“They’re my cops!” corrected Police Commissioner Cleary. Ah, the world of New York politics and fiefdoms. “Well, Melendez, why the cuffs?”
“I-he-When we went to get him, he, uh-he,” she stuttered, flushing slightly.
“Spit it out, Detective. Sometime this week.”
“He ran a red light.”
Fishbein, Starr, Cleary, and Brown sneered disapprovingly, shaking their noggins like four bobblehead dolls on the back deck of the same car.
“If you’re so desperate for traffic enforcement, Melendez, we can put you on Highway Patrol,” Cleary said. “You’d cut a fine figure in those tall black boots and riding pants.”
By the look on the men’s faces, the image of Melendez so dressed had universal appeal. Christ, it appealed to me. But I saw that some of what Melendez had said to me on the ride over was true. She might carry the shield, but she was always one misstep away from being dismissed as portable pussy and nothing more.
“I did worse than blow through a red, Commissioner Cleary. I cut across a crosswalk and sped in a school zone. I saw I was being followed and overdid it, I guess.”
But instead of being pleased or impressed by my jumping to her defense, Detective Melendez shot me a look that would scare the numbers off a clock. I don’t need rescuing. She was tough to figure, and now wasn’t the time to try.
“Cut him loose,” said Cleary.
Murphy let me go. I wanted so hard not to rub my wrists, to show everybody, especially Melendez, how tough and cool I was. I immediately rubbed my wrists.
“You know who that is in that car over there?” Fishbein asked, ignoring the icy stare of his Brooklyn counterpart.
“I can guess.”
“Guess.”
“Larry McDonald.”
“Give Mr. Prager a cigar!” Fishbein joked. “Commissioner, you smoke cigars, don’t you?”
“How’d you know?” D.A. Starr got a question in before Fishbein could breathe.
“I didn’t know. It was a guess.”
“Why guess Chief of Detectives McDonald?”
“If it was a 1930 DeSoto or something instead of an ’89 Chevy, I would have guessed Judge Crater.”
“That’s not an answer,” Starr growled. Fishbein didn’t do a good job of hiding his delight at the displeasure of his Brooklyn counterpart.
“Because I knew Larry was missing.”
“You did, huh?” said Cleary.
Decision time. I had to choose my words very carefully. There’s lying, and then there’s the truth. Lies are lies, but you can filet the truth all sorts of ways depending on the dish you’re cooking. For much of my life, I’d been a bad liar and an unskilled butcher of the truth. Patrick Michael Maloney’s disappearance had changed all that. I’d since learned s-e-c-r-e-t-s was just an alternative spelling of l-i-e-s. And, God help me, I could parse the truth like a Catholic school nun with a run-on sentence.
“I did. I knew he was missing.”
“How’d you know?” Cleary kept on. “The chief was taking vacation time, so there’d be no reason to believe he was missing.”
Time to start parsing. “His ex-wife called me up.”
“And. .” Starr said.
“And she told me she was worried about Larry. That he had called her recently to apologize about their divorce. They had made a date to talk it over, but Larry never showed up.”
“It’s a big leap from standing up your ex to going missing, Prager,” Fishbein piled on.
“I guess,” I agreed. “But he never got back in touch with her. That wasn’t Larry’s style. He could be a selfish, ambitious prick, but never an impolite one. Not to Margaret, not after what he’d done to her.”
They nodded again in unison.
“Is that all, Mr. Prager?”
“Is that all what?” I turned the question back on Fishbein.
“Let’s not be coy. Was there anything besides his ex-wife’s call that might have led you to believe something was up with Chief of Detectives McDonald? It’s no secret that you and Larry were close friends.”
“Close?” I asked. “Was anybody really close to Larry Mac?”
For the first time, I saw something in Detective Melendez’s eyes that looked like admiration. She enjoyed how I kept deflecting their questions with questions of my own.
“Well, then, closer than most,” Fishbein said.
“Okay, yeah, Larry and me, we were closer than Larry and most other people, but he had a lot more layers than an old onion, so I’m not really sure there’s much I can tell you.”
Fishbein screwed up his face as if he were working hard to think of a follow-up, but it was all an act. He was questioning me for appearance’s sake. I guess he was also trying to give me cover. Because, whether I liked it or not, whether I had intended to or not, I was now Fishbein’s boy. By going to him the way I had, he had the inside track. I’d got almost nothing out of the relationship so far except an autopsy report and yellow sheet on Malik, but with me he might knock one out of the park.
“You know, Mr. Prager,” Starr picked up, “you don’t seem awfully broken up about your friend’s suicide.”
“The ground ain’t wet from your tears either, Mr. D.A.,” I said, trying to hide the shock. Suicide! Larry McDonald? “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll grieve on my own terms.”
“Of course,” said Cleary.
“You sure there’s nothing else?” Starr said.
“Nothing else like what? Sometimes Larry played his cards so close to the vest, they were inside his shirt. Maybe there’s something you guys know that you’re not telling me. Is that it?”
Silence. Kind of enjoyed watching four grown men paw at the wet earth with their expensive shoes.
Now there was no mistaking it. There was full-blown admiration in Carmella Melendez’s eyes and fuck me if my heart didn’t race at the sight of it. I had done magic before her. But like all magic, it was an illusion. I had heard the tape. I had spoken to Larry. I knew probably more than any one of them about Larry’s past sins.
“Do you mind if I go over and pay my respects?” I asked.
“It ain’t pretty, son,” Deputy Mayor Brown spoke up.
“Nothing ever is, beneath the surface,” I said.
“Just stay out of the way. It’s still considered a crime scene, remember that,” Cleary warned.
“How about if Detective Melendez comes with me to make sure I keep my nose clean?”
Cleary nodded. Melendez wasn’t stupid. She didn’t jump at the chance. She sneered as if Cleary had told her to carry me over to Larry’s Chevy on her back.
“You were good back there,” she said.
“Thanks. And you were right about what you said in the car on the way over. Maybe we could sort of start over.”
She hesitated. “Where should we start over from, Mr. Prager? From your stunt driving this morning or your unexplained presence at the precinct yesterday? I’m thinking it’s kinda odd that you turned up over there outta the blue and then the chief kills himself, no? The suits and the brass back there might buy your line a shit, but I’m not a big believer in coincidences.”
“That makes two of us.”
“So where does that leave us? You gonna tell me why you were at the Six-O?”
We had reached the car. The driver’s side door was open. Larry’s head rested on the steering wheel; his lifeless eyes looked past me into an unfathomable distance. Even in death, he didn’t look quite peaceful. His ambition had left a residue on his corpse as real as gunpowder. As the chopper moved further away, I caught the stink of his death. In spite of being surrounded by several million tons of decay, the ripeness of it was unmistakable. It was like hearing one particularly sour note from a tone-deaf orchestra.
“How’d he do it?” I asked.
“Look at the tailpipe,” one of the busy bees said. Sure enough, a flexible black hose ran from the mouth of the tailpipe, beneath the car, around the passenger side, up into a slit in the rear window. Neat strips of duct tape covered the opening in the window left to accommodate the exhaust tube. “My guess is he swallowed some sleeping pills, washed ’em down with some bourbon, and went to sleep. There’s a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor.”