17 The knowledge that they had made no progress on the Wilner case, with only a weekend left, had been gnawing on Tom Radnovich since the night before. In the middle of the night he woke up from a dream in which he had, in some way that he could not remember, been one with Daniel Wilner. It struck him that he had had sex with a woman who had done it with Daniel, and that he was likely to do it with another, the mother of Wilner’s child. Of course, this was not the first time that he had banged the same woman as some other man that he knew, and the experience had never led him to identify with the other man. Maybe it was different when the other man was dead, known to Tom only as the victim of a homicide that he was investigating. That had to be it... Hold on, Radnovich, he said to himself. Don’t make this case any more personal than it needs to be. In the morning, as he was toasting a stale bagel (he never understood why so many people liked their fresh bagels toasted) for his breakfast, he thought more about the strange connection, probably no more than a one-night stand, between Daniel Wilner and Lejla Begović. What a bizarre confluence of two cases that he happened to be working! But the nexus, Tom was convinced, was in the person of Omar Murova. He didn’t share Claudia’s pity for “poor little Omar.” It was funny how he and his partner had opposite sympathies with regard to the Murova brothers. Claudia, or at least her feminist self, no doubt was put off by Safet’s “pretty lady detective” line. He now thought that he had heard a disapproving tone in Claudia’s voice when she suggested that he liked Safet. Tom, on the other hand, found Omar worthy of suspicion. He was a sneaky little liar, there was no doubt of that. Could a sneaky little liar be a killer? Tom combed his memory for cases in which a person combined the two attributes, not counting the obvious cases of killers denying their guilt, and came up with half a dozen or so. There was more than one kind of liar, of course. There were the consummate liars who wove an entire coherent, believable narrative but, once they were caught in one lie, their whole web would come apart. And then there those like Omar, whose web of lies was patched together with maybes and equivocations. Maybe Claudia could suspend her compassion and help him find a weak point in the web, he thought as he stepped out of the building into the Manhattan spring on his way to the 96th Street station. The drizzle that began shortly after the bus crossed the border turned into a steady shower by the time it neared Plattsburgh. As it entered the station, Betty felt her heart jump when she saw Cary Seligman on the platform with a huge red umbrella. He took her duffel bag from her as she stepped down, and, with both of his hands occupied, there was no possibility of a hug. A kiss on the cheek would have been nice, but Cary made no move for one. “I see you’ve come for more than just the day,” he said to her. “Isn’t that what you were thinking?” she asked. “It’s what I was hoping,” he said with a chuckle as he began to lead her toward his car, which was parked some twenty paces away. “But, since the weather doesn’t seem ideal for strolling along the lake, I’d like to propose a slight change of plan. What if we go to New York? It’s not raining there.” “You mean, just drive down?” she said as she sat down in the passenger seat, her bag having been tossed into the trunk, where she saw a small suitcase. “No,” he said, “it’s a long drive, and this is a rented car, which I have to return at Burlington Airport. There is a little airport here in Plattsburgh, but the only flights are to Boston.” Cary chuckled. “Suppose we drive to Burlington Airport – it’s about an hour from here – and fly from there to Newark. There’s a flight at one. We’ll probably miss the eleven-twenty-eight ferry but if we get the eleven-forty-three then we should be at the airport by twelve-thirty.” “What about tickets?” she asked, nonplussed by his initiative and his memory for timetables. “I took the liberty of getting them, just in case, for both of us. What do you say?” “Sure!” Along the way, as they made their way to the lake and onto the ferry, Cary said that if they made the train from Newark to Penn station and then took a taxi, they should be at his place by four. “I’ve had a tense morning with my partner,” Claudia Quintero said to her friend Sharon Kovacs, as the two policewomen walked out of the station to go to lunch, in response to Sharon’s remark that Claudia looked tense. Sharon was a uniformed sergeant who was in charge of the precinct’s juvenile detail, and she was putting in catch-up time at the station on this Saturday morning. The two women sometimes worked together when underage homicide suspects were involved. And indeed it had not been a pleasant morning with Tom Radnovich. He had seemed in a strange mood on coming into the station, uncharacteristically subdued, but with nervous energy bubbling under his skin. It was obvious that, with no new leads to tie together what they had on the Wilner case, the case would have to be set aside once again. The problem was that there too many leads – the Gremlins-KLA connection, the mysterious Rexhep Shkodra/Shkodran, the Murovas, Lejla, Alida – with no consistent thread among them. They had reviewed three pending homicide cases, respectively two and a half, three and four weeks old, with respectively two, zero and three suspects, none with enough evidence to warrant arrest. In the most recent case Claudia had done the preliminary investigation and come up with some promising leads that she had handed over to Tom when she went on vacation, but then Tom had become involved in the Wilner case and not pursued the leads. This morning he had apologized for his negligence, but in a halfhearted way. It was obvious that in his mind Wilner, with all the journalistic and political ramifications of the case, took precedence over the mundane killings of the denizens of the South Bronx. Claudia did not tell Sharon any of this. Sharon’s reply was, “Well, I had one with my husband,” and the two women laughed. What had made them friends was a problem that they had in common: the pronunciation of their names. In Claudia’s case it was her first name, and in Sharon’s it was her last, which she had kept after being married. Though she was only one-fourth Hungarian, she liked it pronounced Kovahch, not Kovax. When she was addressed as Sergeant Kovax, her first reaction was always “It’s Kovahch,” even if she was speaking to a superior officer, and she had trained the precinct’s clerical staff to say something like “I’ll connect you with Sergeant Kovahch” if a call came in for Officer Kovax. One of her brothers, an architect, had even gone so far as to restore the acute accent on the A and write the name as Kovács, in the interest of authenticity, only to find that people now called him Kovax. Her three other siblings, on the other hand, used the spelling pronunciation popularized by their famous namesake Ernie, a distant relative. Claudia already knew that the main source of tension between Sharon and her husband was her refusal to have another child. They had two daughters, thirteen and ten, but Larry wanted a son, and Sharon, now forty, did not want to put her thriving career – she had done great work in juvenile crime reduction in the Bronx and was in line for a promotion to lieutenant in Juvenile Division headquarters – on hold. She had told Larry point blank: if you want to divorce me and remarry so you can have a son, be my guest. It was, Claudia knew, a rhetorical challenge, since Larry was a freelance computer programmer (or software developer, or something like that) with a congenital heart problem and needed to be covered by Sharon’s health-care plan. But neither was Sharon’s marriage the subject of their conversation over lunch. It was their first one since Claudia’s breakup with Tony Peralta, and this was what they talked about. “Whatever problems I may have had with Larry,” Sharon said, “jealousy hasn’t been one of them. I used to flirt around when I was younger, once I got my figure back after Ava, but to Larry that was just the Hungarian in me.” They laughed. “He’s got a little bit of Hungarian himself, so he understands.” “Well, you would’ve thought that Tony, who’s one hundred percent Latino, would understand that a Latina like me needs to dance the way we dance.” “I’d like to see you dance some time,” Sharon said. But Claudia’s thinking had gone off on another track. “I wouldn’t have called Tony jealous,” she said, “just controlling or possessive.” “Isn’t it the same?” “Jealousy is directed at the other guys, the potential rivals, and it can be flattering to the object of the jealousy, but possessiveness is about controlling the person that you’re possessive of, and is demeaning to them. I got this distinction from an article I read by a Latina psychologist named Cici Bloom.” “Bloom? As in Leopold? A Latina?” Claudia didn’t know what the Leopold reference meant, but she explained, as she had done to Tom, that the name had come from an ex-husband. “But here’s the amazing part: This Doctor Cici Bloom had been a girlfriend of Daniel Wilner’s and they were still friends, so I contacted her. It turned out that she hadn’t heard about Daniel’s killing. And then – listen to this – when I talked to her again, a couple of days ago, she told me that her boyfriend before Daniel had been none other than Tony Peralta. That was, like, eleven or twelve years ago.” “Your Tony?” “Formerly my Tony. Please.” They laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to have an extended conversation with her yet, but it should be really interesting!” They ordered a Cuban sandwich to share, Sharon’s with beer and Claudia’s with Coke. “You mentioned Wilner,” Sharon said. “What’s happening with that case?” “It’s a mess. You probably remember that it was originally ruled as an accidental killing in the course of a gang shootout.” Sharon nodded as she lit a cigarette. Claudia knew that smoking was allowed in Carlota’s Cuban Café because it had only about twenty seats, well under the limit of thirty-five. “The case got reopened when a report came in that the two Albanian gangs may have been in cahoots, and that Daniel was set up. That report has since been discredited, but other connections came up that also pointed to a possible setup. There’s the fact that he’d been reporting on the war in Kosovo and that his reporting was not flattering to the Albanians, so they may have had it in for him, especially the Kosovo Albanians, which is what one of the two gangs is. I call ‘em the Gremlins.” Claudia chuckled. “There was also Daniel’s sister’s husband in Montreal, who didn’t much care for Daniel and who knew an Albanian guy from Kosovo, and he may have said something to him that the Albanian guy interpreted as wanting to get rid of Daniel. We thought that this Albanian was a big shot in the KLA and that he may have ordered the setup, but it turned out that it was a case of similar-but-not-identical names. And the most interesting connection involves a girl...” “I was waiting for that,” Sharon said with a laugh as she snuffed out her cigarette when she saw the food and drink approaching on the firm hands of their waitress Rosa, Carlota’s cousin newly arrived from Cuba, who was as slim as Carlota was fat. The story of Lejla Begović took up the rest of their lunch. “The kids in your case – Lejla and her brothers, Omar, Alida – are older than the ones I deal with,” Sharon said as they began their walk back to the station and she lit yet another cigarette, “but not by that much. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that at that age it usually comes down to sex, or rather emotions around sex. You can call it jealousy or possessiveness, or it can be anger over rejection or betrayal, or defending someone’s so-called honor... you get the picture. Even if it’s theft, whether robbery or shoplifting, it’s usually to steal something to impress a potential sex partner.” “I see what you mean,” Claudia said, “but I don’t see a scenario with Omar as the perp. He wasn’t even there at Old Nick’s when the shootout happened. And this seems to have been a carefully arranged plot to get rid of Daniel Wilner. There’s an Albanian word for it...” Sam woke up surly. He had napped for less than an hour, maybe fifty minutes or so, and once awake he thrashed in his crib like a caged animal. . When she tried to talk to him, he answered in one-word sentences. Are you hungry? No. Are you thirsty? Thirsty. Would you like some juice? Water. Would you like to play? No. Would you like to sleep some more? No. This last No was shouted fortissimo, and Megan wondered if Sam was coming to the end of his afternoon naps. It had to happen sooner or later. But not just yet. Megan had always preferred afternoon sex to spending the night with a man, even Daniel. The predilection went back to her days at North Am and Dawson College, when she was living at home with her mother, had the house to herself on school-day afternoons and brought her boyfriends there. The last time she had had sex, with Daniel, was during Sam’s nap. She had imagined that the next time would also be during a nap, with Tom Radnovich. In reality, over the past two and a half years all of her sexual activity, except for the few encounters with Daniel, had been of the autoerotic kind, and afternoon felt to her like the best time for that as well. Habit, she supposed. But even in that, it seemed like quite a while since she had last indulged herself. How long? A week – no, more than that. Ten days was more like it. The last time was... the day before Detectives Jane Lewis and Tom Radnovich had come to call! She had not yet had a chance to pleasure herself while fantasizing about Tom. Not that she felt like doing anything of the sort in her current condition. Whatever her condition was. The smile was just fading from Claudia’s lips when Tom saw her come back into the station after lunch. He found himself foolishly resentful of her good mood, but decided that he would try to match it, if only on the surface. Over the past week she had given him all her support in working a case that wasn’t really hers, and he was grateful to her. He knew that she wanted to review the other pending cases and he would not bother her with Wilner, for the time being. But she was the one to bring it up. “I just had lunch with Sharon Kovacs,” she said, pronouncing the surname in a Spanish approximation to Hungarian, “and she gave me an interesting idea about the Wilner case.” “What’s that?” “Look for the sex angle.” “Well, we know it’s there. There’s no doubt Omar was jealous about Lejla, and he had motive for doing Wilner in. It’s just that I don’t see how he could have done it. I mean, how could he have manipulated the two gangs into a shootout, having no connection with one and low status in the other?” “That’s my question too.” “Listen, Claudia,” – he made a point of saying Cloud-ya – “we may have to close the case, but I really appreciate all the work you did with me....” “I know you do,” Claudia said with a laugh. “You said my name right.” The flight had taken an hour and a quarter, during which they chatted about inconsequential matters. Cary seemed guarded, lest he appear too aggressive. Betty found herself wishing that he were more forward, at least hold her hand. After all, they would be making love – yes, making love, faire l’amour, not just having sex – a few hours hence, if she had her way. But his presence felt comfortable. When they stepped into Cary’s apartment, Betty took off her jacket and announced, “By the way, I’m on the pill.” Her announcement was rewarded with what felt like the best kiss of her life. More rewards were to come over the next two hours. One reward came after about an hour. They were resting quietly on their backs, their bodies barely touching, when Betty asked, “Do you happen to know any French?” “Un peu,” Cary said. His pronunciation was quite good. “Would you like to speak French with me sometimes?” “ Bien sûr. J’ai pris français comme ma langue étrangère à l’université.” That it was bad French, translated almost word for word from English, didn’t bother Betty a whit. She climbed on top of him and gave him the biggest kiss that she could. “T’es formidable,” she said. By six o’clock, Betty and Cary agreed that they were both starving. There had barely been time for a snack at Burlington Airport, and the one served aboard the Continental Express flight was rather Spartan. Cary served dinner, a wild-mushroom-and-veal risotto that he had prepared on Thursday and frozen – “just in case,” he said – and afterwards asked Betty what she would like to do. “This may sound morbid,” she said, “but I’d like to get back to Old Nick’s in the Bronx, the place where Daniel was killed. I went there last Sunday with Detective Radnovich, but I’d like to go again. With you.” Cary agreed readily. Traffic on the FDR was slow, and finding parking near Old Nick’s took some time as well. The space they found was actually near El Rinconcito. By the time they got out of the car it was 8:45, and the sound of live salsa music was wafting through the evening air. Betty told Cary that maybe they’d go dancing there later. Cary thought that would be great. Steve Lusha greeted them effusively. “How are you, beautiful Miss Wilner?” he said. “Hi, Steve,” Betty said. “This is my friend Cary, Daniel’s lawyer.” The men shook hands. “Pleasure to meet you,” Steve said. “Always helpful to know good lawyer. A nice bottle of Albanian wine again? On the house, of course.” “Thank you, Steve,” Betty said. “Okay with you, Cary?” “Sure. I’d like to try Albanian wine.” Steve walked back to the bar. “So what was the legal advice you wanted?” Cary asked Betty. “It’s about the status of Daniel’s writings, published and unpublished. Who owns them?” “An interesting question. The will refers to assets, and whatever is published and copyrighted is an asset, so it’s part of the estate, and the rights go to Sam, which means to Megan for the next sixteen years. You say there’s unpublished material?” “Yes, lots of it. It was on diskettes that the detectives found in Daniel’s safe-deposit box, which was not listed in the will.” Steve came by with the wine and poured it into two glasses. Betty and Cary clinked – “To Daniel!” – and sipped. “Interesting,” Cary said. “Now, the schedule of assets is not meant to be exhaustive. Actually, even personal letters have been held to be the writer’s property, not the recipient’s, at least in the case of famous people whose letters may have commercial value when published.” “So Daniel’s postcards to me aren’t mine?” Cary laughed. “Only if Daniel becomes posthumously famous. Established writers often appoint literary executors who are not necessary the same as their executors for material assets. For Daniel, I guess, that would have been premature. Why do you ask?” “Well, I found one completed article that hadn’t been submitted yet, and I’ve already arranged to have it published. And there’s a book – I don’t know yet what stage of completion it’s at – that he was writing about our father, with translations of his articles and essays. The book is dedicated to me.” “Legally, dedication does not constitute a gift. What do you plan to do with the book?” “Edit it and get it published.” “I would suggest that you get clearance from Megan, in writing. Publishers would want it, and it’s probably not too different in Canada, though it may be different in Quebec. You have a Civil Code.” “Don’t I know it!” “In any case, if there are any royalties they go to Sam.” “Of course. To Sam!” Betty said, raising her glass and they clinked again. “To Sam!” Cary said. “Thanks for the consultation. Send me your bill.” “I will. Except that it’s not exactly a bill, but another elongated organ.” Betty burst out laughing. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I have to go to the bathroom.” Claudia Quintero was returning to the station from a call that turned out to be a false alarm – no one would charge anyone – when she heard her cell phone ring. She stopped her car without bothering to park – there was not much traffic, and it was a one-way street – turned on her flashers and looked at the screen. It was Betty Wilner. “Hi, Betty,” she said. “Oh, hi, Claudia. I... I’m back in New York, visiting a friend...” “Cary Seligman?” Betty took a while before saying “Yes,” probably in order to digest Claudia’s intuition. “Anyway, we decided to go to Old Nick’s, and I had to go the ladies’ room, and the toilet paper was out, so I looked in the cabinet under the sink... The vanity, Claudia mentally corrected her. “... and there was no paper there, but there was a box of Kleenex, so I pulled out a tissue, but no more came up, so I pulled out the box, which felt heavier than it should, and I looked inside, and I saw a revolver...” “Stay right where you are, and keep the door locked.” She calculated that she was no more than a minute away when driving with a siren. “I’ll be there in two minutes.” Before starting she called Tom Radnovich, and left him a message: “Meet me at Old Nick’s ASAP.” She parked at the loading zone and walked into the bar at a fast pace. At a table near the bar she saw Cary. Sitting with him was, of all people, Steve Lusha, who was pouring what looked like white wine from an unlabeled bottle into a glass that Cary was holding. “Hi, Cary, hi Steve,” she said as she whizzed by them. The fact that she knew each man so surprised the other that neither of them returned her greeting. She knocked on the door of the women’s restroom. “Betty, it’s Claudia,” she said. She heard the bolt being undone, and the door opened. The Kleenex box, a months-old layer of dust on it, sat on the edge of the washbowl. She picked it up with gloved hands and looked inside. “This isn’t the gun that killed your brother,” she said, “because it’s a different caliber than the bullets that got him, but it may be important anyway.” On the way back she saw that Tom had already joined the two men, and was gesturing to Steve in a way that said, None for me, I’m on duty. “Look what Betty found in the bathroom,” Claudia said as she placed the box on the table. Steve looked like the Platonic idea of embarrassment. “I... I don’t know...” he began to stammer. Betty sat down next to Cary. Tom shone his flashlight inside the box. “This is a nine-millimeter,” he said, “so it couldn’t have been one of the ones...” “I already told Betty,” Claudia said. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Betty and Cary were holding hands under the table. “But I see something more in the box. A cell phone!” He fished it out with a napkin between his fingers and put it on the table on top of the napkin. “It’s the disposable type,” he said. “The battery’s dead, but we should be able to charge it and read the log.” “Remember what Omar told us?” Claudia said. “That he was in the bathroom during the incident?” “And,” Tom said, “after what Alida told us about Omar, this opens a whole new chapter.” “Are Omar’s prints in the system?” “Yeah, last year, when we were investigating the Gremnik Boys, we got all their prints from INS.” “Wow,” Claudia said and took a deep breath. “You know,” she said to Betty, “I was thinking about you yesterday when driving home.” “What about me?” Betty asked with a nervous giggle. “The fact that you and I have something in common. My father was also killed when I was little. And my sister, like you, was born after he had died.” “Really!” “He was a judge in Colombia, and he was murdered, maybe by the guerrillas, maybe by the army. The case was never solved. But now it looks like we’re about to solve your brother’s case. I need to discuss it with Det... with Tom.” “Would you like in my office?” Steve asked. Tom looked around. “Thanks, Steve, but we can just go to that booth over there.” The booth was, in fact, rather isolated.” “Okay,” Steve said. “I make sure nobody sit nearby.” Claudia and Tom walked over to the booth and sat across from each other. “So, let’s see now,” Tom began. “Omar calls Daniel. Maybe he doesn’t bring up Lejla, just checks if he really is a journalist, tells him that he’s from Kosovo.” “They chat,” Claudia said. “Somehow the subject of... what’s his name... Rexhep Shkodran comes up,” Claudia continued. “Daniel says that he wants to meet him, Omar says that he can set up a meeting for them.” “Maybe he already knows that the Gremnik Boys are going to stop for drinks at Old Nick’s, so he tells Daniel to be there and wait for a phone call.” “Could he have been the one who called in the warning about the Gremlins being armed?” “Steve’s right here. Let’s ask him again.” Now that his memory was jogged, Steve Lusha remembered that the caller had been male, speaking Albanian with a Kosovar accent. Steve even remembered the last words of the message: kam mundësi hata, there may be big trouble. “Big trouble, that is what we got,” Steve concluded. “Then Omar,” Tom said, “once he sees someone matching Wilner’s description sitting at the prearranged table with a cell phone in front of him, goes to the bathroom, calls Wilner, and fires his gun, starting the shootout.” “And the rest is history.” “Let’s confront Omar first thing in the morning. Tell him that we already have his prints.” Claudia looked away and noticed that Betty and Cary were getting up from their table and shaking hands with Steve Lusha. “Let’s tell Betty what’s going on,” she said. She waved in Betty and Cary’s direction and held her arm straight up, as if to tell them to wait, and Cary seemed to understand her. He led Betty to the detectives’ booth. “We weren’t going to leave without saying good-bye,” he said. “I know,” Claudia said, “but there’s more to say than good-bye. For one thing, Betty, you may have found your brother’s killer.” “And Rexhep Shkodra has nothing to do with it,” Tom added. “He may still be in Canada, for all we know. The KLA leader who was, so to speak, Daniel’s Moby-Dick was named Shkodran, with an N.” “That’s interesting,” Betty said, and told them of her sighting on the Montreal metro the day before. “But I thought both of you said that the gun I found wasn’t the one that killed Daniel.” “It didn’t fire the bullets that killed him,” Tom said, “but it may have been fired to provoke the shootout with him getting caught in the crossfire. We’ve got no evidence of that yet, but we think we know who it belonged to, and we’re going to confront him tomorrow.” “Will you let me know?” Betty asked. “Of course, Betty,” Claudia said. “We’re going to go dancing at that salsa place,” Betty said. “Can you two join us?” Tom and Claudia laughed. “We’d love to,” Claudia said, “but we’re working.” “We have to go back to the station,” Tom said, “and send our finds – your finds – to the crime lab.” “Have a great time,” Claudia said.