THIRTY

I fell asleep with the sun still hanging lazy in the late afternoon sky and my shoes on my feet. When I awoke the memory of the sun was gone, washed away by the raindrops drumming against my bedroom window. I’d lately fallen in love with naps, though I usually managed to get my shoes off before passing out. For some reason I slept better in the late afternoon these days than at night. At my age, you’re confident you’ll wake up from a nap, but the same couldn’t be said of a night’s sleep.

I stripped off my clothes and showered, making sure not to stand and stare at my sorry-assed self in the mirror when I was done. I threw on a robe and stood looking out my front window at the storm roiling the oily sheen atop the black waters of Sheepshead Bay. Tethered to their docks, dormant fishing boats bobbed and listed. Spring storms in Brooklyn, even at their most fierce, were just so much bluster. The howling wind that carried bits of paper and plastic along the sidewalks and bent the few trees along Emmons Avenue blew warm and with little bite. I found my hand on my abdomen again and my mind filled with all the wrong kind of thoughts.

I did not fear death so much as the dying and I didn’t suppose I was alone in that. When I was a cop, I never gave much thought to getting killed on the job. It wasn’t healthy to think about such things, especially back in those bad old days when people called us pigs with impunity and we were targets for every radical group with a pistol or a pipe bomb. I don’t think kids could even conceive of how dangerous it was for us then. No, I never really worried about it, but I did have my private dread. I didn’t want to die in the cold in the rain. Just imagining the feel of an icy cold sidewalk against my cheek as a freezing rain soaked through my clothing made me nauseous. Even a hospital bed—and I detested the idea of dying in a hospital bed—would be preferable. Like Israel Roth before me, I did not want to be cold. I did not fear being alone so much. We are all alone in death. I accepted that, but I did not want to be cold and wet.

I turned away from the window and suddenly Flannery’s voice rang in my ears. Something he had said earlier in the day came back to me. Not the stuff about pissing people off. That came with the territory. It was something else. Only two types of creatures without the weight of guilt on them: the newly born and the forgotten dead. I’m not sure why it hadn’t registered at the bar—probably because my gut was already starting to hurt—and I wasn’t sure I understood why it popped into my head just then or why it should matter. Sure, I was thinking about death and dying, but I was pretty certain that wasn’t why Flannery’s words had suddenly come back to me. Then, with my next breath, I swore I could smell Maya Watson’s perfume in the air. Christ, I really detested sweet perfume. I’d driven to Bay Ridge with my windows down trying to get the smell of it out of my car. And now it was like I was summoning it up. I was at a loss. As undeniably attractive as Maya was, I wasn’t particularly attracted to her. Besides, in spite of the sympathy I felt for her situation, I don’t think I’d ever get past what had happened at the High Line Bistro.

That’s when I knew. Maya Watson’s parting words came rushing into my head. There’s somebody in this whole mess who nobody wants to see for who he was, not really. She hadn’t been talking about Jorge Delgado at all. No, Maya Watson had to be talking about Robert Tillman, the victim at the High Line Bistro, one of Flannery’s forgotten dead. It seemed so obvious to me now, I wanted to kick myself. Of course he was the one person in this whole ugly mess that hadn’t received much scrutiny at all. Even if it was his being stricken that started the chain of events that led to Alta Conseco’s murder, why would anyone focus on some poor schmuck who happened to drop dead of an aneurism in a restaurant kitchen?

Let’s say a stray dog runs out into traffic, gets killed by a bus, and starts a chain reaction that leads to a fatal car crash. In some sense, although the dog was the catalyst for everything that followed, he’s the least important element. He’s just another dead dog that happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, Robert Tillman had been treated like that stray dog: a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The irony was that if he had been murdered, the cops would have gone over every inch of his life, searching for the killer’s possible motive. But he hadn’t been murdered and, from what I could see, there was no connection between Robert Tillman, Alta Conseco, and Maya Watson beyond the unfortunate coincidence of proximity and unfortunate timing.

I dialed Maya Watson’s phone number. It rang a few times before going to voicemail. I didn’t really blame her for not answering her phone these days. She had no doubt changed her numbers more than once since March, but privacy, which had always been a cruel myth, was now nearly unattainable. No one knows that better than a private investigator. Before everyone used the internet like an anatomical appendage, we used to be able to find out pretty much everything about anyone. True, it used to take a little longer and it depended a little more on bribery, threat, and charm than on hacking, but the results were similar. I left a message, apologizing for what had transpired earlier and asking if we could get together to talk. I left my numbers and hung up.

I sat down at my computer and Googled Robert Tillman. If there was a connection between Tillman and the two EMTs, this was the place to start.