Barely a month ago, if I’d been sitting here this time of night, enjoying the view and my wise investment, part of the reason for my nocturnal musings would have been loneliness. I’d had plenty of female company over the years, but no companionship and that got old and then I worried that I would, too, before I found someone to share life with. Yolanda always told me that stressing over a situation only made it worse, that the woman of my dreams would walk into my life while I was focused on other matters. And she’d been right. Again. So, tonight’s sleeplessness had no angst attached to it; just the fear that I would not be able to save Ravi Patel’s and Jawal Nehru’s property for them. I could tell them who destroyed it and why, but I was completely powerless over the insurance company.
I stood up and paced, both propelled and pursued by my thoughts. Everything hinged on the mysterious “someone” pulling the strings in this operation, and my worst fear was that it was the mob. I had no proof of that and nothing to point in that direction other than Tommy Mottola’s involvement. Was he there to deliver messages from his boss, and to keep an eye on things? Or was he just another hate-mongering little creep who got off on other people’s misery? I hoped it was the latter because if it was the former, there would be nothing I could do to help Patel and Nehru and the others. Ever. I couldn’t help them, the cops couldn’t help, God couldn’t help them. Not if it was the mob who was controlling Big Apple Business Insurers.
I stopped pacing so I could call to mind Yolanda’s research on the company. Can’t walk and think at the same time. It was a well-seasoned outfit, started out half a century ago small, insuring mom-and-pop stores, and grew into one of biggest and best insurers of small- and medium-sized businesses in the five Boroughs of New York City. No hint of Mafia stink attached. So why would a reputable, fifty-year business risk its reputation? Even if it was just Kearney who was crooked, wasn’t it somebody’s job in the company to watch him? To make sure he was doing the right thing? And not having the answers to these questions, and not being able to get the answers, was what was frustrating the very hell out of me.
No, that’s not true. What was frustrating the hell out of me—and scaring me and making me mad—was that I was in either way too deep or in way over my head. Whichever analogy applied. I started my business to help the people of my neighborhood, New York’s Lower East Side, the East Village, Alphabet City—the places that touch and nudge the more well-known neighborhoods of Chinatown and TriBeCa and SoHo and The Village and Little Italy. Those are places where people who need the kind of help I provide live, but who are unable to pay the kind of money that TV and movie PIs get. The people in my neighborhood have the same problems as people in those other places, they just have less money to throw at the problem—either to resolve it or to make it go away. True, Ravi Patel and Jawal Nehru had their businesses in my ’hood, but the source of their problems was well beyond my reach. I couldn’t help them any more than I could help that very nice Buddhist monk get his name off the terrorist watch list. How do you fight back against that kind of nastiness? How do you win against people who play dirty in the dark?
And I knew the answer! With apologies to the monk, whose name I didn’t remember, I knew the answer! And I mentally apologized because I knew that kind and gentle man would never do what I was concocting; he couldn’t even bring himself to be angry. But I could.
“So, have you got it all worked out?” Connie’s arms slipped around me and she rested her head against my back.
I turned to face her. “I think I do,” I said.
She nodded her head against my chest. “I thought you would,” she said. “You were getting close to it at dinner and I knew you wouldn’t sleep until you worked your way through it.”
I was about to ask her how she knew that, but instead I said, “Will you marry me?”
Then the phone rang. We broke apart as if caught in an illicit act, and we both looked at the phone like it was crazy. I picked up and looked at the caller ID strip and my insides froze. “Yo? What’s wrong?”
Connie was by my side, her nails digging into my arm. I was holding the phone to my ear listening to Yolanda tell me that there was a fire but my brain wasn’t working. Connie took the phone from me. “Yolanda. What is it?” Then she said “Oh, God,” and punched off the phone. “Come on, Phil.”
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. My building was on fire.
Flames were visible on the second floor, but it was mostly smoke. Thick, dark, billowing smoke whooshing out from the windows like a big wind was behind it doing the pushing. I still don’t know how Connie managed to get us both dressed and out, but she managed it all by herself because I was of no use or value. I was swinging back and forth between feelings of despair, terror, and rage: Despair for the end of a dream if the building was gone; terror that Yolanda would be hurt; and rage at whoever had set the fire, because I knew it had been no accident. But it wasn’t until I was standing across the street, behind yellow tape, watching my building burn, that the significance of the fire’s location slapped me in the face: The second floor housed the Dharma Yoga Studio, run by a couple of Sikhs.
It took less than half an hour for the Fire Department to call the thing under control. They were rolling up their hoses as Yolanda and I stood holding on to each other, telling ourselves and each other the lie that the building didn’t matter; that what mattered was that we both were safe. That was true, but the building mattered. It mattered a lot. We’d looked for a suitable location for months, me at first just wanting to rent an office somewhere, Yolanda insisting that if we were going into business for ourselves, we needed to own our own building. Then we’d seen this little place—narrow and run-down and dirty and ugly—and we’d known it was meant to be ours. We transformed it into a place where she lived on the top floor and where we both spent the majority of our waking hours on the ground floor and which signified for both of us that dreams can and do come true. The building mattered.
“Phillip,” I heard behind me, and turned to find Jill Mason at my shoulder. It was six-thirty in the morning and she was standing there wide awake and fully dressed. I was about to ask her what the hell she was doing there when I saw she wasn’t alone. Carmine was behind her, and Patty Starrett was there; so were Mrs. Campos and Willie One Eye and Raul. Yolanda started to cry and sought refuge in Sandra’s arms. Connie held me and I reached out a hand to Jill.
Mrs. Campos was handing out fresh juice to everyone, and Raul and Willie were handing out hot coffee. Carmine and Patty were passing around bags of pastries. Nobody was talking; everybody looked as stunned as I felt, all of us shivering in the cold morning air. Grateful, yes, for the food and drink, but all eyes were on the building that had brought all these disparate people together. But, it really wasn’t the building, was it?
Mike Smith pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed me, pulling me away from Connie and Jill and holding me at arm’s length, his big hands squeezing my shoulders until the bones hurt, looking me up and down. Then he let me go and grabbed Yolanda away from Sandra and did the same thing to her. Then he looked across the street at the building. Didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything, just looked. It was Jill’s, “Good morning, Mr. Smith,” that jolted him back to something resembling a normal awareness.
“Dr. Mason,” he said, and offered her his hand. She took it in both of hers and he left it there. Shrinks must be able to soothe with their hands as well as their words because Mike’s shoulders dropped from up around his ears, and his clenched jaw relaxed, and Jill let go of his hand. “It’s good to see you,” he said to her.
She smiled at him, then turned to me and Yolanda. “I’ll be at my office if you need me, then I’ll be home tonight,” she told us, and she walked through a crowd that parted for her, a beautiful, elegant woman who had endured hatred because of her race, and had slogged through a minefield of grief following the deaths of her husband and children, to emerge capable of always being willing and able to offer solace and assistance to someone else.
I watched her go, then turned back to watch my building some more. It was still smoking and that made me think of the Taste of India fire, and remember the smell of the smoke. I didn’t smell anything right now, and I knew that I should. My building was burning but I didn’t smell a thing. Connie took my arm and walked me a little away from the crowd.
“If I stay here I’ll just be in your way, won’t I?”
I pulled her in close and rested my chin on top of her head. We both liked it when I did that. “Thank you for getting me here. I think if you hadn’t been there, I’d still be standing in the living room holding the telephone.” She tightened her arms around my waist. “Yeah,” I said finally, not wanting to let go of her. “I think it’s better if you go on to work. I’ll keep in touch.”
She squeezed me again, then released me, took a step back, and looked into my eyes. “You think it’s the same arsonist, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She kissed the tips of her fingers and placed them on my lips. “Be careful, please,” she said, and turned away.
“You didn’t give me an answer,” I called after her.
She turned back, smiling at me. “Yes, I will,” she said. I watched her walk away, my heart thudding in my chest so hard it hurt. What a way to start a day.
I turned to look for Yolanda and Mike, found them huddled together, their heads almost touching, encircled by Sandra, Carmine, Raul, Willie, Mrs. Campos, Patty, and Arlene Edwards. A wall of protection. It really wasn’t about a building.
Carmine broke away from the group and hurried toward me, his face screwed up into an expression that wasn’t quite angry, but could be on command. “Tommy have anything to do with this?” he said when he was close enough for me to hear him. “ ’Cause if he did, I’ll kill him. I promise you that.”
I looked at my building again; I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. The second floor was a dark, smoking hole; the front door was standing wide open, firefighters in heavy, wet boots tromped in and out, dragging hoses and axes, and I all of a sudden was acutely aware of how noisy the scene was: The motors of the fire trucks and constant crackling of the two-way communication system. “It’s hard not to think that this isn’t connected to the other fires,” I said, “but I can’t point any fingers at anybody right now, Carmine.”
“The same thing I like about you, Rodriquez, is what pisses me off the most about you. That bein’ fair shit. There’s some people you can’t treat with fairness.”
“You’re right, Carmine, but right now, I don’t know if Tommy’s one of ’em.”
The fat man’s face smoothed out and he chuckled, then he looked across the street at my building, then he looked at me. “Gimme another phone number.” He took an expensive pen and a leather notebook from his pocket and I gave him my cell phone and home telephone numbers. “I’ll call ya,” he said, and walked away. I had felt no sympathy for Sam Epstein in the face of his father’s wrath, but I found myself conjuring up an ounce of pity for Tommy Mottola. Carmine really would kill him.
I was beginning to feel my synapses and senses beginning to function again and I went to find Yolanda; we needed to talk to the fire marshal. We needed to get inside our building. We needed to call the people who ran the yoga studio and tell them they were out of business for a while. She and Sandra seemed to be having the same kind of parting that Connie I had: Sandra knew she wasn’t needed here, knew that Yolanda would be fine without her. I approached them, gave Sandra a hug, and put an arm around Yo’s shoulder. “Let’s go get on somebody’s nerves,” I said.
We went looking for the fire marshal, found the arson investigator instead, and introduced ourselves. His greeting was harried but polite. Why couldn’t cops behave more like firefighters? “How bad is it?” I asked. I recognized him from the Taste of India fire. I looked for his name stenciled on to his coat: McNamara.
“Thanks to the first-rate renovation you guys did, not bad at all,” the investigator said. “Fire contained on the second floor so it’s pretty much a mess. Some smoke damage to the top and bottom. You get somebody over here to suck out the smoke, no reason you can’t use those floors.”
“How did it start?” Yolanda asked.
McNamara pointed to the gaping hole that had been the second floor bay window. “Two big rocks tossed with some force through that second-story front window. Once they got the glass broken, they followed the rocks with accelerant. Your alarm system made a silent call when the first rock hit. The cops were here when the actual fire started, and they called us.” He was about to say something else but stopped himself. He saw me watching him. “I was about to tell you all how lucky you are, but it wasn’t luck that saved your building for you, it was smarts: Pouring concrete between the floors, installing that alarm system that’ll detect a rat pissing on a cotton ball, and the bulletproof glass on the first floor front windows. If they’d gotten that accelerant inside the first floor, things might’ve been a little dicier.”
“I thought you said the second floor was the target,” I said.
The inspector shook his head. “I said the second floor is where it started, but the first floor is what they wanted.” He started walking, waved for us to follow him. “Look here,” he said, pointing to the sidewalk in front of the building. There were two very large rocks there, as large as cantaloupes, each with a numbered yellow tag beside it. “And look here,” McNamara said, pointing to scratches on the glass. “This is where those rocks bounced off the glass.”
I peered at the scratches, then down at the big rocks. Where did somebody get rocks like that in New York City? You’d have to go way out into the countryside to find rocks that solid and that big. “You said there were rocks like these upstairs?”
“Yep,” he said, nodding, “two more. River rocks, these are, and it would take somebody big and strong to heave a stone this size not only up that high, but with enough force to break through safety glass.” Then he pointed to door. “Tried to get in this way, too. See the scratches on the panel? Whoever started this fire knew a little bit about what he was doing.”
“Can we get into the building?” Yolanda’s voice sounded so small and distant that I could barely hear her, and she was standing right beside me. I looked over at her; I’d never heard her sound small before.
“Sure,” McNamara said. “We’re almost done here.”
Yo grabbed my arm and pulled me away, in a hurry to get away from our building and I knew why. “That was about us, Phil, not the Sikh owners of a yoga studio.”
Now I smelled the smoke, the harsh, throat-burning, acrid smoke of fire, and it was about the building again. Even as I looked at the people who had come here this morning before dawn out of care and concern for Yolanda and me, this attack was on the building because the building represents us and what we do . . . oh, shit. “The computers, Yo, will the smoke hurt the computers?”
She held up the canvas carryall that hung diagonally across her body and which contained her master computer, the one she’d asked me to sign a blank check to purchase, then unzipped a side pocket and pulled out four of what I now recognized to be those flash things. “The entire building could have burned to the ground and we wouldn’t have lost a single client, business, or personal file,” she said. “Not that I want some perverted son of a bitch burning down my building!”
I blew a kiss at the computer, whose cost she had assured me I didn’t want to know, ergo the blank check, though I had a pretty good idea: Any expenditure of more than five thousand dollars required both our signatures on a check. The computer had just paid for itself. “We need to call . . . I can’t ever remember their names . . . the yoga people.”
“They’re gone for the month. I told you that . . . yes, Phil, I did! They’re in India for some kind of Sikh festival. This could all be cleaned up by the time they get back.”
“Yeah, unless fuckin’ Kearney thinks we tried to burn the thing ourselves.” My cell phone rang and I whipped it out of my pocket, expectin
g Connie. It was Raul. I looked around and he told me to be cool. Then he told me that Jackie’s killer was standing a block and a half away, watching the crowd. I nodded and told him to hang up, then kept talking like I was still on the phone. “Call Mike,” I said, looking at Yolanda. “Tell him Raul just called and told me that Jackie Marchand’s killer is standing a block and half away, watching. Turn and face the other way, Yo, and make the call, then give me your phone.” I closed my phone and palmed Yolanda’s and walked a little away, Mike and me trying to figure a way to get to the guy without being made. I couldn’t look his way; he’d see me. Mike could look in that direction but he couldn’t see around the corner. “Fuck this, Mike! I’m going to him. I think he’s too fat and too drugged to outrun me. He can’t see you, so you get the head start. When I see you reach the corner, I’ll start running. Okay? Go!”
I turned and watched Mike head for the corner, watching our prey out of the corner of my eye. He was just standing there, hands in his pockets, watching. Mike had turned the corner and I had started running toward him before he registered what was happening. Then he took off. So much for being too fat or too stoned to boogie. Mike gave up the chase before I did, and I gave it up a block later, and huffed my way back to where he was bent over, hands on his knees, breathing hard. “I’m way too old that for kind of shit, running down perps,” he said through deep breathing.
“That makes two of us,” I said, adding, “dude’s fast for a fat boy.”
“But he’s a twenty-something fat boy,” Mike said. “Youth. Makes all the difference.”
I shook my head; I was still winded and more than a little pissed off that I’d been out-run by a guy sixty pounds overweight, no matter how young he was. Mike’s breathing was almost back to normal and he was standing up straight. “You ever seen a tank on maneuvers?” he asked, and kept talking because he knew that I hadn’t—except in the movies. “A tank is a big, ugly animal that looks like it should barely be able to roll, but it can damn near outrun a camel and can turn and change directions like a Jaguar—the car—and stop on a dime.”
A Murder Too Close Page 20