Hurt Machine (2 page)

“I did not. I
don’t
.”

“Look, Carmella, what’s this got to do—”

“I thought you might have heard. Alta was murdered last month. She was stabbed dead in the street outside a pizzeria in Gravesend.”

I’d grown up in Coney Island, not too far from Gravesend, and I don’t think I’d ever given the name much thought. Gravesend was just another neighborhood. I mean, you don’t say Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, or Brownsville and contemplate the origin of the names. They were neighborhoods with names, names like any other names … until now, until I found out there was a time bomb ticking in my belly.
Tick … tick … tick …
A long time ago in a cemetery, Mr. Roth told me that he didn’t want to be buried, that to be cold in the ground wasn’t for him. And now the time had come for me to think about that. I didn’t suppose it mattered. When you’re dead, you’re dead, but when you can see the end in sight, it does matter.
Gravesend.
For as long as I had left, I wouldn’t be able to hear the name again without considering its implications.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” I said.

“I cut my family out of my life so many years ago and now …” Carmella was crying. “Here, take this.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Get back to your party. Give your family my love and wish Sarah all happiness. Call me, please.”

She was in my arms again and I was stroking her hair. When I looked up, Pam was standing a few feet away, glaring.

From the
Daily News
, May 6, 2009

Cold-hearted EMT murdered in Gravesend, Brooklyn

By Henry Leroy

One of two FDNY EMTs accused of ignoring a man who died of a stroke at a Manhattan bistro was stabbed to death outside a popular Brooklyn eatery. According to a spokesman for the NYPD, Alta Conseco, 48, of East New York was accosted by an unknown assailant or assailants in close proximity of the Gelato Grotto on 86th Street in the Gravesend section of the borough. Stabbed several times, she managed to crawl to the famous pizzeria where she collapsed. No further details about the attack were released. She was off duty at the time of the assault.

Conseco was taken to Coney Island Hospital where she was pronounced dead. On March 12, Conseco and another EMT, Maya Watson, made international headlines after witnesses claimed the EMTs ignored pleas for help from the bistro staff after Robert Tillman, a cook at the High Line Bistro, seemed to faint. When they were asked to help, the two off-duty EMTs are reported to have told the bistro staff to call 911 and then left. Both EMTs have consistently refused comment.

Conseco and Watson have been vilified by New Yorkers for what many perceive as a callous decision and a dereliction of duty. They were both suspended for thirty days and put on desk duty upon their return to active status. Both the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the FDNY have investigations pending.

THREE

I had to wade through a lot of shit before I could get to any credible media reports on Alta Conseco’s murder. During the last case I worked—the abduction of Sashi Bluntstone, an eleven-year-old art prodigy—I’d learned some hard lessons about the ugly side of the worldwide web. The internet could be a magical place, but it was a sewer too. It was a place where people with axes to grind could hide behind screen names and ceaselessly vent their spleens in the most vicious and brutal ways imaginable without ever having to justify their points of view or answer for their screeds. Sashi had been a particularly favorite target of a group of frustrated art bloggers who posted invective-laden rants and altered photos of her being crucified, raped, and flayed alive. All of that aimed at a prepubescent girl because she had managed to make some money with her paintings, so you can imagine the harsh and varied expressions of loathing that lay in store for Alta Conseco and Maya Watson.

When I finally did climb out of the sludge at the bottom of the sewer pipe, most of the media reports I found weren’t very good and were pretty much the same. They spent about an equal amount of space or time presenting the scant details of Alta’s murder and rehashing Robert Tillman’s death. The reports that came a few days later weren’t much better. No, actually, they were worse. They shed little if any light on Alta’s homicide. In fact, as the week wore on, reportage of her murder became more of a pretext for the papers and TV outlets to sensationalize Robert Tillman’s unfortunate end and to further vilify Alta and her partner. There was an almost inexhaustible number of articles, opinion pieces, and rants by TV talking heads, many of them delighting in portraying the two EMTs as representative of New York City itself.

Over the last few years I’d noticed that all the goodwill the rest of the country had shown New York City since 9/11 had steadily eroded and Robert Tillman’s death was like the last nail in the coffin. It was Kitty Genovese all over again. New York was that cold uncaring place, the place where neighbors hear the screams of a young woman being murdered and turn their heads, the place where EMTs basically tell a dying man to go fuck himself.

I shut the computer down. There wasn’t anything else there for me to know.

I’d had a long day, a happy day, for the most part. Just as I’d been able to put some distance between Carmella and me earlier in the day, I’d done a good job of keeping thoughts of the cancer at arm’s length during the party. I toasted Sarah and Paul. I watched them dance. I danced with Pam, with my sister Miriam, with Paul’s mom, and with Sarah. Still, it didn’t take much for my thoughts to shift back to my pending mortality. The level of my obsession with the disease really surprised me. During the few days since the diagnosis, I would sometimes look down to find myself rubbing my palm across my abdomen. It was as if I was trying to make a silent peace with the damned cancer or reach an accommodation with it.
Come on, we can get along, you and me. Gimme a few more years. Let me see some grandchildren. No, okay, that was greedy. How about a grandson?
Fuck me, this was going to be harder to deal with than I thought. I was an ex-cop, for chrissakes, a pragmatic SOB, but here I was trying to do a deal with a malignant lump growing inside my belly.

There was no way I was telling Sarah about it, not this close to the wedding. The wedding was simply a convenient excuse. I wasn’t going to tell anyone until circumstance forced me to. After Katy, my first wife, was murdered as an indirect result of some half-truths and secrets I’d kept from her, I’d sworn off secret-keeping and lies for good. That lasted about five minutes. A long time ago, I used to tell myself and anyone else who would listen that I was an open book, that secrets were an anathema to me. Bullshit! Secret-keeping was as reflexive for me as squinting my eyes in the face of the sun. And the cancer wasn’t the only secret I’d be keeping and the lies I told myself weren’t going to be much of anything compared to the ones I’d already started telling.

“That was Carmella, wasn’t it?” Pam had asked, her anger still evident as we both watched my ex-wife and ex-business partner disappear around the corner.

“You’ve seen her picture before, yeah.”

“God, she is beautiful. What was she doing here?”

“She heard about the party and she wanted to congratulate me and wish Sarah all the best.”
Lie
number
one
. As easy to tell as breathing. “She knew Sarah from the time she was a little girl and they always liked each other.”

Pam was professionally skeptical. It came with the territory. She was a PI, a real PI, not a PI like me, a guy who more played at it when owning wine shops with his brother got too boring to bear. Pam was licensed in Vermont and operated out of an office in Brattleboro. Brattleboro suited her. The rent was relatively inexpensive and its location gave her easy access to most of New England and New York. She did the majority of her work in New England, but, if the money was right, took cases as far south as Jersey. We met while I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone and the story of how we wound up together is pretty complicated. Let’s just say that since our initial relationship was based on secrets and lies—hers, not mine—I was a total sucker for her. Kindred spirits, you know. It helped that she saved me from being beaten to death by a vengeful ex-cop.

We’d been together for about two years now, if you could call the cha-cha we did being together. We’d both been down the aisle before and neither of us was hankering to take that stroll again. It was one thing for Sarah to sell her vet practice down here and move up to Vermont with Paul. They were young and just starting out. But Pam and I were set in our ways and weren’t going to pull up roots and relocate so we might live unhappily ever after. We had what I suppose you might call an adult relationship. One weekend a month I’d visit her. One weekend a month she’d come down to Brooklyn. Twice a year we’d go on week-long trips together. We enjoyed each other’s company and more than satisfied each other’s needs while managing to avoid the minefield of married sex. I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but married sex was sort of a peculiar mix of comfort and resentment. Between Sarah’s wedding and my ticking clock, I imagined I’d be thinking about a lot of things I’d let slide until now.

Pam, as unconvinced by my lie as I had been by her smile, was already headed back home. She was working an insurance fraud case that she thought would keep her busy for the next couple of weeks. I had a case to work too, probably my last case, my last chance for redemption. As atheists go, I guess I was a dreadful disappointment. I unfolded the paper Carmella had given to me that morning and punched in her phone number.

FOUR

We met on the boardwalk in Coney Island near Nathan’s. The sun was strong. The wind stronger and fragrant too. It smelled of salt from the sea, of sunscreen lotion, and of hot oil. It smelled so intensely of hot dogs and French fries that I imagined I could hear them sizzle and bubble.

“Why meet here?” I asked, turning to face the beach.

“I used to work the Six-O too, remember?”

“Yeah, but it’s also the place where—”

“—that scumbag took me from my family and raped me when I was a little girl. You know, when I first found out this was where the department was assigning me after making detective, I almost said no, but you know how the job was back then. I wouldn’t get no second chance. They woulda stuck me behind a desk at One PP and made me a fucking showpiece. When the department wanted to prove women and minorities were getting ahead, they’d have wheeled out the hot piece of Puerto Rican ass and her shiny gold shield for the press. And when they were done making their point, they’d have put me back on the shelf until the next time they needed to flash my shield and pussy for the cameras. No, Moe, that man who did those things to me when I was a girl, he took too much from me. I wasn’t gonna let him take my career away from me too.”

“Still …”

“I like it here because it reminds me of the best of us. I loved you everywhere, but I loved you here most of all, in this place. Coney Island is your place, Moe. When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk.”

I bit my lip and nodded, my palm pressing against my abdomen.

“Was that your girlfriend yesterday, the one who was staring at me?”

“Girlfriend? At my age, it seems like such a silly word, doesn’t it?”

“You got a better one?”

“I guess not. Pam’s her name.”

“She’s very pretty,” Carmella said.

“She said something similar about you, but that’s not why we’re here, right? I checked into Alta’s murder.”

“So you know about the other thing.”

“About her and her partner not treating Tillman? Yeah, I know what you can know from the internet, which isn’t much. Do you think the two things are connected?”

“You know I do. Any good detective can do simple math,” she said. “Alta became a target the second those stories about Tillman’s death surfaced.”

“What do the cops think?”

“I don’t know what they think. Nobody’s talking.”

“Not even to you?”

“Not even to me.”

I was surprised at that. As a rule, cops are a chatty bunch, especially with other cops. Put a few beers and some Jameson in them and the yak factor goes way up. Add Carmella’s obvious charms to that mix and the chat factor grows exponentially. While Carmella hadn’t exactly been Miss Popularity with the brass, she did have a good rep with her peers—some of whom were still on the job in high places. And she’d taken a bullet in the line of duty, which earned her a lot of respect even from the hardass old-timers who still thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen or the bedroom and who thought a Puerto Rican’s place was in San Juan.

“Why do you think lips are so tight?” I asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what’s so frustrating, Moe. It’s like they just want all of it to go away. And it’s not only the cops. The fire department, they won’t even return my calls because I’m not listed as a relative. Shit, I can’t even get the media sources I used to have to talk to me. Something’s not right.”

“Sorry, but what do you think I can do for you? I’m pretty much outta the game, Carm. I—”

“You called me Carm.” Her smile was full and white, but the grief and guilt over her long-estranged sister weren’t far beneath the surface. “It’s good to hear you call me that again.”