Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

“What do you do, Esme, I mean besides tend bar? Actress? Model?”

There was that smile again. “Some of both, but I am a senior at SVA, the School of Visual Arts.”

“Really? What’s your major?”

“Film,” she said, seeming to be more relaxed.

I squeezed the lime, raised the glass to her, and sipped. “Thanks. Were you here in March when Robert Tillman died?”

She wasn’t smiling anymore. She looked gut-punched, in fact. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I can’t tell you very much because I was behind the bar here. It all happened over there around the other side of the bar by the kitchen entrance,” she said, her head looking down.

“Did you see the EMTs come in?”

“Yes, I noticed them right away.”

“Why would you notice them? Hadn’t they ever been in here for lunch before?”

Esme, still looking down. “No. We do not get many customers like them at the High Line.”

I played dumb. “Why not?”

She held the menu out to me. “I make good money and I get a discount and even I cannot afford food here. And each meal is always cooked to order by Chef Liu. People do not come here for a fast lunch.”

“But even if you didn’t see what happened yourself, people who work here must have talked. What did you hear about what happened?”

“People talked, yes.”

“Come on, Esme, don’t make this like pulling teeth. Just tell me.”

“The EMTs came in and everyone says they were having an argument.”

“An argument. An argument about what?”

“No one said.”

“Okay, so they were arguing. Where did they go after they came in?”

“Toward the restrooms,” Esme said, again pointing around the bar to her right. “Then as they were passing the kitchen door, Chef Liu came out of the kitchen screaming for a doctor and for the hostess to call 911. The short EMT looked into the kitchen and saw Rob-him on the floor. The tall one, she ran into the bathroom and the other one told the chef to call 911, that they were off duty and couldn’t help. When the tall one came out of the bathroom, they left.”

“You said the short EMT looked into the kitchen. Which one was the short one?”

“The heavier, older woman. The one who was murdered.”

“Alta Conseco?”

“If that is her name, yes, that one.”

“You said she looked into the kitchen. Did she go into the kitchen or just look?” I asked.

“I did not see for myself.”

“I know, Esme, but what did the others say?”

“She just looked at him through the open kitchen door.”

“That’s it? She didn’t touch him or anything?”

“That is what I was told. She just left him to die on the dirty kitchen tiles.”

Except for the argument between Alta and Maya, Esme’s hearsay story pretty much fell into line with the witness statements. I took out a list of names I’d scrawled down before leaving the house. The names were of other restaurant employees who’d given statements to the police. I read the list of names to Esme. None of them were on duty. Most of them, she said, no longer worked there.

“It is Manhattan,” she said, “no one works here for very long. We get parts or roles or gigs or even better jobs and leave. It is nice to work here, but it is no one’s dream.”

I asked Esme to introduce me to Chef Liu. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone so happy to be rid of me. Esme’s introduction saved me the trouble of having to scam the chef. If she said I was a cop, I was a cop. His story included more details about Tillman’s collapse-“Robert was just walking to the grill with a pan of diced onions and fell to the floor”-but was otherwise consistent with Esme’s. He said that Tillman, a prep cook, had only started working there the week prior to his death and that he was good at what he did. Robert hadn’t been there long enough for the chef to really get to know him, but that his death and the controversy surrounding it was a shame nonetheless.

“Has his family been in touch?” I asked. “Any lawyers or investigators come in to take statements?”

“No one from Robert’s family, no,” said Chef Liu. “Only the police and fire departments.”

Uh oh, I could see the chef taking a second look at me, wondering what I was doing there if the cops had already come and gone. I thanked him and left before he could put it together and inquire as to why I was asking questions he’d already answered many times. Questions. Now I had more of them than when I’d walked in.

When I got back to the car I noticed a message on my cell from a number I didn’t recognize. I thought about ignoring it as I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell Alta and Maya had been doing at the High Line Bistro that day in March and what it was they were arguing about. I considered calling Maya to ask, but she had been so resistant to discussing anything about Tillman’s death when I’d been at her condo, I couldn’t imagine she’d be more cooperative over the phone. This was the thing I guess I loved and hated about investigations: their individual complexities. Only in retrospect is life a simple series of easily connected dots. Humans yearn for simple answers to complex questions, but it just ain’t the way things work. Nothing involving human beings is simple. Nothing!

I checked the message and was caught totally by surprise by Nick Roussis’ voice. He said it had been good to see me the other day and that he hadn’t taken enough time in the last few years to focus on his friends. He wondered if we could get together for dinner that night or the next night. “Come on,” he said, “I bet you haven’t talked old times with someone from the Six-O for years. It’ll be fun.”

Obviously, Nicky had been out of the loop about what had gone on with our former precinct mates since he left the job. Larry McDonald had risen to chief of detectives before gassing himself in his car at the Fountain Avenue dump. Rico Tripoli had died years ago, but had never been the same after getting out of prison. Ferguson May died after being stabbed through the eye while responding to a domestic dispute. Caveman Kenny Burton was gunned down by another dirty cop right in front of me. Nope, somehow I didn’t think this was the kind of thing Nicky “the Greek” Roussis wanted to chat about over dinner, but he was right, seeing him had been good for me. I knew I could use the distraction. I returned his call and left a message that I would probably be available and that he should give me a call back to make plans.

…

One fifty-one West 27th Street in Chelsea was off 7th Avenue and across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology. There wasn’t much to say for the building: a slim drab affair wedged between two other slim drab buildings on a block full of slim drab buildings. Funny thing about Manhattan was that there were blocks and blocks of such nondescript buildings lurking in the shadows of those iconic skyscrapers. Except in Chelsea, slim and drab cost an arm and a leg. Many are the paradoxes of New York real estate, but I wasn’t here to solve them. I wasn’t scouting locations for our next shop or looking for a new condo. I was here to talk to Henry Handwerker. According to the statements Carmella had gotten me, Henry Handwerker had been at the High Line Bistro that March day when Robert Tillman collapsed in the kitchen.

I rode the tiny elevator up to the tenth floor after bullshitting my way inside the building. The list of lies was growing longer by the second and when the elevator door opened up directly into Henry Handwerker’s apartment, I was prepared to lie some more. There was an engraved sign on the wall that read:

HANDWERKER LITERARY AGENCY, INC.