Red on Red (18 page)

“I’ve been to a lot of funerals,” Esposito said. “I’ve never asked that question, never been asked. ‘Exactly when did he die? Not seven-thirty! I thought it was at least quarter of!’ Who needs to know that? Is somebody putting in for overtime?”

“I don’t know—maybe it’s like an anniversary. It makes you reflect. Maybe the next day, or the next, you see the time, it’s seven-thirty, it makes you look back at the person you lost, remember him. And remember that life is short, we shouldn’t waste time.”

There was no rebuke in her voice, but the words themselves were hard enough that they brought conversation to a stop. There was an uneasy moment before the phone rang.

“Excuse me, I have to get back, but before I forget, I have an address for you, from one of the girls. ‘Maria’ is all I have for her name. She was staying with a man.”

Daysi handed Nick a slip of paper with an address, as she took the call—
“Ortega Florist. Un momento, por favor.”
—and put it on hold. Nick noticed that there was no ring on her finger.

“She thinks it’s 2B, on the second floor. But it’s definitely the second floor, the second apartment to the right, when you take the stairs up. She lived with a man, just moved in, two or three months ago. The girl didn’t know his name, but he wasn’t Mexican. She saw them once together and said hello.”

“Did she say what he looked like?”

“Short, thin, thirties. Nothing to look at. One minute—
Ortega Florist. Un momento, por favor—
”

“Dominican? Puerto Rican? South American?” Nick asked.

“I think Puerto Rican. They had a joke, ‘Maria met a man, with the prettiest blue passport.’
Sí, diga, Ortega Florist …
”

Daysi beckoned her mother to cover the phone, so she could finish with the detectives. Nick tapped Esposito on the shoulder, to move on. Esposito stared at Daysi in dopey awe, turning to Nick a full five seconds after the tap—“Whuh?”—his reflexes preposterously slow, like a lummox in a sitcom. Nick felt a jealous twinge, then laughed, at his partner and himself, at how the most adult instincts bring out the most childish reactions. He’d seen her first.

“Let’s get to it. Daysi has work to do. We do, too,” Nick said.

“Yeah, right. Plus, I’m hungry. You don’t got anything useful here, do you, Daysi? I mean, tomato plants, banana trees? I mean, it’s all pretty to look at, but a man’s gotta eat.”

Daysi laughed, too, not least at the transparency of his suggestions, when his appetites were so plainly carnivorous.

“You’d be surprised,” Daysi said. “Both of you, open your mouths, close your eyes.”

They obeyed like trained seals. After a few seconds of blind surrender, Nick felt a moist petal on his tongue, silky to the touch and grassy sweet, almost melony to the taste. His reverie was broken by Esposito’s moan. Nick opened his eyes and looked over, to make sure his partner’s pants were on. Daysi laughed again, and Esposito opened his eyes, too, the spell broken.

“My God! That shit was great! What was it?”

Daysi twirled a pom-pom of a bloom, ruffled in tangerine and crimson layers. She twirled it like an umbrella.

“Marigold.”

“Really? You can eat them?”

Daysi set that flower down and picked up a long-necked stem with a star-shaped flower, golden with pink edges. She smiled at Nick.

“And you had a daylily. I’m sorry but I forget the variety. Some people think the different colors have different tastes, the reds a little more like apple, the yellows a little lemony. Maybe they imagine it, but it’s still nice. What did you think it tasted like, Nick?”

“Like lettuce in heaven.”

This time, Daysi let loose a laugh that left her coughing and holding her mouth, and the involuntary suddenness, the abdication of soft-porn delicacy, made it all the more erotic. Nick stared at her, smiling, until Esposito, who had a better sense of the moment, touched Nick’s shoulder, then hers.

“This was incredible, Daysi, but I gotta warn you, I’ve been a cop for a long time. When you start sampling the product, it’s all downhill from there.”

Daysi collected herself, and was gratefully distracted by her mother calling her over to take an order in English. She waved to them as she picked up the phone.

“I’ll come back another time, if you don’t mind,” Nick said. “I’d like to talk to the girl who knew Maria.”

Daysi nodded and waved again, and took out a pad for the phone order, to play her ceremonial part in whatever love or death had struck again uptown. When Nick walked out of the store, he felt sad, the way you feel when a favorite song is over. As they got into the car, Esposito looked over to him, shaking his head, and bit his knuckle—the Sicilian version of a cold shower.

“Sonofabitch, you’re lucky you saw her first.”

T
he man with the pretty blue passport lived ten blocks down. Nick told Esposito the address, and there was a momentary thrill when Esposito said that Kiko lived there, too. Convenience became coincidence, and coincidence seemed like conspiracy, before Esposito checked his notebook and saw that Kiko in fact lived across the street. Detectives are superstitious people; they are trained to look for patterns, to connect the dots in the dark, where inspiration can veer into hallucination. What would it have mattered if they’d lived in the same building, shared the same birthday, if it had turned out you could scramble the letters in Kiko’s name to get the other man’s? Nothing,
nada
. You can always find meaning in things, Nick thought, that doesn’t mean anything. He realized he was still a little giddy from seeing Daysi.

“Did you notice that I got the red rose?” Esposito interrupted, divining his own meanings. “Red, for passion, romance? In a word, ass? What does white stand for here, white boy? It stands for ‘Why doncha get outta the way?’ ”

“Did you notice it was the mother who gave it to you? Do you think it might be that she has the hots for you? That she wants us to double-date, me and Daysi, you and Grandma?”

“You know, you just spoiled it for me.”

“Good.”

The building had once been grand, with a columned foyer and marble lobby, but the details that had once announced its quality now highlighted the decline. The white marble panels had turned a urinal yellow, with pocks and divots all over, showing the thinness of the veneer. Tattered posters announced the monthly schedule for the exterminator, bus junkets to the Atlantic City casinos, a reward for a lost cat. There was an
alcove for the mailboxes, in the far corner, from which sharp Spanish words of abuse could be heard.
“Hijo de puta! Animal! Perro! Pinche mugroso!”
The detectives crossed the lobby to the alcove, where a man with his arms full of groceries barked at a crackhead pissing in the corner. The man with the groceries was young and strong, in a crisp white guayabera shirt, with ropes of gold around his neck and wrists. He would have put the bags down, but the crackhead had made that option less attractive. The crackhead was jittery and put-upon, and determined to finish. “Yo, yo … gotta go …”

“Hey! You, ya savage! Get the hell out of here!”

Both men turned in surprise at Esposito’s voice, and neither seemed pleased to hear it. The crackhead zipped up hastily and walked out past the detectives, and the other man hesitated, then began to walk as well. Esposito stepped in front of him, intrigued by the reaction. The grocery bags were filled with rolls of plastic wrap, twenty at least.

Esposito asked, “Everything okay?”

The man gave a polite nod, and he got one in return, toward the grocery bags.

“There was a sale?”

“Qué?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Esposito let him pass, and he walked up the stairs. They followed him without comment up the first flight, and he seemed relieved to see they were no longer with him—
“Buenos días! Gracias!”
—as he continued up. As instructed, the detectives found the second door on the right, 2B. Nick knocked hard, and the door opened. He never liked that, an open door, especially when he wasn’t in uniform. It gave people a reason to come after you, or an excuse. Nick knocked again and stepped inside. His case, his call. A long hallway led to a dim room with a couch.

“Hello? Anybody home? Police here.
Policía …
”

Nick heard Spanish television on in the back, and kept knocking on the walls, calling out again in nonthreatening tones as he went down the hall. When they reached the living room, he heard a dull growl, low and throaty, and they stopped short. Esposito bumped into him from behind. Nick had no love of being bitten, but Esposito’s dread ran deeper, and he had already about-faced to scramble back out before Nick could turn to run. The growl turned to a screech, an awful noise that joined a war whoop with the sound of a kicked cat, and the creature who’d created it
flung open the bedroom door with a bang. Nick was made speechless by the wild-eyed little man who leapt out, improbably costumed in a blue tank top with a silver star on the chest, tight red underpants, and black slippers. Nick started to laugh, thinking that all he lacked was a cape and mask to be a superhero. He kept laughing even as the man rushed him with a machete.

Esposito pushed Nick aside before the man reached him, holding the machete overhead with both hands. He led with his belly, back arched to deliver the maximum blow, and he ran with cartoonishly piston-quick steps on duck-splayed feet. His movement and his battle gargle stopped abruptly when Esposito dropped him with a kick to the crotch. He collapsed onto the floor, and the machete fell with a clank. Esposito picked it up and tossed it to the back of the living room, where it smashed a goldfish bowl. The fish flopped haplessly on the rug. Nick began to laugh so hard that tears filled his eyes, and he had to sit down. Esposito looked at him with concern, wondering if he’d been hurt. A moan rose from the man on the floor.

“No fair …”

It was the perfect thing for the man to say, balled up and bawling in kiddie clothes, a protest at cheating in a pillow fight. Esposito leaned down to place a knee in his back and cuffed him. He looked over to Nick, who shrugged; the situation was more ambiguous than it had at first appeared. Yes, he’d tried to chop their heads off, but they were intruders in his home. He could argue that he’d thought they were burglars, and he might even have believed it. The detectives had gone there for a brief exchange of information, news of a death for the name of the dead. They had other things to do, and had no interest in arresting him, in making another case out of this. They knew nothing about him; that, at least, should change. Nick found a wallet on the kitchen counter and took out the license. He called the squad and had them run the name—Raul Costa—and was told that his criminal history consisted of one arrest, for hopping a turnstile in 1993. He might not have been much of a superhero, but his villainy was barely more impressive. They let him catch his breath, waited for his nausea to pass. This could go either way, Nick thought.

Costa lifted his head from the floor to regard them with wary, watery eyes. He had smooth cheeks and curly black hair, a pouty mouth that formed, eventually, a question. “Well?” As Esposito lifted him to his feet,
Nick kicked the goldfish and as much broken glass as he could manage under the couch.

“What’s the matter with you? What the hell’s wrong with you? You could have killed somebody. We could have killed you, you shithead!”

Costa smiled weakly at Esposito, evidently flattered at being considered such a figure of danger.

“I didn’t know…. Will you let me go now?”

“No. Turn around. Face the wall.”

Esposito looked again at Nick, who raised his hands. The threat had passed, as had the phase of the ridiculous; he still had somber business to finish. He remembered the bruises on the Mexican woman—Maria. She had a name, Maria. Nick went over to Costa and led him to the couch. He was “thin, thirties, nothing much to look at,” as Maria’s friend had said. He wasn’t especially short, but Nick could see how the women would think so; smallness was an impression he left you with. They sat him down, still cuffed.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

“No, why?”

“Is anyone else here? Do you live alone?”

Though he was shackled, nearly naked, before strangers who had kicked him, Costa no longer seemed perturbed; instead, he seemed strangely content with the arrangements. Tufts of snaky hair escaped from his baby clothes at the armpit and crotch.

“Nobody here but me … and the dog! Ruff! You should see your faces!”

Esposito took out his pad and pen, trying to redirect Costa’s attention back to the realm of angry officialdom. Esposito turned off the TV and scanned the dingy room, hoping to see a bag of marijuana, court paperwork, an illegal partition between rooms, anything to hang a threat on. Except for an old photo on the wall of a woman with a young boy, tinted in pastels, the place was as dull and impersonal as a motel room. Esposito was angrier than Nick, or at least he showed it more. Nick stepped in before it escalated too far, too fast. Nick didn’t like Costa any more than Esposito did, but open hostilities would only prolong the conversation. After a few questions, they’d be done with him.