F Train Read online

  “Anything lavender in a piece of jewelry, Jack, and all the dykes snap it right up, no matter what the hell it is. Cigarette cases, cuff links, rings, necklaces. The boys got way more taste in my experience. Paul Flato in lapis is real big right now, blue as a peacock’s eye. Even if nobody intelligent smokes anymore. I asked one fruity-pie, what do you do, baby, with old cigarette cases if you don’t smoke? Never guess what he told me.” The redhead paused for breath. Frank stayed breathlessly silent. “Condoms.” She laughed, hands slapping hams. “And now even the pope goes around blessing condoms these days. Bet you he’s got a Flato case that’ll knock your gawkers out.”

  In the presence of this pineywoods princess of jumble—slippery lips, overglaring redheadedness, age anyone’s guess—Frank found himself at a sudden and uncharacteristic loss for words.

  “Jack, you know what?” The redhead released a snort of air through her nostrils, her intent clearly dismissive. “I think you’re in the wrong store here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Baby, you got about as much interest in antiques as I got in Bibles. Cop, right?”

  Ella Mae Bontemps, Heights Antiques proprietress—too modest a title for so unearthly a figure, in Frank’s gob-smacked opinion. He saw a czarina, a crowned empress, the bricktop begum of these many Ali Baba caves. She granted him a tight, knowing smile. “I pay all my sales taxes, sweetheart, if that’s what you’re nosing around for.”

  Frank produced his detective’s shield. “Homicide.”

  “Oh, shit.” The redhead’s face sagged like an Arkansas field hand’s shack. “Why me, honey?”

  “I just want to talk to you about the late Sidney R. Davidov.”

  The drugged, overmedicated eyes dimmed, the glossy lips drooped. “How come me?”

  “Was Sidney R. Davidov a friend of yours? A business associate?”

  “Wait a minute, am I a target here, Officer? You aiming after me now in some kind of in-ves-ti-ga-tion?” The voice lost its authority, grew faint with emotions in which confusion featured and gut-churning fear predominated. “Maybe I think I need a lawyer for this, and I mean right away, real soon.”

  “No, not you, Ms. Bontemps, you’re not under any investigation, at least not now. And that is your name, isn’t it?”

  “Ella Mae Bontemps, you got that part right. And I got nothing to do with what happened there on that F train, if that’s what you’re out after, Officer. I never ride subways. I’m strictly a car service gal, I don’t know squat about subways. But if you want to hear my side of the story, I think it’s godawful what happened to all those poor people. And to Sid, too. I even feel sorry for him.”

  “Even?”

  “Even. I’m not that heartless, not even where Sid’s concerned. I hope to God you’re not thinking now I’m some kind of cold-blooded killer—you don’t really think that about me, do you, Officer, just because…” Ms. Bontemps sniffled “…just because he jilted me? Well, listen up here, honey, I been dumped more times than the mayor of this city lies, but you never seen me going after those shitbirds with a knife or a gun or a straight-edge razor, did you now? No, not me, not ever, honey, no way. And not with no poison gas neither. I got my pride. Nobody will ever say Ella Mae Bontemps couldn’t take her lumps and then rise up out of the ashes, that’s my MO. Forget and forgive has always been my motto. You take a good look at this girl, sweetie, this girl you’re eyeballing here is one hundred percent ashes free. C’mon now, honestly, do I really look like the crying kind? Not on your nelly, Officer. So if you’ll pardon me just a teensy-weensy minute here, baby, I gotta wet my lips. All this dust and jaw-jacking only dries me out.”

  Ella Mae Bontemps opened the nearest elephantine wardrobe and under the carved eagles’ eyes extracted a bottle of Southern Comfort peach liqueur—one hundred proof—and a Delft-blue china teacup.

  “I’d offer you some, Officer, but I know you’re on working hours here. And there’s nothing like temptation to tempt a man, now is there?” She filled the teacup, hands shaking. “Here’s to your success.” She raised her cup to Frank Murphy. “And I really do mean that, Officer, I hope you catch whoever the hell did it. I’m sincerely praying for you. It’s just about the most horrible crime I ever heard of.”

  In awe, Frank watched this czarina of the caves sip her liqueur, her beringed pinkie curled teatime dainty. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her.

  And closing her eyes, she released a long satisfied sigh. “There, that’s much better. Well, now I suppose we’re all finished by this point, aren’t we, Officer? I guess I’ve pretty much done everything I can do, helping you in your fine work.”

  “Not quite, Ms. Bontemps. I do appreciate everything, so far. But—”

  “But.” This great white empress sighed more deeply. “Always a great big fucking but around somewhere, ain’t there? Now you just keep on going at it, Officer, you do whatever you have to do, and you take yourself a nice comfortable seat right here next to me. Since you insist.”

  They settled in on a pair of Chippendale straight-backs and Ella Mae Bontemps—to Frank’s eyes, like some dazzling great water bird roosting at the edge of a dock—went on tippling from the Delft blue china teacup, pacing herself, never gulping, savoring each ingestion, running the liquor over her tongue and swishing it around as if Southern Comfort were Listerine, whenever she paused in her radio-running commentary and collected her thoughts, letting the reality of him, homicide detective Sergeant Frank Murphy—and the specter of Sidney R. Davidov’s corpse sprawled among the other victims of the F train massacre—sink into her medicated, booze-basted brain, the peach spirits embellishing a great many mordant memories. After a few more thoughtful sips, she put her cup down, and as her nightmare-jittery eyes calmed, her focus wavered in on him.

  Frank bided his time, returning her gaze, playing out a game of sit-and-wait, as he never yet met a motormouth who didn’t abhor silence.

  Then: “Officer, sir, you want to tell me just why you’re picking on me here to do your dirty work?”

  “Because you knew Sidney R. Davidov.”

  “Yeah, you bet, I knew him all right. Son of a bitch.”

  “Davidov?”

  “Right, the swine Sidney R. All of those rotten bums, every single one of them Russians never had a real mother, born out of a bitch’s behind, each goddamn man jack of them. Now you surely didn’t hear me say that. It’s just the hootch talking here, Officer, not me. Lookit, God’s honest truth is I can’t afford to lose my job. I love this work. I don’t deny I got a real fine setup here. And I don’t want them doing to me what they went and did…” The great white bird stopped to drain peachy dregs from her teacup before lapsing into unexpected silence.

  “Did what, Ms. Bontemps? Who did what…to whom?”

  Ella Mae Bontemps shook her head slowly. “I didn’t say nothing. Just the bottle spirits talking again.”

  “Tell me something, Ms. Bontemps.” Frank kept his gaze frozen on her pearly presence. “Where exactly were you on the night it happened? Those subway killings.”

  “Well, honey, I sure as hell wasn’t there then. I wasn’t down in no subway. I can guarantee you that much right now. I got my alibi ironclad. And that’s what you call it, isn’t it, Officer? An alibi?”

  “Depends. So where were you?”

  “Well, I swear, you know, but a lady does have to travel, exactly like my Auntie Bobbi Jean always used to say every single time she came stumbling home from yet another one of her all-time benders. And so since you’re asking me, Officer, well, now then let’s see here, just in the last few months I’ve been to Boston, Montreal, Charleston, Owls Head on Penobscot Bay, Nantucket, Santa Barbara, London in England, Geneva in Switzerland, and even teeny-weeny little Liechtenstein, where they got more banks than people. And all of it on business. I got receipts. You see, Officer, here’s the God’s honest truth, I just gotta buy buy buy, if I’m gonna sell sell sell. Especially all this old jewelry here. This stuff’s all coming back in
fashion again, you know, moving out of here as fast as the Lord’s own lightning. There’s tons of people around this city nowadays they got way more money than they know what to do with. Bad times or no bad times. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Frank Murphy nodded and waited, unspeaking, letting silence return to work its persuasive ways on Ella Mae Bontemps’s nerves.

  Until: “But since you’re looking like you still want to know more, Officer, okay, I guess my time has come and I got to fess up here. You see, in my heart, it seems like during that whole time I’m traveling, I never really left Brooklyn at all. No, never even made it across that bridge over there. In actual fact of course, I was hardly ever even here, I swear, but otherwise I was still here every single awful minute of that time, if you know what I’m saying. It’s just the damnedest thing how that keeps on spooking me, the newspaper and TV pictures of those seven poor people and the dead bodies lying around that subway car. Yes, even Sid Davidov, son of a bitch. They’re haunting me just like I was right there myself and I was one of those corpses. Which ain’t all so hotsy-totsy now, I can tell you. I do hope you get my meaning here, Officer, because what I mean is I do not want to be dead. No, sir. I swear to God almighty I don’t. I want to go on living.”

  “I can understand how you might be afraid of losing your job, Ms. Bontemps. And it does sound like a great job you’ve got here, with all your terrific travel and an expense account, too, I bet. Wish I could swing something like that. But Coney Island is about far as I ever get to go anywhere, Ms. Bontemps. So now, please, just tell me one more thing.” Frank paused to let Ella Mae Bontemps dangle in the air for a moment. “Why dead, Ms. Bontemps? Exactly who’s out to kill you?”

  The empress in white closed her eyes and released the deepest, saddest, most mournful sigh. “Officer, like I said, it’s from what I hear happened to a man who used to run this shop. Before it changed hands. He lit out of here like a bear with a bumblebee up his ass. But enough said about all that old business. I wasn’t around for that neither. It’s all way before my time in this place. Lookit, you don’t expect me to go around repeating—what is it you people call it?—inadmissible hearsay? No, not me, no way, and that’s the actual fact of it. I’m no gossip. I can talk some, but I don’t deal in unfounded rumor.”

  And she clammed up, arms folded, legs crossed.

  Ella Mae Bontemps’s swerving pivot—from wall of words to tantalizing taciturnity—stumped Frank. He couldn’t imagine himself on his own ever penetrating the density and opacity, the sheer feminine volume (as he saw it) and swirl of circumlocutions. “Ms. Bontemps, if you’re not comfortable talking to me right here and now, you can just come over to our office and talk to my partner. She’s very understanding.”

  “Go to the cops? You think I’m out of my rabbit-ass mind? Forget it, hoss, not in a million years.”

  “Then how about tomorrow morning? Either on your own quietly. Or we can serve you with legal process if you prefer. You can have it all put down on the public record, Ms. Bontemps, if that’s what you really want. Every last word you speak. You can even bring your own lawyer. Let everybody know you’re being forced to talk to the police. How’s that, Ms. Bontemps, is that any better? It’s your call.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “First thing. Nine, no later. And don’t go traveling. You’re under surveillance.”

  “You’re a hard man, Officer. I hope your partner, God help me, I hope she’s more understanding.”

  “She’s wonderful. And she’s the boss. Best cop in the homicide business. You’re going to love her.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  3:40 P.M.

  Flo was at home with John James Reilly’s notebook on the kitchen table next to the remains of her lunch.

  Third day running and still no claims made for the massacre. Definitely not a terrorist’s MO. Federal agencies were taking no action yet. No ideology or religion or war was touted by anyone to justify the slaughter, and this meant…exactly what? What was a credible motive for mass murder? What separated merely hateful violence from homicidal violence? What turned pathological anger into calculatingly murderous rage? We think we’re living in a solid place, because when we turn on a tap, water comes out, and when we flip a switch, lights come on. But the fragility of what we think of as our civilization is incredible.

  Flo made herself a cup of instant decaf, sat down at the kitchen table, and opened Reilly’s notebook. She tried imagining the man alive, day by day, leading his disparate lives. Bay Ridge dad and husband. Bureau special agent. Undercover on a UN beat. Tomcat on a nocturnal prowl? Or an agent still at work?

  She looked up at the kitchen ceiling and half-closed her eyes to shut out competing thoughts, but fresher memories persisted. Her daughter, Emma’s, voice on the phone before lunch, calling from college in Boston, Eddie in the shadows of his nursing home room slowly eating a fried chicken supper, the contrasting sensory impressions of what Eddie looked like now—weak, too often silent, drained—and what he was like fifteen years ago, building sandcastles with Emma out at Breezy Point Beach, and how his skin felt then and how he smelled after a summer’s day in the sun and hours body-surfing in the ocean. For a few moments, her mind drifted into a sphere between wakefulness and daydreaming, her imagination like a mirror, suspended, swinging, catching the reflections of spiraling images.

  Then she fought to imagine the other man, the FBI special agent John James Reilly, picturing what this mutable role-player was trying to hide in his hastily encrypted notebook, and the thought drove her.

  A man on his knees, head in a woman’s lap, unmoving hand on a gun.

  Subway car windows streaked with melting snow.

  Blank eyes of seven dead.

  A train rattling down a tunnel.

  Flashing signal lights.

  Fast.

  Slow.

  Stop.

  Go…

  And a retired special agent more than a little boozy, his nose to the windows before he starts running, running, running to tell the whole world.

  Flo’s iPhone rang. A man’s voice. “I couldn’t wait till tomorrow, Flo, sorry. Only want to know what you got so far.” Frank Murphy’s voice.

  “What?” Her mind was back in that subway tunnel.

  “Frank Murphy, Flo. Remember him? Tough guy, fat hands, interrogates antique shop bimbos. Homicide ace? The Russian’s lady friend will be in to see us. Ella Mae Bontemps.”

  “I’m looking into the secret mind of John James Reilly. Have a good Sunday dinner, Frank. Regards to Ann-Marie. Thanks for calling. And for Ella Mae.”

  Flo opened a fresh legal pad alongside the dead agent’s notebook.

  There wasn’t much to work with. A dozen or so pages of overlarge rapid scrawl almost touchingly childlike. Maybe several hundred words in all.

  She made a quick discovery. John James Reilly had the gift of mirror writing, he could write backward, individual words and entire lines, right to left, apparently almost as fast as most people write forward. To Flo’s mind, this eliminated the possibility of sophisticated code.

  An encouraging discovery that quickly led to the next key. This mirror-backward writer usually dropped all vowels, as the text was mainly consonants. She concluded he relied on familiar word recognition and a knowledge of context to fill in the blanks. A simple shorthand method, an almost amateur deception designed only to discourage hasty viewing.

  At first, the job went slowly, guesswork to start, and as Flo built up a vocabulary she began deciphering words—if not deriving enough sense—from Special Agent Reilly’s secret notes. d…r…t…n…d…n, the first word in the notebook at the right hand end of the top line, an underlined word as though a topic heading, d…r…t…n…d…n…when reversed and read back from its correct start, the letters produced n…d…n…t…r…d. Playing with vowels, filling in spaces, Flo quickly arrived at a comprehensible if unusual word.

  Indentured. Theme of the author’s hidden thoughts?

&nb
sp; Certainly not the first word to come to a homicide detective’s mind. A word descriptive of a slavelike relationship binding worker to owner until a debt is paid, often after years of degrading treatment: in any modern civilized country, an illegal practice. And while indenture might well lead to a killing—say, by an owner of a rebellious slave, or perhaps a more understandable crime of a slave slaying his owner—indenture itself wasn’t homicide, however soul-killing the practice. And indenture was a crime in modern American penal codes, an infrequent offense rarely attracting the elevated attentions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Within Flo’s professional memory, indenture was never an absorption even for her humble Brooklyn homicide unit.

  This unexpected one-word start intrigued her, galvanizing energies, giving her an even greater wind for work. Ripple-blooded, she plunged into the task. r…d…s…s…b…m became m…b…s…s…d…r, and soon built out to…ambassador.

  t…r…h…t was t…h…r…t, and then thirty.

  s…k…n…s… skins? Did Special Agent Reilly sometimes alter his backward pattern and write a word’s consonants in their proper order? In haste? Or by design. Or for emphasis. Or deceit. How do you write the truth when hiding and lying are essential? Deceptions complicated Flo’s work.

  Or was John James Reilly being consistent here?

  In which case, snakes was the result. Next: t…x…s converted to s…x…t and expanded to sixty. n…w…n…k…n plus n…t equaled ten unknown. Or maybe unknown ten?

  The first page of Flo’s decryption efforts yielded:

  Indentured—ambassador thirty snakes sixty ten unknown.

  Or perhaps…Indentured—ambassador thirty skins sixty unknown ten.

  Either way, in any order, the sentences stayed a puzzle begging solution. She arranged and rearranged the words, and while every variation stubbornly resisted rational interpretation, the word ambassador persistently piqued her interest. Was Special Agent Reilly—the idea was intimidating in the extreme—referring to the head of the delegation that was the focus of his Bureau work?