Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  As he drove down the Connecticut Turnpike on the right side of the road, despite the cold rain on leafless limbs of early December in southern New England, despite the green grass and occasional streams, Harry Rawson felt he was in some way back in the Gulf. There was death, suspicious people, moves that had to be held back until one knew where the pieces were, and the feeling that if one waited, one could lose the whole thing. Every day, garbage piled up in the dumps of the world where someone might have thrown the poorish bowl.

  Artie Modelstein did not need McKiernan’s description of the gruesome autopsy to know Claire Andrews was in trouble. But he listened to the awful details anyhow, saying to McKiernan, “Okay, Denny. I heard. I heard. Okay.”

  And McKiernan got the last scrap of vengeance for being stranded for a while on a political limb before the rabbi’s son pleaded guilty. He described the tear in the flesh, and where it had been cut, and how it had been torn, and the way the tape had dug into the hands of Avril Gotbaum, who could not scream because his mouth was sealed.

  “Okay, Denny. Okay,” said Artie. They were sitting across Artie’s not-too-neat desk in Frauds/Jewels.

  “I thought you wanted to know,” said McKiernan.

  “I wanted to know about who killed the cutter. I wanted to know why. I didn’t have to specifically know how.”

  “That’s part of it,” said McKiernan.

  “All right. All right. What happened outside the actual death. Any priors on anyone that looks like he did this?”

  “Do you want me to tell you or are you going to keep saying okay, okay, and then look like you’re gonna puke?” asked McKiernan.

  “Okay,” said Artie. He looked away from McKiernan to the floor. He didn’t even want to hear the word puke. He thought that if he recognized the taste of lunch in his mouth the rest was going to come up. He took a sip from a glass of water and breathed deeply.

  “The guy got in and out so clean you wouldn’t believe it. It was beautiful, Artie. Nothin’. Not a print. Nothin’. Not a sound.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Could be a warning,” said McKiernan.

  “Of course it’s a warning. The question is who was he warning? It’s enough of a warning for me,” said Artie.

  “A nosebleed is a warning for you, Artie,” said McKiernan.

  “Hey, c’mon,” said Artie. “Some people are bothered by some things, and others by others. Don’t rag my ass ’cause you shit in your pants when you thought the collar was going to come back on us. Enough is enough.”

  “He’s right,” said Marino. “He stood up for that collar when everyone else was running away from it.”

  McKiernan, who still believed that the measure of a man was his lack of response to death and that judicial respect for the powers that be was wisdom and not cowardice, reluctantly continued. “The tape gag could have been there just to stop the sounds of the screaming. Guy could have taken off the gag if the victim nodded that he was going to talk. So it could have been torture for information.”

  “Was it?” asked Artie.

  “We don’t know,” said Marino. “Battissen was killed clean, one shot, good night. I’m not sayin’ this to rag you, so don’t give me that look.”

  “Not on purpose,” said Artie.

  “The girl’s father was stabbed many times, wildly. The art dealer was done in by one clean stroke into the brain. The Israeli guy was carefully being tortured when his heart gave out. Three different kinds of killing, three different signatures. Are we dealing with three, are we dealing with two, are we dealing with one killer? I do not know, Artie.”

  “So it’s a dangerous situation, right?” asked Artie.

  “Officially no. We can’t make it officially dangerous, otherwise we’d have to authorize protection all over the place. But realistically I’m thinking it could be any one next. Who knows what’s going on?”

  “But look, it’s only people who had that thing or pieces of it,” Artie pointed out.

  “That cutter didn’t have shit when he died. The stones were in evidence,” said McKiernan.

  Marino had another thought.

  “I think the whole thing is cursed. You know they have those things in England. That guy Rawson, who’s supposed to own it, or may own it, or whose family owned it, is from England. They have ghosts there. All the time. Place is loaded with ’em.”

  “So how can we get someone in to protect the lady?” asked Artie.

  “You got a problem there, Artie. Her protection was for the people who threatened her with the dead cat. That one’s been solved. The rabbi’s kid copped a plea. We can’t authorize protection because we suspect a curse,” said Marino.

  “I think that big jeweled piece is as much a killer as a pound of pure coke, and worse. Yeah worse,” said McKiernan.

  “There’s a guy who deals big stones, I mean big stones,” said Artie, “who says with gems that valuable there are no laws. No right or wrong. When the guy was found in the dump I went to this guy’s office and said there’s blood on jewels now. Do you know what he did?”

  McKiernan and Marino shook their heads. A squad captain stopped at a nearby desk to listen. Everyone could hear small conversations at a distance.

  “He laughed,” said Artie, raising his hands. “He just laughed at me. Like I was telling you you are now in a police station, he was laughing at my thinking killing mattered.”

  “Why’d he do that?” asked McKiernan.

  “Because they all have blood on them, I think. I don’t know,” said Artie.

  “Still not enough to get round-the-clock protection for the lady,” said Marino.

  “There’s gonna be more death. Those were just the diamonds,” said Artie.

  “You want out?” asked Marino.

  “You’re damned right I want out. But first, I want this lady from Ohio out.”

  “You doing her?” asked Marino.

  “I want her out of the city,” said Artie.

  “She had nice legs. I like legs like that. They feel good around your ears,” said McKiernan with a big laugh. Artie didn’t bother to answer.

  So they all agreed that Miss Andrews should be apprised of the danger inherent in her search, but that only Marino and McKiernan would do it, because, as Detective Modelstein averred strongly, “She doesn’t listen to anything I say anymore.”

  This was done the next afternoon. Inviting Miss Andrews to come down to Homicide, detectives McKiernan and Marino did advise Miss Andrews of dangers inherent in the situation, which had apparently gotten out of control because of a killer or killers operating outside of known modus operandi.

  They regretted they could not guarantee her safety. They did not know where the killer or killers would strike again, and for her own safety they thought a reasonable response would be returning … for a while … to her domicile in Carney, Ohio.

  They talked to her for half an hour explaining the different manners of death, including that of her father. And according to plan, they were very specific, even providing photographs to demonstrate the results of what killers could do in New York City.

  Artie was waiting for them at Frauds/Jewels. They came in whistling and making circles with their forefingers near their temples.

  “What she say?” asked Artie.

  “Don’t mean shit to her. Nothing. I showed her pictures that almost made me puke. Nothing,” said McKiernan.

  “Whaddya mean nothin’?”

  “She fucking took notes. She wrote stuff down on a pad,” said Marino. “You tell her about an eyeball rotting in a garbage bag and she don’t blink. She writes.” Marino sat down on Artie’s desk. He shook his head. He was a handsome man, in his early thirties, with a noble face that could have come from marble fitting a name like Sebastiano Vincenzo Marino. But now he only looked confused and somewhat disgusted.

  “And then?” asked Artie.

  “She thanked us. Like we had fuckin’ invited her to a party. Thank you. Whoo whee. Thank you for this
lovely afternoon, you nice gentlemen,” said McKiernan, imitating the singsong voice of a woman. McKiernan had the pinched expression of someone who constantly kept something unpleasant in his mouth. He kept his hands in his pockets as though waiting to be challenged.

  “She still doesn’t understand,” said Artie.

  “She understood everything,” said Marino. “She didn’t give a shit. She said she wasn’t gonna run until she had something real to run from. She called me superstitious. Hey. I don’t mind. But I’ll tell you something, Modelstein. I wouldn’t screw her with your dick. That is cold weather there.”

  “No. She’s a decent kid,” said Artie.

  “The only picture she winced at was her father lying in the alley,” said McKiernan.

  “You showed her her father’s homicide scene?” yelled Artie.

  “Hey, you wanted her sent home,” said McKiernan.

  “But her father lying in that alley among the garbage?” said Artie.

  “You wanted her apprised,” said McKiernan.

  “In the alley,” said Artie, slumping in the chair.

  “We apprised her,” said McKiernan.

  Detective Modelstein signed out that evening doing what he had become a policeman not to do. He carried work with him like a cloud. He had seen this in businessmen and so many of the worriers of the world. It was a thing he had worked all his life not to be. His father was a worrier. His father died young. But his father had told him, once, in a very beautiful time, that he envied his son, that his generation had to worry because they were all afraid of not making it, but Artie didn’t. He liked the way Artie took the world, and he whispered one Saturday when other men were taking their sons to synagogue and Dad had taken him to a show at the Roxy: “Never lose it, and never tell your mother I said that.”

  And Artie hadn’t lost it, despite his mother, despite his older sister. It had been a good life. Ordinarily on this Monday night he would get a six-pack of beer and a pizza with sausage, onions, and extra cheese, while pro football players battered each other on television, and be grateful he was not out on the field with them but pleasantly clogging his arteries while relaxing his mind.

  This Monday night, however, he let the beer sit and found he wasn’t tasting the pizza, and he was filled with anger at himself and with great foreboding.

  Perhaps if McKiernan and Marino hadn’t shown Claire Andrews her father’s death scene, him sprawled in the refuse of an alley. Perhaps if Artie had not been the one behind them trying to frighten her home, perhaps if she hadn’t been so relentlessly innocent, or if the Linzer Hasidim, which made the upper councils of the Mafia appear like an equal opportunity employer, had not chosen to embrace her insanity, he might not have thought about her that night. And then do what he knew he had to do.

  He phoned the Carney police and asked to speak to whoever was in charge, informing them that this was an unofficial call. He wanted the name of a close friend of Claire Andrews. He was bucked up to the chief of police, who gave him the name of the publisher of the town’s newspaper. Artie was alarmed at this, but the chief, Frank Broyles, speaking as one policeman to another policeman, said their newspaper was not the same as those in New York.

  “There’s no competition. Everyone gets along with everyone else, except if there is something really big. We had a couple of wise guys here from New York City a few years ago. They didn’t last. Our newspapers are not like your newspapers. And besides, Bob Truet is sweet on Claire. Everyone thought they were going to get married before Vern got killed in your city.”

  “Good,” said Artie and got Truet’s telephone number. Artie was relieved that Bob Truet had all the urgency of a lover. It was obvious he was not acting like a newspaperman.

  “I would definitely say, Mr. Truet, that she is in danger and she will not listen to us. Her apartment has been broken into. A pet killed as a warning. At least two men associated with this thing have been murdered, one horribly. She needs help.”

  “Of course. What can I do?”

  “Tell her to come home. Reason with her. We’re strangers. We can’t reach her.”

  “Claire could always be stubborn.”

  “What about you?”

  “She’ll never listen to me. She never did.”

  “Is there anyone she trusts or listens to?”

  “Only her father, and quite frankly, I am not sure even he had influence over her. Claire was always a very quiet girl, but very firm in her convictions.”

  “Firm enough to stop an ice pick with her ear? Hey, I don’t think you people know what’s goin’ on here. This ain’t some rich little bitch sayin’ no to the county fair or something. They’ll break out her brains laughing.”

  “I am aware of the problem, Detective Modelstein. I am more perplexed than you are. She had always been loath to go places herself, so I don’t really know what’s happened to her. I have phoned a few times and the conversations have died on the wire.”

  “You ain’t gonna have a love life, buddy, with a corpse, so you better do something about finding someone to talk to her.”

  “I resent your tone, Detective Modelstein, and the insinuation that we are having an affair. We are close friends, unless she told you something different. Did she?”

  “No. Your police chief gave me your name. She never mentioned you,” said Artie, angry with himself that he had been probing for that. He was, after all, trying to get rid of this lady.

  “Oh, well. I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s no surprise. It was a one-way relationship. I loved Claire and I still do.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Artie, who for no rational reason wasn’t. Her minister was mentioned as a possible person to come to New York to reason with Claire. Also a girlfriend, but that woman had ceased to be close when the friend got married.

  “What about her mother?” asked Artie.

  “My God, never. Not Lenore McCafferty. No. No McCafferty. You would never send a McCafferty to Claire.”

  “I think she mentioned something about that the first night she came back to New York.”

  “It’s important to Claire, I believe, that she feels people don’t look down on her, don’t treat her as a juvenile but let her exercise her opinion.”

  “Are we talking about Claire Andrews?” asked Artie.

  It turned out to be the last resort. Her minister arrived on a Tuesday morning at Kennedy Airport looking worried and got more worried when he saw Artie with the .38 under his coat jacket.

  They drove into New York on the Long Island Expressway, and Artie had his doubts almost immediately. The man was in his sixties, but a worn sixties, not with the sort of joyous enthusiasm ministers on television seemed to have.

  “I’m not sure what I can tell her,” said Reverend McAdow. He talked about Claire as a young girl, about how she had lived in the shadow of her parents, how she had so much to offer.

  “You do understand you’re supposed to get her out of here because she’s gonna get killed?” asked Artie.

  “I understand that; I just don’t know that I can do it,” said Reverend McAdow. “She’s not a crazy person. She’s very rational and very intelligent.”

  “Okay, work that, then. Work rational.”

  “I had planned to. That’s the only way to reach her.”

  Artie did not press the minister more, because that was the most hopeful thing he had heard so far. He left Reverend McAdow off at Claire’s apartment.

  He heard her little squeal of joy when Reverend McAdow announced himself at the buzzer below. Things were looking better all the time. The message was going to be for Claire to come home for Christmas. There were colored holiday lights all over New York now, and she had to be thinking about that.

  Artie drove to his own apartment to wait for the minister’s call. He did not watch television. He did not eat. He did not do anything but reason fitfully with himself. He asked himself if he was doing this because he was sexually interested in Claire, professionally interested in a
verting a killing, emotionally acting like the good guy, or guilty because in a way he had gotten her kitten killed and she was broken up about it.

  There was only one conclusion he could draw. And that was that if he went in any deeper with this lady, he was going to have more afternoons of grief like this one. Reverend McAdow phoned from Claire’s apartment, inviting Artie to dinner.

  “We’ve had a long talk, Detective Modelstein, and I think you should come over and hear Claire out,” said Reverend McAdow.

  Artie could not believe what he heard at Claire’s apartment, with both of them sitting near a Christmas tree set up in the living room next to the long table with stacks of reports underneath that marked-up wall.

  “When word got about as to the way Vern Andrews was trying to sell some valuable property, many people in town believed it was acquired under less than honorable conditions. Carney is a good town, and they are good people. But perhaps too many of us are too suspicious.”

  Artie cocked an eyebrow. Not enough of you, he thought.

  Reverend McAdow continued: “I don’t know what Claire will find, and I think she senses that also, without admitting it to herself. But this is a thing she must pursue for herself. At this time, she can’t return to Carney. She belongs here doing what she must do. I think I love this young lady and I have known her all her life. And I am glad that I can bring some comfort of home in this Christmas season.”

  Reverend McAdow looked up at Claire and smiled. They shared a warmth. She grasped his hand and held it like a treasure.

  “Yeah, well, I can see her getting lonely at Christmas and maybe wanting to go home. My God, if she left now, she might miss her own hit,” said Artie. He felt his clenched fist tremble. He thought he would bite out his own eyeteeth.

  “If you could let her explain …”

  “Explain what? You’re supposed to explain. You’re her minister. You’re the one who’s supposed to explain. What did you two talk about?”