“Wait, what? Start with the threat tonight.” She looks genuinely concerned.
I tell her what happened earlier.
“I told you not to fly solo. That is exactly why.”
“Is anyone even investigating Grimes’s threats against me, what he said in court? And what about the rookie, DuBois?” The back of my neck gets hot and tense, but none of it is her fault.
“Yes, there is an internal investigation occurring into the possible jury tampering.”
I roll my eyes. “Great. Those are always so fruitful.”
She chuckles.
“What, you think this is funny?”
“No, I just wonder how you always end up in these situations.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
She spends a few minutes trying to talk me into helping her, but I stand firm in my no. If I can just ride this out, eventually everyone will forget that I ever testified.
I watch her switch gears, feigning nonchalance. I know full well that she’s not done.
“What does Fishner have you doing off the books?”
The server comes over and asks if we want to order any food. We decide to split an order of nachos.
I sip my beer and gauge how much to tell her. At this point, I should be able to tell her all of it. My shrink would agree.
“What does Fishner have you doing off the books?” she repeats.
I lean forward slightly. “Mattioli.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t do it. Stay far away from him.”
I arch an eyebrow.
“He’s protected through and through. You think it’s bad with Grimes? Step on Mattioli’s toes, and we’ll all see what ‘bad’ really is.”
“Yeah, but I think he’s behind Elias Maxwell. I think he’s behind the murder.”
She takes a deep breath and another sip of wine.
“Why else would he be running with Mattioli? Why did we find them together at the Renaissance? Why is Sims going to find them on video together on more occasions?”
“Wasn’t Maxwell good friends with Mattioli’s son? It seems believable that he would hang out with a father figure while Mattioli is in town.”
I roll my eyes. “Occam’s razor be damned.”
She chuckles. “Go on, then.”
“Why did Maxwell basically admit that he killed her to avenge Mattioli? The way I see it, Maxwell is guilty of killing her. But Mattioli is guilty of putting him up to it. It’s all so much like that stupid book too—”
“What’s like the book?”
“In the book, he describes how his wife died. And it’s just as horrible as what happened to our vic. There are a lot of similarities.”
“It’s possible that Maxwell read the book and tried to copy—”
“That’s too coincidental. I don’t buy it. And there’s something else.”
She cocks her head to the side.
“Fishner and Goran have both basically said two things that bother me. One, Mattioli was involved with some kind of systematic hazing of female cops back in the day, which may or may not have involved both Fishner and Heather Martin.”
She nods.
“Two, the whole thing with Fishner basically telling me to investigate him without telling me to investigate him... She’s never done that before. It’s beyond strange.”
“You can’t fly solo on this. Not if Grimes and his boys are after you.”
I nod. “I know. Therein lies the problem, if you know what I mean. If I can figure all of this out, they’ll all go down. But figuring it out means that the goons can kill me—or worse.”
“Easy solution is to let me handle this through the prosecutor’s office. If I initiate an investigation into O’Connor, a lot will come out.”
“O’Connor has nothing to do with it. He’s just an asshole. He isn’t connected to Mattioli, unless you know something I don’t.”
She shakes her head.
The server brings our nachos, and I order another round. Screw my four-drink max. “I think you should do your thing through the prosecutor’s office, and I’ll look into Mattioli. I don’t expect it to be dangerous. As far as anyone knows, I’m off for, like, three days after I get a couple of witness statements tomorrow and do the reports. I’ll check in with, um, people who care about me.”
She does her little hair-toss thing. “I’m planning to get an indictment against Maxwell tomorrow. That will buy us some time. How long is Mattioli in town?”
Something occurs to me. “It’s too much of a coincidence that he’s here while Heather Martin is murdered. I’m telling you, Julia, he’s connected to all of this somehow.”
“Are you at least telling Goran what your plan is?”
“I don’t even know what my plan is, beyond going home and finishing his book. But no, I’m not telling Goran. He’s been volatile, and he’s planning to spend tomorrow with his family. He needs the time. He’s actually taking vacation days. He’s elated that we have Maxwell in custody, and I want him to have that feeling.”
She sits back and crosses her arms. “So you’re doing exactly what you shouldn’t.”
“That didn’t sound like a question.”
“It isn’t a question. We’ve been working together for a while now. I know exactly what you’re going to do, and I just hope it doesn’t get you killed.”
I laugh. “I don’t plan to do anything that will get me killed. Daylight hours only. I dead bolt my door. And I have an attack cat.” My attempt at levity feels forced and stupid.
She picks at the nachos. “Will you at least do me a favor and keep me in the loop?”
“What, like check in with you? It’s nice that you’re worried about me.” I feel myself blush a little.
She smiles. “Yes, like check in with me. I like you, Liz, and I’d be sad if you died.”
I laugh, and it’s real this time. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.” Does she get the tension too? Does she enjoy our weird flirting the way I do?
“I’m serious! And this is on me,” she says when the server brings the check. She hands him her credit card without looking at the total. “Thanks for listening. And I know what you’re going to say, but if I get good evidence, will you at least consider going to trial again?”
“Get good enough evidence, and you won’t have to go to trial again, because Grimes won’t have an attorney or any way out other than a plea bargain.”
She applauds. “Very well done.”
The server returns, and Julia leaves a big tip before signing the check. I’m a big believer that how people treat restaurant workers says a lot about who they are, and all of the evidence suggests to me that Julia Becker is a quality person.
We walk out together. “Oh, that’s just great,” she says sardonically when the sleet hits us.
“Well, it’s almost November,” I reply, pulling my jacket around me.
We walk to our cars, and I briefly wonder if I’m too drunk to drive. It’s only a few blocks. I’ll be fine—I’m barely buzzed.
“Watch out for the captain,” she says nonchalantly.
“Who, Carrothers? I already know that. The guy’s a snake.”
She nods. “I am going to follow you to your apartment and watch you go inside. Turn a light on when you get in, and then I’ll leave.”
I laugh. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious.”
“Fine.” I unlock my car but continue facing her. “Let me know what happens at the indictment tomorrow, okay? I’m working on getting you even more evidence. You’ll have the reports tomorrow afternoon.”
She kisses me on the cheek, and I damn near fall over.
“Be careful,” she whispers.
“I will.”
I watch her back away from me and unlock her Lexus. We get in our respective vehicles, and she follows me home. I walk to the door with my hand on my gun and my eyes all over the place as though it’s a crime scene. There’s a brick that s
omeone always uses to prop the door open, and I take it upstairs with me. There will be no door propping just now. When I enter my apartment, I slide the dead bolt then turn a light on. I walk to the window in time to see her pull away.
“That was interesting,” I mutter to Ivan as I put on my favorite Fugazi album. I walk into the bedroom and change clothes, but I don’t put my gun in the safe. It comes with me to the dining room table—I set it next to (Un)Solved, Joe Mattioli’s shitty cop memoir.
I grab a beer from the fridge then drop into a dining room chair. Ivan weaves between my legs, but I can see his bowl from here, and it’s full, so I give him a scratch. Before I can get the book open, he jumps into my lap and begins to purr.
“Ivan, you’ve never been a lap cat.” I rub his ears, and the purr gets louder. “What gives?”
We go on like this for a while, and I wonder if even the cat has noticed that I’m trying—and sometimes failing—to be nicer these days. I slide the book closer—it’s a hardcover, so I can prop it open on the table with one hand—and turn to where I left off. I have to flip back a few pages to remember what’s happening in the narrative, but after I scan for a few seconds, it comes back. Mattioli and his partner, Ray Gibson, have just come from their captain’s office. Mattioli claims that Gibson gave incriminating information about another detective to the brass, and he has strong feelings about it.
That day, Gibson showed me his true colors. I’d always thought we’d be partners forever, but in the captain’s office that November morning, he revealed that he didn’t have it in him. He was beneath me, beneath all of us. “Give me the car keys, Ray,” I said, and he handed them over because he knew he was done leading our partnership, and that meant I would drive from then on.
I couldn’t even look at him in the car. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught him staring out the window, totally silent—he couldn’t even explain himself to me. I couldn’t believe that he’d ratted out one of his own, with me right there in the room. I started to worry that the other guys would think I was complicit, that I’d given information too. More than that, though, I started to worry that he was a dirty, stinking rat through and through, and that he’d get some wild hair up his ass and decide to talk about our antics together too. We never did anything illegal, but we didn’t always follow the rules.
Poor Gibson. He was probably just trying to do the right thing. I take a big swig of beer, and Ivan jumps off my lap and skitters away.
Gibson was always such a pussy, and I don’t feel bad using that word. One of the worst things that’s happened to the police in this country is how effeminate everyone has gotten. We used to be tough, masculine, and ready to lay our balls on the line to get the job done. Now, the whole department has gone soft. I’m not trying to be sexist, and although I was called a chauvinist pig more than once in my career, I really do believe in old-school chivalry and would only treat a woman in the nicest way I could. I’m just realistic. I genuinely believe that there are some jobs more fit for men and some more fit for women. Say what you will. I’m old-school, and I instilled that in my boys too.
I roll my eyes then remember that his kid is a cop in Chicago and briefly wonder whether, like Grimes, he uses illegal choke holds.
About a year before Anna died in the most tragic way I can imagine, I realized that I had to be hard on my boys. When Giacomo, whom Anna and I named after my Sicilian grandfather, was seven, he came home from school one day, crying. Anna, bless her heart, had tried to console him but to no avail. He’d been bullied at school by an older boy, one who had been causing problems in the neighborhood for at least three years and who was fully on my radar as a potential criminal. I remember getting home from work that day to find my wife with Giovanni in his high chair, screaming his little head off, and Giacomo crying on the kitchen floor.
“Get up,” I said to my older son, but he just kept crying. “Get up,” I repeated. “Be a man.”
He slowly stood but looked down at the floor.
“Look at me, son,” I said. “Look me right in the eyes.”
He blinked, his lower lip still quivering as though he might keep crying, but looked at me.
The moment I saw his soft brown eyes on mine, I knew it was time. “Put ’em up,” I said, raising my fists.
I remember Anna telling me to stop and me telling her to mind her own business. I feel a little bit bad about how I used to talk to her, especially since she was the mother of my children.
“Giacomo, raise your fists,” I said. When he didn’t, I slapped him across the face.
That was the day I taught my son to be a man.
It’s more of the same for a couple of chapters, almost to the point that I can barely keep reading. Then I get to some good parts, including a chapter about Elias Maxwell joining the family most Sundays for dinner, how Mattioli encouraged Maxwell to join the service when he graduated from high school—he joined the Navy, which takes me back to the knots at the crime scene—and the description of how his wife was bound and beaten in their basement. Now that I’m reading it again, I guess it’s not as much like Heather Martin’s homicide as I originally thought, and Maxwell was stationed overseas when Anna Mattioli was killed, which is as good an alibi as any.
I read the police reports and saw the pictures. She’d been bound to the sewer pipe and beaten with a nightstick in the basement of that garage in Old Brooklyn. I’ll never forget those pictures—they’re burned into my brain.
I skip forward, since I already read that part, until I get to a piece about Gibson.
When Anna was killed, a light went out inside me. I was no longer the man I thought I was. It devastated me. Still, I managed not to cry at her funeral and to hold it together for the boys.
By that time, Gibson and I were back on speaking terms. A few months before Anna died, he’d tried to explain why he did what he did. He said he was taking one for the team, because he really thought Navaros was dirty. He claimed that Navaros had been accepting money from some local drug guy in exchange for looking the other way on all kinds of crimes.
Dirty cops are everywhere, but I’m not sure I would blow the whistle on drug money. There’s a fine line—a thin blue one, actually.
I remember slapping him on the shoulder and telling him it was water under the bridge. And he came to Anna’s funeral and bought me a few rounds at the bar afterward. All in all, he wasn’t so bad, even if he broke the blue code of silence. He knew better, but I guess he figured it was worth it.
Navaros did turn out to be dirtier than a pig in shit, and I remember thinking that maybe Gibson wasn’t as stupid as I thought he was.
I’m gonna have to talk to Ray Gibson about his old partner. Maybe he can give me information that will connect him to Heather Martin. Question is, who is going with me? Because I’m sure as shit not going alone.
I take the book to bed and finish it. My gun stays on the nightstand.
CHAPTER 26
The weather is gorgeous on Saturday morning—it’s one of those crisp fall days with a slight breeze and promises at sunrise of a bright-blue sky. Soon, and especially if it keeps raining, all of the trees will lose their leaves, then the snow will start. Until then, and in spite of it all, I’m in a decent mood. I’m sleeping again, I think as I eat a bowl of oatmeal at the dining room table. I’m not shoveling peanut butter into my mouth over the sink. I laugh, and the cat looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I guess it’s just become harder to sustain a bad mood.
I see Dr. Shue on Monday. It’ll be good to tell her that—she’ll be proud of me.
I get to the squad early to get a jump on the reports. Even though I hate it, I’m better at paperwork than Goran is, and I want him to have enough time to take his girls to the zoo.
It’s hard to keep my brain working on Elias Maxwell, at least now that I think I know that there’s so much more behind it all. But I do, and I’m almost done by the time Goran arrives. “Morning, sunshine,” I say as he flips his lamp on. I hand him a
stack of papers. “These need your signature.”
“You’re on fire.”
I finish typing a sentence about my visit to Martha Rodgers’s house, not including my little run-in with Householder, then turn to him and remember what Fishner told me last night. “Vacation days, huh? When does that start?”
He gives me a bashful smile. “Tomorrow, assuming you keep going with the reports so fast.”
“You’ve never taken vacation days before.”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
I narrow my eyes. “I’m proud of you, Goran. You were turning into a cranky bastard. Enjoy your time. How long will you be out?”
“I’ll be back a week from Monday.”
I nod and turn back to my computer. “Good riddance.” I glance at him to make sure he knows I’m kidding.
It goes on like this for a while. We finish the reports quickly.
“Want to come to Boo at the Zoo with us?” he asks, standing and shutting off his lamp.
“I’m waiting for a couple of witnesses to come in and give statements. So I’d love to, but I can’t. I want to wrap this up today.” So that I can investigate what’s really going on, I don’t add.
He nods.
“It’s gonna be weird without you next week, Goran. I hope you get some rest.” I mean it—they’re not just words.
He smiles and switches out pieces of Doublemint. “I’ll miss you too.”
“Have fun with the fam.”
“Yeah, I think we’re gonna go see the football hall of fame tomorrow.”
I roll my eyes. I’m not really sure how to end the conversation, knowing full well that the investigation isn’t over. To him, it is, though, and that counts for something in my book.
It’s the first time I’ll truly be alone in my police work. He’ll be royally pissed when he finds out that I worked alone on something potentially dangerous, but he’ll get over it.
He stands there awkwardly.
“Leave, Goran. Go home. We’re done here.” I drive a staple into the last of the reports. “I’ll keep you posted. Becker’ll get the indictment today. It’s all good.”
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