Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

“Suicides don’t always make sense. Someone’s gonna take and eat a thirty-eight slug, he’s not exactly in his right mind. And you know as well as I do—plenty of people off themselves in the can. You’d think they were gonna have to clean up the mess themselves.”

  Liska said nothing. Her attention had gone to the floor, dingy vinyl that had been mostly white twenty years ago. Behind Fallon, the vinyl had taken a spray of blood flecked with bits of bone and chunks of brain matter that looked like overcooked macaroni. In front of him: nothing. The shower curtain was a mess; the door they had entered through was clean.

  Anyone coming into—or going out of—the room had a clean path. No blood to step in or to mark fingerprints.

  “If he’d been a billionaire with a young, pretty wife, I’d say you’re on a hot scent, Tinks,” Kovac said. “But he was a bitter old man in a wheelchair who just lost his favorite son. What’d he have left to live for? He was torn up about Andy, couldn’t forgive himself for not forgiving the boy. So he rolled it in here, parked it, and capped himself. And he did it the way he did it to make a neat death scene—so none of us would come busting in here and step on his brain.”

  Liska pointed the Polaroid at the .38 on the floor and snapped one last shot.

  “That’ll be his old service weapon,” Kovac said. “When we look around, we’ll find that he kept it in a shoe box in the back of his closet, ’cause that’s where old cops always stash their guns.” He made a sharp, hard-edged smile. “That’s where I stash mine, if you want to come and take it away from me. We’re pathetic creatures of pattern and habit.” He stared at Fallon. “Some of us more pathetic than others.”

  “You’re sounding a little bitter yourself, Kojak,” Liska said, handing the snapshots to him.

  He slipped them into the inside breast pocket of his topcoat. “How can I look at this and not be?”

  From another part of the house came the thump of an exterior door closing. Kovac gladly turned away from the corpse and started down the hall.

  “It’s about damn time,” he barked, then pulled up short at the same time Neil Fallon stopped dead in the archway between the living room and dining room.

  He looked as if he’d been rolled. His hair stood up on one side, a purpling bruise crowned the crest of his right cheek, and his lip was split. The brown suit looked slept in. The cheap tie was askew and the top button of the white shirt undone. He couldn’t have gotten the collar closed with a winch. He’d obviously bought the shirt a couple of neck sizes ago and hadn’t had occasion to wear it since.

  He gulped a couple of breaths, pumping himself up.

  “Jesus Christ, he can’t even leave this to me?” he said, his expression sliding from shock to anger. “I can’t even drive him to the goddamn funeral home? He’s gotta have one of his own for that too? The son of a bitch—”

  “He’s dead, Neil,” Kovac said bluntly. “Looks like he shot himself. I’m sorry.”

  Fallon stared at him for a full minute, then shook his head in amazement. “You’re the regular Angel of Death, aren’t you?”

  “Just the messenger.”

  Fallon turned around as if he might walk right back out the front door, but he just stood there with his hands on his hips, the bull shoulders rising and falling.

  Kovac waited, thinking about another cigarette and that glass of whiskey he’d wanted earlier. He remembered the bottle of Old Crow Neil had had out in his shed the day he’d told him about his brother, and how they had stood out in the cold and shared it while they stared at the snow blowing across the frozen lake. It seemed a year ago.

  “When did you last talk to Mike?” he asked, falling back on the routine, same as he always did.

  “Last night. On the phone.”

  “What time was that?”

  Fallon started to laugh, a harsh, discordant sound. “You’re some piece of work, Kovac,” he said, starting to pace a small circle at the far end of the dining room table. “My brother and my old man dead inside a week and you’re giving me the fucking third degree. You’re something. I hadn’t seen the old man five times in the last ten years, and you think maybe I killed him. Why would I bother?”

  “That’s not why I asked, but as long as you’ve brought it up, I’ll need to know for the record where you were this morning between midnight and four A.M.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I think I’d remember that. Must have been someone else.”

  “I was home in bed.”

  “Got a wife or girlfriend to corroborate?”

  “I’ve got a wife. We’re separated.”

  Fallon looked around as if searching for some neutral third party to witness what was happening to him now, but there was no one. He paced some more and shook his head, the anger and frustration building visibly.

  He made a little lunge toward Kovac and bounced back, jabbing the air with a forefinger, a grimace contorting his face. “I hated that old son of a bitch! I fucking hated him!”

  Tears squeezed out of his tightly closed eyes and rolled over his cheeks. “But he was my old man,” he said, and sucked in a quick breath. “And now he’s dead. I don’t need any shit from you!”

  He stopped pacing and bent over with his hands on his knees, as if he’d taken a blow to the stomach. He groaned in the back of his throat. “Christ, I’m gonna be sick.”

  Kovac moved to block the path to the bathroom, but Fallon went for the kitchen instead and straight out the back door.

  Kovac started to follow, then pulled up as the head of the crime scene unit walked in the front door. Just as well. By the time he was able to join Neil Fallon on the back steps, any gastrointestinal pyrotechnics had subsided. Fallon stood leaning against the railing, staring at the backyard, sipping out of a slim metal flask. His skin looked slightly gray, his eyes rimmed in red. He didn’t acknowledge Kovac’s presence, but pointed to a naked oak tree in the far corner of the yard.

  “That was the hanging tree,” he said without emotion. “When Andy and I were kids.”

  “Playing cowboys.”

  “And pirates, and Tarzan, and whatever. He should have come back here and done it. Andy hanging dead in the backyard, Iron Mike in the house with his head blown off. I could have come and parked my car in the garage and gassed myself.”

  “How’d Mike sound last night on the phone?”

  “Like an asshole, like always. ‘I wanna be at the goddamn funeral home by ten o’clock.’” The impersonation was less than flattering, but not less than accurate. “‘You can damn well be here on time.’ Fucking old prick,” he muttered, and swiped a gloved hand under his running nose.

  “What time was that? I’m trying to get a frame for what happened when,” Kovac explained. “We need it for the paperwork.”

  Fallon stared at the tree and shrugged. “I dunno. I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe like nine or something.”

  “Couldn’t have been. I ran into him at your brother’s house around nine.”

  Fallon looked at him. “What were you doing there?”

  “Poking around. There’s a couple of loose ends need tying up.”

  “Like what? Andy hung himself. How can you have any doubts about that?”

  “I like to know the why of things,” Kovac said. “I’m funny that way. I want to look at what he was working on, what was going on in his personal life, things like that. Fill in the blanks, get the whole picture. You see?”

  If Fallon saw, he didn’t like it. He turned away and took another pull on the little flask.

  “I’m used to people dying,” Kovac said. “Drug dealers kill each other over money. Junkies kill each other over dope. Husbands and wives kill each other out of hate. There’s a method to the madness. Someone like your brother buys it, a guy with everything going for him, I need to try to make some sense of it.”

  “Good luck.”

  “What’d you do to your face?”

  Fallon tried to shake off the attention. He touched a hand to the bruise on his cheek as i
f to brush it away. “Nothing. Mixed it up a little in the parking lot with a customer last night.”

  “Over what?”

  “He made a remark. I took exception and said something about his sexual preferences and a sheep. He took a swing and got lucky.”

  “That’s assault,” Kovac pointed out. “You call the cops?”

  Fallon gave a nervous laugh. “That’s a good one. He was a cop.”

  “A cop? A city cop?”

  “He wasn’t in uniform.”

  “How’d you know he was a cop?”

  “Please. Like I can’t spot one a mile off.”

  “Did you get a name? A badge number?”

  “Right. After he knocked me on my ass, I demanded his badge number. Anyway, I don’t need the hassle of filing a report. He was just some asshole knew Andy. He made a crack. We took it outside.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Like half the cops in the world,” Fallon said impatiently. He slipped the flask into his coat pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and went about that ritual, fumbling with his gloves, fingers clumsy with cold—or with nerves. He swore to himself, got the thing lit, took a couple of hard puffs.

  “Look, I wish I hadn’t said anything. I don’t want to do anything with it. I’d had a few myself. I got a mouth on me when I’m tanked.”

  “Big guy? Little guy? White? Black? Old? Young?”

  Fallon scowled and fidgeted. He looked as if his skin suddenly didn’t fit him right. He wouldn’t meet Kovac’s gaze. “I don’t even know that I’d know him if I saw him again. It didn’t mean anything. It’s not important.”

  “It could mean a hell of a lot,” Kovac said. “Your brother worked Internal Affairs. He made enemies for a living.”

  “But he killed himself,” Fallon insisted. “That was what happened, right? He hung himself. The case is closed.”

  “Everyone seems to want it to be.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I want the truth—whatever it might be.”

  Neil Fallon laughed, then sobered, staring once again at the backyard—or back in time. “Then you picked the wrong family, Kovac. The Fallons have never been very dedicated to the truth about anything. We lie to ourselves and about ourselves and about our lives. That’s what we do best.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. We’re the all-American family, that’s what. At least we were before two-thirds of us committed suicide this week.”

  “Could anyone else at your place ID this guy from last night?” Kovac asked, more concerned for the moment with the notion of Ogden going way the hell out to Neil Fallon’s bar and bait shop than he was with the crumbling dynamics of the Fallon family.

  “I was working alone.”

  “Other customers?”

  “Maybe. Jesus,” Fallon muttered, “I wish I’d told you I walked into a door.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first person to try it today,” Kovac said. “So, was it before or after the donnybrook when you talked to Mike?”

  Fallon blew smoke out his nose. Annoyed. “After, I guess. What the hell difference does it make?”

  “He was pretty out of it when I saw him. On sedatives or something. If you talked to him after that, I guess he had snapped out of it.”

  “I guess. When it came to chewing my ass, he always rose to the occasion,” he said bitterly. “Nothing was ever good enough. Nothing ever made up.”

  “Made up for what?”

  “That I wasn’t him. That I wasn’t Andy. You might have thought after he found out Andy was queer . . . Well, he’s dead now, so what’s the difference? It’s over. Finally.”

  He looked at the oak tree once more, then threw the cigarette into the snow and checked his watch. “I have to get to the funeral home. Maybe I can get one in the ground before the other turns cold.”

  He gave Kovac a sideways look as he went to open the door. “Don’t take it personal, but I hope I never see you again, Kovac.”

  Kovac didn’t say anything. He stood on the stoop and looked back at the Fallon brothers’ hanging tree, imagining two young boys with their lives ahead of them, playing good guys and bad guys; the bonds of brotherhood twining the paths of their lives, shaping their strengths and weaknesses and resentments.

  If there was one thing from which people never recovered, it was childhood. If there was one tie that could never truly be broken, for good or for ill, it was to family.

  He turned the thoughts over in his head like a bear turning over rocks to see what kind of grubs it might find. He thought about the Fallons and the jealousies and disappointments and anger among them. He thought about the faceless cop Neil Fallon had picked a fight with in the parking lot of the bar and bait shop.

  Would Ogden have been stupid enough to go there? Why? Or maybe stupid was the wrong word. What would he stand to gain? Maybe that was the question.

  Even as he pondered that, Kovac couldn’t stop thinking that Neil Fallon hadn’t even asked to see his father. The vic’s family usually did. Most people would refuse to believe the bad news until they saw the body with their own eyes. Neil Fallon hadn’t asked. And he hadn’t taken a step toward the bathroom when he’d said he felt sick. He’d gone straight for the back door.

  Maybe he’d wanted air. Maybe he hadn’t asked to see his dead father because he wasn’t the sort of person who needed the visual image to make the death real, or maybe because he couldn’t stomach that kind of thing.

  Or maybe they should be running tests for gunpowder residue on Neil Fallon’s hands.

  The back door opened and Liska stuck her head out. “The vultures have landed.”

  Kovac groaned. He’d bought some time calling in the request for the crime scene unit over his cell phone, but dispatch would have called the team over the radio, and every reporter in the metro area had a scanner. News of a dead body never failed to bring out the scavengers. According to the press, The People had a right to know about the tragedies of strangers.

  “You want me to handle them?” Liska asked.

  “No. I’ll give them a statement,” he said, thinking about the life and times of Mike Fallon, the pain, the loss, the soured love and wasted chances. “How’s this? Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

  Liska arched a brow and spoke with heavy sarcasm. “Yeah. There’s a headline.”

  She started to go back inside. Kovac stopped her with a question.

  “Hey, Tinks, when you saw Ogden this morning, did he look like he’d been in a fight?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Next time you see him, ask him what the hell he was doing at Neil Fallon’s bar last night. See if you get a rise.”

  Liska looked unhappy. “He was at Fallon’s bar?”

  “Maybe. Fallon claims some cop was out there making cracks, and they mixed it up in the parking lot.”

  “Did he describe Ogden?”

  “No. He dropped his little bomb, then clammed up. He acts like a man who’s scared of something. Like retribution maybe.”

  “Why would Ogden go all the way out there? What would be the point? Even if—God, especially if he had something to do with Andy Fallon or with the Curtis murder. Go out there and pick a fight with Neil Fallon? Not even Ogden is that stupid.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. And the next logical question is, then why would Neil Fallon lie about it if it didn’t happen?”

  “Neil Fallon, whose father is sitting in the bathroom missing the back of his head?”

  Neil Fallon, who was seething with long-held hard feelings. Neil Fallon, who had admitted to a quick, harsh temper. Neil Fallon, who resented his brother and hated his father, even after their deaths.

  “Let’s do a little digging on Mr. Fallon,” Kovac said. “Put Elwood on it, if he’s not busy. I’ll talk to some of Fallon’s customers. See if anyone else saw this phantom cop.”

  “Will do.”

  Kovac took one last grim look at the hanging tree. “Make
sure the ME’s people bag Mike’s hands. We could be looking at a murder, after all.”

  17

  CHAPTER

  IT WOULDN’T BE a cop funeral like the ones shown on the six o’clock news. The church would not overflow with ranks of uniforms who had rolled in from all over the state. There would be no endless caravan of radio cars to the cemetery. No one was going to play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. Andy Fallon had not fallen in the line of duty. His death had not been heroic.

  The place didn’t even look like a church, Kovac thought as he left the car in the lot and walked toward the low brick building. Like most churches built in the seventies, it looked more like a municipal building. Only the thin, stylized iron cross on the front gave it away. That and the illuminated sign out near the boulevard.

  ST. MICHAEL’S

  ADVENT: WAITING FOR A MIRACLE?

  MASS WEEKDAYS: 7 A.M.

  SATURDAY: 5 P.M.

  SUNDAY: 9 A.M. & 11 A.M.

  As if miracles were performed regularly at those scheduled hours. The hearse was sitting on the circle drive near the side entrance. No miracles for Andy Fallon. Maybe if he had come here Saturday at five . . .

  The wind whipped Kovac’s coat around his legs. He bent his head into it to keep his hat. The windchill was in the teens. Mourners moved toward the church from scattershot spots in the parking lot. Cop. Cop. Three civilians together—a man and two women in their late twenties. The cops were in plain clothes, and he didn’t know them, but he could spot a cop as easily as Neil Fallon. It was in the carriage, in the demeanor, in the eyes, in the mustache.

  The usual dirge was playing on the organ as they trailed one another into the building to loiter in the narthex. Kovac renewed his promise to himself not to have a funeral when he died. His pals could hoist a few for him at Patrick’s, and maybe Liska could do something with his ashes. Toss them out on the steps of city hall to join the ashes of a thousand cigarettes smoked there by cops every day. Seemed fitting. He sure as hell wouldn’t put people through this: standing around staring at one another, listening to god-awful organ music and choking on the smell of gladiolas.