“Seven years working in Miami-Dade’ll make you an expert,” Spivack said. “I can also smell a phony Cohiba from a mile away, for what it’s worth.”
Strangely, the tension in the room seemed to evaporate. Spivack finally relaxed. Wit lit a cigarette. Larry Mac loosened his tie. Pete Parson took off his jacket.
I pushed ahead. “What Spivack said before about my having a copy of his interview notes on Almonte is true. It’s also the case that I looked them over before we came here. That’s beside the point. It’s not whether I looked the notes over that’s important, but whether Spivack looked them over.”
“I didn’t.”
“Come on, Joe.” I was incredulous. “Out of all the people you interviewed over the last nineteen months, you remember some little Cuban guy you spoke to a year ago for no more than fifteen minutes.”
“I remember a lot of them. You get good at remembering. I was a U.S.-”
“-fucking marshal for twenty-two years,” Pete and Larry Mac recited in unison.
“Yeah,” Pete chided, “we heard that one.”
Everyone laughed, even Spivack.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I still remember the faces of people I wrote up for spitting on the boardwalk, of all things. But
“His eyes,” Spivack mumbled almost to himself. “He had those chilly black eyes. You know, the kind that make it difficult to distinguish the pupils from the irises, wet and opaque like the ocean at night.”
I reached into my pocket and unfolded the front page of yesterday’s
“Dead eyes. Eyes like these?”
“Fuck!”
Looking at Spivack’s face, I knew. He knew. We all of us knew.
God slammed on the brakes and the world slowed down. My hearing changed too. I wasn’t deaf, exactly. At first, it was quite the opposite. I became acutely aware of isolated sounds: the shuffling of paper, the chittering of office machines, individual rings of the phone, my own breathing. Then it blended together. It was like dipping your head beneath the surface of a pool at a party. All the music, the laughter, the chatter, melds into a muted, indistinct drone.
“Moe! Moe!” Larry McDonald screamed. “Are you all right? You look pale as a ghost.”
I picked my head out of the pool. Now God hit the gas, the world spinning so fast I held on to the table for fear of falling off.
I heard Wit say: “Get him a drink.” He would say that.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.” I let go of the table. “It’s one thing for me to have a theory, another thing for Spivack to recognize Ivan Alfonseca as Ishmail Almonte, but it’s light-years from proving he abducted and murdered Moira Heaton. Until we do that, we got nothing, not even smoke and mirrors.”
We took an hour-long coffee break, Spivack having assorted sandwiches and pastries sent up from a local luncheonette. No one talked about the case itself. Although he was the only one of us without a law enforcement background, Wit spent enough time around cops to know this was not the moment to ask questions. Instead, we used the hour to bullshit, to trade war stories, to let off some steam. There was a small sense of relief, but not so the walls themselves sighed. The real hurdles were still ahead of us.
Just prior to starting up again, Spivack pulled me over to one corner.
“I feel like shit, Prager. I should have seen this months ago, but I’ve been preoccupied with the business. Maybe if I’d been paying more attention, I would have recognized him and-”
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda … Come on, Spivack, you know better. Your man had a full beard and long hair. If I didn’t listen to the radio two days ago or see that front page on the subway yesterday, I’d still be tripping over my own dick. Anyway, like I said before, it wouldn’t have mattered if you put two and two together sooner. To Moira Heaton, it would’ve had no meaning. Her fate had already been decided.”
“I’ll see if that helps me sleep tonight. One more thing. I know it’s your case now, but what’s the reporter doing here? He could walk out of this room and blow any chance we got to nail that psycho motherfucker.”
“First off, it’s
Spivack was curious, but didn’t push.
We spent the next few hours dividing up tasks. The first step was gathering some substantive evidence establishing that Ishmail Almonte was in fact Ivan Alfonseca. As Detective Gloria and Pete Parson had earlier pointed out, what we had to go on was thin. It was so thin, it would have been invisible if you turned it sideways. My conjecture about matching initials, the sign-in sheets, even Spivack’s identifying Alfonseca, wasn’t enough to get the most ambitious rookie ADA to do more than yawn. Spivack said he had a way to establish Almonte’s identity and cement the connection between him and Moira.
Wit raised his hand like a third grader asking for a hall pass. “Someone has to say this, but, I suspect, none of you will appreciate it.”
“Go ahead.” Larry Mac, so comfortable with authority, gave him permission.
“While Moira does roughly fit the profile of the suspect’s other victims-single, white, professional between twenty and thirty years of age, living alone, etc.-she does not fit the crime.”
Actually, Wit was wrong. We’d all thought the same thing. At least I had. That very notion had made me hesitate after my initial enthusiasm. Wit was also right. Someone had to say it.
“He’s right,” Detective Gloria seconded.
Pete kept on. “He never killed any of his victims, Moe.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that,” said Spivack.
“He didn’t kill any of the victims we know about,” I corrected. “We know about these twelve women, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t others, others he killed. Look, no one’s found Moira’s body. Maybe he killed and disposed of some of his victims.”
“That’s a fine theory,” Larry Mac damned with faint praise. “You’re just chock-full of theories today.”
“Okay, here’s another,” I said. “Alfonseca fucked up. I showed you Catherine Thigpen’s account of the assault. He pressed his forearm across her trachea during the attack. She said she nearly lost consciousness because she couldn’t breathe. You press a little too hard and … So now he’s killed Moira, probably not his intention, but he has. He’s not the panicky type, this guy. So he-”
Wit wept quietly. He cradled his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. None of us said anything, because none of us knew what to say. Men are useless in the presence of tears, their own or anyone else’s.
“The son of a bitch who murdered my grandson claimed he hadn’t meant to kill him.” Wit forced the words out in fits and starts. “As if torturing him with pliers and electric shocks would have been fair sport had he not had the bad manners to die.”
Spivack made a silent drinking motion at me.
“Bourbon,” I mouthed.
He slipped out of the room, and quickly back in with a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He poured Wit a stiff one. We watched him drink it. No one begrudged him his grief or the flimsy hedge against it he quickly emptied down his throat.
“What Mr. Prager has suggested sounds reasonable and likely to me,” Wit said. “I just thought the inconsistency needed to be pointed out. He’s explained it to my satisfaction. I’m now prepared to do my part in this.”
That was good, because a lot of things had to break right for us to get anywhere near connecting Ivan Alfonseca to Moira’s disappearance. The scary part was that even if we all did our share and got all the breaks to go our way, a great deal of what we needed was completely out of our hands. Ironically, we were as dependent on Ivan the Terrible’s own ego and vanity as on anything else.
Chapter Nine
