“Till now,” Bucyk said. “In a case like this a simple assault beef becomes something, a big something.”
He thought she would start crying again. Instead her voice steadied and she asked, “What do I have to do?”
“You be very careful when they’re asking you questions. Keep your answers short and don’t volunteer anything. That’s the safest way to go.”
“Do you know a lawyer I can call?”
“Do that and they’ll never leave you alone. Innocent people don’t ask for lawyers. They teach that at the academy, too.”
“Why must I go through this?” she asked him. “You can tell them where I was. And Mike can back it up.”
“No way you mention Nicholas. His name comes up, it’ll have repercussions all the way to Washington, hell to Moscow, and everybody in between looking to sell you down the river. You don’t really think you can use a Soviet spy as an alibi witness? You try, we’ll have to cut you loose.”
Kate stuck her head into the corridor, craning for a glimpse of Nathan, and was relieved when she couldn’t see him. “What do I say, then?”
“I don’t know yet. What’s it look like happened?”
“I found Nathan on the stairs. And the place is a mess. He must have let the burglar in like I did.”
“Every bored housewife tips the delivery boy something extra to knock off the old man, they get the idea it should look like a burglary,” Bucyk said. “You hand them a story like that, the dicks’ll try and break you down for a better one, never leave you alone till they see your initials on a ten-page statement.”
“But it’s the truth.”
“Doesn’t mean a thing. Let ’em figure it out themselves. I think you’re right about needing an alibi.”
“You just said I shouldn’t involve Mike in this.”
“Do you a favor,” Bucyk said. “You can say you were spending the night with me.” He coughed and then he cleared his throat and Kate thought he was being sarcastic until he said, “ ’Scuse. This is a personal relationship you’ll tell them about.”
Kate could see him choking on his own laughter, gloating. “Are you sure you want to get involved?”
“Long as we don’t bring in the Bureau, I don’t see there’s any harm. We’ll get our story straight and no one’ll crack us. Whaddaya say?”
“If you think it’s a good idea …”
“It’s the best we’ve got. They ask, tell ’em we were out in Jersey. They want more, say you were tight, you don’t remember exactly. A Holiday Inn somewhere. Details make ’em suspicious. They feel better about you when you’re vague, kind of confused. Tell ’em we had a fight and I dropped you off at home and this is what you found. They want more, they have to come to me.”
“You’ll call them now?” Her voice had become a worn monotone.
“And we can talk about Nicholas later, huh?”
“Later,” she said.
“One more thing. The dead … your boyfriend, what was his name? For my own information.”
“Nathan Metrevelli. Why?”
“It’s a shame,” Bucyk said. “It’s a shame this had to happen to everybody.”
10
AT EAST HOUSTON AND the river, by the handball courts in the park that didn’t have a name, Harry Lema was looking for money or grass, whichever came first. He was looking in a purple satin windbreaker with THE JACKSONS VICTORY TOUR in felt script across the back, tearing it inside out. A black kid eighteen years old was wearing it over gray sweats, new Air Jordans with the laces untied and pulled loose and a knit rainbow tam corralling his rubbery dreadlocks like a cat in a bag. Stretched out on his belly the kid was six-two, two and a half, with rippling muscles tapering into a twenty-nine-inch waist, sinewy arms like a young Thomas Hearns, and if the scraggly-ass bastard climbing up his back ever wore out he wouldn’t bother with the gravity blade taped inside his thigh, just pound his pasty face into the wall. The kid’s name was Nestor Little, Jr., and he was from Sixty-eighth and Lex, where his father was a urologist. Not twenty minutes ago Harry had given him two hundred dollars for a lid of Colombian that was all seeds and stems, hydroponic compost from a greenhouse in the Bronx, it smelled like.
Harry dug his knee in the small of Nestor’s back, enjoying the pained whoosh of air that resulted. When he caught his breath, Nestor said, “You crazy, man. You got your shit. You wanna make trouble for?”
“Shit’s all it is.”
“You didn’t like it? I got some nice sess.”
Harry shifted his weight, forcing Nestor’s chin down where the city’s pooper-scooper legislation was not strictly enforced.
“Oof,” Nestor said. “Didn’t nobody ever tell you caveat emptor?”
“Where’s the two bills?”
“You breakin’ my neck.”
Harry slipped his hand inside Nestor’s shirt. He pulled out six baggies stuffed with dry stalks, a couple of vials of red capsules and a foil packet which he put in his pants and then gave back to Nestor. There was no wallet and only six dollars. “Where is it?”
“Can’t think,” Nestor said. “I got a low threshold of pain. You killin’ me.”
“It’s an idea. Where?”
“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” Nestor said.
Harry tore off the tarn and shook out a butane lighter and two packets of rolling papers, sailed it into the wall like a rainbow Frisbee and watched it crash.
“Ow,” Nestor said again. “My partner have it.”
“Don’t give me any more of your shit,” Harry said.
“Ain’t shit,” Nestor said. “Name Little Peter. Fat dude, carry an umbrella all the time, with an antenna inside like fuckin’ Zorro. Stand round the corner and keep an eye out while I do business.”
“Never saw him.”
“He seen you,” Nestor warned.
“You live through this,” Harry said, “tell him he still owes two bills.”
“Peter hear what you done, be lookin’ for you first. The dude have a problem with his temper. Now you do, too.”
“It’s not like I don’t want to believe you,” Harry said sympathetically, “but the only Little Peter you ever saw was hanging between—”
“Not funny, man.”
Then the kid’s body was steeped in shadow and Harry felt a chill across his back. It had nothing to do with the weather, which was sunny and in the low seventies. In the split second of consciousness remaining it occurred to him that the voice had been deeper than Nestor Little, Jr.’s, and seemed to be coming from behind and above.
Drifting out from under the anesthetic, Harry dreamed he was zipped in a sleeping bag with a girl in a white nightie. She had small-to-medium boobs, which was the way he liked them now, and he could feel their heat on his skin. But there was no room to move his hands. Soon he got tired of trying and lay quietly, so that she would think he was asleep and stay where she was. When he opened his eyes, dizziness arrived with the light. A woman was pressing her face close to his and he smiled back, still feeling warmth. As she came into focus he saw that she was around fifty, with a crisp doily in her mousy hair. She was saying, “How are you going to pay? Do you have Blue Cross-Blue Shield or HIP …?”
Harry stopped smiling, hoping she would go away.
“Or are you on Medicaid?”
Then the pain hit. It had been hibernating in the back of his head and now she’d gone and woke it up. Lasers shot across his forehead and down his cheeks and into his neck. His skull felt like only the scalp was holding it intact. He wanted to squeeze the pieces together, but his hand wouldn’t move. In a panic he looked down and saw his arm sheathed in white from elbow to wrist. He touched the other hand to his temples and felt cloth all around.
“Wha’ happened?” he asked.
“Sir, we must have this information.”
“Isaac,” Harry screamed. “The fuck were you when I was gettin’ killed?”
“Sir,” the woman was saying, “we must have …”
The doctor said,
“You won’t be using that arm for a while. We had to insert a pin in the ulna and the radius is fractured, too. The cast won’t be coming off for at least eight weeks. You took nine stitches in your scalp, but fortunately you have a hard head, no telling how long you were unconscious before the park attendant found you. One thing we don’t understand—your back, the area around your buttocks is covered with welts. We thought it might be some kind of rash, but they’re too pronounced. It looks almost as if you’d been horse-whipped.”
Harry said, “It must be something I’m allergic to.”
An ambulette brought him back to Inwood. There were three other passengers, a dried-up Chinese woman with no feet and two men who didn’t say anything or move on their right sides. The driver was employed by the Vera Institute of Justice. On the knuckles of his left hand Harry saw L-O-V-E in a crude tattoo. On the right was H-A-T-E. He told Harry he was from Hell’s Kitchen before they called it Clinton, on work-release from Greenhaven on a skin beef he didn’t care to get into.
“What’s it like, the driving?” Harry asked. “You wanna scream, takin’ the old farts around in traffic like a fuckin’ chauffeur?”
The driver said it wasn’t so bad, he was making out dealing dimes all over Manhattan. “Mexican brown,” he offered. “Help you with the pain.”
Harry dipped his good hand into a pocket and fished out his wallet.
“Got works,” the driver said.
Harry let go of the wallet. He knew four guys dead from AIDS and only one he was sure was queer. “Maybe next time,” he said.
“Next time,” the driver told him, “you could be in the joint.”
“Where it hurts most,” Harry said.
The apartment looked like shit. The kitchen table was down on two legs and the shades were shredded on the floor. The couch was torn apart, the batting all over the place in balls of white fluff. Smelled like shit, too. Harry ran to the window and something hit him behind the knees, nearly knocking him over. He heard a low growl.
“Isaac, that you?” He reached down to pet the dog. The growling got louder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, I am.” He withdrew his hand slowly. “…Sorry.”
He backed into the kitchen. The food bowl was empty, the other one dry. He ran some water and put it on the floor and the big dog went straight for it. Harry looked in the refrigerator, but saw nothing from Coddled Canines.
“I gotta go to the store now, Isaac,” he said, “but I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”
He hurried to the door. The wolfhound got there first.
“Right back. I swear.”
Isaac growled again, baring shiny teeth.
“Okay, fella,” Harry said, smiling nervously. “You win.”
Harry went into the kitchen again looking over his shoulder. He chipped a large steak from the freezer and threw it on a burner, turned on the gas. “Soon’s this loosens up, it’s yours,” he said. “Then we can talk about goin’ to the store.”
While Isaac attacked the meat, Harry pushed dog crap around with a broom. He tried scooping it up in a shirt cardboard, but with one hand it was impossible. He was on his knees trying, when Isaac jumped on his back. Harry shut his eyes, wanting only that what was coming should be quick and relatively painless. He felt the dog’s mouth on his throat, then hot stickiness, the big tongue. No teeth. He opened his eyes again. “You wanna go for a walk, that what you’re tryin’ to tell me? Soon’s I finish havin’ my heart attack.”
Kate was pacing the stoop, waiting for the detectives, when the phone rang. No way she was going for it, not with Nathan still on the stairs. She listened to it ring twice more and then looked the other way and ran for the kitchen, hoping it wasn’t Bucyk with a last-second change in plan.
“Hello?”
Silence.
What a time for a breather, a breather holding his breath. She looked for a police whistle Howard had given her, one he said was guaranteed to melt eardrums, and remembered that she had left it by the upstairs phone. “Hello?” she said again, louder.
“Hey, how we doin’?”
Her ear didn’t place the voice right away. Her stomach did, putting an extra loop in the knot it was tied in. “Who is this?”
“You forgot already? How long’s it been, been two weeks?”
“Oh my God,” Kate screamed.
“Yeah, me,” Harry said.
In the instant before the receiver crashed he heard her scream again. It reminded him of a wounded animal, though which kind he couldn’t say. He didn’t hang up right away. He said, “Fine thanks … and you? Just wanted to find out if you were receiving. I’m comin’ by with your dog.”
The Olds was still in one piece, still on the street where he’d left it when he got caught downtown. Some kind of record. There were six tickets on the windshield, which he added to the collection in the glove compartment. He unlocked a case-hardened steel chain that was looped around the steering wheel and brake pedal and then jabbed a key at the ignition. It went in up to his fingers. Son of a bitch … someone had gotten in and reamed out the switch. He found the broken parts on the seat under Isaac’s tail. He pushed open the door and the dome light revealed grooves in the chain where a bolt cutter had gone up against it.
He felt under the seat for a few scraps of unshielded wire that he kept there for emergencies, such emergencies as unattended Benzes and BMWs. Then he got out and unlocked a short chain running through the hood latch and the grille. Using his good hand he wrapped one end of a wire around a battery clamp and the other around the ignition coil. He connected a second wire to the other clamp. As he made contact with the solenoid activator, the starter croaked and died.
Some slimeball pushing a shopping cart filled with hubcaps had let him have the battery for eight black beauties, and he had to charge the goddamn piece of crap every other week. At best, there were three more tries left in it. He touched the wire to the solenoid twice more before the engine sputtered and caught. He pressed down on the carburetor linkage and a greasy cloud shot out of the exhaust. Then he slammed the hood and hurried behind the wheel, gunning the motor till the idiot lights went out.
“Fine state of affairs,” he said, “you gotta hot-wire your own car.”
Two lanes of the Henry Hudson were shut for repairs and traffic was permanently backed up off the bridge. He wove along the shoulder till he had skirted the mess and was in the West Seventies in half an hour. Another record. The dark side streets were deserted except for a few derelicts nodding on the steps of a community church, first in line for a free feed and a shower. He turned onto Seventy-sixth and slammed the brakes.
The block was alive with cops. He flashed his high beam and counted five unmarked cars mixed in with at least as many cruisers. Nose-to-nose at the hydrant were a truck from the medical examiner’s office and a Roosevelt Hospital ambulance.
Harry reached over and scratched Isaac’s ears. “I gotta admit she didn’t sound real pleased to be hearin’ from us. But I didn’t think she’d circle the wagons.”
The dog dropped a paw on Harry’s shoulder and licked his face.
“Can’t wait to sleep in your own bed, huh? I know, only I’m not so sure tonight’s the time to try.”
Isaac raised the other paw and scratched at the window. Harry pulled away and frowned. “Whyn’t you say so in the first place?”
He cut the engine and opened the door and Isaac went straight for a parking meter. Harry clipped a metal leash to his collar and walked the big dog down the block. A uniformed officer was standing guard over the brown-stone, protecting it from three men in warm-up suits and a paperboy huddled under a street lamp.
The dog lunged ahead and Harry had to plant his feet to keep his balance. “Tell you the truth, Isaac, this is a hell of a time to be callin’. How’s a couple of beers and some liver sound to you?”
A man in a white surgical gown backed out of the house wheeling a stretcher cloaked in a soiled sheet. A detective was at the other end. Together they carri
ed the cart off the stoop and loaded it into the ME’s truck.
Harry yanked off his glacier glasses and stared. “This could be a fuckin’ tragedy. We gotta go home and figure out what it means.”
The dog was yelping as Harry wrestled him back to the Oldsmobile and pushed him onto the seat. Harry put the key in the ignition automatically, and lost it in the steering column.
“You just can’t say enough for this town,” he told Isaac, and reached under the seat for his wires.
The homicide cop couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, forty at the most, and already his nose had gone doughy, purple capillaries tangled in the rough skin like highways on a relief map. He had shaggy, silver-gray hair, and big horse teeth which he used to break open the red pistachio nuts Kate had put out on the piano. If he mentioned his name, she had forgotten it. He got up off the Barcalounger and said, “Let’s hear it again.”
“But I’ve already told you six times.”
“Seven,” he said, cracking a nut with the big teeth and rubbing the red dye from his fingers fussily. “Seven’s a lucky one.”
“Not for me.”
“So’s eleven,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference to us.”
Kate twisted a furry braid of tissues and looked at the window where Infante was leaning on the sill. “There’s no need for this,” she said. “If you want to believe I could have anything to do with what happened to Nathan, go ahead. I’m too tired to argue any more.”
“It’s for your own good.” The detective sneaked one more pistachio and pushed away the bowl. His face had lost some of its unpleasantness. “The last part,” he said. “Start there.”
Kate shook her head sadly but firmly. “If you’re not going to arrest me, I’d like to try to get some sleep.”
“Please,” the detective said.
She wiped her eyes again. “Just the last?”
He nodded. “After you had the squabble with your date.”
She took a deep breath. “I didn’t want him near the house,” she said. “If Nathan saw him, he’d have gotten the wrong idea.” She looked up at the detective. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
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