He shook his head yes and added again, “No home.”
“Did they say when they were coming back?”
He turned his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. “No English.” But I could tell he had something else to say. He said it in Spanish, finishing with a hopeful smile.
I hated to disappoint him. “ Lo siento, I’m sorry,” I said.
He was undaunted. Standing, he put his arms down by his side, but not completely straight down, and made his hands into fists. He pantomimed carrying something.
“Luggage. They had luggage.”
“ Que?” he asked. What?
“Suitcases. They had suitcases,” I said, imitating his posture.
“ Si, suitcases.” His smile was very broad now.
“ Gracias,” I said, having almost exhausted my entire Spanish vocabulary. That was the odd thing about Carmella, when we were together she avoided speaking Spanish if at all possible, so I hadn’t picked much up. It had never hit me before, the extreme lengths to which Carm went to cut herself off from her family. Not only had she physically removed herself and changed her name, but she had made all sorts of symbolic breaks from them. I was conscious of them before, but it was more glaring now that we had been apart for so many years. When you’re close to someone and entangled in their mishegas, their craziness, it’s hard to see the full extent of the damage.
The old man sat back down, lit up a cigarette, and let the sun take him in its arms. Sitting on your stoop or on your lawn or in your front garden, watching the world go by was a very New York thing. We didn’t understand backyards very well. You can’t see much from your backyard. There’s not much action in your backyard unless you consider charcoals turning white with heat action. All the action’s out front. Even when Katy, Sarah, and I had the house in Sheepshead Bay, we grilled out front on the porch. I lingered a bit, admiring the old man, enjoying him enjoying the moment. I wondered if there would be any moments like this for me to enjoy, or would I spend the rest of my life in and out of the hospital?
I put that thought right out of my head because I was pissed at Carmella. What the hell was she up to, dragging me into this and then splitting? Why hadn’t she told me she had Alta’s personal things and why didn’t she let me see them? I was working myself up into quite a nasty mood as I retreated to the front seat of my car, but it didn’t last. I’d slapped the rearview mirror with the back of my hand in anger and when I went to readjust it, I recognized the hypocrite looking back at me. Who was I to rage at Carm for keeping secrets and hiding from the truth? For fuck’s sake, I was the king of kept secrets and adept at slicing the truth into sheets so thin they were nearly two-dimensional. Carmella had her reasons. I would know them eventually, whether she wanted them known or not. That’s why I wasn’t about to give up on this case. That and what was waiting for me if I did.
I pulled away from the curb, waving to the old man as I went. He nodded goodbye, the sun’s embrace too strong for him to wave.
TWENTY
The package from Brian Doyle was there on the welcome mat outside my condo door. I can’t say that I was particularly excited to see the thick envelope. Basically, it meant I’d be spending the next few days doing grunt work-going from house to house, interviewing angry firemen who would be about as happy to see me as they would be about a bad case of the crabs. I was getting too old for this shit. No, not getting too old: too old. I noticed it when I was working the Sashi Bluntstone case. The going from door to door, the lying and the half-truths, the drama, took a toll on me.
There was a day when I was interviewing potential suspects in Sashi’s abduction that I had to kick a field goal using an art professor’s testicles as the football. He was a big man with a short fuse who tried pushing me around, but even in my sixties, I wasn’t easily pushed. In Brooklyn, the rule is, someone pushes you, you don’t just push back, you push back twice as hard. If that doesn’t work, you go for the throat or, sometimes, you aim a little lower. In my neighborhood, you learned to never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring an F-16. But my roughing up the art professor that day wasn’t the half of it. Later that afternoon in Alphabet City, I went to talk to a woman art blogger whose screen name was Michelangelo or was it Leonardo?… I forget. She turned out to be a meth freak, turning five- and ten-buck tricks for rent and drug money. She had been no threat to Sashi. The only child she was a threat to was her own son, who I found dead cold and blue in his crib. I didn’t think I would ever recover from that day. I’m not sure I have.
Now I would go inside, open up the envelope, and start that process all over again. I laughed at myself, pushing in the front door. I laughed because I remembered the romance being a PI once held for me, how I was so hungry to work cases when I first got my license, but romance fades. I knew that love faded. Anyone married for more than a few years knows that lesson. Sometimes it evaporates completely and so abruptly you question whether it was ever there to begin with, but love and romance are different animals. I remembered how desperate I’d been for my gold shield, how getting it had once been more important to me than the fate of the Western world. As I’ve said before, there were several times over the three decades following my forced retirement from the NYPD that the serpent in varied disguises had offered me that apple and I’d turned him away. Each time it was offered, my desperation faded just a little bit more, until my hunger for the apple completely disappeared and the serpent stopped asking. Poor Eve, I thought, if she’d only been slightly more patient.
The first thing I noticed was the invoice. Talk about sticker shock. Doyle wasn’t kidding about charging me for the work. He seemed to have added an eminent death surcharge. He was going to soak me for all he could while I was still breathing. I didn’t mind, really. He had swallowed the cost of plenty of favors he’d done for me in the past and I’d been around long enough to know the bill always comes due one way or the other. Always.
The size of the invoice was about the only surprise in the pile of paperwork. Just as I had predicted and just as Brian Doyle had said, most of the more violent hate mail was from members of New York’s Bravest: some retired, most not. And the background checks Doyle and Devo had done were very helpful. With these guys’ ages, addresses, contact info, police records, if any, and the public record aspects of their service records there in front of me, I would be able to eliminate a lot of the legwork. I would be able to generate a list of more and less likely suspects without having to interview each and every one of these schmucks.
First thing I took into account was proximity. Although I supposed someone might have been following Alta Conseco around for weeks just waiting for the right moment to kill her, I didn’t think it was likely. There was something about the violence of the attack, the sloppiness of it-Alta had, after all, managed to make it back to the Grotto before she died-that made it seem like a spur of the moment, impulsive attack. Someone who would have been carefully following her for weeks wouldn’t have risked such public exposure and would have made sure she was dead before abandoning the body. I had no proof or experience to back it up. What the fuck did I know anyway? I hadn’t been a homicide detective. It was just a hunch, but I’d done pretty well following my hunches. So I took out an old road map of New York City and drew concentric circles in inch-wide increments extending out from the Gelato Grotto and carefully plotted the addresses of the hate-mailers.
Just as I finished pressing the point of my red pencil to the map where the last potential suspect lived, a stray thought crossed my mind that quickly turned into something else: a question. What in the hell was Alta Conseco doing at the Grotto in the first place? She lived on the other side of Brooklyn, for chrissakes! Okay, so some people loved their pizza and the homemade gelato was outstanding, but why would Alta travel to the Grotto? Did she have a craving? Did she go there to meet someone? If so, who? Like all good questions, the original suggested a hundred more.
I snapped my red pencil in two. My daughter was getting married soon and thre
e days after that, some surgeon would be cutting out half of my kishkas. I didn’t have time for a hundred more damned questions. I wasn’t sure I had time for one.
TWENTY-ONE
Grunt Work 101.
I began the unpleasantries early, figuring to squeeze as much in as I could in one day. It was a useless approach, but it was something. After my pencil-snapping fit of pique and brief wallow in the woe-is-me shallows, I came up with a plan. Any of the hate-mailers who had a history of violence, either on the job or off, moved to the top of the suspect list. Any with a history of violence against women, went to the top of the first list. And any of the folks on that list who lived within walking or short-driving distance from the Grotto, went straight to the head of the class.
Anthony Marinello batted lead-off. He was a nasty piece of pie. He’d only had about four years on the job, but had been moved around from firehouse to firehouse in his brief and undistinguished career. He was now on desk duty in Queens. Just like with the NYPD, there were legitimate reasons for desk duty: injury, advancing age, frayed nerves, et cetera. There were less than legitimate reasons too. I suspected the latter was the case with Marinello. He was a real nut job, a big mouth who was hated by the people he served with. According to his reviews, he wasn’t much of a fireman either, but he hadn’t yet crossed the line far enough to get fired for cause. He probably had a rabbi-someone more senior on the job with some juice who looked out for him-maybe a family friend or relative. Both the NYPD and FDNY were big enough to eat some of their mistakes or bury them, as it were, behind a desk or in a supply room somewhere, where they collected their paychecks without doing much harm.
Anthony also had had a few run-ins with his destined-to-be ex-wife. The wife hadn’t gotten to the order of protection stage quite yet, but she had filed for divorce. Given the number of times the cops had been called to the house, you didn’t need to be a soothsayer to think Marinello’s arrest was on the near horizon. There was something else Marinello had going for him: his address was on West 6th Street near Avenue U, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Grotto. I walked up the concrete steps to the old brick two-family house and rang the bell.
I hadn’t worked on the lies I would tell to whomever answered the door. I found that the lies always sounded best when I hadn’t rehearsed them. They just seemed more convincing somehow if I heard them at the same time as the party I was telling them to. There was no answer at first, but I didn’t get discouraged. Too late for that. I was already discouraged and besides, it was early. I rang the bell again and this time I heard stirring on the other side of the door.
“Hold your water!” was the shrill order from the woman inside the house.
What a quaint expression, that. Most men my age had a little trouble in that area and didn’t like being reminded of it. Between her voice and choice of words, I already wasn’t particularly fond of the woman on the other side of the door. Things went downhill from there.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling the door back. “What?”
Dressed in a garish, red satin robe, she was as hard looking as her voice was shrill. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of her frowning mouth. She smelled like an ashtray rinsed out in vanilla bathroom spray. I carried various sorts of business cards with me: one of the tricks of the trade. From one interview to the next, I never knew who I was going to need to be. I had cards I’d collected from insurance salesmen, doctors, rabbis, transport executives, lawyers-lots of lawyers-collision shop owners, plumbers, and a hundred other professions. I kept it simple and the lies to a minimum by handing her one of my own old cards from Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc.
“Mrs. Marinello?”
“Not for too much longer, I hope.”
“Your lawyer sent me,” I said, yawning with false disinterest.
Mrs. Marinello stared at the card and I at her. She was probably thirty, but looked forty: too much sun and too many Marlboros. She had been pretty once, probably in high school. Her body was still intact and she knew it, but even that seemed to have some sharp edges. Her blond hair didn’t match her coloring and it had been teased and hair-sprayed to within an inch of its life.
“What did the lawyer send you for?” she asked, finally looking up at me.
“To discuss your husband.”
“I been t’rough this with the other guy.”
“I’m better than the other guy. That’s why I’m here.”
“Okay. What the fuck? You wanna come on in?”
I hesitated. “Is your husband on the premises?”
“That asshole? Nah, I kicked his ass outta here in March.”
“Where has he been living since March?” I asked, pulling out a notepad and pen.
“With his cousin Vinny up in the Bronx by Fordham somewheres.”
I tried recalling the dates on the reports Doyle and Devo had supplied me with. “But he’s been back, yes?”
“Yeah, I had to call the cops on him in April. He’s such a prick. Started ripping up my underthings and smacked me around a little.”
“But you didn’t have him arrested,” I said.
“Nah, I’m protecting my investment in that motherfucka. When we make the settlement, I need him to be on the job. I want half of his pension. If I got him arrested and he got shitcanned, where would that leave me? What would I have to show for marrying the prick? He’s stayin’ on the job as long as I can help it and now that Vinny got him assigned to some dumbass desk, I figure I’m in good shape to hammer him. Vinny, now there’s the guy I shoulda married. He’s already got fifteen years on and a vinyl siding business that triples his department take-home.”
“You got it all figured.”
“Too bad about Vinny. I blew him the night I met him and Anthony, but he came almost before I got him in my mouth. Anthony, now that man can fuck. I shoulda known better than to listen to my pussy.”
Charming. “I wouldn’t know.”
She gave me a look that would’ve killed me and anyone within a twenty-foot radius. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Sorry. So back to the matter at hand… Do you know of any other time your husband has been back? Have you seen him driving by, spoken to any of his friends or family, have you spoken to anyone who might’ve indicated he’s been back in the neighborhood?”
“You are better than the other guy,” she said. “All he wanted to know was, was I fucking anyone else or did I know if Anthony was fucking somebody else.”
“I was getting to that, but can you answer my-”
“No, he hasn’t been back around that I know of. He knows I got him by the nuts and he don’t wanna lose his job neither. He’s been a good boy and stayed away.”
“So you’ve had no indication at all-”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said to you, mister? No, from what I can tell, he’s staying up in the Bronx banging this little cooz he hooked up with.”
“That doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
“If it keeps him in line and away from me, I wouldn’t care if he was fuckin’ Vinny.”
Lovely sentiment, I thought, but I supposed she had a point. And by mentioning Marinello’s new girlfriend, she’d given me an opening to ask about Alta Conseco. I took out a copy of the email Anthony had sent to both Alta and Maya and handed it to the wife.
“What’s this?” she snapped.
“It’s a death threat your genius husband sent to those two EMTs who let that guy die a few months back and it’s what’s going to screw up your plans for half the pension if your husband doesn’t watch himself. If we caught him sending hate mail like this, the FDNY can catch him at it too. So, do you think there was anything to this threat?”
“Nah, Anthony’s basically a coward. Yeah, sure, he’s slapped me around a little bit, but he’s just a frightened little boy. He wouldn’t have the balls on him to kill anyone. Besides, ain’t it already too late? Ain’t one of those bitches dead already?”
I bit the inside of my cheek
and nodded yes. “The problem is if you want to keep him on the job so we all make out here, I need to know for certain he had nothing to do with the murder. You do realize that Alta Conseco was murdered over by the Grotto, not a five-minute walk from here.”
Her brown, hungover eyes got big. “Anthony didn’t have nothing to do with that!”
“How can you be sure?”
“I thought you was working for me,” she said, the first traces of doubt about me seeping in.
I ignored the doubt. “Look, if you can help me eliminate Anthony as a suspect here, you can get your dream settlement, but if he’s tied up in this in any-”
“Okay. I can prove it if I have to, but it’s not gonna look good in court.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to get to court,” I said, reassuring as all hell.
“We were in the Dominican Republic when that bitch was killed.”
“ We?”
“Me and Anthony and another couple.” Her leathery skin sort of changed color as she looked away from me. On her, it’s what passed for blushing. “We swing. We used to, anyways, and there’s this resort down there that caters to swingers. We bought the airline tickets like last year and they weren’t refundable and we, um, we didn’t want to, you know, miss the opportunity, if you get my meaning.”
“Oh, I get it. You can prove this?”
“I got the fuckin’ credit card bills, receipts, and doctor bills right inside.”
“Doctor bills?”
“Me and Anthony both got some stomach thing down there. We was sick for a month after we got back. You wanna see the receipts?” she asked, turning to go. “Like I said, I got ’em right inside.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t think it will come up, but I just had to make sure. If I need the documentation, I can get back in touch with you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I think that about covers it.”
I left, hurrying down the stairs. I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t look back. I wanted to get as far away from her as fast as I could. It wasn’t as if she were the most despicable person I’d ever met-not by a long shot. My former father-in-law Francis Maloney made her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nor was her sense of ethics, as fucked up and convoluted as it was, the most self-serving. It was just that her focus was so narrow, her goals so small, so unimportant in the scheme of things, that I wanted to scream. Is this what she was born to dream of, I wondered? Was half of her husband’s pension all she wanted out of life? By the time I reached the street, I wanted to turn around and run back up the stairs and shake her by the shoulders and tell her life was too short to want so little from it. I turned, but she had already gone, gone back inside with her tiny dreams to keep her company.
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