‘Suppose I divorce my wife?’
‘It’s a start.’ Riker pulled a wad of papers from the pocket of his suit jacket and slapped it on the bar. ‘This is your background check on the cops at Natalie’s crime scene. We already had this information. Mallory pulled it off the computer. Took her two minutes.’
‘So that assignment was just busywork.’
Riker ignored this statement of fact and spread the sheets flat on the bar. ‘This is only worthless because you took a computer spit-out, something a clerk gave you over the counter. Now a look at the original files – that might’ve turned up some dirt. But you can still learn a lot from the official fairy tale. I’ll teach you how to read the disappearing ink.’ He put the first sheet aside, saying, ‘There were five cops on the scene, three dicks, two uniforms. Four of them left the precinct in a group. That’s a stand-out fact.’
‘I saw that,’ said Deluthe, defensive now. ‘But it had nothing to do with the murder. That was six years later.’
‘But all in the same four-week period. That tells you Internal Affairs was all over that copshop.’
‘There are no charges on their records, nothing to say – ’
‘Deluthe, I told you this was a fairy tale. Now do you want your bedtime story, or do we call it a night?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Just drink – quietly.’ Riker’s finger moved across the lines of text. ‘So, one of the uniforms, Alan Parris, was fired for insubordination. Now that’s bogus. You’d have to shoot a sergeant to get fired on a charge like that.’ Riker turned to the next page and the next man. ‘The week before that, his partner, your boss Harvey Loman – he gets reassigned to another precinct. That tells you Loman rolled over on his partner to cut a deal with Internal Affairs.’
He moved on to another sheet. ‘Here we got one detective who resigned to take a job in the private sector. The real story? They forced him out. Not enough proof to hang him. This guy’s next job was cleaning out toilets. He drank himself to death years ago.’
Now the final sheet. ‘And here we have one more dead detective, a suicide. So, dead or alive, four out of five men leave the department at the same time. The man who shot himself was probably looking at jail time. That means he was the last one to give it up, but there was nobody left to rat on. If he hadn’t died, he would’ve been the sacrifice, the cop who went to prison.’
Of course, Riker was cheating. The nest of shakedown artists in that stationhouse had been the worst-kept secret in NYPD. ‘Your interview with Alan Parris only looks good on paper. The two witnesses – the little kids in the hall? Parris gave you a lot of convincing details, but nothing to help you find them. That story could be smoke. So Parris goes on the short list.’
‘But the FBI profiles for serial killers – ’
‘And that’s another fairy tale,’ said Riker.
The remainder of Stella Small’s night was a self-imposed blur. She was using rum concoctions to drown the image of a subway full of dead and dying flies and stampeding passengers. Another hour had ended in yet another crowd. On the next bar stool was a tourist in a T-shirt emblazoned with the city motto, ‘I love New York’.
New York sucks.
The young actress’s sinuses were clogged with cigarette smoke, and she fancied that she could still smell the insecticide from the
subway fiasco. Her head was swimming in rum, and the world swirled around her. Perhaps it had been a mistake to order drinks decorated with paper parasols. But she was not up for the humiliation of tears in a room full of out-of-towners, and the booze, so much tastier than Valium, kept her eyes dry.
One of the customers slammed into her back as he moved toward the men’s room. Stella turned to yell at him, but he was lost among a gathering of drinkers.
Damn tourist.
Another patron took advantage of her distraction to cop a feel of one breast. Stunned for a moment, she spun her stool around too late. The man who had sat beside her was gone, lost in the crowd. Stella laid her head down on the bar and knocked it twice against the wood.
I will not cry, I will not cry.
And she did not. She gathered up her house keys and left the bar. Haifa block down the street, she noticed a man who was definitely on a mission, marching in the perfect parade-time of a soldier. No – more like a toy soldier, so mechanical, all springs and levers. Mimicry was her art, and she employed it now, stiffening her limbs to follow the marching man.
When he arrived at the broad avenue, he turned left, then stopped, and so did Stella. By the better light of a street lamp, she could see the gray gym bag in his hand. This was the bastard who had cupped her breast in the bar.
The mechanical man turned sharply on his heel, suddenly changing his direction. Stella saw the spinning red light before she reached the avenue where two police officers were padding down a teenager pressed to the hood of their car. She turned to look for the wind-up man and found him escaping, marching off in double time, afraid that she would report him as a deviant. Well, that was a small victory, but one to savor.
A few minutes later, she was fitting her key into the door lock, though she had no memory of having climbed the stairs to her apartment. Her blue linen blazer was neatly folded over one arm. Miraculously, the material was unmarked despite the subway panic, the rain of flies and the assault of the mechanical pervert. It had come through the day-long odyssey stain-free and hardly wrinkled – certain proof that the suit was magical.
Stella opened her front door and walked into a muggy wall of heat at least ten degrees higher than the outside air. Her one-room apartment had the decor of student housing with mismatched furniture dragged off the street one step ahead of the garbage truck. And all the houseplants had succumbed to neglect, even the artificial varieties. Never once dusted, her plastic ivy had taken on the gray color of authentic death.
She stepped out of her skirt, then clipped it on to a hanger with her blazer. When her lucky suit was in the closet and out of danger, she switched on the air-conditioner and stood in the cool breeze as she stripped off her blouse. Before she could toss it on the couch, which was also her bed, she noticed the black ink stain on the white material, a large X made with a thick marking pen.
Weary beyond belief, the actress whispered somewhat insincerely, ‘I love this town.’ What was she doing here? She stared at the family photograph on the wall, and the Abandoned Stellas smiled back at her. Gram and Mom were so hopeful for her prospects far from the roadside diner and the randy, fertile truck drivers, the fathers of them all.
Stella held up the blouse, shaking her head in deep denial, as if this might make the big black X fade away. She sank down on the couch, then cradled her head in both hands and cried, finally releasing the day in tears.
Had a fellow thespian done this to her during the morning cattle call? The blouse had been fully exposed when the actors were herded into the waiting area. She had put on the blazer just before walking onstage to deliver her lines to a casting director.
No, most likely the vandal had been in that crowded subway car. Was he the same freak who had unleashed the downpour of dead and near-dead insects? Maybe he had been one of the local barflies in the last crowd. Yes, the tourist who had slammed into her back to distract her while he mutilated her only good white blouse.
‘Creep.’ Her other suspect was the pervert who had cupped her breast. ‘Creep number two.’