The Devil She Knows

by Bill Loehfelm

  Waters’s breathing was shallow, rapid, and wet, his huge back rising and falling as he leaned on the car. Watching him, Maureen thought again of a bear. A big brown bear slumped and panting against a boulder, the shrill yelps of a boiling pack of hounds echoing in the distance.

  “And this guy,” Waters said, “he is just…brutalizing this poor girl. Those little bells I’m hearing? He’s swinging on her so hard I can hear the change jingling in his pockets. Every time he hits her blood goes flying. He’s so focused on what he’s doing that he doesn’t even react to the flashlight. He doesn’t react when I identify myself and holler at him to stop, once, twice. And then everything happens all at once: his arm comes up, the girl goes limp, I can see it, and I squeeze off two rounds. He drops the girl, hits the deck hard. I charge him, pin him. I pull off the mask.”

  “And it’s Sebastian,” Maureen said.

  “My boss,” Waters said, “is staring up at me, and the look on his face is like a wild animal.” Despite the cold of the parking lot, sweat slicked his temples. “Like he doesn’t even recognize me. He’s panting through his teeth and bleeding hard all over this dirty alley from the two bullets I put in his hip. I drop him, call in shots fired, officer down.”

  “Everything I read,” Maureen said, “talked about Sebastian walking away from the department a hero.”

  “There was no pimp. I was off the clock, carrying a personal weapon, not my service revolver. I put that gun in the harbor along with the gloves and the ski mask. He and I made up our story and stuck to it. We’d gone to the alley together, we said, to meet one of his informants, that prostitute. He’d gone down the alley alone because she didn’t know me, and he didn’t want to spook her with an extra cop. I heard gunshots and when I got there Sebastian had been shot and the pimp who was beating her had gone over the fence and run for it. That was the story, as far as the rest of the world was concerned. It still is the story.”

  “The girl?” Maureen asked. “What about her? What happened to her?”

  She waited, watching the lie materialize in Waters’s face like a fish rising to the surface of its tank. Maureen thought she might go completely berserk if Waters told that lie. He must’ve felt the fury radiating off of her. Or maybe he decided on his own to stick with the truth. Either way, something inside him had tapped the glass. The lie vanished in a flash.

  “She died,” Waters said. “She was breathing when I got to the end of the alley. She was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.”

  Maureen felt she might go berserk anyway. “He beat that girl to death. Beat her. To death. And you let him get away with it.” She pointed a quivering finger at Waters. Any empathy Maureen had allowed as he’d suffered through the story had died with the girl in the alley. “You let her die, smashed up in an alley like a bag of trash, while you covered up for the man who killed her. For twenty years. You’re right, that’s not crooked. That’s evil.”

  “I shot him, Maureen.”

  “Only because you thought he was someone else. I cannot believe this.”

  “I caught up to my snitch a couple of nights later,” Waters said. “He was never in that alley but he knew the girl, knew she was one of Sebastian’s informants. Sebastian specialized in prostitutes, boys and girls. What we didn’t know was what he did to keep them in line. Ambush them. Beat them. Rape them. Whatever his mood dictated. Anything to keep them afraid. The scene I walked in on? My snitch thought I’d turn Sebastian in when I saw what he was really like. He thought that I’d choose what was right over another cop. It was a trap for Sebastian, set up by people who thought they were smarter than him, and it backfired badly. You understand now why you can’t have anything to do with him? Why I’m not setting any traps with you as bait?”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Sebastian and me,” Waters said, “and now you. Just us three. Now you know the worst about both of us.”

  “You gotta come forward with this,” Maureen said. “Come out with it. No one will listen to me, I’m just a waitress, but you, you’re a cop. A decorated detective with thirty years on the job. At the very least it’ll crush his campaign.”

  Waters shook his head. “I’m a bitter old man with a vendetta. Any accusations I make will roll off of him and kill what career I got left.”

  “What are you talking about? Don’t be a fucking coward. Not again. You owe that girl.”

  “After Sebastian was shot,” Waters said, “I got command of the squad. Rumors got around, probably started by him, that I’d tailed him to that alley, popped him to get his position. Or for other reasons. This was the early nineties. The Russians were moving into Brooklyn. There were whispers on the street that they’d been using Sebastian to squeeze the Italians. That he was taking orders and money. That it was the Italian mob that plugged him in that alleyway. That they paid me to do it. IAB sniffed around some. It’s no secret when Internal Affairs comes looking for you. Everyone knows. Every cop on that vice squad had secrets that coulda got us tossed, got some of us jail time even. I didn’t last two months in charge of that squad. Nobody trusted me. The squad got busted up, I transferred outta vice and outta Brooklyn.” He spread his hands. “And here I am. And don’t tell me what I owe. I did the best I could, Maureen. I got him off the street, off the force.”

  “And covered your own ass in the process,” Maureen said. “You let him scurry off and find a new place to hide, like a rat down a sewer. You let him—you watched him—walk free and get rich and famous. Don’t play hero with me. You let him kill that girl last summer. You let him kill Dennis. And now Tanya.”

  “You think I saw this coming back then? When you walked out of Dennis’s office, did you see the future? No, you didn’t. Handling the present took everything you had. I didn’t kill Dennis or Tanya or anyone else any more than you did. Sebastian did it. He’s responsible. Only him.

  “Back then I was young. I was in love with the department. On my way up. The only cop in New York City on a faster track than me was Sebastian. He was like the goddamn Wyatt Earp of North Brooklyn. I idolized him. Little old ladies from the neighborhood brought trays of eggplant parm to the precinct for him. We thought he was the cop we all wanted to be.

  “That night in the alley, after the shooting, I had to decide things too fast. I was terrified. I couldn’t think. I made the wrong choices. I couldn’t bring him down without ruining all of us. We were good cops. We were trying to get the right results. We thought we knew who the bad guys were. The truth about Sebastian would’ve hurt the whole police department if it got out citywide. I had to protect him in order to protect other people who deserved it, even if he didn’t. The guys from that squad, we’ve done a lot of good over the years in this city.”

  “You guys did more good,” Maureen said, “than a handful of terrorized young strippers and hookers would’ve done, right? How do you live with yourself after what happened to that girl from the Black Garter?”

  “Let’s see you scratch out another forty years in this fucking city, Maureen. See if you have any fingers left to point after that.”

  She shook her head, bringing her hair in front of her face. “I won’t do it, Waters. I’m my own person with my own life; I won’t be your penance project.”

  “I don’t need you for that, thanks. I lost my wife, my sons, because I couldn’t stay at home and be a husband and a father. I’ve paid my tab. You can withhold your forgiveness from me, Maureen. It won’t break my heart. All I care about is keeping you alive.”

  “That dead girl in Queens,” Maureen said. “What was her name?”

  Waters was pacing now, excited. He threw his hands in the air, moving around to the driver’s side of the car. “What’s it to you? Get in the car, already.”

  “Tell me her name.”

  “You don’t remember it? It went around the bars. Or did you not even care enough to notice her when it happened? Or maybe you had a few shots, sucked up a few lines, and laughed about her?”

 
“Tell me her name,” Maureen said, “or you’ll never see me again.”

  “Fine.” Waters raised his hands defensively then settled them on the roof of the car. He squinted into the sky for a long moment. This is it, Maureen thought. He remembers fucking Beppo from twenty years ago but he doesn’t remember the dead girl’s name from last summer. I knew it. I am so done.

  “Danielle,” Waters said. “Danielle Price. Black hair, blue eyes. She was fifteen. She had a little brother named Bruce. He was eight. At her funeral he put his favorite stuffed animal, a little blue mouse, in her casket.” He raised an eyebrow at Maureen. “Had enough yet, or should I keep going? Maybe you don’t remember her, but I do. Get in the car. We’re done here.”

  22

  Sitting in a plastic patio chair at the round red weather-beaten picnic table in her mother’s backyard, Maureen took the mug of coffee from her mother in both hands. Amber, using her bare hand, swept the dirt and dead bugs from another chair and dragged it next to Maureen’s. She wiped her hand on her jeans and sat, letting their knees touch.

  At Molly’s place, along with her clothes and the ladybug, Maureen had packed Molly’s gun. At that moment it was in her bag, in her old bedroom. Having that gun, Maureen felt transformed from protected into protector, a role she’d never had the chance to play, outside of benefactor to her yard birds. She felt good, maybe dangerous, even if she was the only one who knew about the gun, even if she was afraid to carry it around Amber or tell her she had it.

  Leaving the diner parking lot, another argument had flared up concerning Maureen’s next stop. Waters wanted her hidden at Molly’s. Maureen needed to be with her mother. Maureen knew lying was easiest, letting Waters take her to Molly’s and then just doing what she wanted. But that move felt much too high school and not the way a brave person went about her business. So when Waters insisted, Maureen resorted to the simple truth: unless Waters cuffed her to a drainpipe, Maureen would be headed to her mother’s house anyway, ten minutes after he left Molly’s. Waters relented and took her there.

  Slumping in her patio chair, Maureen blew on her coffee and slurped some up, desperate for the caffeine and sugar to kick in and clear her head. She needed to be sharp, vigilant, as if Sebastian and his minions might come scaling over the fence at any moment like the bad guys in that dumb Christmas movie. No, it wouldn’t be like that. There wouldn’t be anything comic about it, and she had more at stake than putting her eye out. She was grateful Waters had promised that by nightfall he’d have cops in a car stationed at the house. On an afternoon in early December, darkness was only a couple of hours away.

  Maureen had slept well past the morning, heading straight to bed and missing the conversation between Waters and her mother about witness protection. Probably a classic. One for the ages. It had been a long time since a cop had brought Maureen home to her mother. And then it had been for something meaningless, like shoplifting or maybe drinking in the park. This was the first time they’d be hanging around to keep an eye on her. She hated admitting it to herself, but cops outside the house made her feel even better than the gun did.

  “I haven’t sat out here in years,” Amber said. “It’s not too cold in the sun.” She stroked her daughter’s hair, her eyes drifting over the dead lawn, the stained concrete of the small patio. A dented plastic kiddie pool leaned against a neglected shed, the padlock brown with rust. “Couldn’t face the mess, I guess. I had enough to take care of inside, even after you left.”

  Maureen leaned her head into her mother’s hand and stared at the kiddie pool. Black eyeliner tears of dirty rain streaked the laughing green turtles and dancing red starfish. Her father had promised her the real thing, a big blue aboveground pool with a ladder and an electric filter and room to float around on a raft without touching the sides. One like the neighbors had. Well, he’d promised a lot of things. Had he known when he’d made those promises that he had no intention of keeping them? Sure would’ve made them easier to make. Had his bullshit promises started at the altar, Maureen wondered, the day he put the ring on her mother’s finger? Or before that. One thing she’d do, she decided, before she left her mother’s, was drag that wasted kiddie pool to the curb and send it off to the dump.

  She pulled on her woolen watch cap and turned to her mom. “I’m sorry about this trouble, Mom. Thanks for letting me stay.”

  “None of this is your fault,” Amber said. “Not Dennis and not Tanya. I’m sure Detective Waters told you that.”

  “He told me a few things,” Maureen said. “You ever been to the Coney Island Aquarium to see the belugas?”

  “What? No. What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Maureen said. “Never mind.”

  “You should listen to that man. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “Did he tell you,” Maureen asked, “that he’s the cop who delivered the news about Dad?”

  “No, he didn’t. Why would he?” Amber pushed up out of her chair. She hadn’t touched her coffee. “These questions. Are you feeling okay?” Her face drawn, she looked ready for her wine. “Why’d you have to bring that up?”

  Amber walked away from the table and across the yard, over toward the chain-link fence. Along the length of it, towering, aged rosebushes grew gnarled and tangled. She reached out and touched a branch, testing an old thorn with her fingertip. “Seems they won’t give out, no matter how badly I neglect them.”

  “Why’d you never remarry?” Maureen asked. “From what I can remember, you never even dated.”

  Amber shot her a look. “You got nowhere else to go, so suddenly you’re interested in your mother?”

  “Ma, I had to go look at Tanya’s dead body,” Maureen said, “’cause there wasn’t one other person on this island that could do it. And then I had to tell Waters I didn’t know anything about her other than her name and what she looked like. I couldn’t tell him a single thing to help him find either her family or her killer.”

  Amber crossed her arms and cocked out her left hip, her mouth turned down at the corners. That’s me, Maureen thought. That’s me when I get sick of a customer’s bullshit. She swallowed a big mouthful of coffee and pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater.

  As a girl, Maureen had nagged her mom to hang a hummingbird feeder in the rosebushes. Amber had refused, telling Maureen time and again that hummingbirds didn’t live on Staten Island, that the feeder was a waste of time, that the sweet syrup it dispensed only attracted ugly things like the insects that already were too plentiful in the yard: flies, wasps, and the Japanese beetles that feasted on her roses. But Maureen hadn’t surrendered the idea for weeks, her imagination fixated on a parade of buzzing, glimmering jewels, a flock of pocket-sized airborne peacocks flitting around the garden. She wanted to cup one of the tiny birds in her hands, to feel the vibrating engine of its wings pulsing like a heart against the soft skin of her palms. Sometimes, she imagined the hummingbirds as miniature chubby old men in fancy suits with dark jackets and satin vests of every color, drinking and gossiping and laughing.

  Looking over her mother’s yard, Maureen thought now of her fire-escape bird feeder, of the dull procession of starlings and sparrows that formed its most consistent clientele. Those plain birds reminded her not of jewels or peacocks but of bar patrons bunched together over drinks and drafts, their ears attuned to every sound, their nervous yellow eyes glancing over their shoulders for the next threat to their precious perch.

  “I got a life full of strangers,” Maureen said, “people I see all the time and know nothing about. I met Waters three days ago and I know more about his life than I know about yours. Why is that?” She dug her fists into her armpits. “I don’t wanna be strangers, Ma. Not now. Not anymore.”

  “I didn’t date because I had you,” Amber said. “I had to work, go to school, take care of the house. Send you to private school. By myself.” She rubbed her arms, turning away from Maureen and into her memories. She was trying, Maureen could tell, to tell the truth for
once and not play for pity. “And you were a handful. Not that I’m blaming you. I could’ve gone out, I guess, if I wanted to. It never seemed that important. Where was I gonna meet someone, anyway? Everyone at Richmond College was ten years younger than me. So I should go to some bar and chase some other poor woman’s husband? No, thanks. Bars were never good for me.” She wrinkled her nose. “Next thing you know, I’m fifty years old and that’s that. I know this is not the thing to tell your young single daughter, but I don’t feel like I missed a whole lot.”

  “What about now? Your life isn’t over, Mom. You know you’re still cute.”

  Amber plucked dead leaves from her rosebushes. She dropped the leaves from her thin fingers to the lawn without watching them fall. He loves me, Maureen thought, watching. He loves me not. Amber didn’t seem to be keeping count, so Maureen didn’t, either.

  “You get to be my age,” Amber said, “and looks are what matter the least. I’ve got nothing to offer. I’ve got nothing to say, even to you most of the time, like you just told me. It’s okay; it’s the truth.” She walked away from the roses and back to the table. In a huff, she snatched up her mug and tossed her coffee out on the lawn. “Can’t even make decent coffee.” She held out her hand to take away Maureen’s. “And Detective Waters isn’t my type.”

  “Do you even know what your type is anymore?” Maureen clutched her mug to her chest, the ceramic warm against her heart and the palms of her hands. “And my coffee is perfectly fine. Better than the shit I get at work.”

  “Young lady,” Amber scolded. “Always with the sailor mouth.”

  “We’re not in the kitchen. And I wasn’t trying to set you up.”

  “I’m gonna go inside,” Amber said, “and order a pizza. We’re losing the sun. Come in whenever you’re ready.” She looked around the yard. “And yes, you were trying to set me up and I appreciate it. Where were you ten, fifteen years ago?”

  “Busy, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Amber said. “Me, too.”