around, but even in my sixties, I wasn’t easily pushed. In Brooklyn, the rule is, someone pushes you, you don’t just push back, you push back twice as hard. If that doesn’t work, you go for the throat or, sometimes, you aim a little lower. In my neighborhood, you learned to never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring an F-16. But my roughing up the art professor that day wasn’t the half of it. Later that afternoon in Alphabet City, I went to talk to a woman art blogger whose screen name was Michelangelo or was it Leonardo?… I forget. She turned out to be a meth freak, turning five- and ten-buck tricks for rent and drug money. She had been no threat to Sashi. The only child she was a threat to was her own son, who I found dead cold and blue in his crib. I didn’t think I would ever recover from that day. I’m not sure I have.
Now I would go inside, open up the envelope, and start that process all over again. I laughed at myself, pushing in the front door. I laughed because I remembered the romance being a PI once held for me, how I was so hungry to work cases when I first got my license, but romance fades. I knew that love faded. Anyone married for more than a few years knows that lesson. Sometimes it evaporates completely and so abruptly you question whether it was ever there to begin with, but love and romance are different animals. I remembered how desperate I’d been for my gold shield, how getting it had once been more important to me than the fate of the Western world. As I’ve said before, there were several times over the three decades following my forced retirement from the NYPD that the serpent in varied disguises had offered me that apple and I’d turned him away. Each time it was offered, my desperation faded just a little bit more, until my hunger for the apple completely disappeared and the serpent stopped asking. Poor Eve, I thought, if she’d only been slightly more patient.
The first thing I noticed was the invoice. Talk about sticker shock. Doyle wasn’t kidding about charging me for the work. He seemed to have added an eminent death surcharge. He was going to soak me for all he could while I was still breathing. I didn’t mind, really. He had swallowed the cost of plenty of favors he’d done for me in the past and I’d been around long enough to know the bill always comes due one way or the other. Always.
The size of the invoice was about the only surprise in the pile of paperwork. Just as I had predicted and just as Brian Doyle had said, most of the more violent hate mail was from members of New York’s Bravest: some retired, most not. And the background checks Doyle and Devo had done were very helpful. With these guys’ ages, addresses, contact info, police records, if any, and the public record aspects of their service records there in front of me, I would be able to eliminate a lot of the legwork. I would be able to generate a list of more and less likely suspects without having to interview each and every one of these schmucks.
First thing I took into account was proximity. Although I supposed someone might have been following Alta Conseco around for weeks just waiting for the right moment to kill her, I didn’t think it was likely. There was something about the violence of the attack, the sloppiness of it-Alta had, after all, managed to make it back to the Grotto before she died-that made it seem like a spur of the moment, impulsive attack. Someone who would have been carefully following her for weeks wouldn’t have risked such public exposure and would have made sure she was dead before abandoning the body. I had no proof or experience to back it up. What the fuck did I know anyway? I hadn’t been a homicide detective. It was just a hunch, but I’d done pretty well following my hunches. So I took out an old road map of New York City and drew concentric circles in inch-wide increments extending out from the Gelato Grotto and carefully plotted the addresses of the hate-mailers.
Just as I finished pressing the point of my red pencil to the map where the last potential suspect lived, a stray thought crossed my mind that quickly turned into something else: a question. What in the hell was Alta Conseco doing at the Grotto in the first place? She lived on the other side of Brooklyn, for chrissakes! Okay, so some people loved their pizza and the homemade gelato was outstanding, but why would Alta travel to the Grotto? Did she have a craving? Did she go there to meet someone? If so, who? Like all good questions, the original suggested a hundred more.
I snapped my red pencil in two. My daughter was getting married soon and three days after that, some surgeon would be cutting out half of my kishkas. I didn’t have time for a hundred more damned questions. I wasn’t sure I had time for one.
TWENTY-ONE
Grunt Work 101.
I began the unpleasantries early, figuring to squeeze as much in as I could in one day. It was a useless approach, but it was something. After my pencil-snapping fit of pique and brief wallow in the woe-is-me shallows, I came up with a plan. Any of the hate-mailers who had a history of violence, either on the job or off, moved to the top of the suspect list. Any with a history of violence against women, went to the top of the first list. And any of the folks on that list who lived within walking or short-driving distance from the Grotto, went straight to the head of the class.
Anthony Marinello batted lead-off. He was a nasty piece of pie. He’d only had about four years on the job, but had been moved around from firehouse to firehouse in his brief and undistinguished career. He was now on desk duty in Queens. Just like with the NYPD, there were legitimate reasons for desk duty: injury, advancing age, frayed nerves, et cetera. There were less than legitimate reasons too. I suspected the latter was the case with Marinello. He was a real nut job, a big mouth who was hated by the people he served with. According to his reviews, he wasn’t much of a fireman either, but he hadn’t yet crossed the line far enough to get fired for cause. He probably had a rabbi-someone more senior on the job with some juice who looked out for him-maybe a family friend or relative. Both the NYPD and FDNY were big enough to eat some of their mistakes or bury them, as it were, behind a desk or in a supply room somewhere, where they collected their paychecks without doing much harm.
Anthony also had had a few run-ins with his destined-to-be ex-wife. The wife hadn’t gotten to the order of protection stage quite yet, but she had filed for divorce. Given the number of times the cops had been called to the house, you didn’t need to be a soothsayer to think Marinello’s arrest was on the near horizon. There was something else Marinello had going for him: his address was on West 6th Street near Avenue U, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Grotto. I walked up the concrete steps to the old brick two-family house and rang the bell.
I hadn’t worked on the lies I would tell to whomever answered the door. I found that the lies always sounded best when I hadn’t rehearsed them. They just seemed more convincing somehow if I heard them at the same time as the party I was telling them to. There was no answer at first, but I didn’t get discouraged. Too late for that. I was already discouraged and besides, it was early. I rang the bell again and this time I heard stirring on the other side of the door.
“Hold your water!” was the shrill order from the woman inside the house.
What a quaint expression, that. Most men my age had a little trouble in that area and didn’t like being reminded of it. Between her voice and choice of words, I already wasn’t particularly fond of the woman on the other side of the door. Things went downhill from there.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling the door back. “What?”
Dressed in a garish, red satin robe, she was as hard looking as her voice was shrill. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of her frowning mouth. She smelled like an ashtray rinsed out in vanilla bathroom spray. I carried various sorts of business cards with me: one of the tricks of the trade. From one interview to the next, I never knew who I was going to need to be. I had cards I’d collected from insurance salesmen, doctors, rabbis, transport executives, lawyers-lots of lawyers-collision shop owners, plumbers, and a hundred other professions. I kept it simple and the lies to a minimum by handing her one of my own old cards from Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc.
“Mrs. Marinello?”
“Not for too much longer, I hope.”
“Your lawyer sent me,” I said, yawning with false disinterest.
Mrs. Marinello stared at the card and I at her. She was probably thirty, but looked forty: too much sun and too many Marlboros. She had been pretty once, probably in high school. Her body was still intact and she knew it, but even that seemed to have some sharp edges. Her blond hair didn’t match her coloring and it had been teased and hair-sprayed to within an inch of its life.
“What did the lawyer send you for?” she asked, finally looking up at me.
