I waited for the door to close. “Liar.”
…
Pam’s being there was good for me on more than one level. I’d discussed aspects of the case with Fuqua, Nicky Roussis, Brian Doyle, and Carmella. What I hadn’t done was discuss the case globally or unfettered and not doing so hadn’t served me well. Pam was the perfect person to discuss it with: she was a top-notch investigator so she could see things from my perspective, but with the added advantages of emotional and geographic distance from the case. Sure, she had heard of the case, everybody had, it was big news. Still, she didn’t have a horse in the race.
Okay, given my history with Carmella, I didn’t think Pam could be completely objective, but that was fine. Objectivity is bullshit anyway. It’s like calculating pi to the last digit. Humans are incapable of it. We all come to the dance, any dance, with too much baggage, conscious and unconscious. We judge. We prejudge. It’s what we do. It’s how we survive. I felt I was close to finally getting some answers, but close is sometimes more frustrating than far away because I didn’t know how close or where to look next.
“There are days it feels like two or three cases, not one,” I said, pretending to drink my wine. “There’s Tillman dying at the High Line Bistro as Alta and Maya watch. There’s Alta’s murder and then there’s all the other stuff.”
“The other stuff?”
“Maya Watson’s silence. Delgado trying to hire someone to hurt Alta. Someone trying to run me off the road. Fuqua warning me off Delgado. The deputy mayor being so sure Tillman’s family won’t sue and this new thing about Tillman and the women at Kid Charlemagne’s. And why did Escobar take off on me like that? There’s a lot going on here, Pam. I’m close to something, but I’m confused.”
She didn’t speak, not right away. Instead she sat there for a minute, sipping more wine, not looking at me, not looking at anything at all.
“Break it up,” she said. “Break it up.”
“Break what up?”
“You said this feels like this is more than one case. Then fine, treat it like more than one case. Instead of trying to squeeze everything into a box that seems too small, break it down into smaller bits. Get the easy answers first like when you were a kid taking a hard test. Get the easy answers, so you can build and move onto the hard questions.”
“Okay, I get the idea, but how do you mean?”
“Look, re-ask yourself some questions you have about the case and find those answers one at a time. When you have enough individual answers, you’ll probably understand the whole case. Have you tried that yet?”
“Re-asking myself individual questions? No.”
“Then start asking and while you’re asking, I’ll be talking to the women from Kid Charlemagne’s.”
“Hey, wait a-”
“No, I’m not waiting. I’m not blind, Moe. I can see the toll this is taking on you even if you don’t. I don’t like it, but I know you. Carmella asked you to stop, but you won’t stop. You won’t stop because it’s not in you to stop.”
“Stopping’s not an option.”
“I didn’t think so, but that’s for tomorrow. For now, I want to go to bed.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
It was something that Maya Watson had said about the type of women Alta was attracted to- She liked military types, younger chicks, white girls mostly — and about a name on a witness statement I’d read over a week ago. It was also about Pam’s advice to break the case down into smaller pieces and to build from there. I think the minute Pam had said it, my mind began focusing on the Grotto and one of the first questions I’d asked myself about the case: What was Alta, who lived on the other side of Brooklyn from the Grotto, doing there in the first place? And when I woke up in the morning, I knew the answer.
Detective Fuqua was happy to humor me as long as I wasn’t still on my Jorge Delgado kick. The latest saint of New York was getting buried today, anyway. Fuqua was probably thrilled to babysit me to make sure I couldn’t do something outrageous like interrupting the funeral mass with wild accusations of Delgado’s complicity in the murder of Alta Conseco. The brass had made me Fuqua’s responsibility and my acting out would sabotage his career. No, that just wouldn’t do, not for someone with Fuqua’s level of ambition. That’s why he had done as I asked and arranged the meeting without asking any questions.
We were stopped at the gate to Fort Hamilton by a sentry who looked barely old enough to shave, let alone vote, but clearly old enough to die. One of the first lessons I learned on the job was that nobody, nobody ever, was too young to die. Fuqua gave our names, flashed his shield, and told the sentry we had an appointment with Colonel Madsen.
“That building there, gentlemen,” the sentry said, pointing the way.
Fort Hamilton dated back to the 1800s and its cannons had once fired on and damaged a British troop carrier during the Revolution. The fort had guarded the Brooklyn side of the Narrows at the mouth of New York Harbor. These days, it was darkened by the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but it was still a lovely old fort.
Colonel Madsen was a gaunt gray man with serious blue eyes and a cool manner. Yes, he had arranged for us to meet privately with Lieutenant Winston. He said he was pleased to do it, but really seemed about as pleased as a plump farm turkey the afternoon before Thanksgiving. He asked again why we were there. When Detective Fuqua explained it was to go over a statement the lieutenant had given in relation to a homicide investigation, Madsen looked even less pleased than before. He felt compelled to remind us that we were on a U.S. Army base and were governed by its rules and not ours. He showed us to a nondescript room in the same building and told us to wait. Told us, not asked us.
There was a smart rap at the door and then it opened. The woman who strode into the room transcended her unflattering Army greens. With some makeup, she might well have been a former beauty queen or head cheerleader or model. I didn’t know anyone, man or woman, who wouldn’t’ve been even a little taken with her, if not out of lust then out of envy. Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston was an athletic five foot nine with legs up to here. Her jawline was softly angular and her cheekbones impossibly high. She had a pert nose, bobbed and bouncy strawberry blond hair, and violet eyes. They were the kind of eyes you could not help stare at or into.
We stood to greet her. I wanted Fuqua to do all the talking, at least to begin with. I just nodded, blank- faced, when the detective pointed to me and introduced me as his “colleague” Moses Prager. The lieutenant and Fuqua had met once before, on the night Alta was murdered. He had taken her statement, so she wasn’t exactly unnerved by his request to speak with her again. That was my job, to unnerve her a little bit.
“Gentlemen,” she said, her voice and demeanor pleasant enough but professional. “What is it I can do for you?” Her accent was deep south, Mississippi maybe or Alabama.
We waited for her to be seated before we sat. The table in the room and the chairs around the table were as nondescript as the room itself.
“Some things have come to light about the homicide of Alta Conseco, the woman who died at the Gelato Grotto on the night of…” Fuqua made a show of thumbing through his file.
“I recall,” she said. Her expression remained unchanged, but something changed at the corners of her eyes. “What is it you think I can do for you, Detective Fuqua? I told you all I could on the evening in question.”
“I’m aware of that, Lieutenant Winston, but there are times that, with some prodding, people can recall details they may have left out or remember after the fact.”
“My daddy says that people who remember things long after they happen aren’t very dependable witnesses. That most of the time their minds are just embellishing or trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense to begin with.”
“Your father is a wise man,” Fuqua said. “What does he do for a career? An attorney perhaps?”
She actually giggled. It made her look very young. “Oh my, no, he hates lawyers. Daddy is a police detective
