Run You Down (Rebekah Roberts #2)(56)

I’ve been sitting in Saul’s car for almost two hours when my phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize.

“This is Rebekah,” I say.

“Rebekah? This is Officer Van Keller.”

“Hi,” I say. “How are you?”

“I’m calling you from my cell. Are you still in town?”

“I’m in New Paltz,” I say.

“Can we meet?”

“Now?”

“If possible. I’ll come to you.”

We agree to meet at a diner just off the New Paltz exit from the Thruway. I order a bowl of potato soup and send Levi a text asking him to call me. If I can get him to comment on Pessie’s apparently secret friendship with her ex, that might be enough for a story. After about an hour, Van Keller appears in the doorway dressed in jeans and a Carhartt jacket. I wave to catch his attention and he slides into my booth.

“Must be important,” I say, trying to keep my smile salutary, not flirtatious. It’s difficult. Poor guy; must be annoying to have every woman he meets turn into a giggling, stuttering teenager in his presence.

“Yeah,” he says, taking off his coat. “We’re off the record, okay?”

“Okay.”

He nods. The waitress appears and he orders a Diet Coke.

“I’m probably going to lose my job for talking to you,” he says. “But I’m not sure what else to do. You’ve already written about the case, so it makes sense that you’d keep digging. I read your other stuff. About that murder in Brooklyn? I guess this is your beat. So. And you have that plate number. I’m sure somebody at the Trib can figure out who it belongs to. Maybe you already have. Have you?”

I don’t answer immediately, which he takes to mean yes. He’s nervous, talking fast, tearing at the paper napkin in front of him.

“Right, yeah. So the truck Pessie’s neighbors saw is registered to a man named Conrad Hall. You’re not from around here so you probably haven’t heard of him, but Connie Hall is a bad dude. He’s Aryan Brotherhood. You know them?”

I nod.

“I don’t think he advertises it, but that’s blood in blood out. The Brotherhood controls most of the drugs and the guns coming into the state—outside of New York City. Heroin has become a big problem here in the past couple years. Everybody hooked on prescription pills is losing their prescription since they started cracking down on doctors, and heroin is almost as good, and cheaper. Most of the robberies we see are heroin-related. Junkies stealing just enough to get a fix. Breaking into cars and houses. It’s not as bad in Roseville, partly because the Jews aren’t into that shit and they’re more and more of the population. But the rest of Rockland and Orange County. Plus Dutchess and Greene and Ulster and up in Albany. And if they’re not robbing—and they’re white—they can sometimes make a little cash moving product for people like Connie. Which means they want to carry a gun. And if you’ve got a record, you can’t get a gun in New York State. Well, you can’t get it legally. But the Brotherhood has people all over, so they bring guns up from the Carolinas, Virginia, even Pennsylvania. And guns just up the ante for everybody. Now we gotta think about getting shot every time we pull over some stoned *, you know? I mean, it happens. Last year a probation officer got killed checking on a meth head in Woodbury. He knocks, and the guy’s out of his mind, and armed. Shoots the officer through the door. Cop’s wife had just had a baby. And, like, even the tweaker, he didn’t know what he was doing. Without that gun he’d have gotten violated, sure, but now he’s life without parole for capital murder.”

Van Keller is talking alternately to me and to the napkin he has now torn to confetti. He pauses, looks at the shredded paper, then makes a kind of disgusted exhale out of his nose, and pushes the pile aside.

“I don’t know if you know this already,” I say, “but I’ve talked to two people who told me that Connie Hall’s son, Ryan, is gay, and that he’s in a relationship with a Jew from Roseville named Sam Kagan. Sam Kagan used to be engaged to Pessie.”

Van Keller blinks. “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” I say, and tell him about my visits with Mellie and Kaitlyn. He takes in what I am saying with eyes wide, mouth agape.

“So,” he says, after I finish, “Connie could have gone to Roseville looking for Sam.”

“Right,” I say. “Except Sam hasn’t lived there in years.”

Van falls silent. He wipes his hand across his face, thinking.

“I read an article about Connie Hall being questioned in a double homicide in Troy,” I say. “Did they ever get anybody for that?”

Van smirks and shakes his head. The waitress sets down a glass of Diet Coke and a paper-wrapped straw. “They indicted a kid connected to Connie.”

“Connected?”

“Friend of one of his sons, I think. I’m not sure which one. A small-time dealer, full-time dirtbag named Tim Doyle. But he didn’t make it to trial.”

“Didn’t make it?”

“He died in jail a couple days after they booked him.”

“How?”

“Hung himself was the official word,” says Keller. “But the Brotherhood has a lot of people. And it’s not like they did an autopsy.”