TWENTY-ONE

Grunt Work 101.

I began the unpleasantries early, figuring to squeeze as much in as I could in one day. It was a useless approach, but it was something. After my pencil-snapping fit of pique and brief wallow in the woe-is-me shallows, I came up with a plan. Any of the hate-mailers who had a history of violence, either on the job or off, moved to the top of the suspect list. Any with a history of violence against women, went to the top of the first list. And any of the folks on that list who lived within walking or short-driving distance from the Grotto, went straight to the head of the class.

Anthony Marinello batted lead-off. He was a nasty piece of pie. He’d only had about four years on the job, but had been moved around from firehouse to firehouse in his brief and undistinguished career. He was now on desk duty in Queens. Just like with the NYPD, there were legitimate reasons for desk duty: injury, advancing age, frayed nerves, et cetera. There were less than legitimate reasons too. I suspected the latter was the case with Marinello. He was a real nut job, a big mouth who was hated by the people he served with. According to his reviews, he wasn’t much of a fireman either, but he hadn’t yet crossed the line far enough to get fired for cause. He probably had a rabbi—someone more senior on the job with some juice who looked out for him—maybe a family friend or relative. Both the NYPD and FDNY were big enough to eat some of their mistakes or bury them, as it were, behind a desk or in a supply room somewhere, where they collected their paychecks without doing much harm.

Anthony also had had a few run-ins with his destined-to-be ex-wife. The wife hadn’t gotten to the order of protection stage quite yet, but she had filed for divorce. Given the number of times the cops had been called to the house, you didn’t need to be a soothsayer to think Marinello’s arrest was on the near horizon. There was something else Marinello had going for him: his address was on West 6th Street near Avenue U, only a hop, skip, and a jump from the Grotto. I walked up the concrete steps to the old brick two-family house and rang the bell.

I hadn’t worked on the lies I would tell to whomever answered the door. I found that the lies always sounded best when I hadn’t rehearsed them. They just seemed more convincing somehow if I heard them at the same time as the party I was telling them to. There was no answer at first, but I didn’t get discouraged. Too late for that. I was already discouraged and besides, it was early. I rang the bell again and this time I heard stirring on the other side of the door.

“Hold your water!” was the shrill order from the woman inside the house.

What a quaint expression, that. Most men my age had a little trouble in that area and didn’t like being reminded of it. Between her voice and choice of words, I already wasn’t particularly fond of the woman on the other side of the door. Things went downhill from there.

“Yeah,” she said, pulling the door back. “What?”

Dressed in a garish, red satin robe, she was as hard looking as her voice was shrill. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of her frowning mouth. She smelled like an ashtray rinsed out in vanilla bathroom spray. I carried various sorts of business cards with me: one of the tricks of the trade. From one interview to the next, I never knew who I was going to need to be. I had cards I’d collected from insurance salesmen, doctors, rabbis, transport executives, lawyers—lots of lawyers—collision shop owners, plumbers, and a hundred other professions. I kept it simple and the lies to a minimum by handing her one of my own old cards from Prager & Melendez Investigations, Inc.

“Mrs. Marinello?”

“Not for too much longer, I hope.”

“Your lawyer sent me,” I said, yawning with false disinterest.

Mrs. Marinello stared at the card and I at her. She was probably thirty, but looked forty: too much sun and too many Marlboros. She had been pretty once, probably in high school. Her body was still intact and she knew it, but even that seemed to have some sharp edges. Her blond hair didn’t match her coloring and it had been teased and hair-sprayed to within an inch of its life.

“What did the lawyer send you for?” she asked, finally looking up at me.

“To discuss your husband.”

“I been t’rough this with the other guy.”

“I’m better than the other guy. That’s why I’m here.”

“Okay. What the fuck? You wanna come on in?”

I hesitated. “Is your husband on the premises?”

“That asshole? Nah, I kicked his ass outta here in March.”

“Where has he been living since March?” I asked, pulling out a notepad and pen.

“With his cousin Vinny up in the Bronx by Fordham somewheres.”

I tried recalling the dates on the reports Doyle and Devo had supplied me with. “But he’s been back, yes?”

“Yeah, I had to call the cops on him in April. He’s such a prick. Started ripping up my underthings and smacked me around a little.”

“But you didn’t have him arrested,” I said.

“Nah, I’m protecting my investment in that motherfucka. When we make the settlement, I need him to be on the job. I want half of his pension. If I got him arrested and he got shitcanned, where would that leave me? What would I have to show for marrying the prick? He’s stayin’ on the job as long as I can help it and now that Vinny got him assigned to some dumbass desk, I figure I’m in good shape to hammer him. Vinny, now there’s the guy I shoulda married. He’s already got fifteen years on and a vinyl siding business that triples his department take-home.”

“You got it all figured.”

“Too bad about Vinny. I blew him the night I met him and Anthony, but he came almost before I got him in my mouth. Anthony, now that man can fuck. I shoulda known better than to listen to my pussy.”

Charming. “I wouldn’t know.”

She gave me a look that would’ve killed me and anyone within a twenty-foot radius. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Sorry. So back to the matter at hand…. Do you know of any other time your husband has been back? Have you seen him driving by, spoken to any of his friends or family, have you spoken to anyone who might’ve indicated he’s been back in the neighborhood?”

“You are better than the other guy,” she said. “All he wanted to know was, was I fucking anyone else or did I know if Anthony was fucking somebody else.”

“I was getting to that, but can you answer my—”

“No, he hasn’t been back around that I know of. He knows I got him by the nuts and he don’t wanna lose his job neither. He’s been a good boy and stayed away.”

“So you’ve had no indication at all—”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said to you, mister? No, from what I can tell, he’s staying up in the Bronx banging this little cooz he hooked up with.”

“That doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

“If it keeps him in line and away from me, I wouldn’t care if he was fuckin’ Vinny.”

Lovely sentiment, I thought, but I supposed she had a point. And by mentioning Marinello’s new girlfriend, she’d given me an opening to ask about Alta Conseco. I took out a copy of the email Anthony had sent to both Alta and Maya and handed it to the wife.

“What’s this?” she snapped.

“It’s a death threat your genius husband sent to those two EMTs who let that guy die a few months back and it’s what’s going to screw up your plans for half the pension if your husband doesn’t watch himself. If we caught him sending hate mail like this, the FDNY can catch him at it too. So, do you think there was anything to this threat?”

“Nah, Anthony’s basically a coward. Yeah, sure, he’s slapped me around a little bit, but he’s just a frightened little boy. He wouldn’t have the balls on him to kill anyone. Besides, ain’t it already too late? Ain’t one of those bitches dead already?”

I bit the inside of my cheek and nodded yes. “The problem is if you want to keep him on the job so we all make out here, I need to know for certain he had nothing to do with the murder. You do realize that Alta Conseco was murdered over by the Grotto, not a five-minute walk from here.”

Her brown, hungover eyes got big. “Anthony didn’t have nothing to do with that!”

“How can you be sure?”

“I thought you was working for me,” she said, the first traces of doubt about me seeping in.

I ignored the doubt. “Look, if you can help me eliminate Anthony as a suspect here, you can get your dream settlement, but if he’s tied up in this in any—”

“Okay. I can prove it if I have to, but it’s not gonna look good in court.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to get to court,” I said, reassuring as all hell.

“We were in the Dominican Republic when that bitch was killed.”

“We?”

“Me and Anthony and another couple.” Her leathery skin sort of changed color as she looked away from me. On her, it’s what passed for blushing. “We swing. We used to, anyways, and there’s this resort down there that caters to swingers. We bought the airline tickets like last year and they weren’t refundable and we, um, we didn’t want to, you know, miss the opportunity, if you get my meaning.”

“Oh, I get it. You can prove this?”

“I got the fuckin’ credit card bills, receipts, and doctor bills right inside.”

“Doctor bills?”

“Me and Anthony both got some stomach thing down there. We was sick for a month after we got back. You wanna see the receipts?” she asked, turning to go. “Like I said, I got ’em right inside.”

“No, that’s okay. I don’t think it will come up, but I just had to make sure. If I need the documentation, I can get back in touch with you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I think that about covers it.”

I left, hurrying down the stairs. I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn’t look back. I wanted to get as far away from her as fast as I could. It wasn’t as if she were the most despicable person I’d ever met—not by a long shot. My former father-in-law Francis Maloney made her look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Nor was her sense of ethics, as fucked up and convoluted as it was, the most self-serving. It was just that her focus was so narrow, her goals so small, so unimportant in the scheme of things, that I wanted to scream. Is this what she was born to dream of, I wondered? Was half of her husband’s pension all she wanted out of life? By the time I reached the street, I wanted to turn around and run back up the stairs and shake her by the shoulders and tell her life was too short to want so little from it. I turned, but she had already gone, gone back inside with her tiny dreams to keep her company.

She’d done me a favor by eliminating Anthony Marinello as a suspect. Did I believe her about them being out of the country when Alta was murdered? Yeah, I believed her. It rang true. If the wife was lying, she was a better liar than me, and if she was lying, she deserved a lot of credit for coming up with an amazingly embarrassing alibi on the spur of the moment. Besides, her story was easy enough to check out. She had done me a favor because looking for the right suspect was like shopping for a house: unless there are very few on the market, you don’t buy the first one you look at.