Red Cat

27

Pitt Street runs through the heart of the Lower East Side, several miles south of where my brother lives, and usually a world awaythough not that Tuesday morning. That morning, David’s world had collapsed to the size of the narrow, windowless room where we sat and waited and watched a clock tick to ten. The Seventh Precinct station house is a new building, but the beige walls around us seemed a hundred years old, and the thick air older still. We were on one side of a metal table, Mike and I, and David in between. He was silent and motionless, and he had the blasted look of a man who’s recently survived a terrible storm. Except the storm was just beginning, and survival was very much an open question.

In David’s apartment, the dance had been all cordiality and caution, everyone polite and all the threats implicit. The two detectives sent to fetch him, Russo and Conlon, were large and tired-looking and almost bored with the proceedings. They’d been happy to wait until Mike and I arrived before talking to David, and they’d never uttered the word “arrest” or “suspect,” never even hinted at them. They kept their explanations of why they’d come vague- something about help with an investigation, a Jane Doe they’d been trying to identify for over a week- and they acted as if a summons to a police station was an unremarkable thing, a bureaucratic nuisance no more important than an expired dog license.

It was only when Mike tested the waters of resistance, suggesting that David appear tomorrow instead, that they’d stirred. And then, without a word spoken- with only glances, furrowed brows, small coughs, and the shifting of feet- David’s situation was plain. We’ve come, so early in the morning, for you. And so we went.

In the station house, the politesse thinned further, and in the way cops do- in the way that I used to do- they made us wait. Because waiting works. Worry turns into paranoid fantasy and a case of the sweats, stomach cramps turn into an urgent need to crap, and pretty soon out bursts full-blown terror. It was working on David- I could see it in the pallor and in the moist sheen on his forehead, and I could hear it in the rumblings of his gut- and nothing Mike or I said seemed to help. I wasn’t sure how much was even getting through.

Mike squeezed David’s shoulder and smiled, relaxed, imperturbable, and entirely confident. “We’re going home soon,” he said. I was hoping he was right when the door opened and a new cast of characters walked in. There were three of them, a man and two women.

The detectives were Leo McCue and Tina Vines, and they made an odd couple. McCue was about fifty and medium height, with a jutting belly and sagging smudges beneath his spaniel eyes. His mustache, like his hair, was bulky and mostly gray, and his fingers were thick and ragged-nailed. Vines was thirty, tall and precise and with the concave cheeks and restless look of an exercise junkie. Her blond hair was cut short, and her blue eyes were quick and unconvinced of anything. She wore her sleeves rolled, and there was a lot of muscle definition in her forearms.

The ADA was Rita Flores. She was small and rounded and forty, with glossy black hair cut to her shoulders, a full, pretty face, and nearly black eyes. Her suit was blue and careful, her shoes were flat, and it was easy to imagine the kindergarten art on her office wall, and the minivan in her garage- easy to cast her as the reliable car-pooler or the genial soccer mom. Which would have been a bad mistake. She introduced herself and I saw Mike’s jaw tighten.

McCue and Vines sat across from us, and Rita Flores took a chair near the door. Vines had a laptop, and she switched it on. McCue smiled and made some noises about everything being informal and thanks for coming down. No one believed a word of it. Vines tapped away at something, and Flores stared at David. McCue went on.

“The autopsy says that, besides being shot in the face, our Jane Doe was beat up pretty bad before she died- probably a few days before, maybe a little longer. And then she was in the water five days so, all in all, she was a mess.” He paused to look at us, his gaze lingering on David. Then he continued.

“We pulled prints from her apartment and matched them to Jane Doe’s. We pulled DNA too- from a hairbrush- and we’re pretty sure that’ll confirm the print match. So we know our Jane is Holly Cade.” He paused again, waiting for a question, daring us to ask. Jane Doe? Holly who?

Mike smiled affably and offered a different query. “Then you don’t need Mr. March’s help with identification?”

McCue smiled back. “Not with that, but with a few other things,” he said, and he looked at Vines.

“Can you tell us something about this?” Vines asked, and she turned the laptop screen toward us and tapped a key. The laptop whirred and a video started playing, dim, but not too dim to see. David and Holly, in the hotel room and with no digital masking. “We hoped you could confirm that that’s Holly’s pussy you’re eating.”

“Jesus Christ,” David breathed.

Mike put a hand on his arm. “Really, Ms. Flores…” he said.

From across the room, Flores raised her hands in a helpless shrug. These crazy cops. What can you do? The smile on her face was less than sympathetic.

McCue tapped a thick finger on the screen. “You see that, on her leg, near your face? To me, that looks like a happy red cat, but Tina disagrees. Maybe you can resolve it for us, Mr. March: was there a happy cat on that leg, or were you too busy to notice? And while you’re at it, maybe you can explain what your relationship with Holly was- besides the pussy-eating, I mean- and why the fuck you didn’t come forward and identify her for us?”

After which, there were theatrics. Mike was shocked and offended: “deliberately embarrassing”…“unnecessary”…“abusive”…“my client is here voluntarily.” He slapped the table. McCue and Vines played bad cop and worse cop, respectively: “no sense of responsibility”…“something to hide”…“bullshit.” They pointed and sneered, and Rita Flores said little but somehow assumed the mien of Darth Vader. Only David and I were silent- I because I had nothing to say, and David because he was, for the moment, incapable of speech. He stared at the screen and his face was paper white. I reached over and turned the laptop around, away from him. Rita Flores watched me with glittering eyes.

When Mike felt he’d defended his turf sufficiently, he cleared his throat and became all affability and reason again. “As it turned out, detectives, you preempted our call to you by just a few hours. We were waiting for Mr. March- the other Mr. March- to complete his report.”

McCue and Vines spoke together, in a torrent of disbelief, but Flores interrupted them. “By all means, counselor, I’d love to hear what you and the other Mr. March have to say.”

And Mike told the story- of David’s brief and limited relationship with Cassandra, of the phone calls and threats, of his intent to pursue legal action against her if necessary, of him hiring me and me finding Holly, and of reading in the papers about the Williamsburg Mermaid.

“My client was shocked by the news, and upset and frightened tooand the direction of your investigation would seem to bear out his fears. So we elected to wait a few days before contacting the police, and in that time to do what we could to identify other reasonable avenues that an investigation might pursue. As John’s report makes clear, there are several.”

He was good at the telling, better than good, and he made the sequence of events- the reasoning, the decisions, and the actions taken- seem entirely logical, if not inevitable. But despite Mike’s delivery, the story itself remained a tough sell. He knew it, and so did Rita Flores and the cops.

Flores smiled ruefully. “I’ve got to get you in front of my law students, counselor, because that was frigging great. Really, you live up to your reputation. But the sad fact is, after all the magic words, it’s still just a sow’s ear. It’s still Holly Cade blackmailing your client, him hiring a PI- his own brother, no less- to find her, and her turning up dead. It’s still him with motive and opportunity.”

“Are you saying that you consider my client a suspect, Ms. Flores?”

She waved a hand. “This is still just a friendly chat, counselor, and I’m still waiting to hear from your investigator.” There was only a little irony in how she said it. Mike turned to me, and so did everyone else.

“It was a dangerous life,” I said, and I walked them through my investigation, and all that I’d learned about Holly’s anonymous, often extreme, sexual encounters, the secret recordings, the pressure she exerted on her partners, the interrogation sessions, the abusive former boyfriend, the current one who was a violent ex-con, and the possibility that someone had been using her videos for blackmail. I could tell by the glances they exchanged and the notes they took that much of it was news. Rita Flores looked at me again and I felt the weight of her dark eyes.

McCue sighed dramatically and shook his head. “I’ve heard shit about you, and none of it good, but nobody said you were stupid enough for this- jumping into an active investigation with both feet…” He shook his head some more. “We know you talked to the neighbor, and to the sister in Connecticut, but I want a list of everybody else: names, addresses, phone numbers, everything. We need to figure out how bad you fucked things up.”

“I know my business, McCue- I documented everything, and nothing was fucked up.”

“Right.” Vines snorted. “The fact that you’d mess with an open case tells me you don’t know shit. I can only imagine how many witnesses you screwed with.”

I took a deep breath. “Check my notes, talk to the people I talked to. I didn’t screw with any of them. I didn’t lead, coax, or coach anyone.”

Vines ignored me. “And God knows what you did to the evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” I snapped, and Mike cleared his throat. “I was nowhere near any physical evidence.”

“No?” McCue asked. “What about when you tossed Holly’s apartment?”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t me,” I said.

Mike coughed again and looked at Flores. “As John said, we’re happy to share information-” Vines snorted. Mike ignored her. “And it seems we’ve developed some that you haven’t come across yet.”

“It’s not so hard when you know who the vic is,” Vines said.

Mike looked at Flores. “I realize there’s a lot to think about in what John had to say.”

“A lot of speculation,” McCue said, “a lot of guesswork.”

Mike continued. “A lot of reasonable doubt to look into, and we’re pleased to help in any way we can. But we could be more helpful if we knew a little more about the state of the investigation.”

McCue’s eyebrows leapt to his hairline. “You have some nerve, asking-” Flores cut him off.

“We’re all playing our cards close, counselor, and I guess that’s only natural at this point.” She looked at McCue. “On the other hand, Leo, I don’t think there’s harm in a little sharing- provided Mr. Metz is willing to do the same.”

Mike nodded. “Within reason.”

Vines glared and McCue’s jaw tightened. “What do you want to know?” he rumbled.

“The video you showed us- where did you get it?”

McCue looked at Flores, who nodded. “We got a DVD in the mail. The footage was on it, and so was a shot of March’s driver’s license.”

“You know where it came from?”

McCue shook his head. “The envelope was postmarked Manhattan, but it had Holly’s return address on it.”

“Was there anything else inside,” Mike asked. “A note, perhaps?” McCue thought for a while, and shook his head.

“An anonymous tip,” I said. “That’s breathtaking police work.”

Vines nearly came out of her chair. “The fuck was that, asshole?”

“It didn’t strike you as a little convenient? Maybe even suspicious?”

“Which means we’re supposed to ignore it?” McCue’s face reddened. “That’d be fucking great police work.”

“Not ignore it,” Mike said, “but given what you know now, about someone using Holly’s videos for blackmail, I’d expect that you’d look at it a little differently.”

Vines sneered. “Differently how?”

I answered before Mike could. “You ever consider that maybe your DVD came from the blackmailer- who maybe had something to do with Holly’s death, and therefore has every reason to set my brother up to take the heat?”

Vines started to snap back, but Flores cut her off. “We’ll look at all of this, counselor, and very closely, I promise,” she said. Then she looked at David.

“And now, what about you, Mr. March? We’ve talked a lot about you today, but we haven’t actually heard you talk.”

Mike nodded at him, and David looked at Rita Flores. His voice, once he found it, was quiet but even. “Mike and John have laid out the facts, and I can’t add to them. But if you want to hear me say I had nothing to do with this woman’s death, then I’m saying it. I don’t know what happened to her, and I had nothing to do with what happened to her.” Flores nodded vaguely and McCue spoke.

“Do you own a gun, Mr. March?”

David didn’t flinch. “No.”

“Can you account for your time two weeks ago today, Mr. March?” he asked. And David walked them through that day. It was the same story he’d told me, and I knew they would see the same holes.

McCue made notes, and looked up at David. “And your wife can confirm that you were home all evening?” Something in his voice raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Yes,” David said.

“So she was with you the whole time?” McCue asked. Mike caught the bad vibe too and interrupted.

“I think Mr. March’s answer was clear,” he said, before David could answer.

McCue swapped looks with Vines and Flores, but went on to other things. “From what you- or your lawyer- said, it sounds like Holly’s telephone calls were mostly about wanting to see you again.” David nodded. “No other topics of conversation?”

David looked puzzled, and the bad vibe returned. “Only that one, and the…threats.”

McCue nodded. “So she never mentioned being pregnant?”

The silence afterward was expectant, just waiting to be filled by sounds of rending metal and breaking glass. David’s face went from white to gray, and his mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out. I put my hand on his back. Mike looked at Flores and tapped his finger on his chin. His face was blank and his voice was icy.

“You want to explain that?”

She shrugged. “ME said she was pregnant, though not by much- four weeks maybe.”

Mike’s brow twitched. “Four weeks. She might not have known herself.”

“It’s hard to ask her, though, so we’re asking your client.”

David took a noisy breath. “She never said anything like that.”

“Then would you mind giving us some DNA,” Flores asked, “to eliminate you as the father?”

Mike answered for him. “The question is whether he knew Holly was pregnant, and the answer to that is no. I think DNA is a little premature.”

“A conversation for another day, then,” Flores said. “But back to who knew what about Holly’s pregnancy…” Flores nodded at Vines, who tapped away on the laptop and turned the screen to face us.

A video played, and this time it was well lit, and the star was fully clothed. It was another hidden camera shot, skewed and looking up from roughly knee height. In the background there were windows covered by a metal gate, and in the foreground there was a woman. She had dark, wiry hair, and big eyes in a pale, pinched face. The sound quality was poor, but Stephanie’s words were distinct.

“Leave him alone, you fucking bitch. Leave my husband alone.”

A haughty laugh came from somewhere off camera, and I knew that it was Holly’s. From across the room, Rita Flores spoke to David. Through the rushing in my ears, her voice sounded much farther away.

“Where is your wife now, Mr. March?” she asked.