Hurt Machine

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Abigail working tonight?”

  He ran his finger along a schedule taped on the wall next to his desk. “Sorry. Abby is off tonight.”

  “Can I get her contact info and the info for the hostess that quit?”

  “After what happened between us with Sashi, I suppose I owe you that much,” he said, tapping at a keyboard. “It’s printing.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where Tino Escobar might be working these days? He left the High Line Bistro after Tillman’s death.”

  “Sure, I know where Tino is,” Martyr said, handing me the sheets that had come out of the printer. “I rehired him. He’s in the kitchen. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  I followed Martyr down the hall, back into the restaurant, and through the kitchen doors. No matter what Nathan Martyr had said about every decision in the restaurant being a calculation, the kitchen was a working kitchen and didn’t look much different than any other restaurant kitchen I’d seen. I did, however, have to confess, that the cooks and even the guy at the dishwasher station were really a pretty attractive bunch.

  “He’s over there, at the grill station,” Martyr said, turning to me.

  Tino was coffee-skinned, about five-five and sturdily built, eyes facing the grill. He was handsome enough, but there was a distinct blankness to his face. It displayed the kinds of sharp corners and hard edges that only a rough life carves out of a man. Maybe it was the dance of the spitting flames that bathed his face or his stone-cold expression that gave me a chill, but whatever the reason, there are times when the cover tells you everything you need to know about the book inside. And what Tino Escobar’s cover told me, what it screamed at me, was that there was only one soul between the two of us.

  “Tino,” Martyr called to his grill man. “Someone would like to speak to you.”

  He turned his eyes up. They were as black and empty as a shark’s. Then everything happened at once. His expression went from icy to feral. I swore he sniffed the air for my scent like a wild animal checking if a rival predator had stepped into his territory. I may not have looked like a cop anymore, but I guess I still smelled like one. Escobar bolted, plowing right over the kid working the grill with him. As he darted through the kitchen to the side door, he made sweeping motions with his arms, knocking bubbling pots and full plates, glasses, and silverware behind him and in my path.

  “Stop!” I shouted after him.

  He didn’t stop. Go figure. The surprise was that I ran after him, through the side door onto 7th Street heading west. For once, the cancer in my belly wasn’t at issue. My surgically butchered knee, the arthritis that had developed in it, and my age all trumped the tumor. I didn’t think about my knee much anymore. It was just another injury, another wound, some scar tissue picked up along the way. That’s what aging is about: wounds and scar tissue. There were times it seemed that my life was not much more than a collection of both. But it was the wounds no one could see, the scars on the inside that were worst of all. Sometimes wounds are like a cascade and so it was with me. It was injuring my knee all those years ago that started the flood.

  Escobar put more distance between us with each stride. Time was I could have reached around behind me and come up with something to make him think a little harder about running away. Problem was that in spite of my scent, I wasn’t a cop and I wasn’t going to pull out my .38 on a busy Greenwich Village street. For all I knew, this was a misunderstanding, that Escobar might have been an illegal alien and thought I was an immigration agent. Half a block into the chase, I stopped running and watched Tino Escobar disappear into the crowd and the fallen darkness. Even without Escobar, I had made progress. Robert Tillman was now something more to me than an innocent corpse and I had the contact information for the two women who worked at Kid Charlemagne’s. I didn’t know how things would play out or if it would help explain why Alta and Maya had let Robert Tillman die. I didn’t know a lot of things, but for the first time since Carmella had asked for my help, I felt close to an answer. I felt it in my bones.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I knew something was up. Pam was standing just inside the door when I walked into my condo. It wasn’t that she hugged and kissed me. It was the way she hugged and kissed me: tentatively, almost shyly, as if we had an audience. And when I stepped out from the little alcove between the front door and my living room, I saw Carmella. She was sitting on the couch, a half-finished glass of beer in her hand.

  “You two have to talk,” Pam said, heading for the bedroom door. “I’ve got some calls to make.”

  We waited for the bedroom door to close and for the other to speak. I wasn’t in the mood for a test of wills or Carm’s mind games, so I just spoke.

  “You show up in New York unannounced. You leave without notice. Then you come to my house without letting me know you’re coming. You’re just full of surprises these days.”

  “Do you love her?” Carmella asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “She loves you, you know?”

  “None of your business. Move on.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  “I’ve been mad at you for nine years. You left me, remember?”

  “No, you are mad because I took Israel back home. I had to get him back to school. That’s all.”

  “It’s not why you’re here, though, is it? You’re not here to talk about why I’m mad at you or to talk about Israel or even about me and Pam.”

  “Then why am I here?” she asked, her tone smug.

  “To tell me to forget it, to stop looking for Alta’s killer.”

  Carmella wasn’t very often speechless. She was now. I don’t know that she was conscious of it, but she kept opening and closing her mouth, groping for something to say like a landed fish gasping for air.

  I pressed her. “Isn’t that right? You want me to stop, don’t you?”

  She couldn’t look at me. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I also went away to think a little. I realize it doesn’t matter if I find out who is responsible for killing Alta. It was a foolish idea. My sister is dead and I can’t make things better between us. I cannot make right my turning my back on her.”

  “You were never much good at lying to me, Carm.”

  That pissed her off. She jumped up from the couch and got in my face, the faintly sour smell of beer strong on her breath. “Everything I just said is true.”

  “The words are true, but you’re lying. That’s not why you want me to stop looking.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Moe.”

  “You want me to stop looking because you’re worried I would find out that Alta was a lesbian. Maybe that her being gay had something to do with her murder and if I found out what happened, it would all come to light. You’re too late,” I said. “I went to Alta’s old apartment and I spoke to her landlady. She told me you’d come by and taken your sister’s things out of the apartment, so I went to the house on Ashford to talk to you. The old man across the way told me you left with Israel.”

  “That’s not it,” she said, again turning away.

  “I couldn’t figure out why you wouldn’t want me to see her personal stuff. You were a detective, the best detective I ever knew, for chrissakes! Of all people, you would know how important personal stuff could be. A scrap of paper with a name on it, a phone number, a matchbook, whatever—anything could be crucial. Why, I wondered, would Carm ask me to do this and then tie my hands behind my back by hiding stuff? The only answer that made sense was that there was something you didn’t want me to know about Alta. It didn’t take me long to figure out what that thing was once I dug a little deeper. I actually should have recognized it sooner from the hate mail, from the things they called your sister. Did you really think it wouldn’t come out? And why the fuck would it matter?”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The way Alta was. It’s wrong.”

  “Say it, Carmella. Say it out loud, because I can’t believe what I think I
’m hearing.”

  “With women. It’s wrong.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “You didn’t see the things she had—the letters from her girlfriends, the pictures of her doing things, the … It’s wrong.”

  “You fucking hypocrite! You’re ashamed. You’re going to stand there and tell me you’re gonna judge your sister because she was gay. Is that what you’re saying? You, who turned your back on your whole family because you felt they were ashamed of you? You’re just like them. No, worse than them, because you let their shame change your entire life. You know better than they did.”

  She was seething, her face red. “I could not help what happened to me.”

  “And you think this was a choice for your sister, that she woke up one day and said I’d rather be a lesbian? In 2009, you’re going to stand there and say this was her choice like what clothes to wear? The only thing about this whole mess that was your sister’s choice was letting Robert Tillman die untreated. You know, Carm, in my head I always believed that you couldn’t know somebody else no matter how close you were to them. I believe that because I don’t think people even know themselves. Still, you fool yourselves sometimes because otherwise you can’t live in this world. I fooled myself about you. I don’t know you at all.”

  Her whole body clenched. “Leave it alone, please.”

  “Maya told me that Alta never forgave herself for what happened to you as a girl, that she blamed herself until the day she was murdered because she felt she should have stopped you from being taken. Do you even care? But you cut her out of your life, so how could you know that? And now you’re doing it a second time, cutting her out of your life, turning your back on her again. Suddenly you’re not ashamed of her letting a man die, but of her fucking women. You should be ashamed … of yourself.”

  Carmella reared back and slapped me across the face. Now I was stunned and speechless.

  “You did what I asked,” she said, walking to the door. “For that I will always be grateful.”

  “I don’t want your gratitude. I don’t want anything from you, but I’m not leaving it alone. You have to know that, Carmella. I’m not leaving it alone.”

  She stopped in her tracks, about-faced, and asked, “What does it matter to you? Like you said, she let a man die. She’s dead. Nothing will change that. Why do you care?”

  “Maybe because no one else does. Someone has to care.”

  “And that’s you, right, Moe? Always you. Moe is the heart at the center of the world.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Now, if you don’t mind,” I said, gesturing at the door. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she said, her back to me as she walked through the door.

  I waited for the door to close. “Liar.”

  …

  Pam’s being there was good for me on more than one level. I’d discussed aspects of the case with Fuqua, Nicky Roussis, Brian Doyle, and Carmella. What I hadn’t done was discuss the case globally or unfettered and not doing so hadn’t served me well. Pam was the perfect person to discuss it with: she was a top-notch investigator so she could see things from my perspective, but with the added advantages of emotional and geographic distance from the case. Sure, she had heard of the case, everybody had, it was big news. Still, she didn’t have a horse in the race.

  Okay, given my history with Carmella, I didn’t think Pam could be completely objective, but that was fine. Objectivity is bullshit anyway. It’s like calculating pi to the last digit. Humans are incapable of it. We all come to the dance, any dance, with too much baggage, conscious and unconscious. We judge. We prejudge. It’s what we do. It’s how we survive. I felt I was close to finally getting some answers, but close is sometimes more frustrating than far away because I didn’t know how close or where to look next.

  “There are days it feels like two or three cases, not one,” I said, pretending to drink my wine. “There’s Tillman dying at the High Line Bistro as Alta and Maya watch. There’s Alta’s murder and then there’s all the other stuff.”

  “The other stuff?”

  “Maya Watson’s silence. Delgado trying to hire someone to hurt Alta. Someone trying to run me off the road. Fuqua warning me off Delgado. The deputy mayor being so sure Tillman’s family won’t sue and this new thing about Tillman and the women at Kid Charlemagne’s. And why did Escobar take off on me like that? There’s a lot going on here, Pam. I’m close to something, but I’m confused.”

  She didn’t speak, not right away. Instead she sat there for a minute, sipping more wine, not looking at me, not looking at anything at all.

  “Break it up,” she said. “Break it up.”

  “Break what up?”

  “You said this feels like this is more than one case. Then fine, treat it like more than one case. Instead of trying to squeeze everything into a box that seems too small, break it down into smaller bits. Get the easy answers first like when you were a kid taking a hard test. Get the easy answers, so you can build and move onto the hard questions.”

  “Okay, I get the idea, but how do you mean?”

  “Look, re-ask yourself some questions you have about the case and find those answers one at a time. When you have enough individual answers, you’ll probably understand the whole case. Have you tried that yet?”

  “Re-asking myself individual questions? No.”

  “Then start asking and while you’re asking, I’ll be talking to the women from Kid Charlemagne’s.”

  “Hey, wait a—”

  “No, I’m not waiting. I’m not blind, Moe. I can see the toll this is taking on you even if you don’t. I don’t like it, but I know you. Carmella asked you to stop, but you won’t stop. You won’t stop because it’s not in you to stop.”

  “Stopping’s not an option.”

  “I didn’t think so, but that’s for tomorrow. For now, I want to go to bed.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was something that Maya Watson had said about the type of women Alta was attracted to—She liked military types, younger chicks, white girls mostly—and about a name on a witness statement I’d read over a week ago. It was also about Pam’s advice to break the case down into smaller pieces and to build from there. I think the minute Pam had said it, my mind began focusing on the Grotto and one of the first questions I’d asked myself about the case: What was Alta, who lived on the other side of Brooklyn from the Grotto, doing there in the first place? And when I woke up in the morning, I knew the answer.

  Detective Fuqua was happy to humor me as long as I wasn’t still on my Jorge Delgado kick. The latest saint of New York was getting buried today, anyway. Fuqua was probably thrilled to babysit me to make sure I couldn’t do something outrageous like interrupting the funeral mass with wild accusations of Delgado’s complicity in the murder of Alta Conseco. The brass had made me Fuqua’s responsibility and my acting out would sabotage his career. No, that just wouldn’t do, not for someone with Fuqua’s level of ambition. That’s why he had done as I asked and arranged the meeting without asking any questions.

  We were stopped at the gate to Fort Hamilton by a sentry who looked barely old enough to shave, let alone vote, but clearly old enough to die. One of the first lessons I learned on the job was that nobody, nobody ever, was too young to die. Fuqua gave our names, flashed his shield, and told the sentry we had an appointment with Colonel Madsen.

  “That building there, gentlemen,” the sentry said, pointing the way.

  Fort Hamilton dated back to the 1800s and its cannons had once fired on and damaged a British troop carrier during the Revolution. The fort had guarded the Brooklyn side of the Narrows at the mouth of New York Harbor. These days, it was darkened by the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but it was still a lovely old fort.

  Colonel Madsen was a gaunt gray man with serious blue eyes and a cool manner. Yes, he had arranged for us to meet priva
tely with Lieutenant Winston. He said he was pleased to do it, but really seemed about as pleased as a plump farm turkey the afternoon before Thanksgiving. He asked again why we were there. When Detective Fuqua explained it was to go over a statement the lieutenant had given in relation to a homicide investigation, Madsen looked even less pleased than before. He felt compelled to remind us that we were on a U.S. Army base and were governed by its rules and not ours. He showed us to a nondescript room in the same building and told us to wait. Told us, not asked us.

  There was a smart rap at the door and then it opened. The woman who strode into the room transcended her unflattering Army greens. With some makeup, she might well have been a former beauty queen or head cheerleader or model. I didn’t know anyone, man or woman, who wouldn’t’ve been even a little taken with her, if not out of lust then out of envy. Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston was an athletic five foot nine with legs up to here. Her jawline was softly angular and her cheekbones impossibly high. She had a pert nose, bobbed and bouncy strawberry blond hair, and violet eyes. They were the kind of eyes you could not help stare at or into.

  We stood to greet her. I wanted Fuqua to do all the talking, at least to begin with. I just nodded, blank-faced, when the detective pointed to me and introduced me as his “colleague” Moses Prager. The lieutenant and Fuqua had met once before, on the night Alta was murdered. He had taken her statement, so she wasn’t exactly unnerved by his request to speak with her again. That was my job, to unnerve her a little bit.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, her voice and demeanor pleasant enough but professional. “What is it I can do for you?” Her accent was deep south, Mississippi maybe or Alabama.

  We waited for her to be seated before we sat. The table in the room and the chairs around the table were as nondescript as the room itself.

  “Some things have come to light about the homicide of Alta Conseco, the woman who died at the Gelato Grotto on the night of …” Fuqua made a show of thumbing through his file.