Empty because I had seen the son that was taken from me nine years ago, but whose loss I was fully feeling only now.
Empty because Pam had gone back to Vermont to wash away the stink of this mess. I thought she’d have to scrub long and hard in very hot water from now until I came up for the wedding to even make a dent.
Empty because I’d failed at the whole point of this. I had even less of an idea about who had killed Alta Conseco than I had before I got involved. This was it, the last good chance, and I’d blown it.
Empty because I’d made deals and compromises that weren’t mine to make.
Empty because the clock was ticking.
Empty because that famous luck of mine had run out.
…
I went to the house on Ashford Street. I didn’t know if Carmella had stuck around or if she’d run back up to Toronto, covering her eyes and her ears so that she could ignore the unpleasant truths. If she wasn’t there, I’d call her. If she didn’t answer the phone, I’d fly up to Toronto. She had gotten me into this and she was going to hear me out.
No need to go to the airport. Carmella answered the door. She read the look on my face and invited me in. She’d said she wanted me to stop working the case and maybe she even meant it when she said it, but Carm had been a cop, was still a cop. You never stop being one, badge or no badge, retired or not. You never stop being one on the inside. Whether or not she had better come to terms with who her sister was since our argument, I couldn’t judge.
She offered me a drink, which I refused. I needed to get this out.
“How did you know to come, Moe?”
“What?”
“I am leaving tomorrow and I won’t be coming back. I have rented this place out since I inherited it. I could not stand to let it go. It means the only happy memories I have of my family. But now… it is time. I have arranged for an agent to sell it and I have someone coming to take the furniture away. I have been hanging on to hopes and ghosts for too long. My life is with Israel in Toronto. It is not here. I am not sure it ever was.”
Only when she finished did I notice the phantom images of picture frames on the bare walls and the stacks of cardboard boxes neatly lined up in rows.
“I always liked this place. Even now I can feel your grandmother’s presence. I’ll be sorry when it’s gone.”
“It is already gone, Moe. So what have you come to say?”
“I don’t know who killed Alta, Carm. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I suppose it might have been a pissed-off fireman. That’s still my best guess. I thought I had someone for it, but that didn’t pan out.”
“It is not a surprise. I have already come to terms with that, I think.”
“But I did find some stuff out that you’ll want to hear, stuff you need to hear.”
She took a deep breath, girding herself. “Go ahead.”
“I know why Alta and her partner didn’t treat Robert Tillman at the High Line Bistro. The short version is that Tillman raped Maya Watson and was also blackmailing her. At Alta’s urging, they went to the restaurant to confront Tillman. It was their bad luck that he happened to pick that moment to stroke out. Alta never got over what happened to you, the thing that blew your family apart, and this was her chance at redemption. It wasn’t only Tillman she went to confront. It was the man who did what he did to you when you were little. It was her own guilt and regret she went to confront. Do you understand? Do you see why she couldn’t help him?”
“I understand,” she said, trying to hold herself together.
“It was all about you, about you and her. What might have been, what should have been between two sisters.”
Carmella cried with her whole body so that I felt it through the floor up from the soles of my shoes. I let her cry. I didn’t try to comfort her. The time for that had long passed. That old bond between us was finally broken.
“It seems like you’ve done a good job of raising Israel,” I said when her jag had quieted.
“Thank you.”
“Does he know-”
“-about you? No, but one of the things I am going to do when I get back home is explain.”
“I’m glad, Carm. He should know and about his biological father too. A kid needs to know where he came from so he can know where he’s going.”
“You are right, Moe.”
There was a moment of awkward silence before I stood to leave. Carmella walked me downstairs. We didn’t speak, not at first, but then I hugged her long and hard. It was a last hug goodbye. Just before I left, I handed her a slip of paper with Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston’s contact information.
“Who is this?”
“Someone you need to sit down with and speak to before you go home.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, Alta really will be lost to you forever.”
I turned and didn’t look back.
FORTY-SIX
Since I was in tying-up-loose-ends mode, I decided to stop in at the Roussis Family Restaurants, Incorporated, corporate offices in Downtown Brooklyn. I wanted to thank Nicky for his help and to say that we should keep in touch. He was a good guy, Nicky, and if I came out the other end of my treatment, I’d need some friends. Truth be told, going back to an empty apartment with only my thoughts for company wasn’t exactly ideal, given my state of mind.
Sarah’s wedding was only a week or so away. Three days after the wedding Sarah and Paul would be strolling through the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and my surgeon would be slicing through my kishkas. Yeah, somehow, I didn’t want to go home and contemplate those stark realities. It’s one thing to ponder your own mortality as an eighteen-year-old who’s just smoked a bowlful of Thai-stick and quite another to do it as a sick old man. So it took little effort for me to turn off Ashford Street and aim my car down along Atlantic Avenue.
In the lobby of the building, I had trouble finding the number of the offices. I guess it was pretty foolish-or desperate-of me to think that Nicky and his family had kept their offices in the same place all this time. It had been nearly fifteen years, after all, since Carmella and I had worked the case for them. New York commercial real estate was like an expensive game of musical chairs. Companies moved all the time to get better deals after their leases ran out. A security guard, a real old-timer, noticed me staring at the board.
“Can I help you, son?”
Son! I liked that. No one had called me that in a long while. “I was looking for the Roussis Family Restaurant offices, but I guess they moved, huh?”
“Not moved exactly,” he said.
“I’m not following you.”
“Money troubles,” he whispered. “About three years back, they were
… er… shown the door.”
“Really?”
“Shame too. Killed the old man.”
“Spiros?”
“Kind man. Generous man. Always with a warm greeting. Always with a nice gift on the holidays. Never forgot to ask about the wife and kids. Even gave me a savings bond for each of my grandkids. You knew ’em?”
“I was on the job with Nicky back in the day and I did some work for the family when I went private.”
“Nicky, a good man like his dad. It was that other son, that Gus that was the bad seed.”
“How so?”
“Can’t say, really, but you know how you can just tell sometimes? I just know it.”
“Thanks.” I shook his hand.
“Need anything else, let me know.”
“There is something. Is Spiegelman, Abbott, Bobalik and Cohen still-”
He smiled. “Moved to bigger offices. They take up the whole eighth floor these days.”
I rode up to eight and the elevator opened into the reception area. The receptionist smiled a practiced smile at me and asked if she could be of assistance. I wondered if Steve Schwartz was around. She buzzed him and he told her to send me down.
“Corner office. I’m impressed.”
“Don�
�t be,” he said, his eyes on a monitor, his hands at a keyboard. “I look out onto Atlantic Avenue, not Park Avenue. Okay, done.” Steve, a slender man a few years my senior, stood to greet me. “Moe Prager. What are you doing here?”
“A farewell tour,” I said only half-kiddingly.
Never a barrel of laughs to begin with, Steve looked at his watch to indicate his patience was already wearing thin.
“Roussis,” I said.
He understood immediately and shrugged his shoulders. Spiegelman, Abbott did corporate and commercial real estate law. They had represented the Roussis family business when Carm and I worked the case in ’95.
“You know I can’t give specifics although we don’t represent them any longer,” he said.
“Not asking for any. I’m just surprised. I’ve reconnected with Nicky lately and he didn’t mention the troubles.”
“Nick’s a proud man.”
“But…”
“Gus,” he said as if his name explained it all. Maybe it did. At least Steve and the old-timer were on the same wavelength. “The kid was a fuck-up. They gave him a position he wasn’t ready for and he ran the ship aground. But they got a big influx of cash somewhere and seem to have rebounded. More than that, I can’t say.”
I thanked him and left. In the elevator on the way downstairs I went over it in my head again and again, that first conversation I had with Nick when I ran into him at the Gelato Grotto. He’d definitely said that he went into the office a few times a week. I couldn’t figure out why Nicky would’ve said that. Maybe Steve had already answered that question for me. Nick, he had said, was a proud man. I could see that, but it still bugged me a little. Funny how a man like me, a skillful and practiced liar, could be so bothered by what was clearly an innocent, self-protective lie. Or maybe it was that I needed to focus on something other than my impending surgery.
Detective Fuqua couldn’t have known the favor he was doing me when he called.
FORTY-SEVEN
Fuqua looked like he hadn’t slept since he walked away from me two days ago with the ammunition he would need to do a little blackmailing of his own. Marco’s detailed description of his love affair with and his alibi for Jorge Delgado would have been powerful enough, but to have photographs of New York City’s most recently sanctified hero at a notorious drag queen show was like the plutonium core at the center of a chocolate-covered H-bomb. Given that the city and the media had just spent weeks touting Delgado as the perfect family man, fireman, self-sacrificing hero-the anti-Alta Conseco, if you will-and thrown him a five-star funeral, those photographs gave Detective Fuqua the power to demand just about any bump-up in rank or assignment he wanted. With this type of ammunition, my old friend Larry Mac could have had himself declared a prince of the realm. Fuqua looked like a prince all right-Hamlet.
“It is a great hypocrisy, is it not, Moe, that almost anyone else could have gone to such a club as Delgado went to without fear of recrimination? You or I could go to such a club and say we went on a dare or just for fun.”
“We don’t have enough time, ink, or paper to list the great hypocrisies, and as they go, there are far greater ones than this. Besides, Delgado was as big a hypocrite as they come. He tried to hire a hitter to take out Alta Conseco in part because she was gay. He tormented her with his phony macho bullshit, so don’t ask me to weep for him. If there’s anyone I have sympathy for here, it’s Marco. He gave me this stuff to save Delgado’s rep and I’m the one who’s perverted it into leverage for you.”
“Here,” he said, sliding the voice recorder and envelope across his desk to me, “take them back, please. They are of no use to me. I thought I was ambitious enough to use them, but I cannot.”
“Look, Fuqua, the stain is on me, not you. I’m the one who offered you this stuff so you would help us with Esme. If you hadn’t played the heavy and gotten her to cooperate, those videos would have gone public either in court or as payback. The only other way to have stopped her would have been to-”
“Do not say that in here!”
“Okay, but you know it’s true just the same. Maya Watson killed herself over this and it hadn’t even gone public. Can you imagine the fallout if these videos started appearing on the web? Some of these women are married and have families. It’s bad enough that they were raped and blackmailed. Do you know what hell their lives must have been? I wasn’t about to let it go any further. I’m the one who compromised himself by betraying Marco, not you.”
“Still, I have no wish to use them. I will feed my ambition with accomplishment, not leverage.”
“Are you sure? You realize that this leverage has a limited shelf life and with every day that passes these pictures lose some potency. Two weeks from now, a month from now, they will lose all their power altogether. Once the city moves on, and it always moves on, no one will care or even remember Jorge Delgado. The brass will no longer have a stake in protecting his rep. If anything, they can run this stuff up the flagpole when they need to distract the media from some real scandal or fuck-up.”
“I am quite certain.”
“There’s hope for you yet, Icarus.”
But if I thought returning the alibi and photos to me would unburden Hamlet, I was wrong. If anything, Fuqua looked more miserable than when I came in.
“What is it?” I asked. “Something else is bothering you.”
“Let us go for a walk.”
Outside it was August in June. Though the mist was so thick that the top of the Parachute Jump had vanished with the sun, the temperature hovered above ninety. Sheets of roiling black clouds from the south moved up slowly behind us as we walked up Mermaid Avenue. For now the only rumbling we heard came from the subway terminal at Stillwell Avenue, but from the dark hues of the clouds at our backs it was obvious the rumbling song of the subway would soon no longer be a solo. As we turned right on Stillwell toward the ocean, even the breezes told tales of the coming storm. The light winds seemed almost to conform to the folds of my face like hot barbershop towels. We made it all the way to the near-deserted boardwalk before Fuqua uttered a word.
“I fear I have made a very grave mistake,” he said, his eyes looking out to sea but unseeing. “A terrible mistake.”
“How so?”
“When I was with Esme the other day, something about her bothered me very much.”
“You mean other than the fact that she was a blackmailing sociopath who had been living with a convicted rapist?”
He winced when I said it. “You have a sharp sense of humor, Moe, but this is not a thing to laugh at.”
“Sorry. So what bothered you?”
“I was not certain. She was too cooperative too quickly, but it goes beyond that.”
“You know, I meant to ask you about how you got to her,” I said. “I figured she would give in eventually, but that it would take all night. You were in and out of that room in less than an hour. I just assumed she was smart enough to recognize that you were a serious man and that you weren’t fucking around. What did you say to her, anyway?”
“I told her that I would pin Alta Conseco’s murder on her if she did not cooperate. She had motive, after all. Alta had let her live-in lover die without treatment. I supplied the means,” he said, removing a plastic evidence bag from his suit jacket pocket and handing it to me. “That weapon conforms exactly to the knife used to murder Alta Conseco. I wrapped Esme’s palm around it. Voila! The murder weapon. I told her I would make sure to defeat any alibi she might produce. When she protested a bit, I informed her that you were not only a former policeman and PI, but one of her victims’ fathers and that you were very probably going to kill her regardless. Dead suspects, I said to her, need no alibis. ‘When you are dead, Esme, I will have someone call my office with a tip and I will find this knife conveniently hidden in your closet. Case closed.’ She then gave me everything you asked for.”
“That was the idea, right? So what’s the problem?”
“I could not sleep that night
. I went over it time after time and her attitude bothered me more and more. Yesterday morning I realized finally what was bothering me.”
“Which was what?”
“I saw that video you showed me. Horrible. Horrible. I suppose I was as outraged by it as were you. I was blinded by my outrage and ambition. I thought, why not help you? I would help rid the city of this parasite. I would do good and myself good all at once with only a small risk to my shield. So when I went in that room to threaten her, I was not actually thinking of Alta Conseco’s homicide in any sense but as a tool. What I realize now, what I came to realize was that the case I made against Esme to pressure her to cooperate-”
Then it hit me so that I was almost breathless. “Holy shit!”
“Yes, Moe, you see now. She very well might have been the person who killed Alta Conseco. She was the best suspect I have had and I did not think to look at her twice.”
“Wait a second. Wait a second. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” I said as much to convince me as him. “Tillman or Sykes or whatever his name was, was a con man. I mean, come on, Fuqua, he was a shitbird convict and she was a sociopath who probably jumped from lover to lover like bees go from flower to flower. When she was done sucking up the nectar, she moved on. Who says they were in love? She probably didn’t give him a second thought when he dropped dead. She would move on, not avenge some clown she didn’t give a shit about.”
“That is what I thought as well. Then I made inquiries.”
“Inquiries?”
“First I checked with both restaurants at which Esme was employed. She was not scheduled at either the evening Alta Conseco was murdered.”
“So what?” I said. “Half the pissed-off firemen in New York City were off that night too.”
“It gets better… or worse, depending upon your perspective. You recall that Tillman was convicted of statutory rape, non?”
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