She placed the phone down softly. I could hear her retreating footsteps. Within seconds I heard another set of footsteps, these louder, much more rapid.
“How dare you tell Spivack not to talk to me? What are you playing at, Moe?” Geary demanded.
I decided not to pretend, but not to tell him the truth either. “Spivack’s just following your orders. He’s giving me his fullest cooperation. As far as playing goes, I’m not playing at anything.”
“Then what’s this nonsense in the papers. Obviously, this mystery woman is meant to-”
“Look, you told me to find out what happened to Moira Heaton. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“But this, really!”
“If my work offends your delicate sensibilities, fire me. Otherwise, leave me alone and let me do my job.”
“I hope this doesn’t blow up in your face.”
“Don’t you mean
“Are you? That’s odd, I must have missed something. I don’t recall signing a contract with you or handing you a retainer or taking any sort of action one might reasonably construe as enlisting your services.”
“Now who’s playing?”
“I don’t play.”
“That makes two of us.” I hung up the phone, hard.
I was several things, but not a fool. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Geary had taken pains to make certain no paper trail existed tying him to me. No money had changed hands. My retainer would be discussed later, he had said. In politics it’s called deniability. In Brooklyn it’s called covering your ass. At worst, Geary could be accused of unwisely helping out a man who had once kindly employed his daughter. One thing was for sure, if the planted stories pissed Ivan off half as much as they’d pissed off Geary, the scheme would work like a charm.
Speaking of charms, I had to see if Larry McDonald’s were working on the Queens district attorney. The plain truth was that no matter how outraged Ivan Alfonseca might be at the moment, he probably was neither crazy nor stupid enough to confess to kidnapping and homicide without some incentive to do so. Larry’s assignment was perhaps the most difficult of all. He had to convince the DA’s office not only to keep our plan a secret, but to offer something to Alfonseca in exchange for an admission of guilt.
In the topsy-turvy world of criminal justice, this was quite a dilemma. On the strength of his Bronx convictions alone, Ivan the Terrible was unlikely ever to see the light of day again. It was the inverse of buying a gift for the man who has everything. What could you offer a man who already knew he was going to prison for the rest of his miserable life? Never mind that the Queens DA was even more unlikely to complicate a high-profile, slam-dunk case with hypotheticals. It would have been different if Moira Heaton had been a confirmed homicide. Then the DA would have been happy to clear the case. But for now, maybe forever, Moira’s would remain just one of tens of thousands of unresolved missing-persons cases.
Before I could dial Larry’s number, the store phone rang. Klaus picked up.
“It’s Ronald McDonald on the phone,” Klaus snickered over the intercom. “Don’t forget to order me two Big Macs and a large fries. Ask him if Hamburglar is dating anyone. I love masked men.”
“Get off the phone, Klaus.”
“Okay, boss.”
“Larry, what’s going-”
“Get your ass over to the Queens DA’s office.”
“Why? What’s-”
“Shut up and get here.”
It took less than forty-five minutes to get to the DA’s office, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about the ride. Although the sky was cloudless, I’d driven in a fog, unable to string memories from one minute to the next. I remembered getting into my car, and then, suddenly, I was there. Larry was waiting for me out front.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I had earlier on the phone.
“Come on, the judge recessed today’s court session for this. Alfonseca, his lawyer, and the DA are waiting for us upstairs.”
“Waiting for us?”
“For you, really,” Larry, said leading me to the elevators by the elbow. “Ivan won’t talk unless you’re there.”
“He doesn’t even know who the fuck I am.”
A court officer was holding an elevator especially for us. We climbed in, the doors closing silently at our backs.
“Just like you figured,” Larry continued, “Ivan went totally berserk this morning when word leaked back to him about the stories in the paper. He refused to leave his cell and demanded his lawyer come to Rikers to speak to him. Good thing Parson’s son was on duty to smooth the way or this could’ve gotten nasty.”
The elevator jerked to a stop. The court officer pointed out the way. Inside a conference room adjoining his office was Robert Hiram Fishbein, the district attorney for Queens County; Marissa Reyes of the public defender’s office; and her client, Ivan Alfonseca. Fishbein, who bore an unfortunate resemblance to Groucho Marx, greeted our entrance with smiles. Reyes, a petite Hispanic woman of thirty, played it close to the vest, barely acknowledging our arrival. Alfonseca, however, looking small and ridiculous in a too-big polyester suit, fairly bristled with excitement at the sight of me. If he hadn’t been cuffed to the table, I don’t know what he would’ve done.
To his lawyer’s shock and horror, he blurted something out in Spanish. Reyes tried not to show her dismay, but her eyes betrayed her. It didn’t help her composure any when, at the conclusion of her client’s brief tirade, he spat at me. He missed, catching Fishbein’s pants leg instead. I recognized several of the words that had come out of Ivan’s mouth: curses, mostly.
“Word for word, please,” I said to his lawyer.
“Yes, Counselor,” Fishbein barked angrily, wiping the saliva off his pants, “word for word.”
She did not hesitate. “My client wanted to know if this was the lying faggot who had the bullshit printed in the papers about him.”
I looked Alfonseca right in his dead black eyes, pointed at my chest, and said: “
“Why?” he asked in English, looking almost wounded, before slipping back into his native tongue.
Reyes didn’t wait to be asked. “He wants to know why you did that. He says it wasn’t necessary. He says-”
Before she could continue, Alfonseca repeated:
She waited for him to finish. “My client wonders why you didn’t come to him like a man and ask him if he did this thing?”
I bowed at him slightly. “
“Okay,” he said, smiling that cruel, superior smile.
“Now I’m asking, man to man, did you abduct Moira Heaton?”
Normally, this approach would have ruffled a lot of feathers, but this was way far away from normally. Fishbein understood he would never get this hard guy to talk to him. He had nothing to lose and an easy, high- profile conviction to gain. Visions of a press conference with himself standing between the mayor and the newly redeemed Steven Brightman danced in his head. Marissa Reyes, however, was not so quick to abandon procedure.
She put her finger to her lips. “Say nothing!” she admonished her client.
“
Reyes ignored him. “Before my client answers another question, we have to know what’s on the table.”
The DA wagged his finger at her. “Counselor, Counselor, what am I going to do with you? Come, let us talk in my office.”
Reyes agreed.
