Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

“That was the idea, right? So what’s the problem?”

“I could not sleep that night. I went over it time after time and her attitude bothered me more and more. Yesterday morning I realized finally what was bothering me.”

“Which was what?”

“I saw that video you showed me. Horrible. Horrible. I suppose I was as outraged by it as were you. I was blinded by my outrage and ambition. I thought, why not help you? I would help rid the city of this parasite. I would do good and myself good all at once with only a small risk to my shield. So when I went in that room to threaten her, I was not actually thinking of Alta Conseco’s homicide in any sense but as a tool. What I realize now, what I came to realize was that the case I made against Esme to pressure her to cooperate-”

Then it hit me so that I was almost breathless. “Holy shit!”

“Yes, Moe, you see now. She very well might have been the person who killed Alta Conseco. She was the best suspect I have had and I did not think to look at her twice.”

“Wait a second. Wait a second. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” I said as much to convince me as him. “Tillman or Sykes or whatever his name was, was a con man. I mean, come on, Fuqua, he was a shitbird convict and she was a sociopath who probably jumped from lover to lover like bees go from flower to flower. When she was done sucking up the nectar, she moved on. Who says they were in love? She probably didn’t give him a second thought when he dropped dead. She would move on, not avenge some clown she didn’t give a shit about.”

“That is what I thought as well. Then I made inquiries.”

“Inquiries?”

“First I checked with both restaurants at which Esme was employed. She was not scheduled at either the evening Alta Conseco was murdered.”

“So what?” I said. “Half the pissed-off firemen in New York City were off that night too.”

“It gets better… or worse, depending upon your perspective. You recall that Tillman was convicted of statutory rape, non?”

“Yeah. He did four years, right?”

“Would you care to speculate as to the identity of his teenage victim in that case?”

I got that sick feeling again. “You’re kidding me.”

“Esmeralda Marie Sutanto of Goshen, New York-Esme. I spoke with the DA that prosecuted the case. Tillman was working a home improvement scam in Goshen when he met the Sutantos, a divorced mom with a teenage daughter. The mother and Tillman started seeing one another. While the mom was at work, Tillman would stop over and keep young Esme company after she came home from high school. The mom caught wind of it and went to the local police.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “Esme refused to testify against Tillman.”

“The DA says that they claimed to be in love and he believed them, but with the mother pushing him and an election that year, he had no choice but to prosecute and go for the maximum. When Esme graduated from high school, she left home. Would you like to guess the identity of Tillman’s only regular visitor during his years in Bedford Hills? His only visitor? I had a training officer who told me when I first got on the job that only fools ignore the obvious.”

“So bring her in. I’ll call in a tip from a pay phone and you can get a warrant.”

“Too late,” he said.

“She’s gone?”

“With the wind. I paid her apartment a visit yesterday evening. She took only a bag with some of her things and did not bother with her furniture. No matter, we gave her time to destroy any evidence she had not already gotten rid of. I fear my training officer was right. I am a fool.”

And with that, the sky opened up on us. Two fools in the rain.

There were at least two sleepless men in the borough of Brooklyn that night. I didn’t know what Fuqua was doing about his insomnia, though I was tempted to call and ask. Me, I had no intentions of staring up at the ceiling. I’d tried to get to bed early as a means of escaping the various spiders in my head. I’d even stooped to taking a pill to help me drift off. Yeah, I used to get high and drop acid when I was in college and until my recent adventures through the looking glass of oncology, I drank enough scotch and red wine to float the Spanish Armada. Yet somewhere in the bizarro melange of cognitive dissonance that was my moral compass, I’d become downright puritanical about narcotics. But puritans have their breaking points too and I’d reached mine. Of course, all the damned pill did was make my head cottony and got me no closer to sleep than counting sheep.

I took a shower-my second in the last several hours if you counted the earlier drenching I got on the boardwalk-and considered doing something I hadn’t done in a very long time: driving over to the Grotto for a dish of pistachio gelato. Perhaps I’d risk a slice of mediocre pizza, I thought, as I took the ten-minute ride from my condo to 86th Street. One of the reasons for the Grotto’s continued popularity was that it stayed open late. The place was crowded as ever. There were no spots on 86th, so I drove around back and parked on West 10th Street at the foot of the entrance to the loading dock.

As I walked back around the corner, I noticed that June had pushed August back into the future where it belonged. The day’s vengeful storms had given way to cloudless, star-saturated skies and the dampness of the afternoon had been replaced by dry, gentle breezes. It smelled like June again and the temperature was very Goldilocks-just right. All this and the lingering cotton in my head were nearly enough to keep thoughts of Esmeralda Sutanto from ruining the glory of the night. Nearly.

After Fuqua and I parted, I’d tried convincing myself that he was wrong about Esme and that he was building a case out of his own demons. That he was horrified by the nakedness of his ambition and the lengths he had almost been willing to go to feed it. That his guilt over looking past Esme was driving his need for self-flagellation. While all of that may have been true, it was more true that Esme really was the perfect suspect for Alta’s murder.

I decided I’d have a slice of pizza and got on that line first. Even if I somehow managed to survive the surgery, chemo, and radiation, I knew that my days of eating whatever I wanted to eat whenever I wanted to eat it were dwindling to a precious few.

“Slice of Sicilian and a Bud,” I said to the kid at the pizza counter.

When the kid slid the tray my way and handed me my change, I asked if Nicky was around. I doubted he would be at this time of night, but I would have felt like an idiot if I hadn’t asked. Although it still bugged me a little that he’d lied to me, I owed him a thank-you for trying to help me with the case. I also wanted to let him know that it was good to reconnect. Over the years, I had shed so many friends that I felt like a snake that’d molted once too often and now had nothing left to replace its old skin.

“Sure,” he said. “He’s in back. You wanna talk to him?”

“Tell him Moe is here when you get a chance, okay? I’ll be sitting over there.” I pointed to a corner table by the railing.

I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, stared at it as if it might make the decision for me, and gave Fuqua a call. He wasn’t asleep nor was he terribly enthusiastic at hearing the sound of my voice.

“Come have a beer with me, a slice of pizza,” I said, after he got done grumbling. “I’m at the Grotto.”

“It is well after midnight.”

“You’re not gonna sleep tonight and neither am I. We can do it alone or together.”

“It would take a half hour for me to get there from Canarsie.”

“So what? We can have a beer here and then go somewhere else.”