by Ben Sanders
Marshall was at a table by himself up front. The younger cop paused at the maître d’ station, like reflex obeyance of the WAIT TO BE SEATED sign, but the older guy came straight through without breaking step, everything about him dialed in on Vialoux.
Outside, one of the uniformed cops said, ‘Kinda looks like they overcooked his steak or something, tossed the table out the window.’
The younger detective smiled, and it got some chuckles going around cop-to-cop for a moment – ‘I asked for it fucking rare’ – but the older guy didn’t laugh or say anything. Marshall liked that. He was probably into his fourth decade of police work, maybe sacrificed plenty, but he hadn’t lost any deference. He knew walking up to a body and standing over it demands a certain attitude, certain manners.
He talked the younger cop through the scene examination – start at the body and work out, drink in the detail, don’t disrupt the blood spatter going for his pocket contents – and then he came back down the aisle to where Marshall was sitting.
‘You the guy that saw what happened?’
In the interest of completeness, Marshall was of a mind to tell him there were five guys who saw it: one was dead, one was outside in an ambulance, one pulled the trigger, one drove, and he was the fifth. But from the cop’s demeanor, Marshall gathered he was abreast of the semantics.
Marshall said, ‘Yeah. I was drinking with him.’
The detective sat down in the chair opposite, knees coming almost to table level. He wore a blue suit and a tie and small rimless spectacles. A thin beard disguising old acne scars, pockmarks, as if he’d been hit in the face with a load of number 10 birdshot. Marshall figured he must’ve been six foot six at least, maybe a hundred seventy pounds if you hosed him down in his suit and he kept his shoes on. He had a pen and a bound notebook with him.
‘I’m Detective Floyd Nevins, NYPD.’
He took a business card from his coat and slid it across the table, as if to prove the statement.
‘Are you happy to answer some questions?’
Marshall read the card and leaned to slip it in his pocket, the same reflex motion that had maybe saved his life thirty minutes ago, and said that he was. Nevins found a clean page, flipping past half a book’s worth of notes from other nights, other murders. He took down Marshall’s name and address, and then asked him what had happened. Marshall gave him the crux of it, said they were having a drink at the table down the back and a guy came up and shot Vialoux through the window. Got in the back of a waiting car and escaped uptown on Fourth.
The detective called Nevins looked down the aisle to where the damage was, as if making sure the story fit. He said, ‘Ray Vee-loo, huh? What’s the spelling on that?’
Marshall told him.
Nevins took it down, and seeing the name written seemed to spark something in his memory. He looked at the paper a long moment, fanned his pen absently in two fingers.
‘You get a look at the shooter?’
‘Lean guy, short, maybe five-seven with his boots on, one-fifty.’
‘You see his face?’
‘No. He wore a mask.’
‘No hair or skin exposed?’
Marshall shook his head. Outside, one of the uniformed cops was saying backup might be a while. The President was staying at his Fifth Avenue place. Half of NYPD was on guard duty in Manhattan.
Nevins said, ‘So nothing at all that stood out?’
‘Nothing physical. They knew what they were doing, though. That’s pretty distinctive with this sort of thing.’
Nevins didn’t answer, giving him room to unpack.
Marshall said, ‘A shot through the window’s hard, but probably the best option given the setup in here. We were way down at the far table, so if the shooter came in the front, we could’ve gone out the back. Percentages from their point of view were way down. I think they sat out there and thought about it and then made a final call. And I think that means they had a couple of different guns with them.’
Nevins just looked at him.
Marshall said, ‘No one shows up for a hit with just a pump-action Mossberg. The gun was as big as he was. I think they would’ve planned to do it close-in with a pistol, but then swapped to plan B. Which wasn’t necessarily a worse option. I mean, reflections on the glass, I didn’t even see him until he was six feet away. He fired twice – slugs, not buckshot, obviously. Then he walked across the street, got in the car, and they drove off. Car was a nothing-sedan, basically invisible. You add everything up, I think the bottom line says hired guys who’ve done this before. It was dispassionate and relaxed.’
Nevins said, ‘Anything else?’
Nothing in his tone, as if the conversation was essentially consistent with his last thirty-five years of witness interviews.
Marshall said, ‘The six-eight precinct’s only a few blocks away, so they needed to lose the car pretty fast. They went north, so I figure they went up to maybe Thirty-ninth Street, something like that, dropped the car off by the railyard. They could’ve had a swap-vehicle, or maybe just walked over to Ninth, took the subway. That’s how I’d do it, anyway.’
Nevins regarded him flatly. The pen nib hovered, two inches off the paper. It made a couple of small motions, as if circling in on a concise summary. Then it touched down, and Nevins wrote: DISPASSIONATE AND RELAXED. His handwriting was even and careful. He wrote only in capitals. The ink was police-blue. He applied visible nib pressure. Marshall liked that. Maybe like the man himself, every new page carried the ghost of prior cases.
Nevins said, ‘You notice the car when you got here?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘There are vehicles almost solid on both curbs. It could’ve been here and I didn’t notice.’
‘You see any exhaust smoke?’
‘Yeah, a little.’
Nevins looked out the window again. Marshall saw him chewing on possibilities. Fumes implied a cool engine, no fumes implied a warm engine. He wanted to know how long they’d sat out there, thinking about the hit. He was murder police. He didn’t come out to do the work, only to let someone squirm out of culpability, plead down to Manslaughter in the Second. He needed death, and the proof of human planning: Murder in the First Degree. He came out looking for Murder One.
He said, ‘How’d you know this guy? Friend of yours?’
‘Yeah, former colleague. We were NYPD.’
He told Nevins about his and Vialoux’s history, the taskforce back in 2010, Brooklyn South narcotics.
Marshall said, ‘Then I got moved to a different unit, and I didn’t really see him again until today. He called me up about two o’clock, said he needed to meet.’
Nevins nodded as he listened, and then he wrote: VIC X/MOS and WIT X/MOS, which was a shorthand meaning both victim and witness were ex-members of service, ex-NYPD.
Nevins said, ‘So he knew someone wanted to clip him?’
Marshall told him about the sixty-seven-k debt.
‘And let me guess: he couldn’t pay?’
Marshall stretched a leg down the aisle, reached in his pocket for the envelope Vialoux had given him. He placed it on the table.
‘What’s this?’
‘He said he had until Tuesday to make the payment. They sent him that as encouragement.’
He watched Nevins examine the contents. The two photos, the written threat. Money by Tuesday. No cops. For a moment, the pen hovered again above the notebook, and Marshall sensed his internal debate, whether to transcribe the message or not. He obviously deemed it sufficiently memorable.
‘Wife and daughter, I take it?’
‘Yeah.’
Nevins leaned back in his chair, looked at the broken window. ‘O’Malley?’
The cop who’d made the steak joke glanced over. ‘Yeah?’
‘Put a unit on the victim’s address when you get it. Hold until further notice.’
‘You got it.’
Nevins returned the papers to the envelope. ‘No cops. But he told you.’
Ma
rshall nodded. ‘We go back. He thought I could help him on the quiet.’
‘But you hadn’t seen him in a while, right? How’d he make contact?’
‘Through a lawyer I know. Harry Rush. Vialoux went to Harry first, and Harry put him on to me.’
‘And who suggested this place for the meeting?’
‘Ray did. He lives around here – Fiftieth Street, something like that. Haven’t been there in a while.’
‘And how do you know Mr Rush?’
Marshall worked for him as an unlicensed P.I., but he didn’t want that going in Nevins’ notebook. He said, ‘I know him from my cop days.’
Half the story, at least.
Nevins said, ‘So who was leaning on Vialoux? Who’d he owe?’
Marshall looked outside to the ambulance. Paulie was still in the back getting oxygen, but he was upright now, sitting on the edge of the stretcher. Marshall wasn’t sure how much the guy had overheard, but he was erring toward nothing. The man had come on too friendly for someone who sensed a life-and-death issue being outlined in his orbit. So it was tempting not to give up the names – D’Anton Lewis, Frank Cifaretti – and just look into it himself. It would be nice to find whoever killed Vialoux and drop them off maybe a four- or five-story fire escape. But Nevins was looking at him with such a steady, neutral stare, it was like he could see through Marshall’s face to that imagined narrative as it unfolded. In any case, reticence wouldn’t be any kind of service. The more people hunting, the better.
Marshall said, ‘He told me a guy called D’Anton Lewis got him involved with the betting operation, and that it was run by someone called Frank Cifaretti. The debt was with Cifaretti.’
That obviously warranted a notebook entry. Nevins wrote down the names. He said, ‘Who else?’
‘That’s all he gave me. You look outside, there’s probably a napkin and a pen trapped under the table. He was in the process of writing down the details.’
Nevins watched him. ‘Keep his mouth free for drinking, huh?’
His pen hovered. The nib made its circular motion, but it didn’t land. He closed the notebook, cupped one hand in the other and cracked his knuckles in clean and measured sequence, one-two-three-four as he looked out the window.
He said, ‘I’m retiring next week. Last shift’s Tuesday.’
Tuesday. The same day as Vialoux’s deadline. Marshall let that small parallel go unspoken.
Nevins said, ‘I did two years down in Baltimore – CID homicide. Worked ninety-seven murders total, lead and assist, not once did I work a dead police. Not even once. CID handles cop shootings, but I never caught one. Now I got a dead gold-shield, five days to go.’
He shook his head, and then his eyes came back, and Marshall saw the story wasn’t so much a digression as evidence: there was nothing else in the world that he took more seriously than what he was doing right now. He watched Nevins stand up, slide his chair back in.
‘Wait there a moment.’
Marshall said, ‘I know the family. If you’re doing next-of-kin, I’ll ride with you.’
Nevins thought about it. ‘Wait there.’
‘If you’re checking up on me, personnel’s slow this time of night. Talk to Lee Ashcroft at organized crime.’
Nevins looked at him for a moment, like maybe the name meant something. Maybe he knew what flavor of operation Ashcroft liked to run. But he didn’t say anything. He went outside, stood by the table and the broken glass and began dialing on his cell phone. He had it to his ear when the cop called O’Malley interrupted him.
‘Detective?’
Nevins put the phone to his lapel.
The cop said, ‘We ran the vic’s details, dispatch says they had a nine-one-one call from his address just tonight, twenty-two hundred. Wife called it in, said she had a guy at her living-room window – guy in a mask just standing there, waving at her.’
THREE
Nevins told the other detective to stay at the scene and interview the restaurant owner, sign the body release once the M.E. showed up. When he reached his car, Marshall was waiting at the passenger door.
Nevins said, ‘Uh-uh. Sorry.’
‘I told you I know the family. I’ll ride with you.’
‘You haven’t been cleared. No offense, I’ve no idea who you are.’
‘Yeah, but Hannah Vialoux does. So it’s an easy test, isn’t it? She’ll either vouch for me, or she won’t.’
He opened the passenger door, but Nevins cut in again: ‘Hey. No.’
Aiming a finger at him across the roof. ‘You ride with me, you’re going in back. Any problems, you’re staying there.’
Marshall didn’t argue. He got in the back and Nevins took off, pulling out onto Fourth and gunning it, grill lights flashing. The traffic seemed to unzip as cars ahead swung curbside to let them through, people on the sidewalk turning to watch, low brick buildings whipping past, signage advertising LAUNDROMAT and ROTISSERIE CHICKEN and LAW OFFICE – an exhibit of perfect randomness that Marshall felt only New York City would conspire to arrange.
It was only a three-minute trip up to Fiftieth Street. The whole block was brownstone town houses, all of them near-identical – a short flight of concrete steps and a bay window at each level. The Vialoux place was obvious, though: two NYPD radio cars were double-parked out front.
Nevins pulled up behind them and got out without a word. Marshall was in the center seat, one foot each side of the drive train in an attempt at nominal comfort. He ducked forward to watch Nevins walk up the front steps and knock at the door. It took a certain leg strength to do that: make the ascent with the burden of awful news, year after year after year. He had his badge wallet out, up and ready, but it was a uniformed cop who opened the door, and she let Nevins straight in.
The door closed.
Marshall sat watching the house, shadows visible in the gaps between the drapes. Ten minutes. Twenty. Shadows coming and going, fluid and random, ghost-motion. Ghosts talking about the dead, he figured.
Rain began to fall. Mist at first, and then fat drops that wormed and shivered and crawled on the glass, blurring Marshall’s view, a steady hiss like signal-loss as the rain drummed the car roof.
He took out his cell phone and called Harry Rush. It was true what he’d told Nevins. They knew each other from Marshall’s cop days, when Rush Law specialized in defending drug dealers. These days he was smaller scale, and used Marshall for repo work and tracking down witnesses. Occasional cash jobs that helped keep Marshall in the black.
The call went to voicemail.
‘Harry, it’s Marshall. Ray Vialoux’s dead. Give me a call.’
Light now from the direction of the house, droplets on the glass turning molten-gold, and he heard muffled voices. Then a shape loomed up darkly in his window, and the door opened, and Nevins leaned down, rain flecks on his glasses.
‘She says she knows a Marshall, so we’ll see if you’re it.’
Marshall slid across the seat and got out. Ahead of him, the brownstone houses and the row of sidewalk plane trees were matched by mirror-house and mirror-tree on the other side of the street, the twinned arrangement extending without variance and without apparent end into the dark. He went up the concrete steps to the Vialoux house, the door open and releasing warm light and the smell of coffee: perversely homely, perversely welcoming in this context.
Inside, the cop he’d seen earlier stood with her chin ducked, listening to a dispatch update from her lapel mic. Another cop of about forty was posed similarly, grim but deferent, and beyond him in profile stood Hannah Vialoux: a figure of concerted but tenuous composure with her jaw clenched and hands pressed together with white intensity, fingertips to chin.
He saw the surprise come into her face as he stepped through the door. Like he was some storied figure, rumored lost or dead, and now returned. Greek odyssey, with a New-York-undercover twist. And then she lost it. Face slackening, mouth drooping, the horrible expression of the recently bereaved, as if flesh itself was b
eing sucked away by misery.
She said, ‘Oh, Marsh, Jesus Christ …’
She came to him with arms wide, so desperate it was like for a moment he would need to catch her. He held her as she sobbed, her words disappearing into his shoulder and Marshall whispering into her hair, telling her it would be all right: he’d find who did it. He was going to find who did it.
They sat in the kitchen. Marshall and Nevins said no to coffee, but Hannah Vialoux gave it to them anyway. She was bustling on autopilot. Some people were like that, in Marshall’s experience. Sheltering in the groove of the mundane.
She’d be nearing forty now, but she hadn’t been on the same aging graph as her husband. Hannah’s curve was shallower, more graceful. She still had that nice figure, still had her hair color. A few fine lines around her eyes and mouth, but that was nothing. Compared to Ray, it was like she’d been on a regimen of honey baths and yoga while he was off staring into blast furnaces without a mask.
She poured a cup for herself and joined them at the table. ‘I knew something was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t tell me anything.’
Nevins had his notebook and pen out. Marshall watched his little routine, turning pages, looking for clean space. He paused at the last page of notes – still half-blank – and Marshall sensed his thought process: turn to a new page, or make this interview part of the thing at the restaurant, part of the Vialoux saga. In the end, he turned the page, studied Hannah Vialoux, and asked her when she’d last seen her husband.
She slid a phone from her pocket, checked it, put it on the table. ‘For God’s sake, why can’t she just call …’
Nevins said, ‘Like they told you, there’s a unit been sent to collect your daughter. The best thing you can do is just not worry.’
He gave it a couple of seconds and then repeated his question: ‘When did you last see your husband?’
Hannah said, ‘I don’t know, frankly. Two, three days ago. I mean, I heard him tonight. He came in, I don’t know. Seven thirty? I heard his car, and I heard him thumping around down here.’ She blinked carefully, exhaled. ‘Seemed to hit … honestly, he must’ve bumped into every wall in the house. I was going to come down, but then I thought it’d just turn into a fight. So, yeah … I stayed upstairs, and he went out again, took my car. I don’t know whether he meant to or not. Probably grabbed the wrong keys and couldn’t be bothered coming back …’ She looked away. ‘I could feel everything sort of ending. I don’t mean like this, I don’t mean with him dead. I mean he was never here. More often than not he wouldn’t even come in at night. At first … you know, I’d lie awake, wanting to hear him come home, but …’ She smiled thinly. ‘You don’t get much sleep that way.’