Victims (30 page)

He spoke about what she had told him, committing it all to memory, checking that he had gotten it all.

“Then the so-called Beast of Queens is probably still out there, despite what this fellow Mera claims. Yes. And I
do
understand the attitudes involved, especially Mike Stein’s. His story would fall apart if she had died of an aneurysm. No help in the world could have saved her. The whole impact of including the people of Barclay Street as this young woman’s murderers would fall apart. The theory that they could have saved her with a phone call, had they cared, falls down.
If
she died of an aneurysm.”

She nodded. He had listened closely, carefully, his face revealing understanding. His mind worked like a cop’s: like the way his brother’s mind had worked on good days.

“Isn’t it ironical, about Kevin?” he said, mentioning his brother. “For all the years that his illness brought him so close to suicide, when we finally hit on the right treatment for him, when he finally was able to put it all together, to take joy in his life—we lost him. Christmas Eve was an awful time for a heart attack. Sad. Did I thank you for your letter and mass card, Miranda?”

“Yes, Senator, in your note. I am glad, though, that Kevin had at least some small time to look out at life without all the pain he had lived with because of his—illness.”

The basically hard cop face softened, became gentle, remembering his brother’s good days, and his brother’s partner. “You were good for Kevin. He liked working with you. You were steady, Miranda, and you gave him more than you know. Truly. I mean that.”

She accepted fact as fact: she and Kevin Collins had been good partners.

“Well, now,” the senator said, “on to this dinner. It should be against the law to require people to dress like this in weather like this. However, it’s all part of my job.”

He looked down at her, his smile lopsided, like Kevin’s. “Not to worry, Miranda. It will all be cleared up. I promise you. Give me a couple of days. This is a lot to handle. And it will all be done discreetly; this is between the two of us. I’ll call you—let’s see—Wednesday night? Around nine
P.M.”

He leaned down, gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek, whispered, “Miranda. It’ll be all right. God bless.”

For the first time in a very long time, Miranda felt safe. She had handed a heavy burden to someone far better qualified than she to deal with it. It was a wonderful, suddenly overwhelming feeling of relief. She turned and reached for the telephone, and then the good feelings were over.

Mike Stein was the only one she really wanted to talk to, to tell him, to share it with him. Instead, she dialed Florida, spoke to her mother, who sounded annoyed, as though Miranda had interrupted something. Then to her son, who sounded formal and polite and disinterested and then relieved when she asked again for his grandmother.

“Mama, maybe I’ll come for a visit soon. I’d like to see you and Mannie. I guess I’m feeling a little lonely.”

Her mother sounded vague and put upon, unwilling to pick up on Miranda’s feelings. “We’ve planned a trip, it’s all set. Emmanuel and his uncle and father are looking into something on the islands, and so Mannie, all of us are going to see and—”

“Not to Puerto Rico?” Miranda felt a sudden panic. Too far away, too far. “Mommy, you’re not planning to move there, all of you?”

Her mother was sharp, brisk. “Miranda, I didn’t
say
that. You don’t listen. Just for a visit, and the men will see to business. Ah, here is my husband now, Miranda. We have an appointment and...”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll call another time and we’ll have a long talk. I send you a kiss, Mommy, and for Mannie a hug and—”

“Yes,” her mother said, “yes, yes. Me too.” And she hung up.

Miranda set the receiver in place, and when the phone rang she jumped. Her mother, calling back, saying, Miranda, what? Tell me, talk to me, let me comfort you, let me reassure you.

Or it was Mike Stein, saying, Miranda, I want to see you, I need to see you, to hold you, to talk with you, to tell you that somehow we will have to work all these things out, so that everything comes out right, as it should.

It was an old friend, a man she hadn’t seen in a while. He was happy, but he caught her sadness, her sense of disappointment, and he backed off. No, she could not see him for dinner, no she didn’t know when would be a good time, listen, please, there was something going on right now, a problem she could not discuss. Could he just let her get back to him when things were a little better?

Friends were meant to stand by, not to probe, to just stand by. The hell with it, he would be patient or not. To hell with it.

Miranda went through the next few days on automatic. She didn’t read Stein’s articles. She had already seen them in typescript. They were the topic of the television news interviews at five, at six and at eleven and were set for the late-night discussion shows and for the morning talk shows and the Sunday specials. The experts were expressing various opinions. Tempers were rising as experts crossed swords. The residents of Barclay Street were letting their attorneys talk for them. They were pressing lawsuits against Mike Stein, the New York
Post,
his book publishers and the movie company which had bought an option on his yet unfinished book. When approached by members of the media, the Barclay Street residents hid their faces behind folded newspapers, or behind their hands, or a few, defiant, angry, fed up, faced the cameras and microphones and reminded their tormentors, “We didn’t stab that girl. Go away. Go interview the murderers and muggers, what’s the matter with you people? Leave us alone.”

The Barclay Street Syndrome found its way into the vocabulary not only of the specialists of the world, but of the people on the street. Debates, discussions, panels and citizens’ meetings were planned, along with opinion swapping over a sandwich at the lunch counter, from office desk to office desk, between husbands and wives. And there were even quickie books out on the stands.

The Anna Grace Bill, also known as the Witness Responsibility Bill, was set for debate up in Albany. No one doubted its swift passage. Those who had allowed this wounded young woman to die before their eyes on the sidewalk of their middle-class, so-called civilized neighborhood were to be immortalized via the bill bearing their victim’s name.

Senator Collins called Miranda at one minute before nine o’clock Wednesday night, just as he had promised.

“Miranda, it’s John Collins. How are you? Feeling a little less uptight than when we met?”

He sounded concerned and pleasant and easy. And yet there was a forced casualness, and to her trained ear, to her detective’s analytic brain, the sound of his voice did not match the friendly inquiries into her well-being. Miranda felt a chill run down her back, so fast and unexpected that her body shuddered. She was afraid and she didn’t know why.

“Well, I’ve had time to check out everything—and I mean
everything
that we discussed the other evening. I’ve had staff members running all over the place, and I can bring you up to date. And, Miranda, be absolutely assured that this was done in the most discreet manner possible. No one at all has any idea why, or for whom, the inquiries were made. Not even my staff members have any idea of the range of inquiries made.”

That was good. It had been one of her concerns. That was good.

So. First; the autopsy mixup was
legitimate.
If truth be known, the M.E.’s Office was in a terrible mess and this was just the latest of many mixups and near-catastrophes that would emerge under closer investigations which would be set in motion at some time in the very near future. By various agencies, incidentally.

“It was indeed a mind-blowing coincidence that the mistaken cause of death was given as an aneurysm. Given your previous conversation with Dr. Ruggiero.”

Who, by the way, had been on a longtime wait list for the appointment that had just become available to her. It seemed she had been unhappy on the staff of St. John’s for a long time. If she had been brusque and abrupt with Miranda, well, that was what others on the staff she worked with had found recently also. Everyone was relieved when her new job became available.

It was just that simple.

Miranda did not answer. Senator Collins did not seem to notice. He continued running down his list.

“Now, Mera. He was caught in a cocaine raid in Miami. You might say he was the ‘stranger in town’ in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Miami narcs do not feel he is personally implicated in the drug trade. Nothing really connects him to it, and their feeling was that he was just too jumpy a type to be in on anything heavy. He was scared to death of the drug dealers. He’s a Colombian, he knows how they operate. He was more willing to put himself into the hands of the New York cops for murder than to be involved in any area of the Colombian drug trade. And I understand,” the Senator said, “that there is actually a videotape of Mera killing this poor Grace girl. Is that true?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Remarkable. But then again, we live in strange times.”

“Now,” he continued checking his list, “the murder of the two Avianca stewardesses is being handled by Queens Homicide. I understand there are certain leads. It seems the two young women met some ‘gentlemen’ on their last flight. They told one of their colleagues that they thought they had ‘landed some heavy dudes.’ Seems like they ran out of luck. I think the squad is pretty good, Miranda. I think they’ll do the job.”

“Yes. They are good men.”

“Let’s see. Hold on. Oh yes. Now, this is something I am a little hesitant to go into. Let’s touch very lightly on this, and forget it. It is ‘political,’ Miranda. The cousin, on Inverness Street, okay? The family is very deeply out of sight. Their security measures were unbelievably lax; almost a joke. All I can say is, they are ‘ours’ in the sense that our government is responsible for their well-being. Apparently, and for whatever reasons we can only surmise, their own people seem to have blown the cover originally provided. They are gone, Miranda. All of them. They do not exist. Follow?”

“Yes, Senator. I follow.”

“Good. All right, so what do we have left? Yes. Maria Vidales. There is information that she is staying somewhere upstate, with a boyfriend. The stewardesses at Parker Towers verify this; they have heard from her. You see, Miranda,” he told her, “I have covered everything that’s been bothering you. Very carefully, as you can see.”

Very carefully. Very smoothly.

“Ah, yes,” he continued, “we are now back to Mr. Mera and the three open Queens homicides to which he has confessed. The investigating officers were as skeptical as you at first, but it seems he has come up with information that only the murderer could have known. Did you know that each murdered woman was found to have a house key pressed into the palm of her hand? Obviously, he didn’t do this to the Grace girl, since she had the key to her mother’s apartment in her hand already. But did you know that about the other victims, Miranda?”

“No. I did not know this.”

“Well, neither did anyone else but the murderer. And the detectives on the cases, of course.” He took a significant pause. “And Mera knew about it. This business of a key.”

“And now you know about it. And now I know about it.”

There was dead silence on the phone as her remark was being evaluated. Miranda felt numb to the soles of her feet. She felt sick and dizzy.

The Senator’s voice, cheerful, reassured and reassuring, broke the silence.

“Well, then we are up to date, Miranda. Everything that has worried and concerned and bothered you has been looked into carefully, evaluated, examined and now reported to you. I can fully understand how worried you’ve been. It is always a worry when there are open, unanswered questions. You were right to have called me. Now, Miranda, that brings me to something else. Something very personal and I hope important to you. Something I think Kevin would have endorsed wholeheartedly. He told me about how supportive you always were, what a good, decent, fearless partner you were. Miranda, I come from a heritage of taking care of my own. I believe in looking after someone who’s been good to my family. And you fit that description, Miranda. You saved Kevin’s life.”

“Yes,” she said softly, waiting.

“Did you tell me, or was it Kevin, that you were planning on law school one day? Constitutional law?”

Or was it Mike Stein who had told him? she wondered. Was it?

“Yes. Someday.”

“Miranda, surely you know about the L.E.A.A. program, federally funded higher education for outstanding police officers with the educational and intellectual qualifications? Miranda, how would you like to get going? Members of the Department, for the last fifteen or more years, have been sent on full scholarship, under the grant, while drawing full departmental pay, to places like Berkeley for Ph.D.s, to the University of Chicago—to universities and law schools all over the country. Does this sound good to you?”

In a hesitant voice, she said, “It’s a little late to apply now, isn’t it? I haven’t taken the boards or applied or...”

United States Senator John Collins laughed. It was a sound of relief, of tension breaking.

“That can be handled, Miranda,” he said easily. “Tell me, where would you like to go? Here, in New York—Columbia, N.Y.U., Fordham? Or Ivy League, Harvard, Yale, or the Coast or... There was a moment’s hesitation, to alert her, to make sure she understood that he knew all he needed to know about her. “Or, how about the University of Florida—or Miami, do they have a good law school? You’d be near your family.”

Miranda held her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. She glanced all around her living room, her eyes moved over pictures and books and records, her furniture, articles of clothing. She tried to center herself, anchor herself into her own reality.

“Senator, I...What am I being paid off for? I haven’t agreed on anything.”

The silence now was hostile, and his voice was finally hard and menacing when he resumed speaking. “Miranda, I’m not going to respond to that. I’m going to say that you are exhausted, that you’ve worked very hard, that you are very diligent and dedicated. I know that about you. Kevin was very fond of you; very proud of you. Of your determination and tenacity and integrity in a field where one can be so easily corrupted. Integrity, Miranda, has its limits. When it bumps up against hard realities. When nothing will change, when there is nothing at all, in any respect, to be gained by anyone. And actually there is nothing to ‘save’ or reveal or work for. Look, Miranda, I’ll be here for another hour or so. I know this offer has come suddenly and unexpectedly. I know you’re probably stunned and confused. But there are no strings attached to this, Miranda. And I want you to know that when you finish law school, you’ll have the option to return to the Department or not. If you resign, there would be any number of criminal-justice agencies, federal and private, anywhere in the country, that would be more than privileged to hire you with your background and credentials. You’d have it made, Miranda. You’d be able to work up to the highest positions in the country. To have
real
input. To make a
real
contribution. Miranda. You think all this over, all right. And you call me back within, let’s see...within two hours. All right?”