ELEVEN

I had two nasty bruises and a headache for my troubles. The hurt in my gut had diminished to the level I had grown accustomed to. The pain, which had so frightened me at first, was now just like background noise. Still, I couldn’t sleep. The possible reasons were legion, so I didn’t waste time considering them. What I did instead was read through a box full of hate mail. About halfway through, it occurred to me that people with hearts so full of hate must have no room in their brains for spelling or syntax. The drab sameness of the vulgarity and racism was mind-numbing. It was kind of like my pain; after a while it became noise. None of it made sense, really. Then again, when did reason ever have anything to do with racism or hate? It was a dumb question for a Jew to ask, even to himself. I imagined Mr. Roth showing me the number on his forearm and shaking his head at me in disapproval.

I pulled a few letters out of the pile. These were the ones that moved beyond simple expressions of hate or vague hopes for terrible fates to befall Alta and Maya and their families. They were the letters in which the writers made specific threats of violence, some alluding to stabbing and throat slitting. I wondered just how hard Detective Fuqua had worked at looking into the origin of these. As he said, many, if not most, New Yorkers felt as though Alta had gotten what she deserved. And no matter how determined Fuqua seemed, I doubted the NYPD was willing to spend the money and manpower it would take to investigate hundreds, maybe thousands of anonymous letters and emails. But things sent electronically weren’t as anonymous as people thought. Sure, there were clever computer geeks and hackers who could bury their cyber-footprints, but I somehow doubted that people who could barely spell fuck or use it in a proper sentence were likely candidates for jobs at Intel, Cisco, or the NSA.

I called Brian Doyle’s cell. Doyle was an ex-cop. When he was on the job, he had a nasty rep for taking shortcuts and dishing out uppercuts. He was a stubborn, impatient prick who liked using his knuckles more than his noggin, but what made him a bad cop helped make him a good PI. When Carm and I owned our security firm together, we took Brian on and made a damned fine investigator of him. Then in 2002, after Carm and I split and dissolved the partnership, Brian and our tech guy Devo opened up their own shop in lower Manhattan. They had helped me with the Sashi Bluntstone case and I was hoping they could help me again.

“What? It’s three in the fucking morning,” Brian answered with his usual Old World charm.

“You doing surveillance?”

“What the fuck else would I be doing answering my cell phone at three a.m.?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re just lonely.”

“Loneliness was never my problem, Boss.” Brian had never gotten out of the habit of calling me that. “So what can I do you for?”

“Can you meet me tomorrow? I got a job for you and Devo.”

“Where and when?”

“Lunch at noon,” I said. “You pick the place.”

“O’Hearn’s on Church Street. I’m in a corned beef and cabbage kinda mood.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Click.

I realized I hadn’t called Pam or Sarah in a few days. I’d call Sarah in the morning. Although Pam was still a PI, she wasn’t Brian Doyle’s type of PI. She wasn’t big on late-night surveillance, but she did kick the occasional ass. I wasn’t going to risk waking her, not at this hour. So I looked out my front window at Sheepshead Bay and thought back to when I was a kid and crossing the Ocean Avenue footbridge over the bay to Manhattan Beach seemed like a walk into another world. I was thinking about that kind of walk a lot lately, a walk into another world.