by Ben Sanders
Marshall said, ‘Did you remember that, or did you have to write it down?’
Nevins said, ‘You’re a witness. You’re not part of the investigative process. I need to make that distinction clear to you.’
Marshall gave that a second. He said, ‘You’re not going to be part of the process, either. You’ve only got until Tuesday. And it’ll probably take half a day to clear your desk.’
Nevins turned and looked back up the concrete steps at the house, as if needing a reminder of context. He said, ‘I spoke to Lee Ashcroft at organized crime. He and I actually go back. Did some time together at Manhattan North.’
‘Good for you.’
‘He tells me you were undercover for a long time with the Asaro family.’
‘I’m pleased that he’s so committed to secrecy. Was he at home, or was he shouting to be heard over bar noise?’
‘He says you have a vexing propensity for unilateralism.’
Marshall smiled. ‘Glad he’s learned to talk and hold his thesaurus at the same time.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘I can assure you, I don’t have any delusions of officialdom.’
Nevins gave a few small nods, keeping his gaze level. He said, ‘Great. I just want to make sure you understand you don’t have a license to withhold anything from me.’
Marshall said, ‘I knew there was some kind of rule like that.’
Nevins shrugged. ‘So is there anything you want to tell me?’
‘Yeah, actually there is.’
He could see he’d caught Nevins off-guard: just a flicker there in his eye, half a second.
Nevins said, ‘Go on, then.’
Marshall said, ‘That windowsill’s nine feet high. I think the guy stood out here and reached up with the shotgun to tap on the glass, and then waited to see who looked out. That’s why he was standing side-on: he wanted the weapon out of sight from the house. If Vialoux had come to the window, the guy would’ve killed him. As it was, they found him at the restaurant. But then how did they know he was there? We know they weren’t lying in wait, because otherwise why come here first? They established he wasn’t home, and then left. But then the timing suggests they went straight to the restaurant. Which is significant, too. Because they didn’t just stumble across him: this is New York City. It’s probably ten thousand to one they’d find him, even if they knew he’d stayed in the same neighborhood. So I think in their minds, it was almost binary: you know, he’s either here, or he’s there – at the restaurant. And they were right. But then why would they know to frame it like that?’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘Because either they’d watched him long enough to establish his restaurant visits as some kind of reliable habit, or someone tipped them off.’
Nevins still didn’t have anything to say.
Marshall said, ‘Do you need to write any of that down?’
‘I don’t want the pages getting wet.’
Marshall said nothing.
Nevins said, ‘You think the owner was in on it?’
‘No, because otherwise Vialoux wouldn’t have asked to meet me there. I think more likely, someone went in, handed over a few hundred bucks and a photograph of Vialoux, and said call us if you see him.’
Nevins looked back at the house. ‘He told you he had until Tuesday. Is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So how come it’s only Thursday and he’s dead?’
‘Hannah said he couldn’t even keep the days square. Maybe they meant Tuesday just been, not Tuesday coming. Frankly the state he was in, I can imagine that being the case.’
Nevins didn’t answer. He dragged a hand down his face. He said, ‘What’s your interest in this anyway? You said you hadn’t seen him in ten years.’
‘My interest? Are you kidding?’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘He asked me for help, and then he was shot right in front of me.’
Nevins was still looking at him, maybe sensing there was something else.
Marshall said, ‘What else did Lee have to say about me?’
Nevins looked past him to the traffic on the BQE. ‘He told me you blew your undercover op when you shot the target of the investigation. He said you took a quarter million dollars cash from the target’s wall safe, but the FBI couldn’t pin it on you.’
‘Yeah. They could never quite make that one stick.’
Nothing.
They looked at each other. The silence of reciprocal analysis.
‘He also said if you find these guys first, you’ll kill them, and I won’t be able to pin it on you.’
‘I’m glad he still holds me in such high regard.’
‘Is it true?’
Marshall said, ‘It’s moot. You wouldn’t want to pin it on me.’
Looking at Nevins for a tell, but the man was inscrutable: blank and patient, like he could stand there in the rain all night. Marshall thought maybe it was best to come clean, give him the background.
He said, ‘There’s something else I should mention, too. Before you find out by yourself and get all excited.’
Nevins took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie and put them back on again. ‘All right.’
Marshall nodded at the house. ‘Hannah and I had an affair ten years ago.’
Nevins seemed like he might comment, but he just stood there, looking faintly vindicated. Like he’d felt there was something else.
Marshall said, ‘I’d rather you did your conspiracy thinking sooner rather than later.’
‘The conspiracy being what, exactly?’
‘Well. Maybe I had Vialoux shot to get him out of the frame. Maybe by being a witness, I have a better excuse to reconnect with Hannah. Maybe I paid the guy with the stolen cash from my undercover op.’
Nevins let that have a second, and then he said, ‘We’ve cleared up delusions of officialdom, but we need to clear up delusions of using your old undercover contacts to find out who’d murder someone over a debt.’
Marshall shook his head. ‘It’s far more complicated than that.’
‘In what way?’
‘Think about it. Why kill someone who owes you money? Makes no sense. Be pretty hard reclaiming anything now, won’t it?’
Nevins cleaned his glasses again.
Marshall said, ‘I saw him tonight, he looked like a guy who thought his life was ending. So what are the chances that a gambling debt with the mob was his only problem?’
Silence for a moment. Nevins said, ‘You need to come in and make a formal statement.’
‘No I don’t. I’ve already told you what I know.’
‘Have you forgotten how policing works?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘I have the opposite problem. I remember too well. I was undercover with the mob for two years, and whenever I sat down in a briefing and said we needed to wrap things up tomorrow because I was going to get a bullet in the head, no one listened. They just sent me back in and said, Don’t worry. I ended up having to exercise my vexing propensity for unilateralism.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘Anyway. Now I like to say things once.’
He turned and walked away toward Fourth Avenue.
FOUR
His place was over in Flatbush, a straight shot east with no direct subway line from Sunset Park. A cab would’ve been the fastest way home, but his MetroCard was two days from expiry, and for reasons inchoate but nonetheless compelling, he felt the need to maximize its usage during the final forty-eight hours of validity.
He caught an R train all the way up to the Barclay Center, and then came back south on a 2 train toward Flatbush. He had a car to himself, but he stayed on his feet in the aisle, the train going through its normal subway anguish, screaming and clattering through the dark, Marshall swaying hands in pockets and thinking about Ray Vialoux, thinking about Hannah. It had been a strange feeling to hold her again, transported by sensation back t
hrough time with perfect clarity. With Nevins there, it had felt as if their history was apparent, as if they’d hugged beneath a bright-red sign reading PAST AFFAIR.
It would’ve been 2009 when he met her. It was a dinner at Alan Moretti’s for some of the task force people. Moretti and his wife, Ray and Hannah Vialoux, a handful of others – whatever their names were. Marshall was there by himself. This had been back in his undercover days, acting out Lee Ashcroft’s grand plan as a supposedly dirty cop in Tony Asaro’s operation. Lee’s plan worked. The mob thought Marshall was their pet lawman. He fed them tip-offs, stolen drug evidence, low-value-but-legit intel files from One Police Plaza. But feigning corruption took a lot of work. For a long time, he’d lived at the cusp of his mental limit, scared he’d be found out, scared someone else would get killed, scared that he was way beyond permissibility, and that he’d end up in prison. It dulled his capacity to question bad ideas, so when he showed up for that dinner in 2009, and became aware that Hannah Vialoux kept looking at him, all he thought was maybe this will lead somewhere.
On a false pretext, he called their house on a night he knew Ray was on a long surveillance shift. He had a story prepared about wanting to pass on a message from a CI, but he didn’t even get to it. Hannah told him straight off that Ray wasn’t home, and then didn’t seem in any hurry to get off the phone. They transitioned from small talk into something awkward and stilted about how evenings alone are hard, and he remembered she’d segued pretty cleanly into asking him where he lived, and then ninety minutes later she was at his door, and ten minutes after that she was in his bed.
She visited him on three more occasions. She told him their marriage was ending, and she was looking for someone else. That confession doused the fantasy pretty quickly for him. He’d been looking for escape. He didn’t want to run off with a colleague’s wife in the middle of an undercover op. He told Hannah he wanted to draw a line under the arrangement, and then waited for news of her separation.
It never came.
He blew his undercover role, and moved to New Mexico as part of federal witness protection. In 2016 he left the program and moved back to New York, and when Vialoux got in contact, he was half-expecting a confrontation about past indiscretion. If only.
He got off the train at Beverly Road. On the platform, a trio of young guys fell into step alongside, one left and two right, wanting to know if he was in the market for crack cocaine. Marshall said that he wasn’t. For a second he toyed with explaining he’d been a subway user for at least as long as they’d been alive, and during that time the NYPD had been consistently proactive and humorless even in regard to lowly turnstile jumpers, so with that in mind, why did they think they had a show trying to push hard drugs? But he didn’t bother. He kept walking. He wasn’t going to trigger any great Eureka moment. They were down at a level where the luck-currents weren’t in their favor. If they didn’t take a hit on a drug charge, something else would get them. As he walked through the platform exit, they’d moved on to someone else.
His place was south of Clarendon on a block of two-story town houses. This part of Flatbush had more variation than Vialoux’s street over in Sunset Park – some brownstone, some brick, some clapboard. Even granted his fondness for regularity, he still appreciated the mix in architecture. The street didn’t just look like barracks for clones. His own house was a clapboard place that he rented from his neighbor, a Russian woman named Vera Boykov.
He let himself in with his key and locked the door again behind him. The added problem now was he didn’t know how closely Nevins would look at him. The guy was smart. Leaving aside the fact Marshall’s admission was self-implicating, his involvement should have struck Nevins as remote. But smart and thorough sometimes worked against each other with police. Nevins might be the type of guy who couldn’t sleep until he’d run a theory into the dirt. He could picture him in an armchair somewhere: brooding in a darkened room, wondering if a guy like Marshall could seem short if you viewed him from an elevated window.
He turned on the light in the front room. On a table under the window, and presided over by a gooseneck lamp, was a thousand-piece puzzle of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist painting, Convergence. He’d bought it at a yard sale from a kid over on Thirty-first Street. The kid was nine years old, and a puzzle-enthusiast of evident zeal. He’d explained to Marshall that despite the mid-century appearance of the packaging, this was actually a fortieth-anniversary reissue of a 1964 original, which itself had been a mere 340 pieces. As the kid put it, ‘the full 1000’ was something of a gold standard in demand and complexity. Marshall was unsure as to the veracity of the historical claims, but he figured that actually completing the thing would take him a while. He gave the kid five bucks for it, on the basis there were no missing pieces, and the kid, somewhat affronted, told him he wasn’t in the business of giving out light product.
He switched on the gooseneck lamp and stood there for a moment, reviewing progress. It was always the first thing he did after coming in the door. The jumbled pieces were in such precise and extensive disarray, it was like a change in the house would manifest as a change in the pieces on the desk, under the scrutiny of the light. He’d completed the whitespace at the border of the image, and an inch-thick perimeter of the artwork proper. But this was just base camp. Still a big climb ahead.
In the kitchen he turned on the light, and then almost walked into the black cat that was standing on the floor looking up at him.
Marshall said, ‘Whyn’t you say anything when I came in?’
He poured a glass of water and stood drinking it at the counter. The cat watched.
Marshall raised the blind and looked out the kitchen window. An alleyway separated his house from Vera’s. A light was on in her upstairs office. He took the phone off its wall charger and called her number. He used burners for business, but the house had a landline in Vera’s name, and he was happy to use it in situations that didn’t incur a security risk.
She said, ‘Uh. You know what time it is.’
He figured she was maybe seventy-five. She’d told Marshall she came to America twenty years ago, worried about this ex-KGB guy named Putin attaining power, wanting to get some distance on him. She’d been in Flatbush since she got here, running a blog about Russian politics from her spare bedroom. Marshall would see the light on in there every other night. She’d told him that’s when she wrote. Sometimes too she gave interviews via Skype to dissident political commentators who published stuff on YouTube. Occasionally if he went outside he’d hear her, this faint voice holding forth in Russian, guttural and exuberant.
Marshall said, ‘I saw your light on. I just wanted to let you know Boris is over here.’
‘You feed him nothing. Understand?’
‘All right.’
‘You say all right. But that cat, he look like Giuliani. And it’s not from what I feed him.’
Marshall smiled.
‘Yes, I hear you thinking it’s funny.’
‘Vera, I don’t feed him. I promise.’
‘And you are up at this hour late for what, precisely? The time is … it is after two a.m.’
Marshall said, ‘Just living a strange old night.’
‘Mmm. By design that is cryptic, yes?’
‘I just wanted to let you know Boris is here.’
‘I know where he is.’
‘I know you know. I just told you.’
‘No. I know prior to admission of the fact.’
‘OK.’
She said, ‘I and Boris, we visit vetinary. Veterinarian. He inject Boris with a tracker. I see him right now, on my screen. Boris, not the vetinary.’
‘Very sensible.’
‘For pets, yes? But you listen: in world’s mind they are the unimportant lives, but they are the canary for what is next. For everyone. You know this phrase? Canary in the mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, yes, good. Pet get ill, euthanize, yes? Wonder where pet is, inject tracker,
yes? These are symptoms of how things change. Watch: your children will be born, and trackers there will be for them also. The doctor will do it: weigh him, and then inject. Bam.’
Marshall said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘Good. What do they say in the films? No, you hang up.’
The gooseneck lamp was still on in the front room. He sat at the table and studied the layout. From an assembly standpoint, the edges of the painting had the advantage of limited colors – black over tan – whereas the central portion of the art included streaks of yellow, orange, blue and white. The groupings alone were a sufficient challenge. He’d created informal categories of loose reserves – edge pieces and internal pieces – with the internal ones sub-categorized depending on color inclusion. He nudged a few around, marrying colors. On a couple of heady occasions, he thought he saw a lineup. Even on nights where he’d pre-committed to organizing color groups only, he couldn’t resist the urge to try pieces on the working edge. All puzzle guys knew the feeling. You chased the rush: the moment when correct shape and correct position meant compatibility, and a given piece went in flush with its neighbor. That was perfection. That’s what you showed up at the table for.
Nothing for him tonight, though. He turned out the light.
The cat followed him upstairs, stood in the bedroom doorway and watched as Marshall opened the closet and unlocked his document safe. He took out his Colt 1911 pistol, checked the load, and then carried it with him into the bathroom. The cat kept its distance now, watching, planning something in the depths of its cat head. Marshall showered with the bathroom door open and the gun in arm’s reach on the vanity beside the stall, wrapped in a towel for moisture protection. The cat paced the hallway and checked in on him every so often. Maybe it had pegged this as unusual behavior, but it wasn’t prejudiced. It waited until Marshall had brushed his teeth and got into bed, and then it jumped onto the mattress and curled up against him.
‘Boris. This isn’t going to work, pal.’
Nothing.
‘If Vera could see this, you’d be in a ton of trouble.’
He remembered the tracker, and thought maybe she could see it. Maybe it reported elevation and velocity. Maybe it could interpret a leap onto furniture.