The Sniper's Wife (19 page)

“Fine,” Willy said, feeling like the sole conduit to society’s late discards. “And thanks for letting me come out here.”

When the time came, of course, and Willy was looking down onto Nathan Lee’s dead face, he no longer felt like a pinch hitter for corpses. He truly mourned the loss of this person whose life he’d changed for the better so long ago. Maybe it was because he saw Nate as his only success along those lines, or maybe because, despite that, the end result turned out to be the same, but whatever the truth, he missed the man he’d rediscovered so recently, who seemed to bear only good memories of Willy, and who’d traveled the last mile to help him out.

“That him?” Ward Ogden asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

They weren’t in the formal and neutrally supportive environment where Willy had viewed Mary’s remains. This was the ME’s more functional part of the building, and everything around them spoke of the emotionally detached curiosity the inhabitants applied to their silent patients. It was starkly lit and equipped for one purpose, all of which made it easier for Willy to focus.

He looked up at the doctor, who’d already given Nate a thorough going-over. “What d’you think?”

The doctor was a woman wearing a mask, goggles, and gloves, the mask, he suspected, mostly to ward off the odor that Nate’s body was already exuding.

“Massive trauma, for sure,” she said. “Consistent with a fall from a bridge. He could have been killed and then pitched over. It would be pretty hard to tell, especially if his heart was still beating when he hit. There’re no signs of anything else, though. No bullet holes or stab wounds. But that’s not to say I don’t have a few questions.”

She moved to the body’s right hand and held it up to the light. “He’s got two skinned knuckles and a broken finger, for instance. Again, that might’ve happened in the fall, but it’s more consistent with a fistfight, especially if he was right-handed, which his musculature suggests.

“Also,” she added, moving up to the head, “I found something really curious. See this small smear of blood just under his ear? Where did it come from?”

Sammie pointed at a gash on the dead man’s leg. “Is it too stupid to think there?”

The woman shook her head. “That would make us both stupid, ’cause that’s what I thought—at first. But then I wondered how it was transferred. There’s no laceration except for the leg. It’s not a splatter mark, so it didn’t splash there when the body hit the ground, and aside from the skinned knuckles, which didn’t bleed, there’s no blood on his hands. So, what’s the explanation?”

“It’s not his,” Joe Gunther suggested.

Her eyes widened behind the plastic glasses. “That’s what I’m thinking. Two men in close combat, one with maybe a bloody nose. This one here lands a punch in the other one’s stomach, let’s say. That guy doubles over, and his face connects with the dead man’s neck and shoulder area, depositing a smear. Too bad the clothes weren’t kept. They might’ve given us a clearer picture.”

But Willy didn’t need a clearer picture. He’d seen that broken nose.

Ogden gestured toward the blood smear. “You got enough to work with there?”

“Oh, sure,” she answered. “We’ll compare it with the deceased’s. If I’m right, they won’t match. That won’t tell you who it does belong to, of course, but maybe it’ll come in handy later if and when you line somebody up.”

Ogden nodded his satisfaction. “Okay. Another piece for the puzzle. Things’re beginning to move along.” He looked at the doctor. “You’ll call me as soon as you get the autopsy results? I’d love to hear what else you find out about Mr. Lee.”

She nodded without comment, writing a note to herself on her clipboard.

Ogden waved his arms at the others like a nanny shooing his small charges out of the room. “Then I guess we’ll go back to hitting the bricks.”

Out in the hallway, the cell phone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out, listened to what the caller had to say for several minutes, thanked him briefly, and hung up. “That was Jim,” he explained as they all continued walking. “He spoke with someone at CCNY in Harlem. Turns out Mary Kunkle had just enrolled there for a course in psychology and drug counseling—one of their community outreach programs. According to them, she visited several times to set up the enrollment and payment schedule, so that gives us at least the most obvious explanation for her subway trips there. He also got something on Ron Cashman. Turns out he has quite a history. How was it again that you heard about him?”

The question was asked genially enough, but given his own lack of forthrightness on the subject, Willy couldn’t help hearing a note of suspicion in Ogden’s voice.

“I was trying to find out about La Culebra,” he said. “Cashman’s name came up as a possible associate who hung out near the Lower East Side. That made me curious. Does he live down there?”

Willy made an effort to sound only marginally interested, but in fact it was a struggle. This was the sole reason he’d broken cover, after all, and since then, the man he thought was Ron Cashman had not only taken a shot at him, but had just now been all but nailed as Nate Lee’s killer.

But Ogden wasn’t going to just blurt out an address and wish Willy happy hunting. Unlike Sammie and Joe, Ward Ogden didn’t know Willy, and what little he’d discovered hadn’t filled him with confidence. He also had serious doubts that Willy had asked to have Cashman’s name run through the computers for the reason he’d just stated.

“No,” he answered vaguely. “He’s more of a Brooklyn boy. Was it drug dealing he was supposed to be doing, or what?”

Willy sensed what was going on, or was paranoid enough to imagine it. The question was designed to draw him out, and possibly to reveal that he knew more than he was admitting. So, instead of answering in the affirmative, he merely looked confused.

“That was the weird part. I asked the same thing, and got nowhere. But it wasn’t just the Lower East Side connection that caught my attention. I mean, the guy’s not Hispanic, he’s not from the neighborhood, and nobody I talked to knew what the hell his angle was. It was the whole package that made me wonder. Why do you ask? What kind of bad boy is he? Did I fall over something hot?”

That put the shoe on the other foot. Now Sammie and Gunther were looking at Ogden expectantly, and Willy interpreted Ogden’s frown as a sign that he was feeling slightly outmaneuvered.

“Good lord, I don’t know,” he said lightly, ducking the question. “All I got was a synopsis of the man’s rap sheet. We’ll have to put him under a bigger microscope back at the office.”

“What part of Brooklyn?” Gunther asked, making Willy suddenly feel kindlier toward him.

Ogden hedged his reply. “Sort of Greenpoint to Red Hook area—ten to twelve square miles. Jim said it looked like he moved around.”

“Does he work for anyone or is he a freelancer?” Gunther persisted naturally enough.

At that point, Ward Ogden changed tactics. Being a realist, he weighed the chances of locating the killer of a dead junkie and an all-but-homeless black man in two completely different parts of the city. Time was against him, his own caseload wasn’t getting any smaller, and his boss would soon start wondering just how much effort all this warranted.

He didn’t like the idea, but he was coming to terms with having to deal with this one-armed bird dog in any case, which meant he might as well put him to work. Maybe the man would prove as professional, if unconventional, as his colleagues seemed to believe.

“My partner told me,” he therefore admitted, “that years back, Cashman was connected to Lenny Manotti. Manotti ain’t what he used to be, but in his day, he worked the Brooklyn docks a fair bit. What the movies call the ‘import-export’ business. I don’t know what Cashman did for him—that’s where the microscope’ll come in—but his record implies enforcement. Weapons and assault charges, mostly. The drug stuff was minor— a couple of small possession raps.”

He stopped there and watched Willy’s expression as he added, “Looks like an interesting angle to chase down if we get the chance.”

Willy kept walking down the long hallway, his eyes on the floor ahead of him. The last thing he wanted to do now was tip his hand.

Chapter 19

W
illy Kunkle excused himself from Ward Ogden and the others as quickly and innocuously as possible—never wondering why Ogden seemed so amenable to this—and was back in Riley Cox’s store in Washington Heights just as night was beginning to fall.

He found the big man as he had before, holding the fort behind his elevated counter by the door, his hand within reach of the shotgun, and his eyes looking half asleep.

“Hey,” Willy greeted him.

“Hey, yourself,” Riley said, barely moving his lips.

Willy glanced down the two aisles, saw a kid studying comic books in a distant rack and two women picking out items from the glass-walled fridge against the back wall.

“I got bad news,” he said in an undertone.

Riley’s expression didn’t so much change as imperceptibly soften, as if its underlying scaffolding had collapsed. “Nate’s dead,” he said without inflection.

It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

Riley watched Willy’s face, struck by his tone of voice, and saw that this enigmatic hard-ass was being neither considerate nor compassionate. He was feeling his own loss with Nate’s death, putting it in a special category in his brain as a collector might add a priceless addition to a vault.

“You know who?” Riley asked.

Willy paused as one of the women approached the counter, laid her few items down, and paid for them in crumpled dollar bills pulled from her coat pocket.

“Pretty sure it was Ron Cashman,” Willy answered after she’d left. “Same guy who took a shot at me last night, uptown.”

“You saw him?”

“I shot at him first.”

Riley produced a hint of a smile. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Willy ignored the comment. “Who do you know in Brooklyn, both sides of the old Navy Yard?”

“A few people,” Riley answered vaguely.

This time, it was Willy’s turn to smile. “I thought you might. Cashman used to work for an old crook named Lenny Manotti. That ring any bells?”

Riley thought about that for a moment. “He Mobbed up?”

“I didn’t know you were so prejudiced. Not that I heard.”

“What does ‘old’ mean?”

“From what I got, semito fully retired.”

Riley grunted, straightened, stretched his thick, muscled arms out to both sides of him, and arched his back. “Good,” he said. “Then he won’t have too many people around him.”

Which was exactly what Willy wanted to hear.

Several hours later, Willy Kunkle and Riley Cox entered a restaurant/bar on Bedford Avenue in the Northside section of Brooklyn. The Waldorf Astoria it wasn’t, but it did have the relaxed, well-used feel of a popular neighborhood dive. Thankfully, it was also not a place so wholly given over to one race, creed, or sex that their sudden appearance caused any notice.

Riley led them to the bar and to two stools either side of a heavyset, bearded man nursing a half-empty beer.

“Hey, Zeke,” Riley said softly.

Zeke looked up at the row of bottles against the wall opposite him, as if he’d just heard a distant alarm bell that made him only mildly curious. “Who’s your friend?”

His voice was gravelly and low-pitched, somewhere in the suburbs of Louis Armstrong, except that he was white.

“He’s shy,” Riley answered. “You got what I’m after?”

“Sure.” Zeke took a long pull on his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What d’you want with an old dog like Manotti? He’s barely breathin’ anymore.”

The bartender approached. Riley ordered a beer, Willy a black coffee. Riley slid two twenties in front of Zeke, who had them enveloped in his fist almost before they touched the bar top.

Zeke, still staring at the bottles before him, said, “He’s the one in the corner booth, facing the door like anyone cared about him anymore. Fat guy with the three hairs combed over the top.”

Willy glanced at the man as he reached for some pretzels. Manotti was eating alone, and seemed almost done with his meal.

“He in a car or on foot?” he asked.

The bearded man slowly swung his head around to look at him and raised his eyebrows. “Wow. It talks.”

“It can also shove that bottle up your ass.”

Zeke returned to his earlier, meditative posture. “I liked you better before. He’s on foot.”

“What’s his address?” Riley asked.

“My, my, you boys are demanding,” he said, but he gave them an address nearby.

“Now leave,” Willy ordered.

From his body language, Zeke looked ready to protest, or at least proffer up some face-saving witticism, but he apparently thought better of it, and muttered, “Next time you’re shoppin’, don’t call me, okay?” as he slid off the stool.

Riley waited until he’d left the bar, and then told Willy, “That was useful. Thanks.”

Willy drank from his coffee. “Too goddamned chatty,” he said, and as if to set an example, stopped at that.

Riley smiled and shook his head slightly. “You always this much fun?”

Willy didn’t answer.

“There was a guy like you in the neighborhood when I was a kid,” Riley told him. “Real sour, never had anything good to say. We stayed out of his way or we cranked him up, depending on how many there were of us. My grandmother used to let me have it when she heard me criticizing him, though. They weren’t friends or anything, but she said anyone like that had to have had things a lot tougher than we did, ’cause nobody gets born that way.”

Willy kept at his coffee. He’d thought about that, of course, blaming his father for abandoning them, his mother for never owning up to it. And, in fact, it had been a little weird—one day the old man had been in the house, the next he wasn’t, not a single person anywhere saying a word about it. Not once. The last communication Willy remembered—the night before his father left—was being slapped across the face by him because Willy had dropped his spoon at the table.

But lots of kids lost their fathers, or were turned into punching bags, or who knew what else. Willy hadn’t suffered as much as most of them.

What people didn’t understand was that it was kind of liberating to speak his mind when he felt like it, to live with his curmudgeon’s reputation. It disentangled him from other people, and he’d come to see that as a blessing.

Willy put his cup down and rubbed his eyes with his hand, pushing hard enough to cause stars.

“Looks like he’s on the move,” Riley said, breaking into Willy’s meditations.

Willy turned discreetly to see Lenny Manotti settling his bill.

So much for deep thinking.

They let Manotti get halfway down the block before leaving the bar and tailing him. If there ever had been a period when the old man had shoved his weight around and needed protection, it was apparently a long time back. Now he sauntered along nonchalantly, one hand working a toothpick, the other buried in a pocket, occasionally waving to some acquaintance on the street. Another retiree enjoying the twilight years.

They’d discussed what approach to take, the most obvious being the one Willy had used on Carlos Barzún. Riley’s information was that despite Manotti’s current inoffensiveness, he hadn’t been a gentle player when he’d been in the game. But he was toothless now, unlike La Culebra, and capable of striking a time-wasting toughguy pose from pure nostalgia.

As a result, Willy had decided not to give him the option.

Riley hadn’t argued the point. Odd as it appeared, he’d discovered in Willy a man whose combat sense he could trust. It had been for him the rediscovery of one Vietnam experience he hadn’t expected to ever feel again: a bonding not based on shared backgrounds or cultures, but on the other guy’s proven ability to get the job done. Riley had no delusions about Willy’s survival skills—the latter seemed devoted to his own self-destruction in a loopy, roundabout way—but Riley did believe that following his lead might well result in avenging Nate’s death, while leaving his own skin intact.

Any further sentiment didn’t apply, and clearly wasn’t asked for.

Manotti lived in a bland apartment building of no architectural merit—merely one of those square brick blocks with dozens of windows, reminiscent of a child’s drawing. Willy picked up his pace, leaving Riley behind, and reached the lobby just as Manotti was digging into his pocket for his keys. Willy was holding his dead pager up to his ear as if it were a cell phone.

“Look,” he said in a slightly argumentative tone as he came up behind the old man, “I don’t care what he told you. We settled on that price a week ago. He can’t expect me to move this kind of deal and then have all the numbers change…. Hang on a sec. I gotta get my door key.”

He made a show of trying to keep the fake phone wedged against his cheek while fumbling deep in his pocket for the fictional keys. Manotti noticed the effort as he unlocked the door, correctly interpreting Willy’s pleading expression, and held the door open for him to pass through.

“Thanks, man,” Willy murmured with a quick smile. “It’s been a hell of a day.”

He regained control of the pager and said, “No, I was talking to somebody else. Harry, tell me exactly what he told you. I wanna hear if maybe I missed something the first time around, like maybe what a crook this guy is.”

Together, Manotti and Willy walked the length of the building’s inner foyer and arrived at the waiting elevator around the corner.

“He said what?” Willy said eventually, his voice rising. “That doesn’t sound even vaguely right. I got the contract upstairs, unless he sent me something new in the meantime…. Shit.” He held the pager against his chest as Manotti pushed the button for the third floor. “Mister,” he explained, “I hate to be a pain, especially after you helped me out, but I forgot to check my mail and I gotta get to my apartment fast. Could you hold the door?”

After a pleasant dinner out, and being flattered for his courtesy, Manotti wasn’t inclined to turn him down. He nodded, said, “Sure,” and placed his hand against the doorjamb.

Willy jogged back the way they’d come, opened the door for the waiting Riley, gave him the floor number, and retraced his steps, pretending as he rounded the corner to be stuffing something into his inner pocket. “Hang on, Harry. I’m doing two things at once.” He rejoined the old man, nodded his thanks, and said, “Four. I really appreciate it,” as Manotti waved inquiringly at the elevator’s control panel. Willy then spoke into his fake phone, “No. Just junk mail and a bill. All right, tell me exactly what he said.”

For the rest of the trip up, all Willy had to do was make facial expressions and an occasional comment to fulfill what remained of his charade. On the third floor, he raised his eyebrows in grateful parting to Manotti, who waved back, and waited for the doors to close before replacing the pager on his belt. On the next floor, he ran down the hallway, found the stairwell, and doublestepped down one flight.

He carefully poked his head into the hallway, looking both ways, and saw Riley leaning against the wall to the left, out of breath from his quick climb up three stories.

Riley met him halfway. “Number 340,” he said in an undertone. “Lucky for me he doesn’t live on the top floor. No dog met him at the door and all the lights were out when he opened the door. He’s gotta live alone. You want to hit him now?”

Willy shrugged. “No reason not to.”

They quietly returned to Manotti’s apartment door. Willy stood directly opposite the peephole. Riley flattened against the wall near the doorknob.

Willy rang the buzzer.

They heard a man’s heavy tread approach. “Yeah?”

“It’s Randy,” Willy said brightly. “Remember? From the elevator just now. You dropped this just as you stepped out. At least it has your address on it.” He held a checkbook up too close to the peephole for anyone to see what it was.

It didn’t matter in any case. The lock was already being snapped open. As the door swung back, Riley whipped around from where he’d been hiding and charged through the opening, his shoulder leading, with Willy close behind. They were both inside, the door closed behind them, before Lenny Manotti had stopped sliding across the floor on his back.

Riley was down on one knee beside him, one large hand clamped across his mouth, before he’d been able to utter a sound. Willy stood at his feet, pointing a gun at him.

“Hi, Lenny,” he said in a quiet voice. “We’re the ghosts from Christmas past. You wanna play ball, or should I shoot you right now? Nod if it’s the first.”

Manotti nodded once. Slowly, Riley removed his hand. At that, Manotti narrowed his eyes. “Who are you fuckin’ assholes? I don’t know you.”

Willy put on a disappointed look. “You hear what he called us? Guess we better turn up the heat.”

Riley grabbed Manotti by the scruff of the neck and yanked him up like a mannequin. He dragged him into the living room beyond the entrance hall and slammed him down into a chair. He then pulled some duct tape from his coat pocket and began strapping the older man down.

Manotti licked his lips. “What the hell d’you want? Maybe we can make a deal.”

Willy smiled, moving a chair opposite his victim and sitting in it so they were virtually knee to knee. “I like that. We’re not after much. Problem is, I want it to be the truth. You could tell us anything you wanted to get us out of your hair, and by the time we found that out, you’d have rounded up some of your old buddies.”

“I’m retired,” Manotti protested. “What do I give a fuck about that shit anymore? What d’ya wanna know, fer Christ’s sake? This is stupid.”

Willy laughed. “Makes me wonder how many times
you
did the same thing in your prime. Or did Cashman do it for you?”

Manotti scowled. “You friends with that bum? I shoulda guessed. Couple of fuckin’ leg breakers. No style.”

“Right. So says the artist. Spare me, Lenny. Actually, we’re not friends of Cashman. Haven’t seen him in a long time. What’s he up to?”

“Who cares?”

Willy leaned forward, suddenly menacing. A switchblade had appeared in his hand and was now resting on Manotti’s upper lip, forcing him to cross his eyes as he stared at it.

“What the—”

Willy interrupted him with a tiny jab. “That’s the question, Lenny. Truth or consequences. Where do we find Cashman?”