“Thank you, sweetheart. You’re doing a fine job of patching things up.”
Margo had a meeting at ten o’clock. She made herself pretty, then climbed into a thick winter coat and a mighty fur hat. I told her, “You look good enough to tackle.”
“You’ll be careful,” she said, not even pretending to make a question of it. “I don’t do hospital visits twice in one week.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Lies,” she said, grabbing her keys. “All lies.”
After Margo left, I called my answering service. Among a dozen dumpable calls were ones from Kelly Cole (“I know a suffocated story when I hear one. I want to know what was going on. Call me.”) and Alan Ross. I dug Kelly’s number out of my wallet and tried it, but I hung up when I was delivered into Ms. Cole’s voice mail. I had better luck with Alan Ross.
“I read about your adventure in the paper,” the executive said after his secretary put me through. “How are you holding up?”
I gave him a brief status report. “The doctors are giving me another forty years minimum, so long as I play my cards right.”
Ross said that he would like to meet with me. “I have a business proposition to discuss.”
“When would you like to meet?”
“Today, if that’s possible. How does noon sound?”
Noon sounded fine. He gave me the midtown address of his office, and we hung up. I showered, careful to keep my various sets of stitches dry. Not exactly your fun-loving singing-in-the-rain kind of shower. On the checklist I’d gotten of possible concussion symptoms, I was feeling low-grade most of them. Especially the headache. Despite the siren song of the couch, I pulled on a thick Irish sweater, double-wrapped a scarf under my chin, shrugged into my bomber jacket and gingerly tugged a watch cap over my battered skull. A bastard wind hit me full force in the face as I exited Margo’s building. Across the street, Robin Burrell’s Christmas tree was gone from the bay window. The final witness shunted off.
MEGAN LAMB CAME OUT to the front desk to meet me. She looked as if she’d gone a few rounds in the ring with a determined kangaroo. If there weren’t exactly bags under her eyes, it was close. She saw me noticing. “Crappy night.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I don’t sleep much. But hey, you’re not looking so bad, considering. Word was you were half dead.”
“Half alive. It’s all a matter of viewpoint.”
“I understand you took a knife.”
I gave my kidney a light pat. “Came in through the side door. I was stupid, he was lucky. Won’t happen again. Trust me.”
I followed her down a corridor to a roomful of desks. Megan’s was in a corner. She dropped into the chair behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. Her phone rang and she took the call. The desk was a mess of papers and folders. The way they were spread clear across the large desk, it looked as if Megan had slept here overnight. There was a framed photograph of an attractive brunette posing next to a table piled high with summer produce. I angled it for a better look. I recognized the spot. The farmer’s market at Union Square. I also recognized the woman.
Megan ended her call. She followed my gaze. “That’s Helen.”
“I know.”
She picked up the photo and looked at it. “Her acupuncturist used to prescribe a visit to the farmer’s market every weekend. He had a whole energy theory going. The harvest. Locally grown foods. He said that just walking through the market was therapeutic. I could never quite catch it all. Kidney energy. I kept hearing about Helen’s kidney energy, whatever the hell that was.” She set the picture back down. “She swore by him. If he’d wanted to put his damn needles in her eyes, she’d have let him. He had her on this thing for a while where she stuck these fuses to the bottom of her feet and then I lit them for her. Some kind of heat acupuncture. Don’t tell me it sounds crazy, I already know. But guess what? Helen was the healthiest person you’d ever want to know, so what can I say? Every Saturday, religiously, off to Union Square to talk with her tomatoes.”
She picked up a pen and tapped it thoughtfully against the picture frame, then tossed the pen on the desk. “You make sense of it. Helen taught sixth-graders how to read and write while I run around for a living with a gun on my hip. But which one of us is still here to tell the story? When I think of how that woman used to worry herself sick over me. That’s a real laugh, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a laugh. It’s normal,” I said. “Margo would be quite happy if I sold paper clips for a living.”
“Well, look at you, fished out of the East River. She might be right. I don’t know, sometimes I think people who do what we do for a living don’t have any business getting ourselves involved with civilians. Helen was all about cute and stupid things the kids did at school that day, while I’m sitting there sucking in exit wounds and bloated floaters. ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, fine, you know, just another romp through mankind’s butcheries.’”
“My old man used to describe his job as toxic.”
“Your old man was right. That’s exactly how I feel sometimes-like I’m slowly being poisoned. And it’s not only the victims but the nut monkeys out there, the ones who are doing this shit. You get to thinking the human race in general is toxic. You’ve got your crazy butchers, you’ve got your perfectly normal-seeming butchers. Kids shooting other kids. Parents killing their own kids, for Christ’s sake. Helen wanted us to adopt a baby. She loved the idea of raising a child. Jesus. In this world? I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”
“Hell of a responsibility.”
“Forget it. I used to think how unfair it’d be to Helen, we adopt a kid then I get killed on the job and leave her to raise the kid on her own. Look what happened instead.” She laughed. It wasn’t a particularly joyful laugh. “If some poor kid had to count on me these days, God help her. Or him. They’d go back to the agency and demand a new placement.”
“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.”
Megan looked at me a moment without speaking. “That’s exactly what my shrink says. I’ll tell you what I tell her: sure, I’m hard on myself, but there’s no way in hell I’m too hard on myself. I deserve all the crap I throw at myself.”
“I’ll bet your shrink doesn’t agree with that.”
“That’s an easy bet to win. Anyway.” She flipped open one of the folders on her desk. It contained the police sketch of my attacker.
“That’s not him,” I said. “I don’t know where you got it, but it’s no good.”
“Michelle Poole worked with our sketcher on this.”
“It’s no good.”
“I had a feeling. The girl didn’t seem very sure of herself.” Megan picked up the sketch and studied it.
“Thurman Munson,” I said.
“Thurman what?”
“Former Yankees catcher.”
“That’s who threw you into the river?”
“That’s who the sketch looks like. But like I said, the sketch is no good. The guy this sketch doesn’t look like was stalking Michelle Poole. I guess she told you that. I saw him that day. At the Quaker meeting.”
“Could be he was first stalking Robin.”
“I was hoping to get a chance to ask him that question, but he decided to show me how fast he could run.”
“I guess he didn’t run fast enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“You caught up to him.”
“Right. Lucky me.”
“So, are you up to a session with a sketcher?” She picked up the phone and put in a call. She covered the mouthpiece. “Twenty minutes. Can you wait?”
“I’m in no hurry.”
She told the person on the phone that twenty minutes was fine, then she hung up. I asked her for some of that fine NYPD coffee, and she fetched me a cup. I discarded a couple of easy jabs about the burnt mud. Megan told me that she had spoken with Edward Anger from the Quaker meeting and that he was in the clear. Out-of-town al
ibi for the evening Robin was murdered. She also told me that Allison Jennings had given Gallo the same two names I’d gotten her to cough up. They’d both cleared as well.
“I wasn’t real keen on those two anyway,” I said. “Though it wouldn’t have been the first time that a long shot came in. But Anger. I guess I was holding out some hope for him. Sometimes the excessively gentle ones-well, you know.”
“A name like that was too good. But the alibi’s fine. Anger’s out.”
“So what do you think, Megan? I mean about Riddick and Robin. Are they copycat jobs, or is it possible that Fox was innocent all along?”
She was shaking her head before I’d even finished the question. “It’s him. The case is too strong. We got the fibers from Nikki’s plaid skirt off of Fox’s scissors. That was huge.”
“You never recovered the skirt itself.”
“Doesn’t matter. We had the receipt. We got the positive ID from the clerk at Liana who sold it to her. Nikki’s neighbor saw her leaving the building wearing it, a green-and-black plaid skirt. Fragments of the same skirt end up in Fox’s bedside scissors? Plus the blood on the scissors?”
“But the defense leaked the story that it was all just sex play. A game of dress-up. They said Nikki got nicked by the scissors when Fox was hacking her out of the skirt.”
“Of course they leaked the story. We got the DNA match on blood that was on the scissors as well as the semen the M.E. recovered from Nikki’s body. No question she had sex with Fox just before she was killed. Or possibly it was even while they were having sex. A man who likes to pretend he’s in bed with a schoolgirl and he’s attacking her with a pair of scissors? I wouldn’t put anything past him. If the defense was so confident about their version of things, they could have put Fox on the stand and had him tell the tale. Uh-uh. He’s our man, Fritz. And ladle in the case for Cynthia Blair. Fox was desperate to keep a lid on that affair. And I mean desperate. When she told him she was going ahead with the pregnancy, that was pretty much her death warrant. You heard the testimony. Fox’s attitude toward fathering children was lethal.”
The sketch artist showed up, and we got to work. The good ones employ a relaxing technique of mild hypnosis. This was a good one. We moved into Joe Gallo’s office so we could have some privacy. Megan took the sketcher out into the corridor, where she briefed him on what we were looking for. The two came back in, and Megan pulled the blinds. I was instructed to close my eyes and think about the ocean. It took me a moment to clear the beach and to locate the big open expanse the sketcher was looking for, but I eventually got it. The sketcher moved me into a trancelike place. He had a voice like one of those classical DJs. I expected him to introduce Rachmaninoff any minute. I heard my disembodied voice talking with him, and I heard myself describing the man who had thrown me into the East River. An image of his face floated in my head crystal-clear, and I calmly ran down his features. When the blinds were opened and I opened my eyes, I was handed a sketch that looked 70 percent like Ratface. I worked with the sketcher until we got to about 85 percent, then I had to beg off. My head was really doing a number. I didn’t want pieces of my skull breaking off and littering Joe Gallo’s desk. The sketcher told me I was a good subject and took off. Megan told me to drink a cup of water-it had appeared miraculously on her desk-and she left the room and came back a minute later with a large brown envelope. Several copies of the sketch were in the envelope.
“I’m not giving these to you.”
“No, ma’am.”
She handed me the envelope. “You’re not to distribute these.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I don’t generally find ‘ma’am’ to my liking.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Megan walked me to the front door and followed me outside. Megan wasn’t dressed for outside, and she hugged herself tightly. She looked like a woman in a straitjacket.
“That conversation we had. About the job. The part about it being toxic.”
“What about it?”
“I’d like that not to go anywhere.”
“I wasn’t planning on hopping on the phone.”
“You know what I mean. I’ve been back to work since the fall, but I’ve still got a lot of eyes on me. There are some people who think I lost it with Albert Stenborg, that I got spooked and that I’m still spooked.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with admitting you’re spooked. It’s human.”
“Being spooked and admitting you’re spooked are two different things.”
“You don’t seem to have a problem admitting it to me.”
“You’re not a cop. I don’t work with you. Besides, I don’t know. I remember that time you pretended to run into me at Mumbles.”
“That was the name of it. I’d forgotten.”
“What the hell was a guy like you doing in a place like that?”
“A guy like me what?”
“A guy.”
“I do recall I seemed to be in the minority.”
“The point is, it was a nice gesture.”
“That’s not how you reacted at the time. As I recall, you told me to mind my own goddamn business.”
“So original.”
I shrugged. “I’d heard you weren’t treating yourself so good. It’s not unexpected, given all you were in the middle of. I’ve had some pretty sour points in my time. Sometimes you welcome a person nosing in, and sometimes you tell them to mind their own goddamn business.”
Megan released her grip on herself and blew into her hands. Her lips were going blue. “Let me ask you something. Something that’s none of my own goddamn business.”
“Shoot.”
“You’ve killed someone,” she said. “That’s not a question. I happen to know it.”
“Okay.”
“You can tell me to shut up if you want.”
“Go ahead.”
“I hate this word, it’s gotten so self-helpy, but did you get closure on it?”
“It?”
She could read my tone of voice. “Jesus. You’ve killed more than one person? I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“That’s okay. All part of the résumé. As for your question, I can’t answer it. Or if I can, I think the answer is no. Closure isn’t a concept that makes sense to me. Not in this context. That kind of closure is too cold for my tastes. Plus, I don’t really buy it. I think it’s denial, to use another self-helpy word.”
“Then you understand what I’m talking about.” She indicated the precinct house behind us. “There’s no one in there I can talk to about any of this. Joe, I guess. But only so much. Pope is too green. I don’t want to spook him. But what you just said, that’s the problem. There’s this idea that I’m supposed to shake off what I did. But what I did was I failed to save my girlfriend and I failed to save my partner. Both of them went down on my account. That’s not something a person just shakes off. And believe me, killing Stenborg didn’t do it for me. Not by a long shot. The time to kill him was before he did his damage. I could unload pistols into that bastard all day long and it wouldn’t make any difference. That’s what I’m carrying around. It’s this feeling that I owe Helen. I owe Chris Madden, too, but if I’m brutally honest, that’s not where the trouble is. It’s Helen. I feel like I still owe her. And the thing is, I owe her what I can’t give her.”
“Thinking like that is only going to drive you nuts.”
“You rest my case.”
“You said you’re not getting much sleep. Is that it?”
“Let’s just say I find it’s a lot easier the less I close my eyes.”
I headed for the subway. The station was like a deep freeze. People stood on the platform stomping their feet and beating their arms up and down. Deep freeze or a nuthouse. The 1 train came in, rocking slightly as it hurtled forward. I caught a glimpse of a rat scurrying to get out of its path. I’d moved closer to the edge of the platform than I’d realized; I could practically smell the train. The sight of the scurrying rat bro
ught to mind a memory I wasn’t particularly fond of.
Yeah. I knew what she meant.
29
ALAN ROSS CAME OUT from behind his desk and clamped a solid two-hander on me. “It’s good of you to come, Mr. Malone. What can Linda get you? Coffee? Sparkling water? Tea?”
The office was just shy of an airplane hangar, a festival of teak and glass and polished metal. The walls were choked with photographs of Ross in the company of celebrities. Through the large window behind his desk, sunlight danced off the stainless-steel spire of the Chrysler Building. Visible in the distance, beyond the steel and concrete, was a thin ribbon of my old friend the East River.
I let Linda off the hook. “I’m fine,” I said. The secretary flashed an unnecessarily large smile. I was made a midget by the large plushy leather chair Ross directed me into as he returned to the ergonomic throne behind the desk.
I asked, “How many people say ‘nice place’ when they come in here the first time?”
Ross laughed, giving the huge room an approving glance. “Nearly all. It’s an absurd amount of space for just one person, no question. But you have to remember, I deal with some pretty colossal egos. You’d be surprised how quickly this room fills up.”
It was a canned response, but for that, not so bad a one. Ross poured himself a glass of water from a moist pewter pitcher on his desk, then set the glass down without taking a sip. He fixed me with a direct gaze. “Marshall Fox is an innocent man.”
I thought he was going to elaborate, but he didn’t. I squirmed in the leather valley, working my way forward. “Okay. Fox is an innocent man.”
He frowned. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“I didn’t try to sound convinced. I have no idea if he’s innocent or not.”
“I’m telling you, he is. Marshall is many things, and unfortunately, not a few of them are far from attractive. But being a vainglorious egotist is not the same as being a murderer.”
“I’m sure the dictionary would back you up on that. But what does any of this have to do with me?”
Ross paused before answering. On the wall just off his right shoulder, Bette Midler eyed me mischievously as she landed a big wet kiss on Alan Ross’s cheek.
Cold Day in Hell Page 21
