“That’s how it’s smelling,” Mike said.
Slitty eyes back on me. “That stinks, all right, but it doesn’t explain why you’re at the top of Delaney’s shit list, why he’s pissed off enough to take your weapon.”
I didn’t know if he expected an answer, but I sure as shit wasn’t about to give him one. Anyway, I was working too hard to avoid making eye contact with Mike. So all three of us stood there looking through the glass at Eddie. The energy field must have been intense because Linda turned around, saw us, whispered something to Eddie, then came out to join us in the hall. We all hugged her, she thanked us for standing by her and Eddie, told us what we wanted to hear: That Eddie was making good progress and that he was going to be just fine.
“I’ve got to get back to pushing the pile of papers on my desk,” Spade said. He gave Linda another hug, Mike another clap on the back, and me another one of those slit-eyed looks. “You call me if you need anything,” he said. “You can call or Mike can call.” And he was gone.
“I can’t believe he’s still standing up for you two,” Linda said.
Mike looked wounded. “What, we’re not worth standing up for?”
She punched him on the shoulder. “You know what I mean. Not only are you guys retired, but he wasn’t even your boss for the last half of your tour.”
I looked at Mike. “Spade was your boss?”
He nodded. “Our first sarge, then our lou. When he made captain they moved him out of Harlem to some place more, ah . . . appropriate. Then he started moving up and just never stopped.”
“And never stopped keeping in touch, either?” I asked.
“They were a really close group of guys,” Linda said. “So close that a lot of the wives got close, too, and stayed close even after the guys retired.”
“Walking a beat in Harlem, back in the eighties . . .”
He didn’t need to say any more. I didn’t join the department until the mid-nineties but I’d heard the stories about Harlem and Washington Heights and the Bronx in the eighties. The cops were afraid to patrol in cars, to say nothing of on foot, and Ace Spade would, legend had it, walk the beat with his cops. At least I’d thought it was legend. I also thought I’d known a bit about Mike Smith and Eddie Ortiz, but apparently what I knew didn’t begin to scratch the surface of who they were and what they’d experienced. “When do you think we can see him, talk to him?” I asked Linda, to have something to say that wouldn’t sound stupid.
“Tomorrow, I think. If he has a good night, they’ll move him to a private room.”
“We’ll be back to check on him later,” I said.
“Tell Yolanda and Connie thanks,” Linda said. “I’ll tell them myself when I see them, but just let them know how appreciative I am.”
I nodded but kept my mouth shut because if I opened it, whatever came out would be stupid since I had no idea what she was talking about. And sure as shit, when we got outside, Mike asked me what Linda was thanking Yolanda and Connie for, knowing that I didn’t have a clue. “Shut up, Mike.”
“So, where to now?” he asked politely to hide his smirk. “Since Miss Aguierre won’t let us back into the office.”
“Let’s go see Nehru first, then Patel. And while we’re there, I want to pop in and see Sam Epstein.”
“I’d like to pop Sam Epstein . . . right upside his sorry head.”
“That’s no way to treat the clients, Mike.”
“The things we do for money,” he said, which reminded me of what Raul had said about Jackie and why he opened his door to his killer.
“And we could always go looking for a fat, dumb white boy.”
“And the sooner we find him, the better. I need to smash something and you won’t let me have my way with Epstein.”
Jawal Nehru greeted us like royalty, and when I told him that we would have questions for him tomorrow, he got so excited that he could barely talk, and when he did speak, it was in a much more heavily accented English than I’d heard from him. “If you can make right this situation, Mr. Rodriquez, my wife will come back home,” he said, clapping his hands together. “I called her and told her that somebody who believed us was helping us and she said that yes, she would come back if this could be made right.”
We received a similar greeting from Ravi Patel and his wife. Patel hurried across the wide expanse of the living room and into a back bedroom, then hurried back with two yellow legal pads, both filled with lines and lines of script. “We have been talking, remembering, and writing down everything, just as you asked,” Patel said, waving the pads at us, his excitement as great as Nehru’s. Of course, his wife was by his side, and she was beaming, every bit as excited and determined as her husband; as Jawal Nehru. They all seemed so certain that I was just steps away from, as Jawal Nehru put it, making things right, and I was anything but certain. Then I had a jarring thought: Patel didn’t know about Bill Calloway, didn’t know that there was a chance he’d have to start his claims process all over again. A remote chance, given that I had all of Bill Calloway’s files and would make them public if I had to, but one I didn’t want to have to take. I also wasn’t going to be the one to tell them about Calloway.
“Is the name Thomas Kearney familiar to you?” I asked.
They consulted their yellow pages. “All names we have written here,” said Mrs. Patel. “Everybody we have talked to . . . and no, no Thomas Kearney. There is a Francis Kearney, but no Thomas.”
“Who’s Francis Kearney?”
“A leech!” Ravi Patel said, the corners of his mouth dropping down in distain. “A parasite! Called the other day offering to buy our restaurant! A burned out shell, he called it. He even had the nerve to say it would never be anything but a burned out shell and we’d be smart to accept his offer.”
“Do you have a phone number for him?” Mike asked, then added, “Though I’d understand if you ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet where it belongs.”
Mrs. Patel looked at Mike as if she wanted to hug him—probably would have had her husband not been in the room. “I was going to do just that but Ravi stopped me,” she said, giving one of the legal pads a good shake. A blue-green colored piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Mike picked it up and held it out to Mrs. Patel but she waved it away. “It’s from him. Francis Kearney.”
Mike moved closer to me so we both could read the paper. It was an eight-by-ten flyer advertising FRANCIS X. KEARNEY PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT and the fine print said the company specialized in the purchase of condemned or fire-damaged property at “fair and reasonable prices.”
“May we keep this?” Both Patels nodded. “And you called him at this number?” This time both Patels shook their head in the negative.
“He called us. This . . . this thing was in with our mail. Then, the same day we received it, he called us that night.”
“How did he know your phone number?”
“That is a very good question,” Ravi Patel said in his logical-sounding voice.
I had quite a few more questions but the Patels didn’t have the answers and I didn’t want to spook them, or give them any false hopes, so we thanked them, told them we’d probably be talking to them again the next day, and left.
“You should’ve told them about Calloway,” Mike said when we got downstairs. We were standing on the sidewalk in the space between the door leading upstairs to the apartment where the Patels were staying and the door leading into the Epstein Dry Cleaners and Laundry.
“Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t certain whether I should have or not; I just knew that I didn’t want to have to tell them that a second person had been killed in the back door of their restaurant, and if I could prevent them ever finding that out, I would. I opened the door of the cleaners, the bell over the door tinkled, and Sam Epstein, who was behind the counter, looked up. He didn’t quite scowl when he saw us, but there was no happy smile of welcome and greeting, either.
“Sam,” I said. “How are you?”
“Getting better every day, Rodriquez,” he said to me, with a nod in Mike’s direction. “What brings you to my humble establishment? I mean, I don’t see an armload of dirty clothes,” he added, trying to cover for his rudeness. Like I needed a reason to visit his humble establishment. How about the fact that we kept Tim McQueen and Pat Casey from killing his sorry ass? We needed more reason than that?
“Where can we find Thomas Kearney?” Mike made it a demand to know and not a request for information, and Sam turned such a sickly shade of green I thought he was going to throw up. I’d been prepared to merely ask Sam if he knew Kearney. Clearly Mike’s approach was the best one. We waited for an answer, and when it seemed that there wouldn’t be one, at least not immediately, Mike pulled the blue-green flyer from his pocket. Sam knew immediately and exactly what it was. His coloring was a contrasting match to the paper. Mike waved it in his face.
“We’ll tell Kearney we got this from you,” I said.
“You can’t do that!” Sam yelled.
“I can and I will,” I said. “I’m sick of your crap, Epstein. People are dead because of you, one of them a friend of mine, and another friend is in the hospital. Because of you. Because you’re a wuss and a coward. If it weren’t for the respect I have for your father, I’d have turned your sorry ass over to the cops and let them charge you with burning down that restaurant and killing that delivery man. That can still happen. The statute of limitations on the arson clock just started ticking, and if you watch the TV crime dramas, you know the one on murder ticks along forever.”
Epstein was watching my mouth like he could see the words coming out, like maybe the words would have a different meaning if he could see them. I felt Mike’s fist tighten and I knew he was about to destroy Epstein’s orthodontics. I also knew that I wouldn’t stop him. Then the curtain parted and Dave Epstein appeared. Sammy snapped to. “Oh, hey, Pop,” he said.
Dave said something back to him in what I assumed was Yiddish and Sam’s head jerked backward as if Mike had punched him. Dave looked as us. “What do you need from Sammy? He knows something that can help you?”
“Yes, he does,” I said, and nodded to Mike, who gave Dave Epstein the Kearney Development flyer. “This guy’s in the business of buying buildings at fire-sale prices,” I said, and waited for Epstein to find the meaning. It didn’t take long. He looked at his only son with such disappointment in his eyes that it hurt my feelings.
“Tell them what they want to know, Sammy. Tell them everything.”
Sammy was sweating. “You don’t know these people, Pop.”
“And I don’t want to. It’s bad enough that you know them.”
I could almost feel sorry for the guy. He was sweating fear bullets, caught in the crossfire between the Old Testament anger of his father and the even older kind of anger fueled by irrational and baseless hatred. Almost but not quite. Mostly what I felt for Sam was anger and it was raw enough that no component of forgiveness had snuck in yet. “So, Sam?” I said. “What’s it going to be?”
“You can’t turn me in! They can’t do that, Pop! You already paid them!”
“I didn’t pay them to break the law, which is what they did when they brought you home instead of taking you to the cops. That was a favor to me, I hope because of how I tried to treat people all my life.” The old man was getting emotional. I put out a hand to calm him but he pushed it away. “This business that pays you such a good living was built treating people like human beings. Everybody who walked in this door was Mr. or Mrs. Somebody, no matter what color they were or how much or how little money they had.” He stopped talking and I thought he was about to cry, but what he did, too fast for someone his age, was slap his son across the face. Sammy stumbled backwards. There was nothing to catch him but the curtains leading through to the plant, so he fell on his ass. The old man looked at us then followed his son through the curtain.
“You know what it takes for an old man to smack his grown son?” Mike said.
I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine. I wasn’t best pals with my old man but he hadn’t hit me since I was ten or eleven and that was for stealing peaches from a fruit stand, then lying about it, which, as far as he was concerned, was worse than the stealing. I didn’t know what Mike’s relationship was with his father—didn’t know if his father was still alive—but I could tell neither of us could imagine, at our age, being slapped by the man we called pop or papi or dad. “I don’t think they’re coming back,” I said.
“Where to?” Mike asked.
“The office,” I said. “See if Yo’ll let us in.”
She did, and she was glad to see us, though looking as harried as I’d ever seen her. Her glasses were riding low on her nose and her hair was, well, disarranged, and there were three pencils sticking out of it at weird angles. She had on sweat clothes and the thick wool socks that were her chained-to-the-computer wardrobe, especially in winter. “This is some truly ugly stuff we’ve got here, my brothers, but I can tell you already know that,” she said. “So. How ugly is it out there at street level?”
“The one who killed Jackie Marchand is the same one who came in here that night looking to sell information about the fires.”
She barely took a beat. “Do we have a name?”
The look on my face was her answer. With Sam Epstein in a catatonic state of fear, there was nobody to leverage. It was all but certain that the Kearneys, whoever they were, weren’t going to roll over on each other—at least not at my request—and anyway, we couldn’t get to the Kearneys without help from Patrick Casey, Tim McQueen, Tommy Mottola, or Sam Epstein. Four strikes puts you out of the game . . . out of the whole damn ball park. “Maybe some of the ugly shit you dug up will combine with some of the ugly shit we dug up, and give us a way to put a name to his face . . . speaking of ugly.” And since he already tried to sell out his masters once, I was betting it wouldn’t take much to get him to do it again.
While Mike and I hung up our coats and got sodas from the fridge, Yolanda was organizing stacks of different colored papers on my desk. She’d started with the colored paper to help me follow threads and connections, which came as easily to her as tying her shoes. Her brain functioned like a computer, mine more like a slot machine: Different images and pieces rotate through mine, each having its own significance, until . . . ding, ding, ding, three of a kind! “You want a juice?” I called out to her.
“I’ve got some ginger tea left . . . oh, and thanks for lunch! It was wonderful, as usual. How’d Raul like it?” And that got us off on a discussion of Raul. I let Mike do most of the talking, his way of apologizing for his up-to-now intractable views of hypes in recovery. “You think he was serious about working there?” Yolanda asked.
“I think so,” I said. “I think the diner job was what he could find when he got out of the joint, and I think he didn’t bother to look further because he didn’t feel that he had a reason to look further.”
“Until Jackie Marchand,” Yo said.
“Those papers from his place, where are they?” Mike asked.
Yolanda got up to get them, returned quickly. “Raul thinks something’s here?”
“We think it’s possible,” I said, quickly paging through papers that were exactly what they appeared to be: Essays and term papers and book reports, most of them from high school, all of them marked “A” or “Excellent” or some other suggestion of genius.
“What did you hope to find?” We told her. “Good thinking,” she said. “Makes sense. There had to be a reason to kill him, and thinking he was about to tell you what he knew would be a pretty good one.”
“But what did he know?” I asked. “And how did they know what he knew?”
“And how did they know he planned to tell you?” Mike added.
We spent the next couple of hours trying to answer those questions, and others; and each time we found an answer, we found also that it led to more questions, the main one being who was the wizard behind the curtain? The Kearneys—Yola
nda’s research had discovered they were first cousins—were front men. Thieves, crooks, and liars for sure, but the trail didn’t end with them as much as it just petered out. We figured that Mottola, Casey, and McQueen were just errand boys for the Kearneys; and we already knew that Epstein was barely a player. But somebody was a murderer and somebody ordered those murders, the same somebody who decided which businesses to torch and then withhold the insurance settlement, forcing the business owner to sell on the cheap so the Kearneys could buy low and sell high. I wanted that somebody.
“Eddie’s awake,” Yolanda said, standing and stretching, “and I’m hungry. Let’s go see if he saw the shooter and the car, and then let’s eat.”
Chapter Ten
I couldn’t sleep so instead of tossing and turning and keeping Connie awake, I got up and sat in the living room and watched the traffic moving back and forth across the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. It was the middle of the night, in a city with one of the greatest subway systems in the world, and I could swear that at times there were as many motorized vehicles here as there were in Los Angeles. And where were these people going at three o’clock in the morning? Three forty-two to be exact. To work? Home from work? Home from a night out? As usual, the view soothed me and began smoothing out the jagged edges of worry that were preventing sleep. One of Yolanda’s many brilliant ideas had been that I buy two units in what was, at that time, a shabby building in an even shabbier neighborhood, which now was being called the New SoHo, and my building, which stuck out into the East River and provided the magnificent view, was some kind of yuppie haven. So trendy, in fact, that the rent I get for the smaller of the two units I own pays for itself and my top floor digs. That thought soothed, too.
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