Death of the Black-Haired Girl (14 page)

“As though I ever fucking referred to it. You’re crazy.”

Charlie did not see himself as crazy. Ever.

Many understood that more personal possessions—cash on a primitive level, credit cards, financial documents, keys and codes, little things and larger things—were found in the dreadful ruins of the twin towers than could ever be returned or passed along or released in an orderly manner to every one of the survivors, if any. Many understood that early in the day on September 11 a brutal, lawless element accompanied the responders, requiring, demanding a share of what was gathered up in that inferno. It happened all the time. It was the world. It was mere humanity.

Old criminal conspiracies that had been, so to speak, present in the pilings under the river, the shafts, the salt-encrusted drowned alleys and bricked-up tunnels, with the eels’ nests and the wrecked rope walks—that had been there in spirit since the first white men, with their bindles and kit, and before them—had emerged with the fire coming down. The word had gone out. Competing villainies saying, It’s ours. Nobody ever suggested such a thing was common or general or even frequent. It was despised and aberrant. Still, it happened.

In depraved quarters, greed and suspicion. “We said all. All over a certain figure. We said all what yez got!” Were all your average citizens a hundred and fifty percent better? No way! So mistakes were made. Charlie Kinsella and associates had a crust. A crust and maybe a crumb besides. It wasn’t more.

Eddie Stack was present that day. His share was emphysema. Placed where he was, he knew a little of what was going on. He could no more have picked up some poor lost soul’s posthumous possession than he could have plunged his hand into a molten girder or into the guts of some poor woman who might have been his own wife or daughter. It was impossible not to half know it, in flashes and fits and the edge of vision, at the rim of a policeman’s mind. And of course there was his then brother-in-law Charlie Kinsella. Stack never saw him that day, but Charlie was there.

Days later the smoke was still everywhere, seeming to be the only source of light. Stack was beginning to understand that he would never draw his breath as before. Maud was safe in her classy Catholic boarding school, where the nuns were long gone but underpaid youths of the Ivy postgraduate faculty struggled to balance the tragedy of the city’s martyrdom with the understandable grievances of the Third World. Barbara had been dead and gone for more than a year, but he still talked to her and still felt she heard him. Then appeared what some old party in an immigrant past might call “a wee man”—sure enough, a little fellow. A little Pinocchio face of a guy. He looks like UPS but he’s not. He’s wearing a messenger’s uniform but you look at his mug, Stack does, and sees not a messenger in the usual sense. He’s come in a panel truck and there are two men with him, not messengers either. The small man has a big box.

So the guy says, “I come from Charlie K.”

And Stack is so confused he thinks, What is that, a Chinese restaurant? but just as well doesn’t say that, or anything. The man at the door’s impatient and thrusts the box at him. It’s medium heavy. Stack struggles to hold it.

“Charlie,” the man says, lowers his voice.

“Charlie Kinsella.” Leaning on the
K,
what Maud would call a plosive, almost ending the word with an
s,
which she’d call a sibilant. “Keep it very safe. A day. Maybe two. Be here. Stay with it.”

When the guy’s gone, Stack is so rocked he’s merry and he makes a black joke to dead Barbara.

“Can I open it?”

God only knows what’s in the box he stays inside with, missing his doctor’s appointment, until the same man comes back for it. He knows what’s in it. He doesn’t know what’s in it either.

The following year, Maud’s admitted to every college he’s ever heard of. She’s got the National Merit Scholarship and financial aid up the gazoo—the guidance counselor at the classy Catholic school helped arrange this. In the end, she picks the college in Amesbury, one of the top liberal arts schools in the country.

It is a great relief to Stack that so much aid is being supplied because it is all unbelievably expensive. And beautiful Maud wants clothes and presently, over her freshman year, will want other things that college girls have, and money for travel and so on.

One day there arrived the man himself, Charlie Kinsella.

“Listen, Eddie, I just wanted you to know we know you got expenses, and we really thought, This man helped us and we should help him. Because I know you’re a guy who thinks, you know, and I don’t understand half the fuckin’ words you say, it was the same with Barbara, God rest her soul—educated—and the kid’s gonna be more so, right? So we wanna help.”

“I . . . I’m good, Charlie. Seriously, brother, I’m good. We’re good.”

Kinsella shows no sign of leaving. He looks very assured in his new clothes. He’s very assertive.

“We want to give you something. We want yez to take it.”

“Really, Charlie, I don’t want anything.”

Charlie K. makes a pained face. As one on the horns of a dilemma.

“Um,” he says, “I don’t lie to the people I work with. Everybody knows that. They know that. Never.”

“Right,” says Stack.

“Anyweez,” he says in a rollicking fashion, “I gotta be able to tell them we helped you out. You see what I mean?”

As much as to say, Stack thought, that there was no way around it.

Stack was reduced to shaking his head, as in no. Kinsella let him understand that the “something” offered was cash. “Nobody’s,” Kinsella said, which Stack inferred to mean unmarked. It was nowhere to be seen on that visit. But Stack mercifully would have no more of such packages or of the unspeakable Charlie until—until now, Maud dead.

What had happened was this. Maud’s college career indeed called for more expenses than might have been foreseen. Charlie Kinsella had a son, Michael, from his first family with Stack’s sister Gerry. Michael practiced law in Florida and might one day be a young champion of conservative forces in that state. The attorney administered a fund for the purpose of paying whatever expenses Maud Stack incurred during the term of her education and the years of her setting forth in the world. The bills and such were passed along and Michael Kinsella wrote checks to meet them in order that Maud not be denied the full enjoyment of the opportunities presented her by a fine education at a world-famous seat of learning.

Now here was Charlie suggesting some fuck saw it wrong.

“Would I know anything, Charlie?” Stack asked. “Would something come from me? What could I say, for God’s sake!”

He saw that his protestations had convinced Charlie and also curled his lip very slightly.

“Sure, Eddie,” Kinsella told him with a punch on the arm. “Yer a standup dude.”

L
IEUTENANT LOU SALMONE
saw her for the first time on the pathologist’s table at the hospital. The spoiled beauty of the young woman laid out there moved him in ways he could not have written down and would never dream of trying to express. The ambient smells were those usual to an autopsy room, and the mixture of mortified humanity and disinfectant somehow conveyed a judgment. The table on which she lay was made of stainless steel. It was a calamitous fall from grace. Bad luck, sure, but you could see and breathe punition and guilt. It made you suspect that what they said might be true, that somewhere in time, maybe ages before, somebody must have done something to make this happen to people the way it happened to cats and dogs.

The wise guys always pointed out how you had to have at least two people to have a murder. A famous person had said, “Character is fate.” This was the wise-guy version: A person had made a mistake, they liked to say, and somebody had to pay. They didn’t give a damn about justice, only about restoring their version of the natural order. The victim was always at a disadvantage, being dead and so often unsightly.

The kid had been lying half in the road, half on the sidewalk, her upper body wrapped to the neck in sky-blue plastic, her head turned at an impossible angle, legs twisted under, one tapering to a boot, the other stocking-footed. Everything about her position on the sidewalk had been incompatible with life. Deeply dead, she had looked.

Deeper dead now, naked on the table beside where Salmone stood. A yoke supported her neck, to hold her head up to the light. It looked distinctly like a temporary expedient to keep her facing the inquiries of the breathing world before what remained of her was put aside.

The examining pathologist was a short, neat man called Dr. Patel. Her ID, what old-time cops called an aided card, stated the victim was Maud Mary Stack, a student at the college from New York City who lived on campus. According to Dr. Patel’s preliminary record, she was six feet tall, weighed one hundred and twenty pounds, was well nourished and athletic. The hospital pictures of the corpse showed Maud’s pale freckles. The EMTs had cleared small traces of ethanol vomitus from her mouth. Her blood alcohol content was .20. Fluorescence revealed no semen on her body or her clothes.

Maud’s belongings were in a plastic evidence bag but would not give evidence of much. She had credit cards, a driver’s license, a New York MetroCard. Forty-six dollars in bills and coins. No cell phone, which was strange. There was a worn birthday card in her jeans pocket with no signature. On it was a single line in what would prove to be Maud’s handwriting: “Dear heart, how like you this?”

“Her neck was broken,” Patel said. “Skull fractured. Practically all the ribs on the left side. Vertebrae. Internal damage, so she won’t be an organ donor.”

“Freakin’ destroyed,” Salmone said.

“So how fast was this driver going?”

“What do you think?”

Patel shrugged and smiled faintly. “Nobody saw this car?”

“None of the witnesses gave much of a description. Just that it was big and fast.”

“Well,” Patel said, “the state is sending a guy down who does traffic deaths for a living. Sometimes he can make a case for a match between a specific vehicle and a specific injury without blood or tissue. For what it’s worth.”

“Tell the state’s guy to look for wounds or bruises might result from an assault,” Salmone said. “She was in an altercation just before the car hit.”

“I don’t know about that. She was knocked all up and down the street, against steps and gates, et cetera. He’ll have a look.”

Salmone was not sure he had ever seen Maud Stack on the campus; it was not a place he frequented. He did know that his friend of many years ago, Eddie Stack, had a daughter there. Salmone knew many people throughout New England, and it was not a rarity for some of them to have children at the college. In Stack’s case, though, her death touched on a friendship from the days when Salmone had started his career as a New York City patrolman, before his father had retired and the police department in Amesbury made a pitch for Salmone to take up the stick there. In fact, hizzoner the mayor himself had extended a kind of invitation. Salmone did it—a move that involved enormous economic, moral and familial complications—because he had thought it was the appropriate thing to do.

He had done it for his elderly parents and because his wife, who grew up in Amesbury, had family and friends there and disliked New York. Salmone’s mother had died soon after the move. His father had lingered long. He was a busybody, a loudmouth, an invalid, a professional Friend of the Mayor, friend here, friend there, everybody’s fucking friend, until Salmone grew to hate him. And Salmone’s wife, who had to move back to town so as not to have to bring their children up in dread in New York, walked—divorced him, turned his very children against him. Even his venal father was shocked.

“She wasn’t really Italian,” the old guy would say helpfully. “She was an Albanese, a gypsy witch. That family was from Puglia, they wasn’t even Catholics.” Whereupon he would make useful signs against the evil eye.

So Salmone was left to live in the Little Italy of the college’s town, where few Italian Americans remained and where many people from the state of Durango, Mexico, lived and labored. Which had left Salmone to a dissipated and troubled small-city-constabulary middle age from which he was still recovering. That he was now standing by the corpse of the child of a man who had once been a friend, whom Salmone had been in the job with and partnered with, struck him in ways that were confusing but somehow familiar.

On his way back to the station he stopped at the scene of the accident. The scene also happened to be the area of Felicity Street directly outside the front door of the professor on whom Maud Stack had come calling on the night of her death. The responding officer’s report had described her as exiting the house, but it had turned out that she had gone there and been refused entrance by the professor and his wife. The girl was drunk, according to the professor—the toxicologist at the hospital supported him in that—so the professor had not let her inside.

Salmone had found the professor’s statement of very limited usefulness. She had come to his house, he had offered, because she was his student—his advisee. But he had shed no light on why she had come there crocked at eleven o’clock at night. Also on his reason for not letting her in on that particular night. And why exactly they were reportedly having other than friendly physical contact in the street subsequent to her visit. Among other things not illuminated.

She had raised hell and the professor had gone out to placate her or otherwise persuade her to leave. The whole ruckus had taken place in front of a crowd leaving Collier Rink after a hockey game, and the car that hit Maud had come out of that crowd, injuring a couple of other students and leaving Maud dead in the street, almost on impact. Salmone had statements, taken by other officers, from the professor and his wife. He had other statements, taken from witnesses and first responding officers, and he had spent part of the day reading them. A number of students, three particularly vociferous, claimed they saw Professor Brookman deliberately push Maud Stack into the path of the oncoming car. The city police had statements and a number of cell phone videos that might be used to support that charge. But the people in the crowd had argued about it and the majority of witnesses affirmed that what they saw was Brookman trying to pull Maud Stack out of the car’s way. A lot of the videos could equally well be interpreted to show that. Salmone decided to look at the statements and the videos again. He thought he might bring some of the witnesses in again as well.