Bad to the Bone (7 page)

If there was any way that Betty could have done it by herself, Moodrow would have begged off, but there are no legal parking spaces in midtown Manhattan and the prospect of taking five subways through Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn, even without the grocery bags, was too gruesome to be contemplated. Moodrow knew he was drafted and his complaints no more than ritual.

It was nine o’clock in the morning when they left Betty’s Park Slope apartment in Brooklyn. They headed toward the Manhattan Bridge, and the traffic along Flatbush Avenue was fierce. In most cities, the rush hour ends at nine, when the workday begins; in New York there are days when it doesn’t end until the workers go home. Under normal circumstances, Moodrow would sooner have rescued a cat from a tenement fire than spend his morning in Manhattan traffic, but as soon as he began to talk about Connie Alamare and her daughter, Flo, he forgot the traffic altogether, steering his newly purchased ’82 Mercury Marquis with the automatic professionalism of a veteran cop.

“The thing cops hate most is when witnesses start bullshitting them,” he began airily. “It happens all the time and mostly there’s no reason for it. Alamare’s daughter has holes up and down both arms. Clean punctures from clean needles which most likely makes her a rich junkie. That’s not so uncommon as you’d think, but the funny thing is her mother didn’t mention it. If you listen to her, you’d think the daughter was an angel.”

“Did she know?”

“She knew. She paid a lawyer two hundred dollars an hour to make sure she’d know. When the doctors saw Flo Alamare’s arms, the first thing they did was test her for drugs and she showed positive for heroin.”

“Did she overdose? Is that what happened?”

“I spoke to the doctor in charge of the ward where they first brought her. Doctor Johnson in Bronx Municipal which is a hellhole. He insists that she only had traces of heroin in her system. Not near enough for an OD. Then they brought in a cardiologist to do some tests. His name is…”

Without taking his eyes from the road, Moodrow took a worn notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to turn the pages with his thumb. “Merstein. Samuel Merstein. He’s the one who thinks she had a stroke.”

“How does he know?”

Moodrow’s thumb curled the pages for another moment. “They took a test—a PET test. It’s an unbelievable thing really. They put radioactive glucose into your veins, then watch your brain cells with a Geiger counter. The idea is to find which part of your brain doesn’t use the sugar. That’s the dead part. Which is what happens when you have a stroke—some part of your brain dies. Anyway, the parts of Flo Alamare’s brain that control movement and thinking don’t work. Dr. Merstein wouldn’t say that she’s brain dead, but he thinks she’s so close to it that it doesn’t matter. Flo Alamare’s never gonna tell us what happened to her.”

“Couldn’t the same condition result from an overdose of heroin? I’ve seen a lot of that with Legal Aid. If you stop breathing and the brain doesn’t get oxygen, you can definitely have brain damage.”

Moodrow, trying to avoid the traffic on the Bowery, took the east-bound Canal Street exit and began to work his way through Chinatown. “They only found
traces
of heroin in her body.”

“You did say that she’d been using for a long time?”

“She had a lot of holes in her arm. All clean, by the way. No infections which means she wasn’t sharing needles. Contrary to popular belief, not all dope addicts are poor.”

“If she was that much of a junkie and that rich, how come she only showed
traces
of heroin? It doesn’t make sense. She should have been stoned.”

Moodrow grinned. “There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense. That’s why they call it a mystery. That’s why I was hired. If it made sense,
they
wouldn’t need me to straighten it out.”

They ran up Allen Street to Houston, then turned west. They were heading for the west side, to DeLuca’s cheese shop and Manganero’s Grocery, both left over from the day when Italian immigrants, looking for work on the Hudson River docks, had flooded into Hell’s Kitchen. DeLuca’s would supply the creamy ricotta for Betty’s cheese cake and the sharp crumbly provolone she’d throw into the antipasto. Manganero’s would supply prosciutto, cappicola, stuffed cherry peppers, a garlicky salami and freshly made pasta.

“What if she’d taken the overdose a couple of days before she was found?” Betty, one foot out of the car, turned back to Moodrow. “Maybe in someone else’s apartment. If they hoped she’d come around, they might have waited, then decided to dump the body. She would have metabolized most of the heroin by then, so she’d only show traces.”

Moodrow giggled his appreciation. “I spent most of my career hating lawyers. That’s because they’re smarter than me, and they think like cops. I spoke to the uniforms at the Four One, in the Bronx, the ones that found her. She was tossed in the middle of a vacant lot. Just left on top of the garbage. There’s two people living in cardboard shacks at the back of the lot. Two old-time juicers. They’re the ones who found her, and they swear she had to have been dropped off that night. The point I’m making is that I think whoever dropped her there meant for her to die in that lot, so it doesn’t seem likely they’d keep her in an apartment for two days, then bring her out alive. Also, I asked the doctor who first examined her if she had any fresh punctures. He said she did. In fact, they tested the tissue around it for traces of poison. The doctor said the puncture was still open when she came in. It had to’ve been made within twenty-four hours.”

Moodrow waited until Betty disappeared into Manganero’s before descending on the nearest hotdog wagon. Hell’s Kitchen, below 42nd Street, had escaped the wave of gentrification sweeping across Manhattan’s poorer neighborhoods. By day, workers streamed into the small warehouses, filling the coffee shops and delis. At night, the crack dealers huddled in doorways near the Lincoln Tunnel exit ramps, feeding the shoppers streaming in from New Jersey to get stoned. It was New York without tourists and Moodrow, smiling to himself, absorbed it the way other retirees soak up the Florida sun.

When Betty finally appeared on the opposite side of Ninth Avenue, weighed down with two huge sacks of groceries, Moodrow calmly opened the Mercury’s enormous trunk and waited for her to thread her way through the traffic. Dodging traffic is a necessary survival strategy for New Yorkers, and Betty was a master, even remembering to look out for crazed bicycle messengers.

“I got it,” she said, dumping the groceries into the trunk. “Flo Alamare had a stroke. Just like the doctors say. But whoever she was with couldn’t know that. They just assumed she overdosed and dumped her in the lot.”

“It’s possible,” Moodrow admitted, “but I don’t like it. Only street junkies dump people in lots. And they don’t do it if the person is still alive.”

“I take it there’s no chance she got a hotshot? That she was deliberately poisoned.”

“Hotshots are mostly rat poison or bug poison. That would mean stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting. There was nothing like that.”

Moodrow cut west to Tenth Avenue, then headed straight uptown. The next stop was a Greek delicatessen in Astoria, Queens, because Betty insisted that Greek olives were more Italian than Italian olives. She’d also decided to surround the antipasto with stuffed grape leaves, but she kept that anomaly to herself.

“What do the cops think?” Betty asked. “You said you spoke to them.”

“The cops say no crime was committed. Every other question gets an ‘I don’t know.’ How did she get to the Bronx? Where did she spend the twenty-four hours before she was found? Where did she spend the last two years before she was found? How did she support herself? Who did she associate with? Same bullshit: ‘I don’t know.’ After the old lady started busting chops, they sent a detective over to Hanover House. He interviewed Davis Craddock who says Flo Alamare took her kid and walked out of the cult two years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

Betty shook her head in disbelief. “Didn’t they check phone records? Credit cards?”

“Not until after the lawyer got involved. His name is DeVilio, by the way. When the lawyer started screaming about lawsuits, the detectives put a trace on all the paper, including motor vehicle records and tax returns. Flo Alamare had a driver’s license with Hanover House as the address, but it was three years old and maybe she forgot to file a change. Other than that,
nada
.”

“Then Connie Alamare was right. Flo must have been in the commune when this happened to her. If she was living on her own, she would’ve at least had to pay taxes.”

“Unless she was living with another rich junkie. One who was rich enough to support her, too.”

Moodrow inched the Mercury up to the toll booth on the Triborough Bridge. The toll was $2.50 each way, about five times as much as it took to keep the bridge in repair. The surplus, the profit, was used as a subsidy for the buses and subways. Somehow, the politicians, city and state, had decided that driving a car into Manhattan was an immoral act, like drinking alcohol, so immoral that any tax was justified. A year earlier, Moodrow would have flipped his badge and been allowed to pass without paying, one of a number of perks available to cops. Now he forked over the toll like everybody else.

“The thing about the Hanoverians,” he began, once they were moving across the bridge, “is that they’ve always kept themselves away from what was happening on the street. That part of the Lower East Side was dope heaven when they started their commune. Heroin, cocaine, speed, acid, dust. Meanwhile, the Hanoverians went around looking like office workers. Even the kids were turned out. The antidrug thing was one of the fronts they put up to curious reporters. Here they lived in the middle of the drug war and they kept themselves straighter than straight. I’m gonna go out and talk to some of the people I used to know on the street, but I doubt very much if things have changed.”

They came off the bridge at 31st Street in Queens. A quick left turn would take them directly to Mediterranean Foods, but the signs hanging from the el were clear. Moodrow would have made the turn anyway, if he was still a cop, counting on his badge to get him through, but now he feared the forty-dollar ticket like any other civilian.

“What about the kid? What’s his name?”

“Michael Alamare.” Moodrow pulled the car alongside a fire hydrant. The Greek store was just up the block, but Betty made no move to open the door. “Kids are another problem altogether. Kids don’t leave paper trails. No driver’s license, no credit cards.”

“What about doctors? He must’ve been to see a doctor within the last couple of years. I mean that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? To place Flo or her son inside the commune within the last two years? That makes Davis Craddock into a liar.”

“Making a false statement to a cop,” Moodrow continued, “is at least a misdemeanor. It’s a wedge we can use to find the kid.”

“Exactly.” Betty opened the door and stepped out onto the curb. “What I can’t figure out,” she said, closing the door, “is what the Hanoverians want with a five-year-old kid.”

She was walking down the street before Moodrow could answer. The question had already occurred to him and the answer, given a little thought, was obvious. If Hanover House (or Davis Craddock) was responsible for Flo Alamare’s condition, denial was the only way to save the commune from an intense police investigation. The Lower East Side, long a haven for the city’s freaks, had seen its share of communes. Moodrow didn’t know of one that could stand close scrutiny.

He looked around for a coffee shop. Though the books about cops are filled with alcohol, it’s coffee that fuels the department. There was a small candy store up the street that looked promising, but even as he started to get out of the car, Moodrow spotted a brown Plymouth slowly cruising down 30th Avenue. He didn’t have to look for the word TRAFFIC on the doors. New York City’s third major source of revenue, after real estate and the income tax, is traffic. If he left the Mercury, the Brownie would wait until he was out of sight, then write him a thirty-dollar ticket. A year ago, like every other cop, he’d had a restricted parking permit…

Moodrow shook his head. Why was he thinking about the cops so much? He rolled the window down and watched the human parade. Astoria is primarily a Greek neighborhood and the widows, in their shapeless black dresses, were out on the street. There was a fair sprinkling of Asians, too, as there seemed to be in every New York neighborhood. Most of the Asian women pushed strollers and a few were obviously pregnant. The scene was as close to bucolic as the city ever got.

Moodrow stepped out of the car, then leaned back against the door. The Brownie was ticketing a Toyota by an expired meter, and Moodrow wondered if he’d have enough time to run over to the candy store for a container of coffee. But the Brownie was already giving him a speculative look. Tickets were expensive and if you got too many of them, the state wouldn’t renew your registration. He waited until Betty came back, then left her to guard the Mercury while he fetched coffee for both of them.

“There’s something I think you should do,” she said when he got back. She was sipping at her coffee while Moodrow, one-handed, headed off to Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. “I think you should save the blood and urine. If it’s still there.”

“Say that again?”

“When Flo Alamare was in the two hospitals, they took blood and urine samples. For testing. If the samples haven’t been destroyed, you should have the hospital hold onto them. I got somebody off on that, one time.”

“You’re still thinking it’s poison.” Moodrow shook his head.

“I had a client about two years ago. I don’t even remember his name. That’s how many there are. Anyway, his wife goes in the hospital with severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and dehydration. She starts running a fever and, for a day or two, the doctors think they’re going to lose her. Then she recovers. Six months later, the husband gets drunk in a bar and brags to his pal about how he poisoned his wife with bug poison. It turns out the pal is a cop informant, and he repeats the story before the husband gets out of the bar. The cops investigate and make an arrest, but all the blood and fluid they took when the wife was in the hospital had been destroyed. Meanwhile her body metabolized whatever he gave her. I don’t have to tell you the rest.”