A Cast of Killers (54 page)

Santos nodded. "Worthington was smart about
it, too. He had the kid go to a local priest about Fleming, and
told Timmy to pretend to be confused and unsure of what to do. It
would help establish his credibility, Worthington explained to the
kid, if anyone questioned his story. Timmy did as he was told. And
the priest, of course, did as he was taught to do and urged the boy
to go to the police, never knowing the story was false."

"So Father Stebbins is only guilty of being
gullible?" Auntie Lil said incredulously.

"So far as I can tell," Santos conceded.

"Father Stebbins told you about Timmy?" T.S.
asked. "Whatever happened to the sanctity of the confessional?"

"He didn't tell me. He spoke in all sorts of
cryptic mumbo jumbo clichés. But his, um, companion, filled us in
on the details."

"Fran?" Herbert asked.

"I knew there was something going on between
those two," Auntie Lil declared.

"Now, I didn't say that," Detective Santos
protested. "In fact, I consider that definitely out of my
jurisdiction. But I did get the feeling that she sticks pretty
close to the padre. When she saw the boy, Timmy, approach him a
couple of times, she made it a point to be around in case he came
back. Without admitting it in so many words, I got this picture of
her lurking behind the pews and by the confessional pretending to
dust, if you know what I mean. But she was doing it for a good
reason. She didn't trust the kid and thought he was a liar. She
thought maybe he was setting Father Stebbins up for something. She
came right out and told the priest so, but he didn't believe her.
They had a falling out. And she still looks like she wants to wring
his neck."

"But after Timmy went to Father Stebbins and
lied about Bob Fleming, Annie O'Day found him and convinced him to
change his mind?" Auntie Lil asked.

Santos nodded. "Timmy is a street kid. He'll
blow with the wind. I think that when Annie reached him and made
him feel bad about lying, he truly got confused and went back to
see the same priest to sort it out. He doesn't sound like a bad kid
at heart, just mixed up and frightened at Emily's death. He told
the priest the truth and admitted that Worthington had put him up
to lying about Fleming. Father Stebbins was pretty broken up about
it—after all, he had counseled the kid to destroy a man's life—so
he did his best to convince the kid that he had to retract his
statements as soon as possible. He even had the kid halfway talked
into ditching New York and going back to Texas. Timmy wouldn't
agree to go home but he did agree to retract his accusations.
That's when he went to Homefront."

"And said he would only talk to me," Auntie
Lil added.

Santos shrugged. "Well, there's no accounting
for taste, Miss Hubbert." His eyes twinkled and he located another
piece of paper, checked his notes and finished his summary. "The
kid was being followed, of course, by Rodney—who had been parading
around exclusively as Leteisha ever since he'd poisoned Emily.
Rodney puts two and two together when he sees Timmy heading for
Homefront, calls Worthington, and gets his orders. As Leteisha, he
tells Little Pete that the man has a way for them to make some
really big money that night, but that he and Timmy will have to do
a job together. Little Pete is sent to get Timmy at Homefront
before he can retract the allegations against Fleming. They were
told to meet Leteisha at the piano warehouse for instructions and
part payment. But, of course, by the time the kids got there,
Leteisha was back to being Rodney again and beat the crap out of
Timmy to teach him a lesson. And, if you ask me, to kill him as
well. But he lived and Rodney will probably eventually be sorry for
that. Rodney didn't hurt Little Pete because they needed him that
night for one of Worthington's investing scams." He eyed T.S. "The
rest of the story, I think you know." He looked up at them
expectantly.

"So even in the middle of all this,
Worthington was still trying to get something on me?" T.S. asked.
"That's why he doped me and tried to set me up with Little
Pete?"

"You got it. Like I say, he found you hard to
please."

"I should think so." T.S. sat back with great
dignity. "How utterly sordid."

"Murder usually is," the detective reminded
him.

"And Eva?" Herbert asked almost fearfully.
"She was killed because of mistaken identity?"

Here, Santos softened. "Not really," he
admitted with a kindly nod toward Auntie Lil. "Don't forget, as
Leteisha, Rodney was a real working girl and had coworkers who were
always happy to contribute information in exchange for a buck here
and there. People, if you want to go so far as to call them that,
had been telling The Eagle about you, Miss Hubbert, for a number of
days. You'd been seen having dinner with Little Pete. And you
apparently met the super of Worthington's building? Funny how that
little detail slipped your mind when you gave your statement.
Anyway, the descriptions of you weren't very exact. For one thing,
they left out your big mouth—" He smiled again, loving every minute
of his revenge. "All The Eagle knew was that an old lady was
snooping around, and he might have mistaken Eva for you. But I
think that Eva was probably killed because she'd put two and two
together and had figured out that The Eagle was also Leteisha
Swann. She'd been hanging around the stoop as a bag lady or
something." He stared at the assembled group. "A curious fact that
I'm sure you'll eventually enlighten me on. And she made the
mistake of letting The Eagle know he'd been found. I think it was
just a matter of hours for her after that."

"She should have told us right away," Auntie
Lil protested. "Oh, those women. Always trying to upstage each
other."

"Or you," Santos pointed out and she fell
silent. "At any rate, after Eva was killed, Worthington figured out
that there was more than one little old lady snooping around."

"Many more than one!" Herbert interjected,
the memory of being trapped in a street opera still fresh in his
mind.

"He was waiting with Sally St. Claire in his
car outside Homefront today when Little Pete came for Timmy. He
didn't want any more screw-ups and was personally supervising
Timmy's removal. He saw you arrive and he saw Bob Fleming rush in
after you. Sally says that they went back to the super and asked
for a better description of the old lady who'd been asking about
Emily. That's when he realized you were the one who'd come around
asking questions. And that you were still alive. When they saw you
again at the hospital, it was easy to pick you up after that. Since
you weren't paying attention like I had warned you to."

The constant undercurrent of jousting between
Detective Santos and Auntie Lil was tactfully ignored by the
others.

"And the ladies from the soup kitchen?"
Herbert asked. "Were they involved in any way? I'm speaking of Miss
Adelle and the others."

"The ladies from the soup kitchen are a royal
pain in the ass and they turned this place into a zoo last night.
But other than that, they are uninvolved. So far as we can
tell."

Auntie Lil looked a bit disappointed. "What
about Nellie?" she asked. “The woman who runs the Jamaican
restaurant?”

T.S. rolled his eyes. Auntie Lil loved
conspiracy stories. Even when she had to make them up.

"Certainly she's involved," Santos said. "But
only so far as the kid, Little Pete, is concerned. Seems she's had
her eye on him for a while. Seen him around the streets. Wants to
get him off them. Looks to me like she's going to do it by force,
if necessary. She marched him in here and, by God, he told us just
about everything. You would have, too, if you had seen the look on
that woman's face."

"She's going to try and get custody of him?"
Lilah asked.

Santos shook his head. "So far as I'm
concerned, it's out of official channels. I have a feeling we
should just let things take their course on their own."

"Well, what do you think? Is there enough to
get Worthington?" T.S. knew the system and was not convinced. He'd
seen worse people get off for more.

Santos nodded slowly. "Yeah, we'll get him.
At least on blackmail and ordering Eva's death and endangering the
welfare of minors and a handful of other charges."

"But what about Emily's death?" Auntie Lil
said indignantly. "That's what started this whole thing."

Santos shrugged. "It's hard. There's not much
to tie The Eagle into that murder, much less Worthington. And
Rodney Combs knows the system. He hasn't come right out and said he
did it. He probably never will. He knows we don't have much on him.
I don't think we'll get him on Emily and we certainly won't get him
to roll over on Worthington for Emily's murder. Not without a
witness to hold over his head."

"Hey, Santos." The beefy desk sergeant stuck
his head in the door and bellowed: "Some big black dude is here to
see you. Says he's got someone with him you should meet." The
sergeant rolled his eyes and twirled a finger by his head.

"It's Franklin." Auntie Lil knew at once.

"Send him in," Santos ordered. A few seconds
later, Franklin entered the room, his enormous bulk dwarfing the
slight figure of his companion—a funny old man with half a shaved
head, uneven beard stubble and rummy eyes.

"I found him," Franklin declared with
satisfaction. "Living under the Manhattan Bridge. He saw The Eagle
put the poison in Miss Emily's chili. And he's all yours, Mr.
Santos. Right?"

Franklin's companion fixed his unnaturally
bright eyes on the detective and wheezed his way into speaking like
a car getting started on a cold morning. "Yeah. Yeah. Yup. Yup. I
seen it all right. And I don't mind saying so if you keep his evil
eye away from me. You just point me to where I should stand."

Santos looked at T.S. skeptically.

"It's better than nothing," T.S. said with a
shrug.

The detective looked at T.S. "You could be
right," he finally admitted. "You have been right before." He
gestured for the man to sit at the table and took out his pencil
with a sigh. What was one more statement after an entire night of
taking notes?

Margo McGregor kept her
part of her bargain. Two days later, the following column appeared
as the first in what would become a series of columns clearing Bob
Fleming and detailing Emily's death. It ran across from the
editorial pages of the Sunday edition of
New York Newsday,
landing in nearly
three million homes throughout the metropolitan area:

IT IS TIME TO TURN TO EACH OTHER

New York City is a city with invisible walls
as insurmountable as any barrier the world has to offer. These
walls separate the rich from the poor, pit black against white and,
too often, turn the young against the old. Yet, sometimes we find
ourselves breaching these walls in unexpected ways. Those are the
times when I am proudest to be a New Yorker. A New Yorker like
Emily Toujours.

Two weeks ago Emily died in a Manhattan soup
kitchen. She was an old woman, maybe homeless and definitely
hungry. In short, her death wasn't big news. Until you take a
closer look at her life: after an absence of decades, Emily had
returned to the city three years ago, hoping to live out her final
years near the stage. She had enough money for a small apartment
and, always, orchestra tickets. She did not always have enough
money for food. It is probable that Emily found a Broadway much
different from the Broadway she remembered. At least until the
curtain went up. But even with the grime and the danger that had
invaded its streets, her friends say that Emily never stopped
loving New York—or the people who live here.

But it turned out that Emily had died as she
had lived much of her life—under a stage name. And even then, no
one was really quite sure that it was anything but "Emily." She had
nothing on her to say who she really was or even to indicate where
she lived. And her friends discovered that, among them, no one knew
her real name. It appeared that her "Emily" identity would die with
her. Despite the dismay of her friends, Emily was assigned a number
and left to wait a week in a chilled city locker. Perhaps someone
would step up to claim her. If not, there was Potter's Field.

Unexpectedly, someone did step up. Many
someones, in fact. All of them New Yorkers like Emily. People who
refused to forget. Her friends at the soup kitchen—more than two
dozen in all—would not let Emily die unknown. "She has a family
somewhere," they told each other. "She deserves to be mourned."

They mounted a campaign to find out her true
identity. And if anyone among them doubted Emily's love for drama,
they've stopped doubting now: though her real name remained a
mystery, her friends discovered that Emily had been poisoned. Who
would bother to murder an unknown, nearly penniless, old woman? It
was a puzzle that our overburdened police force could not afford to
solve. But her friends would not let it go. Young and old, black
and white and, yes, even rich and poor, they banded together to
unravel why Emily had died.

They found that she died giving of herself
to others. Emily Toujours, an old woman who only weighed 84 pounds
at her autopsy, died because she tried to help two young runaway
boys leave our streets. One boy was black and the other was white.
Both of them called her "Grandma." There's nothing really special
about either of these boys. They're the kind of kids the rest of us
pass by every day. They smirk and make us uncomfortable. We, in
turn, make them invisible.

But they weren't invisible to Emily. She
turned to every agency, every hotline, every task force and every
department in this city for help. Logs show she made more than 85
phone calls in all. What she wanted was someone, anyone, to show
her a way to save two young boys from our streets. What she found
instead was disinterest, apathy, discouragement and just plain
exhaustion. And, like so many other New Yorkers, I am among the
guilty ones.