I tried to take her pulse. I couldn’t feel it.
The waiting area at Bellevue’s emergency room was packed. One boy with what looked like a broken arm was howling while his mother tried alternately to calm him down and get the attention of the triage nurse. But a broken arm could wait. There were head wounds, there were infectious diseases. This was one of the largest trauma centers in the world, but also one of the busiest, and there was never enough staff to go around.
But Susan was inside. Even at Bellevue, a chest wound like hers took priority. The ambulance had arrived in less than five minutes and had torn up First Avenue with its siren blaring, dodging around cars and pedestrians to shave seconds off our arrival time. Even so, I knew it might not have been enough. They said she’d lost a lot of blood – as though that wasn’t obvious. They told me she was in critical condition. When I asked if she’d make it, they’d shrugged. EMTs had no time for politeness.
“She’s got a chance,” one of them had said. I’d been clinging to that ever since.
The cops had followed us to the hospital, adding their siren to the mix. They’d waited while I got her admitted, waited some more while I filled out paperwork as best I could. Last name: Feuer. First name: Susan. Home address? Home phone? Social security number? I left it all blank. Medical insurance provider? All I could do was hand over my credit card and hope I wasn’t close to my limit.
They waited while I called Leo from a payphone and told him where I was and what had happened. They stood next to me and listened, but they waited.
Then they were done waiting. They steered me through the triage station to an empty administrative office just past the ER. Both were uniformed cops from the Seventh Precinct. One was about my height but twice my weight, with a round face and a thick moustache and a patch on his chest that said “Conroy.” The other’s patch said “Gianakouros” and belonged to a veteran with hair the color of old curtains and deep grooves creasing his face. He was the one who had me by the arm and he took the lead in questioning me.
“Your name?”
“John Blake.”
“And the victim’s name?”
“Susan Feuer. F-E-U-E-R.”
“What’s your relationship to the victim?”
“She’s a friend. And we’ve been working together recently.”
“What do you do, Mr. Blake?”
I took out my license and showed it to him. He handed it over his shoulder to Conroy, who jotted down the license number on a spiral-bound pad. “I work for Leo Hauser. He used to be at Midtown South. He has a small agency now – just the two of us, basically.”
“And Feuer works with you?”
“No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.”
“Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back.
“You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said.
How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened.
And I wouldn’t mind explaining – but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city?
Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide.
“We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.”
“What was she doing in the park?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“How did you know she was there?”
“Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.”
“So you went there.”
“I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.”
Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?”
“None,” I said.
“What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?”
“It’s possible. I just don’t know.”
“How close are you to finding her?”
Pretty close, I thought – if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the first agency to work on it. The last one took a year and never found her.”
“Maybe you’re closer than they were.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“If Miss Feuer could tell us who she was meeting in the park, we might have something,” Gianakouros said. “But she’s not going to be doing much talking any time soon. Not with multiple stab wounds in her chest.”
No, not soon. Maybe not ever.
“We’re going to canvass the area for witnesses tonight, people in the neighborhood, anyone who might have seen it happen. But we’re also going to need to talk to you some more.”
“And your mother,” Conroy said.
“That’s right, your mother, and Mastaduno’s parents, and anyone else you can think of who might know something about this. We’re going to need any information you have.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “But can we do it in the morning? I can’t think straight now.” They looked at each other. “I’m sorry, it’s just too much. I’m a wreck.” I held my hands up. They were trembling, and it wasn’t an act. “First thing in the morning, nine a.m., I’ll be there. I promise, I’ll help any way I can. I’m just not up to it now.”
“Eight a.m.,” Gianakouros said. “Wreck or no wreck. We need you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Conroy’s voice softened. “You want us to ask the doctor if you can look in on her?” he said. “Maybe she’s out of surgery.”
I shook my head. “Five stab wounds to the chest, there’s only one way she’d be out of surgery this soon. So I hope to God she isn’t.”
Why hadn’t I told them? It would have been simple. I had Jocelyn’s address. They could have gone right now and arrested her, or if she wasn’t there, they could have staked the apartment out and waited for her to arrive. They could at least have taken the luggage cart in as evidence, gotten fingerprints and blood from it, tied Lenz’s murder to Miranda’s, gotten me off the hook in Queens, begun the process of tracking her down – something. But I hadn’t done it.
It would have been the right thing to do – I knew that. But the time was past for doing the right thing. It had passed when Jocelyn lured Susan down to the park and sank a blade five times into her chest. The person who did that, the person who murdered an innocent woman and left her body on a strip club roof, the person who shot Wayne Lenz in cold blood and left me to take the fall, a person who could do those things didn’t deserve to be arrested and prosecuted and defended and maybe sent to jail or maybe not, depending on how sympathetic a jury she found. What she deserved, the police and the courts weren’t the ones to deliver.
I waited till I was well away from the hospital and confident that neither Conroy nor Gianakouros was following me. I dialed the number and waited while it rang. When the hoarse voice said “Yes?” I hesitated for a second. There would be no turning back.