I thanked him and left. In the elevator on the way downstairs I went over it in my head again and again, that first conversation I had with Nick when I ran into him at the Gelato Grotto. He’d definitely said that he went into the office a few times a week. I couldn’t figure out why Nicky would’ve said that. Maybe Steve had already answered that question for me. Nick, he had said, was a proud man. I could see that, but it still bugged me a little. Funny how a man like me, a skillful and practiced liar, could be so bothered by what was clearly an innocent, self-protective lie. Or maybe it was that I needed to focus on something other than my impending surgery.
Detective Fuqua couldn’t have known the favor he was doing me when he called.
FORTY-SEVEN
Fuqua looked like he hadn’t slept since he walked away from me two days ago with the ammunition he would need to do a little blackmailing of his own. Marco’s detailed description of his love affair with and his alibi for Jorge Delgado would have been powerful enough, but to have photographs of New York City’s most recently sanctified hero at a notorious drag queen show was like the plutonium core at the center of a chocolate-covered H-bomb. Given that the city and the media had just spent weeks touting Delgado as the perfect family man, fireman, self-sacrificing hero-the anti-Alta Conseco, if you will-and thrown him a five-star funeral, those photographs gave Detective Fuqua the power to demand just about any bump-up in rank or assignment he wanted. With this type of ammunition, my old friend Larry Mac could have had himself declared a prince of the realm. Fuqua looked like a prince all right-Hamlet.
“It is a great hypocrisy, is it not, Moe, that almost anyone else could have gone to such a club as Delgado went to without fear of recrimination? You or I could go to such a club and say we went on a dare or just for fun.”
“We don’t have enough time, ink, or paper to list the great hypocrisies, and as they go, there are far greater ones than this. Besides, Delgado was as big a hypocrite as they come. He tried to hire a hitter to take out Alta Conseco in part because she was gay. He tormented her with his phony macho bullshit, so don’t ask me to weep for him. If there’s anyone I have sympathy for here, it’s Marco. He gave me this stuff to save Delgado’s rep and I’m the one who’s perverted it into leverage for you.”
“Here,” he said, sliding the voice recorder and envelope across his desk to me, “take them back, please. They are of no use to me. I thought I was ambitious enough to use them, but I cannot.”
“Look, Fuqua, the stain is on me, not you. I’m the one who offered you this stuff so you would help us with Esme. If you hadn’t played the heavy and gotten her to cooperate, those videos would have gone public either in court or as payback. The only other way to have stopped her would have been to-”
“Do not say that in here!”
“Okay, but you know it’s true just the same. Maya Watson killed herself over this and it hadn’t even gone public. Can you imagine the fallout if these videos started appearing on the web? Some of these women are married and have families. It’s bad enough that they were raped and blackmailed. Do you know what hell their lives must have been? I wasn’t about to let it go any further. I’m the one who compromised himself by betraying Marco, not you.”
“Still, I have no wish to use them. I will feed my ambition with accomplishment, not leverage.”
“Are you sure? You realize that this leverage has a limited shelf life and with every day that passes these pictures lose some potency. Two weeks from now, a month from now, they will lose all their power altogether. Once the city moves on, and it always moves on, no one will care or even remember Jorge Delgado. The brass will no longer have a stake in protecting his rep. If anything, they can run this stuff up the flagpole when they need to distract the media from some real scandal or fuck-up.”
“I am quite certain.”
“There’s hope for you yet, Icarus.”
But if I thought returning the alibi and photos to me would unburden Hamlet, I was wrong. If anything, Fuqua looked more miserable than when I came in.
“What is it?” I asked. “Something else is bothering you.”
“Let us go for a walk.”
Outside it was August in June. Though the mist was so thick that the top of the Parachute Jump had vanished with the sun, the temperature hovered above ninety. Sheets of roiling black clouds from the south moved up slowly behind us as we walked up Mermaid Avenue. For now the only rumbling we heard came from the subway terminal at Stillwell Avenue, but from the dark hues of the clouds at our backs it was obvious the rumbling song of the subway would soon no longer be a solo. As we turned right on Stillwell toward the ocean, even the breezes told tales of the coming storm. The light winds seemed almost to conform to the folds of my face like hot barbershop towels. We made it all the way to the near-deserted boardwalk before Fuqua uttered a word.
“I fear I have made a very grave mistake,” he said, his eyes looking out to sea but unseeing. “A terrible mistake.”
“How so?”
“When I was with Esme the other day, something about her bothered me very much.”
“You mean other than the fact that she was a blackmailing sociopath who had been living with a convicted rapist?”
He winced when I said it. “You have a sharp sense of humor, Moe, but this is not a thing to laugh at.”
“Sorry. So what bothered you?”
“I was not certain. She was too cooperative too quickly, but it goes beyond that.”
“You know, I meant to ask you about how you got to her,” I said. “I figured she would give in eventually, but that it would take all night. You were in and out of that room in less than an hour. I just assumed she was smart enough to recognize that you were a serious man and that you weren’t fucking around. What did you say to her, anyway?”
“I told her that I would pin Alta Conseco’s murder on her if she did not cooperate. She had motive, after all. Alta had let her live-in lover die without treatment. I supplied the means,” he said, removing a plastic evidence bag from his suit jacket pocket and handing it to me. “That weapon conforms exactly to the knife used to murder Alta Conseco. I wrapped Esme’s palm around it. Voila! The murder weapon. I told her I would make sure to defeat any alibi she might produce. When she protested a bit, I informed her that you were not only a former policeman and PI, but one of her victims’ fathers and that you were very probably going to kill her regardless. Dead suspects, I said to her, need no alibis. ‘When you are dead, Esme, I will have someone call my office with a tip and I will find this knife conveniently hidden in your closet. Case closed.’ She then gave me everything you asked for.”
“That was the idea, right? So what’s the problem?”
“I could not sleep that night. I went over it time after time and her attitude bothered me more and more. Yesterday morning I realized finally what was bothering me.”
“Which was what?”
“I saw that video you showed me. Horrible. Horrible. I suppose I was as outraged by it as were you. I was blinded by my outrage and ambition. I thought, why not help you? I would help rid the city of this parasite. I would do good and myself good all at once with only a small risk to my shield. So when I went in that room to threaten her, I was not actually thinking of Alta Conseco’s homicide in any sense but as a tool. What I realize now, what I came to realize was that the case I made against Esme to pressure her to cooperate-”
Then it hit me so that I was almost breathless. “Holy shit!”
“Yes, Moe, you see now. She very well might have been the person who killed Alta Conseco. She was the best suspect I have had and I did not think to look at her twice.”
“Wait a second. Wait a second. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” I said as much to convince me as him. “Tillman or Sykes or whatever his name was, was a con man. I mean, come on, Fuqua, he was a shitbird convict and she was a sociopath who probably jumped from lover to lover like bees go from flower to flower. When she was done sucking up the nectar, she moved on. Who says they were in love? She probably didn’t give him a second thought when he dropped dead. She would move on, not avenge some clown she didn’t give a shit about.”