resembling the piece I sought.
Glancing at my watch, I realized I’d have to leave for my appointment with the detective. Should I bring the letter to show him? I had no proof it had come from Hal and I could have made the whole thing up. I settled for printing off a copy of the puzzle and stuck it in my pants pocket, thinking I could play around with it if my meeting was delayed. I downloaded Hal’s file to my BlackBerry and got a new envelope for the flash drive, scribbling my name on it.
That left one more urgent task.
Nina, who owned the condo across the hall, often looked after our place, watering the plants and checking the air conditioning while Samuel and I were away. I assumed she’d still be at home on a Sunday morning.
A quizzical smile crossed her face when I asked her to hold on to the envelope for me. Not the best solution, but all I had time for at the moment. She pressed the paper. “It’s not your stash or anything, is it? I don’t think you’d trust me with that.” She gave the envelope a gentle shake. “I’ll peek, you know.”
“It’s stolen jewelry. Twenty-carat diamonds. They’re worth a fortune.”
“Oh, no problem then.” She laughed and promised to keep it safe. “You haven’t forgotten about tonight, have you?”
I looked at her blankly. “Sorry, Nina, it’s been a rough twenty-four hours. Remind me again?”
“My party. You’ve been stuck in that place of yours for way too long. It’ll do you good to be social again.”
“Oh, right. I’m not sure I can. Something’s come up. But I’ll try my best.” I thanked her and walked to the elevator.
After waiting for close to an hour at the Tenth Precinct station, I was finally summoned by a uniformed cop, who took me down the hallway to a clerk’s desk. No sign of Detective Gentile. The cop checked my pockets and waved a wand over my body. When the clerk started asking questions to update my old file, I protested.
“Gentile ordered it,” was all she said in reply. She shot another photo and confirmed the color of my eyes, my height and weight. I pointed out that my eyes hadn’t changed color in the last fourteen years, and told her a woman had once said they were like dark velvet.
The clerk frowned and looked over the top of her glasses. Bending her head again, she wrote down “brown.”
“You look better with the beard, though,” she said. “On your driver’s license, your name is spelled Madak; on your Visa card it’s Madison. Why the difference?”
“Legally, it’s the one on the license. It’s Turkish. My brother changed it to Madison when I came to America.”
“Named you after an American president, did he?” She hunched her shoulders up to her ears and let them drop. I wasn’t sure whether this was a tension reliever or a gesture to show she needed more clarification. “So the correct version is on your license?”
“That’s right.”
“Your given name is Jonathan?”
“Yes.”
“What about the second name? K-E-N-I-T-E. Is that right, too?”
“Yes. Actually that’s supposed to be my Turkish given name. It’s pronounced Ken-it-ee.”
“If I were your mother I would have stuck to Ken.” She chortled as if this were the most brilliant joke ever.
I let it pass.
The uniformed cop, Vernon, steered me to an interview room furnished with an ancient metal table and chairs, white walls the color of old eggshells, and cheap gray carpeting. The room was freezing, with the air conditioning jacked up, and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. I guessed this place was a law unto itself, like the Vatican or something.
Vernon left the room, secured the door, and leaned against it. Through the textured glass I could see the wavy blur of his shirt. I was able to make out people passing by and hear them exchange a few words. Among other things, I learned Detective Paul Gentile’s nickname was Genitalia—and it didn’t have a positive connotation.
Coming here had turned out to be a miscalculation. So much for good intentions. Were they going to try to pin Hal’s death on me somehow? I spent the rest of the time rehearsing the story I wanted to give them, making sure there were no rough edges to it or inconsistencies. I wanted to get the message across about Eris and her brute without admitting I’d left the scene.
When the door finally clicked open, in walked the inquisitors— two men. Vernon nodded a greeting to the first man, “Lieutenant Gentile,” and shut the door, propping himself up against it, this time inside the room. Gentile and the other man took seats across from me, plunking their file folders down.
Gentile fumbled with the switches of the auto cam and turned it on, then announced the time, date, and the interview participants. The second man was Louis Peres, another detective.
In an earlier life Gentile could have played defense for pro football. Maybe his suit jacket was too small, but his muscles bulged and strained against the pinstripes. His cheeks were pockmarked, his hair cropped close to the head and stone white. He wore a Rolex Cellini Classic and a silver ring on his baby finger. He looked to be pushing sixty. Old for a cop. Gentile locked his gaze on me; Peres flipped through the material in his file without bothering to acknowledge my presence.
A female civilian clerk entered with a pitcher full of ice water and some glasses. She set the glasses in front of the detectives, put the pitcher on the table, and left.
“Okay,” Gentile said. “Let’s get started. Tell us what happened.” He lifted his eyebrows, stared at me, and jutted out his chin like a wrestler setting me up for the first chokehold.
“Before we get into that, I came here voluntarily. Why are you treating me like a criminal?”
“We’re just trying to get the facts here, Mr. Madison. A man is dead. Let’s hear what you have to say.”
His attitude didn’t fill me with confidence. “All right. I came because someone deliberately shot Hal full of high-grade heroin, a woman I met at Hal’s party. I heard her and another guy arguing with him as I was leaving the party.”
“Oh? What time would that have been?”
“Around midnight. I went straight to a club. You can check on that if you want.”
I knew Diane would back me up, and the time frames should easily rule me out for the murder. I gave him the name of the club and told him how to reach Diane. Gentile scribbled something down on a piece of notepaper and handed it to Peres, who left the room. I prayed Diane had already made it in to work.
Gentile continued, “So, can you identify these people?”
“The woman’s name was Eris; I don’t know her last name. Attractive, late twenties, fit, probably around five seven. The guy with her was pushing seven feet and heavyset.”
Gentile ran a hand over his forehead. Even though the room was cold he was sweating. His face was the color of raw beef. “Colin Reed talked about a woman like that. Claimed she left the party before he did.”
More scribbles on Gentile’s notepad, but I could tell he wasn’t buying my story. “Are you back in business again? How did Vanderlin obtain his drugs?”
“Check that file you have. You know I was never involved with opiates.”
Gentile made a pretense of opening the folder, a bullshit move because he’d have reviewed the whole thing before he even walked in here. He flipped through several pages. “Convicted for fourth-degree grand larceny, 1989, selling marijuana. In 1990, charged with third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, twenty-two grams of cocaine. You managed to weasel out of that one. Maybe this time you’ve just graduated.”
“That was my wild youth. I was still a kid. I turned the corner on all that long ago. Anyway, those amounts are nothing.”
“What was your relationship with Vanderlin?”
I could have answered this easily twenty-four hours ago. The friendship had certainly been rocky at times, but I’d discovered depths of bitterness in Hal’s feelings about me I’d never known existed. All the same, I gave
