FORTY-ONE

I don’t think I’d ever fully grasped the concept of reverse engineering. There was more to it than just breaking something down into its component pieces and putting it back together. There were more subtle aspects to it. Even inanimate things are more than the sum of their parts. Pam understood that. Carmella understood it too. Me, Mr. Stumbler and Bumbler, I didn’t get it until now. Alta’s murder was proving to be a lot more than a series of connected events. I wanted to trace it back to its point of origin, to the first falling domino, and now I thought I knew where that domino had fallen.

It was a five-minute walk and a one-minute drive from where Maya Watson and Alta Conseco were stationed to Piccadilly. Piccadilly was the bar next door to Kid Charlemagne’s and the chick behind the bar recognized Maya’s face immediately.

“Used to be in here all the time.”

“Used to be?”

“Haven’t seen her in here since February maybe. She was so hot and so cool—guys used to be all over her like flies.”

“Hot and cool. How do you mean?”

“Come on, man. With those mixed-race looks and that long lean body, are you kidding me? But she was also aloof, you know?”

Yeah, I knew. She was now as aloof as aloof could be.

I hadn’t had to search for a picture of Maya to show around because it was on the front page of all the local dailies. Detective DiNardo was right, word of her suicide had become news. And with the news of her suicide came the nightmare, the public rehashing and communal hand-wringing over the death of Robert Tillman. It was a field day for the pundits and talking heads, a second bite at the apple. But this time around Alta and Maya, and even Robert Tillman, were like deep sea dwellers, beyond the reach of the tempest roiling the surface.

So now I knew where it had all started, where Maya Watson and Robert Tillman had crossed paths last February. And given what Abigail had told Pam, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Tillman had probably slipped something into Maya’s drink. It was the mechanics of what followed that I was curious about and there was only one person who could help me find that answer.

…

Pam had to cajole her way into meeting with Natasha. I took a more direct approach and badged my way into her building. I told the doorman to call ahead to let her know I was coming up. Would it freak her out, the notion that a cop was coming up to her apartment? Maybe. That was the idea.

Natasha Romaine, dressed in cut-off jean shorts and a pastel pink tank top, was waiting at the door for me when I got off the elevator. I could see what Pam meant about her fragility. No older than twenty-one or -two, with wispy red hair, freckled, almost translucent skin, watery blue eyes, a button nose, and pale lips, she was pretty in a delicate, hothouse flower sort of way. She was very slight of build and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. She’d probably always played an angel in her church’s holiday pageants. I felt immediately protective of her, a reflexive reaction that I imagine she elicited from most men. Most, not all. That reflex was going to make what I knew I had to do even harder.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said, girding herself, thrusting out her chest. Her breasts were evident, but as small as the rest of her.

“You don’t even know what I came to talk about.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, staring into my eyes, “and I don’t have to talk about it.”

“I guess you don’t have to, no, but part of you wants to. May I come in or are we going to have this talk out in the hallway so all your neighbors can hear?”

Her apartment was typical Manhattan fare: a cluttered studio that was probably not much bigger than her bedroom back home—wherever that was—and probably more money per month than most folks’ mortgage payments. But the clutter was of fine things. Her computer, an Apple desktop, had a huge monitor and every peripheral known to mankind. The futon and chairs were high end. No IKEA in here. The clothing and shoes strewn about were SoHo boutique, not Aéropostale. The art on the wall, mostly pieces from famous street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, was either original or a signed and numbered print. Any one of the things in the studio cost more than a restaurant hostess could afford. Natasha came from money. Helps when you’re being blackmailed.

I sat on the futon. The delicate flower pinballed back and forth from the front door to the bathroom door like a trapped fly banging against a closed window. Just my being here had raised her anxiety level into the red numbers.

“What do you want?” Natasha fairly barked at me.

I opened the paper, but hid the headlines. “Do you recognize this woman?”

Her eyes got gigantic and she buried a trembling hand in her armpit. “No.” She was lying and she knew I knew it.

“Listen, Natasha, let’s stop lying to each other, okay? I used to be a cop, but I retired a long time ago. I’m a private investigator now and not a very good one anymore.”

“Get out!”

It was my turn to say no. “I’m not going anywhere until you talk about this, about what happened to you. I have a daughter a little bit older than you and I would hope that if she had trouble in her life and couldn’t talk to me about it, that she would be able to talk to someone else, someone who would listen, who would care and not judge.”

The steel was going out of her, but she wasn’t at the point of surrender. “Please go.”

I showed her Maya Watson’s face again. “Do you recognize this woman?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all, just yes?”

“Why is she in the paper?” Natasha asked, a lot of fear in her little voice.

I ignored the question and pushed her harder. “How do you know her? Have you seen her in the papers before or on TV?”

Natasha tilted her head at me like a confounded puppy. “What?”

“She committed suicide a few days ago,” I said, answering the earlier question. “She couldn’t take the secrets and the lies anymore. Swallowed two bottles of pills. They found her in her bed in a hot apartment. The insects had gotten to her.”

She bent over at the waist, letting out a strangled gasp, and began dry heaving. She covered her mouth as I had in my dream.

I kept at her. “You knew her from Piccadilly, right?”

She nodded yes.

“She drank there sometimes after work like you and the other people from Kid Charlemagne’s. That’s how you met, right?”

She nodded again.

“You knew that she was one of the EMTs who let Robert Tillman die at the High Line Bistro.”

She nodded.

“He had been blackmailing you and he had been blackmailing Maya and probably a lot of other women too.”

Now Natasha fell to her knees and the heaving was no longer dry. She vomited up whatever she had eaten in the last few hours, but she kept heaving. I got down beside her and held her head, stroked her hair and hugged her like I used to do with Sarah. When she was finally done, I laid her down on the futon, and got her a cold bottled water out of her fridge. I wiped her face and put a cold cloth on her forehead. After cleaning her floor, I sat in a chair across from her as she napped for about half an hour. When she got up, she didn’t say a word. Instead she went into the bathroom. I listened to her brush her teeth, gargle, and take a quick shower. She came out of the bathroom in a robe, went directly to her computer, and began tapping at the keyboard.

“Can you please come here.” She uttered her first words in nearly an hour. “See this email?” She pointed to a line in her inbox. It was from RT6969@constop.com. Didn’t take Einstein to figure out who RT6969 was. The subject heading was Ebony and Ivory.

“Uh huh, yeah.”

“I’m going to get dressed and leave for about an hour because I just can’t be here. When I leave, click on the links in the email and then you’ll understand.”

That was it. She gathered up some clothes, disappeared back into the bathroom, and was gone. As she closed the door behind her, I opened the email and clicked on the first link.

The link was to a video. I pressed the play arrow and knew immediately that Natasha was right: I understood, maybe more than I wanted to. In the video, a man I took to be the now late Robert Tillman and three much younger men took turns raping and sodomizing both Maya Watson and Natasha Romaine individually and in groups. I didn’t recognize the younger men in the video. Maya and Natasha were obviously drugged up, but not unconscious. They were pliable, not cooperative, but not uncooperative either, sort of will-less. Then things got weirder.

The women were dressed in fetish wear—leather and latex—and posed in several positions with each other, sometimes with sex toy props. A lot of it seemed totally staged, but in some of the footage, a third woman joined in. She was thin and muscular, clad in a black latex bustier, super high-heeled black stilettos, and a black latex mask. She wasn’t drugged or, if she was, it was a very different drug cocktail than Maya and Natasha had been fed because this woman didn’t seem to need any posing or prompting. She was active, enthusiastic, and none of what she did seemed forced or involuntary. Some of the things she did to Maya and Natasha were very disturbing and had probably been very painful for them.

The second link was to another video featuring much of the same footage, but it had been professionally edited. No longer did the things that had seemed so obviously staged seemed staged. A cheesy synthesized soundtrack played in the background. The sort of low moans, probably from pain and bewilderment, that Maya and Natasha had emitted during the nightmare, had been enhanced so that the women sounded like they loved what was going on and couldn’t get enough. Gaudy pink lettering was superimposed over the video to make it look like an advertisement for Ebony and Ivory Escort Service. Numbers flashed up on the screen and a disembodied voice promised that there wasn’t anything Ebony and Ivory wouldn’t do to make their clients happy. The footage that went along with that particular promise featured a montage of the most disturbing scenes from the earlier video.

The third link was to another video and, in some ways, the most chilling of all. In it, a man’s hand went through both women’s bags and clothing pockets one item at a time. An unusual amount of time was spent on shots of a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an address book, and two sets of keys. I clicked off, but forwarded a copy of the email with the links to my computer.

Okay, I thought, I understood a lot of it. Robert Tillman had drugged Maya and Natasha at the bar, gotten them back to a location where things were set to go, and probably kept feeding both women drugged drinks until he was done with them. And it was no wonder the women were willing to pay their rapist to keep that video footage away from the public. In this day and age, once video is out there, it is out there forever. Even if your parents or fiancé would believe your story about being drugged and raped, there might always be some level of doubt. But the fact was, Robert Tillman was dead and the other guys in the video didn’t strike me as criminal masterminds. They seemed more like three frat boy jocks who were promised a good time and were just drunk enough not to give a shit about at whose expense that good time came. So what was Natasha still so scared of and why couldn’t either Maya or Natasha breathe a sigh of relief after Tillman’s death?

Then, as I was staring at the line on Natasha’s email account, two things hit me so hard I was almost breathless. The date of this email was last week. Natasha certainly and probably Maya had continued to be blackmailed four months after Robert Tillman’s death. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if it really was the termination letter that pushed Maya over the edge and into eternal sleep. One piece of the puzzle was clear enough: Tillman hadn’t returned from the dead. He had left behind a very live partner. Of course he had a partner. How else had he managed to get both women to where the footage was shot? How had he managed to round up the frat boys and run the camera? Tino Escobar! No wonder he took off when I went to talk to him at Kid Charlemagne’s. It made perfect sense. He and Tillman worked together in both places. Convenient, huh?

The other thing that struck me was that there was no money demand anywhere in the email or buried in the video that I could see. I forced myself to watch them again, looking for something I might have missed. I hadn’t missed anything.

I think Natasha half-hoped I would be gone when she returned, but only half-hoped. The other half hoped I could make the blackmail finally go away. I told her that I thought I could, that she would need to trust me, and do as I asked, no matter what I asked. It couldn’t have been easy for her to agree, but she did just the same.

“I don’t know your name,” she said, as I headed for the door.

I took one of my ancient cards out of my wallet and wrote down my cell number.

“Moses,” she whispered to herself and then, looking up at me, “Why are you doing this?”

I opened up my mouth to give her a quick, meaningless answer, but held my tongue. This wasn’t as simple a question as it seemed. I thought about it for a moment. Why was I doing this? Was it because of the history between Carmella and me or because I was sick and working the case was a form of denial? Was it as simple as my curiosity or as complicated as my guilt? Was I trying to make up for the hurt and damage I’d done, to put one more check in the good column before I died? Or was it just because it was the right thing to do?

“I’m not sure,” I said at last. “I’m really not sure. Does it matter?”

“No. I just want it to be over.”

I was careful not to mention Tino Escobar. I didn’t want her getting more freaked out than she already was. Besides, I needed more proof than convenience and coincidence to connect him to this. I took a long last look at Natasha before leaving. Suddenly, she didn’t seem quite so fragile. To see that almost made it worth it.

I thanked the doorman on the way out. He nodded goodbye, not quite sure what to make of me. That made two of us. I was a sixty-something eighteen-year-old who didn’t know himself any better now than he did when he really was eighteen. Sometimes I fooled myself that I knew more about my nature and the nature of things than I did, but I guess what I actually understood was how little I understood. People always say that when you are near the end, you get religion. Not me. The louder I heard the coffin lid closing, I believed less and less. What I wanted was to know things before I died, to know things for sure. Maybe that’s what I should have said to Natasha, that I wanted to know things, something, anything for sure before the metastatic golf ball in my belly ate me alive, that I was working the case because I was tired of questions and wanted answers.

I got some when I called Fuqua on the way to my car, though not exactly the kind of answers that would make dying much easier.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Your instincts were right about Robert Tillman.”

“How so?”

“Robert Tillman was an alias. His real name was Roland Sykes. He was born in Vestel, New York, July 22, 1972. And he was not a very nice fellow. When he died, the city had no luck in contacting his next of kin through the usual methods. In most such cases, the city would have kept him on ice for a respectable amount of time and, if his body remained unclaimed, they would have stuck him in Potter’s Field. But this was too high profile for that, so they ran his prints et voila, Roland Sykes! A pity that poor Roland had a criminal record.”

“When you say he wasn’t a very nice fellow, how do you mean?”

“Most of his arrests and convictions were for forging checks, running scams on old women, even extortion. But he was also convicted of statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old girl. It was a class E felony and he did the full four-year bid. Got out two years ago. He kept up with his reporting responsibilities for a year and then disappeared from the radar screen.”

“So this was the city’s hold card. If any of his real family members came forward to sue, the city would play hardball. It would be tough to find even a civil jury or judge sympathetic to the family of a convicted sex offender. No wonder everyone was so tight-lipped about it. The city just wanted it to all go away and be forgotten. No harm, no foul.”

“Just so. Now we both know why my superiors were so adamant about you not pursuing Jorge Delgado as a suspect. The publicity would have been impossible to contain. You are aware, I hope, it wasn’t easy for me to discover these things, Moe. I had to call in many favors and I have not been a detective long enough to have many favors to ask.”

“I don’t suppose my gratitude will be enough to satisfy you.”

He laughed. “It will be a fine starting point.”

“We’re not done quite yet,” I said. “Find out who his cellmates were during his last few times inside. My guess is you’re gonna run across the name Tino Escobar somewhere in there. See if Tino or any of them worked with video equipment.”

He didn’t ask why. I liked that. I enjoy most those moments early in any relationship when you know the other person has begun to trust your judgment. So it was with Fuqua. His ambition made it impossible for me to trust him quite so much as he seemed willing to trust me.