“Oh, I get it. You can prove this?”
“I got the fuckin’ credit card bills, receipts, and doctor bills right inside.”
“Doctor bills?”
“Me and Anthony both got some stomach thing down there. We was sick for a month after we got back. You wanna see the receipts?” she asked, turning to go. “Like I said, I got ’em right inside.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t think it will come up, but I just had to make sure. If I need the documentation, I can get back in touch with you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I think that about covers it.”
I left, hurrying down the stairs. I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t look back. I wanted to get as far away from her as fast as I could. It wasn’t as if she were the most despicable person I’d ever met—not by a long shot. My former father-in-law Francis Maloney made her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nor was her sense of ethics, as fucked up and convoluted as it was, the most self-serving. It was just that her focus was so narrow, her goals so small, so unimportant in the scheme of things, that I wanted to scream. Is this what she was born to dream of, I wondered? Was half of her husband’s pension all she wanted out of life? By the time I reached the street, I wanted to turn around and run back up the stairs and shake her by the shoulders and tell her life was too short to want so little from it. I turned, but she had already gone, gone back inside with her tiny dreams to keep her company.
She’d done me a favor by eliminating Anthony Marinello as a suspect. Did I believe her about them being out of the country when Alta was murdered? Yeah, I believed her. It rang true. If the wife was lying, she was a better liar than me, and if she was lying, she deserved a lot of credit for coming up with an amazingly embarrassing alibi on the spur of the moment. Besides, her story was easy enough to check out. She had done me a favor because looking for the right suspect was like shopping for a house: unless there are very few on the market, you don’t buy the first one you look at.
TWENTY-TWO
The guy at the next stop was no less a fuck-up than Anthony Marinello, just an older, more accomplished one. This time there was no wife for me to talk to. Patrick Scanlon had stubbornly clung to his career until the department basically told him to take a hike. He was a classic red-noser, a professional drinker with so many busted blood vessels in his face you could scan them like a barcode. He had skated by for nearly three decades until the FDNY really cracked down on drinking a few years ago. The last straw was a New Year’s Eve brawl at a firehouse on Staten Island that involved whiskey, a folding chair to the chops, a broken jaw, and a tumble down a staircase. When the incident was thoroughly investigated, all sorts of bad things came out of it and the department put its foot down hard. Indiscretions that’d traditionally been tolerated or treated with wrist slaps were now fireable offenses. Guys like Scanlon either saw the writing on the wall or had it shown to them. I wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that the desk Scanlon vacated when he put in his papers was taken over by Anthony Marinello.
Scanlon showed me down to his den in the basement. He was a hunter and a fisherman and had the trophies to prove it. He was a big man with a shock of white hair and gray stubble and a surly son of a bitch. No matter how I tried, it was difficult to get him to focus. That sort of worked for and against me. When I pointed out that his Cropsey Avenue address was only a short car ride to the Grotto, he looked at me like I was talking in tongues.
“I don’t even like their fucking pizza,” he said.
Well, I thought, Scanlon had at least one redemptive feature: he knew mediocre pizza when he tasted it.
He sobered up a little bit when I showed him my old badge and a copy of the rather disgusting email he had sent to Alta Conseco and Maya Watson only a week before Alta was murdered. He wasn’t the type to challenge my badge even if I looked too old to be carrying it. When I pressed him about his threats, he didn’t exactly ask for forgiveness.
“Fuck them two cunts,” he said. “They stained us all by leaving that man to die like that. They’re a fucking disgrace!”
I bit the inside of my cheek again. It was going to be a rough day for the inside of my cheek.
“Is that how you see women, as cunts? You seemed pretty sure about what you’d do to their anatomy if you ever got hold of them.”
“How did you get a hold of that anyways?” he slurred. “I didn’t put my name on it.”
“You’re proud of that, huh, hiding behind a phony name? If you had half a brain, you’d know there are ways to track emails.”
“No need to get insulting.”
“I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings? Why would I want to insult a coward who hides behind a fake name and threatens women and calls them cunts? Gee, I wonder.”
“Okay, so I’m an asshole sometimes. It’s the drink.”
“First refuge of a coward, blaming everybody and everything but himself.”
He seemed not to hear me. “Hey, I gotta piss. All right?”
“It’s your house and your dick. Go ahead.”
When he left the den, I took a closer look at the décor. I noticed three taxidermied fish on the walls and a framed photo of Scanlon with some hunting buddies standing over the carcass of deer. In another, he posed holding the limp body of a wild turkey by its neck. In yet another, his feet were surrounded by a stack of dead ducks and geese. On the wall to my right I noticed a locked gun rack with two shotguns and three bolt action rifles. There was a glass case with some wall-mounted handguns that weren’t just there for show and next to that case was a wall display of hunting knives, machetes, bayonets, ceremonial knives, one with an ivory handle and a black swastika affixed to the hilt, a Confederate cavalry saber, and a samurai sword.
“What were we talking about?” he asked when he returned.
I ignored him. “Where’s the knife that goes there?” I asked, pointing to a conspicuously empty spot on the wall.
He didn’t like that question and I could see the gears turning. “No knife goes there. I, um, I haven’t filled that spot yet.”
He was completely unconvincing. “Don’t bullshit me, Patrick. You can see the silhouette of it. You know that Alta Conseco was stabbed to death, right? So here’s what I’m looking at: a death threat from you, a nasty drunk who lives five minutes away from the crime scene, a missing knife, and a very dead woman. Can you do the math? Because I can.”
“I wouldn’t’a killed that dyke.”
“Dyke?”
“Yeah, yeah, she tried to hide it, but I heard shit.”
“How the fuck would you hear shit?” I said. “You’ve been out of the department for a few years.”
“What, you think because I got forced out, I don’t hear things? You hang out at McPhee’s, you hear plenty.”
I shook my head. “That place again. What is it with you guys and that bar?”
“You know McPhee’s?”
“I know it. But we’re getting off the subject here. You haven’t said one word that disputes my math, Scanlon. I still got the same problem.”
He dipped his head like a little kid who’d been caught boosting a pack of gum at the local candy store. “I sold that knife months ago, way before that—before what’s-her-name was murdered. I can prove it.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“It wasn’t my knife to sell. It belonged to one of my old hunting buddies. We had a falling out, but I kept it and then I sold it.”
“Do you think I give a shit? I’m not from the stolen knife squad, for chrissakes!”
That was a dumb thing to say because now Scanlon was taking his first good look at me. I hadn’t quite told him before who I was and what the exact nature of my business was. The old badge had worked well enough and I had let his drunken mind fill in the blanks. Now fear was sobering him up pretty fast. I had to get his mind off me and back on the subject.
“Okay, so you sold that knife, but you got lots more here and probably dozens more
I don’t see.” I picked up the Nazi knife with the fancy handle. It was probably some bonus gift to an SS man for killing the largest number of my relatives in a single month. “What about this one?” I asked, twirling it in my hand and then dropping it.
He cringed. “Hey, cut that out. That’s worth a lotta—”
“Or this one?” I knocked a hunting knife to the floor.
“Cut it out. Cut it out! Those are worth—”
I knocked another one to the floor. That did it. He came at me, swinging wildly, blindly and missing by a mile. I sidestepped, leaving my right leg out for him to stagger over. He tripped, sprawling into a leather recliner and then to the floor. He rolled over, but didn’t get up for a second run at me. He probably wanted to, but the thing of it was I was now showing him some hardware of my own. I had my old .38 out and pointed straight at his belly.
“That’s enough of that, shithead. I couldn’t miss you from here even if I was blindfolded.”
He held his hands up, palms out in surrender. “I swear I didn’t do nothing to her. I was mad, sure. We was all mad at them, but I didn’t kill nobody.”
“Not like you haven’t hit a woman before,” I said. “You were arrested a few months ago for—”
“It wasn’t like that. She hit me first. We had a fender bender on Bay Parkway and the bitch gets out of the car and slaps me in the face. I grabbed her wrists and then some passersby grabbed me and called 911. It was all fucked up. The charges were dropped. You can check it out. I done some shitty things in my life, but I ain’t never hit a woman.”
“Okay, get up.” I put my gun away. “I’m leaving now. If I were you—god forbid—I would try real hard to find someone who could alibi you for the night Alta Conseco was murdered. Someone other than a relative.”
“I didn’t touch that dyke, I swear.”
I let myself out. Problem was, I believed the prick. I had nothing to back it up beyond the sense that he was telling me the truth. He was a bad liar and it was my experience that it was hard for people to fake being bad at something. Scanlon was just a bag of leaves: all puffed up, but ultimately weak and full of hot air and decay. I suppose he’d be worth taking a second look at and I would call Fuqua to let him know what I’d found. What bothered me more was him calling Alta a dyke. I mean, that’s what guys on the job do. If a woman doesn’t swoon at the sight of them or keeps to herself or doesn’t wear enough makeup to suit them, she gets labeled as gay. It happened when I was on the cops and it hadn’t changed. I didn’t care one way or the other but if it was true that Alta was gay, it added yet another ingredient to the mix that might complicate things more than they already seemed to be. With every step, the slippery slope got steeper and more slippery.
TWENTY-THREE
The address was on Havemeyer Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Before evolving into hipster central, Williamsburg had once been a German, Italian, and Jewish immigrant stronghold. By the late sixties and early seventies, White Flight had emptied the neighborhood of its more traditional residents and that void was filled by the oddest of ethnic odd couples: Puerto Ricans and Hasidic Jews. Even as the area was transforming into its present incarnation as hipster heaven, the Puerto Ricans and Hasidim stayed on, if in somewhat smaller numbers than during the last two decades before the new millennium.
The uneasiness hit me before I got to Jorge Delgado’s street. I’m not sure why that was. Probably had to do with the dubious pleasure of starting my morning rounds with Mrs. Anthony Marinello and Patrick Scanlon, but maybe not. My unease intensified as I pulled into the spot across from Delgado’s address and it grew stronger still as I got out of my car. It was, I thought, an omen. I’m not one for omens except when I am. I mean, you don’t believe in God, it’s tough to believe in omens. Fuck that! Logical consistency only counts if you care about what other people think and my oncologist had given me license not to care.
Although his hate mail to Alta and Maya was just as scathing and cruel as the others, Jorge Delgado was a distinct creature, unlike Marinello, Scanlon, and the other douche bags on my list. He had been part of the FDNY for nearly twenty years. Delgado was highly decorated and very well-respected, if not exactly beloved. His fury at Alta and Maya—Alta in particular—came from a different place than almost all of the other hate-mailers. Not only was he good at his job, but his was a strong minority voice in the union and Delgado was a leading member of a Puerto Rican fraternal organization. He had fought long hard struggles for equality and fair representation of women and minorities on the job. Although he did, apparently, sometimes let his temper get the better of him. There were reports of the occasional shoving match and shout-down with fellow firefighters who stood on the opposite side of the issues.
Entering the building, I held the front door open for a big guy on the way out. It didn’t hit me immediately, but the man who nodded his appreciation as he passed was wearing a blue FDNY T-shirt.
After 9/11, half the men in New York City were wearing T-shirts just like his. They’d been sold to raise money for the families of the dead. I had a few myself. Those shirts, like my old PI license, hadn’t seen much action in the last several years and had been consigned to the bottom of a drawer somewhere. The man who walked by me was black, which didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t Puerto Rican, but he was about ten years too young to have been Delgado.
“Excuse me,” I called to him.
He stopped and about-faced. “What’s up?”
“The Delgados?” I asked, hoping the question in my voice would suffice.
He nodded, his rugged face drooping in sadness. “You here to pay respects too, huh?”
“No, I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard, but I’m glad I ran into you,” I said, furiously working out my cover story in my head. “I had an appointment with Jorge to discuss retirement investments. God, it would have been awful to walk in on his grieving family. What happened?”
“Traffic accident about three weeks ago. Georgie was walking to his car after a shift and this little girl was crossing the street. He saw a car blowing through a stop sign, so Georgie ran for the kid. Knocked her out of the way, but he took it full on. Wound up nearly a hundred feet away. He was totally fucked. Brain dead. The family finally gave up and pulled the plug a few days ago.”
“Christ! That was him?” I said, pretending to have known about the accident. Since my family tragedy in 2000 and 9/11 the following year, I’d stopped reading the papers or listening to the news. Reading the paper had once been a part of my everyday routine and one of the great pleasures in my life. Not anymore.
“Yeah, that was Georgie: the bravest of the brave.”
I lied. “The first time I spoke to him, he was still pretty upset over those two EMTs who stood by and let that man in the restaurant die. He sounded really angry.”
“That shit drove Georgie nuts. Said they had set back the cause by twenty years. Man, I tell you what, there was times I thought he was mad enough to kill those EMTs if he got the chance. I’ve seen him pretty crazy mad, but never mad like he was ’bout those two. He only just stopped talking about it.”
“You can’t be serious, not about him hurting those women. He seemed like such a nice man.”
“True that. He was a great guy, a brother. Kept my ass alive more times than I’d like to say, but Georgie had a temper on him, a bad temper. It was his Achilles heel. You know what I’m saying? When the man got a bug up his bee-hind about something, it was hard to calm him down. Don’t matter much now, does it?”
“I guess not,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I do work with some other firefighters. One of them told me that EMT that got murdered was … that she was a … you know …”
“Gay?”
“I guess that’s the better way to say it.”
The man’s previously sad and caring expression turned suddenly cold. “So what if she was? She fucked up, but even that don’t mean she should’ve been cut up like that.”
“You’re right,�
� I said. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“Forget it.”
He turned and walked to his Honda Accord parked down the street. I watched him drive away. It’s an amazing thing, what people will tell absolute strangers. They’ll tell you things they wouldn’t tell their best friends or their priests. Investigators count on that impulse. I was kind of disappointed that I’d upset him because he was clearly grieving for Delgado, but one of the things about doing PI work is that you’re never going to win any popularity contests. Whether you tell the truth or lie through your teeth, you’re not usually saying things people want to hear. I thought about finding Delgado’s apartment, but decided there were some situations that were off limits no matter how just your cause. I wasn’t going to intrude on the Delgados’ grief. What I needed to know, they probably couldn’t tell me. Even if they could, I wasn’t going to ask, not today.
I’d never met Jorge Delgado. I’d never even seen a picture of him. To me he was a man who wrote a threatening email and, until I knew more, simply the sum of the parts of a limited background check and the brief testimonial of a grieving firefighter. Still, I could not ignore the feeling in my belly. Hunches worked both ways and I had to trust them equally. If I had been willing to believe that a complete scumbag like Patrick Scanlon was telling me the truth based solely on my sense of him, then I had to believe the gnawing in my gut about Jorge Delgado. I wasn’t prepared to be judge, jury, and executioner—I was already too late for that last part—but I couldn’t deny that bells had gone off in my head during my conversation with the firefighter with whom I’d just crossed paths.
Back in the front seat of my car, I called Brian Doyle. He answered on the second ring.
“Yeah, Boss, what’s goin’ on?”
“I sent your check yesterday as soon as I got the package.”
“Thanks, but that’s not why you called, is it?”
“Nope.”
“Then why?”
“Jorge Delgado. He’s one of the firefighters you guys did a preliminary background check on. I want you—”
Hurt Machine Page 11
