The James Deans (21 page)

“Bravo! Bravo!” Brightman applauded. “You’re wasting your time in the wine business. You should take up writing fiction. You have quite a flair for it.”

Again, I ignored him. “One problem solved. But for every problem solved, there are two lurking. You underestimated the press reaction. You see, you knew Moira. To you she was some boring, plain-Jane, forgettable drip who no one would be interested in. To the press, the disappearance of a young woman under mysterious circumstances is like blood in the water to sharks. It doesn’t matter to them if the woman looks like Quasimodo and has the personality of a brick. They turn her into the Black Dahlia and sell papers. So you’d gotten away with two homicides, but your political career was fucked.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “fucked is the word.”

“But things began breaking your way. Spivack and Associates was floundering, and Joe, who probably assumed you were innocent in Moira’s disappearance, came to you with an idea of how to save his company and your career at the same time. You prop up Spivack and Associates and he’d find you some shithead to take the fall for Moira. He probably convinced himself he wasn’t doing anything wrong, really. After all, you hadn’t done it and you wouldn’t be free to run for higher office until the crime was solved. For his part, he’d be saving his company and a lot of people’s jobs. You didn’t have to be asked twice and gave him the money. But he got cold feet. I don’t know why. Maybe he started taking a good look at you for the crime and arrived at the same conclusion as me. In any case, you refused to take the money back. He may not even have offered. He knew he’d already been compromised.”

Brightman looked impatiently at his Swatch. “Now the clock’s running on you, Mr. Prager.”

“I’m almost finished.”

“Thank God!”

“I’d watch that if I were you. You’re already into Him pretty deep.”

“Look—”

“Did Barto come to you or was it the other way around? Doesn’t matter. Barto sees that Ivan Alfonseca’s been arrested for all these rapes in the boroughs. He remembers Alfonseca from when he worked as a marshal in South Florida. He waits for Alfonseca to get convicted on enough counts so he’d have nothing to lose by confessing to Moira’s murder. Barto arranges to have the family back in Cuba paid off. During trips to Rikers, his lawyers bring him the office sign-in sheets to fill out. He is given a story to remember about how he killed Moira and where he planted the jewelry. Now all you need is a patsy to think he’s discovering all this on his own. That’s where I come in. The timing was just too perfect. After two years, you just had to have me now. Why? I kept asking myself. Why?”

“It certainly wasn’t your charm,” Brightman said. “I shall have to have a talking-to with the man who recommended you. He assured me you’d be adequately incompetent.”

“Really, and who was that?”

“Let’s get on with this, Prager.”

“I’m curious about how you handled Spivack. My instinct is you and Barto kept him in the dark. Although he’d already been compromised, there was no need to involve him until he couldn’t do anything about it. On the other hand, he might have been a part of it as long as he thought you were innocent. Or you might’ve had more on him than I’m aware of. I guess I’ll never know.”

“The man did kill himself. I don’t think he did that because he was depressed over his wardrobe.”

“You did almost everything right, even lying about having slept with Moira. That was brilliant. It took my attention away from any other reason you might have to do away with her. Once I was convinced it wasn’t about an affair, I stopped thinking of you as a suspect. And you deserve a lot of credit for having the foresight to keep some of Moira’s jewelry. That’s what sold everyone on Alfonseca. Almost everything broke your way. Spivack killed himself. Alfonseca’s dead. I don’t know where Barto is. The thing is, if you’d only hired some other poor schmuck besides me, you’d have gotten away with it.”

“Oh, but I have, Moe. Like you said, your brilliant oratory is just so much smoke. It’s completely valueless. None of it would stand up in court, and if your pal Wit ever tries to print a word of this, he knows I’d sue and win.”

“I don’t suppose I could appeal to your humanity and ask you to come with me and turn yourself in?”

“Humanity! Are you nuts? I’m a politician.”

“Then just tell me where Moira’s body really is and the bicycle, too. These families have suffered enough.” I raised my right hand. “I give you my word, I won’t mention you at all.”

“Sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, how’s about you take my revolver and blow the back of your head off.”

“Once again, I must disappoint you,” he said as calmly as if I’d asked him to pick up some flour for me at the store.

“How about I go to your brownstone and tell your wife what you’ve done?”

“Be my guest. Unfortunately she’s away with friends, but I’ll have her call you when she gets back. She wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

I ripped my .38 out of his waistband and pressed the barrel to his head. “How about I blow your brains all over the street?”

He didn’t look scared until I pulled back the hammer.

“All right, Prager, what is it you want?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You’ve already given me what I wanted.”

“What?”

I pulled the trigger. Click. The front of Brightman’s running shorts got dark with moisture and a stream of urine ran down his bare leg.

“You fuck. It was empty.”

“Old cop rule: Never give a murderer a loaded weapon.”

He twisted up his face into a mass of red distortion. “You’re not getting a fucking penny from me now, you asshole.”

“How’s it feel, thinking you’re gonna die? I bet you Moira and Carl didn’t piss themselves.”

“Carl shit himself, the little screaming bastard. What a fucking baby. All he cared about was what his father would say if he didn’t fight for that stupid fucking bicycle.”

“He was a little boy, for chrissakes!”

“Not a penny, you hear me?”

“Like I said, you’ve already given me what I want.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

I didn’t answer, but walked up the brownstone steps and rapped on the front door. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

It took a few seconds, but the door swung back. Brightman’s wife, Katerina, was first out. Her eyes were rimmed in red, silent tears staining her perfect face. Her presence wasn’t strictly necessary, but I had wanted so much to punish Brightman. His career would be over. Geary would see to that. Somehow, that wasn’t enough. I wanted him to hurt, to suffer, to lose someone he loved the way the Stipes and Heatons had.

Thomas Geary was next through the door, his rugged good looks intact. He shed no tears over Brightman. There were always other horses, other races to run. If not exactly responsible for Moira’s death, he was not guiltless, either. His money had helped finance Moira’s execution. Though no pauper, Brightman could never have afforded to pay off Spivack, Barto, Alfonseca, Morenos, and the like without raising an eyebrow. Geary didn’t ask where the money was going, because he didn’t want to know. He had admitted as much to me in my noisy hotel room across the way from La Guardia.

“Looking back,” he confessed, “there were a thousand questions I should have asked. It was the same about hiring you. Though we both trusted the man who recommended you, I was quite skeptical. You had no track record to speak of, and frankly, Constance thought you were a bit of a pushover as a boss. Your brother sounded more qualified. Now, in all honesty, I wish I had hired him.”

“That makes two of us.”

Brightman’s face, red with fury, went starkly white and blank. He was naked before the world for the first time since his birth. He stared at the open windows on the first floor of the brownstone, realizing Katerina and Geary had heard every word. Still, none of it would holdup in a court of law. But there are other courts in which to try a man, and places in the cosmos where the statute of limitations never ever applies.

IF THE LAST fifteen years had taught me anything, it was that there was no justice in this world. There’s nothing particularly original or profound in coming to that conclusion. All grown-ups come to it in the end. Coming to it, however, has set me free. It lets me sleep at night while men like Steven Brightman walk unfettered among us. Actually, I’m not sure where he’s walking these days. I lost track of him when he disappeared from the headlines.

Within a week of our bit of street theater, Brightman made big news when he resigned his office and withdrew from politics altogether. He and Katerina flew to the Caribbean shortly thereafter and got a divorce. Hurting her that way is the only regret I have about how I handled that day. Sometimes I think it would have been enough to have had only Geary there to hear. In formulating my plan, I had convinced myself that I was protecting Katerina, that I could not let her continue to sleep in the same bed with a man who had, in the course of his life, murdered a nine-year-old boy and a twenty-three-year-old woman. Now I find myself wondering if I hadn’t just wanted to punish Brightman. Had I punished Katerina instead?

Thomas Geary was good to his word. As long as I didn’t go public with what I knew, he would make sure none of us suffered from the truth. Larry Mac and Rob Gloria kept their promotions. Though we have never discussed it, I suspect Larry McDonald has figured out what actually happened, or a version of it. Like I said, Larry was a good cop, a very good cop. But in his way he was as ambitious as Steven Brightman had been, and could not be bothered with the details of how he got to where he wanted to go. Rob Gloria wasn’t a gift-horse-looking kind of guy and probably never gave a second thought to Brightman’s resignation. We don’t talk much, Gloria and I.

Pete Parson’s kid has flourished on the job and has already traded in his sergeant stripes—the NYPD equivalent to the rank of captain in corrections—for lieutenant bars. Pete made a killing on the sale of his share in Pooty’s. Though he hasn’t yet moved south, he and his wife have taken several exploratory trips to the Outer Banks, Hilton Head Island, and Myrtle Beach. I think he enjoys thinking about and planning the move more than he will the moving. When he finally gets around to leaving he’ll do what all good New Yorkers do when they relocate. He’ll pine away for good pizza, kosher deli, and the type of energy that doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth.

Wit never wrote that follow-up piece on Brightman. He said that working with me on the case changed him forever, though I think it has precious little to do with me. While he hasn’t stopped drinking altogether, he has cut back severely. Whether it’s enough to save his liver, it’s too soon to say. But the biggest change has come in his writing. He has given up doing those celebrity exposes and now devotes his time to writing about people the world usually ignores or has forgotten.

His first book after the dust settled was entitled
A Lonely Death: The Times of Susan Leigh Posner.
It was Susan’s remains in the marsh across from Lake Ronkonkoma that the Suffolk County cops had thought might be those of Moira Heaton. Wit hired me to help do the background investigation into what had driven Susan to suicide. My name’s first on the acknowledgments page. I’m very proud of that. I would have been equally as proud had the book not won the Pulitzer. It’s dedicated to Carl, Moira, and Little Man. Little Man is what Wit used to call his grandson.

Wit took Katy and me to the Yale Club for dinner as promised. It was very cute how impressed Katy was by the place and by a sober Wit’s charm. I remembered my first time there and Wit’s slide into nastiness greased by three double bourbons. We both had come a long way in a very very short time. Homicide changes everything for the killer and the victim, but like an earthquake its effects can be felt by everyone for miles around.

After Brightman had faded into obscurity, Wit and I took a drive into Hallworth. We parked across the street from the big Tudor on Reservoir Road. We watched Carl Stipe’s mother raking late-autumn leaves into plastic bags. Though she was only in her late fifties, she seemed much much older. She moved with a robotic deliberateness that was painful to watch. There were tears in my eyes and Wit’s, too.

I started to get out.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“No.”

I got out of the car. The noise of the closing door got Mrs. Stipe’s attention. She stopped raking and turned to face me.

“Can I help?”

I froze for a second, looking for a sign in her face that would tell me she wanted to hear what I had to say. When I didn’t answer her immediately, she just sort of shook her head.

“Sorry, ma’am, wrong house.”

She didn’t say a word and went back to the task at hand. In that second of hesitation, I thought of Katerina Brightman and how my not thinking things all the way through had made an unintended victim of her. What would the truth, I wondered, really do for Mrs. Stipe? I certainly wasn’t smart enough to do the permutations.

Judith Resnick sent a lovely thank-you card to me, though she said she was having trouble coming to terms with her dad’s death. We have spoken on the phone a few times since. She hasn’t asked me about HNJ1956. I don’t know what I’d tell her if she did.

AARON HAS STARTED searching for a location for our next store. He says I’m to blame for our rapid expansion.

“With all your
meshugas
, we made new managers and hired new people. We have to have someplace to put them all.”

Of course, the fact that we were doing amazingly well didn’t have a thing to do with it.

In early November I received the most unexpected call at the Brooklyn store I think I’ve ever gotten. It was my father-in-law, Francis Maloney Sr., the old political hack, inviting me to lunch. He knew that in spite of my antipathy against him I would never turn him down. On the ride over I realized I was more frightened than I’d been in the Black Flamingo. The worst Ralph Barto could have done was kill me. My father-in-law had the ammunition to do much worse. He could ruin my marriage with a few words whispered in Katy’s ear. It was just like him to do it this way, to tell me first so he could enjoy watching me squirm.

Thin Tim McGuinn’s was an old cop hangout in the shadows of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges that served a lunch buffet of boiled meats and bleached vegetables. I forgot sometimes that Francis had been a cop. I didn’t like to think of him that way. What he had done on the job tarnished the badge I carried in my pocket.

Though my father-in-law was short and thick, he was easy to spot in a crowded room. And there he was, seated in the third booth from the door with a glass of Bushmills on the rocks on the table before him. He actually stood up and smiled when he spotted me. I was nauseated with fear and he must have seen it in my expression.

“You’ll get yours someday, but not today. Relax, son-in-law.” He said it like a curse. “Sit down and have a drink. You look as if you need one.”

“Dewar’s rocks.”

“Jimmy,” Francis called to the bar, “Dewar’s rocks for the lad.”

He waited to bring my drink over from the bar before talking. When I lifted the glass, he warned me not to.

“I’d offer you food, but you don’t look as if you could keep it down, boyo. Haven’t you figured out why you’re here?”

“No, Francis, I haven’t. If it’s not to tell me you’re going to ruin my life, then—”

“So the tough Jew hasn’t gotten it all figured out. I’ll be damned.”

“That’s beside the point.”

He didn’t like that. “There’s no call for that, especially as I’m here to toast you for a job well done. To you, Moses Prager, and a job well done.”

“A job well—” Then it hit me. “You son of a bitch. You’re the one. You’re the one who recommended me to Geary and Brightman.”

He smiled. “Ah, the joy of it. It was Joe Donohue and Thomas Geary who five years ago pushed to have me squeezed out of the party. Geary didn’t think I knew, but I did. That bastard Donohue died before I could pay him back. I couldn’t believe my luck when Geary and Brightman came sniffing around about you. I knew they wanted a patsy. I may hate that I have to breathe in the air you breathe out, but I know you’re no patsy. Fucking Jews are all troublemakers to begin with, never happy to leave well enough alone. And with what you did to me and my family, I had every confidence you would ruin their plans. I don’t know what you did to force Brightman to resign and I don’t care, but here’s to you! There is justice in this world.”

I didn’t explain why I was laughing when I walked out of Thin Tim McGuinn’s.

Two weeks later, Israel Roth showed up in Sheepshead Bay. We had spoken several times after my return to New York, but I had been purposely vague about what had transpired during my time in Florida. He hadn’t gotten in any trouble with the Boca cops. They had scolded him like a child and suggested he take a gun-safety course offered by the local NRA. I apologized for what I’d put him through.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Moses, you’ll see. For being an ass when you’re young, the punishment is getting old.”

One night, when Katy and Sarah had gone to bed, we sat up drinking scotch and vodka. I explained to him about how his offering me his automatic had saved my life. He looked very perturbed at me when I suggested that our meeting in the Catskills and our reconnecting in Florida must have been a part of some great plan.

“I’ve seen too close the results of some of God’s great plans. It’s better you think of things as luck or misfortune,” he advised.

“To luck and misfortune!”

That cheered him up. He said that there had been nothing in the papers about either Morenos or Barto, but that he’d keep his eyes open. I wasn’t sure I much liked that, but there was nothing to be done about it.

On the day he was to leave, I gave Mr. Roth back the boxes he’d given me. I told him it was only right that he give Katy and Sarah their stars. He almost started crying. Almost. Like he said, he had too closely seen some of God’s great plans. As he put their stars around their necks, I touched the one he’d given me back in Florida. I had gotten quite used to it by now. The strange thing is, I could have been reinstated and gotten my detective’s shield in spite of everything. I had turned it down. Somewhere along the way, I’d realized I had my shield, only not the one I’d expected.