The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [37]
“Plus he’s hard to get a sympathetic jury for. He’s a big handsome guy, a sharp dresser, and you’d love him in a gin joint, but how much do you love him in a courtroom? He’s a securities salesman, he’s beautiful on the phone, and that means every clown who ever lost a hundred dollars on a stock tip or bought magazines over the phone is going to walk into the courtroom with a hard-on for him. I’m telling you, I want to stay the hell out of court. I’ll win in court, I know that, or the worst that’ll happen is I’ll win on appeal, but who needs it? This is a case that shouldn’t be in the first place, and I’d love to clear it up before they even go so far as presenting a bill to the grand jury.”
“So from me you want — ”
“Whatever you can find, Matt. Whatever discredits Cruz and Herrera. I don’t know what’s there to be found, but you were a cop and now you’re private, and you can get down in the streets and nose around.”
I nodded. I could do that. “One thing,” I said. “Wouldn’t you be better off with a Spanish-speaking detective? I know enough to buy a beer in a bodega, but I’m a long way from fluent. ”
Kaplan shook his head. “A personal relationship’s worth more than a dime’s worth of ‘Me llamo Matteo y ¿como está usted?’ ”
“That’s the truth,” Tommy Tillary said. “Matt, I know I can count on you.”
I wanted to tell him all he could count on was his fingers. I didn’t really see what I could expect to uncover that wouldn’t turn up in a regular police investigation. But I’d spent enough time carrying a shield to know not to push away money when somebody wants to give it to you. I felt comfortable taking a fee. The man was inheriting a quarter of a million, plus whatever insurance his wife had carried. If he was willing to spread some of it around, I was willing to take it.
So I went to Sunset Park and spent some time in the streets and some more time in the bars. Sunset Park is in Brooklyn, of course, on the borough’s western edge, above Bay Ridge and south and west of Green-Wood Cemetery. These days, there’s a lot of brownstoning going on there, with young urban professionals renovating the old houses and gentrifying the neighborhood. Back then, the upwardly mobile young had not yet discovered Sunset Park, and the area was a mix of Latins and Scandinavians, most of the former Puerto Ricans, most of the latter Norwegians. The balance was gradually shifting from Europe to the islands, from light to dark, but this was a process that had been going on for ages and there was nothing hurried about it.
I talked to Herrera’s landlord and Cruz’s former employer and one of his recent girlfriends. I drank beer in bars and the back rooms of bodegas. I went to the local station house, I read the sheets on both of the burglars and drank coffee with the cops and picked up some of the stuff that doesn’t get on the yellow sheets.
I found out that Miguelito Cruz had once killed a man in a tavern brawl over a woman. There were no charges pressed; a dozen witnesses reported that the dead man had gone after Cruz first with a broken bottle. Cruz had most likely been carrying the knife, but several witnesses insisted it had been tossed to him by an anonymous benefactor, and there hadn’t been enough evidence to make a case of weapons possession, let alone homicide.
I learned that Herrera had three children living with their mother in Puerto Rico. He was divorced but wouldn’t marry his current girlfriend because he regarded himself as still married to his ex-wife in the eyes of God. He sent money to his children when he had any to send.
I learned other things. They didn’t seem terribly consequential then and they’ve faded from memory altogether by now, but I wrote them down in my pocket notebook as I learned them, and every day or so I duly reported my findings to Drew Kaplan. He always seemed pleased with what I told him.
I invariably managed a stop at Armstrong’s before I called it a night. One night she was there, Carolyn Cheatham, drinking bourbon this time, her face frozen with stubborn old pain. It took her