Hurt Machine (26 page)

“I’m sorry, Detective DiNardo, I was interrupted there for a second. What’s this in relation to again?”

“Do you know a Maya Watson?”

“I might.”

His previously flat affect turned decidedly hostile. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. What’s this about?”

“This is a homicide investigation, Mr. Prager, and I suggest you stop fuckin’ around with me and answer the questions.”

“Is Maya Watson dead?”

There was silence on his end of the phone.

I covered the mouthpiece again and turned to Fuqua. “I think Maya Watson’s been murdered.”

He crossed himself, mumbled something in French, then asked for the phone. I obliged.

“Detective DiNardo, this is Detective Jean Jacques Fuqua of Brooklyn South Homicide, shield number 814. Mr. Prager is assisting me in an investigation that also involves Maya Watson. Mr. Prager will cooperate with you fully, I can assure you. Can you please tell me what happened? Oh … Suicide … Yesterday … How long had she been dead? … Three days … A neighbor … The One-O-Seven … On Parsons Boulevard … We will be there within the hour.”

“Christ,” I heard myself whisper.

Fuqua clicked off and handed back the phone. “Definitely a suicide, but you know procedure. It is treated as a homicide until other possibilities are eliminated and the ME makes the final determination. They found your number and messages on her cell phone. He was just doing his job.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“He did not say, but we will know soon enough.”

…

Detective DiNardo was a forty/forty man: forty years old with a forty-inch waist. He was counting the days until he could put in his papers, collect his pension, and move down to South Carolina. I knew a lot of John DiNardos when I was on the job. They were sort of the opposite numbers to ambitious guys like Larry McDonald and Jean Jacques Fuqua. For the DiNardos of this world, making detective third was as far as their reach extended. They were content to wear Walmart wardrobes, work the cases that came across their desks, and to get fat on fast food. That was fine. In the opera of the law, someone’s got to sing in the chorus. And the fact that DiNardo didn’t aspire to be Sherlock Holmes made him easier to deal with. To him Maya Watson’s suicide was an easy case to clear, so he had no qualms about sharing information with us.

DiNardo handed Fuqua two plastic, amber-colored prescription bottles in an evidence bag. “She swallowed about fifty of those. This was no cry for help. She meant to do the job right.”

Fuqua handed the bag back. “Why was there no report of her death in the media?”

“We didn’t put two and two together at first,” DiNardo said. “That thing with her and her partner letting that guy die, that was months ago. None of us made the connection. Only when I started digging a little did I put it together. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

“Suicide note?” I asked.

“No need for one,” DiNardo said, handing me another evidence bag. “That’s the letter from the FDNY officially dismissing her. I figure it was the last straw and that was that.”

I wanted to argue with him, but what he said made too much sense. I had seen the way Maya had shut herself in and closed herself off. I had smelled the cigarettes and seen the cups and cups and cups of coffee. I had heard her talk about her unending grief over what had happened to Alta. Sure, that day when we went to Coney Island, she seemed better, feisty even, but I was no shrink. People killed themselves for all sorts of reasons, sometimes not very substantial ones. No one could argue that that was the case with Maya Watson. Her reasons seemed substantial enough to me.

It struck me, though, that her suicide had shut the door on the only lead we had. We might now never know what she was being blackmailed about, if Robert Tillman had been the man behind it, or if the blackmail had anything to do with Alta’s murder.

“Detective DiNardo, did you call all the other numbers in her cell phone in and out box?” I asked, not quite sure why.

“I did.”

“And did you get everyone on the phone?”

“Nah. I couldn’t reach one or two of them.”

“Would you mind giving me those numbers and letting me keep trying?”

“Not a problem. Let me get them for you.” He transcribed the numbers from the file onto the back of his card and handed it to me. “Anything else, gentlemen?”

Fuqua and I looked at each other and silently agreed that we had no more questions.

“Nothing I can think of,” I said. “Thanks.”

We all shook hands like captains at the center of a football field before the coin toss.

“Good luck with your case, Fuqua,” DiNardo said. “What these women did was wrong, but I don’t think either one of them deserved their fates.”

I changed my mind about DiNardo. He wasn’t like the guys I’d known on the job. None of them would have been thoughtful enough to look beyond their own gut reactions. The guys I had known would have looked at what had befallen Alta and Maya and said good riddance.

THIRTY-NINE

It was her apartment, but it wasn’t, and we didn’t need a crystal ball to know what we would find. She hadn’t answered the door and she hadn’t responded to our knocking at her windows. We knew all we needed to know when the foul stench of rancid flesh seeped under the door and around the window frames like fog. Old death’s signature is as distinctive as John Hancock’s. I knew that if the fog could get out, flies could get in. The image of her body as the hostess of flies made me sick to my stomach and I covered my mouth to hold back the vomit. That image would be as hard to erase as the stink that filled up my senses.

Fuqua handed me a cell phone.
Where was mine?
I punched in her number like a silent prayer. Silent or not, God said no, and the call went straight to voicemail.

“It is the Tonton Macoute,” Fuqua said, his hands shaking. Then he turned and kicked in the door. It crumbled into dust as if it were made of chalk and a wave of thick black coffee came pouring out the empty doorway, thousands of cigarette filters riding the surf. Our clothes remained perfectly dry. “Watch out for the Tonton Macoute,” he whispered, his index finger across his lips.

We walked into the apartment. The walls were papered in hate mail, the carpeting covered in tobacco stains and sticky brown resin. There was a makeshift altar in one corner of the living room. On it was a framed photo of Alta Conseco kissing Kristen Jo Winston. The photograph was surrounded by hundreds of Hanukah candles; blue and white wax dripped into a two-foot high mound on the floor. Odd, I thought, this altar was just like the altar in John Tierney’s house, the man who had been accused of kidnapping Sashi Bluntstone. But this wasn’t his basement, or was it?

Fuqua nodded at the altar. “See, see?”

We were in her bedroom now. It was so thick with flies that we breathed them in like black air, but the beating of their wings was only a whisper. John DiNardo was now there with us. He pointed at the bed. Her body lay under a quilt that conformed perfectly to her outline.

“This is how we found her,” he said. “She’s still under there. Look!”

And when Detective DiNardo pulled back the quilt, nothing was in bed but a cell phone.

I didn’t wake up screaming because I’d been complicit in my dream. It was as if I was rooting from the sidelines for me to keep moving ahead, to find what I was looking for, to find an answer. No, I woke up feeling like an old-fashioned percolator. Things were bubbling up inside me. Sure, there was regret over Maya Watson’s suicide, but death had been her choice, a luxury I didn’t think was going to be afforded me. Besides, I didn’t hold with those people who believed that suicide was an act of cowardice. Those were the same people who saw addiction as a moral weakness, the same people who thought of posttraumatic stress as a disease for pussies. Suicide wasn’t exactly an act of heroism either, not in my book. It was an act of control, the ultimate proof of propriety.

I rolled over in bed. Pam was there with me, asleep but lightly so. She was in that rested, semi-conscious state where a soft touch in the right place would lead us down the road to slow building, sleep-drunk sex. Pam was nude and with my body pressing against her back, it would have been easy to touch any number of sensitive spots and to let the dance begin. Instead I put my arm around her abdomen and held on for all I was worth.

“What is it?” she mumbled, rolling onto her back and brushing my cheek with the back of her hand. “What time is it?”

“It’s either very late or very early.” I dragged my thumb over her lips. “Lady’s choice.”

“Late is sexier than early.”

“Then it’s very late. What time did you get in?”

“Past midnight. We’ve got a lot to talk about later,” she said.

“It’s already later.”

She pushed me over onto my back and straddled me. “Later later,” she said. “Some things can wait. Others can’t. Lady’s choice, remember?”

I knew when to keep my mouth shut.

FORTY

It had taken Pam nearly the entire day to track down Abigail and Natasha, the two women from Kid Charlemagne’s. She had had to tell them lies, different lies to each, but she had managed to have coffee with Natasha, the hostess who had quit, and a glass of wine with Abigail before her shift. Pam had a gift for lying. That was how we met, through a series of her lies. Although I too could lie with as little effort as it took to blink, I’m not sure I ever got completely over how Pam and I came to be together. Even after Pam saved my life, I couldn’t forget her lies. Most of the time I was fine with it. She had just been doing her job. I knew that was true. True or not, it rang hollow, the way my words must’ve sounded to my first wife Katy when she discovered I’d been lying to her about her brother Patrick’s disappearance since before we were married.

Pam’s hard work had gotten her only so far.

“Abigail was very cooperative. She told me that a couple of months ago some of the crew from Kid Charlemagne’s went to the bar next door to the restaurant for drinks one night after work. They did that sometimes, nothing unusual about it. As it got later and later, the crowd thinned out until only she, another bartender, one of the other cooks, and Tillman were left. She said she liked older men and Tillman was handsome enough. They had flirted around a little bit. Then she started feeling weird, not sick exactly, just light-headed, and she went to the bathroom to throw some cold water on her face. When she came out, Robert Tillman was standing there. He opened his hand and there was a pill in his palm. He told her to take it, that it would make everything feel better. When she refused, he shoved her back into the bathroom and tried to force it down her throat. She spit it out, kicked him in the nuts, ran out, and caught a cab. Said she really doesn’t remember getting home and woke up still in her clothes like twelve hours later. She told her boss and Tillman was fired.”

“And the other woman, Natasha?”

“Nice girl, but fragile. She wouldn’t talk. She was scared shitless. When I brought up Tillman’s name, I thought she would snap in two.”

“Doesn’t make any sense. If Tillman was blackmailing her or even if he was just a pig and had pulled the same stunt with her as he had with Abigail, he’s dead. Dead is dead.”

“Maybe not,” Pam said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Listen, Moe, no matter how I tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, she wouldn’t. Finally, when I saw I wasn’t getting anywhere with her, I did a variation on Abigail’s story and told her Tillman had tried it on me. She began shaking like crazy and when I put my hand on her to try and calm her down, I could feel she was cold sweating. She asked me if he was still threatening me too.”

“What?”

“That’s what she said, Moe. ‘Is he still threatening you?’ When she saw the confusion in my eyes, I saw betrayal in hers. She knew I was lying and ran out.”

“This is nuts. The one thing we do know here is that Tillman is dead.”

Pam smiled a sad smile. “Well, Natasha doesn’t seem to think so.”

“Holy shit!” I smacked myself in the forehead. “It’s all right here.”

“What’s all here?”

“The answers,” I said.

“To what?”

“To everything.”

“Everything?”

“Almost.”

“Did the Mafia kill JFK?”

I kissed her hard on the mouth. “I said almost everything, wiseass. I’ve got some calls to make.”

FORTY-ONE

I don’t think I’d ever fully grasped the concept of reverse engineering. There was more to it than just breaking something down into its component pieces and putting it back together. There were more subtle aspects to it. Even inanimate things are more than the sum of their parts. Pam understood that. Carmella understood it too. Me, Mr. Stumbler and Bumbler, I didn’t get it until now. Alta’s murder was proving to be a lot more than a series of connected events. I wanted to trace it back to its point of origin, to the first falling domino, and now I thought I knew where that domino had fallen.