“Come in the kitchen,” she said and led the way.
Her looks—a striking mixture of African and European features—both defined and defied the label African-American. She was pretty enough in the photos I’d seen of her, but she was more attractive in person. This in spite of the obvious toll the last few months had taken on her. In her thirties and taller than I expected, she was athletically slender and wore her tightly curled hair short to her head. Her medium brown skin was taut over mile-high cheekbones. She had a gently sloping nose and angular jawline. Her lips were full without being showy, but the stars of the show were her hazel green eyes. Yet, in spite of her natural beauty, she was practically aging before my eyes.
“You’re no cop,” she said, resigned to the fact that I was already in her house.
“Used to be along time ago, probably before you were born. Do you know who Carmella Melendez is?” I asked.
“Alta’s little sister, but what’s that got to do with me?”
“Probably nothing. Listen, this may not mean anything to you, but my name is Moe Prager. Carmella and me—”
“—were married and business partners once.”
I was stunned. “How can you know that?”
“Carmella abandoned her family, but Alta never abandoned her. She told me she was very proud of her little sister and had followed her career as a detective and all. She had a scrapbook and everything. Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Prager—”
“Moe. Please, call me Moe.”
“Don’t be so surprised, Moe. When you were a cop, didn’t you and your partner ride a lot of miles stuck in a car together? What did you guys talk about?”
“Women mostly.”
She laughed, her smile lighting up the room. Still, it seemed almost painful for her, like she was out of practice. “No, seriously, Moe.”
“We told stories, talked about our families, talked sports, politics.”
“Us too,” she said. “Alta and I spent a lot of hours together talking.”
“Alta told you a lot, but did she tell you why Carmella changed her name and broke away from her family?” I asked.
That wiped away any last traces of a smile from Maya Watson’s face. The air went out of her as if I’d sucker punched her in the belly. She dropped the cigarette into an old cup of coffee and we listened to its death hiss. She lit another. Yeah, the last few months had taken a toll on her nerves. I repeated the question.
“That her mama was ashamed of her on account of her getting raped as a little girl, that their mama blamed her.” Maya bowed her head. “Shame is a powerful thing, Moe, a powerful thing.”
She was right about the power of shame. Problem was that these days, no one seemed capable of feeling it. That didn’t seem to be one of Maya Watson’s issues. Apparently, whatever had gone on with Tillman had stirred up a lot of shame in her. After a few more puffs on the cigarette, she looked up at me.
“But what are you doing here anyway? You didn’t come here to talk about Carmella.”
“In a way, I did. Carm was the one who asked me to look into Alta’s murder.”
“She’s a little late to the game, don’t you think? She might’a thought about doing something for Alta when she was alive. Like when her face was plastered all over the news. Alta could’ve used some support then.”
“Maybe you’re right, Maya. Carmella’s wounds are old and deep, but I think she’s feeling thirty years of guilt and loss all at once. I guess there’s plenty of shame to go around these days.”
“Carmella’s shame won’t do Alta no good now.”
“Like I said, maybe you’re right to be so hard on Carmella, but I had an old friend who survived Auschwitz. He had every right in the world to be angry and judgmental, but he was slow to judge and when he did judge, he never did it harshly. ‘Look in the mirror,’ he used to say, ‘then judge.’ Besides, I’m here, not Carmella, and I need your help.”
She dropped the second cigarette into the coffee and gestured for me to sit at the table. When I sat, she sat.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“Whatever you can give me. I need a sense of who Alta was. What kind of men did she date? What did she love? What did she hate? That sort of thing.”
Maya Watson didn’t need any further prompting. She spoke for nearly forty minutes, stopping only to breathe and light up cigarettes. Alta was tough. She had to be. Female EMTs were now going through what women cops had gone through in the seventies and eighties. And minority women … forget about it. You had to be three times as good at your job just to tread water. Alta had taken Maya under her wing and had protected her from the worst parts of the job. Like Carmella, Alta had a temper, but was fierce and fiercely loyal. Alta would take a bullet for someone. She loved movies and detective novels and Indian food. But Alta was pretty secretive about who she dated. Eventually, Maya ran out of steam. Tears formed in the corners of her otherworldly eyes.
“What is it?” I asked, gently laying a hand on her shoulder.
“I couldn’t go to her funeral and I’ve had to grieve Alta here, alone. I’ve been cooped up in this place for weeks with only my thoughts and my cigarettes. When I went back to work after the suspension, they put me on sick leave and told me I was bad for the morale of the department. I miss her. Can you understand how much I miss her?”
I thought of Sarah and noticed my hand on my abdomen. “I think I can. I really think I can.”
“The cops won’t find her killer, will they?” she asked, wiping away the tears with her thumb.
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “The detective in charge of the investigation—”
“Fuqua?”
“Yes, Fuqua. He strikes me as a stubborn motherfu—as a stubborn man who doesn’t give up on things so easily. Also strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think.”
“That’s good?”
“In a detective, yeah. Carmella is like that.”
“And you?”
“Me too, I guess.”
“Did Alta have any enemies, spurned lovers, anyone you can think of who might have wanted her dead?”
Maya Watson broke into a jag of manic laughter so removed from joy that I was frightened for her. All this time alone was doing her a lot of harm.
“Enemies! You want to see some enemies?” She disappeared from the room and came back carrying two cardboard boxes stacked in her arms. She dropped them to the floor, sheets of paper spilling onto the tiles. “You talk about hate mail.”
I picked up the sheets that had fallen out of the boxes and looked at the top one. The author had managed to use the words nigger, spic, and cunts in the first sentence. I stopped reading. I was quick on the uptake.
“Not exactly love sonnets, Moe. No one comparing me and Alta to a rose or a summer’s day.”
“You showed these to the police?”
“Every single one. This is nothing. These are just the ones off the net that I printed out. The newspeople and the crowds of people are gone from outside since Alta was killed, but these just keep coming in. I used to think potential was the greatest untapped thing in the world, but it isn’t. It’s hate. People got all kinds of hate in them.”
“I know it. Do you mind if I take some of these?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
The time had come, I thought, to broach the subject of Robert Tillman’s death. “Do you think Alta’s murder is connected to what happened with Tillman?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“But—”
“I can’t talk about it and I won’t.”
Her face got hard and determined. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her like this and didn’t want to risk alienating her. She’d given me some sense of Alta, enough of one to start with, at least, but I might need Maya’s insights again.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“I don’t know how much help I was,” she said.
“I don’t know either, but it’s
a start. Alta is real to me now and that’s something.”
Maya showed me to the door, the box of letters in my arms unexpectedly heavy. Whether that was a matter of physics or hate, I couldn’t yet say.
NINE
I had intended to head back to my house or to one of the stores’ offices to read through Maya Watson’s hate mail, but I didn’t feel like running into my brother Aaron. For all of his mishegas and obsession with the business, Aaron was an observant bastard and had recently commented on my weight loss and rather pale complexion. Besides, I had less and less patience for Aaron’s craziness these days. We were both getting old and old men get cranky. An indirect blessing of Sarah’s wedding was that I had three weeks off from work. No need, I thought, to risk having to lie to my big brother about the thing that was probably going to kill me. If he ever found out, he would just make me feel guilty for abandoning him and I already felt guilty enough for a thousand other things. And there was something else, something that stuck with me. Maya Watson had taken pains to mention how hard it had been for her and Alta at work.
I remembered how women cops were hazed and abused and basically tortured when I was on the job in the early seventies. It wasn’t trial by fire. It was trial by inferno—all of it done with the winking approval of the brass. They were going to show those broads that police work was man’s work. I remembered the stories Carmella told me about what she suffered through in uniform and then when she made detective. I’d witnessed some of it myself, how she was disrespected, disregarded, and treated, as she so indelicately put it, like pussy on the hoof. Most of the guys eventually came around, if grudgingly, but some never did. A few of them took it personally and made weeding women out of the job their own private crusade. The more isolated these guys got, the more determined they became. It took a long time for the NYPD to change, but it changed. Walk into Times Square and look around. The people in those dark blue uniforms with badges on their chests look freshly minted from the UN. They’re men and women. They’re Asian and Hispanic. They’re African-American, Arab-American, and the children of Russian immigrants. They’re Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids from the suburbs.
The FDNY was more like the Catholic Church. Change, when it came at all, came slowly, very slowly. During my days as a cop, the FDNY was almost entirely male, largely Irish, and if not quite a private club, then something pretty close. I’m no sociologist, but I think the pace of change had a lot to do with the way firehouses were set up. They’re small, close-knit units. Firemen live, eat, work, and sleep together for days at a time. Guys in a precinct can be close, but firemen are closer. Cops always talk about trusting other cops to have their backs, but trust between firefighters is even more crucial, because, let’s face it, it’s a more dangerous job. It was easy to understand how any foreign presence in a firehouse—most especially a woman’s—would be perceived as a threat.
As I adjusted my plans and my car’s direction in kind, I realized I was falling victim to the very thing I had vowed to avoid: linking Alta’s murder to Tillman’s death. Whether it suited me or not, if things were taking me in that direction, I had to follow. That’s the trouble with being a stumbler. I had no surefire methods to fall back on. So I drove down through the trench of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and up onto the Gowanus Expressway. Expressway, my ass! In New York City, there’s nothing express about expressways.
Finbarr McPhee’s Brass Pole was a famous tavern in the shadow of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. The joint had built its rep on two things: the biggest selection of Irish bottled and tap beers in all of New York City and the biggest collection of firemen east of the Mississippi. Just as there were cop bars, there were firemen bars. Finbarr McPhee’s—no one who knew better called it the Brass Pole—was top of the pops in this select group of public houses. Firemen came here to hang from all over the city and Long Island and they didn’t come for the Guinness, Harp, Smithwick’s, or Jameson Irish whiskey. They came to talk shop and swap war stories, sure, but mostly they came for the women.
That’s right, the women. Rock stars have groupies, but folks in uniform have a fair amount of their own. Shit, I knew a few sanitation guys who swore they had groupies too. I think the one exception to the rule of uniform attraction was traffic enforcement agents—meter maids as we were once wont to call them in the unenlightened days before men hired on. Everybody hates meter maids, Paul McCartney and lovely Rita notwithstanding. Although I did once have a date who asked to see my gun, it took a long time for me to come to terms with the attraction to the uniform. It was only later, when I was off the job for many years, that I came to see what the groupies were all about. The revelation was that the attraction wasn’t strictly about one thing.
Some of the women had the jones for the uniform or the perceived danger inherent in the job. They fetishized the trappings of the job: with cops it was the badge, the gun, the cap, the cuffs; with firemen it was the boots, the helmet, the axe. They got off on hearing the stories about life on the streets or responding to fires. But for some of the women, it was less about partying than pragmatism. It was about a solid future, a husband due fifty-two paychecks a year, medical benefits, and a killer pension. Because of their work
schedule, firemen could work second jobs. Every fireman I ever knew held down a side gig or owned part of a business. Yeah, it was the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the world was barely recognizable to me anymore, but there were some things I hoped had remained constant. When I walked into Finbarr’s and saw the ratio of women to men, I was happy to see that not everything in the world had changed.
It was still relatively early, but the place was packed. A lot of the men were in their twenties and thirties, but not all. There were plenty of older shaved heads and gray hairs too. There were even some relics as old or older than myself. Imagine that. Some guys can just never let go of the job and drinking with the kids who were still working helped keep them connected. Cop bars were like this too and just like in cop bars, the young guys steered well clear of the old-timers. The young guys were there to drink and hit on women, not to listen to stories about how the job used to be back in the day or what happened ten or twenty or thirty years ago. The ages of women also spanned a wide spectrum. They were mostly young, pretty, and eager. But there were plenty of emotional battle scars on the faces of the older men and women. Mixed in with the smells of stout and whiskey, perfume and cologne, were the darker grace notes of disappointment and regret.
There was something else too, something that hovered like a shroud over the flirtatious smiles and touches, over the beery laughter and the too-loud music pumping out of the CD jukebox. It was a shroud like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room that everyone fought to ignore, but everyone knew was there just over your shoulder. It was the wall of honor listing the names of the men who had died in the line of duty. It was 9/11. And if you listened just closely enough, you could still hear the echoes of the Twin Towers collapsing and the screams of the firefighters who died that day. My mind flashed back to the Halloween Parades after AIDS had cut a deadly swath through the gay community. How the parades went on and everyone tried to be happy, but whatever happiness people mustered only seemed to make the sadness that much worse.
On the way over, I hoped I’d catch a break like I had with Nick Roussis at the Grotto. That there would be a friendly face at McPhee’s, someone I knew from the job, the stores, or from having lived in Brooklyn my whole life. No such luck. There were a lot of familiar types, but not a soul I recognized. So I went for my next best option. I found the sourest, loneliest old-timer in the place and headed straight for him. He was over at the corner of the bar where it met the back wall. Everything about him, from his gray stubble to his untidy shirt and permanent sneer, screamed grumpy old prick. And if I needed any further proof, the empty barstool next to him was the only empty seat in the whole place.
“Fucking rap music,” I groused, pulling in next to him.
“I can’t hear myself think. Whatever happened to real music like the Beatles or the Stones?” I made sure not to look at him and to seem like I was talking more to myself than to him.
I threw a fifty on the bar, caught the bartender’s eye, pointed at the Guinness tap, held up one finger, and waited. Guinness takes a while to pour properly, so I had time to get my new friend going if the line about the music hadn’t gotten his attention. Turned out I didn’t need the extra time.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said. “It’s not rap, it’s crap.” His voice was a boozy rasp: Bronx Irish with a heavy dose of Staten Island. “Used to play the bass in a band up in Pelham in the sixties. Man, we played the Beatles, the Four Seasons, even a little Motown. But, Jesus, this stuff! We used to get all the girls we could handle too.”
I turned to face him and offered my hand. “Moe Prager.”
He said his name was Flannery. He had a grip like a car crusher and breath like a distillery. I offered to buy him a drink and he didn’t say no. I had the barman bring him a Jameson while I sipped at my stout. My oncologist had warned me against drinking, but fuck me if I was going to be a monk. I had months of surgery, radiation, and chemo ahead of me and I was still probably a goner. I wasn’t going to be one of those poor schmucks who stopped living in order to die.
“What are you doing here, Prager? You don’t look like one of us.”
I knew what he meant. “Ex-cop, but some of my best buds were firemen and it’s been a long time since I was in here.” The former was a lie, but not the latter. I had been to McPhee’s before, a long long time ago. I’d also been vague enough to let Flannery’s imagination fill in the blanks.
“Cop, huh? Suppose it’s okay since you sprung for the drink.” He laughed at his own sense of humor and I pretended to.
“Yeah, I worked the Six-O in Coney Island with a firehouse right next door. We got on like lions and hyenas.”
“That good, huh?”
I laughed again, only this time I meant it. Cops and firemen had this inbred rivalry that went back forever and persisted to the present. Who were the bravest? Whose underpayment was more egregious? Who did the city shaft more often? Who could piss farther? It was like that.
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