There was silence then. Ross tried to stare me out, then looked away in boredom.
“Agent Ross here thinks that you’re holding out on us,” said Walter. “He’d like to sweat you for a while, just in case.” His expression was neutral, his eyes bland. Ross had returned to staring at me.
“Agent Ross is a scary guy. He tries to sweat me, there’s no telling what I’ll confess to.”
“This is not getting us anywhere,” said Ross. “Mr. Parker is obviously not cooperating in any way and I—”
Walter held up a hand, interrupting him. “Maybe you’d both leave us alone for a while, get some coffee or something,” he suggested. Barth shrugged and left. Ross remained seated on the table and looked like he was going to say more, then he stood up abruptly and quickly walked out, closing the door firmly behind him. Walter exhaled deeply, loosened his tie, and opened the top button of his shirt.
“Don’t dump on Ross. He’ll bring a ton of shit down on your head. And on mine.”
“I’ve told you all I know on this,” I said. “Benny Low may know more, but I doubt it.”
“We talked to Benny Low. The way Benny tells it, he didn’t know who the president was until we told him.” He twisted a pen in his hand. “ ‘Hey, it’s just bidness,’ that’s what he said.” It was a pretty fair imitation of one of Benny Low’s verbal quirks. I smiled thinly and the tension in the air dissipated slightly.
“How long you been back?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“What have you been doing?”
What could I tell him? That I wandered the streets, that I visited places where Jennifer, Susan, and I used to go together, that I stared out of the window of my apartment and thought about the man who had killed them and where he might be, that I had taken on the job for Benny Low because I was afraid that, if I did not find some outlet, I would eat the barrel of my gun?
“Not a lot. I plan to look up some old stoolies, see if there’s anything new.”
“There isn’t, not at this end. You got anything?”
“No.”
“I can’t ask you to let it go, but—”
“No, you can’t. Get to it, Walter.”
“This isn’t a good place for you to be right now. You know why.”
“Do I?”
Walter tossed the pen hard on the table. It bounced to the edge and then hung there briefly before dropping to the floor. For a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me but then the anger went from his eyes.
“We’ll talk about this again.”
“Okay. You going to give me anything?” Among the papers on the table, I could see reports from Ballistics and Firearms. Five hours was a pretty short time in which to get a report. Agent Ross was obviously a man who got what he wanted.
I nodded at the report. “What did Ballistics say about the bullet that took out the shooter?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“Walter, I watched the kid die. The shooter took a pop at me and the bullet went clean through the wall. Someone’s got distinctive taste in weaponry.”
Walter stayed silent.
“No one picks up hardware like that without someone knowing,” I said. “You give me something to go on, maybe I might find out more than you can.”
Walter thought for a minute and then flicked through the papers for the Ballistics report. “We got submachine bullets, five-point-seven millimeters, weighing less than fifty grains.”
I whistled. “That’s a scaled-down rifle round, but fired from a handgun?”
“The bullet is mainly plastic but has a full-metal jacket, so it doesn’t deform on impact. When it hits something— like your shooter—it transfers most of its force. There’s almost no energy when it exits.”
“And the one that hit the wall?”
“Ballistics reckons a muzzle velocity of over two thousand feet per second.”
That was an incredibly fast bullet. A Browning 9 millimeter fires bullets of one hundred ten grains at only eleven hundred feet per second.
“They also reckon that this thing could blow through Kevlar body armor like it was rice paper. At two hundred yards, the thing could penetrate almost fifty layers.” Even a.44 Magnum will only penetrate body armor at very close range.
“But once it hits a soft target…”
“It stops.”
“Is it domestic?”
“No, Ballistics say European. Belgian. They’re talking about something called a Five-seveN—that’s big F, big N, after the manufacturers. It’s a prototype made by FN Herstal for antiterrorist and hostage rescue operations, but this is the first time one has turned up outside national security forces.”
“You contacting the maker?”
“We’ll try, but my guess is we’ll lose it in the middlemen.”
I stood up. “I’ll ask around.”
Walter retrieved his pen and waved it at me like an unhappy schoolteacher lecturing the class wise guy. “Ross still wants your ass.”
I took out a pen and scribbled my cell phone number on the back of Walter’s legal pad.
“It’s always on. Can I go now?”
“One condition.”
“Go on.”
“I want you to come over to the house tonight.”
“I’m sorry, Walter, I don’t make social calls anymore.”
He looked hurt. “Don’t be an asshole. This isn’t social. Be there, or Ross can lock you in a cell till doomsday for all I care.”
I stood up to leave.
“You sure you’ve told us everything?” he asked to my back.
I didn’t turn around. “I’ve told you all I can, Walter.”
Which was true, technically at least.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I had found Emo Ellison. Emo lived in a dump of a hotel on the edge of East Harlem, the kind where the only guests allowed in the rooms are whores, cops, or criminals. A Plexiglas screen covered the front of the super’s office, but there was no one inside. I walked up the stairs and knocked on Emo’s door. There was no reply but I thought I heard the sound of a hammer cocking on a pistol.
“Emo, it’s Bird. I need to talk.”
I heard footsteps approach the door.
“I don’t know nothin’ about it,” said Emo, through the wood. “I got nothin’ to say.”
“I haven’t asked you anything yet. C’mon, Emo, open up. Fat Ollie’s in trouble. Maybe I can do something. Let me in.”
There was silence for a moment and then the rattle of a chain. The door opened and I stepped inside. Emo had retreated to the window but he still had the gun in his hand. I closed the door behind me.
“You don’t need that,” I said. Emo hefted the gun once in his hand and then put it on a bedside cabinet. He looked more comfortable without it. Guns weren’t Emo’s style. I noticed that the fingers of his left hand were bandaged. I could see yellow stains on the tips of the bandages.
Emo Ellison was a thin, pale-faced, middle-aged man who had worked on and off for Fat Ollie for five years or so. He was an average mechanic but he was loyal and knew when to keep his mouth shut.
“Do you know where he is?”
“He ain’t been in touch.”
He sat down heavily on the edge of the neatly made bed. The room was clean and smelled of air freshener. There were one or two prints on the walls, and books, magazines, and some personal items were neatly arrayed on a set of Home Depot shelves.
“I hear you’re workin’ for Benny Low. Why you doin’ that?”
“It’s work,” I replied.
“You hand Ollie over and he’s dead, that’s your work,” said Emo.
I leaned against the door.
“I may not hand him over. Benny Low can take the loss. But I’d need a good reason not to.”
The conflict inside him played itself out on Emo’s face. His hands twisted and writhed over each other and he looked once or twice at the gun. Emo Ellison was scared.
“Why did he run, Emo?” I
asked softly.
“He used to say you were a good guy, a stand-up guy,” said Emo. “That true?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to see Ollie hurt, though.”
Emo looked at me for a time and then seemed to make a decision.
“It was Pili. Pili Pilar. You know him?”
“I know him.” Pili Pilar was Sonny Ferrera’s right-hand man.
“He used to come once, twice a month, never more than that, and take a car. He’d keep it for a couple of hours, then bring it back. Different car each time. It was a deal Ollie made, so he wouldn’t have to pay off Sonny. He’d fit the car with false plates and have it ready for Pili when he arrived.
“Last week, Pili comes, collects a car, and drives off. I came in late that night, ’cause I was sick. I got ulcers. Pili was gone before I got there.
“Anyway, after midnight I’m sittin’ up with Ollie, talkin’ and stuff, waitin’ for Pili to bring back the car, when there’s this bang outside. When we get out there, Pili’s wrapped the car around the gate and he’s lying on the wheel. There’s a dent in the front, too, so we figure maybe Pili was in a smash and didn’t want to wait around after.
“Pili’s head is cut up bad where he smacked the wind-shield and there’s a lot of blood in the car. Ollie and me push it into the yard and then Ollie calls this doc he knows, and the guy tells him to bring Pili around. Pili ain’t movin’ and he’s real pale, so Ollie drops him off at the doc’s in his own car, and the doc insists on packing him off to the hospital ’cause he thinks Pili’s skull is busted.”
It was all flowing out of Emo now. Once he began the tale he wanted to finish it, as if he could diminish the burden of knowing by telling it out loud. “Anyway, they argue for a while but the doc knows this private clinic where they won’t ask too many questions, and Ollie agrees. The doc calls the clinic and Ollie comes back to the lot to sort out the car.
“He has a number for Sonny but there’s no answer. He’s got the car in back but he doesn’t want to leave it there in case, y’know, it’s a cop thing. So he calls the old man and lets him know what happened. So the old man tells him to sit tight, he’ll send a guy around to take care of it.
“Ollie goes out to move the car out of sight but when he comes back in, he looks worse than Pili. He looks sick and his hands are shakin’. I say to him, ‘What’s wrong?’ but he just tells me to get out and not to tell no one I was there. He won’t say nothin’ else, just tells me to get goin’.
“Next thing I hear, the cops have raided the place and then Ollie makes bail and disappears. I swear, that’s the last I heard.”
“Then why the gun?”
“One of the old man’s guys came by here a day or two back.” He gulped. “Bobby Sciorra. He wanted to know about Ollie, wanted to know if I’d been there the day of Pili’s accident. I said to him, ‘No,’ but it wasn’t enough for him.”
Emo Ellison started to cry. He lifted up his bandaged fingers and slowly, carefully, began to unwrap one of them.
“He took me for a ride.” He held up the finger and I could see a ring-shaped mark crowned with a huge blister that seemed to throb even as I looked at it. “The cigarette lighter. He burned me with the car cigarette lighter.”
Twenty-four hours later, Fat Ollie Watts was dead.
3
W ALTER COLE lived in Richmond Hill, the oldest of the Seven Sisters neighborhoods in Queens. Begun in the 1880s, it had a village center and town common and must have seemed like Middle America recreated on Manhattan’s doorstep when Walter’s parents first moved there from Jefferson City shortly before World War II. Walter had kept the house, north of Myrtle Avenue on 113th Street, after his parents retired to Florida. He and Lee ate almost every Friday in Triangle Hofbräu, an old German restaurant on Jamaica Avenue, and walked in the dense woods of Forest Park during the summer.
I arrived at Walter’s home shortly after nine. He answered the door himself and showed me into what, for a less educated man, would have been called his den, although “den” didn’t do justice to the miniature library he had assembled over half a century of avid reading: biographies of Keats and Saint-Exupéry shared shelf space with works on forensics, sex crimes, and criminal psychology. Fenimore Cooper stood back to back with Borges; Barthelme looked uneasy surrounded by various Hemingways.
A Macintosh PowerBook sat on a leather-topped desk beside three filing cabinets. Paintings by local artists adorned the walls, and a small glass-fronted case in the corner displayed shooting trophies, haphazardly thrown together as if Walter was simultaneously proud of his ability yet embarrassed by his pride. The top half of the window was open and I could smell freshly mown grass and hear the sound of kids playing street hockey in the warm evening air.
The door to the den opened and Lee entered. She and Walter had been together for twenty-four years and they shared each other’s lives with an ease and grace that Susan and I had never approached, even at the best of times. Lee’s black jeans and white blouse hugged a figure that had survived the rigors of two children and Walter’s love of Oriental cuisine. Her ink black hair, through which strands of gray wove like moonlight on dark water, was pulled back in a ponytail. When she reached up to kiss me lightly on the cheek, her arms around my shoulders, the scent of lavender enfolded me like a veil and I realized, not for the first time, that I had always been a little in love with Lee Cole.
“It’s good to see you, Bird,” she said, her right hand resting lightly on my cheek, lines of anxiety on her brow giving the lie to the smile on her lips. She glanced at Walter and something passed between them. “I’ll be back later with some coffee.” She closed the door softly behind her on the way out.
“How are the kids doing?” I asked as Walter poured himself a glass of Redbreast Irish whiskey—the old stuff with the screw top.
“Good,” he replied. “Lauren still hates high school. Ellen’s going to study law in Georgetown in the fall, so at least one member of the family will understand the way it works.” He inhaled deeply as he raised the glass to his mouth and sipped. I gulped involuntarily and a sudden thirst gripped me. Walter noticed my discomfiture and reddened.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right,” I responded. “It’s good therapy. I notice you’re still swearing in the house.” Lee hated swearing, routinely telling her husband that only oafs resorted to profanity in speech. Walter usually countered by pointing out that Wittgenstein once brandished a poker in the course of a philosophical argument, proof positive in his eyes that erudite discourse sometimes wasn’t sufficiently expressive for even the greatest of men.
He moved to a leather armchair at one side of the empty fireplace and motioned to its opposite number. Lee entered with a silver coffeepot, a creamer, and two cups on a tray and then left, glancing anxiously at Walter as she did. I knew they had been talking before I arrived; they kept no secrets from each other and their unease seemed to indicate that they had discussed more than their concerns about my well-being.
“Do you want me to sit under a light?” I asked. A small smile moved across Walter’s face with the swiftness of a breeze and then was gone.
“I heard things over the last few months,” he began, looking into his glass like a mystic examining a crystal ball. I stayed silent.
“I know you talked to the feds, pulled in some favors so you could take a look at files. I know you were trying to find the man who killed Susan and Jenny.” He looked at me for the first time since he had begun talking.
I had nothing to say, so I poured some coffee for both of us, then picked up my own cup and sipped. It was Javan, strong and dark. I breathed deeply. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I want to know why you’re here, why you’re back. I don’t know what you’ve become if some of the things I’ve heard are true.” He swallowed and I felt sorry for him, for what he had to say and the questions he had to ask. If I had answers to some of them, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give
them, or that Walter really wanted to hear them. Outside, the kids had finished their game as darkness drew in, and there was a stillness in the air that made Walter’s words sound like a portent.
“They say you found the guy who did it,” he said, and this time there was no hesitation, as if he had steeled himself to say what he had to say. “That you found him and killed him. Is that true?”
The past was like a snare. It allowed me to move a little, to circle, to turn, but in the end, it always dragged me back. More and more, I found things in the city—favorite restaurants, bookshops, tree-shaded parks, even hearts carved bone white into the wood of an old table—that reminded me of what I had lost, as if even a moment of forgetfulness was a crime against their memories. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.
And so, with Walter’s question, I fell back to late April, back to New Orleans. They had been dead for almost four months.
Woolrich sat at a table at the rear of the Café du Monde, beside a bubble gum machine, with his back against the wall of the main building. On the table before him stood a steaming cup of café au lait and a plate of hot beignets covered in powdered sugar. Outside, people bustled down Decatur, past the green-and-white pavilion of the café, heading for the cathedral or Jackson Square.
He wore a tan suit, cheaply made, and his silk tie was stretched and faded so that he didn’t even bother to button his shirt at the collar, preferring instead to let the tie hang mournfully at half mast. The floor around him was white with sugar, as was the only visible part of the green vinyl chair upon which he sat.
Woolrich was an assistant SAC of the local FBI field office over at 1250 Poydras. He was also one of the few people from my police past with whom I’d stayed in touch in some small way, and one of the only feds I had ever met who didn’t make me curse the day Hoover was born. More than that, he was my friend. He had stood by me in the days following the killings, never questioning, never doubting. I remember him standing, rain-soaked, by the grave, water dripping from the rim of his outsized fedora. He had been transferred to New Orleans soon after, a promotion that reflected a successful apprenticeship in at least three other field offices and his ability to keep his head in the turbulent environment of the New York field office in downtown Manhattan.