by Archer Mayor
Sammie was a little confused. “What happened? She wasn’t home?”
It was an obvious question, given the conversation. But he knew with a slight jolt that he wasn’t about to answer it. It would have been like opening the shutters from around a candle and allowing the wind to blow it out. And having abruptly realized how committed he was to seeing this investigation through alone, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, he also saw that his entire supposed confession was probably corrupt. If he was truly interested in opening up and addressing his problems, being straight with this person above all others would have been the reasonable place to start. But apparently he wasn’t ready. The complex, ephemeral issue of settling emotional past dues held sway. “Something came up.”
They stopped before a large building with a central circular room just beyond the open double doors. The light filtering through the windowed cupola high overhead fell upon row after row of disheveled, disemboweled, and rusting metal filing cabinets, their massive paperwork contents spilling all over the floor in disastrous quantities. God only knows what files these were, whose lives they documented, and what void they’d created by being discarded here to rot.
Watching the cabinets lined up like disorderly, drunken, speechless soldiers, Sammie had to wonder about the similar repositories that everybody carried around in their heads, either ignored and neglected or simply inaccessible. In Willy’s terse answer, it was as if she’d overhead him struggling in vain with this very dilemma and realized the best she could expect right now was that this conversation might be just the first of more to come.
Nevertheless, a little disappointed, she tried another angle. “Joe says that despite all the shit you hand out, you’ve got a lot to offer.”
“Good for Joe. He’s fed me that line.”
“Maybe good for you. This is the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about why you are the way you are. That can’t be all bad.”
He turned away and resumed walking up the street. “I’m not so sure.”
“You’ve tried ignoring it,” she pressed him, her own frustration and irritation welling up. “You tried drowning it with booze. For all I know, you’re down here trying to get yourself killed avenging a dead woman you think you wronged. How can talking about it be worse than any of that?”
She heard the words tumbling out of her the way a bystander might watch a car hit a bicyclist—unbelieving and a little fearful. Nevertheless, she did have some control, and that part of her now suddenly felt relieved. The inner strength she’d experienced the night before had been suddenly reinforced with the realization that she had nothing to lose by challenging him.
And in his own way, he rose to that challenge now. Instead of bursting out as he usually did, deflecting an assault with a response of greater magnitude, he stopped dead in his tracks.
Sammie almost bumped into him from behind.“What?” she asked.
There was a drawn-out moment of silence before he said, staring at the ground before him, “You’re right. And so’s Joe. He told me a while ago I should just be straight with you—to honor you by taking the risk, was what he really said. Such a crap artist. You want to know the great thing about anger?” he asked, looking up at her. “It’s that you don’t have to worry about anything else—not the other guy, not what’s going to happen to you. There’re no consequences. You just fire both barrels and walk away if you’re lucky.”
“What about after the smoke clears?”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t think about it. And if it gets to be a problem again, and you’re still alive, you reload and fire off another round.”
She thought about that before saying, “You’re not firing now. If you’re not angry, what are you feeling?”
He pursed his lips and smiled ruefully. “Confused. That’s why I don’t like talking. It just screws me up.”
“I think that’s bullshit,” she told him flatly. “I think you’re sick of being mad all the time, but you don’t know what to replace it with.”
He laughed bitterly, recalling what had happened to him since getting that phone call in Brattleboro a few short days ago. “Yeah… maybe I’ll try love, peace, and harmony. That would really fit.”
“You can’t tell till you try it,” she suggested.
But they both knew that was pushing things. He rolled his eyes and resumed walking. “Can we talk about something else?”
She smiled. “Yeah, for the moment. We’re going to circle this hydrant again, though. Count on it.”
He shook his head, curious as to why that didn’t sound as bad as it should have. “Good image.”
By the time they returned to the burial site, the boxes they’d arrived with had been covered with dirt, leaving the rest of the trench open, and the backhoe was scratching at the ground next to the previous hole. All but four of the prisoners were back in the bus with the driver and one of the COs. The remainder waited patiently, leaning on shovels, while the backhoe’s blade picked at the earth’s raw surface with surprising dexterity and tenderness.
Slowly, a hole slightly longer than a coffin began to grow as the operator dug straight down into the fresh, previously untouched ground.
“What’re they doing?” Sammie asked. “He’s not in the trench.”
“He doesn’t want to hit the boxes,” Willy guessed as they approached Joe Gunther and Ward Ogden.
“They exhume from the side,” the latter explained, “like an archaeology dig.”
Sure enough, after going down some ten feet, the backhoe backed off and the four prisoners jumped in and began cutting into the side wall, quickly revealing the stacked boxes, their pine sides still pale and unstained by the dirt.
“Good thing we got after this so fast,” Ogden said.
“They don’t embalm these folks. Doesn’t take long for them to get pretty messy.”
The team in the hole removed the uppermost box and lifted it to the edge. The CO above them then gestured to a waiting medical examiner’s hearse to come pick it up.
Ogden began walking toward his own car. “Okay. It’s a wrap. We go to Bellevue now so they can take a closer look at your friend. And I hate to do this to you,” he said to Willy, “but it looks like you’re going to have to play next-of-kin again in identifying the body, if that’s all right.”
“Fine,” Willy said, feeling like the sole conduit to society’s late discards. “And thanks for letting me come out here.”
When the time came, of course, and Willy was looking down onto Nathan Lee’s dead face, he no longer felt like a pinch hitter for corpses. He truly mourned the loss of this person whose life he’d changed for the better so long ago. Maybe it was because he saw Nate as his only success along those lines, or maybe because, despite that, the end result turned out to be the same, but whatever the truth, he missed the man he’d rediscovered so recently, who seemed to bear only good memories of Willy, and who’d traveled the last mile to help him out.
“That him?” Ward Ogden asked quietly.
“Yeah.”
They weren’t in the formal and neutrally supportive environment where Willy had viewed Mary’s remains. This was the ME’s more functional part of the building, and everything around them spoke of the emotionally detached curiosity the inhabitants applied to their silent patients. It was starkly lit and equipped for one purpose, all of which made it easier for Willy to focus.
He looked up at the doctor, who’d already given Nate a thorough going-over. “What d’you think?”
The doctor was a woman wearing a mask, goggles, and gloves, the mask, he suspected, mostly to ward off the odor that Nate’s body was already exuding.
“Massive trauma, for sure,” she said. “Consistent with a fall from a bridge. He could have been killed and then pitched over. It would be pretty hard to tell, especially if his heart was still beating when he hit. There’re no signs of anything else, though. No bullet holes or stab wounds. But that’s not to say I don’t have a few questions.”
; She moved to the body’s right hand and held it up to the light. “He’s got two skinned knuckles and a broken finger, for instance. Again, that might’ve happened in the fall, but it’s more consistent with a fistfight, especially if he was right-handed, which his musculature suggests.
“Also,” she added, moving up to the head, “I found something really curious. See this small smear of blood just under his ear? Where did it come from?”
Sammie pointed at a gash on the dead man’s leg. “Is it too stupid to think there?”
The woman shook her head. “That would make us both stupid, ’cause that’s what I thought—at first. But then I wondered how it was transferred. There’s no laceration except for the leg. It’s not a splatter mark, so it didn’t splash there when the body hit the ground, and aside from the skinned knuckles, which didn’t bleed, there’s no blood on his hands. So, what’s the explanation?”
“It’s not his,” Joe Gunther suggested.
Her eyes widened behind the plastic glasses. “That’s what I’m thinking. Two men in close combat, one with maybe a bloody nose. This one here lands a punch in the other one’s stomach, let’s say. That guy doubles over, and his face connects with the dead man’s neck and shoulder area, depositing a smear. Too bad the clothes weren’t kept. They might’ve given us a clearer picture.”
But Willy didn’t need a clearer picture. He’d seen that broken nose.
Ogden gestured toward the blood smear. “You got enough to work with there?”
“Oh, sure,” she answered. “We’ll compare it with the deceased’s. If I’m right, they won’t match. That won’t tell you who it does belong to, of course, but maybe it’ll come in handy later if and when you line somebody up.”
Ogden nodded his satisfaction. “Okay. Another piece for the puzzle. Things’re beginning to move along.” He looked at the doctor. “You’ll call me as soon as you get the autopsy results? I’d love to hear what else you find out about Mr. Lee.”
She nodded without comment, writing a note to herself on her clipboard.
Ogden waved his arms at the others like a nanny shooing his small charges out of the room. “Then I guess we’ll go back to hitting the bricks.”
Out in the hallway, the cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out, listened to what the caller had to say for several minutes, thanked him briefly, and hung up. “That was Jim,” he explained as they all continued walking. “He spoke with someone at CCNY in Harlem. Turns out Mary Kunkle had just enrolled there for a course in psychology and drug counseling—one of their community outreach programs. According to them, she visited several times to set up the enrollment and payment schedule, so that gives us at least the most obvious explanation for her subway trips there. He also got something on Ron Cashman. Turns out he has quite a history. How was it again that you heard about him?”
The question was asked genially enough, but given his own lack of forthrightness on the subject, Willy couldn’t help hearing a note of suspicion in Ogden’s voice.
“I was trying to find out about La Culebra,” he said. “Cashman’s name came up as a possible associate who hung out near the Lower East Side. That made me curious. Does he live down there?”
Willy made an effort to sound only marginally interested, but in fact it was a struggle. This was the sole reason he’d broken cover, after all, and since then, the man he thought was Ron Cashman had not only taken a shot at him, but had just now been all but nailed as Nate Lee’s killer.
But Ogden wasn’t going to just blurt out an address and wish Willy happy hunting. Unlike Sammie and Joe, Ward Ogden didn’t know Willy, and what little he’d discovered hadn’t filled him with confidence. He also had serious doubts that Willy had asked to have Cashman’s name run through the computers for the reason he’d just stated.
“No,” he answered vaguely. “He’s more of a Brooklyn boy. Was it drug dealing he was supposed to be doing, or what?”
Willy sensed what was going on, or was paranoid enough to imagine it. The question was designed to draw him out, and possibly to reveal that he knew more than he was admitting. So, instead of answering in the affirmative, he merely looked confused.
“That was the weird part. I asked the same thing, and got nowhere. But it wasn’t just the Lower East Side connection that caught my attention. I mean, the guy’s not Hispanic, he’s not from the neighborhood, and nobody I talked to knew what the hell his angle was. It was the whole package that made me wonder. Why do you ask? What kind of bad boy is he? Did I fall over something hot?”
That put the shoe on the other foot. Now Sammie and Gunther were looking at Ogden expectantly, and Willy interpreted Ogden’s frown as a sign that he was feeling slightly outmaneuvered.
“Good lord, I don’t know,” he said lightly, ducking the question. “All I got was a synopsis of the man’s rap sheet. We’ll have to put him under a bigger microscope back at the office.”
“What part of Brooklyn?” Gunther asked, making Willy suddenly feel kindlier toward him.
Ogden hedged his reply. “Sort of Greenpoint to Red Hook area—ten to twelve square miles. Jim said it looked like he moved around.”
“Does he work for anyone or is he a freelancer?” Gunther persisted naturally enough.
At that point, Ward Ogden changed tactics. Being a realist, he weighed the chances of locating the killer of a dead junkie and an all-but-homeless black man in two completely different parts of the city. Time was against him, his own caseload wasn’t getting any smaller, and his boss would soon start wondering just how much effort all this warranted.
He didn’t like the idea, but he was coming to terms with having to deal with this one-armed bird dog in any case, which meant he might as well put him to work. Maybe the man would prove as professional, if unconventional, as his colleagues seemed to believe.
“My partner told me,” he therefore admitted, “that years back, Cashman was connected to Lenny Manotti. Manotti ain’t what he used to be, but in his day, he worked the Brooklyn docks a fair bit. What the movies call the ‘import-export’ business. I don’t know what Cashman did for him—that’s where the microscope’ll come in—but his record implies enforcement. Weapons and assault charges, mostly. The drug stuff was minor— a couple of small possession raps.”
He stopped there and watched Willy’s expression as he added, “Looks like an interesting angle to chase down if we get the chance.”
Willy kept walking down the long hallway, his eyes on the floor ahead of him. The last thing he wanted to do now was tip his hand.
Chapter 19
Willy Kunkle excused himself from Ward Ogden and the others as quickly and innocuously as possible—never wondering why Ogden seemed so amenable to this—and was back in Riley Cox’s store in Washington Heights just as night was beginning to fall.
He found the big man as he had before, holding the fort behind his elevated counter by the door, his hand within reach of the shotgun, and his eyes looking half asleep.
“Hey,” Willy greeted him.
“Hey, yourself,” Riley said, barely moving his lips.
Willy glanced down the two aisles, saw a kid studying comic books in a distant rack and two women picking out items from the glass-walled fridge against the back wall.
“I got bad news,” he said in an undertone.
Riley’s expression didn’t so much change as imperceptibly soften, as if its underlying scaffolding had collapsed. “Nate’s dead,” he said without inflection.
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
Riley watched Willy’s face, struck by his tone of voice, and saw that this enigmatic hard-ass was being neither considerate nor compassionate. He was feeling his own loss with Nate’s death, putting it in a special category in his brain as a collector might add a priceless addition to a vault.
“You know who?” Riley asked.
Willy paused as one of the women approached the counter, laid her few items down, and paid for them in crumpled
dollar bills pulled from her coat pocket.
“Pretty sure it was Ron Cashman,” Willy answered after she’d left. “Same guy who took a shot at me last night, uptown.”
“You saw him?”
“I shot at him first.”
Riley produced a hint of a smile. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Willy ignored the comment. “Who do you know in Brooklyn, both sides of the old Navy Yard?”
“A few people,” Riley answered vaguely.
This time, it was Willy’s turn to smile. “I thought you might. Cashman used to work for an old crook named Lenny Manotti. That ring any bells?”
Riley thought about that for a moment. “He Mobbed up?”
“I didn’t know you were so prejudiced. Not that I heard.”
“What does ‘old’ mean?”
“From what I got, semito fully retired.”
Riley grunted, straightened, stretched his thick, muscled arms out to both sides of him, and arched his back. “Good,” he said. “Then he won’t have too many people around him.”
Which was exactly what Willy wanted to hear.
Several hours later, Willy Kunkle and Riley Cox entered a restaurant/bar on Bedford Avenue in the Northside section of Brooklyn. The Waldorf Astoria it wasn’t, but it did have the relaxed, well-used feel of a popular neighborhood dive. Thankfully, it was also not a place so wholly given over to one race, creed, or sex that their sudden appearance caused any notice.
Riley led them to the bar and to two stools either side of a heavyset, bearded man nursing a half-empty beer.
“Hey, Zeke,” Riley said softly.