Red on Red (14 page)

There were two coffins, both dark wood, one half-open, which showed Miz Cole in a bright patterned dress of blue and yellow checks. Her hands were clasped piously, resting high on the breast, and here the pose seemed real, seemed right, and not model number three from the undertaker’s handbook. A poster of Milton was set on an easel beside his closed coffin, a blowup of a school photo. Malcolm stood, his head hanging down. A minute passed, and another, and Nick heard him mutter something, maybe a prayer. He seemed to have little to say, but he was unwilling to go. Nick turned away, and his eyes came upon a large gilt-framed
Last Supper
on the wall. Who painted that, Leonardo da Vinci? Nick looked closer, scanning the faces, the twelve around the one. When he painted it, did his Jesus have such a big Afro? Did the prophet not say,
Yea, shall ye not know him, by his funkadelic halo of hair?

It was a kind of disease, Nick thought, the sudden laughter that overtook him sometimes. The susceptibility struck him after long exhaustion, like the flu, and when you looked back after a good night’s sleep at what had been so hysterical, it was as funny as a foreign cartoon.
I guess … I get it
. Nick had seen black Christs before, and though they had seemed odd at first, he realized they were no more fantastic than blond ones. This should have been no different, really. Really. Jesus at the center, surrounded by … his point guards and power forwards. Nick coughed to cover up the laugh that seized him like a hiccup, and then he lowered his head, as Malcolm and Esposito turned to look. Nick rubbed his brow. Esposito moved in, picking up a folding chair and setting it beside the coffin.

“All right, Malcolm. If you wanna sit for a while, we wanna pay our respects, too.”

Malcolm took the chair, and the detectives knelt at the rail, heads bowed, and Nick didn’t look over at Esposito, even though he knew Esposito was sneaking a peek at him. Nick had almost been caught, and he knew he would be, unless he played it straight all the way to the end. The words of the Hail Mary and the Our Father escaped him, scrambled like puzzle pieces dumped from the box. He counted backward from fifty, slowly, eyes shut tight. Malcolm might have taken the larger view and decided that they had not killed his mother. Still, there really was no good way to get around the sight of a cop laughing at his mother’s corpse.

Yes, there was. Nick stood and rose, looked over the body, and shook his head. Nick went over to Malcolm and rested a hand on his shoulder, letting him see the redness in his eyes.

“Sorry, Malcolm. My mother died, too. I have a tough time with this.”

Malcolm looked up, seemingly touched. “S’arright.”

Nick took a deep breath and walked to the back. Esposito got up and stood beside him, but Nick avoided eye contact. Malcolm walked over to the coffin. He leaned in and kissed his mother on the cheek. Whatever his regrets were, he seemed to leave them there as he turned around and approached the detectives, offering his hands to be re-cuffed.

“All right, then. Let’s do it.”

T
hat was the deal—a chance to say goodbye, in exchange for a confession. Malcolm hadn’t known that the sole witness to the murder, the grocery clerk, had been hesitant with the identification, and had since returned to Yemen. Maybe he would have come back, and maybe he’d have been willing to look at a lineup, and maybe he would have picked him out; otherwise, Malcolm Cole had no idea how close he had been to freedom. And yet it wasn’t freedom, never would be, as long as he was on the run. Every knock at the door made the hair on your neck stand up; every tap on your shoulder felt like a hand at your throat. Malcolm was here to settle his accounts and move on. He was going to break his life in half like a wishbone, and hope the bigger part was not behind him.

The ride downtown was somber. Malcolm looked out the window, his face brushing occasionally on the glass. The detectives did not want to disturb him. When they arrived back at Central Booking, Esposito parked the car and led Malcolm out from the back like a chauffeur. Before they went back into the jail, with its skim milk and baloney sandwiches, its denials and excuses and indigestion, Malcolm looked over at Esposito, tipping up his chin—
Wait
. He had what Nick first thought was a plaintive look, but it began to shift—or Nick did—even before Malcolm spoke. It was weary but didn’t ask for pity or anything else. Malcolm was slightly taller than Esposito, and looking down to him, he spoke without ego and from strength.

“This worked out with us, today. I did what I needed to do, said what you needed me to say. What’s done is done. I’m gonna pay and move on. Where we go from here, I don’t know—but this don’t got to be over, between
us. I know a lot. I know about a lot more than just the thing I did, a lot worse. I wanna help myself. You interested?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How do I get ahold of you?”

Esposito stuck a card into Malcolm’s pocket.

“You call me. You need to sleep, to clear your head. If we’re gonna do this, you gotta be all in. Don’t even answer me now. Tell me tomorrow, the next day.”

“Answer’s not gonna change. Everything else got to.”

“I believe you,” said Esposito, as he took hold of Malcolm’s shoulder. “Tell me about Milton. Who killed your brother? Did someone want to kill him, or did they think it was you?”

“If they thought it was me, it was Babenco’s cousin Kiko. If they knew it was my brother, it was Kiko. If they didn’t care, it was Kiko. You follow me? It was Kiko.”

Esposito couldn’t shake Malcolm’s hand just then, but he did as soon as he uncuffed him inside, before leading him down to the cells. The detectives headed back uptown.

Traffic was heavy and conversation was brief until the road cleared above the bridge, when Esposito stepped on the gas. He seemed to open up with the engine.

“That was great. It went perfect! The video, he gave up everything! His clothes. Didja see the look on him when I gave him the clothes? It was like he was meeting Santa Claus. And that girl, Donna—was she hot, or what? I hadn’t seen her in years. I can’t believe I still had her number, and she was game, ready to go. And, and—wait a second, what was up with you? In the funeral home, when you made it look like you broke down? You cracked up, didn’t you? What was it that was so funny you almost laughed my homicide—two cases, two homicides—straight down the toilet?”

Nick started to laugh again, at the memory and in relief.

“There was a picture there, a painting of Jesus and the apostles. Everybody was black in it. It looked like an old commercial for something, an ad for menthol cigarettes. It just hit me.”

“Well, it was a nice save. The thing about your mother—is it true?”

Nick had to think for a moment. “Yeah, it is true. She died when I was a kid.”

“Sorry…. Like I said, it was a nice save.”

Esposito looked over to him with an appreciative eye—a man who would take advantage of his own mother’s death to salvage an interrogation was clearly someone he could work with. Nick didn’t think of it that way. He was neither as bad as that nor as good—and the gambit had failed as solidly the night before, with Michael, as it had succeeded with Malcolm. For Malcolm it had been a poignant gesture; for the other, an appalling presumption. Who knew how these things would go over? Still, if he couldn’t cry on cue, he could think on his feet, and he was glad for the compliment. He and Esposito were still in the testing phase.

“Hey, let me cover half of Malcolm’s stuff, the underwear and toothbrush and whatever. What did you pay?”

“Don’t worry about it. Buy me a beer next time.”

“What was it?”

“Forty bucks. The guy made some noise about it, but I didn’t understand him, and I didn’t have time.”

“He might have been trying to tell you it only cost thirty.”

Esposito laughed. “See? I told you it worked out, all around.”

At the precinct, they went to their desks. Esposito was eager to begin work on the next thing—Kiko—and Nick was anxious to finish up the last, yesterday’s suicide. The fingerprints had not matched anyone in the database, as expected, so she was still a missing/unidentified person. The case would be reassigned to Missing Persons in a week if he couldn’t find a family member to notify, and she would be buried—physically in Potter’s Field, on Hart Island in the Bronx, statistically in a folder downtown. Nick had tasted of both fates, and he didn’t care for them. He took her to be Central American and illegal, someone who had slipped over the border or had missed a flight home, looking for work and finding it by the end of the day. She would not have gotten in trouble, at least not with cops, though she was no stranger to misfortune. Beyond those loose ideas, Nick had two phone numbers. Nick called the first—disconnected. The second was a beeper, and he punched in his number for the return call. When his phone rang, he snatched it up.

“Sí?”

“Sí?”

“You speak English?”

“Un poco …”

“
Soy policía, soy detectivo, es muy importante que tu a la precincto immediamente venir
. Understand? You gotta come to the precinct. You talk to me,
a hablar con mijo
, right away.
Tu nombre?
Your name?”

There was a pause on the other end. Nick’s Spanish was poor, and he didn’t know for whose benefit he repeated himself, in simultaneous pidgin. He wanted to make the other man feel uncomfortable trying to speak English, wanted to make him work at understanding, but the message had to be clear. Nick didn’t want to threaten him, whoever he was, but he had to let the situation seem threatening to him, to impress that his involvement couldn’t be sidestepped. That kind of blame-spreading was one of the primary skills of a cop, to make one person’s problems belong to someone else, to as many people as possible.
Mi casa es su casa
, and my problems are yours.

“Mi nombre es Jose.”

“
Jose qué?
Last name, papi,
también.
”

“Jose Rodriguez.”

“Okay, Señor Rodriguez, you come now?”

“No, no,
trabajando
. Maybe tomorrow.”

“No, not tomorrow. Now. How do you work, what kind—
qué tipo trabajar?
”

“Taxi.”

“Good. Taxi up here, drive up here, now. Five minutes.”

“No, I in Bronx. Fifteen minutes, I go there.”

“Good.”

Nick didn’t necessarily believe that Jose Rodriguez had found his inner citizen, but he believed he’d show up. Nick took out the Polaroids of the woman in the park and laid them across the desk. Her black hair blended with the black night, and the flash had given the skin a bluish tint, a cool, almost underwater pallor, so that her face looked like a mask. There is something deforming about the official camera, for passport, license, or yearbook, that makes people go stiff and flat. Most mug shots are more natural; hostility and fear photograph better than a fake smile. The woman looked better than Nick remembered, less afflicted than she had seemed in the tree, less pitiful than she had seemed in the morgue. If only the same lying kindness that the camera had shown had found her before yesterday.

When the cabdriver came, Nick put him in the interview room and pointed to a seat. He was young and looked Mexican, like the woman,
which was good. He seemed nervous, and Nick encouraged it, leaving the room briefly—
“Momento, señor.”
—closing the door and sliding the bolt shut with an audible click. Nick went around to the side to have another look at him through the one-way mirror. The man’s left leg jack-hammered under the table, and his fingers twisted and untwisted into cat’s cradles. These little lab rat experiments said so little. Rodriguez was afraid because he was her lover who had left her; because he was illegal; because he had speeding tickets, a bloody machete under the driver’s seat from the last guy who’d tried to rob him; because he was a decent and hardworking man who had never even spoken with the cops before. You watched what he did, wondering what it meant; the only true proof of guilt was sleep. If he had killed someone, he’d have been slumped over, snoring, as Malcolm had the night before, in any two-minute break. A nightmare to be caught, but also a relief; fear had held the body rigid for so long that when it passed, it was like the bones turned to butter. Then again, if Jose Rodriguez had anything heavy on his conscience, he wouldn’t have come. Nick went back in and set the pictures on the table. Rodriguez glanced at them and looked up, offering dim and pointless observations. “A lady?”

“Yes, a lady.”

“She dead?”

“Yes, she dead.”

“Who?”

“You tell me.”

Nick let the silence weigh on him. Rodriguez’s eyes were on Nick, not the pictures, and Nick tapped on the table to return his attention to them.

“Oh, I don’ know….”

“Yes, you do. Look again. I’ll give you time to think, to remember.”

Nick abruptly stood up and walked out. The door shut and the bolt locked with a bit more force. Esposito looked up from his desk.

“Does he know her?”

“Beats me. He’s playing dumb, though, so he gets the dummy treatment.”