“That her mama was ashamed of her on account of her getting raped as a little girl, that their mama blamed her.” Maya bowed her head. “Shame is a powerful thing, Moe, a powerful thing.”
She was right about the power of shame. Problem was that these days, no one seemed capable of feeling it. That didn’t seem to be one of Maya Watson’s issues. Apparently, whatever had gone on with Tillman had stirred up a lot of shame in her. After a few more puffs on the cigarette, she looked up at me.
“But what are you doing here anyway? You didn’t come here to talk about Carmella.”
“In a way, I did. Carm was the one who asked me to look into Alta’s murder.”
“She’s a little late to the game, don’t you think? She might’a thought about doing something for Alta when she was alive. Like when her face was plastered all over the news. Alta could’ve used some support then.”
“Maybe you’re right, Maya. Carmella’s wounds are old and deep, but I think she’s feeling thirty years of guilt and loss all at once. I guess there’s plenty of shame to go around these days.”
“Carmella’s shame won’t do Alta no good now.”
“Like I said, maybe you’re right to be so hard on Carmella, but I had an old friend who survived Auschwitz. He had every right in the world to be angry and judgmental, but he was slow to judge and when he did judge, he never did it harshly. ‘Look in the mirror,’ he used to say, ‘then judge.’ Besides, I’m here, not Carmella, and I need your help.”
She dropped the second cigarette into the coffee and gestured for me to sit at the table. When I sat, she sat.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“Whatever you can give me. I need a sense of who Alta was. What kind of men did she date? What did she love? What did she hate? That sort of thing.”
Maya Watson didn’t need any further prompting. She spoke for nearly forty minutes, stopping only to breathe and light up cigarettes. Alta was tough. She had to be. Female EMTs were now going through what women cops had gone through in the seventies and eighties. And minority women… forget about it. You had to be three times as good at your job just to tread water. Alta had taken Maya under her wing and had protected her from the worst parts of the job. Like Carmella, Alta had a temper, but was fierce and fiercely loyal. Alta would take a bullet for someone. She loved movies and detective novels and Indian food. But Alta was pretty secretive about who she dated. Eventually, Maya ran out of steam. Tears formed in the corners of her otherworldly eyes.
“What is it?” I asked, gently laying a hand on her shoulder.
“I couldn’t go to her funeral and I’ve had to grieve Alta here, alone. I’ve been cooped up in this place for weeks with only my thoughts and my cigarettes. When I went back to work after the suspension, they put me on sick leave and told me I was bad for the morale of the department. I miss her. Can you understand how much I miss her?”
I thought of Sarah and noticed my hand on my abdomen. “I think I can. I really think I can.”
“The cops won’t find her killer, will they?” she asked, wiping away the tears with her thumb.
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “The detective in charge of the investigation-”
“Fuqua?”
“Yes, Fuqua. He strikes me as a stubborn motherfu-as a stubborn man who doesn’t give up on things so easily. Also strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think.”
“That’s good?”
“In a detective, yeah. Carmella is like that.”
“And you?”
“Me too, I guess.”
“Did Alta have any enemies, spurned lovers, anyone you can think of who might have wanted her dead?”
Maya Watson broke into a jag of manic laughter so removed from joy that I was frightened for her. All this time alone was doing her a lot of harm.
“Enemies! You want to see some enemies?” She disappeared from the room and came back carrying two cardboard boxes stacked in her arms. She dropped them to the floor, sheets of paper spilling onto the tiles. “You talk about hate mail.”
I picked up the sheets that had fallen out of the boxes and looked at the top one. The author had managed to use the words nigger, spic, and cunts in the first sentence. I stopped reading. I was quick on the uptake.
“Not exactly love sonnets, Moe. No one comparing me and Alta to a rose or a summer’s day.”
“You showed these to the police?”
“Every single one. This is nothing. These are just the ones off the net that I printed out. The newspeople and the crowds of people are gone from outside since Alta was killed, but these just keep coming in. I used to think potential was the greatest untapped thing in the world, but it isn’t. It’s hate. People got all kinds of hate in them.”
“I know it. Do you mind if I take some of these?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
The time had come, I thought, to broach the subject of Robert Tillman’s death. “Do you think Alta’s murder is connected to what happened with Tillman?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“But-”
“I can’t talk about it and I won’t.”
Her face got hard and determined. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her like this and didn’t want to risk alienating her. She’d given me some sense of Alta, enough of one to start with, at least, but I might need Maya’s insights again.
“Okay. Thanks.”
“I don’t know how much help I was,” she said.
“I don’t know either, but it’s a start. Alta is real to me now and that’s something.”
Maya showed me to the door, the box of letters in my arms unexpectedly heavy. Whether that was a matter of physics or hate, I couldn’t yet say.
NINE
I had intended to head back to my house or to one of the stores’ offices to read through Maya Watson’s hate mail, but I didn’t feel like running into my brother Aaron. For all of his mishegas and obsession with the business, Aaron was an observant bastard and had recently commented on my weight loss and rather pale complexion. Besides, I had less and less patience for Aaron’s craziness these days. We were both getting old and old men get cranky. An indirect blessing of Sarah’s wedding was that I had three weeks off from work. No need, I thought, to risk having to lie to my big brother about the thing that was probably going to kill me. If he ever found out, he would just make me feel guilty for abandoning him and I already felt guilty enough for a thousand other things. And there was something else, something that stuck with me. Maya Watson had taken pains to mention how hard it had been for her and Alta at work.
I remembered how women cops were hazed and abused and basically tortured when I was on the job in the early seventies. It wasn’t trial by fire. It was trial by inferno-all of it done with the winking approval of the brass. They were going to show those broads that police work was man’s work. I remembered the stories Carmella told me about what she suffered through in uniform and then when she made detective. I’d witnessed some of it myself, how she was disrespected, disregarded, and treated, as she so indelicately put it, like pussy on the hoof. Most of the guys eventually came around, if grudgingly, but some never did. A few of them took it personally and made weeding women out of the job their own private crusade. The more isolated these guys got, the more determined they became. It took a long time for the NYPD to change, but it changed. Walk into Times Square and look around. The people in those dark blue uniforms with badges on their chests look freshly minted from the UN. They’re men and women. They’re Asian and Hispanic. They’re African-American, Arab-American, and the children of Russian immigrants. They’re Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids from the suburbs.
The FDNY was more like the Catholic Church. Change, when it came at all, came slowly, very slowly. During
