by Blake Banner
“Then stay. You have been very lucky, Moses. Both of you have. You may not think so, but I have seen what Akachukwu is capable of, with my own eyes. So has Detective Dehan. And believe me when I tell you, you have been lucky. Stay here. Do not go back to your house until this man is convicted and in prison.”
“OK, we agree.”
“Will you testify against this man at trial?”
They both nodded. “Yes, we will.”
I stood. “You have both been more helpful than you can realize. We’ll be in touch very soon.”
Moses stood. “Detective, I have heard from friends that you have already arrested this man, and he is in prison.”
“Pending trial, Moses. Don’t risk it. A smart lawyer could get him bail. Stay away. Stay out of sight.”
He heaved a big, reluctant sigh. “Very well.”
They saw us to the door. Dusk had faded and it was now turning to evening. Streetlamps were coming on and, along the street, the warm glow of lighted windows touched the shadows of the trees and the lawns with warmth. Angela waved and closed the door, and we climbed into the Jaguar and sat staring through the windshield at the gathering darkness.
Dehan gazed at me. After a while, it dawned on me that I was gazing back and it struck me suddenly how absurd and intimate it was that we were sitting in a dark car in a dark street, just gazing at each other without talking. I blinked and sighed.
“So now, what I want to do, Dehan, is eliminate Akachukwu Oni from Sebastian’s murder inquiry.”
“What?”
“I want to send him down for Jack’s murder and for the attempts on Moses and Angela…”
“You think he killed Jack?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“But you don’t think he killed Sebastian…”
“No. But we need to prove that.”
“You are going to have two problems there, Stone. One, you’re trying to prove a negative, and two, I think he did kill him.”
I shook my head. “I don’t see either of those as a problem, but tell me what his motive is for killing Sebastian.”
“He hasn’t got one.”
I smiled. “OK…”
“He wasn’t there waiting for the car. He arrived with the intention of breaking in and finding out from Angela where Moses was. But when he arrived, he saw the car wasn’t there. So he waited. Maybe he thought he’d wait for her to return, or maybe he was just wondering what to do. Either way, he didn’t have to wait long, because the car turned up. In the poor visibility, he saw two people, but couldn’t make out exactly who they were. Naturally, he assumed it was Moses and Angela. Being how he is, he didn’t hesitate. He got out, walked up, and emptied his magazine. Then drove away.”
I drummed on the wheel with my fingers for a moment. “It’s possible.”
“But you don’t buy it.”
I sighed. “I am hungry, tired, and thirsty. Let’s call it a day and see how it looks in the morning. Forensics will make things a bit clearer.”
I followed Ellsworth Avenue and, at the bridge, without thinking, I turned onto East Tremont, headed north. We didn’t talk. I’d noticed she’d been odd for the last couple of days. I had half-assumed it was her time of the month, or something equally incomprehensible to men, and guessed it would pass in time. I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I’d had a crazy idea. I had no evidence as yet, but hard as I tried to pick holes in it, I couldn’t. It worked, and that’s probably why, when we came to Westchester I continued north on the Williamsbridge Road, instead of turning west onto East Tremont; probably why I didn’t take the Bruckner Expressway in the first place; probably why it never even crossed my mind to ask her what she wanted to do.
Now she looked at me with that same expressionless face she’d had for the past couple of days and said, “What are you doing, Stone?”
I gave her a blank look back. “What?”
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
She blinked a couple of times. “I have to get a cab?”
I smiled, then laughed. “Sorry, Dehan! I should have asked. I thought we could have those bison steaks and a bottle of wine. It might stimulate the little gray cells. What do you say?”
She didn’t smile or laugh. She looked away from me, out of the window, and after a moment, she said, “Just drop me on Morris Park Avenue. I’ll get a cab. Thanks all the same.”
I felt a flush of anger start in my belly and rise up to my head. I stayed quiet until it passed. I didn’t drop her at Morris Park Avenue. She turned and looked at me as I crossed over it and kept watching me as I turned into Rhinelander and eventually Haight Avenue, and parked in front of my house. There, I killed the engine and turned in my seat to face her.
“Dehan, I can cook you a bison steak on the barbeque, I can help you cook a bison steak on the barbeque, or I can drive you home. I am not, after a year of considering you more than a partner, more than a friend…” I was momentarily lost for words. “…considering you family! I am not going to drop you on Morris Park Avenue to get a cab. And frankly, I feel insulted that you would expect me to.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap. I waited, but she didn’t say anything, so I asked her, “Dehan, ever since we got back from Goa you’ve been…” Again I was lost for words. Now she raised her eyes and watched me.
She said, “What?”
I gestured at her. “Like this! Talk to me! Tell me what’s going on!”
She looked strangely sad. “Nothing’s going on, Stone.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true. Something happened in Goa. As I recall, we had a great time. Then, on the last day, you started to…” I searched for the word. I noticed her smile, but it was a smile of sad irony. I frowned, said again, “You started to go like this. What happened in Goa, Dehan?”
She reached over and took my hand, gave it a small squeeze. “Nothing.” She gave the word an odd emphasis. “Nothing happened in Goa.” She gave a small laugh and patted my hand. “You’re a great detective, Mr. Stone, but I guess there are some things you just can’t work out. Enjoy your steak. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She climbed out of the car and I sat confused, watching her tall, elegant form, on those long, extraordinary legs, walk away from me. As she passed through the dappled glow of a street lamp, under a plane tree, she reached behind her head and tied her long, black hair into a knot. I felt a sharp pang of loss. I got out of the car and drew breath to shout after her. But she passed out of the glow, into the shadows, and soon after that, she turned onto Rhinelander Avenue and I saw her raise her hand to hail a cab. I had been too slow, and now it was too late.
I sat on the hood of my Jag, staring at the empty glow of the avenue at the end of the gloomy tunnel which was my street. My mind was still and quiet. It seemed to be empty of thought, but I heard myself mutter, “What happened in Goa…?”
Nothing happened in Goa.
I climbed the stairs to my house, let myself in and poured myself a whiskey.
NINETEEN
The call came a little after two AM. I was still up, sitting in my chair with a third glass of whiskey in my hand, staring at the cold, empty fireplace. The ringing roused me from dark thoughts and memories. I reached for my phone and saw it was Frank.
“Yeah! Hi…”
“Sorry to wake you, John, I thought you’d want to know. I’m here with Joe, all the results are in…”
“No. I was up. I’ll come right over.”
“You were up?” He sounded curious.
“Yeah, long story. See you in ten minutes.”
It was just half a mile from my house to the Van Etten building, and at that time there was no traffic, so I made it in less than ten minutes. I found them both in Frank’s small office, drinking coffee laced with whiskey out of paper cups. I’d had an idea that’s what they’d be doing, so I put my contribution of half a bottle of Irish on the table and pulled up a chair.
“What have you got?”
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Joe poured me some coffee, laced it, and handed it to me.
“First of all, the boot prints at the scene of Jack O’Brien’s murder: they were made by the boots you had sent in, which places your man Akachukwu at the scene of the murder, removing the cannabis plants.”
I nodded. “That’s good.”
“Yeah, but there is more. What we hadn’t spotted on the first, cursory glance, was that there was blood on the boots, on the soles and on the uppers. The blood is in the prints he left behind, in the dust, and still in the stitching and the overlaps of the boots. Naturally, the blood is a match for O’Brien. Those boots were not only at the scene of the murder, removing the cannabis, they were there at the time of the murder, removing the cannabis.”
“That is damn good work, Joe.”
Frank sipped and said, “I can confirm what we already assumed, that he was killed by a single slash of an extremely sharp blade. Something like a samurai sword or a razor sharp machete. He was then beaten, probably kicked, and his spine broken, but that occurred postmortem.”
I took a swig. “Poor bastard.”
Frank nodded. “Not the nicest way to go. Now, to make your life a little more complicated, the DNA you sent in on the mug, it was a match for the DNA found in Rosario Rojas. Whoever drank from that cup, also raped Rosario.”
I gave an unhappy laugh. “So both are almost certainly guilty of a crime which is not killing Sebastian Acosta.”
They both grunted and we all drank.
“Logic dictates that one of the two was there that night.”
Joe leaned down into his bag and extracted a folder. He dropped it in front of me. “There are all your results. I don’t know if it helps, but the slugs that were removed from Sebastian, Luis, and the car are not a match for the slugs that were removed from Angela’s hall and Moses’ leg. Those two were .45s. Moses was lucky that slug had traveled through a door before it hit him. It might have done a hell of a lot more damage otherwise.
“The slugs that killed Sebastian and injured Luis were .38s.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they weren’t fired by the same man, it just means they came out of a different gun.”
I sat tipping my coffee one way and another. “If you wanted to kill somebody, as a punishment, not for expediency, but to bolster your reputation as a badass, and you owned a .45, would you use your .38 for the job?”
Joe shook his head. “I’d take the biggest, baddest gun I had.”
Frank nodded. “And I have to tell you, what whoever it was did to Sebastian is what they used to call a cowboy. That was back in the days of Dutch Schultz and Bumpy Johnson. If you did a cowboy on somebody, you shot them dead and you just kept shooting until you’d emptied the magazine. You weren’t just killing them, you were destroying them, and their reputation.”
I nodded several times. Joe topped up my cup, so it was now whiskey stained with coffee. “At least you’ll have enough for a search warrant. You may find the cannabis plants. You’ll have trouble making anything stick with Irizarry, though. He’ll claim they had consensual sex, and proving he strangled her is going to be hard. The prints they lifted back then were no good. It’ll be down to the DA persuading the jury.”
I frowned. “How about the prints on Angela’s neck? You get anything there?”
He shook his head. “He was wearing gloves.”
I shrugged. “That’s not a problem. When the jury hears about Jack, they hear Moses’ and Angela’s testimony, and me and Dehan swear we saw him there moments after she was attacked, they’ll know what conclusion to come to.”
They both nodded, then they both frowned. It was Frank who voiced it, though.
“Say, what gives with you and Dehan?”
I raised an eyebrow. “This again?”
“Come on, John. How many years have we known each other? This isn’t idle gossip, we are concerned about you. You don’t seem yourself.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I took another swig of whiskey. Joe was studying me. He glanced at Frank. “To be honest, John, when you went to Goa, we thought you were going to come back…” He shrugged. “At the very least happy! We expected, well…”
I sighed. “You’re not alone, the whole damned precinct seems to have been thinking the same thing. What’s the big deal?”
Frank shook his head. “Don’t misread it, John. You may not realize it, but you are well liked and well respected, people wish you well. Dehan also. She had a lot of attitude when she arrived, but she’s mellowed a lot since you two were partnered. She’s a damned fine cop and…” He stopped and glanced at Joe, who shrugged.
I said, “What?”
It was Joe who answered. “Well, John, everybody except you seems to have noticed that she…” He sighed, then laughed. “God knows why, but she is serious about you.” He glanced at Frank. “And we think she’s good for you.”
I stared at them both. “Who is ‘we’?”
They both spoke in unison, like some surreal sitcom. “Everybody.”
We drank some more, had a bit more ‘guys’ talk—I do not recall what I said or what I admitted to—but at almost four AM, I walked out of the Van Etten building with my hands in my pockets, thinking deeply and humming Sinatra’s ‘One for my Baby (and One More for the Road)’.
I climbed into my car and sat for five minutes staring out the windshield at the empty, lamp-lit streets. I pulled out my phone, opened Whatsapp, and stared at her name for another five minutes. Then I opened our conversation. We were cops. We had no fixed sleeping hours. We sent each other important information at any time. That was how it was. That was what I told myself.
I looked at my watch. It was gone four. I wondered if I was drunk and decided I was, a little.
I typed: “Boot-print confirmed. DNA Ed Irizarry. Bullets not a match. Crime scene .38, door .45”
I pressed ‘send’, put the phone away, and fired up the engine. There was an immediate ping. I left the car in neutral and looked at my phone. It was Dehan. I opened the message.
“Shit. No closer to an answer then.”
I stared at it for a long moment. Then wrote, “I am not sure. I think so.” Then, “You’re awake?”
I sent it and waited. There was no reply. I put the car in gear and moved to the gate. As I was about to pull onto Morris Park and head home, there was another ping. I stopped, selected neutral again, and pulled out my phone. It was a reply from Dehan.
“You feel like an early breakfast? I can scramble some eggs.”
I sat motionless for a long moment. There was another ping. “You there?”
I typed: “Yes. Your place?”
“That’d be a first.”
“We could try something new.”
Silence.
I put the car in gear, ready to go home. Another ping. I put it back in neutral, read the message.
“We could do that.”
I typed, “I’m on my way.”
Fifteen minutes later, I parked outside her block. I sat for a couple of minutes, conscious that my breath probably smelled of booze. I told myself not to be an ass, then climbed out, crossed the road, and rang on her bell. She let me in almost immediately, and when I reached her floor she was standing there, with the door open, dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.
I smiled. “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
She shook her head. “You came empty-handed.”
“Good job you have tequila.”
She smiled. “You been drinking, Sensei?”
“It’s what guys do.”
She gave a small laugh. “Does that make me a guy?”
I waited a moment, then said, “I hope not.”
She turned and went inside. “You’ve only been here once.”
“I remember. I won’t forget in a hurry.”
“Neither will I.”
She closed the door. I was in the living room. She had a bottle of tequila on her coffee table, and a shot glass beside it. The bottle was half empty. She ha
d Stan Getz playing.
I turned to look at her. “You like Stan Getz?”
“Yeah. He’s very cool. You mentioned him once, so I decided to explore. Miles, too, when he’s not drilling teeth. You want some scrambled eggs and bacon?”
“Yes.”
She went into the kitchen. “So, how’d it go?”
I leaned on the doorjamb and watched her break and beat eggs. “Frank and Joe had a bottle and some coffee on the go. They called me at just after two.”
“Were you in bed?”
“No. So I drove over. I told you the results in the Whatsapp. I think…”
She turned and came over to me. She put her right hand on my chest and looked up at me with large, black eyes.
“Let’s try something different.”
I shut my mouth and frowned. “OK.”
“We eat, we drink tequila, and we talk about anything—anything—ancient Egypt, reincarnation, Donald Trump, baseball, Elon Musk; you name it, anything but work.”
I nodded. “OK.”
She shrugged and made a Latin face. “And then we see what happens.”
What happened was that we talked and we got drunk, and then we talked some more and we got drunk some more, and it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I had had in years; maybe ever. I told her about my parents, about my wife, about life as a bachelor cop. She told me more about her parents, about her dad’s family and her mother’s, and about life as a single, female cop. We talked about movies we liked and music we loved, books, poems, peculiar memories…
And we laughed a lot. And a couple of times, while she laughed, she leaned on my shoulder. It was astonishing to discover, after a year of working so closely together, how many things we did not know about each other, and how much we shared in common. It was good.
At six AM, she looked at her watch and said, “Hooooly shshshsh…” Then she gave me a long, steady look. It was a drunk look, but it was a steady look, too. “I was going to ask you if you wanted the couch… or not… But it is time for a cold shower, Mr. Stone, and a gallon of coffee. We have work to do. Make coffee! I am going to shower.”
She walked unsteadily into the bedroom. I shook my head, took a few deep breaths and went into the kitchen wondering if I had heard right, and if so, what the hell I was going to do about it.