Flesh and Blood (34 page)

“Thanks.”

Tannenbaum nodded peremptorily, then went on to another subject. “That village,” he said. “San Jorge. It's gone.”

“Gone?”

“A ghost town. Since 1954.”

“So that stuff about poison,” Frank said. “It was true?”

“That's right.”

“What was the poison?”

“They still don't know,” Tannenbaum said. “We told them about what Kincaid said, a magic drug. They grow some weird stuff in the hills up there. It could be that Hannah was trying to refine it somehow, get some extra strength in it.” He smiled. “People are always looking for a better lift. Out in California, they got this new drug they call ‘ecstasy.'” He laughed. “Can you believe that?” He looked back at his notebook. “When Kincaid made that crack about revenge, what did you take it to mean?”

“I took it for his motive,” Frank said matter-of-factly. He snuffed out the cigarette. “It's as good as any.”

Tannenbaum laughed lightly as he wrote it down. “Well, it's an old one, right?”

“Hannah had caused Gilda's death,” Frank said. “Along with Pérez. That's the way Kincaid saw it.”

Tannenbaum nodded in agreement. “Tell me this, Frank: Do you think Kincaid had come back to the United States specifically to kill Miss Karlsberg?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think there might be any other targets? I mean, in this country?”

“He didn't mention any.”

“Did he say how he found out where she was?”

“No.”

“Well, like they say, Frank, it's a big country.”

Frank said nothing.

“And she'd changed her name,” Tannenbaum added.

“He didn't say anything about how he found her,” Frank told him.

Tannenbaum flipped a page of his notebook. “He worked at this settlement house, right?”

“That's what the super told us.”

“Us?”

“Me. Farouk.”

Tannenbaum smiled. “Oh, yeah, Farouk,” he said. “How'd you get involved with him?”

“We met. At a bar.”

“No kidding?” Tannenbaum said brightly. “Which one?”

Frank said nothing.

Tannenbaum smiled thinly. “Maybe that little illegal after-hours dump on Tenth Avenue?”

Frank did not answer.

Tannenbaum laughed. “No need to get nervous, Frank. We've known about that little dive for years. Who gives a shit, huh?” He returned to his notebook. “This settlement house business,” he said. “We've checked that out, too. Kincaid worked there, all right. Strictly voluntary. Always with Latinos.” He shook his head wonderingly. “He loved the Hispanics, I guess.” His eyes wandered over to Frank. “A lover of humanity, right?”

“In a way,” Frank said.

“That what you think?”

“Yes.”

“Slashed her up pretty good, though,” Tannenbaum said darkly.

Frank said nothing.

Tannenbaum closed his notebook and stood up. “Well, I guess that's it,” he said. “Everything checks out.”

Frank walked him to the door.

“We checked Kincaid's machete, too,” Tannenbaum said as he stepped into the hallway. “It could have been the one that killed Hannah.”

“Could have been?” Frank asked.

“Well, it only had Kincaid's blood on it,” Tannenbaum said. “He'd had plenty of time to wash it. But as far as the wounds on Hannah's body, it fit them pretty well.”

“That's not the same as evidence,” Frank said.

“No, but Kincaid's machete was a homemade affair,” Tannenbaum added. “They make them in Colombia. Mostly for the cane fields. They're not imported here.” He smiled. “Which means you just can't go down to Times Square and pick one up.” He dropped his hand onto Frank's shoulder. “Thanks for the help,” he said. “I mean it. Nobody's happier than me to put this case to bed.” Then he nodded quickly and headed for the stairs.

Frank walked slowly back to his desk, took out the bottle of Irish and poured himself a drink. For a while he sat silently, his mind drifting wearily back over the preceding hours. Once again he saw Kincaid rise from the mat, the machete dancing over his head until it finally sliced downward and Kincaid staggered forward, his knees bending slowly as he fell into Frank's astonished arms.

After that, it had been long hours of talk, as the ambulance arrived, then the police, and finally the Brooklyn homicide detectives who'd kept him in the small brown grilling room at the precinct house. They had paced around methodically, as he had paced around so many others during the days when he was, himself, a homicide detective, firing questions, then repeating them, until they had finally settled for the fact that neither Frank nor the “big Arab”—as they continually referred to Farouk—had murdered Benjamin Kincaid.

Dawn had already broken over the city by the time he'd returned to his office, and so he'd simply slumped down on the sofa and twisted about fitfully until Tannenbaum had delivered him from a sleep far worse than waking.

Now, as he lit a second cigarette, Frank knew that he could not return to the sofa. Instead he opened the envelope Tannenbaum had left, drew out the papers, and spread them across his desk.

Wearily, he read what the police department had been able to gather on Kincaid during the last fifteen hours. They had traced his life in its broad details, his birth in California, his ordination as a Catholic priest, his service in South America, and his final residence in the remote, jungle outpost of San Jorge. It was there that he'd lived until 1954, the year Pérez was murdered. For the next few years, he'd wandered about South America, working as a teacher in the slums of Lima, Bogotá and Santiago. He had returned to what was left of San Jorge in 1968, stayed for a few months, then begun what appeared to be a long, meandering journey back to the United States, drifting up the jagged coast of Central America, living for a while in Mexico City and Monterrey, then finally crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo in 1981. During the following years he'd continued to follow the coast along the Gulf of Mexico and then northward, with short stays in Savannah, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and finally New York. He had worked in all these places, always as a teacher, always in the slums. In New York, now an old man, he had finally retired.

Frank folded the paper, then went through the others, an autopsy, an inventory of Kincaid's possessions, such as they were, a statement by the Haitian superintendent and a few of his neighbors which traced his general movements, habits, and character traits. It was all routine, and he'd seen such papers hundreds of times in the past. Still, he resisted the impulse to return them to the envelope, seal it, and drop it into one of his file drawers. And so, for a long time, they remained scattered across his desk while his mind wandered about as if detached in some odd way, and yet profoundly engaged by the lingering mood of Hannah's death, and Gilda's, the brown bodies by the river, Kincaid with his head held back, offering his throat to the whirling blade. He could hear Farouk's body as it plunged down the stairs, feel the warmth of Kincaid's blood as it soaked through the shirt which still hung from the chair across the room.

He stood up, walked over to the shirt and picked it up. For a moment, he glanced about, looking for some place to put it, a paper bag, a plastic can, and then, suddenly, he heard a voice in the gray air:
This is a man who saves things.
He draped the bloody shirt over the chair, walked to his desk and sat, staring back at it until the dark red stains seemed to write their own insistent message in his mind.

It was nearly noon when Farouk came into the office. “Are you all right?” he asked as he sat down on the small sofa by the window and drew out a cigarette.

“I'm okay,” Frank said. He returned his eyes to the scattering of documents and reports, which still lay strewn across his desk.

“It is difficult,” Farouk said in a voice that was low, considered, oddly mournful, as if something besides justice had been served by Kincaid's death, a malicious appetite for the sorrowful and ironic. “There was some goodness in this man's heart.”

“Yes, there was.”

“Until he came back here.”

“To New York, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think he came back to kill Hannah?”

“It's possible.”

“It's possible,” Frank admitted. “But if he did, how did he know to come to New York in the first place?”

Farouk shrugged.

“And once he got to New York,” Frank went on, “how did he find her?”

Farouk stared at Frank evenly. “I don't know.”

“According to the interviews the police have done,” Frank said, “Kincaid went from his apartment to that settlement house every day. He stayed there for several hours, then he went back home. That was his day. That was all he did.”

Farouk said nothing.

“And another thing,” Frank added. “Kincaid had been in New York for several months. He lived in a Queens apartment for a while, then moved to Brooklyn. That's when he started showing up at the settlement house.”

Farouk nodded.

“Why did it take him so long to kill her?” Frank asked emphatically.

“I do not know,” Farouk said.

Frank's eyes bored into him. “Do you remember what your friend at the police department said? About Hannah's husband, I mean?”

Farouk nodded slowly. “That it was too old a trail for a crime of such hot blood.”

“What if he was right?”

Farouk remained silent, but Frank could see a slowly building intensity in his eyes.

“And something else,” Frank added. “When we were in his apartment, you looked all around and then you said that whoever lived here was a man who saved things.”

“That is true,” Farouk said.

“Where is Hannah's hand?” Frank asked. He nodded toward the police inventory of Kincaid's apartment. “He had bones in his place, teeth, plants and seeds. He had a bloodstained cloth, and old pots. Stalks of something, dirt from places.”

“But no hand,” Farouk said.

“No, there was a hand,” Frank said. “Look at this.” He handed him the police inventory. “Tannenbaum brought it over. It's a list of everything that was found in Kincaid's apartment.”

Farouk's eyes drifted down the column until it struck the single item Frank had already marked in red.

“The hand,” Farouk whispered.

“A human hand,” Frank added. “That's right. But it isn't Hannah's. It's too old. It must have once been attached to Emilio Pérez.”

“Pérez,” Farouk repeated as his eyes settled firmly on the paper Frank had handed to him.

“Kincaid cut off Pérez's hand when he killed him years ago.”

“And saved it all these years,” Farouk added.

“Yes,” Frank said. “But there was only one hand. Not two.” He waited a moment, then drew the paper slowly from Farouk's fingers. “There's no more money in this case, Farouk,” he told him softly. “Not a dime. I can tell you that.”

A strange smile broke over Farouk's dark face. “That is the odd thing about money,” he said.

“What?”

The smile dissolved. “That it's what you always take in the place of what you need.”

29

The Brandon Street Settlement House was a large wooden building which rested on a run-down street in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. It had been freshly painted, and because of that, it looked considerably less dilapidated than the much smaller row houses which surrounded it.

“It was here when I was a child.” Farouk told Frank as they walked up the stairs together. “It was here that I learned English.”

“It's the only place we can begin,” Frank said matter-of-factly as he headed up the stairs, opened one of the large double doors and walked in.

The building seemed almost entirely deserted, and for a moment the two of them stood alone in the empty lobby. Large portraits of Brandon Street Settlement's past benefactors hung from the recently painted walls, and small rectangular bronze plates identified some of them as having been members of New York's most prestigious families.

“It was always a favorite charity,” Farouk said as he stared about. “They were always coming around, the people who gave the money.” He smiled. “They came in big black cars, and the people on the steps, the immigrants, they would think that someday they would have such cars, too.”

“What went on here?” Frank asked.

“It was a place to help foreigners,” Farouk answered. “Help them to adjust, you might say, to the new country.”

“Adjust how?”

“To the place, to what was required,” Farouk said. “To learn English, so you could get a job.”

Frank nodded silently while his eyes glanced about the empty lobby. “Was it usually this deserted?”

Farouk laughed. “No. It was full of life. We were always having parties, festivals. People wore their old clothes, the ones from their native countries. There was music. There was dancing.” A bright, playful light filled his eyes. “It was a good place. People gave assistance.” He paused a moment, his eyes glancing about the silent lobby. His lips parted, and he started to go on. But suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of footsteps, and both Frank and Farouk glanced quickly to the left, and saw a group of men and women heading toward them from the end of the corridor.

“
Arriba
,” someone said harshly from the end of the line. “
Vamos.
”

The men and women moved on down the corridor, their heads slightly bowed, their brown faces vacant, silent, unquestioning. They carried battered suitcases or simple cloth bundles, and they speeded up noticeably each time the voice cried out from behind them.

Frank stepped to one side of the corridor and Farouk to the other, so that the line of people passed between them, then moved on to the rear of the building and disappeared behind a set of heavy metal doors.