"You saw John this morning, right? When he drove away? This is the cops."
She nodded. "I called out to him. Asked him if he knew where Budd was, 'cause I thought they were together."
"You saw his face?" Ogden asked.
She gave him the same blank look Budd had earlier. "Yeah… well, sort of. He was in his car, pulling out."
"But you saw his face clearly?"
"No, but it was him," she answered belligerently. "Who the hell else would it be?"
Ogden murmured to himself, "Who indeed?"
Judy Wilcox studied them for a moment, shook her head, and muttering, "Goddamn cops-frigging useless," turned and retreated into her house.
Budd faced them again, now totally perplexed. "Why're you here anyway?"
Ogden gave him a slow smile, as if a ray of sunlight had just slipped into a dark recess of his brain. He reached into his pocket and removed a photograph of Ron Cashman, which he showed to the burly Wilcox.
"You ever seen this man?"
Wilcox stared at it, stared at Ogden, and began to look angry again. "You jerking me around?"
"Not on purpose."
Ogden looked so ingenuous, Wilcox had no choice but to set him straight. "That's John Smith."
Ogden handed the picture to his sidekick, along with his cell phone. "Get us a search warrant for this place."
Chapter 22
Sammie Martens unclipped the quietly vibrating pager from her belt and looked at the call-back number. She wasn't surprised she didn't recognize it. A stranger here, all she knew was that it wasn't a Vermont exchange. Probably Joe on one of a billion phones outside the building. She glanced around the small room she was sharing with Jim Berhle. "There a phone in here?" she asked.
He looked up from the computer screen before him. "No. Use one of the ones outside. Just dial nine to get out."
She stepped outside and crossed to an empty desk and punched in the number, reading it carefully from the pager.
Willy Kunkle answered after the first ring. "Meet me at the Greenwood Cemetery. Boss Tweed's tombstone."
The phone went dead. Greenwood Cemetery was commissioned in 1838 and occupied almost five hundred acres in Brooklyn, just a few blocks inland from the Red Hook warehouse where Ron Cashman had breathed his last. The primary inspiration for the much more famous Central Park in Manhattan twenty years later, Greenwood had many of that spot's sylvan touches, but being both a cemetery and reflective of a gaudier era, it was enhanced with some truly over-the-top flourishes. Pavilions, gatehouses, ornate shelters, fountains, reflecting pools, streams, lakes, and dozens of other oversized wedding cake accoutrements were scattered among the half million graves, monuments, mansion-sized mausoleums, and hundreds of statues to display a Gothic/ Victorian vision of what heaven was thought-or hoped-to be like.
Sammie drove through a gatehouse that looked as if it had been stolen off the front of a thousand-year-old French cathedral, and after asking directions from a bored guard, meandered along a narrow half mile of curving, forested, paved hill-and-dale roadway, aware of the fact that the higher she got, the more spectacular became the view facing west, overlooking New York Bay and the rigid, serried ranks of stalwart Manhattan skyscrapers. The contrast between the two impressions-the cemetery's contrived Valhalla and the city's concrete commercialism-made Sammie feel she was part of neither, like a fly crawling across two overlapping photographs.
She slowed among a copse of trees near the top of an incline and pulled over on the outside of a gentle curve, having finally discovered William Tweed's headstone, downright demure given the setting and his own flamboyant reputation.
Sammie killed the engine and got out of the car, enjoying the sense, however artificial, of being in the countryside once more. She hadn't fully admitted it yet, but New York's unremitting geometric solidity-its hard angles, lack of earth, and the peculiar way everything seemed to either run up and down or left and right, but rarely in nature's random way-was getting to her.
As if to communicate that fact to a kindred spirit, she crossed over to a nearby tree-large, old, and supporting a broad, comforting canopy-and laid her palm against its rough surface.
"Hey, Sam."
She turned to see Willy cautiously emerge from behind a statue-topped monument. He looked tired and worn.
She went to him, put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek, feeling his one arm loop around her waist and a shudder run through his body.
"I forgot how good this feels," he said, barely above a whisper.
"You should practice more," she suggested, rubbing his back.
"Along with a lot of other things."
She pulled away enough to look him in the face, struck by the total absence of his usual edginess. "You going to survive all this?"
He gazed at her with a sudden wave of tenderness. In its utter simplicity, it was a wonderful question: caring, supportive, and pertinent, all while being discreet. She wasn't asking for what he couldn't tell her. She'd neatly sidestepped the fact that they were both police officers and avoided asking him anything that might force him to either lie or admit to a malfeasance.
All she'd posed was the single core question. And all it had done was to render him speechless.
He buried his face in her neck and shut his eyes, feeling for the first time something other than the slow buildup of an indefinable, all-consuming heat that had been kindling inside him for longer than he could remember, and threatening to explode for the last several days.
"Come over here," she finally said, leading him to the low stone wall surrounding one of the lots. "Sit down."
They sat side by side for a long time, watching the gentle breeze barely ruffle the nearby branches, enjoying the smell of grass and the sound of water running, even superimposed as it was over the low, steady thrumming around them.
"Why do you stay with me?" he finally asked.
She'd asked herself the same question so many times, she didn't hesitate to answer, "Because your trying so hard has made it worthwhile. So far."
He smiled bitterly. "A man on the road to redemption?"
But she shook her head, well used to his deflecting cynicism. "I don't know where you're headed, especially now, but you've never taken the easy way."
His voice betrayed his skepticism. "And that's good, the way you see it?"
She took her eyes off the scenery to look at him. "Think about it, Willy. The people we deal with every day, most of them didn't start any worse than you, or suffer more than you have. They just quit."
He looked over the past few days, not just at what had happened recently, but at what he'd been forced to confront from years before, all the way back to his childhood.
"I don't know about that. Feels like I quit a bunch of times."
"Stopped, maybe. For a while. Like you're doing now, I hope."
She'd gone back to gazing at the trees before saying this, and he studied her profile with a sudden sense of revelation. What was it that made some people see things the way they did? He was so self-absorbed most of the time, he never paid much attention to such philosophical musings, finding it easier to simply ignore them. He was a pretty good student of human nature, funnily enough, smelling out people's inner motivations and often getting them to reveal what they didn't want others to see. But that was when they were opposed to him, like another hockey player in a face-off. He wasn't as good when it came to his own teammates. The effort expended on his behalf by people like Sammie or Joe confused him, since it wasn't something he ever practiced himself.
Looking at this woman whom he'd never bothered understanding, he was struck by her thoughtfulness, and embarrassed by his own lack of depth. When they'd become lovers, he'd been in turn stunned by his good fortune and dismissive of her common sense, but in both guises, he hadn't chosen to consider her view of that decision. It had merely been something he figured she'd soon see as a giant mistake.