Hurt Machine

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “I’m not sure,” I said at last. “I’m really not sure. Does it matter?”

  “No. I just want it to be over.”

  I was careful not to mention Tino Escobar. I didn’t want her getting more freaked out than she already was. Besides, I needed more proof than convenience and coincidence to connect him to this. I took a long last look at Natasha before leaving. Suddenly, she didn’t seem quite so fragile. To see that almost made it worth it.

  I thanked the doorman on the way out. He nodded goodbye, not quite sure what to make of me. That made two of us. I was a sixty-something eighteen-year-old who didn’t know himself any better now than he did when he really was eighteen. Sometimes I fooled myself that I knew more about my nature and the nature of things than I did, but I guess what I actually understood was how little I understood. People always say that when you are near the end, you get religion. Not me. The louder I heard the coffin lid closing, I believed less and less. What I wanted was to know things before I died, to know things for sure. Maybe that’s what I should have said to Natasha, that I wanted to know things, something, anything for sure before the metastatic golf ball in my belly ate me alive, that I was working the case because I was tired of questions and wanted answers.

  I got some when I called Fuqua on the way to my car, though not exactly the kind of answers that would make dying much easier.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Your instincts were right about Robert Tillman.”

  “How so?”

  “Robert Tillman was an alias. His real name was Roland Sykes. He was born in Vestel, New York, July 22, 1972. And he was not a very nice fellow. When he died, the city had no luck in contacting his next of kin through the usual methods. In most such cases, the city would have kept him on ice for a respectable amount of time and, if his body remained unclaimed, they would have stuck him in Potter’s Field. But this was too high profile for that, so they ran his prints et voila, Roland Sykes! A pity that poor Roland had a criminal record.”

  “When you say he wasn’t a very nice fellow, how do you mean?”

  “Most of his arrests and convictions were for forging checks, running scams on old women, even extortion. But he was also convicted of statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old girl. It was a class E felony and he did the full four-year bid. Got out two years ago. He kept up with his reporting responsibilities for a year and then disappeared from the radar screen.”

  “So this was the city’s hold card. If any of his real family members came forward to sue, the city would play hardball. It would be tough to find even a civil jury or judge sympathetic to the family of a convicted sex offender. No wonder everyone was so tight-lipped about it. The city just wanted it to all go away and be forgotten. No harm, no foul.”

  “Just so. Now we both know why my superiors were so adamant about you not pursuing Jorge Delgado as a suspect. The publicity would have been impossible to contain. You are aware, I hope, it wasn’t easy for me to discover these things, Moe. I had to call in many favors and I have not been a detective long enough to have many favors to ask.”

  “I don’t suppose my gratitude will be enough to satisfy you.”

  He laughed. “It will be a fine starting point.”

  “We’re not done quite yet,” I said. “Find out who his cellmates were during his last few times inside. My guess is you’re gonna run across the name Tino Escobar somewhere in there. See if Tino or any of them worked with video equipment.”

  He didn’t ask why. I liked that. I enjoy most those moments early in any relationship when you know the other person has begun to trust your judgment. So it was with Fuqua. His ambition made it impossible for me to trust him quite so much as he seemed willing to trust me.

  FORTY-TWO

  Brian Doyle was about the last person I expected to hear from, but that’s life, isn’t it? It’s not the things we expect that makes it both wonderful and impossible to bear. Think how dull it would all be if things went according to plan. Frankly, there were times I could have done with a little more boredom than some of the unexpected and unwelcome surprises I’d been dealing with lately. For instance, I think I might have welcomed my oncologist saying something like, “April Fools!” or “Sorry, Moe, wrong chart.” Those would have worked much better for me than his, “Look at it this way, it’s treatable.” That it-could-always-be-worse kind of rationalization was lost on me. No one had to tell me it could always be worse. I had a lot of firsthand experience in that area.

  Mostly, I was surprised to hear from Doyle because he had washed his hands of the whole Jorge Delgado mess. I’d seen Brian in a lot of moods, but I’d only seen him scared a few times in all the years I’d known him. And when he appeared at my condo the other day, he was scared. He tried not to show it, playing up the brawl and how he’d given better than he got. I always admired that about the Irish cops I worked with over the years, their love of a good fight. Jews, even tough Jews, tend to fight as a last resort. For some of the guys I knew, fighting was more like foreplay, just a way to get their blood up, a kind of a pinch to let them know they were still alive. And I was surprised, not so much by Doyle as myself. After learning of the blackmail and of Maya’s suicide, I had more or less turned my attention away from Alta’s murder, the reason I had gotten involved in this in the first place. It was a reminder to me that even at my age, I had no clue of what I was doing or where I was going. Here I was again, stumbling around in the dark.

  It was a good thing Brian called me when he did, because if I’d gotten across the Manhattan Bridge and into Brooklyn, I’m not sure I would have gone back. I was tired, very tired, and my head was swimming. I was focused on the blackmail, on Natasha, on the dream of Maya in a room of black flies, on putting an end to it. I was thinking of Pam, of Sarah, of my own guilt over leaving them behind. The last thing I was interested in was the recently interred, New York saint-elect, Jorge Delgado. Besides, I no longer believed for a second he really had anything to do with Alta’s death. He was just another macho schmuck who had acted foolishly and impulsively when he went to Nestor Feliz and Joey Fortuna to have Alta hurt. I’m sure the parents of the little girl he saved wouldn’t have cared if Jorge was an axe murderer. Who knows, maybe it was his own guilt over what he’d done that made him jump in front of that car? I didn’t particularly care.

  Doyle was leaning against the fender of a midnight blue Corvette coupe when I pulled onto West 11th Street in the West Village.

  “Like it?” Brian asked, gesturing at the ’Vette.

  “You must be doing well for yourself these days.”

  He winked at me. “I make a nice living for an ex-cop.”

  “Not exactly inconspicuous, though.”

  “Just like you and Carm taught me, I drive a vintage shitbox when I do surveillance.”

  “Nice to know someone listened to me.”

  “It was really Carm who taught me,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to feel left out.”

  “Fuck you, Doyle. I see your face is healing up. So what are we doing here?”

  He didn’t answer directly. “You ever wonder why Delgado wasn’t cleared of Alta’s murder from the get-go and why everybody was so big on warning people off?”

  “It crossed my mind, yeah.”

  “I mean, all the guy had to do was give the cops a solid alibi and that was that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So it’s gotta make you wonder why he didn’t. To me, there’s only two possible reasons a suspect don’t give a rock-solid alibi. He either committed the crime or he thinks the alibi is more trouble than it’s worth. Like a guy wouldn’t say I can prove I definitely didn’t kill X in Brooklyn because I was too busy killing Y and Z in the Bronx. Or maybe he knew that even if he was a suspect, that the cops couldn’t prove it and his rock-solid alibi would have been so embarrassing he was willing to take the heat.”

  “Is this going somewhere, Brian?”

  “Yeah, apartment 5S.”

  “What
’s going on? I thought you were done with this case.”

  “For about five minutes,” he said, pressing the vestibule buzzer for apartment 5S.

  I grabbed him by the shoulder after we were buzzed in. “I don’t know what I’m going to find up there, but thanks for not giving up. You know this means a lot to me.”

  “No offense, Boss, but I didn’t do it for you. I’ve never let myself get scared off anything in my life and I wasn’t gonna start now. You back down once, there’s no telling when it’ll stop. You let yourself get scared and it never goes away. It fucks up your judgments.”

  We shunned the elevator and walked the five flights up the pink marble stairs of the old pre-war building. The steps were so well-used that there were actually smooth ruts worn into the stone treads. The walls in these buildings were thick plaster and made for good neighbors the way stone walls and high fences made for good neighbors in the country. In a city of probably ten million people, New Yorkers held dear their small, private niches.

  At the door to 5S, Doyle slapped me on the shoulder and handed me a slim digital voice recorder. “What you need is already on there,” he said, “but I think you’ll want to hear this for yourself. You can take it from here, Boss.”

  I watched Brian walk away. He disappeared down the stairs, but his footsteps echoed around the stone and plaster. I rang the bell to the apartment and waited.

  When the door pulled back, I was greeted by a slight but fit young man, maybe thirty years old. Shirtless and dressed in gym shorts, he was about five-seven and likely weighed no more than a hundred and thirty pounds. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and his muscles were cut and ripped without being ridiculous on someone his size. He was by any standard a handsome man. He had hazel eyes, flawless, perfectly shaven skin, and close-cropped light brown hair.

  “Please,” he said, sweeping his arm back in a welcoming gesture. “Step in.”

  I did and listened as the door closed behind me.

  “I’m Marco and you must be Moe.”

  “I am.”

  “Something to drink? Wine? Bottled water?”

  “Bottled water would be good,” I said. “It’ll be fine to leave it in the bottle.”

  “Okay, look around. I’ll be right back.”

  I took his suggestion to heart and stepped into the living room. The apartment was as perfectly groomed as Marco: neat and very well appointed. In one corner of the apartment was a rolltop desk used more as a mantel than a desk. A host of framed photos covered what would have been the writing surface and in those photos were the illustrated story of why Brian Doyle brought me here.

  When Marco returned from the kitchen, he had a glass of red wine in one hand and a bottle of Perrier in the other. I took the bottle from him.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  I clinked bottle to glass and picked up one of the framed photos. At a glance, it looked like a shot of Cher on stage. “You?” I said. I didn’t wait for an answer. “Very good.”

  He smiled proudly with all his perfectly straight white teeth. “Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, that’s what the people of the town would call us,” he belted out in quite a good imitation of Cher’s voice.

  There were photos of him as Barbra Streisand, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Rivers, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli. They were remarkable.

  “Liza, that’s who I’m known for. She’s even come to see me.”

  And there it was, a picture of his Liza and the real one standing cheek to cheek. It was signed by her with the inscription: If only I were this young and pretty and talented. Love, Liza.

  “She’s such a doll.”

  But none of the photos of Marco as other people interested me nearly as much as the photo of Marco as himself, clutched in the thick, powerful arms of Jorge Delgado. He noticed my gaze.

  “We met when he was working on the pile at Ground Zero,” Marco said, taking hold of the photo and sitting down on the couch. “God, I was such a child back then. I had been in the city for about a year from Denton.”

  “Texas?”

  “Yes, not exactly a place that had much use for someone like me.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “But after the attacks, I went down there to the Trade Center to help anyway I could. Georgie and I just struck up a kind of odd friendship to begin with. We both loved working out and though you can’t tell it, I’m half Argentinean. I speak fluent Spanish. Georgie liked that and my sense of humor. That’s all it was for years, a friendship. He would come to see me do my act on occasion. Of course, he could never tell anyone about me. My goodness, he would have never heard the end of it on the job. And his family … forget it! They would have been horrified. In some ways, I think that helped him to finally give into it. He had to hide me anyway. Over the years, when he would drink a little too much, and I was still in costume, we would kiss sometimes, but nothing more. Then one night, about two years ago, it didn’t stop with kissing. I loved him very much.”

  “Not to burst your bubble, Marco, but your lover over there had a funny way of dealing with being with you. He basically tormented Alta Conseco because she was a lesbian. Did you know he tried to hire a guy to break her bones?”

  “Guilt,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “Moe, I didn’t say it was all bliss with Georgie. In some ways, it was easier when it was only kissing and I was in drag. He could maintain the pretense that way, but once we were together, his world crumbled. It’s always more difficult with men like him, the married macho types who can never accept themselves for what and who they are. He was jealous of Alta, someone who could be out in the world as a gay woman. Georgie resented it and was repulsed by who he was. What’s the old saying? We hate those things in other people we detest most about ourselves.”

  “Why come forward now?”

  “I didn’t exactly come forward, did I? Your Mr. Doyle found me.”

  “Come on, Marco. I’ve been around the block a few times myself. Brian wouldn’t have found you if you didn’t want to get found.”

  “Georgie died fretting over whether he would have to tell the cops the truth to clear his name. He was afraid that if that happened, it would all come out. He didn’t want to hurt his family. He also forbade me from coming forward. He was like that.”

  “And now?”

  “He’s dead and buried, a hero. I need the doubts erased. I couldn’t live with myself if people continued to whisper that Georgie had anything to do with that woman’s murder.”

  “You were with him that night and you can prove it?” I asked.

  Marco didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up, and went into what I supposed was his bedroom. He came out holding a nine-by-twelve envelope and handed it to me.

  “I can prove it and so can a hundred other witnesses. He was at both shows that night. It was a very special night, the anniversary of the first time we were together. It was also the night I premiered my Lady Gaga routine. Look for yourself.”

  Sure enough, there was Marco on stage as Lady Gaga. And at one of the front tables in the time-and-date-stamped shots was Jorge Delgado’s smiling face. I put them back in the envelope and made to hand the envelope to Marco.

  “No. Keep them. It will help. I want those whispers to be done with. Brian tells me you’ll know how to make that happen.”

  I stood up. “I’ll try.”

  He walked me to the door and thanked me for making this last gift to his lover a possibility.

  “Can I ask you one thing, Marco?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why Delgado? It couldn’t have been easy.”

  “We love who we love,” he said. “We love who we love.”

  I had a sick feeling in the pit of my belly, not because of the cancer and not because of what had transpired between Marco and Delgado. On the contrary, I agreed with Marco’s view: we love who we love. The older I got, the less all the old rules mattered to me about the rights and wrongs of love and relationships. I thought
about how destructive Carmella’s attitude was and who it really hurt in the end. What did any of those stupid shoulds and shouldn’ts accomplish except to ruin lives and crush hope? It was just that I was uneasy, that somehow I knew what Marco had given me as a gesture of love and absolution would be perverted into a weapon and that I would be the one to wield it.

  When I got downstairs I realized I was only a block or two away from the High Line Bistro, a restaurant, frankly, I wish I had never heard of.

  FORTY-THREE

  In all things, success breeds complacency. It is dangerous and unavoidable. This was equally true for blackmailers and baseball players and bartenders. When you’re so sure things will go smoothly in the future because they have in the past, you’re bound to get bitten in the ass. Complacency, that’s what I was counting on as I drove Natasha around the Upper West Side in my rented Suburban, killing time until I had to drop her off.

  She had been true to her word, cooperating fully without a word of complaint. As I instructed her to do, she had gotten in touch with her blackmailer as she always had, sending him an innocuous email: Package ready. Just need an address. Then, within twenty-four hours, she received a call giving her instructions. No, she didn’t recognize the voice. She never could because he used one of those voice distortion boxes.

  “The first two times,” she said, “he had me mail the cash to different PO boxes. After that, he had me drop it in garbage cans or leave it on a bench.”

  “How much?”

  “The first payments were for three thousand dollars each. Now they’re a thousand bucks each time.”

  Clearly, the blackmailer—who I couldn’t help but see as Tino Escobar—wasn’t as trusting of the mail as his late partner. That and he was impatient for his money. That was good, a nice compliment to his complacency. His focus would be on the money.