“Uh huh, yeah.”
“I’m going to get dressed and leave for about an hour because I just can’t be here. When I leave, click on the links in the email and then you’ll understand.”
That was it. She gathered up some clothes, disappeared back into the bathroom, and was gone. As she closed the door behind her, I opened the email and clicked on the first link.
The link was to a video. I pressed the play arrow and knew immediately that Natasha was right: I understood, maybe more than I wanted to. In the video, a man I took to be the now late Robert Tillman and three much younger men took turns raping and sodomizing both Maya Watson and Natasha Romaine individually and in groups. I didn’t recognize the younger men in the video. Maya and Natasha were obviously drugged up, but not unconscious. They were pliable, not cooperative, but not uncooperative either, sort of will-less. Then things got weirder.
The women were dressed in fetish wear-leather and latex-and posed in several positions with each other, sometimes with sex toy props. A lot of it seemed totally staged, but in some of the footage, a third woman joined in. She was thin and muscular, clad in a black latex bustier, super high-heeled black stilettos, and a black latex mask. She wasn’t drugged or, if she was, it was a very different drug cocktail than Maya and Natasha had been fed because this woman didn’t seem to need any posing or prompting. She was active, enthusiastic, and none of what she did seemed forced or involuntary. Some of the things she did to Maya and Natasha were very disturbing and had probably been very painful for them.
The second link was to another video featuring much of the same footage, but it had been professionally edited. No longer did the things that had seemed so obviously staged seemed staged. A cheesy synthesized soundtrack played in the background. The sort of low moans, probably from pain and bewilderment, that Maya and Natasha had emitted during the nightmare, had been enhanced so that the women sounded like they loved what was going on and couldn’t get enough. Gaudy pink lettering was superimposed over the video to make it look like an advertisement for Ebony and Ivory Escort Service. Numbers flashed up on the screen and a disembodied voice promised that there wasn’t anything Ebony and Ivory wouldn’t do to make their clients happy. The footage that went along with that particular promise featured a montage of the most disturbing scenes from the earlier video.
The third link was to another video and, in some ways, the most chilling of all. In it, a man’s hand went through both women’s bags and clothing pockets one item at a time. An unusual amount of time was spent on shots of a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an address book, and two sets of keys. I clicked off, but forwarded a copy of the email with the links to my computer.
Okay, I thought, I understood a lot of it. Robert Tillman had drugged Maya and Natasha at the bar, gotten them back to a location where things were set to go, and probably kept feeding both women drugged drinks until he was done with them. And it was no wonder the women were willing to pay their rapist to keep that video footage away from the public. In this day and age, once video is out there, it is out there forever. Even if your parents or fiance would believe your story about being drugged and raped, there might always be some level of doubt. But the fact was, Robert Tillman was dead and the other guys in the video didn’t strike me as criminal masterminds. They seemed more like three frat boy jocks who were promised a good time and were just drunk enough not to give a shit about at whose expense that good time came. So what was Natasha still so scared of and why couldn’t either Maya or Natasha breathe a sigh of relief after Tillman’s death?
Then, as I was staring at the line on Natasha’s email account, two things hit me so hard I was almost breathless. The date of this email was last week. Natasha certainly and probably Maya had continued to be blackmailed four months after Robert Tillman’s death. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if it really was the termination letter that pushed Maya over the edge and into eternal sleep. One piece of the puzzle was clear enough: Tillman hadn’t returned from the dead. He had left behind a very live partner. Of course he had a partner. How else had he managed to get both women to where the footage was shot? How had he managed to round up the frat boys and run the camera? Tino Escobar! No wonder he took off when I went to talk to him at Kid Charlemagne’s. It made perfect sense. He and Tillman worked together in both places. Convenient, huh?
The other thing that struck me was that there was no money demand anywhere in the email or buried in the video that I could see. I forced myself to watch them again, looking for something I might have missed. I hadn’t missed anything.
I think Natasha half-hoped I would be gone when she returned, but only half-hoped. The other half hoped I could make the blackmail finally go away. I told her that I thought I could, that she would need to trust me, and do as I asked, no matter what I asked. It couldn’t have been easy for her to agree, but she did just the same.
“I don’t know your name,” she said, as I headed for the door.
I took one of my ancient cards out of my wallet and wrote down my cell number.
“Moses,” she whispered to herself and then, looking up at me, “Why are you doing this?”
I opened up my mouth to give her a quick, meaningless answer, but held my tongue. This wasn’t as simple a question as it seemed. I thought about it for a moment. Why was I doing this? Was it because of the history between Carmella and me or because I was sick and working the case was a form of denial? Was it as simple as my curiosity or as complicated as my guilt? Was I trying to make up for the hurt and damage I’d done, to put one more check in the good column before I died? Or was it just because it was the right thing to do?
“I’m not sure,” I said at last. “I’m really not sure. Does it matter?”
“No. I just want it to be over.”
I was careful not to mention Tino Escobar. I didn’t want her getting more freaked out than she already was. Besides, I needed more proof than convenience and coincidence to connect him to this. I took a long last look at Natasha before leaving. Suddenly, she didn’t seem quite so fragile. To see that almost made it worth it.
I thanked the doorman on the way out. He nodded goodbye, not quite sure what to make of me. That made two of us. I was a sixty-something eighteen-year-old who didn’t know himself any better now than he did when he really was eighteen. Sometimes I fooled myself that I knew more about my nature and the nature of things than I did, but I guess what I actually understood was how little I understood. People always say that when you are near the end, you get religion. Not me. The louder I heard the coffin lid closing, I believed less and less. What I wanted was to know things before I died, to know things for sure. Maybe that’s what I should have said to Natasha, that I wanted to know things, something, anything for sure before the metastatic golf ball in my belly ate me alive, that I was working the case because I was tired of questions and wanted answers.
I got some when I called Fuqua on the way to my car, though not exactly the kind of answers that would make dying much easier.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Your instincts were right about Robert Tillman.”
“How so?”
“Robert Tillman was an alias. His real name was Roland Sykes. He was born in Vestel, New York, July 22, 1972. And he was not a very nice fellow. When he died, the city had no luck in contacting his next of kin through the usual methods. In most such cases, the city would have kept him on ice for a respectable amount of time and, if his body remained unclaimed, they would have stuck him in Potter’s Field. But this was too high profile for that, so they ran his prints et voila, Roland Sykes! A pity that poor Roland had a criminal record.”
“When you say he wasn’t a very nice fellow, how do you mean?”
“Most of his arrests and convictions were for forging checks, running scams on old women, even extortion. But he was also convicted of statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old girl. It was a class E felony and he did the full four-year bid. Got out two years ago. He kept up with his reporting responsibilities for a year and then disappeared from the radar screen.”
“So this was the city’s hold card. If any of his real family members came forward to sue, the city would play hardball. It would be tough to find even a civil jury or judge sympathetic to the family of a convicted sex offender. No wonder everyone was so tight-lipped about it. The city just wanted it to all go away and be forgotten. No harm, no foul.”
“Just so. Now we both know why my superiors were so adamant about you not pursuing Jorge Delgado as a suspect. The publicity would have been impossible to contain. You are aware, I hope, it wasn’t easy for me to discover these things, Moe. I had to call in many favors and I have not been a detective long enough to have many favors to ask.”
“I don’t suppose my gratitude will be enough to satisfy you.”
