Hurt Machine (10 page)

“What is it you want to know?” he asked and then volunteered, “I have no desire to crucify those two women EMTs. There was clearly something troubling going on with them.”

“Troubling. How?”

“They were pretty agitated,” he said.

“They were arguing with each other?”

“Not exactly. It wasn’t an argument, per se. It seemed they were both upset over something, but in different ways.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Handwerker, but I’m a bit confused here. Can you be a little bit more explicit?”

“One, the Hispanic woman—”

“Alta Conseco.”

“Yes. She was angry, but with someone or something, not at her partner. You could see the fire in her. Her face was contorted and her gestures were violent and purposeful.”

“And what about Maya Watson, the partner?”

“A beautiful woman,” he said almost wistfully as he remembered her face.

“She is, I agree.”

“She looked frightened, very frightened and hesitant, almost nauseous really. Maybe she was because she basically headed right for the restrooms. Her partner, Miss Conseco, she was making a straight line for the kitchen.”

This was why you couldn’t just read written statements and take them as being representative of what had actually happened. In his original statement to the police, Mr. Handwerker, probably somewhat stunned, hadn’t described things in quite this way. He’d stated that the two EMTs were agitated, yes, but hadn’t made the finer distinctions he was making for me now, nor had he mentioned that Alta and Maya were in fact headed to different places when they entered the bistro. I pointed that out to him.

“I was still out of sorts and a little bit in shock, I suppose, when I gave my statement,” he said, confirming my impression. “It was all very tumultuous. Things happened so quickly.”

“I understand. So, Miss Conseco was headed to the kitchen and Miss Watson to the restrooms?”

“Exactly.”

“Could you hear any of their conversation?”

“Not really. I was seated facing the door, midway between the bar and the entrance. It was crowded and noisy in there. I could barely hear my client across the table, but there was a definite vibe between them.”

“A vibe?”

“I can’t explain it. It’s just something I picked up on. That’s all.”

I could see he wasn’t going to say more about that and I moved on. We talked through the sequence of events, with estimates of how much time elapsed between the two EMTs entering the restaurant and Chef Liu emerging from the kitchen, screaming for help.

“I wouldn’t have wanted either of those women treating me,” Handwerker said in conclusion. “You could see how totally out of it they were. If it had been anything else other than a stroke, that poor man would have been better served to wait until reinforcements arrived. Both women were shaking and the beautiful one was completely distraught.”

I thanked him for his time and told him I might be back in touch.

“As I stated before, I don’t wish to crucify those women.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Handwerker. I’m not certain the Tillman family will pursue this. Besides, one of the two EMTs is already dead.”

“I heard. Terrible.”

“Well,” I said, “at least she can’t be hurt by any of this.”

“Maybe not her, but her family can suffer and there’s the other woman.”

“Of course. If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Handwerker, you’re the first person I’ve run into in this whole investigation who’s had an ounce of sympathy for the EMTs.”

“Those other people weren’t there that day. They didn’t see the distress on those women’s faces. Something was dreadfully wrong there.”

I thanked him again and hopped back on the elevator. It was nice to know there were still some people in the world like Henry Handwerker. If there was any redemption to be found in this universe, it lived in the hearts of people like him.

The trouble with eyewitnesses was that they could all see the same exact things, but see them differently. Such was the case with what happened at the High Line Bistro that day last March. By four-thirty in the afternoon, I’d interviewed four other witnesses beside Henry Handwerker who’d given statements to the police about the circumstances that day and the only thing they all agreed on was that the two EMTs refused to treat Tillman. Otherwise, it was difficult to tell that they had actually witnessed a common event. One woman didn’t notice the two EMTs were agitated. “Agitated?” she said when I suggested it. “No, they seemed fine.” Another, younger woman who was then working at an exclusive jewelry boutique on Gansevoort Street and was taking her lunch at the bistro said that both Alta and Maya were headed to the restrooms. “The kitchen? No. They were definitely walking toward the restrooms. I’d swear to it.” She did say the two EMTs were bickering, but not about anything serious. “A girl thing,” she said as if that explained it all.

The older of the two men I spoke with swore Alta and Maya came in separately and resisted any suggestion they were arguing. The younger man barely noticed Alta. “That tall EMT was so hot and, man, she was amazing in that uniform.”

One of the problems with how the human brain functions is its need for a coherent narrative. It perceives events and then builds a story around them, it edits and embellishes, it ascribes motives when none are obvious. The mood, age, and sex of the witness can affect the perceptions of events and, to an even greater extent, the narrative woven out of those events. Although I had no palpable reason to accept Henry Handwerker’s version of what had transpired, I chose to trust his version instead of the others. I don’t know, maybe it was his sense of detail. Maybe it was his sense of style. Maybe it was that he displayed compassion. No matter, because there was one inescapable truth here: Alta and Maya had refused to treat a dying man and no amount of parsing or pretzel twisting of the facts was going to change that.

SIXTEEN

Nick was late, so I sipped at a glass of Brooklyn Lager and munched on olives at the bar. The Kythira Café on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, was, as Nick described it, the crown jewel of his family’s business. The menu featured updated and upscale versions of classic Mediterranean dishes. The interior décor was dark and moody and about as far away from the stereotypical white and blue stucco walls as you could get. There were no Ouzo or retsina bottles, no Greek flags, no bad murals of whitewashed houses on cliffs above the blue Mediterranean, no travel posters of Mykonos, Crete, or the Parthenon.

The bartender, a scruffy young hipster, was about as Greek as me and as invested in his work as a member of a prison road crew. His generation’s attitude toward their jobs was one of the things about the new world I had trouble getting adjusted to. I grew up believing in doing the best you could do at any job, even if you hated it. Aaron and I had several employees, including Klaus and Kosta, who had worked for us for over thirty years and prospered because of it. Now such dedication was considered old hat or worse, foolish. And when I thought about it, their attitude made sense. In today’s economy, job security and company loyalty were bullshit. Maybe they always had been.

I checked my watch—7:23—and surveyed the restaurant. For the second time that day, I was the lone patron at a restaurant bar. A guy could get a complex. There were about thirty tables and about eighty seats in the Kythira. Currently, the majority of them were as in demand as the barstools. In most places, this many empty seats at dinnertime would be cause for hanging a “Going Out Of Business” sign in the window or for the owner to hang himself in the window, but Park Slope was an alien part of Brooklyn, very different from the neighborhoods I grew up in and lived in. The Kythira probably had a late-arriving crowd and things got going when a man my age was going to bed. What did I know about Park Slope, anyway? Park Slope was a satellite of Manhattan, populated mostly by people who were transplanted Brooklynites, not natives. Funny, when I was growing up, people seemed as desperate to get out of Brooklyn as East Berlin. Now there was no East Berlin and this part of Brooklyn was the hot place to live. Go figure.

“Always this busy?” I asked the bartender to kill some time and to make sure he wasn’t actually in a coma.

“This time of night, yup.”

“Things pick up later?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but I saw his focus shift to over my right shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Roussis,” he said, giving a quick smile.

“Wyatt,” Nick said, clamping a hand on my shoulder, “this gentleman’s tab is comped. Have a bottle of ’97 Opus One sent over to table three and tell the chef to come out to see me.”

“Okay.” Wyatt headed for the kitchen.

I chucked a five onto the bar.

“Generous,” Nicky said.

“You can’t take it with you.”

“Wyatt’s a good boy. Come on.”

We sat at what I guessed was table three. I could see why the owner would want to sit here. It was the best vantage point in the place from which to watch the bar, the comings and goings from the kitchen, the waiter’s station, the hostess’ podium, and the rest of the dining room. What people don’t understand about owning a business is that when you’re there you can’t ever relax. There’s no such thing as being off duty when you’re in-house. The chef came out to us, introduced himself, shook our hands. Nicky spoke to him in Greek and the chef went away.

“I hope you don’t mind, but he does this thing with rib steak that I absolutely love. I ordered it for us. It’s not very Greek, but we don’t do strictly Greek here, anyways. That okay with you?”

“Fine. I hate that you’re going to waste a bottle of Opus One on me. I haven’t been feeling great lately and—”

“Don’t worry, Moe. It won’t go to waste. No one’s spilling the Opus One down the drain or watering the plants with it.”

Dinner, what I ate of it, was fantastic. We started out with a platter of dips and vegetable concoctions, only some of which I recognized, then salad, the marinated steak with lemon, garlic, and rosemary roasted potatoes, creamed spinach and feta tarts, and dessert of assorted pastries. I ate just enough of each to carry the wine. Nick was right about the wine, there would be no Opus One going to waste. I had way, way too much of it and by my third glass I didn’t really care about the physical price I was going to pay for indulging. The food aside, it was a lot of fun to tell the old stories about the Six-O. Enough time had passed for me to forgive and forget the betrayals so, at least for one night, I let myself feel about the guys the way I felt about them then. It was okay for me to laugh about what a ladies man Rico had been and to shake my head at what a practical joker Larry McDonald could be. I even laughed about the time Kenny Burton laid out a fireman during a pickup basketball game we played in Coney Island. Maybe it was the wine or maybe it was the dying that set me free of the baggage and the pain. Probably both.

When we weren’t talking old times, we talked about our families and business and where we’d come to in our lives. In a weak moment at the end of the meal and with my third glass of Grand Marnier in my hand, I told him the truth about why I’d come to the Gelato Grotto the other day. That I wasn’t working for the Tillman family at all, but that Alta Conseco was Carmella’s older sister and I felt obligated to look into things when she asked me to.

“I knew that story you told me at the Grotto was a crock a shit,” Nick said, but not angrily. “I figured you’d tell me. You always was big on the truth.”

I laughed. “Not as much as I used to be. Life has weaned me off it.”

He didn’t pursue it. “Look, I get why you told me what you did. You didn’t figure I would help otherwise. And I understand your helping out. You and Carmella was once family and her sister was her sister even if she did a terrible thing. You can’t abandon your family no matter what. That’s what a family does, it stands together when things get bad. Am I right?”

“Exactly. I couldn’t just say no to Carm.”

“But you should watch your back, Moe. Not everybody’s gonna be as understanding as me if they find out what you’re really up to. Defending those EMTs is kinda like defending Osama Bin Laden in this city, you know what I mean?”

“Thanks. I’m being careful.”

“So what you find out so far?”

I figured I owed it to him to tell him as much as I could. Here was a guy I hadn’t seen in fifteen years and the first thing I did was lie to his face. Plus, he’d been really cooperative based on that lie. He’d given me the surveillance video and sent me to Fuqua.

“So you think it’s somebody in the FDNY?” Nicky asked.

“I don’t know what to think, but it’s possible.”

“Okay, I’ll keep my eyes open. I hear things. People do a lotta loose talking in restaurants. You’d be surprised at the shit you hear when you’re not even trying.”

“Thanks, Nicky. I appreciate it. This was fun. Next time, dinner’s on me.”

We shook hands. “Let’s do it soon, Moe.”

“Soon. You have my word on that.”

Dinner with Nick would have to be soon, I thought, or it probably wouldn’t be at all.

SEVENTEEN

If I thought the cab ride with the windows rolled down was going to cut into the intensity of my alcohol buzz or take the edge off the searing pain in my gut, I was wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. The cabbie dropped me at the corner of Ashford Street and Atlantic Avenue. Carmella’s grandmother’s house was a few houses in off Atlantic. For many years, Carmella had lived in the upstairs apartment while her abuela lived on the first floor. She had willed the house to Carmella and I’d wrongly assumed that Carmella had sold the place after moving up to Toronto. When she’d sent me that packet of information, I’d been surprised to see she’d written down this address as where she was staying. I stood outside, looking up at the old place. Except for a coat of paint, the house hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years. This was where I kissed Carmella for the first time, a pretty chaste kiss even as first kisses go. And shortly after that, this house is where I learned of Carmella’s true identity.