A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

“Mike’s inside,” Yolanda said, both sounding a warning and issuing a plea, and I heard both, loudly and clearly.

  Eddie and I both knew that at this time of day our feet would get us over to First Avenue and Second Street faster than any form of motorized transportation. We both started running, dodging cars and people as we moved from street to sidewalk. We took the one-way streets whenever possible, traveling the opposite direction. In about twelve minutes we were standing outside of Jackie Marchand’s apartment building. No sign or sound of cops present or en route. I was about to press the buzzer to Jackie’s apartment when Eddie nudged me in the ribs with his elbow and signaled with his head that I should look inside the door. I did, and saw Mike Smith coming down a dimly lit hallway at a trot. Eddie and I both backed up down the steps and were headed up the block when Mike caught up with us but we didn’t speak for another block. If Mike was in a hurry to get out of that building, there was a good reason for it. We turned a corner, spied a bodega, and headed for it. There were too many people inside for us to talk about anything, so we each bought something—chips for Mike and me, gum for Eddie—paid and left. We walked another block, slower this time, Mike and me eating our chips, until we reached a small park. It had benches so we sat.

  “Jackie Marchand’s been dead long enough to stink,” Mike began. “Beat to death, looks like.” He dug in his pockets, came up with a grubby manila envelope folded in half. He opened it, spread it out across our three laps, and shifted the pieces of paper inside so that we all could see and read them: Transcripts from New York University that showed Jacques Marchand to be a dean’s list student; documents from the Department of State of the United States showing Jacques Anatole Marchand to be a naturalized citizen of the United States; essay and term papers marked A or excellent; and pay stubs. From Furniture Depot dating back more than a year, just like the loading dock supervisor said, and from Big Apple Business Insurers, dating back to December. “The place was tossed,” Mike said. “Somebody was looking for something. I don’t know if they found it. This was all I found, and I had a pretty good look around before I called it in.”

  The screech and scream of sirens split the air. Jackie Marchand’s death now was a matter for officialdom. “How’d you get in, Mike?” I asked, “and where’d you find this stuff? Must’ve been hidden pretty good.”

  First question answered first. “Picked the lock. Whoever did him, he let ’em in, but when they left, they just shut the door behind them so the top two locks weren’t engaged. I couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. As for this stuff,” and he tapped the folder still spread across our laps, as if none of us wanted to be the one to close the file on Jackie Marchand’s life, “it was inside a boot, one of those heavy, fur-lined things, the kind they probably wear in Canada, or up in Buffalo or Syracuse, ’cause even our worst winter here wouldn’t require anything like those shoes. And it was obvious he hadn’t worn them in a while. The top of the box they were in was all dusty.”

  “If he let in whoever beat him to death,” I said, “he either wasn’t afraid of them or he didn’t believe he was a threat to them.”

  “Or he didn’t know he was a threat to them,” Eddie said. We all thought about that for a moment, then Eddie tapped the papers in our laps. “I mean look at this! This boy was no threat to anybody! All he did was study and work.”

  I swallowed hard and closed the file on Jackie Marchand’s life. This was getting to me, in the same way, only more intensely than the death of the Taste of India delivery man had gotten to me. I thought I understood that one—I’d first thought that a fifteen-year-old boy had been murdered for so stupid a reason that it didn’t warrant trying to understand. I didn’t understand this one at all. Aside from the fact that he was a human being who didn’t deserve to be murdered because no human being deserved that—okay, most human beings didn’t deserve that—why should I be affected like this? I didn’t have an answer. I only knew that I felt these murders were coming too close to home.

  Mike got to his feet and Eddie and I followed suit. “I promised Talbot at the loading dock I’d let him know something,” Mike said.

  “Are we sure he won’t blame you?” I asked.

  Mike nodded. “He already was having a bad feeling. He really liked the kid. I just don’t want him to suffer any longer than necessary.”

  “I’m going back to the office, then. Finish helping Yolanda,” Eddie said.

  Mike gave him the same kind of look that I had but didn’t say anything. “I guess I’ll head over to the diner and fill Raul in,” I said. I gave Jackie Marchand’s folder to Eddie. “Give this to Yo. She’ll figure out if it can help us.” And how to keep the cops from finding out we’d broken into a murder victim’s apartment and stolen evidence I thought, but didn’t say. And we split up, heading off in three different directions. If there was an up side to the situation it was that my destination was only two blocks away. I walked slowly, wondering how to break bad news to a guy I barely knew. I didn’t know how well Raul knew Jackie, didn’t really know how it happened that Raul knew Jackie. Didn’t know how Raul knew that I was looking into the fires in the first place. I called up to memory the phone call from Willie One Eye, Raul’s uncle. All he’d said was that his nephew had words for me, and when I went to see Raul, all he’d said was somebody named Jackie knew something about the fires. And now Jackie was dead. Because he knew something about the fires?

  I opened the door to the diner and before I could go in, three people came out, two of them thanking me for holding the door. Who said New Yorkers weren’t polite? I realized, once I was inside, that I didn’t know if Raul was working now or not. He wasn’t at the grill and I didn’t want to make myself obvious by looking for him, so I took a seat at the far end of the counter, kept my eyes down, and took a business card from the jacket pocket. I wrote my cell phone number on the front, where the office number already was imprinted, and on the back I wrote: We need to talk, Sorbino. It’s important. Call me any time. I was capping the pen when I thought to add, Gracias.

  I looked up to see the counter man watching me. It wasn’t Raul. I made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, then raised the index and middle fingers. He quickly brought me two doughnuts and a cup of coffee and he didn’t walk away immediately so I looked up at him. He was an old white guy, lined face, hard, pale eyes, unlit cigarette in the left corner of his mouth. He had tattoos up and down both arms just like Raul did; just like most cons did, and I was certain that if I studied his I’d find the Aryan Brotherhood or some other white supremacist prison protection group. He met my eyes, then looked down at the card I’d written on for Raul. “Want me to give it to him?” the counter man asked in a near whisper.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Layin’ low,” came the answer, not one I was happy to hear. I took a twenty from my wallet and put it on top of the card, nodded my thanks, and picked up my coffee cup. I missed Raul doubly, because this counter man made a lousy cup of coffee. As always, though, the doughnuts were fresh, gooey and good. I bought a bag of them to go.

  I walked back to the office wondering why Raul found it necessary to be laying low. Something to do with Jackie’s murder? I hoped he was just laying low and not laid out somewhere. That would be problematic in more ways than one, the one being that his uncle might blame me. On that cheery thought I zig-zagged across the street against traffic that was at a standstill and jogged the rest of the way to the office. I pushed the buzzer, told Yolanda it was me, and walked in to the scent of freshly brewing coffee. Eddie must’ve suggested that no way I’d go to a doughnut diner and not bring back a bag and he stuck his head around a screen as I came in and peered at me over the tops of black-rimmed reading glasses. He looked like a hairy academic. I tossed the white bag at him and he was grinning in anticipation before the bag reached him. “Told you!” he said with a little kid’s glee.

  When we all had a mug of coffee and Eddie a plate of doughnuts, we slouched on the sofa, our feet on
the table, and I laid all my doubts, worries, skepticism, and fears on the two of them. They listened and contemplated. Eddie chewed. Yolanda said she wasn’t that worried about people knowing that we were looking into the fires. “You know, this is nothing but a small town, Phil. Everybody in the East Village knows everybody and knows everybody’s business, and they especially know the people who help and people who hurt.”

  Eddie was nodding vigorously but his mouth was too full of doughnut to talk so he had to keep nodding while we waited. Finally he said, “Yo’s right about that, Phil. And I’ll tell you something else about down here.” He said “down here” like he was talking about a foreign land, and in a way, he was: When his folks finally left East Harlem they moved further north, like Connie’s family did, up to the Bronx. “People down here live close to the ground. You got no fifteen-, twenty-story apartment buildings down here, block after block of ’em. You got these little short, squat, narrow buildings, people can’t have a decent marital spat or case of diarrhea without the neighbors knowing about it.”

  Yolanda gagged in mock disgust and punched him on the arm and they both giggled like they were back in junior high. I covered my surprise at the ease of their banter. Until four months ago, these two had barely tolerated each other. I was glad of the change. Yolanda was my right hand; no, more than that—the exhalation to my inhalation. Without her there would be no Phillip Rodriquez Investigations and I didn’t fool myself about that. But Mike Smith and Eddie Ortiz were important to the business and as it grew, they were becoming crucial. I needed them and relied on them more and more and it had been tough, the two of them and Yolanda at odds. It was so much better being able to have these brain-airing sessions with them together instead of with Yo, then with Mike and Eddie, then blending and balancing their differing views and opinions to come up with some kind of whole, rational approach.

  “So you all are saying that despite our professional obligation to maintain confidentiality, for our clients, we can’t do that because everybody knows what we’re doing anyway, sometimes even before we do it?”

  “Not saying that, ’mano.”

  “What we’re saying, Phil . . . for instance . . . about the rapes? Everybody knows you did the cops’ job for them, finding that rapist, but it’s not public knowledge who the rape victims were, except for the ones who were murdered.” Yolanda didn’t finish. She still got really emotional around this case because it cut too close to home for her.

  “And nobody knows who beat the shit outta that lowlife scum bag who raped those other little girls and put him in the hospital on life support. People just know that you’re the one who found him for the parents,” Eddie said.

  “And nobody knows the cops knew who he was and could have arrested him before he raped and killed another child,” Yolanda added angrily.

  “But people think I’m the one who beat him.”

  Both Yo and Eddie were shaking their heads. “No, they don’t,” she said. “They think one of the fathers did it but they don’t know which one—the even money is on Carmine because of who he is—and they don’t really care. All they care about is that somebody—you, Phil—found out who was hurting little girls and put a stop to it.”

  “But they do think I castrated Itchy Johnson.”

  Now they were back to giggling and punching each other like high schoolers. “Yeah, well, whatcha gonna do, hermano? It’s hard bein’ a hero,” Eddie said.

  “And that’s another example, Phil, where everybody knows you’re the one who saved Jill Mason but nobody knows who hired you to do that.”

  “And nobody cares about that part, Phil, the confidential part,” Eddie said. “It’s the results that matter to people. You find out who’s burning these businesses and put a stop to it, that’s what people will care about, not the confidential client part. That’s what people will remember long term.”

  “But we can’t do business confidentially if everybody knows we’re doing it!” Their attempts to soothe and reassure me were having the exact opposite effect. “Suppose that’s why Jackie Marchand is dead, because somebody knew I was looking to talk to him? That makes me, in a way, responsible for his death.”

  “You’re reaching, dude,” Eddie said, and though both his tone of voice and his words were gentle I felt a bit of a sting. “If, and I say IF, that boy’s death is related to these fires, then it’s because he was ready to rat somebody out, not because you’re doing the investigating. Get clear about who the bad guys are, Rodriquez, and you ain’t one of ’em. The bad guys are whoever is setting the fires. The bad guys are whoever beat that boy’s head in. The bad guys are reporting innocent people to fuckin’ Homeland Security. That wuss we just took home to his daddy, for my money, he’s a bad guy, and it’s a good thing I’m working for you and not the New York City police department ’cause his sorry ass would be in a cell right now. Then he’d really have something to whine about.”

  “Eddie’s right, Phil. People in the neighborhood know that you’re the one to come to when there’s a problem and they automatically assume that if something’s getting fixed, you’re the one doing the fixing.”

  I looked from one to the other of them, saw the resolve and right in their eyes. “I’m not doing the fixing alone,” I said.

  “You finally said something that makes sense, ’mano,” Eddie said, and ate the last of the doughnuts. “So, what’s up for tomorrow?”

  I looked at Yolanda for the answer. “You go see the Buddhist monk in the morning, then swing by Avenue B to see Kallen.”

  “Aw, shit! I just left Kallen! What’s he want now?”

  “He’s seeking your approval—his words, not mine—about the steps he’s taken in the building, and to tell you the truth, I want you to take a look, because Eddie doesn’t like what he’s seeing in his files any more than I do.”

  “And what are you seeing?” I asked, praying that the answer wouldn’t be a glimpse of the Russian Mafia. They scared me more than Carmine ever did or could.

  “Seven new tenants, all women, all under twenty-five, all white, all employed by the same temp agency. Two new employees—a handyman and a porter—both with out-of-state references, both early thirties, both white.” Eddie looked at me, waiting for me to get it. I did.

  “White janitors in buildings in this part of town. A bit unusual,” I said.

  “No shit,” Eddie said.

  “What about those girls, the tenants?” Yolanda asked.

  “Seven new tenants, all at the same time, sounds a little suspish to me. And all of ’em single, white, twenty-something females?” He wobbled his hand from side to side.

  I shrugged; didn’t seem that unusual to me, given what I’d seen of Kallen and what I thought about him based on what I’d seen. “I can see Kallen renting to a bunch of single women. Probably thinks he’s a player. And besides, Eastern Europeans have a reputation as being more than a little racist. Maybe they don’t hire or rent to non-whites.”

  Yolanda thought about that. “Maybe that’s why he tried to fire us? He found out we didn’t meet his pigmentation requirements?” She thought for another moment, then said, “Okay, I’ll buy their illegal and racist rental practices—everybody in town is guilty of that—but the only apartment building in this town with seven vacancies at one time is the one still under construction.”

  She definitely had a point. “What about Boris?” I asked.

  “Who’s Boris?” Eddie asked.

  “The resident manager. I told you about him, Yo.”

  She was shaking her head. “No Boris in the files.”

  Eddie was giving me a negative, too. “No resident manager in the files, either.”

  “Well, maybe Kallen will give me some paperwork on him tomorrow. And these other people—they all have socials?” Yolanda said she was still checking them. “Was Mike planning to come back here?”

  “He’s going home,” Eddie said, “which is where I need to be going if I’m going to have dinner ready when Linda gets
home.”

  “You can cook?”

  “Damn right I can cook! Red beans or black, you haven’t had beans and rice until you’ve had my beans and rice. I’ll bring you some tomorrow.”

  “I’ll bring my appetite,” Yo said, and disappeared behind the screens.

  “You ever seen her eat? You better make an extra pot of beans,” I whispered, and it was the two of us, Eddie and me, giggling like high schoolers. I walked him to the door, thanked him for his good work, and got a pat on the back and wink and the reminder that I paid him very well for his good work, which was thanks enough for him. I turned off the front lights and lowered the shades, feeling better about things. Not quite relieved, but better. I loaded the Patel and Nehru files into my carryall and turned off my desk lamp. “You going to Sandra’s?” I called out to Yolanda.

  She appeared already wearing coat, hat, and scarf, my question answered. I opened the door, she set the alarm, and we left. I walked her to the subway, then turned east and headed home. It was, I realized, still daylight. The cold weather was hanging on but it would have to give up soon. Spring definitely was coming.

  Chapter Eight

  I looked in surprise at the tiny building that housed the Village Buddhist Center. I must have walked past it dozens of times if not hundreds. Off Broadway, it was situated between the Villages, East and West, in an old clapboard house that was a throwback to the century before the last one. Pots of colorful spring flowers lined the porch; Buddhists, like most New Yorkers, hastened the arrival of spring. Pairs of shoes also lined the porch, at least a dozen of them, too many, I thought, to belong to residents of the little house. I looked at my watch. I was six or seven minutes early. I walked up on to the porch. The door was closed and no sound emanated from within. In fact, there was no sense of movement of any kind. I looked for a doorbell or knocker, didn’t see either. I raised my hand to knock, thought better of it, and was glad I did because at that moment I heard bells inside, a tiny tinkle, three times, then more silence and stillness, and then movement. If I had knocked I’d have disturbed a religious ceremony.