Mean Streak (28 page)

I said nothing. I had no idea who Dwight should have married.

“He should have married a gum-chewing bottle blonde with a high-school diploma and a job at the Key Food checkout counter, is who he should have married. Some girl from the neighborhood who thought he was hot shit, who'd sit in the audience and clap her fucking hands off when he made detective. Trouble with Annie,” he said, as much to himself as to me, “is she always wanted Dwight to be something he couldn't.”

“I got the feeling she would have been happier if Dwight had left the Department,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. I'd liked Annie Straub and I didn't buy the idea that any woman who didn't idolize her man was a ball-buster.

“Is that right?” There was a challenge in Stan's dark, angry eyes. “Is that the feeling you got from meeting Dwight and Annie for, what, a whole fucking six minutes? That is bullshit, Counselor, bullshit pure and simple. Annie wasn't nearly that straightforward with the poor bastard. If she had been, he might still be alive. No,” Stan went on, “underneath it all, she wanted him to be the same kind of guy, the same kind of cop, as her precious father, Sergeant Mick Cohagan. She wanted him, when it came right down to it, to be Eddie Fitz.”

“But she loathed Eddie,” I protested.

“That's what she
said
,” Stan concurred, undercutting any real agreement with his tone of voice. “And maybe that's what she really believed in some part of her twisted brain. But make no mistake,” he went on, fixing me with his intense eyes, “Annie got turned on by Eddie. He may have been a prick, but he was a man, and she was a bitch in heat around him. What she really wanted was for Dwight to punch Eddie's lights out, then take her to bed and fuck her brains out. She wanted—”

“Give me a fucking break,” I muttered, but my words didn't even slow Stan down.

“She wanted her husband to show he had bigger balls than Eddie. Which the poor sap never had and was never going to have. A woman without Annie's smarts wouldn't have seen all that, would have appreciated Dwight without comparing him to the macho cops. But Annie was Mick Cohagan's daughter, and she knew Dwight didn't have the balls to make it, and she let him know she knew it. Even more so after she got sober.”

Balls. It came down to balls, always. Who had them, who didn't, whose were bigger. As someone who'd gotten through forty-some years without any, I had a hard time understanding how they could have dominated Dwight's thinking.

“Dwight killed himself because he was afraid of being charged with TJ's murder,” I said.

Stan shook his head. “It was more than that,” he explained. His face wore a mournful expression. “It was Annie. Not only would Dwight stand naked as a murderer, he'd be revealed as a jerk who was set up by a man he thought was a hero. He'd be a schmuck. And the last thing in this world a schmuck can stand is for everyone to know he's a schmuck. It wasn't so much that Dwight couldn't face the music, it was that he couldn't face Annie.”

It was only after I left Stan's Bay Ridge apartment and rode the subway train through the dingy little stops along the way to Borough Hall that I let myself understand the relief I was feeling. If Dwight killed TJ, then Warren Zebart was wrong about Matt. He was innocent of TJ's murder, and, by extension, of Eddie's.

But why was that such a relief? Hadn't I always believed in Riordan's innocence?

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

I stood outside the church, waiting for the meeting to end. There was a light drizzle, the kind of rain that makes you feel foolish whether your umbrella is up or down. If it was up, you felt that you were overreacting because it was, after all, only a mist. But if you kept your umbrella furled, you felt like an idiot because you were getting wet while holding an umbrella you weren't using. A can't-win kind of rain.

My umbrella was up. I needed protection, not so much from the rain as from my thoughts. I'd spent a long, sleepless night running through my list of suspects, and I thought I knew at last who'd killed Eddie Fitz.

I'd known it longer than I'd admitted the truth to myself. In some corner of my mind, I'd known it even as I'd confronted Lazarus, lectured Singer on her moral choices, hunted down Stan Krieger. I'd wanted very much for the killer to be one of them. To be anyone other than who it was.

To be anyone other than the person who was going to walk out of St. Andrew's in five minutes.

People began streaming out of the little room at the side of the church. I walked to the stone portico of the Federal Correctional Center and stood under it, folding up my umbrella now that I was no longer being rained upon.

The meeting was almost over. People were leaving. Why didn't I see the person I was waiting for?

At last I gave up and dashed across the alleyway, going through the gate with the little wooden AA sign on it. I ducked into the doorway.

She was alone in the room. She held a red banner with gold letters that read “One Day At A Time”; she was getting ready to put it away in a cupboard.

“We have to talk,” I said, my voice echoing in the empty room. Chairs sat where people had left them, in ragged rows grouped around a scarred wooden table. There were empty paper coffee cups and an occasional brown paper bag wadded up on the floor. I wondered if it was Annie's job to clean it all up, or if a janitor came in.

“No, we don't,” she replied, rolling the banner up as if I hadn't come in. “We have nothing to talk about.”

“We have Eddie to talk about,” I replied. I moved toward her. I picked one of the chairs, turned it around so it faced her, and sat myself down in it.

“Eddie's dead,” she said. “And if you want me to shed tears about that, you've come to the wrong person. But that doesn't mean I had anything to do with it.”

“But you did,” I countered. “You were the chessmaster.” She gave me a blank look that had nothing to do with pretending. I realized the term was my own; there was no reason it would mean anything to her.

“You were the one who made sure all the suspects would be in the right place at the right time,” I explained. “You were the one whose boss's office overlooked the plaza, the one who could see the possibilities from twenty stories up.”

She hugged the furled banner to her chest as if it could warm her. The day was dank and cool, but she was dressed for sun. “I'm right, aren't I?” I asked in a tone I kept carefully conversational. “The Department of General Services is on the twentieth floor of the Municipal Building, isn't it?”

She shook her head. “Nineteenth,” she corrected in a flat tone of voice. Then she smiled a one-sided smile and added, “but who's counting?”

“People must look like chess pieces from up there,” I mused aloud. “Easily manipulated, easily put in whatever place you want them to be in. Not,” I added, “that you needed to manipulate Nick Lazarus or Davia Singer to be in the plaza at the right time. You knew Lazarus worked killer hours, and that Singer worked almost as late as he did. All you had to do was get Eddie to the top of the courthouse steps while Singer waited for him at the sculpture.”

No reply. She stood with her arms folded, making me spin it out, making me lay all my cards on the table. I kept talking, in hopes something I said would force her to respond.

“So all you had to do,” I continued, my voice growing strained, “was arrange for Stan Krieger and Matt Riordan to be on the scene.”

She turned away abruptly and walked toward the cupboard. She put the banner away and headed for the window, where two large cardboard signs had been propped up for the meeting. One listed the Twelve Steps, the other the Twelve Traditions. She hefted the Twelve Steps and walked it over to the cupboard.

“Let's take Stan first,” I said, trying not to let her lack of response interfere with my train of thought. “Whoever baited the hook for Stan had to know he had a buddy at Police Headquarters. At first, I thought that pointed to Lazarus or Singer. I knew they were monitoring the internal investigation into the squad.”

Annie stood beside the cupboard where she'd stored the huge poster. She looked thin, hungry. Sad. I forced myself to keep talking, to keep making my case, setting out my indictment.

“But the more I thought about it, the more I realized anyone who knew the squad would know that. Then I realized this cop wouldn't just be an old pal of Stan's—he'd be an old friend of your husband's, too. You knew him, you'd had him over to your house for a party to celebrate his promotion to OCCB. So it was no problem to use his name to lure Stan to the plaza that night.”

There was still no spark of comprehension in her face, but at least she'd stopped fussing with the posters.

“As for Riordan,” I continued, “he was a little harder. But it was at the same party that Eddie bragged about taping his Psych Services interview. You knew he'd probably worn a wire when he spilled his guts to Nick Lazarus, and you knew he'd keep the tapes as insurance. So when you let Riordan think you had the tapes Eddie made, you were acting on what you knew about Eddie.”

I cleared my throat. “And you were acting on what you'd read about Matt. You knew he'd do anything to destroy Lazarus, and you knew he'd do anything to get those tapes.”

Still no response. Her eyes seemed to drift away as she listened to me. “The guy I married was a really good person,” she said at last. “He was a good cop and a good guy. And then he met Eddie.”

In her mouth, the name was a curse. “He met Eddie,” she went on, “and he became somebody I didn't know anymore, somebody I didn't like very much.”

She pulled herself up and faced me, her eyes burning with a need to convince me of something. “They killed him,” she said. “The goddamn squad killed my Dwight, turned him into someone else. Eddie killed him with his macho bullshit and his dirty money. Stan killed him with his indifference. Lazarus and Singer killed him with their ambition. You and Matt Riordan killed him with your lousy subpoena. So when it came time for me to do what I had to do, I wanted all of you to suffer. I wanted all of you to be suspected.”

“But Riordan and I were going to destroy Eddie,” I pointed out. “He wasn't going to get away with it, not really.”

“He was going to be alive, wasn't he?” she replied. “That's getting away with it from where I sit. Because Dwight's dead, and I couldn't stand to live one more day in a world where Dwight was dead and Eddie was alive.”

Her voice shook slightly, whether from grief or rage I couldn't be sure. She clamped her jaw shut, but not before I realized she was very close to falling completely apart.

“It must really have torn you up to hear Nick Lazarus trying to put the blame on Dwight for everything Eddie did,” I said.

“Don't patronize me, okay?” Annie said. The tears that had been lurking in her eyes dried up; her voice was firm and hard and angry. “Lazarus was a complete shit, but none of the rest of you were any better. All any of you cared about was your goddamned egos. Eddie was going to get away with it one more time, because he had balls and my Dwight had too much of a conscience.”

“So you took the gun Dwight used to kill TJ and you brought it to the plaza to kill Eddie Fitz,” I said. “Only you didn't realize it was the same gun, did you? You didn't realize Dwight killed himself because he was worried about being indicted for murder, not just corruption. Corruption he probably could have lived with, but he didn't want the world to know Eddie had conned him into murder.”

“Stan should have stopped it,” she said in a low voice. “He was older, he was a guy Dwight could have looked up to, would have listened to. Only Stan was too busy being cynical. He could have stopped Eddie, or at least helped Dwight to see Eddie for what he really was. But he didn't care enough. He let Dwight kill that drug dealer.”

“I hate to sound harsh,” I said, “but all Dwight had to do was say no. You can blame everyone else in the world if you want to, but the truth is, nobody forced Dwight to rip off drug dealers or to murder TJ. He could have said no.”

“You don't understand,” she cried. “You don't know what it's like for a man like Dwight. How he always had to prove himself, how he was never sure of who he really was. The other guys laughed at him, made him feel like a wimp. He needed to show them. Oh, God,” she said. “If only I'd been able to convince him to move away, to leave the Department.”

“Is that what you really wanted?” I prodded. “Or did you want Dwight to show Eddie what a big man he could be? Did you maybe let Dwight see that if he left the Department, it would be because he wasn't man enough to handle it?”

“I never said that,” she replied. “I never in our whole marriage said a thing like that.”

“Maybe you never said it sober,” I shot back, the thought just occurring to me, “but how about when you were drinking?”

“If I said it then, I didn't mean it,” Annie said, her tone sullen.

“Do you think Dwight could make that distinction?” I asked. “You know what they say about
in vino, veritas
.”

“Which is total bullshit,” Annie argued. “Any ex-drunk knows that. People say a lot of crazy things when they're drinking; it doesn't make it the truth.”

“I repeat, did Dwight know that? Or did he think the only way to get your respect was to be like Eddie?”

“Why are you asking me these things? Why do you want to make it my fault that Dwight did what Eddie wanted him to do?”

That was one hell of a good question, and one for which I had no good answer.

Or did I? Wasn't I really seeking absolution for the crime of hitting Dwight with the subpoena? It had been no more than a fishing expedition but it literally scared the life out of him. I'd known Dwight wouldn't break, wouldn't testify against Eddie when push came to shove. I hadn't known why. I hadn't known it was because Dwight had committed a murder for Eddie, but I did know the subpoena was just a scare tactic. And I served it, anyway. I served it anyway, and it ended up in Dwight Straub's car, alongside his body.