“Just one more thing,” Georgia said. “Mac says Connie called him tonight because she got a threatening phone call. He said he thought it might have something to do with a case she was working on.”
Leahy gave Georgia a patronizing smile and shook his head. “Sweetheart, you wanna be snowed by lover boy in there, that’s your business. But don’t ask me to shovel it for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I guarantee you, there was no threatening phone call. Anyone can see, he and your girlfriend were having a roll in the hay and things got out of hand.”
“He would’ve told…”
“—Yeah, right. You think he’s gonna admit he was there getting his rocks off? That’d be like admitting he iced her.”
“He didn’t.”
“That’s good. You keep that up, girlie. You’ll make a great witness for the defense.” He turned on his heel and started down the hall. He had a heavy walk, feet turned out, like a duck.
She called after him. “Aren’t you even going to check if Connie got a threatening call tonight?”
He spun around and gave Georgia a sad smile.
“We’ve already subpoenaed her telephone records,” he said. “We’ll trace her calls—don’t you worry. But believe me—I’m never wrong about this stuff. The only incoming calls we’re gonna find on Officer Ruiz’s numbers will be the ones from Mac Marenko.”
19
It was almost ten on Wednesday morning before the union rep and the fire department lawyer finished the paperwork that would free Marenko—at least for the time being—from police custody. The cuffs were removed, but a million other indignities took their place. Marenko was suspended for thirty days without pay, pending the outcome of the investigation. He was stripped of his badge and his right to carry a weapon. He didn’t have a passport, but he had to agree to surrender his birth certificate so he couldn’t leave the country. He had to submit to random drug and alcohol tests, which meant he’d be slugging down O’Douls until this was over. And he couldn’t leave the state without special written permission.
Marenko’s face dropped. “Not even Jersey?” Georgia recalled that his brother Pete was having a family get-together there on Labor Day.
“Most people don’t think of that as a punishment,” cracked Detective Leahy. Georgia, who had driven over from Fort Totten as soon as she got word he’d be released, shot Leahy a dirty look.
Mac got his wallet and keys back, but it would be a month or two before the crime lab returned his car. He and Georgia left the station by the rear exit doors. Word had already leaked out about Marenko’s arrest, but the cops on duty cut him a break and told the media he was being held at a different precinct to give him a head start.
The blinding morning sun caught both of them off guard as they walked out of the building. Georgia put on her sunglasses. Marenko brought a hand up to cover his eyes.
“I know you want to go home, Mac. But first, we have to talk.”
“You gonna ball me out about being with Connie?”
“No. I think it’s best if I explain while we grab some breakfast. Are you hungry?”
Marenko looked down at his baggy brown trousers and wrinkled T-shirt. “Scout, I need a shower and a shave bad, and I’ve got maybe ten dollars in my wallet.”
“But are you hungry?” she asked.
“Are you kidding? I could eat your cooking.”
“Don’t bite the hand that’s going to feed you.”
They found a diner three blocks away peopled by annoyed Greek owners and harried Mexican busboys. Marenko chose a spot in the smoking section in back. He went to light up the moment the waitress brought their water. Georgia cupped a hand over his.
“Mac, please. I know you’re smoking a lot because you’re under stress, but it’s first thing in the morning.”
He put the cigarettes back in his pocket, but couldn’t resist a shake of the head. “Man, the law won’t let me drink. You won’t let me smoke. I might as well be in jail.” His eyes traveled down her tight-fitting rib-knit T-shirt, stopping at the zipper of her faded jeans. “With everything that’s been happening, I haven’t asked if you…”
Georgia shook her head. “Ten days. No period.”
“Well”—he tossed off a laugh—“you can’t sue me for child support. I won’t even be getting a paycheck.”
“How’s that going to go down with…?”
Marenko put his hands over his ears, as if to ward off a blow. “I don’t even want to think about it. Forget the money. What do I tell my kids?” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I would hurt her, Scout,” he mumbled, as if arguing with himself. “I’ve never raised a hand to a woman in my life. I keep thinking maybe I had a seizure.”
“But surely you’d remember something,” said Georgia.
He ran his fingers through his matted hair. “I don’t even know where she is or how I ended up in this state. I’m scared for her. I’m scared for me. And no one believes me. No one.”
“I believe you.”
His blue eyes locked on hers. Even unshaven and grimy, he could still send an electric jolt to her heart. “Thank you,” he said softly. He put one of his large, callused hands on top of hers. “That means a lot…You mean…”
The waitress appeared at Marenko’s elbow. “Do you know what you want?”
Georgia studied the menu. “Scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee. Side of whole wheat, no butter.”
Marenko raised an eyebrow. “What’s this ‘no butter’ stuff? You got maybe two thousand calories there. Butter ain’t gonna make a difference.”
“Well, it’s a start,” said Georgia. Marenko smiled at the waitress, who seemed to blush under that wattage. He never tried, never even seemed to give it much thought, yet he always had that effect on women.
“I’ll have the same,” he said. “Extra butter on my toast.”
The waitress took their menus, and Marenko went to the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned, he had a serious, questioning look in his eyes.
“Chief Brennan was at the station house last night,” he said. “He talk to you at all?”
“He did,” said Georgia.
“About me?”
“He asked what our relationship was and how Connie fit into all of this.”
“And?”
“And what, Mac? I told him the truth.”
“Aw, Jeez.” He pulled a face.
“What?” asked Georgia, annoyed. “You want me to lie to the chief fire marshal of the city of New York in a murder investigation? A man you consider your own personal rabbi in the department?”
He leaned back in the Naugahyde booth and palmed his tired eyes. “I’m just sayin’—you know—that since you had nothing to do with the situation at Connie’s, you could’ve just told Brennan we were friends. For chrissake, Scout, he’s my boss. How’s it gonna look?”
“So in the future, if I know something, I should keep it to myself—is that right?”
“Well…yeah.” Marenko shrugged. The waitress brought their food.
“There you go. Extra butter for you, sir,” the woman said, blushing at him. It looked as though she’d freshened her lipstick, too. Georgia’s eyes narrowed.
“Bet they don’t feed you like that in jail.” Georgia smiled up at the waitress. “He just got out of jail, you know. For murder.”
The waitress left the table quickly. Marenko frowned.
“What did you tell her that for?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. I’m supposed to keep things to myself.”
“Women.” Marenko rolled his eyes and stuffed a forkful of scrambled egg in his mouth. He took a sip of water. “So Brennan knows who’s sleeping with who—is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll handle it myself.”
Marenko put down his fork and stared at her. “Does it have to do with Connie?”
“I’m not sure.�
��
“If it does, you owe it to me to tell me.”
“Chief Brennan doesn’t want me to.”
“Well, the chief ain’t looking at twenty-five-to-life.”
“And you just finished lecturing me about keeping things to myself.”
“But not from me,” Marenko said indignantly. “Scout, I’ve told you everything I know about Connie and last night. I swear. I couldn’t have hurt her. I didn’t even sleep with her.”
“Yeah? Well talk to Detective Leahy. He told me I was a sap for believing that one.”
“I told you,” said Marenko. “I went there ’cause she was upset over a threatening call.”
“Then an audit of her phone records should contain evidence of that call.”
Marenko dismissed Georgia with a wave of his hand. “The number that turns up will be worthless. Nobody’s stupid enough to make a call like that from a traceable line.”
Georgia stared at him. His jaw hardened as it sank in. “Oh, I get it,” he said, pushing his plate away. “Finding that call’s got nothing to do with getting a bead on who hurt Connie. It’s about figuring out whether I’m telling the truth about why I went to her apartment.”
“You don’t have an exactly stellar record in the truth department now, do you?”
Marenko fiddled with his coffee cup while Georgia asked for the check. “I’m paying,” she told the waitress with a smile that said He just got out of jail, you know. She enjoyed watching him squirm.
20
Georgia dropped Marenko off at the subway station to catch a train back to his apartment in Manhattan. He forced a brave smile as he leaned over and gave her a warm, soulful kiss.
“You sure you don’t want to tell me what you discussed with the chief?”
She smiled. “So that’s what the kiss was for—a bribe.”
“Not a bribe.” He grinned like a little boy caught in the act. “A…uh…show of faith.”
“Let me think about what I’m going to do, okay?”
“Okay.” He nodded. “I trust you.” He put a hand on the door latch. “One day, maybe you’ll say the same about me, huh?”
She laughed. “When pigs fly.”
He got out of the car and gave her a wink as he closed the door. “I’m working on it.” As soon as he left her, his demeanor turned somber. By the time he trudged down the steps to the subway, his whole body looked as if two concrete blocks were nailed to his shoulders.
Georgia watched him disappear. It felt like a brick to her heart. She still had no sense of what happened last night. And she had to know. It was the only way she could hope to find Connie. She tried to picture Connie’s apartment now. Everything in the place was white or turquoise. White rug. Turquoise drapes. White couch. Turquoise pillows. Big white conch shells on the glass coffee table. A big turquoise mother-of-pearl bowl on top of the wall unit.
But there was something flat and static about these images because the apartment Georgia was picturing was no longer there. Now, it was a blood-splattered crime scene. If I’m going to find her, I’ve got to face the truth about her last hours there. I’ve got to see the place myself.
Connie’s apartment was part of a complex of three buildings, each ten stories high, styled in what, years from now, historians will cite as a perfect example of 1960s space-age architecture. The windows were round like portholes on a spaceship; the lobby had a strange, curved ceiling like a space module. Tubular steel, mirrors and white concrete predominated. Connie, never one for understatement, loved the place. But then again, she thought the 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
On the drive over, Georgia’s emotions seesawed a million times. One moment, she couldn’t imagine Marenko hurting any woman, much less one he’d been attached to. She pictured him in her basement, shooting pool with her mother, or on their driveway, tossing around a basketball with Richie. But the next moment, she’d get an image of him in the kitchen of Charles Dana’s house—callous, hot tempered and demanding. She couldn’t help wondering whether this was the real Mac, the one she wouldn’t allow herself to see.
Georgia walked into the lobby and opened the door to the fire stairs. Randy Carter was trudging up the first set of steps. Their eyes locked for one speechless moment.
“What are you doing here, girl? This could be misconstrued as compromising an investigation.”
“And you aren’t?” she replied, bounding up the stairs to meet him.
“I was going to tell you about it, later.”
“Well now you don’t have to.” Georgia surveyed the stairwell above them. “How were you planning to get in?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. They climbed the stairs in silence. At the third-floor landing, Carter cracked open the fire door. Halfway down the hall, Georgia could see Connie’s front door. Yellow crime-scene tape was strung across the entrance. A baby-faced Latino police officer was slouched against the wall near Connie’s door, smoking a cigarette and talking to a teenage girl who appeared to be taking out the trash. The officer’s black duty holster was so stiff and shiny, Georgia felt certain he was brand-new to the job. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.
“Just follow my lead, okay?” said Carter. With that, he threw open the door to the fire stairs and barreled down the hallway.
“You there,” Carter boomed in his best ex-drill sergeant’s voice. He flashed his gold shield at the young cop, then quickly put it away before the cop could tell he wasn’t NYPD. “You call yourself a police officer, son? I’ve seen Brownies writing parking tickets who conduct themselves better.”
The officer’s baby face paled. He opened his mouth to speak while the girl inched away. Carter looked the kid over. His nameplate said “Mercado.”
“This ain’t no dating game, Mercado. Put out that cigarette. Straighten your cap. Wipe that stupid look off your face. My partner and I have work to do, so you will stand by this doorway and not let anyone in until we’re through. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Detective,” Officer Mercado mumbled.
“I didn’t hear you,” said Carter in a loud sing-song voice.
Mercado lifted his chin and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
“That’s better.”
“That was quite a show you put on out there,” Georgia whispered to Carter when they got inside Connie’s apartment.
“Yeah, well.” He sighed. “I wish it was for something more positive than this. Keep your gloves on and don’t move or remove anything, you hear?”
“I won’t.”
The entrance hall looked undisturbed. So did the galley kitchen, which didn’t surprise Georgia. Connie probably turned the stove on once a year. On the counter sat a small, silver ashtray with some ash in it. Connie didn’t smoke. Georgia knew who the cigarette ash belonged to.
She let Mac smoke in her apartment, thought Georgia, an odd defensiveness coming over her. Georgia made Marenko smoke outside.
They walked past the kitchen into the living room. Georgia knew what was coming and yet she flinched anyway when she saw the eight-by-twelve-inch voids in Connie’s white carpet. The police had cut the rectangles for evidence. Georgia didn’t need to be told what was on them. The remaining checkerboard of carpet carried traces of the dark red stains. She could still smell the musky, coppery odor of blood in the apartment. She pictured Connie lying on this rug. Was she frightened? Was she unconscious? What about now?
“You see Marenko yet?” Carter grunted, his voice as sudden as a firecracker in the perfect silence of the room.
“Yes.”
“He confess?”
“He says he didn’t do it. He says he doesn’t know what happened.”
Carter said nothing. He simply walked over to a wall unit where Connie’s compact discs of jazz and salsa were lined up along the stereo. There were black powder marks everywhere in the room from where the Crime Scene unit had dusted for fingerprints. There were pinhole marks along the
edges of certain splatters suggesting that the police had run string between the pinholes to photograph the splatters’ trajectory and dimensions.
On top of the television, Connie’s blue binder of materials for the sergeant’s exam lay open to the very page she and Georgia had stopped on on Monday night. Georgia’s heart twisted like a dishrag to see Connie’s pencil scribbles in the margins—some sort of “to do” list she’d put together since their last meeting:
Shampoo…Lipstick…Dry cleaning…Bridgewater…B-day card for Joanne…
Georgia knew who the “Joanne” was: Joanne Zeligman, an older woman and the closest thing to a mother Connie had ever had. Georgia was certain the police would have already gone through Connie’s address book and spoken to her. She worked as a Tae-Bo instructor at a gym in Chelsea. She would be devastated by Connie’s disappearance.
Georgia’s eyes passed over the list a second time. The words were etched deeply into the page. Connie regularly broke pencil tips and caused ballpoint pens to rupture. She always pressed too hard. Only that wasn’t what made Georgia stare at the page now. It was the fourth entry that gave her pause: Bridgewater.
“Randy, does the word Bridgewater mean anything to you?”
“There’s a Bridgeport in Connecticut.”
Georgia gestured to the binder. “Connie scribbled what looks like a list of errands sometime during the last twenty-four hours she was in this apartment. ‘Bridgewater’ was one of her errands. When I spoke to Seamus Hanlon the other night—about that safety report in Dr. Rosen’s files—he told me it had to do with a fire on Bridgewater Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Do you think Connie was referring to the same Bridgewater?”
“Even if she was, it’s just a street.”
“Connie was working on the Dana/Rosen case. Maybe she found out something and…”
“—Skeehan.” Carter cut her off. His voice was harsh and shaky. The crime scene was getting to him, too. He rubbed a hand across his face and walked over to the white couch that now sported two bullet holes and a splatter of blood that looked like barbecue sauce. There was a smear on the wall behind the couch. Carter couldn’t take his eyes off it. Georgia walked up behind him, stared at the smear and choked back a note of alarm. It was a bloody handprint—too delicate and long fingered to be Marenko’s.
Flashover Page 13