“Come with me, Moe.”
Geary led me to the stable door and slid it back. He gestured for me to enter, and when I did, he followed. I didn’t much like horses. Maybe it was their imposing size, their smell, or the inscrutability of their eyes. I was a city boy. Geary took me by the elbow and we walked.
“That’s Ajax, there,” my host said, pointing at a beautiful palomino.
Ajax’s regal head and long neck stuck over the stall door. For reasons beyond my understanding, I felt compelled to rub his snout. My face smiled involuntarily.
“Here, feed him this.” Geary handed me an apple.
Ajax chomped it right out of my hand.
“You don’t like horses.”
“That obvious, huh?” I asked, now patting the horse’s muscular neck.
“But look at you, Moe. Look at you and Ajax. He has that effect on people.”
“It’s a shame he can’t run for office,” I said. “Next time I meet with Brightman, I’ll have to remember to bring an apple along.”
He looked at me with utter disdain. “You can find your own way back to your car.”
As I climbed into the driver’s seat, I found I felt better, if not exactly wonderful, about my involvement with Brightman and worse about working for Geary. Geary was a manipulator, a puppeteer. I never much liked puppet shows as a kid, and age hadn’t changed my opinion. Brightman, on the other hand, had been straightforward even when the truth worked against him. He’d given me the right answers, not the best or easiest ones. Still, I’d have to watch out for him. In spite my parting byplay with Geary, neither of us was foolish enough to see Brightman as a show horse.
The Hound’s Tooth was a cop bar near the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. Its walls were coated in a sticky resin of dust and old cooking grease. Mounted on the sticky walls were pictures of every crooked New York politician since Boss Tweed. Needless to say, there wasn’t much free wall space. You didn’t see young cops in the Hound’s Tooth. It was the kind of place you tended to gravitate to after several years on the job. They checked you for gray hair and crankiness at the door.
It had become an even less popular hangout for low men on the totem poll since the nearby construction of One Police Plaza. “Too much brass and not enough ass,” as the late Ferguson May was fond of saying. And these days, Larry McDonald was definitely brass. I wondered why Larry had chosen the Hound’s Tooth for our meeting, whether it was about his ambition or, given the crooked politicians on the wall, he had wanted to make a point about Brightman. But seeing him here in his element, I decided it was the former. He was three quarters of the way up the totem pole and climbing. The altitude agreed with him.
“Hey, gimpy, get over here,” Larry called to me from a close-by booth. When I approached, he stood and held my face between his palms. “Oy, such a punim!” he exclaimed in perfect Yiddish.
“I don’t care what the birth certificate says, your milkman musta been a guinea. You’re the least Irish-looking Irishman I’ve ever seen.”
“Fuck you, Moe. And what were you, switched at birth and raised a Jew?”
We went through some version of this routine whenever we saw each other, which, since my retirement, wasn’t very often. Friendship is frequently a product of proximity and shared experience. Well, we no longer shared physical proximity, and our most recent shared experiences dated back over five years.
“Gimme a Johnny Red and one Cutty Sark rocks,” Larry Mac shouted at the barman as if to prove my point. I’d stopped drinking Cutty Sark a few years back. I let the order stand. When the bartender put them up, Larry threw some money at him and brought the drinks to the table.
I thanked my old friend, we clinked glasses and made small talk. He loved his new house in Massapequa Park out on the South Shore of the island. It was a different life out there. The schools were great. The air was fresh. There was no crime to speak of. He made it sound wonderful. What I purposefully neglected to mention was his choice of adjectives. He said it was a different life, not a better one. It had been my experience that cops who made the move out to the Burger King landscape of the suburbs never stopped pining for the city. The suburbs were everything Larry described and more, but they were also less, often much less.
“So, you ever hear from Rico?” Larry asked the inevitable.
“It’s been a few years.”
“He made detective. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, and Robert Johnson mastered the blues. I wonder if it was worth the price.”
Larry looked perplexed, but didn’t ask for an explanation. Good thing, because he wouldn’t have gotten one. At one time Larry, Rico, and I were so close we were called the Three Stooges by our precinct mates. For a long time I considered Rico a second brother. Then, during the hunt for Patrick, Rico crossed a line that could never be uncrossed, erased, or forgotten. He’d tried to play me, to use me to further his own career.
“Whatever that means,” Larry said, waving his hand dismissively. “He’s making a name for himself in Narcotics.”
“Next subject, Larry.”
“Whatever you say, Moe.”
“Were you able to get your hands on the-”
“They’re in my car. We’ll head out in a few minutes.” He took a sip of his scotch, waved at a few of the faces as they came in, and headed out of the place. “I took a look at ‘em, Moe. There’s a lot of paper and not much in it.”
“You don’t mind if I take a-”
“Hey, hey, don’t get touchy with me. I was just making conversation.”
“Sorry. It’s been a long, weird day. So, you looked at the files. You got any ideas?”
“None that the files would back up,” he said. “According to everything in there, your politician’s as pure as the driven fucking snow. The Blessed Virgin’s got nothing on him.”
“In other words, you think Brightman did the girl?”
“Yop.”
“Why?”
He touched his nose. “Because this says so.”
One myth every cop, myself included, buys into is that he can smell a rat. What civilians get wrong is that crap about reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt is for juries, not cops. Cops don’t doubt. Cops make up their minds early. Whenever you hear that nonsense about the cops having no suspects, it’s pure bullshit. Cops always have suspects. It’s getting the evidence to fit that’s the hard part.
“It is a lovely nose, Larry, to be sure,” I complimented. “I didn’t notice Brightman’s picture on the wall. Is it up?”
“Give him some time. Come on, finish your drink and let’s go.”
So many people shook Larry’s hand or slapped his back or grabbed his forearm on the way out, you’d think he was a walking rabbit’s foot. He was definitely working his way up the food chain, and his fellow brass knew it.
We walked around the corner to his car in silence, neither one of us willing to put the jinx on his rising star by talking about it. He popped the trunk and handed me a cardboard box of photocopied documents.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. I owe you, Moe, and we both know it. Just mark this against my account, okay? And listen,” he said gravely, taking hold of my arm, “don’t come back to me on this case. What you got in your arms is all the help you’re gonna get from me this time around.”
“Not an issue,” I said. “Thanks again.”
I didn’t wait for him to drive away. I just turned and headed back to my car. On the way, I looked over my shoulder in the direction of the World Trade Center, but rows of Wall Street office buildings obscured the view. It was strange how on a clear day like today had been, you could see those two ugly shoe boxes from all five boroughs and Jersey, but not from just a few blocks away. Although they’d been up for only a little more than ten years, I couldn’t remember the skyline without them.
Chapter Six
Wit actually did me a favor by calling. I was in the Brooklyn store about to take on the task of checking the police files Larry Mac had grudgingly handed over against the Spivack file. It would probably have been a tremendous waste of time, and I’d already gathered a list of people I wanted to speak with. Though I’d been at it for only a few days, the truth was I hadn’t gotten anywhere. The only thing I knew about Moira Heaton today that I hadn’t known twenty-four hours before was that she’d slept with her boss. While that didn’t make her a harlot, it didn’t exactly inspire me either. I had to get a better idea of who she was. Once I got a sense of her, I might get a handle on how to look for her.