Nevins told the other detective to stay at the scene and interview the restaurant owner, sign the body release once the M.E. showed up. When he reached his car, Marshall was waiting at the passenger door.
Nevins said, ‘Uh-uh. Sorry.’
‘I told you I know the family. I’ll ride with you.’
‘You haven’t been cleared. No offense, I’ve no idea who you are.’
‘Yeah, but Hannah Vialoux does. So it’s an easy test, isn’t it? She’ll either vouch for me, or she won’t.’
He opened the passenger door, but Nevins cut in again: ‘Hey. No.’
Aiming a finger at him across the roof. ‘You ride with me, you’re going in back. Any problems, you’re staying there.’
Marshall didn’t argue. He got in the back and Nevins took off, pulling out onto Fourth and gunning it, grill lights flashing. The traffic seemed to unzip as cars ahead swung curbside to let them through, people on the sidewalk turning to watch, low brick buildings whipping past, signage advertising LAUNDROMAT and ROTISSERIE CHICKEN and LAW OFFICE – an exhibit of perfect randomness that Marshall felt only New York City would conspire to arrange.
It was only a three-minute trip up to Fiftieth Street. The whole block was brownstone town houses, all of them near-identical – a short flight of concrete steps and a bay window at each level. The Vialoux place was obvious, though: two NYPD radio cars were double-parked out front.
Nevins pulled up behind them and got out without a word. Marshall was in the center seat, one foot each side of the drive train in an attempt at nominal comfort. He ducked forward to watch Nevins walk up the front steps and knock at the door. It took a certain leg strength to do that: make the ascent with the burden of awful news, year after year after year. He had his badge wallet out, up and ready, but it was a uniformed cop who opened the door, and she let Nevins straight in.
The door closed.
Marshall sat watching the house, shadows visible in the gaps between the drapes. Ten minutes. Twenty. Shadows coming and going, fluid and random, ghost-motion. Ghosts talking about the dead, he figured.
Rain began to fall. Mist at first, and then fat drops that wormed and shivered and crawled on the glass, blurring Marshall’s view, a steady hiss like signal-loss as the rain drummed the car roof.
He took out his cell phone and called Harry Rush. It was true what he’d told Nevins. They knew each other from Marshall’s cop days, when Rush Law specialized in defending drug dealers. These days he was smaller scale, and used Marshall for repo work and tracking down witnesses. Occasional cash jobs that helped keep Marshall in the black.
The call went to voicemail.
‘Harry, it’s Marshall. Ray Vialoux’s dead. Give me a call.’
Light now from the direction of the house, droplets on the glass turning molten-gold, and he heard muffled voices. Then a shape loomed up darkly in his window, and the door opened, and Nevins leaned down, rain flecks on his glasses.
‘She says she knows a Marshall, so we’ll see if you’re it.’
Marshall slid across the seat and got out. Ahead of him, the brownstone houses and the row of sidewalk plane trees were matched by mirror-house and mirror-tree on the other side of the street, the twinned arrangement extending without variance and without apparent end into the dark. He went up the concrete steps to the Vialoux house, the door open and releasing warm light and the smell of coffee: perversely homely, perversely welcoming in this context.
Inside, the cop he’d seen earlier stood with her chin ducked, listening to a dispatch update from her lapel mic. Another cop of about forty was posed similarly, grim but deferent, and beyond him in profile stood Hannah Vialoux: a figure of concerted but tenuous composure with her jaw clenched and hands pressed together with white intensity, fingertips to chin.
He saw the surprise come into her face as he stepped through the door. Like he was some storied figure, rumored lost or dead, and now returned. Greek odyssey, with a New-York-undercover twist. And then she lost it. Face slackening, mouth drooping, the horrible expression of the recently bereaved, as if flesh itself was being sucked away by misery.
She said, ‘Oh, Marsh, Jesus Christ …’
She came to him with arms wide, so desperate it was like for a moment he would need to catch her. He held her as she sobbed, her words disappearing into his shoulder and Marshall whispering into her hair, telling her it would be all right: he’d find who did it. He was going to find who did it.
They sat in the kitchen. Marshall and Nevins said no to coffee, but Hannah Vialoux gave it to them anyway. She was bustling on autopilot. Some people were like that, in Marshall’s experience. Sheltering in the groove of the mundane.
She’d be nearing forty now, but she hadn’t been on the same aging graph as her husband. Hannah’s curve was shallower, more graceful. She still had that nice figure, still had her hair color. A few fine lines around her eyes and mouth, but that was nothing. Compared to Ray, it was like she’d been on a regimen of honey baths and yoga while he was off staring into blast furnaces without a mask.
She poured a cup for herself and joined them at the table. ‘I knew something was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t tell me anything.’
Nevins had his notebook and pen out. Marshall watched his little routine, turning pages, looking for clean space. He paused at the last page of notes – still half-blank – and Marshall sensed his thought process: turn to a new page, or make this interview part of the thing at the restaurant, part of the Vialoux saga. In the end, he turned the page, studied Hannah Vialoux, and asked her when she’d last seen her husband.
She slid a phone from her pocket, checked it, put it on the table. ‘For God’s sake, why can’t she just call …’
Nevins said, ‘Like they told you, there’s a unit been sent to collect your daughter. The best thing you can do is just not worry.’
He gave it a couple of seconds and then repeated his question: ‘When did you last see your husband?’
Hannah said, ‘I don’t know, frankly. Two, three days ago. I mean, I heard him tonight. He came in, I don’t know. Seven thirty? I heard his car, and I heard him thumping around down here.’ She blinked carefully, exhaled. ‘Seemed to hit … honestly, he must’ve bumped into every wall in the house. I was going to come down, but then I thought it’d just turn into a fight. So, yeah … I stayed upstairs, and he went out again, took my car. I don’t know whether he meant to or not. Probably grabbed the wrong keys and couldn’t be bothered coming back …’ She looked away. ‘I could feel everything sort of ending. I don’t mean like this, I don’t mean with him dead. I mean he was never here. More often than not he wouldn’t even come in at night. At first … you know, I’d lie awake, wanting to hear him come home, but …’ She smiled thinly. ‘You don’t get much sleep that way.’
Nevins said, ‘Did he tell you where he was?’
‘Work. He always said work. He wasn’t creative with his excuses.’
‘Why. Where do you think he was?’
Hannah just shook her head. She said, ‘It’s terrible, but I just had this bad feeling for months. That something awful was going to happen. But then you think: well, it’s arrived, why didn’t you do anything?’
Nevins shook his head, holding her gaze. ‘None of this is your fault.’
‘I know. I just mean, so often in life, there’s a feeling that comes before the thing itself. You know what I mean? But how often do you act on it?’
No one answered.
The seating configuration was wrong. The table was round, and the three of them should have been positioned with equal circumferential spacing. But they weren’t. The Nevins–Hannah offset was too small. In a coordinate sense, the positioning was isosceles, as opposed to the infinitely more pleasing equilateral. But there was nothing Marshall could do about it. He’d just have to sit there and accept it was going to be on his mind. He drank some coffee.
Hannah said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. He went out Tuesday morning, I think it was, didn’t hear from him at all the last couple days. I mean, other than tonight. And then you showed up.’
Nevins said, ‘Did he seem stressed or anxious recently?’
‘Well, I don’t know … like I said, something wasn’t right, because I never saw him. But he wouldn’t talk to me about it. I remember last week, he finally came in one night – two, three a.m. maybe, and I just said to him, What’s going on? And it was literally like talking to a wall. He just rolled over and I was talking to his back. He reeked of booze, I mean he stank of it. It was like he was sweating alcohol. But I just said something like, Whatever, or, Suit yourself.’ She shook her head. ‘Funny when you look back, it really feels like you’re telling the universe to do its best, you know?’
Nevins didn’t have a response to that. His pen nib touched the paper a few times, as if marking an ellipsis, noting the pause.
Hannah jutted her lower jaw, caught a tear with the tip of her tongue, looked at her phone again. ‘Kids, honestly. Always on their phone unless you’re trying to reach them yourself …’ She looked away, as if seeing a thought come together in the middle distance. She said, ‘It’s terrible, but I know he’s done something. This isn’t some kind of freak event that might’ve happened to anyone. He set it in motion somehow. I don’t know how and I’m not …’ She caught another passing tear. ‘I’m not saying he deserved it. I’m not saying that. But something was happening.’
Nevins said, ‘Tell me again about the man in the mask.’
Hannah blinked, made wide eyes at the ceiling, clearing her vision. ‘Do you think he’s the man who killed Ray?’
‘I’m not sure yet. But I need to find out what happened.’
She shook her head slightly, eyebrows raised. That vacant look people get, as if baffled by the power of hindsight.
‘I was in here cleaning up, and I heard this tapping at the window in the front room. Very precise – you know: one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi … Maybe, I don’t know, five or six times. I went to see what it was, looked out through the drapes, there was just this guy standing by the front steps, looking up at me. He was … I already told you he was wearing a mask, but there’s a streetlight right there outside our door, and I could see from the shape of it – the shape of the mask – I could tell he was smiling. It’s such a bizarre thing to see out your window, I kind of stood there for a second looking down at him. I mean, there was nothing unusual about him other than the mask, if that makes sense. He just stood there looking back, and then he waved at me, like this …’
She raised a hand like taking an oath and curled her fingers a couple of times.
‘Almost … it’s strange, but it was almost royal. Completely still, except for his fingers. Anyway, that’s when I called nine-one-one. The operator said to lock myself in the bathroom, but I was worried he’d still be there when Ella got home. She’s over in Williamsburg at a party, did I tell you that? Anyway, I was on my cell phone, so I stayed at the window with the guy still looking at me, but then I thought he could be just a distraction. You know, keep me at the front window while someone broke in through the kitchen. So I came back here to make sure the door was locked, and then by the time I checked the front window again, he’d gone.’
Nevins said, ‘Think back to when you saw him standing outside. Was he tall, short, fat, thin …?’
‘Shortish I guess, medium weight. He was wearing quite a heavy coat, waist length. Gloves on, too. Couldn’t tell his skin color. And he was standing … he was standing almost side-on, with his hip forward, almost like a boxer might. So maybe that’s something … looking for a shortish guy who stands sideways.’
All three of them smiled, trying to coax something out of that little spark.
Nevins said, ‘Yeah. That should narrow it down.’
Hannah said, ‘Honestly, I don’t know what to feel. I mean … I’m devastated. But then, it almost felt like this was where he was heading. He wouldn’t talk to me, he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I’d hear him come in, hear the door close, and then the next thing was the stopper coming out of the wine. He was drinking so much he could never seem to remember anything – he couldn’t even keep the days square. I was worried … I literally thought maybe he was getting Alzheimer’s or something, early onset, but I think he was just loaded all the time. Lucky he was into wine and not whiskey, he’d be dead years ago. He’s had diabetes the last five years, type one. Childhood-onset diabetes at forty-three. I guess sometimes it just goes that way. It was hard, because Ella’s actually had it since she was two, so it seemed … well, I don’t know. You never know what’s going to happen. But it just seemed extra-cruel that they both ended up with it. I’d thought maybe they could help each other, but it never seemed that way. They were kind of on independent tracks, really. But the thing was of course, when Ray was diagnosed, he had to retire from the PD, and I think that really knocked him. I think losing his career was a bigger blow than the condition. Some people … they really need a structure and a … well. They need a formal purpose for getting up in the morning, and that was his. He was police. He never came out and said it, but you could tell. Even his car, he drove one of those old Fords – a Crown Vic. He was adamant it had to be a Crown Vic. He never said it, but it was obviously part of the connection. He drove the car, he felt like he was still on the job, still on the inside.’
Nevins said, ‘Did he ever mention having trouble with anyone?’
‘Well, I mean, it was his job, wasn’t it? Some people were easier than others, I guess. I don’t know.’
‘But you weren’t aware of anyone threatening him?’
‘No, like I say, we just … he wouldn’t talk to me. It was like … well, to be honest, I don’t know what it was like.’ Her mouth trembled and then steadied. ‘He looked like he was in trouble, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He just would not talk about it.’
‘You aware of any financial trouble he might’ve had?’
‘You mean like loan sharks?’
‘Anything like that. Loans, gambling …’
She shook her head. ‘It’s the same answer to every question, really.’ She shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t talk to me. There’s not a lot I can tell you.’
‘So he didn’t mention the type of work he was doing?’
‘He wouldn’t ever talk cases. It was the same when he was on the P.D., he wouldn’t ever talk cases. But I guess, in general, last six or eight months, it was office-based stuff, mainly. Fraud investigations, more and more I.T.-related work.’ She laughed. ‘God. He used to be … setting up a T.V., or downloading photos from a camera, it’d be a three- or four-hour saga.’ She stayed in the memory for a moment, smile slowly fading. She said, ‘But I think he actually developed an affinity for it. He looked like he knew what he was doing, anyway.’
From the front of the house came the sound of a key scraping in the lock. Hannah rose from her seat. ‘Ella, I’m here. Ella.’
Marshall leaned in his chair and saw the girl step in through the front door. She was maybe nineteen or twenty, a younger version of her mother. Superficially, at least. Same hair and height, maybe five-eight, same facial structure, but Ella still had an adolescent smoothness, features not yet sharpened by age. She wore jeans and an oversize hooded sweater, a fat satchel hanging from her shoulder. Rain had plastered her hair tightly around her face. She resembled someone peering out through a dark thicket.
Hannah said, ‘I was trying to call you …’
The girl looked back through the open door to the police cars at the curb, the cops in the hallway busy listening to their collar mikes and studying the floor.
She said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
Neutral, like she was unfazed.
Hannah hugged her, and the girl’s chin settled on her shoulder.
Hannah said, ‘Yes, he’s gone. Someone shot him.’ Voice shaking. ‘He was sitting in a restaurant and someone …’ Deep breath. ‘Someone shot him.’
Ella just stood there, one thumb hooked in the strap of the satchel, face blank and pale, eyes on Marshall now.
She said, ‘I remember you. You worked with Dad.’
He smiled. ‘I remember you, too.’ He wanted to tell her he was sorry, but he knew whatever he said would be inadequate. He didn’t trust himself to summon the proper level of condolence, even if it was sincere. Some things you couldn’t wrap a phrase around.
She shrugged. ‘It was going to happen. Almost like he wanted it.’
‘Sweetheart …’
Hannah pulling back now, holding her at arm’s length.
‘It’s true. I’m serious.’ She stepped away. ‘I can’t do this now, honestly. I can’t do this.’ Her voice breaking up.
‘Ella …’
The girl’s feet a leaden trudge on the stairs. Marshall looked at Nevins, saw him scanning back through what he’d written. Or maybe looking at what he hadn’t written: the information between the lines, things that would get in his head and wake him at three a.m. one day. Marshall got up from the table. His coffee was only partially consumed, and he felt that when he parted ways with it, the mug should be either empty, completely full, or half-full. The challenge was in the fact the mug’s horizontal cross-section varied, curving inward at the base, and so the half-capacity mark wasn’t evident by inspection. All he could do was leave it empty, or perhaps top it up with coffee from the flask. But that would trigger the obvious corollary problem of identifying the proper flask volume. Better not to get involved. He rinsed the mug and set it on the counter and went through to where Hannah was standing in the hallway, hands tented across her nose and mouth like a breathing mask. She turned to him, blinked carefully a couple of times.
He said, ‘I’m more than happy to stay, but I’ll get out of your hair if you like. Whatever you want.’
She moved her hands to her hips. ‘No, no, you’re fine. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it.’
‘It’s no trouble. It’s the least I can do.’
‘It’s been …’ She looked at the floor, and then back at him. ‘God. I haven’t seen you in years. Ray said you were undercover, and then we just … It seemed like you disappeared.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah, I did, sort of. But I’m glad I put my head up again.’
She nodded, studied him carefully. Concern and maybe even pity in her face, and Marshall wondered what she’d heard that she could spare those emotions for him on a day like today, so cataclysmic for her own life.
She said, ‘We umm …’
She was looking upstairs, hands back to her mouth. She combed her hair with her fingers. ‘I think I just need some time with her. But I don’t even know how you talk about this kind of thing. I don’t know what to tell her.’
Marshall said, ‘Tell her we’re going to find who did it. Maybe that’s a good way to start.’
As soon as he said it, he knew it was wrong. He couldn’t guarantee anything like that. He shouldn’t be claiming otherwise. But it sounded better than a promise that he’d do his best. Maybe it was what he needed to hear. Hannah just hugged him again, cheek against his chest and rocking slightly, foot-to-foot. He rested his chin on her head, not sure what else to tell her, and when he looked up Nevins was there, looking back.
‘Mrs Vialoux, sorry to interrupt. We’re going to get an officer to take you down and make the formal identification. Maybe in about an hour, if that’s OK.’
Marshall felt her swallow. She stepped away, wiped her eyes with the heel of a hand. ‘Yes. Of course.’
‘And ma’am, did your husband have an office in the house? Computer or anything I could take a look at …’
She told him Ray had a home office in the spare bedroom. She led Nevins upstairs, saying she’d been through it before out of curiosity, never seen anything that worried her, other than credit card bills. She leaned out from the landing and said, ‘Marsh, honestly. You don’t need to stay.’
‘I’ll leave my number. Give me a call if you need anything.’
She nodded, managed to tell him there was a pen and paper down there somewhere, and then she was welling up again. Kindness was different in these situations, he’d found. The share price went way up. He found a pen and a spiral-bound notepad in the side table in the hallway, turned to a clean page and wrote down his name, address, and phone number, centered carefully to ensure equal margins. He used only burner phones, switching to a different number once per month on average. He flipped through the book. Pages of notes that meant nothing. Names and phone numbers and reminders. Plumber Tuesday. Dr Poole Friday. Routine entries, but it was still all private information, and he felt guilty for prying, even if he was in search of murder clues. It felt like a dubious dispensation. He cleared space on the table and left the notebook open to the correct page, and returned the pen to the drawer. It was full of paper detritus he didn’t attempt to review. But there was a fat stack of business cards secured with a bulldog clip. He fanned through them. Plumber, gasfitter, glazier, AC technician, accountant, lawyer. Even a private investigator. JORDAN MORA INVESTIGATIONS. No one Marshall had heard of. Maybe a colleague of Ray’s. A magnifying glass logo, and phone numbers for landline and cell. An address up in Queens. Marshall slipped the card in his pocket with Nevins’ and left the others in the drawer.
The front door was still open, and the uniformed cops had moved outside. Nothing like silence among strangers to force a move. He stood there a moment, listening to Hannah’s muffled voice from upstairs, and then he took the cordless phone handset off the hallway wall and went back through to the kitchen.
The REDIAL button brought up the call history in the little backlit window, and there was another button with arrows that let you navigate up and down the list. The system stored the last twenty outgoing calls, apparently. The most frequent number appeared five times. It was almost midnight, but he tried it anyway, dialing the number on his cell.
The woman who picked up sounded elderly: ‘Yes, hello? Is that you, Hannah?’
Her mother, Marshall figured.
‘I’m very sorry, ma’am. I’ve dialed the wrong number. Apologies for waking you.’
The woman said goodnight and hung up on him.
Marshall scrolled through the list again. He could hear one of the cops arguing by radio, telling someone that if the President wanted to vacation on Fifth Avenue, he had to accept they didn’t have the staff to look after him: they couldn’t pull both cars off the Vialoux place.
The next most frequent number showed up four times. Marshall thumbed it in on his cell.
This time a man answered: ‘Bagel shop.’
He remembered what Vialoux had said earlier: Frank Cifaretti the mob man, with his bagel shop down in Brighton Beach. He figured Ray had been calling up, trying to renegotiate his debt payments.
Marshall said, ‘Is Frank there?’
‘He’s out of town.’
‘When’s he back?’
‘Who are you, pal?’
Marshall went out into the hallway. He said, ‘Tell him Marshall’s looking for him.’
He ended the call and pocketed his cell. Then he hung Hannah’s phone up quietly on the wall and went outside to wait.
He stood on the sidewalk next to what he guessed was Vialoux’s car. The old Crown Vic that Hannah had mentioned. The rain was fine enough it seemed to hang in the air like mist, streetlights haloed and suspended as if by magic in the dark. One of the patrol cars had departed, the final ruling being that only one unit was required for guard duty. He put his collar up against the cold and jammed his hands in his pockets. A block away on his right, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was stilted above Fourth Avenue like some kind of iron mantis, green and rivet-studded. A minute later, Nevins came down the steps and joined him.
He said, ‘You need to be careful with your pronouns.’
Marshall didn’t answer, not wanting to be drawn in by a line the guy was obviously pleased with. Probably been working on it the last few minutes while he said his goodbyes.
Nevins said, ‘You told her I’m going to find who did it, and then you told her we’re going to find who did it.’
Marshall said, ‘Did you remember that, or did you have to write it down?’
Nevins said, ‘You’re a witness. You’re not part of the investigative process. I need to make that distinction clear to you.’
Marshall gave that a second. He said, ‘You’re not going to be part of the process, either. You’ve only got until Tuesday. And it’ll probably take half a day to clear your desk.’
Nevins turned and looked back up the concrete steps at the house, as if needing a reminder of context. He said, ‘I spoke to Lee Ashcroft at organized crime. He and I actually go back. Did some time together at Manhattan North.’
‘Good for you.’
‘He tells me you were undercover for a long time with the Asaro family.’
‘I’m pleased that he’s so committed to secrecy. Was he at home, or was he shouting to be heard over bar noise?’
‘He says you have a vexing propensity for unilateralism.’
Marshall smiled. ‘Glad he’s learned to talk and hold his thesaurus at the same time.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘I can assure you, I don’t have any delusions of officialdom.’
Nevins gave a few small nods, keeping his gaze level. He said, ‘Great. I just want to make sure you understand you don’t have a license to withhold anything from me.’
Marshall said, ‘I knew there was some kind of rule like that.’
Nevins shrugged. ‘So is there anything you want to tell me?’
‘Yeah, actually there is.’
He could see he’d caught Nevins off-guard: just a flicker there in his eye, half a second.
Nevins said, ‘Go on, then.’
Marshall said, ‘That windowsill’s nine feet high. I think the guy stood out here and reached up with the shotgun to tap on the glass, and then waited to see who looked out. That’s why he was standing side-on: he wanted the weapon out of sight from the house. If Vialoux had come to the window, the guy would’ve killed him. As it was, they found him at the restaurant. But then how did they know he was there? We know they weren’t lying in wait, because otherwise why come here first? They established he wasn’t home, and then left. But then the timing suggests they went straight to the restaurant. Which is significant, too. Because they didn’t just stumble across him: this is New York City. It’s probably ten thousand to one they’d find him, even if they knew he’d stayed in the same neighborhood. So I think in their minds, it was almost binary: you know, he’s either here, or he’s there – at the restaurant. And they were right. But then why would they know to frame it like that?’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘Because either they’d watched him long enough to establish his restaurant visits as some kind of reliable habit, or someone tipped them off.’
Nevins still didn’t have anything to say.
Marshall said, ‘Do you need to write any of that down?’
‘I don’t want the pages getting wet.’
Marshall said nothing.
Nevins said, ‘You think the owner was in on it?’
‘No, because otherwise Vialoux wouldn’t have asked to meet me there. I think more likely, someone went in, handed over a few hundred bucks and a photograph of Vialoux, and said call us if you see him.’
Nevins looked back at the house. ‘He told you he had until Tuesday. Is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So how come it’s only Thursday and he’s dead?’
‘Hannah said he couldn’t even keep the days square. Maybe they meant Tuesday just been, not Tuesday coming. Frankly the state he was in, I can imagine that being the case.’
Nevins didn’t answer. He dragged a hand down his face. He said, ‘What’s your interest in this anyway? You said you hadn’t seen him in ten years.’
‘My interest? Are you kidding?’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘He asked me for help, and then he was shot right in front of me.’
Nevins was still looking at him, maybe sensing there was something else.
Marshall said, ‘What else did Lee have to say about me?’
Nevins looked past him to the traffic on the BQE. ‘He told me you blew your undercover op when you shot the target of the investigation. He said you took a quarter million dollars cash from the target’s wall safe, but the FBI couldn’t pin it on you.’
‘Yeah. They could never quite make that one stick.’
Nothing.
They looked at each other. The silence of reciprocal analysis.
‘He also said if you find these guys first, you’ll kill them, and I won’t be able to pin it on you.’
‘I’m glad he still holds me in such high regard.’
‘Is it true?’
Marshall said, ‘It’s moot. You wouldn’t want to pin it on me.’
Looking at Nevins for a tell, but the man was inscrutable: blank and patient, like he could stand there in the rain all night. Marshall thought maybe it was best to come clean, give him the background.
He said, ‘There’s something else I should mention, too. Before you find out by yourself and get all excited.’
Nevins took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie and put them back on again. ‘All right.’
Marshall nodded at the house. ‘Hannah and I had an affair ten years ago.’
Nevins seemed like he might comment, but he just stood there, looking faintly vindicated. Like he’d felt there was something else.
Marshall said, ‘I’d rather you did your conspiracy thinking sooner rather than later.’
‘The conspiracy being what, exactly?’
‘Well. Maybe I had Vialoux shot to get him out of the frame. Maybe by being a witness, I have a better excuse to reconnect with Hannah. Maybe I paid the guy with the stolen cash from my undercover op.’
Nevins let that have a second, and then he said, ‘We’ve cleared up delusions of officialdom, but we need to clear up delusions of using your old undercover contacts to find out who’d murder someone over a debt.’
Marshall shook his head. ‘It’s far more complicated than that.’
‘In what way?’
‘Think about it. Why kill someone who owes you money? Makes no sense. Be pretty hard reclaiming anything now, won’t it?’
Nevins cleaned his glasses again.
Marshall said, ‘I saw him tonight, he looked like a guy who thought his life was ending. So what are the chances that a gambling debt with the mob was his only problem?’
Silence for a moment. Nevins said, ‘You need to come in and make a formal statement.’
‘No I don’t. I’ve already told you what I know.’
‘Have you forgotten how policing works?’
Marshall shook his head. ‘I have the opposite problem. I remember too well. I was undercover with the mob for two years, and whenever I sat down in a briefing and said we needed to wrap things up tomorrow because I was going to get a bullet in the head, no one listened. They just sent me back in and said, Don’t worry. I ended up having to exercise my vexing propensity for unilateralism.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘Anyway. Now I like to say things once.’
He turned and walked away toward Fourth Avenue.