lives must have been? I wasn’t about to let it go any further. I’m the one who compromised himself by betraying Marco, not you.”
“Still, I have no wish to use them. I will feed my ambition with accomplishment, not leverage.”
“Are you sure? You realize that this leverage has a limited shelf life and with every day that passes these pictures lose some potency. Two weeks from now, a month from now, they will lose all their power altogether. Once the city moves on, and it always moves on, no one will care or even remember Jorge Delgado. The brass will no longer have a stake in protecting his rep. If anything, they can run this stuff up the flagpole when they need to distract the media from some real scandal or fuck-up.”
“I am quite certain.”
“There’s hope for you yet, Icarus.”
But if I thought returning the alibi and photos to me would unburden Hamlet, I was wrong. If anything, Fuqua looked more miserable than when I came in.
“What is it?” I asked. “Something else is bothering you.”
“Let us go for a walk.”
Outside it was August in June. Though the mist was so thick that the top of the Parachute Jump had vanished with the sun, the temperature hovered above ninety. Sheets of roiling black clouds from the south moved up slowly behind us as we walked up Mermaid Avenue. For now the only rumbling we heard came from the subway terminal at Stillwell Avenue, but from the dark hues of the clouds at our backs it was obvious the rumbling song of the subway would soon no longer be a solo. As we turned right on Stillwell toward the ocean, even the breezes told tales of the coming storm. The light winds seemed almost to conform to the folds of my face like hot barbershop towels. We made it all the way to the near-deserted boardwalk before Fuqua uttered a word.
“I fear I have made a very grave mistake,” he said, his eyes looking out to sea but unseeing. “A terrible mistake.”
“How so?”
“When I was with Esme the other day, something about her bothered me very much.”
“You mean other than the fact that she was a blackmailing sociopath who had been living with a convicted rapist?”
He winced when I said it. “You have a sharp sense of humor, Moe, but this is not a thing to laugh at.”
“Sorry. So what bothered you?”
“I was not certain. She was too cooperative too quickly, but it goes beyond that.”
“You know, I meant to ask you about how you got to her,” I said. “I figured she would give in eventually, but that it would take all night. You were in and out of that room in less than an hour. I just assumed she was smart enough to recognize that you were a serious man and that you weren’t fucking around. What did you say to her, anyway?”
“I told her that I would pin Alta Conseco’s murder on her if she did not cooperate. She had motive, after all. Alta had let her live-in lover die without treatment. I supplied the means,” he said, removing a plastic evidence bag from his suit jacket pocket and handing it to me. “That weapon conforms exactly to the knife used to murder Alta Conseco. I wrapped Esme’s palm around it. Voila! The murder weapon. I told her I would make sure to defeat any alibi she might produce. When she protested a bit, I informed her that you were not only a former policeman and PI, but one of her victims’ fathers and that you were very probably going to kill her regardless. Dead suspects, I said to her, need no alibis. ‘When you are dead, Esme, I will have someone call my office with a tip and I will find this knife conveniently hidden in your closet. Case closed.’ She then gave me everything you asked for.”
“That was the idea, right? So what’s the problem?”
“I could not sleep that night. I went over it time after time and her attitude bothered me more and more. Yesterday morning I realized finally what was bothering me.”
“Which was what?”
“I saw that video you showed me. Horrible. Horrible. I suppose I was as outraged by it as were you. I was blinded by my outrage and ambition. I thought, why not help you? I would help rid the city of this parasite. I would do good and myself good all at once with only a small risk to my shield. So when I went in that room to threaten her, I was not actually thinking of Alta Conseco’s homicide in any sense but as a tool. What I realize now, what I came to realize was that the case I made against Esme to pressure her to cooperate-”
Then it hit me so that I was almost breathless. “Holy shit!”
“Yes, Moe, you see now. She very well might have been the person who killed Alta Conseco. She was the best suspect I have had and I did not think to look at her twice.”
“Wait a second. Wait a second. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” I said as much to convince me as him. “Tillman or Sykes or whatever his name was, was a con man. I mean, come on, Fuqua, he was a shitbird convict and she was a sociopath who probably jumped from lover to lover like bees go from flower to flower. When she was done sucking up the nectar, she moved on. Who says they were in love? She probably didn’t give him a second thought when he dropped dead. She would move on, not avenge some clown she didn’t give a shit about.”
“That is what I thought as well. Then I made inquiries.”
“Inquiries?”
“First I checked with both restaurants at which Esme was employed. She was not scheduled at either the evening Alta Conseco was murdered.”
“So what?” I said. “Half the pissed-off firemen in New York City were off that night too.”
“It gets better… or worse, depending upon your perspective. You recall that Tillman was convicted of statutory rape, non?”
“Yeah. He did four years, right?”
“Would you care to speculate as to the identity of his teenage victim in that case?”
I got that sick feeling again. “You’re kidding me.”
“Esmeralda Marie Sutanto of Goshen, New York-Esme. I spoke with the DA that prosecuted the case. Tillman was working a home improvement scam in Goshen when he met the Sutantos, a divorced mom with a teenage daughter. The mother and Tillman started seeing one another. While the mom was at work, Tillman would stop over and keep young Esme company after she came home from high school. The mom caught wind of it and went to the local police.”
“Let me guess,” I said, “Esme refused to testify against Tillman.”
“The DA says that they claimed to be in love and he believed them, but with the mother pushing him and an election that year, he had no choice but to prosecute and go for the maximum. When Esme graduated from high school, she left home. Would you like to guess the identity of Tillman’s only regular visitor during his years in Bedford Hills? His only visitor? I had a training officer who told me when I first got on the job that only fools ignore the obvious.”
“So bring her in. I’ll call in a tip from a pay phone and you can get a warrant.”
“Too late,” he said.
“She’s gone?”
“With the wind. I paid her apartment a visit yesterday evening. She took only a bag with some of her things and did not bother with her furniture. No matter, we gave her time to destroy any evidence she had not already gotten rid of. I fear my training officer was right. I am a fool.”
And with that, the sky opened up on us. Two fools in the rain.
FORTY-EIGHT
There were at least two sleepless men in the borough of Brooklyn that night. I didn’t know what Fuqua was doing about his insomnia, though I was tempted to call and ask. Me, I had no intentions of staring up at the ceiling. I’d tried to get to bed early as a means of escaping the various spiders in my head. I’d even stooped to taking a pill to help me drift off. Yeah, I used to get high and drop acid when I was in college and until my recent adventures through the looking glass of oncology, I drank enough scotch and red wine to float the Spanish Armada. Yet somewhere in the bizarro melange of cognitive dissonance that was my moral compass, I’d become downright
