Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  Empress had never had another man like him. He was a little gruff, maybe, and not much of a talker, but there was passion under all that, and kindness, and she’d loved him so much that when he kissed her, it felt like time stopped. Back when she used to ride that blue ’77 Goldwing with the purple running lights, they used to go riding together along the water, down to Coney Island, side by side, pounding hearts and roaring pipes.

  They’d gone on the Ferris wheel even though he was no good with heights. They’d shared cotton candy, and he’d done his best to win her a big stuffed dog at the skee ball pavilion, to no avail. The first time they had sex, it was underneath that boardwalk, with mobs of feet clomping overhead, a speaker system blaring the Talking Heads (sounding slightly muffled through the wood), the dinging and knocking and clamoring of the game machines providing a soundtrack for their hurried, hungry fucking.

  They’d lain in the sand on their spread-out leather jackets, grinning stupidly at each other, shushing each other’s moaning, and all she could see was his face, smiling at her; all she could feel was his lips on hers, his long hair winding around her fingers, the stubble of his face against hers, and the sweet, frantic thrusts of his cock inside her.

  She could still feel it now, even though he wasn’t around anymore. She could stuff whatever she liked in that empty place in her soul, and she did: bikes, girls, violence, and the peculiar bonds that came along with these things. But none of it was enough. None of it left her feeling like anything more than half a person without him.

  A cold anger rose to take its own turn at trying to fill the space in her. For now, it worked.

  Elsewhere in the city, Lawrence and Ibrahim were having sweaty, vigorous sex against a granite countertop and moaning their declarations of love.

  Elsewhere in the city, Finlay Sparr whispered sleepy sweet things into a telephone to his wife, who’d just finished breakfast in Hong Kong.

  Elsewhere in the city, Lina Schulze and Maggie Burnett sat awake, each alone, sipping a cocktail, taking a mental inventory of all the weapons at their disposal.

  The city didn’t care. It lay serene as they all loved and teemed and scrambled and strove. And then it was morning.

  13

  Gin, Tonic, and Treachery

  Maggie roamed the floor of her Gramercy Park penthouse, still wearing her heels, which made little echoing taps along her hardwood floors. She wandered over to the living room and flicked on her stereo, which faded elegantly to life, softly glowing in the half-light. If you looked at District Attorney Maggie Burnett, you probably wouldn’t peg her as a Radiohead fan, but Kid A was queued up, and the moody opening bars of “Everything in Its Right Place” drifted through the cavernous space, pooling in its corners, washing through it, coloring her musings.

  She’d have liked another of those rose water martinis right now, but she supposed she’d settle for a gin and tonic, which she mixed herself. She was generous with the gin.

  Poor Lily Sparr, she thought, sipping away and gazing out her enormous windows over the East River, watching the boats slip up and down it with their pinprick lights twinkling. Lily had hurried out of that ballroom as if her dress had been on fire. Maggie knew she’d been throwing a lot at her. Maybe it had been too much. She had a moment of questioning her judgment in slipping the number for her flip phone into Lily’s bag, but she dismissed it. It was right. It had to be. She was Graham Sparr’s daughter. Which meant she was smart, committed to the truth, and if she wasn’t aware of her own strength, she soon would be.

  She was worried, though, by what she’d seen going on between Lily Sparr and Lina Schulze on that balcony before she’d swooped in and whisked her out. The deputy mayor had seemed overly familiar with Lily Sparr, and Lily had, for her part, seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with her. Not that anyone on this earth was comfortable with Lina Schulze, except that handsome brother of hers and possibly Tommy. And, frankly, the jury was out on Tommy. Still, she didn’t like it. She hadn’t banked on Lily turning up at that event and disliked the level of interest with which the deputy mayor had been eyeing her. The last thing anyone needed was for Lina to decide she was curious about what the young detective was doing.

  Thom Yorke sang:

  “There are two colours in my head

  What is that you tried to say?”

  She tapped her fingers on the black lacquer of her end table for a few moments. And then she reached into her purse and pulled out the plastic flip phone. Barstow answered, sounding as he always did, like he was drinking a hot toddy and getting ready to give himself a manicure. “My, it’s late. You must be missing me terribly.”

  “As ever,” she answered dispassionately. “Do you remember the thing we discussed the last time we spoke?”

  “I could hardly forget, darling.”

  “Well, I wonder if you could send that package to that friend we like to sometimes send packages to?”

  A pause. “Of course. Shall I give him any particular instructions?”

  “I hardly think you’ll need to. I can’t imagine him being shy about it.” She flipped the phone shut.

  There, she thought with a little smirk. If there was any inkling in Lina’s head right now about taking any interest in Lily Sparr, she’d be distracted soon enough.

  “Sorry, Tommy,” she sighed to herself. He really wasn't a bad guy. But this really wasn't about him.

  It was too late tonight to have it hit tomorrow, but on Monday morning, the bottom half of the front page of the Borough Record would have a mugshot of a handsome young man, with the headline, “León Brother Arrested in Newark for Marijuana Possession.”

  The byline read, “Kyle Klotzman.”

  14

  Detective Sparr Un-closes the Case

  Lily woke up with Miri’s arms around her. She woke up a little more and realized that her feet and ankles were sticking out from the blanket with the air conditioning blasting on them. She woke up a little more and heard Felix’s footsteps bounding across the living room toward the open bedroom door. He was smelling exposed ankles. She kicked the blanket back over her feet, muttering, “Oh, no, you don’t.”

  Now that she was away from the moment and the panic that the whole thing had induced, her mind was kind enough to begin tossing up bits of remembered words that Maggie Burnett had said to her last night. “…you probably have a lot of questions…” “…if you do look into it, you have to be careful…” “…you absolutely can’t tell anyone what you’re doing…” “…If you do reach out to me before you have something solid, you must be completely discreet.”

  She rolled out of bed and shuffled out into the kitchen, leaving Miri snoring in bed. She plucked her little evening bag from the countertop and found a matchbook with a cell phone number jotted on it. She hadn’t even noticed Maggie slipping that into her bag.

  And Lily realized: it was her; it had to be. The D.A. had somehow engineered her move to Midtown South. Maggie fully expected her to start investigating her father’s death, under the radar. It was why she had put her there. It was the only thing that made sense. But her motives were a mystery.

  It was supposed to be her day off, but Lily decided, after she and Miri had had some breakfast and some of Miri’s high-octane coffee, that she was going to go down to the precinct and see if she could figure out what it was Maggie was expecting her to find.

  Chernov was around when she got there, so she mentioned to him that she’d found this trend with the priors on all the Midtown victims, and floated the idea that it might be some kind of vigilante action. He grudgingly admitted that it was an interesting possibility and agreed it was a line of inquiry worth pursuing.

  She found the list sitting in a folder on Ray’s desk, so she started researching the ones with priors. Sure enough, most of them had gone to trial. All of them had walked.

  She set aside of the names of the six without priors and tried to figure out where to go next with this. It was so odd. The whole thing seemed to sprout up out of nowh
ere about three months ago in midtown, and she wondered whether it was going on in other precincts, other boroughs. Did it start here? Or did it start elsewhere and move here?

  Chernov seemed annoyed when she asked him for a computer she could log onto, but he sat her at Ray’s desk and gave her a temp password. She logged into LexisNexis (she still had SparrMedia’s login credentials) and started combing all of the local news articles for all five boroughs, looking for any reports of crimes involving multiple perps on motorcycles. There seemed to be a smattering here and there since time immemorial, but there was a cluster that started in Brooklyn around six months ago, mostly in the Sunset Park and Flatbush neighborhoods.

  Those weren’t assault, though; they were just vandalism, breaking and entering, destruction of property, that kind of thing. When she asked Chernov what he thought about a possible connection, he was less impressed, but told her she was welcome to reach out to the precincts involved to see if their reports had anything to offer. She left a few messages with a few people who were probably not going to be around on a Sunday, and then got up and tried to act nonchalant as she pulled up the files for her father’s death.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look at the photographs of her father, not yet. Her mother was the one who had identified the body. She decided instead to work backwards and look at the reports on the arrest attempt of the alleged perp, a young bike messenger from the Bronx. There was photography of his body, the torso riddled with bullet wounds, wearing skinny jeans, sneakers, and a hooded sweatshirt. The close-up of his face revealed him to be shockingly young. He looked sixteen at most. She shook her head sadly.

  The police had told her family at the time that they believed he’d killed her father in a mugging attempt gone wrong, and he’d been shot resisting arrest a few days later. So, she pulled his priors. Indeed, there was a string of them. Mugging, petty theft, armed robbery, possession of marijuana, from the time he was about fourteen. But no assault record, and there appeared to be no casualties or injuries in any of his crimes. The kid was troubled, clearly, and poor, but not violent. She had trouble believing that her dad would have tried to do anything but give up his wallet if a mugger approached him, so it wasn’t clear how it could have gone the way it did.

  She read through the reports written by the officers who attempted to arrest him. All four reports seemed hastily written and skipped around a bit, something that she’d seen many times in other cops’ writing and always got frustrated with. Officers Franks and Dooley’s in particular were frustratingly hard to follow. Each officer recorded having fired between three and five shots. At the most, she calculated, twenty shots. The pictures looked like easily twice that many.

  After some poking around, she turned up his mother’s name and phone number. She slipped downstairs into the street, took out her cell, and dialed.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice answered.

  “Mrs. Hartwell?”

  “Who’s that?” She sounded elderly, but sharp.

  “This is Detective Sparr with Midtown South. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your son, Lamont.”

  “I ain’t talking to anybody on the phone,” she replied harshly. “I ain’t saying shit unless I see a face and a badge with a number.”

  “Will you be home in an hour?”

  An awkward pause. “What the hell do you want to talk about anyhow? You people already closed the case and then hung him up in the papers. He went to his grave a damn murderer; what more do you people want?”

  “I want the truth, Mrs. Hartwell. I … I’m not sure Lamont did what the department says he did. I want to talk to you about what you saw.”

  A long silence.

  “Mrs. Hartwell?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  “So, will you be home in an hour?” Lily pursued.

  “Yeah, I’ll be here. This better not be some kind of bullshit.”

  15

  So Much Blood

  “It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.”

  –Mahatma Gandhi

  Ainsley had gotten suspended once from tournament fights because she got a little carried away and kept hitting an opponent after they called time. But what she and her friends had done to Evan Bisset was another level entirely. The group found their way back to the club, and Ainsley somehow stumbled back to the bathroom, where she shut the door, crumpled onto the floor and started vomiting.

  She kept seeing his face, more bruise than flesh, and the spray of teeth and blood that shot out of his mouth, and the sickening way his eyes rolled back into his head when Khady struck it with the pipe and knocked him unconscious. What if they’d killed him? She was filled with panic. She knew he deserved what he’d gotten, but leaving his broken body on the hood of his car left her feeling, well…sick. Smashing windows was one thing. She wasn’t sure she was ready to do things like this on a regular basis.

  After a few moments, Khady knocked on the door. “Ainsley?”

  “I’m all right,” Ainsley groaned.

  Khady wasn’t buying it. She opened the door. She walked over, flushed the toilet, and then wet a paper towel, knelt down next Ainsley, and started cleaning the sweat and puke off of Ainsley’s face, calmly, as if she did this for her every day. She stroked Ainsley’s hair and kissed her shoulder. “You’re not all right. This was bigger than you thought it would be.”

  Ainsley nodded.

  “Empress said she suspected this would give you trouble,” she sighed, her voice so tender. “That it would be too abstract for you to feel comfortable.”

  Ainsley stiffened. “She said that to you?”

  Khady gave her a faint, gentle smile. “Yeah. And I guess she was right.”

  Ainsley huffed.

  “So she’s letting me pick the next one.”

  “What?”

  Khady sighed heavily. “Let’s go sit up on the roof.”

  They climbed the ladder up to the roof hatch and found a spot that wasn’t covered with broken glass, shards of metal, and other dangerous looking junk that didn’t seem like it ought to be on a roof. There were few stars in the city, even out here in the far reaches of Brooklyn where there were no skyscrapers and the buildings hunkered low against the sky. But the moon hung large inbetween the buildings just now, if you stared straight down the block.

  “My brother has resurfaced,” Khady said finally, when they’d settled into a spot.

  “There’s a lot you haven’t told me about him.” Ainsley didn’t know why, but she didn’t like the way this conversation was starting.

  “Yes. There’s a lot I haven’t told you about me, too. Until now, only Aatifah knew everything about me. But now you’re going to know, too. This is going to be a lot,” Khady warned, and her face was as serious as Ainsley had ever seen it. Her white-blonde hair was down, falling in tight little waves over her shoulders and little curly wisps blowing around her face in the mild spring breezes.

  Ainsley shrugged. “I’m ready.”

  Khady took a deep breath.

  “My brother Vaiteh and I came here when I was ten, as you know, after my parents died, as you also know. It was a car bomb. I know from the news here, you must think that bombings and things are so commonplace, but it really was shocking. My parents were scientists at Al Najah University; we lived in a quiet, safe neighborhood, and we had a nice life.

  “We went out to dinner sometimes, and on warm days, the four of us would go swimming in this pool at an abandoned amusement park all the time, underneath the shadow of this giant, defunct Ferris wheel, and an entire passenger jet up on stilts you could climb on. I know it sounds weird, and if I could ever show you pictures, I guess it was. They had to shut the amusement park down because of military activity many years ago, but people still went there, and turned some part of it into a swimming pool.

  “Anyway, I always lived in the shadow of sadness, I guess, but I never knew it until they d
ied. My brother said it was Mossad that did it, but I never knew why they would. My parents were just scientists. They weren’t making weapons or bombs or anything like that. Maybe it was meant for someone else.

  “Anyway, Vai decided we should come here. He was enough older than me that he could be my legal guardian when we came to the States. We moved to Brooklyn, he found a job, we found a mosque and a community, and we were about as proper and devout as you could ever imagine. That was when I met Aatifah, and we were best friends from the beginning. When I say I don’t think I would be alive right now without her and her father, I’m not exaggerating. They were both so kind to us, and she especially saved me from myself when things became very bad.

  “Vai and I had a room in a basement, in an old building that was probably not up to code, and we shared one bed. We didn’t have any money and didn’t have room to put another bed even if we could have afforded it. My brother… I guess it’s not so different than it is with these priests, or these other loudmouth Christians; the ones making the most noise about how holy they are are the most screwed up. He, um… He used to touch me sometimes, in bed at night.”

  Ainsley felt like she was going to throw up again.

  Khady continued: “This is not what most Muslim men are, do you understand? It’s as wrong and horrible in my own faith as it is in any other. I knew more men like Aatifah’s father than like my brother. But what could I do? I was ten, my parents were gone, and he was all I had in the world. I made myself be okay with it. The first time I ever had an orgasm in my life, I was ten, and it was with him.”