I had to remind myself that in New York, it’s always about the money and never the beauty. Beauty was a commodity affordable only to people who foisted eyesores like Starrett City upon the rest of us.
But just because the dump had been closed, its mounds of fetid garbage tarped over, its methane vented and burned, its clouds of birds relocated to Staten Island, it didn’t mean people had forgotten what it once had been. As Rico’s task force had proved many years ago, there were plenty of bodies beneath the tarpaulins. Now, apparently, there was one outside its gates. As soon as I saw the other “official” vehicles lining the road, I knew this wasn’t going to be pretty. This wasn’t a drug bust or a speeding ticket or a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association barbecue. There were no flames or aircraft debris strewn about. No plane had gone down on its approach to Kennedy. This scene had homicide written all over it. Disquiet wrapped me in its arms and squeezed tight.
As we rolled along, Melendez navigating us through the throng of uniforms and suits, I got that sick feeling in my belly. I know that’s something people just say, but I meant it. This wasn’t any old crime scene either. There was a lot of brass in attendance, a lot of suits, a lot of worried white faces. We veered off the road and into a patch of tall blond reeds and cattails. A blue and white NYPD chopper flew tight circles overhead, the downwash from its rotors toying with the reeds like a fickle plain’s wind blowing Kansas wheat to and fro. We came to a full stop. Detective Melendez threw the Chevy in park.
“Okay, get him out,” she groused at her partner. Murphy’s clenched jaw indicated just how much he loved being ordered around.
I slid over to the rear passenger door and Murphy helped me out, making sure I didn’t crack my head on the car frame. He looped his
Almost to the yellow perimeter, Melendez ducking under the tape in front of us, I turned away from the line of princes and to my left. There, in the midst of the reeds, hundreds of feet away from the closest paved road, was an incongruous blue Chevy, not dissimilar to the one I’d just gotten out of. A swarm of men and women moved around it like worker bees attending to the queen. When one of the worker bees moved away from the driver’s side window, I noticed a figure slumped against the wheel. I couldn’t make out his face, but I knew in my heart it was Larry McDonald.
They say energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and I guess I’ll have to take their word for it. But when a man with that much ambition dies, there has to be fallout somewhere-an earthquake, a tsunami, an erupting volcano, something. Or did Larry have ambition in place of a soul? Did it pass into the body of the first cop on the scene or the person who found him? Did it inhabit the first ant that crawled by or the first gull to swoop over? If so, the other gulls had better watch out.
“What are you smiling at?” Murphy wanted to know.
“Seagulls.”
“Whatever.”
He guided me under the tape. It took a few seconds for the assembled minions to notice me, my police escort, and my NYPD issue jewelry. When they did, Fishbein scowled.
“Detective, what is Mr. Prager doing in cuffs?” he asked Murphy in a less than cordial tone. “You were ordered to bring him to the scene, not arrest him.”
Melendez started to answer. “I told him to cuff-”
“Get them off. Now!” Fishbein ordered.
“Hey, Hy,” D.A. Starr said, “this is my borough. Don’t be ordering my cops around.”
“They’re
“I-he-When we went to get him, he, uh-he,” she stuttered, flushing slightly.
“Spit it out, Detective. Sometime this week.”
“He ran a red light.”
Fishbein, Starr, Cleary, and Brown sneered disapprovingly, shaking their noggins like four bobblehead dolls on the back deck of the same car.
“If you’re so desperate for traffic enforcement, Melendez, we can put you on Highway Patrol,” Cleary said. “You’d cut a fine figure in those tall black boots and riding pants.”
By the look on the men’s faces, the image of Melendez so dressed had universal appeal. Christ, it appealed to me. But I saw that some of what Melendez had said to me on the ride over was true. She might carry the shield, but she was always one misstep away from being dismissed as portable pussy and nothing more.
“I did worse than blow through a red, Commissioner Cleary. I cut across a crosswalk and sped in a school zone. I saw I was being followed and overdid it, I guess.”
But instead of being pleased or impressed by my jumping to her defense, Detective Melendez shot me a look that would scare the numbers off a clock.
“Cut him loose,” said Cleary.
Murphy let me go. I wanted so hard not to rub my wrists, to show everybody, especially Melendez, how tough and cool I was. I immediately rubbed my wrists.
“You know who that is in that car over there?” Fishbein asked, ignoring the icy stare of his Brooklyn counterpart.
“I can guess.”
“Guess.”
“Larry McDonald.”
“Give Mr. Prager a cigar!” Fishbein joked. “Commissioner, you smoke cigars, don’t you?”
“How’d you know?” D.A. Starr got a question in before Fishbein could breathe.
“I didn’t know. It was a guess.”
“Why guess Chief of Detectives McDonald?”
“If it was a 1930 DeSoto or something instead of an ’89 Chevy, I would have guessed Judge Crater.”
“That’s not an answer,” Starr growled. Fishbein didn’t do a good job of hiding his delight at the displeasure of his Brooklyn counterpart.
“Because I knew Larry was missing.”
“You did, huh?” said Cleary.
Decision time. I had to choose my words very carefully. There’s lying, and then there’s the truth. Lies are lies, but you can filet the truth all sorts of ways depending on the dish you’re cooking. For much of my life, I’d been a bad liar and an unskilled butcher of the truth. Patrick Michael Maloney’s disappearance had changed all that. I’d since learned s-e-c-r-e-t-s was just an alternative spelling of l-i-e-s. And, God help me, I could parse the truth like a Catholic school nun with a run-on sentence.
“I did. I knew he was missing.”
“How’d you know?” Cleary kept on. “The chief was taking vacation time, so there’d be no reason to believe he was missing.”
Time to start parsing. “His ex-wife called me up.”
“And. .” Starr said.
“And she told me she was worried about Larry. That he had called her recently to apologize about their divorce. They had made a date to talk it over, but Larry never showed up.”
“It’s a big leap from standing up your ex to going missing, Prager,” Fishbein piled on.
“I guess,” I agreed. “But he never got back in touch with her. That wasn’t Larry’s style. He could be a selfish, ambitious prick, but never an impolite one. Not to Margaret, not after what he’d done to her.”
They nodded again in unison.
“Is that all, Mr. Prager?”
“Is that all what?” I turned the question back on Fishbein.
“Let’s not be coy. Was there anything besides his ex-wife’s call that might have led you to believe something was up with Chief of Detectives McDonald? It’s no secret that you and Larry were close friends.”
“Close?” I asked. “Was anybody really close to Larry Mac?”
For the first time, I saw something in Detective Melendez’s eyes that looked like admiration. She enjoyed how I kept deflecting their questions with questions of my own.
“Well, then, closer than most,” Fishbein said.
“Okay, yeah, Larry and me, we were closer than Larry and most other people, but he had a lot more layers
