Gladyss of the Hunt (38 page)

Even if I did see him at the rap fashion show, I had a sinking feeling that we were over. I watched him get back in his clean, rented car, and then he was gone. Feeling isolated, I called Carl to see how he was doing. As though he had eavesdropped on me, he immediately asked: “You don't really think you're the goddess of the hunt, do you?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I just spoke about it to my shrink, and he said he's had clients who believed they were figures from history and mythology.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah—and he says it's always a sign of some kind of psychosis.”

“I just meant that I'd found some weird similarities between me and Diana—fact-based stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we're both tall blondes, both twins, and . . .”—I was about to tell him about my lost virginity, but I couldn't face it—“both guardians of females, in different ways.”

“Everything I told you about Bloomberg getting elected due to the 9/11 attacks was based in fact too, but you hung up on me.”

“Actually, I didn't. I fell asleep.”

“Gladyss, I'm only saying that hallucinations, delusions . . . I mean, I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and those things are classic early warning signs.”

“If I experience any more of it, I'll seriously consider getting help, but”— my voice took on a severe tone—“if you start nagging me about this, and that's what you usually do, your calls will go straight to voicemail and your messages will get deleted.”

“Okay,” he conceded.

When I arrived at work the next morning, Bernie hadn't come in.

Annie tried to reach him on the phone, but he didn't pick up. Alex said he probably needed some alone time, so the three of us started working through Miriam's oddball list of people who'd talked trash about Marilyn.

Without even leaving the office, we discovered that three of the eight suspects had died of old age. Two more might as well have been dead, insofar as they couldn't possibly have committed the killings—one was suffering from second-stage Alzheimer's, and the other had been an invalid for some years. A further suspect had moved to Montenegro twenty years ago, which left us with only two. The first fellow was a man named Glen Mueller, who according to Miriam was still in his seventies. As with Sam Wochenskil, we located him via the phone book. It felt kind of pointless, but Annie and I headed over to Mueller's place while Alex remained at the precinct, tracking down the whereabouts of the last suspect on Miriam's list.

Mueller lived in an Upper East Side walk-up. He was a semi-retired sports reporter. He opened the door wearing a loosely cinched terry cloth robe and filthy flip flops. He had a small cigar in his yellowish mouth and he seemed to have a speck in his left eye, which he kept tightly shut.

“I just got out of the shower,” he said, gingerly touching a towel to his thinning gray hair. “Come on in.” He turned away from us and walked to his medicine cabinet. A moment later he spun back to face us with both eyes wide open.

“Sorry ladies,” he said, pointing to his left eye, “I always take it out in the shower—it's glass. So how can I help you?”

In his living room I saw that he had turned TV trays into his primary furnishing. Two televisions were on, both tuned to sports channels and muted. He didn't turn them off, but he didn't look at them either.

“We're investigating a murder,” Annie began, “do you know a Mrs. Miriam Williams?”

“Miriam Williams?” he said, flipping through the Rolodex of his memory. “Oh yeah, I was married to a woman in the early Seventies who was a friend of hers. Was she killed or something?”

“No, she's fine. Do you remember the last time you saw Miriam?”

“It had to be a while ago, because I remember meeting Jackie Onassis at her place.” Mueller took a seat in an old, over-upholstered leather chair and flipped off one of the TVs with a very small remote.

“Mr. Mueller, can you tell us where you were on the evening of February 23rd this year?”

He sighed. “Look, if I have to get up and find out what the hell I was doing on February 23rd, I'd at least like to know why?”

“That's the date of a murder we're investigating,” Annie said. It was the day on which Jane Hansen had been butchered.

“Good enough.” He went over to his desk, rubbed out his miniature cigar, and flipped through an appointment book.

“I was staying with my kid brother Louie and his wife, along with their three kids and their families, on Martha's Vineyard from the 20th until the 27th,” he replied. “We sat around the fireplace, drank cognac and watched TV. If you want, I can give you his number.”

“That should do fine,” Annie said.

On the ride back to the precinct, Annie commented that ninety percent of this job consisted of colorful interviews that led to dead ends.

“Officer Chronou?” I heard as we stepped into the office.

I turned to see a pair of heavy-set, dark-suited men; they looked like pallbearers for a mafia funeral.

“I'm Lieutenant Lucas, this is Detective Paste, Internal Affairs,” he showed his shield. “You got a minute?”

Annie gave a tense smile. Silently they led me down a corridor into an empty interrogation room. O'Ryan had warned me that this day would come. And more than once, Bernie had told me to drop
Noel Holden. The
Page Six
item must've been the last straw.

Three chairs were arranged around a small table, but I was the only one who sat down. Thoughts were racing through my head, and quickly a mitigating mea culpa came together: I'd met Noel Holden while on the job. Initially I considered him a suspect, but once I cleared him, I realized I liked him. Of course, I couldn't say any of that. I wondered if I could bargain with them: Let me just go back to NSU and I'll write parking tickets till I die.

“Officer Chronou, you've kind of become Detective Farrell's partner over the last few weeks,” Paste began.

“Huh?”

“Since Bert Kelly died, you've probably been partnered with him more than anyone else.”

“Okay . . .”

“We've been getting a steady stream of complaints about him, allegations of abuse.” Lucas said. He seemed to be the lead.

“If you're talking about O'Flaherty, the man had just tried to rape and kill me, so—”

“We
are
talking about O'Flaherty, yes,” Lucas interrupted. “Considering what he did to you, we're prepared to let that one pass. But unfortunately there are half a dozen other complaints, too, apparently without any such mitigating factors. And they seem to keep on coming.”

“Like who?”

“For one, an entrepreneur from Brooklyn named Charles Barnett.”

Paste pulled out a Polaroid photo of a man with a black eye and a split lip. It was Youngblood, who Bernie had beaten up outside Port Authority.

“He just filed a law suit against the NYPD for half a million dollars.”

“Give me a break,” I said, trying to act like it was all utterly ridiculous.

“Look, we know you're not going to turn him in,” said Paste. “And hopefully he still hasn't done anything that he could lose his shield for. But when the time comes that he seriously hurts someone and is facing jail time, and loss of pension, not to mention a civil suit that takes whatever assets he has, you should remember this moment when we came to you and asked you to help your partner.”

“Bernie's rough, but he's not corrupt or anything. And there's no way I'm going against him,” I said, feeling like a thousand cliché characters in a thousand crime films.

“We just need you to swear to a lesser charge, enough to get him off the street.”

“You want me to help you force him to
retire
?”

“You know what's worse than living off your pension? Not living off of it.” Lucas said.

“And even worse than that,” said Paste, “Is spending your golden years in an eight by ten cell, surrounded by vengeful guys competing with each other to take out the cop.”

“Is that it?” I said, rising to my feet.

“Look,” Lucas said quietly. “Bernie has been around since the bad old days when this place was hell. No one wants to hurt him. But he's sick. Physically and in other ways, we both know that. You might think we're the bad guys, but we really want what's best for the guy.”

I had nothing to say, so I walked out. My thirty-day assignment ended tomorrow, then this would be someone else's nightmare. I returned to my desk and checked the voicemail on my cell. Surprisingly, I had seven messages. The first message was a tense one from Eddie O'Ryan asking me to call him back; no doubt he wanted to warn me yet again about the IAD interview, which hadn't even targeted me. A relaxed message followed from Noel, telling me not to be shaken by the press and saying he was looking forward to seeing me back at Bryant Park for the big “Fashion Dogs on the Catwalk” show tomorrow afternoon. The other messages were from tabloid and TV reporters, including
Access Hollywood
and the
National Enquirer
. I couldn't think how they got my private number.

The temperature had dropped precipitously by the end of the day, as I dashed across to the yoga studio, where I had a good workout with the skinny, dough-eyed substitute. Exhausted, I went home, showered, had a high-protein low-carb dinner, and dove into my layers of comforters and sheets. I had just fallen asleep when my cell chimed. The display said
Angry Bastard
, the name I'd assigned to Bernie's number.

“What's up?”

“I . . . I . . . not f-f-feeling too g-g-good,” I could hear his teeth chattering.

“Where
are
you?”

“Near . . . p-p-precinct.” He sounded drunk, but before I could ask him anything else, his phone cut out. When I tried calling back I got his voicemail. I was worried he'd freeze, considering his constantly congested lungs, so I called the station. When the desk sergeant picked up, I introduced myself and explained that Detective Farrell was intoxicated nearby in his parked car.

“Old Bern's fine,” the sergeant replied. “He sleeps there all the time.”

“But it's really freezing tonight. Can't somebody just bring him inside. He can sleep on the sofa in his office.”

“See what I can do.”

Fifteen minutes later, I still couldn't sleep, so I called the precinct again. The overpaid armed receptionist said he still hadn't been able to get anyone to track Bernie down. So much for watching each other's backs.

I got dressed and headed outside. When I exhaled, my breath was white. I caught a taxi, and five minutes later I was up by the precinct on Thirty-fifth and Ninth. I walked around the corner and there, in front of one of the few remaining 24-hour porn video arcades, illegally parked, was Bernie's battered Buick.

He was curled up in the front seat, and didn't wake up even when I opened his door. It was easy to see how he had gotten mugged. He was shivering beneath a polyester and cotton sports jacket. His lips had turned blue. I tried to turn on his car engine, but it wouldn't start.

“What's going on?” he muttered.

“Come on, stakeout's over.”

I helped him to his feet, hailed a cab, and pushed him into the backseat.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

After fruitlessly interrogating Bernie for his home address, I ended up taking him back to my humble abode. He obediently staggered upstairs.

“Where was I when you were my age?” he asked drunkenly as I opened my apartment door.

I pulled out the pullout in my living room and pushed him onto it, then gingerly removed his shoes. Maybe because he was freezing,
or because my nose was stuffy, his foot didn't smell quite so bad. As I covered him with a blanket, I could hear Maggie in her apartment, laughing it up with her latest French tickler. I jumped back into my bed for the second time and fell asleep right away.

Around three in the morning I was woken by the delicate sounds of Bernie retching his guts out in the bathroom. Once he stopped, I went back to sleep.

When I awoke a while later, I realized he was in bed with me. Considering he was probably still more drunk than awake, and my bedroom door was next to the bathroom, it seemed like a genuine mistake. I tried to get him awake enough to move back to the sofa bed, but he seemed totally out of it, even more so than I had been with Noel. I peeked under the sheets and saw he was wearing his boxers and T-shirt. A gold Saint Christopher's medal was around his neck. Every godparent in the outer boroughs seemed to loop one around their godson's neck at confirmation.

There was plenty of space between us, so since he was already snoring away, I left him where he was.

A few hours later, when he flopped his arm over me, I woke up enough to push him back. As I was drifting back into sleep, I could hear little Maggie making noisy, squeaky love. I pulled the pillow over my head, ignoring the bumping and groaning, but slowly my sleep thinned out.