Flesh and Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  His desk sat at the back of the room, gunmetal gray and solid as a monument. Several manila folders were scattered over it, and for a time he busied himself going through them. They were the files on cases he’d completed and for each of them he calculated the remainder of his fee, then typed up a letter asking for payment. The money usually came in full and without complaint a few days later, each check in its own monogrammed envelope. Sometimes there was even a polite little thank-you note on embossed stationery. During all the time he’d been a homicide detective in Atlanta, he’d never received a formal thank-you note from anyone. But from time to time, he remembered now, after he’d finally tracked down and convicted the one who’d killed a mother or husband or child, after all the evidence had been presented and all the appeals exhausted, someone would walk slowly up to him in the corridor outside the courtroom and without a single word draw him into a grateful embrace. At such moments the world had seemed to open up, and he’d been able to know with an absolute certainty that he had done something good.

  The phone rang as he was putting the last of the folders into the green metal filing cabinet behind his desk.

  He picked it up immediately. “Frank Clemons,” he said.

  “Frank?”

  “Hello, Sheila.”

  There was a moment of silence, and Frank could tell that she was trying to keep herself together.

  “This is always the hardest time for me,” she said finally.

  “I know.”

  “You, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “She would have been twenty yesterday, Frank.”

  “I know.”

  “I went out to her grave. I took some flowers.”

  They had buried her in a small cemetery outside Atlanta, his daughter, Sarah, who, at sixteen, had walked off into the woods along the Chattahoochee River late one summer afternoon and swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills.

  “Twenty, Frank,” Sheila repeated.

  “Yes.”

  Sheila started to say something else, but broke it off.

  Frank could hear her crying softly from a thousand miles away.

  “Are you in Atlanta now?” he asked after a moment.

  Sheila cleared her throat gently. “Yes. I just came over for a couple of days.”

  “Still living with your father?”

  “No. I got a small apartment near the courthouse. I finished stenography school. I have a job.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m glad I left Atlanta. It was never right for me.”

  She’d moved back to their hometown in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama, and sometimes Frank imagined her still young and restless among their speckled granite cliffs and narrow twisting streams.

  “I’m glad you moved back, Sheila,” he said.

  “I’m a country girl, I guess,” Sheila said with a small, painful laugh. “I can’t believe you live in New York City now.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Are you happy there?” Sheila asked tentatively.

  “You know me, Sheila.”

  “I’ll never get over it, Frank.”

  “No one ever does.”

  “But this week, it was worse than it’s ever been.”

  Frank shook his head in the dense gray air of his office. “There’s nothing to do about it.”

  “But go on living.”

  “Nothing else, Sheila,” Frank told her. He didn’t know what she wanted from him, only that she wasn’t getting it. It seemed best not to string it out. “Well, say hello to your father for me,” he said.

  “He doesn’t let me talk about you, Frank,” Sheila said flatly. “He doesn’t let me mention your name.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, you know how fathers are.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  There was a long pause. He could hear her breathing, almost feel her breath in his hair.

  “I have to go now, Sheila,” he said finally.

  “All right,” Sheila said, “I’m sorry. I just wanted to …”

  “I know.”

  “It’s the one thing we’ll always have together, Frank.”

  “Yes,” Frank said as he hung up, but he wondered what else could be said of two people who had nothing left in common but their grief.

  The old woman was still curled up in her swirl of ragged clothes when Frank left his office a few minutes later. Her shoulders twitched painfully as he stepped over her and moved up onto the street.

  It was nearly eight in the morning, and the construction site across the street was already spewing out a deafening noise. Huge cranes lifted tons of steel girders from the trucks that lined the street, their diesel engines roaring steadily over the normal din of traffic and street cries. Within two years it would be completed, and a huge luxury condominium would rise over the squat brick tenements which now surrounded it. It would tower over everything, transform dilapidated candy stores into chic boutiques, festoon the adjoining streets with fancy restaurants and gourmet bakeries, line the sidewalks with limousines from Ninth Avenue to Broadway. From their littered stoops, the people of the old neighborhood watched in dismay as the colossus approached them. In a little while they would all be gone, swept away like driftwood before a tidal wave.

  The sidewalk along 49th Street was decked with battered metal cans and huge black garbage bags, and like everyone else, Frank had to walk down a narrow stretch of walkway to keep from wading into them. Some had already been cut open and rifled during the night by people looking for the beer and soda cans they could redeem at the local food stores for five cents apiece, and because of that, waves of soiled paper and rotten vegetables sometimes swept all the way to the gutter. Each morning the street looked the same, and every time he walked along it, Frank remembered the sedate, tree-lined neighborhoods of Atlanta, remembered their gently swaying dogwoods, and wondered why—compared to this—he could not stand them.

  At the corner of Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, Frank stepped into a small deli, took a table in the back and ordered a cup of coffee. Across the street he could see the local liquor store, its windows crowded with bottles, and he felt the old hunger again, as he always did in the early morning. To keep it down, he glanced to the left, trying to focus his attention on something besides his need. Two men were sitting at a small table, one gray and somewhat chubby, the other young and very thin.

  “You think I don’t know, Paulie?” the older man asked resentfully. “Huh? You think I don’t know where it went?”

  The young man said nothing. He had a long ponytail of light brown hair and it swayed rhythmically across his back as he shook his head.

  “I’ll tell you where the fuck it went,” the older man cried. “Up your fucking nose, that’s where my goddamn money went.”

  The young man remained silent, his eyes averted, staring at the small glass of tomato juice that rested on the table in front of him.

  “What happens to you is your business, Paulie,” the old man said. “But nobody takes me down with them, you understand?”

  The young man nodded slowly, but did not look up.

  The older man took a deep breath, as if to calm himself, and when he spoke again, most of the anger had left his voice.

  “Paulie,” he said, almost pleading. “Paulie, you got to be so fast to keep out of the shit, you can’t believe it. You can’t believe it, Paulie. Christ, you stop a second, it fucking buries you.”

  A few minutes later, Frank walked back out onto the street. The noise swept over him. hard, thundering, and for an instant he thought of the dogwoods again, so white and pink in the Atlanta spring. Nothing in his life had ever seemed more false.

  For a while, he walked aimlessly along the avenue, glancing into the shop windows or watching the people as they lounged about or walked hurriedly by. He wanted to begin something, but he did not know what, and it struck him that he had already lived too long in a state of helpless waiting. He didn’t know what he’d been waiting f
or, but only that when it came, it would be wrapped in something else, that he wouldn’t recognize it until, like a hand in the dark, it suddenly gripped him from behind.

  It was after ten by the time he headed back down 49th Street toward his office. The garbage cans had been emptied by then, and the swollen black bags were gone. The old lady who slept at the foot of the stairs wasn’t there anymore, either.

  But Imalia Covallo was.

  3

  She was standing stiffly against the brick wall at the bottom of the stairs, and if it hadn’t been for the pale white skin and luminous black eyes, Frank would not have recognized her. The sleek velvet dress of the night before had been replaced by a long denim skirt and matching jacket. Her hair was no longer pulled tightly along the sides of her head and gathered in a small bun at the back of her neck, but fell loosely across her shoulders. The pearl necklace was gone, along with the gold bracelets, and Frank could not help but notice that she looked better without them, less the figment of someone else’s imagination.

  “Good morning,” she said quietly. “I took your advice, I looked you up in the book.” She noticed the faintly puzzled look in his eyes. “My street clothes,” she explained. Then she smiled tentatively. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

  “You were at the party last night,” Frank said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Imalia Covallo.”

  Frank said nothing.

  She looked at him with an odd, almost childlike, innocence, and despite the fact that she was over forty, he thought instantly of his daughter, Sarah, of that bewildered look she’d often had as she gazed silently out the front window.

  “I suppose I look as if I’m in disguise,” Imalia said, then looked at him so strangely that for a moment Frank suspected she was precisely that, a creature hid beneath another face.

  “Well, not exactly in disguise,” Imalia added quickly. She glanced toward the narrow corridor that led to his office. “This is where you work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most people get to work at nine,” she told him in a voice that was gently scolding, yet straining to be light, playful, to warm the air around them.

  Frank said nothing.

  “It’s not exactly the high-rent district, is it?” she added. “For a moment I thought I must have gotten the address wrong. You know, with your living with Karen, I thought …” She stopped, as if against the wall of her own awkwardness. Her eyes darted downward quickly, then back up to him. “I didn’t mean to suggest that …”

  “Are you here on business?” Frank asked crisply.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I am,” Imalia said, now suddenly very formal. “Last night, at Karen’s, Zack mentioned that you were a private investigator.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I think that’s what I need.”

  Frank stepped around her and headed toward his desk. “Okay,” he said. “Come in.”

  The air inside the office was still faintly musty, and Imalia sniffed at it uncomfortably as she closed the door behind her.

  “Have you been here long?” she asked after a moment.

  “A few months.”

  “And before that, you were a policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  She glanced silently about the room, and from the look in her eyes, Frank couldn’t tell whether she approved or not, but only that some final judgment was being made.

  After a moment, she looked back at him. “It looks like a place where a secret would be safe,” she said.

  Frank sat down behind his desk and lit a cigarette. “What can I do for you, Miss Covallo?” he asked.

  Imalia slipped into the rickety wooden chair which rested a few feet from Frank’s desk. “I don’t exactly know where to begin,” she said. “It was such a shock.” She nodded toward the half-empty pack of cigarettes on Frank’s desk. “May I have one?” she asked.

  Frank slid the pack over to her.

  Imalia lit the cigarette, then sat back slightly in her seat. “Obviously, I’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

  “What is it, exactly?” Frank asked immediately.

  Once again, Imalia seemed to hesitate slightly, as if she could not get to the words she needed.

  “Well,” she said finally, “I suppose you could say that it’s about murder.” Suddenly, a high, trembling laugh broke from her. “Sorry, sorry,” she said quickly as she broke it off. “It’s an odd problem I have, nervous laughter.” She shook her head angrily. “I hate it. It makes me look like a hysteric.”

  Frank leaned toward her slightly. “Who was murdered, Miss Covallo?”

  “A woman,” Imalia told him. “A woman named Karlsberg, Hannah Karlsberg.”

  “A relative?”

  “No. An employee.”

  Frank took out a small green notebook, flipped to the first page and wrote Hannah Karlsberg’s name at the top. “When did this happen?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Here in New York,” Imalia said. “Seventy-sixth Street. You may have read about it. It was in the Post, but I don’t think it made the Times.”

  “What was the address?”

  “Three fifty-seven Central Park West.”

  “Do you know the time?”

  “Early in the morning,” Imalia said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  “And you said she was an employee of yours,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do?” Frank asked.

  Imalia smiled quietly. “You don’t know?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “I’m a designer,” Imalia explained. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but, the truth is, I’m very well known. …”

  “What do you design?”

  “Clothes. Very fine clothes.”

  Frank wrote it down. “And what did Miss Karlsberg do for you?”

  “She worked for me in several different ways,” Imalia said. “She’d been doing it for many years.” She took a long draw on the cigarette, then blew a thin column of smoke into the air. “Many years,” she repeated, her eyes darting to the left. “There’s no calendar on your wall. Don’t you need a calendar?”

  “How many years?” Frank asked.

  Imalia hesitated slightly. “Does that matter?”

  “I like to know as much as I can,” Frank explained.

  Suddenly Imalia looked reassured. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” She took another long draw on the cigarette. “Hannah was a very valuable employee. She had worked for me for over twenty years.”

  “As what?”

  “First as a seamstress, then, later, as a floor manager. For the last ten years she’d been my most important assistant.”

  Frank wrote it down quickly, then looked back up at Imalia. “This next question may seem a little strange, but it’s important.”

  Imalia stiffened slightly, as if bracing herself against it.

  “Is there any doubt that it was a homicide?” Frank asked. “I mean, could she have killed herself, something like that?”

  “Hannah was slashed to death, Mr. Clemons,” Imalia said darkly. “She didn’t do that to herself.”

  Suddenly, Frank felt his fingers squeezing more tightly around the pen, felt its point bearing down more firmly on the page as his energy began to flow through it, building steadily with each passing second, the way it always did when suddenly, from out of nowhere, something mattered.

  “Then the police have been looking into it,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  “Have they talked to you?”

  “Yes, several times.”

  “About what?”

  “Just if I knew anything about Hannah,” Imalia said. “Which I really didn’t. She kept to herself. That’s just the way she was.”

  “Do you have any idea about what the police think?”

  “None whatsoever,” Imalia said. “I guess they’re a little like Hannah. They k
eep things to themselves.”

  “But have they told you anything at all about their investigation?”

  “Only that nothing was missing from Hannah’s apartment.”

  “Did she have anything worth stealing?” Frank said. “Not everybody does.”

  “Well, she had jewelry,” Imalia said. “And I don’t mean the sort of junk you buy at Woolworth’s. Her jewelry box was open, but nothing had been taken.”

  “How about a safe?”

  “The police didn’t mention it. I don’t think she had one.”

  Frank took a map of New York City and spread it out across his desk. It was a police sector map, and it indicated that Hannah’s address was in the Midtown North Precinct. “Do you know who’s in charge of the case?” he asked.

  “Quite a few policemen came marching through my office,” Imalia said. “They have a way of all looking the same.” She smiled. “It’s those polyester jackets.” Then the smile vanished, her face softened, and her voice took on a gentle, apologetic quality. “I don’t mean to be snide, I really don’t. It’s just that Hannah was very loyal to me, and I want her to have a decent burial.”

  “Burial?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not been buried?” Frank asked unbelievingly.

  “No,” Imalia said. “And that’s why I’ve come to you.”

  Frank looked at her, puzzled.

  “The police won’t release the body until a relative claims it,” Imalia explained.

  “Did Miss Karlsberg have any relatives?”

  “I don’t know,” Imalia told him. “That’s what I want you to find out.” She shifted uneasily in her chair. “She mentioned a sister once. Maybe she had a sister. I don’t know.”

  Frank wrote it down, then glanced back up at Imalia. “Do you have any idea why the police are trying to hold on to the body?”

  “No.”

  “Have you asked them to release it?”

  “Yes, of course. Right away.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “That for now, they required a relative,” Imalia said. “Otherwise, they won’t release it.”

  “Who’s in charge of the case?”

  “A man named Tannenbaum, I think,” Imalia said. “At least he’s the one I’ve spoken to a few times.” She looked suddenly puzzled. “They wanted to know if Hannah had any enemies at work, things like that. They wanted to know what she did at work, who she knew at work. That’s what Mr. Tannenbaum was always asking about.”