Flesh and Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  Wearily, he read what the police department had been able to gather on Kincaid during the last fifteen hours. They had traced his life in its broad details, his birth in California, his ordination as a Catholic priest, his service in South America, and his final residence in the remote, jungle outpost of San Jorge. It was there that he’d lived until 1954, the year Pérez was murdered. For the next few years, he’d wandered about South America, working as a teacher in the slums of Lima, Bogotá and Santiago. He had returned to what was left of San Jorge in 1968, stayed for a few months, then begun what appeared to be a long, meandering journey back to the United States, drifting up the jagged coast of Central America, living for a while in Mexico City and Monterrey, then finally crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo in 1981. During the following years he’d continued to follow the coast along the Gulf of Mexico and then northward, with short stays in Savannah, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and finally New York. He had worked in all these places, always as a teacher, always in the slums. In New York, now an old man, he had finally retired.

  Frank folded the paper, then went through the others, an autopsy, an inventory of Kincaid’s possessions, such as they were, a statement by the Haitian superintendent and a few of his neighbors which traced his general movements, habits, and character traits. It was all routine, and he’d seen such papers hundreds of times in the past. Still, he resisted the impulse to return them to the envelope, seal it, and drop it into one of his file drawers. And so, for a long time, they remained scattered across his desk while his mind wandered about as if detached in some odd way, and yet profoundly engaged by the lingering mood of Hannah’s death, and Gilda’s, the brown bodies by the river, Kincaid with his head held back, offering his throat to the whirling blade. He could hear Farouk’s body as it plunged down the stairs, feel the warmth of Kincaid’s blood as it soaked through the shirt which still hung from the chair across the room.

  He stood up, walked over to the shirt and picked it up. For a moment, he glanced about, looking for some place to put it, a paper bag, a plastic can, and then, suddenly, he heard a voice in the gray air: This is a man who saves things. He draped the bloody shirt over the chair, walked to his desk and sat, staring back at it until the dark red stains seemed to write their own insistent message in his mind.

  It was nearly noon when Farouk came into the office. “Are you all right?” he asked as he sat down on the small sofa by the window and drew out a cigarette.

  “I’m okay,” Frank said. He returned his eyes to the scattering of documents and reports, which still lay strewn across his desk.

  “It is difficult,” Farouk said in a voice that was low, considered, oddly mournful, as if something besides justice had been served by Kincaid’s death, a malicious appetite for the sorrowful and ironic. “There was some goodness in this man’s heart.”

  “Yes, there was.”

  “Until he came back here.”

  “To New York, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he came back to kill Hannah?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Frank admitted. “But if he did, how did he know to come to New York in the first place?”

  Farouk shrugged.

  “And once he got to New York,” Frank went on, “how did he find her?”

  Farouk stared at Frank evenly. “I don’t know.”

  “According to the interviews the police have done,” Frank said, “Kincaid went from his apartment to that settlement house every day. He stayed there for several hours, then he went back home. That was his day. That was all he did.”

  Farouk said nothing.

  “And another thing,” Frank added. “Kincaid had been in New York for several months. He lived in a Queens apartment for a while, then moved to Brooklyn. That’s when he started showing up at the settlement house.”

  Farouk nodded.

  “Why did it take him so long to kill her?” Frank asked emphatically.

  “I do not know,” Farouk said.

  Frank’s eyes bored into him. “Do you remember what your friend at the police department said? About Hannah’s husband, I mean?”

  Farouk nodded slowly. “That it was too old a trail for a crime of such hot blood.”

  “What if he was right?”

  Farouk remained silent, but Frank could see a slowly building intensity in his eyes.

  “And something else,” Frank added. “When we were in his apartment, you looked all around and then you said that whoever lived here was a man who saved things.”

  “That is true,” Farouk said.

  “Where is Hannah’s hand?” Frank asked. He nodded toward the police inventory of Kincaid’s apartment. “He had bones in his place, teeth, plants and seeds. He had a bloodstained cloth, and old pots. Stalks of something, dirt from places.”

  “But no hand,” Farouk said.

  “No, there was a hand,” Frank said. “Look at this.” He handed him the police inventory. “Tannenbaum brought it over. It’s a list of everything that was found in Kincaid’s apartment.”

  Farouk’s eyes drifted down the column until it struck the single item Frank had already marked in red.

  “The hand,” Farouk whispered.

  “A human hand,” Frank added. “That’s right. But it isn’t Hannah’s. It’s too old. It must have once been attached to Emilio Pérez.”

  “Pérez,” Farouk repeated as his eyes settled firmly on the paper Frank had handed to him.

  “Kincaid cut off Pérez’s hand when he killed him years ago.”

  “And saved it all these years,” Farouk added.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “But there was only one hand. Not two.” He waited a moment, then drew the paper slowly from Farouk’s fingers. “There’s no more money in this case, Farouk,” he told him softly. “Not a dime. I can tell you that.”

  A strange smile broke over Farouk’s dark face. “That is the odd thing about money,” he said.

  “What?”

  The smile dissolved. “That it’s what you always take in the place of what you need.”

  29

  The Brandon Street Settlement House was a large wooden building which rested on a run-down street in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. It had been freshly painted, and because of that, it looked considerably less dilapidated than the much smaller row houses which surrounded it.

  “It was here when I was a child.” Farouk told Frank as they walked up the stairs together. “It was here that I learned English.”

  “It’s the only place we can begin,” Frank said matter-of-factly as he headed up the stairs, opened one of the large double doors and walked in.

  The building seemed almost entirely deserted, and for a moment the two of them stood alone in the empty lobby. Large portraits of Brandon Street Settlement’s past benefactors hung from the recently painted walls, and small rectangular bronze plates identified some of them as having been members of New York’s most prestigious families.

  “It was always a favorite charity,” Farouk said as he stared about. “They were always coming around, the people who gave the money.” He smiled. “They came in big black cars, and the people on the steps, the immigrants, they would think that someday they would have such cars, too.”

  “What went on here?” Frank asked.

  “It was a place to help foreigners,” Farouk answered. “Help them to adjust, you might say, to the new country.”

  “Adjust how?”

  “To the place, to what was required,” Farouk said. “To learn English, so you could get a job.”

  Frank nodded silently while his eyes glanced about the empty lobby. “Was it usually this deserted?”

  Farouk laughed. “No. It was full of life. We were always having parties, festivals. People wore their old clothes, the ones from their native countries. There was music. There was dancing.” A bright, playful light filled his eyes. “It was a good place. People gave assistance.” He paused a moment, his eyes glanc
ing about the silent lobby. His lips parted, and he started to go on. But suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of footsteps, and both Frank and Farouk glanced quickly to the left, and saw a group of men and women heading toward them from the end of the corridor.

  “Arriba,” someone said harshly from the end of the line. “Vamos.”

  The men and women moved on down the corridor, their heads slightly bowed, their brown faces vacant, silent, unquestioning. They carried battered suitcases or simple cloth bundles, and they speeded up noticeably each time the voice cried out from behind them.

  Frank stepped to one side of the corridor and Farouk to the other, so that the line of people passed between them, then moved on to the rear of the building and disappeared behind a set of heavy metal doors.

  “What can I do for you?” someone asked suddenly.

  Frank turned back toward the corridor and saw a muscular man in jeans and a light blue sweatshirt.

  “We’re just closing down,” the man said.

  “Closing down?”

  “The settlement house,” the man explained. “It’s being closed down.” He gave Frank a quick glance, then allowed his eyes to settle on Farouk. “Are you the new owner?”

  “No,” Farouk told him.

  “I thought, with all the Arabs in the neighborhood …”

  “We don’t have anything to do with this settlement house,” Frank said. He took out his identification.

  The man gave it a perfunctory glance, then looked up. “What do you want?”

  “You know a man named Kincaid?” Frank asked. “Benjamin Kincaid?”

  “Yeah, he’s the old guy who offed himself, right?”

  “Yes,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, I knew him a little,” the man said. “But I’ve already told the police everything I knew about him.” He shrugged. “Which wasn’t much. The guy was creepy. He didn’t say much, except to the campesinos.”

  Frank took out his notebook. “What did you tell the police?” he asked immediately.

  “That he did some sort of teaching around here. He’d come in and hang out with the people from the neighborhood, teach them stuff.”

  “Like what?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “There’s a school set up downstairs. It’s got desks and stuff. It’s for some of the neighborhood kids.”

  “Just kids?” Farouk asked as he stepped to Frank’s side. “What about the people who just went by? Did he teach them?”

  “No, he didn’t,” the man said. “That’s not allowed. Those people are more or less boarding here. School’s not for them.”

  “You mean they live here?” Frank asked. “Those people?”

  “That’s right,” the man said. “Until they get shipped out.”

  “Shipped out?”

  “Back to where they came from.”

  “They’re illegals?” Frank asked.

  The man laughed. “No, of course not. We don’t deal with illegals. We don’t want the trouble. These people are on six-month visas. They need a place to stay for just that long. Then they head back to wherever they came from.” He nodded toward the rear doors. “That bunch is heading back now.”

  Farouk smiled thinly. “Heading back. How are they heading back?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

  Farouk said nothing, and after a moment, the man turned his attention back to Frank. “You looking for anything in particular about this Kincaid guy?”

  “We’re just looking into what he did here at the settlement,” Frank said.

  “Well, nothing illegal, I can tell you that,” the man said earnestly. He shifted slightly on his feet. “I mean, Brandon Street Settlement’s been around since the turn of the century.”

  “But in the past, it was not a boarding house,” Farouk told him.

  “No,” the man said, “but that just means it’s changed with the times.”

  “How has it changed?” Farouk asked insistently.

  “Well, in some ways it’s still like it was in the old days,” the man said. “At least, as far as the teaching goes.”

  “But in other ways it’s like a hotel?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah. Except there’s no charge,” the man said. He laughed slightly. “I mean, these people, the ones you just saw, they couldn’t afford a hotel.”

  Frank wrote it down.

  “You want to look around?” the man asked brightly. “Go ahead. It’s not the Waldorf. But then, for these people, it’s free.” He smiled politely. “So go ahead, check it out. Just don’t steal anything.” He nodded quickly, turned on his heels and headed off down the corridor.

  A moment later, two vans, both of them filled with the people who’d marched down the corridor, rumbled out of the driveway, turned right, and barreled down Brandon Street.

  Frank’s eyes slid over to Farouk. “What do you think?”

  Farouk shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Frank looked at the single flight of stairs that led up to the second floor. “Wouldn’t hurt to look around, would it?”

  “I don’t think it would hurt, no.”

  Together they moved up the stairs to the second floor. Like the rest of the building, it appeared entirely deserted. Small rooms lined both sides of the hallway, each with its own bed, desk and water basin. A small plaster image of the Virgin Mary sat on the window sill of each room, along with two votive candles and a plain white doily.

  “It looks just fine,” Frank said.

  Farouk nodded quickly. “We should look downstairs as well.”

  The two of them headed down the wide staircase which led back to the lobby, then moved on down the more narrow one which led to the basement.

  A large room had been set up with desks and a blackboard.

  “This is where Kincaid taught,” Farouk said as he stared at the fews words which had been written in yellow chalk across the board. Someone had tried to erase them, but they could still be seen faintly against the black background of the board. Two columns, one in Spanish, one in English, of three words each, both columns under the heading: Palabras importantes.

  “Important words,” Farouk said quietly. Then he read them. “Verdad. Truth. Libertad. Freedom Justicia. Justice.” For a moment, his eyes lingered on the board, following the words once again, staring at them intently, as if trying to discover some elusive richness in their meaning. Finally, he gave up, and turned from the board, his eyes shifting over to Frank. “What do you say of one who writes such things?” he asked.

  Frank shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.” He looked around silently. “It looks fine here. Clean. Very nice.”

  Farouk did not seem convinced. “In the day, perhaps,” he said. Then he smiled knowingly. “But the true detective watches through the night.”

  It was almost night when they got back to 49th Street, and by that time the army of flannel-shirted construction workers who lounged along the street had been replaced by knots of teenagers, homeward-bound pedestrians and a few well-dressed suburbanites who rushed nervously toward the distant, glittering lights of the theater district.

  “Well, we didn’t find much,” Frank said, as he opened the door of his office, then stepped aside and let Farouk pass into it.

  Farouk nodded. “No, we didn’t.”

  Frank turned on the light, walked to his desk and pulled out the bottle of Irish. “Want one?”

  “Yes,” Farouk said without hesitation. He lowered himself into the chair opposite Frank’s desk. “It is an odd thing, memory,” he said. “I remember the settlement house as such a big place. Big rooms. Big windows. This is the way a child sees everything.”

  Frank poured two drinks, and handed one of them to Farouk.

  The two drank quickly, without a toast, then Frank poured each of them a second.

  “We’re at a dead end, Farouk,” he said as he lifted his glass to him.

  Farouk nodded slowly. “Yes, we are.”

  “Maybe
it’s all been solved,” Frank added. “The whole thing.”

  “Perhaps,” Farouk said. “But there is the matter of the hand.”

  “Maybe Kincaid was through collecting things,” Frank told him.

  “But all his life, such a single-minded man,” Farouk said. He took a quick sip from the glass. “Does such a person change, do you think?”

  “It’s possible,” Frank said. He took out his notebook, turned it to the notes he’d written while talking to Kincaid, and began to scan them casually. In his mind, he could see the room where he’d written them, its windows covered with tattered native quilts. He could smell the dusty, pungent odor of foreign herbs and hear the crackle of drying stalks and leaves as he’d gotten to his feet and watched the strange, bent figure open the door, then close it, then light the single candle on the table by the door.

  “I tried to get everything down,” Frank said.

  Farouk’s eyes lifted toward him from the rim of his glass. He did not speak.

  Frank continued to look through his notes, his eyes moving methodically from one line to the next. “He said that Hannah was a serpent in the garden,” he said. “That she’d brought in a lot of money and made a place to find—”

  “To find the jungle magic,” Farouk said. “Yes, I remember that.” He shook his head. “It would make the world beautiful, this drug, the one she’d found.”

  “And then, later, she’d brought in a man to make it.”

  Farouk nodded thoughtfully. “Pérez,” he said.

  “And to bring the people in,” Frank concluded.

  “A man to bring the people into the factory, or whatever it was,” Farouk concluded.

  “Then we talked about Pérez, and Kincaid admitted killing him,” Frank went on, his eyes still fixed on his own tiny script.

  “Then his death,” Farouk said. “Kincaid’s.”

  Frank nodded. “Yes.” He finished his drink and lit a cigarette.

  Farouk did the same, and for a few minutes, the two of them sat in the smoky silence, each going back through all he remembered of the case.

  “I think Hannah was into something,” Frank said finally. “I think this whole business with clothes was a front for something else.”