EIGHT

As usual, I wasn’t following my own rules. I’d been determined to keep Tillman’s death discreet from Alta’s murder, but there I was outside Maya Watson’s condo door.

In the end, Fuqua was very cooperative, but he didn’t actually have much to share. Nobody was talking because, as I suspected, there was nothing much to say. The statements taken by the cops at the Grotto, most of which I’d already seen, were from people who basically watched Alta die. One minute they were eating their pizza and the next minute a woman in blood-soaked clothing collapsed to the concrete. No one had witnessed the crime itself and none of the very few leads Fuqua had developed had come to anything. Most of what the detective had for me was all rather clinical and sterile. Alta, like all victims, had been reduced to a statistic, a batch of test results, a group of crime scene and autopsy photos. Only in the hearts and minds of those closest to them do victims remain themselves. And even then, not always or forever.

“Let us be honest, Mr. Prager, the night of the homicide was my only real opportunity. Now that everyone knows the identity of the victim, no one will come forward. Rightly or wrongly, people feel as if she has received what she had coming her,” said the detective.

“I didn’t know Haitians believed in karma.”

“Haitians believe in pain and suffering. They are experiences we are very familiar with.”

“Do you feel that Alta Conseco got what she had coming?”

“I am not the judge of such things. To me, all victims are equal in murder.”

As ultimately cooperative as he was, Fuqua could not supply a sense of who Alta Conseco had been. There was nothing unexpected in that. A homicide detective handles dozens of cases in a year and even the most dedicated ones don’t really know the victims. I guess maybe because I was a stumbler and didn’t approach cases with a logical game plan, I needed a hook, a connection, a feel for Alta. The saddest part of all this was that I couldn’t go to her sister to get it. For although Alta and Carmella shared genetics and a family resemblance, they had shared very little else for going on three decades. As soon as Carmella could legally change her name and leave her family behind, she did. Her paternal grandmother, her abuela, had been the only person who kept Carm tethered to her family, and her grandmother had died many years ago. In the years we spent together as friends, as business partners, as lovers, Carmella’s self-imposed exile from her family was the one taboo subject between us.

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.