Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  “Tall skinny guy? Ex-cop?”

  “Yeah.” Reiman nodded. “What a dick. He didn’t tell me he was retired, I only found that out when I talked to the real cops. They knew who he was, though. I was doing a Doctors Without Borders thing in Peru when it happened. And I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

  “You and her, you were happening, am I right?”

  “No. I mean, truthfully, I was trying like hell. I was happening but she wasn’t. How can I say this? I mean, you are her brother . . .”

  “Spit it out.”

  “You know how you always want what you can’t have? Melanie was the chick that no one could have. I mean, she’d go out with me, as long as I didn’t call it a date. If she could say that we were just hanging, you know, she’d be all right with it. Just, you know . . .”

  “Maybe she didn’t like you like that.”

  “No, she did.” His smile came and went like a strobe light. “I know she did. You ever date a nurse?”

  I thought about it for a moment. The answer was yes, I had, and the lady in question wasn’t hard to remember, but I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to talk about her. Still, Reiman was being pretty open . . . “Yeah. I guess. I don’t know if we were dating, exactly. It was in Bosnia.”

  “During the war?”

  “Shortly thereafter.”

  “What was she like?”

  Oh brother. “She knew what she wanted.”

  He pointed at me. “That’s it! That’s it. A lot of nurses are like that. They know what they want. Well, Mel was different. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know, it was . . . She didn’t want . . . She didn’t allow herself to want anything. She liked to keep everything contained. She kept her life small.” His hands described a small square box on the coffee shop table. “Nothing bigger than this. Nothing that scared her. Nothing that didn’t fit into her comfort zone.”

  “Must have been frustrating.”

  “You mean . . . Nah. It was fun. Mel was something else. And we were starting to get somewhere. I mean, I know I had a long way to go, but she was starting to trust me. She’d started to open up, just a little. Toward the end, I started getting a nicer vibe from her. I wanna say that we had a future, maybe.”

  The Melanie Reiman was telling me about didn’t sound much like the woman who’d gotten out of her depth trolling Manhattan’s night streets, like the one the ex-cop Josh Whelen described. “You sure? Maybe she hit from the other side of the plate.”

  Reiman shook his head. “Listen, I’m not so egotistical as to think that any woman who doesn’t want me must be a lesbian, but you know, no. She was coming out of her shell, but on her own time. You had to give her the space, and the time. And someone didn’t give her the time.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance it was an accident?”

  “Did you see the postmortem photographs?”

  All of a sudden Marcus Reiman looked old and tired. “No. And don’t tell me.”

  “I wasn’t going to. But it was no accident.”

  “Jesus Christ.” He turned away.

  I decided to shift gears. “Did she have any particularly close friends? Someone she may have confided in? Other than yourself.”

  “I’m not sure. The people she worked with, I suppose, to a certain extent, but even with them . . . Mel was easy to be friendly with, but hard to be friends with. She was so guarded it’s hard for me to believe she’d be too intimate with very many people, that’s not who she was. There was this one chick, though. Not a nurse. What the hell was her name? Strange bird. She lives downtown, just off Houston Street. I met her a couple of times. She was a lot like Melanie, only more so. She was so self-contained, so hermetic, she was so shut off from you that you never got even a clue about who she was. I always pictured her showering with her eyes closed so she wouldn’t catch a glimpse of herself naked. I think she’s Polish. Of Slavic extraction, anyhow. Loves her some baby Jesus. She’s like, a dog walker, poet, personal trainer, editorial assistant, blogger kind of a chick. You know what I mean? Like, vegan, PETA, fur is murder, gluten-free, nonviolent, sew a quilt for peace, like that’s going to make any goddamn difference.”

  “Melanie was like that?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, she was, but with Mel, behind the mask there was this other person, I’d get a quick look at her every now and then. But with Klaudia, that’s it, that’s her name, Klaudia. With her, I never got the impression that there was anyone inside there. Livatov, Klaudia Livatov. I don’t have her phone number but I know where she lives. Second Street, right off Houston. With Mel, I sort of knew I’d get to meet the real person someday but whoever Klaudia is, I never saw her. I don’t know if anyone ever did.”

  “So Melanie worked here at Beth Israel?”

  “Yeah. But she had some other things going on.”

  “Like what?”

  “One of her jobs, okay, she was working for the city. They had an outreach program, I don’t think it’s still running because the budget got cut, but they were trying to help the street girls. Health care, which is a nice thing to have even if you’re not a hooker, disease prevention, reproductive counseling, all of that. And that was Mel, if she thought you needed help she would really put herself out there.”

  “Socialism! I can see why they cut the program. So the prostitutes that showed up at her funeral, I guess that’s how she met them.”

  “Well, yeah, she got to know some of the girls. You know, who they were, where they were from. What they did. She once told me that she never wanted to do any of the things the girls did to their johns, which don’t leave a lot of unplowed ground, you know what I’m saying. She claimed that a lot of the girls had been forced into it. Which is true enough, I suppose. And the whole thing with oral sex, you know, how unhealthy it was for the girls, and so on, and so on. She would always be over the moon when she convinced one of them to get out of the life, you know, and go home or whatever. For a while, she had started to hate us.”

  “Us.”

  “Yeah. You, me, everyone with a pair.”

  “What did you do about that?”

  “What could I do? My strategy was time, which was how I knew I had it bad. I was thinking I would wait her out. Like I told you, she was coming around. Listen, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He considered his question for a moment. “When you were seeing that nurse in Bosnia, you were, what, like an MP or something? Do you know how to do this? Were you some kind of an investigator?”

  “No. You’re a doctor, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, somewhat cautiously.

  “What kind of doctor?”

  “A gas passer. Anesthesiologist.”

  “So you’re a specialist. Not a surgeon.”

  “No.”

  “But you could do it, if you had to. Set a broken leg, maybe. Something like that.”

  “I been around. Where you going with this?”

  “I’m a specialist. I’m not an investigator, and I’m not a shooter, but I been around. My theory is, whoever did this, they were probably breathing a little easier up until a couple days ago. I wonder what they’re gonna do when they start hearing footsteps behind them. You know what I mean? Just when they thought they’d gotten away with it. If they’re human at all, they gotta wonder, once in a while, when the shoe is gonna drop. Maybe they’ll react, maybe we’ll see something. Maybe their karma catches up with them.”

  “Yeah, karma. Maybe.” Reiman looked out the window for a while. “You know something, it would be nice if that were true. Like the guy in Crime and Punishment, right? In the end it was his own belief system that got him. Always thought that ending was a fucking copout. I have a neurologist buddy who says that religion and superstition are essentially the same thing, they’re both a product of the mapping function of the human mind. Trying to make sense out of things. Impose some kind of order on a random universe.”

  “I was thinking m
ore along the lines of, nobody wants to go to jail, everybody wants to get away with whatever shit they’re doing. I wanna make the guy nervous, I wanna bait him into doing something rash. Smoke him out.”

  “Okay. Yeah. I hear you. Serious question,” he said. “How can I help?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But I have your phone number. I’ll let you know.”

  I wondered what to do about Klaudia Livatov. Two people had brought up her name, Branch and Reiman, and from what they both said, it seemed to me that Livatov was the kind of person who would take one look at a guy like me and run away, either run or shut down like a snail, pull up into her shell and slam the door shut behind her. I know myself well enough to know that I’m not very good with that kind of fear, but I could picture Reiman sitting down with her, holding her hand, telling her that he knew how much pain she was in but that she needed to be brave for Melanie’s sake, she would have done it for us . . . Yeah, Reiman would do a much better job of that than I ever would, I should leave her to him, plus, since she already knew the guy, she might be more comfortable with him. But I decided to go by and ring her bell first.

  Houston Street is like the Colorado River, it chokes before it ever reaches the sea, strangled by the needs of men. It starts out strong on Manhattan’s East Side, it flows west toward the Hudson, but it dies in the middle of a desert of concrete and steel, leaves you standing there wondering what the hell happened.

  The building where Livatov lived was steps off the eastern end of Houston; it was a tenement not too unlike all the other tenements, three broken slate steps took you up to the ancient, paint-crusted outer doors. In the entryway there were rows of aluminum mailboxes; each had an ivory-colored button on it whereby you could harass the occupant of the mailbox’s corresponding apartment. I leaned on the one marked Livatov and waited.

  Nothing.

  Maybe she’s not home, I thought. Maybe she’s hiding . . .

  Out in the street, I heard someone yelling.

  I pictured her up there, a bookish sort of woman wearing clogs, glasses, and a too-large-for-her denim dress, afraid to answer the bell. I leaned on the bell again, but that time I heard her.

  “Hey asshole! HEY! Who’s ringing the goddamn bell?!”

  Maybe I had the wrong Livatov.

  I went back out on the sidewalk and looked up, saw blond hair obscuring the face that leaned out of a window and looked down at me from several floors up. “Klaudia Livatov?” I said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Melanie Wing.”

  The blond hair disappeared, but a moment later a key floated down through the air, a piece of bright green yarn fluttering behind it like the tail on a kite.

  This was not the Klaudia Livatov that Reiman and Branch told me about. Must be a cousin, or maybe a roommate.

  I caught the key and went up.

  She wasn’t waiting behind a chained door, like I’d expected, her door was wide open and she stood halfway out into the hall staring at me. I had the sudden feeling that someone had left the tiger’s cage open. I was immediately hyperaware of everything about her. I could hear the sound of her breathing, I could see her taut musculature, and there was no fear in her face as she shook her blond hair back over her shoulder. This was not the Klaudia Livatov they’d been telling me about. This was no mouse . . .

  I dropped the key in her hand.

  “Who are you,” she said.

  My cover had started to sound stale, at least to me, but I repeated it all over again. A half sister, my only sibling, dead before I’d ever known she existed . . . I could not tell from her face whether she bought it or not. “Come inside,” she said. My pulse seemed, all of a sudden, quicker than it ought to be, and I felt too warm, like I should lose the sweater, except I wasn’t wearing one. And whatever it was that I had glimpsed looking at me, however briefly, out of Frank Porter’s mother’s eyes, and later, through the eyes of those other women, Livatov had it in its raw, undiluted state; something or someone inside of her stared out, straight down into me, I could feel it. “You coming in or what?”

  It was a small apartment, even by New York standards. A couch that looked like it doubled as a bed, a canvas rug on the floor, movie posters on the walls, a small glass-topped table with two chairs, a phone booth–sized kitchen, and in the corner by the window, a rickety little wooden table, the top of it maybe a foot square, adorned by a lace doily. On top of the doily rested a statue of some sainted woman, I assumed it was the Virgin Mary. The statue was about eighteen inches tall, she had a semicircle of burnt tea candles at her feet, and an unopened half pint of rum. Myers’s Dark. Who drinks half pints, I wondered. A half pint ain’t nothing but a tease. The table and everything on it looked like a relic left over from a previous administration, it didn’t fit the Klaudia Livatov that I was seeing. Maybe if she’d been fifty years older . . .

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  I chose one of the chairs next to her table, felt it creak and strain as it took my weight. “You’re not what I expected,” I told her.

  She sat down across from me. “I know, I know.” She tossed her hair back again. She could not sit still, she did not so much sit in the chair, she occupied it, she pushed its limits, the thing could not have been engineered to cope with so much . . . what? Energy? Emotion? I wasn’t sure. She had a vaguely Eastern European face; I looked at it in profile as she turned and looked over her shoulder at her tiny kitchen. “But after Melanie died, I got pissed off and now I can’t seem to shake it.”

  “Why?”

  She whirled back to glare at me, her left forefinger pointing at my face. “Because she was a fucking person! She was a human being! She wasn’t just some cat you could strangle and throw in the river just because you didn’t want her anymore! She had never even . . .” She paused a second, lowered her arm, then went on in a calmer tone. “. . . done anything yet. Listen, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be yelling at you. Jesus. I was going to offer you something to drink.”

  “I’m good,” I told her.

  “I’m not.” It took her two steps to reach the kitchen. She reached into a cupboard, pulled out a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Red and two chipped white coffee cups. She turned and caught me admiring her ass but she didn’t react to it. She hefted the bottle. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, no, I would rather have water.” She poured whiskey into one, water in another, then brought them back and reoccupied her chair. “Thanks,” I told her. “You don’t look old enough to drink.”

  “Chronologically I’m twenty-six,” she said. “But lately I been feeling like I’m about ten thousand and twenty-six.”

  I could believe it. In fact I could hardly credit the stories I’d heard of that other, earlier Klaudia. In contemporary America it seemed that the ingredient list for the ideal woman generally included silicone, anorexia, and a Barbie doll face, no matter how you got it. Klaudia was oh for three and didn’t seem to give a shit. “Tell me how you came to this, Saul. Or how Melanie’s story came to you.”

  A bit more of the truth, then. “One of my mother’s exes looked me up.” I told her about McClendon, about the beach where he found me, and about what the man told me he wanted, and about his list of targets. Klaudia was nodding before I was halfway through. McClendon’s assumption that one of his victims had been the murderer seemed to rub her the wrong way.

  “Men,” she said, after I was done. She got up out of her chair and stalked away to stand by the window. “The guy’s daughter is murdered and he automatically assumes it’s all about him, not her. It wasn’t her life, it didn’t happen because of what she was, it was only because of something he’d done. Someone he’d screwed, and they killed her to get back at him.”

  “In your story,” I asked her, “aren’t you the hero?”

  “Point taken,” she said. “Regardless. Some son of a bitch killed Melanie. And that’s awful enough, all by i
tself, but when I think about what he might have done to her first, when I think about what her final hours might have been like, it makes me want to scream. And if it wasn’t even about her, if it was all just because of some dickhead she never even met . . .”

  Stop staring at her ass, I told myself, and I hitched my chair around so I could see the religious statue she kept in the corner. “How do you know it was a man?”

  “Isn’t it always?” she said. “The real question is, can you find out who it was? And what are you gonna do about him if you do?”

  I realized that she wasn’t looking out the window at all, she was looking at my reflection in the glass. Our eyes met, and I felt her gauging my interest, but rather than act insulted, she looked like she’d merely coded the information and filed it away for reference. “There’s a chance,” I told her. “It really depends on how our guy plays his hand. If he’s smart enough to lay low and do nothing, he’ll be hard to catch. But whoever he is, he already heard my name, and he already put some of his people on my tail. So he already made one mistake. I’m thinking he’ll make another one sooner or later. That’ll be my best shot.”

  She turned around, leaned her butt on the window sill, and crossed her arms on her chest. She nodded at the statue. “Admiring the goddess?”

  “Goddess? I had assumed that she was the Virgin Mary.”

  “Did I say goddess? Sorry. No, that’s Our Lady of Charity. I don’t know if history is clear on her sexual experience, or lack thereof. She bothering you? You could turn her around if you want. Or I could put her away in a closet.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that would be a good idea. Back to McClendon’s list of offended parties, okay? Let me tell you how good McClendon was. I would bet that all or most of those guys still like McClendon, and even though they lost money on him, they probably all think they came up just short on one of the greatest business opportunities they ever had. And if he called them up tomorrow with some wild-ass scheme, I’m guessing most of them would at least think about going in on it.”