“Go ahead and sit,” Cain said from where he was seated in front of the desk.
He was wearing his usual blue blazer and tan slacks, no doubt his 9 mm tucked under the left armpit. Also per usual, he was smoking.
“You know why we called you in,” he said. A question.
I stood instead of sitting. Mr. Independence. Here was my one chance to confront Jake over the odd circumstances regarding his wife’s “apparent” suicide.
I said, “Let me get his straight. Now that Scarlet has been delivered to the M.E., you want me to sign and seal a case synopsis attesting to her suicide.”
“We’re giving you a chance to do this the right way,” Cain said while Jake continued looking out the window. “The way you’ve always done it for us before, Divine.”
“The way you tell me to do it.”
“On the contrary,” he said. “We want a full case synopsis, case management analysis, issue and comparison analysis just in case the I.A. gets bored and wants to test police findings against your information. We also want a diagram of the crime scene. As for disposition and collection of the evidence and photographs, we already have those. They will of course be made available for you to examine, so long as you initial the bag tags.”
What was all this?
By the sounds of it, Cain did want me to go by the book. At least procedurally. But then, I should have been conferring with S.I.U., not him. That is, if South Pearl Street had a viably staffed S.I.U. All this meant one thing and one thing only: those procedurally required reports were still going to jibe with Jake’s theories. Or else!
But then, as far as I was concerned, that was good thing.
A report detailing suicide as the manner of death would exempt me from any and all involvement in Scarlet’s death. I should have been happy about their directives. But I wasn’t. I could only assume that even under the most severe memory loss situation, I would never be capable of cutting up a woman like Scarlet. But what about Jake? What if he was capable?
“I’ll want copies enough for everybody,” Cain went on. “Everything on department letterhead. After that, we’ll need the M.E. to release the body for burial per Scarlet’s Last Will and Testament.” He slid out a neatly folded sheet of eight-and-one-half by fourteen-inch legal-sized paper from the interior of his blazer, set it down on Jake’s desk.
I never bothered to look at the will. What difference did it make what it said or, for that matter, if the document was genuine or not?
“Then you do want me to proceed with an inquiry,” I confirmed. “You got a timeline in mind?”
“Initial paperwork by tomorrow night,” Cain said. “Two weeks from this very second for the rest of it.”
He stamped out his cigarette. Smoke poured out of his nostrils.
I said, “What about the autopsy?”
Cain’s smile faded.
“Please, Divine,” he said, “will you just forget about the autopsy? She’s already cut from crotch to sternum.” Jake shot him a look that, from where he was sitting, Cain couldn’t see. “We’re working with you. Work with us a little.”
I approached the desk.
I knew the only reason they weren’t firing me on the spot is because I already knew too much. I might have given in, in the interest of protecting myself. But then sometimes you have to take risks in life. Do it not for yourself, but for others. In this case, for a woman who was newly dead.
I said, “I’m still a cop.”
“What that’s supposed to mean?” Cain asked.
“It means I’m honestly not giving you anything until I get the M.E. to autopsy.”
That’s when Jake made a fist, slammed his desktop. The shock wave it created blew through me like a jolt of raw electricity. At the same time, it almost knocked Cain out of his chair.
“Just what the hell will it take for you to cooperate the way you used to cooperate?” Jake demanded. “How much more cash?”
I took a step back as though some invisible force had shoved me.
I said, “This isn’t about money. This is about your wife, Jake.”
“Just give us the statement we need, Richard,” Cain said, pulling yet another smoke from the pack in his pocket, firing it up with the Zippo, “or think about giving up police work altogether.”
Cain, my old partner, threatening me. As if threats mattered at this point.
I turned my attention back to Jake.
I said, “Let’s say I’ll execute the false statement, play the game. Word leaks out, I’ll be the one indicted. I mean, for Christ’s sakes, Jake, this is your wife we’re talking about here. Not some rogue dope pusher we found belly-up in the south end.”
“When are you going to finally understand, Divine, that you have no choice but to go along?” Cain jumped in, his voice raised considerably.
“A cop always has a choice,” I said.
He said, “Considering what you’d already done to contribute to Scarlet’s … how shall we say … already delicate mental condition, I’m sure you’ll decide in the end to make the right choice.”
I began to feel the floor shifting out from under my feet. Ever so gently. The stakes, they were being raised. Cain was the dealer.
Jake looked at me with pursed lips and eyes at half-mast, as if to say, Don’t play dumb.
“We know all about your affair with Scarlet,” Cain said. “We know you two were lovers and we can prove it.”
Now, along with the shifting floor, I felt an invisible noose wrapping itself around my neck.
“All proof aside,” Jake said in a surprisingly even tone, “we don’t have to prove a goddamned thing. I’m the Captain, the acting Chief of the S.P.D. I’m popular. I just lost my wife. All I have to do is accuse you of having sexual relations with Scarlet, just to get the ball rolling.”
Cain said, “That accusation could very well make you a suspect. Maybe even the prime suspect. That is, if you don’t approve our discovery of suicide.”
I was still focusing on Jake. He was doing something I should have been expecting all along.
He sat far back in his chair, opened the top drawer on his desk, pulled out a plastic evidence baggy. Inside the transparent bag was a beer bottle. Budweiser was the brand.
Cain asked, “Do we need to further this conversation, Detective Divine?”
Jake reached into his desk once more, pulled out a plain white business-sized envelope, tossed it across the desk. I caught it out of mid-air. Flipping open the unsealed lid, I recognized at least fifty, fifty-dollar bills.
“Down payment,” Jake said. “Now that we’re all on the same page again.”
I looked at Cain. He inhaled a deep drag of his cigarette, exhaled it through his nostrils.
“Told you he’d come to his senses,” he said.
“Despite appearances,” Jake jumped in, “we are not trying to cover anything up. You’re right, Scarlet was not just another drug dealer. She was my wife. We are, quite simply, expediting the process of providing a reasonable explanation for her death, based upon the existing evidence.”
“Expediting,” I said. “In the interest of what?” I felt the weight of the money in my hand and the weight of the empty beer bottle on Jake’s desk. My brains felt like they were bouncing against the walls of my skull. Maybe I was attempting to investigate Scarlet’s death in order to implicate the man I suspected of having committed the crime. But then, as it turns out, Jake was more or less doing the same thing—threatening me with arrest should I refuse to play ball the way they wanted me to. Clearly, the time had come for me to make a decision. I could either back down right away or I could stand my ground, no matter the outcome, no matter what happened to me.
“In the interest of preserving my wife’s memory,” Jake said, a bit too undertoned for me. “The Scarlet I married.”
The Scarlet he married.
Was that truly his interest? Or did his interest lie in saving his own ass? Cash deposit or no cash deposit, beer bottle or no beer bottl
e, proof of my bedding down with Scarlet or no proof, I knew exactly what an official investigation would do to a man like Jake. It would crack open all sorts of boxes that he and Cain might not want cracked. And in that, lay my leverage.
So what’s a part-timer with a constant headache to do?
He takes a chance.
I opened the envelope once more, counted out twenty-five-hundred dollars. Then I stuffed the packet into the interior pocket of my leather driving coat.
I said, “Since it’s the truth we all want, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.”
I took a few more steps forward, reached across Jake’s desk, picked up the handset on the phone, punched in the numeral nine. When the outside line clicked over, I dialed the number for the Stormville Medical Center, Office of Pathology. The autopsy room. As expected, George Robb answered. I asked the M.E./Pathologist if he had Scarlet Montana scheduled for an exam. He said he had her on ice, pending further orders, and that was it. I asked him if I could get a look at her tonight. He said he didn’t see why not.
“Off the record,” he clarified.
“Not exactly, George,” I said, staring at Jake’s face. “The S.P.D. has instructed me to submit a thorough report, which I guess that kind of makes me your ‘pending further orders.’”
“Come on down,” George said, his harsh, chain-smoker’s voice reverberating inside the tiled autopsy room.
I hung up, shifted my gaze to Cain.
Judging by his tight red face and bulging eyeballs, I sensed that his blood pressure was just a few degrees short of rapid boil. Never in my life had I ever seen him so angry. But then, never in my life had I seen Scarlet dead.
He said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting at the truth,” I said, patting the thick packet that filled my jacket. “In the interest of preserving Scarlet’s memory.”
I snatched one of Cain’s ball points from his chest pocket, ripped a yellow Post-a-Note from one of the pads on Jake’s desk. I penned a receipt for the twenty-five-hundred bills, signed it, dated it and pasted it back on the desktop. Then I tossed Cain’s pen back in his lap.
“There now,” I said. “It’s official. I am currently in your employ to discover the truth and the whole truth behind the death of Mrs. Jake Montana.”
“You, my old partner,” Cain said, “are flirting with your own premature demise.”
He could not have made a truer statement.
I said, “My demise can be expected at any time. With or without you.”
“Oh, yeah. Suicide.”
“No. Accident.”
“Leave,” Jake said. “Before I throw you out the window.”
I smiled, made for the door.
“Hell of a way to treat an employee,” I gibed, my left hand twisting the brass doorknob. “This keeps up, I’ll contact the Better Business Bureau.”
Cain whipped the pen at the door.
“We are your Better Business Bureau,” he said.
24
DICK DIVINE HADN’T BEEN gone from Jake’s office for more than a minute when Cain fired up another smoke, exhaled a long resigned breath of blue smoke.
“Any more ideas,” Jake posed to his colleague seated across the desk from him.
“How was I to know that Divine wouldn’t follow the normal rules of engagement?”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“I’m all ears, Mitchell.”
“He was sleeping with your wife, Jake. Maybe there was a little more to their relationship than just a good fuck every now and then.”
Jake’s big brown eyes went wide, face red and veiny.
For a quick instant, Cain was certain his boss was about to leap over the desk, grab him by the neck.
“Listen, Jake,” the Lieutenant jumped back in, “what I’m trying to say is, just maybe Divine’s relationship with your wife was far deeper than previously expected. Maybe he had some reason or reasons to be angry with her. Maybe they were fighting. Maybe their little clandestine partnership was turning into something hateful and even … violent.”
“You suggesting we make our own independent investigator a suspect in the death of my wife?”
Cain smoked.
“What I’m saying is, we keep pushing for suicide. But if Divine keeps pushing for murder out of some weird newfound sense of rough justice, then we make him the murderer.”
Nodding, Jake pursed his lips, turned towards the window.
Jesus, we’re talking about the death my wife here …
“That bullet frag in his head. It causes him to have lapses in memory from time to time,” Cain added. “It’s possible, in theory at least, that our boy Divine could have whacked Scarlet and not have the slightest memory of it. That combined with his intimate relationship with the deceased, would make him the perfect patsy.”
Jake, watching the pigeons that perched on the ledge outside the window. In his own throbbing head he knew that he too had little memory of the previous night. Just a hazy recollection of too much Jack Daniels followed by a screaming match with his wife. A screaming match that led to something worse.
“If we have to,” the Captain added, “you feel confident we can point the finger at Divine and I.A. and/or Prosecutor O’Connor would be satisfied?”
“I’d say it’s our only hope. Because the alternative …” Cain raised up his hands, allowing his point to dangle.
“Because the alternative is to expose everything we’ve worked for with our Russian friends from the north.”
“That happens, Captain, we’re all no better off than Scarlet.”
25
SOME THIRTY MINUTES LATER I was pulling into short-term parking at Stormville Airport. At the video-monitored entrance gate, I rolled down the funeral coach window, snatched the ticket from the narrow mouth of the automated ticket vendor and parked as close to the U.S. Air terminal as I could manage.
I met up with Brendan Lyons inside the open bar on the second floor of the terminal, just a short walk from Gates B7 to B11. I recognized his face from the black-and-white portrait printed in the paper beside his byline. In person he was a tall, slim, somewhat balding man of about my age. He was wearing gray slacks and a black blazer over a pressed, olive-colored button-down.
No tie.
A black leather briefcase was set on the floor by his feet and set on the bar was the same morning edition of the Times Union newspaper that I had read earlier.
He’d already started on a bottle of Miller by the time I walked in at five minutes after five. As we shook, I took a quick look over his shoulder at the wide expanse of tarmac that was plainly visible through the floor to ceiling plate glass wall. Outside, a bright yellow turbo-prop helicopter was warming up its rotors, the giant blades spinning mirage-like circles above and at the tail end of the sleek craft.
While Brendan got the attention of the gray-haired woman tending bar, I sat myself down on one of the seven or so available stools. I didn’t mention the free, supposedly go-nowhere ticket and boarding pass. That was his business, his private arrangement with Miss Bea from the information booth.
The lady asked for my order.
“Bud,” I smiled.
I took a look around the small bar. We were the only people to occupy the place.
I asked, “So what’s with the airport?”
The reporter grinned, took a drink of his beer.
“Pretty much no one knows me here,” he said. “What I am, what I do. No one expects me to be working an angle if we get to chatting.”
The bartender set my beer down atop a paper napkin. I took notice of the nameplate pinned to her purple uniform shirt. “Anna Mae,” it said. I drank some beer.
“That what I am?” I asked. “Angle of the day?”
Lyons pulled a pack of Merits from his shirt pocket, lit one.
Why does everyone smoke after you quit?
“Scarlet Montana,” he exhaled, along with the cigarette smoke.
“How’d you find out I was working the case?”
He said, “I called around, checked in with a few sources. Finally I got a cop who told me you were brought in to work the case in place of the nonexistent S.I.U.”
“What cop?”
Lyons pulled the cigarette from his lips.
“You know the way the news beat works, Mr. Detective.”
He was right, but it didn’t hurt to ask. Simple fact of the matter was the people on the inside talked. Their motive was almost always personal gain—for greenbacks. But then, there was also the occasional stab in the back—one pissed-off cop to another.
We both drank some more beer.
I asked, “So how can I help?”
He never bothered to pull out a tape recorder or a steno pad. No pen or pencil. He just stamped out his cigarette into the glass ashtray and said, “I am going to make an assumption, Detective Divine. You believe that Scarlet Montana was murdered last night. Or else you would not be wasting your time with me right now.” He held his breath for a beat or two. “And, you believe that her husband—the esteemed Chief of our very own S.P.D.—has everything to do with that murder.”
Sure it had been more or less my theory for more than twelve hours now. I’d even been toying with the idea that I might have had something to do with that murder. There was the issue of my hands after all. The scrapes, cuts, abrasions. But just hearing the word “murder” come from another’s mouth made it seem all the more based in reality.
“Look, Mr. Lyons—”
“Brendan.”
“Brendan,” I said. “All I know is that I was brought in last night on a potential conflict-of-interest situation that Mitchell Cain and Jake Montana thought important enough to warrant my independent attention.”
“What could be more important than the mutilation of one’s wife?”
I looked into his face. It looked better in the flesh than in the grainy newsprint.
I said, “Scarlet’s death was as gruesome as I’ve ever witnessed in my entire life. That includes the bodies my father sometimes took into his funeral home. Bodies no one else could or would work with.” A drink of beer. “I’m no stranger to the dead, Brendan. To just assume that Scarlet had committed suicide …” I threw up my hands. “Well, you get the point.”
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