David Rosario’s apartment was a mess. Drawers, boxes, pots and pans. Turned over kicked down pulled out. Kitchen cabinets thrown open. The gray couch had its cushions slashed, the back ripped down to reveal its skeletal frame.
The desk. Drawers open, papers strewn. He must have just picked up those rolls of film from the developer’s. The packets had been opened, the pictures scattered. Snapshots of him happy smiling. An office party. The blonde I saw in his office. The way they snug laughed in the snaps, all close.
I should have come looking for him. He never answered my calls. I must have left three messages on his machine at home. It was why the lieutenant found me squatting by the small table beside the desk. The phone was there, but no answering machine. I knew there had been one. I’d seen it myself that time I was here. It was missing.
“Are you sure?”
Lieutenant Jack’s round face creased up. I showed him the short connection cord, still attached to the phone. The phone jack was about ten feet away. The connecting cord, which would have gone from the jack to the machine, was gone too.
The time I came here to see Spook, David let me in. I was trying to get Spook to help me line up some witnesses to testify against Dirty Harry. He was on the gray couch, while David went back to the little table where the phone was. The machine was a clunky old Panasonic that used regular audio cassettes. David had been clearing messages when I came. My messages would have been on the machine’s tape, along with something else. The something else that probably made someone swipe it.
There were keys lined up on the desk, as if meticulously examined—and rejected. There was a lockbox designed for the storage of a firearm. It was empty except for a clip of .22 ammunition and a leather holster. I was still doing the math when Lieutenant Jack did the tour guide routine. He was a nut for ballistics and forensics. He had a good team. These guys could make a room talk.
The killers had picked the lock. It was a pro job. (The locksmith was on his way.) They’d busted the flimsy chain on the door and poured into the bedroom. David must have had his back to them when they came. They blasted a bullet into his back that exited through his chest and lodged in the wall. When he fell, they pumped another bullet into his head. The bullet went through the floor. Scared the hell out of Mrs. Garcia, who lives in the apartment below with her three cats. She heard a third shot. This one shattered the window, perforated the blinds. The bullet chinked off the fire escape, and lay in the alley in a white chalk circle.
That bullet was meant for someone else.
“That would be the blond girl,” Jack said, popping another stick of gum. Jack tended to chew gum compulsively at murder scenes. He said it killed the stink. He handed me a photo, his pick from the bunch.
“Myers identified her. Ava Reynolds. Twenty-six. Works with Rosario at the ad agency. His personal assistant. Looks pretty personal judging by these snaps. Got a couple of witnesses that spotted her running toward Westchester Avenue. Barefoot. In a minidress.”
Her face. A white chalk circle. His pockets were pulled out, his shoes removed, pants unbuckled. IDs, wallet intact. Rings remained on fingers. The energy on Myers was an intense bright light. He was the first one on the scene. The other cops rubbing sleep from pupils all cloudy dark. Only way was to keep squinting.
“If I had something and didn’t want you to get it, I would hand it to someone else,” he said. “I would try to stall the killer so she could get away.”
“She?”
The sure confidence of him turned everything around him into sludge. I was molasses. We were all mollusks.
“That’s right. Tried to stall them so she could get away. The killers knew she had it on her. The killers knew when they came in. They tried to intercept a pickup. It’s why they came.”
“But he had a gun,” Lieutenant Jack said. “There was a gun here. He could have used it to defend himself. It’s missing. We haven’t found it.”
“Gentlemen, I remind you that Spook is still missing and has not been found. It’s a possibility that they contacted David, to get him to hand it over. They probably threatened to kill him unless David handed it over. Instead of handing it over, David thought he would stall while the girl made the getaway with the goods. It’s possible.”
“Maybe they called on the phone,” I said.
“The answering machine is missing,” Lieutenant Jack added.
Myers gave the phone table a look. “It’s possible,” he said.
“Did you get anything from your wiretaps?”
This was the first time I alluded to Myers and his bread truck in public, that is, alongside Jack. Myers squinted at me and glanced at Jack. There were other officers around.
“Unfortunately, we had a weird system breakdown,” he said, not missing a beat. All Myers talk had a rhythm, a marching cadence. “We’ve been down for three days now.”
“Tough break,” I said.
“We have to think that maybe these people have Spook. They might have made him talk. They didn’t come here for payback. They came to find the money, or whatever leads to the money. They knew it was here. And they figured that whoever had it here didn’t intend for the money to reach its destination.”
The pale totem face beside him, his fellow agent, never said a word. Never registered words or the sound of them. Stood looking about as if he was guarding his man. The other agent was by the door to the living room, same blank face watching everyone. It was like they were memorizing us. I just kept asking myself, if they were both here, who was in the bread truck? Was Myers telling the truth about the system being down?
I wanted the next cigarette. I swiped three from Sergeant Mooney, but no smoking at a murder scene. A dead body should remain as pure as possible, the air untouched by nicotine, by scents and smells. Skin is highly receptive, even in death. A bit of cigarette ash on a thumb does not only change its smell. It can distort a vast network of minute data, or worse: wipe it out. Yet I wanted the next cigarette. To light and puff. To block words from coming, from spilling out.
Myers seemed to have developed the ability to ignore Jack completely. Maybe he was trying to dismiss him as a gum-crack wise-ass. I’m sure Jack realized that. It didn’t stop him. It made him worse.
“But he had a gun. Why would he not use it to pop these bastards?”
“He thought he could talk to them,” Myers said. “Just think, if they’re holding his brother.”
“But maybe the gun would have kept him alive.”
“He gave the gun to the girl.”
“You know that for a fact, yeah?”
“It hasn’t been found.”
“Maybe the killers took it, what do you know? You think they swiped the answering machine too?”
Myers grit his teeth. “Maybe if they were on it.”
“Quite a bitch, not having your gizmos in effect, huh?” At this moment I was so in love with Jack. His gumshoe style was the stuff of movies, every romantic image of a cop I ever had. He nudged me, like I was in on the joke. “What the hell? A recording will only tell you you’re right. But are you going to recognize the voice? Is it someone we know?”
“They obviously thought so,” I added, “since they lifted the machine.”
Myers’s face went flat with distaste.
“He gave the girl the gun,” he said, as if overriding all previous assumptions. “And probably something else.”
The token booth clerk at the train station was still on his shift. He hadn’t seen a blonde.
The bus driver said it was before 3 a.m. He was heading down Westchester Avenue, under the el. It was raining hard. He had just hit the bus stop on Elder Avenue when the blonde got on. She was in some obvious distress. Wet through and breathing hard, she could hardly swipe her MetroCard from trembling. She was also barefoot.
“Barefoot?”
“She was carrying the shoes in her hand.” (Because she ran for the bus, get it?) She asked for 149th Street. The bus driver told her she should stay on until the last stop, but she didn’t. She got off at the spot where Prospect Avenue meets Longwood. The driver was pretty sure it was down Prospect Avenue that she went. Hit the street running like she thought a car might veer off and give chase. “Sure as hell the devil was chasing that girl,” he said.
Could Myers know like I know? If the bus driver was right, then she got off at the perfect spot to hit 149th Street. It was a walk, but going straight down Prospect Avenue in the direction she took would have led her right to the spot where 149th crosses Southern Boulevard. It made me think this was no girl just running. She had a definite destination.
The apartment was starting to reek.
It was still dark outside. Officer Jenkins was taking pictures. Mahoney was dusting for prints. Officer Peters stepping right up to bat.
“Lieutenant, I’d like to know how my people are supposed to do their jobs with this guy running around getting prints on everything,” he said. “Did you see him and his people earlier?” He hooked eyes on Myers. “This is a crime scene.”
“I have gloves on,” Myers said, holding up both hands. Covered in those rubber disposables cops use when they touch homeless guys.
“You don’t disturb a crime scene like that,” Officer Peters went on. “And his people took stuff.”
“Okay, I took these keys,” Myers said, holding up a plastic baggie. “Would you say these are safe-deposit box keys?”
Jack took the baggie and gave the keys a look.
“More like luggage keys.”
“Just what did you take?” I asked, but Myers didn’t hear me in the outburst of cop voices that followed. Procedural questions, investigative priorities. Departmental pecking order. Jenkins, Mahoney, Peters. Cops I had worked with. I looked at them now as if from a distance, images through a train window on a landscape I was speeding past. I might have said once that these men were my friends. But since Dirty Harry, they were just officers. Their eyes grew hooded and empty when they looked at me. Unlike Jack, they would not stand and smoke with me. I never asked them for cigarettes. (I swiped them.)
I watched them argue. Myers wanted the room sealed, while Jack refused to cripple what he felt was HIS investigation with federal meddling. Besides which, he pointed out loudly, he hadn’t even been briefed yet … at least not by Myers. All this while David lay there, no longer able to say a word as we pawed through his possessions and walked through his space. The stink that was starting to fill the room was his only gesture of complaint.
It was now, while standing there in that veritable cop world, that David Rosario’s murder started to hit me.
I had told Myers that David was clean. How was I supposed to stick to a story like that if David got caught handing the goods to the blonde? Got plugged just as he shunted her out the window. Myers had suspected him all along. That smug look he was giving me. He was right and I was wrong OR I was lying OR I couldn’t come up with a good enough story to explain the edges jutting through the fabric. And how about him, would he have a good story to tell? Could he explain to me how David got murdered while Myers claimed to have planted an operative on him? How did this informant not tell Myers what was coming? I was dying to put him on the spot, but I couldn’t bring that up in front of all these cops. It seemed more and more that there was something between us, a private place of stories and lies.
The time I met David here, he pelted me with questions. He didn’t really believe I was hunting down a fellow cop. “I’m sorry,” he had said. Shaking his head. “Cops just aren’t too big with us.” (I thought he was going to say WITH US PUERTO RICANS, an instinctive feeling I grew up with.) Good guys bad guys. Spook and David’s parents have a nice house in the Puerto Rican furry green. Couldn’t link it directly to dirty Spook money, but I knew. The two of them, crooked and straight, earned their folks a nice calm life in the suburbs of San Juan.
“You never give up, do you?” He’d watched me grill Spook about getting me those witnesses. Spook had been wary. Bitched about immunity issues, cop retaliations, worries about his street cred … David pushed him. I got my witnesses. After Spook left, I lingered awhile. A cigarette before the despedida at the door, something that can take a Puerto Rican a long time.
“Hey man,” he’d said as I went down the stairs, “do you think being Puerto Rican makes you a different kind of cop?”
I didn’t know at the time if it was an honest question or a challenge, a dare, a playful gibe. It was better to think of it as a joke, and that’s how I took it at the time. I gave him some shrug, some vague one-liner. Back then I wasn’t even thinking about stuff like that. Now it was too late to talk to him. I wanted to rewind the tape and examine the question with him. I wanted to tell him that no one had ever asked me this. Other Puerto Rican cops I knew didn’t talk about it. I almost felt trained not to answer his question, even though I had never in my entire life heard the word spick as often as I heard it at the police academy. It was the price of admission. We were too busy trying to be cops. I didn’t get to seriously answer his question. I wanted to, now. I think if I had back then, the answer would have been different. Maybe he already knew better than I did. Maybe what he was really asking was, Are you sure you should be hunting down a fellow cop? That made me feel stupid, naïve, sorry. POLICE CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER. A bullet in a chalk circle. A light rain. A deep gray street. A watery coffee. Myers and I watched the paramedics walk a stretcher into the building. Half a stale cigarette. A bad gig. I could imagine taking the fall for this. A few words from Myers could do it. I found Detective Sanchez to be uncooperative, combative, and unreliable. The captain would be happy to finally see me wash out. Was that what Myers was thinking? I can’t forget the grin he shot me as cops argued all around us about procedure, as if this chaos pleased him. About him I was guessing, just guessing all along. I could put a picture of him together, only to have him change the pieces, rearrange his face, his voice, his manner. I was growing two faces myself. One face to Myers, one face to Lieutenant Jack, who was simply trying to solve a pair of murders. In the old days we would have immediately side-by-sided. Now my legs were made of lead, my instincts no longer based on cop procedures or cop speed or even cop BELIEF. That comic book stuff about how good guys inevitably triumph over bad guys. How all parts fit together snug and there are always answers. Spook missing, probably dead, and David murdered right under my nose, almost as if that freak cop had returned to do a sequel. That’s another thing that happens in comic books: Super villains who get snuffed in one issue may reappear a few issues later, just as powerful. Maybe it was just my instincts gone bad. I stood with Lieutenant Jack, popped a stick of gum, made cracks about the feds like we were high school brats razzing the teacher’s pet. I felt I was going into mourning. Jack was the last piece of my cop life left. I could feel his energy bubbling over with mission. He had been briefed by Myers, in the loop but still skeptical and unimpressed. Who knows what the fuck Myers told him. Cops like to keep things basic. The more complicated things get, the less they believe it. This business with the ten million just didn’t swing with him. The blonde was a witness who might be able to identify the murderers. But if she was an innocent witness in fear for her life, why not just come to the police? She could walk into a station house or flag down a cop car. That she was clearly not doing this already soured him on the whole business. Myers was impatient with him, brusque, matter-of-fact.
“I should go back to working with captains,” Myers snapped at one point, when frustrated by Jack’s questioning. (He would find it hard working with our captain, a man who rarely left the office.) It looked like in many ways he was still trying to avoid involving the locals. His thing was with me. He knew something about me. Him and his fucking bread truck, his twin zombies, his silent team. What did he need me for? I hadn’t found Spook and I couldn’t save David. Wasn’t I just talking about the captain? He seemed to have the same opinion of me and my record of failure. “This doesn’t seem to be working out,” he said, but he meant ME, ME.
I hadn’t seen the captain at a crime scene for a long time, even Jack was agape. What brought the captain here now was probably not concern, but the FBI, which he had spent part of the morning talking to. (They must have roused him out of bed.) Myers’s face went blank when he saw the three agents approaching. The captain addressed me with enough solemnity to bend my cigarette, had I been smoking one.
“Detective Sanchez, this is Special Agent Anderson from the FBI,” he said. A tall, white-haired guy with a face like the rock of Prudential shook my hand, steel hard. “Special Agent Richards, Special Agent Dupreé. This is Detective Sanchez, Lieutenant Jack. I believe you already know Special Agent Myers.”
Anderson’s piercing blue eyes were stiff on Myers. He didn’t waste time on formalities.
“Myers, just what the hell have you done? How did you get your nose so deep so fast in this case, and how did you manage to botch it up?”
Myers answered smooth swift, seemingly routine for him to field hostile questions. “It’s not botched up yet. It’s your butting in that’s causing the problem.”
“You don’t have jurisdiction,” Anderson said. “Did you forget that? Even if you solved this case, you can’t possibly walk it into court. The judge will throw it out the moment you show him how you compiled your information.”
Myers grinned. “You don’t know that. You’re hoping it’s like that.”
“You should know better, Myers.” Special Agent Dupreé smirked like he was making a dirty joke. “You can’t bug the natives. You can’t watch them, listen to them, or triangulate their cell phones. You can only do that to foreigners.”
“And Puerto Ricans aren’t foreigners, last time I checked,” Special Agent Richards quipped, giving me a wink. Was that supposed to make me feel better? These bastrads probably knew all about my record. They had a way of looking at me that made me feel diseased. Or it was me, the same paranoia. A net had fallen over me, and though there was plenty of air, I couldn’t breathe. The apartment, so full of cops, was not the place to air this shit. The captain suggested we go outside, not even bothering to give the body a look. Out by the stoop, the words started twice as fast.
“Can you say ExECUTIVE ORDER 12333?” Anderson seemed to be reprimanding a child. “American citizens have been murdered here. This is where we step in.”
“An American citizen murdered by foreigners,” Myers said.
“You don’t know that,” Dupreé countered.
“Murdered by people we know,” Myers continued. “You’re stepping in a little late, I think. You don’t fool me, Anderson. You tried it in D.C. and now you’re here again, making another shoddy attempt to shut us down when what you really want is to confiscate our information.”
That was it, I was through waiting. I lit a cigarette. All eyes turned to me. That’s the thing about smokers: You light one, we all light one. I didn’t have a pack, so I dug in a pocket and held up a handful to takers. Lieutenant Jack lit the round with his Normandy 44 Zippo. I don’t know if it was rude. Everyone but the captain and Anderson lit up. Myers, calm and unfazed, held the cigarette more than smoked it.
“Let’s face it, Anderson. You dropped the ball.”
“We dropped the ball?” Anderson’s eyes looked like they were full of boiling water. “How about you? Wasn’t Ava Reynolds your idea?”
“That’s the blonde,” Jack said, nudging me.
“Will you—?” Myers coughed up smoke. “Not everybody here has been briefed,” he said, giving the captain a wary look.
“You mean you want New York’s Finest to locate this girl for you, and you haven’t even told them about her?” Anderson laughed, his eyes mocking.
“Tsk tsk,” Dupreé said, wagging a finger, joining in the laugh.
“No problem,” Anderson said. “I briefed the captain on the way here.”
“You what?” Myers tossed down his cigarette. “I demand you tell me what you told him! Captain, what he said just isn’t true.”
The captain stared back blank.
“These officers,” Anderson went on, “are involved in a homicide investigation, and now that this is a domestic case, I’m going to make sure we find this Ava Reynolds. She’s not going to disappear like some of the others in this case.”
“Nobody’s disappeared,” Myers said.
My ears were definitely perking up now. I knew agencies competed. Sometimes teams within the same agency fought each other as viciously as street gangs. They battled over access, information, and scoops just like reporters, stalkers, and paparazzi. Which team gets the goods, which team gets the ear of the district attorney? Does the D.A. have a favorite team? The different agencies responsible for protecting the country do not communicate well, they mistrust each other, and they generally work independently. The cops are the last people to be let in on anything.
“This office should have been notified. We could have gotten the Rosarios with warrants.” Anderson stepped awful closer. “Instead, you chose not to involve us and play spy games. Some stupid hook-and-tail scam like you pulled in D.C. It even looks,” he said, casting a glance at Myers’s bookends, “like the same cast as last time.”
“Anderson, why don’t you lick my nuts?”
“Gentlemen,” the captain said. I liked him right then. He seemed the father figure cutting in between battling siblings. “My people haven’t all been briefed.”
“It’s about the girl,” Anderson went on, staring Myers down at close range. “She’s no innocent bystander. She was working for Myers.”
Now the blonde came charging into my mind like an icepick. I could see her smiling away so snug and close in David’s arms in those office party pictures. Could see her watching me, those two times I visited David at the office. The strange penetrating stare of her and how she seemed to be sizing me up. Now I thought hard, of David, David trusting her, David telling her, David pulling her in with him. For some reason for whatever reason she was inside that strange secret. And so was I, so was I. Did she know? And if she knew, how didn’t Myers know? A burn to the air, a burn to my cigarette.
“Man, did you come all this way just to drop that bombshell?” Myers, hands in pockets, grinned furious.
“She was supposed to set up the Rosarios,” Dupreé said, looking right at me, right into my eyes, something cops don’t do very often these days. “But it looks like the bunny just up and run off with the prize. Ain’t that about right, Myers?”
There was a slight Southern twang to Dupreé. Myers didn’t say anything.
Dupreé laughed. “Man, you and your people should stick to overseas tricks.”
“She’s no agent,” Richards said with a scowl, sucking down that last bit of cigarette nub. “She’s a contract player.”
“There’s another word for that type of contract,” Dupreé said, again wearing that dirty-joke grin.
I felt buzzed with a sick nausea, a need to crack someone, anyone, in the face. I wanted silence when the paramedics walked David’s body past us. I wanted slow motion so that I could take my time and digest it, frame by frame. I should have been up there with him, working to find the answers and maybe receive any clues he might want to give me. It was a different feeling for me now. The room was full of cops. I didn’t want to be in there anymore. I didn’t want to talk through the stares and feel that hesitation when I gave orders or opened my mouth. It was a dark feeling. I was sad for David, but now I felt I was in danger. The good guys bad guys paradigm, the sense that I had crossed a line starting with the day David asked me a theoretical question about what I would do if I had ten million dollars. It was all questions with David. He had boxes full of question marks. I should have never answered. Maybe I was being hard on myself, but something I did got him killed, maybe something I didn’t do. David went by with as much ceremony as a laundry pickup. He took my old life with him, that one wheel on his gurney jiggling round spin. I wondered if he knew about her, if she knew about me. I couldn’t decide. Not about her. Not about David, Spook, or Myers, who was pulling an envelope from an inside pocket.
“Look, you want jurisdiction? Here’s mine, gentlemen. You give the DD/I a call. Tell him what you told me. You get him to tell me I’m off the case.”
Anderson didn’t look at the letter. He passed it to Dupreé.
“Who hired you?” Richards asked, “Kagan? Kristol? Somebody at the PNAC?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why are you after it, Myers?” Anderson kept pushing. “Even if you get it, you can’t bust anybody. You need us for that. And we probably can’t use your evidence.”
“That’s what you say now, in public,” Myers answered, taking the letter back. “I have my orders. His ways are not your ways.”
“I don’t think Myers has ever made an arrest in his life,” Dupreé cracked with a smirk. Myers seemed to ignore him, but seized on that keyword.
“Yeah, arrests! Listen, Anderson. Why don’t you go downtown and make some arrests? You know who they are already, right? Go arrest them, make a big splash. Afterwards, we can meet at the Senate hearings in Washington, which is where the agency will take you after you blow this lead we’ve been working on for months. Go ahead. I dare you. Your courts will just let these people go. You’re lucky if you can bust them on visa irregularities. Why don’t you just do it?”
The captain was wearing a wry smile that I hadn’t seen for years. I nudged Jack.
Anderson stepped so close to Myers I thought he would spit. “We’ll find her,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll have a lot to say about you.”
“Not if I find her first,” Myers said. It was an underbreath, muttered. The words stayed with me for a day and a night. Words like a pledge, like an oath. The captain walked the agents to their car. Myers made FBI cracks. The cops laughed with him. Suddenly he wasn’t looking so bad to everybody, more like a Joe next to those feds. I felt jealous of the easy camaraderie that grew around him, even if momentary. I was wondering why Myers would think I was the path to the blonde. The captain seemed to wonder the same thing. Talking to me and Jack seemed to rob him of all energy. He authorized Jack to give Myers whatever he wanted, whatever it took. As for me, “Find the blonde then,” he said, “just try to find her alive, not dead.” (The captain was still good at those indirectas.) “Then this guy Myers can take the whole mess with him back to D.C. and leave us the hell alone.” He felt the case was already beyond us. Jack could talk as much as he wanted about finding the murderers with that old fire and verve, the captain gave him that closed face too. To me, Jack seemed a child, a happy puppy. He was alone with his enthusiasm. The captain went to talk to Myers, who had crossed the street to take a call.
“We have a murder investigation going,” Jack said, “and that little bastard has taken all the fun out of it.”
I couldn’t tell if he was talking about Myers or the captain. Back when, we would’ve been Heckle and Jeckle, burning with the desire to solve this murder. Now I just stood beside him, feeling tired and empty.
I was thinking about a man named Roman. His manner was of tall thin aristocrat, of hardly ever speak. His black shirts, his eye-patch. People call him “One-Eye.” Like Wiggie, Jaco, and Quique, he was one of Spook’s district chiefs. I’d tried reaching him over and over again since Spook disappeared, over and over for a few reasons I wasn’t sure Myers didn’t know about. I couldn’t tell him, that first time in my office. I knew about Spook. When I saw the accounts, I had gone straight to David. I was on the trail. I was sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, or maybe it was where it belonged all along. I wondered later what an honest cop would have done with this information, realizing now I had passed the point where such terms carry any meaning. I thought I would just ask questions. I hadn’t expected to be on the receiving end of a proposition. David just came right out with every fine detail. He laughed, it was a kick. “We’re swiping the money from criminals!” More information than I had bargained for. No walls no barbed wire no tollbooth. A door was simply opened. I had expected evasions, having to duck verbal dukes, avoid tank traps. Instead I got some Asian defense tactic, which calls for letting your enemy defeat himself with his own momentum. You side-step his charge, maybe grab a piece of him EN PASSANT and help him along. Into a wall out a window down some stairs. Only this was no defense. This was an invitation.
David then took me to Spook. I told him it was madness. He told me it was a ticket out. The kids could keep the drug trade. The only person in the whole organization he brought into the deal was Roman, an old friend who was already phasing himself out of the business. Those couple of weeks I tried to talk David and Spook out of it, I approached him. Roman said no. To him it was a cheap-ass sellout of the organization. He fought, like I did in the beginning, to get them to give up the idea. By then, the laundering job was already on, the cash flowing in, before the swipe—“Call the feds,” I said to them. “Tell them you want to make a deal.” But Spook and David didn’t think that was the way to make ten million bucks. In the end, Roman stuck to his guns and backed away, no doubt making contingencies for the troubled times to come. I didn’t back away. I made contingencies too.
Roman was not “in” it, but he knew about it. I’m wondering if David told that to the blonde. I’m wondering if the blonde knew about him. She had asked for 149th Street, then ran straight down Prospect Avenue. Prospect Avenue crosses 149th Street right where it ends against Southern Boulevard. I bet if I had put it to Jack, he would’ve come up with Roman. I hoped it might take Myers a little longer to connect the dots—I was counting on it. Myers was all over Jack—where was the manpower to do all these searches? David’s office had to be sealed and searched. Ava Reynolds’s things had to be seized. There was her apartment too, and what about the girl herself? I plotted her course on a road map. From the moment she left that bus on Westchester, a straight line ending some place near 156th Street, close to the last sighting of her … a good place, I said, to begin canvassing the neighborhood. Cops carrying pictures, maybe a few of my detectives to do lay-and-waits.
Myers seemed a little distracted, his momentum shot, when Jack just came out and asked, “So, was this chickie one of your agents?”
Myers was unable to speak for a moment. There was nothing on the street but cop cars and pigeons. The sidewalk was wet again, vehicles dotted with drizzle. Dawn was dingy and dirt-streaked. I kept seeing that rock-faced Anderson, laying words like landmines. I kept seeing the blonde. Those first lingering stares of hers, the sense that she knew something about me. Had she really been in touch with Myers, was Anderson right about that? Myers hadn’t contradicted him. Again the thought: If David trusted her enough to lay the prize on her, he could have mentioned me to her. And she, in touch with Myers, could have mentioned me. I couldn’t light another cigarette fast enough. Myers looked needy. I lit him one too. When he took the cigarette from me and nodded his appreciation, I felt an odd kinship with him. I sensed about him an intense loneliness, suddenly. I don’t know what it was, just a sense of standing outside locked gates. Something to prove. How those days were over for me. When I saw how he pulled up the collar of his raincoat and didn’t answer Jack at all, I felt included in some secret world. When Jack moved off to consult with some officers, it was just me and Myers, smoking side by side in the airless gray.
“Why does Anderson know you?” I asked. He shrugged, his eyes getting blurry. A high school student reminded of homework.
“He followed me from D.C. He caught the tail end of my last op. Couldn’t raise a stink there so he followed me here. You have no idea how personal this all is.”
“You’re going to have to brief me again,” I said, sounding reluctant, like I was trying to spare him. “Anderson covered a lot of turf.”
He looked at me a moment with round, glassy eyes. “You’re not insulted I didn’t tell you, right?”
“Nah,” I said. “Part of the job.”
“I’m glad. I would hate if you—”
A cop car suddenly let out a string of beeps. Cop laughter.
“I meant to tell the lieutenant,” Myers said sluggish. Tossed down the cigarette. Stepped on it, ground it into the sidewalk with his shoe. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I haven’t slept. He’s a good cop.”
“I know.” I tossed my cigarette too. A nice flaming arc that sparked the street. “He’s my favorite.”
“Anderson only knows the half of it.” Myers became more animated now, some of the old verve returning. “He makes good guesses and knows just enough to fuck up the game. This whole thing he pulled today.” A dismissive wave of the hand. “He did it on purpose, to discredit me. He’s still about three steps behind.” Myers winked at me. “He hasn’t even gotten to the Sanchez part.”
“The Sanchez part?”
“That’s right. There’s a Sanchez part. He won’t find her because he doesn’t have the Sanchez part. He hasn’t even gotten there yet. That’s why we’ll find her, while he’s bumbling around getting court orders for a few cheap wiretaps.”
My stomach was a knot. I closed my eyes for just a moment, almost fell into a dream.
“So. You still think David Rosario was clean?”
I looked at him. It was a soft voice, tinged with sadness. There was no mockery on his face. I could see he didn’t expect an answer.
“Don’t worry about it.” He looked out at the empty street, hands deep in his pockets. “I seem to have misjudged somebody too.”
I felt he was talking about the blonde. I knew he was talking about the blonde.
He was looking at me. He spoke softly. “You knew, didn’t you?”
Cop car let out another string of beeps. Electronic farts. Cop laughter.
“She told you?” I said, though I couldn’t look at him. Anything was better. Gray brick. Parked cars. A brown dog happily lapping up water.
“I can’t believe everything she says. Not now.”
“I tried to stop it,” I said.
“I know.” He wouldn’t take his eyes off me. “You see why we have to find her?”
“Yes,” I said. Were we now in the same boat? Would eliminating her make everything okay? Is that what it meant? Sometimes the heaviest things in a relationship are those things never spoken, never admitted, the words never said.
“You should go home, get some sleep. We can meet in the afternoon.” He smiled. It was slow, tentative, real. “You brief me, I brief you.”
I nodded assent. I said something, or was I dreaming it? Did I tell you my wife’s name is Milagros? The name means MIRACLE she was still with me after four years. She could sense when I was disturbed, couldn’t sleep. She has those deep spiritual qualities that dark-skinned mountain women are supposed to have. Her fingers, soft stroking, could send me into a trance. There was candlelight squirming on the ceiling. David being wheeled by in a gurney just wouldn’t let me sleep. All light was too bright.
I sat in the living room and almost finished my pilfered cigarettes. Milagros brought over the chessboard. Some little diversion while the sky lightened and the tea kettle boiled. I kept thinking: I don’t want to find her, I don’t. I want it all to go away. I want to sleep and forget. The strong scent of jengibre: She cooked up a strong tea, a potent blend of leaf magic that soon had me in bed with fluttering eyelids. Her touch … savory waves shimmery nymphs. Hendrix when he plays slow, and mystic. Her whispered words tranced me dark.
“Maybe the answers will come to you in dreams,” she said, like she would breathe spirits into me.