The James Deans (11 page)

“Holy shit!” Detective Gloria was amazed. “Your client got some deep-ass pockets.”

“And who interviewed Ishmail Almonte?” I continued.

Spivack squirmed. “I did.”

“Why you?” I asked.

“Because I’m not blind. I was a U.S. fucking marshal for twenty-two years. It didn’t escape me that his name appeared so frequently.”

“And …?” Detective Gloria prodded.

“And nothing,” Spivack said smugly. “The guy’s story checked out. He said he was an illegal and wanted to find out how to get a green card. He said Moira Heaton was helping him. I ran the guy’s sheet. He was clean.”

“Oh, please!” Larry Mac was skeptical. “He was clean ‘cause he gave you a bullshit name.”

Spivack turned an angry shade of red. “Listen, you second-guessing prick, ask your buddy over there from Missing Persons how many of these people
he
interviewed. Ten? Five? One? None? He had access to the same records I had. If the fucking NYPD did their job in the first place—”

Gloria jumped up. “Watch your mouth, asshole. I never met a fed worth his weight in piss.”

“Okay, okay, this shit’s gonna stop right here and now,” I bellowed, pounding my fist on the table. “Right here and right now! Not one person in this room could’ve done anything to prevent what happened to Moira Heaton. Not one. If who I think did what I think, she was long dead by the time anyone even knew she was missing. So let’s stop the name-calling and recriminations. To me, the only thing that matters now is that we find the guilty party and bring a little peace to the family so they can grieve. Agreed?”

They all nodded sullenly.

“Agreed, Mr. Prager,” Wit repeated. “But evidently, you think this Ishmail Almonte is responsible.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete was curious.

I turned to Spivack. “I think we all realize you interviewed a ton of people in the course of the investigation, so no one’s gonna get bent outta shape if you don’t remember what Ishmail Almonte looked like.”

“Twenty-five to thirty years of age. Light skinned, Spanish speaker with a Cubano accent. Some English. Five foot six or seven inches tall, one hundred forty pounds, muscular build. Shoulder-length black hair, full beard and thick mustache. Dark eyebrows, dark brown eyes, broken nose. No visible tattoos or scars, as I can recall. But you know all this. There’s a copy of my interview notes in the file, Prager.”

Wit was fascinated by a single detail. “How did you know it was a Cuban accent?”

“Seven years working in Miami-Dade’ll make you an expert,” Spivack said. “I can also smell a phony Cohiba from a mile away, for what it’s worth.”

Strangely, the tension in the room seemed to evaporate. Spivack finally relaxed. Wit lit a cigarette. Larry Mac loosened his tie. Pete Parson took off his jacket.

I pushed ahead. “What Spivack said before about my having a copy of his interview notes on Almonte is true. It’s also the case that I looked them over before we came here. That’s beside the point. It’s not whether I looked the notes over that’s important, but whether Spivack looked them over.”

“I didn’t.”

“Come on, Joe.” I was incredulous. “Out of all the people you interviewed over the last nineteen months, you remember some little Cuban guy you spoke to a year ago for no more than fifteen minutes.”

“I remember a lot of them. You get good at remembering. I was a U.S.—”

“—fucking marshal for twenty-two years,” Pete and Larry Mac recited in unison.

“Yeah,” Pete chided, “we heard that one.”

Everyone laughed, even Spivack.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I still remember the faces of people I wrote up for spitting on the boardwalk, of all things. But
why
do you remember Almonte? Was there something about—”

“His eyes,” Spivack mumbled almost to himself. “He had those chilly black eyes. You know, the kind that make it difficult to distinguish the pupils from the irises, wet and opaque like the ocean at night.”

I reached into my pocket and unfolded the front page of yesterday’s
Post.

“Dead eyes. Eyes like these?”

“Fuck!”

Looking at Spivack’s face, I knew. He knew. We all of us knew.

God slammed on the brakes and the world slowed down. My hearing changed too. I wasn’t deaf, exactly. At first, it was quite the opposite. I became acutely aware of isolated sounds: the shuffling of paper, the chittering of office machines, individual rings of the phone, my own breathing. Then it blended together. It was like dipping your head beneath the surface of a pool at a party. All the music, the laughter, the chatter, melds into a muted, indistinct drone.

“Moe! Moe!” Larry McDonald screamed. “Are you all right? You look pale as a ghost.”

I picked my head out of the pool. Now God hit the gas, the world spinning so fast I held on to the table for fear of falling off.

I heard Wit say: “Get him a drink.” He would say that.

“I’m okay. I’m okay.” I let go of the table. “It’s one thing for me to have a theory, another thing for Spivack to recognize Ivan Alfonseca as Ishmail Almonte, but it’s light-years from proving he abducted and murdered Moira Heaton. Until we do that, we got nothing, not even smoke and mirrors.”

WE TOOK AN hour-long coffee break, Spivack having assorted sandwiches and pastries sent up from a local luncheonette. No one talked about the case itself. Although he was the only one of us without a law enforcement background, Wit spent enough time around cops to know this was not the moment to ask questions. Instead, we used the hour to bullshit, to trade war stories, to let off some steam. There was a small sense of relief, but not so the walls themselves sighed. The real hurdles were still ahead of us.

Just prior to starting up again, Spivack pulled me over to one corner.

“I feel like shit, Prager. I should have seen this months ago, but I’ve been preoccupied with the business. Maybe if I’d been paying more attention, I would have recognized him and—”

“Woulda, coulda, shoulda … Come on, Spivack, you know better. Your man had a full beard and long hair. If I didn’t listen to the radio two days ago or see that front page on the subway yesterday, I’d still be tripping over my own dick. Anyway, like I said before, it wouldn’t have mattered if you put two and two together sooner. To Moira Heaton, it would’ve had no meaning. Her fate had already been decided.”

“I’ll see if that helps me sleep tonight. One more thing. I know it’s your case now, but what’s the reporter doing here? He could walk out of this room and blow any chance we got to nail that psycho motherfucker.”

“First off, it’s
our
case, all of ours. That includes Wit. Geary wanted him around, and wisely so. If and when we do get Alfonseca to cop to this, Wit’s word will go a long way in giving credence to the process and reestablishing Brightman’s good name and reputation. Besides, he has his own reasons for keeping quiet. He has no love for Ivan the Terrible, believe me.”

Spivack was curious, but didn’t push.

We spent the next few hours dividing up tasks. The first step was gathering some substantive evidence establishing that Ishmail Almonte was in fact Ivan Alfonseca. As Detective Gloria and Pete Parson had earlier pointed out, what we had to go on was thin. It was so thin, it would have been invisible if you turned it sideways. My conjecture about matching initials, the sign-in sheets, even Spivack’s identifying Alfonseca, wasn’t enough to get the most ambitious rookie ADA to do more than yawn. Spivack said he had a way to establish Almonte’s identity and cement the connection between him and Moira.

Wit raised his hand like a third grader asking for a hall pass. “Someone has to say this, but, I suspect, none of you will appreciate it.”

“Go ahead.” Larry Mac, so comfortable with authority, gave him permission.

“While Moira does roughly fit the profile of the suspect’s other victims—single, white, professional between twenty and thirty years of age, living alone, etc.—she does not fit the crime.”

Actually, Wit was wrong. We’d all thought the same thing. At least I had. That very notion had made me hesitate after my initial enthusiasm. Wit was also right. Someone had to say it.

“He’s right,” Detective Gloria seconded.

Pete kept on. “He never killed any of his victims, Moe.”

“Yeah, I was thinking that,” said Spivack.

“He didn’t kill any of the victims we know about,” I corrected. “We know about these twelve women, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t others, others he killed. Look, no one’s found Moira’s body. Maybe he killed and disposed of some of his victims.”

“That’s a fine theory,” Larry Mac damned with faint praise. “You’re just chock-full of theories today.”

“Okay, here’s another,” I said. “Alfonseca fucked up. I showed you Catherine Thigpen’s account of the assault. He pressed his forearm across her trachea during the attack. She said she nearly lost consciousness because she couldn’t breathe. You press a little too hard and … So now he’s killed Moira, probably not his intention, but he has. He’s not the panicky type, this guy. So he—”

Wit wept quietly. He cradled his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. None of us said anything, because none of us knew what to say. Men are useless in the presence of tears, their own or anyone else’s.

“The son of a bitch who murdered my grandson claimed he hadn’t meant to kill him.” Wit forced the words out in fits and starts. “As if torturing him with pliers and electric shocks would have been fair sport had he not had the bad manners to die.”

Spivack made a silent drinking motion at me.

“Bourbon,” I mouthed.

He slipped out of the room, and quickly back in with a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He poured Wit a stiff one. We watched him drink it. No one begrudged him his grief or the flimsy hedge against it he quickly emptied down his throat.

“What Mr. Prager has suggested sounds reasonable and likely to me,” Wit said. “I just thought the inconsistency needed to be pointed out. He’s explained it to my satisfaction. I’m now prepared to do my part in this.”

That was good, because a lot of things had to break right for us to get anywhere near connecting Ivan Alfonseca to Moira’s disappearance. The scary part was that even if we all did our share and got all the breaks to go our way, a great deal of what we needed was completely out of our hands. Ironically, we were as dependent on Ivan the Terrible’s own ego and vanity as on anything else.

AN ENTIRE DAY and another night had passed when I received the call. Katy said there was a Joe Spivack on the phone.

“Good news, Prager. I got it!”

“What?”

“The proof, the original sign-in sheets. I had one of the five dusted just to make sure we weren’t wasting our time.”

“And …?”

“It’s a match. And I don’t mean a partial. He must have had something oily on his hands.”

“Okay, so we
can
prove Almonte was really Alfonseca and we can tie him to Moira.”

“Looks that way.”

“Did you call Larry McDonald yet?”

“He knows. Called him the minute I got the results. You can exhale now, Prager. It’s not just a theory anymore.”

Although the theory was mine, I hadn’t wanted to believe in it so much that I might be blinded to the chance I could be wrong. It seemed I needn’t have worried. Beyond what Spivack had come up with, there was mounting evidence of Alfonseca’s involvement. Just yesterday, the doorman at Moira’s building had identified a picture of Alfonseca. He said he thought he remembered a delivery guy who looked a lot like the picture. Posing as a delivery boy was a ploy Ivan had used to stalk many of his victims.

“Funny,” the doorman said, “this guy looks like that guy in the papers.” I agreed, not wanting to make too much out of it. And Sandra Sotomayor, Brightman’s longtime aid at the community affairs office, thought she recognized Alfonseca as someone she’d seen around, but not for a while. “His face is very familiar.” I asked if she might not be confusing this man with someone she might have seen recently in the papers. She said she didn’t think so. While we couldn’t exactly go to the bank with either the doorman’s testimony or Sotomayor’s, they would help if we had to go to a prosecutor. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be necessary.

“You see the paper yet?” Spivack continued.

“No, not yet. Why, is it in there?”

“Is it in there? Are you kidding? That Wit guy came through in a big way. Wait’ll you see the stories. Alfonseca’s gonna go apeshit.”

“Let’s hope so. I’ll speak to you later.”

I showered and dressed, kissed Katy and Sarah, and headed to the newsstand under the subway station on Sheepshead Bay Road. Spivack was right. Wit had done more than we’d asked for. The
Post
headline said it all:

MYSTERY VICTIM SAYS IVAN WAS TERRIBLE

The story on page 3 detailed the saga of a woman, a thinly veiled Moira Heaton, who had been an intended victim of Ivan Alfonseca. The woman, abducted outside her office in late 1981, claimed to have been driven to an unknown location, where her abductor attempted to sexually assault her. Her would-be attacker, however, proved to be “woefully” inept. Frustrated and embarrassed, Alfonseca had strangled her, leaving her for dead. That was all she remembered, she said, having only recently awoken from a coma in an upstate hospital.

Of course the story was utter bullshit. The reporter credited several unnamed sources for the story and quotes contained within. Those quotes were full of particularly insulting and inflammatory adjectives. The alleged victim seemed very fond of the words “limp,” “tiny,” and “impotent.” She said her attacker had “cried like a little girl when his laughable attempts at penetration failed.” The story in the
Daily News
was equally damning. Wit hadn’t bothered trying to plant the story in the
Times
.

I crossed the street to the bagel store and got a coffee. When the pay phone came free, I dialed Pete Parson’s home number.

“Parson,” he answered.

“See the papers today?”

“About old limp dick? Yeah.”

“Your son’s on today, right?”

“Don’t worry, Moe, Captain Peter Parson Jr. of the Department of Corrections, City of NewYork, will make sure Mr. Alfonseca gets complimentary copies of today’s papers and all the translation help he needs. Anyways, you know what Rikers is like. That story got back to him before the papers ever made the island. His
compadres
are probably whistling at him already, calling him
pato
and
maricón.
He’ll go fuckin’ nuts.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “let’s hear him brag his way outta this. Thanks, Pete, and thank your son for all of us.”

“He’s glad to do it.”

Now there was nothing we could do but wait. I went to the Brooklyn store to do it.

I WAS WRONG—waiting wasn’t the only thing I would have to do. Klaus rolled his eyeballs as I strode through the doors of Bordeaux in Brooklyn.

“If I were you,” he warned, waving several pink message slips at me, “I’d start digging myself a foxhole in the basement. If things get bad enough, I’ll just shovel the dirt back over you.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse. I don’t know what you did to get these people so upset, but you did a very commendable job of it.”

I snatched the slips out of his hand and walked back to the office, which, I had forgotten, was still in disarray. My life had been so consumed by the case that I had neglected to clean up after my all-nighter. The files were everywhere, spread all over the desk, the floor, and the adjoining room. I picked up enough to allow safe passage. I’d already suffered enough in my life from a careless piece of paper thrown on the floor. What I was actually doing was avoiding.

I turned on the radio, still tuned to the news channel which had first alerted me to Ivan the Terrible’s existence. The papers, apparently, weren’t the only branch of the media to run with the story Wit had so carefully planted. Someday, if I worked up the courage, I’d have to ask Wit how much personal capital this had cost him. I suspect he had called in more than a few favors.

I called John Heaton first because his pain and confusion would be worst of all, and lying to him would be most difficult.

“Where the fuck’s my money?” he screamed in my ear. “It’s been two days since you spoke to me.”

Oddly, I was quite relieved. Either he hadn’t yet seen the papers or he hadn’t made the connection or he was too drunk to care. I wasn’t about to ask which.

“How much do I owe you again?”

“Five.”

“Okay, will you be at the club today?”

“After four.”

“I’ll be in later,” I said.

“When?”

“Later.”

“Cash.” It was a demand, not a polite request.

“Cash.”

I thought about calling Brightman back, but decided against it. Politicians can never be trusted to keep their traps shut, even when it’s in their best interest. No, he’d have to stay in the dark. Thomas Geary, on the other hand, was technically my employer. If he hadn’t called me first, he’d have stayed in the dark too. But he’d probably already called Spivack, who would have, as agreed, referred him to me. Unlike John Heaton, Geary would not be so easily placated.

Geary’s wife, Elizabeth, picked up the phone. We chatted for a moment. She said the expected things about Katy. I thanked her on my wife’s behalf and lied about what fun the fund-raiser at the Waldorf had been.

“Hold on, will you, please, while I fetch Thomas.”

She placed the phone down softly. I could hear her retreating footsteps. Within seconds I heard another set of footsteps, these louder, much more rapid.

“How dare you tell Spivack not to talk to me? What are you playing at, Moe?” Geary demanded.

I decided not to pretend, but not to tell him the truth either. “Spivack’s just following your orders. He’s giving me his fullest cooperation. As far as playing goes, I’m not playing at anything.”

“Then what’s this nonsense in the papers. Obviously, this mystery woman is meant to—”

“Look, you told me to find out what happened to Moira Heaton. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“But this, really!”

“If my work offends your delicate sensibilities, fire me. Otherwise, leave me alone and let me do my job.”

“I hope this doesn’t blow up in your face.”

“Don’t you mean
your
face. I’m working for you, remember?”

“Are you? That’s odd, I must have missed something. I don’t recall signing a contract with you or handing you a retainer or taking any sort of action one might reasonably construe as enlisting your services.”

“Now who’s playing?”

“I don’t play.”

“That makes two of us.” I hung up the phone, hard.

I was several things, but not a fool. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Geary had taken pains to make certain no paper trail existed tying him to me. No money had changed hands. My retainer would be discussed later, he had said. In politics it’s called deniability. In Brooklyn it’s called covering your ass. At worst, Geary could be accused of unwisely helping out a man who had once kindly employed his daughter. One thing was for sure, if the planted stories pissed Ivan off half as much as they’d pissed off Geary, the scheme would work like a charm.

Speaking of charms, I had to see if Larry McDonald’s were working on the Queens district attorney. The plain truth was that no matter how outraged Ivan Alfonseca might be at the moment, he probably was neither crazy nor stupid enough to confess to kidnapping and homicide without some incentive to do so. Larry’s assignment was perhaps the most difficult of all. He had to convince the DA’s office not only to keep our plan a secret, but to offer something to Alfonseca in exchange for an admission of guilt.

In the topsy-turvy world of criminal justice, this was quite a dilemma. On the strength of his Bronx convictions alone, Ivan the Terrible was unlikely ever to see the light of day again. It was the inverse of buying a gift for the man who has everything. What could you offer a man who already knew he was going to prison for the rest of his miserable life? Never mind that the Queens DA was even more unlikely to complicate a high-profile, slam-dunk case with hypotheticals. It would have been different if Moira Heaton had been a confirmed homicide. Then the DA would have been happy to clear the case. But for now, maybe forever, Moira’s would remain just one of tens of thousands of unresolved missing-persons cases.

Before I could dial Larry’s number, the store phone rang. Klaus picked up.

“It’s Ronald McDonald on the phone,” Klaus snickered over the intercom. “Don’t forget to order me two Big Macs and a large fries. Ask him if Hamburglar is dating anyone. I love masked men.”

“Get off the phone, Klaus.”

“Okay, boss.”

“Larry, what’s going—”

“Get your ass over to the Queens DA’s office.”

“Why? What’s—”

“Shut up and get here.”

IT TOOK LESS than forty-five minutes to get to the DA’s office, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about the ride. Although the sky was cloudless, I’d driven in a fog, unable to string memories from one minute to the next. I remembered getting into my car, and then, suddenly, I was there. Larry was waiting for me out front.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I had earlier on the phone.

“Come on, the judge recessed today’s court session for this. Alfonseca, his lawyer, and the DA are waiting for us upstairs.”

“Waiting for us?”

“For you, really,” Larry, said leading me to the elevators by the elbow. “Ivan won’t talk unless you’re there.”

“He doesn’t even know who the fuck I am.”

A court officer was holding an elevator especially for us. We climbed in, the doors closing silently at our backs.

“Just like you figured,” Larry continued, “Ivan went totally berserk this morning when word leaked back to him about the stories in the paper. He refused to leave his cell and demanded his lawyer come to Rikers to speak to him. Good thing Parson’s son was on duty to smooth the way or this could’ve gotten nasty.”

The elevator jerked to a stop. The court officer pointed out the way. Inside a conference room adjoining his office was Robert Hiram Fishbein, the district attorney for Queens County; Marissa Reyes of the public defender’s office; and her client, Ivan Alfonseca. Fishbein, who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Groucho Marx, greeted our entrance with smiles. Reyes, a petite Hispanic woman of thirty, played it close to the vest, barely acknowledging our arrival. Alfonseca, however, looking small and ridiculous in a too-big polyester suit, fairly bristled with excitement at the sight of me. If he hadn’t been cuffed to the table, I don’t know what he would’ve done.

To his lawyer’s shock and horror, he blurted something out in Spanish. Reyes tried not to show her dismay, but her eyes betrayed her. It didn’t help her composure any when, at the conclusion of her client’s brief tirade, he spat at me. He missed, catching Fishbein’s pants leg instead. I recognized several of the words that had come out of Ivan’s mouth: curses, mostly.

“Word for word, please,” I said to his lawyer.

“Yes, Counselor,” Fishbein barked angrily, wiping the saliva off his pants, “word for word.”

She did not hesitate. “My client wanted to know if this was the lying faggot who had the bullshit printed in the papers about him.”

I looked Alfonseca right in his dead black eyes, pointed at my chest, and said: “
Sí.
”

“Why?” he asked in English, looking almost wounded, before slipping back into his native tongue.

Reyes didn’t wait to be asked. “He wants to know why you did that. He says it wasn’t necessary. He says—”

Before she could continue, Alfonseca repeated:
“No fue necesario! No fue necesario!”

She waited for him to finish. “My client wonders why you didn’t come to him like a man and ask him if he did this thing?”

I bowed at him slightly. “
Lo siento.
I’m sorry. You’re right, I should have come to you like a man.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling that cruel, superior smile.

“Now I’m asking, man to man, did you abduct Moira Heaton?”

Normally, this approach would have ruffled a lot of feathers, but this was way far away from normally. Fishbein understood he would never get this hard guy to talk to him. He had nothing to lose and an easy, high-profile conviction to gain. Visions of a press conference with himself standing between the mayor and the newly redeemed Steven Brightman danced in his head. Marissa Reyes, however, was not so quick to abandon procedure.

She put her finger to her lips. “Say nothing!” she admonished her client.