Hurt Machine (13 page)

“I’m old, Brian. Everything makes me cranky.”

“I just wanted to let you know that Devo did his magic and we traced down a lot of the names on those hate emails. We also did background checks on the senders.”

“A lot of firemen I bet.”

“Cancer make you cranky and clairvoyant or is that an age thing too, Boss?”

“Just logic,” I said. “And since when do you know words like clairvoyant?

“Since I started reading Webster’s on the crapper.”

“Lovely image, Doyle. Lovely. About the firemen …”

“Lots of firemen and lots of them assholes. They break down into three basic categories: guys with less than five years on, union hard-ons, and headcases.”

“It would break down the same way if the NYPD were involved. It was always the same bunch that got worked up over stuff in the papers.”

“Yeah, I guess. Listen, I had the stuff messengered over to your condo. There’s an invoice attached and—”

“Don’t worry, Brian. I’ll pay it before I drop dead.”

“Phew! That’s a relief.” He was laughing.

I was laughing too. “Fuck you very much, Doyle. Thank Devo for me, okay?”

“No problem, Boss. Take care of yourself.”

“I intend to.”

That was that.

I got out of the car and strolled right up to the front door. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew things had changed since my drunken visit the night before. No one answered the bells or my insistent knocking. I stepped back away from the house and stared up at it as if by staring intensely enough I would somehow divine what had changed and why no one was home. That strategy was about as effective as foam darts against armor plating. The house wasn’t giving up any secrets. Houses seldom do. I headed across the street to my car and tried Carmella’s number on my cell. Nothing doing. It went right to voice mail. I turned back to the house one last time.

“No home,” a voice came from behind me.

Turning, I spotted the old Puerto Rican gentleman sitting on a discount store beach chair in the midst of his postage stamp-sized garden. Under his bleached-out Mets cap, he had a wizened, age-spotted face and a tobacco-stained smile. He had lived on the block for forever and was old when I first came here twenty years ago.

“Carmella isn’t home?” I asked.

“No home,” he repeated, but didn’t leave it there. “The boy …”

“Carmella and her son aren’t home?”

He shook his head yes and added again, “No home.”

“Did they say when they were coming back?”

He turned his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. “No English.” But I could tell he had something else to say. He said it in Spanish, finishing with a hopeful smile.

I hated to disappoint him. “
Lo
siento
, I’m sorry,” I said.

He was undaunted. Standing, he put his arms down by his side, but not completely straight down, and made his hands into fists. He pantomimed carrying something.

“Luggage. They had luggage.”

“
Que
?” he asked. What?

“Suitcases. They had suitcases,” I said, imitating his posture.

“
Si,
suitcases.” His smile was very broad now.

“
Gracias
,” I said, having almost exhausted my entire Spanish vocabulary. That was the odd thing about Carmella, when we were together she avoided speaking Spanish if at all possible, so I hadn’t picked much up. It had never hit me before, the extreme lengths to which Carm went to cut herself off from her family. Not only had she physically removed herself and changed her name, but she had made all sorts of symbolic breaks from them. I was conscious of them before, but it was more glaring now that we had been apart for so many years. When you’re close to someone and entangled in their
mishegas
, their craziness, it’s hard to see the full extent of the damage.

The old man sat back down, lit up a cigarette, and let the sun take him in its arms. Sitting on your stoop or on your lawn or in your front garden, watching the world go by was a very New York thing. We didn’t understand backyards very well. You can’t see much from your backyard. There’s not much action in your backyard unless you consider charcoals turning white with heat action. All the action’s out front. Even when Katy, Sarah, and I had the house in Sheepshead Bay, we grilled out front on the porch. I lingered a bit, admiring the old man, enjoying him enjoying the moment. I wondered if there would be any moments like this for me to enjoy, or would I spend the rest of my life in and out of the hospital?

I put that thought right out of my head because I was pissed at Carmella. What the hell was she up to, dragging me into this and then splitting? Why hadn’t she told me she had Alta’s personal things and why didn’t she let me see them? I was working myself up into quite a nasty mood as I retreated to the front seat of my car, but it didn’t last. I’d slapped the rearview mirror with the back of my hand in anger and when I went to readjust it, I recognized the hypocrite looking back at me. Who was I to rage at Carm for keeping secrets and hiding from the truth? For fuck’s sake, I was the king of kept secrets and adept at slicing the truth into sheets so thin they were nearly two-dimensional. Carmella had her reasons. I would know them eventually, whether she wanted them known or not. That’s why I wasn’t about to give up on this case. That and what was waiting for me if I did.

I pulled away from the curb, waving to the old man as I went. He nodded goodbye, the sun’s embrace too strong for him to wave.

TWENTY

The package from Brian Doyle was there on the welcome mat outside my condo door. I can’t say that I was particularly excited to see the thick envelope. Basically, it meant I’d be spending the next few days doing grunt work—going from house to house, interviewing angry firemen who would be about as happy to see me as they would be about a bad case of the crabs. I was getting too old for this shit. No, not getting too old: too old. I noticed it when I was working the Sashi Bluntstone case. The going from door to door, the lying and the half-truths, the drama, took a toll on me.

There was a day when I was interviewing potential suspects in Sashi’s abduction that I had to kick a field goal using an art professor’s testicles as the football. He was a big man with a short fuse who tried pushing me around, but even in my sixties, I wasn’t easily pushed. In Brooklyn, the rule is, someone pushes you, you don’t just push back, you push back twice as hard. If that doesn’t work, you go for the throat or, sometimes, you aim a little lower. In my neighborhood, you learned to never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring an F-16. But my roughing up the art professor that day wasn’t the half of it. Later that afternoon in Alphabet City, I went to talk to a woman art blogger whose screen name was Michelangelo or was it Leonardo? … I forget. She turned out to be a meth freak, turning five- and ten-buck tricks for rent and drug money. She had been no threat to Sashi. The only child she was a threat to was her own son, who I found dead cold and blue in his crib. I didn’t think I would ever recover from that day. I’m not sure I have.

Now I would go inside, open up the envelope, and start that process all over again. I laughed at myself, pushing in the front door. I laughed because I remembered the romance being a PI once held for me, how I was so hungry to work cases when I first got my license, but romance fades. I knew that love faded. Anyone married for more than a few years knows that lesson. Sometimes it evaporates completely and so abruptly you question whether it was ever there to begin with, but love and romance are different animals. I remembered how desperate I’d been for my gold shield, how getting it had once been more important to me than the fate of the Western world. As I’ve said before, there were several times over the three decades following my forced retirement from the NYPD that the serpent in varied disguises had offered me that apple and I’d turned him away. Each time it was offered, my desperation faded just a little bit more, until my hunger for the apple completely disappeared and the serpent stopped asking. Poor Eve, I thought, if she’d only been slightly more patient.

The first thing I noticed was the invoice. Talk about sticker shock. Doyle wasn’t kidding about charging me for the work. He seemed to have added an eminent death surcharge. He was going to soak me for all he could while I was still breathing. I didn’t mind, really. He had swallowed the cost of plenty of favors he’d done for me in the past and I’d been around long enough to know the bill always comes due one way or the other. Always.

The size of the invoice was about the only surprise in the pile of paperwork. Just as I had predicted and just as Brian Doyle had said, most of the more violent hate mail was from members of New York’s Bravest: some retired, most not. And the background checks Doyle and Devo had done were very helpful. With these guys’ ages, addresses, contact info, police records, if any, and the public record aspects of their service records there in front of me, I would be able to eliminate a lot of the legwork. I would be able to generate a list of more and less likely suspects without having to interview each and every one of these schmucks.

First thing I took into account was proximity. Although I supposed someone might have been following Alta Conseco around for weeks just waiting for the right moment to kill her, I didn’t think it was likely. There was something about the violence of the attack, the sloppiness of it—Alta had, after all, managed to make it back to the Grotto before she died—that made it seem like a spur of the moment, impulsive attack. Someone who would have been carefully following her for weeks wouldn’t have risked such public exposure and would have made sure she was dead before abandoning the body. I had no proof or experience to back it up. What the fuck did I know anyway? I hadn’t been a homicide detective. It was just a hunch, but I’d done pretty well following my hunches. So I took out an old road map of New York City and drew concentric circles in inch-wide increments extending out from the Gelato Grotto and carefully plotted the addresses of the hate-mailers.

Just as I finished pressing the point of my red pencil to the map where the last potential suspect lived, a stray thought crossed my mind that quickly turned into something else: a question. What in the hell was Alta Conseco doing at the Grotto in the first place
?
She lived on the other side of Brooklyn, for chrissakes! Okay, so some people loved their pizza and the homemade gelato was outstanding, but why would Alta travel to the Grotto? Did she have a craving? Did she go there to meet someone? If so, who? Like all good questions, the original suggested a hundred more.

I snapped my red pencil in two. My daughter was getting married soon and three days after that, some surgeon would be cutting out half of my kishkas. I didn’t have time for a hundred more damned questions. I wasn’t sure I had time for one.

TWENTY-ONE

Grunt Work 101.

I began the unpleasantries early, figuring to squeeze as much in as I could in one day. It was a useless approach, but it was something. After my pencil-snapping fit of pique and brief wallow in the woe-is-me shallows, I came up with a plan. Any of the hate-mailers who had a history of violence, either on the job or off, moved to the top of the suspect list. Any with a history of violence against women, went to the top of the first list. And any of the folks on that list who lived within walking or short-driving distance from the Grotto, went straight to the head of the class.

Anthony Marinello batted lead-off. He was a nasty piece of pie. He’d only had about four years on the job, but had been moved around from firehouse to firehouse in his brief and undistinguished career. He was now on desk duty in Queens. Just like with the NYPD, there were legitimate reasons for desk duty: injury, advancing age, frayed nerves, et cetera. There were less than legitimate reasons too. I suspected the latter was the case with Marinello. He was a real nut job, a big mouth who was hated by the people he served with. According to his reviews, he wasn’t much of a fireman either, but he hadn’t yet crossed the line far enough to get fired for cause. He probably had a rabbi—someone more senior on the job with some juice who looked out for him—maybe a family friend or relative. Both the NYPD and FDNY were big enough to eat some of their mistakes or bury them, as it were, behind a desk or in a supply room somewhere, where they collected their paychecks without doing much harm.

Anthony also had had a few run-ins with his destined-to-be ex-wife. The wife hadn’t gotten to the order of protection stage quite yet, but she had filed for divorce. Given the number of times the cops had been called to the house, you didn’t need to be a soothsayer to think Marinello’s arrest was on the near horizon. There was something else Marinello had going for him: his address was on West 6th Street near Avenue U, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Grotto. I walked up the concrete steps to the old brick two-family house and rang the bell.

I hadn’t worked on the lies I would tell to whomever answered the door. I found that the lies always sounded best when I hadn’t rehearsed them. They just seemed more convincing somehow if I heard them at the same time as the party I was telling them to. There was no answer at first, but I didn’t get discouraged. Too late for that. I was already discouraged and besides, it was early. I rang the bell again and this time I heard stirring on the other side of the door.

“Hold your water!” was the shrill order from the woman inside the house.