A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  “How do you know?” I couldn’t keep the relief out of my voice.

  “Sasha saw the story on the news this morning and called him on his cell phone. Every kid in America has a cell phone these days, you know? They were up all night. His family. Frankie’s. The person who got killed was a delivery boy.”

  “So you managed to kill a kid anyway,” I said, nasty replacing relief in my voice.

  “It just all got out of hand.”

  I looked at the clock again. “I’ve got to go, Sam, but we’ll talk again. This evening. Same time, same place. And I want answers.” I opened the door and the sound hit me like a sledge hammer and the heat enveloped me like a wool sweater in August. I all but danced down the narrow staircase, and all but ran the length of the long room back to the front of the store.

  “Is Sam all right?” the cousin asked me as she gave me my coat.

  I bit back the residual nastiness. This woman didn’t deserve that from me. “I’m sorry but I don’t know your name,” I said instead.

  She smiled. It was a nice smile. “Eleanor Stillman. Everybody calls me Ellie.”

  “I’m sorry I had to ask, Ellie. I’ve seen you around for years, knew you were related to Sam, but I guess we never had occasion to talk.”

  “You and Sam are closer in age,” she said, helping me into my coat. “Is Sam all right?” she asked again.

  I thought before I answered. “Sam’s got some problems that he’s trying to work out,” I finally said, pleased with myself that I had avoided the truth and a lie with the same sentence.

  “Are you helping him?” Ellie asked.

  “I’m trying to,” I said. Less of the truth in that one.

  She smiled her nice smile again. “Then it’ll be okay,” she said.

  The four-story walk-up on Avenue B was a dump, pure and simple. I could tell from half a block away that a security prevention evaluation would be a waste of my time. I only kept walking because the management company had a dozen other buildings all over town and the law of averages dictated—and I hoped—that they all wouldn’t be as sorry as this one. The upside to the situation was that I could probably do the entire evaluation in less than an hour, starting with the building entrance, problem number one: I walked right in, followed by two other men. I stood aside to let them pass, knowing better than to allow two strangers to stand behind me in a strange environment. They brushed past me as if I didn’t exist and headed for the stairs. Problem number two: Anybody walking up a semi-dark staircase is either a potential victim or a potential criminal. Problem number three: The semi-darkness was due to burned out and/or non-existent light fixtures. Problem number four: The lights that existed were exposed instead of mesh covered, and were barely sixty watts. Did I say waste of time? Try waste of effort.

  “Mr. Rodriquez?” I turned to find a man built like a heavy-duty trash compactor coming through the building’s front door. Mike Kallen from the management company, I guessed. I gave him my hand, got a quick, firm shake, and a rueful look. “So, what do you think? We’ve got our work cut out for us, huh?” He managed a tight laugh as he said it, and I picked up the faintest hint of an accent, too faint to determine its origin, though not Latin; I was sure of that.

  Since he was being honest, I decided to follow suit. “How serious are you, Mr. Kallen, about securing this building?”

  “We’ve got to make the effort.” He looked up and down and all around. “We’re the new management group and I’ve got this part of town. They told me this was the worst of the lot, so I thought this was the best place to start. It’s got to get easier from here, don’t you think?”

  “I think I’m glad you like a challenge, Mr. Kallen,” I said, and told him my first impressions. Then I asked what the units rented for and when he told me, I told him that in addition to security, he should make some decorating changes, too. I didn’t know why anybody would pay that kind of rent to live in a building with walls the color of baby shit and floor tiles that started cracking in the middle of the last century and I told him so.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve got a sense of humor, Mr. Rodriquez.” But he wasn’t laughing when he said it. Neither was I.

  “I’m not laughing, either,” Yolanda said when I related the story to her and she, as usual, proceeded immediately and directly to the bottom line. “Did you find out where the other buildings are? And are we getting the job?”

  I reached inside my carryall and extracted a sheaf of papers. Most of it was the evaluation of the Avenue B building, but three pages of it were the contract with the KLM Management Group. Kallen had the signed contract in his pocket. He had just wanted to meet me, he said, to do his own evaluation. Yo turned to the back page to check the signatures, then looked at me over the tops of her glasses. I took the check from my pocket and gave it to her. She scanned it and nodded her satisfaction.

  “So, what’s he like, our new client?”

  I told her how he looked like he’d been born in a gym and was doing squats before he could walk, and about the accent that I couldn’t get a handle on, and about the weird questions he asked, though they hadn’t seemed weird until I’d left him; at the time he was asking, they’d only seemed annoying and picky, like the guy was going to micromanage the job. “It’s only now that it seems weird,” I said, thinking back and recalling the details of the conversation.

  “Give me an example,” Yo demanded, wrinkling her nose.

  “Well, he wanted to know who got copies of the prospective employee background checks and the prospective tenant background checks. I told him KLM Management got all that and nobody else. Then he wanted to know if we retained copies and when I told him yes, he wanted to know why. So I told him—that it was to protect ourselves in the event of a lawsuit. Then he wanted to know whether we told the cops if any of the background checks came back dirty. So I told him that we worked for him, not the cops, and that our reports were confidential.” The more I played the conversation with Kallen over in my head, the weirder it felt to me.

  “You said he had an accent, right? So, maybe he comes from one of those countries where there’s no such thing as privacy and confidentiality.”

  “Yeah,” I said darkly, “like the New and Not Improved United States of America,” and related my encounter with the Homeland Security agent. Instead of amazed or amused, though, Yo looked angry, which pissed me off all over again. “Oh, I suppose you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t have expressed my true feelings to the agent.”

  “Why do you do that thing with cops?”

  “What thing, Yo?” Now I was well and truly pissed.

  “That macho, I-can-kick-your-ass-if-I-really-want-to thing. That my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick thing. That my-balls-hang-down-to-my-knees thing. You do it with cops all the time and it’s dangerous, Phil.”

  I looked at her while formulating an appropriate response. Then I realized that she wasn’t angry, she was frightened. Really and truly scared. I raised my hands, palms out, in surrender. “Nothing’s going to happen to me, Yo. I promise.”

  “You can’t promise that, Phil! You said it yourself: ‘The New and Not Improved United States of America.’ Things are different now. They can tap your phones and search your home and open your mail any time they want and they don’t need a reason or a warrant. And they can ‘detain’ you. Scoop you up off the street, take you to a secret lock-up, and nobody will know where you are! This is serious, Phil! And you’ve got to start taking it seriously.”

  I didn’t want to worry Yolanda, and I didn’t want to minimize her feelings because it was clear that she was genuinely frightened. But I wasn’t going to buy into her fear. In fact, seeing her so frightened just made me madder. Maybe Mike Kallen came from a place where people feared their own government, but I wasn’t quite ready for that to become my reality and I’d fight tooth and nail to make sure it didn’t ever become my reality. I also wasn’t quite ready to say that to Yolanda, so I changed the subject. Slightly. “Did you get any more in
tel about the Taste of India fire, anything that would point to a reason for Homeland Security to be on the scene?”

  “They’re thinking arson, but you already thought that. And the person who was killed was the guy who delivered for them, so no to a reason for the Feds. Not that I can see.”

  “Was it a kid?”

  She shook her head and I felt a small flutter of relief. Very small. A man was dead, murdered, because . . . because why? Because of some stupid religious warfare? Because of something even more stupid—like racism? And did it matter, really, whether the dead man was fifteen or fifty? Probably not to the people who cared about him, but to me, it made a tiny difference, and I wasn’t exactly sure why, except, I suppose, that if a young boy had died in the fire, it would have represented Frankie Patel and, by extension, Sam Epstein. “I printed out everything I could find, but the way I read it, the dead guy, if he weren’t dead, could maybe tell the cops who set the fire.”

  Yolanda was a full partner in Phillip Rodriquez Investigations. It was our arrangement and our agreement that I did the investigating and she did everything else. I’d told her more than once that her investigative instincts were as good, and maybe even better, than my own, but she always said that she didn’t like that side of the business. She liked computers and she liked researching, and when researching didn’t work, she liked digging for facts and information and reading between the lines and making links and connections and following leads wherever they went, even if it was around in circles. So I didn’t argue with her. But when she said something like what she’d just said, she got my full and undivided attention. I watched her, waited for her to continue. “The guy had just come back from a delivery. He parked his truck behind the restaurant. Another order was waiting for him in the kitchen. He’d already called to say he was en route back, and he would call again when he was en route to the new delivery. At almost the same time the manager was wondering why the guy hadn’t picked up the order that was waiting for him and checked in with her, there was an explosion and screams from the kitchen, then the fire. The diners all ran out the front door. First the manager and the owners ran into the kitchen. The two cooks were on fire—literally. They dragged them out into the dining room, people helped, there was lots of running back and forth and screaming. Everybody eventually got out the front door, but the fire was chasing them. That’s what the owner’s wife was quoted as saying: The fire was chasing them. That’s how fast it was moving. But Phil, it was set at the back door at almost exactly the same time that the delivery man returned. He saw who did it.”

  I took the sheaf of print-outs she gave me but I didn’t need to read a single word. I told her what Sam said about things getting out of hand. “Do you think he meant the fire? That it wasn’t supposed to spread like it did?”

  “No,” Yolanda said in so cold a voice that I wouldn’t have known it was her if I hadn’t seen her mouth move. “I think he meant the hatred.”

  Chapter Three

  “Have you seen Sam? Do you know where he is?” Ellie Stillman, her voice seeming to rise an octave with each word she spoke, ignored the three customers in line at the counter, addressing me over their heads the moment I entered the dry cleaners a few moments after eight the following morning.

  “He’s not here?”

  “Hey, lady! Do you mind? I’m gonna be late for work,” the man at the head of the line complained. Ellie looked at me and I signaled that she should take care of her customers and that I would wait. I could use the time to organize my thoughts. None of the things I was thinking about Sam Epstein when I walked in the door of the cleaners had him on the run, and despite the fact that he thought I’d stoop low enough to hurt a kid, I still was giving him the benefit of a whole bag full of doubts. If people thought—believed—that I had developed a violent, sadistic streak, well, maybe I could understand that, given the nature of my work. But one thing nobody would ever think or believe was that I would abandon my business, my life’s work; and no matter how silly Sam Epstein behaved, he wouldn’t, either. I knew he’d never walk away from three generations of his family’s sweat equity. Wouldn’t, couldn’t.

  “Phil!” I looked toward where I heard my name called and saw a middle-aged Black woman take Ellie’s place at the counter, and Ellie was beckoning for me to come around, the way I had the day before. I immediately removed my coat; I knew we were headed for the steamy back room. I didn’t try to talk. I just followed Ellie through the building, up the stairs, and into the box. As soon as the door closed and quiet permitted, she started talking. “He didn’t go home last night. Sasha called me at about three this morning. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom and discovered that Sam wasn’t home. I rushed over there—I live way up in Yonkers, Phil! And Sam never came home! I called his cell phone every ten or fifteen minutes . . .” She was talking so fast and breathing so hard that I stopped her.

  “Ellie, slow down. Calm down. Catch your breath.” I took her shoulders and squeezed a little bit and gave her a little shake and she immediately got control of herself, nodding her head up and down to let me know that she was under control. “I take it Sam’s never done this kind of thing before?”

  “Not even when he was a kid. Sam is the most responsible person I’ve ever met. Maybe even too responsible, you know? Almost obsessive about some things, Sasha being one of them. And he certainly wouldn’t leave her alone all night. You’d think he was that child’s father, the way he dotes on her.” Now she was shaking her head back and forth and her chest was heaving again.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be soothing or comforting, and I knew that’s what Ellie Stillman wanted and needed to hear: that Sam was fine, that there was some acceptable explanation for his absence. “When did you last see him?” I asked.

  “Last night. We closed at six, just like always. Then the night crew came in—you know we run a major part of our operation from six in the evening until one a.m.?” I hadn’t known that and Ellie explained that much of the actual cleaning and laundering was done at night so that the top windows in the back room could be opened. “Otherwise, it would be too unbearably hot.”

  I thought it already was too unbearably hot, but didn’t say so. “These night crew people, you know them? All of them?”

  Ellie nodded emphatically and spoke the same way. “They’ve worked here for more years than I can remember, every one of them. In fact, once we leave, the night supervisor, Alfred Miller, is in charge and he’s the one who locks up at two in the morning. I actually called him at home at a little before three to ask him what time Sam left.” Then, as if she realized what she’d said, added, “I only did that because I knew he’d just gotten home and hadn’t had time to go to bed.”

  “And what time did Sam leave, Ellie?”

  Tears filled her eyes, as if she finally gave in and allowed some horrible thought to take hold. “Just before seven. I left at six-thirty and Freddie—that’s what everybody calls Alfred—he said Sam left just after I did.”

  “And he never went home? Sasha never saw him last night?” She shook her head and the tears leaked from her eyes and dropped onto her face and slid down her cheeks. “Cell phone messages still going directly into voice mail?” This time she nodded her head. “Who are Sam’s friends, Ellie? What does he do on weekends, for fun, recreation? I know he takes good care of Sasha, but he has to have a life of his own.” I had watched Ellie’s face and by the time I finished speaking, she had undergone a major transformation: From scared and sorrowful to lip-curling, teeth-gnashing mad.

  “Tim McQueen, Patrick Casey, and Joey Mottola. Three of the sorriest pieces of shit on this planet.” She pushed the words out of her mouth as if they were the rancid meat Jack Heller’s people used to sell to their undesirable clientele.

  I didn’t try to hide my surprise. “When did he start hanging with those guys?” I knew all three of them and her assessment of them was dead on. And they’d no more have been running buddies with a Jew than they wo
uld have with my Spic self. In fact, if memory served correctly, both Sam and I had had to outrun Timmy and Pat more than once to get home in one piece. And their terrorism didn’t stop until I enlisted the help of some of my cousins from East Harlem, who enlisted the help of some of their friends from Black Harlem, to put a hurting on them. Of course, nobody fucked with Joey Mottola because his back-up put people in the cemetery. And now Sammy Epstein was buddies with them?

  “After . . . after what happened.” Lots of New Yorkers, especially those directly impacted and affected by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, couldn’t bring themselves to call it anything, and certainly not the nine-one-one that seemed to be the rest of the country’s favorite descriptive term. As far as we’re concerned, that’s a telephone number. “They’re cousins, you know, Timmy and Pat, and their grandpa was some kind of maintenance man or custodian down there and he died. And that just seemed to, I don’t know, put more meanness and mad inside them. And Joey—he’s the one started this campaign of hate against anybody that wasn’t white—and it didn’t take much for Timmy and Pat to fall in line behind him. And Sammy was hurting so bad it didn’t take much for him, either.”

  “Hell, Ellie, those guys hated anybody who wasn’t as white as they were when they were in elementary school! And that meant anybody who wasn’t Irish or Italian. In fact, half the time they even hated each other.”

  She nodded. “I know. What I mean is especially people like . . . like . . . anybody who dresses in their native clothes, like Muslims and Arabs and . . .”

  “And Hindus,” I said softly. And the pieces started clicking into place. I could hear Sam saying, “It just all got out of hand.” I could hear Yolanda saying, “I think he meant the hatred.”

  Ellie watched me for a moment, then said, “I called Uncle Dave, Sam’s father. I hated to do that but I didn’t have a choice. I can’t keep this place running by myself, and I can’t take care of Sasha. She’s already refused to come home with me to Yonkers and I certainly can’t leave her in that apartment alone.” She started to cry again. “What is happening, Phil? What’s going on? What’s this all about? You said you were helping Sam with a problem? What is it? You have to tell me!”