chef to really get to know him, but that his death and the controversy surrounding it was a shame nonetheless.

  “Has his family been in touch?” I asked. “Any lawyers or investigators come in to take statements?”

  “No one from Robert’s family, no,” said Chef Liu. “Only the police and fire departments.”

  Uh oh, I could see the chef taking a second look at me, wondering what I was doing there if the cops had already come and gone. I thanked him and left before he could put it together and inquire as to why I was asking questions he’d already answered many times. Questions. Now I had more of them than when I’d walked in.

  FIFTEEN

  When I got back to the car I noticed a message on my cell from a number I didn’t recognize. I thought about ignoring it as I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell Alta and Maya had been doing at the High Line Bistro that day in March and what it was they were arguing about. I considered calling Maya to ask, but she had been so resistant to discussing anything about Tillman’s death when I’d been at her condo, I couldn’t imagine she’d be more cooperative over the phone. This was the thing I guess I loved and hated about investigations: their individual complexities. Only in retrospect is life a simple series of easily connected dots. Humans yearn for simple answers to complex questions, but it just ain’t the way things work. Nothing involving human beings is simple. Nothing!

  I checked the message and was caught totally by surprise by Nick Roussis’ voice. He said it had been good to see me the other day and that he hadn’t taken enough time in the last few years to focus on his friends. He wondered if we could get together for dinner that night or the next night. “Come on,” he said, “I bet you haven’t talked old times with someone from the Six-O for years. It’ll be fun.”

  Obviously, Nicky had been out of the loop about what had gone on with our former precinct mates since he left the job. Larry McDonald had risen to chief of detectives before gassing himself in his car at the Fountain Avenue dump. Rico
Tripoli had died years ago, but had never been the same after getting out of prison. Ferguson May died after being stabbed through the eye while responding to a domestic dispute. Caveman Kenny Burton was gunned down by another dirty cop right in front of me. Nope, somehow I didn’t think this was the kind of thing Nicky “the Greek” Roussis wanted to chat about over dinner, but he was right, seeing him had been good for me. I knew I could use the distraction. I returned his call and left a message that I would probably be available and that he should give me a call back to make plans.

  …

  One fifty-one West 27th Street in Chelsea was off 7th Avenue and across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology. There wasn’t much to say for the building: a slim drab affair wedged between two other slim drab buildings on a block full of slim drab buildings. Funny thing about Manhattan was that there were blocks and blocks of such nondescript buildings lurking in the shadows of those iconic skyscrapers. Except in Chelsea, slim and drab cost an arm and a leg. Many are the paradoxes of New York real estate, but I wasn’t here to solve them. I wasn’t scouting locations for our next shop or looking for a new condo. I was here to talk to Henry Handwerker. According to the statements Carmella had gotten me, Henry Handwerker had been at the High Line Bistro that March day when Robert Tillman collapsed in the kitchen.

  I rode the tiny elevator up to the tenth floor after bullshitting my way inside the building. The list of lies was growing longer by the second and when the elevator door opened up directly into Henry Handwerker’s apartment, I was prepared to lie some more. There was an engraved sign on the wall that read:

  HANDWERKER LITERARY AGENCY, INC.

  I was greeted by a handsome if compact man with blue eyes, short gray hair, a bright friendly smile, and a welcoming handshake. He was about ten years my junior and was comfortably clad in a blue and yellow striped shirt, khaki slacks, and deck shoes. It was an outfit I might have worn, but it looked different on him. His shirt was crisply ironed, the rolled cuffs perfectly squared midway up his forearms, the creases in his slacks just so. His office/apartment reflected that same sort of style: comfortable, yet everything in it was neat and clean.

  “I’m Henry Handwerker. What can I do for you, officer?”

  “Retired,” I said, putting my badge back where it belonged. “Sorry, but the badge sometimes saves a lot of time.”

  “Lying may be efficient, but it is unwelcome.”

  “I agree, but I didn’t think I could get away with claiming I was the Chinese food delivery man.”

  “I see your point, still …”

  “I’m an investigator working for the Tillman family.”

  Handwerker’s whole body seemed to sag. “Oh.”

  “See, it would have been a little difficult explaining through the voice box downstairs.”

  “What is it you want to know?” he asked and then volunteered, “I have no desire to crucify those two women EMTs. There was clearly something troubling going on with them.”

  “Troubling. How?”

  “They were pretty agitated,” he said.

  “They were arguing with each other?”

  “Not exactly. It wasn’t an argument, per se. It seemed they were both upset over something, but in different ways.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Handwerker, but I’m a bit confused here. Can you be a little bit more explicit?”

  “One, the Hispanic woman—”

  “Alta Conseco.”

  “Yes. She was angry, but with someone or something, not at her partner. You could see the fire in her. Her face was contorted and her gestures were violent and purposeful.”

  “And what about Maya Watson, the partner?”

  “A beautiful woman,” he said almost wistfully as he remembered her face.

  “She is, I agree.”

  “She looked frightened, very frightened and hesitant, almost nauseous really. Maybe she was because she basically headed right for the restrooms. Her partner, Miss Conseco, she was making a straight line for the kitchen.”

  This was why you couldn’t just read written statements and take them as being representative of what had actually happened. In his original statement to the police, Mr. Handwerker, probably somewhat stunned, hadn’t described things in quite this way. He’d stated that the two EMTs were agitated, yes, but hadn’t made the finer distinctions he was making for me now, nor had he mentioned that Alta and Maya were in fact headed to different places when they entered the bistro. I pointed that out to him.

  “I was still out of sorts and a little bit in shock, I suppose, when I gave my statement,” he said, confirming my impression. “It was all very tumultuous. Things happened so quickly.”

  “I understand. So, Miss Conseco was headed to the kitchen and Miss Watson to the restrooms?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Could you hear any of their conversation?”

  “Not really. I was seated facing the door, midway between the bar and the entrance. It was crowded and noisy in there. I could barely hear my client across the table, but there was a definite vibe between them.”

  “A vibe?”

  “I can’t explain it. It’s just something I picked up on. That’s all.”

  I could see he wasn’t going to say more about that and I moved on. We talked through the sequence of events, with estimates of how much time elapsed between the two EMTs entering the restaurant and Chef Liu emerging from the kitchen, screaming for help.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted either of those women treating me,” Handwerker said in conclusion. “You could see how totally out of it they were. If it had been anything else other than a stroke, that poor man would have been better served to wait until reinforcements arrived. Both women were shaking and the beautiful one was completely distraught.”

  I thanked him for his time and told him I might be back in touch.

  “As I stated before, I don’t wish to crucify those women.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Handwerker. I’m not certain the Tillman family will pursue this. Besides, one of the two EMTs is already dead.”

  “I heard. Terrible.”

  “Well,” I said, “at least she can’t be hurt by any of this.”

  “Maybe not her, but her family can suffer and there’s the other woman.”

  “Of course. If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Handwerker, you’re the first person I’ve run into in this whole investigation who’s had an ounce of sympathy for the EMTs.”

  “Those other people weren’t there that day. They didn’t see the distress on those women’s faces. Something was dreadfully wrong there.”

  I thanked him again and hopped back on the elevator. It was nice to know there were still some people in the world like Henry Handwerker. If there was any redemption to be found in this universe, it lived in the hearts of people like him.

  The trouble with eyewitnesses was that they could all see the same exact things, but see them differently. Such was the case with what happened at the High Line Bistro that day last March. By four-thirty in the afternoon, I’d interviewed four other witnesses beside Henry Handwerker who’d given statements to the police about the circumstances that day and the only thing they all agreed on was that the two EMTs refused to treat Tillman. Otherwise, it was difficult to tell that they had actually witnessed a common event. One woman didn’t notice the two EMTs were agitated. “Agitated?” she said when I suggested it. “No, they seemed fine.” Another, younger woman who was then working at an exclusive jewelry boutique on Gansevoort Street and was taking her lunch at the bistro said that both Alta and Maya were headed to the restrooms. “The kitchen? No. They were definitely walking toward the restrooms. I’d swear to it.” She did say the two EMTs were bickering, but not about anything serious. “A girl thing,” she said as if that explained it all.

  The older of the two men I spoke with swore Alta and Maya came in separately and resisted any suggestion they were arguing. The younger man barely noticed Alta. “That tall EMT was so hot and, man, she wa
s amazing in that uniform.”

  One of the problems with how the human brain functions is its need for a coherent narrative. It perceives events and then builds a story around them, it edits and embellishes, it ascribes motives when none are obvious. The mood, age, and sex of the witness can affect the perceptions of events and, to an even greater extent, the narrative woven out of those events. Although I had no palpable reason to accept Henry Handwerker’s version of what had transpired, I chose to trust his version instead of the others. I don’t know, maybe it was his sense of detail. Maybe it was his sense of style. Maybe it was that he displayed compassion. No matter, because there was one inescapable truth here: Alta and Maya had refused to treat a dying man and no amount of parsing or pretzel twisting of the facts was going to change that.

  SIXTEEN

  Nick was late, so I sipped at a glass of Brooklyn Lager and munched on olives at the bar. The Kythira Café on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, was, as Nick described it, the crown jewel of his family’s business. The menu featured updated and upscale versions of classic Mediterranean dishes. The interior décor was dark and moody and about as far away from the stereotypical white and blue stucco walls as you could get. There were no Ouzo or retsina bottles, no Greek flags, no bad murals of whitewashed houses on cliffs above the blue Mediterranean, no travel posters of Mykonos, Crete, or the Parthenon.

  The bartender, a scruffy young hipster, was about as Greek as me and as invested in his work as a member of a prison road crew. His generation’s attitude toward their jobs was one of the things about the new world I had trouble getting adjusted to. I grew up believing in doing the best you could do at any job, even if you hated it. Aaron and I had several employees, including Klaus and Kosta, who had worked for us for over thirty years and prospered because of it. Now such dedication was considered old hat or worse, foolish. And when I thought about it, their attitude made sense. In today’s economy, job security and company loyalty were bullshit. Maybe they always had been.