TWENTY

The package from Brian Doyle was there on the welcome mat outside my condo door. I can’t say that I was particularly excited to see the thick envelope. Basically, it meant I’d be spending the next few days doing grunt work—going from house to house, interviewing angry firemen who would be about as happy to see me as they would be about a bad case of the crabs. I was getting too old for this shit. No, not getting too old: too old. I noticed it when I was working the Sashi Bluntstone case. The going from door to door, the lying and the half-truths, the drama, took a toll on me.

There was a day when I was interviewing potential suspects in Sashi’s abduction that I had to kick a field goal using an art professor’s testicles as the football. He was a big man with a short fuse who tried pushing me around, but even in my sixties, I wasn’t easily pushed. In Brooklyn, the rule is, someone pushes you, you don’t just push back, you push back twice as hard. If that doesn’t work, you go for the throat or, sometimes, you aim a little lower. In my neighborhood, you learned to never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring an F-16. But my roughing up the art professor that day wasn’t the half of it. Later that afternoon in Alphabet City, I went to talk to a woman art blogger whose screen name was Michelangelo or was it Leonardo? … I forget. She turned out to be a meth freak, turning five- and ten-buck tricks for rent and drug money. She had been no threat to Sashi. The only child she was a threat to was her own son, who I found dead cold and blue in his crib. I didn’t think I would ever recover from that day. I’m not sure I have.

Now I would go inside, open up the envelope, and start that process all over again. I laughed at myself, pushing in the front door. I laughed because I remembered the romance being a PI once held for me, how I was so hungry to work cases when I first got my license, but romance fades. I knew that love faded. Anyone married for more than a few years knows that lesson. Sometimes it evaporates completely and so abruptly you question whether it was ever there to begin with, but love and romance are different animals. I remembered how desperate I’d been for my gold shield, how getting it had once been more important to me than the fate of the Western world. As I’ve said before, there were several times over the three decades following my forced retirement from the NYPD that the serpent in varied disguises had offered me that apple and I’d turned him away. Each time it was offered, my desperation faded just a little bit more, until my hunger for the apple completely disappeared and the serpent stopped asking. Poor Eve, I thought, if she’d only been slightly more patient.

The first thing I noticed was the invoice. Talk about sticker shock. Doyle wasn’t kidding about charging me for the work. He seemed to have added an eminent death surcharge. He was going to soak me for all he could while I was still breathing. I didn’t mind, really. He had swallowed the cost of plenty of favors he’d done for me in the past and I’d been around long enough to know the bill always comes due one way or the other. Always.

The size of the invoice was about the only surprise in the pile of paperwork. Just as I had predicted and just as Brian Doyle had said, most of the more violent hate mail was from members of New York’s Bravest: some retired, most not. And the background checks Doyle and Devo had done were very helpful. With these guys’ ages, addresses, contact info, police records, if any, and the public record aspects of their service records there in front of me, I would be able to eliminate a lot of the legwork. I would be able to generate a list of more and less likely suspects without having to interview each and every one of these schmucks.

First thing I took into account was proximity. Although I supposed someone might have been following Alta Conseco around for weeks just waiting for the right moment to kill her, I didn’t think it was likely. There was something about the violence of the attack, the sloppiness of it—Alta had, after all, managed to make it back to the Grotto before she died—that made it seem like a spur of the moment, impulsive attack. Someone who would have been carefully following her for weeks wouldn’t have risked such public exposure and would have made sure she was dead before abandoning the body. I had no proof or experience to back it up. What the fuck did I know anyway? I hadn’t been a homicide detective. It was just a hunch, but I’d done pretty well following my hunches. So I took out an old road map of New York City and drew concentric circles in inch-wide increments extending out from the Gelato Grotto and carefully plotted the addresses of the hate-mailers.

Just as I finished pressing the point of my red pencil to the map where the last potential suspect lived, a stray thought crossed my mind that quickly turned into something else: a question. What in the hell was Alta Conseco doing at the Grotto in the first place? She lived on the other side of Brooklyn, for chrissakes! Okay, so some people loved their pizza and the homemade gelato was outstanding, but why would Alta travel to the Grotto? Did she have a craving? Did she go there to meet someone? If so, who? Like all good questions, the original suggested a hundred more.

I snapped my red pencil in two. My daughter was getting married soon and three days after that, some surgeon would be cutting out half of my kishkas. I didn’t have time for a hundred more damned questions. I wasn’t sure I had time for one.