I rolled over in bed. Pam was there with me, asleep but lightly so. She was in that rested, semi-conscious state where a soft touch in the right place would lead us down the road to slow building, sleep-drunk sex. Pam was nude and with my body pressing against her back, it would have been easy to touch any number of sensitive spots and to let the dance begin. Instead I put my arm around her abdomen and held on for all I was worth.
“What is it?” she mumbled, rolling onto her back and brushing my cheek with the back of her hand. “What time is it?”
“It’s either very late or very early.” I dragged my thumb over her lips. “Lady’s choice.”
“Late is sexier than early.”
“Then it’s very late. What time did you get in?”
“Past midnight. We’ve got a lot to talk about later,” she said.
“It’s already later.”
She pushed me over onto my back and straddled me. “Later later,” she said. “Some things can wait. Others can’t. Lady’s choice, remember?”
I knew when to keep my mouth shut.
FORTY
It had taken Pam nearly the entire day to track down Abigail and Natasha, the two women from Kid Charlemagne’s. She had had to tell them lies, different lies to each, but she had managed to have coffee with Natasha, the hostess who had quit, and a glass of wine with Abigail before her shift. Pam had a gift for lying. That was how we met, through a series of her lies. Although I too could lie with as little effort as it took to blink, I’m not sure I ever got completely over how Pam and I came to be together. Even after Pam saved my life, I couldn’t forget her lies. Most of the time I was fine with it. She had just been doing her job. I knew that was true. True or not, it rang hollow, the way my words must’ve sounded to my first wife Katy when she discovered I’d been lying to her about her brother Patrick’s disappearance since before we were married.
Pam’s hard work had gotten her only so far.
“Abigail was very cooperative. She told me that a couple of months ago some of the crew from Kid Charlemagne’s went to the bar next door to the restaurant for drinks one night after work. They did that sometimes, nothing unusual about it. As it got later and later, the crowd thinned out until only she, another bartender, one of the other cooks, and Tillman were left. She said she liked older men and Tillman was handsome enough. They had flirted around a little bit. Then she started feeling weird, not sick exactly, just light-headed, and she went to the bathroom to throw some cold water on her face. When she came out, Robert Tillman was standing there. He opened his hand and there was a pill in his palm. He told her to take it, that it would make everything feel better. When she refused, he shoved her back into the bathroom and tried to force it down her throat. She spit it out, kicked him in the nuts, ran out, and caught a cab. Said she really doesn’t remember getting home and woke up still in her clothes like twelve hours later. She told her boss and Tillman was fired.”
“And the other woman, Natasha?”
“Nice girl, but fragile. She wouldn’t talk. She was scared shitless. When I brought up Tillman’s name, I thought she would snap in two.”
“Doesn’t make any sense. If Tillman was blackmailing her or even if he was just a pig and had pulled the same stunt with her as he had with Abigail, he’s dead. Dead is dead.”
“Maybe not,” Pam said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Listen, Moe, no matter how I tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, she wouldn’t. Finally, when I saw I wasn’t getting anywhere with her, I did a variation on Abigail’s story and told her Tillman had tried it on me. She began shaking like crazy and when I put my hand on her to try and calm her down, I could feel she was cold sweating. She asked me if he was still threatening me too.”
“What?”
“That’s what she said, Moe. ‘Is he still threatening you?’ When she saw the confusion in my eyes, I saw betrayal in hers. She knew I was lying and ran out.”
“This is nuts. The one thing we do know here is that Tillman is dead.”
Pam smiled a sad smile. “Well, Natasha doesn’t seem to think so.”
“Holy shit!” I smacked myself in the forehead. “It’s all right here.”
“What’s all here?”
“The answers,” I said.
“To what?”
“To everything.”
“Everything?”
“Almost.”
“Did the Mafia kill JFK?”
I kissed her hard on the mouth. “I said almost everything, wiseass. I’ve got some calls to make.”
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.