THIRTY-SIX

I knew something was up. Pam was standing just inside the door when I walked into my condo. It wasn’t that she hugged and kissed me. It was the way she hugged and kissed me: tentatively, almost shyly, as if we had an audience. And when I stepped out from the little alcove between the front door and my living room, I saw Carmella. She was sitting on the couch, a half-finished glass of beer in her hand.

“You two have to talk,” Pam said, heading for the bedroom door. “I’ve got some calls to make.”

We waited for the bedroom door to close and for the other to speak. I wasn’t in the mood for a test of wills or Carm’s mind games, so I just spoke.

“You show up in New York unannounced. You leave without notice. Then you come to my house without letting me know you’re coming. You’re just full of surprises these days.”

“Do you love her?” Carmella asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “She loves you, you know?”

“None of your business. Move on.”

“You’re mad at me.”

“I’ve been mad at you for nine years. You left me, remember?”

“No, you are mad because I took Israel back home. I had to get him back to school. That’s all.”

“It’s not why you’re here, though, is it? You’re not here to talk about why I’m mad at you or to talk about Israel or even about me and Pam.”

“Then why am I here?” she asked, her tone smug.

“To tell me to forget it, to stop looking for Alta’s killer.”

Carmella wasn’t very often speechless. She was now. I don’t know that she was conscious of it, but she kept opening and closing her mouth, groping for something to say like a landed fish gasping for air.

I pressed her. “Isn’t that right? You want me to stop, don’t you?”

She couldn’t look at me. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I also went away to think a little. I realize it doesn’t matter if I find out who is responsible for killing Alta. It was a foolish idea. My sister is dead and I can’t make things better between us. I cannot make right my turning my back on her.”

“You were never much good at lying to me, Carm.”

That pissed her off. She jumped up from the couch and got in my face, the faintly sour smell of beer strong on her breath. “Everything I just said is true.”

“The words are true, but you’re lying. That’s not why you want me to stop looking.”

“Don’t be stupid, Moe.”

“You want me to stop looking because you’re worried I would find out that Alta was a lesbian. Maybe that her being gay had something to do with her murder and if I found out what happened, it would all come to light. You’re too late,” I said. “I went to Alta’s old apartment and I spoke to her landlady. She told me you’d come by and taken your sister’s things out of the apartment, so I went to the house on Ashford to talk to you. The old man across the way told me you left with Israel.”

“That’s not it,” she said, again turning away.

“I couldn’t figure out why you wouldn’t want me to see her personal stuff. You were a detective, the best detective I ever knew, for chrissakes! Of all people, you would know how important personal stuff could be. A scrap of paper with a name on it, a phone number, a matchbook, whatever—anything could be crucial. Why, I wondered, would Carm ask me to do this and then tie my hands behind my back by hiding stuff? The only answer that made sense was that there was something you didn’t want me to know about Alta. It didn’t take me long to figure out what that thing was once I dug a little deeper. I actually should have recognized it sooner from the hate mail, from the things they called your sister. Did you really think it wouldn’t come out? And why the fuck would it matter?”

“It’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The way Alta was. It’s wrong.”

“Say it, Carmella. Say it out loud, because I can’t believe what I think I’m hearing.”

“With women. It’s wrong.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You didn’t see the things she had—the letters from her girlfriends, the pictures of her doing things, the … It’s wrong.”

“You fucking hypocrite! You’re ashamed. You’re going to stand there and tell me you’re gonna judge your sister because she was gay. Is that what you’re saying? You, who turned your back on your whole family because you felt they were ashamed of you? You’re just like them. No, worse than them, because you let their shame change your entire life. You know better than they did.”

She was seething, her face red. “I could not help what happened to me.”

“And you think this was a choice for your sister, that she woke up one day and said I’d rather be a lesbian? In 2009, you’re going to stand there and say this was her choice like what clothes to wear? The only thing about this whole mess that was your sister’s choice was letting Robert Tillman die untreated. You know, Carm, in my head I always believed that you couldn’t know somebody else no matter how close you were to them. I believe that because I don’t think people even know themselves. Still, you fool yourselves sometimes because otherwise you can’t live in this world. I fooled myself about you. I don’t know you at all.”

Her whole body clenched. “Leave it alone, please.”

“Maya told me that Alta never forgave herself for what happened to you as a girl, that she blamed herself until the day she was murdered because she felt she should have stopped you from being taken. Do you even care? But you cut her out of your life, so how could you know that? And now you’re doing it a second time, cutting her out of your life, turning your back on her again. Suddenly you’re not ashamed of her letting a man die, but of her fucking women. You should be ashamed … of yourself.”

Carmella reared back and slapped me across the face. Now I was stunned and speechless.

“You did what I asked,” she said, walking to the door. “For that I will always be grateful.”

“I don’t want your gratitude. I don’t want anything from you, but I’m not leaving it alone. You have to know that, Carmella. I’m not leaving it alone.”

She stopped in her tracks, about-faced, and asked, “What does it matter to you? Like you said, she let a man die. She’s dead. Nothing will change that. Why do you care?”

“Maybe because no one else does. Someone has to care.”

“And that’s you, right, Moe? Always you. Moe is the heart at the center of the world.”

“Not for much longer.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Now, if you don’t mind,” I said, gesturing at the door. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“I don’t want to know,” she said, her back to me as she walked through the door.

I waited for the door to close. “Liar.”

…

Pam’s being there was good for me on more than one level. I’d discussed aspects of the case with Fuqua, Nicky Roussis, Brian Doyle, and Carmella. What I hadn’t done was discuss the case globally or unfettered and not doing so hadn’t served me well. Pam was the perfect person to discuss it with: she was a top-notch investigator so she could see things from my perspective, but with the added advantages of emotional and geographic distance from the case. Sure, she had heard of the case, everybody had, it was big news. Still, she didn’t have a horse in the race.

Okay, given my history with Carmella, I didn’t think Pam could be completely objective, but that was fine. Objectivity is bullshit anyway. It’s like calculating pi to the last digit. Humans are incapable of it. We all come to the dance, any dance, with too much baggage, conscious and unconscious. We judge. We prejudge. It’s what we do. It’s how we survive. I felt I was close to finally getting some answers, but close is sometimes more frustrating than far away because I didn’t know how close or where to look next.

“There are days it feels like two or three cases, not one,” I said, pretending to drink my wine. “There’s Tillman dying at the High Line Bistro as Alta and Maya watch. There’s Alta’s murder and then there’s all the other stuff.”

“The other stuff?”

“Maya Watson’s silence. Delgado trying to hire someone to hurt Alta. Someone trying to run me off the road. Fuqua warning me off Delgado. The deputy mayor being so sure Tillman’s family won’t sue and this new thing about Tillman and the women at Kid Charlemagne’s. And why did Escobar take off on me like that? There’s a lot going on here, Pam. I’m close to something, but I’m confused.”

She didn’t speak, not right away. Instead she sat there for a minute, sipping more wine, not looking at me, not looking at anything at all.

“Break it up,” she said. “Break it up.”

“Break what up?”

“You said this feels like this is more than one case. Then fine, treat it like more than one case. Instead of trying to squeeze everything into a box that seems too small, break it down into smaller bits. Get the easy answers first like when you were a kid taking a hard test. Get the easy answers, so you can build and move onto the hard questions.”

“Okay, I get the idea, but how do you mean?”

“Look, re-ask yourself some questions you have about the case and find those answers one at a time. When you have enough individual answers, you’ll probably understand the whole case. Have you tried that yet?”

“Re-asking myself individual questions? No.”

“Then start asking and while you’re asking, I’ll be talking to the women from Kid Charlemagne’s.”

“Hey, wait a—”

“No, I’m not waiting. I’m not blind, Moe. I can see the toll this is taking on you even if you don’t. I don’t like it, but I know you. Carmella asked you to stop, but you won’t stop. You won’t stop because it’s not in you to stop.”

“Stopping’s not an option.”

“I didn’t think so, but that’s for tomorrow. For now, I want to go to bed.”