Our server brought us drinks—whiskey for me, gin and tonic for Sunny. I said, “When my dad died, I kind of felt the same way. We had a pretty rocky relationship, to be honest. And when he died, it was like I was grieving for the end of something that didn’t exist, or grieving for the end of the chance that it might exist at some point, rather than for a person. You know?”
“Yes! That’s exactly it. I’m surprised to hear you weren’t close. He bragged about you a lot.”
I sipped my drink, or maybe it wasn’t exactly a sip. “See, even now, hearing something like that? It makes me feel like shit. Just because it’s pretty clear now that he and I just misunderstood each other to some extent. I’m not saying that what Mickey did to you was a misunderstanding, but you know what I mean.”
Sunny nodded. “I do, yeah. It’s like getting credit for something you didn’t do. But it’s also infuriating, because of what happened between us. Four or five times, the neighbors called the cops on us, we were arguing so bad. They’d come, talk to me, talk to him, talk to me again and convince me to let it go. He’d go, ‘Sun, baby, I’m so sorry, I’m ashamed, I can’t believe I raised a hand to you, I’ll never hurt you again.’ Crying these big crocodile tears. A man crying, that just does something to you.”
“Yeah.”
“I always forgave him. And it always happened again. Till the last time, when I was just done. I drove myself to St. Ann’s and a nurse there got me a lawyer. But you know what? Even when I tried to press charges, it wasn’t happening. I didn’t have any evidence. You hear about the thin blue line on cop shows and you figure that’s Hollywood, but no. There really is a line. Or a wall. Whatever it is.”
“So he was never charged?”
“Never. But to be honest, after that, I was clear with him that we were over. I think he knew he was lucky to get out of the situation with his career intact. I knew I was lucky. Plenty of women in my situation would have been worried for their lives. But in the end, it wasn’t like that. The air went out of our relationship after that night. The pressure valve got released, if that makes sense. It was just done with. I was going to file for divorce once he went back to work.”
“That’s magnanimous of you.”
Sunny shrugged. “Not really. I was mostly just thinking about how the alimony would work.”
“So you weren’t trying to spare his dignity?”
“Not particularly. It’s like how after his surgery, I let him stay at the house for a few weeks while he recovered. I think I did it so I could feel smug about how magnanimous I was being. It wound up being fine. As soon as he was able to get around on his own, back he went to the motel. But now, even though I know I did what I had to do, I’m doubting myself. Was I too harsh with him, or something? You know, they told me they aren’t sure what happened, if it was some accident, or he took his own life, or what. And how can I ever be sure what they tell me is the truth anyhow?”
“You really think that?”
She crunched on an ice cube from her glass. “I don’t know. You never felt like that? About your dad?”
“Well,” I said, “they knew what happened to my dad—there were witnesses, lots of them. So it’s different. But I guess you’re right, that they wouldn’t necessarily tell us everything. Not about his death, but about his life.” I was thinking about the halo-halo again, still impossible for me to reconcile with the Frank Weary I knew.
“Like if he killed himself, because of something I did? Are they going to tell me that?”
“Sunny—”
“No, I don’t think they would. They might say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what happened, it’s undetermined.’ To spare me.”
I said, gently, “The police aren’t in the business of doing things to spare anyone.”
“Not even to spare him? To spare Mickey from being the cop who couldn’t handle it?” She stopped, rubbed her eyes. “I’m sorry. You must think I’m a lunatic.”
“Hey, it’s okay. You’re just feeling feelings.”
Sunny smiled. “Feeling feelings.”
“That’s the clinical term.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, then said, “Could I hire you? To make sure I have the whole story about what happened?”
The last time someone had asked me that—Jordy Meyers—things hadn’t gone so great. I said, “I know one of the detectives working the case. Tom Heitker. He’ll give you the whole story.”
Sunny shook her head. “There was this guy Mickey told me about once. I don’t think he knew him, but he’d heard this story. The guy was a narcotics cop, and everybody knew he had a problem. Problems. Pills, gambling. But he was good at getting people to open up and confess, so people looked the other way. He had a wife at home, three little girls, good at his job. Anyway, then the guy died. Where? In the middle of a whorehouse. He had a massive heart attack, there’s Oxy and cocaine everywhere, no fewer than three hookers servicing him all at once. This could have called into question a couple hundred possession cases, not to mention what it would have done to the guy’s family. So his squad covered it up. Got him dressed, put him in his police vehicle, said he must have had a heart attack right there. The man got to die a hero.”
This story sounded like squad-room lore rather than an actual event. “And that’s what you’re afraid of?”
“Oh, the story isn’t over yet. Three years later, the guy’s wife, who’s been celibate since her husband died, gets the stomach flu and she can’t get rid of it. Finally she goes to the doctor and finds out she’s HIV-positive, has been for years, and it’s progressed to AIDS-defining symptoms. And she hadn’t been tested before her last pregnancy, so it turns out her daughter’s HIV-positive too. And no one knew, all because this guy’s buddies chose to cover up the circumstances of his death.”
“Sunny,” I said.
“I know. I know that isn’t what happened to Mickey, I know the story probably isn’t true. But what do you think the context was, when he told me that? We were talking about family, and how you stick with your family for better or for worse, no questions asked.”
From what I knew of Mickey Dillman so far, he did seem like the type to use a bullshit anecdote to try to make a point that it didn’t even come close to making. But Sunny’s point was an easier sell. Even if Mickey’s story wasn’t true, Sunny had experienced firsthand how some cops could trample other people in the efforts to protect their own.
“I can try to keep an eye on things for you,” I said, “if that would give you some peace of mind.”
“It would.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you, Roxane.”
“Is it okay if I take notes?”
She smiled. “You are definitely your father’s daughter.”
“Tell me about the last time you saw Mickey.”
Sunny finished her drink and signaled for another. “He seemed like Mickey. I don’t know. He came over to pick up some boxes from the basement.”
“What was in the boxes?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He’d texted me the night before, I told him I wasn’t going to be home, but then the weather was bad and my salon was opening later in the day than usual. So I was there. He showed up with Rick—his cousin, pretty much his only non-cop friend, or maybe his only friend these days. I was there, Mickey asked me if he should come back another time and I said no, it was fine. He got his boxes, he told me again how sorry he was and how pathetic life was living in the shittiest motel in America. I was kind of like, well, you get what you get, and that was that.”
“His cousin, Rick…?”
“Dillman. Mickey and Ricky, they called them growing up.”
“And are they still close?”
Another nod. “I mean, what’s ‘close’ when you’re talking about someone who is so invested in being a ‘tough guy’? But yeah, I’d say so. Mickey has a heck of a temper. But I never saw him lose it at Rick. The whole time we were together, they went bowling once a week. Even when Mickey coul
dn’t bowl, because of his back, he still went to the Columbus Bowling Palace every Wednesday. Rick’s some kind of bowling genius, I don’t know, perfect game after perfect game.” She studied her cuticles and said, “I have no idea how this could possibly be helpful to you.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. It had been late Wednesday—or early Thursday—when Addison had showed up at my brother’s apartment. “I’ve solved cases based on less than a bowling score. Did you tell the police about bowling night?”
“Oh, sure. But like they’re going to listen to me, about anything? I’m just the woman who lied about him getting violent. See, this is why I feel like I can’t trust what they say to me.”
After lunch we stood just inside the doors to the restaurant and finished our conversation. It had been so long since I’d just shared a meal with a friend, and even though the circumstances were hardly ideal, it was nice to make a connection with a person who wasn’t related to one of my cases, or related to me. In the past six months, I’d barely spent time with anyone other than Catherine.
Sunny said, “Roxane, thank you, really, for this. I don’t think I realized how not okay I was today.”
This seemed to be a bit of a theme around people I knew lately.
* * *
The thing about funerals is every last detail needs to be decided by someone. Although I’d been to my share, I’d never thought about it until my father died. A family liaison officer and a chaplain from the department came over with forms and papers and a bleak little pamphlet called “Continue the Journey: Planning the Catholic Funeral Mass.” My mother put Andrew and me in charge of selecting the readings while she and Matt were picking out a casket, and we sat side by side on the couch simultaneously paging through the pamphlet and a Precious Moments bible that one of us had gotten as a first communion gift years ago. It was the only one we could find in the house.
“These are terrible,” Andrew said. “Isaiah, twenty-five: ‘On this mountain he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, the web that is woven over all nations. He will destroy death forever.’ Is this supposed to be comforting?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Yes?” I said. “No?”
“He wouldn’t want any of these. He’d want us to get drunk and go to the goddamn movies.”
“The funeral is for the living,” I said, something someone had told me or I’d read somewhere in the last few days and I felt stupid even saying it, because it sure as hell wasn’t for me. “We just need to pick. You know she wants this done by the time they get back.”
I was worried about my mother. She was eerily calm, muted, artificial. There had been people around constantly—my brothers and me, Tom, the chaplain, the liaison officer. But eventually there would be no one, and I was afraid of what would happen then.
“Lamentations, three: ‘My soul is deprived of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is.’ Seriously, what the fuck,” Andrew said. He stood up and went to the liquor cabinet in the corner of the dining room, returning a minute later with a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses.
I shook my head but I took what he poured.
“Are you worried,” he asked, “about, you know, who is going to show up?”
I downed the shot. “Yeah,” I said. There had been other women. Four that we knew of, probably more. Once, when I was nine, I picked up the phone to call a friend and I heard my father on the line, talking to one of them. Her voice was breathy and she was crying. My father’s voice was just his voice, rough and flat. Later, he came into my room and said, “Sometimes when you’re a little kid you hear things that you don’t understand, because you don’t know the whole story,” and then he said he would get me my own phone line, but he didn’t. When I was twelve, he moved out for six months and was staying in a shambling duplex in Groveport with a woman named Sylvie. I visited once and got head lice and wasn’t allowed to go back.
“Maybe we can have a guest list,” Andrew said. He refilled our shot glasses. “Bouncers. The whole deal.”
I fanned the pages of the “Continue the Journey” pamphlet.
“I don’t see anything in here about bouncers.”
Andrew swallowed his second shot. “I’ll tell you right now,” he said. “I want the same exact funeral as Dad. Minus the cop stuff. I don’t want anybody having to plan it.”
“Don’t even say that,” I said. I flopped backward and balanced my glass on my stomach. “I want to be cremated and shot into outer space as fireworks. I heard they can do that. No funeral.”
“I like it.”
“Or make me into a diamond.”
“Who gets the diamond?”
“Throw it in the river,” I said.
We sat in silence for a long time.
“Let’s just use these ones,” Andrew said finally, pointing to the suggestions in the pamphlet. “It’s going to be over in five minutes anyway.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. But I was afraid it was going to be unfolding forever.
The funeral was on a Sunday. The sky was the color of a dead fish and it was raining, the kind of steady downpour that seemed to be a judgment. There was a full agenda: private prayer service at the funeral home. Procession to St. Joseph’s downtown for the Mass. Procession to Greenlawn for the burial. My mother had selected the “last radio call” tribute instead of the three-volley salute, not wanting to hear gunfire. The chaplain warned us that there would be a lot of tears at the cemetery. The last radio call made everyone tear up, he said. Even the members of the honor guard, who probably had never met my father, but hearing his badge number broadcast over the radio for the last time did something to everybody. It made no sense to me, this litany of obligations, of separate opportunities to fall apart. After the burial, we were to retire to Rita’s house for light refreshments. Rita Andosca, my mother’s neighbor, a dead cop’s wife too. Her husband had died of an aneurysm many years earlier. She knew the drill.
I didn’t want to go to any of it. I woke up shaky and nervous and the feeling didn’t go away as I dressed in black and drove to my mother’s house. We were meeting there, would ride to the funeral home in a limousine like we were rich kids going to prom. When I arrived, Genevieve looked at me and, despite her unsettling calm all week, she freaked out.
“You’re late,” she said, throwing the door open. “And what are you wearing? No.”
I was wearing a suit, a fitted black jacket and trousers that I’d bought at Express the day before because I didn’t want to contaminate any of my actual clothes with this horrible time. My mother had asked me what I was going to wear and I said a suit and flats and she said fine.
“What is wrong with you?” she barked as she gripped my arm and pulled me into the house. “You can’t wear pants to your father’s funeral.”
“Mom—”
“No. Go home and change.”
“But we’re already late—”
“And whose fault is that, Roxane? I can’t believe you.”
It was five days’ worth of grief pouring out all at once. My father wouldn’t give a shit about what I wore to his funeral. I pressed my lips together and let her go. Finally Rita intervened, said that her daughter was about my size and might have a black skirt I could wear. My mother locked herself in the bedroom while Rita went back to her house to see. I asked Andrew if he had any Xanax on him.
“She didn’t want it,” he said. He’d gotten a haircut, was wearing a black suit of his own with a white shirt and a tie with somber black-and-grey stripes. It was pretty bad, I realized, if Andrew had done better in the wardrobe department than I had.
“I meant for me,” I said.
“Oh,” Andrew said. “Yeah, of course.”
Rita brought back a grocery bag full of garments. “You can just get this back to me whenever, no hurry, hon. Here, this would be so pretty on you, Roxie, so ladylike,” she said. A black wool fit-and-flare dress and a cardigan with thread-woven buttons. An unopened pair of nude pantyhose in that cheap plastic egg from the ei
ghties. There were shoes, too: black patent heels.
“No,” I said.
“I took a guess that you were a nine,” she said as she removed the shoes from the bag.
She was right, and the Xanax had gone to work already, so I took the clothes. I didn’t feel better but I also didn’t feel like fighting. I went to the bathroom and thrashed around with the hose before just stuffing them in the trash and I pulled the stupid dress on and sat on the lid of the toilet and stared at the wallpaper, a striped pattern with seashells thrown into the mix, like this eighty-year-old house was situated on a beach somewhere, which it definitely was not.
Someone knocked on the door, lightly. “We need to go in five minutes,” Andrew said.
“I’m not going,” I said.
“Yes you are. Five minutes,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
My brother opened the door.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
“I know.”
“How are we supposed to do this?”
Andrew took me by the arm and pulled me gently into a standing position. “The same way we do everything else.”
NINETEEN
Before everything had gone to shit yesterday, I’d been about to follow up on CleanSweat, the only lead I currently had on Wyatt, the Nightshade bouncer. In addition to sounding like a deodorant brand, CleanSweat was a second-floor storefront on Cleveland Avenue above an optometrist and a sub shop. It was done up in a black and red color scheme, the power suit of interior decorating, and the space had a troubling smell, a sort of low-key gym funk with notes of spray-cleaner and damp carpet. There were exactly zero customers using the assortment of weight and cardio machines on the workout floor, but the sounds of an out-of-sight aerobics class indicated that CleanSweat did have customers, somewhere.
The front counter was attended only by a dog-eared paperback copy of Boomer’s book, Sweating Through the Pain: An Addict’s Journey Back to Fitness, the cover of which featured him standing behind this very desk. The whole enterprise had a homespun quality to it. I called out, “Hello?”
The Stories You Tell Page 13
