Skin Deep

by Gary Braver

  “Did she ever say that Neil hurt her physically or ever threatened her?”

  “She never said that he hit her. But she did say he had a temper and felt a little afraid of him.”

  “This isn’t going to get back to him, is it?” Alice asked.

  “No.”

  “See why I called?”

  “Yes, and you did the right thing.”

  They were quiet for a moment, then Alice asked, “Do you think, you know, that he did it?”

  “Do I think he killed her? No, I don’t,” he said, trying to put conviction behind his words.

  Alice nodded and Michelle just looked blank. They had only picked on the desserts. When it was time to go, Steve paid and they left the restaurant together.

  He thanked the women and headed for his car, feeling as if he were stuck halfway through a Lewis Carroll looking glass, hoping that his partner was the killer and not himself.

  47

  Neil lived in a condo on Park Drive between Beacon Street and the intersection at Heritage Place. It was in walking distance to Fenway, and Steve said to meet him at noon at the little bridge across from the Museum of Fine Arts. The day was cool and overcast, feeling more like October than June.

  Steve arrived first and headed for the bridge, a stone arch with wrought-iron rails. In the water below Canada geese bobbed, their butts point-up in the air. More geese spread across the lawn munching grass and honking. In the distance he saw Neil approach and he felt his blood charge. This could be one of those defining moments—a tipping point from which the rest of his life would be forever altered. In police culture you and your partner were like blood brothers. You didn’t cross each other. On the contrary, you went to the wall for each other. You looked the other way if your partner appeared dirty. The problem was that when he did, Steve saw himself.

  Because it was his day off, Neil was dressed in a black windbreaker over jeans. “The place is goose-shit city.” He scraped the bottoms of his shoes on the bridge rail. He looked at Steve. “So what’s up?”

  Centuries ago people saw a correlation between a person’s facial features and character traits. That you could read one’s soul and predict behavior according to face-parsing rules. Narrow eyes belonged to liars and cheats; round foreheads to the brave; long foreheads and narrow chins to the cruel; bulbous noses, the obtuse; sharp-tipped noses, the irascible. Today such rules are considered ridiculous. Yet at the moment Steve found himself trying to parse Neil’s face. It had gotten down to that—ancient physiognomy because he could no longer trust his interpretation of reality. Is this the face of a killer? he asked himself.

  Is mine?

  “We have to talk.”

  Neil’s eyebrows twitched. “Sounds serious. There’s a Starbucks up the street.”

  He was not wearing his weapon on his belt, and the windbreaker was too loose to detect a shoulder harness. Steve’s was under his jacket. “No, because there may be shouting.” He started walking down the path toward the basketball court where a few kids were shooting hoops.

  “Shouting?”

  “I was talking to people and I find out you were dating Terry Farina.”

  Neil stopped in his tracks and glared at Steve, his eyes shrunk to dark beams. “What people?”

  “That’s not important. You never told me this. You said you knew her from the club, that she was your trainer.”

  “She was.”

  “Yeah, but you said nothing about being involved with her.”

  “Okay, I was involved with her.”

  “So, why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was in the past and it had no bearing on the case.”

  “For Christ’s sakes, Neil, we’re partners. We’re supposed to trust each other. You were dating a murder victim and that technically makes you a person of interest. But you purposely didn’t tell me. Instead you let me go chasing down a lot of people and find out on my own.”

  Steve was stunned by his own hypocrisy. He could not believe his glibness. But a voice kept telling him, It’s him or you, Bubba. Him or you. Pendergast is scapegoat meat on a hook.

  “Did you tell Reardon?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  Neil nodded, maybe in gratitude. “My relationship with her ended months ago.”

  “But it was an intimate relationship, which makes it relevant to the investigation.”

  “Who says it was intimate?”

  “You were seen having a fight with her outside the health club and I’m sure it wasn’t over a parking space.”

  “Ah, the smoking gun. Yeah, we had a fight. I wanted her to quit the pole and she refused.”

  A student couple approached them hand in hand, and Steve let them pass until they were out of earshot. “And that caused you to break up?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t like her stripping. She claimed she was saving for school and didn’t care about the sex stuff, said it was like doing aerobics with her clothes off. Except I didn’t see it that way. They make a lot of coin, but there’re a lot better jobs than playing dick-tease to a bunch of losers.”

  “So it was her decision to split.”

  “That makes no difference, but that’s what the parking lot scene was all about.”

  Steve nodded, trying to read Neil’s face, waiting for that giveaway tic to hang hopes on.

  “She also didn’t want to move from one relationship into another. So now you know what you need to know.”

  They came to an intersection in the walkway and Neil led them left toward the water where the grass grew to a high thick wall of green. In the distance barely visible through the trees loomed the Greek pillars of the MFA, looking like an ancient temple. Only a few people were out because rain was in the forecast and thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Witnesses say she slapped you and you grabbed her and pushed her against a car.”

  Neil stopped again. “Fuck!” He pulled the stirrer from his mouth and tossed it away. “Yeah, okay. It was an emotional moment and we got a little physical. So what?”

  Steve felt the press of his piece against the small of his back. “Did you kill her?”

  Neil’s face was plumped to the bursting point. “No, I did not.”

  Steve nodded. “I had to ask.”

  “Yeah, and now you know.”

  Steve had been waiting for that deciding moment, that giveaway declaration or micro-expression, but the promise had receded. And he began to wonder who it was he was interrogating, Neil or himself. “Were you in love with her?”

  “Are you asking as Steve or Lieutenant Detective Markarian?”

  “Both.”

  “What the fuck difference does it make? Yeah, I was pretty hooked.” His eyes began to tear up and he looked away.

  Steve had seen Neil emotional only once before—when his daughter was in trouble. He had also seen him put on Oscar-winning performances during interrogations. So he didn’t know if this was real or performance—if he was tearing up because he loved Terry Farina or because he had killed her. They circled back toward the bridge. “How long did you see her?”

  “A few months. After Ellen died, I let myself go, gained thirty pounds. I finally kicked myself in the ass because I didn’t want to die and leave Lily a ward of the state. So I joined Kingsbury, where I met her.”

  “And this led to that and you started going out.”

  “Something like that. She asked if I would help get rid of the asshole living with her. She wanted to end it and he wouldn’t go. So I paid him a visit. After that we went out a few times.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Maybe two months ago.”

  “How come her girlfriend Katie didn’t know about you?”

  “I don’t know.” Then he stopped. “This has turned into an interrogation and I don’t like it.”

  “And I don’t like what you did to Pendergast. I told you I didn’t think he was our man, and you pulled him in and ate him up.”


  “Because he’s a sexual predator with a track record.”

  “A sexual predator doesn’t kill without sex or mutilation.”

  “Because he killed her before it got to that.”

  They had returned to the bridge. Neil reached into his pocket and removed a tin of aspirin and swallowed two. Below a bull goose flared his chest and beat his wings to drive away other males. There was a lot of honking and Neil threw a few stones, sending the group into flight.

  “Fucking things are just flying shit machines. Look at the mess.”

  “I checked the video again and I’m concerned prosecutors are going to see what I saw.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A coercive interrogation that’s more personal than professional. That you arrested him for having sex with her.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “All that stuff about did she initiate the making out, did she rub your bulge, did she go down on you, how she was nothing but a little slut….”

  “I’m getting a little tired of you playing Sigmund Freud with me.”

  “Maybe so, but it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to wonder if you tried to pin the rap on Pendergast because you killed her yourself.”

  Neil’s hands were on the rail, but in his head Steve saw the explosive attack on Pendergast and rehearsed his moves if Neil went for a weapon.

  “I told you the truth.”

  “You also told me you hadn’t seen her in four months, now it’s two months. How do I know you didn’t arrest him to cover your own crime?”

  Neil glared at Steve. “And how do I know you didn’t kill her, huh? You knew her from Northeastern. Your room was right next to hers, 215 Shillman Hall.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I used to pick her up from class. She said you two met during breaks and had coffee. For all I know you could have been going at it hot and heavy. Plus you like redheads.”

  “Where the hell you get that?”

  “One, I heard you say that. Two, your old friend.”

  “What old friend?”

  “Sylvia Nevins. That picture from last year’s Christmas party in the staff room. The redheaded broad with your arm around.”

  He glared at Steve with the same gotcha eyes he had given Pendergast. “So you conclude that I killed Terry Farina because I had coffee with a redhead?”

  “That and because you’ve got all the answers. You seem to know everything before anybody else, including twenty-five-year C.S.S. vets. You that smart or have you got information the rest of us don’t? The more I think about it, you could have gone up there yourself and done it.”

  Yeah, I could have.

  “In fact, where exactly were you that night?”

  “Home watching the game.” The words slid out as if oiled. Except he couldn’t recall a moment of being home or the game. Everything he knew about the Sox win he had read in the Sunday Boston Globe.

  “Maybe we should do an internal investigation of you, Lieutenant.”

  And in a voice straining for nonchalance, Steve said, “Be my guest.”

  Neil looked at him and bobbed his head. He made a dry smirking humph. “So now what?”

  “We go to Reardon.”

  48

  Steve had briefed the captain on the phone as they headed back to headquarters. When they arrived, Reardon’s face was a terracotta mask. He looked at Neil across the desk from him. “Were you lovers?”

  “Is this a formal interrogation, Captain?”

  “No more than Pendergast’s was.”

  Neil made a face to say he didn’t like the comment. “We were close.”

  “And you never told anybody.”

  In Neil’s defense Steve said, “At the crime scene he said that he knew her from the health club.”

  “There’s a fucking mile between casual acquaintance and an intimate relationship with a homicide victim. What the hell were you thinking? You kept us in the dark on a critical piece of information.”

  “I didn’t want to go public,” Neil said. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Maybe? This suppression of information is sufficient to disqualify you from the case.”

  “Give me a break,” Neil said.

  “I’m giving you a break. You could be fired from the force.”

  Neil’s face hardened. He looked to Steve, but said nothing.

  “You’re suspended from the case permanently and from your current load for the next two weeks, but we’ll call it a leave of absence. When you return you’ll still have your other cases.”

  “With or without pay?”

  “Because it’s an infraction, with. And let me suggest that you work on your interrogation tactics. You were out of control with Pendergast.”

  “Okay.”

  A long moment passed. Then Neil asked, “Am I a suspect?”

  “At the moment, you’re a person of interest and we’ll want a full statement from you. I’ll see you in your office in fifteen.”

  Neil got up, and in silence Steve watched him walk to the door. As soon as the door closed Reardon shot a look at Steve. “Do you think he did it?”

  Crosscurrents ripped through Steve.

  “And how do I know you didn’t kill her, huh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Reardon nodded. “What was his relationship with her?”

  “It started off as trainer and client then became more.” Steve measured his words. “I think he got serious about her. But I think he’s still conflicted, still unresolved in his feelings. He never approved of her stripping, but he feels bad that he made her feel sleazy about it.”

  “So maybe he was narrating how he killed her himself—all the sexual taunting, feeding him motives, attacking him with the stocking. Like he was reenacting his own crime.”

  Steve’s next words could set in motion the investigation of his own partner—

  “In fact, where exactly were you that night?”

  —or himself.

  What Reardon had speculated was the unthinkable: a veteran homicide cop implicated in a high-buzz murder case. Exactly what he did not need on top of all the shrill press about the murder rate and police incompetence.

  At the same time Steve was speculating on hideous Monty Hall options:

  Facing three doors, Bunky, and behind one is the killer, behind the others, scapegoats. The host tells you it’s door number one, which is Earl Pendergast. Door number two is Neil. Door number three is good ole Stevie McHyde. For too many reasons Pendergast doesn’t feel right. Door number two: Neil killing his old girlfriend? Think about it and the pieces begin to snap together like magnets. He wasn’t on duty that day but agreed to take over for Hogan. He’s first to the crime scene and convinces the techs it’s accidental asphyxia. Stomps all over evidence. As soon as Pendergast’s name surfaced, he’s first to peg him as the bad guy. Never went to the ball game. No alibi. Lied about his relationship with the vic. Had a stockingful of motives. Gets a twofer: spurned jealous lover kills the bad girl and scapegoats the competition—poor geeky, creepy English prof.

  (But tell me this: are we lining up circumstances to fit a conclusion in lieu of opening door number three?)

  (And are we ye old pot calling ye old kettle black? That maybe you and Terry were lovers and you dispatched her to rid yourself of the guilt for having an affair that you conveniently burned out of your memory banks?)

  Like she said, blame the victim. That and maybe get back at Dana through her look-alike.

  “It’s also possible,” Steve said, “that we’re seeing a good cop trying to squeeze a confession out of a guy he thinks killed his girlfriend.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  “My gut tells me nothing.”

  “Well, we’ve got nothing connecting him to the crime scene.”

  “And no documented history of his lying, false arrests, or giving misleading evidence in court.”

  “What about Pendergast?”

&n
bsp; Steve shook his head. “We’ve hit stone. Even her friends and coworkers never heard of Earl Pendergast, nor the brother and sister. Nothing from his credit cards, phone records. And he doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “Well, it’s in the prosecutor’s hands.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever, Neil’s off the case. When he comes back, we’ll put him elsewhere. Meanwhile, work with Dacey, Hogan, and Vaughn. And this does not get out. The last fucking thing we need is the media getting wind we’re investigating a crime where an investigator’s a major suspect.” He rubbed his face. “Jesus H. Christ, I don’t need this.”

  49

  “Well, Dana, if I must say so myself, you look wonderful.”

  With his hand on her chin, Dr. Monks inspected the work he had done on her eyelids and the crease line above her nose bridge, turning her face as if examining a rare vase.

  The assistant handed her a hand mirror. “I think you look great.”

  Dana inspected herself. The scowl crease was gone and so were some frown lines. Even through the discoloration she could see that her eyes looked more open. But the enhanced smoothness only made her nose look bigger.

  Dr. Monks donned a set of magnifying lenses to study the stitches. His eyes were huge, the centers almost completely black pupils. While he inspected her, it crossed her mind that what people said was true: enlarged pupils added to a person’s sex appeal, which was probably why magazine ads showed models with exaggerated blackness to associate arousal with the products.

  After a minute he removed the glasses. “The incisions are healing well and the swelling is down. Dana, you once again have smooth young eyelids.”

  “Thank you.” Again he had addressed her by her first name. Until today she had been Mrs. Markarian.

  He slipped the lenses back on and removed the stitches. Probably because of the ice compresses and medication she felt only minimal discomfort. When he was finished he handed her a hand mirror. “What do you think?”