by Norman Green
The thought struck her as they climbed the stone steps to the museum. Is this a date? Is that what this is? Are you actually going out with this guy? Alessandra Martillo don’t go on dates, are you kidding me? Have you lost your freakin’ mind? Alessandra Martillo finds a guy she can stand for ten minutes, she drags him into the bushes and she takes what she wants. Besides, you’re supposed to be looking into the possibility that the guy is a murderer. Isn’t he the common denominator here? He knew Willy, he’s into recreational pharmaceuticals, and he’s a hustler. If he had a key to Willy’s place, it very well could have been him. And anyway, even if you could manage to have something normal with this guy, how can you expect to compete with a bus full of naked sixteen-year-old girls? TJ Conrad going out with you must be the rough equivalent to a regular guy going out with his grandmother.
The dude knew his way around the Met, though. She got turned around after about five minutes, she wasn’t sure she could find her way back to the main entrance without stopping to ask for directions, but she followed Conrad as he wandered through the rooms. The guy’s got no focus, she thought, he’s got no goal, he stops and stares at whatever catches his eye, a painting or a statue or even just a kid admiring something. He didn’t try to explain anything to her, though, which was a large point in his favor. And when they finally got to the rooms that housed what they’d come to look at, works by Manet and Monet and Degas, he got lost in the paintings. He stood silent, open-mouthed, transported, and then after a while he’d bring himself back, shake his head slightly, and move on to the next. She lost track of time, for a while she just watched him, but ultimately she found herself wondering how anyone could, through the application of spots of paint on rough fabric, capture anything as ethereal as luminescence, as evanescent as human spirit.
They finally made it out, into the next gallery, which was occupied with more contemporary works, which Conrad ignored. “Whew,” he said, and he headed for a stone bench next to a window. “Man, I gotta sit down. What did you think?”
I think I need to open my eyes wider, she thought. “I’m glad I came. Thanks for asking me.”
“You feel like walking?” he asked her. “It’s a sin to come this close to Central Park without at least sticking your head inside.”
“Why is that?” Alessandra had spent her life in New York City, but hadn’t been to Central Park twice that she could remember. Her childhood had been about survival, not about going to the park.
“It’s like the city’s backyard,” he told her. “It’s where we all come out to play. It’s the best place in the world to watch people.”
“All right,” she said.
“You want my jacket?” It had gotten chilly as the afternoon wore on, and she wasn’t dressed for it.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“You sure? You look frozen . . .” He put an arm around her shoulder, pulled her close to himself, and just like that she knew her mind was made up. And how can it be, she wondered, why is it, at the key moments in my life, the buried primitive mind makes its choice while the rational part of me swallows its tongue? How can I be afraid of what I think this man might be and yet want him so badly at the same time? She felt his hand rough against the bare skin of her upper arm. She quaked at the very idea, her letting him get past the razor wire and up next to who she really was. “You are frozen,” he said.
She stopped. Fuck it, she thought. You can’t risk this, your life is gonna suck beyond belief. He turned to face her. “I am not,” she said, her voice emphatic, “frozen.” She stepped into him then, wrapped herself around him, felt his arms folding her in, and she kissed him, kissed him with as much of herself as she could manage, and then she did it again, holding him harder, as though she could squeeze their two separate selves into one new thing. She did it to shut her inner critic’s mouth, she did it so that the choice could be made once and for all, and not reconsidered later, weighed, doubted, debated. And she did it because she wanted to.
But that inner voice of fear is never really defeated. She broke free, buried her face in the side of his neck. You can’t back out now, she told herself, you run away from this guy you’ll never get this close to real ever again.
He didn’t let her go. “Okay,” he said, after a moment. “You’re not cold.”
“No.”
“All right,” he said. “But I think we should go.”
Her pulse jackhammered as the beast inside her exulted, but she had wrested the tiller back out of its grasp. “Okay,” she said, as they separated. “God,” she said. “It is kinda chilly out here.”
They didn’t speak until she drove the van onto the FDR. “How do we do this? Do I ride you home?” she asked him. She wondered if he could hear her voice shivering. She glanced at him, saw in his eyes that he knew how afraid she was.
“We do whatever you say we do,” he said. “We go where you wanna go.”
“We can go to my place,” she said, her voice shaking.
“Well all right,” he said. “Drive this love wagon back to wherever you hide it, and I’ll walk you home. Just like in the movies.”
“You know what? I think I would like that. But it’s like a half-hour’s walk from the lot back to my place.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll drop you home, then I’ll go park this thing and walk the keys back to you. Okay?”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He’s trying to be nice to you, she thought. Why don’t you let him? “Okay. Thanks.”
Fifteen
The door to the apartment directly under hers on the fourth floor opened when she climbed up the stairs. The Korean guy who lived there came out, stared at Alessandra’s chest. “There were some guys here earlier. I think they were waiting for you.”
“Are you serious? What did they look like?”
“One of them looked like a football player. Might have been Hispanic, I don’t know. Dark hair, dark eyes. Pockmarked face. Wore one of those green fatigue jackets. I didn’t get a good look at the second guy. He might have had blond hair.”
“Have you seen them around since then?”
“I was working,” he said. “I don’t know if they came back or not. Maybe they left you a note.”
“Maybe they did. Thanks.” She turned, looked back down the stairs behind her, then craned her neck to see if there was anyone on the landing above. Nobody there, or at least no one in sight. She turned back to catch the Korean guy staring at her ass.
So? My best feature, she thought. If I got breast implants, I could be the Wet Dream of the Month. Alessandra Martillo in all her naked, airbrushed, surgically enhanced glory. Miss April loves children and reading the Bible, she’s saving herself for her soul mate, oh, and for you, too, of course, and you can talk to her direct by dialing 1-900-Miss April, please have your major credit card ready.
Her neighbor went back inside, closed his door. She wondered if he even knew what her face looked like.
Concentrate, Martillo. Someone has shown an unhealthy interest in your whereabouts. You can still get out of here. Take the cell phone off your belt and call Anthony. You know he’d let you sleep in your old room for a couple of days . . . Or you might even have enough courage to let TJ take you home to his place.
But it had been a long day. She didn’t want to call Anthony, she didn’t want to sleep in her old room, she wanted to be in her own space where she could think about what had happened in the park. She walked down the hallway, turned, and looked up the stairs. She could see the door to her apartment. Nobody around, she thought. Go for it.
She sat on the floor in her studio, leaned back against her daybed. She looked at her watch. You’ve got at least a half hour before he gets back, she thought. Probably more like forty-five minutes . . . She had the news articles and police reports she’d gotten from Marty spread around her. She tried to wrestle her mind back to her job. She read through the newspapers, which were more succinct than the pol
ice reports. Promising young musician found dead in east side studio. Sean William Caughlan, aka Willy C, was discovered in his apartment by the other members of BandX, the musical group in which he played lead guitar. They came looking for him after he failed to show up for a performance. Cause of death was an apparent overdose.
It was the same story in the police reports, told in convoluted copspeak. No sign of forced entry. No marks on the body. Body temperature indicating a time of death eight to ten hours prior to discovery. Various officers filed reports after interviewing neighbors, who had collectively heard and seen nothing unusual. There were signed affidavits by each of the band members which stated, among other things, the whereabouts of said individuals ten hours before discovery of the body. Cliff Davis and Trent Wegman had been at the home of a Miss Charlotte Rae Peters, corroborating statement signed by Miss Peters and by the two other women present attached. Timothy “Doc” Jamison had been home with his family, was observed mowing his lawn by his next-door neighbor, corroborating statement attached. Theodore James Conrad had been confined in a court-mandated inpatient treatment facility, corroborating statements attached. Missing from the victim’s studio was a guitar alleged to have once belonged to Stevie Ray Vaughn, description and pictures attached.
And so on. No big deal, just another dead druggie.
The NYPD sometimes suffers from a short attention span. Each new day brings its crop of victims who must be attended to. The press has an even shorter focus. The next batch of stories elbowed its way in: a Democratic congressman from Queens indignantly denied the outrageous charges against him and his campaign finance committee, the federal DA was confident of a conviction of the congressman and several key aides; two ex-cops were charged with carrying out executions in the service of a well-known organized crime figure; the New York Mets traded away two starting pitchers for a minor league starting pitcher, a reliever, and a bucket of warm spit. The passing of Sean William Caughlan faded from public view. So much for the record.
They buried the kid. After that, no one seemed to have given him much thought.
She called Caughlan’s cell number. He answered on the first ring. “Al,” he said. “I been meaning to call you back. Things have been a little bit crazy out here.”
She could hear voices in the background. “Can you talk?”
“Not really.” She heard some muffled noises, as though he had shifted the phone from one hand to the other. “I can listen, though, if you’re quick about it.”
“Okay,” she said. “Number one, have you heard about a video your son supposedly shot of himself doing the wild thing with Shine, the singer?”
Caughlan was silent for a moment. She was beginning to think he wasn’t going to answer. “I can’t be mad at him for that,” he finally said. “If he was still alive, maybe I would be. Maybe I wouldn’t.”
“Regardless,” she said. “The video has gone missing. I was offered a half a million bucks if I could turn it up.”
“Holy Christ,” Caughlan said. The voices in the background went silent. She listened to him breathing into the phone. “Is that . . . How real is that number?”
“Sounded real enough to me. Someone from the West Coast entertainment industry made the offer. We can go over the details later, if you want. My opinion, a half million was just the opening bid.”
“Lot of money,” he said.
“You grow up as poor as I did,” she said, feeling him out.
“Yeah, yeah. Anything else?”
“Gearoid say anything to you about three mutts who tried to make a grab for us the other night? On the way home from your party?”
“He did not. They after you or him?”
“Good question. How bad would it be for your business if someone sat O’Hagan down on a hard chair in a small room and shined a light in his eyes?”
“Bad enough.”
“You think he just forgot to mention it to you? Slipped his mind, maybe? I’m not trying to get anybody in hot water here. Nobody likes a rat.”
“He’s an independent cuss,” Caughlan said. “Don’t care for anyone messing about in his life.”
“Which you’re about to do.”
“No choice,” Caughlan said. “I can’t have him running around loose. Not if what you say is true.”
“Is it possible it’s him they’re after? That they don’t really care about you?”
He chewed on that for a moment. “Doubt it,” he finally said. “But there is one other possibility. And if you catch my drift, you’d better watch your arse, Miss M.”
“You think they may have been after me?”
“Add it up,” he said. “You’re the one who’s been going around asking questions. Look, I really gotta go. I’ll call you later. You watch your step, you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I do.”
“Sorry,” Caughlan said, and he stuck the phone back in his jacket pocket. “Go ahead.”
“The grand jury’s been meeting every Thursday for about six months,” Marty Stiles told him. They were walking west on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. The city had just finished paving it, and now, for whatever reason, they were tearing it up again. “So far, they got shit. Bunch of icky-picky stuff, some interstate shipping rules violations, some labor law bullshit, nothing anybody cares about.”
“So they don’t know about the opium base,” Caughlan said.
“I don’t think so. Maybe they got a little sniff, but they don’t got anything in the way of evidence, or even hearsay. That’s probably why they been dragging this thing out so long. I mean, you look guilty as hell, Mick. You fit all the stereotypes.”
“Maybe I ought to hire a bunch more illegal Mexicans,” Caughlan said. “Let them catch me at that, I can pay a fine and everybody goes home happy.”
“Nice theory,” Stiles told him, “but no way you want these guys up your ass. We gotta figure out who’s using you to move that product, first.”
“Any progress on that front?”
Stiles shook his head. “Nothing concrete. Couple things I gotta check into, though.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Little birdie told me about this chemist, guy’s up in Rockland County, just over the New York State line from Jersey. The boy was in trouble last year, the FDA banged him for some hair regrowth formula he was selling on the Net. He got fined something like seven hundred fifty thou, but he’s been livin’ large. Just bought his girlfriend a new Jag.”
“It fits,” Caughlan said. “They gotta process that shit someplace. Stupid to do it in New York State, though. Bring it in through Jersey, then up across the state line, that makes it federal. Who is this guy? And who was the little birdie? Who ratted him out to you?”
“His lawyer,” Stiles told him. “Never stiff your lawyer out of his fee. But have a little patience, okay? I don’t want you stomping on the guy, not yet. At least lemme make sure he’s our guy first.”
“Can you find out who he’s connected with? You trace him back to whoever he works for, we’ve probably got our guy.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Okay. Sounds good. And you’re telling me I don’t need to sweat this grand jury thing.”
“Not yet. Anyway, drug busts have went out of vogue this year. Listen, the indictment don’t mean shit. They can get that any time they want it. Doesn’t mean a fucking thing. What you gotta worry about is what they can convince a jury that you done. Besides.” Marty waved his hand at the crowd on Fourteenth Street. “Half the people out here are walking around whacked, and the other half don’t give a fuck. You gotta figure, it would cost the state of New Jersey, what, five million to prosecute? Ten? And for that, the DA gets his picture on page four of the fucking Bergen Record, maybe once. Twice if they convict. So about eight people see it. Who gives a fuck? Nah, that’s going nowhere. Now, you was the mayor of Jersey City and you had your hand in the cookie jar, you’d be dead meat. That’s what’s hot this year. Everybody wants to be seen ‘cleaning up
corruption.’ Drug busts are yesterday’s news.”
“Glad to hear it,” Caughlan said, “even if I ain’t done shit. You let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with your chemist.”
“Will do. Listen, speaking of crooked politicians, I hadda promise this guy fifty large for his reelection committee. That’s how I got the dope on the grand jury.”
“Grand,” Caughlan said, shaking his head. “Terrific. Can I send it direct or do I have to go through you?”
“No, we gotta bury it,” Stiles told him, a little too quickly. “We can’t have it look like you paid him off.”
“Of course not,” Caughlan said. “What a terrible thing that would be. Let me know how you want it.”
“I already got it set up,” Marty told him, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket.
Her kitchen was too small to sit in, you had to stand up while you were in it, so she sat on a chair just outside. She had the top apartment in the rear of the building, but she had a sidelong view of a slice of Pineapple Street through the kitchen window. A Brooklyn Union Gas Company truck was parked on the far side of the street, and three guys in BUG uniforms stood around behind the truck. Where the hell could TJ be, she wondered. Maybe Tio Bobby’s van did it to him, maybe he got lost, maybe he stopped in somewhere for a few . . .
What made me ever think I wanted to do this job, she asked herself. Maybe you were trying to impress your father, she thought. She remembered what Gearoid had said about that, trying equally hard to impress his old man and to piss him off, and having success only at the latter.
Maybe you should consider a career change, she thought. It’s not too late, you could still get those implants . . .
There had been something real between her and her father, she remembered thinking that, back in the old days. Maybe it had been more of a drill sergeant–recruit thing than a father-daughter thing. He’d treated it like a job, one more obligation to be discharged.