TWELVE

Whereas Sarah was thrilled to hear from me and excited about the wedding, the edge to Pam’s voice was about as subtle as a chainsaw. I didn’t need to scratch too far below the surface to understand why. The edge was there when she first saw Carmella in my arms. Although Pam had done a good job of sheathing it during the party on Sunday, the edge was there again in our goodbyes that night. Funny how this woman, who never seemed threatened by anything or anyone, was so thrown off her game. It was worse now than on Sunday night because she’d been alone for a few days with time to think. That was the worst thing of all, time to think. Time to think is life’s Petri dish. It’s the medium in which a random twinge of anxiety morphs into debilitating self-doubt, where a passing regret grows into paralytic guilt. Since walking out of my oncologist’s office, I’d become very familiar with the dangers of time to think. That’s why Carmella’s reappearance was saving me from eating myself alive before the cancer could. Problem was, until after the wedding, Pam couldn’t know that the more immediate threat to the two years we’d spent together wasn’t Carmella at all.

“Hey, how’s the case going?” I asked, ignoring the edginess.

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“What do you want me to say? It’s a case.”

“Specificity, that’s what I always loved about you.”

“Loved?”

Shit! I’d been trying to walk on eggshells when it was actually a minefield I was walking through.

“Come on, Pam, cut it out.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding like she meant it. “I’m just feeling off is all. Listen, I should be wrapping this job up by next Monday latest. You have off, right? Why not come up here a few days early and we can spend time drinking in bed? Besides, you’ve looked pretty stressed out lately and you haven’t taken good care of yourself. Let me take care of you.”

Talk about a minefield. Jesus! “As incredible as that sounds, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m working a case.”

“A case? You haven’t worked a case in two years and you’re working one now, a few weeks before your daughter’s wedding.”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“It’s for her, isn’t it? That’s why she was there Sunday.”

I decided that lying would only make things worse. “For Carmella? Yes, for her. It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not, Moe. It’s not complicated at all.”

“But it is.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“You know the EMT who let that guy die in the restaurant and then got stabbed to death in Brooklyn? Her name was Alta Conseco. She was Carmella’s older sister.”

“Christ! I never thought to put the names together.”

Pam knew the whole story about Carmella and me, about how Carmella had changed her name from Marina Conseco, even about how Carmella had added the extra l in her new first name as a fuck you to her mother for the way she treated Carmella after being molested.

“So what are you supposed to do?” Pam asked.

“Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“So of all the cases in the world, you choose this one? You’re going to spend the weeks before Sarah’s wedding doing a favor for a woman who basically ran out on you and robbed a child from you? No, Moe, like I said, it’s not complicated. It’s just plain crazy.”

“May well be.”

“This Alta Conseco just let a man die, Moe.”

“Allegedly.”

“Bullshit. Everyone in the restaurant saw it happen. So what’s the point here, Don Quixote? You going to resurrect a dead woman’s reputation or are you looking for a little redemption because you still blame yourself for your first wife’s murder?”

“A little bit of both, I guess.”

“Well, call me when you get up here for the wedding. That’s if you still want to take me instead of your great love.”

“Now you’re just being cruel, Pam.”

“Am I? We’ll see.”

We would have to, because she was off the phone by the time I opened my mouth to say something.

…

O’Hearn’s was one of many bars of its kind in New York City. It was Irish through and through and served a hearty, if not exactly gourmet, lunch for reasonable money. Most of the menu choices were laid out in aluminum pans recessed into two rows of steam tables, the steam bleaching out the color and flavor of nearly all the food. The vegetables in particular seemed most susceptible to the vagaries of over-warming. Somehow, my mother used to achieve the same results without resorting to steam. The best feature of lunch was the carving board. There was ham and corned beef every day, sometimes turkey and roast beef too. Since getting off the job in 1977, I’d only been to places like O’Hearn’s twice: once with Francis Maloney Sr., my former father-in-law, and once with an ex-precinct mate of mine, Caveman Kenny Burton. In fact, I’d met Kenny here at O’Hearn’s. They were both dead now: Francis a victim of old age and his own bile, Kenny a victim of a bullet. Jesus did a lot of dying for their sins. Neither was missed, certainly not by me.

Brian Doyle had a half-empty pint of Harp on the table when I walked in. He was a naturally lean and athletic man and hadn’t put on an ounce since I met him. His hair was graying, but he still had the eyes of a kid. I bought us lunch before settling down to talk. I had some turkey and mashed potatoes and not much of either. Good to his word, he had corned beef and cabbage and boiled potatoes and another Harp. I’d always wondered how he could eat like that and stay slim. My guess was he had so much energy that he lost weight in his sleep.

“So what’s the deal, Boss?”

I handed over a large yellow mailing envelope with copies of the hate mail that directly threatened violence. “I need you and Devo to trace these back to the senders.”

Doyle took a look. His eyes got big, not from the harsh language or the racism—he’d be used to those—but from the names Alta Conseco and Maya Watson. I couldn’t remember how much of the story he knew about the history between Carmella and me before we hired him, so I simply told Brian that Alta was Carm’s sister.

“Still, Boss, this isn’t a good idea.”

“Don’t worry, you guys won’t be mentioned at all. I’m your client and that’s that. Charge me whatever you have to charge me. No discounts.”

“For swimming in this shit, you weren’t gonna get one. But there’s a problem I see already.”

“What’s that?”

He put one of the emails on the table and pointed at the addresses. “See here? There’s only so much Devo can do with this. If we had access to the actual emails, Devo could probably do what you want.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Look, I’m not as IT-savvy as Devo by a long shot, but there are reveal codes you can use to unmask people trying to hide their email identities. So if you can get her to forward those emails to Devo …”

“I’ll get them for you.”

“How?”

“You let me worry about that, Brian.”

“I almost wish you couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“You know I love you and Carmella. You guys saved my ass and taught me the ropes and everything, but this bitch Alta deserved what she got.”

I thought about saying that no one deserved a violent death, but I didn’t believe it, not for a second. I’d seen too much, lived through too much to think that there weren’t some people, maybe only a very few, who warranted a violent end: Caveman Kenny Burton, for instance. Besides, I thought, when did deserving have anything to do with it?

“I owe it to Carm,” I said, “and so do you. When you get the information I’m looking for, you can wash your hands of it.”

He wasn’t enthusiastic. “All right. Whatever.”

“Another drink?”

“Nah, just let me know when you get what we need.”

He stood to go, but I grabbed his arm.

“I think I’m dying, Brian.” The words came out of my mouth involuntarily.

He sat back down. “What?”

“Stomach cancer.”

“Jesus. Fuck!”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“It’s bad, huh?”

“It’s not good.”

“Why tell me? I was gonna do the job for you anyhow.”

“It’s not that, Brian. I would never manipulate a friend that way. Weird thing is, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone, but I think I would have exploded if I didn’t tell somebody. I knew I could tell you. You can’t say a word about it.”

“Not to Devo?”

“I suppose you can tell him,” I said. “But that’s it.”

“Okay, you got my word.”

“Shit, Doyle, lighten up. I’m the one with the cancer. You look worse than me.”

He stared at me for a long few seconds and said, “No, Boss, I don’t.”

After he left O’Hearn’s, I watched him walk away down Church Street. I caught a reflection of myself in the window. He was right.