“That was Mr. Wingate’s wish, but no, he would only be making false accusations, and we were prepared to sue for libel. We indicated as much, but he appeared eager to play the role of crusader. A false role that would have bankrupted him, but some gentlemen cannot be reasoned with.”
“Even the whiff of scandal would have been bad for your biz as well, I’m guessing.”
“Without question. Eberhard and I just wanted the story, this proposed book, to go away, for the good of all involved. But then things became more complicated. I am partly to blame, of course, due to my relationship with Cassandra. Now there is Oliver’s behavior, a much greater problem, and one that Eberhard refuses to acknowledge. His addiction is worse than we thought—the meth, along with opioids, anything other than the antipsychotic drugs that he needs. He’s beyond rational thought. He’s going to kill you, Mr. Darley. You and maybe others too.”
“I don’t think you’re a bit concerned with my safety or anyone else’s. It sounds to me like you’re just interested in saving your own ass.”
“Interpret it however you like,” he said. “But I think you’ll see that our interests are now aligned. We both need to find Oliver before he hurts anyone else.”
Crowley crossed his arms and let it all sink in. He wasn’t lying and he knew that I knew it. At least about his relationship with Cass . . . but that did not make her a murderer. Pushing a lover off a cliff in a deranged rage—okay, I could maybe see that. But executing Carl Kruger like that, in such a personal, vicious way, after knocking me out? It couldn’t be. What did Kruger have to do with her love triangle? That one had to be on Oliver—perhaps acting at the behest of his father, or whatever they were to each other.
“I know this is a lot to process,” he said. “Kruger had become very close with Victor. He never trusted Cassandra. I think he knew a few things about the edge of madness, and he recognized it in her. He told his friend as much. When Victor died, she knew that Kruger would suspect her first. So she sent you to him. It gave her a lovely alibi.”
“You’re telling me that Cass sent me to talk to a man she intended to kill, about the guy she’d just killed? That’s pretty clever.”
“Let me ask, where was Cassandra that night, do you know?”
“Upstate,” I said. “She dropped me off at the bus that afternoon and went back to deal with Wingate’s crazy sister.”
“When did you next speak to her?”
I considered the fallout after Kruger’s murder. Waking on the barroom floor at dawn around a crowd of cops; the time spent being questioned at the 5th Precinct; Detective Miller driving me home; drinking until I passed out on the couch; waking late in the night and getting the call from Cass. How long had it been between Kruger’s death and her call? Around twenty-four hours, and where was she in that gap of a day? I remembered her lack of surprise when I told her. “It’s all over the news,” she said. I couldn’t remember Cass ever glancing at the news.
I needed to banish this line of thought.
Crowley was examining me like a patient. There appeared to be a glint of sympathy in his eyes as he delivered his unwelcome diagnosis. “We tried to warn you,” he said. “Before you left to see her on that bus.”
“ ‘Some things, they’re not worth it,’ I believe that’s what Oliver told me. And then when I returned home, I found that graffiti sprayed on my front door, the same as the tattoo on his knuckles. As you noted, I’ve done time. I know what that means.”
“It was a mistake for him to join me. I blame my partner, who thinks he can control him.”
“Were you aware that your partner sent a letter threatening an eight-year-old boy?”
“ ‘Letter’?” he asked. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I looked at him over a gulp of lager. Wiped my mouth and kept on looking. He never blinked. “You’re a hell of a liar, Doc. I’ll grant you that.”
“I think you know I’ve been very open with you. I’ve not heard of any letter.”
“A close friend received a note that threatened her son,” I said. “Typed, no prints, but no matter, I know it was Lipke, and I’m going to prove it. You get one chance at some mercy on this. Are you telling me this is the first you’ve heard of that?”
“I have no idea,” he said. He spoke the words with conviction. Like the rest of what he’d told me, it was difficult not to believe him.
Crowley sat back and clasped his fingers in his lap, his thin mouth turned down. “When people you love let you down, it can be one of life’s most difficult experiences. Though I think you know all about that, don’t you?”
I didn’t reply. I finished off the beer and stood up. Slid out of my seat, still holding the glass. “Thanks for the drinks,” I said over him.
Then I raised the pint and brought it down hard on the back of his blond head.
Chapter 29
I left Crowley sprawled on a table of blood and glass. Left him there with a six-drink tab and a head wound, and maybe something to think about. It was impolite to be quite so honest with one’s cruelty.
The daylight was blinding, a slap to the senses. I waved down a passing cab with a shaky forearm. The ginger waitress and her manager came out after me as I climbed into the back and told him to drive. Without considering my destination, I called out East Broadway and Canal, the cross streets of Kruger’s bar on the Lower East Side. Before I visited Cass in Rikers, I needed to retrace the scene with new eyes. I needed to talk to Uli. Their affection for one another had been evident. Cass’s lawyer might be dead, and if there was truth to Crowley’s claims, she could be going away for life.
I thought about trying Juliette again. Decided she wouldn’t like what I had to say: My partner, the woman who set all this in motion, was now a presumed killer. The guy who sent that letter was an insidious doping doctor, with a meth-head adopted son on a rampage. I had nothing positive to report, nothing that could set her rich, worried mind at ease. Better to keep Juliette ensconced with that crew of Warrior Security. Instead I tried Detective Miller. This time she picked up.
“You may want to check out an assault and a suspicious heart attack at a Midtown pub called the Wheeltapper,” I told her.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Did you hear me? I’m reporting a crime, I thought cops were supposed to care about that sort of thing.”
“I heard you fine, Duck. Where are you?”
I gazed out the window as the cab turned toward the FDR. We inched past the United Nations complex with its expanse of white marble along the south façade. I thought of all the earnest peacekeepers inside, all the delusions of democracy and cooperation preached in there. So far removed from folks like Carl Kruger, another victim of Cold War nonsense. A soldier in a tracksuit juiced for nationalist glory; defected; changed genders; embraced American dreams; and was killed with the instrument of his success. He was one of the doomed. Marked for strife until his number came up, too soon, and ended a difficult life.
The East River waterfront was an ugly blight of barges and cranes. The speed of the tide flowing north always surprised. Across the gray water was the developing skyline of Long Island City and Greenpoint. The traffic loosened and picked up as we passed the Midtown Tunnel exit and continued south.
“You there?” asked Miller.
“I’m on the FDR,” I said. “Back in town and causing trouble.”
“I suggest you go back to your apartment and stay there,” she said.
“I just had an interesting conversation with a Dr. James Crowley, that name ring any bells?”
She paused, enough to indicate her surprise. “Listen, Duck, I can’t talk right now, but I strongly urge you to stop whatever it is you’re doing and go home.”
“I can’t do that, Lea.”
“Duck . . .”
I hung up wondering why I bothered to call in the first place. Did I want Crowley to report my assault so I could join Cass inside? My violence was as illegal, as unpr
ovoked, as the lawyer’s curbside attack. I wondered what Oliver had done to him. Maybe pressed a Taser to his chest, maybe a quick strike to the trachea. There was any number of ways to incapacitate an out-of-shape overstressed New Yorker. I knew a few of them. Oliver had been tracking me since Cass first called, even after he shed his boss. I doubted Crowley knew about his knife-to-the-throat warning inside that darkened theater. Much as I hated to acknowledge it, Crowley had shared facts, at least as he believed them. I knew with a certainty that the love triangle he described was accurate. Cass wanted to rid herself of Wingate, and Crowley was sick of the unstable lady that wanted him. He’d already learned enough from her.
Or perhaps another scenario, one with pieces that fit more cleanly into the emerging puzzle: Crowley and Cass were together when Wingate went over that waterfall. They’d been partners in the crime. He wasn’t sick of her at all. They were united in their desire to eliminate the unwanted third side of the triangle. He’d turned her, convinced her to help him in the suppression of that book. Crowley had been present when she called me for “help.” Indeed he’d been given instructions on where I could be found, when to approach. But then something shifted between them. Another murder had been necessary. I had been spared. And while I lay unconscious, someone had gone to Carl Kruger and executed him, driven his spear through his throat and watched the blood drain from his body and stain his barroom floor.
* * *
The cab let me off in front. KRUGER’S glowed in neon over the entrance. Back open for business and scrubbed clean, that was where I found Uli Kruger at work behind the bar, slinging drinks. A widow needed to eat. She glanced sideways as I entered and eyed me as I found a stool in the corner.
The life of the bar hummed on a low, boozy frequency. The only thing different about the space was the missing javelin hanging over the bottles. The room did not hang its head in mourning for its fallen proprietor. The city cannot afford to pause for every death. There is rent to pay.
It was the same eclectic mix of patrons, a diverse crew of Asians, blacks, and whites collected in shared union around their chosen sacrament. They sipped from their pints and their spirits with murmurs of conversation. Early Tom Petty, “Here Comes My Girl,” played from unseen speakers.
Rest in peace, Tommy boy, you were one of the kings. Drinking music, if I ever heard any. I lifted a finger toward Uli, waited for her to make her way over. Decided to stick with the day’s double: another pint of lager, another hit of the Jamie. As many as it took, until I got some answers or collapsed drunk. Both, I hoped.
Uli took her time about it. When she approached, she offered no acknowledgment, just nodded at my order and turned to pour. When she set them before me, she lingered and asked, “How’s your head?”
“Just fine,” I said. “How you holding up?”
She gave a shrug.
The space may have looked the same to every regular, but to the widowed owner it had become a tomb. Each day she was forced to walk over the spot where her husband was slaughtered.
“We didn’t have much savings,” she said. “I have no choice but to stay open.”
“They’ve arrested Cass,” I said.
“I know.”
“She couldn’t have done this. I don’t believe it.”
“I do.”
“Why? You sounded like friends? How could she kill Carl?”
She suppressed a shudder at the K-word. Then she looked back at her customers lining the bar. Noticed a few half-empty glasses. “I must get back to work,” she said.
So I stayed. Drank slowly through the afternoon, getting more two-word answers to my questions each time she served my refills. I felt myself reaching a zone where drunkenness was impossible. I could mainline the whiskey and my brain would continue to function on its same fuzzy frequency until morning. There are times when successive drinks cease to matter. It’s like the accumulation of snow in a blizzard: Does it really make a difference whether it’s fifteen inches or twenty in the end? Either way you’ll be crippled for most of the next day.
The bar emptied a little before five. She could expect another swell in the happy hours, but for now Uli Kruger had just one customer to serve: a surly pseudo investigator a dozen drinks in.
“Alone at last,” I said.
She came and topped off my Jamie without asking. Poured one for her. “Prost,” she said.
We knocked them back, set down the glasses, and looked at one other. She was a fine-looking woman whose size disguised her beauty. Her almond-shaped eyes were almost Asian in their lines. Her mouth was wide and full, with plump natural lips, the kind that ridiculous women on the Upper East Side pay for, only to look in perpetual need of Benadryl. Her skin, even in mourning, was flawless. She wore the same loose frock as before. It covered a thick, powerful body. Once a swimmer, always a swimmer, there was no mistaking her.
“I used to swim too, you know?”
It was the first thing I’d said that seemed to interest her.
“Where did you grow up?”
“Right here.”
“They have teams here in the city?” she asked. “I would not think—”
“Ever hear of Charlie McKay?”
“Ah, of course, I’m sorry. I know about him, and all that happened. I’m sorry, my mind has not been working so well since Carl . . .”
“What was your stroke?” I asked.
“Butterfly,” she said.
“Nice. Same here. Though you were probably faster than I was.”
She gave a faint smile without pride. “Well, we had some help in those days. The drugs worked well.”
“It’s not like you asked for it.”
She poured us another shot, raised hers, and knocked it back.
“Not many appreciate that,” she said after a wince. “They think we were all evil cheaters.”
“Were you given a choice?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. If we refused, terrible things would happen. Not only to us, to our families as well.”
“So you have nothing to apologize for.”
“We are all atoning for something, I think.”
“Guilt doesn’t get anyone anywhere,” I said.
She poured us another round and this time we sipped it slow. I kept stealing glances at her blue almond eyes. She didn’t look away. When she leaned forward against the bar, I caught a glimpse of the bra beneath her frock. It was a simple number, no lace or leather, but the sight of it stirred my thoughts.
After a stretch of silence Uli met my gaze and said, “You’re a good man, aren’t you, Duck?”
I had nothing for that. So I excused myself and moved to the bathroom. The floor rose and fell as if I was on a ship in high seas. I steadied myself on passing chairs, lurched the rest of the way, and acknowledged that perhaps the drinks were having their desired effect after all. When I was locked inside the men’s room, I took a look in the dirty mirror. Remembered what happened the last time I was in this room. A killer hid in wait outside the door. Waited for me to emerge, hit me over the head, and went to Carl. It happened just like this, alone in the bar with the owner, after too many rounds for clear thought, much less decisive action. When I finished, I looked back in the mirror, splashed water on my face until my eyes came back into focus. I opened the door and jumped at the sight of her.
Uli was leaning against the wall across from me. I thought for a moment that she was waiting to go next, but the ladies’ room was open next door. She stepped forward without expression. I moved aside and let her enter the room and watched as she locked the door behind her. Together we filled the small space to capacity. Wordless, she draped her arms around my neck and kissed me. Her strong hands moved down my back as she pressed her body against mine. She moved with a hunger it would have been rude to deny. Then she broke the kiss, let go, and turned her back to me. She hiked up her dress and bent over the sink. Let out a low growl. I did not need to be told twice.
Jeans were dropped, underwear pu
lled aside, and then I was inside her. I held her hips as she pressed back into me. Watched as her hands clutched either side of the sink until her knuckles turned white. Dispensed of any building rhythm and took her as hard and as fast as she required. She felt me building and thickening and rocked back in time with my thrusts. We both looked into the mirror at the same moment. Stared into each other’s reflected eyes as I let out a cry and came deep inside her.
We panted against each other until I slipped out. She tore a strip of toilet paper from the roll and wiped herself off. Then she hiked up her underwear, smoothed her dress, and offered a parting kiss.
“I’ll get us another drink, yes?” she asked.
I nodded and she let herself out.
I looked back in the mirror, sober as can be.
Chapter 30
The bar began to fill soon after we emerged. Uli put on Klaus Nomi again, turning it loud without her fallen husband to object. A song called “Total Eclipse,” which fit the mood. I watched her move with a freshly fucked air that I could be proud of. It meant nothing and everything. I told myself I helped ease a widow’s pain. I told myself a lot of things.
Uli kept my glasses full and delivered each refill with a wink. If anyone knew of her recent loss, her spirits wouldn’t seem right. But I knew better. I’d only offered temporary reprieve. The crash tomorrow would be even darker than before. I wanted her to myself again, couldn’t wait for the bar to empty. I kept willing customers to drink up and get lost. Around ten there was another lull. I watched a tattooed couple leave, hand in hand, and then it was just the two of us again. Uli tapped at her phone with a frown, then set it down and approached with a look I couldn’t quite read. Another purging romp bent over the bathroom sink perhaps? No, it wasn’t that kind of look. She glanced at the remains of my latest lager.
“Finish up,” she said. “We’re closing early tonight, there’s something I want to show you.”
I swallowed it down, knew better than to ask. She settled the register, checked the back, and turned off the lights. The Nomi was the last to go; “Valentine’s Day” played in the fluorescent darkness as she gathered her purse and said, “Shall we?”
Against Nature Page 23
