“Your daddy told me he hated threats,” I said.
“My daddy?” he asked. “He told you that, yeah? Sweet daddy Ebi.” He laughed. “In exchange for taking his name, he promised to take care of me, to leave me much of his fortune. In exchange for his name and a few other things . . .”
At that, Oliver thrust his hips lewdly. “All I had to do was close my eyes and let him lower my pants on occasion. No big deal, a mouth is a mouth, right? I was forced to do worse for less as a kid in that home.” He turned and leered at Stevie. “Is that what your relationship is like with this guy?” he asked.
“Don’t listen to him, buddy,” I said. “He’s crazy.”
“I know,” said Stevie, staring straight back at him.
Oliver took a step toward him. I stood. He leveled the gun at my chest and looked down at the boy. “It’s easy to be brave when you’ve never been hurt.” He took a step closer to Stevie.
“Don’t you touch that boy, Oliver,” said Uli.
He swiveled his shaved head to face her. “Maternal instincts kicking in? A little late, don’t you think?”
“If you touch that child, we will both be on you,” she said, glancing at me. “You can’t shoot us both at once.”
“This little shit really means more to you than your own blood?” he asked. “You never fail to disappoint.”
“You took my husband, Oliver. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, no,” he said with a sick smile. “We killed him. It wasn’t just me there that night. Who was it again that knocked out this clown coming out of the bathroom?”
Uli looked away, avoided my gaze. Oliver kept grinning. “Who was it again who told me to take the cash out of the register, and to grab that bottle, to make it look like a robbery gone wrong? I believe those were your words, mother, were they not?”
“You said you only wanted to speak to him,” said Uli. “You promised me that you would reason with him, we both would. With Victor dead he just needed to give up on that story of his.”
“You believed that?” he asked, full of what seemed genuine disbelief. “I finally get to confront the bastard who stole my mother, and you thought I’d just want to chat?”
When she didn’t answer, I said, “You set us up, both of us. You were prepared to let Cass and me take the fall for murders your son committed.”
“I had no choice,” she said. “He would have killed me.”
“I suspect he still will,” I said.
Oliver liked that. He stepped away from Stevie and came over to me, rubbing the barrel of the gun against his cheek. “I wasn’t lying, you know. I was a fan of your work. True crime is a passion of mine, ask Eberhard. I love those shows. I learned all about your last case. I really was excited to meet you.”
“Like an autograph?”
His foot came up fast, too fast to catch, and connected with my mouth. My head rocked back. I tasted blood and loose fragments in my mouth. A few teeth—I spit them out at his feet. He came closer and delivered another kick to my stomach, blasted the breath out of me. “You were lucky the cops were there that day,” he said. “You might have a few moves, but I would have cleaned the sidewalk with you.”
I gasped for air, wiped the blood from my mouth, tried to straighten up for Stevie. “Four murders and counting,” I said. “You’re lucky New York doesn’t have the death penalty.”
Returning to the table of drugs, he said, “It’s funny that you’ve already included yourself in the death count.”
“I haven’t.”
“You said four?” He leaned down and snorted up another line. “So far I count only Kruger, Crowley, and that useless security guard at the kid’s place.”
“You’re forgetting about Victor Wingate,” I said.
“The writer, the bitch’s boyfriend? I’m afraid you’re mistaken, not my work. I was still in Miami at the time of his death.”
“Bullshit.”
“He was,” said Uli next to me. “Eberhard called to tell me they were coming. He was worried.”
“See!” said Oliver. “Alibis galore. Besides, my plane ticket will confirm that I was on a flight here after that man was killed. That one looks like the doing of your partner.”
“No way Cass pushed him.”
“Really? You know she was screwing Doc Crowley, right? He liked to talk about what a fiend she was. He was sure she killed him. That was the reason for his visit—to cover his own ass. Crowley was worried he was being set up, and, of course, he was worried about that book. Eberhard asked me to join him.”
“What are you going to do with her?” I asked, turning to Uli. “Are you going to kill your own mother too?”
“The act of giving birth does not make a mother,” he said. “She is nothing to me. Until I followed you to her bar, I didn’t even know what she looked like.”
“And the kid?” I asked. “What’s your play, to kill us all and make a run for it?”
“Life is cheap,” he said. “Something that spoiled little shit is about to learn.”
“Fuck you,” said Stevie from across the room.
Oliver spun around. “What was that?”
“Fuck you,” repeated the kid. “You’re a druggy racist Nazi. The cops will probably be here any minute.”
“Is that so?”
Oliver stepped toward him and raised the gun. Stevie’s face crumpled after his reckless burst of bravery. Tears flooded down his cheeks. “I hate you,” he said.
Uli and I exchanged a glance, a flash of connection that communicated life and death and action. We turned toward Oliver and leapt together at him. I caught his right arm holding the Luger and knocked it from his grip as it fired. Uli put her shoulder into the small of his back and sent him falling forward toward the boy. The three of us tumbled into the chair as Stevie dove out of the way. The gunshot rang through the small apartment, ripping through the plaster ceiling. Oliver roared and flung his limbs at us, fighting back in all his meth-fueled fury. His elbow met his mother’s head and sent her flailing back. I kept hold of his right arm and twisted it behind his back, ignoring the pressure point limit and kept twisting until I heard it pop. But his raging survival adrenaline blocked out the broken bone and his fight increased. I went for his eyes next, tried to gouge them out and blind his assault. Like the broken arm, a blinded eye didn’t slow him. He was stronger than I was. The dope pumping through his veins gave him superhuman ferocity. He managed to flip me over, freed an arm, and drove a fist through my face. All was a blur. My world spun, my limbs went limp.
Then a second shot rang out from the Luger.
Chapter 37
Stevie was holding the gun. He kept it raised with both hands, shaking steps away from us. We made eye contact. The Luger lowered and dropped from his grip and he burst into tears. I scrambled to my feet, stepped over Oliver’s lifeless mass, and wrapped him in my arms.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I kept saying, over and over.
Uli stirred next to us, wiped blood splatter from her face. She pushed herself to her feet and went to her son. Dead on her floor, shot through the temple, back in his mother’s life for the first and last time. I watched as she stared down at him. Her body was very still, all emotion contained in a shell of shock.
We heard sirens approaching.
Uli knelt before him and pulled a blanket from the turned-over chair. She covered his torso and face with it, sat back on her heels, and shut her eyes. “I’m sorry, Oliver,” she whispered. “So very sorry.”
“He killed your husband,” I said behind her.
“And I killed him many years before that,” she said without turning. “I chose myself over my son.”
Stevie looked up at me, confused. I hugged him tighter. The little hero had saved us all. I didn’t want to contemplate all the psychic damage it cost him.
Moments later the room filled with cops and shouts and déjà vu. I was practiced at such aftermath and I tried to be as helpful as possible. Questions were
answered; statements were taken; a body was wrapped and wheeled away. I could have directed the scene myself. The senior detective on site had less experience than I did with such madness. This time there were few exterior injuries among the survivors, nothing requiring hospitalization, just a few lost teeth and rattled heads. Psychiatric treatment would come later.
Inside the 5th Precinct, Uli recanted her story about going home after closing the bar the night Crowley was killed. She established that she was indeed with me inside Cass’s apartment-cum-dungeon at the time. I couldn’t have killed him. She said that her son and his former boss were headed to my apartment when Oliver struck the doctor in the park. She confirmed that he killed her husband, Carl Kruger, in her presence. She said she tried to stop him, but had been scared for her own life. Cass and I were expendable ways for her to save herself.
It was the culmination of decades of betrayal, beginning with pills and needles of steroids shot into the muscles of young German girls. It continued with an abandoned boy, an amoral doctor, a couple desperate for freedom. The perpetuation of sin never slows. It only collects more momentum as it builds toward another reckoning. Those naïve souls who believe in the inherent goodness of man have always confused me. How much more evidence could they need before accepting the obvious truth—that this race was born doomed. The righteous choice is seldom the first choice. It’s a minority decision that must be celebrated for its rarity. Dishonesty and self-interest are our natural settings. How could anyone with open eyes disagree with such an observation?
But sometimes there are kids like Stevie Cohen, whose fearlessness shines through at the exact right moment, and helps rescue us all. It wasn’t genetic. I couldn’t give his mother credit for instilling that bravery, and certainly not his absentee father. Maybe it was something that existed in everyone, but was seldom pushed to the surface. Whatever it was, it could never be predicted. Better just to be thankful when it appeared.
My former partner, Cassandra Kimball, was another question. She seemed to be one of the infinite selfish souls who acted on dark impulse, and then tried to save herself after the fact. She must have pushed Victor Wingate after all. First thought, best thought; ignore the noise that comes later.
For now, she would stay inside Rikers. She’d be cleared in the murder of Carl Kruger, but one murder was enough for life without parole, and plenty of folks have been known to rot on that hopeless island for years before a trial and any justice is declared.
* * *
It was a day later that Susie Wingate surfaced on a tabloid news program called Inside Edition. She was chum in the water for those bottom-feeders. A wounded relative of scandal, a close spectator to a story full of sex and death—they probably tracked her down and convinced her to talk. A producer called and tried to persuade me to participate. He mentioned another private investigator turned talking head that the show had helped make famous. I hung up on him. But that night I made sure to tune in to Susie’s segment.
They made her look like a grieving angel, with her interview shot in sun-kissed morning light on her front porch outside Woodstock. For B-roll the cameraman captured gorgeous scenes of the sylvan landscape. The shot moved through the woods, along the trail where Cass led me, to the spot where Victor Wingate went over those falls, where my former partner was alleged to have pushed him. They found footage from our previous case—of both of us being led into the backs of cop cars and ambulances. We were a damaged pair of moral-free New Yorkers, the sort the heartland could shake their heads at and mutter about Gomorrah. In her sound bites Susie accused the media of missing the real story: her brother’s murder.
“I don’t care about that freak show in the city,” she said, weeping. “All that other stuff that happened later, the other deaths. I just miss my brother.” Zoom on the tear-streaked cheek as she said, “I loved him so much.”
I turned it off and took a shower. Hoped it was the last I saw of her. If she had any sense left, she’d sell that mountain home of her brother’s and live frugally off the proceeds. Like my apartment it would need to be cleansed of its demons.
The next morning I awoke to a message from Detective Lea Miller, informing me that she’d be by my place at ten a.m. I checked my phone; it was a little after eight, enough time to wake with sufficient refreshments. I texted back Okay, didn’t bother to ask why. After I dressed, I sat around opening bottles and reading the bad news of the day. Another mass shooting, another powerful pig accused of serial sexual harassment, another natural disaster that decimated an island nation. She knocked a few minutes after ten.
With a well-rested smile she said, “C’mon, we’re going for a drive.” Her Prius was parked in front of a hydrant with the back door open.
“Where we going?”
“Few hours north. You eaten?”
Did three Beck’s and a coffee count?
I glanced over her shoulder at an overnight bag in the backseat. “Do I need to pack?”
“Up to you,” she said. “I’m going to stay the night, get some fresh air. When we’re done, you’re welcome to take the bus back. The Department will pay the fare.”
“Where are we going?” I asked again.
“Catskills,” she said. “Should be about two and a half hours.”
“Why?”
“Someone wants to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“Victor Wingate’s sister, Susie. Let’s go, I’ll explain more in the car. I said we’d be there by one.”
So much for never seeing her face again . . . I grabbed my phone, wallet, keys, and took a book—Tosches’s Me and the Devil—maybe I’d finally have a chance to finish it on the ride back. No way I was spending the night outside the city.
We made it up the FDR and over the George Washington Bridge without too much traffic or talk. I waited for Lea to share more, didn’t push it. On the Palisades she glanced over and said, “So, aren’t you curious what Susie wants?”
“Not really.” I shrugged. “I saw her on Inside Edition last night. They made her look half sane.”
“Inside what?”
“The show, that tabloid that what’s his name used to host? Anyway, yeah, she was on it. They asked to interview me too. I declined.”
“What did she say, on the show?”
“How heartbroken she is, how guilty Cass is. What you’d expect.”
Lea was silent for a moment. “When did this air?” she asked.
“Last night, at eleven, why?”
“When did a producer call you for comment?”
“I don’t know, sometime yesterday afternoon, what does it matter?”
“So they must have filmed her earlier in the day.”
“You want to tell me why I should care?” I asked.
“Because there’s been a . . . development. It appears Susie discovered something that may clear your partner.”
“Which is?”
“I’m not totally sure. I just spoke to a local sheriff up there this morning. Wingate’s death is their jurisdiction, but since your partner is being held in Rikers, it had to go through us.”
“What did his sister find?”
“A letter,” she said. “And she asked to speak with you specifically. That’s all I know.”
“What about Dr. Lipke?” I asked. “Has he been arrested in Miami yet?”
Lea shook her head. “Appears he’s left the country. A flight to Moscow was booked on his credit card. There’s an Interpol notice out for him, but Russia isn’t exactly helpful in returning suspects to America.”
“I’m sure they’ll welcome a proven doping Doctor. He probably already has a job.”
The rest of the ride passed in almost total silence. Neither of us reached for the radio. The windows stayed up. The AC hummed. I stared out the window at the rolling green landscape, thought of Cass’s escape to these parts after our last case. It had soothed her then, until it didn’t.
Lea got off the Thruway at Exit 19 and turned on her GPS. The disembod
ied female voice guided us from there down winding two-lane country roads toward Woodstock until we found Wild Rose Road. She turned and slowed and searched for the number on the mailbox. Finding it, we crunched over a gravel drive at ten minutes before one. A state police car was parked in front of a sagging farmhouse, a country pile in advanced disrepair.
Susie Wingate sat on a rocker on her front porch, clutching a mug with two hands. It was a warm spring day, but her shoulders were wrapped in a woolen blanket. Her face was slack, her eyes looked turned in on themselves. Two officers leaned against their squad car. They straightened up at our approach. Lea parked behind them and we stepped out into the sun.
“Afternoon,” said one.
The other tipped his hat and said, “Detective Miller, thank you for coming.” Then to me, “And you must be Mr. Darley.”
If Susie noticed our arrival, it didn’t register. Drugged, I presumed, heavy meds for a heavy time. In her lap I noticed a torn envelope. We stepped closer. The cops waited awkwardly for someone else to begin. Without turning, Susie said, “I hate the mail, I hardly ever check it. Nothing ever comes but junk.”
The older of the two officers cleared his throat. “Miss Wingate received a letter from her brother,” he said. “It seems to have been sent on the day he died.”
“But it wasn’t discovered until yesterday afternoon,” added his partner.
“I almost threw it out,” said Susie. “Then I recognized his handwriting. It was like seeing a ghost in the night.” She turned and looked at us for the first time. “There are ghosts here, you know? Lots.”
“Susie, is that the letter in your lap?” asked Lea.
She glanced down at it, nodded. “I guess you’d like to see it.”
Lea went to her with caution. Susie appeared to be in a state of catatonic madness, but the slightest fright was liable to throw her into frenzy. Lea stepped onto the porch, lifted the letter from her lap, and backed away. The air felt suspended, breezeless. The bark of a far-off dog came through the woods.
She came back to me and slid the piece of paper from the torn envelope. It was written in blue ink on a plain piece of printer’s paper. Over her shoulder, I read:
Against Nature Page 29
