Bad blood

by Linda Fairstein

  Joan had urged me to accept a setup with a guy whom she had befriended after one of her readings. I remembered it was for a Valentine’s Day museum benefit. “So you’re the writer, then?”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking a finger. “After him. Joan told me about him. She said she couldn’t move you even to have that dinner. I think she decided to try a little-well, foreign intrigue. You were investigating a murder at the time. Some terrible thing at Lincoln Center, and it seemed rather foolish to try to take you away from that. Did you get your man?”

  “I wish I could say she always does.”

  “Yes, the police solved it.”

  “So what kind of business are you in?” Nina wasn’t the least bit subtle in trying to get Luc’s pedigree.

  “I own a restaurant. In Mougins. I do some consulting in Paris and New York. That’s why I’m here so often.”

  “So, you wear the toque and the white jacket and sprinkle pepper in the pot and go ‘Bam!’?” Nina asked.

  Luc laughed. “No, chère madame, I’m not an entertainer. I own the restaurant. I’m the executive chef, as we say, but I don’t do the cooking.”

  “How many stars?” Nina asked.

  “Michelin? Three stars, naturally,” he said playfully, feigning surprise that she even needed to inquire.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I’m not going all that way to sample any one-star joint. Truffles?”

  “In season, of course. From Périgord, not those ridiculous American ones you try to cultivate in North Carolina.”

  “Your wine cellar?”

  “Superbe.”

  “It’s a very tough business. It’s so competitive,” Nina said. “How did you get into it?”

  “The easy way,” he said, pocketing his glasses, so that the blue-gray eyes appeared to be more vivid. “I was born into it. Did you two ever know Lutèce?”

  The landmark French restaurant that had closed its elegant doors a couple of years ago had been the center of the culinary world in New York for four decades.

  “Very well. Alex took me there the first time I came to the city on a business trip.”

  “André Rouget?” Luc asked.

  “America’s first superstar chef,” I said, thinking of the many special occasions in my life that had been feted in that wonderful town house on East Fiftieth Street.

  “He’s my father. So you see, I had rather a good head start.”

  “How divine it was,” Nina said. “I wish it hadn’t shut down.”

  “Well, perhaps we can do something about that,” Luc said. “One of the things I’ve been exploring on these trips is the possibility of re-creating the restaurant.”

  The music had started and the bridal couple made their way to the adjacent tent, which had been set up for the small band. When others joined in on the second number, Luc asked Nina to dance. She tried to resist and turn him over to me.

  “When I hear a Smokey Robinson song,” he said, sounding ever so French as he pronounced my favorite Motown name, “then I understand I’m to come back for Alexandra.”

  The next few hours were a seductive mix of dancing and dining, talking while trying to keep myself grounded as my heart fluttered for the first time since my ill-fated romance with Jake Tyler.

  By the end of the evening, after Joan had tossed her bouquet and driven off with her groom, only a dozen of us were left on my deck.

  “Would you like to take a walk?” Luc asked.

  I stepped out of my heels and rested my empty glass on the ground, leading him to the footpath beyond my caretaker’s cottage. “Let’s go down to the water.”

  I hadn’t felt this kind of electricity in a long time, but I knew I had to get off this one spot, this piece of earth that still called up Adam’s memory whenever I stood on it. I wanted to kiss Luc, I wanted to be held by him and caressed, and yet I wanted to pace this newfound excitement just as badly.

  Nina saw us start to walk away and followed me to the top of the steps. “See you in the morning, mes amis,” she called out to us. “She’s really gotten rusty, Luc. Her French-I mean her French is rusty. Make her work on it.”

  He picked up my hand as we walked down the grassy slope, neither saying a word until we reached the edge of the pond. The sand felt good underfoot, and I let go of Luc to wade into the shallow water, refreshed and a bit sobered by the cold June current that lapped over my feet.

  I turned around and Luc took my face in his hands. Moonlight bounced off the surface of the pond, and for three or four minutes we just drank each other in while he held on to me and stroked the outline of my features. Then he started to brush at the tendrils of hair, wisps that had broken loose from my ponytail as we’d danced, that had curled around my forehead and the nape of my neck.

  Gently but firmly, he put his lips down against my mine, kissing me over and over until I opened my mouth and kissed him in return. For more than an hour, we walked the shoreline and climbed slowly back up to the yard, stopping to taste each other from time to time, trying to slow ourselves down.

  The lights were out in the guest bedrooms and my other friends had departed. I started to lead Luc back out to the deck. The night was too beautiful to waste on sleep.

  Instead, he opened the screen door into the living room. “I know you won’t turn into a pumpkin, but I have very strict orders from Joan to send you off to sleep before it gets to be too late. She said you’re in the middle of a big trial and you must absolutely be tucked in by-”

  Luc looked at his watch and uttered a completely Gallic “Ooof. You see? I lost all sense of time.”

  “But we can sit up for a little longer.”

  He put a finger up to my lips to quiet me. “I’ve got to pay attention to the rules or maybe I won’t be invited back. Your room is here?”

  “Yes,” I said, walking through the kitchen and study. Luc followed behind me and took my arm as I opened the bedroom door to go inside.

  He pressed me against the wall and kissed me again-harder this time-on my mouth. Then he nibbled at the top of my ear, smiling as he pushed me over the threshold and backed away. “Bonne nuit, ma princesse. Bonne nuit.”

  18

  “Sorry to bring you back early,” Mike said, closing the car door outside the shuttle terminal at noon on Sunday. “I think I need you for this interview. Festivities over?”

  “Mostly.” I had been sitting on the deck of the Chilmark Store with Luc, drinking coffee, eating a blueberry muffin, and reading the Sunday Times when Mike had called. Switching my flight from evening to midday was simply a reality check. Holding people’s lives in our hands as we did with every serious case we handled, I never questioned the urgency of an interruption from Mike or Mercer. Today-leaving the Vineyard, and Luc-I felt as if I’d been wrenched out of paradise.

  “Tell me about the call,” I said. I needed to focus on Mike’s new information, but last night’s hours with Luc had been one of those encounters that struck like a thunderbolt. “You think she’s for real?”

  “The first one came in this morning. Peterson said she sounded legit.”

  “Caller ID?”

  “Yeah. Just a pay phone. But it’s right around the corner from the funeral home in the Bronx where Duke Quillian’s being waked, so that fits.”

  “She asked for you specifically?”

  “‘Detective Chapman. The man who locked up Brendan Quillian.’ That’s how she put it.”

  “Did she give a name?” I knew I was missing a chance to let Luc’s magic work itself on me back in Chilmark, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a moment that would ever present itself to me again.

  “Nope. Said she wouldn’t talk to anyone but me. Peterson told her to phone back in an hour, then called and told me to get myself back to the squad,” Mike said. “Something wrong? You look distracted.”

  “Just tired. Has he got anyone sitting on the phone booth?”

  “Iggy grabbed somebody to go with her.” Ignacia Bliss was one of a handful of w
omen to have penetrated the ranks of Manhattan’s elite homicide squad. She had the skill and intelligence necessary for the job, but was usually short on charm and humor. Still tacked to the windowsill behind her desk was the sign with which Mike had reluctantly welcomed her to the mostly macho unit-IGNORANCE IS BLISS.

  “Were you there when she called back?”

  “Yeah. But it was a pretty short conversation. She asked me a few questions and for whatever reason seemed satisfied that I was the right guy. Told me she has information about Duke Quillian’s death. Said she knows the explosion wasn’t an accident.”

  “Wouldn’t give her name?”

  “Nope. And she refuses to come into the office to talk. Not mine, not yours. Won’t give it to the bomb squad or the task force. She wants me.”

  “Did Iggy eyeball her?”

  Mike shook his head. “She made the second call from a different phone, different neighborhood. Iggy cruised around the funeral parlor for a while, but she says that won’t tell us anything. Every sandhog and his wife, every parishioner from Duke’s church-the place is expected to be a mob scene by three o’clock.”

  “So what kind of deal did you make with your lady?”

  “The wake starts at three. She wants to meet me at two, a few subway stops away, in a bar-El Borricua-in Soundview.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Between the Bronx River and the parkway. No view of the Sound at all, in case you’re looking for one, and a completely Hispanic neighborhood. I think we’re going someplace that none of her peeps will recognize her.”

  Mike had told me to hide my blond hair under a baseball cap and wear sweats or something that would call no attention to myself. Iggy would be our backup outside the bar.

  We drove from the airport in Queens, over the Triborough Bridge, to the Bronx. Mike knew the territory and steered us to the neighborhood, which seemed to be a clumsy assortment of tenements wedged between redbrick housing projects. We found the bar and, a block beyond, saw Iggy waiting for us in her car.

  Mike pulled up alongside. “You scope it out yet?”

  “Yeah. I been in. Sleepy little place. I’m not sure you’d want to eat anything there, but there’s enough rum behind the bar to float a navy.”

  “Anybody home?”

  “A bunch of old guys wearing polyester guayaberas and watching soccer on the tube. A few roosters in the back and I’d think I was in Humacao,” Iggy said, referring to the small town in Puerto Rico where she’d been raised. “There are four booths along the wall. That last one is where you want to be.”

  “Thanks. We got some time to kill. I’ll take Coop for something to eat.”

  “Pelham Parkway. You could get some good bacalaitos. We’ll sit on the place,” Iggy said, pushing herself up off the car seat to look at me. “You taking her in with you?”

  “Yeah. That’s the plan.”

  “Well, I better set myself up at the bar with the boys,” the petite detective with straight black hair and dark brown skin said to Mike. “If you think you’ve camouflaged that white-bread prosecutor with a Yankees hat and workout clothes, you’re thicker than I thought. I’ll keep the old geezers occupied inside. Give me ten for a couple of Coronas.”

  Mike passed her a bill and we drove off for a late lunch.

  This kind of thing-a mysterious caller offering useful information-had happened to us scores of times before. Once, the night before my closing argument, a woman who lived in a penthouse apartment on Central Park West had called to tell me she had seen the real killer while walking her dog just minutes before the murder inside the Rambles had occurred. If we ignored the information, we might be missing an essential clue, a possible witness, or a piece of exculpatory evidence. The dog walker had been a whack job and a waste of time, but one of us had to follow up on every lead and evaluate its usefulness.

  We discussed that old case while we ate at the counter of the diner. Mike told me about Brendan Quillian’s short reunion with his family-quiet and uneventful-at the funeral parlor yesterday afternoon. Mike and the other detective had waited at the door of the small chapel in which Duke’s body was laid out, and for an hour Brendan had been allowed to visit with his relatives. I described Joan’s wedding and extended regards from the friends who had asked after Mike. Neither of us talked about anything more personal that had happened over the weekend, which had been the nature of most of our conversations since Val’s death.

  “Let’s go get comfy at El Borricua,” he said, getting off the stool to pay the check.

  We doubled back to the narrow street and walked into the dingy restaurant. The men at the bar all turned to look as we slowly made our way to the back of the room. Mike was fooling himself if he thought no one made him as an NYPD detective.

  Iggy, whose tight black jeans and slinky white shirt had caught the eye of the regulars, was standing among them and drinking. As we passed by, she said something in Spanish about policía and waved us off as she encouraged them to ignore us. Mike wasn’t the one trying to hide his identity. It was the caller who preferred this spot to her home or a police station.

  Mike sat with his back against the wall, facing the door. We each ordered a beer to make the proprietor happy, and I sipped the soda chaser as we waited.

  When the woman came in, she must have noticed Mike immediately in the darkened room. I saw him sit up straight as the footsteps approached our booth.

  His mouth fell open as she revealed herself to us at the table, untying the black scarf that she had wrapped around her head.

  “I’m Trish. Patricia Quillian. Brendan’s my brother-Duke was, too.”

  Mike was on his feet. “I’m Mike Chapman. I saw you there yesterday. I-uh, I’m sorry about Duke.”

  “It’s no accident at all, Mr. Chapman. He was murdered in that tunnel, that’s the truth. I can tell you who did it and I can tell you why it happened. But you’ve got to help me, Mr. Chapman. They’d kill me for talking to you.”

  19

  “This is Alexandra Cooper, Ms. Quillian. She’s the assistant DA on-”

  “I know very well who she is.” Trish’s speech was sharp and clipped, and if she could have spit at me, I think she would have. “She’ll have to leave.”

  The woman was younger than I but had hard features, pale skin lined prematurely with creases, and eyelids reddened from crying. She was tall and gaunt-unlike her brothers-and her shoulders slumped, perhaps from the weight of the week’s events.

  “Alex is working this investigation with me. There’s nothing you can tell me that I won’t be telling her.”

  “She’s railroaded Brendan, that’s what I know. I won’t have her here.”

  “We’re a team, Trish. You think you’ve got something to help us on Duke’s case, give me another call,” Mike said.

  “She’s not one of us. She won’t understand me.” I assumed Trish was referring to the Irish Catholic bond she expected to make with Mike.

  “C’mon, Coop. Let’s move on.”

  I was halfway out of the booth as Trish Quillian stopped chewing on her lip and told me to sit down. Mike had heard the desperation in her voice and knew that as much as she must have hated both of us, she needed something only Mike could do for her.

  “Will you sit?” he asked.

  She looked at the door and then down at me. I slid over to the wall and she sat beside me, clutching the black cloth coat that seemed way too heavy for the warm afternoon.

  “Are you okay here? We can go somewhere else.”

  “Back when I was a kid, this was McGinty’s Pub. Had a cousin who worked here till the whole neighborhood turned over. No one knows me here anymore.”

  “Who are you afraid of, Trish? We ought to know that before we get started.”

  The question provoked the hint of a smile. “I’d have to start with my own blood. I’ve got two brothers left now-that’s besides Brendan, even though he doesn’t really count anymore. The both of them would kill me just for talking to you.�
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  I wondered why Brendan didn’t count.

  “Any others?” Mike asked.

  “I take it you know something about sandhogs? Not a one of them wants you people snooping around their business. They’ll be promising me Lord knows what to just be still and let them find out what happened in the hole, what got Duke killed, themselves. Screw the cops.”

  “Is that because you think whoever murdered Duke is also a sandhog?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “And the young men from Tobago?” I asked. “They were part of the murder plan?”

  “I don’t know what they were, Ms. Cooper. I’m not here to talk about them. Maybe they just got in the way.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Brendan’s case?”

  She hesitated when the bar owner came back to ask if she wanted a drink. “Also a beer, lady?”

  “No. I’ll take a shot of whiskey. Straight.” Trish then answered me without turning her head to me, “I can’t prove that yet, but I’ll bet that it does.”

  “So, why don’t you tell us your theory? Tell us who did it and why,” Mike said, waiting as the shot glass was placed in front of her and letting her take a drink.

  I could tell from his tone that Mike was skeptical of Trish’s usefulness. She seemed to be the bitter voice of the hapless Quillians, and he wouldn’t want to head off on a wild-goose chase just to assuage her while his task-force colleagues were following solid leads.

  She looked up at Mike from the small glass she was rubbing between her fingers. “Do you know the name Hassett?”

  We exchanged glances. I let Mike answer. “I think there was a Hassett-Bobby Hassett-working at the tunnel site on Thursday.”

  He was one of the workers who had refused George Golden’s request to take us down in the shaft. But so had a dozen others.

  Her eyes widened. “Doing what? Not getting in the way of my brother’s investigation, was he?”

  “No, no, no. What’s he to you?” Mike asked.

  “There’s no polite way to say it, Mr. Chapman. He’s scum. The Hassett boys-that’s just what they are.”