The car was a rusted yellow Volkswagen hatch that smelled like cigarettes. Nevins pulled them off the curb and headed south, still watching his mirrors. The dashboard had a little bobble-head figurine of a Batman villain – Riddler, Marshall was pretty sure – nodding along to the motion of the car.
Marshall said, ‘Vehicle budget must be tighter than in my day.’
Nevins glanced at him. ‘Small talk first, huh?’ He was in jeans and a faded sweater and a Yankees cap. ‘This is off the narc impound lot. I was hoping for something flashier.’
He made a right and went over to Ocean Parkway, headed back uptown. It took him another block to get to it. ‘What were you doing in there?’
Marshall said, ‘Asking questions. Same ones you have probably, except I scraped up the courage to go in the door.’
Nevins just looked at him.
Marshall said, ‘Is this your version of working undercover?’
Nevins swung to the curb. ‘If you’re going to be an asshole, you can walk.’
‘Do you want to know what I was doing, or not?’
The turn signal tocked faintly.
Then Nevins made some half-formed comment under his breath, no doubt offensive if afforded greater clarity, and pulled back out into the traffic lane. He sighed through his nose, as if cleansing himself of irritation, and said, ‘You were setting a pretty good pace.’
‘I was timing myself back to the subway.’
‘What are you doing down here?’
‘I told you. Same as you.’
‘All right. So what am I doing down here? Don’t take me in circles.’
‘Vialoux said his debt was with a mob guy – Frank Cifaretti. I told you that. I remembered the bagel place is one of his fronts.’
‘And then kept that recollection to yourself, obviously. And you didn’t tell me he was mob, either. Or was that another instance of delayed memory?’
‘It was an instance of assuming you’d run his name and then know what I know. Or did you decide to stop searching databases after being warned off D’Anton?’
No reaction. Which itself was a tell, Marshall thought. Like an unmarked cop car: suspiciously bland. He knew Nevins must have been told to leave D’Anton alone.
Nevins said, ‘If there’s a body back there, you’re going to put me in a difficult position.’
‘All you have to do is tell the truth. You saw me running, gave me a ride.’
Nevins looked at him, no trace of humor.
Marshall said, ‘No one’s dead. Relax.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I asked them about the little guy with the smile. Frank Cifaretti thought he might work for a guy called Langello. Mikey Langello. That’s all he knew about it.’
‘And you took him at his word, did you?’
He pictured Frank with the gun in his mouth, saying he didn’t know why Vialoux was dead. Neck arched back and that one eye locked on him, terrified.
Marshall said, ‘Vialoux was a mob hit, but those guys didn’t know about it. It’s something above their pay grade. And the guy above their pay grade’s off the grid, apparently. Frank said no one knows where this Langello guy is.’
Nevins didn’t answer.
Marshall said, ‘I’m up in Flatbush. Come in for a beer.’
Boris emerged from the pet flap to greet them. He stood watching as Marshall unlocked the front door, and then trotted in again after Nevins. Marshall turned on the lights and went into the front room.
‘Just give me a minute.’
He turned on the lamp and sat at the desk to consider his Pollock puzzle. Everything vivid and inviting under the glow. Straight away, he thought he saw a lineup, a shape and color match that ran voltage down his spine. He tried the active piece on the working edge but couldn’t get a clean fit, tried again with a ninety-degree rotate and came up short. Something there at a deeper layer of puzzle-knowing that he couldn’t make operative. He backed off and went in again after a piece-swap, tried both lateral working edges and then the two verticals, got it within microns of a lineup but couldn’t close the placement. He piece-swapped a second time, encouraged by a tantalizing mental flash, but the board let him down. No: that was a fallacy. Every aspect of it was what you showed up with yourself. Your categories and your patience and your vision. The board had no say. He tried a fourth piece, seeing something on the lower lateral edge, but then pulled out, knowing even from six inches that it was piece-mirage, nothing there for him. But then something – something – told him to stay with it, and on reflex he paired a working-edge diagonal shift with a ninety-degree rotate, coming across to the right of the frame almost without thinking and laid it down clean. Two edge contact: convex-convex with respect to host shape. Then still flowing off instinct, he made a take from the loose reserves and came across to the same right-hand edge and placed piece five on the first attempt: one touch, double-edge contact, and again double-convex.
He leaned back, knowing he wouldn’t hit another run that smooth in one night, and Nevins said, ‘You good?’
Marshall turned off the lamp and stood up. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’
He found a couple of Budweisers in the fridge and took them through to the living room. Nevins was over at the desk.
‘Pollock, right?’
‘Yeah. Convergence.’
‘Yet to converge.’
Nevins gave the jigsaw a thorough scan, maybe assessing it for post-retirement value. Marshall handed him a beer and Nevins took a sip, eyes staying with the puzzle. He selected a piece from the reserves and ran it down the left vertical working edge, found a home for it near the base of the frame: two-sided contact, complex shape and color interactions, concave-convex with respect to host curvature. Inarguably a nice placement.
Marshall said, ‘You didn’t return my call.’
Nevins glanced at him.
Marshall said, ‘I met Loretta Flynn. We had a nice talk this afternoon, in the back of her car. I wondered why you were so cagey when I asked you about D’Anton Lewis. I figured she must have warned you off.’
Nevins sifted through the reserves.
Marshall said, ‘Did she tell you anything interesting? Other than avoid him?’
‘She said D’Anton was very much within the scope of their current operation, and she would advise if anything relevant materialized.’
‘I think that’s how deputy inspectors spell, Fuck off.’
‘Quite possibly.’ Nevins chose a second piece.
Marshall said, ‘Cifaretti was a good lead. I’m surprised you were down there by yourself. Or were you worried if you asked for backup, you’d be told to stay away from him, too?’
‘How did Flynn find you?’
Marshall said, ‘I assumed because you’d told her about me.’
‘I told her you might try to speak to him, yes.’
‘Right. Well, I knocked on his door, and then twenty minutes later I had three unmarked NYPD cars following me.’
‘What did Flynn tell you?’
‘To stay away, more or less. She said D’Anton had a mistress who tried to blackmail him, and then went swimming in the Hudson with no fingers.’
Nevins nodded. He was still trying to place his second piece. Marshall guessed Flynn had shown him the photo of the hand, too.
Marshall said, ‘It didn’t exactly persuade me he has nothing to do with Vialoux’s murder.’
Nevins said, ‘Loretta Flynn oversees trafficking cases. But she wouldn’t tell me what her interest is in D’Anton.’
‘The question is, if they’re looking at D’Anton, are they looking at Cifaretti, too, for the same thing. Frank said they get a lot of cops drinking coffee at the Minimart, but I didn’t see anything that looked like surveillance. And you were the only one who came to meet me when I left.’
‘Yeah. And what was going on that you had to set a Guinness World Record for coming out of a store?’
Marshall said, ‘I put a gun in Frank Cifaretti’s mouth and asked him what the story is.’
Silence.
Marshall said, ‘It was his gun, actually. They had some clever idea about playing Russian Roulette. I thought that was a bit risky.’
Nevins put the beer beside him on the desk. ‘You think it’s less than a one-in-six chance they’ll find you and kill you?’
Marshall had some beer. He said, ‘The smiley guy works for their boss. Whoever this Langello guy is.’
‘You said that already.’
‘I thought if I said it again, I might get a thank you.’
Nevins dropped his second piece on the reserves pile and turned from the desk. He looked tired and hollowed out. Marshall had asked in jest if he was working double shifts, making the most of his last few days on the job, but he wondered now if he’d landed on the truth by accident.
Marshall said, ‘What do you think he was into? Vialoux?’
Nevins drank his beer.
Marshall said, ‘He shouldn’t be dead over a seventy-k debt. We’ve established that already. And Frank Cifaretti just told me he’d wanted him alive to keep paying. But then he also said it’s his boss who’s had Ray killed, apparently.’
Nevins said, ‘Some people …’ He faded off, and then said, ‘Crises aren’t tidy, are they? Things fall down all over the place. Marriage, job, gambling, whatever …’
Saying it with a kind of dull resignation, and Marshall wondered if he had inside knowledge, his own story of how life had picked him up and thumped him on the rocks.
Nevins said, ‘I think whatever his trouble, he’d crossed a line bright enough, the debt couldn’t save him. They weren’t worried about getting back their seventy thousand. They just wanted him gone.’
Marshall didn’t answer, thought back to his run-in with D’Anton Lewis.
Open you up, cock to throat.
He wondered what Vialoux had been doing with him, whether a job for a guy like D’Anton could put you on a hitlist with the mob. D’Anton seemed to consider murder a possibility. Why else did he need three bodyguards watching him cross a sidewalk?
Marshall said, ‘What are you going to do when you retire? Cold turkey, or do you have a P.I. gig lined up?’
Nevins moved his tongue around his cheek for a second. Marshall watched him scanning the room. Two a.m. and the detective protocols still running in his brain, looking for detail that would mean something. ‘Did you get anything out of D’Anton?’
‘No. He told me to stay away from him. And then Loretta Flynn came and told me the same thing.’
He picked up a coaster from the coffee table and centered it under Nevins’ bottle. In general, he preferred straight edges, because they lent themselves straightforwardly to a condition of order: parallel, or perpendicular. Coasters were an exception. It was a question of complimentary geometry. A circular coaster, with its edge concentric to the edge of the thing supported, was a deeply pleasing arrangement.
Nevins said, ‘They’ll be looking for you now. Cifaretti’s people. You’re somebody’s full-time project, I guarantee it.’
‘Cifaretti’s a full-time project, too. For his dentist.’
Nevins’ beer was three-quarters full, but he left it on the desk and moved to the door.
Marshall said, ‘People have taken morbid interest in me before. And here I am, drinking beer on a Friday night.’
‘Yeah. But it’s like Russian Roulette, isn’t it? How many times can you spin and not pay? These guys have long memories, and after Tuesday, I can’t help you anymore. Think about that.’
‘I’ve only known you for a day. I haven’t developed a dependency just yet.’
Nevins opened the door.
Marshall said, ‘Are we going to keep doing things in parallel, or are we going to help each other?’
‘Up to you. Is there anything else you need to tell me?’
Marshall said, ‘You weren’t just going to sit there all night looking at a store with its blinds down. You saw me go in, and thought you’d see what happened. Well, as I say, I’m happy to confirm, the suspect is one of Mikey Langello’s guys. I’ll keep you updated with my progress. But maybe in the meantime you could call around, see if anyone knows where he is.’
Nevins went out, and the door seemed to swing shut behind him on its own accord. Marshall stood at the window and watched him get into the yellow VW and drive away. He stayed there a minute, finishing his beer, and then he turned out the light and went upstairs.
He made it halfway. He stood in the dark with his head level with the landing, and then he turned and came back down and switched on the desk lamp. The piece Nevins had placed on the puzzle was three inches up from the base of the frame. Marshall excised it carefully, lifting it with a thumbnail, no disruption to its neighbors, and returned it to the reserves. Then he switched off the light and went to bed.