Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (8 page)

“Respect,” she said. “What’s he care about respect? I would have just been part of the office crowd; we both work at Tannahill; far as anyone there knows, we’re just friends. And all we ever were is friends, you know.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Oh,
shit
,” she said. “I don’t mean I wasn’t fucking him, for the Lord’s sake. I mean it was just laughs and good times. He was married and he went home to Mama every night and that was jes’ fine, because who in her right mind’d want Tommy Tillary around by the dawn’s early light? Christ in the foothills, did I spill this or drink it?”

We agreed she was drinking them a little too fast. It was this fancy New York sweet-drink shit, she maintained, not like the bourbon she’d grown up on. You knew where you stood with bourbon.

I told her I was a bourbon drinker myself, and it pleased her to learn this. Alliances have been forged on thinner bonds than that, and ours served to propel us out of Armstrong’s, with a stop down the block for a fifth of Maker’s Mark—her choice—and a four-block walk to her apartment. There were exposed brick walls, I remember, and candles stuck in straw-wrapped bottles, and several travel posters from Sabena, the Belgian airline.

We did what grown-ups do when they find themselves alone together. We drank our fair share of the Maker’s Mark and went to bed. She made a lot of enthusiastic noises and more than a few skillful moves, and afterward she cried some.

A little later, she dropped off to sleep. I was tired myself, but I put on my clothes and sent myself home. Because who in her right mind’d want Matt Scudder around by the dawn’s early light?

Over the next couple of days, I wondered every time I entered Armstrong’s if I’d run into her, and each time I was more relieved than disappointed when I didn’t. I didn’t en-counter Tommy, either, and that, too, was a relief and in no sense disappointing.

Then, one morning, I picked up the
News
and read that they’d arrested a pair of young Hispanics from Sunset Park for the Tillary burglary and homicide. The paper ran the usual photo—two skinny kids, their hair unruly, one of them trying to hide his face from the camera, the other smirking defiantly, and each of them handcuffed to a broad-shouldered, grim-faced Irishman in a suit. You didn’t need the careful caption to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I went over to Armstrong’s for a hamburger and drank a beer with it. The phone behind the bar rang and Dennis put down the glass he was wiping and answered it. “He was here a minute ago,” he said. “I’ll see if he stepped out.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked quizzically at me. “Are you still here?” he asked. “Or did you slip away while my attention was diverted?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Tommy Tillary.”

You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man or how a man will react to it. I didn’t want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and took the phone from Dennis.

I said, “Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife.”

“Thanks, Matt. Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a week?”

“At least they got the bastards.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Jesus. You haven’t seen a paper, huh?”

“That’s where I read about it. Two Spanish kids.”

“You didn’t happen to see this afternoon’s
Post
.”

“No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?”

“The two spics. Clean? Shit, they’re about as clean as the room in the Times Square subway station. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything. Monogrammed shit. I mean, that’s how clean they were, for Christ’s sake.”

“So?”

“They admitted the burglary but not the murder.”

“That’s common, Tommy.”

“Lemme finish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it was a put-up job. According to them, I hired them to hit my place. They could keep whatever they got and I’d have everything out and arranged for them, and in return I got to clean up on the insurance by overreporting the loss.”

“What did the loss amount to?”

“Shit,
I
don’t know. There were twice as many things turned up in their apartment as I ever listed when I made out a report. There’s things I missed a few days after I filed the report and others I didn’t know were gone until the cops found them. You don’t notice everything right away, at least I didn’t, and on top of it, how could I think straight with Peg dead? You know?”

“It hardly sounds like an insurance setup.”

“No, of course it wasn’t. How the hell could it be? All I had was a standard homeowner’s policy. It covered maybe a third of what I lost. According to them, the place was empty when they hit it. Peg was out.”

“And?”

“And I set them up. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it’d look like it happened in a burglary.”

“How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?”

“They couldn’t. All they said was they didn’t and she wasn’t home when they were there, and that I hired them to do the burglary. The cops pieced the rest of it together.”

“What did they do, take you downtown?”

“No. They came over to the house, it was early, I don’t know what time. It was the first I knew that the spics were arrested, let alone that they were trying to do a job on me. They just wanted to talk, the cops, and at first I talked to them, and then I started to get the drift of what they were trying to put on to me. So I said I wasn’t saying anything more without my lawyer present, and I called him, and he left half his breakfast on the table and came over in a hurry, and he wouldn’t let me say a word.”

“And the cops didn’t take you in or book you?”

“No.”

“Did they buy your story?”

“No way. I didn’t really tell ’em a story, because Kaplan wouldn’t let me say anything. They didn’t drag me in, because they don’t have a case yet, but Kaplan says they’re gonna be building one if they can. They told me not to leave town. You believe it? My wife’s dead, the
Post
headline says, ‘Quiz Husband in Burglary Murder,’ and what the hell do they think I’m gonna do? Am I going fishing for fucking trout in Montana? ‘Don’t leave town.’ You see this shit on television, you think nobody in real life talks this way. Maybe television’s where they get it from.”

I waited for him to tell me what he wanted from me. I didn’t have long to wait.

“Why I called,” he said, “is Kaplan wants to hire a detective. He figured maybe these guys talked around the neighborhood, maybe they bragged to their friends, maybe there’s a way to prove they did the killing. He says the cops won’t concentrate on that end if they’re too busy nailing the lid shut on me.”

I explained that I didn’t have any official standing, that I had no license and filed no reports.

“That’s okay,” he insisted. “I told Kaplan what I want is somebody I can trust, somebody who’ll do the job for me. I don’t think they’re gonna have any kind of a case at all, Matt, but the longer this drags on, the worse it is for me. I want it cleared up, I want it in the papers that these Spanish assholes did it all and I had nothing to do with anything. You name a fair fee and I’ll pay it, me to you, and it can be cash in your hand if you don’t like checks. What do you say?”

He wanted somebody he could trust. Had Carolyn from the Caroline told him how trustworthy I was?

What did I say? I said yes.

I met Tommy Tillary and his lawyer in Drew Kaplan’s office on Court Street, a few blocks from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. There was a Syrian restaurant next door and, at the corner, a grocery store specializing in Middle Eastern imports stood next to an antique shop overflowing with stripped-oak furniture and brass lamps and bedsteads. Kaplan’s office ran to wood paneling and leather chairs and oak file cabinets. His name and the names of two partners were painted on the frosted-glass door in old-fashioned gold-and-black lettering. Kaplan himself looked conservatively up to date, with a three-piece striped suit that was better cut than mine. Tommy wore his burgundy blazer and gray-flannel trousers and loafers. Strain showed at the corners of his blue eyes and around his mouth. His complexion was off, too.

“All we want you to do,” Kaplan said, “is find a key in one of their pants pockets, Herrera’s or Cruz’s, and trace it to a locker in Penn Station, and in the locker there’s a footlong knife with their prints and her blood on it.”

“Is that what it’s going to take?”

He smiled. “It wouldn’t hurt. No, actually, we’re not in such bad shape. They got some shaky testimony from a pair of Latins who’ve been in and out of trouble since they got weaned to Tropicana. They got what looks to them like a good motive on Tommy’s part.”

“Which is?”

I was looking at Tommy when I asked. His eyes slipped away from mine. Kaplan said, “A marital triangle, a case of the shorts and a strong money motive. Margaret Tillary inherited a little over a quarter of a million dollars six or eight months ago. An aunt left a million two and it got cut up four ways. What they don’t bother to notice is he loved his wife, and how many husbands cheat? What is it they say—ninety percent cheat and ten percent lie?”

“That’s good odds.”

“One of the killers, Angel Herrera, did some odd jobs at the Tillary house last March or April. Spring cleaning; he hauled stuff out of the basement and attic, a little donkeywork. According to Herrera, that’s how Tommy knew him to contact him about the burglary. According to common sense, that’s how Herrera and his buddy Cruz knew the house and what was in it and how to gain access.”

“The case against Tommy sounds pretty thin.”

“It is,” Kaplan said. “The thing is, you go to court with something like this and you lose even if you win. For the rest of your life, everybody remembers you stood trial for murdering your wife, never mind that you won an acquittal.

“Besides,” he said, “you never know which way a jury’s going to jump. Tommy’s alibi is he was with another lady at the time of the burglary. The woman’s a colleague; they could see it as completely aboveboard, but who says they’re going to? What they sometimes do, they decide they don’t believe the alibi because it’s his girlfriend lying for him, and at the same time they label him a scumbag for screwing around while his wife’s getting killed.”

“You keep it up,” Tommy said, “I’ll find myself guilty, the way you make it sound.”

“Plus he’s hard to get a sympathetic jury for. He’s a big handsome guy, a sharp dresser, and you’d love him in a gin joint, but how much do you love him in a courtroom? He’s a securities salesman, he’s beautiful on the phone, and that means every clown who ever lost a hundred dollars on a stock tip or bought magazines over the phone is going to walk into the courtroom with a hard-on for him. I’m telling you, I want to stay the hell
out
of court. I’ll
win
in court, I know that, or the worst that’ll happen is I’ll win on appeal, but who needs it? This is a case that shouldn’t be in the first place, and I’d love to clear it up before they even go so far as presenting a bill to the grand jury.”

“So from me you want—”

“Whatever you can find, Matt. Whatever discredits Cruz and Herrera. I don’t know what’s there to be found, but you were a cop and now you’re private, and you can get down in the streets and nose around.”

I nodded. I could do that. “One thing,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be better off with a Spanish-speaking detective? I know enough to buy a beer in a bodega, but I’m a long way from fluent.”

Kaplan shook his head. “A personal relationship’s worth more than a dime’s worth of
‘Me llamo Matteo y ¿como está usted?’”

“That’s the truth,” Tommy Tillary said. “Matt, I know I can count on you.”

I wanted to tell him all he could count on was his fingers. I didn’t really see what I could expect to uncover that wouldn’t turn up in a regular police investigation. But I’d spent enough time carrying a shield to know not to push away money when somebody wants to give it to you. I felt comfortable taking a fee. The man was inheriting a quarter of a million, plus whatever insurance his wife had carried. If he was willing to spread some of it around, I was willing to take it.