Hurt Machine (14 page)

What a quaint expression, that. Most men my age had a little trouble in that area and didn’t like being reminded of it. Between her voice and choice of words, I already wasn’t particularly fond of the woman on the other side of the door. Things went downhill from there.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling the door back. “What?”

Dressed in a garish, red satin robe, she was as hard looking as her voice was shrill. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of her frowning mouth. She smelled like an ashtray rinsed out in vanilla bathroom spray. I carried various sorts of business cards with me: one of the tricks of the trade. From one interview to the next, I never knew who I was going to need to be. I had cards I’d collected from insurance salesmen, doctors, rabbis, transport executives, lawyers—lots of lawyers—collision shop owners, plumbers, and a hundred other professions. I kept it simple and the lies to a minimum by handing her one of my own old cards from Prager & Melendez Investigations, Inc.

“Mrs. Marinello?”

“Not for too much longer, I hope.”

“Your lawyer sent me,” I said, yawning with false disinterest.

Mrs. Marinello stared at the card and I at her. She was probably thirty, but looked forty: too much sun and too many Marlboros. She had been pretty once, probably in high school. Her body was still intact and she knew it, but even that seemed to have some sharp edges. Her blond hair didn’t match her coloring and it had been teased and hair-sprayed to within an inch of its life.

“What did the lawyer send you for?” she asked, finally looking up at me.

“To discuss your husband.”

“I been t’rough this with the other guy.”

“I’m better than the other guy. That’s why I’m here.”

“Okay. What the fuck? You wanna come on in?”

I hesitated. “Is your husband on the premises?”

“That asshole? Nah, I kicked his ass outta here in March.”

“Where has he been living since March?” I asked, pulling out a notepad and pen.

“With his cousin Vinny up in the Bronx by Fordham somewheres.”

I tried recalling the dates on the reports Doyle and Devo had supplied me with. “But he’s been back, yes?”

“Yeah, I had to call the cops on him in April. He’s such a prick. Started ripping up my underthings and smacked me around a little.”

“But you didn’t have him arrested,” I said.

“Nah, I’m protecting my investment in that motherfucka. When we make the settlement, I need him to be on the job. I want half of his pension. If I got him arrested and he got shitcanned, where would that leave me? What would I have to show for marrying the prick? He’s stayin’ on the job as long as I can help it and now that Vinny got him assigned to some dumbass desk, I figure I’m in good shape to hammer him. Vinny, now there’s the guy I shoulda married. He’s already got fifteen years on and a vinyl siding business that triples his department take-home.”

“You got it all figured.”

“Too bad about Vinny. I blew him the night I met him and Anthony, but he came almost before I got him in my mouth. Anthony, now that man can fuck. I shoulda known better than to listen to my pussy.”

Charming.
“I wouldn’t know.”

She gave me a look that would’ve killed me and anyone within a twenty-foot radius. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Sorry. So back to the matter at hand…. Do you know of any other time your husband has been back? Have you seen him driving by, spoken to any of his friends or family, have you spoken to anyone who might’ve indicated he’s been back in the neighborhood?”

“You are better than the other guy,” she said. “All he wanted to know was, was I fucking anyone else or did I know if Anthony was fucking somebody else.”

“I was getting to that, but can you answer my—”

“No, he hasn’t been back around that I know of. He knows I got him by the nuts and he don’t wanna lose his job neither. He’s been a good boy and stayed away.”

“So you’ve had no indication at all—”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said to you, mister? No, from what I can tell, he’s staying up in the Bronx banging this little cooz he hooked up with.”

“That doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

“If it keeps him in line and away from me, I wouldn’t care if he was fuckin’ Vinny.”

Lovely sentiment, I thought, but I supposed she had a point. And by mentioning Marinello’s new girlfriend, she’d given me an opening to ask about Alta Conseco. I took out a copy of the email Anthony had sent to both Alta and Maya and handed it to the wife.

“What’s this?” she snapped.

“It’s a death threat your genius husband sent to those two EMTs who let that guy die a few months back and it’s what’s going to screw up your plans for half the pension if your husband doesn’t watch himself. If we caught him sending hate mail like this, the FDNY can catch him at it too. So, do you think there was anything to this threat?”

“Nah, Anthony’s basically a coward. Yeah, sure, he’s slapped me around a little bit, but he’s just a frightened little boy. He wouldn’t have the balls on him to kill anyone. Besides, ain’t it already too late? Ain’t one of those bitches dead already?”

I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded yes. “The problem is if you want to keep him on the job so we all make out here, I need to know for certain he had nothing to do with the murder. You do realize that Alta Conseco was murdered over by the Grotto, not a five-minute walk from here.”

Her brown, hungover eyes got big. “Anthony didn’t have nothing to do with that!”

“How can you be sure?”

“I thought you was working for me,” she said, the first traces of doubt about me seeping in.

I ignored the doubt. “Look, if you can help me eliminate Anthony as a suspect here, you can get your dream settlement, but if he’s tied up in this in any—”

“Okay. I can prove it if I have to, but it’s not gonna look good in court.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to get to court,” I said, reassuring as all hell.

“We were in the Dominican Republic when that bitch was killed.”

“
We
?”

“Me and Anthony and another couple.” Her leathery skin sort of changed color as she looked away from me. On her, it’s what passed for blushing. “We swing. We used to, anyways, and there’s this resort down there that caters to swingers. We bought the airline tickets like last year and they weren’t refundable and we, um, we didn’t want to, you know, miss the opportunity, if you get my meaning.”

“Oh, I get it. You can prove this?”

“I got the fuckin’ credit card bills, receipts, and doctor bills right inside.”

“Doctor bills?”

“Me and Anthony both got some stomach thing down there. We was sick for a month after we got back. You wanna see the receipts?” she asked, turning to go. “Like I said, I got ’em right inside.”

“No, that’s okay. I don’t think it will come up, but I just had to make sure. If I need the documentation, I can get back in touch with you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I think that about covers it.”

I left, hurrying down the stairs. I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t look back. I wanted to get as far away from her as fast as I could. It wasn’t as if she were the most despicable person I’d ever met—not by a long shot. My former father-in-law Francis Maloney made her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nor was her sense of ethics, as fucked up and convoluted as it was, the most self-serving. It was just that her focus was so narrow, her goals so small, so unimportant in the scheme of things, that I wanted to scream. Is this what she was born to dream of, I wondered? Was half of her husband’s pension all she wanted out of life? By the time I reached the street, I wanted to turn around and run back up the stairs and shake her by the shoulders and tell her life was too short to want so little from it. I turned, but she had already gone, gone back inside with her tiny dreams to keep her company.

She’d done me a favor by eliminating Anthony Marinello as a suspect. Did I believe her about them being out of the country when Alta was murdered? Yeah, I believed her. It rang true. If the wife was lying, she was a better liar than me, and if she was lying, she deserved a lot of credit for coming up with an amazingly embarrassing alibi on the spur of the moment. Besides, her story was easy enough to check out. She had done me a favor because looking for the right suspect was like shopping for a house: unless there are very few on the market, you don’t buy the first one you look at.

TWENTY-TWO

The guy at the next stop was no less a fuck-up than Anthony Marinello, just an older, more accomplished one. This time there was no wife for me to talk to. Patrick Scanlon had stubbornly clung to his career until the department basically told him to take a hike. He was a classic red-noser, a professional drinker with so many busted blood vessels in his face you could scan them like a barcode. He had skated by for nearly three decades until the FDNY really cracked down on drinking a few years ago. The last straw was a New Year’s Eve brawl at a firehouse on Staten Island that involved whiskey, a folding chair to the chops, a broken jaw, and a tumble down a staircase. When the incident was thoroughly investigated, all sorts of bad things came out of it and the department put its foot down hard. Indiscretions that’d traditionally been tolerated or treated with wrist slaps were now fireable offenses. Guys like Scanlon either saw the writing on the wall or had it shown to them. I wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that the desk Scanlon vacated when he put in his papers was taken over by Anthony Marinello.

Scanlon showed me down to his den in the basement. He was a hunter and a fisherman and had the trophies to prove it. He was a big man with a shock of white hair and gray stubble and a surly son of a bitch. No matter how I tried, it was difficult to get him to focus. That sort of worked for and against me. When I pointed out that his Cropsey Avenue address was only a short car ride to the Grotto, he looked at me like I was talking in tongues.

“I don’t even like their fucking pizza,” he said.

Well, I thought, Scanlon had at least one redemptive feature: he knew mediocre pizza when he tasted it.

He sobered up a little bit when I showed him my old badge and a copy of the rather disgusting email he had sent to Alta Conseco and Maya Watson only a week before Alta was murdered. He wasn’t the type to challenge my badge even if I looked too old to be carrying it. When I pressed him about his threats, he didn’t exactly ask for forgiveness.

“Fuck them two cunts,” he said. “They stained us all by leaving that man to die like that. They’re a fucking disgrace!”

I bit the inside of my cheek again. It was going to be a rough day for the inside of my cheek.

“Is that how you see women, as cunts? You seemed pretty sure about what you’d do to their anatomy if you ever got hold of them.”

“How did you get a hold of that anyways?” he slurred. “I didn’t put my name on it.”

“You’re proud of that, huh, hiding behind a phony name? If you had half a brain, you’d know there are ways to track emails.”

“No need to get insulting.”

“I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings? Why would I want to insult a coward who hides behind a fake name and threatens women and calls them cunts? Gee, I wonder.”

“Okay, so I’m an asshole sometimes. It’s the drink.”

“First refuge of a coward, blaming everybody and everything but himself.”

He seemed not to hear me. “Hey, I gotta piss. All right?”

“It’s your house and your dick. Go ahead.”

When he left the den, I took a closer look at the décor. I noticed three taxidermied fish on the walls and a framed photo of Scanlon with some hunting buddies standing over the carcass of deer. In another, he posed holding the limp body of a wild turkey by its neck. In yet another, his feet were surrounded by a stack of dead ducks and geese. On the wall to my right I noticed a locked gun rack with two shotguns and three bolt action rifles. There was a glass case with some wall-mounted handguns that weren’t just there for show and next to that case was a wall display of hunting knives, machetes, bayonets, ceremonial knives, one with an ivory handle and a black swastika affixed to the hilt, a Confederate cavalry saber, and a samurai sword.

“What were we talking about?” he asked when he returned.

I ignored him. “Where’s the knife that goes there?” I asked, pointing to a conspicuously empty spot on the wall.

He didn’t like that question and I could see the gears turning. “No knife goes there. I, um, I haven’t filled that spot yet.”

He was completely unconvincing. “Don’t bullshit me, Patrick. You can see the silhouette of it. You know that Alta Conseco was stabbed to death, right? So here’s what I’m looking at: a death threat from you, a nasty drunk who lives five minutes away from the crime scene, a missing knife, and a very dead woman. Can you do the math? Because I can.”

“I wouldn’t’a killed that dyke.”

“Dyke?”

“Yeah, yeah, she tried to hide it, but I heard shit.”

“How the fuck would you hear shit?” I said. “You’ve been out of the department for a few years.”

“What, you think because I got forced out, I don’t hear things? You hang out at McPhee’s, you hear plenty.”