She looked different when we got outside, under street lights, gaunter, like a wraith, no more substantial than a ghost, her eyes deeper and darker, and full of mystery, her long fingers pale. Her mouth alone had the same crooked and taunting look as she’d shown in the bar, taunting, as if she was on the verge of saying something mocking, perhaps even hurtful.
“Which way?” I asked.
She pointed to the left, the light catching a gold ring she wore on the thumb of her right hand. The tall historic water tower loomed out of the darkness like a wraith, caught in the occasional flash of headlights as traffic used the street as a short cut to the tunnel and the highways headed towards western New Jersey.
Clusters of stores cluttered the sidewalk on both sides, some better illuminated than others, most on the far side with the temporary feel of hopeful entrepreneurs, while on our side, the more established, older stores – the Chinese takeout, the liquor store, and a cheap bodega – drew in customers, some of whom double parked.
This was a border street between two starkly different towns, the poor side of an extremely wealthy city where – on the far side – large mansions overlooked the Hudson River and the Manhattan Skyline. The other side of the street was in one of the poorest cities in the state, although the stores there all desperately tried to cater to the wealthy, with restaurants and cafes with offerings even a well paid public servant could not afford.
The street also posed a barrier that cops regularly patrolled in order to keep “the trash” from wandering into the wealthier part of the town, making it clear poor people had no business wandering a part of the city clearly designed to benefit the wealthiest population.
The cops’ job was to keep the poor where they belonged, regardless of what methods they deemed necessary.
This, of course, differed from the bad old days when I first came onto the force, when a certain elite group of cops made a few bucks on the side by rousting the illegal immigrants who worked off-the-books as kitchen and other help in the posher waterside restaurants, immigrants who earned just about enough to feed their families, yet were harangued by cops to fork over protection money or get a visit from INS agents who would eventually deport them.
The cops hit on them so often, the poor fools struggled to find ways to avoid getting robbed three and four weeks in a row.
The police chief at the time, a man named Manny Diaz, either knew and tolerated the practice or was so caught up in his own corruption, he failed to see it. Diaz made his money protecting illegal gambling, prostitution and drug sales, interests completely unrelated to the immigrant scam. But when the feds swooped in on him, they also uncovered the immigrant scam and busted the other cops, too.
Paul Columbo, the man I’d seen on the motel video with Jeannette, got snagged in the scheme. He turned in fellow cops to save himself, but later took credit for bringing the police chief down, which in fact happened prior to his own arrest.
But it was a good marketing play for the private investigation firm he opened after being fired for the police force – although private eye was too elaborate a term for the kind of business he conducted.
He mostly snooped on people, primarily cops. He made his living discrediting cops while getting two-bit criminals off. Other cops hated him; even his own clients didn’t completely trust him, suspecting accurately that he might trade them off to the prosecutor for a more lucrative fee.
I wondered about him as I wandered the street with her, suspecting that he also took a fee for pimping her. This meant he as not too far away or above using her at the cop bar for his own questionable practices.
The bad part in all this. Someone always linked my firing with his and mistook him for me and vice versa. His story became my story and mine became his, and once set into people’s mind, no amount of explanation could undo it.
After a while, I stopped trying, unfortunately for Columbo, who got the bad side of an already bad situation, he could not – especially when he tried to convince people he did not kill his own partner.
Most people assumed that he was simply trying to defend himself against the basic charges and so merely got confused when he said they mistook him for me.
This made him sound like the liar he often was, and when he realized as much, it pissed him off even more, at whomever he was trying to correct, but most of all at me, and strangely believed I had killed my own partner just to make him look bad.
Jeannette looked even thinner than I had thought in the bar, not quite emaciated, but close enough to rival glamor magazine models: thin arms, thin legs, yet perky, not overly large breasts, something I actually found attractive since I didn’t like big boobs, but rather liked what I could get my hands around. In the dim light, despite her long hair, she looked a little boyish, though she exuded a sexuality too much for me to ignore.
She was incredibly beautiful, but in an unconventional way.
She had a mouth slightly too wide for her narrow face, her lips a bit too thick to fit, a pretty version of the old Mrs. Potato head kids used to decorate, where they got to select mouth, nose, eyes and ears, and almost always exaggerated the final product.
“Have you lived in this neck of the woods long?” I asked as we walked, more to fill the uncomfortable silence than to elicit a reply.
“About a year,” she said.
“Where did you live before?”
“Upstate.”
“Why did you leave.”
“Somebody tried to kill me.”
I stopped, looked at her face. She smiled but her eyes were serious.
“Who?”
“A stalker,” she said, giving me a sideward glance as if trying to gauge my reaction. “But not the one who stalks me now.”
“Have you had a lot of stalkers?”
“Oh, yes, but none like her,” Jeannette said. “She was always violent, which is why we broke up. Then she got worse.”
“So, you moved all the way down there to get away from her?”
‘Sort of,” she said. “I’m a singer – like I told you, and unless I anted to spend my life singing in small bars or community theater, I had come back down to the big city.”
“I’m surprised you were upstate in the first place,” I said, part of what I said drowned out by the sudden wail of a police siren, the patrol car appearing behind us, and passing us in a rush of rubber and flashing lights.
“My husband made me move.”
“Husband?”
“Ex-husband, I should have said. He was from that part of the state. Although I met him in New York City. I went on tour with him and his band. When the band broke up, we went back home. I sort of got stuck there after we broke up.”
“Is that when you moved in with your woman stalker?”
“Not right away. I worked other jobs first.”
“That sounds promising for a professional singer.”
“I’ve loved horses from when I was a kid. So, when the guy asked me if I wanted to work there, of course, I said, yes.”
“What happened?”
“You know. When the romance ended, so did the job. I got another gig for a short while with a dance company. But that didn’t work out either. I was really down and out when my girlfriend found me. It was almost perfect.”
“Almost?”
“I told you. She got violent when she got jealous, and she was jealous all the time.”
“Did you give her reason to be jealous?”
“I suppose,” Jeanette said thoughtfully. “I like being with women like her. But I needed more than that. I needed a man. She never understood that. So, I had to leave.”
“So, you came down here and got a job singing?”
“A few. But I hade to work at other jobs so I could pay my rent.”
“Such as?”
“Well, these days I work with a friend who is a private investigator.”
“You mean, Paul Columbo?”
Stopped and turned, her eyes filled with surprise and suspicion.
“How the hell did you know that?”
“This may be a big city, but in some ways it’s still a small town,” I said. “What happens in one place usually gets heard about elsewhere. And Columbo, even at the best of times, inspires talk.”
“Talk about me?”
“Talk about what he does, and with whom,” I said. “You said you work for him. What exactly does that mean?”
“I help him with his investigations.”
“How?”
“If he needs me to do something, I do it.”
“To the point of blackmail?”
“Paulie wouldn’t do anything as horrible as that,” she said. “But sometimes, he needs a little leverage.”
“And you supply it?”
“When necessary,” she said. “I wouldn’t go as far as to call it blackmail. These are bad people he’s investigating.”
“Bad people who you go with,” I said. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes they aren’t as bad as Paulie makes out.”
“When they are?”
“Then Paulie takes care of them. Just as he takes care of my stalkers.”
“It sounds convenient.”
“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” she said, then pointed towards a doorway. “There. That’s my building. Do you want to come up?”
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