Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  “What’s that I smell?”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  Lourdes began to slide away sideways, but the woman put up a log-like arm on either side of her, penning her in.

  “I smell dry cooch. Don’t you?”

  “I didn’t think dry cooch had a smell.” Lourdes thrust her chin out. “But I don’t get down there that often.”

  “You saying I do?”

  “No.”

  “You calling me a dyke or something?”

  “All right, can you back up or put your arms down?”

  “You saying that because of how I look, right?”

  “I’m not judging anyone or anything, but you’re crowding me.”

  “Shit.” The big woman looked down and laughed, but kept her arms where they’d been. “I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever be.”

  “Whatever. If you say so.”

  Lourdes tried to turn away with a demure smile, but the cellmate followed her with her face, keeping her hemmed in.

  “Hey, look at me when I’m talking to you,” the big woman said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  It was obvious what this was. They’d placed someone with a serious mental illness in the cell with her, trying to provoke a physical confrontation when she was forced to defend herself. Then they could tack on assault charges to go with the drug evidence they’d planted on her. To further discredit her by making her look unstable. And if she didn’t fight back and got her face stomped again, losing two teeth and getting her jaw fractured like she did at the Whitman houses, well, that wasn’t the fault of the guards. Was it? Just them dumb crazy bitches going at it in the pens. Same as it’s always been.

  “I want to know what’s inside you.” The cellmate leaned in, their chests almost touching as Lourdes smelled the remnants of weed, beer, and maybe crack. “Can you tell me?”

  “Same thing that’s inside everybody else.” Lourdes kept her profile turned to the woman.

  “Yeah, but you’re a cop.” The woman’s nose was almost mashing into Lourdes’s cheek. “They told me that you’re a cop.”

  “If they said it, then it must be true.”

  “Hey, I said, look at me.” The woman suddenly grabbed Lourdes’s jaw with one hand and twisted it as she squeezed. “Are you afraid?”

  “Don’t touch me.” Lourdes batted the hand away. “I’m not your bitch.”

  The guards were definitely all crowded around the closed-circuit monitors outside, watching this instead of UFC reruns. The best show in the facility.

  “What would you do if I got all up in your business?” The woman pressed her mouth up to Lourdes’s ear, her breath hot and heavy. “If I got my fingers in there, would you be all hard and rough like the inside of a police car? Or would you be all soft and wet like a lady should be?”

  “All right, you need to back the fuck off and give me some space right now.” Lourdes ducked away from her and slid along the wall. “I think we just established that I’m a cop.”

  “Except now you’re in here, chiquita.” The woman cornered her again, in the place where two walls met. “So we’re the same now. You said it yourself. There’s no difference inside.”

  It was not going to be good if this got physical. On the street, Lourdes could handle herself decently. She got down and dirty in the gutter with a few perps. But that was when she had mace and cuffs and a partner to back her up. And of course she’d shot that lowlife Tyrell Humphries in the scrotum when he’d tried to hold up a beauty parlor where she was getting her hair done. But here: no partner, no gun, no physical parity. She could be rolling on the cold floor for hours with this hag and the guards would claim they’d been tied up handling a bigger disturbance in the main cells.

  “You know what?” The cellmate put the tip of her right boot against the tip of Lourdes’s left shoe. “I used to be prettier than you.”

  “I said, back the fuck off.” Lourdes tried to push her away with both hands, to little effect. “I’m not gonna tell you again.”

  “I had a man who was twice the man you’ll ever have.” The woman was exhaling and staring down at Lourdes with a kind of unyielding interest, like she was already thinking about taking pleasure without asking for consent. “He bought me clothes. He bought me shoes. He took me away. He poured champagne all over my body, Moët Chandon, and licked off every inch of it with his tongue.”

  “Then why you bothering me?” Lourdes tried shoving her harder but it was like trying to move the Great Wall of China.

  “Because they arrested my man for selling drugs out of his car, then they beat him until he wasn’t a man anymore. Then they locked me up with a bunch of fucked-up psychos where the only way I had to survive was to become like I am now.”

  “Oh.”

  Lourdes felt some of the air go out of her fear. Even as the woman laid a gentle finger against her lips.

  “So you stay cool, baby,” she hastened her whisper. “Everything ain’t the way it looks out here. There’s some scary people who’ll do you right in the end. And rotten-ass skanks who’ll smile in your face and stab you in the back. But if they end up doing you like I think they will, at least you’ll know you got a friend on the inside. I’ll look out for you if you look out for me. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Lourdes nodded.

  “But if we both go to prison, don’t forget to slip me some sugar once in a while. Your big bad mama’s got a sweet tooth for sweet thangs.”

  She kissed Lourdes hard on the mouth and then went to lie down on the bench. Leaving just enough room for Lourdes to sleep sitting up beside her.

  30

  SEPTEMBER

  2017

  The bar in Central Islip was called Legends. It had dartboards and Never Forget posters on the walls, Led Zeppelin on the jukebox, and off-duty police and corrections officers three deep at the counter, letting off steam. When Mitchell Vogliano walked in with Kevin Sullivan that night and tried to order a glass of red wine instead of a domestic beer, it nearly caused an international incident.

  “A cabernet? Here? Seriously?” The bartender, with a boiled cabbage complexion and an accountant’s eyes, nodded toward the taps. “You’re drinking Bud or Guinness.”

  “Read the room,” Sullivan muttered.

  “I’ll just have a seltzer then,” Mitchell Vogliano said, ignoring the commotion he’d set off around him.

  “Christ,” said Sullivan. “Like we’re not going to have enough trouble.”

  They’d driven out from Brooklyn together to try to get Lourdes out of county lockup. But the night sergeant said he didn’t care what they heard when they called ahead; courts were closed for the night, arraignments were in the morning, anyone in was staying in. And yes, this so-called Detective Robles was being held in protective custody.

  Sullivan made a few calls and arranged to meet a local bail bondsman he knew slightly at the bar and now here they were, strangers in a strange land, and semi-strangers to one another. He’d had Mitchell Vogliano as an assistant district attorney on one drug murder case back in Brooklyn where the defendant pled out right away and had heard he was good at his job. Otherwise, he was mainly aware of him as Robles’s fancy man, a choice he found himself puzzling over as he pointed toward the Guinness harp and settled on a bar stool.

  “Ever hear the expression ‘go with the flow’?” he asked. “Or ‘when in Rome’?”

  “I don’t like beer.” Mitchell sat down beside him. “And I don’t change my stripes to fit in.”

  “Good for you. I suppose.”

  Typical nose-in-the-air prosecutor arrogance, Sullivan thought. Let the world come to me. As opposed to your work-a-day cop adjusting to circumstance. On the other hand, now he could see a little bit of what Lourdes liked about this skinny young white fella. He wasn’t exactly a street fighter, like she was, but he wasn’t a pushover either.

  “I’m a little surprised she called you first,” Mitchell said forthrightly, like it was something he’d been sitting on durin
g the mostly silent car ride out here.

  “I’m sure she tried you.” Sullivan shrugged. “Or was about to.”

  “Maybe I should say that I’m jealous. That you were who she thought to reach out to when she knew she was in trouble.”

  “I just happened to be on the line when they pulled her over. I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

  “Shouldn’t I?” Mitchell rested an elbow on the counter. “There’s a lot I don’t get out of her. Like I wasn’t aware you guys were that close, or had worked together for that long.”

  “We didn’t,” Sullivan said. “But in this job, sometimes you just click with people or you don’t.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m jealous.” Mitchell nodded. “You got to be in the car with her. For all those hours.”

  But you get to be in bed with her, Sullivan thought. Another one of those regretful things he’d never say aloud. Especially not now.

  The jukebox was playing “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” And even though it was a weeknight, the officers at the bar balled up their fists and threw them in the air every time the song switched from its sad acoustic part to the bludgeoning electric sections.

  “She’s a good woman,” Sullivan said quietly. “You’re a fortunate man.”

  “Am I?” Mitchell’s eyes had started to drift like he was sinking into worry. “I wonder how long I’m going to have her sometimes.”

  “Well, I doubt you’ll ever really have her, son. But you’re fortunate to have time with her. That’s all you really have with anybody.”

  Sullivan watched the bartender tilt back a glass and fill it under the taps. For some reason, he remembered playing his wife some other Zeppelin album and trying to explain to her why white men loved “Stairway to Heaven.” She was, of course, a Latina and a dancer, so classic rock made absolutely no sense to her. But he adored the way she laughed when Robert Plant sang about the bustle in the hedgerow.

  “So what do you think?” Mitchell leaned over. “Am I going to lose her?”

  “To another man or to the job?”

  “Actually, detective, I was more anxious about the immediate situation with her being in custody.” The younger man almost smiled as he looked around. “These people are a little scary. No?”

  Sullivan eyed the crowd. It was true that police were police in most places. And there were plenty of good cops from the city who’d come out to work here. But experience had taught him that within every constabulary force was a core of officers who hated of democracy and preferred authoritarianism. And that this was a group that was particularly hostile to outsiders and people who didn’t look like them, and they were very dangerous to drink around.

  “She should be all right,” he said, looking toward the entrance to see if his bail bondsman had arrived. “But I’ll feel better once she’s headed home with you.”

  “You don’t really think they’d plant evidence on her and try to send her to prison, do you?” Mitchell asked.

  “You challenge the powers that be, they’ll rarely thank you for it.”

  “So it’s true,” Mitchell lowered his voice. “You think this could go up the ladder as well? I mean, that the higher-ups could have been involved in what happened to these women?”

  “It’s hard to imagine, but maybe. Once you decide it’s more important to protect the system than the people in it, then anything is possible.” He turned as the bartender brought them their drinks. “Excuse me, sir, were you on the job out here?”

  “Was I a police officer in Suffolk?” The bartender fingered his blue denim work shirt and smiled to himself. “For about five seconds. Till they put me on midnights on the highways. Not for me, brother. I’m a talker, not a loner.”

  “Kevin Sullivan, Mitchell Vogliano. We’re out here from the city.” Sullivan offered his hand. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.” The bartender returned the grip firmly. “I’m Paul Gillispie, by the way.” He ignored a couple of drunken officers waving their empties at him. “I always say that I serve these guys, but I’m not their servant. Some of them get confused sometimes.”

  “You ever hear of something called the Bird Dog case?”

  “Are you putting me on?” Gillispie asked. “You’re talking about the Kim Bergdahl case?”

  “That would be the one.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Now that you’re saying the name properly, it’s starting to come back to me.”

  “Then pull your stools closer and order another round,” Gillispie said.

  31

  FEBRUARY

  1996

  The state investigators came to talk to him three days after Leslie Jesperson was killed. They found him on a Saturday morning loading up the station wagon in the iced-over driveway of the Smithtown house.

  “Captain, can we get a minute?” The taller one was built like a hockey player, hefty but easy on his feet, with a trace of a Canadian border accent. “I’m Chris Sinclair. My partner’s Ernie Barbaro.”

  Joey waved them off when they started to show tin. No need to make a bigger thing of this with the neighbors watching.

  “Going somewhere?” Barbaro was eying the equipment in the back of the station wagon.

  If his partner Sinclair was the point man, Barbaro was the enforcer. Lower to the ground and chunkier. More a brawler than a skater.

  “I’m supposed to referee a hockey game at the rink this afternoon,” Joey said. “I’m bringing the pads and sticks and balls and all the other equipment. But if you need me, the lady of the house can step up.”

  Beth was watching from behind the half-open door, giving all three of them the evil eye. He had made up his mind to shed her and the kids as soon as he got the bump to chief. The internal buildup was getting too hard to manage without release and the family was getting in the way.

  “Anyway, what can I do for you guys?” he asked.

  Sinclair and Barbaro exchanged a look, as if they’d scripted for more resistance.

  “We’re hoping you could come by the barracks and help us out with a case we’re working on,” said Sinclair.

  “Happy to oblige.” Joey reached into his pocket for keys. “State police have been great about helping out with our cases. I got another car in the garage. Should I take it or go with you?”

  “Don’t you want to know what this is about?” Barbaro thumbed the side of his mouth.

  “Sure, if you want to tell me.” Joey looked back at the house. “Or we can wait till we get to the barracks. Whatever works for you guys time-wise.”

  “You spoke to an investigator named Leslie Jesperson a while back,” Barbaro said. “You remember that?”

  “Of course. She used to be Martinez. I saw her up at the commission. I wish I could say ‘nice lady,’ but to be honest I never got around to that side of her. What’s up?”

  It would have been ridiculous to lie about knowing her. They could get the video of the interview he’d done with his lawyer present.

  “She got shot to death in Albany a few days ago,” said Sinclair. “In a supermarket parking lot.”

  “Ho shit.” Joey unhinged his jaw. “I saw something about a cop getting shot upstate, but I didn’t think … Do we have any leads?”

  The driveway was slightly slanted and both state officers looked unbalanced now on the slippery ice.

  “Not yet,” said Sinclair. “We’re hoping you could help us check off a few boxes, so we can move more quickly.”

  “Absolutely.” Joey nodded. “Let’s go. Whatever you need.” He looked toward their Buick, parked across the street. “By the way, what day was she shot?”

  “Wednesday afternoon,” said Barbaro. “Witnesses saw a man in a brown hooded sweatshirt driving away in a white car.” He took his time, looking at the black station wagon Joey had loaded up and then glancing at the garage.

  “Wednesday afternoon?” Joey feigned a double take. “Yeah, that’s why I didn’t hear about it until later. I was tied up all day in a seminar.”


  “Seminar?” Barbaro shot a worried glance at Sinclair.

  “Yeah, I teach a class about securing crime scenes at the academy in Brentwood from one to five every Wednesday afternoon.” Joey shrugged. “They gotta learn somehow.”

  “So you were with a bunch of recruits on Wednesday afternoon?” Sinclair asked, the smooth skater tripped up.

  “Yeah,” Joey said, playing it out. “A couple dozen cadets. Good class this year. Why do you ask like that?”

  The neighbors had come out to see what was going on. The Hansons, the Armitages, the McCarthys. All the people who’d been there the night he showed up to deal with Randy and who had kept their distance the whole time he’d been living here. He looked back and forth between them and the investigators, pretending to be surprised and embarrassed.

  “You guys weren’t thinking I had anything to do with this.” He composed a hurt expression. “Were you?”

  “Nah, nah, nah…”

  Their voices were a cascade of denials as they broke into awkward grins. Flea-brain Staties. Better suited to flag duties than homicide investigations. He couldn’t believe they thought they had a right to even stand near his lawn.

  “We just need to look at everyone and everything,” Sinclair said. “You understand, right?”

  “Totally.” Joey nodded. “And I’ll get you the names and numbers of every student I was with, so you can confirm. But really, guys? You thought I was good for this? All the time I have on the job?”

  “Hey, captain.” Barbaro had taken on a sort of disappointed hedgehog look. “Wouldn’t you have done the same thing if you were us?”

  “No doubt I would, my brother.” Joey slapped him on the back, making sure it smarted. “Can’t blame someone for doing his job.”

  32