Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

“You’ll be careful,” she said, not even pretending to make a question of it. “I don’t do hospital visits twice in one week.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Lies,” she said, grabbing her keys. “All lies.”

After Margo left, I called my answering service. Among a dozen dumpable calls were ones from Kelly Cole (“I know a suffocated story when I hear one. I want to know what was going on. Call me.”) and Alan Ross. I dug Kelly’s number out of my wallet and tried it, but I hung up when I was delivered into Ms. Cole’s voice mail. I had better luck with Alan Ross.

“I read about your adventure in the paper,” the executive said after his secretary put me through. “How are you holding up?”

I gave him a brief status report. “The doctors are giving me another forty years minimum, so long as I play my cards right.”

Ross said that he would like to meet with me. “I have a business proposition to discuss.”

“When would you like to meet?”

“Today, if that’s possible. How does noon sound?”

Noon sounded fine. He gave me the midtown address of his office, and we hung up. I showered, careful to keep my various sets of stitches dry. Not exactly your fun-loving singing-in-the-rain kind of shower. On the checklist I’d gotten of possible concussion symptoms, I was feeling low-grade most of them. Especially the headache. Despite the siren song of the couch, I pulled on a thick Irish sweater, double-wrapped a scarf under my chin, shrugged into my bomber jacket and gingerly tugged a watch cap over my battered skull. A bastard wind hit me full force in the face as I exited Margo’s building. Across the street, Robin Burrell’s Christmas tree was gone from the bay window. The final witness shunted off.

MEGAN LAMB CAME OUT to the front desk to meet me. She looked as if she’d gone a few rounds in the ring with a determined kangaroo. If there weren’t exactly bags under her eyes, it was close. She saw me noticing. “Crappy night.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I don’t sleep much. But hey, you’re not looking so bad, considering. Word was you were half dead.”

“Half alive. It’s all a matter of viewpoint.”

“I understand you took a knife.”

I gave my kidney a light pat. “Came in through the side door. I was stupid, he was lucky. Won’t happen again. Trust me.”

I followed her down a corridor to a roomful of desks. Megan’s was in a corner. She dropped into the chair behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. Her phone rang and she took the call. The desk was a mess of papers and folders. The way they were spread clear across the large desk, it looked as if Megan had slept here overnight. There was a framed photograph of an attractive brunette posing next to a table piled high with summer produce. I angled it for a better look. I recognized the spot. The farmer’s market at Union Square. I also recognized the woman.

Megan ended her call. She followed my gaze. “That’s Helen.”

“I know.”

She picked up the photo and looked at it. “Her acupuncturist used to prescribe a visit to the farmer’s market every weekend. He had a whole energy theory going. The harvest. Locally grown foods. He said that just walking through the market was therapeutic. I could never quite catch it all. Kidney energy. I kept hearing about Helen’s kidney energy, whatever the hell that was.” She set the picture back down. “She swore by him. If he’d wanted to put his damn needles in her eyes, she’d have let him. He had her on this thing for a while where she stuck these fuses to the bottom of her feet and then I lit them for her. Some kind of heat acupuncture. Don’t tell me it sounds crazy, I already know. But guess what? Helen was the healthiest person you’d ever want to know, so what can I say? Every Saturday, religiously, off to Union Square to talk with her tomatoes.”

She picked up a pen and tapped it thoughtfully against the picture frame, then tossed the pen on the desk. “You make sense of it. Helen taught sixth-graders how to read and write while I run around for a living with a gun on my hip. But which one of us is still here to tell the story? When I think of how that woman used to worry herself sick over me. That’s a real laugh, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a laugh. It’s normal,” I said. “Margo would be quite happy if I sold paper clips for a living.”

“Well, look at you, fished out of the East River. She might be right. I don’t know, sometimes I think people who do what we do for a living don’t have any business getting ourselves involved with civilians. Helen was all about cute and stupid things the kids did at school that day, while I’m sitting there sucking in exit wounds and bloated floaters. ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, fine, you know, just another romp through mankind’s butcheries.’”

“My old man used to describe his job as toxic.”

“Your old man was right. That’s exactly how I feel sometimes-like I’m slowly being poisoned. And it’s not only the victims but the nut monkeys out there, the ones who are doing this shit. You get to thinking the human race in general is toxic. You’ve got your crazy butchers, you’ve got your perfectly normal-seeming butchers. Kids shooting other kids. Parents killing their own kids, for Christ’s sake. Helen wanted us to adopt a baby. She loved the idea of raising a child. Jesus. In this world? I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”

“Hell of a responsibility.”

“Forget it. I used to think how unfair it’d be to Helen, we adopt a kid then I get killed on the job and leave her to raise the kid on her own. Look what happened instead.” She laughed. It wasn’t a particularly joyful laugh. “If some poor kid had to count on me these days, God help her. Or him. They’d go back to the agency and demand a new placement.”

“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.”

Megan looked at me a moment without speaking. “That’s exactly what my shrink says. I’ll tell you what I tell her: sure, I’m hard on myself, but there’s no way in hell I’m too hard on myself. I deserve all the crap I throw at myself.”

“I’ll bet your shrink doesn’t agree with that.”

“That’s an easy bet to win. Anyway.” She flipped open one of the folders on her desk. It contained the police sketch of my attacker.

“That’s not him,” I said. “I don’t know where you got it, but it’s no good.”

“Michelle Poole worked with our sketcher on this.”

“It’s no good.”

“I had a feeling. The girl didn’t seem very sure of herself.” Megan picked up the sketch and studied it.

“Thurman Munson,” I said.

“Thurman what?”

“Former Yankees catcher.”

“That’s who threw you into the river?”

“That’s who the sketch looks like. But like I said, the sketch is no good. The guy this sketch doesn’t look like was stalking Michelle Poole. I guess she told you that. I saw him that day. At the Quaker meeting.”

“Could be he was first stalking Robin.”

“I was hoping to get a chance to ask him that question, but he decided to show me how fast he could run.”

“I guess he didn’t run fast enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“You caught up to him.”

“Right. Lucky me.”

“So, are you up to a session with a sketcher?” She picked up the phone and put in a call. She covered the mouthpiece. “Twenty minutes. Can you wait?”

“I’m in no hurry.”

She told the person on the phone that twenty minutes was fine, then she hung up. I asked her for some of that fine NYPD coffee, and she fetched me a cup. I discarded a couple of easy jabs about the burnt mud. Megan told me that she had spoken with Edward Anger from the Quaker meeting and that he was in the clear. Out-of-town alibi for the evening Robin was murdered. She also told me that Allison Jennings had given Gallo the same two names I’d gotten her to cough up. They’d both cleared as well.