by Stone Kiss
He dabbed his face and nose with the wet towel.
“It’s not far from the truth.”
Donatti regarded the lieutenant’s face, then passed him the bottle.
Decker took a drink. “Right now, I’m a washout. No one’s afraid of me. Not the Liebers, not the cops, not you, and not the bastards who whacked Shaynda and Ephraim. I’m a steaming turd, my man. No one wants to get near me. But you… you’re different, Donatti. You’ve got the rep as a real nasty dude. If you start nosing around and the perps get wind of your involvement, they’re going to rabbit. Even worse, if you screw up, you’re dead meat. Me, on the other hand, I screw up, it’s par for the course. For the time being, it’s in both of our best interests to keep you a guarded secret.”
The room was quiet.
Donatti banged his fist on the table, wincing in pain. The gun jumped up and down, landing with the barrel pointed at Decker’s stomach.
“Get that thing out of here,” Decker groaned.
“Shit!” Donatti picked up the Walther and stowed it underneath his shirt. Rage invaded his face. “They got one of my girls, Decker. It’s personal!”
“But if she bolted, and they didn’t take her from under your nose, it isn’t personal. Think about it for a moment, Chris. Say I did scare her into bolting. Then whoever popped Shaynda didn’t even know she had an association with you. If that’s the case, you sure don’t want it advertised that she was one of yours, right?”
Donatti was silent.
“Talk to your people, Chris. Maybe they’ll tell you she simply rabbited.”
“Is it possible you were followed last night?” Donatti said.
“I don’t see how!” Decker said. “I took so many twists and turns, it would have been impossible to tail me. Not because I was so clever, but because I was lost.”
“Did you check for a tail?”
“Christopher, that’s offensive.”
He threw his head back and looked at the ceiling.
Decker said, “Talk to your girls.”
“Of course I’ll talk to my girls.” He ran his fingers atop his stubble of hair. “Man, there goes that trust. I was invincible to them. They’ll never feel the same way again.”
“I would think just the opposite, Donatti. If Shayndie ran away on her own accord, it’ll make you look stronger in their eyes. They’ll have to be thinking, ‘See what happens when someone tries to make it on her own. See what happens when I don’t have Mr. Donatti’s protection.’ That’s what I’d be thinking.”
Decker raised a brow.
“Am I right about this?”
Donatti didn’t answer. He picked up the bottle, then put it down, his face restored to its former expressionless self.
“You’ll have to trust me on this one.” Decker took the wet towel off his face. Now his nose was frozen as well as sore. “As tempted as you are, you’ve got to stay out of it. You’re an excellent hunter, Donatti, when you know who your prey is. But in this case, we don’t know the prey. That’s my specialty. Finding the bastards. Let me handle it.”
Again Donatti looked at him.
“Yeah? I’m right? You know that.” Decker nodded. “You back off and you won’t be sorry. Because I’m going to find this son of a bitch and put him in deep freeze. Don’t worry. He’ll be taken care of.”
“Not the way I had in mind.”
“It’s true we have different styles,” Decker said. “This entire mess has to do with my business—my family. You owe it to me so I can redeem myself. Give me this one or we’ll both end up in deep shit.” He touched his nose and lip. “How the hell am I going to explain this to my wife?”
“Just tell her some random nutcase came up and slugged you. It’s New York. She’ll believe you.” Donatti rubbed his head and pushed the bottle over to him. “I don’t see what I missed.… There must be something else going on.”
“Maybe there is.” Decker inhaled. It hurt to breathe. “If you give me a chance to figure this out, then maybe we’ll both know what happened.”
Silence.
Decker needed Donatti’s cooperation; he didn’t want to get in Chris’s way. Mistakes could be lethal. “So you’ll back off, right?”
“No, I won’t back off,” Donatti snapped back. “But since it’s your family, I’ll give you a twenty-four-hour head start. Then it’s everyone for himself.”
“Even I can’t work that fast. Seventy-two hours, Chris. At the end of three days—solve or no solve—I’m out of here.”
“Right.”
“Donatti, I’m not jerking my chain over this. No one has a one-hundred-percent solve rate.”
“What’s yours?”
“High enough. But it’s not one hundred percent.”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Sixty hours, starting now. You broke my nose, you bastard. You owe it to me.”
Chris leaned over the desk and examined Decker’s features. “No, I didn’t break your nose. I just clipped it. I got you on the cheek— bone’s swollen, but not too bad. It wasn’t full force, Decker. If I had meant business, your face would have been a Cubist study.”
“If you’re asking me to thank you, forget it. Sixty hours.”
“This is stupid! You want me to back off until you leave town, I’ll do it. But I’m not paying for your funeral.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I’m serious, Lieutenant. You may be a good cop in L.A., but out here you don’t know horseshit.”
“So fill me in.”
“That’s impossible. Could you fill me in on what makes a good Homicide cop in Los Angeles? These kinds of things are intuitive. I’ve lived on these streets and with these people all my life. It’s just this… feel—this sixth sense. Here I can do in a day what you couldn’t do in a year. I’d actually be an asset to you.”
“I don’t think a partnership would enhance either one of us in the reputation department.”
“I’ve worked with cops before.”
“Not honest ones.”
“No such animal.”
Decker didn’t argue. What was the point?
“I could turn you into a homicidal maniac in a minute because I know your weakness. But why bother? Cleaning your family isn’t gonna solve my problems.”
“That is very true. Give me sixty hours solo, Donatti. I need to know I won’t be stepping on your toes.”
“All right.” Donatti threw up his hands. “I’ll give you till Friday, if you last that long. If you land on your ass, I finish up my business my way. Deal?”
Decker said, “You stay out of my hair—”
“I said, ‘Deal.’” Abruptly, Donatti jumped over the desk and planted his mouth on Decker’s bloody lip. “There. Signed, sealed, and delivered with a kiss.”
Decker grimaced as he wiped his mouth. “What the hell was that for?”
“I dunno.” Donatti was amused by Decker’s repugnance. “I’m used to kissing authority figures. I used to kiss my uncle on the lips all the time.”
“I’m not your friggin’ uncle, Chris.”
“You said you were my father figure. In therapy, they call that transference.”
“Then I take it all back.”
“You’re squirming, Decker.” Donatti licked his lips and wiggled a pierced tongue. “Could that be… panic raising its ugly head?”
“Christopher, for heaven’s sake, grow up! I don’t give a damn where you park it, as long as you keep your hands off my family and me. Why the hell should I care who you fornicate with?”
“You cared about Shayndie. You asked me not to bust her, and I didn’t.” Donatti was wistful. “Now I’m sorry I didn’t. She wanted me to do it, and I said no. I was wrong. I should have fucked her. No one should die a virgin.”
22
Not a whit.
That was how much Decker believed Donatti.
Walking back to the car via Riverside Drive, Decker kept his hands in his pockets as he stared over the parkway. T
he sun had burned several holes in the cloud cover, casting an intermittent glare over the sluggish Hudson. The streets were a traction nightmare, a mixture of motor oil and ice-chunked water. Cars were splashing sludge and mud curbside, causing Decker to do a two-step to avoid the mess. He touched his swollen face, biting back the pain with stoicism and Advil. He concentrated on his choices, the two very different paths he could take.
The first was to follow the bastard: to find out what was on Chris’s dance card. Five seconds later, Decker nixed the idea. The man was savvy and would pick up a shadow as easy as a firearm. Plus, Donatti knew the city streets, and Decker did not. A tail would not only be useless, but would also alert Donatti to the already known—but as yet unstated—fact that Decker didn’t trust him.
Give the man a round of applause. Donatti had put on a good exhibition. But the shock and outrage meant nothing. Chris was a pathological liar, having stalemated several lie-detector tests given by veterans in the field. He hadn’t been perfect, but good enough to make the experts wonder. The most convincing piece of evidence that Chris had going for him was the “Why bother?” What would he have gained by having Shayndie murdered? No real money in it, and now he had Decker bird-dogging his ass.
C.D. don’t do nothing unless there’s something in it for him.
For right now, it was handy to put Donatti on hold, not to discount him, but to direct the efforts elsewhere. Decker’s second and slightly more viable option was to go back to square one and try to figure out what the hell went wrong. That required another look inside the Lieber family. Help from Chaim and Minda was a lost cause. They hated him with an irrational passion, having converted him into a convenient scapegoat—azazel in Hebrew, the symbolic sheep thrown off the cliff on Yom Kippur that atoned for the community’s past sins. Tackling Minda and Chaim, in such horrendous times, was absolutely out.
But Jonathan was another matter.
Decker thought about Jonathan’s reaction to the news of Shayndie’s death. The surprise and shock were real enough, no debate there, but something about Jonathan’s incredulous response was off, as if he hadn’t even considered Shaynda’s death a possibility. It had been out of character because Jon had been so skeptical during the five days prior to her death. He should have anticipated murder as a possibility, readying himself to help out his in-laws should things go bad. Jon was a clergyman; that was his job. Yet when the news hit, it seemed as if Jon were knocked down even harder than Chaim.
And then there was that irksome suspicion, the tweak in the gut that Decker had had during his shiva call just before his literal runin with Minda.
Chaim and Jonathan are sitting on something.
Combining their secretive stance with the knowledge that Shaynda had either bolted from Donatti or disappeared, Decker concluded that the girl must have contacted Jon or Chaim somewhere between six in the morning—when Donatti last saw her—and her death roughly four hours later.
So it really wasn’t a matter of going back to square one. What he needed to do was retrace those crucial four hours. Of course, what had occurred during those four hours were probably by-products of the murder five days ago.
He decided to start with the easiest chore: to change the plane tickets.
Decker had to remain in the city, but there was no earthly reason for Rina and Hannah to stay with him. That meant he’d have to convince his wife to go on to Florida with his daughter, and without him. Dealing with Donatti was a cakewalk compared to dealing with Rina. She seemed in constant denial of danger. But while she didn’t have much regard for her own safety, she did care about Hannah. He’d use that angle—that too many deaths were traumatizing, and it was abusive to keep Hannah in such a morbid atmosphere.
He arrived at his car, but before getting in, he placed a call to the Lazaruses on his cell. As expected, no one answered. Rina wasn’t carrying a cell phone, and he had no idea where she was. Presumably, she hadn’t heard the news, because if she had, she would have called him. He had no choice but to wait to hear from her.
The second call was to Jonathan’s cell. The voice on the other end was a mixture of anger and fear. “I can’t talk right now, Akiva. As you know, things are a mess. Getting messier by the moment.”
“Fine. I’ll come out to Quinton. I’ll see you there in an hour—”
“No, don’t do that!”
“Then where—”
“Akiva, I can’t meet you right now. I have Chaim and Minda to deal with.”
“Jonathan, listen to me.” Decker spoke with purpose. “Something was going on this morning before we all heard the terrible news. You know something. Or at the very least, you thought you knew something. Now, you can either deal with me, or I’ll call in the police and you can sort it out with them. Take your pick.”
Silence over the phone.
Jonathan said, “You’re blackmailing me.”
“That’s not fair. But I’ll let it slide because you’re under duress.”
“I didn’t mean… What do you want from me?”
Now it was pure anger.
Decker said, “I’ll meet you in Quinton—at Liberty Park right outside the Community Hall.”
“Not in public.”
Decker held back his own anger. “Ashamed to be seen with me?”
“Akiva, please!”
It was a low blow. Decker apologized, but he didn’t back down. “Jon, you don’t know me all that well, so let me clue you in. You brought me out. Now I’m involved. I don’t get uninvolved just because you and your brother-in-law decide to scrap me. As a matter of fact, that kind of about-face makes me very curious.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“So let’s meet and you can explain it to me.”
Again no one spoke.
Decker said, “Where’d they find her?”
“Fort Lee Park.”
“Where’s that?”
“Jersey.”
Decker’s heart started hammering. “Where? Like the middle of the state?”
“No, Fort Lee is right over the George Washington Bridge… five minutes out of the city. The park is commemorative grounds.”
“Big?”
“Yes.”
“Populated?”
“During the day, yes. It’s a big place.”
Decker didn’t know where he was last night, but he knew he had been more than five minutes out of the city. More like an hour from Manhattan. One possible scenario: Chris had murdered Shaynda after Decker had seen her, then dumped her on his way back to his place. But why would Donatti make the drop somewhere so visible and so close to his digs? He was a pro; he didn’t like to advertise. Unless he was the type who’d do it for kicks—which really gave Decker something to worry about.
Jonathan cleared his throat over the line. “Cops were thinking that maybe”—he cleared his throat again—“maybe she’d been hiding out there. Lots of spaces to hide because it’s so big. Historical… goes back to revolutionary days. That’s why it’s so close to the bridge. Actually, they named the bridge after George Washington because it’s so close to Fort Lee.”
Jonathan was rambling. Decker interrupted him. “I’d like to talk to the Quinton Police again. It’s no problem for me to travel back upstate. If you don’t want to meet with me in public, give me a private place.”
“We could meet in the city. They want me to go to Jersey… to identify the body… .” There was a deep, depressed sigh over the line. “Akiva, I don’t know if I’m up for it.”
“Would you like me to come with you?”
“They need a relative to identify—”
“I know, Jon. I’ve never met the girl.” The lie came out as smooth as tanning oil. “I just meant I’d accompany you for moral support.”
“That’s very generous of you.” An exhalation. “Thank you.”
“It’s fine, Jon. When do you want to go?”
“Someone was going to meet me at the… the morgue at about five.”
Four hours from now. Decker said, “That gives me enough time to come out to your neck of the woods. If you want to meet with me, fine. If not, we’ll talk later. I’ll go see the police. When you’re ready to leave upstate, let me know and I’ll follow you into New Jersey.”
Jonathan’s voice dropped to a whisper. There were tears in his words. “I think I might have messed up.”
Decker said, “I’m sure you didn’t. I’m sure you did what you thought you had to do. Let’s meet in Quinton and talk about it.”
“Yes, that probably would be a good idea.” Now the anger was directed at himself. “It’s what I should have done this morning.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had hindsight,” Decker consoled him. “I know I’m persona non grata at the Liebers’. Tell me where we should meet.”
“I don’t know… my mind’s a blank.”
“Is there a Starbucks somewhere?”
“No, that wouldn’t be good. Someone might see us.”
“How about we just talk in the car?” Decker suggested. “With the windows fogged up, no one will be able to see inside.”
“No, that’s…” Another clearing of the throat. “The only thing that comes to mind is a Tattlers between Quinton and Bainberry.”
“Sounds good.”
No one spoke.
Jonathan said, “Are you familiar with the chain?”
“Nope.”
“It’s like a raunchy Hooters.”
“This is where you want to meet?”
“I’ve never been there, Akiva. It’s the sole place I can think of where it’s unlikely we’ll meet anyone from the community. And if by chance we do see someone there, believe me, he’ll pretend we don’t exist.”
Dividing Quinton and Bainberry were six miles of untamed woods holding hundreds of bare trees and scores of tangled brush. The border between the two townships was demarcated by the Bainberry mall, a series of connected brick buildings sitting in a slick pool of asphalt parking. Like an errant child, Tattlers sat by itself, unattached and off to the left. Jonathan was waiting for him, his eyes jumping behind his glasses when he saw Decker’s face.