Apaches (8 page)

“Just one more for now,” Mary said.

“What?”

“Who else knew about you and Jamie?” Mary asked.

“I never told any of my friends,” Walker said. “People
gossip about me as it is. They always have. And I wanted to keep what Jamie and I had special and private.”

“What about him?” Mary asked. “Did he tell anybody?”

“Just his brother,” Walker said. “They were very close.”

“Did he tell his brother about the money too?” Mary asked.

“No,” Walker said. “I don’t think so. It’s not the sort of thing Jamie would talk about. With anyone.”

“You take care of yourself,” Mary said, heading for the front door. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Walker asked, sadness breaking through the solid shield. “For Jamie, I mean.”

“How’d you find out he was dead?” Mary asked. “It barely got a mention in the tabloids. And they don’t seem your kind of reading anyway.”

“His brother, Albert, told me,” Walker said. “He called and told me when and how Jamie died.”

“Did Albert tell you anything else?” Mary asked.

“Not to talk to anyone,” Walker said, head bowed.

When Walker looked up again, she found herself staring at a closed door.

•    •    •

T
HE BAR WAS
crowded despite the hour and the heavy rain pelting the streets and causing the windows to steam. They sat at a circular table in the back, away from the jukebox. The table was crammed with beer bottles, shot glasses, crumpled napkins, and bowls of salt pretzels. The place was dark, like most cop bars, scattered overhead lights giving off more shadow than glow. The four men and one woman around the table, members of the North Bronx Homicide Unit, were in a festive mood, their work for this day brought to a successful end.

Mrs. Columbo had solved another homicide.

“Took less than a week,” Russo said, washing down a Snickers bar with a slurp of Bud. “Mary spots the bottle of wine, squeezes the spinster, and nabs the brother. We coulda called this one in from home.”

“I like the
we
part,” Stanley Johnson, senior detective on the squad, said to Russo. “What’d you do? Drive?”

“Brother break easy?” John Rodriguez asked. He was the new badge, working Homicide less than a month, promoted from the pickpocket division in Midtown South.

“He cracked in the car,” Mary said, sipping from a scotch straight. “Cried all the way to the station.”

“You gotta really hate your brother to slice him like that,” Captain Jo Jo Haynes, precinct commander, said. “Corkscrew the throat and
then
cut his feet off. Christ! And I thought my family was fucked up.”

“If I got a fuckin’ nickel, I’m not lettin’ my brother know about it,” Russo said. “And I
like
the guy.”

“It wasn’t just the money,” Mary said.

“What else?” Rodriguez asked.

“The brother, Albert, has some sort of muscular disease,” Mary said. “And his insurance doesn’t pick up all the costs. So he’s always behind the financial eight ball.”

“He know this Jamie’s pullin’ in a few thou a week?” Johnson asked.

“No,” Mary said. “Thinks the guy’s on the balls of his ass. In fact, Albeit lends him money. Feels sorry for him.”

“What a prick,” Jo Jo Haynes said.

“Albert’s over at the apartment,” Mary said, finishing her scotch. “Sees a bottle of wine and looks for a corkscrew.”

“He finds it,” Russo said. “In a cabinet drawer next to a folded-up paper bag. Albie, curious as well as thirsty, pops open the bag.”

“And finds the money,” Johnson said.

“He sat on the bed for three hours,” Mary said. “Holding the corkscrew and staring at all that cash.”

“Jamie walks in,” Russo said. “Sees poor little Albie sittin’ next to his stash and starts yellin’ at the guy.”

“Albert snaps,” Mary said. “All those years being suckered by Jamie melt down into a couple of bloody minutes.”

“He sliced and diced the fucker,” Russo said. “Left him hangin’, took the money, and walked out.”

“And he never got to drink the wine,” Johnson said.

“That’s the sad part,” Rodriguez said. “Guy comes in thirsty. Goes out the same way.”

“Except this time with a murder rap,” Russo said. “And Mrs. Columbo here smellin’ his ass out in no time flat.”

“What happens to the old lady?” Haynes asked. “What’s her name? Walker?”

“Who gives a fuck, Cap,” Russo said. “She still got her feet and can swallow anything she chews.”

“She’ll die alone,” Mary said in a low voice. “Jamie was her only real friend. After this, she’ll never let herself get close to anyone. She’ll be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And she’ll die alone.”

“Think Albert cops an insanity?” Johnson said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Russo said. “He comes up Mr. Clean on the sheets. Not even a parking ticket. One of those jaboes goes through life nobody notices.”

“Two lives ruined and one ended,” Mary said. “All for a glass of wine.”

“Let this be a lesson,” Russo said, holding up a bottle of Bud. “Drink beer. You don’t need a fuckin’ weapon to open a bottle, and anybody who drinks it sure as shit don’t have a paper bag filled with cash.”

“I guess this means you’re not buying,” Mary said.

“Not unless one of you got a corkscrew in your pocket,” Russo said, standing up from the table.

“Hey, Cap,” Johnson said with a smile. “Whatta we get if we each put a bullet into Russo right here and now?”

“A raise,” Jo Jo Haynes said.

Mrs. Columbo and the detectives ended their night of victory over death on a loud laugh.

•    •    •

M
ARY PARKED HER
car four blocks from her Whitestone row house. The rain had stopped and the air was cool and
clean, early morning smells wafting down from the trees. Overhead lights cast broken shadows across cars and patches of lawn. It was closing in on three
A.M
. and the streets were empty as she walked with a slow step, head down, her purse hanging from a strap off her shoulder. Sated with drink, she let her mind ease past the events of the day.

The emptiness of Alison Walker’s life had rubbed a nerve. The woman had money, comfort, and a certain status. But none of those could fill the vacuum of years built around set routines and nights spent alone. Alison wouldn’t die broke, but the odds were strong she would die bitter.

Mary lacked all the luxuries of Alison’s life. Her status came courtesy of the gold shield in her purse. Her money traveled on a biweekly spin cycle and her comfort was a small house with a leaky roof, bad plumbing, and two bedroom windows long painted shut. But Mary knew, as she walked down the cracked sidewalk of Thirty-seventh Avenue, that she had Alison beat by a record mile. She had what the other woman would give everything to attain—a husband in her bed and a son in the next room.

Maybe her marriage wasn’t such an uneasy fallback after all, and watching Frankie grow had given her plenty of reasons to smile. It was far better than sitting in a room alone, staring at an antique vase filled with a single red rose, knowing no phone would ever ring to a voice that cared and no door would ever open to let in a warm hug.

Mary Silvestri crossed against a flashing red light and picked up the speed of her pace, suddenly eager to get home. She never saw the man with the knife hunkered down in the alley, alongside the shuttered gates of Sergio’s Deli. He stood perched on the balls of his feet, watching as she approached, waiting to time his leap and score the purse dangling against her hip.

When she was directly in front of him, he jumped.

The man, wiry and muscular, wrapped his right arm around Mary’s throat and wedged the blade of a six-inch knife between her shoulders, hard against the soft wool of her camel’s hair J. C. Penney blazer.

“You breathe, you die,” the man said. His breath against her neck reeked of alcohol.

He tightened his grip around Mary’s throat and gave the edge of the knife a rough twist. He took backward steps, dragging Mary with him, pulling her away from the light and into the blind darkness of the alley.

Mary relaxed her body and let the man’s strength do all the work. She kept her hands free, loose, waiting to make her move. The arm around her throat was wrapped in bandages, blood flowing through the white gauze as his fingers gripped thick clumps of her hair. She shifted her face away from him, brushing against the rough skin of his cheek as she moved.

They were in the alley now.

“What you got for me?” the man asked, leaning her face forward against the red brick wall. “How much?”

“Take it all,” Mary said, forcing the words out. “In the purse. Take it.”

He yanked her head back with a forceful grip of her hair and slammed her face against the wall.

“Don’t tell me what to take, bitch. I take what I want. Understand me?”

“Yes,” Mary said, tasting the blood dripping down from her forehead.

He moved his arm from her throat and ripped the purse off her shoulder. He leaned her hard against the wall, the blade of the knife keeping her in place. Mary closed her eyes, took in a few deep breaths, and tried to think with a clear head. She knew she didn’t have much time and was angry at herself for leaving her gun in the office, something she always did when she went out drinking with the squad.

She heard the man rifle through the purse and knew
exactly what he would find—sixty dollars in cash, Visa and MasterCards, one overdue and the other at its limit, a few coins, her father’s pocket watch, and an NYPD gold-shield detective’s badge.

The man took the cash, missed the badge, and tossed the purse into a corner of the alley. He shoved the money into a front pocket of a pair of soiled jeans and leaned closer to Mary. He rested his head on her shoulder and put his lips to her ear, the knife still in its place.

“Like the way you smell,” he said, his tongue stroking the edges of her ear.

“You got what you wanted,” Mary said, fighting to keep her voice calm. “You got enough to get a fix and make it through the night.”

She heard the man slide his zipper down and push himself closer.

“You gonna be my fix,” he said. “You and me, we gonna make it through the night.”

The man was rubbing himself against her leg, free hand pawing at her skirt and panties, trying to reach flesh. Mary struggled to free herself from his grip, using the wall as a brace, balancing her feet for leverage.

“That’s it, baby,” the man said. “Fight me. C’mon, trim, fight me.”

Mary turned her face from the wall, moving the man’s arm away from her thigh. She looked in his eyes, brown, glazed, and empty, and saw in them what she had seen in the faces of so many killers over so many years. It was in that fragment of a second that she knew what awaited her. It wasn’t just sex he wanted. Or drugs he needed.

It was blood.

Her blood.

The man with the knife needed a fix that only the blade could bring him. He was laughing as he stood and watched her blood flow past his legs like melted Jell-O, moving down the cracked path of a dark alley on an empty street in Queens. Laughing and staring into Mary’s eyes, watching as the life ebbed out of them.

It was the rush of the killer.

No one understood that feeling better than Mary Silvestri.

•    •    •

S
HE WOKE UP
three days later in the intensive care unit of Mission Hospital. Doctors had removed a portion of her lung, sliced beyond use by the man’s knife. Her stomach had also been slashed, requiring forty-seven stitches to close. There were welts and bruises up and down her body, and her right arm and left foot were broken and in casts. One eye was closed shut, and the side of her right cheek was bandaged.

Mary looked around the room, pale blue walls floating like waves, shards of sunlight warming the left side of her face. She saw an IV hanging off to the side, fluid slow-dripping into her arm. The inside of her mouth felt crusted, and there were two small plastic oxygen tubes in her nose. A set of rosary beads was wrapped around the fingers of her left hand.

She turned to her left, past the glare of the sun, and saw her son, Frank, sitting in a chair, wearing a New York Yankee jacket and cap, hands folded in his lap, staring back at her. She gazed at him for several seconds, read the concern etched on his youthful face, saw the tense way he leaned his body forward, and studied the eyes of a teenage boy terrified that his mother would die.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” she said, each word weighed down with a pain that reached into her chest.

“It’s Sunday,” Frank said, surprised to hear her speak.

“Church, then,” Mary said, managing a slight smile. “I could use a couple of prayers thrown my way.”

“Went this morning,” Frank said. “With Dad.”

“Here alone?”

“No,” Frank said. “Dad went down to the cafeteria. To get some coffee.”

“How’s he doin’?”

“Scared,” Frank said. “Stays here all day. Sleeps in the
bed next to you at night. Leaves just to check on work and pick me up from school.”

“How about you?” Mary asked, wishing she could sit up, lean over, and, for the first time in many years, take her son in her arms.

“I’m not as scared,” Frank said.

“Why’s that?”

“Dad forgets how tough you are,” Frank said. “I don’t.”

“I’m not as tough as the guy I ran into,” Mary said. “Otherwise, we’d be sending him flowers.”

“They caught him,” Frank said.

“Who made the collar?” Mary asked.

“Not sure,” Frank said. “Russo and some of the other guys started chasin’ him down while you were in surgery. By the time you were in recovery, they had him.”

“I can’t wait to see him in court,” Mary said. Her throat was dry and raw, and her jaw ached whenever she spoke.

“He won’t be in court,” Frank said.

She didn’t have to say anything. She just looked at him, first curiously, then knowingly.

“Russo told me and Dad the guy put up a fight.” Frank went on in a matter-of-fact tone that would have made any seasoned cop proud. “Came at them with the same knife he used on you. Russo and Johnson stopped him.”

Mary nodded and turned from her son. She lifted her head slowly, eyes scanning the flowers and baskets that filled the room.