are downstairs, Johnny. They want to come up.”
27
Pitt Street runs through the heart of the Lower East Side, several miles south of where my brother lives, and usually a world awaythough not that Tuesday morning. That morning, David’s world had collapsed to the size of the narrow, windowless room where we sat and waited and watched a clock tick to ten. The Seventh Precinct station house is a new building, but the beige walls around us seemed a hundred years old, and the thick air older still. We were on one side of a metal table, Mike and I, and David in between. He was silent and motionless, and he had the blasted look of a man who’s recently survived a terrible storm. Except the storm was just beginning, and survival was very much an open question.
In David’s apartment, the dance had been all cordiality and caution, everyone polite and all the threats implicit. The two detectives sent to fetch him, Russo and Conlon, were large and tired-looking and almost bored with the proceedings. They’d been happy to wait until Mike and I arrived before talking to David, and they’d never uttered the word “arrest” or “suspect,” never even hinted at them. They kept their explanations of why they’d come vague- something about help with an investigation, a Jane Doe they’d been trying to identify for over a week- and they acted as if a summons to a police station was an unremarkable thing, a bureaucratic nuisance no more important than an expired dog license.
It was only when Mike tested the waters of resistance, suggesting that David appear tomorrow instead, that they’d stirred. And then, without a word spoken- with only glances, furrowed brows, small coughs, and the shifting of feet- David’s situation was plain. We’ve come, so early in the morning, for you. And so we went.
In the station house, the politesse thinned further, and in the way cops do- in the way that I used to do- they made us wait. Because waiting works. Worry turns into paranoid fantasy and a case of the sweats, stomach cramps turn into an urgent need to crap, and pretty soon out bursts full-blown terror. It was working on David- I could see it in the pallor and in the moist sheen on his forehead, and I could hear it in the rumblings of his gut- and nothing Mike or I said seemed to help. I wasn’t sure how much was even getting through.
Mike squeezed David’s shoulder and smiled, relaxed, imperturbable, and entirely confident. “We’re going home soon,” he said. I was hoping he was right when the door opened and a new cast of characters walked in. There were three of them, a man and two women.
The detectives were Leo McCue and Tina Vines, and they made an odd couple. McCue was about fifty and medium height, with a jutting belly and sagging smudges beneath his spaniel eyes. His mustache, like his hair, was bulky and mostly gray, and his fingers were thick and ragged-nailed. Vines was thirty, tall and precise and with the concave cheeks and restless look of an exercise junkie. Her blond hair was cut short, and her blue eyes were quick and unconvinced of anything. She wore her sleeves rolled, and there was a lot of muscle definition in her forearms.
The ADA was Rita Flores. She was small and rounded and forty, with glossy black hair cut to her shoulders, a full, pretty face, and nearly black eyes. Her suit was blue and careful, her shoes were flat, and it was easy to imagine the kindergarten art on her office wall, and the minivan in her garage- easy to cast her as the reliable car- pooler or the genial soccer mom. Which would have been a bad mistake. She introduced herself and I saw Mike’s jaw tighten.
McCue and Vines sat across from us, and Rita Flores took a chair near the door. Vines had a laptop, and she switched it on. McCue smiled and made some noises about everything being informal and thanks for coming down. No one believed a word of it. Vines tapped away at something, and Flores stared at David. McCue went on.
“The autopsy says that, besides being shot in the face, our Jane Doe was beat up pretty bad before she died- probably a few days before, maybe a little longer. And then she was in the water five days so, all in all, she was a mess.” He paused to look at us, his gaze lingering on David. Then he continued.
“We pulled prints from her apartment and matched them to Jane Doe’s. We pulled DNA too- from a hairbrush- and we’re pretty sure that’ll confirm the print match. So we know our Jane is Holly Cade.” He paused again, waiting for a question, daring us to ask. Jane Doe? Holly who?
Mike smiled affably and offered a different query. “Then you don’t need Mr. March’s help with identification?”
McCue smiled back. “Not with that, but with a few other things,” he said, and he looked at Vines.
“Can you tell us something about this?” Vines asked, and she turned the laptop screen toward us and tapped a key. The laptop whirred and a video started playing, dim, but not too dim to see. David and Holly, in the hotel room and with no digital masking. “We hoped you could confirm that that’s Holly’s pussy you’re eating.”
“Jesus Christ,” David breathed.
Mike put a hand on his arm. “Really, Ms. Flores…” he said.
From across the room, Flores raised her hands in a helpless shrug. These crazy cops. What can you do? The smile on her face was less than sympathetic.
McCue tapped a thick finger on the screen. “You see that, on her leg, near your face? To me, that looks like a happy red cat, but Tina disagrees. Maybe you can resolve it for us, Mr. March: was there a happy cat on that leg, or were you too busy to notice? And while you’re at it, maybe you can explain what your relationship with Holly was- besides the pussy-eating, I mean- and why the fuck you didn’t come forward and identify her for us?”
After which, there were theatrics. Mike was shocked and offended: “deliberately embarrassing”…“unnecessary”…“abusive”…“my client is here voluntarily.” He slapped the table. McCue and Vines played bad cop and worse cop, respectively: “no sense of responsibility”…“something to hide”…“bullshit.” They pointed and sneered, and Rita Flores said little but somehow assumed the mien of Darth Vader. Only David and I were silent- I because I had nothing to say, and David because he was, for the moment, incapable of speech. He stared at the screen and his face was paper white. I reached over and turned the laptop around, away from him. Rita Flores watched me with glittering eyes.
When Mike felt he’d defended his turf sufficiently, he cleared his throat and became all affability and reason again. “As it turned out, detectives, you preempted our call to you by just a few hours. We were waiting for Mr. March- the other Mr. March- to complete his report.”
McCue and Vines spoke together, in a torrent of disbelief, but Flores interrupted them. “By all means, counselor, I’d love to hear what you and the other Mr. March have to say.”
And Mike told the story- of David’s brief and limited relationship with Cassandra, of the phone calls and threats, of his intent to pursue legal action against her if necessary, of him hiring me and me finding Holly, and of reading in the papers about the Williamsburg Mermaid.
“My client was shocked by the news, and upset and frightened tooand the direction of your investigation would seem to bear out his fears. So we elected to wait a few days before contacting the police, and in that time to do what we could to identify other reasonable avenues that an investigation might pursue. As John’s report makes clear, there are several.”
He was good at the telling, better than good, and he made the sequence of events- the reasoning, the decisions, and the actions taken- seem entirely logical, if not inevitable. But despite Mike’s delivery, the story itself remained a tough sell. He knew it, and so did Rita Flores and the cops.
Flores smiled ruefully. “I’ve got to get you in front of my law students, counselor, because that was frigging great. Really, you live up to your reputation. But the sad fact is, after all the magic words, it’s still just a sow’s ear. It’s still Holly Cade blackmailing your client, him hiring a PI- his own brother, no less- to find her, and her turning up dead. It’s still him with motive and opportunity.”
“Are you saying that you consider my client a suspect, Ms. Flores?”
She waved a hand. “This is still just a friendly chat, counselor, and I’m still waiting to hear from your investigator.” There was only a little irony in how she said it. Mike turned to me, and so did everyone else.
“It was a dangerous life,” I said, and I walked them through my investigation, and all that I’d learned about Holly’s anonymous, often extreme, sexual encounters, the secret recordings, the pressure she exerted on her partners, the interrogation sessions, the abusive former boyfriend, the current one who was a violent ex-con, and the possibility that someone had been using her videos for blackmail. I could tell by the glances they exchanged and the notes they took that much of it was news. Rita Flores looked at me again and I felt the weight of her dark
