Chapter Nine
“First Mike breaks into a murder victim’s apartment and steals crucial documents that might be evidence, then you steal what definitely is evidence from a murder victim’s actual body.” The way she said “body” and glowered at me almost made me contrite. Almost.
“Don’t forget, the first message in Bill’s flash thing-y was addressed to me.”
“Which you didn’t know at the time you stole it.”
“I wish you’d stop saying that word!”
“What word, Phil? Steal? That one?”
I knew Yo was well and truly pissed but at the moment I didn’t care; I was too focused on what we’d learned from Bill Calloway’s treasure trove of information, and what I thought was in store from Raul. I’d walked my usual route to work this morning, and made my usual stops along the way, including at Willie’s newsstand. Far from being upset or angry with me, he’d fixed me with his one-eyed stare and told me his nephew had “important words” for me, told me when and where. I told him I’d left my card with my numbers on it for Raul but Willie told me that Raul didn’t use the telephone. Not ever. I didn’t bother commenting on yet another of Willie’s nephew’s peculiar eccentricities; I was just glad he wanted to talk to me. I worried that he still was laying low, staying away from his job at the diner, and I was thinking maybe the reason would connect some of the dots that I saw leading from the fires to and from Big Apple Business Insurers, because Bill Calloway’s message to me had been that he’d been removed as the investigator of the Taste of India fire. No reason given. He also included e-mails from his immediate supervisor removing him from investigating three other fires in the last year. We weren’t certain yet but Yolanda thought all were on her list. And we knew that Jackie Marchand’s time sheets were signed by Thomas Kearney—the same Thomas Kearney who was Bill Calloway’s boss.
“What do you want to bet that if I’d left that flash thing in Bill’s pocket, it would right now be in a paper bag locked in an evidence room and we’d never know why Bill wanted to see me.”
Yolanda gave me an exasperated look. “That doesn’t make it all right, Phil.”
I looked over at Mike, looking for some support, but since he already was on her list for the break-in at Jackie Marchand’s, he had no intention of opening his mouth, causing her attention to be directed at him. He intensified his concentration on the Times editorial page.
“Okay, Yo,” I said.
“Okay, what, Phil?”
“I promise no more breaking and entering the apartments of DBs and no more removing evidence from DBs—but that’s only if no-damn-body else in this sorry show gets killed.” I was all but shouting. Yolanda doesn’t like shouting, a holdover from her childhood when her father spent most of his waking hours shouting, so I apologized for mine and almost immediately realized the reason for it, the source of it: I’d been afraid that sobrino Raul was not just laying low but was somewhere lying dead. My relief at hearing from Willie this morning literally felt like something enormous had been lifted off my shoulders and back, allowing me to stand upright.
“You’re really letting this get to you,” Yolanda said.
“I’m not letting it, Yo, it’s just there, up close and in my face and very, very personal, and I don’t like it. It’s too close.”
Mike rattled his newspaper, closed it, folded it, and stuffed it into his back pocket. “I say we go check on Ortiz, make sure he’s not recovered enough to be grabbing on nurses, then go find your friend, Raul, see what he has to say for himself.”
Mike’s good at that, almost as good as Yolanda, at saying what it is I’m thinking. I finished my coffee and my orange juice, then took my cup and Mike’s to the kitchen and washed them. Mike and Yo had their heads together when I came back out front and I left them alone; whatever they were saying about me I didn’t want to hear. Besides, I still was so happy that the three of them had decided to like each other, I didn’t mind if they occasionally put their heads together to discuss me. As long as they didn’t make it a habit. I got my phone off the charger and spent a panicked moment wondering why my gun wasn’t in the desk drawer until I remembered that the cops had it. They had to make certain that it wasn’t my weapon that had killed Bill Calloway and wounded Eddie Ortiz.
“Let’s go, Mike!” I was back to the raised voice that almost was shouting.
Yolanda walked toward me. “I’ll need the rest of today and probably a good part of tomorrow to analyze everything of Bill’s and Jackie Marchand’s, see where their paths cross those of Patel and Nehru. And I need their files, Phil.”
I got them from my desk drawer. “These men didn’t destroy their own businesses and I’d be a terrorist before either of them would.”
“Don’t say things like that, Phil! Not even as a joke. You never know who’s listening.”
“Speaking of listening, Yolanda, can you give me one of those remote devices?”
I jumped in before Yo could respond. “For what, Mike?” I demanded.
Mike Smith doesn’t intimidate. “You’re not going to let me sit in on your meeting with your pal, Raul,” he said calmly and matter-of-factly. It wasn’t a question so it didn’t require an answer. “So, if I can’t be right there next to him, I will be close enough to hear every word.” He looked at Yolanda and she went behind the screens to the supply closet.
“Why can’t you cut the guy a break, Mike? He’s put his past behind him, why can’t you do the same thing?”
Mike sighed deeply and I saw more than two decades of walking a beat uptown in Harlem flicker through his memory, his eyes being the projection screens, the lines in his dark brown face as readable as captions. “Once a hype, Phil, always a hype. They try, they really do, some of them, to change; to be and do different. I believe your guy, Raul, is probably clean right now, maybe even been clean for a couple of years. He’s got a job he goes to and someplace clean to live. But I’ll bet you he wouldn’t recognize his own kids on the street, his wife stopped talking to him years ago, and his parents, if they’re still alive, probably love him but they won’t let him in the house. They gave him too many chances too many times and lived to regret all of them.”
“I’m not his wife or his kids or his parents, Mike.”
“No, Phil, you’re not; you’re just a guy who does a lot of good for a lot of people who will suffer if, because of Raul, you go down. I don’t have to trust Raul and I don’t and I won’t, but I will watch your back. That way, you can trust all the Rauls of the world all day long.”
Yolanda was back with the remote transmitter. I stuck my hand down inside my sweater and shirt and put the transmitter inside the pocket of my T-shirt, and Mike turned on the receiver. Without a word, we walked away from each other, me talking to nobody and being glad I was inside so nobody could see me losing my mind.
“At some point, Phil, would you pay Mr. Patel and Mr. Nehru a visit and tell them that I need to talk to them? And sooner rather than later. Please,” she added.
“Is that your way of saying you’d appreciate it if I didn’t come back here today?”
She gave me a high-wattage Yolanda smile and Mike and I headed for the door. “I don’t suppose you’d complain, though, if a lunch delivery from El Caribe interrupted your work?” I tossed over my shoulder as we left, and I heard a few loud smacks follow us out the door, which indicated that Yo was blowing us kisses.
“I’ll kiss you, too,” Mike said, “if you’re buying me lunch at El Caribe.”
Eddie wasn’t awake when we got to the hospital, though his nurse said he had been earlier—awake, conscious, and lucid long enough for Linda to be convinced that he wasn’t going to die, so she’d finally gone home to get some sleep. Neither Mike nor I was allowed inside the ICU, not being family—the only reason we got any information at all was because the charge nurse knew Mike’s wife—so we sat out in the waiting area, reading our newspapers and not talking about the things we were thinking about. The not talking part was fine with
me because I realized that I couldn’t talk about it without getting angry and that getting angry didn’t help connect any dots. The meeting with Raul wasn’t until eleven, in Washington Square Park.
“Why do we have to meet this guy in the park? What’s wrong with a restaurant or a coffee shop? The library, even? Your office, for crying out loud! But a park, sitting right out there, exposed to the world!”
“Mike? Calm down, bro. It’s not a setup,”
“You don’t know that, Phil, not for sure.” He jumped up and began pacing, looking over at Eddie through the glass every time he passed the ICU suite. I waited for him to collect himself and sit back down.
“Mike? Eddie’s going to be fine and nothing’s going to happen to me. Or to you either, for that matter. And I know because I know, all right?”
Mike wasn’t anywhere close to being convinced. “You were set up yesterday, Phil. You and Calloway. I think you were right in your assessment: Eddie got what was meant for you, and we can only be thankful that in addition to being stupid, most lowlifes also can’t shoot worth shit.”
“But it wasn’t Raul who set me up, Mike.”
“Dammit, Phil, you don’t know who it was!”
Nothing I could say to that. If anybody was keeping score and giving prizes for being right, Mike would win it for this round. I didn’t know who wanted me dead, to say nothing of poor Bill Calloway. Or Jackie Marchand. I looked at my watch. Despite what it felt like, an hour hadn’t passed since last I’d checked. I stood up. “Let’s go eat some doughnuts. There’s a Supreme King Doughnuts over near Washington Square Park.”
“Now you’re talking, bro,” Mike said. He walked over and looked at Eddie through the glass. “If it was one of us lying in there, Eddie would go eat doughnuts until he thought of what to do to make things right.”
If there was such a thing as a perfect doughnut, the Supreme King people made it. The coffee, though, wasn’t much better than that at Raul’s diner—when Raul made it. But the coffee didn’t matter when the doughnuts were this good. Mike nodded his agreement. “Though they’re about to go out of business,” he said, chewing.
“Who’s about to go out of business?”
“Supreme King Doughnuts. Stock tanked.” Mike knew things like which stock was up and which was down—he and Yolanda could always discuss the market, even when, a couple of years ago, they couldn’t find anything polite or civil to say to each other.
“I thought everybody loved these doughnuts.”
Mike gave his head a disgusted shake. “So did the Supreme King Doughnuts people.” He bit into another doughnut, this one lemon filled. “I don’t understand that kind of greed. They’re already making money hand over fist, opening up new outlets across the country, but they gotta have more. Wasn’t enough to be making lots of money, they wanted to be making more than lots. That’s how businesses get into trouble: fueled by greed.”
“But they exist to make money, Mike, right? Isn’t that what it’s all about?”
“Yeah, but at some point, somebody’s got to decide what’s enough money and draw the line. They also gotta pay attention. When the hamburger and chicken joints started selling salads, the doughnut people should’ve seen the handwriting on the wall.”
“You make a good point, Mike.”
He started laughing. “Greed is a killer, man.” He laughed harder. “You hear about the fool who opened a pizza franchise somewhere in Africa?” He was holding his sides he was laughing so hard, and I joined in, the two us putting our own takes and spins on ordering and delivering pizza in a place where food itself was a luxury, to say nothing of telephones on which to call in the order, and vehicles with which to deliver the order, and houses with doorbells for the pizza delivery person to ring. “I don’t wish bad fortune on other people, but that guy needed to go broke.”
We both felt better after the laugh and were probably intoxicated from the sugar in all the doughnuts we’d eaten. I decided I wouldn’t get a receipt; didn’t want to have to explain to Yolanda how Mike and I, just the two of us, no Eddie, had consumed a dozen doughnuts in one sitting. Yolanda is one of the people who would send the doughnut and the pizza people spiraling into bankruptcy. I looked at my watch and was thinking I’d head toward the park when I felt Mike snap to attention. I looked out the front window of the restaurant, following his gaze.
“That’s Raul, isn’t it?”
Indeed it was Raul, head down, hands stuffed into his pockets, walking swiftly toward Washington Square Park. Question was how did Mike know? I asked him.
“He was leaving Jackie Marchand’s building when I was going in that day.” He didn’t need to explain what day: The day he’d found the kid’s beat-up body on the floor of his apartment, smeared with pints of his own blood.
I dropped some money on the table and stood up. “Where will you be?”
He put his hand into his inside jacket pocket and I knew he’d activated the receiver to the transmitter I wore. “I’ll sit here for another couple of minutes, let you get a good head start, then I’ll follow, find a place that looks good. Just one thing, bro: Since this meet is out in the open, stay out in the open, okay? Don’t let him get you to sit behind a statue or a wall.”
I nodded and left, chin dropped and talking into my chest to be certain that I was transmitting. If there was a problem, I knew Mike would have caught up to me before I was half a block away; caught up to me and either insisted on joining me, or canceling the meet, and not giving a damn whether Raul ever trusted me again or not.
He was sitting on a bench in the middle of the park when I got there, head still lowered, hands still stuffed into his pockets. He wore jeans and high-top sneakers and a knit cap pulled low over his ears, and the scarf and gloves I’d given him a few months earlier when we’d had a similar outdoor rendezvous. That day had been bitterly cold and I hadn’t realized until I questioned his lack of hat, scarf, and gloves, that he didn’t possess any. I’d left mine for him on the bench between us.
Looking at him as I drew nearer, thin and hunched, he could have been a kid Jackie’s age instead of a grown man my age. He looked up as I approached, then looked past me to see if anybody was with me. Up close he was thinner and much more hunched than he’d appeared at a distance. “You don’t look so good, sobrino,” I said.
He tried to smile, couldn’t make it happen. “I’m not feeling so good, Inspector.”
The shock I felt must have registered on my face because now he did muster a thin, sickly smile. “That’s what me and Uncle Willie call you. The Inspector.” Then a look of panic widened his eyes. “It’s meant to be respectful,” he said.
“That’s how I’m taking it,” I said, and sat next to him on the bench. My butt immediately froze and I wished we were in his diner, or back at the Supreme King Doughnuts. “But I have been worried about you, when the guy on your job said you were laying low. That worried me, Raul, especially after what happened to Jackie.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and he spoke so low that I barely heard him, wondered if Mike did. “I was scared he’d come for me.”
I was confused. “Who would come for you, Raul?”
“The freak who killed Jackie. I saw him. I was there.” The guy was shaking so hard he was stuttering, and he was stuttering so hard I could barely understand him. Part of it was fear, certainly, but he was cold and probably hungry.
“When was the last time you ate?”
He looked at me through squinted eyes, like he really was trying to remember, then he gave up, shrugged. “I don’t know. Since before Jackie . . .”
I stood up. “You like Island food, right? Ever eaten at El Caribe?”
“I can’t afford food like that.”
“I can,” I said, standing up and turning around in a circle. I wasn’t sure where Mike was but I needed to give him a heads up and a head start. “Let’s grab a taxi on Fourth,” I said to my chest, and saw Mike loping over to Fourth just ahead of us. I started to move toward Fourth
Street and the warmth of a taxi but Raul didn’t move a muscle. “Raul? Come on, man.”
“Suppose he’s out here, waiting for me?”
This guy was not just frightened, he was terrified. “Stick close to me, Raul. I won’t let anybody hurt you. I promise.” I looked him squarely in the eyes. He met and held my gaze, though his eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue, fear, hunger, and I hoped that was all; I didn’t want Mike to be right about this particular hype, though I could well imagine that watching someone you cared about get beat to death would be enough to send even the strongest among us running for a fix, to say nothing of the weakest among us. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Raul.”
He nodded, stood up and started walking with me toward Fourth Street and a taxi.
We got to El Caribe just as the lunch rush was starting. Arlene Edwards, the owner, was greeting customers at the door. “Phil! What a wonderful surprise!” She pulled me into a tight hug and I gave her one back. I introduced her to Raul. Then I whispered in her ear that we needed to eat in her office, if that was all right, that Mike would arrive in a moment and position himself in the hallway outside her office, and that I wanted lunch delivered to Yolanda. Bradley, Arlene’s son, followed us into her office, moved a pile of papers off a card table in one corner, and in about three seconds, had a tablecloth, napkins, and silverware laid out. Then he was out the door, with a promise to return “in just a few moments” with water and menus.
Raul looked around uneasily but the cooking smells of the best Caribbean food restaurant in Manhattan had followed us from the front of the place to the back, and he was, it seemed, hungrier than he was scared. I took that to be a good sign. “Have a seat, Raul. I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
I wanted to make sure Mike was in the hallway; he was, and, surprisingly, worried about Raul. In a manner of speaking. “Hurry up and get the description of Jackie’s killer before this guy strokes out on us. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody that scared of anything. I thought you said he was a con? How’d he ever last in the joint?”
A Murder Too Close Page 17