Seven Ways to Die (21 page)

“How about a drink?” he asked when the waiter arrived.

“I’ll have a Thai beer,” she said.

“Good. I’ll have Thai tea, iced.”

The waiter nodded and left.

“You don’t drink?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I don’t have to…”

“Hey,” he said with a smile, “I have absolutely nothing against it. I just never got around to it.”

She started to laugh and smothered it with two fingers pressed against her lips. “Never got around to it. That’s funny.”

“Funny stupid or funny-to-the-point?”

“Oh, succinct. I can’t imagine you saying anything stupid.”

“Oh. Well, I can be stupid, believe me.”

She thought a moment and said, “Dave says you’re a prophet. I always think of prophets as being profound. And you have visions. Are you psychic?”

“Well, not exactly. The visions are very brief and…uh …metaphoric.”

She laughed and said, “So you’re, let’s see…” she thought a moment and said, “Profoundly psychimetaphoric.”

They both laughed.

He shook his head. “I’m only profound on
Halxpaawit.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. I wouldn’t even try to pronounce that.” More laughter.

The waiter came with their drinks and Cody told him they weren’t ready to order yet. Then Micah stared at her and said, “
Halxpaawit
is like Sunday, if you’re a Christian. Or Saturday, if you’re a Jew. It’s
Nimi’uuputimptki
, the language of the
Nimiipu
—the Nez Perce. So, on
Halxpaawit,
the
Nimiipu m
eet in a large communal house and practice
walabsat
, which is the Religion of the Seven Drums as told by the
miyooxat,
who are spiritual leaders, and interpreted by the
weyekin,
who are, as you put it, profoundly psychimetaphoric. Oh, and my mother was a Catholic. How about you?”

He started to laugh and she joined him and said, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Very succinct,” he said and raised his glass of tea to her. “You’ve eaten here before, what’s your recommendation?”

Δ

Jonée Ansa offered to drive Kate Winters over to the Hospital. He was running recon in South Manhattan and, as he said, “As long as you’re going south of 42
^nd
Street anyplace is on my way.”

Munching from a bag of chips, he drove up to 14
^th
Street and headed east.

“You picked quite a day to start,” Ansa said.

“And how,” Kate answered. “Is it always like this?”

“Nah. Sometimes we’ll go a couple weeks working with the precinct guys, then we’ll catch one. But it’s never dull. Think you’re gonna like it?”

“I do already,” she said, fingering the whistle under her blouse. “I couldn’t believe it when he gave me the whistle.”

“Yeah, he’s full of surprises. Let me tell you, they come in handy. Me and Rizzo caught a double homicide report one day monitoring 911. It was over on Avenue D. We get there, we can see a dead guy in the hallway. His brains are all over the place. The door’s locked so I go around to the side of the house, jump a little fence, and just before I get to the back door I am looking at the biggest fu…friggin …Doberman I ever saw. Waist high and all teeth and just itchin’ to have me for lunch. So I grab my whistle and blow as hard as I can and that dog’s ears damn near fly off his head and he starts yipping like I kicked him in the nuts and he disappears. I think he went under the house or something. Anyway, it turned out to be a guy who popped his wife and then ate the gun. We had to call animal rescue to come find the dog.”

Kate laughed. “I’ll remember that.” She paused a moment then asked, “Does Cody ever lose his temper?”

”I heard him raise his voice once, coupla years ago. But you can tell when he’s angry. Those eyes of his’ll burn a hole right through the wall. But then it’s over, just like that. He smiles and gets on with business. Right now he’s getting edgy. I mean, so far we ain’t got a clue. That dame in the red dress is it. This one’s really clean. Not a print, no DNA. Nothin’. Just Handley—deader than Honest Abe.”

He turned left on First Avenue and headed north.

“Your companion’s a nurse, huh?”

“She’s a doctor. ER Chief of Staff. Right now she’s squiring a new group of interns through their first year.”

“That sounds like a pain. What’s her name?”

“Song.”

“What’s her first name?”

“That’s it. Dr. Song Wiley. Her parents were hippies back in the late sixties, hanging in Haight-Ashbury. She was born in a one room flat. Five people living together. Says she was ten before she realized that some people smoked real cigarettes.”

Ansa chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “Been there.”

They drove past Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village with the East River reflecting the full moon in the background.

“Where did you meet?” Ansa asked.

“It was really strange. We both answered an ad for an apartment at the same time. There we were, the two of us, seniors in college, and a real estate gal who didn’t know what to do. So Song looks at me and I look at her and then she says, ‘Why don’t we go to dinner and work it out.’ We ended up sharing the apartment. Been together ever since. Fourteen years.”

“Terrific. There’s Bellevue. Where to?”

“Emergency entrance will be fine.”

“Hell, that’s not much of a leap, is it?”

“Well, not really when you think about it.”

“At least she’ll understand the crazy hours.”

He pulled up at the ambulance entrance. “Gimme a call on the cell when you’re ready to leave, I’ll run you home.”

“That’s way off your beat, Jonée. I live up on 94
^th
Street.”

“Ah, I’ll have Butch meet us at 42
^nd
and take you from there. He’s running the north end. One of the perks, Kate. Makes up for the lousy hours. Welcome to the crew.”

Kate walked through the swinging emergency doors and down a hallway to the night desk. As she approached it she saw Song, who was only five-two, a pretty woman with bright red hair and a pixie nose. Forty-four and looked thirty. She glanced up from her desk and grinned elfishly at Kate, her Asian eyes looking oddly comfortable in her freckled face.

“You’re happy,” she said. “I can tell. You got it, didn’t you?”

“I had it already, sweetheart. Cody just ran some of the rules by me and gave me this.”

She pulled out the whistle and showed it to her mate who took it and held it in the palm of her hand.

“Sterling silver.” Song admired the craftsmanship.

“Tiffany’s. Cody gives one to every member of the crew.”

“It’s already initialed.”

“How about that?”

“Pretty classy boss you got there.”

The white-haired chief night nurse came down the hall and Song called her over. Her name was Myrza and she was an old pro.

“Hey, Kate,” she said.

“Hi, Myrza.”

“Take the desk for thirty,” Song said. “We’re going over to the deli and get a sandwich.”

“Don’t dally at the deli, girl, it’s Friday night,” Myrza yelled after them. “They’re already backing up in the holding room.”

Song and Kate walked out the driveway toward First Avenue.

“We’re already working a case,” Kate said excitedly. “They call it a show. Cody came back from doing the entry and told me I was the new ADA and introduced me around and I sat through an incredible briefing and then I got my first assignment. I went with Cody to tell some rich Wall Street snob his future son-in-law was murdered last night.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Song squeezed her hand and pulled Kate to a stop. “I can hear your adrenalin rushing.”

“I know. I wish we were going home.”

“Sorry, sweetie, I’m on a thirty-six-hour shift. But I’ll be home by seven.”

“Oh, great. My partner is picking me up at six.”

“Hey, I’ll be off for twenty-four hours. I’ll be there when you get home. Congratulations, darlin’.” Song stood on her tiptoes and they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed there under a street light in the middle of First Avenue.

It was 8:53 p.m.

Δ

When Frank Rizzo got back to his small apartment after dinner with some of the old timers, he opened the cabinet in the kitchen, looked up at the unopened bottle of Jack Daniels on the top shelf, and said, “Hello, you son of a bitch. Eat your heart out.”

It was a tough night for him. There were several–-holidays, anniversaries—but October 26 was always the one that hit his heart the hardest. Forty-three years ago he had his first date with Jessie. It was her nineteenth birthday and they had gone to the Tivoli Theater to see the movie “West Side Story,” which had opened ten days earlier, and she had cried all the way home. He was twenty, had been a cop for two months, and didn’t know what to do with the pretty, dark-haired teenager who had her face smothered in his handkerchief and was sobbing uncontrollably.

When her father opened the door, he immediately assumed the worst.

“What’d ya do with my little girl,” he roared, balling up his fist.

“I didn’t do anything,” Rizzo pleaded. “It was the movie.”

“Movie? What movie?”

She rushed past her father into her mother’s arms. “Poor Maria,” she wailed. “They killed Tony and she was really in love with him.”

Rizzo looked at her equally bewildered father and held his hands out at his sides.

“What d’ya do?” he said helplessly.

What he did was date her for six months and then marry her. They had weathered thirty-six years, a son and a daughter, three grandchildren, the long hours and often fear-filled nights of a cop’s life, and were thinking about Rizzo taking early retirement and moving to Florida.

He got the call while interrogating a robbery suspect at the precinct station. She was dead by the time he got to Bellevue. She had collapsed in a super market two blocks from their apartment. No warning. No previous history. Her heart had just stopped, Snap! Like that, she was gone.

Rizzo was alone for the first time in thirty-six years. His son lived in Denver. His daughter was a flight attendant stationed in Atlanta. The members of the Manhattan South Precinct were his real family.

So he took three weeks off, buried his wife, and his kids helped him gather her clothes for Good Will. And when they left, Frank went back to work. He hired a cleaning lady twice a week, ate most of his meals at Chauncey’s, the precinct hangout, and did his drinking there.

Booze crept up on him. Soon he was closing the bar at night, having a shot to get started in the morning, eating lunch alone so he could sneak a drink or two to get through the day. It was his precinct captain who finally suggested that he take a thirty day paid leave and go into rehab. The suggestion surprised Rizzo. On his way home that night he bought a bottle of Jack Daniels, put it in the cupboard and quit drinking.

Four months later, Cody offered him a dream job—second in command of the TAZ, with a promotion to go with it.

He had been clean and sober for 2,017 days.

He got a glass, poured himself a glass of ginger ale, went in the living room and turned on the television set. When the remote turned up nothing of interest, he put on the DVD of “West Side Story” and as the overture began, he slumped down in his easy chair and let memories envelope him like a warm blanket.

Δ

Bergman was on his second cup of coffee when he looked up from Handley’s journal and realized that the last of La Venezia’s customers were paying their bills. He checked his watch: Eleven-ten. He had been so focused on the book he had lost track of the time. The kitchen had closed at eleven. He marked his place in the journal and hurried to the desk.

“Sorry,” Bergman said. “Time got away from me.”

“No problem,” Tony said. “And how did the homework go?”

“So-so. You know what they say, win some, lose some.”

“Sorry. Maybe it was too noisy.”

Bergman laughed. “No, Tony, maybe the food was too good.”

The little man chuckled and glanced down at the bill. “I see you took my advice about the special.
Che

pensa
?”

“Magnificent. It floated into my mouth.”

The little man beamed.

“I get to have my taste at the end of the day,” Tony said. “Something to look forward to.”

He looked at the sizeable tip, which more than covered the discount Bergman had received.

“You spoil my waiters,” Tony said.

“That’s not possible, Uncle Tony, they spoil me.”

“
Grazi’
,” Tony answered with a smile. “
Buona notte,
Sergeant.”

Δ

Throughout their dinner, Cody had purposely avoided business and Amelie had followed his lead by keeping her sardonic sense of humor in play. They had talked about everything: mutable subjects that flowed naturally from one to another; about music, about movies, about Japan and Idaho; about parents, wolves, and falcons. They laughed a lot about Jon Stewart and the lunacy of politics. They talked about why neither of them ever married: Amelie lived with a musician who insisted she put her career on hold while his progressed; so she walked. Cody had the opposite problem: He was engaged to a wealthy, young woman but his unpredictable hours did not fit into her social schedule, so she eloped—but not with him. He read about it in the newspapers. Later she told him he was too damned secretive about his work, and she got bored being stonewalled. Enough time had passed for them to brush off the experiences without regrets. It was a comfortable evening.

About the only thing they did not discuss was Raymond Handley.

But as Cody turned into 73
^rd
Street, the specter of Handley became palpable again. He sensed her fear creeping back as they turned into the driveway; the kind of fear fueled by the unknown, by rampant imagination; by the dark at the top of the stairs, a shadow moving in a dark corner, a squeaky floor in a room above.

“Don’t worry,” he told her as he helped her out of the car. He checked both doors on the first floor when they entered the brownstone, rattled Handley’s door, and then checked the rooms in her apartment, the closets, even looked under the beds.