Lush Life (19 page)

"Most likely."

"With some fraction of a block between you?"

"I guess."

"That takes raised voices. You were raising your voice at each other?"

"I'm not sure."

"Arguing?"

"No."

"You sure about that?"

Condo took a moment, then shrugged. "Possibly."

"People say possibly to me they usually mean probably"

"So what if we were?" His voice smaller than the bellicose response would have suggested.

"Randal, dead of night, your girlfriend's walking a half a block ahead of you. You were having a fight, yes?"

He didn't answer, Flaherty cursing himself, this all so fucking obvious now.

"Now, I told you this morning we had a number of people told the canvass they heard shouting in the street around the time of the shooting, yeah? Voices raised loud enough to be heard in fourth-, fifth-, sixth-floor apartments, you remember me asking you about that?"

"We weren't that loud."

'Your girl's a half a block down the street and you're still going at it? Trust me, you were."

Condo breathed through his nose, looked off. "Possibly."

"And I'll tell you something else. People who get into arguments in the street? In public like that? You got to be pretty deep into it not to give a shit about who's watching. In fact, I'd say that there could be a three-ring circus twenty feet away, they'd barely know it."

Condo closed his eyes, rubbed his face.

"So, I'm thinking, if, when rounding Delancey onto Eldridge, you two are going at it so hot and heavy that she starts stomping away from you so that now you have to start yelling just to keep it going? There's no way you were watching that encounter develop across the street."

"I didn't make it up."

"And then it just gets worse. Because at some point you mustVe said something, yelled out something got this woman so pissed off that all of a sudden she does a one-eighty and starts coming back at you? Now, at that point there's no way she's not getting your undivided attention. No way you're checking out anything across the street. That'd be like the quarterback sizing up some blonde in the stands while a linebacker's coming for him straight up the middle. And that leads me to believe that what first got your attention over there was hearing that gun go off, and by the time you really gave them a good look-see, whatever had gone down was already a done deal. You might have seen the two of them falling and the third guy booking into the building, but I don't think you can honestly tell me if before that there were originally three, four, or five people, who actually had the gun, or if anybody else took off other than the guy running into the building." The ADA took a beat to let this sink in. "All they would have needed was a split-second lead on your eye and they're out into the shadows like they never existed."

"Look, I saw what I saw."

"That's my point."

Condo took a breath. "Can I smoke in here?"

"Not really, but go ahead."

Flaherty watched him fire up, watched him think.

"We have a guy in the Tombs right now pretty much based on what you told us," Flaherty said, then leaning forward, lowered his voice. "It's not criminal to be mistaken, Randal. Sometimes we confuse the words see and hear, especially when something goes down so fast and unexpected."

"OK," he said hoarsely

"So." The ADA tapped Condo's crossed knee. "Are you still sure we have the right guy?"

"I saw what I saw."

'Just answer yes or no." "No."

Flaherty sat back and finger-combed his hair, resisting the impulse to pull it out by the fistful.

"Just out of curiosity," his own voice growing hoarse now, "what exactly were you two fighting about?"

"The definition of a word."

"What word would that be?"

Condo closed his eyes. "Girlfriend."

"I specifically asked you if you heard arguing." Bobby Oh was not in the habit of raising his voice, so he didn't now, but it was all there in his bloodshot eyes.

"Well, if you're doing the arguing yourself, do you consider that 'hearing arguing'?" Nikki Williams responded queasily

Bobby leaned forward in his chair so abruptly that she flinched. "Say again?"

"It's like, if you're already underwater, do you think of yourself as wet?"

He stared at her until she looked away.

"He always told me I was only the second woman of color he had ever had a relationship with, then somebody at the party tells me that actually I was the fifth." Nikki talking to her lap now, avoiding his eyes. "That's a very creepy kind of lie."

Bobby made himself look away from her.

"Then on the way home he goes and improves things by yelling out from halfway down the block that those other three were just about the sex."

Bobby Oh was Night Watch. He was here, he was still here, eighteen hours after his tour began, strictly as a favor to Matty Clark because he had developed a rapport with this witness, this bullshit witness. He could go home now and nobody would think the lesser of him even though he had helped screw the pooch on this one as much as anyone else.

"I didn't want to say anything about it," Nikki said, "because it was nobody else's business."

Then, "It was humiliating."

Then, tearing up, "I'm so sorry."

Eric had been standing in a corner of the holding cell for three hours. Four cells all directly faced the CO command desk, their capacity twenty prisoners each. In his particular cell, thirteen prisoners, most of them seeming to take being here in stride, were standing or sitting together and talking as if at a bar or in a barracks, the only swirl of action coming about when a new arrestee had made it through the maze and stood in front of the desk with his accompanying paperwork and escort. Most of the prisoners saw this as an occasion to drape themselves on the front bars and call out to the cops or COs that an innocent man was in here, that they were still waiting for that Tylenol or pay lawyer or asthma medicine or whatever came to mind. The only ones in the cell who didn't seem to know anybody else or join in this periodic rush to the bars were Eric and a blaze-eyed black man, slack-bellied and nuts, wearing his T-shirt around his neck like a dickey as he disjointedly paced the perimeter whispering to himself. For hours now this guy had been keying on Eric, approaching him in his corner every few minutes on his aimless journey though the cage and asking to borrow his E-ZPass, Eric just ignoring him and slipping back into his own inner static like slipping back into bed: The reason he ran into 27 Eldridge was because . . . The reason he didn't call 911 was because . . . The reason he never even thought to ask if Ike Marcus had survived was because . . . The reason he had lied about everything was because . . .

Lost as he was in his fractured and incomplete ruminations, not even the ambient stink of the cage got through to him; not even the occasional rush of phantom hands in his pockets, the mumbled threats; not even his own name being called over and over by a pregnant CO was enough to pull him out of the forest fire that was his head, until she finally barked, "Hey, Cash. Do you want to go home or not?"

When he looked up, he saw that the same two detectives who had brought him here three hours ago were back, looking jumpy as ever about getting the hell out.

The first car stop of the evening came right at sundown, the Quality of Life taxi just happening to be there as a Nissan Sentra ran a red light in front of the Dubinsky Co-ops on the eastern end of Grand; no need to justify the pullover.

Lugo and Daley, working as a solo team this tour, walked up on either side of the car, cross-beaming the front seats. When the driver, a beefy crew-cut white guy with an open box of KFC on his lap, rolled down his window, the weed stank curled out like steam from a sauna.

"You got to be shitting me." Lugo reared back, fanning the air. "Make my job a little hard at least."

"Sorry." The driver, still chewing, half-smiled, a glistening sliver of dark meat pasted to the corner of his mouth.

The passenger, also white, a vacant-faced teenager blinged out in triple-X-size threads and a sideways baseball cap from the Negro Leagues, stared directly into the beam of Daley's flashlight as if it were a movie screen.

"C'mon out." Lugo opened the driver's door, but instead of hopping to it, the driver purposefully wiped the grease from his fingers one at a time, then leaned across the lap of his passenger to open the glove compartment.

"Whoa!" Lugo lunged forward, seizing the man's wrist with one hand, fumbling for his gun with the other.

"OK, OK," the driver said easily. "I was just getting out my ID."

"Did I ask you to?" Lugo near shouted, his hand, still trembling, gripping the butt of his unpulled Glock.

The kid in the passenger seat was grinning now, his eyes red and waggling. Daley reached in and pulled him out by the back of his shirt, dropped him belly-down on the hood, and held him there.

"I said get the fuck out of the car," Lugo bellowed, yanking on the already open driver's door so violently that it slammed itself shut on the rebound.

The driver waited for Lugo to step back a little, then came out with his hands up. "I'm on the job, fellas," he said calmly, his jaw still rolling with chicken. "Check the glove box."

Daley went into the compartment, came out a moment later with a Lake George, New York, police ID, displaying it for Lugo across the roof of the car.

"The fuck is wrong with you, reaching for something like that," Lugo barked. "Of all people, you don't know better than that?"

"Sorry," the driver said. "We've been driving around all day, I'm a little spacey."

"Spacey, huh? It fuckiri reeks in there."

The teenager sniggered.

"Just a little somethin' somethin' for the drive," the upstate cop said.

"Somethin' somethin', huh?" Lugo hadn't heard that phrase in two years.

"Can I ask you somethin' somethin'?" Daley addressed the blingedout kid. "What exactly is cow-tipping?"

"Fuck should I know," the kid sulked.

"Where are you headed now?" Lugo asked the driver.

"Right there." The driver pointed to the co-ops. "My father's apartment."

"Do me a favor." Lugo lit a cigarette, his hand still shaking. "You want to do your little somethin' somethin'? Do it up there."

"Yeah, Dad would love that," the younger kid said. "He's a cop too."

His brother threw him a look.

"Cop down here?" Daley asked.

"Right down here," the kid crowed, the driver coming off his buzz now, glowering a little.

Daley reread the guy's ID. "Huh," he grunted, then threw Lugo a look.

This time, with the drapes pulled back and the glass doors open, walking into room 1660 of the Landsman felt like walking up to the edge of a cliff. Billy Marcus, reduced to a silhouette, sat outside on the low railing, his back to the street sixteen floors below.

Matty walked out to join him.

"Derek Jeter got some hate mail," Marcus said, leaning backwards a little, turning his head and peering down at the street life. "That's the headline, today's headline."

"I hear you," Matty murmured, getting a casual grip on Marcus's elbow and easing him off the railing.

Actually it was yesterdays headline, but Matty wouldn't tell him that.

Matty maneuvered Marcus back into the room, then closed all the terrace doors.

"Where's Elena?"

"She left."

"To where?"

"I don't know."

"She's coming back?"

"I don't think so."

Surveying the clutter on the floor, Matty noted the absence of any obviously feminine items.

"I was hoping she would be here," Matty said, pulling up the desk chair.

"For what."

"I have some news."

And at the way the guy's face leapt, Matty knew that he had just made a mistake, the word news probably sounding to Marcus like a coy prelude to an announcement of a miraculous reversal of recent events, his son in some way having snapped out of it or finally stopped messing around, fucking with everybody's head.

"We had to cut Eric Cash loose. The third member of your son's party, Steven Boulware? He came to and basically backed Cash's version of events." Matty took a beat, let that sink in. "So we reinterviewed our eyewitnesses, and it turns out their testimony, unfortunately, is a lot more sketchy than we initially thought." Another beat. "So, without any solid testimony, without any physical evidence, without . . ."

"Who's Eric Cash?" Marcus said.

"The initial suspect," Matty said evenly. "The one we arrested."

"OK." Marcus nodded cautiously.

Matty stared at his hands. "Look, we had to move fast with what we believed to be a credible account."

"No, sure, you had to."

"But we're right back out there scouring the area for other possible witnesses, for the gun, for . . ."