“One, the Hispanic woman-”
“Alta Conseco.”
“Yes. She was angry, but with someone or something, not at her partner. You could see the fire in her. Her face was contorted and her gestures were violent and purposeful.”
“And what about Maya Watson, the partner?”
“A beautiful woman,” he said almost wistfully as he remembered her face.
“She is, I agree.”
“She looked frightened, very frightened and hesitant, almost nauseous really. Maybe she was because she basically headed right for the restrooms. Her partner, Miss Conseco, she was making a straight line for the kitchen.”
This was why you couldn’t just read written statements and take them as being representative of what had actually happened. In his original statement to the police, Mr. Handwerker, probably somewhat stunned, hadn’t described things in quite this way. He’d stated that the two EMTs were agitated, yes, but hadn’t made the finer distinctions he was making for me now, nor had he mentioned that Alta and Maya were in fact headed to different places when they entered the bistro. I pointed that out to him.
“I was still out of sorts and a little bit in shock, I suppose, when I gave my statement,” he said, confirming my impression. “It was all very tumultuous. Things happened so quickly.”
“I understand. So, Miss Conseco was headed to the kitchen and Miss Watson to the restrooms?”
“Exactly.”
“Could you hear any of their conversation?”
“Not really. I was seated facing the door, midway between the bar and the entrance. It was crowded and noisy in there. I could barely hear my client across the table, but there was a definite vibe between them.”
“A vibe?”
“I can’t explain it. It’s just something I picked up on. That’s all.”
I could see he wasn’t going to say more about that and I moved on. We talked through the sequence of events, with estimates of how much time elapsed between the two EMTs entering the restaurant and Chef Liu emerging from the kitchen, screaming for help.
“I wouldn’t have wanted either of those women treating me,” Handwerker said in conclusion. “You could see how totally out of it they were. If it had been anything else other than a stroke, that poor man would have been better served to wait until reinforcements arrived. Both women were shaking and the beautiful one was completely distraught.”
I thanked him for his time and told him I might be back in touch.
“As I stated before, I don’t wish to crucify those women.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Handwerker. I’m not certain the Tillman family will pursue this. Besides, one of the two EMTs is already dead.”
“I heard. Terrible.”
“Well,” I said, “at least she can’t be hurt by any of this.”
“Maybe not her, but her family can suffer and there’s the other woman.”
“Of course. If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Handwerker, you’re the first person I’ve run into in this whole investigation who’s had an ounce of sympathy for the EMTs.”
“Those other people weren’t there that day. They didn’t see the distress on those women’s faces. Something was dreadfully wrong there.”
I thanked him again and hopped back on the elevator. It was nice to know there were still some people in the world like Henry Handwerker. If there was any redemption to be found in this universe, it lived in the hearts of people like him.
The trouble with eyewitnesses was that they could all see the same exact things, but see them differently. Such was the case with what happened at the High Line Bistro that day last March. By four-thirty in the afternoon, I’d interviewed four other witnesses beside Henry Handwerker who’d given statements to the police about the circumstances that day and the only thing they all agreed on was that the two EMTs refused to treat Tillman. Otherwise, it was difficult to tell that they had actually witnessed a common event. One woman didn’t notice the two EMTs were agitated. “Agitated?” she said when I suggested it. “No, they seemed fine.” Another, younger woman who was then working at an exclusive jewelry boutique on Gansevoort Street and was taking her lunch at the bistro said that both Alta and Maya were headed to the restrooms. “The kitchen? No. They were definitely walking toward the restrooms. I’d swear to it.” She did say the two EMTs were bickering, but not about anything serious. “A girl thing,” she said as if that explained it all.
The older of the two men I spoke with swore Alta and Maya came in separately and resisted any suggestion they were arguing. The younger man barely noticed Alta. “That tall EMT was so hot and, man, she was amazing in that uniform.”
One of the problems with how the human brain functions is its need for a coherent narrative. It perceives events and then builds a story around them, it edits and embellishes, it ascribes motives when none are obvious. The mood, age, and sex of the witness can affect the perceptions of events and, to an even greater extent, the narrative woven out of those events. Although I had no palpable reason to accept Henry Handwerker’s version of what had transpired, I chose to trust his version instead of the others. I don’t know, maybe it was his sense of detail. Maybe it was his sense of style. Maybe it was that he displayed compassion. No matter, because there was one inescapable truth here: Alta and Maya had refused to treat a dying man and no amount of parsing or pretzel twisting of the facts was going to change that.
SIXTEEN
Nick was late, so I sipped at a glass of Brooklyn Lager and munched on olives at the bar. The Kythira Cafe on 5th Avenue in Park Slope, was, as Nick described it, the crown jewel of his family’s business. The menu featured updated and upscale versions of classic Mediterranean dishes. The interior decor was dark and moody and about as far away from the stereotypical white and blue stucco walls as you could get. There were no Ouzo or retsina bottles, no Greek flags, no bad murals of whitewashed houses on cliffs above the blue Mediterranean, no travel posters of Mykonos, Crete, or the Parthenon.
The bartender, a scruffy young hipster, was about as Greek as me and as invested in his work as a member of a prison road crew. His generation’s attitude toward their jobs was one of the things about the new world I had trouble getting adjusted to. I grew up believing in doing the best you could do at any job, even if you hated it. Aaron and I had several employees, including Klaus and Kosta, who had worked for us for over thirty years and prospered because of it. Now such dedication was considered old hat or worse, foolish. And when I thought about it, their attitude made sense. In today’s economy, job security and company loyalty were bullshit. Maybe they always had been.
I checked my watch-7:23-and surveyed the restaurant. For the second time that day, I was the lone patron at a restaurant bar. A guy could get a complex. There were about thirty tables and about eighty seats in the Kythira. Currently, the majority of them were as in demand as the barstools. In most places, this many empty seats at dinnertime would be cause for hanging a “Going Out Of Business” sign in the window or for the owner to hang himself in the window, but Park Slope was an alien part of Brooklyn, very different from the neighborhoods I grew up in and lived in. The Kythira probably had a late-arriving crowd and things got going when a man my age was going to bed. What did I know about Park Slope, anyway? Park Slope was a satellite of Manhattan, populated mostly by people who were transplanted Brooklynites, not natives. Funny, when I was growing up, people seemed as desperate to get out of Brooklyn as East Berlin. Now there was no East Berlin and this part of Brooklyn was the hot place to live. Go figure.
“Always this busy?” I asked the bartender to kill some time and to make sure he wasn’t actually in a coma.
“This time of night, yup.”
“Things pick up later?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but I saw his focus shift to over my right shoulder. “Hey, Mr. Roussis,” he
