Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  Not sure what else to say, Macie smiled. “Thank you.”

  They baby-stepped behind the metallic clicks of the walker into the living room where the Home Shopping Network was conducting a big sale on Char-Broil cookers. At a glance her layout was the mirror reverse of Rúben Pinto’s apartment, but clean and in Danish Modern, circa 1962. “We appreciate your assistance, Dr. McBlaine.” Macie’s head whipped toward Cody. He subtly angled a brow toward the wall of dental diplomas and professional honors for Thea McBlaine, DDS.

  They declined decaf Keurigs and took seats in the airless, overheated room. Ad-libbing, ex-Detective Cody dove into an interview. He went right for the timeline, a cop’s best friend: how and when McBlaine was first alerted to something out of the ordinary the day of her neighbor’s murder. Macie took notes as the former dentist told the former cop about the shouting she heard in the hallway—two men—and how she couldn’t see them through her peephole, but when she opened her door to spy out, she saw a slender black man yelling at her neighbor.

  “Rúben Pinto?” asked Cody.

  “Yes.”

  “And do you remember what was being said?”

  “Oh, I’ll never forget. The man in the hall was hollering at the top of his lungs. He yelled, ‘I’m looking at a dead man, you fucking son of a bitch.’ I must have made a noise then because he turned my way, and I shut my door. And locked it.”

  “Was that when you called the police?”

  “No, that was later, because things got quiet until a few minutes later. Then I heard loud banging and screams. Lots of screams.” Macie’s flesh prickled in the warm apartment. She understood the banging. And the screams. “I went back to my peephole and saw a man run up the hallway toward the stairs. I didn’t dare open my door, and just kept watch for the police.”

  “Was that the same man you saw go into the apartment earlier?”

  “No. I told this to the detectives exactly like I told you. Don’t you cops talk to each other?”

  “Did you see the first man leave?” Cody quoted her without notes. “The . . . ‘slender black man?’”

  “No. I don’t really know what became of him.”

  Cody asked her for a description of the other man. “White. A blur.”

  “Did you notice anything distinctive about him, even if it’s trivial? Height, weight, hair color, whiskers, clothing, anything?”

  Dr. McBlaine shook her head. “No.”

  Macie recognized the vibration pattern of the GPS alert in Cody’s pocket, and both rose to leave.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  They stood near the tapas place next door to Pinto’s building and watched Czcibor’s old Volvo wagon cruise West Sixteenth for an open spot. “You did all right in there,” said Cody. “I was worried you’d go all ‘Ms. Full Disclosure’ on me after I flushed out the only witness you have so far.” An uncomfortable pause hung there. He broke the silence, speaking an ugly truth. “Doesn’t look good that your client was there voicing a death threat.”

  “True, except for that other man. Whom the DA has chosen to ignore in favor of my client for some reason.” They watched the Volvo pass again. “What I’d like to do is get a line on that white guy.”

  “Could he be Pinto and Hall’s crew chief?”

  “Love to know.”

  “Have you been to Hall’s place yet?” He read her expression and said, “Seriously?—No?” He pulled his cuff back to check his watch. “You said you cleared your afternoon, right? You up for a little ride-along?”

  Macie sized him up. Glad for some help for once, but still wondering why. “Sure.”

  He patted his messenger bag full of the files. “You forgot to have me put these back.”

  It was her turn to smirk. “Did I?”

  C H A P T E R • 10

  * * *

  Climbing the stairwell of any New York City apartment building is pretty much like taking an olfactory core sample. You know what was for lunch and what’s for dinner, who’s cleaning and who needs to take out the garbage. Macie Wild scaled the cracked steps of the walk-up in Spanish Harlem, picking up the ghost specimens: onions, cumin, fried fish, old fish. A Dr. Seuss take on lives being lived in dense proximity. Macie trudged upward while getting a cell phone briefing on her client from the team’s social worker. Jackson Hall was still at Bellevue, still in ICU, still comatose. “Soledad, would you please ask the duty nurse to let us know immediately if Pilar Fuentes shows up for a visit?”

  “Absolutely. Fuentes is the girlfriend, right?”

  “Correct. She’s not answering repeated calls. I’d like to ask her about a guy who might be connected to Mr. Hall. Don’t let her know that. Just have the hospital alert us if she shows.”

  “I can swing by her apartment, if you want. I live, like, three blocks from there.”

  “I’m already here. About to meet up with Jonathan. I don’t feel optimistic.”

  “About Jonathan, or locating the girlfriend?”

  Macie cast a look up the stairwell to see how close she was to five and her investigator’s earshot. “A self-answering question, smart ass.” Wild left it there and hung up as she gained the fifth-floor landing. Jonathan Monheit waited, midhall, outside one of the apartments, looking not just alone but adrift.

  “I’ve been at this since you called,” he began, just this side of a whine. “No Pilar Fuentes. No nothing.”

  “I’m sure you covered all the bases. You covered all the bases, right?” But his attention was over her shoulder. Macie turned to find Gunner Cody topping the stairs. He told her he would wait outside. He didn’t.

  “Hi,” said the ex-cop.

  She introduced Cody by name only, leaving off any background or explanation for his presence. And her colleague didn’t ask for any, but just said, “Jonathan Monheit, lead investigator,” in his reedy, NPR voice as the two men shook hands. To Macie they smacked of a pairing for an action-comedy-buddy movie about a veteran cop stuck with a reject from the Geek Squad. Cody treated her associate politely. Even discreetly taking a step back to give Wild some space while Monheit recapped his fruitless door knocks, beginning with the apartment they stood in front of that was shared by Pilar Fuentes and Jackson Hall. Then he moved on to neighbors, who variously claimed not to know Fuentes or to simply say that they hadn’t seen her in days. As Monheit recited a list of his thwarted attempts, Macie balanced her frustration at his unimaginative task work with her low-grade embarrassment at having the NYPD veteran witness her exchange.

  However, gaining further points for discretion, Cody had quietly slipped away, obviously to give her more privacy during this excruciating professional moment. Wild interrupted Monheit’s tedious litany of dead-end encounters to brief him on the crime scene and her interview with Dr. McBlaine. When she got to the part about the old woman reporting she saw another man running in Pinto’s hallway, Monheit took out a spiral notebook. “Did she give you a description?”

  Macie searched to find a way to phrase “white, and a blur” that wouldn’t sound as feeble as the report she just endured from him. During her pause, a muffled thump came from inside the Fuentes apartment. Startled, Jonathan stared at her, frozen. The deadbolt clicked. They both retreated a yard closer to the stairs. Then the door swung open, and Gunnar Cody filled the frame, holding a fistful of mail.

  “This was in Pilar’s mailbox downstairs. Don’t ask. I’d say she’s been gone for days.” Behind him, a curtain billowed at the window leading to the fire escape. “Well, you’re not just going to stand out there, are you?”

  Resigned to trespass for the second time in her life, excluding the usual teenage dares, Wild stepped inside. “I’m starting to understand why you are ex-NYPD.”

  After riffling through the ads and catalogues, Cody set them back on the counter. “It’s complicated.”

  Monheit, who had gone from fear to confusion, transitioned to alarm. “He’s a cop?”

  “Ex,” said Wild and Cody in unison.

  “Still . . .”
Monheit’s gaze bounced from Cody to land on Macie. “What are you doing with an ex-cop?”

  “It’s complicated,” she said, poaching Cody’s own words, but he was too busy walking through the apartment to notice.

  “Hall told you CSU gave this place a once-over, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Monheit’s voice rose an octave and cracked. “You told him about our client interview? Isn’t that privileged?”

  Cody smiled. “It’s OK, ace. I’m sort of helping out. Fresh eyes, and all that.”

  Sympathetic to Monheit’s spot in this accidental triangle, Macie said, “You know, Mr. Cody, this is a little awkward.”

  Cody disappeared into the bedroom for only a few seconds then came back out. “Awkward, how?” Then he regarded Jonathan Monheit. “Oh, I get it. No dick measuring here, amigo, honest.” He moved to the galley kitchen and said, “Interesting.” Macie showed up next to him, and he picked up a fishing pole that was parked beside the fridge. “What do you make of this?”

  “Jackson Hall fished. In fact, he said he went fishing the day of the murder.”

  He cocked his head. “What. You mean like having a cigarette after sex?”

  “No, no . . . That’s one of his unconfirmed alibis.” Monheit snorted his exasperation, and Cody turned to him.

  “Jonathan, this is your party. As lead investigator, let’s get your take.” Which only served to startle the rookie.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious . . . Hall, um, got back from fishing. Left the rod here.” He searched their faces for feedback, got none, then blundered on. “So. That’s how it got there.”

  “Great,” said Cody. “Thanks.” He crossed to the open curtain, and it looked like he was going to exit by the fire escape. Instead he pulled the window closed and moved to the door. “I got what I needed. All yours,” he said nonchalantly. Then left.

  The lead investigator began to retrace Cody’s steps, clearly wondering what the ex-detective got that he hadn’t.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  When Macie burst out of the apartment building onto the sidewalk, Cody was jaywalking 103rd toward where he had double-parked. She called his name, but he didn’t turn, although he halted for an ambulette crossing Lexington, which let her catch up. “You didn’t have to leave.”

  “I know,” he said. Halfway up the street the lights blinked on his cargo van as it unlocked.

  She fell into step with him. “Then what’s your hurry?”

  “No hurry. You just don’t need a third wheel. Not when you’ve got Jonny Midnight.” Macie laughed out loud at the perfectly catty nickname he had coined for Jonathan Monheit. That seemed to please him, and he crossed his arms next to his driver door. “I have this feeling I overreached. Like I’m dragging you where you don’t want to go. It’s all right.” He pulled the handle.

  “Wait.” He did, and she continued, “When you said you got what you needed up there, what was it?”

  “Back to the push-pull. I keep getting these mixed signals from you, Macie.”

  He wasn’t wrong, of course. She bobbed her head to acknowledge that. “I . . . apologize. Well, sort of. You need to understand this is all sudden and new for me.”

  “You mean conducting a viable investigation?” He saw her blink and walked it back. “That was shitty. Sorry. I just get a little . . . directive when I’m working. ‘Get ’er done,’ know what I mean?”

  “So I’m learning, yes.”

  They stood in silence, waiting out the thunder of a passing cement mixer. When the street quieted again, he said. “It was the fishing pole.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s the Sesame Street theory.” That got her attention. What cop invokes Sesame Street? “You’ve heard it. Sing along, if you like: ‘One of these things is not like the others.’” He looked across Lex in the direction of the fifth-floor walk-up. “Every bit of that apartment was impeccably kept. Except—who keeps a fishing pole in the kitchen? I can answer that. Someone who planned to go fishing and got interrupted, or who just came back, and suddenly got distracted before he could stow it away in storage or a closet, what have you.”

  “That’s the same thing Jonathan said.”

  “Except, for me, it pings my alarms. I don’t give a rat’s ass how the pole got there. I want to know who Jackson Hall went fishing with. Not just to set his alibi, which, by the way, wouldn’t suck. But more importantly, is one of his fellow anglers a nondescript white guy? It’s all about noticing what you’re noticing. Thanks again to my yellow-feathered friend. That would be—”

  “—Big Bird, I get it. So your alarm pings. What do you do about it?”

  “What Jonny Midnight didn’t. I’m going fishing. Baitin’ up for alibi buddies.”

  “All from a fishing pole.”

  “In the absence of better, yes.” He popped his door and added, “By proximity, I’m guessing he fished the river. Did Hall happen to tell you where?”

  Wild tried to slow the cadence and get her legs under her. She wasn’t sure yet where all this was leading but, thanks to this ex-detective, new pieces of the jigsaw, however small and disconnected, were suddenly on the table. Among the most puzzling to her was the interest of Gunnar Cody, a puzzle piece in itself. Why was this video-doc renegade doing all this? Was he connected to her case in a way that went beyond a project overlap? It couldn’t be that he had simply taken a liking to her. The sensible Macie Wild would have applied the brakes. Hard. But her curiosity, his magnetism, and a new sense of hope had seized her. Making another break from prudence, Macie said, “I’ll show you,” and opened the door on the passenger side, wondering if she had just taken bait herself.

  ♢ ♢ ♢

  Gunnar Cody improvised a parking spot on East 102nd near the pedestrian bridge he and Macie used to cross over the FDR to Bobby Wagner Walk. Joggers huffed by now and then as they strode the blacktop path alongside the Harlem River where it flowed into Hell Gate, the channel where it joined the East River. A windless afternoon, the water to their right lay flat, with the only disturbance created upstream by an asphalt barge getting a tug push south. Just a few blocks to its stern, the vessel’s wake slapped against the piles of the East Harlem Fishing Pier. But Wild and Cody weren’t watching waves; they were looking for signs of life on the wharf.

  The walk heated Macie inside her linen blazer so she slid out of it, draping it over a forearm without breaking stride. Ahead she began to make out figures on the pier. When she turned aside to Cody to see if he had registered them, too, she caught him stealing a glance at her bare shoulders. He diverted, saying, “Think I’ll lose mine too,” then slipped off his sport coat. Both continued on with eyes front.

  They found surprisingly few visitors taking advantage of the sunlit day on the water. “Sparse,” said Macie as they surveyed the prospects. Ahead of them on the concrete outcropping, a disabled person reclined in his therapeutic wheelchair. A caregiver in nursing pastels adjusted his nasal cannula, then went back to her People magazine. Off to the left, across the deck, a young man leaning on a delivery bike blazed nonstop venom in Spanish into a cell phone. Breakups. They sounded the same in any language.

  “Possibles.” Cody’s attention locked on the end of the pier, nearly the length of a football field away. Three black men stood clustered around fishing poles bungee-corded to the metal rail. When Wild and Cody got halfway there, the trio changed attitudes, two of them getting busyish checking their lines, while the third pulled a porgy from a white PVC bucket and plunked it on one of the cleaning stations attached to the fence.

  “Looks like somebody caught one,” said Cody on their approach. Macie watched the man in the silver tracksuit slice open the fish’s belly, releasing innards and blood onto the metal tray. He didn’t acknowledge Cody’s cheerful greeting, just set about gutting his catch, flinging the entrails into the river with his knife to the excitement of the gulls. His pals became more engaged with their tackle, not acting with hostility, but presenting their backs to a
void conversation.

  “My name’s Macie Wild,” she said, bypassing ice breakers. “I’m the attorney representing a man who likes to fish here. Jackson Hall.” Her pause for reaction yielded nothing, so she continued even more directly. “Do any of you know him? Jackson Hall? I have a picture.” She went to each, showing the fractured screen of her cell phone. They barely looked but shook no. “He’s in trouble, and I’m trying to help him.” She went for her notebook, found the page she wanted from Hall’s debrief at Rikers, and asked, “Is one of you named Sammy, Sammy Goins? Fabio Mir? Pete Loomis?”

  “Feel free to sing out,” said Cody. “Like she said, we’re just looking to get a brother out of a jam.” He waited, then pointed to each one in succession. “Let’s start with Sammy. You Sammy? Are you? What about you?”

  The man in the silver tracksuit answered, but to his companions. “Sammy . . . ? No, man, my name’s Otis. Otis Redding.” Then he laughed, singing a few lines of “The Dock of the Bay.” “You said sing out.”

  Macie waited for their chuckling to subside. “You see, I’m trying to find out who killed a friend of his, Rúben Pinto. He fishes here too. You know Rúben?” She held out his picture, sweeping it in an arc before them. Nobody looked. “Just in case one of you wants to help Mr. Hall, let me ask you a question. He had another friend, a white man that he . . .”—she searched for the best way to frame it—“. . . may have worked with sometimes. Do any of you know who that might be?”

  “You a cop?” asked one of the two working the poles, a stocky guy in a denim shirt who’d cut off the sleeves to make it a vest. “Cause you’re not asking questions like a fucking lawyer.”

  “I’m a public defender. I’m not with the police.” Wild handed her business card to each. They gave it a glance, but their attention went to Cody. He picked up on that.

  “I’m not a cop either.”

  “Sure, homes, ten-four,” said The Vest. “By the way, thank you for your service.” He turned away to check his line and the others disengaged as well.