Last Chance for Glory (21 page)

“You ready for another, Mister Loest?”

Blake, when he turned back to Kosinski, was grinning madly. Up on his toes, eyes glittering, he stepped over to the ex-cop, shot a contemptuous glance at Heinrich Werther, said, “I gotta talk to you a minute, Kosinski.”

“Marty,” Kosinski said, astonished, “are you drunk?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your fucking business.”

“Yeah, you’re right, Marty. It’s not. You wanna take a table?”

“Naw, this’ll do just fine.” Blake plopped himself down on the stool deserted by Heinrich Werther, pulled several crumpled sheets of paper out of his pocket, tossed them onto the wet bar. “Take a look at these. Got some real interesting pictures here.”

Kosinski flattened the sheets, then leaned back to get a good look before they disintegrated in the puddle on the bar. There were four of them, each a photo of the riot in Tompkins Square Park. Kosinski saw cops swinging nightsticks, punks throwing bottle and rocks, citizens running for their lives. In each, Kamal Collars towed an almost bemused Billy Sowell away from the action.

“So whatta ya think, Kosinski? Proof positive, right? Can’t be in two places at the same time, right?”

Kosinski looked up at Blake, wondered if Blake had come to brag. If that’s all there was to it. “What I think is that it’s time for congratulations. Looks like the kid’s gonna get out.”

“The kid’s
already
out. Ain’t that amazing?” Blake brought his face to within inches of Kosinski’s. “Even as we speak, Billy Sowell is lying on a slab in an upstate morgue, the victim, so the authorities say, of a common sexual assault that went too far. Beaten to death, so they say, with a common red brick. Do you think that was Billy’s problem, Kosinski? Do you think he was just too common?”

“Look, take it easy, Marty.” Kosinski’s voice was deliberately soft, the way he’d pitched it when passing the bad news to a victim’s family. “It’s not like it comes as a big surprise.”

“No? You were expecting this?”

“I was expecting
something.
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. The people who set this up—and I’m not saying I know who they are—these people are not goin’ down without a fight.” Kosinski heaved a sigh of relief as Marty Blake leaned back. The kid was unpredictable, that was for sure. All along, Blake had been making noises like freeing Billy Sowell was just a job, like the only point was Max Steinberg’s autograph on a check.

“So tell me,” Blake demanded. “I mean we all know you’re a great detective—it’s common fucking knowledge—but how do you know that Sowell’s death has anything to do with us?” He ran on before Kosinski could answer. “Not that it matters. Whoever put Billy Sowell in prison is responsible for his death, right? No matter who actually did the killing, right?”

“I can’t argue with that, Marty.” Kosinski drained his glass, waved to Ed O’Leary. “And it’s good that you can see it clearly. Because we’re never gonna get in that prison to find out what happened.”

“That’s what I told Max, but I couldn’t get through to him. He’s mighty pissed, Bell. He thinks …” Blake stopped abruptly. “What are you grinning at?”

“Was I grinning? Sorry, I didn’t realize. Go ahead.” Kosinski couldn’t think of any way to explain why Blake’s use of his first name affected him so deeply. In truth, he didn’t want to explain it to himself.

“Yeah? Well, button your lip and hang onto your balls, Kosinski. Max Steinberg wants revenge, and he wants the both of us to help him get it, and there’s only one way
to
get it, and that’s what you’ve been warning me about all along. Steinberg wants to find Sondra Tillson’s killer.”

“And what about you, Marty? What do
you
want?”

Blake actually flinched at the question. Which didn’t surprise Kosinski who’d come to accept the fact that people often didn’t know the most obvious things about themselves. It wasn’t a question of dishonesty, either. Blake just couldn’t see the contradictions.

“Well, you know …”

“I
don’t
know, Marty. And I—or we—don’t have all that much time to find the answer. You have to be in or out here. Look, if they reached into that prison to whack Billy Sowell, what makes you think they’ll hesitate to hit
us
?”

“How do you know they killed Billy Sowell? It might have happened just the way the administration says it did. A little rough sex got a little too rough. Nothing more to it.”

“Marty, I know it like I knew that Billy’s makeup didn’t mean he was gay. You got to reach out a little, open up your mind. Billy Sowell was a prison prostitute, a valuable commodity. You
steal
property, you don’t destroy it. Look, you said Billy was beaten to death with a brick. Why would that happen? Because he resisted? Because he fought for his honor?”

“Maybe the killer was a sadist, maybe …”

“Wrong on two counts. First, a sadist would’ve done it slowly, with a shank, one slice at a time. This was out-and-out murder. Second, Billy’s pimp had to have had enough juice to protect his property; that’s what pimping is all about, in the joint or on the street. I’m not saying there’s
no
possibility that it went down like you said. What I’m saying—and you could believe me because I got a lot of experience in these matters—is that you should think twice before you step into this. You should know exactly what you want to get out of it. You should know what’s in it for
you.”

Bell Kosinski was right about one thing—Marty Blake had greatly exceeded his single-drink limit. But Kosinski was wrong if he thought alcohol was responsible for Blake’s anger. Much to his surprise, Marty Blake had felt it rise in him even as Max Steinberg outlined the reported facts over the telephone. By the time he’d replaced the receiver, he was ready to smack someone, anyone. Rebecca Webber’s face had floated up in his mind, followed by Billy Sowell’s, Joanna Bardo’s, Matthew Blake’s, Bell Kosinski’s.

The feeling itself, divorced from any object, was thoroughly familiar. Marty Blake wanted to hurt someone and he wanted to be hurt; he wanted the utter chaos of a barroom brawl with chairs, bottles, and boots flying in all directions. You were
supposed
to come out of it with a torn ear, a swollen eye: anything less was dishonorable. Anything less meant you’d wasted your time on an unworthy opponent. There was no glory in squashing a bug.

Blake, who’d been blaming his temper on alcohol for more years than he cared to admit, had wasted no time getting to a neighborhood bar in Kew Gardens. The Scotch hadn’t made him any more angry than he already was, but it did short circuit further introspection. Now, sitting next to Bell Kosinski in Max Steinberg’s office, considerably more sober, but no less enraged, he found himself disgusted by everything within his field of vision.

A horse-faced clown and a drunk, he thought. What the fuck am I doing here? Sitting on a mission chair, staring at baskets filled with painted gourds, bleached animal skulls, eagle feathers. And who does he think
he
is, Max Earp? Talking to Wild Bell Hickok. About Billy the
fucking
Kid? Shit, what I’d like to do—what I’d love to do—is walk over to that sand painting and blow it away like I was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. One quick whoosh and call for the vacuum cleaner. See what the jerk has to say about it.

Steinberg was going on about the lack of detail coming out of the Department of Corrections. “They’re investigating is what they say. The rest is none of my business. They’re only notifying me because Billy hasn’t got a next of kin and do I want to pay for the funeral when the ME gets through with the body. Otherwise, they’re gonna dump him in a graveyard they got up there for indigent cons. I tell ya, Bell, I got so pissed-off I called a reporter I know at
Newsday
and asked him if he’d do the story. I wanted to put it out there.”

“And he turned you down, right?” Kosinski seemed perfectly content. Sitting there with his fist wrapped around a glass of the lawyer’s booze.

“Yeah. A maybe-innocent dead con who can’t even tell his own story? From this you don’t make a Pulitzer. ‘Bring me the real killer,’ he said. And make sure it’s the mayor. Then we got a story.’”

“So that’s what you wanna do, Max? Find the real killer?”

“Damn right. Steinberg doesn’t back down.”

“And how ’bout you, Marty. What do you want?”

“What do I want?” Blake grinned. “I wanna put on eagle feathers and do a war dance.”

“That’s not good enough. Not even close.”

“Well, it’s gonna
have
to be, Kosinski, because that’s all you’re gettin’.”

Kosinski nodded wisely, a gesture that raised the hair on the back of Marty Blake’s neck, then turned to face the lawyer. “Whatta ya say, Max? Should we talk about the case?”

“I
SEE IT AS YOUR
basic crime of passion,” Kosinski began. “She says something; he says something; she says something. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Two defensive cuts, third one’s the charm. It slices down to the bone—opens the jugular vein, the carotid, laryngeal, and thyroidal arteries, the esophagus and the trachea. She falls away, maybe clutching her throat, definitely spurting blood across the room; she falls onto her back, and now he’s sorry. So sorry that he tries to make it better. He drops to his knees, takes the edges of the wound and pinches them together like a faith healer in a revival tent. It doesn’t help, of course, doesn’t restore Sondra Tillson, but it does force blood down into her lungs. Enough blood for her to drown before she bleeds out.”

Kosinski stopped, drained his glass, wondered if he was being too dramatic, too positive. Wondered if he was having too much fun. He filled his glass, filled the lawyer’s, filled Marty Blake’s despite the
pro forma
protest.

“Now he’s in a panic. Crime is not his thing, neither is physical violence. He’s not a mob guy with a disposal site in a Staten Island swamp. And he can’t just walk away, because he killed her in his own home.

“He mops the floor, wipes most of the blood off her body, changes his clothes, takes her out through the garage, lays her on the backseat of her own car. All he knows is that he has to be rid of her, as much because he’s killed the proverbial ‘thing he loves’ as from fear of getting caught. And believe me, he
does
love her. He loves her much too much to dump her in the woods or in a vacant lot. No, what our killer does is drive into Manhattan, at great risk to himself, and leave her two blocks from the apartment she shares with her husband. He takes her
home.”

Steinberg’s head moved slowly back and forth. A half-smile split his lips, but his eyes were glittering with the fervor of a born trial lawyer facing an impeachable witness.

“You’ll excuse me, Mister Kosinski, for being a skeptic, but in my opinion, it’s just this kind of tunnel vision that puts innocent people in jail. I read the case file from cover to cover and I can make a dozen scenarios out of it. You’re pushing this one like it was chiseled on the tablets.”

“It’s job description, Max,” Blake interrupted. “As in it’s Bell’s job to find criminals and your job to get them off the hook.”

Steinberg reacted sharply, the wig bouncing forward as he spoke. “Whatsa matter, Marty? You don’t like defense lawyers? You think Shakespeare was right? You think maybe we should kill all the lawyers? Did you hate the lawyers when it was your own ass on the line?”

“Whoa! Slow down a minute.” Kosinski to the rescue. He looked over at Marty Blake, nodded as he spoke. “Max’s got a right to question me here, because it
isn’t
in the case file. Why should it be? If I put my own theory in the case file and it turned out to be wrong, some defense counsel, like Max Steinberg, would beat me to death with it. Facts go into the file; theories you keep to yourself.

“So, let’s run through it. We know that Sondra Tillson wasn’t killed in the car, because of the blood—or the lack of blood—which lack also points to another piece of the puzzle: she was probably murdered in a single-family home. How else could he have gotten her into her own car? There’s no way you can picture him dragging a naked body down a hallway to an elevator. And there’s no way he could have cleaned up a motel room, so don’t even suggest it.

“Sondra Tillson’s throat was badly bruised. At first, I thought she’d been strangled as well as stabbed, but the pattern of bruising was inconsistent with strangulation. The bruises were clustered at the edges of the wound and were probably made with the tips of the fingers alone. That is, the perp was trying to repair the damage, to put her back together.

“Apparently, he didn’t try very hard, because her lividity was consistent with her position on the backseat of the car. He didn’t dress her, and the only fibers found on her body came from her own clothing, which I take to mean that he didn’t cover the body with a sheet or a blanket. I also take it to mean he didn’t have to go very far. The ME found minor abrasions packed with dirty motor oil on both heels. Perfectly consistent with being dragged across a garage floor.

“Now, let’s go through the deal: he kills her, tries to fix it, can’t, puts her body into the backseat instead of the trunk. He’s in a total panic, thinking what am I gonna do, where can I go, how can I get away with it? Thinking like an ordinary citizen who made a big, big mistake. But then something happens, something you wouldn’t expect. Instead of heading out to the boonies, maybe dumping her body where it won’t be discovered until spring, our perp drives his lover home. He puts her where she’ll be found and buried before she starts to decompose. You wanna call it sick, call it sick, but I make it for an act of remorse. I make it for an act of
love.”

Steinberg sat up in his chair, clapped his hands enthusiastically. “Very nice, Bell. Very,
very
nice, but let’s try this one on: the killer owns a business in Manhattan. He invites his cutie in for a quickie—you like that? cutie? quickie?—but then something goes wrong and he kills her. Of course, like you said, he’s gotta dump the body, but there’s another problem, too. Her car is parked in front of his place of business. So, he does what he
has
to do—he pulls an overcoat over his bloody clothes, stuffs her in the backseat of her own car, abandons the car close enough to her apartment to throw suspicion on the husband.”