by Gerry Boyle
“What sort of car?”
“A black car. That’s all I saw. By the time I got out there, it was going down the street.”
“And Lester didn’t say anything else?”
She pulled the legs of her shorts down. There was a pale surgical scar on her knee.
“He’s saying, ‘Call the cops.’ Then he says, ‘Call the mayor.’”
I looked at her.
“I know. The mayor. Then Lester says—his legs are kicking and they got him around the neck and they’re jamming his arm—and he says, ‘He was the DA. Call Fiore.’”
“He was, wasn’t he?”
“Back then?”
“Yeah. When Lester got arrested,” I said.
“So? We never saw him. In court it was some skinny little guy.”
“Conroy?”
“Maybe. That sounds right. We thought he was going to stick him good, the woman being hurt and all, but it turned out they didn’t. I think they musta realized Lester didn’t mean it.”
“I’m sure he didn’t. And Lester got bailed. Where’d he get the money?”
Lynnette Stephens shrugged.
“I don’t know. I could have taken two thousand out of the credit union, but I didn’t.”
“What’d Lester say?”
“He said it was a friend of his.”
I looked at her.
“Hey, Lester, he was no Boy Scout. Not my fault. I didn’t get him until he was thirteen, and by that time, he is what he is. But I gave him a place to live, my sister in jail and on drugs when she was out. Couldn’t take care of a cat, never mind a kid. And I tried to get him to go to school. He went sometimes, too. Smart, when he wanted to be.”
“Where’d he go after he bailed?”
“Detroit.”
“You knew he jumped?”
“Hey, I figured they’d go get him. He was at my brother’s.”
“And then he came back?”
“Yeah, he came back. I said, ‘Lester, they’re surely gonna find you now. Why don’t you just go down to the police station and march up and down?’ He says, ‘Lynnie, don’t worry about it. That business is all taken care of.’”
I looked back. The car was moving closer.
“And nothing happened? He didn’t get picked up?”
“Not for almost a year. Until this Puerto Rican kid comes. I figured it out later. He comes up to the booth, talks right through the speaker. Says, ‘Hey, Lynette.’ Like he knows me. ‘Hey, Lynette, Lester home today?’
“I look at him. He looks like somebody Lester would hang with. Doesn’t look like a cop.”
“He probably wasn’t,” I said. “He probably got a hundred bucks to go up and ask you that question.”
“From who?”
“From a private investigator. What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘He was when I left. He was sleeping.’ And the kid smiles, and says thank you and walks away.”
“And nothing happens?”
“Not for two weeks. Then Lester’s dragged out of bed and gone.”
“And you’ve tried looking for him?”
“Hey, I’m not ignorant. I called the courts. I called the DA’s office. I called the cops, every precinct in Brooklyn, everything in Manhattan. One of the Transit cops, she checked for me, too. She said there’s no record of Lester being arrested for anything.”
She ran her hands back and forth over her knees.
“So I don’t know if you can find him, but maybe if the newspaper was asking and not me, then maybe they’ll find that he was . . .”
The words trailed off.
“This isn’t Guatemala or Brazil or someplace, you know what I’m saying?” Lynette Stephens said, new anger in her voice. “This is New York. There’s bad cops, sure. There’s Louima. There’s Amadou. Shot forty-one times ’cause he reached for his wallet. But still, police don’t just take you out and shoot you.”
I looked in the mirror, saw the Taurus, closer now.
“Have you considered,” I said, “that maybe they weren’t police at all?”
And I slammed the Rover in gear, stomped the accelerator to the floor.
22
“Holy Jesus,” Stephens said.
She fell against me as I turned the corner. Fell back and then against me as I turned again. I circled, sped through the project. Kids gawked. The men stared as the Rover roared by, the Taurus in pursuit.
I took a right, floored it, and flashed down side streets, wide-eyed faces slipping past. The Taurus still in the mirror, I slammed on the brakes, slid the Rover to the right between parked cars, and jumped the curb. I clung to the wheel as we pointed straight up and the tires clawed up an embankment and we jumped another curb. The Rover bounced, scattering pigeons.
“Oh, my God,” Stephens said, covering her eyes. I threaded down walkways between the buildings, drove over a hedge. Crashed through a low metal fence. A section of it sailed into the air, clanged to the ground.
I heard shouts from somewhere, but the Taurus wasn’t in sight.
I jumped the Rover back onto the street on the far side of the project. Threaded my way through the tenemented streets, one eye on the mirror. Nothing showed, and I slipped under the expressway, keeping it in sight as I drove north, running red lights, threading between cars and trucks. When I hit a main drag, I looked in the mirror again, then pulled over.
The motor murmured. The air conditioning was cool.
Lynette Stephens smoothed her shirt. Gave her knees another rub.
“What the hell kind of reporter are you?” she said.
“It’s called a stringer,” I said.
She looked at me skeptically.
“I’ll call for a car.”
“You need money?”
“No. I got money.”
She paused. Didn’t get out.
“So,” she said. “They weren’t cops who took Lester, were they?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So Lester’s probably dead.”
I didn’t reply, but she already knew the answer.
“You know why?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“You gonna try to find out?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re not writing a story, are you?”
“Probably not. But someone else might. With what I find out.”
“What do you do, the research part?”
“Something like that.”
“Were you in on killing the mayor?”
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”
“But this has to do with that, doesn’t it? I mean, you don’t care about Lester John. Not for his sake.”
I looked at her, a good-seeming woman with a mugger in the family. I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “Not for his sake.”
At the curb at Amsterdam and 83rd, I called Donatelli’s pager. After a minute or two, the car phone rang. It was him. He said we had to talk, face-to-face. I said there was a coffee place on the corner and I’d wait inside. He said he’d be there in fifteen minutes.
In eleven, he rolled up in a dirty blue Caprice, Ramirez in the passenger seat. From my seat in the window, I could see her scowl.
“Hey,” I said, as they came in the door. They walked over. Donatelli said, “Hey yourself.” Ramirez looked at me sternly, like I’d left the yard without permission.
“You have kids?” I asked her.
She flinched.
“Why?”
“Just wondered,” I said.
“I haven’t seen my kids in three days,” Donatelli said quickly. “Missed two farm league games and one T-ball. This sucks.”
“Yup,” I said.
“But it would suck a little bit less if I could just see your mug once in a while.”
“Feast your eyes,” I said.
“I am. DA wants to feast his eyes, too. Go over some things from your initial interview. Times and stuff.”
“Should have brought him,” I said
, sipping a tea. “How’d the arraignment go?”
“You were there,” Ramirez said. “What was that about?”
“Just wanted to get a look at him. See if we were talking about the same Butch Casey.”
“No, I mean, what he said to you.”
“I told you about that.”
“The conspiracy stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“If he’s trying to say somebody else stuck Fiore, he’s kidding himself,” Ramirez said.
“Oh?”
“Prints in the stall,” she said.
“Maybe he used it first.”
“And then held the door for the mayor? ‘Here, use this one. I warmed up the seat for you. By the way, I’ve always hated your guts.’”
“Reasonable doubt,” I said. “How many stalls are there? Four? Three? That means he had a thirty percent chance of getting the same one.”
“Yeah, right,” Ramirez said.
The woman came out from behind the counter and walked over with my order, a scone. She was meek, with purplish hair and black shoes as big as satchels. She eyed the detectives’ guns nervously, as though they might go off at any moment.
“Would you—”
“No, thanks,” Donatelli said.
The woman looked toward Ramirez, who gave her the stare. The woman left.
“Sit,” I said.
Donatelli did. Ramirez stood over us like a cafeteria monitor.
“What about Lester John?” I said.
“Fugitive from justice,” Donatelli said. “Wanted for aggravated assault, back in 1988.”
“He was picked up a couple of weeks ago.”
“Not by us.”
“By somebody. Feds?”
“No record of it. There’d be a record,” Donatelli said. “Maybe he crossed the wrong dirtbags.”
“Aunt says they were detectives and they were all white. In Red Hook this kind of detail stands out.”
“Maybe they were Russians. Light-skinned Colombians.”
“No, she meant white-bread white. Like you.”
“Maybe she’s feeding you a line of crap,” Ramirez said. “People like blaming the cops for everything.”
“No record of it,” Donatelli said.
“Well, he’s gone.”
“He broke some poor lady’s skull open,” Ramirez said. “What goes around, comes around.”
I sipped. Donatelli stretched his legs out.
“What do you do to relax?” I asked Ramirez.
“What’s it to you?” she said.
“I can picture you hunting sharks or something.”
“She target-shoots,” Donatelli said. “Has a rumpus room full of trophies. Tell him about it, Rambo.”
“Rambo?” I said.
“Can we get back to business?” Ramirez said.
I put my tea on the table.
“Sure,” I said. “Victim’s husband thinks he was arrested, too.”
“Who told him that?” Donatelli said.
“I don’t know. He’d been writing to Fiore about it.”
“So some college-intern politician’s kid gets to mail back the form letters,” he said. “Who the hell knows what was said?”
“Or misunderstood,” Ramirez said.
I took a bite of half the scone, and held up the plate to Ramirez to offer the other half. She shook her head. Donatelli took the scone, looked at it once, and chomped off half of it.
“How closely do you work with the DA’s investigators?” I said. “Like that guy who sat in when you talked to me.”
“Not very,” Donatelli said, chewing. “They got their own agenda. But I asked them about finding you first. They said it was just a mix-up. Somebody was supposed to call but they went off and didn’t, and so we weren’t notified. Happens.”
“You talk to them in the last hour?”
He shook his head.
“Tell anyone there you were going to meet me here?”
Donatelli shook his head again. Ramirez watched me closely. I sipped the tea and tried to decide. Would Ramirez run to the Boxer? Were they all in this together? Ramirez clearly disliked me, but Donatelli didn’t seem to. Or was it just the role he’d been assigned? Was anyone in this city what they seemed, or were they all disguised?
The words formed in my mind. I could hear them, in my voice.
You know, the Boxer guy and Dave Conroy know about Lester John. As soon as I left the professor’s house, he called the Boxer. He called the DA’s office. They know all about it. And they’re worried.
I choked them back.
“I’ve got a question for you, McMorrow,” Ramirez said, edging closer. “What did Butch Casey say to you this morning? What did he mean? ‘It was all arranged. There was a plan.’”
She looked down at me and waited. Donatelli, about to take a bite, paused and looked at me, too. I looked up at Ramirez, and her irritated scowl had been replaced by an expression that was neutral, a carefully made-up mask.
“Yeah, what is this, McMorrow? Is this more about this conspiracy Butch was telling you about? And what did you say to him this morning?”
“Did you say something about an envelope?” Ramirez said.
She tried to smile but came up short.
“We just need to know what’s going on in his head,” she said.
I looked at her and made my decision.
“You do?” I said. “Why?”
23
Just up the block from Maria Yolimar’s apartment, I parked. Opened the envelope and reviewed my notes.
She calls the mayor’s office. Claims her husband is missing. He was taken into police custody and disappeared.
Maria Yolimar says the mayor knows where he is. Calling every year on the anniversary of his disappearance, she’s dismissed as a crank.
I stuffed the envelope under the seat and looked out.
The street was wide and the buildings had at one time been handsome, if not grand. The doorway at 486 West 165th Street was stripped like a plundered Mayan ruin, but still was framed by a delicate cement filigree. There were buzzers in a battered panel beside the open door. The hallway inside the door was dark, even in the afternoon. A rusted sign on the wall said there was a $25 fine for littering.
I didn’t think so.
Just up the block, three men were bent over the open hood of a dented Honda. They watched me, their expressions hostile and cold. I went to the door of 486 and peered at the buzzer plate. There were twenty buttons, half as many names. Most of the tags were faded, covered with grime. Of those that were legible, one was M. YOLIMAR.
Sometimes you got lucky.
I pressed the button. Glanced back at the staring men. I didn’t know if the button worked or had been broken for five years. I’d stepped into the hallway when a woman’s voice crackled something.
I pressed again.
She spoke again. In Spanish.
“Maria Yolimar,” I said.
“Who is that?” in English.
“Jack McMorrow. I want to talk about your husband and the city.”
“She’s not here,” the woman said.
I pressed again.
“She’s not here. She’s gone to work.”
“What apartment? I’ll come back.”
There was no answer. I looked at the list of names, tried to discern a pattern to the numbers. There was none. I stepped back to the curb and looked up. Saw a child peering down at me from an open window on the third floor. An arm reached through the curtains and pulled the child back.
I took off my glasses and went inside.
The hall was dark and smelled of cooking. Murmurs came through the doors. Music in Spanish. A game show in English. A baby crying, in no language at all.
At the second-floor landing, I heard someone coming down. Three teenage girls, red-lipped, shoulders tattooed. They glared at me as they approached.
“Do you know Maria Yolimar?” I said.
As though I hadn’t spoken, they continued on.
I kept going, up to the third floor, where the fire door was propped open. I stepped into the hallway. It was like dusk, lighted by a single bulb at the far end. The carpet was threadbare, with patches of floor showing through. I walked slowly down the hall and tried to orient myself.
At the second door on the left I stopped. It was unmarked, except for the peephole.
I stood and listened for a moment. From the other side of the door, I heard Grover, from Sesame Street. A child’s voice laughing. I knocked. Grover shut up.
A woman’s voice came through the door. “Who’s that?”
“This is Jack McMorrow. To see Maria Yolimar about her husband and City Hall.”
“I told you. She’s working.”
“Sorry to bother you, but it’s important.”
“You police?”
“No, a reporter.”
That silenced her for a moment, and then I heard another woman’s voice, and the first one answering. They spoke in rapid Spanish. I caught journalista and Maria and viejo. Waited. The kids were whining, saying they wanted Grover back. I knocked again. The door opened slowly. A woman in a flowered bathrobe looked out, hair mussed, eyes close set and narrowed.
“Maria Yolimar?”
“No. I’m her sister.”
“I’m Jack McMorrow,” I said. “I’m a reporter. I need to talk to her about her husband.”
Her eyes opened wide. I could smell her sleepy breath.
“They found him?”
“No,” I said gently. “But I need to talk to her about how he disappeared. Or to you.”
She hesitated.
“You know what happened to him?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, I don’t. But I want to know what you know.”
“For the newspaper?”
“It’s still important,” I said.
“You think so?” Maria Yolimar’s sister said.
I sat on a plastic patio chair with my notebook out. Maria Yolimar’s sister sat across from me on the black vinyl couch, her long hair unbrushed, her robe pulled protectively around her, bare feet set squarely on the carpet. An older woman sat at the other end of the couch and watched the children, three of them under five. They watched Sesame Street again.
