Hurt Machine (25 page)

We were stopped at the gate to Fort Hamilton by a sentry who looked barely old enough to shave, let alone vote, but clearly old enough to die. One of the first lessons I learned on the job was that nobody, nobody ever, was too young to die. Fuqua gave our names, flashed his shield, and told the sentry we had an appointment with Colonel Madsen.

“That building there, gentlemen,” the sentry said, pointing the way.

Fort Hamilton dated back to the 1800s and its cannons had once fired on and damaged a British troop carrier during the Revolution. The fort had guarded the Brooklyn side of the Narrows at the mouth of New York Harbor. These days, it was darkened by the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but it was still a lovely old fort.

Colonel Madsen was a gaunt gray man with serious blue eyes and a cool manner. Yes, he had arranged for us to meet privately with Lieutenant Winston. He said he was pleased to do it, but really seemed about as pleased as a plump farm turkey the afternoon before Thanksgiving. He asked again why we were there. When Detective Fuqua explained it was to go over a statement the lieutenant had given in relation to a homicide investigation, Madsen looked even less pleased than before. He felt compelled to remind us that we were on a U.S. Army base and were governed by its rules and not ours. He showed us to a nondescript room in the same building and told us to wait. Told us, not asked us.

There was a smart rap at the door and then it opened. The woman who strode into the room transcended her unflattering Army greens. With some makeup, she might well have been a former beauty queen or head cheerleader or model. I didn’t know anyone, man or woman, who wouldn’t’ve been even a little taken with her, if not out of lust then out of envy. Lieutenant Kristen Jo Winston was an athletic five foot nine with legs up to here. Her jawline was softly angular and her cheekbones impossibly high. She had a pert nose, bobbed and bouncy strawberry blond hair, and violet eyes. They were the kind of eyes you could not help stare at or into.

We stood to greet her. I wanted Fuqua to do all the talking, at least to begin with. I just nodded, blank-faced, when the detective pointed to me and introduced me as his “colleague” Moses Prager. The lieutenant and Fuqua had met once before, on the night Alta was murdered. He had taken her statement, so she wasn’t exactly unnerved by his request to speak with her again. That was my job, to unnerve her a little bit.

“Gentlemen,” she said, her voice and demeanor pleasant enough but professional. “What is it I can do for you?” Her accent was deep south, Mississippi maybe or Alabama.

We waited for her to be seated before we sat. The table in the room and the chairs around the table were as nondescript as the room itself.

“Some things have come to light about the homicide of Alta Conseco, the woman who died at the Gelato Grotto on the night of …” Fuqua made a show of thumbing through his file.

“I recall,” she said. Her expression remained unchanged, but something changed at the corners of her eyes. “What is it you think I can do for you, Detective Fuqua? I told you all I could on the evening in question.”

“I’m aware of that, Lieutenant Winston, but there are times that, with some prodding, people can recall details they may have left out or remember after the fact.”

“My daddy says that people who remember things long after they happen aren’t very dependable witnesses. That most of the time their minds are just embellishing or trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense to begin with.”

“Your father is a wise man,” Fuqua said. “What does he do for a career? An attorney perhaps?”

She actually giggled. It made her look very young. “Oh my, no, he hates lawyers. Daddy is a police detective down in Mobile.”

She pronounced Mobile like MO-beel.

“Alabama?”

“Yes, sir, Detective, Mobile, Alabama.” But just as she was beginning to relax, she reminded herself why she was here and stiffened up rod straight in her chair. “We aren’t here, though, to discuss home or my daddy.”

Fuqua ignored that. “You’re a West Point grad.”

“I am. Soldier’s the only thing I ever wanted to be. Even as a little girl, I pictured myself in uniform.”

That was my opening. “So you’d do just about anything to protect your career, wouldn’t you, Lieutenant Winston?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with that night.” She looked to Fuqua for help.

He obliged. “Never mind my colleague, Lieutenant. He has some very silly notions. It occurs to me that I failed to ask you what you were doing at the Gelato Grotto on the evening the Conseco woman was murdered. Would you mind telling me now?”

“I was hungry for pizza,” she said with another giggle, but this one caught in her throat. “It’s not all that far from the fort and some of the soldiers from this area are always bragging on it. We don’t get pizza like that at home.”

“So you went by yourself to the restaurant, not with other officers?” Fuqua asked.

I didn’t let her answer. “Bet you’re happy to be away from home. I mean, I’m sure you miss your daddy and the rest of your family, but it’s easier to be who you really are away from home. Am I right?”

She looked to Fuqua again, but this time no rescue was forthcoming.

“Why, Mr. Prager—I’m sorry, I never did get your rank—I could not possibly know what you mean.”

“Oh, sorry, it was a kind of don’t ask don’t tell thing, Lieutenant Winston.”

That did it. She held herself together, but there was real panic in her eyes. She tried playing for time, but I didn’t let her.

“Look, Lieutenant, all we’re interested in right here right now is the truth about what you were doing at the Grotto that night.”

“As I’ve previously told you, gentlemen, I was hungry for—”

I kept at her. “If you cooperate, we’ll walk out of here and you’ll never hear from us again. You can go on and have the career you’ve always wanted and deserve. Or if we don’t like your answers, we can all walk over to Colonel Madsen’s office and have a nice chat.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Please don’t make me do this,” I said. “Please.”

She jumped out of her chair. “Do what?” she asked, a slight quiver in her voice, the panic spreading. “I’m leaving now and I suggest you never contact me again concerning—”

Fuqua came once more to her rescue. “Please sit.” He waited for her to do so before continuing. “We know why you were there, Lieutenant. We know you went to meet Alta Conseco and we fully realize the pressures you are under. We understand that you could not have said these things in your statement, that to do so might have risked the career you love. And while we are not interested in you, per se, we do have an unsolved homicide to deal with. I would ask you to help us, to be fully honest with us in answer to our next questions.”

“Or what?” she asked.

“Or we’ll have to produce witnesses who will testify to having seen you with Alta Conseco in places your commanding officer would most assuredly not approve of, and then there are the pictures.” All of it was a bluff on my part, but especially the stuff about the pictures.

“I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Fine,” I said. “Forget the threats. Tell us the truth because it is the right thing to do and because you owe it to Alta.”

Tears rushed out of her, her body convulsing, but there was scarcely a sob. This had been a long time coming. Fuqua and I sat there silently and let it happen. When she was done, she was done. The lieutenant wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then her palms.

“I was in love with her, yes,” she said.

“Alta Conseco?”

“Yes.”

“And you went there to meet her?”

“Yes. I had seen very little of her since … since the incident and it was killing me. I told her no one would recognize her, that people had moved on.”

My turn. “So the Grotto was your idea?”

“Yes.”

“Did she come, eat with you, then leave or had she not yet shown up?”

“I was getting up to leave because she was so late. I wasn’t mad at her, just disappointed. I thought she had gotten scared about coming to such a public place and decided not to show. Then … that’s when she—”

“That’s okay, Lieutenant Winston,” I said. “You’re not a suspect and we really do understand how hard this is for you. What we’re more interested in is what you and Alta talked about. What did she tell you about the incident at the High Line Bistro? What did she tell you about why she and her partner were there in the first place and why they let Robert Tillman die?”

Winston sat there, squeezing her hands together so hard the blood went out of them. There are times you can literally see people struggling with themselves. This was one of those times.

“I can’t,” she said, her voice shaking. “I gave my word.”

I asked, “And you would sacrifice your career to keep your word?”

“If I had to, yes, sir, I would. How can you measure yourself if not by the value of your word?”

This wasn’t the time for more pressure. She would have shut down. Instead, I took a picture out of my wallet and slid it across the table to her. It was a photo I’d carried for nine years. I hadn’t looked at it for nearly as long. I saw the recognition in her eyes and there were more tears.

The lieutenant picked up the picture. “That’s Alta’s sister Carmella, Israel, and you,” she said. “I didn’t make the connection. Alta used to talk about missing her.”

“That’s right, Kristen, I’m Moe. I used to be married to Alta’s little sister. So do you understand why I’m here and why it would be okay with Alta to tell me?”

The lieutenant never looked up, but kept staring at the photo. “Maya, Alta’s partner, was being blackmailed. She wouldn’t tell me about what because she had made a pact with Maya that she would never tell anyone, that they would never even speak about it.”

“Blackmailed? Blackmailed by whom?”

“She never told me, but Alta said they had gone to the restaurant that day to confront the man who was doing it. Maya didn’t want to go through with it. She begged Alta not to, but Alta said she wouldn’t let Maya keep paying, that she would take care of things even if it meant killing him. That was Alta. She was really protective of the people she—” Winston put the picture down, finally.

I reached across the table and took her right hand in mine. “I’m sorry for the things I said before, but …”

“I understand. Just find the person who did this, please.”

“Is there anything else, any other details you’ve left out about any of it?” Fuqua asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Alta didn’t give me any details. It was hard for her to even tell me what she did. Her word meant a lot to her too.”

That’s how we left her, sitting at the table, collecting herself, her thoughts, and her feelings.

Fuqua waited until we exited the fort before giving voice to what we were both thinking. “It was him, Tillman, who was the blackmailer.”

“Looks that way to me, Detective.”

“But to let him die … What could he have been blackmailing her about to let things get to such a point?”

“There’s only one person who knows that answer,” I said.

I excused myself, telling Fuqua I needed a restroom break. What I needed was to call Pam. When I got her on the phone, I related to her what the lieutenant had just told us about Maya being blackmailed and that it looked like the late Robert Tillman had something to do with it. She said she didn’t know when she’d get back to my condo and told me not to wait up for her.

Fuqua was in the car waiting for me just outside the door of the building. I got in. Neither of us spoke. No need. We knew where we had to go and who we had to speak to. Out of the fort, he turned onto the Belt Parkway east toward Queens and Maya Watson’s condo.

THIRTY-EIGHT

We weren’t quite to the Flatbush Avenue exit on the Belt when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t recognize the number, but I’m such a curious bastard, I picked up anyway. It was a real flaw of mine that it was difficult for me to ignore a ringing phone or a knock at the door. Over the years I had done a lot of talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses and kids selling fundraising raffles. Someone once said your biggest weaknesses are also your greatest strengths. Might have been Ben Franklin. Might have been Charles Manson. I forget. Well, curiosity was an abiding weakness of mine. I could never just stand back and let it be. Wasn’t in my nature. I wondered about what would happen to my curiosity when I was dead. Where would it go? What happens to the energies that drive the engines that drive us? Do they just vanish?

“Is this Moses Prager?” a man’s voice on the other end of the line asked.

“You tell me. You’re the one calling this number.”

He repeated the question. “Is this Moses Prager?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Detective John DiNardo, NYPD.”

“And what’s this in relation to, Detective?”

That got Fuqua’s attention and he mouthed, “Who is it?”

I covered the mouthpiece and told him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “The name is not a familiar one.”

I could hear the detective talking, but couldn’t make out his words. I went back to him.