EIGHTEEN

I stopped at my condo for another shower and a change of clothing before heading over to see Detective Jean Jacques Fuqua. Neither the shower nor the new clothing made me feel like a new man. I was past the age when feeling like a new man was possible. The best I could hope for was feeling like a retread and recently even that had become a pipe dream. I no longer got just tired. That ship done sailed. These days my exhaustion was profound as a Russian novel. Exhaustion for me was now a whole other state of being and last night had taken more out of me than I had to give. I wasn’t sure if this new state of being was simply my body giving me a preview of what I’d feel like once chemo and radiation kicked in or if it was preparing me for death. Death, I thought, had all sorts of potential for unpleasantness, especially if I was wrong about all those many things I didn’t believe in. What if the face of God was a sneering one and he was the type to say I told you so? What if he was just a universal hurt machine? Man, in either case, I was fucked.

Even last night as I lay on Carmella’s bathroom floor, I knew I wasn’t quite dead. I couldn’t imagine the departed could taste their own vomit or feel as though their kishkas were being torn apart from the inside out. Nope. I was pretty sure that sort of unpleasantness was reserved for the living, but as poorly as I felt, it was much better than I had at the kitchen table. The nausea was gone and my vision was no longer blurred at the edges. My view of the base of the toilet was crystal clear. I was weak, but my arms were no longer leaden and my legs seemed like they might once again support my full weight. I hadn’t been foolish enough to test them out. I was content to just lie there and enjoy the coolness of the tiles.

Eventually, I got around to showering and rinsing my mouth. There wasn’t enough mouthwash left in Carm’s medicine cabinet to fully rid me of that awful taste. There probably wasn’t enough in all of East New York to do that. I was feeling much better when I spit the last of the mouthwash into the sink, but the exhaustion had set in. It was the exhaustion, along with some other less savory symptoms, that had forced me to go to my doctor in the first place. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I looked old. I noticed my hand on my abdomen and turned away. I wrapped two big bath towels around me, and asked Carmella if I could lie down on the couch and just shut my eyes for a few minutes. A few minutes turned into a long deep sleep of forgotten dreams.

When I opened my eyes, the sun was just sending the tips of its fingers over the east end of Long Island. The birds were in full throat—the birds in Brooklyn sing like any other birds, except maybe a little louder, in order to be heard. The apartment itself was quiet and I found my clothes on the chair next to the couch. Carm had washed my shirt, briefs, and socks. She’d pressed my suit and sprayed it with that stuff that was supposed to pull the stink out of fabric. It had worked well enough. In a book or movie, I would have tiptoed to look in on Israel. I just left. I’d had enough pain for the time being.

Catching a cab on Atlantic Avenue at that hour had turned out to be easier than I thought it might be. The cabbie dropped me off in front of the Kythira Café. I could scarcely believe my eyes: my car was still there and there was no parking ticket wedged under the wiper blade. It’s something of a miracle to park your car on the street overnight in New York City without it getting towed or ticketed. I had a friend who worked in the city budget office who told me the city took in like five hundred million dollars a year from parking violations and towing fees. Nice, huh? Talk about predatory practices. Lions and crocodiles could take lessons from New York City meter maids.

Now more than the sun’s fingertips hovered in the cloudless blue skies over the County of Kings and the pain in my gut was back at the level I’d grown accustomed to. But there was no getting around it, last night had scared the shit out of me. I was afraid: mouth-dry, hands-shaking afraid. I’d felt many things since walking out of my oncologist’s office. Mostly anger. I suppose I accepted the diagnosis and filed the reality of it away somewhere. It was one thing to think about dying in the abstract, which is what I had been doing to hold it at bay. The holding my abdomen, the silent deals with the tumor, the waiting until after Sarah’s wedding to begin treatment: it was a kind of denial. The fact was I hadn’t faced it, not really. Last night changed that. There was going to be a lot of pain and suffering. Not all of it would be mine. I was glad Sarah had Paul and that she wouldn’t be here to watch me suffer in close-up. I was thinking about Sarah when I parked the car on Mermaid.

Fuqua actually smiled at me when I walked over to his desk.

“You are a stubborn man, Moe Prager.”

“I prefer persistent.”

He gestured to an empty chair. “Sit. What may I do for you on this glorious day?”

“I’d like to see Alta Conseco’s apartment or where her personal effects are stored.”

“Porquoi? Why?”

“A feeling.”

“A feeling? What sort of feeling?”

“Did you pay any attention to the witness statements from the High Line Bistro?” I asked.

“Of course. You are referring to the alleged argument?”

It was my turn to smile at him. “Exactly.”

“It is my understanding from the detectives and the fire department investigators who interviewed both my victim and Maya Watson that they refused to discuss any aspect of that day other than to say they were there for lunch. And when I interviewed the Watson woman after my vic was killed, she once again refused to discuss the matter and denied there had been an argument. She stated only that she and Conseco were there for lunch.”

“Bullshit!”

“I agree. Bullshit. But if Watson did not cooperate after her friend and partner was murdered, she will not cooperate now.”

“Maybe not.”

“There is that persistence again, Mr. Prager. How will you get the Watson woman to talk with you?”

“Good question.”

“I am a detective. I am full of good questions.”

“It doesn’t add up,” I said. “There’s something obvious here that I can smell, but I just can’t see.”

He laughed. “Yes, a familiar feeling for me.”

“With this case?”

“With many cases, but with this one, very much.”

“That’s why I want to see Alta’s things. Maybe I will spot something.”

“It is a stretch, non?”

“Mais oui,” I said, using the full extent of my junior high school French. “I think stretches are all that’s left to us, detective.”

“Of course the items Miss Conseco had on her person when she was murdered, we are still holding as evidence.”

“I understand.”

“Here,” he said, “let me write down her address for you.”

…

Essex Street between Liberty and Glenmore Avenues was no more than six or seven blocks away from Carmella’s house on Ashford Street. I had meant to ask Carmella about why she’d held onto her abuela’s house for so many years and why the upstairs apartment still looked pretty much unchanged after two decades. I seemed to have forgotten several things I had gone there meaning to ask. Someone once said that men get older but they never grow up. How true, because when I really thought about it, I hadn’t gone to Carmella’s to ask about Alta or about the house or anything like that. No matter how I might rationalize it away and regardless of the date on my birth certificate, alcohol had reduced me to nothing more than a drunk and horny teenage boy desperate to sleep with his old girlfriend. Men never get over rejection. Seeing Israel again had pretty much put a damper on any of my plans for conquest. The fainting and the puking didn’t much help.

Besides, in my heart I knew why Carmella hung on to the house. That house represented her last remaining connection to her family. Not the family she had voluntarily cut out of her life, the family that had so carelessly let a seven-year-old girl fall into the hands of a pedophile, the family that afterwards treated her as an object of shame and disgust, but the idealized family she’d created out of the dreams and memories of her life prior to Easter Sunday, 1972. I have often wondered how Carmella hadn’t torn herself completely apart given the powerful and contradictory nature of her feelings toward her family. I don’t think she ever stopped wanting to belong to them, but I know better than most there are walls that cannot be scaled and wounds so raw they never heal. As best as I could tell, Carmella had long ago come to terms with the abduction and days of abuse. She has never come to terms with how her family treated her in the aftermath.

The address on Essex Street was a two-story, red brick row house with a small brick stoop. The wrought iron handrails had been freshly painted in a thick coat of black, but not much else in the way of maintenance had been done to the place in years. The wood around the old single-paned windows was rotting away and the mortar between many of the front façade bricks was missing. What once had probably been a lovely wrought iron and glass front door with side panels and transom had long since been replaced by a simple steel door with a peephole as its major design feature. The new door wasn’t pretty, but it was practical. As Brooklyn neighborhoods went, East New York was one of the roughest and in such places, safe always trumps aesthetics.

I read the names in the slots beneath all three doorbells. A. Conseco was the name on the little black and white plastic label in the slot for the top floor apartment, not that her name being there meant anything. New Yorkers aren’t exactly anal about getting names right on doorbells and mailboxes. I’m not sure why we’re like that. We just are. Maybe we have too much other shit to worry about to fret over the small stuff. And in East New York, there were probably a lot of people only too glad to have someone else’s name on their bell or mailbox. I rang the top bell for the hell of it. No answer. I wasn’t expecting one. The name in the slot under the main floor bell was T. Truax. I held my thumb down on it long and hard and I could hear it ringing through the front windows. Again, no answer. The name in the basement apartment slot was Rodriguez and I held that button down for quite some time as well. And just like the bell for Truax, I could hear it ringing inside the apartment. Same results too.

Depending upon your point of view, I was either batting zero or a thousand. Felt more like zero. Lacking x-ray vision or the will for risking a felony conviction for breaking and entering, I decided to go. I made it down three steps when I thought I heard something at my back. I took a quick peek over my left shoulder and saw the main floor curtains covering the windows closest to the stoop had been pulled slightly to one side. I felt eyes on me, but I didn’t turn immediately around. Instead I took my time reaching street level and then made a lazy about-face. I tried to make myself seem as unthreatening and forlorn as possible. Much more easily accomplished these days than it had once been. I turned my lips down, shook my head, threw my hands up in exasperation, and made to go. The act must have played well for my audience because the front door opened and someone called out, “Hey, mister, you jus’ hold on.”

She was a stout black woman in a well-worn bathrobe and men’s brown slippers, the kind my dad used to favor. She had a fussy hairdo with lots of elaborate twists and curls and it glistened in the midday sun. She didn’t have to touch it for me to see that her hairdo was a source of great pride. She had a lovely, welcoming smile, but wary eyes taking my measure. The problem was I was at a loss. I’d been going through the motions, ringing the bells and all, but I was still preoccupied by the implications of what had happened to me last night and the fear of what lay ahead. I remembered Carmella first telling me about Alta’s murder. I could see her mouthing the word Gravesend in my mind’s eye. Gravesend, indeed.

“Hey, mister, you all right?” the woman on the stoop asked, breaking the trance.

“Fine,” I said for lack of anything else.

The thing was, I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t bothered thinking about what I would say if someone answered one of the bells. I knew I had to say something right then or lose her. What to say was the issue. I opened my mouth, but she spoke first.

“I seen you before,” she said, the wary squint of her eyes evaporating. “Where I seen you at? On TV somewhere or the papers?” It wasn’t really a question, not for me anyway. She closed her eyes tight and scrunched up her face as if she were trying to squeeze the memory out of her head. “Tha’s it! I know where from. You the man that saved that little girl, the artist. Your face and hers was all over the news.”

“Sashi Bluntstone,” I said. “Very good.”

She seemed pleased with the both of us. “C’mon up here …”

“Moe,” I said, walking up the steps with my right hand extended, “Moe Prager.”

“Thelma Truax. I own this place. Husband left it to me when he passed.” Her hand was meaty, her handshake genteel. “I imagine you here about poor Alta, such a nice woman.”

“Not many people in this city share your view of Alta, Mrs. Truax.”

“It’s the Lord’s place to judge, Moe, not ours. Alta was never nothin’ but sweet to me and mine. Times when we couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, she’d see to my grandchildren. If it was serious, she would make arrangements with doctor friends of hers. So I hope the Lord shines his light of forgiveness on her.”

“Then you believe the media reports about Alta?”

“Don’t have to believe ’em,” she said. “Alta tol’ me her own self that they was true.”

Thelma’s words hit me like a tire iron. No matter that I’d already come to the same conclusion, that Alta had abandoned her principles and turned her back on her oath. I clung to the hope that I was wrong, that when I waded through everything there’d be some reasonable explanation for her actions or, more accurately, her inaction. Now I had independent confirmation that she had stood by and let Tillman die.

“When did she tell you that?”

“It’s quiet on this street now, but right after it all came down, it was just a shame how them newspeople hounded Alta. There was news trucks all over the street, people be ringing her bell at all hours. She took shelter in my apartment sometimes in that first week. We tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t have none. She said she deserved what she got, that she had let that man die.”

“Did you ask why?”

“She wouldn’t never say and I figured wasn’t none of my business really.”

“You’re a good woman for doing that for her, Thelma.”

“You don’t turn people away when they need you most, was how I was taught. But why you here, Moe?”

“I was taught like you, I guess. Someone’s got to stand up for Alta.”

She placed her hand on my shoulder. “Bless you.”

“Don’t go blessing me just yet. Do you think it would be possible for me to see Alta’s apartment?”

“Not much to see. Just furniture mostly.”

“The cops take most of her stuff?”

“Them too,” she said.

“Them too? Who else?”

“Her sister. She come round ’bout two days ago with all sorts of papers and things to prove she had inherited Alta’s belongings, but I knew it was Alta’s sister the minute I seen her. She look like Alta, but more beautiful.”

“Carmella?”

“That’s the one. After the police took what they would, which wasn’t much from what I could see, she come and take the rest. She said I could keep the furniture, if it would help me rent the place.”

“Do you remember what Carmella took?” I asked.

“Not in my nature to look. Why? Is it important?”

“For Carmella, probably. For me, not so much. Thelma, can I ask why you haven’t rented the apartment?”

“Haven’t had a heart to, though Lord knows, I need the money. And, to be honest with you, I wanted to wait till people on the block kinda forget. Tough to rent with this so fresh on everybody’s mind, you know?”

“I understand. Thank you for your help.”

“I wasn’t much help that I could see, but I was happy to do it for Alta’s memory. People should know she wasn’t always like that, like she was that day when the man died. We all do things we know we shouldn’t. We all have regrets in our hearts.”

“I know the truth of that,” I said.

Thelma took my hand and stared right up into my eyes so intently I could not look away. “I believe you do, Moe. Yes, I believe you do.”