“Is this going somewhere?” I asked, sipping on the wine.
“Let the man talk and you’ll see,” Nick chided.
“The guy says he’ll pay me five large to t’row a scare into this bitch, that I can hurt her all I want and that if she died, he wouldn’t shed no tears over it. He said just to make sure it was slow and that it hurt. I told him I wasn’t gonna kill nobody and that if I was, five large wasn’t large enough. He said ten was the best he could do, but that if he had some more time, he might be able to come up with another five. I said that I still wasn’t interested in killin’ nobody, especially a woman, but that five grand would buy him a lot of hurt. He said he’d send me half the money and information about where I could find the woman.”
With a sense of where this was going, I speeded up the process. “He sent you the money?”
“Twenty-five hundred in used twenties and this,” he said, sliding a folded piece of paper across the table to me.
Tucked inside the paper was a grainy newspaper headshot of Alta Conseco. Alta’s address and phone numbers were printed on the paper. Even knowing what was coming, I felt my eyes get big when I saw the photo.
“Did you kill her?”
“No, man. What are you, fuckin’ crazy? You think I’d come in here and tell you this shit if I—”
“Calm down, Joey,” I said. “I’m not stupid and I don’t think you are either, but I had to ask. So, what happened after you got this package?”
“I recognized the bitch. I mean, the guy even sent me a newspaper picture, right? I read the papers and I listen to the news. No way I was gettin’ mixed up in this shit. It’s one thing to put some hurt on some loser nobody ever heard of. It’s somethin’ else to do somebody who’s got reporters following them around. I kept callin’ that number until the guy answered. I told him I wasn’t interested and asked him where I should send the money back to.”
“What happened when you told him you weren’t interested?”
“Man, he went like freakin’ batshit on me. Cursin’ at me in Spanish, callin’ me faggot and cunt and—”
I interrupted him. “Spanish?”
“Yeah, you learn those curse words pretty fast inside. He told me he’d kill me if I ever said a word to anybody and he sounded like he meant it. What a fuckin’ temper on that guy. He went off, man. He gave me a PO box to send the money to, but I told him I was keepin’ the paper to make sure he stayed away from me. I’m tellin’ you, he was crazy, that guy.”
“You never got his name?”
“Are you kiddin’ me? That was the whole point of workin’ over the phone.”
“Did he have an accent?”
“Only when he was screamin’ at me and cursin’.”
“But this friend of yours,” I said, “the one you used to work with in the Bronx, he knows the—”
Joey shot out of his chair. “I’m not goin’ there. Forget it. If I didn’t give up no names or roll over on anybody to save myself jail time, I ain’t gonna give you no names. The only reason I’m here now is because my boss told me I had to talk to Nicky, but that’s it. I told you what I had to tell you. What you do with it ain’t none of my business.” He grabbed the paper and newspaper photo and shoved them in his pocket.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let me ask you a few more questions and then we’re done.”
Joey sat, but looked ready to bolt at any time.
“The guy you used to work with in the Bronx, the one who hooked you up, I don’t want to know his name, but he doesn’t work in the Bronx anymore, does he? He works in Queens, right?”
Joey didn’t run, but kept silent. That was answer enough for me.
“And this unnamed guy, he’s Puerto Rican, right?”
That did it. Joey stood up and bent over the table, looming right above me. “Look, I was here because I was told to talk to Nicky, but I don’t know you and I don’t like you. You jam me up with any of this and I’ll do to you what that guy wanted me to do to the bitch. You hear me, old man?” He reached for my collar, then stopped. I guess he didn’t like how my .38 felt against his ribs.
“I may be old, but my finger still works pretty good. All the steroids and HGH in the world won’t do you much good from point-blank range, asshole, so step back and get the fuck outta here. I don’t give a shit about you, but I owe Nicky, so you’re safe.”
He didn’t need to be told twice and was gone. I ate very little of the meal, good as it was, nor did I hear much of the background music over the sound of Jorge Delgado singing to me from the grave.
TWENTY-SIX
It wasn’t time to go to Detective Fuqua, not yet, anyway. So far I had some interesting, even compelling circumstantial evidence that pointed to Jorge Delgado, but nothing that would stick—as if anything would really stick to a dead man. Besides, I had a problem with things that came together too quickly and nested so seamlessly. People’s lives weren’t like model airplanes. They didn’t come with glue or parts that fit perfectly together according to the instruction sheet. They were sloppy, messy things full of competing impulses, conflicting emotions, and unresolved feelings. It had been my experience that unresolved feelings were like that undigested food people carried around in their gut: it festered and grew into the things that eventually ruined us, turned us ugly, and sometimes killed us. Unresolved feelings, I thought, were probably at the root of more pain and destruction than any other single cause in the history of humankind.
Twice before I had worked cases where the parts seemed to fit perfectly together, but the model came out wrong, all wrong. The first time was in the early eighties when Moira Heaton, a state senator’s intern, disappeared from her boss’s office on Thanksgiving Eve. After some digging, I thought I had her killer nailed. The other time was when I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone. The kidnapper and alleged murderer was practically served up on a silver platter like John the Baptist’s head. In both cases all the evidence—circumstantial and substantive—pointed one way and in both instances the evidence was wrong. I had been manipulated into taking what I had at face value. The prime suspects turned out to be false positives. So, no, I didn’t trust seamlessness and it didn’t escape my notice that on the same day I stumbled across Delgado as a suspect, I got that call from Nick. It doesn’t get more seamless than that. This time I wanted to be sure to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s before I shouted that the sky was falling.
It was a piece of cake finding out who the fireman was who had acted as the middleman between Delgado and Joey Fortuna. No need for me to go to Doyle and Devo for that. Fortuna had all but told me the guy was Puerto Rican and it wasn’t much of a leap to guess he had worked out of the same firehouse as Delgado. A few little lies and a few fifty dollar bills later and I had a name: Nestor Feliz. I waited outside the firehouse until Feliz’s shift ended and approached him as he opened his car door.
“Nestor Feliz?” I asked in that same antiseptic voice I used as a cop. It got people’s attention and it fucked with their equilibrium. He looked up, scared. Nestor had a guilty conscience about something. I held up my leather case that contained my old badge, but didn’t open it. Then I lied a bit about what was inside the leather case. “If I show you my gold shield, this will be an official conversation. If I don’t, we can have a nice little unofficial chat at a local bar and leave it at that.”
He stalled for time. “What’s this about?”
“Nestor, I can feel my fingers about ready to show you my shield.”
“Okay. There’s an Irish pub on Austin Street off Queens Boulevard.”
“I’ll follow you there.”
Parking was easier to find than usual in Forest Hills. Irony was, the pub Feliz had chosen was only a few blocks away from the 112th Precinct and I had little doubt that half the people in the bar with us were real cops, not retired old farts playing pretend. We found a quiet table in a corner. I bought Nestor a Bud and I had a Dewars. The alcohol was meant to prove this was all very unofficial.
“So, Nestor, let’s get something straight. I’m not looking to hurt you, but if you bullshit me once, I’m gonna come down on your head like a tornado.”
“What’s this about?” he repeated.
“Jorge Delgado.”
Nestor went from looking worried to angry. “He’s dead.”
“No shit! I know that. C’mon.”
“Georgie was a great fireman, a hero. Let him be. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Okay, fair enough. I’m gonna give you another name and if you say to me, ‘She’s dead,’ I’m gonna cuff you and march you down the street to the One-One-Two and book you. You ready? You understand?”
“Go ahead, yeah.”
“Alta Conseco.”
Now he went from looking angry to nauseous, which, in a way, was all the answer I needed. “I didn’t have nothing to do with that shit.”
I had to be careful here, because as much as I detested scum like Joey Fortuna, I couldn’t betray the deal Nick Roussis had made in order to get him to talk to me. It wasn’t important to me to know how Nick got word about Joey or with whom he had made the deal. You do business in New York City, you have dealings with all sorts of unsavory types. Ridiculous taxes and exorbitant fees weren’t the only reasons prices in the city were high. There were all sorts of invisible taxes and hidden fees too. Part of every dollar you spent on trucking or carting refuse or construction went into some gangster’s pocket and it wasn’t just the Mafia, the Irish, the Chinese, the Columbians, or the Russians anymore. Organized crime was a growth industry and everyone from the Indians to the Israelis to the Dominicans to the Haitians to the Vietnamese were looking for their taste. Don’t think for a second that Aaron and I were somehow above it. We weren’t. We knew where the money went and that’s why I couldn’t hurt Nicky.
“My bullshit-o-meter is starting to click away here, Nestor. Word on the street is that you were a middleman between a hitter and Jorge Delgado. I don’t have the hitter’s name, not just yet, but if I start digging around out there, I’ll find it and I’ll find him. He’s not gonna go down by himself, not for murder one.”
“Georgie was pissed at those two EMTs. When he got that way, there was no calming him down. I tried, I swear. I tried, but he just got madder. I made a few phone calls, that’s all. One guy took the job, but when the guy found out who Georgie wanted him to hurt, he backed out. When Georgie told me he offered the guy money to kill her, I told Georgie I was out of it. I mean, we was all mad at the two EMTs, especially us Puerto Ricans, but I didn’t want to kill nobody.”
“But how about Georgie? After you told him you didn’t want to be part of it anymore, did he let it go?”
“It wasn’t Georgie’s way to let things go. He was a stubborn man.”
“What happened when he found out Alta Conseco had been murdered?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know, Nestor? There goes my bullshit-o-meter again.”
“I mean I don’t know because Georgie took that week off.”
“Did he go away on vacation?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, he said he stayed home and did work around the apartment.”
“And when he came back to the job, how was he?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He was himself.”
“Was he still angry? Did he say anything, anything at all about Alta Conseco’s homicide?” I held up my hand. “Listen, Nestor, don’t even try to con me here. If you’re lying to me about this, I’ll know it, so think hard before you answer.”
Feliz bowed his head and mumbled something I only caught part of. I told him to repeat it loudly enough for me to hear.
“He said, ‘One down, one to go.’”
TWENTY-SEVEN
My cell phone rang as I approached Maya Watson’s condo. I let it go to voicemail. I had taken the thing with Delgado as far as I could take it until I got word from Brian Doyle. Even with Feliz’s confirmation of what Joey Fortuna had told me the previous evening, I still didn’t have enough to go to Fuqua. As good as Delgado looked on paper, the paper itself was as thin and fragile as a tissue. All I had was a dead hero fireman who had been angry enough to have hired someone to hurt Alta Conseco, but just because he’d tried to hire a hitter once didn’t mean he’d tried it again or that he had killed Alta himself. Delgado’s “One down, one to go,” comment to Nestor Feliz about Alta’s murder wasn’t exactly damning evidence. Most of the city probably thought karmic justice had been served when they read the headlines the morning after Alta’s murder.
Regardless of my good fortune—if that’s what it was—in stumbling across Jorge Delgado, I needed not to fall in love with him as a suspect. I had to block out his love song to me from the great beyond. A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing and if you love a suspect too much, it’s impossible to remain skeptical. I knew that better than most. I wanted to run Delgado’s name past Maya Watson. I guess I could have called and asked or called to warn her I was coming, but I wanted to see her face, to judge her reactions. And even if her reaction supported my belief in Delgado as the most likely suspect, there were still things about the case that bugged the shit out of me. I didn’t buy for a second that, on their salaries, Maya and Alta had gone to the High Line Bistro to grab lunch. And if they weren’t there for lunch, what the fuck were they doing there? What were they arguing about when they got there? And the ultimate question still remained: Why, in spite of their training and spotless performance evaluations, had they stood by and let Robert Tillman go untreated? What good would it do Carm, I wondered, if I could wrap up her sister’s murderer in a tidy package with a silken bow, but not explain why her sister had simply let a man die? Someone had those answers and I meant to get them.
The bruise in the atmosphere around Maya Watson’s condo development had healed a little more since my earlier visit. Kids were outside playing and none of her neighbors gave me the evil eye as I approached Maya’s door. This time, when she opened up to let me in, there was a hint of a smile on her face. Her hand wasn’t shaking and there was no cigarette burning between her fingers. The place still reeked of them, but her windows were open and the living room drapes were pulled back to let the sun stream in. The drapes danced to the tune of the ceiling fan and the shadows danced with them. But it was all part and parcel of a false promise, a lie with a brief shelf life that Maya was telling herself, an attempt to wish herself back to Kansas from the dark depths of her personal Oz. It was as if she were telling herself it was all going to be better now, but I could see it wasn’t. The lies we tell ourselves are always the worst lies of all.
Some of the sunlight from the living room managed to bend its way into the kitchen, but only enough to show me just how false hope could sometimes be. The kitchen was still an utter mess: a platoon of unwashed coffee cups stuffed with half-smoked cigarettes covered the entire table. Bulging plastic garbage bags were stacked in a pyramid at the side of her refrigerator and the sink was piled above countertop level with dirty dishes. Worst of all, that hint of a smile on Maya’s face had so thoroughly vanished that I questioned whether it had actually been there at all.
“Okay, this is bullshit!” I said, grabbing two of the garbage bags. “Where are you supposed to throw the trash out around here?”
Stunned, she said, “There’s cans around back.”
“Go take a shower and get dressed while I clean up in here.”
Maya opened her mouth to object. What was I doing there and who was I to order her around in her own house? Instead, she did as I asked. People have an amazing talent for self-preservation and she understood in her bones how desperately she needed to get out of her self-imposed prison. All the sunlight and fresh air in the world weren’t going to make that place anything but a prison cell until she walked outside and faced the world.
The trash was gone and most of the dishes were done by the time she reappeared. For the first time I saw how
tall Maya really was. The weight of the controversy and the grief over Alta had literally compressed her. With makeup covering some of the stress lines, I could see what a complete knockout she was. And even in a simple gray, v-necked tee, jeans, and low heels, her athleticism showed through. She moved with the grace and ease of a cat. The best part was that hint of a smile had returned.
“Go open the rest of the windows and turn on every fan you’ve got, while I finish the dishes. Then we’ll get out of here.”
She’d come this far with me and I guess she didn’t see the point in arguing with me now. She turned and left the kitchen.
“Come on, we’re going for a ride,” I said after I finished drying my puckered hands, putting her hand in the crook of my elbow. “How do you feel about hot dogs and french fries?”
She didn’t answer, not with words, but with a smile.
The hardest part for her was the stroll from her front door to my car. Maya dug her fingers into my arm as we walked. She kept her eyes straight ahead for fear she might crumble at a disapproving glance or worse, that she might run back to her solitary confinement. We didn’t talk much along the way and I was glad of that. We both were. The two of us knew, I suspect, that I wasn’t a boy scout and that although my heart did ache at her dilemma, I had motives beyond doing my good deed for the day. We had made a silent bargain: she would let me get her out of her dungeon and I could ask for something in return, but that was for later. Now she just wanted to enjoy her freedom.
Carmella had said it, Coney Island was where I was my most comfortable. It was the place where I most belonged in this world and the world most belonged to me and when we stepped out of my car and up onto the boardwalk, it seemed the right place to have brought Maya Watson. She took deep breaths of the salted air, her first free breaths in months. The breeze was light and cool off the water, cutting against the intensity and warmth of the sun. Sea gulls complained noisily at water’s edge, fighting over some scraps of discarded food or the last bits of rotting flesh sticking in the overturned shell of a horseshoe crab. Maya was leaning over the guardrail, her eyes peering so far into the distance she might have seen Galway Bay.
Hurt Machine Page 13
