by Norman Green
Calabrese didn’t look satisfied to me. “And you’re sure of all that,” he said, glaring at Plover. “You are confident that—”
“We know where Mr. Fowler was,” Plover said calmly, and Calabrese shut up at once. “And we know what he was doing.”
I felt a sudden chill. Of these two characters, I was much more afraid of Plover, and the idea that he’d had me watched, though useful as an alibi, was not comforting. Focus, I told myself. Keep your mind on business. “So you have two problems,” I said to Calabrese. “You have a serial killer working in your city, and you have someone inside your department who murdered two women and tried to pin it on him. Are you sure it’s a copycat?”
“The serial murderer has a couple of signature moves,” Calabrese said. He looked like he wanted to bite someone. “Not all of the details have gotten out. For example, he has sex with his victims, postmortem. That was not the case with either Annabel or Melanie Wing. And there are several other markers that are absent. Minor, taken individually, but together they are significant enough to indicate a copycat.”
“A cop.”
“We are exploring that possibility,” Calabrese said, seething.
Plover did not seem interested in the problems of the NYPD. “In any event,” he said, “we have our Mr. Fowler in Zurich or in Maine for six out of seven of your cases, and it would seem that he simply stumbled onto the scene of the latest murder.” He glanced at me again. “The lieutenant has established that at the approximate time of death, you were in the company of a certain young lady at her apartment in Manhattan.” He looked back at Calabrese. “I assume you will relay the necessary information to your investigation team . . .”
“I’m telling them nothing,” Calabrese growled.
“And that would be because . . .” The warning in Plover’s voice was clear.
“Sal Edwards is not an idiot,” Calabrese said. “He’s got the time of death and he’s got Miss Livatov’s statement. That’s all he needs to know.”
Plover walked me out through the lobby. “I don’t think he liked you,” he said.
“I don’t think he likes anybody.”
“He’s had some setbacks,” Plover said. “Have a little compassion. He thought he had you for two out of seven, and now he doesn’t. And one of the things he didn’t tell you, his killer has hep C. So whoever the guy is, he’s really already dead. Hardly worth looking for him. I wonder if he knows it . . .”
“I suppose I’ll be hearing from you.”
“Well, you know how it goes,” he said. “They say it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, but the next time it seems like the oversight committee will give us neither, we may give you a call.”
I knew it was her, even from a block and a half away. My eyesight was okay, not outstanding, but there was no mistaking Klaudia Livatov’s athletic grace or her blond hair dancing in the breeze that blew northward between the buildings up Avenue C. Sitting on her stoop, I don’t think I stood out the way she did but she did not act surprised when she saw me. “Hey, hotshot,” she said. “No flowers? No candy?”
She was right, I should have brought something. Man, I had a lot to learn. “Sorry.”
She snorted at that.
“Actually,” I told her, “I am sorry I didn’t call you. I was unavoidably detained.”
“I heard about all about it,” she said. “Come on up.”
She had her back to me as she hung up her coat. “About last time,” she said.
“Yeah . . .”
She turned around and stared at me. “I don’t know what that was.”
A thousand smart-ass answers occurred to me, all of them wrong, so I kept my mouth shut, but apparently my poker face still needed work. “Okay, okay, you idiot,” she said. “I know what it was. But what I mean is, I don’t know what came over me.” I opened my mouth to reply but she pointed at me so I shut it again. “Let me just, you know, let me just say this.”
God I wanted her right at that moment. I had never known another woman as intensely and fiercely alive as she was. “Okay.”
“Normally,” she said, and then she shook her head. “Start over. Before you. Yeah, that’s better. Before you, okay, I have never been . . .” She looked around, searching for the right words. “That motivated. Physically. I don’t know why. It’s just that guys . . . All the men I’ve ever known were just guys. Just guys. Beer-swilling, TV-watching, sex-starved slobs. I don’t know what it is about you.”
I didn’t know, either.
“It was like a kind of seizure. I felt like I had a thunderstorm go through my head. Too dark to see, you know, and too loud to think, rain drumming on the roof, and lightning . . . All I knew was . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I just felt all of a sudden like I’d been waiting for you for one hell of a long time, and once we started, I could not let you loose until . . .” And then it seemed to be my turn to talk. “Am I making any goddamn sense to you at all?”
“Yeah. Yeah. No.” Very smooth, Casanova. “The thing is, nothing like that ever happened to me before. Nothing like you. I mean, with me, it’s always been sort of mercenary. Only, that’s not really the right word. Impersonal, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Howling at the moon, okay, and I’m not complaining, but then afterward, nothing. No connection. I always figured that was going to be it for me. That was as much as I was ever gonna get.” There it was, the thing that I’d always been afraid to say, now it was out there and I couldn’t get it back.
She walked past me like a boxer going to the center of the ring just before a fight. She stopped at her little statue, paused to light one of the candle stubs with a kitchen match. “I can still feel it,” she said, without looking at me. “I got it locked down right now, but if I give in to it . . .” She turned and stared at me. “I don’t know if I like giving some guy that much power over me.”
“I’m not some guy.”
“No?” She flipped the match into her kitchen sink, walked over to me, stood too close, inside that zone, but I didn’t back away.
“No. I am a grown-ass man, not a guy. There is a difference.”
“I’ve heard that.” She reached out, put a hand on my chest. “You’re gonna have to give me a little time with this.”
“I can do that.”
“Good,” she said. “We got other things to talk about anyway.”
Yeah, but . . .
“Two cops came to see me,” she said. “Day before yesterday. They got my number out of your cell. They didn’t wanna tell me but I got it out of them eventually. They said they were holding you but they wouldn’t say why.”
“Melanie Wing’s mother was murdered,” I told her. “They think I did it.”
“Holy shit,” she said, her face turning paler than normal. “Are you serious? What happened?”
“She called me that morning. Maybe a half hour before you did. She told me she’d lied to me when I talked to her the first time, about Melanie. I was on my way to see her when you called me. My original intention was to take the subway out to Flushing, where she lives. Lived. So after I talked to you I grabbed a cab instead, I figured that would save me enough time so I could stop here, talk to you, and still be more or less on time to see her.”
“Didn’t work out that way,” Klaudia said.
“No. I should have pressed her, when I had her on the phone, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. I mean, I was already headed out there . . .” I broke off, staring at Klaudia, remembering what had held me up. “What did the cops ask you?”
“How I knew you. Did I know anything about your past. What time did you get here. What did we talk about. What time did you leave. Did I know where you came from. And on and on, in circles, same questions over and over, just phrased a little different each time. I told them they could get the times you came and went from the cab companies. Told them I wasn’t interested in where you came from. Which was a lie, by the way. And I told them I called you over here so I could fuck your b
rains out.” She colored, just a bit. “What happened to Melanie’s mom, exactly?”
“My gut feeling is that whoever killed Melanie killed Annabel, too. Word must have gotten around that I was in town and asking questions. And if they find out about you and me, whoever they are, that would make you the next logical step. I think we need to talk about getting you some—”
“I can take care of myself,” she said.
“Listen, Klaudia, I know you’re a tough lady, but . . .”
“Saul!”
I shut up.
“I’m on it.”
“Seriously, if anything ever happened to you, I would . . .”
“If someone comes after me, I’ll try to remember to leave a piece big enough for you to identify them. Okay?”
“Whoever he is, this guy doesn’t play.”
“Neither do I. I made some more progress on your list.”
“I’m not feeling good about this.”
She gave me a look that said the subject was closed. “I made some more progress on your list.”
“All right.” She took me through it, and it didn’t really feel much like progress. Eight more names disqualified because they still liked Mac too much to do him dirty. “Well, thank you for doing the work. Are you up for a little more?”
“Sure,” she said. “What do you have?”
I told her about the building on Tenth Street that housed the Los Paraíso Hotel, gave her the shorthand version of why I was interested in it. “What I really want to know,” I told her, “is who owns the actual building, and who holds the leases. Who are the interested parties.”
“I’m on it,” she said.
Mac, I found out, had been in town for two of the three days I spent in the arms of the Corrections Department. He’d been staying at a small boutique hotel over on the East Side, just north of the UN. I was hungry, for a couple days I’d been thinking about a steak at The Palm, but Mac didn’t want to go out so I met him at the bar in his hotel. Not my kind of joint, but it was a nice enough place in a traditional sort of way, dim lighting, lots of dark wood, a piano but no piano player. Mac was sitting alone at a table in a dark corner, which surprised me quite a bit.
Mac was born talking.
He raised his head when he saw me, struggled to his feet and waved me over. He looked good enough from across the room, his shaggy mane of white and his country and western suit making him look like a red state politician in town to raise hell and get laid, but when I got closer I saw that he hadn’t shaved in a while and his face was gray. “Mac,” I said. “Are you okay?”
He sat back down, pointed at a chair for me. “Tell me something, Saul. Did you ever think you’d live this long?”
A fine young waitress wandered over just then, and her musky scent and flawless smile lit up our dark corner, just for a second. I asked her for a coffee and she went off to get it. I watched her walking away, confident that Mac was doing the same, but when I looked back at him he was staring down into the depths of his glass. He looked up at me, waiting for his answer. “It would be easy for me to tell you that I shouldn’t still be here,” I told him. “But the fact is, I’m always pretty sure I’m gonna make it. If this place catches on fire, you and everybody else might get burned up, but not me. I’ll get out.”
He sighed. “Not as much fun as you might think,” he said, “outliving all your friends.”
He did look old. Facial stubble is a fine thing on a young man, and it can look good on a middle-aged guy too, but past a certain age, it just makes you look like a wino. “I’m really sorry about Annabel, Mac.”
He nodded. “So am I. She didn’t deserve to go like that. She was not a bad person.” He picked up his glass, swirled its contents, then took a drink. “I wish I’d been a better man. Wish I’d have taken better care.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Do you? You have any kids?”
“I’ve had plenty of times when I wanted to be someone else. Some guy drives a Toyota to work every morning, watches football with his buddies on Sunday. You know what I mean? Anybody but me. But it’s all bullshit, Mac. If I can’t learn how to be who I am, what makes me think I could cut it in some other guy’s shoes?”
He nodded. “Escapism.”
She came back with my coffee, and she still had that smile. It didn’t seem to be working on Mac. “How’d you get loose?” Mac said. “I was tryina get you out, but all I got was doors slammed in my face. It ain’t normal, when your money don’t talk at all. It ain’t American. What the hell? How’d you get them to let you go?”
“I made a deal with the devil.” I told him a little bit about Dick Plover.
“Ah, shit. I’m sorry I ever got you involved in this thing, Saul. Really, I mean it. Who the hell is this guy, and what are you gonna have to do for him, you don’t mind me asking. The devil.”
“Something he can’t get caught doing. It’ll be an incursion of some kind, probably. Go in, get something or somebody he wants, get back out without leaving any evidence. I think Plover works for the Department of Defense. He’s the kind of guy that management will tolerate because they know he ‘gets things done.’ ”
“A patriot,” he sneered.
“I’m sure he thinks he is.”
“Those guys are the worst,” he said. “Their minds don’t work like yours and mine. God help you if you get mixed up with them.”
“God might. Or he might not.”
“Yeah, sometimes not,” he said. “Sometimes he’ll leave you to it. Or maybe it just feels like he ain’t hearing you. Does this mean you’re in the clear on Annabel’s murder?”
“Well, I have an alibi, but the NYPD still considers me a person of interest. They still wanna think I killed Annabel, no matter who’s leaning on them to let me go. I got set up, Mac. Somebody boxed me in pretty good.”
“Someone musta heard you were asking questions, and they got nervous. Any idea who it was?”
“There are a few possibilities. I had someone working on your list of names. Nothing face to face, just computer searches and some phone contact. We had a good cover story. ‘Hey, I’m a reporter and I’m researching an article I wanna do on this guy Mac, what can you tell me about him,’ and so on. We got a couple possibles but nothing that jumps out at you. Seven out of ten, if you knocked on their door right now and told them you had a great opportunity for them, they’d be so in they’d get the money up tonight, so we crossed them out. Couple of them thought hanging with you was the most fun they ever had. Two others didn’t wanna talk about you, so I’d guess they deserve a little more exploration. Maybe. One’s past caring, since he got run over by his ex-wife’s Mercedes, with her driving it. I mean, there were no red flags, Mac. But I got a call from Annabel a couple days later, she asked me to stop out and see her. Time I got there, she was gone.”
“If you were a rich guy,” Mac said, staring at his glass, “and you were enough of a prick, you’d probably know somebody who could make this all happen. Kill Annabel, set you up to take the fall for it. Problem solved.”
“Yeah, maybe. But it ain’t as easy as it looks in the movies. Easier to have someone put a couple rounds in the back of my skull.”
He swirled the contents of his glass again. “I think it’s time we walk away from this, Saul.”
“Are you serious?”
“Two people I cared about, in my own limited and dysfunctional way, and now they’re both gone. And you, look at you, look at the trouble you’re in. The thought of you all jammed up sitting in a cell because of something you didn’t do . . . I don’t think I could handle it. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Saul. Maybe we oughta leave him to it.”
“Yeah, I thought of that.” I watched him for a moment. “Do you remember the pictures you gave me? The postmortem stuff on Melanie?”
Mac squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes.”
“All those cuts on the body.”
“Stop, Saul.”
“She’d been in the water too l
ong. Nobody could say definitively if they happened before she died or after she went into the water.”
“Please.”
“I can tell you now.” I waited for a reaction. If he really didn’t want to know, I wasn’t going to inflict it on him.
“Go on, then,” he finally said.
“They were knife wounds,” I told him. “He bled her out first, then he dumped her. She was alive when he cut her up.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he killed Annabel the same way.” I had a terrible thought. He’d been with her when she called me . . . “When she called me that morning, she was weak. She had a hard time talking. She had to stop for breath in the middle of every sentence. He was with her, Mac. She was already dying. She was bleeding to death, right then. The son of a bitch was right there.” I wondered what he’d promised Annabel, to secure her cooperation. Probably told her he’d stop something he’d been doing . . .
“You’re sure of this?”
I was getting pissed off at myself, thinking about it. “I should have known, Mac, just from the sound of her voice. I should have called the cops right then. If I had, this thing would already be all over.”
“Strangulation, they told me. Annabel, she died from . . .” He couldn’t continue.
“Yeah. Technically, that may have been cause of death, but I was there, Mac, I saw her. There wasn’t a lot of blood left in her.”
“Same . . . Same as Melanie.”
“Yeah. Same guy. Same person. And I’ll tell you one more thing.”
Mac closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Go ahead.”
“He took a piece of her with him. I keep saying ‘he,’ but I’m not assuming that, not yet. But Melanie had one earlobe missing. Earring still in the other ear. Same with Annabel.”
Mac opened his eyes and looked at me and I saw the anger flowing into him, pulling him back from whatever brink he’d been standing on. Saving him. “Son of a bitch. Then it was the same person.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. And we can’t walk away. And not because of ego, either. Not because I don’t like getting beat.” Not really . . . “We can’t let this douchebag walk free.”