Blackie held the door for me and I slid into the front passenger seat of the unmarked car. Then he went around the other side, started the engine, and pulled into traffic. All without saying a word.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Come on, Blackie, tell me.”
“Pipe down, Lanie. You’re on thin ice already.”
Okaaay. After a minute, I started counting backward. “Ten … nine … eight … seven …”
“What’re you doing?”
“Counting down till your explosion. It’s due any second now.”
He started to answer, then swallowed it. But when we stopped at a red light, he couldn’t hold it in anymore. “You should’ve known better!”
I didn’t try to defend myself. Deep down, I agreed.
“I know you feel sorry for the Bernards,” he began. “But they’re not the only ones who’ve got a stake in this mess. There are other families—and I don’t just mean the Harvard kid’s either. I mean all the folks of the people who got blown away.” He rubbed his chin. “Shit!” He pounded the steering wheel.
I dared pose a question. I knew it was bothering him because it was bothering me. “Are you going to tell the victims’ families that the kidnapping was a fake, that their people died because of a family feud?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Eventually. Maybe. But right now, I got something else to do.”
The intersection of West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue formed a wide quadrangle, with two-way traffic flowing both north-south and east-west. Some people called this vehicular nexus the heart of Harlem. Maybe it was. If so, its arterial flow had come to a halt.
Hundreds of onlookers crowded the sidewalks, held back by police officers with truncheons. The focus of their attention was a huddled mass in the middle of the intersection. Newspaper photographers jockeyed for position. Reporters screamed out questions. Seeing me, more than one yelled, “Hey, how come she gets to go up close?”
Blackie ignored them all. He half-knelt by the small figure lying in the middle of the road, his face expressionless. I stood next to him.
“Is it her?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered, “it’s her.”
Sheila lay on her right side. Her face and chest were bloodied, her legs splayed. One arm was thrown back and bent at an impossible angle. Her skirt was caught up around her hips, her stockings ripped and dirtied. She looked exposed and vulnerable. I reached out to draw her skirt down, but Blackie stopped me with a hand on my wrist.
“Not yet. Not till the M.E.’s done and the photos are taken.” He observed me curiously. “What’s the matter with you? You’re not acting like yourself.”
“Please. It’s not necessary to take pictures of her like this.”
After a moment, he relented.
I arranged the skirt to restore modesty. “She deserved better.” I meant that she deserved better help than I’d given her, but he took it otherwise.
“Yup. Looks like she was a sweet kid.” Blackie let his gaze roam among the crowd. “Olmo, oh Olmo, where are you now, you crazy son of a bitch?”
The left side of her face was swollen and bruised. Someone had worked her over, then pushed her out of a moving car and kept on driving. But that wasn’t what killed her. It was being kissed in the head by a .38.
“He put the gun right up against her skin,” Blackie said.
The star-shaped hole in her forehead looked like a third eye, the skin around it puffed and blackened.
“Why’d he kill her?” I asked. “He had his money.”
“Did he?”
Blackie extended his hand and a uniform who had been standing nearby passed him a bag. It was the satchel Sheila had taken from the hotel.
“He threw it out with the body.” Blackie yanked the bag open.
I looked inside and saw bundles of money. “I don’t understand.”
He took out a bundle and rifled through it. The first layer was a genuine twenty all right, but the rest was newspaper.
“Oh no!”
“Bernard signed her death warrant when he did that. Did you know he was going to do something that stupid?”
I shook my head.
Blackie cursed under his breath. “Un-effin’-believable. Just how selfish can one man be?”
I thought of Phyllis Bernard and how she’d bewailed the loss of all their money. Was she that good an actress, or had she really not known what her husband was up to?
Blackie was also still thinking of the Bernards. “I’ve got to tell them,” he said. “You can go back to your newsroom for the time being, but I’m trusting you to keep mum about the fake dough.”
Seemed like the deeper I got into this story, the less I could write about it. “Sure. Fine.”
Even though I agreed to do as he asked, something about my tone must have set him off.
“Just answer me this: what were you thinking, not saying anything about the cigar box and going up to that hotel by yourself?”
“I was thinking about doing my job.”
“You’re not a cop. You’re a reporter.”
“And a damn good one. If—”
“It never would’ve come to this if you’d been straight with me.”
“I gave them my word.”
“Well, you had no business giving it. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And you just proved it.”
I shut up. He was right. If I’d followed the rules and gotten backup, then Sheila wouldn’t have been able to sneak out of that hotel. Someone would’ve been there to grab her, or follow her and the guy who did her in.
Blackie was grim. “Olmo’s going to be calling the Bernards, and when he does I want you to stay out of it.”
“Do you honestly expect the Bernards to tell you if he contacts them?”
“Yes, I do.” He grimaced. “All right, maybe not. I hope they do. I hope with all my black Irish heart they’ve learned their lesson. But I doubt it.” He paused. “You do know I’m going to have to call you in for another talk, don’t you?”
“Why? You know everything now.”
“Do I?”
I felt a flutter of unease. “What are you after?”
“The truth.” His eyes met mine. “I need to know everything you’ve done and said since yesterday morning.”
“Sounds like you’re asking for an alibi.”
“I can’t help what it sounds like.”
“You don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?”
He sighed. “All I can say is that you should be prepared to make a formal statement.”
First jail, now this. If I hadn’t known Blackie better, I would’ve said he was out to get me. But I did know him, and I knew this wasn’t his style. I stepped closer and lowered my voice. “What’s going on here? Cause this seems like more than flack from the brass.”
“There’s been an accusation.”
“About what?”
“About this.” He motioned toward Sheila. “That maybe you’re in on it.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” He squinted and ruffled his hair. “You’ve got to admit, it does look suspicious.”
“How?”
“Think about it.”
“Think about what?”
He inched closer. “At every step, you were there. When the Black Orchid got nabbed, you were there. When the cigar box was delivered, you were there. And now, with this girl … you were there.”
“They left that box on my doorstep. And she called me.”
“That’s what you say.”
For a moment, we held each other’s gaze.
“Who put the poison in your coffee?” I asked.
“Who do you think?”
Only one name came to mind. “Bernard. He’s the one. He stepped outside when you came to the door.”
“I want to believe you, but …”
“You know me. Do you actually think that I’d be involved in something like this?”
“I’ve got to ask—and you’d better come up with good answers.”
I took a step back. “Do I need to bring a lawyer?”
“That’s up to you.”
All right. So we were back to playing tough. What was it about this case? It had us all at each other’s throats. First Sam giving my stories to Selena; then Blackie throwing me in jail—and now accusing me of collusion with murderers and thieves. It made me feel ugly inside. It took an effort not to be bitter.
“You need me to come right now?”
“No, I have to finish up here first. In the meantime, you can go back to your newsroom, write your story, and stay away from the Bernards.”
“Lanie! You-hoo! Oh, Lanie!”
The voice cut over the rest, a grating female voice that I knew all too well. I turned to see Selena Troy. She was standing on the southwest corner of the intersection. The cops were holding her back with the other reporters. She was jumping up and down, waving her steno pad and calling out to me.
I turned back to Blackie. “We done here?”
“For now. Just remember to stop by and see me later.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Today. In an hour.”
Message received. I took one last long hard look at Sheila. I wanted to remember. I wanted to burn this image into my brain. This was the price of well-meant but misplaced compassion. It was a lesson I would never forget. Then I went over to Selena, told her, “The answer is no.”
“What d’you mean, no? I haven’t asked you anything yet.”
“You want me to tell them to let you through. The answer’s no.”
“But they let you in.”
“So?”
She was fuming now. “If you don’t make them let me through, I’ll tell Sam.”
She couldn’t be that stupid. I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. “Selena, this may come as a shock to you, but I can’t make a New York homicide dick do anything. As for telling Sam, go ahead. Tell him you don’t know how to work a crime scene. Tell him you don’t know how to deal with cops. You’d be doing me a favor.”
“Why, you b—”
I turned and walked away. I should have thanked her: she’d given me the one and only bit of levity I was to have that day.