What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I didn’t correct his hanging the collar back around Bill’s throat. I still thought of him that way, too, a lot of the time. It was like when an old teacher of yours asks you to call her by her first name. You do it, but it takes some getting used to.

  “So, what’s goin’ on, Guth?”

  “What’s your work schedule like over the next few days?”

  Smudge’s eyes got big. “Whatever you need it to be. The sisters are pretty flexible with me. They know they don’t pay me enough to bust my chops. What do you need?”

  “I need you to keep an eye on someone for me.”

  “Who?”

  “Maggie.”

  He tilted his head, confused. “Your Maggie?”

  “My Maggie.”

  “Did somebody hurt her?” Smudge’s voice got squeaky with anger and fear.

  “Threatened, not hurt.”

  I explained about Mr. Gordon, but didn’t go into details about the whys and wherefores. Besides, Smudge didn’t need to know that stuff. He would only want to know, need to know anything that would help him do his job.

  “That shitbox of yours still drivable, Smudge?”

  “Yeah, sure. The sisters paid to have it fixed up so I could do my deliveries. Runs good these days.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  I shouldn’t have. The reason Smudge had gone to prison was because he was part of a scheme to con people out of charitable contributions. Pretty ironic, given his current job. As he once told me, it was easy for people to feel sorry for him. “One look at me and they reached into their pockets.”

  “If you hang back,” I said, “I think you’ll be fine. All I want you to do is scream fire if there’s any sign of trouble.”

  “You know what’s funny, Guth? When you look like me, people notice you and then they don’t. They wanna forget you and they make you disappear. No one will see me watching Maggie. I promise.”

  One thing I admired in Smudge more than anything was his brutal honesty. He didn’t want you to lie to him to try and soothe his hurt. His hurt was too deep and his truths too evident.

  “What’s your rent here?”

  “Six.”

  “Six bucks? Sounds about right.”

  He laughed. It was kind of a snort and a honk, but it made me laugh, too.

  “Six hundred,” he said between honks.

  “A hundred a day plus gas and meals. And don’t insult me by giving me fucking receipts or trying to turn the money down.”

  “Okay, Guth.”

  We shook on it. I took three twenties out of my wallet and told him that was just for some gas and a meal, that there’d be a hundred on top of it when we settled up.

  I looked at my watch. “She’s home now, but leaving for a bartending gig in Chelsea in about an hour.”

  “I’ll have her back. Don’t worry about it.”

  Of course I was worried. Yet in spite of Mr. Gordon’s threats and his obvious skills at violence, my ugly little friend’s assurances eased my mind.

  31

  (FRIDAY MORNING/AFTERNOON)

  Smudge woke me up to give me good news. Maggie had worked a party at a Chelsea art gallery from eight last night until midnight. Afterward she’d gone into Hell’s Kitchen with two women who met her at the gallery. They ate dinner, had drinks. Maggie drove one of them home to Astoria and got back to her place around two.

  “You want the details, Guth, I can give ’em to you.”

  “No, that’s okay, Smudge. All I want to know is if something doesn’t smell right or if you see somebody who doesn’t belong. Go get some rest so you can pick her movements up later. I’ll call her in a little while to see if I can’t get you a heads-up about if she’s working tonight and where. Even if she’s in for the night, I want you to sit on her place, okay?”

  I’d just about hung up and shut my eyes when my phone buzzed again. It was Alvaro Peña.

  “You got something to write on?” he said.

  “Wait a second.”

  I rolled out of bed and found a piece of Paragon stationery and a pencil. The stationery was a leftover from the people who’d bought the hotel two sales ago. They thought they were going to turn the place into the Waldorf. Instead the hotel turned them into paupers. The Paragon pencils were a recent addition, because the pens those Waldorf dreamers had purchased ran out a few months back.

  “Yeah, Alvaro, go ahead.”

  “That tag you gave me is registered to a Kimberly Mark, Thirty-four Ocean Court, Brooklyn, New York one-one-two-two-nine. Any help?”

  “Maybe. Thanks.”

  “Any progress on the Salazar thing?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  He was off the phone. This time when I closed my eyes, they stayed shut for a while. When I opened them again, there was someone knocking at my door and screaming at me.

  “For fuck’s sake, Gus Murphy, open up.”

  When I pulled back the door Bill Kilkenny was standing there, looking as badly dressed as ever. Sometimes I could swear a blind man picked out his clothes, but I guess that’s what you get from a man who wore black with a dash of white for most of his adult life.

  “Good morning, Bill.”

  “Morning! If it was morning I wouldn’t be here dislodging your arse from bed. It’s near one in the afternoon and I’ve called you twice, to no avail.”

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to shake the sleep out of my head. “It’s been a long week, Bill, and I work the club this weekend. What’s up?”

  “You, just barely. But I’ve Brother Vassily downstairs in the lobby and the both of us are famished. Ten minutes, lad,” he said, tapping his watch crystal. “Ten minutes. And remember, lunch is on you.”

  I don’t know that I had formed an image of Brother Vassily in my head, but if I had, it wouldn’t have done justice to the hulking giant of a man who stood up from the lobby couch as I approached. He was wearing lay clothing—a plaid flannel shirt, ill-fitting jeans, and work boots. Brother Vassily must have been six-six and thick as an oak tree, though it wasn’t his size that made the most impact on me. Twenty years Bill’s junior, he had long, unruly black hair, a matching mountain-man beard threaded with silver-gray, and possibly the most intense dark brown eyes I had ever seen. They truly seemed as if they might cut right through me. There was a broad smile on his face as I approached. I held my right hand out to him, but instead he embraced me and kissed my cheeks several times.

  “Forgive me, Brother, I am sorry for being late.”

  “Not to worry, Mr. Gus. Let us eat and discuss. There is much curiosity about this thing I am translating for you,” he said, his voice deep. His English was much better than Slava’s, if just as heavily accented.

  “Come on, my car’s in the lot.”

  There weren’t many decent sit-down restaurants in the area around the Paragon, so we ended up at the new coal-fired pizza place across from the airport. We had just missed the lunch rush and were basically alone in the place but for the help. We made a little small talk—I mentioned to Bill that I had some questions for him about Micah Spears—but it was evident that Brother Vassily was very anxious to discuss the newspaper article Bill had given him on my behalf. When Brother Vassily asked me where I’d gotten the article, Bill put his hand on Vassily’s forearm.

  “That’s between Gus and me,” he said to the Russian.

  Brother Vassily nodded that he understood.

  “So,” I said after we’d ordered, “what’s it about—the article, I mean, Brother Vassily?”

  “Please to call me Vassily.”

  “Okay, Vassily, what’s the article about?”

  “It is from April eighteenth, 2003, an obituary for a man named Sergei Yushenkov.”

  “Sorry, Vassily, but the name means nothing to me.”

  “I had already l
eft home by then to come here. But according to story, Yushenkov was a man who was part of a commission looking into the Chechen apartment building bombings.”

  When he said “Chechen,” I froze up. I wanted to say something but couldn’t. Bill asked what I would have asked, had my head not been going in several directions at once.

  “The what?”

  “In three cities in Russia in September 1999 bombs exploded in apartment buildings killing many, many people. Three hundred I am thinking is the number, or something close to this. The Chechens, those crazy Muslim bastards, they did it, killed men, women, and children as they slept. They are animals, the separatists like those Muslim brothers who make the Boston bombing. They were from Dagestan, but is the same. Murderers! Murderers!”

  Brother Vassily was red-faced and agitated. He leaned forward and was pointing his finger at Bill. Then, noticing that he was almost out of his seat and losing it, the Russian sat down and took a second to gather himself.

  “The next day, Prime Minister Putin is bombing Grozny and making war on—”

  I cut him off. “Excuse me, Vassily. Did you say Putin?”

  “Yes, Putin. He was not yet president then. Yeltsin was president. But many people are saying it is not the Chechens making these bombings of the apartment houses, but the FSB . . . state security like American FBI. They are saying that the FSB are killing our own people so Yeltsin and Putin can make war on Chechnya. It is madness to say this. Look what the Muslims have done in the theater and at children’s school. But still to make happy those foolish people who believe lies, a commission was convened. This man Yushenkov was on commission. He was shot in his apartment by robbers. This is what newspaper is saying.”

  Before Bill or I could ask any more questions, the pizzas arrived. It was just as well. The rest would be details about the situation given to us by a man who had very strong opinions on the matter. It hadn’t escaped my notice nor Bill’s, from the looks on his face, that Brother Vassily had emphasized religion in his description of these events. I wasn’t judging him. Who was I to judge? Fourteen years later, 9/11 still resonated with me. I couldn’t drive into Manhattan and not look for the Twin Towers. Even now with the Freedom Tower built, I looked. Everybody on Long Island knew somebody who’d been killed that day. Me, I knew two firemen and a Port Authority cop who’d died at Ground Zero. Annie had worked at the Trade Center for a year before she got pregnant with John. And I knew, like any cop knew, how easy it was to stop seeing people as individuals. There’s a kind of perverse comfort in group blame. That’s the soil hate grows in best.

  Afterward, I drove them back to the Paragon and the car Brother Vassily had borrowed for the day. I thanked him for his help and told him that I’d drive Bill back to his apartment. There was another round of hugs and cheek kissing. It was almost comical to see the blade-thin Bill in Vassily’s grasp. It was good to smile after what I’d heard from Vassily.

  “Nice car,” Bill said, as I headed down Locust to Sunrise Highway. “I bet Maggie thinks it’s a wee bit of a step up from the van.”

  “She hasn’t seen it.”

  “What? Don’t tell me you and Maggie—”

  “No, Bill, it’s not like that. She got a big part in a show that opens out of town. She’s leaving in about a week from today.”

  “Look out, world. You’re apt to be a miserable bastard for a while.”

  “That about sums it up, yeah. So, I’ve spoken to Linh Trang’s boyfriend, her college roommate, and her sister. I’ve found out some hard stuff about the girl herself and maybe something that might help explain her murder. Might not.”

  “Will you tell Micah?”

  “Not until I get more. Right now it’s only an idea in my head. I need to do more checking around before it even becomes a real scenario.”

  “I trust you’ll do as you see fit and do the right thing.”

  “Why did Linh Trang think her grandfather was a monster?”

  Bill blanched. He was pale to begin with, but he truly went white.

  “I can’t discuss it with you, Gus. I truly can’t.”

  “Sanctity of confession?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “But he is a monster, isn’t he, Bill? Or at least he used to be.”

  Bill’s continuing silence for the remainder of the ride to North Massapequa was answer enough for me. The answer was yes.

  32

  (FRIDAY AFTERNOON)

  Gyron Machinery Inc. was located in a stucco-coated factory building just a mile or two north of the Paragon. Their bland building looked about the same as the others clustered together in the industrial park south of the LIRR tracks in Ronkonkoma. Several industrial and office parks dotted Suffolk County, many of them flanking either side of Vets Highway. In only a little while, many of the workers from these places would be cramming themselves into the bar at the Paragon for Friday happy hour. Some would be back again later to prowl the dance floor when the bar was transformed into the Full Flaps Lounge.

  Though I probably should have gone back to the hotel and rested for a while—shifts at the Full Flaps could be long, loud, and rough—I decided to have a talk with the people Linh Trang Spears had worked for from the time she graduated college until the day she was murdered. Most of her grumpiest Facebook posts were about working in the accounting department at Gyron. There weren’t any red flags in those posts. Nothing that indicated she was being stalked or sexually harassed by other employees or her bosses. Nothing that hinted at anything inappropriate in their business practices. Her posts were what I imagined Krissy’s posts might be like when she discovered that working for a living was tougher and more boring than she might have imagined. Krissy had a year or two more before she would discover the reality of the working life.

  Gyron’s logo was featured on the lighted orange, blue, and black sign that ran across the front of the building and on the like-colored free-standing sign at the entrance of their parking lot. It wasn’t a terribly original logo—a large black G superimposed over a smaller black M in the midst of a series of interconnected cogs and sprockets. It looked like something that might have been picked out of an online logo catalog. The lot was half empty, but I parked in a visitor’s spot just the same and followed the signs to the office entrance.

  The reception area was actually more sumptuous than I would have thought for a light industrial factory in Ronkonkoma. The carpeting was custom-made—dyed orange, blue, and black to mimic the signs outside—and the logo, woven into the carpeting, greeted visitors as they entered. The walls were covered in polished mahogany. The photos on those mahogany walls were signed and numbered, artfully shot black-and-white prints of industrial machinery. The seats were steel and black leather, still new enough to give off that strong leather scent akin to new-car smell. I liked it but could understand how it might turn some people off.

  Unlike the decor, the fiftyish woman at the reception desk gave off the vibe that she had been there a long time, long enough to have been rooted to the chair she sat in. She was attractive but wore too much makeup, and her hair was too brown. She was half paying attention to her cell phone, half paying attention to the People magazine on the desk in front of her. With her attention so divided, there was no room for me. I cleared my throat, loudly, and she deigned to look up. She didn’t exactly snap to or apologize, but she did acknowledge me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I speak with the owner, please?”

  She laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. More sneering, like the look on her face.

  “Good luck with that. He’s fishing in the Keys,” she said.

  “The plant manager, then.”

  “Why, you selling something?” She turned and looked at the clock behind her and turned back to me. “’Cause you’re so cute, let me give you a piece of advice. Friday afternoon at almost four ain’t exactly the best time to be
peddling your goods.”

  “Thanks for the compliment and the advice,” I said, “but I’m not peddling anything. I’m here to talk about the homicide of Linh Trang Spears.”

  The receptionist shook her head and seemed genuinely shaken. “Nice girl. Beautiful soul,” she said. “Hang on. I’ll get Carl for you.”

  She tapped the keyboard and spoke into the small mic on her headset, “Carl, there’s a cop here to talk to you about LT’s . . . about LT.”

  I didn’t correct her mistake. I would save that for when I spoke to Carl.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the receptionist.

  “Lara.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lara. I’m Murphy. Gus Murphy. What can you tell me about LT?”

  Lara had a lot to say, but it was mostly commentary on LT’s looks, her polite manner, and the horror surrounding her murder.

  The man I assumed to be Carl came through a door behind Lara. He was about my age, a few inches shorter, tanned in April, and had a mouth full of the whitest, straightest teeth this side of Hollywood. He had a shaven head and a salt-and-pepper goatee, was good-looking in a tough-guy kind of way, and was built like he spent time in the gym. He was dressed in khaki slacks and a black golf shirt featuring the company logo.

  He offered me his hand. “I’m Carl Ryan, factory manager. And you’re Detective . . .”

  I shook his hand but didn’t answer his question. “Can we speak someplace privately?”

  “Sure, this way.” He headed back toward the door through which he’d come.

  I thanked Lara and followed.

  Carl had a slight hitch in his walk. Not a limp exactly, but his strides were uneven. He took me down a corridor that was much more of what I expected to find in a machine factory. The green walls were grease-stained; blue vinyl flooring was grungy and worn-out in spots. None of the framed prints on the wall were signed or numbered, and they were also about as current as my aunt’s harvest-gold refrigerator. And you could smell the factory odors in here—the petroleum tang of industrial lubricants, the odd odor of hot metal and plastic, and overcooked egg vapors of some sulfuric chemical. At the end of that corridor, we turned left. From here you could look out onto the factory floor through a Plexiglas wall. Although the place smelled of activity, there was frankly very little going on. Mostly a few guys in dirty coveralls, cleaning. Like Lara said, it was four on a Friday afternoon. What else could I have expected?