Through the closed door of Rita's second-floor apartment I could hear the sound of Seinfeld on the TV and a child's soft cough. I knocked twice and the door opened. Rita stood aside to let me in, Donald, dressed in blue rompers, resting on her right hip. Her hair was tied back in a bun and she wore a shapeless blue sweatshirt over blue jeans with black sandals. The sweatshirt was stained with food and child spit. The apartment, small and neat despite the worn furniture, smelled of the child as well.
A woman stood a couple of feet behind Rita. As I watched, she placed a cardboard box filled with diapers, canned food and some fresh produce on the small couch. A plastic bag filled with secondhand clothes and one or two used children's toys lay on the floor, and I noticed that Rita was holding some bills in her hand. When she saw me, she blushed bright red, crumpled the cash and shoved it into the pocket of her denims.
The woman with her looked at me curiously and, I thought, with hostility. She was probably in her late seventies, with permed silver hair and large brown eyes. She wore a long wool coat that looked expensive, with a silk sweater and tailored cotton pants beneath it. Gold twinkled discreetly at her ears, her wrists and around her neck.
Rita closed the door behind me and turned to the older woman.
"This is Mr. Parker," she said. "He's been talking to Billy for me." She slipped her hands into the back pockets of her denims and nodded her head shyly to the older woman. "Mr. Parker, this is Cheryl Lansing. She's a friend."
I stretched out a hand in greeting. "Pleased to meet you," I said. After a moment's hesitation, Cheryl Lansing took my hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong.
"Likewise," she said.
Rita sighed, and decided to elaborate a little on her introduction. "Cheryl helps us out," she explained. "With food and clothes and stuff. We couldn't get by without her."
Now it was the older woman's turn to look uncomfortable. She raised a hand in dismissal and said, "Hush, child," once or twice. Then she pulled her coat tightly around her, and kissed Rita lightly on the cheek before turning her attention to Donald. She ruffled his hair, and the toddler smiled.
"I'll drop in on you again in a week or two," she said to Rita.
Rita looked a little pained, as if she felt that she was somehow being rude to her guest. "You sure you won't stay?" she asked.
Cheryl Lansing glanced at me, and smiled. "No, thank you. I have quite a ways to go tonight, and I'm sure you and Mr. Parker have a lot to talk about."
With that, she nodded a good-bye to me, and left. I watched her as she walked down the stairs: social services, I guessed, maybe even someone from St. Vincent de Paul. After all, they were only across the street. Rita seemed to guess what I was thinking.
"She's a friend, that's all," she said softly. "She knew Billy. She knew what he was like, what he's still like. Now, she tries to make sure that we're okay."
She closed and locked the door, then took a look at my eye. "Did Billy do that?"
"We had a misunderstanding."
"I'm sorry. I really didn't think he'd try to hurt you." There was genuine concern on her face and it made her seem pretty, despite the dark patches beneath her eyes and the frown lines that were working their way across her features like cracks through old plaster.
She sat down and balanced Donald on her knee. He was a large child, with huge blue eyes and a permanent expression of mild curiosity on his face. He smiled at me, raised a finger, then dropped it again and looked at his mother. She smiled down at him and he laughed, then hiccuped.
"Can I get you some coffee?" she asked. "I don't have any beer, otherwise I'd offer you a drink."
"It's okay, I don't drink. I just came by to give you this."
I handed her the seven hundred dollars. She looked a little shocked, until Donald tried to take a fifty-dollar bill and stick it in his mouth.
"Uh-uh," she said, moving the money beyond his reach. "You're expensive enough to keep as it is." She peeled away two fifties and offered them to me.
"Please, take it," she said. "For what happened. Please."
I folded her hand over the money and pushed it gently back toward her.
"I don't want it," I told her. "Like I told you, it's a favor. I've had a talk with Billy. I think he has a little cash right now and maybe he might start coming around to his obligations. If he doesn't, it may be a matter for the cops."
She nodded. "He's not a bad person, Mr. Parker. He's just confused, and he hurts a lot inside, but he loves Donnie more than anything in the world. I think he'd do just about anything to keep me from taking him away."
That was what worried me. The red flame in Billy's eyes flared up a little too easily, and he had enough rage and resentment inside him to keep it burning for a long, long time.
I stood up to leave. On the floor beside my feet I saw one of the toys that Cheryl Lansing had brought with her: a red plastic truck with a yellow hood that squeaked when I picked it up and placed it on a chair. The noise briefly distracted Donald, but then his attention returned to me.
"I'll drop by next week, see how you are." I reached out a finger to Donald and he gripped it in his little fist. I was suddenly seized by an image of my own daughter doing the same thing to me and a terrible sadness welled up inside me. Jennifer was dead now. She had died with my wife at the hands of a killer who believed that they were worthless enough to tear apart and display as a warning to others. He was dead as well, hunted to death in Louisiana, but it didn't make me feel any better. The books don't balance that way.
I gently removed my finger from Donald's grip and patted his head. Rita followed me to the door, Donald once again at her hip.
"Mr. Parker…" she began.
I stopped at the door.
"Please stay." With her free hand, she reached out and touched my cheek. "Please. I'm putting Donald to bed now. I got no other way to thank you."
I carefully removed her hand and kissed her palm. It smelled of hand cream and Donald.
"I'm sorry, I can't," I said.
She looked a little disappointed. "Why not? You don't think I'm pretty enough?"
I reached out and ran my fingers through her hair, and she leaned her head into my hand.
"It's not that," I said. "It's not that at all."
She smiled then, a small smile but a smile nonetheless.
"Thank you," she said and kissed me softly on the cheek. Suddenly Donald, whose face had darkened when I touched his mother, now began to strike at me with his little hand.
"Hey!" said his mother. "Stop that." But still he struck, until I took my hand away from her.
"He's very protective of me," she said. "He thought you were trying to hurt me." Donald buried his head in her breast, his thumb in his mouth, and looked out at me with suspicious eyes. Rita stood in the dark hallway as I went down the stairs, framed by the light of the apartment. She lifted Donald's hand to make him wave good-bye, and I waved back.
It was the last time I saw either of them alive.
CHAPTER TWO
I rose early the day after Rita Ferris spoke to me for the last time. The darkness outside was still and oppressive as I drove to the airport to catch the first commuter flight to New York. There were early reports on the news bulletin of a shooting incident at Scarborough, but the details were still sketchy.
From JFK, I caught a cab, the Van Wyck and Queens Boulevard dense with traffic, to Queens Boulevard and 51st. There was already a small crowd gathered at the New Calvary Cemetery: groups of cops in uniform smoking and talking quietly at the gates; women in funeral black, their hair carefully arranged, their makeup delicately applied, nodding solemnly to one another; younger men, some barely out of their teens, uncomfortable in too-tight collars, with cheap, borrowed black ties knotted untidily at their necks, the knots too small, too thin. Some of the cops glanced at me and nodded, and I nodded back. I knew many of them by their last names, from my own former life as a policeman in New York.
The hearse approached from Woodside, three
black limousines following, and entered the cemetery. The waiting crowd moved behind in twos and threes as, slowly, we made our way toward the grave. I saw a mound of earth, green matting thrown across it, wreaths and other floral tributes ranged against it. There was a larger crowd here: more police in uniform, others in plain clothes, more women, a sprinkling of children. I spotted some deputy chiefs, an assistant chief, half a dozen captains and lieutenants, all come to pay their last respects to George Greenfield, the old sergeant in the 30th Precinct, who had finally succumbed to his cancer two years before he was due to retire.
I knew him as a good man, a decent cop in the old mold who had the misfortune to work a precinct that had been plagued for years by rumors of shakedowns and corruption. The rumors eventually became complaints: guns and drugs, mainly cocaine, were routinely confiscated from dealers and resold; homes were raided illegally; threats were made. The precinct, over at 151st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was investigated. In the end, thirty-three officers, who had been involved in two thousand prosecutions, were convicted, many for perjury. On top of the Dowd incident in the 75th-more arms and cocaine dealing, more payoffs-it made for bad coverage for the NYPD. I guessed that there was more to come: there were whispers that Midtown South was under the gun, the result of an ongoing deal with local prostitutes involving recreational sex for officers on duty.
Maybe that was why so many people had turned out for Greenfield's funeral. He represented something good and fundamentally decent, and his passing was something to mourn. I was there for very personal reasons. My wife and child were taken from me in December 1996, while I was still a homicide detective in Brooklyn. The ferocity and brutality of the manner in which they were torn from this world, and the inability of the police to find their killer, caused a rift to develop between me and my fellow officers. The murders of Susan and Jennifer tainted me in their eyes, exposing the vulnerability of even a policeman and his family. They wanted to believe that I was the exception, that somehow, as a drunk, I had brought it on myself, so that they would not have to consider the alternative. In a way, they were right: I did bring it on myself, and on my family, but I had never forgiven them for forcing me to confront this alone.
I resigned from the NYPD barely one month after the deaths. Few people had tried to argue me out of my decision, but one of them was George Greenfield. He met me one bright Sunday morning at John's on Second Avenue, close by the UN building. We ate pink grapefruit and English muffins while sitting in a booth by the window, Second Avenue quiet with little traffic and few pedestrians. Slowly, patiently, he listened to my reasons for leaving: my growing isolation; the pain of living in a city where everywhere reminded me of what I had lost; and my belief that maybe, just maybe, I could find the man who had stolen everything I held dear.
"Charlie," he said (he never called me Bird), thick gray hair topping a full-moon face, eyes dark like craters, "those are all good reasons, but if you quit then you're alone and there's a limit to the help anyone can give you. With the force, you still have family, so stay. You're a good cop. It's in your blood."
"I can't, I'm sorry."
"You leave, and maybe a lot of people will think you're running away. Some of them will probably be glad that you are, but they'll hate you for caving in."
"Let them. Those ones aren't worth worrying about anyway."
He sighed, sipped his coffee. "You were never the easiest man to get along with, Charlie. You were too smart, too likely to go off the handle. We all have our demons, but you wore yours for everyone to see. I think you made people nervous, and if there's one thing a cop doesn't like, it's being made to feel nervous. It goes against the grain."
"But I don't make you nervous?"
Greenfield twisted his mug on the table with his little finger. I could tell that he was debating whether or not to tell me something. What he said when he spoke made me feel a little ashamed, and increased my admiration for him tenfold, if such a thing was possible with a man like this.
"I have cancer," he said quietly. "Lymphosarcoma. They tell me I'm going to get real sick in the next year, and I've got maybe another year after that."
"I'm sorry," I said, the words so small that they were quickly lost in the enormity of what he was facing.
Greenfield raised a hand and gave a little shrug. "I'd like to have more time. I got grandchildren. I'd like to watch them grow. But I've watched my own kids grow, and I feel for you because that's been taken away from you. Maybe it's the wrong thing to say, but I hope that you get a second chance at that. In the end, it's the best thing you get in this world.
"As for you making me nervous, the answer's no. I got death coming for me, Charlie, and that puts things in perspective. Every day I wake up and thank God that I'm still here and that the pain isn't too bad. And I go into the 30th, and I take my seat at the muster desk and watch people piss their lives away for nothing, and I envy them every minute they waste. Don't you go doing that, Charlie, because when you're angry and grieving and you're looking for someone to blame, the worst thing you can do is turn on yourself. And the next worst thing is to turn on someone else. That's where the structure, the routine can help. That's why I'm still at that desk, because otherwise I'd tear myself and my family to pieces."
He finished his coffee and pushed the mug away. "In the end, you'll do what you have to do, and nothing I can say will change that. You still drinking?"
I didn't resent the bluntness of the question, because it contained no deeper implication. "I'm trying to quit," I said.
"That's something, I guess." He raised his hand for the check, then scribbled a number on a napkin. "My home number. You need to talk, you give me a call." He paid the check, shook my hand and walked out into the sunlight. I never saw him again.
At the graveside, a figure raised its head and I felt its attention focus on me. Walter Cole gave a small nod in my direction, then returned his attention to the priest as he read from a leather-bound prayer book. Somewhere, a woman cried softly, and in the dark skies above, a hidden jet roared its way through the clouds. And then there were only the low, muted tones of the priest, the soft rustle as the flag was folded, and the final, muffled echo as the first handfuls of earth hit the casket.
I stood by a willow as the mourners began to move away. And I watched, with bitterness, sorrow and regret, as Walter Cole walked away with them without saying a word to me. We had been close once; partners for a time, then friends and, of all those whose friendship I had lost, it was Walter that I missed the most. He was an educated man. He liked books, and movies that didn't star Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme, and good food. He had been best man at my wedding, the box holding the rings clutched so hard in his hand that it had left deep ridges in his palm. I had played with his children. Susan and I had enjoyed dinners, the theater and walks in the park, with Walter and his wife, Lee. And I had sat with him for hours and hours, in cars and bars, in courtrooms and back rooms, and felt the deep, steady pulse of life throbbing beneath our feet.
I remembered one case in Brooklyn, when we were trailing a painter and decorator whom we believed to have killed his wife and somehow disposed of her remains. We were in a bad neighborhood, just northeast of Atlantic Avenue, and Walter smelled so much of cop they could have named a scent after him, but the guy didn't seem to suspect we were there. Maybe nobody told him. We weren't bothering the junkies or the pushers or the whores, and we were so obvious that we couldn't be undercover, so the local color decided that the best thing would be to let us be and not to interfere in whatever we were doing.
Each morning, the guy filled his van with paint cans and brushes and headed off to work, and we followed him. Then, from a distance, we watched as he painted first a house and, a day or two later, the storefront on which he was working, before he dumped the empty cans and headed home.
It took a few days to figure out what he was doing. It was Walter who took a screwdriver and flipped open the lid, as the can lay with its fellows in a Dumpste
r. It took him two tries, because the paint had dried along the edge. That was what had alerted us, of course: the fact that the paint on the can was dry, not wet.
Inside the can was a hand, a woman's hand. There was still a wedding ring on one of the fingers, and the stump had adhered to the paint at the bottom of the can, so the hand seemed to be emerging from the base. Two hours later we had our warrant and, when we kicked in the door of the painter's place, there were paint cans stacked almost to the ceiling in one corner of the bedroom, each containing a section of his wife's body. Some of them were packed tight with flesh. We found her head in a two-gallon can of white gloss.
That night, Walter had taken Lee out for dinner, and when they went home he held her the whole night through. He didn't make love to her, he said, he just held her, and she understood. I couldn't even remember what I did that night. That was the difference between us; at least, it was. I knew better now.
I had done things since then. I had killed in an effort to find, and avenge myself upon the killer of my family, the Traveling Man. Walter knew this, had even used it for his own ends, recognizing that I would tear apart whoever stood in my way. I think that, in some ways, it was a test, a test to see if I would realize his worst fears about me.
And I did.
I caught up with him near the cemetery gate, with the roar of the traffic in our ears, the city's answer to the sound of the sea. Walter was talking with some captain who used to be with the 83rd: Emerson, who was now with Internal Affairs, which maybe explained the look he gave me as I approached. The murder of the pimp Johnny Friday was now a cold case, and I didn't think they'd ever get the guy who killed him. I knew, because I was the guy. I had killed him in a burst of black rage in the months following the deaths of Jennifer and Susan. By the end, I didn't care what Johnny Friday knew or didn't know. I just wanted to kill him for what he had helped to do to a hundred Susans, a thousand Jennifers. I regretted the manner of his death, like I regretted so much else, but regrets weren't going to bring him back. There had been rumors since then, but nothing would ever be proved. Still, Emerson had heard the rumors.
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