by Norman Green
I was almost three and a half hours late getting to Annabel Wing.
What was I supposed to do? It was Klaudia, man, it was freakin’ Klaudia . . . I felt like I was miles away from understanding her, and I couldn’t get her out of my head. Maybe it was her kinetic physicality, that sense of restless power and energy that seemed to boil just beneath her surface, maybe it was the way my interactions with her seemed to run counter to everything everyone had told me about her. Maybe it was just, you know . . .
The way I was choosing to see the thing with Klaudia was that she had decided to trust me. That was not something that happened a lot in my life. I was too used to being the strange new kid with the weird clothes, I had always been the kid who didn’t fit, and all of a sudden the coolest girl in the neighborhood was hanging with me. She’d let me past her defenses, she’d reached out, and with the touch of a hand she’d incinerated everything I’d been using to keep everyone away from me.
The cab fare was twenty-four bucks, I only had twenties and the driver’s English had deserted him, conveniently, but hey, the goonas had finally smiled on me that morning and I was feeling too great to stiff the guy, so he drove off with a sixteen-dollar tip. I stopped and bought a bottle of wine as a sort of peace offering to Annabel, wondering as I did so if she even drank, if she’d maybe take the bottle and clock me with it.
Annabel Wing lived on a sort of quiet side street. Quiet for Flushing, anyhow. It was a one-way street of adjoining two-story brick buildings that looked like they’d all been built sometime back in the seventies or eighties; they had commercial spaces in the street-level units, God-only-knew-what going on in the basement units, and apartments up top, each with its own balcony. Guy on the sidewalk out front was handing out flyers and mumbling “Ten dollar,” and a couple of the girls were hanging, giving you the eye, trying to tempt you down the stairs. I barely noticed them. The doors to the upper-level units were the sort of barred metal security doors that you see everywhere in the city, although they’re not great for security if you leave them unlocked the way Annabel had.
The light in her stairwell was out.
I should have taken another half hour or so, late or not, I should have waited for my vagrant mind to reassemble itself . . .
Something brushed at my face, it felt like a hair or a strand of spider’s silk, and when I went to wipe it away it was gone. I stopped in the doorway and waited, but nothing happened, so I went up the stairs. The door at the top of the stairs was open, too, and I finally woke up. Without moving my feet at all I checked all around the door for a trip wire or some sort of trigger, and when I found none I pushed the door the rest of the way open with my elbow.
“Ms. Wing?”
Nothing.
I put the wine down on the hallway floor behind me and took two careful steps into her apartment, which allowed me to look left into her dining room. There was a kitchen beyond that but it was open enough for me to see that she was not in it. I took three more steps.
“Ms. Wing? Annabel?”
Straight ahead was her sitting room, to the right, her bedroom. I could see the bottom third of her bed. Someone lay facedown on the mattress, I could see their shins and feet.
I would like to have remembered Annabel Wing the way she looked the morning I met her, tall and exotic and nice. I should not have looked into that room.
Death does not reside easily in the mind, there isn’t a good space for its odd shape and sharp corners, it always seems to push back at you somehow. How could she be dead, hadn’t I talked to her just that morning, and yet she was, with so much of her blood on the walls and floor there could not be enough left inside her to support life. Her face was darker than the rest of her, she was discolored from the middle of her neck on up because someone had taken a wire coat hanger, wrapped it around her neck and tightened it up until it was imbedded in her flesh. They’d twisted the wires together behind her neck the way an electrician does, wound the strands tightly around one another and cut off the excess, all I could see was maybe an inch and a half of it sticking out behind her. No human being that I’d known, including me, would have been able to loosen that noose without a pair of pliers, so even if I hadn’t been hours late, I’d have been too late.
Her left earlobe was missing.
I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs behind me. There wasn’t any point in trying to run, whoever had set me up must have been a pro. “In here,” I said. “I’m unarmed.”
Two cops, one young guy in blues and an older guy in a brown suit. “Freeze!” the younger one said, holding his pistol out in a somewhat unsteady combat stance. The older guy slid past him in the narrow hallway, he was the one I worried about, he pointed his pistol at my chest, almost casually.
“Don’t move, asshole,” he said. “Move and you’re dead.”
I spent a couple of hours handcuffed in the back of a squad car, exercising my right to remain silent. The cop in the brown suit came to talk to me once, but it was a short conversation, something about my best chance at cooperation and fair treatment and my desire to see a lawyer. I wouldn’t talk. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make a statement, but cops are pros and you have to know when you’re outclassed. After that we rode down to the precinct house and I spent a couple more hours shackled to a metal pole that was bolted to the wall behind the perp bench. When I finally got to make my call, I called Mac. More accurately, I called his voice mail . . .
A cop I once knew told me that there used to be an unwritten rule in the NYPD: You never took a suspect into the station house if he was still upright and walking under his own power. So there are worse places to get arrested but I don’t think the margins are huge. It’s a little like getting your arm caught in some giant, slowly revolving machine, the thing is going to pull you in and you’re going to die slowly and horribly and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
That’s what it felt like, anyway.
I hadn’t noticed much about the cop in the brown suit back at Annabel’s, I mean, I remembered he was black and had some gray in his hair but after two days in lockup I could not have picked him out of a lineup. I was pretty sure this was the guy, though, he was seated on one side of a table when they brought me in and shackled me to the chair across from him. I didn’t know about his chair, but mine was bolted to the floor. When the security detail went through the steel door and it clicked shut behind them, he looked over at me. “Mr. Fowler,” he said. “We meet again.”
“Mr. Fowler?” I said. “Last time I was just an asshole.”
“Forgive me. That was before I found out you weren’t just any old every-day asshole. My name is Sal Edwards.”
“Nice to meet you, Sal. I’d offer to shake hands, but . . .”
“No thank you.”
“How’d you arrange all this, Sal?” I nodded at the empty room. “I didn’t know you guys still pulled shit like this. No lawyers? No DA? Nobody does anything without a lawyer these days.”
“We’re old school here,” he said. “Call it interdepartmental cooperation. Besides, this isn’t really happening. I’m not actually here. But in principle, communication is good, don’t you think?”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“I worked counter-intel before I came home to the cops,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it, but in every steaming shithole on this planet, there always seems to be someone like you around. There’s always some guy who can get shit done even when there’s no legal way to do it. I always wondered what they did with you fucks once Uncle Sam didn’t need your talents anymore.”
Technically that was a statement and not a question, not that I could have answered it anyhow.
“Why are you in my city, Mr. Fowler?”
“I just have this thing about New York, man.”
“Why did you let us take you, back at the apartment?”
“You were properly ordained agents of the law . . .”
“Yeah, stop,” he said, cutting me off. “Who are you
working for?”
“Melanie Wing,” I told him.
“You’re probably gonna burn for Annabel Wing’s murder,” he said.
“I didn’t do it.”
“Are you saying you don’t believe I can stick you with it?” I didn’t have an answer for that. “Who are you working for?”
“Melanie Wing.”
He acted like I hadn’t answered him. “Your name pulled up a red flag. I’d never seen one like it before. ‘Inform immediately.’ I got to make the call myself. You wanna know what was the first thing they asked me? They wanted to know if I thought you’d gone active. I told them we had you for criminal trespass. You know when someone’s laughing at you on the other end of the phone, right, you can’t hear them but you know they’re doing it?” He leaned in, motioned me closer, and I responded. It’s the natural reaction. “Who are you, anyway, and what the fuck are you doing in my town?” he whispered, presumably to defeat the mikes. “How much trouble are we in?”
I leaned back. “You ever work a case out in Podunk, Sal?”
His eyes narrowed, but he shook his head. “Brooklyn born and raised.”
“Thought so.” I had his complete attention. “I’m gonna tell you something you’d know if you’d worked much outside of the five boroughs. When it comes to white trash families, it ain’t all in the computers. Now I don’t give a shit if you believe this or not, but this is the truth. My truth, anyway. I suppose a DNA test could prove me wrong, but unless and until, I’m going with it. Melanie Wing was my half sister. Melanie, Annabel’s daughter. Six or seven months ago someone killed Melanie and dumped her into the East River. And once I started sniffing around, they killed her mother and set me up to take the fall for it. I really wanna find out who did it.” I surprised myself, laying it out there, for one, believing it, for another.
Edwards exhaled, like he’d been holding his breath, and then he leaned back and stood up out of the chair. My read on him was that he was relieved. Funny, how the things you fear the most so often turn out to be something other than what you expected. He walked over and knocked on the inside of the steel door. He didn’t turn around. “The forensics are gonna place you at the scene. Where we found her.”
“How’d you pull that one off?”
“Wasn’t me,” he said. Someone unlocked the door and pulled it open for him. “Either you ain’t as good as I was told, or somebody tied you up in a nice neat package. I’d say you got a real problem. I know you don’t wanna talk, I know that’s the way you guys play the game, but if it was me, I think I’d consider my circumstances before I made up my mind to clam up. This situation, right here, this could be your whole ball game.”
He walked out.
Chapter Nine
I thought it was gonna be Mac, a day later when they came to tell me I’d made bail I just assumed he’d finally gotten it done, so when I saw the guy through the reinforced windowpane in the metal door it felt like I’d gotten shot, that jolt of unexpected recognition blows through you and then all your nerve endings wake up and go Oh shit . . .
His name was Dick Plover and he was a nightmare of a client.
He was fifty or so, fat, florid, with a fringe of gray hair. He wore a blue suit, flag pin on the lapel, white shirt, red tie, I’d never seen him in anything else, I could not picture him as a child or a high school student; there was no way any kid I’d ever known could have turned into something like Dick Plover. I mean, he was human, he had to be, sired by a man just like the rest of us, born of a woman, but God, I couldn’t picture it. His was a face from another lifetime, one I had sincerely hoped I’d never see again. They say that America needs men like Plover and I suppose it might be true, but we’re still pretty good at building things, we’re still pretty good at feeding people. I always wondered what the world would look like if we spent a little more time and money doing that and a little less blowing shit up.
Then again, since I am not a builder, I suppose I have no right to speak.
Plover was not a builder, either.
This is as close as I ever got to understanding the guy, and as close as I want to get: He was an Unformed Man. You see guys like him on occasion, running a corporation, a school or a church. They can sound like us when they want to, they can laugh and cry and pat you on the back, but they are nothing like you and me. They believe in the primacy of the mind, they have never had to run or hit, never held the rifle or the knife themselves, only by proxy. They never had an older brother to slap the shit out of them for straying too far from normal, have never felt physical pain themselves and are therefore all too ready to cause it in others. I have no doubt that Plover went to church on Sundays. I am equally sure that the people sitting next to him would move to another pew if they had any idea what he was.
I watched him watching me as they processed me out. He walked me out, after, he had a car and driver waiting in the tow-away zone outside. The people going by, cops and lawyers and families of the unfortunate, they all eyed us speculatively as the driver, who aside from the black suit looked like USMC standard issue, got out and opened the back door. Plover motioned me in first. I looked back at the building, then up at the sky, and then I sighed and got in.
The car was a cocoon, a bubble, nothing of the outside world intruded. “You should have called me, Saul,” Plover said, oozing phony compassion.
Yeah, sure. I owed him now, and owing a guy like him could be bad for your health. “What happened, Dick? We get into another war?”
“The enemies of freedom never sleep.” I never knew if he was serious when he said shit like that. “I think I may be of some use to you when it comes to resolving the manner of Ms. Wing’s death. But I’d like to know that I can count on you.” Tit for tat, that’s what he was telling me.
“I didn’t kill her, Dick.”
His smile was eloquence itself, he was letting me know that he didn’t really care whether I’d done it or not. “They have your prints at the scene.”
“Impossible. I never touched anything.”
“A water glass in the kitchen sink. You took your pleasure with the woman, then you killed her. And, despicable bastard that you are, you stopped in the kitchen for a drink of water on the way out.”
Son of a bitch. “Someone set me up.”
He nodded. “And a fine job they’ve done of it, too.”
We rode in silence for the space of a block or two. “Why do you need me, Dick?” I finally asked him. “I’m not a shooter.”
“We have plenty of those.” He turned and looked at me, for all the world looking just like your favorite uncle giving you a red bicycle on your birthday. “Saul, you are a man of talent and resourcefulness. We consider you an asset, I want you to know that. Despite what you might think, we do care about you.”
“Bullshit. You already have something, don’t you.”
The look on Plover’s face was not exactly a smile. “Your cynicism disturbs me, Saul. We were so happy to see you get out of Zurich. Europe was a bad situation, all the way around. Maine, on the other hand, seems to have agreed with you. You look great.” His eyes narrowed. “You had us all very worried, there, for a while.”
“Yeah, sure.” He knew, that’s what he was telling me. He knew I’d been using. Wouldn’t have surprised me if he had my old dealer’s phone number. And it was more than a little unsettling to find out he’d been keeping tabs on me. “Must be a comforting thought, if you need me to become permanently silent, you just stick a lethal dose in my arm and a syringe in my hand.”
“May that unfortunate circumstance never become necessary,” he said. “I told you, Saul, we consider you an asset. We want to see you prosper.”
There was probably no real way to tell what Plover wanted, other than me, willing to work for him again. “All right,” I said, knowing I’d regret it, agreeing to it anyway. One last time, I told myself. One last time and I’m free. “I owe you one.”
He nodded. I could almost see the checkmark next to my name i
n his little book. “Good,” he said. “Now, if you don’t mind, you and I are going to go sit down with a gentleman who represents the interests of the NYPD, and we’re going to see if we can clear this whole mess up.”
We met around a conference table at the Midtown Sheraton. The guy was technically a lieutenant. Calabrese was his name, and he stood like a boxer, looked like he was waiting for a good time to hit you. Plover introduced us. “The lieutenant works for the chief of detectives,” he said. Calabrese didn’t offer to shake hands, and I didn’t push it. “Lieutenant,” Plover said. “If you would.”
Calabrese glared at Plover but I guess Plover outranked him; either that or he had something on the guy, or the guy’s boss. Calabrese shifted his attention to me, sucked in a big breath of air, let it out slowly, as if he were praying for patience. “We believe we’re dealing with a serial murderer,” he said. “We know of five women that he’s killed in the last two years. There may be others that we haven’t found yet. So far we’ve managed to keep this out of the media, and we’d like to keep it that way.”
“I’ve already vouched for Mr. Fowler’s discretion,” Plover said, a tone of warning in his voice.
Calabrese grimaced.
“Five women,” I said. “Does that include Melanie Wing and her mother?”
“No. It would appear that those two murders are the work of a copycat.”
“I thought you said nobody knew about this guy yet?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that the media didn’t know. There are at least four precincts where rumors have started.”
“Oh. Okay. That means he’s one of yours. The copycat. Otherwise, how would he know what to copy?”
Calabrese just stared at me.
“To speed things along, here,” Plover said, “we have established to Lieutenant Calabrese’s satisfaction that you were in Switzerland at the times of the first two murders, and that you were in Maine for the next three, as well as at the estimated time of your half sister’s untimely demise.”