Paulie had turned very white. Marshall kept him on his side under the table and called it in on the phone at the maître d’ station, told the operator what happened and gave a description of the car: silver Impala, maybe an oh-four model.
Six minutes later, a couple of uniformed guys from the seven-two precinct showed up in a radio car, full lights and noise. They came in with guns drawn, one guy staying up by the door while his partner came down for a look at Vialoux and decided, yeah, they definitely needed detectives.
Three more radio cars from the seven-two and an ambulance arrived. The paramedics took Paulie out on a stretcher and gave him oxygen, and twenty minutes after that, two detectives showed up.
One guy was Hispanic, early thirties, looked to be something of a bench-press enthusiast. His partner was a black guy nearing sixty, tall and lean enough the act of getting out from behind the wheel of the unmarked looked mechatronic: joint and limb motion like the sequenced unfolding of some prototype robot. They took a look at the broken glass and the table out on the sidewalk and then came into the restaurant.
Marshall was at a table by himself up front. The younger cop paused at the maître d’ station, like reflex obeyance of the WAIT TO BE SEATED sign, but the older guy came straight through without breaking step, everything about him dialed in on Vialoux.
Outside, one of the uniformed cops said, ‘Kinda looks like they overcooked his steak or something, tossed the table out the window.’
The younger detective smiled, and it got some chuckles going around cop-to-cop for a moment – ‘I asked for it fucking rare’ – but the older guy didn’t laugh or say anything. Marshall liked that. He was probably into his fourth decade of police work, maybe sacrificed plenty, but he hadn’t lost any deference. He knew walking up to a body and standing over it demands a certain attitude, certain manners.
He talked the younger cop through the scene examination – start at the body and work out, drink in the detail, don’t disrupt the blood spatter going for his pocket contents – and then he came back down the aisle to where Marshall was sitting.
‘You the guy that saw what happened?’
In the interest of completeness, Marshall was of a mind to tell him there were five guys who saw it: one was dead, one was outside in an ambulance, one pulled the trigger, one drove, and he was the fifth. But from the cop’s demeanor, Marshall gathered he was abreast of the semantics.
Marshall said, ‘Yeah. I was drinking with him.’
The detective sat down in the chair opposite, knees coming almost to table level. He wore a blue suit and a tie and small rimless spectacles. A thin beard disguising old acne scars, pockmarks, as if he’d been hit in the face with a load of number 10 birdshot. Marshall figured he must’ve been six foot six at least, maybe a hundred seventy pounds if you hosed him down in his suit and he kept his shoes on. He had a pen and a bound notebook with him.
‘I’m Detective Floyd Nevins, NYPD.’
He took a business card from his coat and slid it across the table, as if to prove the statement.
‘Are you happy to answer some questions?’
Marshall read the card and leaned to slip it in his pocket, the same reflex motion that had maybe saved his life thirty minutes ago, and said that he was. Nevins found a clean page, flipping past half a book’s worth of notes from other nights, other murders. He took down Marshall’s name and address, and then asked him what had happened. Marshall gave him the crux of it, said they were having a drink at the table down the back and a guy came up and shot Vialoux through the window. Got in the back of a waiting car and escaped uptown on Fourth.
The detective called Nevins looked down the aisle to where the damage was, as if making sure the story fit. He said, ‘Ray Vee-loo, huh? What’s the spelling on that?’
Marshall told him.
Nevins took it down, and seeing the name written seemed to spark something in his memory. He looked at the paper a long moment, fanned his pen absently in two fingers.
‘You get a look at the shooter?’
‘Lean guy, short, maybe five-seven with his boots on, one-fifty.’
‘You see his face?’
‘No. He wore a mask.’
‘No hair or skin exposed?’
Marshall shook his head. Outside, one of the uniformed cops was saying backup might be a while. The President was staying at his Fifth Avenue place. Half of NYPD was on guard duty in Manhattan.
Nevins said, ‘So nothing at all that stood out?’
‘Nothing physical. They knew what they were doing, though. That’s pretty distinctive with this sort of thing.’
Nevins didn’t answer, giving him room to unpack.
Marshall said, ‘A shot through the window’s hard, but probably the best option given the setup in here. We were way down at the far table, so if the shooter came in the front, we could’ve gone out the back. Percentages from their point of view were way down. I think they sat out there and thought about it and then made a final call. And I think that means they had a couple of different guns with them.’
Nevins just looked at him.
Marshall said, ‘No one shows up for a hit with just a pump-action Mossberg. The gun was as big as he was. I think they would’ve planned to do it close-in with a pistol, but then swapped to plan B. Which wasn’t necessarily a worse option. I mean, reflections on the glass, I didn’t even see him until he was six feet away. He fired twice – slugs, not buckshot, obviously. Then he walked across the street, got in the car, and they drove off. Car was a nothing-sedan, basically invisible. You add everything up, I think the bottom line says hired guys who’ve done this before. It was dispassionate and relaxed.’
Nevins said, ‘Anything else?’
Nothing in his tone, as if the conversation was essentially consistent with his last thirty-five years of witness interviews.
Marshall said, ‘The six-eight precinct’s only a few blocks away, so they needed to lose the car pretty fast. They went north, so I figure they went up to maybe Thirty-ninth Street, something like that, dropped the car off by the railyard. They could’ve had a swap-vehicle, or maybe just walked over to Ninth, took the subway. That’s how I’d do it, anyway.’
Nevins regarded him flatly. The pen nib hovered, two inches off the paper. It made a couple of small motions, as if circling in on a concise summary. Then it touched down, and Nevins wrote: DISPASSIONATE AND RELAXED. His handwriting was even and careful. He wrote only in capitals. The ink was police-blue. He applied visible nib pressure. Marshall liked that. Maybe like the man himself, every new page carried the ghost of prior cases.
Nevins said, ‘You notice the car when you got here?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘There are vehicles almost solid on both curbs. It could’ve been here and I didn’t notice.’
‘You see any exhaust smoke?’
‘Yeah, a little.’
Nevins looked out the window again. Marshall saw him chewing on possibilities. Fumes implied a cool engine, no fumes implied a warm engine. He wanted to know how long they’d sat out there, thinking about the hit. He was murder police. He didn’t come out to do the work, only to let someone squirm out of culpability, plead down to Manslaughter in the Second. He needed death, and the proof of human planning: Murder in the First Degree. He came out looking for Murder One.
He said, ‘How’d you know this guy? Friend of yours?’
‘Yeah, former colleague. We were NYPD.’
He told Nevins about his and Vialoux’s history, the taskforce back in 2010, Brooklyn South narcotics.
Marshall said, ‘Then I got moved to a different unit, and I didn’t really see him again until today. He called me up about two o’clock, said he needed to meet.’
Nevins nodded as he listened, and then he wrote: VIC X/MOS and WIT X/MOS, which was a shorthand meaning both victim and witness were ex-members of service, ex-NYPD.
Nevins said, ‘So he knew someone wanted to clip him?’
Marshall told him about the sixty-seven-k debt.
‘And let me guess: he couldn’t pay?’
Marshall stretched a leg down the aisle, reached in his pocket for the envelope Vialoux had given him. He placed it on the table.
‘What’s this?’
‘He said he had until Tuesday to make the payment. They sent him that as encouragement.’
He watched Nevins examine the contents. The two photos, the written threat. Money by Tuesday. No cops. For a moment, the pen hovered again above the notebook, and Marshall sensed his internal debate, whether to transcribe the message or not. He obviously deemed it sufficiently memorable.
‘Wife and daughter, I take it?’
‘Yeah.’
Nevins leaned back in his chair, looked at the broken window. ‘O’Malley?’
The cop who’d made the steak joke glanced over. ‘Yeah?’
‘Put a unit on the victim’s address when you get it. Hold until further notice.’
‘You got it.’
Nevins returned the papers to the envelope. ‘No cops. But he told you.’
Marshall nodded. ‘We go back. He thought I could help him on the quiet.’
‘But you hadn’t seen him in a while, right? How’d he make contact?’
‘Through a lawyer I know. Harry Rush. Vialoux went to Harry first, and Harry put him on to me.’
‘And who suggested this place for the meeting?’
‘Ray did. He lives around here – Fiftieth Street, something like that. Haven’t been there in a while.’
‘And how do you know Mr Rush?’
Marshall worked for him as an unlicensed P.I., but he didn’t want that going in Nevins’ notebook. He said, ‘I know him from my cop days.’
Half the story, at least.
Nevins said, ‘So who was leaning on Vialoux? Who’d he owe?’
Marshall looked outside to the ambulance. Paulie was still in the back getting oxygen, but he was upright now, sitting on the edge of the stretcher. Marshall wasn’t sure how much the guy had overheard, but he was erring toward nothing. The man had come on too friendly for someone who sensed a life-and-death issue being outlined in his orbit. So it was tempting not to give up the names – D’Anton Lewis, Frank Cifaretti – and just look into it himself. It would be nice to find whoever killed Vialoux and drop them off maybe a four- or five-story fire escape. But Nevins was looking at him with such a steady, neutral stare, it was like he could see through Marshall’s face to that imagined narrative as it unfolded. In any case, reticence wouldn’t be any kind of service. The more people hunting, the better.
Marshall said, ‘He told me a guy called D’Anton Lewis got him involved with the betting operation, and that it was run by someone called Frank Cifaretti. The debt was with Cifaretti.’
That obviously warranted a notebook entry. Nevins wrote down the names. He said, ‘Who else?’
‘That’s all he gave me. You look outside, there’s probably a napkin and a pen trapped under the table. He was in the process of writing down the details.’
Nevins watched him. ‘Keep his mouth free for drinking, huh?’
His pen hovered. The nib made its circular motion, but it didn’t land. He closed the notebook, cupped one hand in the other and cracked his knuckles in clean and measured sequence, one-two-three-four as he looked out the window.
He said, ‘I’m retiring next week. Last shift’s Tuesday.’
Tuesday. The same day as Vialoux’s deadline. Marshall let that small parallel go unspoken.
Nevins said, ‘I did two years down in Baltimore – CID homicide. Worked ninety-seven murders total, lead and assist, not once did I work a dead police. Not even once. CID handles cop shootings, but I never caught one. Now I got a dead gold-shield, five days to go.’
He shook his head, and then his eyes came back, and Marshall saw the story wasn’t so much a digression as evidence: there was nothing else in the world that he took more seriously than what he was doing right now. He watched Nevins stand up, slide his chair back in.
‘Wait there a moment.’
Marshall said, ‘I know the family. If you’re doing next-of-kin, I’ll ride with you.’
Nevins thought about it. ‘Wait there.’
‘If you’re checking up on me, personnel’s slow this time of night. Talk to Lee Ashcroft at organized crime.’
Nevins looked at him for a moment, like maybe the name meant something. Maybe he knew what flavor of operation Ashcroft liked to run. But he didn’t say anything. He went outside, stood by the table and the broken glass and began dialing on his cell phone. He had it to his ear when the cop called O’Malley interrupted him.
‘Detective?’
Nevins put the phone to his lapel.
The cop said, ‘We ran the vic’s details, dispatch says they had a nine-one-one call from his address just tonight, twenty-two hundred. Wife called it in, said she had a guy at her living-room window – guy in a mask just standing there, waving at her.’