Chapter Six
The front door opens straight onto the living space of a run-down, untidy apartment.
The living room is dominated by a single tableau, and for the briefest moment, Simon sees it all in extraordinary detail, clear as the flare of a camera flash or the black-and-white afterimage of a silver halide photograph.
Cevolatti—or the guy Simon assumes is Cevolatti—is on the living room rug, tied to a chair.
He’s a solid, slope-shouldered guy of about thirty, hair already thinning a little on top, and he’s been dead for some time.
A large quantity of blackened blood has soaked into the rug.
Someone’s left the apartment window open, so flies are involved.
“Oh Jesus.” Nomi has staggered a few steps away, arm raised and mouth tucked into the crook of her elbow. “Do not touch anything. I mean it—not one goddamn thing.”
Simon studies the body, and his own reaction to it.
He’s not reacting like Nomi—why? He felt discomfort on the subway, but now he’s oddly dispassionate about this man’s death, and even that awareness comes with a sense of disconnection.
Instead, he feels . . . curiosity. A complex interest. Also annoyance? Where is that coming from?
Something dormant inside him has activated, and now his eyes move from detail to detail, compulsive, instinctive.
For a moment, with the blood and the bitter smells, he’s at work: his hands encased in slithering chainmail, his cleaver chopping through the joints, breaking knife moving smoothly—an extension of his hand and wrist—as he assesses the lines of muscle and tendon and fat, instantly judging the best places to cut.
But the unprofessional mess here in this living room brings him back: This is not like work, and the incorrectness of it jags on him like a broken tooth.
“This isn’t . . . clean,” he says quietly. “But some parts of it are clean. This is wrong.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Nomi drops her arm, appalled; the gesture disturbs the flies, and she’s forced to raise her arm over her mouth again. She looks at the body, her expression contorted. “Oh god, this is gross. I’m gonna puke . . .”
“Don’t be sick in here!” Simon whispers.
“You don’t have to fucking tell me that!” Now she’s angry and miserable, not just miserable. “Jesus—I need to look around for a minute, see if there’s anything left behind. Just—I don’t know, stay the hell away from smooth surfaces!”
He stands there for about one minute, listening to her curse as she checks the rest of the apartment’s rooms. Then she returns and holsters her weapon, begins using a pen to poke at the pizza boxes on the coffee table, the loose change in the cookie tin on a bookshelf ledge.
What does it mean that it’s not clean? Simon needs to look at something before they leave—it’s a compulsion, one he can’t contain. He breaks for the kitchen.
“Noone!” Nomi stage-whispers, her cheeks pink with alarm. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Simon ignores her and crouches, uses his sleeve to protect his hand as he yanks open the cupboard door beneath the kitchen sink.
Everyone keeps their dishwashing gloves under the sink, and Cevolatti is no exception: Simon grabs the gloves, turns them right side out and pulls them on before returning to Nomi and the body.
He leans to get a closer look at what’s been done to Cevolatti’s face and chest and tongue, waving flies away. Then he steps carefully around to the rear of the body and takes a knee to examine the hands where they’re tied at the back.
“That’s clean,” he mutters to himself. “But the front of him isn’t the same. It’s inconsistent.”
“We need to get out of here,” Nomi whispers. “I need to get out of here.”
“One more second,” Simon whispers back. He examines the stubby collection of digits on the floor, picks one up to check, places it back where he found it.
“Noone, for fuck’s sake!”
“Okay, okay.”
“Noone.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
They go out the same way they came in—Nomi uses her sleeve to close the front door so it’s unlatched the way they found it—before they clatter down the stairs.
Once they’re out, past the seafood shop, Nomi makes serious strides down the block until she reaches the mouth of an alley a little distance away from Cevolatti’s tenement.
Then she ducks around the corner of the alley entrance.
Simon finds her, one hand against the brick wall, heaving up her most recent meal into the drain near an open dumpster.
“Ah fuck.” She spits, wipes her eyes with her forearm. “God.”
Simon takes his gloved hands out of his trench coat pockets, peels off the gloves and throws them in the dumpster before taking her elbow. “Are you dizzy?”
“Yes,” she groans. “No. Dammit—I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“Are you gonna fall? Do you want to sit?”
“No, I don’t want to sit.” She hawks and spits again, yanks her elbow away, rounding on him. Her eyes are very wide, red rimmed. “What the fuck, Simon. We just saw a dead body—how are you not fazed by that?”
“I lived with a doctor for five years. I work in a slaughterhouse.” Those reasons make the most sense, anyway. “Didn’t you get used to seeing dead bodies when you were a cop?”
“Not like that. However long you’ve been on the force, you don’t get used to seeing people who’ve had their tongue and eyelids hacked off—Jesus Christ.” Her face is ruddy. “And what was the deal with the dishwashing gloves? Were you doing a goddamn examination? They fucking tortured him!”
“Yes, they did torture him.” Simon puts his hands in his pockets. “They. More than one person went to work on him. More than one person was there.”
Nomi smears her palms down her jeans, wipes her face with the hem of her T-shirt. “How can you know that?”
“The fingers—they were clean. Clean cuts, right between the middle and proximal phalanges. From the angles, I’d say they used bolt cutters. Whoever did that knew exactly what they were doing, it was professional work.”
Her face screws up. “How can you—”
“Again, I work in a slaughterhouse. I know the difference between a hack job and a pro cut.” He steps back to give her space.
“I didn’t see a set of bolt cutters in the apartment, did you?
Someone brought that, and the ropes to tie him with.
Someone prepared, efficient, professional.
They came to question him, like we did, except they were using stronger means of persuasion. ”
Nomi exhales, regaining composure. “Okay. But if they wanted to ask him questions, why cut out his tongue?”
“That wasn’t clean, it wasn’t . . . elegant.” He shakes his head in distaste. “It was just vindictive.”
“It wasn’t elegant?” Nomi is looking at him like she’s never seen him before.
“No. It was messy—angry. The tongue and the eyelids and the chest wounds were done with a knife, a sharp one. Maybe from his own kitchen, which they took away and dumped later—there wasn’t a knife in the sink or on the floor nearby.
But someone else was in that room, someone who was very unhappy with Ricki Cevolatti. ”
“Jesus.” Nomi puts both hands behind her head, elbows out, before dropping her arms and turning around. “Okay, fine. It’s fucked, but it’s fine.”
“Now what do we do?”
She grimaces, spits once more before walking back toward the street. “Well first, I need to wash my mouth. And we need to move. I want to get as far away from this mess as I can before I call it in.”
“You’re going to call the police?”
“No, you’re going to call the police, from a pay phone, with an anonymous tip. I don’t want my voice anywhere on record, but they don’t know you. But before that, I need a Coke.”
That’s what they do. Nomi buys a soda from a bodega near the corner of Church Avenue.
Simon follows her instructions and calls the cops from a phone kiosk at the subway station, hanging up when the operator asks for his name.
They get back on the subway—Simon holds his breath when the train dips and enters the tunnels again.
Nomi gives him some of her Coke as a consolation prize.
He tries distracting himself with conversation. “So . . . you were a cop?”
“Keep your voice down.” She scans the carriage, but the only other passengers are near the far end. She’s sitting facing him across the aisle, knees wide, forearms resting on them as she leans forward. She still looks a little haggard. “Yes. For two years. I quit in ’85.”
He takes another sip of soda. “Folks in the district, like Solange, will trust an ex-cop?”
“The relevant word is ex. And yes, they trust me because I’m one of them.”
Her eyes dart around. Something she’s hiding there, but he’s not going to pry. Once again, she reminds him of a mink, a trickster animal—slippery, predatory, a true survivor.
He diverts. “So what does the business with Cevolatti mean for your case?”
“Nothing good.” She shakes her head, reaches into her jacket pocket. “At least I got this.”
She’s holding a man’s wallet, brown leather, bulging with receipts and cash and other detritus.
Simon’s eyebrows lift involuntarily. “You told me not to touch anything!”
“I told you not to touch anything. And I only touched the stuff I was going to steal.” She tucks the wallet back into her pocket. “Looks like Cevolatti never threw anything away, so hopefully there’ll be something useful in there.”
Simon examines an advertisement for Newport 100s above her head, turning things over. “Solange is mixed up in some bad stuff, then.”
“Yeah.” Nomi straightens. The silver handrail on her left casts glinting reflections on her skin. “Her daughter has been abducted.”
Simon’s eyes snap back. “To keep her quiet?”
“To keep her compliant. So she does what Lamonte tells her to do.”
“What is he telling her to do?”
Nomi shakes her head again; that’s something she won’t reveal. But talking about it has given her a brittle, glittering energy—this isn’t just a job she’s been employed to do; she has some kind of personal stake in this.
“And Solange doesn’t want to go to the regular cops?”
“She’s been warned by Malcolm that going to the cops would put her daughter’s safety at risk. Anyway, why would she go to law enforcement? So she can have her case deprioritized? Even if they got Brittany back, they’d take her away from Solange and give her to social services.”
It’s starting to come together for him now. “Because Solange is a prostitute. And Malcolm is her pimp.”
“Give the man a prize.”
Simon hands her the soda bottle. “How old is Brittany?”
“Seven.” Nomi screws the cap back on slowly. “She’s seven years old.”
Simon looks at her flinty expression—a solid tell. She’s angry and worried about the kid. “That’s heavy. You weren’t joking when you said you had a full slate.”
The phrase seems to deflate her a little. “I don’t mind being busy, but I don’t like it when dead bodies are involved.”
“At least you don’t have to worry about that with my case.”
“We’ll see.” Nomi’s look is cool, appraising. “I don’t know you very well yet.”
“That’s funny,” he says. “Neither do I.”