Red on Red Page 10

  Nick leaned forward to take the bags from the passenger seat, showing them to Malcolm as he opened them for inspection. Nick only looked at the price tags—ten dollars, ten again, then a half-dozen dollar items. Thirty dollars, at most. They pulled over suddenly, rubbing right up against the curb. Nick tensed a moment, looking at Malcolm, then Esposito, then at what had drawn Esposito’s attention—a woman, striding down the sidewalk like it was a runway, in a short skirt, tall boots, and a loose, light coat that flowed behind her. She had a Somali look—long, lean, and elegant, with light-brown skin and a tangle of black hair held back in a yellow band. Esposito leaned out the window.

  “Excuse me, miss? Police. Can I talk to you a minute?”

  She paused, hesitant. She wore sunglasses, which made it hard to read her, whether she was suspicious or merely surprised.

  “Police. C’mere a sec. I just want to show you a picture.”

  Holding up his shield, he leaned over to the passenger seat and fished a random mug shot from the glove compartment. The woman approached slowly at first, before her curiosity got the better of her. She leaned over to the car and looked at the photo intently.

  “What did he do?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “I think … in the area. Is he dangerous?”

  “Very.”

  “Should I be careful?”

  “Somebody like you should always be.”

  A smile broke on her face and she laughed, tossing back her glossy tumble of hair. Malcolm and Nick both leaned forward, to see her better.

  “I should be careful of you, especially.”

  Esposito took a card from his jacket and handed it to her.

  “If you see any bad guys out there, or if you’d like to meet some, call me.”

  She held up the card for a second, reading it, then waving it like a fan. For a moment, it looked like she might throw it away, but then she slipped it into her pocket. She touched his shoulder and then glanced into the backseat, waving before walking away. Esposito gently put the car back into drive, casting a few backward looks out the window.

  Malcolm laughed, impressed. “Man, you beastin’!”

  “You like that, huh?”

  “Not bad,” said Malcolm, appraising. “Too skinny.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I ain’t—what’s it, what they say? ‘Meat for the man, bone for the dog.’ ”

  “You’re crazy,” said Esposito, looking at her dwindling image in the rearview mirror. “She was perfect.”

  Nick thought so, too, but Esposito never saw a woman who wasn’t beautiful, or ate a meal that wasn’t exactly what he wanted. Enthusiasm, which once was considered a disease; still was, sometimes. Animal and tactical, for Esposito to think of women, to make Malcolm think of them, remind him of outside. They settled back into traffic. Nick considered the word, the verb, “to beast”—a little monstrous, all natural. It fit. As they drove, Nick looked ahead, so he could keep an eye on Malcolm without staring at him.

  Nick’s phone rang, but the call was from a blocked number. Allison, from her office, or Internal Affairs. He didn’t want to talk to either, and he resented how they had become associated, the overlap of fraying claims on him. He waited to see if a message was left, but there was none. Maybe a wrong number. He fretted over it until he heard Esposito, with his own cellphone to his ear.

  “Hey. It’s me…. Yeah, you know … Right…. Well, when you’re right, you’re right…. Right…. So, anyway, I need a favor. Government emergency, police emergency. It’s for an orphan, believe me…. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Just trust me, I need you, I need this. There’s nobody else I can call…. Yeah? Beautiful! Five minutes.”

  He clicked the phone shut on his chin and tossed it onto the seat. He glanced backward, gladness in his face, even as he gunned the engine, sending them shooting up the street.

  “This is gonna work out all around.”

  The brick towers of Stuyvesant Town cropped up, and Esposito parked the car and took off his jacket. When Malcolm got out, Esposito threw his jacket around Malcolm’s shoulders, so his rear-cuffed hands wouldn’t be obvious, then pulled his shield from his belt and stuck it into his pants pocket. Nick picked up the bags, and the detectives walked on either side of Malcolm, close in, swaying a little, as if they were three jolly executives coming home from a multiple-martini lunch. Esposito guided them to one of the buildings, and caught the lobby door as an old woman left, frowning at their overindulgence. He caught the drift and played it up, staggering, keeping close enough to Malcolm so that she could not see the gun on his hip, holding Malcolm’s cuffs so he could not reach for the gun.

  “Shank you, ma’am!”

  They stayed close inside the lobby, waiting for an empty elevator. It looked like the projects, but it wasn’t. Esposito pressed the button for the tenth floor. Malcolm and Nick both looked at him, differently confused. He declined to enlighten them until they reached their stop.

  “I got a friend here. Like I said, it works out all around.”

  At the end of the hall, he rang a doorbell. A woman answered, olive-skinned and dark-haired, in a T-shirt and jeans. She smiled but waited at the doorstep for a moment, unsure whether to let her curiosity get the better of her. Esposito scooped her up in a hug, lifting her and twirling her around.

  “Baby! So good to see you! I can’t tell you how good! You look great. I ain’t kiddin’! You did me a big, big favor, lemme tell you. Wait, I will—this is Nick and Malcolm. And this is Donna, guys.”

  “Hey, Donna.”

  Nick shook her hand and Malcolm nodded, having no hands to offer. She held the door for them, and they walked in. Esposito led the other two to the bathroom, plainly familiar with the route. He took the shopping bags and set toiletries in the sink, a dress shirt, pants, socks, and underwear on the toilet. He stood close to Malcolm, smiling and putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “Here you go. You’re all set. I forgot shoes, but I didn’t know your size, and what you got looks okay anyway. So clean up, we’ll get goin’. I’m gonna uncuff you and give you privacy. I think we respect each other, we got something working here, but, hey—let’s be real. I don’t think I gotta remind you, we’re on the tenth floor, no fire escape. We’re working on a handshake. Both of us can back out, take the other road. We understand each other?”

  “Yeah. You been cool.”

  “Good. Now go ahead in. We’ll be right here if you need something.”

  Esposito uncuffed Malcolm, who went into the bathroom and shut the door. Esposito turned to Nick as he headed back down the hall to another room in the apartment.

  “You wanna wait here? Knock on the bathroom door in ten minutes if he’s not done. Hell, I feel good. Matter of fact, make it twelve…. Believe me, Nick, it’s all good.”

  He turned the corner and disappeared. Nick checked his watch, to make sure ten minutes would be the most either of them got. “Believe me, Nick …” Nick wanted to, he was working on it. New York was for believers, he knew, and he opened the hallway doors—closet on the left, bedroom on the right, with a narrow view of the water, the harbor flooding up beneath the bridges. Downtown, the old island, the lowest tip settled first, by the Battery. On the Feast of the Epiphany, Greek boys dove into the harbor to retrieve a golden cross flung into the waters; on Rosh Hashanah, Hasidim gathered by the shore in their beards and black hats for tashlich, a prayer of atonement, and cast their sins into the river with crumbs of bread. It was an island littered with enchantments, the buildings freaks of steel that made you agnostic about gravity, the people a wandering carnival, all of it lit like a forest of Christmas trees. He checked his watch again—a little more than five minutes left. He didn’t have an on-duty sexual authorization form with him.

  The toilet flushed, and the shower went on inside the bathroom. Four and a half minutes. Nick made a note to himself. Next time, he gets the girl, Esposito guards the bathroom. Nick imagined what would ha
ppen if he did this to Allison, stopping by with a perp, five minutes’ warning. A visit like that would have ended the marriage right there. Or not. It would have given them something to talk about, decades from now. Would he tell her about this at dinner? Would he tell her friends? Work and weather, that’s what he’d talk about. Maybe just the weather. This was not the kind of story he could tell in public, and, even with Allison, it could easily come across wrong. Too much time had passed for them, or not enough. The thought of him and Allison, old together and laughing, made Nick forget his watch. The shower went off, and Malcolm was out shortly, in a crisp white polyester shirt and black pants that made him look like a waiter.

  Esposito appeared, straightening his tie, recently dressed as well.

  “You look sharp,” Esposito said to Malcolm.

  “C’mon.”

  “All right. You do look better, though. Let’s get going.”

  “Do you gotta cuff me again?”

  “Yeah, for now.”

  Donna called out her goodbye, unseen in another room, as they headed back to the car, in the same drunken musketeer formation. The histrionics were less, because they cared less about being noticed, and the destination loomed closer. There was little conversation as they headed through midtown, the Upper East Side, toward Harlem. The Northwest Passage, Mannahatta version. The streets were less packed here, but the people seemed to move more slowly; in midtown, downtown, no one stood still. Here, they stood on corners, in front of bodegas and project lobbies, as if assigned to their spots. Nick glanced over to Malcolm and saw how he watched the streets as they did; he was a stranger here, too. There were no familiar faces for him; he was an immigrant, a tourist, though he was a black man born here, sixty blocks up. He leaned up against Esposito’s seat.

  “You know where we’re goin’?”

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  One-two-five, 125th Street, was the hypertensive heart of Harlem—fat, fast, and ready to pop. With its new superstores and theaters, its traffic and lights, its shoppers, strutters, and ranters, it was like a jukebox playing every song at once. A single turn and a few blocks uptown, and they were in a 1970s ghetto, with boarded-up buildings and empty storefronts. Another turn, a few blocks more, and there were rows of old brownstones with flower boxes in the windows, maple-shaded sidewalks swept twice a day, beside which you could imagine the clip-clop of carriage horses. The world changed so much with each corner, it was like switching channels. Harlem: hell-bent and bound for glory, minding its own business and moving on. They rolled up to a funeral home and parked the car.

  Esposito spotted a side door and rang the bell. A young man in a dark blue suit opened the door, his mortician’s poise momentarily broken by the unlikely sight. Now that Malcolm was cleaned up, the detectives could have been mistaken for his bodyguards instead of his captors.

  “We’re here for the Coles—Miz Cole and Milton.”

  “I’m sorry, but I believe her viewing is scheduled for tomorrow.”

  “We’re here for a private viewing. I’m Detective Esposito, and this is Malcolm Cole. I called early this morning. I spoke with Mr. Pendleton.”

  It occurred to Nick that the side trip to Stuyvesant Town had been necessary to waste an hour, as much as it had been for sex or showers. Things did have a way of working out for Esposito, or maybe he had a knack for taking advantage of them. The young man appeared to appreciate the situation and nodded, opening the door.

  “I see. Come in, and let me find out what arrangements have been made.”

  Inside, they waited as the man disappeared into an office down the hall. When he returned, he led them in the opposite direction down the corridor to a modest room, and ushered them inside.

  “The public viewing will be in a larger venue,” he said, an apologetic note in his voice. The room was a mix of the once-deluxe and the office functional, red velvet and black leather below, fluorescent lights and acoustic tile above. “I could show it to you, if you have time.”

  “That’s all right,” said Esposito. “We appreciate it.”

  The man shut the door as he left. Esposito took the cuffs off Malcolm. Nick scanned the room to make sure there were no other exits, and then stepped back, leaving Malcolm to say his goodbyes.

  There were two coffins, both dark wood, one half-open, which showed Miz Cole in a bright patterned dress of blue and yellow checks. Her hands were clasped piously, resting high on the breast, and here the pose seemed real, seemed right, and not model number three from the undertaker’s handbook. A poster of Milton was set on an easel beside his closed coffin, a blowup of a school photo. Malcolm stood, his head hanging down. A minute passed, and another, and Nick heard him mutter something, maybe a prayer. He seemed to have little to say, but he was unwilling to go. Nick turned away, and his eyes came upon a large gilt-framed Last Supper on the wall. Who painted that, Leonardo da Vinci? Nick looked closer, scanning the faces, the twelve around the one. When he painted it, did his Jesus have such a big Afro? Did the prophet not say, Yea, shall ye not know him, by his funkadelic halo of hair?

  It was a kind of disease, Nick thought, the sudden laughter that overtook him sometimes. The susceptibility struck him after long exhaustion, like the flu, and when you looked back after a good night’s sleep at what had been so hysterical, it was as funny as a foreign cartoon. I guess … I get it. Nick had seen black Christs before, and though they had seemed odd at first, he realized they were no more fantastic than blond ones. This should have been no different, really. Really. Jesus at the center, surrounded by … his point guards and power forwards. Nick coughed to cover up the laugh that seized him like a hiccup, and then he lowered his head, as Malcolm and Esposito turned to look. Nick rubbed his brow. Esposito moved in, picking up a folding chair and setting it beside the coffin.

  “All right, Malcolm. If you wanna sit for a while, we wanna pay our respects, too.”

  Malcolm took the chair, and the detectives knelt at the rail, heads bowed, and Nick didn’t look over at Esposito, even though he knew Esposito was sneaking a peek at him. Nick had almost been caught, and he knew he would be, unless he played it straight all the way to the end. The words of the Hail Mary and the Our Father escaped him, scrambled like puzzle pieces dumped from the box. He counted backward from fifty, slowly, eyes shut tight. Malcolm might have taken the larger view and decided that they had not killed his mother. Still, there really was no good way to get around the sight of a cop laughing at his mother’s corpse.

  Yes, there was. Nick stood and rose, looked over the body, and shook his head. Nick went over to Malcolm and rested a hand on his shoulder, letting him see the redness in his eyes.

  “Sorry, Malcolm. My mother died, too. I have a tough time with this.”

  Malcolm looked up, seemingly touched. “S’arright.”

  Nick took a deep breath and walked to the back. Esposito got up and stood beside him, but Nick avoided eye contact. Malcolm walked over to the coffin. He leaned in and kissed his mother on the cheek. Whatever his regrets were, he seemed to leave them there as he turned around and approached the detectives, offering his hands to be re-cuffed.

  “All right, then. Let’s do it.”

  That was the deal—a chance to say goodbye, in exchange for a confession. Malcolm hadn’t known that the sole witness to the murder, the grocery clerk, had been hesitant with the identification, and had since returned to Yemen. Maybe he would have come back, and maybe he’d have been willing to look at a lineup, and maybe he would have picked him out; otherwise, Malcolm Cole had no idea how close he had been to freedom. And yet it wasn’t freedom, never would be, as long as he was on the run. Every knock at the door made the hair on your neck stand up; every tap on your shoulder felt like a hand at your throat. Malcolm was here to settle his accounts and move on. He was going to break his life in half like a wishbone, and hope the bigger part was not behind him.

  The ride downtown was somber. Malcolm looked out the window, his face brushing occasionally on the gla
ss. The detectives did not want to disturb him. When they arrived back at Central Booking, Esposito parked the car and led Malcolm out from the back like a chauffeur. Before they went back into the jail, with its skim milk and baloney sandwiches, its denials and excuses and indigestion, Malcolm looked over at Esposito, tipping up his chin—Wait. He had what Nick first thought was a plaintive look, but it began to shift—or Nick did—even before Malcolm spoke. It was weary but didn’t ask for pity or anything else. Malcolm was slightly taller than Esposito, and looking down to him, he spoke without ego and from strength.

  “This worked out with us, today. I did what I needed to do, said what you needed me to say. What’s done is done. I’m gonna pay and move on. Where we go from here, I don’t know—but this don’t got to be over, between us. I know a lot. I know about a lot more than just the thing I did, a lot worse. I wanna help myself. You interested?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How do I get ahold of you?”

  Esposito stuck a card into Malcolm’s pocket.

  “You call me. You need to sleep, to clear your head. If we’re gonna do this, you gotta be all in. Don’t even answer me now. Tell me tomorrow, the next day.”

  “Answer’s not gonna change. Everything else got to.”

  “I believe you,” said Esposito, as he took hold of Malcolm’s shoulder. “Tell me about Milton. Who killed your brother? Did someone want to kill him, or did they think it was you?”