He laughed. “It will be a fine starting point.”
“We’re not done quite yet,” I said. “Find out who his cellmates were during his last few times inside. My guess is you’re gonna run across the name Tino Escobar somewhere in there. See if Tino or any of them worked with video equipment.”
He didn’t ask why. I liked that. I enjoy most those moments early in any relationship when you know the other person has begun to trust your judgment. So it was with Fuqua. His ambition made it impossible for me to trust him quite so much as he seemed willing to trust me.
FORTY-TWO
Brian Doyle was about the last person I expected to hear from, but that’s life, isn’t it? It’s not the things we expect that makes it both wonderful and impossible to bear. Think how dull it would all be if things went according to plan. Frankly, there were times I could have done with a little more boredom than some of the unexpected and unwelcome surprises I’d been dealing with lately. For instance, I think I might have welcomed my oncologist saying something like, “April Fools!” or “Sorry, Moe, wrong chart.” Those would have worked much better for me than his, “Look at it this way, it’s treatable.” That it-could-always-be-worse kind of rationalization was lost on me. No one had to tell me it could always be worse. I had a lot of firsthand experience in that area.
Mostly, I was surprised to hear from Doyle because he had washed his hands of the whole Jorge Delgado mess. I’d seen Brian in a lot of moods, but I’d only seen him scared a few times in all the years I’d known him. And when he appeared at my condo the other day, he was scared. He tried not to show it, playing up the brawl and how he’d given better than he got. I always admired that about the Irish cops I worked with over the years, their love of a good fight. Jews, even tough Jews, tend to fight as a last resort. For some of the guys I knew, fighting was more like foreplay, just a way to get their blood up, a kind of a pinch to let them know they were still alive. And I was surprised, not so much by Doyle as myself. After learning of the blackmail and of Maya’s suicide, I had more or less turned my attention away from Alta’s murder, the reason I had gotten involved in this in the first place. It was a reminder to me that even at my age, I had no clue of what I was doing or where I was going. Here I was again, stumbling around in the dark.
It was a good thing Brian called me when he did, because if I’d gotten across the Manhattan Bridge and into Brooklyn, I’m not sure I would have gone back. I was tired, very tired, and my head was swimming. I was focused on the blackmail, on Natasha, on the dream of Maya in a room of black flies, on putting an end to it. I was thinking of Pam, of Sarah, of my own guilt over leaving them behind. The last thing I was interested in was the recently interred, New York saint-elect, Jorge Delgado. Besides, I no longer believed for a second he really had anything to do with Alta’s death. He was just another macho schmuck who had acted foolishly and impulsively when he went to Nestor Feliz and Joey Fortuna to have Alta hurt. I’m sure the parents of the little girl he saved wouldn’t have cared if Jorge was an axe murderer. Who knows, maybe it was his own guilt over what he’d done that made him jump in front of that car? I didn’t particularly care.
Doyle was leaning against the fender of a midnight blue Corvette coupe when I pulled onto West 11th Street in the West Village.
“Like it?” Brian asked, gesturing at the ’Vette.
“You must be doing well for yourself these days.”
He winked at me. “I make a nice living for an ex-cop.”
“Not exactly inconspicuous, though.”
“Just like you and Carm taught me, I drive a vintage shitbox when I do surveillance.”
“Nice to know someone listened to me.”
“It was really Carm who taught me,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to feel left out.”
“Fuck you, Doyle. I see your face is healing up. So what are we doing here?”
He didn’t answer directly. “You ever wonder why Delgado wasn’t cleared of Alta’s murder from the get-go and why everybody was so big on warning people off?”
“It crossed my mind, yeah.”
“I mean, all the guy had to do was give the cops a solid alibi and that was that, right?”
“Right.”
“So it’s gotta make you wonder why he didn’t. To me, there’s only two possible reasons a suspect don’t give a rock-solid alibi. He either committed the crime or he thinks the alibi is more trouble than it’s worth. Like a guy wouldn’t say I can prove I definitely didn’t kill X in Brooklyn because I was too busy killing Y and Z in the Bronx. Or maybe he knew that even if he was a suspect, that the cops couldn’t prove it and his rock-solid alibi would have been so embarrassing he was willing to take the heat.”
“Is this going somewhere, Brian?”
“Yeah, apartment 5S.”
“What’s going on? I thought you were done with this case.”
“For about five minutes,” he said, pressing the vestibule buzzer for apartment 5S.
I grabbed him by the shoulder after we were buzzed in. “I don’t know what I’m going to find up there, but thanks for not giving up. You know this means a lot to me.”
“No offense, Boss, but I didn’t do it for you. I’ve never let myself get scared off anything in my life and I wasn’t gonna start now. You back down once, there’s no telling when it’ll stop. You let yourself get scared and it never goes away. It fucks up your judgments.”
We shunned the elevator and walked the five flights up the pink marble stairs of the old pre-war building. The steps were so well-used that there were actually smooth ruts worn into the stone treads. The walls in these buildings were thick plaster and made for good neighbors the way stone walls and high fences made for good neighbors in the country. In a city of probably ten million people, New Yorkers held dear their small, private niches.
At the door to 5S, Doyle slapped me on the shoulder and handed me a slim digital voice recorder. “What you need is already on there,” he said, “but I think you’ll want to hear this for yourself. You can take it from here, Boss.”
I watched Brian walk away. He disappeared down the stairs, but his footsteps echoed around the stone and plaster. I rang the bell to the apartment and waited.
When the door pulled back, I was greeted by a slight but fit young man, maybe thirty years old. Shirtless and dressed in gym shorts, he was about five-seven and likely weighed no more than a hundred and thirty pounds. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and his muscles were cut and ripped without being ridiculous on someone his size. He was by any standard a handsome man. He had hazel eyes, flawless, perfectly shaven skin, and close- cropped light brown hair.
“Please,” he said, sweeping his arm back in a welcoming gesture. “Step in.”
I did and listened as the door closed behind me.
“I’m Marco and you must be Moe.”
“I am.”
“Something to drink? Wine? Bottled water?”
“Bottled water would be good,” I said. “It’ll be fine to leave it in the bottle.”
“Okay, look around. I’ll be right back.”
I took his suggestion to heart and stepped into the living room. The apartment was as perfectly groomed as Marco: neat and very well appointed. In one corner of the apartment was a rolltop desk used more as a mantel than a desk. A host of framed photos covered what would have been the writing surface and in those photos were the illustrated story of why Brian Doyle brought me here.
When Marco returned from the kitchen, he had a glass of red wine in one hand and a bottle of Perrier in the other. I took the bottle from him.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
I clinked bottle to glass and picked up one of the framed photos. At a glance, it looked like a shot of Cher on stage. “You?” I said. I didn’t wait for an answer. “Very good.”
