Bad to the Bone (24 page)

“Why do you care? You afraid she’ll run out and you’ll have to go back to the old ladies’ home? Excuse me, I forgot. They’re not called that anymore. Now they’re retirement communities.”

“Retire? While there’s
citrullos
like you in the world, I’ll never retire.”

“Ummmm.” Moodrow couldn’t get past the fact that grandma thought ball busting was a legitimate occupation. He’d known any number of silks in the job who’d put this idea into practice, but they’d always justified their sadism with sanctimonious pronouncements about protecting the job from cops like him. This woman was blatantly throwing it out there.

“I came here to see your daughter,” Moodrow finally muttered. “If I remember correctly, she doesn’t
allow
you to write checks.”

The woman ignored his comment. “What’s with you, anyway?” She gestured at his best brown suit. “
Sciofoso
. You can’t afford clothes? You spend our money on dope?”

Moodrow leaned in close. “You know what you are?
Una chiachierona
.” He was calling her an old windbag. The carefully researched epithet had been intended for the old woman’s daughter.

“
Va fancula
,” she replied evenly. “
Va fa en Napoli
.”

Va fancula
, Moodrow knew, meant ‘up your ass.’ The rest of it was beyond him. In desperation, he turned and began to walk back to the elevator.

“Hey,
paisan
,” the woman shouted. “Where you goin’?”

“I had enough bullshit,” Moodrow called over his shoulder. “If your daughter wants to speak to me, let her come to my office.”

“You don’t have an office.”

“Now you’re gettin’ the picture.” He pressed the elevator button, then folded his arms across his chest.

“C’mon,
gumbah
, what’s the matter with you? I’m just an old lady. I thought you were a tough guy. My daughter’s alone in there with Florence. You come on.”

“Are you sorry?” Moodrow asked without turning.

“
Ammaza tutta la familia
,” she muttered.

“Uh-uh. None of that. I asked if you were sorry.”

“I’m sorry, all right. Go talk to Connie.” The old woman turned and began to walk away, leaving the door open. She took five or six steps before she lost control and spit on the floor.

“Your daughter’s gonna have your head for that, Maria,” Moodrow called after her. “Because I’m gonna tell on you.”

The woman continued to mutter softly as she walked back into the depths of the mammoth apartment and Moodrow almost laughed. Then he remembered that he still had Connie in his immediate future and sobered up. He hunched his shoulders and made his way back through the living room and into the hallway leading to the bedroom. To his surprise he heard the sounds of conversation along with the hiss of the respirator coming from Flo Alamare’s room.

“I got a letter this morning from Aunt Bella in Columbus.” Connie Alamare’s strident voice was instantly recognizable. “The fat one who threw up at your cousin’s wedding. You remember? The
chooch
. She’s as stupid as ever. Her youngest boy was arrested for dealing cocaine and she moans and groans. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’ Meanwhile, he’s got a hole where his nose should be. It’s disgusting. Her husband only cares about his silk suits and his guido shoes and the
grappa
he drinks with his friends at the social club. He won’t even talk about getting a lawyer for the kid or posting bail. That’s why she writes me after five years. All the money is in Frank’s name. She can’t even find the checkbook. I told her years ago to put the horns on him. ‘Why do you let this
citrullo
step on you? Your children are all grown. Get yourself a young boy to make you happy and a lawyer to make you rich. Your husband has money. You don’t have to live like a servant.’

“Not Bella, Flo. Bella’s a guinea from the old country. Her husband is God. ‘What would I do without Frank? Divorce is forbidden by my religion.’ I tried to explain that divorce isn’t forbidden. Only remarriage. ‘I don’t know how to live by myself. I only know how to take care of the house. Cooking, washing, cleaning. This is my life.’ I told her, ‘If that’s your life, you’d be better off dead.’

“Flo, it’s sickening. Believe me, I know because I once had to live that way. If it wasn’t for your father’s passing, I’d have ten kids and a forty-inch waist. The world is set up to make men happy. Why shouldn’t it be? It’s men that set it up in the first place. Women are just whores. A man can go on the street and buy a woman for twenty dollars or go in a church and get a lifetime contract for nothing. For room and board. That’s what they give the slaves. Clothes for their backs and a place to sleep.

“I didn’t want that to happen to you. That’s why I was so hard on you when you were growing up. I wanted you to be strong enough to resist the crap. I wanted you to be a woman who stood up for herself.”

In the silence that followed, Moodrow, curious, stepped into the doorway. Connie Alamare was sitting next to Flo’s bed, holding her daughter’s hand, a hand that was little more than twisted bones, and crying softly. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She murmured the phrase again and again.

Flo had gotten noticeably thinner. Her dark, empty eyes stared, unblinking, at the ceiling. Saliva dripped from the corners of her mouth to form a dark stain on the sheets. A tube ran from beneath the sheets to a half-filled bag of urine while the IV bottle slowly emptied into a vein on her throat. The respirator continued to push air into her lungs, then pull it out again. Over and over.

It didn’t seem possible that she could still be alive. Her body was little more than a shadow beneath the bedclothes. Moodrow, taken by surprise, felt himself drifting back to those first years in the job. There were times, before he’d hardened himself, when the unrelenting misery had threatened to overwhelm him. When he’d seriously considered leaving the job. The victims, the families, even the criminals—it was ugly beyond description and the realization that he would have to deal with it for the length of his career made him want to run as far away as he could get. Eventually, he’d learned to ignore it. You took the man’s pay and did the man’s job and sending the mutts Upstate was all the consolation you were going to get.

But there were times when the old feelings returned. You walked, unsuspecting, into a crime scene and found all the misery summed up in a single image. He recalled an incident that had taken place in his last year in the job. He was summoned to the scene of a homicide involving an eighty-one-year-old woman. She’d been raped first, then beaten to death with a tire iron. Moodrow, preoccupied, had stepped into the apartment to find the woman’s husband, in violation of all crime scene procedure, cradling his wife’s bloody head in his lap. He’d looked up at Moodrow and his eyes held every inch of the suffering that would dominate the rest of his life.

“Hey, Flo, look who’s here. It’s Nero the detective.” Connie Alamare, her dark eyes glittering through her tears, had turned toward him. She continued to stroke her daughter’s hand as she spoke. Her voice was defiant.

“Your mother told me you were in here.” If there was anything else to say, Moodrow couldn’t think of it.

“Did he come for another check, Flo? What do you think?”

“You know why I came here, Connie. I spoke to you about it yesterday.”

“He wants to send your blood to a laboratory, Flo. After three weeks of work, he gets a brilliant idea. Check the blood.”

“I want to find out exactly what happened to her.”

“If you want to find out what happened to Flo, all you have to do is open your eyes.”

“Look, Connie, your daughter was using drugs when this happened.” Moodrow’s voice was calm and steady, his anger entirely gone. “I’ve talked to the narcs in the Seventh Precinct. I’ve talked to the mutts on the street. Everyone tells me there are no drugs in Hanover House. We may have to look elsewhere.”

“You’re sniffing up the wrong tree, Nero.” She finally dropped her daughter’s hand. “Flo was crazy about Davis Craddock. She thought he was some kind of a god. She
worshiped
him. If she left him, she would have come home. And what happened to my grandson? You want me to believe that little Michael is a prisoner of some drug addicts? I don’t believe it. What would they do with him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nero doesn’t know. Ten thousand dollars and he doesn’t know.”

“For Christ’s sake, Connie…” The woman’s ability to get under his skin was maddening. He’d come prepared to challenge her acid tongue, epithet for epithet, but the scene had disarmed him. He found himself wanting to ease her suffering. Ease it or kill her. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“It’s getting
you
somewhere. It’s getting
you
rich.”

Moodrow looked back at Flo Alamare’s twisted body. Her narrow chest, pumped by the respirator, was moving up and down. “I haven’t given up on Davis Craddock. I’m doing what I can to draw him out. I promise you, if Craddock did this to your daughter, I’m going to know how and why. If your grandson is still in Hanover House, I’ll eventually be able to prove that, too. But I also think you should prepare yourself for the possibility that she left Hanover House and got into trouble later on.”

“You should send someone inside. Pretend to go for therapy. My grandson isn’t invisible. You get inside, you’re going to find him.”

“I’m already doing that, but maybe there’s something else you better consider. Michael has a father, biological if not legal. The father could have a claim on…”

“Leave that for the lawyers, Nero. You just find him. That paper you wanted is on the table in the living room. Pick it up on your way out.” She turned her back on Moodrow and began to caress her daughter’s face. “You see, Flo,” she said, “pretty soon you’ll have Michael back with you. We’ll be a family again.”

I
T WAS ONLY TEN
o’clock when Moodrow left the Alamare apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He would have liked to go directly to the hospital, but the chairman of the toxicology department, Dr. Federico Benari, would be unable to see him until four in the afternoon. Benari had insisted on the hour, just as Connie Alamare had insisted Moodrow pick up her notarized request in the morning. It was frustrating, at the least, but Moodrow had already decided to make the gap productive by trying to answer one of the questions that had been jumping out at him since he’d begun the investigation. What was Flo Alamare, a middle-class white girl, doing in a part of the Bronx dominated by unrelenting poverty? Of course, without any recent history, the question had remained unanswered and it was tempting to think of her as just another junkie looking to get stoned, but the emerging picture of Flo as one of Davis Craddock’s enforcers suggested that she may have been on official business.

Moodrow had a list (by no means complete) of former Hanoverians. Reviewing them, he found only one with a Bronx address: William Brandeis Williams. Flo Alamare’s body had been discovered a few blocks north of the Bruckner Expressway, the logical route for anyone traveling between Williams’ east Bronx apartment and Hanover House. Moodrow had already been to see Williams. He’d gotten nothing from the man besides a muttered “I don’t know anything” and a hastily closed door. As this same response had come from virtually every other ex-Hanoverian, Moodrow had drawn no conclusion, but with time to spare, he decided to pay Mr. Williams a second, unannounced visit.

The late morning traffic was extremely light and Moodrow made the run to Williams’ Throgs Neck apartment in under an hour. He was looking forward to a quick, productive conversation and a long, cholesterol-filled lunch before he went to the hospital. Williams, according to Moodrow’s notes, worked nights and Moodrow hoped to find Williams sleepy and vulnerable. What he found was a spider’s web of yellow crime scene tape covering Williams’ door. Apartments are only sealed in suspected homicides. Williams lived alone.

Moodrow, his instincts quickening, drove to the nearest precinct, the Four Five. The duty sergeant informed him that Williams was indeed a homicide victim, but the case wasn’t being handled by the precinct detectives. It had been turned over to a borough-wide homicide task force.

“They don’t trust the precincts no more,” he announced. “We’re not professional enough.”

“Where’s the task force operating from?”

“They’re housed in the Four Six.”

“That’s on the other side of the Bronx.”

“Very good. I see you know your geography.”

Moodrow ignored the sarcasm. “What about the uniforms who responded to the scene. Maybe I could speak to one of them?”

“We had a suit who heard the squeal and made an initial response. Calaverri. He closed off the scene until the task force dicks showed up. I think he’s at his desk. Straight through to the back.”

Moodrow made his way to a large room filled with back-to-back desks. Calaverri was a short, thick man with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard. He was sitting behind a mountain of paperwork and was none too pleased by the unexpected visit.

“Williams? Yeah, I responded to the scene. Unfortunately, I’m not competent to handle a simple homicide. It don’t mean shit that I spent the last nine years building up a list of snitches in the precinct. Now we got scientific detectives with computers sitting on the other side of the goddamn borough. They don’t clear half the files, but they fit the latest professional fucking model. Me, I’m just a clerk.”

“That’s how come I retired.” Moodrow shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense, Calaverri. Thirty years in the Seven and they tell me I don’t know the territory. I said, ‘Here’s my papers. I’m outta here.’ ”

It was bullshit, of course, but it was the kind of bullshit Calaverri wanted to hear. They gossiped about mutual friends in the job for a few moments, then got down to business.

“Williams got his head busted with the traditional blunt object,” Calaverri announced. “Probably a tire iron or a pipe. I only got a look at the guy’s brains. The autopsy report went to the task force. The apartment lock was busted out and about three quarters of the apartment was trashed. Williams most likely surprised the burglar who then went crazy. The victim looked like a dog run over by a truck.”