Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

“It doesn’t add up,” I said. “There’s something obvious here that I can smell, but I just can’t see.”

He laughed. “Yes, a familiar feeling for me.”

“With this case?”

“With many cases, but with this one, very much.”

“That’s why I want to see Alta’s things. Maybe I will spot something.”

“It is a stretch, non?”

“ Mais oui,” I said, using the full extent of my junior high school French. “I think stretches are all that’s left to us, detective.”

“Of course the items Miss Conseco had on her person when she was murdered, we are still holding as evidence.”

“I understand.”

“Here,” he said, “let me write down her address for you.”

…

Essex Street between Liberty and Glenmore Avenues was no more than six or seven blocks away from Carmella’s house on Ashford Street. I had meant to ask Carmella about why she’d held onto her abuela’s house for so many years and why the upstairs apartment still looked pretty much unchanged after two decades. I seemed to have forgotten several things I had gone there meaning to ask. Someone once said that men get older but they never grow up. How true, because when I really thought about it, I hadn’t gone to Carmella’s to ask about Alta or about the house or anything like that. No matter how I might rationalize it away and regardless of the date on my birth certificate, alcohol had reduced me to nothing more than a drunk and horny teenage boy desperate to sleep with his old girlfriend. Men never get over rejection. Seeing Israel again had pretty much put a damper on any of my plans for conquest. The fainting and the puking didn’t much help.

Besides, in my heart I knew why Carmella hung on to the house. That house represented her last remaining connection to her family. Not the family she had voluntarily cut out of her life, the family that had so carelessly let a seven-year-old girl fall into the hands of a pedophile, the family that afterwards treated her as an object of shame and disgust, but the idealized family she’d created out of the dreams and memories of her life prior to Easter Sunday, 1972. I have often wondered how Carmella hadn’t torn herself completely apart given the powerful and contradictory nature of her feelings toward her family. I don’t think she ever stopped wanting to belong to them, but I know better than most there are walls that cannot be scaled and wounds so raw they never heal. As best as I could tell, Carmella had long ago come to terms with the abduction and days of abuse. She has never come to terms with how her family treated her in the aftermath.

The address on Essex Street was a two-story, red brick row house with a small brick stoop. The wrought iron handrails had been freshly painted in a thick coat of black, but not much else in the way of maintenance had been done to the place in years. The wood around the old single-paned windows was rotting away and the mortar between many of the front facade bricks was missing. What once had probably been a lovely wrought iron and glass front door with side panels and transom had long since been replaced by a simple steel door with a peephole as its major design feature. The new door wasn’t pretty, but it was practical. As Brooklyn neighborhoods went, East New York was one of the roughest and in such places, safe always trumps aesthetics.

I read the names in the slots beneath all three doorbells. A. Conseco was the name on the little black and white plastic label in the slot for the top floor apartment, not that her name being there meant anything. New Yorkers aren’t exactly anal about getting names right on doorbells and mailboxes. I’m not sure why we’re like that. We just are. Maybe we have too much other shit to worry about to fret over the small stuff. And in East New York, there were probably a lot of people only too glad to have someone else’s name on their bell or mailbox. I rang the top bell for the hell of it. No answer. I wasn’t expecting one. The name in the slot under the main floor bell was T. Truax. I held my thumb down on it long and hard and I could hear it ringing through the front windows. Again, no answer. The name in the basement apartment slot was Rodriguez and I held that button down for quite some time as well. And just like the bell for Truax, I could hear it ringing inside the apartment. Same results too.

Depending upon your point of view, I was either batting zero or a thousand. Felt more like zero. Lacking x-ray vision or the will for risking a felony conviction for breaking and entering, I decided to go. I made it down three steps when I thought I heard something at my back. I took a quick peek over my left shoulder and saw the main floor curtains covering the windows closest to the stoop had been pulled slightly to one side. I felt eyes on me, but I didn’t turn immediately around. Instead I took my time reaching street level and then made a lazy about-face. I tried to make myself seem as unthreatening and forlorn as possible. Much more easily accomplished these days than it had once been. I turned my lips down, shook my head, threw my hands up in exasperation, and made to go. The act must have played well for my audience because the front door opened and someone called out, “Hey, mister, you jus’ hold on.”

She was a stout black woman in a well-worn bathrobe and men’s brown slippers, the kind my dad used to favor. She had a fussy hairdo with lots of elaborate twists and curls and it glistened in the midday sun. She didn’t have to touch it for me to see that her hairdo was a source of great pride. She had a lovely, welcoming smile, but wary eyes taking my measure. The problem was I was at a loss. I’d been going through the motions, ringing the bells and all, but I was still preoccupied by the implications of what had happened to me last night and the fear of what lay ahead. I remembered Carmella first telling me about Alta’s murder. I could see her mouthing the word Gravesend in my mind’s eye. Gravesend, indeed.

“Hey, mister, you all right?” the woman on the stoop asked, breaking the trance.

“Fine,” I said for lack of anything else.

The thing was, I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t bothered thinking about what I would say if someone answered one of the bells. I knew I had to say something right then or lose her. What to say was the issue. I opened my mouth, but she spoke first.

“I seen you before,” she said, the wary squint of her eyes evaporating. “Where I seen you at? On TV somewhere or the papers?” It wasn’t really a question, not for me anyway. She closed her eyes tight and scrunched up her face as if she were trying to squeeze the memory out of her head. “Tha’s it! I know where from. You the man that saved that little girl, the artist. Your face and hers was all over the news.”

“Sashi Bluntstone,” I said. “Very good.”

She seemed pleased with the both of us. “C’mon up here…”

“Moe,” I said, walking up the steps with my right hand extended, “Moe Prager.”

“Thelma Truax. I own this place. Husband left it to me when he passed.” Her hand was meaty, her handshake genteel. “I imagine you here about poor Alta, such a nice woman.”

“Not many people in this city share your view of Alta, Mrs. Truax.”

“It’s the Lord’s place to judge, Moe, not ours. Alta was never nothin’ but sweet to me and mine. Times when we couldn’t afford to go to the doctor, she’d see to my grandchildren. If it was serious, she would make arrangements with doctor friends of hers. So I hope the Lord shines his light of forgiveness on her.”

“Then you believe the media reports about Alta?”

“Don’t have to believe ’em,” she said. “Alta tol’ me her own self that they was true.”

Thelma’s words hit me like a tire iron. No matter that I’d already come to the same conclusion, that Alta had abandoned her principles and turned her back on her oath. I clung to the hope that I was wrong, that when I waded through everything there’d be some reasonable explanation for her actions or, more accurately, her inaction. Now I had independent confirmation that she had stood by and let Tillman die.