Cold Day in Hell (26 page)

“Jesus Christ!” Already dropping the magazine, she rushed out of the frame. Her pale face filled my vision. “You shit. You big old goddamn son-of-a-bitch
shit
!”

There were tears on her cheeks. Her hand fumbled for something near my ear. I turned my head to see. A plastic button. Margo’s thumb was bloodless white on the button. A woman entered the room, a cartoon moving swiftly. A nurse. Breasts like soft mountains.

“What is it?”

“He’s awake.”

The nurse surged forward. I thought she was going to fall on top of me. “Hello, Mr. Malone.” She gave me a piano-keys smile to focus on as Margo bobbed on her horizon. The nurse held up an object in front of her nose. “What am I holding?”

I felt my eyes crossing as I focused on the object. It was a pen. Blue. Ballpoint. Paper Mate. Behind the nurse, Margo was scrutinizing me with her scowl.

“An elephant,” I said. My voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar.

The nurse blinked with confusion. “I’m holding an elephant?” She looked over at Margo, who was no longer scowling.

“He’s fine.”

I’D GONE UNDER the ice. Witnesses saw me hit (the one who called 911 said I hit headfirst, the other thought I landed on the small of my back), and for a short period of time, I had remained on its surface, motionless. When I finally did move, it wasn’t to prop myself up on my elbows and shake it off. Quite the opposite. Both witnesses agreed that it was my feet that went first. They slid down into the crack that my body had made when I’d landed. The widening crack. My feet lolled into the water, then, as if a voracious aquatic creature were reeling me in, I slid cleanly off the splintering ice and disappeared into the black water without a splash. Only a thin smear of blood on the ice gave any suggestion that I had been there at all.

The wound that Ratface and his kitchen knife had given my side required seven stitches. Fortunately, nothing vital had been pierced. Another set of stitches had been required to close up the nasty gash on the back of my head, where I’d hit the ice. This was where the doctors were placing concern. My head. They were worried about brain swelling, a concern that had prompted Margo to blurt, “God, that’s all we need.”

Perversely, the several minutes I had spent partially under the ice were to thank for my head injury not being quite as threatening as it otherwise might have been. The East River had performed first aid on me, the bracing water freezing the swelling in its tracks. However, it had also taken the opportunity to fill my lungs with a gallon or so of its chilly swill. But that was the least of my problems. Mainly, it was the concussion that preoccupied the doctors. I was given a list of symptoms I needed to be on the lookout for. Trouble remembering things, disorientation, difficulty making decisions, headaches, irritability.

My doctor insisted that I remain in the hospital through the day and overnight for observation. I wanted to wrestle him on the matter, but he refused. My memory seemed to have holes in it. My mother and my half sister, Elizabeth, came by to see me, but I have no recollection of what we spoke about. Joe Gallo’s face appeared at my bedside, but when it vanished, so, too, did my memory of our conversation. I got calls from Peter Elliott and Michelle Poole and Megan Lamb, but General Margo refused to let me take them. Kelly Cole put in a call as well. Margo jotted her number on the back of one of my business cards and stuck it in my wallet for me.

“I don’t think you’re up for that kind of syntax right now.”

I felt remarkably better the next morning and was dressed and ready to go by the time the doctor came to check on me. He aimed a penlight in my eyes and had me follow his finger as he waved it like a symphony conductor; then he told me I was to rest, not drive a car, keep off alcohol for at least a week and also to refrain from sex. Margo was seated on the large windowsill, posing with her hands on her knees. “Thanks, Doc. You’re a pal.”

I lost the argument with Margo about staying at my place while I convalesced. Truth was, I put no real heart into my end of the argument. Neither Margo nor I had touched on the subject of our recent sword crossings. My injuries had forced a truce, and I was just as happy to keep the issue unspoken. Margo took me from the hospital to a tiny country-food-themed restaurant near Gramercy Park, where I ate a double helping of eggs and sausage and home fries. After breakfast, we went to Margo’s, where I picked up the phone, set it back down, then crawled onto the couch and slept until eight that night. Margo shoveled some pesto pasta into me. I showered, got into bed, made a lame pass at Margo when she joined me, then went out with the light.

I can’t say I felt like a million bucks in the morning. More like enough for a down payment on a small dump somewhere unpopular. But that would do. Margo dutifully retrieved a three-day-old copy of the
Post
that she’d been holding on to for me. “If your head was a hundred percent, you’d have asked for this already.”

She flipped the paper open to page five. There was a short article about my unscheduled trip into the East River. Accompanying the article was a police sketch of my alleged attacker. If he looked like anyone, he looked like Thurman Munson, the beloved Yankees catcher who was killed midseason in a plane crash a quarter century ago.

“This looks like Thurman Munson,” I said to Margo. “The guy who attacked me didn’t look like this.
You
look more like him than this does.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. You’re doing a fine job of patching things up.”

Margo had a meeting at ten o’clock. She made herself pretty, then climbed into a thick winter coat and a mighty fur hat. I told her, “You look good enough to tackle.”

“You’ll be careful,” she said, not even pretending to make a question of it. “I don’t do hospital visits twice in one week.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Lies,” she said, grabbing her keys. “All lies.”

After Margo left, I called my answering service. Among a dozen dumpable calls were ones from Kelly Cole (“I know a suffocated story when I hear one. I want to know what was going on. Call me.”) and Alan Ross. I dug Kelly’s number out of my wallet and tried it, but I hung up when I was delivered into Ms. Cole’s voice mail. I had better luck with Alan Ross.

“I read about your adventure in the paper,” the executive said after his secretary put me through. “How are you holding up?”

I gave him a brief status report. “The doctors are giving me another forty years minimum, so long as I play my cards right.”

Ross said that he would like to meet with me. “I have a business proposition to discuss.”

“When would you like to meet?”

“Today, if that’s possible. How does noon sound?”

Noon sounded fine. He gave me the midtown address of his office, and we hung up. I showered, careful to keep my various sets of stitches dry. Not exactly your fun-loving singing-in-the-rain kind of shower. On the checklist I’d gotten of possible concussion symptoms, I was feeling low-grade most of them. Especially the headache. Despite the siren song of the couch, I pulled on a thick Irish sweater, double-wrapped a scarf under my chin, shrugged into my bomber jacket and gingerly tugged a watch cap over my battered skull. A bastard wind hit me full force in the face as I exited Margo’s building. Across the street, Robin Burrell’s Christmas tree was gone from the bay window. The final witness shunted off.

MEGAN LAMB CAME OUT to the front desk to meet me. She looked as if she’d gone a few rounds in the ring with a determined kangaroo. If there weren’t exactly bags under her eyes, it was close. She saw me noticing. “Crappy night.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I don’t sleep much. But hey, you’re not looking so bad, considering. Word was you were half dead.”

“Half alive. It’s all a matter of viewpoint.”

“I understand you took a knife.”

I gave my kidney a light pat. “Came in through the side door. I was stupid, he was lucky. Won’t happen again. Trust me.”

I followed her down a corridor to a roomful of desks. Megan’s was in a corner. She dropped into the chair behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. Her phone rang and she took the call. The desk was a mess of papers and folders. The way they were spread clear across the large desk, it looked as if Megan had slept here overnight. There was a framed photograph of an attractive brunette posing next to a table piled high with summer produce. I angled it for a better look. I recognized the spot. The farmer’s market at Union Square. I also recognized the woman.

Megan ended her call. She followed my gaze. “That’s Helen.”

“I know.”

She picked up the photo and looked at it. “Her acupuncturist used to prescribe a visit to the farmer’s market every weekend. He had a whole energy theory going. The harvest. Locally grown foods. He said that just walking through the market was therapeutic. I could never quite catch it all. Kidney energy. I kept hearing about Helen’s kidney energy, whatever the hell that was.” She set the picture back down. “She swore by him. If he’d wanted to put his damn needles in her eyes, she’d have let him. He had her on this thing for a while where she stuck these fuses to the bottom of her feet and then I lit them for her. Some kind of heat acupuncture. Don’t tell me it sounds crazy, I already know. But guess what? Helen was the healthiest person you’d ever want to know, so what can I say? Every Saturday, religiously, off to Union Square to talk with her tomatoes.”

She picked up a pen and tapped it thoughtfully against the picture frame, then tossed the pen on the desk. “You make sense of it. Helen taught sixth-graders how to read and write while I run around for a living with a gun on my hip. But which one of us is still here to tell the story? When I think of how that woman used to worry herself sick over me. That’s a real laugh, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a laugh. It’s normal,” I said. “Margo would be quite happy if I sold paper clips for a living.”

“Well, look at you, fished out of the East River. She might be right. I don’t know, sometimes I think people who do what we do for a living don’t have any business getting ourselves involved with civilians. Helen was all about cute and stupid things the kids did at school that day, while I’m sitting there sucking in exit wounds and bloated floaters. ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, fine, you know, just another romp through mankind’s butcheries.’”

“My old man used to describe his job as toxic.”

“Your old man was right. That’s exactly how I feel sometimes—like I’m slowly being poisoned. And it’s not only the victims but the nut monkeys out there, the ones who are doing this shit. You get to thinking the human race in general is toxic. You’ve got your crazy butchers, you’ve got your perfectly normal-seeming butchers. Kids shooting other kids.
Parents
killing their own kids, for Christ’s sake. Helen wanted us to adopt a baby. She loved the idea of raising a child. Jesus. In
this
world? I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”

“Hell of a responsibility.”

“Forget it. I used to think how unfair it’d be to Helen, we adopt a kid then I get killed on the job and leave her to raise the kid on her own. Look what happened instead.” She laughed. It wasn’t a particularly joyful laugh. “If some poor kid had to count on me these days, God help her. Or him. They’d go back to the agency and demand a new placement.”

“Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.”

Megan looked at me a moment without speaking. “That’s exactly what my shrink says. I’ll tell you what I tell her: sure, I’m hard on myself, but there’s no way in hell I’m
too
hard on myself. I deserve all the crap I throw at myself.”

“I’ll bet your shrink doesn’t agree with that.”

“That’s an easy bet to win. Anyway.” She flipped open one of the folders on her desk. It contained the police sketch of my attacker.

“That’s not him,” I said. “I don’t know where you got it, but it’s no good.”

“Michelle Poole worked with our sketcher on this.”

“It’s no good.”

“I had a feeling. The girl didn’t seem very sure of herself.” Megan picked up the sketch and studied it.

“Thurman Munson,” I said.

“Thurman what?”

“Former Yankees catcher.”

“That’s who threw you into the river?”

“That’s who the sketch looks like. But like I said, the sketch is no good. The guy this sketch doesn’t look like was stalking Michelle Poole. I guess she told you that. I saw him that day. At the Quaker meeting.”

“Could be he was first stalking Robin.”

“I was hoping to get a chance to ask him that question, but he decided to show me how fast he could run.”

“I guess he didn’t run fast enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“You caught up to him.”

“Right. Lucky me.”

“So, are you up to a session with a sketcher?” She picked up the phone and put in a call. She covered the mouthpiece. “Twenty minutes. Can you wait?”

“I’m in no hurry.”

She told the person on the phone that twenty minutes was fine, then she hung up. I asked her for some of that fine NYPD coffee, and she fetched me a cup. I discarded a couple of easy jabs about the burnt mud. Megan told me that she had spoken with Edward Anger from the Quaker meeting and that he was in the clear. Out-of-town alibi for the evening Robin was murdered. She also told me that Allison Jennings had given Gallo the same two names I’d gotten her to cough up. They’d both cleared as well.

“I wasn’t real keen on those two anyway,” I said. “Though it wouldn’t have been the first time that a long shot came in. But Anger. I guess I was holding out some hope for him. Sometimes the excessively gentle ones—well, you know.”

“A name like that was too good. But the alibi’s fine. Anger’s out.”

“So what do you think, Megan? I mean about Riddick and Robin. Are they copycat jobs, or is it possible that Fox was innocent all along?”

She was shaking her head before I’d even finished the question. “It’s him. The case is too strong. We got the fibers from Nikki’s plaid skirt off of Fox’s scissors. That was huge.”

“You never recovered the skirt itself.”