Fictions

by Nancy Kress

“I told you. None.”

  “None at all?”

  “No.” His brown eyes were completely honest. “Gene, I want you to find out how these clinical subjects really died. You have access to NYPD records—”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But you know people. And cases get buried there all the time, you used to tell me that yourself, with enough money you can buy yourself an investigation unless somebody high up in the city is really out to get you. Kelvin Pharmaceuticals doesn’t have those kinds of enemies. They’re not the Mob. They’re just . . .”

  “Committing murder to cover up an illegal drug trial? I don’t buy it, Bucky.”

  “Then find out what really happened.”

  I shot back, “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know! But I do know this drug is a good thing! Don’t you understand, it holds out the possibility of a perfect, totally open connection with the person you love most in the world. . . . Find out what happened, Gene. It wasn’t suicide. J-24 doesn’t cause depression. I know it. And for this drug to be denied people would be . . . it would be a sin.” He said it so simply, so naturally, that I was thrown all over again. This wasn’t Bucky, as I had known him. Or maybe it was. He was still driven by sin and love.

  I stood and put money on the table. “I don’t want to get involved in this, Bucky. I really don’t. But—one thing more—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Camineur. Can it . . . does it account for . . .” Jesus, I sounded like him. “I get these flashes of intuition about things I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes it’s stuff I didn’t know.”

  He nodded. “You knew the stuff before. You just didn’t know you knew. Camineur strengthens intuitive right-brain pathways. As an effect of releasing the stranglehold of violent thoughts. You’re more distanced from compulsive thoughts of destruction, but also more likely to make connections among various non-violent perceptions. You’re just more intuitive, Gene, now that you’re less driven.”

  And I’m less Gene, my unwelcome intuition said. I gazed down at Bucky, sitting there with his skinny fingers splayed on the table, an unBucky-like serenity weirdly mixed with his manic manner and his belief that he worked for a corporation that had murdered eight people. Who the hell was he?

  “I don’t want to get involved in this,” I repeated.

  “But you will,” Bucky said, and in his words I heard utter, unshakable faith.

  Jenny Kelly said, “I set up a conference with Jeff Connors and he never showed.” It was Friday afternoon. She had deep circles around her eyes.

  Raccoon eyes, we called them. They were the badge of teachers who were new, dedicated, or crazy. Who sat up until 1:00 A.M. in a frenzy of lesson planning and paper correcting, and then arrived at school at 6:30 A.M. to supervise track or meet with students or correct more papers.

  “Set up another conference,” I suggested. “Sometimes by the third or fourth missed appointment, guilt drives them to show up.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Meanwhile, Jeff has my class all worked up over something called the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, where they’re supposed to inform on their friends’ brothers’ drug activity, or something. It’s somehow connected to getting their Social Services checks. It’s got the kids all in an uproar . . . I sent seventeen kids to the principal in three days.”

  “You might want to ease up on that, Jenny. It gives everybody—kids and administration—the idea that you can’t control your own classroom.”

  “I can’t,” she said, so promptly and honestly that I had to smile. “But I will.”

  “Well, good luck.”

  “Listen, Gene, I’m picking the brains of everybody I can get to talk to me about this. Want to go have a cup of coffee someplace?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.” She didn’t looked rebuffed, which was a relief. Today her earrings matched the color of her sweater. A soft blue, with lace at the neck. “Maybe another time.”

  “Maybe.” It was easier than an outright no.

  Crossing the parking lot to my car, I saw Jeff Connors. He slapped me a high-five. “Ms. Kelly’s looking for you, Jeff.”

  “She is? Oh, yeah. Well, I can’t today. Busy.”

  “So I hear. There isn’t any such thing as the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, is there?”

  He eyed me carefully. “Sure there is, Mr. S.”

  “Really? Well, I’m going to be at Midtown South station house this afternoon. I’ll ask about it.”

  “It’s, like, kinda new. They maybe don’t know nothing about it yet.”

  “Ah. Well, I’ll ask anyway. See you around, Jeff.”

  “Hang loose.”

  He watched my car all the way down the block, until I turned the corner.

  The arrest room at Midtown South was full of cops filling out forms: fingerprint cards, On-line Booking System Arrest Worksheets, complaint reports, property invoices, requests for laboratory examinations of evidence, Arrest Documentation Checklists. The cops, most of whom had changed out of uniform, scribbled and muttered and sharpened pencils.

  In the holding pen alleged criminals cursed and slept and muttered and sang. It looked like fourth-period study hall in the junior-high cafeteria.

  I said, “Lieutenant Fermato?”

  A scribbling cop in a Looney Tunes sweatshirt waved me toward an office without even looking up.

  “Oh my God. Gene Shaunessy. Risen from the fuckin’ dead.”

  “Hello, Johnny.”

  “Come in. God, you look like a politician. Teaching must be the soft life.”

  “Better to put on a few pounds than look like a starved rat.”

  We stood there clasping hands, looking at each other, not saying the things that didn’t need saying anyway, even if we’d had the words, which we didn’t. Johnny and I had been partners for seven years. We’d gone together through foot pursuits and high-speed chases and lost files and violent domestics and bungled traps by Internal Affairs and robberies-in-progress and the grueling boredom of the street. Johnny’s divorce. My retirement. Johnny had gone into Narcotics a year before I took the hit that shattered my knee. If he’d been my partner, it might not have happened. He’d made lieutenant only a few months ago. I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half.

  Suddenly I knew—or the Camineur knew—why I’d come to Midtown South to help Bucky after all. I’d already lost too many pieces of my life. Not the life I had now—the life I’d had once. My real one.

  “Gene—about Marge . . .”

  I held up my hand. “Don’t. I’m here about something else. Professional.”

  His voice changed. “You in trouble?”

  “No. A friend is.” Johnny didn’t know Bucky; they’d been separate pieces of my old life. I couldn’t picture them in the same room together for more than five minutes. “It’s about the suicides at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home. Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith.”

  Johnny nodded. “What about it?”

  “I’d like to see a copy of the initial crime-scene report.”

  Johnny looked at me steadily. But all he said was, “Not my jurisdiction, Gene.”

  I looked back. If Johnny didn’t want to get me the report, he wouldn’t. But either way, he could. Johnny’d been the best undercover cop in Manhattan, mostly because he was so good at putting together his net of criminal informers, inside favors, noncriminal spies, and unseen procedures. I didn’t believe he’d dismantled any of it just because he’d come in off the street. Not Johnny.

  “Is it important?”

  I said, “It’s important.”

  “All right,” he said, and that was all that had to be said. I asked him instead about the Neighborhood Safety Information Network.

  “We heard about that one,” Johnny said. “Pure lies, but somebody’s using it to stir up a lot of anti-cop crap as a set-up for something or other. We’re watching it.”

  “Watches run down,” I said, because it was an old joke betw
een us, and Johnny laughed. Then we talked about old times, and Libby, and his two boys, and when I left, the same cops were filling out the same forms and the same perps were still sleeping or cursing or singing, nobody looking at each other in the whole damn place.

  By the next week, the elderly suicides had disappeared from the papers, which had moved on to another batch of mayhem and alleged brutality in the three-oh. Jenny Kelly had two more fights in her classroom. One I heard through the wall and broke up myself. The other Lateesha told me about in the parking lot. “That boy, Mr. Shaunessy, that Richie Tang, he call Ms. Kelly an ugly bitch! He say she be sorry for messing with him!”

  “And then what?” I said, reluctantly.

  Lateesha smiled. “Ms. Kelly, she yell back that Richie might act like a lost cause but he ain’t lost to her, and she be damned if anybody gonna talk to her that way. But Richie just smile and walk out. Ms. Kelly, she be gone by Thanksgiving.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”

  “Not me, they don’t.”

  “Maybe even you, Lateesha.”

  Jenny Kelly’s eyes wore permanent rings: sleeplessness, anger, smudged mascara. In the faculty room she sat hunched over her coffee, scribbling furiously with red pen on student compositions. I found myself choosing a different table.

  “Hi, Gene,” Bucky’s voice said on my answering machine. “Please call if you . . . I wondered whether you found out any. . . give me a call. Please. I have a different phone number, I’ll give it to you.” Pause. “I’ve moved.”

  I didn’t call him back. Something in the “I’ve moved” hinted at more pain, more complications, another chapter in Bucky’s messy internal drama. I decided to call him only if I heard something from Johnny Fermato.

  Who phoned me the following Tuesday, eight days after my visit to Midtown South. “Gene. John Fermato.”

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  “I’m calling to follow through on our conversation last week. I’m afraid the information you requested is unavailable.”

  I stood in my minuscule kitchen, listening to the traffic three stories below, listening to Johnny’s cold formality. “Unavailable?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “You mean the file has disappeared? Been replaced by a later version? Somebody’s sitting on it?”

  “I’m sorry, the information you requested isn’t available.”

  “Right,” I said, without expression.

  “Catch you soon.”

  “Bye, Lieutenant.”

  After he hung up I stood there holding the receiver, surprised at how much it hurt. It was a full five minutes before the anger came. And then it was distant, muffled. Filtered through the Camineur, so that it wouldn’t get out of hand.

  Safe.

  Jeff Connors showed up at school after a three-day absence, wearing a beeper, and a necklace of thick gold links.

  “Jeff, he big now,” Lateesha told me, and turned away, lips pursed like the disapproving mother she would someday be.

  I was patrolling the hall before the first bell when Jenny Kelly strode past me and stopped at the door to the boys’ room, which wasn’t really a door but a turning that hid the urinals and stalls from obvious view. The door itself had been removed after the fifth wastebasket fire in two days. Jeff came around the comer, saw Ms. Kelly, and stopped. I could see he was thinking about retreating again, but her voice didn’t let him. “I want to see you, Jeff. In my free period.” Her voice said he would be there.

  “Okay,” Jeff said, with no hustle, and slouched off, beeper riding on his hip.

  I said to her, “He knows when your free period is.”

  She looked at me coolly. “Yes.”

  “So you’ve gotten him to talk to you.”

  “A little.” Still cool. “His mother disappeared for three days. She uses. She’s back now, but Jeff doesn’t trust her to take care of his little brother. Did you even know he had a little brother, Gene?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” She looked like Lateesha. Disapproving mother. The raccoon eyes were etched deeper. “This boy is in trouble, and he’s one we don’t have to lose. We can still save him. You could have, last year. He admires you. But you never gave him the time of day, beyond making sure he wasn’t any trouble to you.”

  “I don’t think you have the right to judge whether—”

  “Don’t I? Maybe not. I’m sorry. But don’t you see, Jeff only wanted from you—”

  “That’s the bell. Good luck today, Ms. Kelly.”

  She stared at me, then gave me a little laugh. “Right. And where were you when the glaciers melted? Never mind.” She walked into her classroom, which diminished in noise only a fraction of a decibel.

  Her earrings were little silver hoops, and her silky blouse was red.

  After school I drove to the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home and pretended I was interested in finding a place for my aging mother. A woman named Karen Gennaro showed me a dining hall, bedrooms, activity rooms, a little garden deep in marigolds and asters, nursing facilities. Old people peacefully played cards, watched TV, sat by sunshiny windows. There was no sign that eighty-year-old Lydia Smith had thrown herself from the roof, or that her J-24-bonded boyfriend Giacomo della Francesca had stabbed himself to death.

  “I’d like to walk around a little by myself now,” I told Ms. Gennaro. “Just sort of get the feel of the place. My mother is . . . particular.”

  She hesitated. “We don’t usually allow—”

  “Mom didn’t like Green Meadows because too many corridors were painted pale blue and she hates pale blue. She rejected Saint Anne’s because the other women didn’t care enough about their hairdos and so the atmosphere wasn’t self-respecting. She wouldn’t visit Havenview because there was no piano in the dining room. This is the tenth place I’ve reported on.”

  She laughed. “No wonder you sound so weary. All right, just check out with me before you leave.”

  I inspected the day room again, chatting idly with a man watching the weather channel. Then I wandered to the sixth floor, where Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca had lived. I chatted with an elderly man in a wheelchair, and a sixteen-year-old Catholic Youth volunteer, and a Mrs. Locurzio, who had the room on the other side of Lydia Smith’s. Nothing.

  A janitor came by mopping floors, a heavy young man with watery blue eyes and a sweet, puzzled face like a bearded child.

  “Excuse me—have you worked here long?”

  “Four years.” He leaned on his mop, friendly and shy.

  “Then you must come to know the patients pretty well.”

  “Pretty well.” He smiled. “They’re nice to me.”

  I listened to his careful, spaced speech, a little thick on each initial consonant. “Are all of them nice to you?”

  “Some are mean. Because they’re sick and they hurt.”

  “Mrs. Smith was always nice to you.”

  “Oh, yes. A nice lady. She talked to me every day.” His doughy face became more puzzled. “She died.”

  “Yes. She was unhappy with her life.”

  He frowned. “Mrs. Smith was unhappy? But she . . . no. She was happy.” He looked at me in appeal. “She was always happy. Aren’t you her friend?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just made a mistake about her being unhappy.”

  “She was always happy. With Mr. Frank. They laughed and laughed and read books.”

  “Mr. della Francesca.”

  “He said I could call him Mr. Frank.”

  I said, “What’s your name?”

  “Pete,” he said, as if I should know it.

  “Oh, you’re Pete! Yes, Mrs. Smith spoke to me about you. Just before she died. She said you were nice, too.”

  He beamed. “She was my friend.”

  “You were sad when she died, Pete.”

  “I was sad when she died.”

  I said, “What exactly happened?”

  His face changed. He
picked up the mop, thrust it into the rolling bucket. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? But Mrs. Smith is dead.”

  “I gotta go now.” He started to roll the bucket across the half-mopped floor, but I placed a firm hand on his arm. There’s a cop intuition that has nothing to do with neuropharms.

  I said, “Some bad people killed Mrs. Smith.”

  He looked at me, and something shifted behind his pale blue gaze. “They didn’t tell you that, I know. They said Mrs. Smith killed herself. But you know she was very happy and didn’t do that, don’t you? What did you see, Pete?”

  He was scared now. Once, a long time ago, I hated myself for doing this to people like Pete. Then I got so I didn’t think about it. It didn’t bother me now, either.

  “Mrs. Gennaro killed Mrs. Smith,” I said.

  Shock wiped out fear. “No, she didn’t! She’s a nice lady!”

  “I say Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor killed Mrs. Smith.”

  “You’re crazy! You’re an asshole! Take it back!”

  “Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor—”

  “Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank was all alone together when they went up to that roof!”

  I said swiftly, “How do you know?”

  But he was panicked now, genuinely terrified. Not of me—of what he’d said. He opened his mouth to scream. I said, “Don’t worry, Pete. I’m a cop. I work with the cops you talked to before. They just sent me to double check your story. I work with the same cops you told before.”

  “With Officer Camp?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “With Officer Camp.”

  “Oh.” He still looked scared. “I told them already! I told them I unlocked the roof door for Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank like they asked me to!”

  “Pete—”

  “I gotta go!”

  “Go ahead, Pete. You did good.”

  He scurried off. I left the building before he could find Karen Gennaro.

  A call to an old friend at Records turned up an Officer Joseph Camphausen at Midtown South, a Ralph Campogiani in the Queens Robbery Squad, a Bruce Campinella at the two-four, and a detective second grade Joyce Campolieto in Intelligence. I guessed Campinella, but it didn’t matter which one Pete had talked to, or that I wouldn’t get another chance inside Angels of Mercy. I headed for West End Avenue.