“Good night’s sleep. I think I read about that once.” Megan released her chin and poured some milk in her coffee, stirring it slowly with her spoon, in miniature figure eights. “I’ve got a brother. Josh. A couple of years younger than me. Do you know what he makes me do? My little brother? Whenever I catch a body, Josh makes me describe the victims to him. He sits me down and draws out the details.”
“Is our Josh a moribund little fellow?”
Something flashed in her eyes. Just as quickly, it vanished. It looked like anger. She set down the spoon. “Not at all. Just the opposite, in fact. I’d be dead without Josh.”
“What’s with the curiosity?”
“It’s not curiosity. It’s for my own good. He doesn’t want it festering inside me. I’m sure it sounds silly, but Josh is a very intuitive person. It’s ugly. A murdered person is ugly. You’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. It’s ugly. I’m trained to overlook the ugliness and get on with my job. Josh thinks what I do is poison. His making me describe it to him in detail is sort of a detox, for lack of a better word. He thinks it helps me to get it out of my system.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you feel better after you’ve done it?”
“Better?” She weighed the empty space above her hands. “It’s nice that there’s someone who cares. I’d feel a lot worse without that.”
She looked out the window again. It wasn’t difficult to see that something troubling was rolling around in her head. When she turned back to me, her energy had shifted.
“You’re a cowboy on this case, Fritz. You’re just galloping in for reasons of your own. Whatever they are, that’s your business. I don’t really care. What I want is to catch the person who killed Robin and Zachary Riddick. And it’s not a pride thing with me. I don’t give a damn how I catch him. I’m not going to waste my breath telling you to steer clear. You know the drill. We’ve had this conversation before. You know the difference between inquiries and interference. Don’t interfere. That’s the message. The end. Pope and I are the leads on these killings, and don’t think Joe Gallo’s not right on my back. We can’t let this get out of hand. The city doesn’t need a mad slasher running around, turning our beautiful new snow red. Thank you for Mr. Anger. I’ll follow up. I’ll talk to the Poole woman, too. If it hadn’t been for my damn flat tire, I’d be reading you the riot act for interfering, but like I said, all I want is to nail this bastard. Whatever it takes. I really don’t like sitting in a chair describing dead people to my baby brother. It makes me feel like a cripple.”
“A cripple.”
“Yeah. I don’t like it.”
“Have you described Robin to him yet?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“So then the ugliness is still in your system.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t have to.
13
I GRABBED A CAB uptown. My phone had vibrated while I was talking to Megan, but I hadn’t answered it. It was Margo. She’d left a message.
“Do you remember that time you came with me when I was meeting a bunch of other writers for drinks? We talked shop and about pitching ideas for articles and who’s the biggest ass on the ass-ignment desks? Do you remember what you said to me later? How you couldn’t find a way in? That it just wasn’t a language you spoke? Maybe…maybe you want to think about that when it comes to us sometimes. I’m sorry, Fritz. We’ve gone over this before. I don’t know these murdered people of yours, and I don’t want to. They’re dead. But you go and slip into their lives and get this whole thing going that I just can’t relate to. And I don’t want to relate to. It’s not a language I speak, you know? I…I don’t know exactly what I’m saying. Nothing. I’m saying nothing. Forget it. I hate leaving messages. Look…I’m having dinner with some friends tonight in the Village. How about you stay at your place tonight? Make it easier. I know you’ll be bereft without me, but you can handle it, tough guy like you. We can talk about all this when…God. Never mind. This is nuts. Margo Motormouth, signing off.”
I pocketed the phone and stared down the cabdriver, who was eyeing me in the rearview mirror. Tough guy like me. This wasn’t a new dance, this thing with Margo, though it had been a nice long stretch since the last time we’d gotten out of synch like this. I try not to be knee-jerk defensive, so I didn’t put the blame on her. Not all of it, anyway. The problem with what I do for a living is that it doesn’t stay at the office. Hell, I am the office. It’s mobile work, but as much of it gets done with the head as with the feet. Margo was right-I do slip into the lives of dead people. Usually, they’re already cold when I meet them, but sometimes not. Sometimes they’re like Robin Burrell, and I get a taste of the live item before he or she meets the abrupt fate. Margo wasn’t like Megan Lamb’s brother, Josh. That’s what she was reminding me in her phone message. Three’s a crowd, and when the third one is, to put a blunt point on it, fresh kill, Margo wants no part of it. Or, to be fair, a limited part. She’d been disingenuous during our argument earlier. She does get jealous. My focus turns to other people when I’m working. Sometimes too much of my focus. Tough guy like me. I hate the sight of broken bodies. It disgusts and disturbs me every bit as much as it drives me to seek out who the hell is responsible. I don’t blame Margo for not wanting to hear about it. I don’t want to share. “You just suck it up,” Charlie used to tell me. “A butcher’ll wash his hands before he heads home. You do the same. If you can’t do it, think about maybe not going home for a while.”
The cab dropped me off at the Church of the Sacred Heart just as the second service was letting out. Shirley Malone was standing at the door at the top of the steps, testing the staying power of Father Manekin’s ear. As the priest spotted me coming up the steps, I could have sworn he breathed a silent prayer.
“Fritz. How good to see you.”
“Father.”
“I’m afraid you’re too late. I’ve already issued the congregation its marching orders for the week.”
“Shame. What was your topic?”
My mother answered for him. “Equanimity. That means you’re no more important than anybody else.” She gave me her version of the evil eye, something to which I long ago developed a Kevlar-like resistance. Father Manekin saw his opportunity to make a break for it.
“Don’t remain a stranger, Fritz.” He gave my mother’s hand a squeeze. “I’ll remember what you said, Shirley.”
“What did you say?” I asked after the priest had slid off to another of his flock. Shirley presented me with her elbow so that I could walk her down the steps in regal fashion.
“That’s between Theo, myself and the Lord.”
I felt blessed for the exclusion.
We picked up an armful of lilies at a shop on Ninth then made our way to the subway and caught the number 7 to Queens. It’s been said that my mother looks like Maria Callas by way of Audrey Hepburn, which might also stand for a description of the quicksilver blend of her personality, though what is generally meant is that she is a skinny thing with a swan’s neck, a strong flirtatious face, and a jet-black hairdo. She’s hovering near sixty, but if you mention that to her, you might get a black eye from her tough little fist. Stuff a force of nature into a size-four dress and there you have her. Shirley grew up in Hell’s Kitchen-as did I-and remains there still with only her memories of the place as it once was, before developers and gentrification-level rents steamrolled not only the color out of the area but the very name itself. It’s now tagged Clinton, which is a designation that’ll put you to sleep before you’ve even finished saying it. Shirley is a bona fide ghost of the old neighborhood. Far fewer haunts, but those that remain she clings to with her notorious tenacity.
We got off at Fortieth Street in Sunnyside and walked the several blocks to Calvary Cemetery. Shirley crossed herself before entering, shooting me a look.
The recent snowfall had left the cemetery with a smooth white covering, broken by the thousands of ch
alky stones poking out of the ground like uneven teeth. We walked several hundred feet along the road before making our way over the snow to the simple stone that read: PATRICK MALONE. Shirley let out a gasp. “There it is.”
“It” was not the stone itself. She was referring to the small bouquet of daisies sitting atop the stone. I started forward, but Shirley put her hand on my chest. “Don’t walk.” She scoured the site. “Damn it all. There should be footprints.”
She was right. Assuming that the flowers had been left off earlier in the day-which was the anniversary of my uncle Patrick’s remains being identified, and the date agreed upon for the official registration of his death-there should have been footprints in the fresh snow. But there were none.
“He’s too clever,” Shirley hissed. “He knew the forecast and he got here early, damn his eyes.” She stepped forward and planted her lilies in the snow. Then she plucked the daisies from the tombstone, crossed herself and buried her face in the flowers.
A year before I was born, an undercover cop in the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force working to infiltrate the gangs in Hell’s Kitchen lost one of his informants, nineteen-year-old Patrick Malone. My mother’s twin brother. The undercover cop had worked diligently for months to flip Patrick, recognizing in the young tough a muted streak of humanity and tending it diligently, the way a good gardener tends his plants. What the cop failed to tend with equal care were safeguards to protect Patrick from his ruthless cronies should the facts behind the relationship ever come to light. Which is exactly what happened. The cop was found out, and ten days after Patrick’s disappearance, an extra-strength black trash bag washed up on the sand at Rockaway Beach in Brooklyn. Five days after that, Shirley Malone stood with her head bowed as the scant contents of the bag-no other bags were ever recovered-were lowered into a grave at Calvary Cemetery. My mother allegedly uncorked her first bottle of whiskey that same afternoon and managed to work her way halfway down the label before the cop came by to check on her and put a stop to it. It was a week after the funeral that the cop and Shirley began their affair. It would last all of four months. The cop was married. One child and another on the way. He wouldn’t find out until several months after breaking things off with Shirley that she was pregnant with me and planning to see it through. Her relationship with the bottle was moving along nicely by that point as well. After I was born, the cop made a point of keeping tabs on me and my mother when he could, dropping in on us now and again. Sometimes I was invited to leave the apartment for an hour while the two hashed things out. To some extent, despite his spotty presence in my life, my old man managed to mold me, if not directly as often as I’d have preferred then at least by dint of his considerable persona and the name he made for himself as he rose steadily up the ranks of the police department. I steered in the direction of the NYPD myself for a while-managed one year at John Jay-though I fell with a pronounced bounce from that particular path. Eventually, my father was named police commissioner for the city of New York. Commissioner Harlan Scott. But one summer afternoon four years into his post, he stepped down without notice or explanation and, five days after that, disappeared forever from the face of the earth. One would have had to be watching closely-which I was-to see that my mother’s relationship with the bottle moved to a deeper level after the old man’s disappearance. Even fifteen years later-eight years after Harlan Scott was officially declared dead-she never tires of reminding me how the important men in her life have a habit of disappearing.
The freaky thing about the daisies on my uncle’s grave was this: Harlan Scott had made it a point every year on the anniversary of Patrick Malone’s declared death to join my mother at her brother’s gravesite and leave off a clutch of daisies. In the fifteen years since his disappearance, every year without fail, the daisies had continued to appear. I knew it wasn’t my father. The lead weight in my stomach told me that he was every bit as dead as the uncle I’d never met. But my mother has another way of viewing matters. It’s not stretching the truth to say that she looks forward to the annual anguish of discovering the mysterious daisies on her brother’s tombstone. Even though she married (and, later, divorced), no other man on earth was going to take my father’s place in her emotions. The inexplicable daisies gave my mother the kind of false hope that fuels constant low-level heartache, a pain with which the small tough woman was, unfortunately, all too comfortable.
After several silent minutes, we left the gravesite. As she always did, my mother paused just outside the cemetery. She slowly scanned the buildings running both ways in front of us. One year she’d brought binoculars. But generally, the tactic was to remain visible for a minute or two, in case someone was watching. The windows of the buildings stared back blankly. Hundreds of opaque empty eyes.
Shirley wanted a drink. I’m not my mother’s keeper, so we ducked into a place called the Lounge. Dark. Stale. I could swear the same elbows were on the bar as the year before, and the year before that. We took a table next to a silent pinball machine, and I fetched an old-fashioned for the lady and for myself an Irish coffee, heavy on the Irish.
Several months after Commissioner Harlan Scott disappeared, I’d gotten a referral to Charlie Burke, private investigator out of Queens, and procured his services to snoop around and see what he could find. I’d never trusted the official investigation. It’s easy to make enemies when you’re a cop on the rise, especially once you’ve reached the top. Easy target. Fair game. Charlie managed to shine his light on any number of characters who might have been happy to assist in the obliteration of Harlan Scott, but ultimately nothing rock-solid. Along the way, I picked up my PI license and put myself under Charlie’s tutelage. It was a better fit for me. Attempting to follow in the old man’s footsteps had been downright quaint of me, or just plain stupid. I’m better suited for contract work or just being nosy on my own. Charlie declared that I had the raw material already in place, it was just a matter of fine-tuning, picking up some of the tricks and the bumps and bruises of experience. He also did a smart thing. Or, if not smart, extremely shrewd; the equivalent of attaching an endless belt of ammunition to a weapon. He sat me down one evening at his local, a bar not that far from the Lounge. I remember his every word.
“Your old man. What do we know? I’ll tell you. We know one of two things. He either disappeared because he wanted to, and he’s got no intention of being found except on his own terms, or he was taken out. Forget the first one, it’s the less likely. That second one? Listen. Somebody bad killed your father. Someone with the poison in their blood. My advice to you is that when you take on a case, it doesn’t matter what kind it is, you keep in mind that what you’re looking to do is nail someone with the poison in their blood. Doesn’t matter if it’s only a little poison. Embezzler, guy cheating on his wife, insurance scammers, doesn’t matter. It comes from the same source as the creep who took your old man away from you. They’re cousins, all these schmucks. That’s what you go after. Every time. It’s their blood you’re sniffing for, Fritz. Poison blood. Get it off the street. Every time. You want to do right by your old man? There’s your ticket.”
When I reminded Shirley that she wasn’t allowed to smoke in the bar, she quietly cursed the mayor. She dropped the celery-green pack back into her purse.
“I noticed where the girl lived who got her throat slashed the other night,” Shirley said. “That’s little missy’s front yard, isn’t it?”
“She goes by the name of Margo.”
“I figured you knew who I was talking about.”
“The murder happened right across the street.”
“Did she know her?”
“Did Margo know her?”
“I know it’s not fashionable to know your neighbors in this city, but stranger things have happened.”
“She didn’t know her,” I said.
“If I were an associate of this Marshall Fox character, I’d be leaving on the next train. You know who did this, don’t you?”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. Not the specifics, but it was a fan. A demented fan. An obsessed fan. Someone’s trying to make it look like the original killer is still out there, like Marshall Fox is completely innocent of those two murders last year. He wants to sow the seeds of doubt in the jury’s mind so that they don’t come in with a guilty verdict. Everyone knows this is the world’s stupidest jury and they can’t make up their minds even when it’s as clear as a bell. You wait, you’ll see. Some nutcase with pictures of Marshall Fox plastered all over his walls. That’s your killer.”
“And the reason for these particular victims?”
“Friends of Fox. Like those first two. They’re just trying to go with the pattern.”
“The pattern was women with whom Fox had been involved,” I pointed out. “Zachary Riddick is a square peg.”
“Did I say the killer was brilliant? The lawyer probably just got under his skin and he decided to do Riddick in while he was at it. I’m not the police. I don’t have all the answers.”
Her drink was finished, and she wanted another one. I’d cut her off after two and then hope we’d have to wait in the cold air awhile for the elevated subway. I replenished my mug while I was at it. Cold gray Sunday would have been perfect in front of a toasty fire with little missy. My day was feeling like the booby prize.
“Except for roses and black-eyed Susans, daisies were about the only flower your father could identify. You knew that, right?”
Of course I knew that. She pointed it out to me every year. She picked up her glass and took a noisy sip.
“He was devastated about what happened to Patrick. He took the blame. Thing is, your uncle had too big a soft spot. He ran with all those crazies, but his heart wasn’t in it. Not really. He was a good boy. Harlan spotted that. You’ve never seen a man so miserable with remorse. I should have hated him. I should have ripped his eyes out. He killed my brother. Sweet Patrick.” She picked up her glass again and held it near her chin.
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