Hurt Machine (30 page)

“Hello, Esme,” I said.

She wheeled around. She knew immediately who I was, but pretended not to. “Do I know you?”

I waved my cell at her, smiling. “Why don’t you answer your phone?”

She ignored that. “Who are you?”

I clicked my phone off and the ringing in her bag was silenced. “Aren’t you curious how I got your number?”

“Not really, no. Who are you again?” Now she was just stalling for time, trying to make sense of the situation.

“Maybe you don’t recognize me without my old badge or a drink spilled all over me.”

“Oh, I remember now, yes. From the High Line.” She smiled at me, running her tongue over her lips as she had the second time I spoke to her. “How did you find me?”

“Finding your address was simple, almost as simple as blackmail.”

“You are crazy. I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Weak, Esme. That was weak. And you were doing so well up to then. See, I know all sorts of unexpected stuff about you, like how to email you at
[email protected]
.”

That chased the flirtatious smile right off her lips. Her face hardened and her eyes busied themselves burning holes right through mine. That was good because she was so focused on me she never even heard Pam come up behind her. Only when Pam pressed the tines of the Taser to Esme’s neck did she realize the tables were about to turn on her and turn hard.

…

I would have dismissed it as a scene out of a bad movie—a woman duct-taped to a chair in a semi-dark room in a warehouse. Only the warehouse belonged to my brother and me, and it wasn’t a movie. There were times when there weren’t very many options and this was one of those times.

When Esme stirred, she tried shaking herself fully awake. She tried moving her arms and legs to no avail and then looked down at the strange clothes she was wearing.

“You shit yourself when you got zapped,” I said, straddling a chair directly across from her. “It happens sometimes.”

“I’m gonna fuck you up for this.”

I clucked my tongue at her. “Sorry, Esme, but your fucking people up days are over.”

“You think so?”

“What’s the matter? Not so much fun when you’re not in control, is it?”

“Fuck you!”

“I’m not the one who’s fucked here.”

“What are you going to do, kill me, old man?”

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

I stood up and reached under my jacket for my .38. I opened the cylinder and emptied the cartridges onto the floor. I picked a lone bullet up and made a show of putting it back in the cylinder. I walked over to her and spun the cylinder very close to her right ear. Then walked behind her, spun it again and snapped the cylinder shut. “Click, click, click, click … I love that sound. This is a trick I learned to play as a cop, Esme. Now let me teach it to you. You see, it’s stupid beating a confession out of someone. Too messy, too much potential fallout. In any case, we don’t really need you to confess, do we? No we don’t. Keeping that cell phone on you, that was really sloppy, and picking the money up yourself was just plain stupid. And sorry, but we’ve got your computer here, all your little sex toys and outfits, and all your video equipment too. I’m sorry. I’m getting off the point. Where was I? Oh, right. The trick.

“Yeah, like I said, it’s dumb hitting a suspect. And you know, I was always in uniform, so I never got to learn how to ask clever questions in that manipulative way detectives ask them. Some of those guys were amazing. They could get real hard-case motherfuckers to confess to terrible things, but sometimes it took hours, days sometimes. No, see, out on the street, we had our own way of interrogating suspects and we also got hard cases to confess to all kinds of shit, but it never took more than two minutes. That’s where the trick comes in. It worked every time too, ’cause no matter how different people are from each other, tough or weak, brave or cowardly, sane or psychopath, they all have one thing in common: they don’t want to die. And, Esme, I bet you think you’re different. I bet you always think that, huh? That you’re gonna be the exception to the rule. Well, you keep thinking that, okay?

“So here’s how it would work if you were a hard case. I would take this gun here with the one bullet in it and I’d jam it against the back of your fucking head or press it to your temple.” I lightly brushed her hair with the muzzle of the .38. “Then I’d start asking you for where the video footage is stored, for all your access codes, and the master codes for your accounts. I’d ask you for a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people you’ve been blackmailing. And the minute you stopped answering or started lying to me, I would pull the hammer back and squeeze the trigger and I would keep doing it until I got the answers I was looking for. See how it works? But here’s the trick,” I said, walking around in front of her and showing her the bullet in my left hand. “The trick is that I palmed the one bullet you thought was in the cylinder the second I moved out of your line of sight. The gun’s empty.” With that, I pressed the muzzle up to my temple, pulled the hammer back, and squeezed the trigger. I did it over and over and over again. “See?”

The look of utter horror on her face was astonishing. The cop who taught me this trick many years ago told me it would work just this way.

“It scares ’em more if you put the empty gun against your own head or put it in your own mouth and keep squeezing. That really scares the shit out of them. They’re already scared to begin with, but seeing that makes ’em think you’re just crazy enough to really kill them if you have to. And that’s the whole point.”

It went off perfectly, but I wasn’t feeling particularly proud of myself. Nor was I quite done, not yet.

I leaned over her and put my lips very close to her ear and whispered, “Someone is going to come talk to you now. He’s a real cop, a detective, but if you don’t cooperate with him and give him all the things we talked about, including your bank account and pin number, I’m gonna come back in here and we’re gonna play that game again. Except this time, I won’t palm the bullet. I’m dying, Esme. I have gastric cancer and, unlike you, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

“You are full of shit,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to keep her voice steady.

I stepped back from her far enough so she could see my face. “Take a good look, Esme. Look in my eyes and tell me I’m full of shit. Tell me!”

She was silent.

I turned to go.

“What is this to you?” she called after me. “Why should you care what I do?”

I kept walking.

When Fuqua came out of the room, he handed me the cartridges I’d left scattered on the floor in front of Esme. I hadn’t done it out of carelessness.

“Here is the information,” he said, giving me a sheet of paper. “How long will you continue to hold her?”

“A few more hours. I have a computer guy who used to work for me. He’ll check this stuff out and wipe the videos.”

“Now, I believe you have something for me,
non
?”

I didn’t say a word as I handed him the fuel to feed the furnace of his ambition: a nine-by-twelve envelope and the digital voice recorder. I had that sick feeling in my belly again.

FORTY-FIVE

Empty.

Empty, that’s how I felt.

It was over.

Done with.

And who was better for it? Carmella? Maya? Pam? Natasha? Yes, Natasha. Maybe Natasha and the fourteen other women Esme had blackmailed. Pam and I checked their names against phone numbers, emails, addresses, and videos. Fourteen was the number, not counting Maya Watson, of course. It was hard to watch all the videos, even in fast forward, although there was a horrible, mind-numbing sameness to them. I didn’t hold out any hope that these women who had been drugged and raped and blackmailed would find an ounce of comfort in the fact that they weren’t lone victims. They were alone in every way that mattered, far removed from solace, though not quite as far removed as Maya. At least part of the nightmare was over for the survivors, but how much solace would there be in that? I felt like the doctor outside the triple amputee’s door preparing a speech about looking on the bright side. None of these women, I thought, was apt to see any silver lining.

Empty because I had seen the son that was taken from me nine years ago, but whose loss I was fully feeling only now.

Empty because Pam had gone back to Vermont to wash away the stink of this mess. I thought she’d have to scrub long and hard in very hot water from now until I came up for the wedding to even make a dent.

Empty because I’d failed at the whole point of this. I had even less of an idea about who had killed Alta Conseco than I had before I got involved. This was it, the last good chance, and I’d blown it.

Empty because I’d made deals and compromises that weren’t mine to make.

Empty because the clock was ticking.

Empty because that famous luck of mine had run out.

…

I went to the house on Ashford Street. I didn’t know if Carmella had stuck around or if she’d run back up to Toronto, covering her eyes and her ears so that she could ignore the unpleasant truths. If she wasn’t there, I’d call her. If she didn’t answer the phone, I’d fly up to Toronto. She had gotten me into this and she was going to hear me out.

No need to go to the airport. Carmella answered the door. She read the look on my face and invited me in. She’d said she wanted me to stop working the case and maybe she even meant it when she said it, but Carm had been a cop, was still a cop. You never stop being one, badge or no badge, retired or not. You never stop being one on the inside. Whether or not she had better come to terms with who her sister was since our argument, I couldn’t judge.

She offered me a drink, which I refused. I needed to get this out.

“How did you know to come, Moe?”

“What?”

“I am leaving tomorrow and I won’t be coming back. I have rented this place out since I inherited it. I could not stand to let it go. It means the only happy memories I have of my family. But now … it is time. I have arranged for an agent to sell it and I have someone coming to take the furniture away. I have been hanging on to hopes and ghosts for too long. My life is with Israel in Toronto. It is not here. I am not sure it ever was.”

Only when she finished did I notice the phantom images of picture frames on the bare walls and the stacks of cardboard boxes neatly lined up in rows.

“I always liked this place. Even now I can feel your grandmother’s presence. I’ll be sorry when it’s gone.”

“It is already gone, Moe. So what have you come to say?”

“I don’t know who killed Alta, Carm. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I suppose it might have been a pissed-off fireman. That’s still my best guess. I thought I had someone for it, but that didn’t pan out.”

“It is not a surprise. I have already come to terms with that, I think.”

“But I did find some stuff out that you’ll want to hear, stuff you need to hear.”

She took a deep breath, girding herself. “Go ahead.”

“I know why Alta and her partner didn’t treat Robert Tillman at the High Line Bistro. The short version is that Tillman raped Maya Watson and was also blackmailing her. At Alta’s urging, they went to the restaurant to confront Tillman. It was their bad luck that he happened to pick that moment to stroke out. Alta never got over what happened to you, the thing that blew your family apart, and this was her chance at redemption. It wasn’t only Tillman she went to confront. It was the man who did what he did to you when you were little. It was her own guilt and regret she went to confront. Do you understand? Do you see why she couldn’t help him?”

“I understand,” she said, trying to hold herself together.

“It was all about you, about you and her. What might have been, what should have been between two sisters.”

Carmella cried with her whole body so that I felt it through the floor up from the soles of my shoes. I let her cry. I didn’t try to comfort her. The time for that had long passed. That old bond between us was finally broken.

“It seems like you’ve done a good job of raising Israel,” I said when her jag had quieted.

“Thank you.”

“Does he know—”

“—about you? No, but one of the things I am going to do when I get back home is explain.”

“I’m glad, Carm. He should know and about his biological father too. A kid needs to know where he came from so he can know where he’s going.”

“You are right, Moe.”

There was a moment of awkward silence before I stood to leave. Carmella walked me downstairs. We didn’t speak, not at first, but then I hugged her long and hard. It was a last hug goodbye. Just before I left, I handed her a slip of paper with Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston’s contact information.

“Who is this?”

“Someone you need to sit down with and speak to before you go home.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, Alta really will be lost to you forever.”

I turned and didn’t look back.

FORTY-SIX