Emo looked at me for a time and then seemed to make a decision.
“It was Pili. Pili Pilar. You know him?”
“I know him.” Pili Pilar was Sonny Ferrera’s right–hand man.
“He used to come once, twice a month, never more than that, and take a car. He’d keep it for a couple of hours, then bring it back. Different car each time. It was a deal Ollie made, so he wouldn’t have to pay off Sonny. He’d fit the car with false plates and have it ready for Pili when he arrived.”
“Last week, Pili comes, collects a car, and drives off. I came in late that night, ‘cause I was sick. I got ulcers. Pili was gone before I got there.”
“Anyway, after midnight I’m sittin’ up with Ollie, talkin’ and stuff, waitin’ for Pili to bring back the car, when there’s this bang outside. When we get out there, Pili’s wrapped the car around the gate and he’s lying on the wheel. There’s a dent in the front, too, so we figure maybe Pili was in a smash and didn’t want to wait around after.”
“Pili’s head is cut up bad where he smacked the wind–shield and there’s a lot of blood in the car. Ollie and me push it into the yard and then Ollie calls this doc he knows, and the guy tells him to bring Pili around. Pili ain’t movin’ and he’s real pale, so Ollie drops him off at the doc’s in his own car, and the doc insists on packing him off to the hospital ‘cause he thinks Pili’s skull is busted.”
It was all flowing out of Emo now. Once he began the tale he wanted to finish it, as if he could diminish the burden of knowing by telling it out loud. “Anyway, they argue for a while but the doc knows this private clinic where they won’t ask too many questions, and Ollie agrees. The doc calls the clinic and Ollie comes back to the lot to sort out the car.”
“He has a number for Sonny but there’s no answer. He’s got the car in back but he doesn’t want to leave it there in case, y’know, it’s a cop thing. So he calls the old man and lets him know what happened. So the old man tells him to sit tight, he’ll send a guy around to take care of it.”
“Ollie goes out to move the car out of sight but when he comes back in, he looks worse than Pili. He looks sick and his hands are shakin’. I say to him, ‘What’s wrong?’ but he just tells me to get out and not to tell no one I was there. He won’t say nothin’ else, just tells me to get goin’.”
“Next thing I hear, the cops have raided the place and then Ollie makes bail and disappears. I swear, that’s the last I heard.”
“Then why the gun?”
“One of the old man’s guys came by here a day or two back.” He gulped. “Bobby Sciorra. He wanted to know about Ollie, wanted to know if I’d been there the day of Pili’s accident. I said to him, ‘No,’ but it wasn’t enough for him.”
Emo Ellison started to cry. He lifted up his bandaged fingers and slowly, carefully, began to unwrap one of them.
“He took me for a ride.” He held up the finger and I could see a ring–shaped mark crowned with a huge blister that seemed to throb even as I looked at it. “The cigarette lighter. He burned me with the car cigarette lighter.”
Twenty–four hours later, Fat Ollie Watts was dead.
Chapter 3
* * *
Walter Cole lived in Richmond Hill, the oldest of the Seven Sisters neighborhoods in Queens. Begun in the 1880s, it had a village center and town common and must have seemed like Middle America recreated on Manhattan’s doorstep when Walter’s parents first moved there from Jefferson City shortly before World War II. Walter had kept the house, north of Myrtle Avenue on 113th Street, after his parents retired to Florida. He and Lee ate almost every Friday in Triangle Hofbr?u, an old German restaurant on Jamaica Avenue, and walked in the dense woods of Forest Park during the summer.
I arrived at Walter’s home shortly after nine. He answered the door himself and showed me into what, for a less educated man, would have been called his den, although “den” didn’t do justice to the miniature library he had assembled over half a century of avid reading: biographies of Keats and Saint–Exupéry shared shelf space with works on forensics, sex crimes, and criminal psychology. Fenimore Cooper stood back to back with Borges; Barthelme looked uneasy surrounded by various Hemingways.
A Macintosh PowerBook sat on a leather–topped desk beside three filing cabinets. Paintings by local artists adorned the walls, and a small glass–fronted case in the corner displayed shooting trophies, haphazardly thrown together as if Walter was simultaneously proud of his ability yet embarrassed by his pride. The top half of the window was open and I could smell freshly mown grass and hear the sound of kids playing street hockey in the warm evening air.
The door to the den opened and Lee entered. She and Walter had been together for twenty–four years and they shared each other’s lives with an ease and grace that Susan and I had never approached, even at the best of times. Lee’s black jeans and white blouse hugged a figure that had survived the rigors of two children and Walter’s love of Oriental cuisine. Her ink black hair, through which strands of gray wove like moonlight on dark water, was pulled back in a ponytail. When she reached up to kiss me lightly on the cheek, her arms around my shoulders, the scent of lavender enfolded me like a veil and I realized, not for the first time, that I had always been a little in love with Lee Cole.
“It’s good to see you, Bird,” she said, her right hand resting lightly on my cheek, lines of anxiety on her brow giving the lie to the smile on her lips. She glanced at Walter and something passed between them. “I’ll be back later with some coffee.” She closed the door softly behind her on the way out.
“How are the kids doing?” I asked as Walter poured himself a glass of Redbreast Irish whiskey — the old stuff with the screw top.
“Good,” he replied. “Lauren still hates high school. Ellen’s going to study law in Georgetown in the fall, so at least one member of the family will understand the way it works.” He inhaled deeply as he raised the glass to his mouth and sipped. I gulped involuntarily and a sudden thirst gripped me. Walter noticed my discomfiture and reddened.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right,” I responded. “It’s good therapy. I notice you’re still swearing in the house.” Lee hated swearing, routinely telling her husband that only oafs resorted to profanity in speech. Walter usually countered by pointing out that Wittgenstein once brandished a poker in the course of a philosophical argument, proof positive in his eyes that erudite discourse sometimes wasn’t sufficiently expressive for even the greatest of men.
He moved to a leather armchair at one side of the empty fireplace and motioned to its opposite number. Lee entered with a silver coffeepot, a creamer, and two cups on a tray and then left, glancing anxiously at Walter as she did. I knew they had been talking before I arrived; they kept no secrets from each other and their unease seemed to indicate that they had discussed more than their concerns about my well–being.
“Do you want me to sit under a light?” I asked. A small smile moved across Walter’s face with the swiftness of a breeze and then was gone.
“I heard things over the last few months,” he began, looking into his glass like a mystic examining a crystal ball. I stayed silent.
“I know you talked to the feds, pulled in some favors so you could take a look at files. I know you were trying to find the man who killed Susan and Jenny.” He looked at me for the first time since he had begun talking.
I had nothing to say, so I poured some coffee for both of us, then picked up my own cup and sipped. It was Javan, strong and dark. I breathed deeply. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I want to know why you’re here, why you’re back. I don’t know what you’ve become if some of the things I’ve heard are true.” He swallowed and I felt sorry for him, for what he had to say and the questions he had to ask. If I had answers to some of them, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give them, or that Walter really wanted to hear them. Outside, the kids had finished their game as darkness drew in, and there was a stillness in the air that made Walter’s words sound like a portent.
“They say you found the guy who did it,” he said, and this time there was no hesitation, as if he had steeled himself to say what he had to say. “That you found him and killed him. Is that true?”
The past was like a snare. It allowed me to move a little, to circle, to turn, but in the end, it always dragged me back. More and more, I found things in the city — favorite restaurants, bookshops, tree–shaded parks, even hearts carved bone white into the wood of an old table — that reminded me of what I had lost, as if even a moment of forgetfulness was a crime against their memories. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.
And so, with Walter’s question, I fell back to late April, back to New Orleans. They had been dead for almost four months.
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