"And what do you have, if that's okay to ask?"
"Same as I told you yesterday. Her apartment was locked from the inside and she was found with a needle in her arm. We're treating it as a ground ball."
The woman's voice came back on. "So, he's heading back?"
Ogden chose his phrasing carefully. "Could be. He was here and then he left. I didn't ask and he didn't say."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line, which made Ogden show some pity. He was a little torn here, on one hand understanding their concern for a colleague, and on the other wondering why it was such a big deal.
"I got the feeling," he volunteered, "that he was at least going to talk to a few of her friends. He told me he wanted to find out why she'd done what she did."
"You make it sound like a suicide," Gunther suggested.
"There was no note," Ogden countered. "But you could say any overdose is a suicide. That's how I look at them."
"I see what you mean," Gunther agreed. "One last question: Do you know which friends Willy may be contacting?"
Ogden shook his head, even though no one could see it. "Not the slightest clue." He then asked what he thought would be an obvious question: "Why don't you ask him?"
Sammie Martens didn't make a sound, but Gunther actually laughed. "Detective, if you knew him better, you'd know the answer there. You want to find out anything about Willy Kunkle, he's the last one you ask. Thanks for your help."
"No problem," Ogden answered, and slowly replaced the receiver, seriously doubting this would be the last he'd hear about Mr. Kunkle. Joe Gunther pushed the off button on the side of the speakerphone and looked up at his younger colleague. Sammie Martens was scowling and staring at the floor.
"It's a natural reaction, Sam. He needs to talk to a few people. Find out what was going on in her life."
"I know that," she answered almost angrily. "It's just frustrating not knowing."
Gunther mulled that over a moment, carefully considering the person they were discussing before asking, "Not knowing what he's doing? Or what he will do?"
The questions were purely rhetorical, since they both knew the answers would not only defy convention, but possibly dictate Willy's survival.
Chapter 5
Willy Kunkle emerged from the subway as from a slightly faulty time machine. He was in New York's Washington Heights section, far to Manhattan's northern tip, near the George Washington Bridge, just one of dozens of distinct neighborhoods spread across the five boroughs. To outsiders, the whole city was simply New York, but to its residents, it wasn't even fragmented into Brooklyn or Manhattan. Instead, it was minutely parsed into Canarsie or Greenwich Village or Green Point- communities as finite and defining to their inhabitants as the famed "hollers" of West Virginia or the hundreds of towns and villages in Vermont.
That's how it had been for young Willy Kunkle, growing up. Washington Heights had been his entire world, what had helped form him as a human being. Midtown Manhattan, just a subway ride away, had remained as foreign to him as if he'd lived in Germany.
And the comparison was relevant, since Willy's own roots were German. His parents had emigrated before he was born, part of a huge exodus stimulated by Hitler's ascent. The world where he'd begun his childhood had been highlighted by the sights of Hasidic Jews in the streets, the sounds of German and Yiddish in countless stores and apartments. One of his early struggles within the family had been his refusal to speak in anything other than English and his insistence that his parents wake up to the realities around them. Not only was Washington Heights not the Germany they'd left, now so long ago, but it wasn't even the neighborhood they'd created by sheer force of numbers after stepping off the boat. For one thing could be said about Washington Heights without doubt: It was a community in constant cultural flux.
Once a retreat for the city's mega-rich, famous for its sprawling nineteenth century estates and sweeping views of the two rivers bordering it, it had again and again undergone radical changes, influenced variously by urban expansion, the arrival of the subway line, the ebb and flow of foreign immigrants, and the spread of affordable housing. In 1965, the little piece of the Old Fatherland was where Malcolm X was assassinated before a local rally of African Americans, and where, just a few decades later, the Dominican community here and in next-door Inwood was recognized as the largest of its kind in the entire United States.
Washington Heights had seen race riots, poverty, overcrowding, rampant crime, and drug dealing, and yet, through it all, had maintained a thriving business section, kept its many parks from being paved over, and had managed to sustain a definable, if transient, sense of identity.
Stepping forth from the subway, Willy Kunkle, the erstwhile child of these streets, both warmed to the familiarity of it all and was swamped once again by the sense of suffocation it revived in him. He had fought with his family for independence and freedom, had broken away from this world he linked to his early despair, and yet, enveloped by its embrace once more, he couldn't deny the influence it had on him still.
But he didn't like it, and it soured his mood.
He was here to meet his brother, Bob. He'd called him earlier, using the Westchester number on Mary's phone bill, but Bob's wife had told Willy, not bothering to hide her displeasure at hearing his voice, that Bob was in the city, visiting their mother.
He'd received the news with mixed emotions. His mother and he hadn't spoken in years, not because of the sort of vitriol and disappointment that had soured Mary's link to her mother, but instead to keep a door shut he never wanted reopened. It didn't matter to him that such an act merely emulated his father's abandoning the family when Willy was a child, compounding the pain inflicted on his mother. For much of his adult life, and subliminally before then, Willy had been in survival mode-not a great place to breed empathy for others.
So, he'd called the house, grateful that Bob had answered, and arranged to meet him in Wright Park, at West 175th, cautioning him to keep their get-together to himself.
Not that Bob would have instinctively shared the news with their mother. He was the protective son, who'd trod the straight and narrow. He hadn't known their father as Willy had, hadn't felt the loss and witnessed the fallout. By the time Bob had become conscious of the world around him, Mom was back in the saddle with a vengeance, guaranteeing she'd have at least one bond in the family that would stick. And stick it had.
Willy wasn't complaining. It had worked for those two, and had allowed him to absorb a little less guilt in the process, although not enough to want to look his mother in the eyes.
He saw Bob just outside the small park, ordering up a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor across from the public school, paying no attention to his surroundings and giving Willy a few unobserved moments to reacquaint himself with his sibling.
Although Willy's junior by ten years, Bob didn't look it. Prematurely bald, with a soft middle and a permanently pale complexion, he looked much like the men's clothing store manager he was. He spent his days dressed in a fine suit, dividing his time between well-heeled customers in a fake Victorian decor and working the books in a windowless, concrete-walled office jammed with filing cabinets and a desk bought cheap at a fire sale. He had a wife, two kids, a dog and a cat, an aboveground swimming pool, and a ten-year-old car, and was utterly convinced he'd grabbed hold of the gold ring. Willy, despite a natural tendency to dismiss such notions, thought that in Bob's case it might be the truth.
He came at him from an oblique angle, noticing how his brother was ogling the hot dog just handed to him.