No need to go to the airport. Carmella answered the door. She read the look on my face and invited me in. She’d said she wanted me to stop working the case and maybe she even meant it when she said it, but Carm had been a cop, was still a cop. You never stop being one, badge or no badge, retired or not. You never stop being one on the inside. Whether or not she had better come to terms with who her sister was since our argument, I couldn’t judge.
She offered me a drink, which I refused. I needed to get this out.
“How did you know to come, Moe?”
“What?”
“I am leaving tomorrow and I won’t be coming back. I have rented this place out since I inherited it. I could not stand to let it go. It means the only happy memories I have of my family. But now… it is time. I have arranged for an agent to sell it and I have someone coming to take the furniture away. I have been hanging on to hopes and ghosts for too long. My life is with Israel in Toronto. It is not here. I am not sure it ever was.”
Only when she finished did I notice the phantom images of picture frames on the bare walls and the stacks of cardboard boxes neatly lined up in rows.
“I always liked this place. Even now I can feel your grandmother’s presence. I’ll be sorry when it’s gone.”
“It is already gone, Moe. So what have you come to say?”
“I don’t know who killed Alta, Carm. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I suppose it might have been a pissed-off fireman. That’s still my best guess. I thought I had someone for it, but that didn’t pan out.”
“It is not a surprise. I have already come to terms with that, I think.”
“But I did find some stuff out that you’ll want to hear, stuff you need to hear.”
She took a deep breath, girding herself. “Go ahead.”
“I know why Alta and her partner didn’t treat Robert Tillman at the High Line Bistro. The short version is that Tillman raped Maya Watson and was also blackmailing her. At Alta’s urging, they went to the restaurant to confront Tillman. It was their bad luck that he happened to pick that moment to stroke out. Alta never got over what happened to you, the thing that blew your family apart, and this was her chance at redemption. It wasn’t only Tillman she went to confront. It was the man who did what he did to you when you were little. It was her own guilt and regret she went to confront. Do you understand? Do you see why she couldn’t help him?”
“I understand,” she said, trying to hold herself together.
“It was all about you, about you and her. What might have been, what should have been between two sisters.”
Carmella cried with her whole body so that I felt it through the floor up from the soles of my shoes. I let her cry. I didn’t try to comfort her. The time for that had long passed. That old bond between us was finally broken.
“It seems like you’ve done a good job of raising Israel,” I said when her jag had quieted.
“Thank you.”
“Does he know-”
“-about you? No, but one of the things I am going to do when I get back home is explain.”
“I’m glad, Carm. He should know and about his biological father too. A kid needs to know where he came from so he can know where he’s going.”
“You are right, Moe.”
There was a moment of awkward silence before I stood to leave. Carmella walked me downstairs. We didn’t speak, not at first, but then I hugged her long and hard. It was a last hug goodbye. Just before I left, I handed her a slip of paper with Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston’s contact information.
“Who is this?”
“Someone you need to sit down with and speak to before you go home.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, Alta really will be lost to you forever.”
I turned and didn’t look back.
FORTY-SIX
Since I was in tying-up-loose-ends mode, I decided to stop in at the Roussis Family Restaurants, Incorporated, corporate offices in Downtown Brooklyn. I wanted to thank Nicky for his help and to say that we should keep in touch. He was a good guy, Nicky, and if I came out the other end of my treatment, I’d need some friends. Truth be told, going back to an empty apartment with only my thoughts for company wasn’t exactly ideal, given my state of mind.
Sarah’s wedding was only a week or so away. Three days after the wedding Sarah and Paul would be strolling through the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and my surgeon would be slicing through my kishkas. Yeah, somehow, I didn’t want to go home and contemplate those stark realities. It’s one thing to ponder your own mortality as an eighteen-year-old who’s just smoked a bowlful of Thai-stick and quite another to do it as a sick old man. So it took little effort for me to turn off Ashford Street and aim my car down along Atlantic Avenue.
In the lobby of the building, I had trouble finding the number of the offices. I guess it was pretty foolish-or desperate-of me to think that Nicky and his family had kept their offices in the same place all this time. It had been nearly fifteen years, after all, since Carmella and I had worked the case for them. New York commercial real estate was like an expensive game of musical chairs. Companies moved all the time to get better deals after their leases ran out. A security guard, a real old-timer, noticed me staring at the board.
“Can I help you, son?”
Son! I liked that. No one had called me that in a long while. “I was looking for the Roussis Family Restaurant offices, but I guess they moved, huh?”
“Not moved exactly,” he said.
“I’m not following you.”
“Money troubles,” he whispered. “About three years back, they were
… er… shown the door.”
“Really?”
“Shame too. Killed the old man.”
“Spiros?”
“Kind man. Generous man. Always with a warm greeting. Always with a nice gift on the holidays. Never forgot to ask about the wife and kids. Even gave me a savings bond for each of my grandkids. You knew ’em?”
“I was on the job with Nicky back in the day and I did some work for the family when I went private.”
“Nicky, a good man like his dad. It was that other son, that Gus that was the bad seed.”
“How so?”
“Can’t say, really, but you know how you can just tell sometimes? I just know it.”
“Thanks.” I shook his hand.
“Need anything else, let me know.”
“There is something. Is Spiegelman, Abbott, Bobalik and Cohen still-”
He smiled. “Moved to bigger offices. They take up the whole eighth floor these days.”
I rode up to eight and the elevator opened into the reception area. The receptionist smiled a practiced smile at me and asked if she could be of assistance. I wondered if Steve Schwartz was around. She buzzed him and he told her to send me down.
“Corner office. I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be,” he said, his eyes on a monitor, his hands at a keyboard. “I look out onto Atlantic Avenue, not Park Avenue. Okay, done.” Steve, a slender man a few years my senior, stood to greet me. “Moe Prager. What are you doing here?”
“A farewell tour,” I said only half-kiddingly.
Never a barrel of laughs to begin with, Steve looked at his watch to indicate his patience was already wearing thin.
“Roussis,” I said.
He understood immediately and shrugged his shoulders. Spiegelman, Abbott did corporate and commercial real estate law. They had represented the Roussis family business when Carm and I worked the case in ’95.
“You know I can’t give specifics although we don’t represent them any longer,” he said.
“Not asking for any. I’m just surprised. I’ve reconnected with Nicky lately and he didn’t mention the troubles.”
“Nick’s a proud man.”
“But…”
“Gus,” he said as if his name explained it all. Maybe it did. At least Steve and the old-timer were on the same wavelength. “The kid was a fuck-up. They gave him a position he wasn’t ready for and he ran the ship aground. But they got a big influx of cash somewhere and seem to have rebounded. More than that, I can’t say.”