Falsely Accused

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Jimmy Dalton at the Two-Five. I thought—” “Thanks, Champ—look, keep in touch, this is great, gotta go.” She left Marlene staring puzzled at the dead phone. She pushed down the button and called Harry Bello.

  Hector Roberto Chajul y Machado, aged twelve, slipped from the basement room in the rectory of Old St. Patrick’s, where he had passed the night, and walked north on Mulberry Street until he came to Houston, where he turned east. He paused at the corner and, as he did habitually, turned to see if someone was following him. He saw no one and went on his way. He saw no one because the man who was following was very good.

  The boy entered the Lexington Avenue IRT subway station on Houston. In the dank underground, he checked to see that he was unobserved and then darted under the turnstile. He took the Lex up to 116th Street, left the subway, and walked to a tenement at 117th Street. At the third-floor front apartment, he listened carefully at the door, as he had been taught. There were no sounds. He drew out a key that hung around his neck by a long, dirty string, opened the lock, and went in.

  From his perch on the stairwell, one floor above, Harry Bello heard the boy cry out. In an instant he was down the stairs and through the door. Like most tenement apartments, it had a railroad layout, living room, kitchen, and a narrow hall leading to two bedrooms and a bath. The place had been tossed, and crudely too. The couch in the living room had been overturned and slashed, the small television knocked off its table and tossed into a corner. Harry moved into the kitchen.

  Hector was in the center of the room, surrounded by ruin. The refrigerator and the pantry had been emptied, the food containers broken and spilled onto the floor, which was covered with a swill of liquids, rice, corn flakes, dried beans, and broken crockery. The counter drawers hung open, their contents scooped out and strewn in piles beneath them.

  The boy cried out when he saw Harry and grabbed a long knife from a pile. He charged but slipped on the mess and fell to his knees. Harry stepped on the knife, knelt, and hugged the boy to him.

  “Listen! I’m not here to hurt you. I didn’t do this. I’m Lucy’s godfather. Soy el padrino de Lucy. Comprende? Lucy!”

  Hector stopped struggling. They both stood up. Harry asked, “Do you know where your mother is?”

  He nodded. “She’s working.”

  “You got a number?” Nod.

  “Okay, let’s call her.”

  “The lady say not to call.”

  “Yeah, well, this is an emergency. Give me the number.”

  Harry called and got an irate woman who told him that Corazon had not shown up for work that morning, and that she was highly inconvenienced, and that as far as she was concerned—

  Harry hung up. “Hector,” he said, “I’m going to look around here for a minute, and then you and me are going to go up to Lucy’s house and you’re going to stay there for a while. And then we need to go get your sister and bring her back to the City. I think you all need to stay at Lucy’s until we figure out who did this and who’s after you.”

  “The soldiers,” said Hector.

  “Yeah, them.” Harry started to go through the trash from the kitchen drawers. People whose equipage does not run to desks and filing cabinets use kitchen drawers as a depository of sorts. Harry found a bank book, electric and phone bills, but no pay stubs and no personal papers. He also found two keys on a ring, which caught his eye, because they had red embossed-tape labels on them. The labels read “800 18 Fr” and “800 18 B.” He thought for a while and then made a phone call, and asked a cop he knew to use the reverse-number directory on the phone number he had just called. The cop gave him an answer. He grunted thanks, and when he left the apartment with Hector the keys were in his pocket.

  Shortly after passing the Joyce Kilmer service plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike, Harry thought of the keys. He reached them out of his pocket and tossed them to Marlene, who was in the passenger seat of the tan Plymouth.

  “Funny.”

  Marlene looked at them, as always trying to stay in step with Harry’s jumps. “Work keys,” she reasoned out loud. “Somebody’s apartment; she’s a maid. But not her current employer?” Harry nodded. “So: another employer, or a former employer, to whom she didn’t give back the keys, because … she ran? She was canned under unpleasant circumstances?”

  Harry shrugged. “Front and back. And no letter.”

  Marlene inspected the key labels. She had a peculiar feeling, almost a déja vu, something tugging at her mind. “Front and back doors means either a private residence, something in the burbs, or an apartment in an old-fashioned, high-tone building. The 800/18? Eight hundred Eighteenth Street? No such place in Manhattan. Or the eighteenth floor of 800 some avenue? Oh, I see, you think the floor having no letters after it means there’s only one apartment on the floor, so, somebody with money.” She laughed and handed the keys back. “Or maybe she just picked them up on the street.” But she didn’t believe that.

  The Sisters of Perpetual Help were housed in what used to be a cheap motel, one of several along a strip of mixed zoning cut off from the rest of Chester, Pennsylvania, by the roaring mass of the 1-95 freeway. The motel signs had been removed, and a black and white sign with the name of the order had been placed in the window of the former motel office. Here Marlene and Harry entered.

  A rugged-faced young woman with short brown hair, wearing a modest blouse and jumper combination, looked up and smiled and asked if she could be of help. Marlene explained who they were and asked if they could see Isabella Machado. The young woman looked blank, and said that she had no information about a guest with that name, but if they cared to wait, she would refer them to Sister Gregory, who was out at the moment. If they wanted to get something to eat while they waited, the restaurant in the motel across the road was open. You understand, things are always a little slow on Sundays. They understood, but short of rousting the place with drawn guns, they could do nothing, and so they said they’d be back and traipsed across the street to the Keystone Motel, 24-Hour Service, Truckers Welcome, an arc of aqua-colored huts terminating in a diner-like office and restaurant.

  Several truckers had, in fact, been welcomed at the Keystone, as witnessed by their rigs parked in a row on the motel’s large gravel lot. There were also private cars in slots in front of three of the huts.

  They went in and sat at the counter. Marlene was not hungry; she ordered a bran muffin and coffee. Harry ordered a cheese steak, the specialty of the house.

  “What are you staring at, Harry?”

  “The Fury with the New York plates in the lot there.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  Harry bit into his sandwich and chewed for a while. Then he said, “It looks like an unmarked.”

  Marlene frowned. “Harry, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would an NYPD car be parked in a motel lot in Chester?”

  Harry shrugged. He didn’t seem interested in his sandwich anymore. He stared at the black Fury some more and then abruptly rose, slapped some bills on the table, and walked out. Marlene ran after him.

  “It is an unmarked,” said Harry, shading his eyes with his face pushed up against the glass of the Fury’s window. He stared at the door of the cabin number twelve, the one closest to the car, as if trying to see through it.

  “Come on, Harry,” said Marlene. “It could be a fugitive bust, a police convention, anything … come on, I want to see Isabella.”

  He gave her a scornful look and stalked away. Marlene looked at the car and then at Harry’s retreating back. She tried, and failed, to see what an NYPD car had to do with Guatemalan hit squads while she trotted to catch up with Harry. He had an idea, and since he was Harry Bello, it was probably a good one, but she had no clue as to what it was.

  Sister Gregory was a wiry little woman with close-cropped steel-colored hair. She appeared in the ex-motel office in a greasy mechanic’s coverall, of a blue slightly paler than her eyes, which regarded them with a curious mixture of sweetness and suspicion from behind sm
udged, round spectacles. She explained that she had been fixing the boiler. Isabella who? She shook her head, as did the nun behind the reception desk.

  They showed her their P.I. cards and explained who they were and what they wanted. The sister looked at these closely and returned them with a look that was kind but unsympathetic. Marlene remembered that look well from parochial school in relation to sloppily done French exercises.

  “I’m sorry,” said the nun. “You know, anyone can get these made up.”

  “Sister, do we look like Guatemalan assassins? Isabella is a friend of my daughter.” Faint smiles, regrets. A memory blossomed in Marlene’s mind. She rummaged in her bag and extracted the drawing Isabella had done for Lucy. The nuns studied it, conversed briefly in undertones, and returned it.

  “Wait here,” said Sister Gregory.

  They waited. They heard running steps. Sister Gregory burst into the office, flushed and angry.

  “She’s gone!”

  “What! When?” cried Marlene.

  “She was at lunch,” said Sister Gregory. “It must have been sometime after that. Somebody broke in the bathroom window.”

  Harry’s eyes met Marlene’s for an instant, and then he was gone, running out of the office and across the road. A passing semi blocked Marlene from following him, and by the time she got to cabin twelve at the Keystone, Harry was pounding on the door with the butt of his .38 revolver.

  He used the pistol to smash the window, reached in, and released the lock and door chain. He turned his head and shouted to Marlene, “Get out of here! Call the cops!” Then he went in.

  Marlene drew her .380 automatic and followed behind him. The bathroom door opened and Marlene had the impression of a huge shape filling the doorway, a big man, swarthy, with stiff black hair, wearing a white T-shirt and blue slacks. The blood was pounding in her ears. Something was shouted, but she couldn’t make it out. She shifted to her left to get a clear line on the big man.

  Who moved, a great leap, like a forward going for the paint. Harry’s gun went off, twice. Marlene stopped, stunned by the sound.

  The big man had Harry down on the floor. They were grappling for the gun. The back of the man’s white T-shirt had a large, round red circle in its middle, like a Japanese flag. Harry fired again. A window shattered. Again. A chunk flew out of the ceiling tile. In a corner of her frozen mind, Marlene knew that Harry was trying to expend all his bullets, because the man on top of him was stronger than he was and in a few more seconds would wrench the pistol away. Another shot.

  “He’s got the gun, Marlene! Run!”

  The big man struggled to one knee, and Marlene saw that indeed he had the pistol in his hand, holding it by its short barrel and cylinder. He turned to look at Marlene. His eyes were bulging; his face was pale and covered with sweat, and she could see a larger red stain on his chest, spreading around two dark holes in the cloth.

  Marlene shot him in the face. His head jerked, but he didn’t fall. There was a hole in his cheek, below the left eye. Incredibly, he rose slowly to his feet. He swayed slightly and looked at the pistol in his hand, as if he barely understood what it was for. Marlene shot her remaining four bullets into his chest. The big man took a step backward; again he looked stupidly at the pistol in his hand, turned it around, and pointed it slowly in Marlene’s direction.

  Then, like a man returning after a hard day’s labor, he took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed. He opened his mouth, loosing a gush of bright blood. He toppled sideways and slid off onto the floor.

  “Are you okay?” asked Harry, getting up.

  Marlene was on her hands and knees, retching into the tin wastebasket. She brought the spasms under control, got to her feet.

  “Yeah, just great,” she said. “You?”

  “My arm’s fucked up, but I’m okay. Jesus, the thing that wouldn’t die.” Marlene went into the bathroom. She rinsed out her mouth at the sink. Fortunately, the mirror had been shattered by a bullet, so that she didn’t have to look at herself. When she came out she made herself look at the corpse.

  “Christ, Harry, who the hell is he?”

  “Was he,” said Harry. He was going through the items on the bedside table: a .38 Chief’s Special in a woven belt holster, a wallet, a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys, and a black leather badge folder. Harry flipped open the badge folder, revealing an NYPD detective’s gold shield and ID.

  “Paul Jackson,” he said. Half consciously, he slipped the shield into his pocket.

  The name barely registered with Marlene. “My God! Where’s Isabella?”

  They quickly searched the motel room. Nothing. Harry grabbed the keys from the nightstand and ran out to the car. He opened the trunk.

  Harry tried to wave Marlene off, but she pushed forward and looked into the trunk. The marks around the girl’s throat were the same as those on the young men in the autopsy photographs.

  Marlene screamed. She shouted curses, not the sexual and scatalogical obscenities of the Anglo-Saxons, but the dreadful blasphemies of Sicily, in Sicilian. God was a dog. God was a pig. The Madonna was a whore. Jesus was the son of a diseased whore. She pissed in Christ’s wounds. She cried, great heaving sobs, and smashed her hands again and again against the roof of the car. She tore at her hair. Harry grabbed her and held her still, while the sirens grew in volume.

  Harry dealt with the local cops. Marlene sat in Harry’s car and shivered. Harry had given her his suit jacket to wear because she had started shivering. It was stained down the front with Jackson’s blood. She had her hands thrust deep into its side pockets. Her hands closed around something hard and angular, and she drew out the two keys with the red labels and looked at them dumbly.

  Then her mind started to function again. A building at 800 some avenue and an apartment on the eighteenth floor. Yes. She had, in fact, been in that very apartment. In less than a minute she had figured the whole thing out.

  NINETEEN

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Karp. It was two in the morning, Monday morning. Marlene had returned from Pennsylvania an hour earlier, had stripped and plunged into a perfumed bath, ignoring Karp’s questions, and then had emerged and related the terrible events of the day, and what she and Harry Bello had made of it all.

  “No, ‘surprised’ is not the word,” said Marlene. “Maybe ‘stupefied.’ Here’s a guy who has all the money in the world, he has a powerful position, he’s good-looking, personable. He could get all the sex, of any variety, that any man could possibly want. Why does he decide to rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of his maid?”

  “Why not? He tried to rape the head of the Rape Bureau, didn’t he? And got away with it? And he probably would’ve gotten away with this one too if Jackson hadn’t been such a dumbass and Bloom had remembered to get his keys back.”

  Marlene sighed and lay back on the pillows. At a certain level, she thought, evil becomes incomprehensible to the rational mind and exists only as agony, a bone cancer to the spirit. Tears were still leaking from her eyes at intervals, as much as she tried to push from her mind the thought of that thin white body curled into the filthy trunk of Jackson’s car. There had been no telltale marks on Isabella’s ankles. Jackson had hung her from the shower head; her own small weight had sufficed. Murdering the cabbies at the precinct, he had been forced into a horizontal technique, because the fixtures in the rotten ceilings (oh, yes, she remembered now, but she hadn’t made the connection at the time) wouldn’t have held the weight of even a skinny Central American. Jackson had probably intended to leave her dangling somewhere on the nuns’ property, another sad Latina suicide. Clearly not one to let a good idea go, Jackson, not that any of it mattered now. She would have to tell Lucy in the morning. And Hector.

  “The only things that’re missing,” Karp said, “is, one, how Jackson and Seaver were brought into it in the first place, and two, how Isabella got to the shelter.”

  Marlene brought her thoughts back to the present. “How do you mean
?”

  “Okay, the girl gets raped. The mother, the maid, finds out. She takes off, quits, gets a new place to live. Does she go to the cops? No, she’s an illegal, she wouldn’t dare. But somehow Jackson and Seaver find her, and they figure out that Bloom is the rapist. This would be last May. Jackson had murdered Ortiz in March and Valenzuela in April. Fuentes had just died too, and there was an investigation heating up. So they go to Bloom and they say, we got the girl you raped, make sure there’s no serious investigation of the guys we killed. It was manna from heaven, finding that girl. Anyway, Bloom says something like, hey, I can’t control the determination of murder, that’s the M.E.’s job and he’s an independent bastard. So they, Seaver probably, says, get rid of him, put your own guy in there. And he does. All the dates check like clockwork. Still, there’s something missing on how the two of them got on to the rape in the first place.”

  “Yeah, but how she got to the shelter is easy,” said Marlene. “Bloom obviously says to them, okay, deal, but you have to get rid of the girl. She has to disappear. So Seaver takes her to the shelter and leaves her on the doorstep. That date checks too.”

  “Why Seaver?”

  “Because if it was Jackson, he would’ve killed her,” said Marlene. “He did kill her, may he burn in Hell forever. No, Jackson says, we got to whack the girl. Seaver says, hey, I’ll do it, you did the two spic cabbies, it’s only fair. But Seaver’s a softy; he doesn’t like rough stuff, and also he’s being a clever boy, because it gives him an edge, Bloom ever starts saying, ‘What rape was that, Detective?’ So he drops her at the shelter instead and tells Jackson and Bloom she’s buried out in the Meadowlands someplace.”

  “So how did Jackson find her after all this time?” Karp asked.

  “Ah, fuck if I know,” said Marlene groggily. “We haven’t quite penetrated to the bottom of this yet. We’ll find out the whole thing when they grab Seaver, though. He’ll talk.” She clicked off the bedside light, and they lay awhile in the semidarkness, in the pale moonlike glow of the street lights filtering through the blinds on the wide bedroom windows. “What’ll this do to your case?” she asked, suddenly remembering the ostensible cause of the entire cascade of revelations.