Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (10 page)

“The stuff you came up with,” he said.

“What stuff? I should have brought back fingernail parings, you could have had someone work voodoo on them.”

“About Cruz and the fairies.”

“He was up for murder. He didn’t kill himself because he was afraid they’d get him for fag-bashing when he was a juvenile offender.”

Tommy took a sip of scotch. He said, “Couple days ago, huge black guy comes up to Cruz in the chow line. ‘Wait’ll you get up to Green Haven,’ he tells him. ‘Every blood there’s gonna have you for a girlfriend. Doctor gonna have to cut you a brand-new asshole, time you get outa there.’”

I didn’t say anything.

“Kaplan,” he said. “Drew talked to somebody who talked to somebody, and that did it. Cruz took a good look at playin’ drop the soap for half the jigs in captivity, next thing you know, the murderous little bastard was on air. And good riddance to him.”

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I worked on it while Tommy went to the bar for another round. I hadn’t touched the drink in front of me, but I let him buy for both of us.

When he got back, I said, “Herrera.”

“Changed his story. Made a full confession.”

“And pinned the killing on Cruz.”

“Why not? Cruz wasn’t around to complain. Who knows which one of ’em did it, and for that matter, who cares? The thing is, you gave us the lever.”

“For Cruz,” I said. “To get him to kill himself.”

“And for Herrera. Those kids of his in Santurce. Drew spoke to Herrera’s lawyer and Herrera’s lawyer spoke to Herrera, and the message was, ‘Look, you’re going up for burglary whatever you do, and probably for murder; but if you tell the right story, you’ll draw shorter time, and on top of that, that nice Mr. Tillary’s gonna let bygones be bygones and every month there’s a nice check for your wife and kiddies back home in Puerto Rico.’”

At the bar, a couple of old men were reliving the Louis-Schmeling fight, the second one, where Louis punished the German champion. One of the old fellows was throwing roundhouse punches in the air, demonstrating.

I said, “Who killed your wife?”

“One or the other of them. If I had to bet, I’d say Cruz. He had those little beady eyes; you looked at him up close and you got that he was a killer.”

“When did you look at him up close?”

“When they came and cleaned the house, the basement, and the attic. Not when they came and cleaned me out; that was the second time.”

He smiled, but I kept looking at him until the smile lost its certainty. “That was Herrera who helped around the house,” I said. “You never met Cruz.”

“Cruz came along, gave him a hand.”

“You never mentioned that before.”

“Oh, sure I did, Matt. What difference does it make, anyway.”

“Who killed her, Tommy?”

“Hey, let it alone, huh?”

“Answer the question.”

“I already answered it.”

“You killed her, didn’t you?”

“What are you, crazy? Cruz killed her and Herrera swore to it, isn’t that enough for you?”

“Tell me you didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Tell me again.”

“I didn’t fucking kill her. What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He closed his eyes, put his head in his hands. He sighed and looked up and said, “You know, it’s a funny thing with me. Over the telephone, I’m the best salesman you could ever imagine. I swear I could sell sand to the Arabs, I could sell ice in the winter, but face-to-face I’m no good at all. Why do you figure that is?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. I used to think it was my face, the eyes and the mouth; I don’t know. It’s easy over the phone. I’m talking to a stranger, I don’t know who he is or what he looks like, and he’s not lookin’ at me, and it’s a cinch. Face-to-face, especially with someone I know, it’s a different story.” He looked at me. “If we were doin’ this over the phone, you’d buy the whole thing.”

“It’s possible.”

“It’s fucking certain. Word for word, you’d buy the package. Suppose I was to tell you I did kill her, Matt. You couldn’t prove anything. Look, the both of us walked in there, the place was a mess from the burglary, we got in an argument, tempers flared, something happened.”

“You set up the burglary. You planned the whole thing, just the way Cruz and Herrera accused you of doing. And now you wriggled out of it.”

“And you helped me—don’t forget that part of it.”

“I won’t.”

“And I wouldn’t have gone away for it anyway, Matt. Not a chance. I’da beat it in court, only this way I don’t have to go to court. Look, this is just the booze talkin’, and we can forget it in the morning, right? I didn’t kill her, you didn’t accuse me, we’re still buddies, everything’s fine. Right?”

Blackouts are never there when you want them. I woke up the next day and remembered all of it, and I found myself wishing I didn’t. He’d killed his wife and he was getting away with it. And I’d helped him. I’d taken his money, and in return I’d shown him how to set one man up for suicide and pressure another into making a false confession.

And what was I going to do about it?

I couldn’t think of a thing. Any story I carried to the police would be speedily denied by Tommy and his lawyer, and all I had was the thinnest of hearsay evidence, my own client’s own words when he and I both had a skinful of booze. I went over it for a few days, looking for ways to shake something loose, and there was nothing. I could maybe interest a newspaper reporter, maybe get Tommy some press coverage that wouldn’t make him happy, but why? And to what purpose?

It rankled. But I would just have a couple of drinks, and then it wouldn’t rankle so much.

Angel Herrera pleaded guilty to burglary, and in return, the Brooklyn D.A.’s Office dropped all homicide charges. He went Upstate to serve five to ten.

And then I got a call in the middle of the night. I’d been sleeping a couple of hours, but the phone woke me and I groped for it. It took me a minute to recognize the voice on the other end.

It was Carolyn Cheatham.

“I had to call you,” she said, “on account of you’re a bourbon man and a gentleman. I owed it to you to call you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“He ditched me,” she said, “and he got me fired out of Tannahill and Company so he won’t have to look at me around the office. Once he didn’t need me to back up his story, he let go of me, and do you know he did it over the phone?”

“Carolyn—”

“It’s all in the note,” she said. “I’m leaving a note.”

“Look, don’t do anything yet,” I said. I was out of bed, fumbling for my clothes. “I’ll be right over. We’ll talk about it.”

“You can’t stop me, Matt.”

“I won’t try to stop you. We’ll talk first, and then you can do anything you want.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I threw my clothes on, rushed over there, hoping it would be pills, something that took its time. I broke a small pane of glass in the downstairs door and let myself in, then used an old credit card to slip the bolt of her spring lock.

The room smelled of cordite. She was on the couch she’d passed out on the last time I saw her. The gun was still in her hand, limp at her side, and there was a black-rimmed hole in her temple.

There was a note, too. An empty bottle of Maker’s Mark stood on the coffee table, an empty glass beside it. The booze showed in her handwriting and in the sullen phrasing of the suicide note.

I read the note. I stood there for a few minutes, not for very long, and then I got a dish towel from the Pullman kitchen and wiped the bottle and the glass. I took another matching glass, rinsed it out and wiped it, and put it in the drainboard of the sink.

I stuffed the note in my pocket. I took the gun from her fingers, checked routinely for a pulse, then wrapped a sofa pillow around the gun to muffle its report. I fired one round into her chest, another into her open mouth.

I dropped the gun into a pocket and left.

They found the gun in Tommy Tillary’s house, stuffed between the cushions of the living-room sofa, clean of prints inside and out. Ballistics got a perfect match. I’d aimed for soft tissue with the round shot into her chest, because bullets can fragment on impact with bone. That was one reason I’d fired the extra shots. The other was to rule out the possibility of suicide.

After the story made the papers, I picked up the phone and called Drew Kaplan. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “He was free and clear; why the hell did he kill the girl?”

“Ask him yourself,” Kaplan said. He did not sound happy. “You want my opinion, he’s a lunatic. I honestly didn’t think he was. I figured maybe he killed his wife, maybe he didn’t. Not my job to try him. But I didn’t figure he was a homicidal maniac.”

“It’s certain he killed the girl?”

“Not much question. The gun’s pretty strong evidence. Talk about finding somebody with the smoking pistol in his hand, here it was in Tommy’s couch. The idiot.”

“Funny he kept it.”

“Maybe he had other people he wanted to shoot. Go figure a crazy man. No, the gun’s evidence, and there was a phone tip—a man called in the shooting, reported a man running out of there, and gave a description that fitted Tommy pretty well. Even had him wearing that red blazer he wears, tacky thing makes him look like an usher at the Paramount.”

“It sounds tough to square.”

“Well, somebody else’ll have to try to do it,” Kaplan said. “I told him I can’t defend him this time. What it amounts to, I wash my hands of him.”

I thought of that when I read that Angel Herrera got out just the other day. He served all ten years because he was as good at getting into trouble inside the walls as he’d been on the outside.

Somebody killed Tommy Tillary with a homemade knife after he’d served two years and three months of a manslaughter stretch. I wondered at the time if that was Herrera getting even, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. Maybe the checks stopped going to Santurce and Herrera took it the wrong way. Or maybe Tommy said the wrong thing to somebody else and said it face-to-face instead of over the phone.

I don’t think I’d do it that way now. I don’t drink anymore and the impulse to play God seems to have evaporated with the booze.

But then, a lot of things have changed. Billie left Armstrong’s not long after that, left New York, too; the last I heard, he was off drink himself, living in Sausalito and making candles. I ran into Dennis the other day in a bookstore on lower Fifth Avenue full of odd volumes on yoga and spiritualism and holistic healing. And Armstrong’s is scheduled to close the end of next month. The lease is up for renewal, and I suppose the next you know, the old joint’ll be another Korean fruit market.