‘Boots.’
THIRTY-SEVEN
Encouraged by Jill, Boots managed to postpone the inevitable through a quick shower, which they took together, then a second, slower odyssey, this one more deliberate. But time marches on, and flesh fails. Suddenly, they were lying beside each other, their shoulders and knees touching, and the inevitable could no longer be postponed.
‘How do you know,’ Jill began, ‘that I was the target on Saturday?’
Boots felt the ground shift, a fissure open. This was going to be very bad. If not for her leaving her gun in the other room, there was even a chance that he’d come out dead. He laid his hand on her thigh just above her knee.
‘I had a long conversation with Maytag LeGuin.’
The story that followed was true in every respect, though it left out a number of details. Velikov and O’Malley became hired help, Madeline Gobard’s existence was never mentioned, Chris Parker’s hideaway was reduced to ‘somewhere private’. On the other hand, Boots described the scene at LeGuin’s Forest Hills apartment in detail; Malcolm Sutcliffe’s wound, Isabella Amarando and her family, how easily they could be exploited. Finally, he turned to his conversations with Shaw and Inspector Najaz.
‘When they got around to asking me what I wanted,’ he concluded, ‘I told them straight out. The murder charges against Vinnie Palermo have to be dropped.’
‘Did you threaten them?’
‘Your uncle asked me that identical question, asked me twice: was I threatening him?’
‘What’d you answer?’
‘That I hoped with all my heart that I wouldn’t have to prove Vinnie innocent by arresting Parker’s actual killer.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘That would be you, Jill. You executed Chris Parker. Lenny Olmeda, too.’
Jill lit a cigarette, forcing Boots to go in search of an ashtray. He finally settled on a chipped saucer which he carried into the bedroom. Jill took the saucer and laid it between them on the bed.
‘How’d you find LeGuin?’ she asked.
‘I traced him through the plate number on the van.’
‘Ah, I remember. That’s the plate number you told me you didn’t get.’ Jill took a drag on the cigarette, releasing the smoke in a thin line. She watched the smoke until it splashed against the ceiling, then said, ‘Does that mean you knew all along? Knew that I was Killer Jill, not Crazy Jill?’
Boots drew a breath. ‘Chris Parker recorded your sexual encounter, yours and a couple of dozen others. I know this because I found a DVD when I searched his house. You were on it.’
Jill flicked the ash at the end of her cigarette into the saucer. ‘So what? I was in a cop bar on a Saturday night when Chris walked in. We had a couple of drinks, Chris wasn’t bad-looking, I was in the mood. If he turned out to be pervert, it’s not my problem.’
Boots ignored the entire statement. He had to get it out there, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Instead, he spoke about his search of Chris Parker’s house. The temptation, he explained, had been irresistible, what with Parker’s connections to Maurice Selman and Maytag LeGuin, and the house being empty. He’d been hoping, even expecting, to prove that Chris Parker’s murder was related to his corruption. That would be enough to get Vinnie off the hook. Instead, he’d found the DVD.
‘Did you get off?’ Jill asked when Boots finally ground to a halt. ‘Watching me perform?’
‘What I did was destroy every disc in that apartment, and the computer’s hard drive, too. I can’t say that Parker didn’t brag to his pals, but at least there’s no physical evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’
‘Evidence of why you waited six years to take your revenge.’
Jill’s thoughts whirled through her mind, autumn leaves on a windy day, dancing just out of reach. For now, she could only watch them. The problem was Boots Littlewood. It’d been so long since she’d wanted a man for more than sex; she didn’t trust her emotions. Nor, for that matter, did she trust Boots. Maybe, as things now stood, he wasn’t prepared to reveal ‘Parker’s actual killer’, but there were no future guarantees. Boots was obsessed with Vinnie Palermo. If pushed to the wall, she didn’t know what he’d do. Most likely, he didn’t know, either.
‘The six years,’ Boots continued, ‘that’s what threw me off.’ He sat up, then leaned against the headboard. ‘If you were out for revenge, why wait so long? The answer is obvious now that I know you were intimate with Parker. You had to wait because you didn’t know the identities of the men who killed your father and …’
Boots hesitated for a few seconds, his courage almost failing him again. Finally, he said, ‘The men who killed your father, then raped you.’
A shudder tore through Jill’s body. Suddenly, she wanted to dress, to cover her nakedness, but it seemed to her that any move she made would be an admission of some obscure and undefined guilt. Unable to remain still, much less frame a response, she finally pulled herself to her knees, then punched Boots in the mouth.
Boots saw the punch coming, but didn’t try to block it, or even move out of the way. The blow hurt him and he had to take a moment to clear his head.
‘Besides yourself, there were three witnesses to your father’s murder.’ Boots swiped at a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. ‘Two of them heard a pair of gunshots around six thirty, but took no action. The third saw two men, one of whom possibly wore a ski mask, drive away at seven o’clock. Since each of the witnesses was firm about the time, I simply assumed that what the last witness saw was unrelated to the case. How else to account for that missing half-hour?’
Jill sat back on her heels. ‘Is there a point here?’ she asked.
‘In the case file – Chris Parker’s – there’s a photo of his body lying on an autopsy table. I don’t remember why I looked at it. I’d reviewed the ME’s report by then and knew the cause of death. But I did look, Jill, and what I noticed was a very long, very deep scar on Parker’s hip. You saw that scar when he raped you six years ago. You saw it again in his bedroom shortly before you killed him.’
So, there it was, her secret, out in the open, and now her freedom was on the line. Although Jill Kelly did not fear death, incarceration was another matter.
‘Assuming you’re not lying,’ she said, ‘when you said you destroyed the DVDs and the hard drive, you knew you were destroying evidence in the murders of two cops. Is that right?’
‘Yeah, I knew.’
‘Why’d you do it?’
Jill was entirely unprepared when Boots took her by the shoulders and pressed his mouth to hers. Though she found the taste of his blood intoxicating, she neither resisted nor surrendered. She was sure Boots felt that he’d undressed her completely, that her soul was now as exposed as her body. Wrong again, but she appreciated the gesture enough to set him straight.
When Boots released her, she rose to her feet. ‘Don’t worry, Boots, I’m not going for my gun. I’m looking for a bathrobe.’
‘Are you cold?’
Jill leaned over to grind out her cigarette. ‘Just naked,’ she said.
Boots watched Jill struggle with an oversized flannel bathrobe, one that fit him loosely. For Jill, it was like wrapping herself in a kimono. Meanwhile, he was feeling more and more naked himself.
‘Let me see if I’ve got the whole picture.’ Jill sat down in a rocking chair, his mother’s rocking chair, carried from Ireland and passed down to Boots as an heirloom. ‘We start with Jill Kelly, young and innocent, a student at Fordham University, filled with the hopes and dreams appropriate to young women of her age and station. Then, in a space of thirty minutes, the youth, the innocence, the hopes and the dreams come crashing down – she is raped within sight of her father’s body. Shamed and humiliated as she is by her defilement, she can’t bring herself to speak the unspeakable, not to the street cops who appear first, or to the hardened detectives who follow. So she clutches her secret to her heart and holds her tongue. Months p
ass, then years. She quits school, becomes a cop, her great secret all the while corrupting her heart and her soul until she’s fully transformed. Until she becomes Crazy Jill Kelly.’
Jill smiled. ‘Have I got it right? Is that the sequence you imagine, Boots?’
Unable to produce a verbal response, Boots reached down to draw the sheet to his waist. Jill’s laughter ran straight down into his heart.
‘What I knew,’ she continued, ‘even while it was happening, even while Parker slammed into me, was that the brand of justice offered by the state just wasn’t gonna be good enough. That’s why I kept the rape to myself. Now, I’m not saying that I wasn’t humiliated, or that I wasn’t ashamed. I just knew that pointing out my assailant in a courtroom wouldn’t cleanse me of shame and humiliation, that what rape victims usually find in a courtroom is more shame and more humiliation.’
Boots watched Jill light another cigarette. ‘Cleansed by blood,’ he said, ‘that was option number two, right?’ He gave her a chance to reply. When she didn’t, he said, ‘Well, did it work? Are you cleansed?’
‘If by that you mean restored to something I never was, then the answer is no. But when I search my conscience, as I have a number of times, I can’t find an ounce of regret.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
Jill crossed her legs and began to rock slowly, her eyes criss-crossing the room. At first, Boots suspected that she was looking for a bug of some kind, but she surprised him.
‘This room,’ she grinned, ‘it’s really you. The family photos on the bureau, the signed baseballs, the corduroy bedspread, the battered furniture. It’s oak, right?’
‘I don’t know. I bought the set from Teddy Marks before he went to prison. It was in better shape then.’
‘No cigarette burns?’
Boots looked down for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Are we done?’
‘No, Boots, we’re not.’ Jill began to rock a little faster as she organized her thoughts, her eyes turning inward. When she finally began to speak, her voice was more tentative, as though she’d never before conducted this particular review of the facts.
‘I joined the cops,’ she explained, ‘when it became obvious that my father’s case wouldn’t be closed with an arrest. My plan, before that, was to have a short conversation with whoever got charged. I wasn’t overly worried about the direction this conversation might take because I had five years of simulated combat experience behind me. But nobody was arrested, and Uncle Mike not only refused to let me see the case files, he made sure nobody else in the family did, either. Keep in mind, there are thirty-one Kellys on the job, ranking officers among them. Our ties to the NYPD go back a hundred years.’
Jill hesitated, closing her eyes briefly. Despite the bravado, she looked somehow older to Boots, and very tired.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.
Her eyes jumped open. ‘I didn’t unlock the door, Boots. You did.’
Chastened, Boots simply waited for her to begin speaking.
‘On the day I was promoted to detective, Uncle Mike finally gave me the case file. He told me it was complete and I bought the lie. Uncle Mike can be very persuasive. Did he play the kindly grampa for you, Walter Cronkite in a uniform?’
‘Yeah, he was good.’
‘As usual.’ Jill tugged on the sleeves of the robe as she folded her arms beneath her breasts. ‘Here’s a fact you can take to the bank: I received my gold shield only because of my connections. I’m possibly the worst detective in NYPD history. I have no patience and all that bullshit with hair and lint drives me crazy. But I worked hard. I reinterviewed anyone whose name appeared in the file, including Corcoran, Olmeda, Farrahan and Parker, and I spent fifteen months working on a list of violent offenders arrested by my father. I got nowhere, of course, absolutely nowhere. That’s because a piece of the puzzle, the only piece that mattered, had been withheld by kindly Uncle Mike. That piece, an IAB file, was given to me by a Kelly about six months ago, a cousin who grew up with my father. It seems that Patrick Kelly was already working for Internal Affairs when he was placed on the Lipstick Killer task force. Corcoran was dirty. Farrahan, Parker and Olmeda, too. My father’s job was to get the proof.
‘It’s still hard for me to describe the way I felt when I read that file. I had them, Boots. Finally. Call it rebirth, the phoenix rising. Call it whatever you want, but there was no going back. The only thing I needed to know after that was which one raped me. I wanted to begin with the worst offender in case I got caught right away, then climb the ladder of culpability.
‘Gut instinct, Boots. I chose Parker because of the way he stared at my breasts when I first interviewed him. Women get used to being eye-fucked by men. It’s just one of those things you can’t do anything about, like men being stronger. But Parker had the eyes of a true pig. His lust surrounded him like a force field.’
Jill slowed down long enough to smile. Boots’s eyes were pinned to hers, his gaze so penetrating it took all her will not to flinch.
‘I have to admit, Boots, that events took a very erotic turn when I stripped away Chris’s pants and saw that scar. Parker was lying on the bed, no doubt thinking, “I’m gonna fuck the bitch I raped six years ago.” I was standing a few feet away, thinking, “I’m gonna fuck the scumbag I intend to murder.” Now, what could be hotter than that?’
When Jill stopped abruptly, Boots released his breath. All along, he’d been hoping that Jill’s discovering Parker’s scar was an accident, the result of a chance meeting, a stirred memory. Not so.
‘You want to hear how I lured Parker to Berry Street? It’s a funny story, I promise you.’
Resigned, Boots simply said, ‘Yeah.’
‘After that night, I kept Parker at arm’s length. He was eager to go again, very eager, but I put him off without actually turning him down. Then, one night, I called him on his cellphone. I think I caught him at home, but I’m not sure. I told him that I had a long-term fantasy I wanted to act out. Can you guess the fantasy, Boots?’
‘You wanted to play the part of a hooker.’
‘Street whore is the way I put it to him, street whore turning a car trick. If he would drive to Berry Street and wait a couple of minutes, I’d come walking down the sidewalk, appropriately dressed, and we’d negotiate the cost of whatever services—’
‘Enough, Jill.’
‘Enough? What’s the matter, Boots, you squeamish? You want to go in the bathroom and vomit?’
Boots slid his feet over the edge of the bed and sat up. He reached out for Jill’s hand, but she pulled away.
‘Right on that corner, there’s a building, a converted warehouse with a recessed doorway that turns to the left. I was in there when Vinnie Palermo showed up. I couldn’t see him, but I heard a car alarm go off, then a door open and close. Chris arrived a moment later, before I could leave. I should have stayed put, what with a witness only a few yards away, and I knew it. But there were all those memories. Like the gunshots that killed my father, like Parker knocking me to the floor, like Parker ripping off my pants, then my panties, like Parker forcing my legs apart. Boots, once you start down that road, self-preservation becomes irrelevant. I was wearing a knit cap, a navy pea coat and black jeans. I tucked my hair under the cap, turned up my collar and stepped out behind Chris when he got out of the car. As you can imagine, I’d fantasized this scene many times in the past, and there’d always been a final exchange. You know, a few snappy lines, a little back and forth. But when the moment came, I found myself speechless. So I decided to send the rest of the boys a message. I put one round in Chris Parker’s back, then another in his head. Then I walked away.’
For his part, Boots was just glad to be done. He’d expected the worst, but he was still breathing air and Jill was sitting across from him. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t about to go anywhere. Boots wasn’t fooled by Jill’s bravado. Her eyes, when she told her story, had darkened almost to black, the light they projected no more than sparks in a night-t
ime sky. Life had smacked her down. Her scars were as visible as his own.
As for Parker, Boots could not bring himself to care. Even as a boy, he’d recognized, as did all his friends, the difference between personal revenge and telling the teacher.
‘Do you think your uncle knew?’ he finally asked.
‘Knew what?’
‘Knew who killed your father, and why.’
Jill slid the rocker forward. ‘Knowing and proving aren’t the same thing. Except for street rumors, there was no evidence that Corcoran and the boys were even dirty. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure myself until I saw the scar on Parker’s hip.’
Boots nodded to himself. Corcoran’s rabbi, Eamon Gogarty, was highly placed. Michael Shaw would never start a war with Gogarty, not without the sort of rock-solid ammunition Pat Kelly had been trying to obtain at the time of his death. Suddenly, Boots realized that Michael Shaw was using him to accomplish what his brother-in-law couldn’t. Boots was now Shaw’s point man, like it or not.
‘Tell me about Olmeda,’ he said.
‘Olmeda was the one who held me down.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He confessed.’
‘Right before you killed him?’
‘Right before.’
Boots smiled as he found himself imagining Father Gubetti hovering above them. Revenge is a crime in the State of New York. But is it a sin? Most likely, the priest would invoke Jesus instructing the faithful to love their enemies, a command that apparently fell on deaf ears. Boots Littlewood had never met a single man or woman who even liked their enemies. Not one.
‘Boots?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I asked you a question.’
‘I’m sorry, I drifted a bit.’
‘I asked you what you wanted. From me.’
Boots stared at Jill as he searched for an answer. She seemed astonishingly beautiful at that moment, beautiful beyond any dream of beauty. And though he knew it was utterly irrational, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been waiting all his life to meet her. Nevertheless, when he finally spoke, there was nothing of these sentiments to be found in his words.
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