Through The Grinder

“Todd has got a problem with men. A rooster complex. He’s superficially charming around both sexes, but he truly prefers to deal with women. Especially if it has to do with his career. In my opinion, it’s the secret of his success…his way with the ladies, I mean. My boy Seth has charmed his way to the top.” Torquemada offered me a malevolent smile. “If you’re very lucky, my dear Ms. Cosi, he’ll work his magic on you.”

Sitting next to me, Matteo shifted his weight and folded his arms tightly. I could hear the tension in his voice when he asked, “Does that magic include murder?”

“Seth has his personal ghosts to deal with,” said Torquemada, his attention straying to the skeleton behind him for a moment. “We all do.”

Then he looked at me. “If you think Seth murdered Sahara, you’re wrong. He felt nothing but contempt for Sally and her bourgeois background. Seth’s power as an artist comes from the knowledge that he destroyed something he loved. That the one person who meant more to him than life itself died at his hands.”

The bald man’s gaze strayed to the skeleton behind him again. “I understand Seth,” he continued. “In a way, I know how he feels. I didn’t kill my wife, but I stood by and watched her die.”

He looked back to us, but his eyes were distant as he kept talking. “Madeline had a taste for the needle… heroin…That coupled with her inability to measure anything correctly caused her to have an overdose. But she’s still here, with me.”

Call me naïve, but it took me a few seconds to understand that he was referring to the skeleton. That medical school anatomy specimen standing behind his shoulder was the mortal remains of Torquemada’s late wife.

Good god, I thought. This place really is a horror show.

“I can’t forget her, you see,” Torquemada said. “At least Mars was healthy enough to let go, to bring those pictures to me. To never look upon the dead face of Sahara McNeil again.”

“Thank you for your time,” I said, rising quickly. Matteo followed my lead. Before I turned to leave, however, I couldn’t stop my eyes from straying morbidly to the contents of the tray clutched in the late Mrs. Torquemada’s hands.

I saw a syringe, a spoon, a clear plastic bag of white powder, and a candle burnt down to the wick. There was also a shrunken object that looked like a turkey neck — whatever it was, it was definitely organic.

Matteo glanced at the tray, too, and I heard his breath catch in complete horror. “Jesus Christ, man!”

Matt’s outburst set off Torquemada, who rose quickly and nearly pushed us out the door. “You’ll never understand,” he said angrily. “There are many ways to be faithful, to keep one’s promises…I have been faithful, in my fashion.”

Matteo grabbed my arm and the next thing I knew, we were both out in the street, sucking in fresh, cold air like a pair of trapped miners resurrected.

“Thank goodness we’re out of there,” I said. Then I turned to Matt. He looked pale. That surprised me — frankly, his outburst surprised me, too.

“Since when have you been so squeamish?” I asked him. “You’ve seen bones before. And New York City creeps.”

“It wasn’t the bones that got me, or that creep Torquemada. It was the thing lying on that tray,” Matteo said, hustling me along Thompson Street.

“The needle? The heroin? The turkey neck?”

Matteo shook his head. “That wasn’t a turkey neck, Clare.”

“Then what was it?”

“When I was in Africa some time ago, two men were convicted of rape. After their trial certain body parts were removed as punishment.”

“My god,” I choked, “then that was — ?”

“You heard the man,” said Matteo, nodding. “He remained ‘faithful,’ in his ‘fashion’…”

Nineteen

After we left Death Row Gallery, Matteo and I walked to the R line and boarded the uptown Broadway local — the train Valerie Lathem died trying to catch.

At Times Square we switched to the Queens-bound 7 train for the ride out to Long Island City. The 7 train travels underground from Times Square to Fifth Avenue, and on to the deepest level of Grand Central Station. Then it races through a tunnel under the East River and emerges to run along an elevated track across the middle of Queens to Flushing’s Shea Stadium and the end of the line.

Among the 7 train’s passengers, Hispanics and Asians dominated, along with East Indians and a smattering of florid-faced Irish newcomers who had migrated from the Emerald Isle to Woodside, Queens, to be among their fellow émigrés. Matteo and I would be getting off before we reached that tiny Irish enclave. We were heading to a far less pleasant place, a nominally industrial area of Queens known as Long Island City, which was in transition to residential zoning — in other words, we were going to an old factory district that spirited urbanites had begun to homestead.

Despite our wretched experience in the bowels of SoHo, or maybe because of it, I found the train’s hypnotic underground motion sending me into a daydream — back to Bruce Bowman’s unfinished house, where my skin still faintly tingled from the hours he spent touching me, our last coupling in his four-poster bed.

Until recently, the transit authority ran an older scarlet-painted train along this line, known as the redbird, with drafty, noisy old cars so loud on some sections of track it made conversation almost impossible. The new cars were sleek and quiet, but Matteo and I still chose not to converse. I remained in my reverie, and beside me on the hard, plastic orange seat, Matteo sat with arms folded, staring into the distance, looking as though he’d gone somewhere else, too.

I roused when the train emerged from its tunnel, the glaring light of late afternoon bursting through scratched windows. Then the track inclined and the 7 Local became elevated, crossing over a deserted railroad yard covered with puddles of mud and melting snow.

Despite long and extensive work on the tracks, and the new train, the 7 line still looked dismal and worn in places, like an impoverished cousin of the Manhattan lines, with their restored mosaic-tiled stations.

Century-old elevated 7 stations like the one at Queens Plaza were a throwback to the Industrial Revolution — no-frills steel-framed structures on tall iron stilts, with several levels of concrete platforms and wooden tracks. When the subway clattered into that station, it sounded to me like the old wooden roller coaster I used to ride at a local amusement park growing up.

We disembarked just after Queens Plaza, at the Thirty-third Street stop. From its narrow concrete platform, we had a magnificent view of the Empire State Building across the river, burnished by sunset’s golden rays. We walked down three long flights of stairs to Queens Boulevard, one of the borough’s two major thoroughfares. While we waited for the light to change, a tide of traffic flowed by in three crowded lanes. It was here, over the roar of the engines, that Matt and I began to argue.

“This is a bad idea, Clare,” Matteo said. “Why confront Seth Martin Todd now? Today? We already know he’s killed — twice. Why enter the predator’s den?”

“You know why. It’s something I have to do for my own peace of mind.”

“We could let Quinn handle it. Police detectives must do more than eat Krispy Kremes and chase divorcees, right? Let that faded gumshoe earn his salary for once.”

“You don’t have to insult Quinn,” I said. “He may be wrong about Bruce, but he’s not a bad cop. And I do intend to let him handle it…I just need to give him an ‘it’ to handle. Come on, we’ve got a good lead here. You’re usually up for a challenge.”

Matteo’s face was stone. “A challenge is one thing, Clare. But now you’ve got me escorting you to the home of a murderer, and I don’t like it.”

I sighed. “You don’t want me to go alone, do you?”

“I don’t want you to go at all.”

“Well, I am. So it’s your choice.”