Hurt Machine (5 page)

So I was forced to turn to Maya Watson, Alta Conseco’s partner on the job and in infamy. I drew some rather suspicious and unwelcoming stares from her neighbors who had no doubt grown weary and wary of strangers. Many of the TV news reports I’d watched on the net were remotes done right outside this condo. Several of those remotes featured hair-sprayed blondes in makeup masks and million-dollar mouths, giving over-rehearsed, falsely earnest spiels in front of rows of protesters. It had probably been a circus around here for weeks. The news vans, blondes, and protesters were gone, but I could still sense them. It was as if they had bruised the atmosphere and it would take time to recover and forget.

Maya Watson came to the door, but did not let me in, not at first. Who could blame her? I felt her eye on me as she spoke to me through the front door.

“Go away. I ain’t got what you’re looking for, mister.” Her voice was somehow tentative and defiant all at once.

“How do you know what I want?”

“What you want is what everybody else wants and I can’t give it. You don’t move away from this here door, I’m dialing 911. You hear me?”

That was my opening, the one opportunity for my old badge to do me some good. By the time Maya Watson processed that I was twenty years too old to be what my badge claimed I was, I’d be inside her apartment.

“No need to dial,” I said, holding my badge up to the peephole.

I listened to her undo the deadbolt and chain and waited for the door to pull back. It didn’t take long, but when the door opened, it opened only slightly so that I had to enter sideways. Maya Watson was nowhere to be seen. The apartment was dimly lit and the shadows stank of stale coffee and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes. Maya Watson had been shielding herself with the door and closed it quickly behind me. Not surprisingly, the burning stub of a cigarette was stuck between her elegant brown fingers. Her hand shook just enough to be noticeable.

“Come in the kitchen,” she said and led the way.

Her looks—a striking mixture of African and European features—both defined and defied the label African-American. She was pretty enough in the photos I’d seen of her, but she was more attractive in person. This in spite of the obvious toll the last few months had taken on her. In her thirties and taller than I expected, she was athletically slender and wore her tightly curled hair short to her head. Her medium brown skin was taut over mile-high cheekbones. She had a gently sloping nose and angular jawline. Her lips were full without being showy, but the stars of the show were her hazel green eyes. Yet, in spite of her natural beauty, she was practically aging before my eyes.

“You’re no cop,” she said, resigned to the fact that I was already in her house.

“Used to be along time ago, probably before you were born. Do you know who Carmella Melendez is?” I asked.

“Alta’s little sister, but what’s that got to do with me?”

“Probably nothing. Listen, this may not mean anything to you, but my name is Moe Prager. Carmella and me—”

“—were married and business partners once.”

I was stunned. “How can you know that?”

“Carmella abandoned her family, but Alta never abandoned her. She told me she was very proud of her little sister and had followed her career as a detective and all. She had a scrapbook and everything. Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Prager—”

“Moe. Please, call me Moe.”

“Don’t be so surprised, Moe. When you were a cop, didn’t you and your partner ride a lot of miles stuck in a car together? What did you guys talk about?”

“Women mostly.”

She laughed, her smile lighting up the room. Still, it seemed almost painful for her, like she was out of practice. “No, seriously, Moe.”

“We told stories, talked about our families, talked sports, politics.”

“Us too,” she said. “Alta and I spent a lot of hours together talking.”

“Alta told you a lot, but did she tell you why Carmella changed her name and broke away from her family?” I asked.

That wiped away any last traces of a smile from Maya Watson’s face. The air went out of her as if I’d sucker punched her in the belly. She dropped the cigarette into an old cup of coffee and we listened to its death hiss. She lit another. Yeah, the last few months had taken a toll on her nerves. I repeated the question.

“That her mama was ashamed of her on account of her getting raped as a little girl, that their mama blamed her.” Maya bowed her head. “Shame is a powerful thing, Moe, a powerful thing.”

She was right about the power of shame. Problem was that these days, no one seemed capable of feeling it. That didn’t seem to be one of Maya Watson’s issues. Apparently, whatever had gone on with Tillman had stirred up a lot of shame in her. After a few more puffs on the cigarette, she looked up at me.

“But what are you doing here anyway? You didn’t come here to talk about Carmella.”

“In a way, I did. Carm was the one who asked me to look into Alta’s murder.”

“She’s a little late to the game, don’t you think? She might’a thought about doing something for Alta when she was alive. Like when her face was plastered all over the news. Alta could’ve used some support then.”

“Maybe you’re right, Maya. Carmella’s wounds are old and deep, but I think she’s feeling thirty years of guilt and loss all at once. I guess there’s plenty of shame to go around these days.”

“Carmella’s shame won’t do Alta no good now.”

“Like I said, maybe you’re right to be so hard on Carmella, but I had an old friend who survived Auschwitz. He had every right in the world to be angry and judgmental, but he was slow to judge and when he did judge, he never did it harshly. ‘Look in the mirror,’ he used to say, ‘then judge.’ Besides, I’m here, not Carmella, and I need your help.”

She dropped the second cigarette into the coffee and gestured for me to sit at the table. When I sat, she sat.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Whatever you can give me. I need a sense of who Alta was. What kind of men did she date? What did she love? What did she hate? That sort of thing.”

Maya Watson didn’t need any further prompting. She spoke for nearly forty minutes, stopping only to breathe and light up cigarettes. Alta was tough. She had to be. Female EMTs were now going through what women cops had gone through in the seventies and eighties. And minority women … forget about it. You had to be three times as good at your job just to tread water. Alta had taken Maya under her wing and had protected her from the worst parts of the job. Like Carmella, Alta had a temper, but was fierce and fiercely loyal. Alta would take a bullet for someone. She loved movies and detective novels and Indian food. But Alta was pretty secretive about who she dated. Eventually, Maya ran out of steam. Tears formed in the corners of her otherworldly eyes.

“What is it?” I asked, gently laying a hand on her shoulder.

“I couldn’t go to her funeral and I’ve had to grieve Alta here, alone. I’ve been cooped up in this place for weeks with only my thoughts and my cigarettes. When I went back to work after the suspension, they put me on sick leave and told me I was bad for the morale of the department. I miss her. Can you understand how much I miss her?”

I thought of Sarah and noticed my hand on my abdomen. “I think I can. I really think I can.”

“The cops won’t find her killer, will they?” she asked, wiping away the tears with her thumb.

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “The detective in charge of the investigation—”

“Fuqua?”

“Yes, Fuqua. He strikes me as a stubborn motherfu—as a stubborn man who doesn’t give up on things so easily. Also strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think.”

“That’s good?”

“In a detective, yeah. Carmella is like that.”

“And you?”

“Me too, I guess.”

“Did Alta have any enemies, spurned lovers, anyone you can think of who might have wanted her dead?”

Maya Watson broke into a jag of manic laughter so removed from joy that I was frightened for her. All this time alone was doing her a lot of harm.

“Enemies! You want to see some enemies?” She disappeared from the room and came back carrying two cardboard boxes stacked in her arms. She dropped them to the floor, sheets of paper spilling onto the tiles. “You talk about hate mail.”

I picked up the sheets that had fallen out of the boxes and looked at the top one. The author had managed to use the words
nigger
,
spic
, and
cunts
in the first sentence. I stopped reading. I was quick on the uptake.

“Not exactly love sonnets, Moe. No one comparing me and Alta to a rose or a summer’s day.”

“You showed these to the police?”

“Every single one. This is nothing. These are just the ones off the net that I printed out. The newspeople and the crowds of people are gone from outside since Alta was killed, but these just keep coming in. I used to think potential was the greatest untapped thing in the world, but it isn’t. It’s hate. People got all kinds of hate in them.”

“I know it. Do you mind if I take some of these?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

The time had come, I thought, to broach the subject of Robert Tillman’s death. “Do you think Alta’s murder is connected to what happened with Tillman?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“But—”

“I can’t talk about it and I won’t.”

Her face got hard and determined. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her like this and didn’t want to risk alienating her. She’d given me some sense of Alta, enough of one to start with, at least, but I might need Maya’s insights again.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“I don’t know how much help I was,” she said.

“I don’t know either, but it’s a start. Alta is real to me now and that’s something.”

Maya showed me to the door, the box of letters in my arms unexpectedly heavy. Whether that was a matter of physics or hate, I couldn’t yet say.

NINE

I had intended to head back to my house or to one of the stores’ offices to read through Maya Watson’s hate mail, but I didn’t feel like running into my brother Aaron. For all of his mishegas and obsession with the business, Aaron was an observant bastard and had recently commented on my weight loss and rather pale complexion. Besides, I had less and less patience for Aaron’s craziness these days. We were both getting old and old men get cranky. An indirect blessing of Sarah’s wedding was that I had three weeks off from work. No need, I thought, to risk having to lie to my big brother about the thing that was probably going to kill me. If he ever found out, he would just make me feel guilty for abandoning him and I already felt guilty enough for a thousand other things. And there was something else, something that stuck with me. Maya Watson had taken pains to mention how hard it had been for her and Alta at work.

I remembered how women cops were hazed and abused and basically tortured when I was on the job in the early seventies. It wasn’t trial by fire. It was trial by inferno—all of it done with the winking approval of the brass. They were going to show those broads that police work was man’s work. I remembered the stories Carmella told me about what she suffered through in uniform and then when she made detective. I’d witnessed some of it myself, how she was disrespected, disregarded, and treated, as she so indelicately put it, like pussy on the hoof. Most of the guys eventually came around, if grudgingly, but some never did. A few of them took it personally and made weeding women out of the job their own private crusade. The more isolated these guys got, the more determined they became. It took a long time for the NYPD to change, but it changed. Walk into Times Square and look around. The people in those dark blue uniforms with badges on their chests look freshly minted from the UN. They’re men and women. They’re Asian and Hispanic. They’re African-American, Arab-American, and the children of Russian immigrants. They’re Irish, Italian, and Jewish kids from the suburbs.

The FDNY was more like the Catholic Church. Change, when it came at all, came slowly, very slowly. During my days as a cop, the FDNY was almost entirely male, largely Irish, and if not quite a private club, then something pretty close. I’m no sociologist, but I think the pace of change had a lot to do with the way firehouses were set up. They’re small, close-knit units. Firemen live, eat, work, and sleep together for days at a time. Guys in a precinct can be close, but firemen are closer. Cops always talk about trusting other cops to have their backs, but trust between firefighters is even more crucial, because, let’s face it, it’s a more dangerous job. It was easy to understand how any foreign presence in a firehouse—most especially a woman’s—would be perceived as a threat.

As I adjusted my plans and my car’s direction in kind, I realized I was falling victim to the very thing I had vowed to avoid: linking Alta’s murder to Tillman’s death. Whether it suited me or not, if things were taking me in that direction, I had to follow. That’s the trouble with being a stumbler. I had no surefire methods to fall back on. So I drove down through the trench of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and up onto the Gowanus Expressway.
Expressway
,
my
ass!
In New York City, there’s nothing express about expressways.