The Sniper's Wife

Chapter 17

The subway dropped Willy Kunkle off at the Essex Street station, just shy of where Delancey begins ramping up to meet the Williamsburg Bridge on its leap across the East River. It's an impressive view and a true monument to engineering, especially superimposed over the Lower East Side backdrop. It's also a visual testament to the cars-over-people mentality born in the twentieth century's first half, when the already downtrodden, roughand-tumble neighborhood was furrowed up to make room for what, even at the time, was deemed a remarkably ugly bridge. It made of the whole area a fractious orchestra of brick and steel, poverty and history, mixed in with the bridge's contradictory, even incongruous promise of a way out. It had forever been a picture Willy could appreciate.

He continued walking toward the river on the northern sidewalk, intending to cut under the bridge at Ridge Street to the precinct house below. But the route had an extra benefit, offering up yet another telling symbol of the neighborhood-one reflecting the locals' ability to rally against the sheer weight of the city around them. It was an enclosed chicken ranch, complete with wire racks jammed with hundreds of red hens strutting around and pecking out of feed trays, all tucked behind the broad plate-glass windows of an otherwise conventional store. Willy pondered an ad that might accompany such counterintuitive offerings: "Manhatten Free-Range Chickens." This was definitely a town for the innovative.

It was dark by now, and Willy paused in the shadows under the bridge to look at the redbrick station house and consider his actions one last time. He and Riley Cox had wasted hours fruitlessly chasing down a match for the name Carlos Barzun had given him: Ron Cashman. They'd even tried calling every Cashman in the phone book. But in a town of so many millions, a good many of whom were less than eager to be located, they hadn't held out much hope. And along those lines, they hadn't been disappointed.

Willy's working out in the cold had just hit its first distinct disadvantage. He didn't have the resources, the equipment, or the manpower to conduct a search like the one he needed done.

The challenge, therefore, was to locate Ron Cashman using police help without losing control of the case, something his recent incarceration and attending mistrust was going to make that much more difficult.

Which is why he'd phoned Ogden a half hour ago.

He broke cover and headed for the Seventh, vowing to make it up as he went along, and hoping to get lucky.

As soon as he entered the detective bureau upstairs, he knew this might be more difficult then he'd thought- certainly more complicated. Both Joe Gunther and Sammie Martens were clustered around Ward Ogden's desk, drinking cups of sacrosanct coffee.

"Hey, Willy," Gunther said affably enough.

"Hey, yourself," he answered, watching Sammie.

Sammie merely looked at him, her expression closed.

"Pull up a chair, Mr. Kunkle," Ogden suggested, "and let's compare notes."

Willy instead parked one hip on the edge of an adjacent desk, so he was sitting with a slight height advantage over them all. "I doubt I have much to offer," he said, "seeing that I've spent most of my time in town behind bars." He suddenly gave his two colleagues closer scrutiny. "Why are you two still here, anyway?"

"I called the boss," Gunther explained. "Sam had vacation time coming, and I told him I was taking emergency grief leave-death in the family with complications. Not too far off."

"And he bought that?"

"I told him the death was the result of a murder."

In the sudden stillness, Willy heard the background clatter of a couple of old-fashioned typewriters and the ceaseless ringing of the phones slowly yield to a buzzing in his ears.

"Is that true?" he asked, his own words sounding distant.

"You surprised?" Gunther inquired doubtfully.

Willy felt a numbness spread throughout his body. Despite his dogged efforts of the past few days and his own nagging doubts verging on conviction, he suddenly realized that he'd still been holding out hope that Mary had perhaps died simply of the despair for which he so pointedly took responsibility. To think that she'd also been murdered compounded his loss, and, as unreasonable as he knew it to be, made him feel somehow doubly responsible for her death.

"I suspected as much," he said quietly, settling into the chair beside him. "I just wasn't a hundred percent sure."

"What made you suspicious?" Ogden asked, obviously keen to know anything he might have missed.

"I don't know," Willy answered vaguely. "It felt wrong. She'd been happy, planning ahead-looking to go back to school. And there were things at her apartment- a missing date book, no address book. She always had those, and they weren't in your file."

He was finding it helpful to talk. "You also have three letters. That may be all there was, but she used to be a pack rat with those, and the birth control pills and her girlfriend both told me she had men in her life. I got the feeling someone had sanitized things, probably one of them."

"Was the girlfriend Louisa Obregon?"

"Yeah. The Re-Coop director gave me her name."

"And she told you about Mary wanting to go to school?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Ogden chose his words carefully, still unsure of Willy's trustworthiness. "We heard she might've visited the CCNY campus in Harlem."

Willy shrugged. "Maybe. Obregon didn't say." The proximity of that campus to La Culebra's neighborhood wasn't lost on him. But he, like Ogden, was keeping his own counsel for the moment.

A couple of detectives entered the squad room, laughing. Ogden rose without fanfare and quietly suggested the four of them retreat to their familiar, more private lair.

Once the door was closed behind them, and they'd settled into new seats, Joe Gunther commented to Willy, "Obregon mentioned you'd asked her about the ReCoop-how it's run, funded, who's behind it. What made you so curious? You smell something there?"

Willy answered truthfully. "Not particularly. It just seemed pretty ritzy to me, given where it is, and I was surprised Mary could just walk in off the street and get in. Most of these places have waiting lists a mile long. Made me wonder, is all. I never checked it out."

He was by now fully recovered from his earlier shock, and returned to the topic that had stimulated it, asking the New York detective, "Since we're playing twenty questions, why're you so convinced she was murdered, 'specially after you almost shelved the case?"

It hadn't been diplomatically worded, but Ogden apparently had Joe Gunther's talent for forbearance. "Thank your fearless leader. He saw what we missed."

For the next twenty minutes, Ogden and Gunther briefed Willy on their theories, with Gunther going beyond the dinosaur's reluctance and telling Willy exactly what they were investigating. Gunther knew as Ogden didn't the extent of his renegade colleague's abilities and dedication, but he was also fully aware that had it not been for Ogden's status and the fact that they'd hit it off, none of the Vermont team would have stayed in this building, much less become an integral part of the investigation.

Willy, for his part, didn't press for details. In fact, he was more interested in extracting information they wouldn't know anything about.

"So basically," he said once he'd been brought up to date, "you're crunching numbers and pounding the pavement, hoping to get lucky."

"You know how it goes," Gunther agreed, having noticed that Sammie Martens hadn't said a word so far.

"Sure," Willy conceded, and played the card he'd arrived with. "Then maybe you should add the name Ron Cashman to the list. I heard he might know something, and I can't get a location on him."

Both old-timers studied him carefully. "What's his story?" Gunther asked.

Willy looked nonchalant, willing to share information, within limits. "I was chasing down the drug angle-Diablo?"

Ogden nodded. "Right, the uptown stuff. What'd you find out?"

"Nothing. My options were to poke around generally or ask the manufacturer directly if he knew Mary. The last approach seemed a little suicidal."

"That's what we were thinking earlier," Ogden admitted. "Did you find out who makes it?"

Willy feigned surprise. "You don't know that? I only heard the street name, La Culebra. Cashman's name came up as someone who'd done business with him from this part of the city. I thought it was both unusual and an interesting coincidence."

Ogden nodded and wrote the name down in his notepad.

Willy was suddenly struck by a thought. "Add Nathan Lee to that list, too, would you?"

"Why?"

Here he felt freer to be honest. "He's a friend of mine. Been helping me out-in fact, he was the one I was with in that bar-but he disappeared. I've been looking all over for him. I'm worried he got into a jam. I checked his apartment, his friends. He's vanished. Black guy, midsixties-maybe older-small and wiry."

Ogden watched him carefully. "What kind of business is he in?"

"Hustling. Nothing big time. He makes ends meet. I met him when I was on the beat and cut him some slack. He never forgot it."

Ogden got to his feet. "Let me add these to Jim's list. He's already staring at a computer. I'll be right back."

He left the room. There was an uncomfortable silence before Gunther rose, too, and said, "I gotta go to the bathroom," and followed Ogden's example.

After he'd left, the silence remained. Willy stared at his shoes. Sammie stared at him.

"How've you been?" she finally asked.

He spoke to his toes. "Okay."

Her cheeks flushed. "I'm not asking about your health."

His jaw clenched. He'd been dreading this ever since Gunther told him she'd come along. "I'm trying to set things right," he said.

"I know that. How's it going?"

Something in her voice made him look up. It was the strength he heard-familiar, natural, welcome. In his own emotional gyrations, he'd begun to blend his memories of Mary with those of Sammie, making the latter weaker and less reliable than she was. Sammie was high-strung, and he knew that he'd occasionally put her through the wringer, but she wasn't Mary. She'd be someone who would throw him out when the time came, not run to get away from him. And she certainly wouldn't seek out male companionship for security or drugs for escape. Sammie was a fighter-passionate and emotional, definitely, but tough as nails when it counted.

The way she'd just voiced that short sentence reminded him of that, and helped reestablish one of the few tethers he had to a world he felt he was only orbiting at the moment.

"Pretty shitty right now," he admitted.

"Nathan Lee?" she asked.

His face registered his surprise.

She smiled, which came as a relief. "The sphinx you're not-not with me, anyhow."

He sighed in concession. "I hadn't thought about him in years. Only did now because I needed his help. I saw it as calling in a marker, but he treated me like a friend. And now I think maybe I got him killed, like I've been doing all my life."

Sammie cupped her cheek in her hand and studied him. "Your whole adult life you've been either a soldier or a cop, same as me… except you're a whole lot older."

"Hey," he said, smiling despite himself.

"And you've been in combat," she continued. "What did you expect? That your friends wouldn't get banged up or killed? It's a dangerous life."

He frowned at the seeming banality of the comment until she added, "You should ask yourself why you chose those lines of work."

That stopped him. He actually never had, and only now wondered why not. He shared a contempt for selfanalysis that many did who needed it most, using those who overindulged in it as the reason why. Except that now, in a virtual flash, he saw that his might have been like an anorexic's view of a glutton, with no acknowledgment that the majority of humans inhabit neither extreme.

But this was a passing thought only. Willy wasn't given to clarifying epiphanies, and he answered Sammie instead with a defensive, "You saying I like this? That I do it on purpose?"

She didn't back down. "That's for you to find out, Willy. And while you're at it, ask yourself why you shut out the people who aren't likely to get killed, like your mother, or Bob, or your friends."

Willy stood up angrily, making his chair skitter across the floor. "Speaking of mothers, who elected you, all of a sudden?"

But he stopped his ineffective outburst almost as quickly as he'd started it, stalled by her simply rolling her eyes. For a moment he just stood there, breathing hard, his face red, fighting for some of the dignity she seemed to possess without effort. It was a side of her he hadn't seen in a long time, and the fact that it had resurfaced told him something he couldn't yet clearly define.

The door opened and Ward Ogden stopped on the threshold, his eyes moving between the two of them. "Everything okay in here?"

Willy retrieved his chair and sat back down. "Yeah."

Sammie let out a silent breath of air. Her show of strength notwithstanding, her heart had been pounding all through that last exchange. She was sick and tired of feeling anxious and manipulated. All it did was remind her of her poor history with men. Except that this one, she believed fundamentally, was not to be grouped with any of those preceding him. While still probably one of the worst choices for a lifelong companion, Willy had stamina and courage and a strong sense of righteousness, and the potential of being someone extraordinary, if he could beat back his own personal Mr. Hyde.

The trick for her was to figure out how to disconnect his fate from her own self-regard, and it was there, just lately, that she felt she'd been making inroads.

She had no idea if this was actually true, of course, but it made her feel better about herself, and for the moment that was enough.

Slightly warily, Ogden stepped farther into the room and placed a photograph on the table. Gunther was watching from the doorway.

"That the guy you were looking for?" Ogden asked gently.

Willy gazed down onto the obviously lifeless face of Nate Lee. "What happened to him?"

"He was found under the 145th Street Bridge, dressed like a bum. The assumption was he'd fallen and hit his head. He had no ID, nobody in the area knew who he was, so they declared him an accidental and took him to the potter's field on Hart Island yesterday. We're lucky they started photographing these folks a while back and cataloguing where they're buried. We can have him exhumed first thing tomorrow morning."

Willy pursed his lips, drawing connections in his head. "Anything on the other one-Ron Cashman?"

"No, sorry. We only came up with this 'cause of a habit of mine. Anytime somebody living hand-to-mouth goes missing, even if he fancies himself an independent businessman, as I'm sure Mr. Lee did, I check the Hart Island index. I figured this was him. They've only had four this past week, and he was the only one fitting the description."

Willy nodded. "Well, I appreciate it."

Ogden checked his watch. "It's getting late. I got a couple of people keeping the search engines running on some of our inquiries. I suggest we get a good night's sleep and meet at Bellevue after they bring the body back from Hart Island."

"I'd like to be with him," Willy said softly.

Ogden gave him a surprised look, but instantly grasped his meaning. "At the exhumation?"

Willy simply nodded, not making eye contact.

Ogden immediately defused any possible debate. "Sure. We'll all go-make it a field trip. It's a beautiful spot. How 'bout the dock on City Island at eight A.M.? You need directions?"

"I know where it is," Willy said, turning to Gunther and Sammie. "Where're you two staying? I'll pick you up."

Joe gave him the name and address of an inexpensive hotel, followed by, "You want to have dinner together?"

But predictably he shook his head. "No. I better pay somebody a visit I haven't seen in a while." He smiled sadly at Sammie and added, "Maybe make amends. I'll see you seven-forty-five." It wasn't all that late when Willy reached Washington Heights by subway and began walking toward the street where he'd spent his entire youth. If she was keeping to her old habits, which he had no reason to doubt, his mother would be lost in whatever television was beaming out after suppertime, and would probably stay there until eleven. She'd always been a night owl.

He wasn't making this journey with any great conviction, or holding out much hope. In fact, he wasn't sure he fully understood his own motives, aside from the fact that Sammie had indirectly made him feel he should make some sort of gesture-that and Nate's death being confirmed right afterward. Sammie's comment about his abandoning people who didn't do him the service of either abandoning him or dying first had struck a chord. Despite all that had befallen him, Willy had never seen himself as one of life's victims. However insensitive, clumsy, and even brutal his ways of fighting back, he had never considered quitting. So, while the cynical pessimist in him was gearing up for a disappointment, he was nevertheless going to show Sammie that he was at least sometimes capable of making the first move.

As he approached its perimeter, the old neighborhood seemed to echo similar contradictions to the ones he was struggling with. The buildings and streets were familiar, the roll of the terrain underfoot like an old and comforting home movie, but the foreground of language, people, and general spirit was utterly foreign, as if the old hometown had been completely taken over by a busload of tourists.

Gone were the sausage shops and beer parlors and the guttural shouts of angry hausfraus yelling at children running in the streets. Gone, too, were the synagogues and kosher delis and serious men all dressed in black that had been as much part of the landscape as trees were to Vermont. The Irish Catholics, whose presence here had wobbled between the entertaining and the threatening, depending on who you were and what the alcohol intake had been that evening, were also just figments of memory. Now, nearly everywhere he looked, Willy saw a world almost completely become Hispanic.

As a result, he noticed with some amusement, the old stomping grounds had been blessed with a lot more life and color. He knew the area had suffered hard times, including violence, drugs, and civil unrest, but there was also an exuberance now that he didn't recall from before. The music spilling into the streets, the effervescence of the neon store lights, even the swagger of the people loitering on the sidewalks, laughing, catcalling, and having a good time after work, were all things he wished had been there when he'd been young. Admittedly tainted by retrospection, his memories were of a dour place of Germanic discipline and disappointment, and of traditions he'd longed to escape.

He continued walking up St. Nicholas Avenue, to where Washington Heights becomes Fort George. Here were the remnants of his youthful experience, surviving like an outpost on foreign soil, and sure enough, the old familiar restlessness began welling up inside him like an instinct.

He turned the corner onto 187th Street, now just a few blocks away from his mother's apartment, the smell of some familiar German meal drifting by on the cool night air, when he heard a tired, slightly querulous voice say behind him, "Hey, mister, gimme a buck?"

The question wasn't directed at Willy. He was already too far past the spot for that to be the case. It was also nothing he hadn't heard before, especially given the streets he'd been walking recently. But there was something about the plea that made him turn around. Later, he thought it might have been the utter silence following the request, instead of the usual muttered evasion. But whatever the cause, when he looked back, he saw not the bum propped up against the wall, but the man who'd stirred him to speak.

And as soon as he saw him, a tall, angular man with a large, flesh-colored bandage incongruously plastered across the bridge of his nose, Willy knew he was looking at someone wishing him harm.

He didn't hesitate, as an innocent might have. Nor did he wait for this perceived threat to announce itself, as cops are trained to do. He simply reached under his coat and pulled out his gun.

The other man reacted with equal instinctiveness. Producing his own weapon, he ducked and sidestepped, dropping behind the bum, using him as a barrier behind which to draw a bead. Willy fired once at a spot just beside them to make his pursuer tuck in, and then made for the nearest alley at a dead run, his eyes still smarting from the brightness of the muzzle flash.

The ploy worked. The one return round sang harmlessly by like a wasp on adrenaline.

Willy ran down the alley to where an oversized metal Dumpster lay as large as a sleeping buffalo. He swung around behind it, using its bulk as a shield and its side to steady his arm, but even as he waited for his follower's shadow to fill the opening of the alleyway, he knew it was over as quickly as it had begun.

As if in confirmation, the bum's thin voice drifted down to meet him. "Help, police. Somebody call the cops. There's shootin' goin' on."

Willy straightened, pocketed his gun, and returned to the street, cautiously peering around the corner. The bum was on all fours, crawling around, uselessly wailing and trying to collect his scattered belongings. The rest of the block was empty, but he could already hear the sounds of startled voices asking one another if they'd heard what they thought they had.

Willy continued in the direction he'd been headed, his casual pace belying his vigilance.

But the family reunion wouldn't happen tonight. He was not going home. He was confident he hadn't been followed here. He'd been keeping an eye out instinctively. Which meant the shooter had known of his mother's address, and had selected it as the perfect site for an ambush, and the perfect way to make Willy Kunkle join Nate Lee in the hereafter.

For Willy was pretty sure he'd just met Ron Cashman.