Cover Story

by Gerry Boyle

  “Butch Casey? Nothing, really,” I said. “He went out on stress disability.”

  “So you’ve stayed in touch?”

  There was an implication in her voice.

  “Not constantly,” I said. “But, yeah. I mean, we’ve known each other for so long. He sent me a postcard a few weeks ago. Said he had a story for me.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. He just said it could be big, like they always do. But it’s probably nothing. I’m meeting him for a drink tonight.”

  “Have you considered a follow?”

  I stopped and looked at her. The elevators were to the left, the executive wall to the right.

  “A follow?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to write it, obviously.”

  “No.”

  “And it would be a metro story, of course. So technically I couldn’t even assign it. But is there an anniversary or anything?”

  “His wife’s murder was ten years ago last week.”

  “So that’s the hook. And don’t you think there’s a story there? The long-term consequences of a random street crime. It ended a detective’s career, and—”

  Ellen paused.

  “And mine?” I said. I smiled.

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “Yes,” Ellen said. “I was.”

  3

  I replayed it in snippets all the way back to the hotel, where I opened a bottle of ale and the drapes and, sitting in the armchair, stared out the window. I got up. Wandered about the room. Tried Roxanne on the phone but got no answer.

  Sat down and lived it all again.

  Butch’s wife, Leslie, an English-born emergency-room nurse, killed on the street outside Columbia-Presbyterian. Not just killed, but shot point-blank in the face by a guy who wanted her car. It was a big gun; it was gruesome and terribly sad.

  So there was numbing grief for Butch, vain sympathy from me. And all the while, a relentless hunt for the piece of shit who killed a cop’s wife.

  I wrote the stories. The murder. The pursuit. The arrest.

  The guy’s name was Muriqi, but that was an alias and his real name turned out to be Ortiz. He was a small-time thug who, by inadvertently targeting the wife of a New York homicide detective, had made the leap to notorious criminal.

  I reported his arrest in the Times. And I wrote the story when the case was dropped, when Fiore, then Manhattan district attorney, said a witness had been coached by the cops, by Butch himself.

  Sitting there in the hotel room, I sipped the ale and shook my head.

  I still could picture her: Annie Scott, a tiny, stoop-shouldered woman in her fifties who lived with her brother in East Tremont in the Bronx. Worked in dietary at the hospital and saw Muriqi when her brother pulled out of the hospital entrance after picking her up that night. Afraid, she didn’t call until a month later. She said she could place the suspect at the crime scene. She was a miracle, a witness sent by God. But then she backed out, rattled by the cops, caving in to a brother who didn’t want her to get involved. But leaving the station house, Annie Scott and her brother ran into Butch.

  He bought them coffee. They talked about Leslie. After a half-hour, Annie Scott had changed her mind. They had Muriqi nailed, and they went up to the Bronx and picked him up and made sure TV got a good long look at his face, that the newspapers had printouts of his police record. And then Fiore, Manhattan DA, found out that Butch had made contact with the key witness. Annie Scott was out; Muriqi, too. Butch soon followed.

  And when I still pursued it—repeatedly contacting Annie Scott, trying to convince her to talk—I was gone, too.

  Fiore got me yanked from the story for not divulging my longtime friendship, since childhood, with Detective Casey. I still could remember my dressing-down, staring into the editor’s angry red face and saying, “Yeah, we grew up together. Our fathers knew each other at the Museum of Natural History. But show me bias in my stories, show me where the reporting isn’t balanced. Show me one word . . .”

  I shook myself loose. Finished the last swallow of ale and, hoisting myself from the chair, went to the bathroom. When I came back, I sat down heavily on the edge of the king-size bed.

  It had been turned down and a mint had been left by my pillow and by the pillow that would have been Roxanne’s. I ate both of them, then got up and opened another bottle of India pale ale, one of two I’d brought in my bag. I took a swallow, then went to the eighth-floor window and took in the view of the building next door. Its brick wall was pocked with office windows behind which people moved like ants in an ant farm. I watched them for a minute, then turned back to the phone.

  It was quarter to nine and I’d called Roxanne three times, leaving messages at her office in Portland and at her condo, across the harbor. I’d considered calling the house in Prosperity but couldn’t think of any reason why she would drive way up there, not with work to do, not alone.

  Roxanne probably was working, trying to find placements for—what had it been? A boy and two girls? Two boys and a girl? I couldn’t remember, but I did know the emergency-room people had found scars and scabs, broken and healed bones. Roxanne had stepped in.

  Her phone had rung while we were packing late Saturday night. With the shrill ring went our plan for a couple of days in Manhattan, our first trip to the city together. There was a worker on call, but these kids were close to Roxanne. She’d go to the hospital. She’d go find a judge to sign a petition to take the children.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” she’d said, grabbing her briefcase, her suitcase still on the bed.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I’d said.

  But I hadn’t been, not entirely.

  Like someone reluctant to bring a date to a family reunion, I hadn’t relished the idea of bringing Roxanne on a tour of my old haunts. I’d left the old Jack McMorrow behind. We’d lost touch. He didn’t call. I didn’t write. We didn’t hash over old times.

  Hey, what was the name of that place on Seventh Avenue? You were there with that blonde who looked like Debbie Harry. She worked for some magazine. Yeah, right. Vogue. Little Miss Name Dropper. Telling us she’d just been at a party with Ron Wood. You don’t remember? Well, I do. You went home with her and we didn’t see you for a week.

  No, part of me wanted to keep that life in the past. McMorrow the highflier. McMorrow the Times reporter who drummed himself out before others got the chance. I didn’t talk about it. Roxanne didn’t ask.

  Some things you carried alone.

  I looked at the phone. Turned and looked out at the office workers, each framed like a painting. I stood and watched and drank the ale, leaning forward to look down. A guy came to one of the windows and looked up. The phone rang and I grabbed it.

  “Hello.”

  “Jack.”

  “Hey there, darlin’.”

  “I got your message. I just got home.”

  “Long day?”

  “On top of a long night. I was at the foster home. The oldest one wouldn’t let go of me.”

  “She liked you.”

  “She didn’t have much to compare me with.”

  “She would’ve liked you anyway.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Roxanne said.

  “I do.”

  “You like me?”

  “I love you.”

  “Well, thanks. I love you, too.”

  She sounded a bit startled, a little perplexed. “Jack, you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How is everything? How’s the room?”

  “Very nice. You’d love it. I think it’s taupe but I’m not sure.”

  “Taupe is sort of a dull gray with a tinge of yellow.”

  “It’s not taupe. It’s beige with a tinge of purple.”

  “That’s mauve.”

  “Okay. It’s mauve. But very soft and soothing. It would have been—”

  “Fun,” Roxanne said.

 
“Sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, well. Did you get to the Times?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “How was that?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Well, a little strange,” I said. “Like going back to your high school or something.”

  “Did you see anybody you knew?”

  I told her about Ellen and D. Robert and Nadine.

  “Were they glad to see you?”

  “Sure. I mean, they weren’t jumping up and down or anything. But it was all very cordial. I guess you’d call it cordial.”

  I took a swallow of ale. Then another.

  “Jack, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, Rox. I’m fine.”

  “You sound a little sad or something.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. But it’s only been a day.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just different. Being back here.”

  “You’d rather I were with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, next time,” Roxanne said. “It couldn’t be helped.”

  “I know,” I said. I paused again.

  “What is it, Jack?”

  I sat down on the bed. The people across the way still were at their desks. They worked late in New York. It was a rat race and the other rats were always nipping at your tail.

  “Jack, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you going to do now? I don’t want you to sit around the hotel just because I’m not there.”

  I told her my plan for the evening. A drink for old times’ sake with Butch Casey.

  “The police detective?”

  “He called a couple of weeks ago. Did I tell you that?”

  “No.” She paused. “But that will be nice. Catching up with your old friend.”

  My oldest, I thought. From when we were kids and his father was doing museum security and mine was doing beetles. His dad had a red nose. This big jolly retired cop who always smelled like beer.

  I sipped my ale, turned the bottle in my hands, the phone propped against my ear. From Roxanne’s end, I heard a cork pop.

  “Well, enjoy yourself.”

  “I will,” I said, but I was thinking of Ellen, how quick she was to bring the Casey thing back up.

  “You all right, Jack?” Roxanne said.

  “Fine. Just a little tired. I’ll have a quick beer and get back here and get some sleep. See you tomorrow night.”

  “You sound like you don’t want to see him. Is he okay? I mean with his wife and all.”

  “As okay as you could be if that had happened to your wife.”

  The woman he loved, shot in the face. A hole in the back of her head the size of a fist. How okay could he ever be?

  “It’s horrible,” Roxanne said.

  “Very sad. She was really nice and he just loved her. For a cop, he was kind of shy. At least around women. You know how some cops use their job to get to women? He used the job to hide from them, in a way. Then he finally connects with someone and bang, she’s gone.”

  Roxanne didn’t say anything.

  “And then the guy gets off,” I said. “So Butch didn’t have even that much solace.”

  “And that was the end of it?”

  “Except for Butch’s long slide.”

  “Well, maybe seeing you will be a help.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So drive safely tomorrow.”

  “You drive safely down here, you get rear-ended.”

  “Well, just do whatever it takes to come back to me, safe and sound.”

  “I will. I always do, don’t I?”

  Roxanne didn’t answer.

  “Most of the time?” I said.

  JUNE 1986

  It was ten-thirty and still no Jack. Butch and Leslie waited, at this little restaurant on East 38th, a nondescript sort of place that Butch had found the week before while hunting down a witness.

  “So I order the roast chicken,” Butch was saying, “and I say, ‘But don’t do anything to it. Nothing weird.’ Everybody’s gotta be more bizarre than the next guy. You order chicken and it comes garnished with eye of newt. Just cook the chicken, you know what I’m saying? There’s a reason why you’re the first guy to think of stuffing chicken with weasel brains. It’s ’cause it isn’t edible, pal. Some things humans just aren’t meant to eat.”

  “So how was it?” Leslie asked.

  “What?”

  “The chicken.”

  “Very good. It was just chicken. They give you some canned cranberry sauce, you want to get garnishy.”

  Leslie looked at the menu doubtfully.

  “Oh, and they have Spaghetti-Os,” she said.

  “Really? Haven’t had those in years. Maybe I’ll—”

  “Butch,” Leslie interrupted, “I was joking.”

  “Oh. Got my hopes up. Last time I had Spaghetti-Os I was probably twelve. Me and Jack coulda had ’em for old times’ sake.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Guy’s always late,” Butch said. “I add at least a half-hour to everything. Probably writing on deadline. You been reading his stuff?”

  “I’ve been looking for his name. I saw the one about that man who was killed on the subway. The man who played the saxophone and they killed him for the money in his saxophone case.”

  “We got a lead on that one,” Butch said. “Commissioner wants a collar. Mayor leans on him. He leans on the commander. Down the line it goes.”

  “It was a good story. I liked the way he went to the man’s hometown in—”

  “Orange County.”

  “And talked to his music teacher in grade school and all. It was quite well done.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Butch said. “Jack always goes the extra mile.”

  “You helped him with that one?”

  “Just gave him a few names. He does his own legwork.”

  “The boyhood chums,” Leslie said. She smiled. “You’re proud of him, aren’t you?”

  “Proud? Sure. I guess I’m pretty proud of Jackie. But mostly I’m proud of you.”

  “You’re proud of me? What are you proud about?”

  Butch leaned toward her, his wineglass in his hand.

  “I’m proud about how good-looking you are. I mean, you are hot. And you’re smart. And you’re tough.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “There’s lots of good nurses.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He leaned over and whispered something and Leslie blushed.

  “God, I’ve fallen in with a sex maniac,” she said. “Do you think of anything else?”

  “No. You want me to?”

  “No,” Leslie said.

  At that moment, Jack McMorrow walked in.

  Butch got up and beamed. His jacket was open and his gun showed and people looked. Leslie started to stand but Jack, taking her hand, told her to sit. Still standing, Butch poured wine into Jack’s glass.

  “Drink up, Jackie,” he said. “Good stuff. You can tell by the fancy label. Last time Jack had wine, it was on a bench in the park and he had to share it with three other guys. Hey, you’re lucky we’re not half in the bag here, waiting for you. I told Leslie you were always late.”

  “Late?” McMorrow said. “Forty-five minutes? I’m early.”

  “Be late for his own autopsy,” Butch said.

  “Butch. Yuck,” Leslie said, but she smiled and McMorrow saw that it was a broad, easy smile, the kind backed with self-assurance.

  She was tall, even sitting, with short, dark hair, pale skin, and rosy cheeks. She wasn’t beautiful, perhaps not even pretty. But there was something warm and welcoming about her, something solid and stable.

  Jack watched and listened that night, over seafood and more wine, and saw Butch more happy, more relaxed than he could remember him. The homicide cop watched every move his new love made. He smiled when she smile
d, leaned toward her to hang on every word she uttered, in an accent that was almost Irish but really was Liverpool. They told war stories, the three of them veterans of the front lines. The saxophone player. The kids Butch was hunting for his murder. A cocaine-addicted prostitute Leslie had treated that morning. The woman had overdosed, Leslie said. And she was pregnant.

  “She really was quite nice,” Leslie said. “But one misstep leads to another. They’re all small steps, but they take you so far off track. And then you come in contact with people like us.”

  Jack smiled. He did like Leslie Moore.

  And they talked about England and the English sense of order versus the American need for change and chaos. Butch said he’d never been east of Montauk, and now he and Leslie were planning a trip to England, Scotland, and Wales.

  “We’re going Wales watching,” he said, and Leslie rolled her eyes.

  And then she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. Butch watched her sturdy stride with an almost dreamy pride. He turned to his old friend.

  “Isn’t she something?”

  Jack was seeing a woman named Christina who was much more beautiful and much more glamorous than Leslie. But he smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah, Butch. She is. I like her.”

  “I love her.”

  He said it without embarrassment, this rough, tough homicide cop.

  “You might think that’s goofy.”

  Over ten years, he could think of Butch with only two other women. Sputtering relationships, all over in a matter of weeks. They ended with Butch fleeing back to his job, his homicide haven.

  “I don’t think it’s goofy at all,” Jack said.

  “I mean, she’s smart. She’s tough. She’s beautiful.”

  McMorrow smiled. It was in the eye of the beholder.

  “She’s English. Lived in Australia. Before Columbia-Presbyterian she was in some Peace Corps kind of thing in West Africa or some goddamn place, treating the native kids for dysentery and whatever the hell else they get over there. She’s just a good person. And she goes for me.”

  The words trailed off and Butch shook his head.

  “That’s why, when I don’t have this stupid smile on my face, I’m kinda worried,” he said. “It’s the Irish in me. When things are going good, that’s when you start looking over your shoulder. I go around all the time knocking on wood.”