Hurt Machine (20 page)

I didn’t figure on finding Flannery in McPhee’s, so I went to that other neighborhood place, the one with the name that I never knew. And there on a lonely barstool was the great man himself in all his guilt and glory. He didn’t turn, but saw me at the door in the mirror behind the bar. He tilted his head and slapped the barstool to his left.

“Dewar’s rocks,” I said to the barman as I nestled in beside Flannery.

He still did not turn my way, looking instead at my face in the mirror. “Rough day?”

“Rough month, but, yeah, today in particular.”

The bartender put up my drink and started a tab without asking.

“Any progress in the case?”

Shrugged my shoulders. “I thought so, but I’ve been warned off for the time being.”

He was confused. “Warned off?”

I explained about Delgado, but did it very quietly so that not even someone right next to Flannery would be able to hear. Flannery shook his head and laughed. It was the kind of laugh that had more to do with disgust than good humor.

“Great fireman,” Flannery said, “but a total prick, old Jorge. He tries to hire a leg-breaker to hurt a woman, then jumps before a speeding car to save a child. Go figure. Moe, I swear, I sometimes wonder if there is a God.”

“I don’t, not anymore. I was never much of a believer to begin with and with what I’ve seen …”

“The wife was a true believer. Madge went to mass every day and the rosary was like a sixth finger on her hand. I used to think she believed enough for all of us. Then, when she passed, I knew the lie of that. You can’t believe for somebody else. They bury your faith with you.”

“Then I guess my coffin will be light as a feather. No faith to bury with me.”

“There’s always the guilt to add the weight of absent faith. With the guilty cross I bear they’ll need a forklift to lower me down.”

“Maybe we can split the cost of the rental.”

He waved his hand at me. “Ah, listen to the two of us bellyaching about the weight of our guilt. Only two types of creatures without the weight of guilt on them: the newly born and the forgotten dead.”

Why did he have to use the word bellyaching? I hadn’t even finished two thirds of my drink and I was already feeling the fire burning in my gut. I asked for a glass of ice water.

“Are you okay, Moe?” Flannery asked, looking directly at me for the first time since I walked in.

“No, Flannery, I’m pretty far away from okay.” I gulped the water down and turned to the barman. “Get my friend here another.”

He nodded. I left enough on the bar to cover more than two more Jamesons and a nice tip.

“I need to rest,” I said, shaking Flannery’s hand.

“You know, Moe, there’s something I meant to talk to you about.”

“What’s that?”

“I hear there’s some guy fanning the flames over at McPhee’s,” he said. “You’ve pissed off a lot of folks poking around the way you have.”

“I have a talent for pissing people off.”

“Best to watch your back carefully for now.”

“For today, at least, I’ve got New York’s Finest doing that for me.”

“What?”

“Never mind and thanks for the heads up. Take good care.”

Out on the street, I nearly keeled over from the pain in my belly, but the pain didn’t last. It was only a tease, a calling card to say, “Welcome to the rest of your life.”

THIRTY

I fell asleep with the sun still hanging lazy in the late afternoon sky and my shoes on my feet. When I awoke the memory of the sun was gone, washed away by the raindrops drumming against my bedroom window. I’d lately fallen in love with naps, though I usually managed to get my shoes off before passing out. For some reason I slept better in the late afternoon these days than at night. At my age, you’re confident you’ll wake up from a nap, but the same couldn’t be said of a night’s sleep.

I stripped off my clothes and showered, making sure not to stand and stare at my sorry-assed self in the mirror when I was done. I threw on a robe and stood looking out my front window at the storm roiling the oily sheen atop the black waters of Sheepshead Bay. Tethered to their docks, dormant fishing boats bobbed and listed. Spring storms in Brooklyn, even at their most fierce, were just so much bluster. The howling wind that carried bits of paper and plastic along the sidewalks and bent the few trees along Emmons Avenue blew warm and with little bite. I found my hand on my abdomen again and my mind filled with all the wrong kind of thoughts.

I did not fear death so much as the dying and I didn’t suppose I was alone in that. When I was a cop, I never gave much thought to getting killed on the job. It wasn’t healthy to think about such things, especially back in those bad old days when people called us pigs with impunity and we were targets for every radical group with a pistol or a pipe bomb. I don’t think kids could even conceive of how dangerous it was for us then. No, I never really worried about it, but I did have my private dread. I didn’t want to die in the cold in the rain. Just imagining the feel of an icy cold sidewalk against my cheek as a freezing rain soaked through my clothing made me nauseous. Even a hospital bed—and I detested the idea of dying in a hospital bed—would be preferable. Like Israel Roth before me, I did not want to be cold. I did not fear being alone so much. We are all alone in death. I accepted that, but I did not want to be cold and wet.

I turned away from the window and suddenly Flannery’s voice rang in my ears. Something he had said earlier in the day came back to me. Not the stuff about pissing people off. That came with the territory. It was something else.
Only two types of creatures without the weight of guilt on them: the newly born and the forgotten dead.
I’m not sure why it hadn’t registered at the bar—probably because my gut was already starting to hurt—and I wasn’t sure I understood why it popped into my head just then or why it should matter. Sure, I was thinking about death and dying, but I was pretty certain that wasn’t why Flannery’s words had suddenly come back to me. Then, with my next breath, I swore I could smell Maya Watson’s perfume in the air. Christ, I really detested sweet perfume. I’d driven to Bay Ridge with my windows down trying to get the smell of it out of my car. And now it was like I was summoning it up. I was at a loss. As undeniably attractive as Maya was, I wasn’t particularly attracted to her. Besides, in spite of the sympathy I felt for her situation, I don’t think I’d ever get past what had happened at the High Line Bistro.

That’s when I knew. Maya Watson’s parting words came rushing into my head.
There’s somebody in this whole mess who nobody wants to see for who he was, not really.
She hadn’t been talking about Jorge Delgado at all. No, Maya Watson had to be talking about Robert Tillman, the victim at the High Line Bistro, one of Flannery’s forgotten dead. It seemed so obvious to me now, I wanted to kick myself. Of course he was the one person in this whole ugly mess that hadn’t received much scrutiny at all. Even if it was his being stricken that started the chain of events that led to Alta Conseco’s murder, why would anyone focus on some poor schmuck who happened to drop dead of an aneurism in a restaurant kitchen?

Let’s say a stray dog runs out into traffic, gets killed by a bus, and starts a chain reaction that leads to a fatal car crash. In some sense, although the dog was the catalyst for everything that followed, he’s the least important element. He’s just another dead dog that happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, Robert Tillman had been treated like that stray dog: a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The irony was that if he had been murdered, the cops would have gone over every inch of his life, searching for the killer’s possible motive. But he hadn’t been murdered and, from what I could see, there was no connection between Robert Tillman, Alta Conseco, and Maya Watson beyond the unfortunate coincidence of proximity and unfortunate timing.

I dialed Maya Watson’s phone number. It rang a few times before going to voicemail. I didn’t really blame her for not answering her phone these days. She had no doubt changed her numbers more than once since March, but privacy, which had always been a cruel myth, was now nearly unattainable. No one knows that better than a private investigator. Before everyone used the internet like an anatomical appendage, we used to be able to find out pretty much everything about anyone. True, it used to take a little longer and it depended a little more on bribery, threat, and charm than on hacking, but the results were similar. I left a message, apologizing for what had transpired earlier and asking if we could get together to talk. I left my numbers and hung up.

I sat down at my computer and Googled Robert Tillman. If there was a connection between Tillman and the two EMTs, this was the place to start.

THIRTY-ONE

The High Line Bistro seemed like the logical second step after the Internet. Frankly, going back to the High Line was more like step 1-b. According to Google, there were a lot of Robert Tillmans in the world and most of them had accomplished a good deal more than landing a job as a prep cook at an overpriced Manhattan eatery. Even after I had made my search specific enough to get information on the Robert Tillman I was looking for, there wasn’t much to find worth looking at. In a world where every other putz on the street managed to achieve some diluted form of internet celebrity with a video of himself doing something creative or creatively stupid, Robert Tillman had managed to remain as anonymous and unheralded as a store brand soft drink. In fact, there wasn’t a single entry on him that predated his death.

The bartender recognized me immediately and smiled. Then, when she remembered why she recognized me, that lovely smile slid right off her face. It’s funny how people’s expressions so betray them. I knew a detective once, a guy named Micky Dingle, who used to watch TV with the sound off. He insisted it was good practice for learning how to read body language and facial expressions and it was hard to argue with his results. Dingle was a legendary interviewer—
interviewer
, that’s cop speak for interrogator—and had a knack for getting suspects to confess to their crimes, large and small. These days they would say Micky was attuned to unconscious physical cues and nonverbal communication. The FBI probably taught classes in it by showing videos of baboons doing threat behavior and dolphins recognizing themselves in mirrors.

I sat in the same barstool I’d occupied the last time I was here. There were actually a few other people at the bar this time around, so the bartender wasn’t pinned and wriggling in front of me like she had been during my previous visit. But we both knew she couldn’t avoid me forever.

“Sparkling water with a lime?” she asked.

“Good memory. Yeah, to start, sparkling water is fine. It’s Esme, right?”

“Esme, yes.”

“I’d also like a glass of Zin and a minute of your time.”

“The water is with my compliments. The Zinfandel you pay for, but my time is my own. And please do not bother showing me your badge again. It took me a little while to figure it out, but you are old enough to be my grandfather.”

“You know how to hurt a man’s pride, don’t you? No, I’m not a cop, but I used to play one on TV.”

She didn’t laugh. “I do not understand.”

“Bad joke, never mind. I used to be a cop and I use my old badge sometimes as kind of a shortcut is all. I am a licensed private investigator, though. And no, I guess you don’t have to talk to me, though I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to.”

“No one enjoys being lied to. It makes them feel foolish,” she said, pouring my Zinfandel.

“That wasn’t my intention, making you feel foolish, I mean. I’m very sorry if I did.”

The wine was so deeply red it was nearly black. I sipped: full-bodied, peppery with a hint of cherries. Pretty impressive stuff for wine by the glass, but at fifteen bucks a glass, the price was impressive too.

“What do you really want of me?”

“The truth?”

“That would be a change.”

“The first time I was just poking around on behalf of a client. It was more like fact finding than anything else.”

She got inexplicably agitated. “A client? What client?” Catching the semi-desperation in her voice, she calmed herself down. “Forgive me. I am not myself today.”

“That’s privileged information, Esme. I wouldn’t be a very good investigator if I was willing to come right out and tell you.”

She didn’t like that answer and moved away from me for the moment, but she was soon right back in front of me. “Please tell me,” she said, not-too subtly running the tip of her tongue over her red lips. “I would really like to know.”

“If I were thirty years younger and you looked at me like that, I might just tell you.”

“Please.”

“Sorry.”

Her lovely face turned to stone, her body clenching tight. “Is your client a woman?”

It was an odd question. I suppose I could have just said no and been done with it, but her reaction was so incredibly visceral I couldn’t let it go. “What’s wrong? What if it was a woman?”

“
Is
it a woman?” she practically growled.

“I told you, I can’t say.”

“Please leave.” It might have sounded like a request, but it wasn’t.

“Miss, can I get another Black Label, please,” asked a man at the end of the bar in a thousand dollars worth of casual clothing, jiggling the ice in his freshly scotchless glass.