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.
FORTY-TWO
Brian Doyle was about the last person I expected to hear from, but that’s life, isn’t it? It’s not the things we expect that makes it both wonderful and impossible to bear. Think how dull it would all be if things went according to plan. Frankly, there were times I could have done with a little more boredom than some of the unexpected and unwelcome surprises I’d been dealing with lately. For instance, I think I might have welcomed my oncologist saying something like, “April Fools!” or “Sorry, Moe, wrong chart.” Those would have worked much better for me than his, “Look at it this way, it’s treatable.” That it-could-always-be-worse kind of rationalization was lost on me. No one had to tell me it could always be worse. I had a lot of firsthand experience in that area.
Mostly, I was surprised to hear from Doyle because he had washed his hands of the whole Jorge Delgado mess. I’d seen Brian in a lot of moods, but I’d only seen him scared a few times in all the years I’d known him. And when he appeared at my condo the other day, he was scared. He tried not to show it, playing up the brawl and how he’d given better than he got. I always admired that about the Irish cops I worked with over the years, their love of a good fight. Jews, even tough Jews, tend to fight as a last resort. For some of the guys I knew, fighting was more like foreplay, just a way to get their blood up, a kind of a pinch to let them know they were still alive. And I was surprised, not so much by Doyle as myself. After learning of the blackmail and of Maya’s suicide, I had more or less turned my attention away from Alta’s murder, the reason I had gotten involved in this in the first place. It was a reminder to me that even at my age, I had no clue of what I was doing or where I was going. Here I was again, stumbling around in the dark.