Empty Ever After

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Devo smiled a smile at me that made me feel like an apt pupil. Maybe he’d put a gold star next to my name.

  “Do you have enough to make an educated guess about whether it was someone imitating Patrick’s voice or some digital wizardry?” I asked.

  “We are certain he is dead, are we not?”

  “Everybody but Katy.”

  “Well, until I have a copy of the message, I cannot say. Even then, I may not be able to render a definitive opinion, but it is almost beside the point.”

  “How’s that?”

  “For someone to imitate a voice they have to hear it. And if Patrick is dead …”

  “… they either had to have known him or have a recording of him. Even if the mimic knew Patrick, it would be hard to do his voice flawlessly simply from memory.”

  “Imitation is a matter of trial and error, of feedback and fine tuning,” he said. “Hard to get accurate feedback from old memories.”

  “So,” I said, “either way, if it’s some digitally enhanced trick or a clever mimic, there’s a recording of Patrick’s voice out there somewhere.”

  “Find that recording and—”

  “—I’ll find my ghost.”

  I shook Devo’s hand. “How are you coming with that list of names I gave Carmella?”

  “I should be finished this afternoon,” he said.

  Had he been any other employee, I would have slipped him a few C-notes in an envelope or sent over a bottle of Opus One. But gestures like that were just wasted on Devo. He was old school in that he found the job itself reward enough. He wasn’t interested in the perks. I guess I liked him for that.

  I CAN’T SAY that I hate the wine business, although I have, at times, hated it. I’ve often thought that if I really despised the life, I’d be out of it. I’ve always had strength enough to walk away. The thing was, the business bored me. Like I once said, there’s only so many times you can parse the difference between champagne and methode champenoise without completely losing your mind. For over twenty years the wine business had kept my bank account full and left my soul empty. It afforded me a few luxuries. I’d owned a house. I had a condo. I got to drive new cars every few years. My kid could go to whatever college she was smart enough to get into.

  The wine business was never my dream. I wasn’t a dreamer by nature. Even the profession I loved was the result of a drunken dare. I mean, how many college students in the late ’60s were signing up to take the NYPD entrance exam? One year I’m tossing bottles at the cops, the next year I’m a cop getting bottles tossed at me. The wine business was Aaron’s thing. The initial plan was for me to be an investor and then to come on board after I retired from the job with my twenty years in and a detective first’s pension. Didn’t work out that way and all because I fell prey to a conspiracy of fate. In a way, I was actually Son of Sam’s last victim.

  In August of ’77, when Sam was finally captured, New York City was as close to defeat as it ever was or is ever likely to be. Beaten down by years of near bankruptcy, brutal winters, blackouts, and Mr. Berkowitz, the city was a madhouse. Any street cop would know. I knew. Rage was boiling just beneath everybody’s skin, beneath the city’s streets. We were always a pinprick away from explosion. And none of us was immune to the Vietnam hangover: our national headlong rush into pot, punk, polyester, and Plato’s Retreat. I think sometimes if Gerald Ford had wanted to be a more effective president, he should have moved from the White House to Studio 54.

  Anyway, when Son of Sam was arraigned, the brass wanted to make sure there were plenty of cops around for crowd control. So they bussed in uniforms from precincts all over the city. I was one of those uniforms. If you catch any of the old video from that day, you can see me standing just behind Detective Ed Zigo and to Son of Sam’s left. Although I couldn’t have known it then, it was my first appearance on television and my final shift in uniform. While I was gone, the precinct’s linoleum had been waxed for the first time in months and some careless schmuck had thrown a piece of carbon paper onto the floor. When I returned, my foot found that piece of carbon paper. Cops who were there say the sound my knee made when all the ligaments snapped was enough to make you puke. Apparently, a few people did. I don’t remember, because my head smacked the floor pretty hard. I woke up in Coney Island Hospital having taken my first misstep into the wine business.

  Five months and two surgeries later, I was put out to pasture with pain pills and a patrolman’s pension. Aaron had found the perfect store, but we were still a little short on funds and worried about getting our liquor license. That’s when Rico Tripoli, my closest buddy from the Six-O, told me about some missing kid and how maybe, just maybe, if I found the kid, his influential father could get us our financing and license and how we’d be set for life. Yeah, sure! What Rico neglected to mention was that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the missing kid or my future. I was to be his shortcut to a gold shield and the means to the end of Francis Maloney’s political career.

  Rico was right in a way. We all got what we wanted. Rico got his gold shield. His handlers got Francis Maloney to retire from politics. Aaron and I got our financing and our license and we were set for life. I got a wife and love and a family as well. Yes, we all got what we wanted, everyone but Francis Maloney. I hated my father-in-law, but I never blamed him for his hating me for my part in his demise. We all got what we wanted and the only happy one of us was Aaron.

  My big brother was tinkering with the register as I walked through the creaky wooden doors of Bordeaux In Brooklyn. Aaron had aged well. His hair was thinner and all gray, but his shoulders were still broad and unbowed. Other than my chronic disinterest in the business, he had everything he ever wanted. Our success had washed away the sting of our dad’s small-time thinking and big-time failures. He had a wife he probably loved more now than the day they married, great kids, a big house on Long Island, and good health. Aaron didn’t think so, but I envied him. It was a blessing to be born knowing what you want and how to get it. With few exceptions, my wants shifted with my cases.

  “Hey, big brother.”

  “Christ, will you help me with this thing,” he barked.

  “Here, shithead.” I banged the side of my fist into the till and it slid open. “You should come to this store more often. The drawer’s been sticking like that for years.”

  “You should come to any store more often.”

  “Touché.”

  “So what’s this mishegas with your wife?”

  “Ex-wife, as everyone keeps reminding me.”

  “All right, your ex-wife.”

  “What mishegas? What’s wrong with thinking your dead brother dug his way out of his grave, smashed his dad’s headstone to bits, and is making phone calls?”

  “Oy gevalt!”

  “Yeah, big brother, oy gevalt indeed.”

  “What are you doing about it?”

  “I was just about to call Ghostbusters.”

  “Very funny, Moses.”

  “I’m doing the only thing I can do. I’m gonna look into it. First, I have to pick your niece up at the airport.”

  He grinned. My brother and Sarah had a special affinity for one another. “When does she get in?”

  “I’m leaving for LaGuardia in about an hour.”

  “Does she know what’s going on?”

  “Some of it. Look, Aaron, I just want you to know, I’m going to take as long as it takes to find out what’s going on.”

  “We’ve prospered for two decades without your full attention. We should be able to survive another few weeks.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you, he says to me,” he stage-whispered to an invisible audience. “Let’s face it, the best thing you ever did for us was getting us started. That shit with Katy’s dad, look, you never wanted to tell me much about it, okay. It was your business, but enough already.”

  I wanted to explode. He was right, but he was wrong too. I put in my time. I got us some of our biggest accounts,
hired our best people. Even Aaron would have to admit that much. Klaus and Kosta were integral parts of our success and had been with us from year one. Both now owned small percentages of the business. Kosta was our head buyer and Klaus, besides running the day-to-day operations of the New Jersey store was, along with our lawyers and accountants, looking into the possibility of our franchising.

  “Without me, there’d be no business,” I said.

  “Yeah, I heard that refrain before. It used to mean something, too, when you said it last century. That was then. Four stores and twenty years later, it’s enough already.”

  “Did Abraham Lincoln write that for you?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Go play cops and robbers with your Spanish hottie.” Aaron was very much of my parent’s generation. I’m surprised he didn’t call our African-American employees colored. He wasn’t a bigot. Far from it. He was just old. He was born old.

  “Puerto Rican.”

  “What?”

  “Carmella is Puerto Rican and she’s not my hottie. Where do you come up with these terms anyway, Reader’s Digest?”

  “What’s wrong with Reader’s Digest?”

  No matter what our arguments started over, they always ended in the same place.

  “You want coffee?” I asked.

  “Sounds good.”

  “The usual?”

  “Always. Hey, little brother …”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love ya.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  THE NORTHWEST TERMINAL was bustling. The area airports were always busy, but there was just something about LaGuardia that brought out the closet claustrophobic in even the most hardened New Yorker. I found myself wishing I’d made the travel arrangements instead of leaving them up to Sarah. All this foot traffic was going to make things that much more difficult. No doubt a late afternoon or evening flight would have been a better option, but there was no use giving myself shpilkes over it now. For the moment, I only wanted to think about the best thing in my life, Sarah.

  I loved the kid so much it hurt. Maybe it was her only-child status or that we were baseball buddies, but I had never gotten used to her being away from home. The sting was particularly sharp today with LaGuardia being just a stone’s throw away from Shea Stadium. Sarah had a double-major as a kid, learning about baseball and aircraft as we sat and watched the big jets roar over Shea on their final approaches to the airport. I remembered the first game I took her to, a weekday matinee against the Padres. She lasted only a couple of innings in the baking sun and passed out on my shoulder. When she woke up, she said she was firsty. I remembered that day for other reasons too.

  It was the summer of 1983 and I had been hired to look into the disappearance of a political intern named Moira Heaton. Moira was a plain looking girl, a cop’s daughter, who had gone missing from State Senator Steven Brightman’s neighborhood office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. For two years Brightman had proclaimed his innocence. He’d done everything he could, cooperated completely with the police, posted a big reward, jumped through fiery hoops, but it was all to no avail. He had been tried and convicted in the press and in the court of public opinion. Trouble was, Brightman was the fair-haired boy, the next Jack Kennedy and he was too ambitious to just live out his days as a has-been that never was.

  That’s where I came in. Thomas Geary, one of Brightman’s wealthy backers and the father of one of our former wine store employees, got the idea that I could magically clear the state senator’s name. My reputation was for luck, not skill. As my early clients had too often said, “We tried good, now we’re going to give luck a chance.” I guess, if I want to be honest, they were right. I was lucky. My luck extended as far back as 1972. On Easter Sunday of that year, a little girl named Marina Conseco was kidnapped off a Coney Island street. And once seventy-two hours passed, the search for Marina silently morphed into a search for her remains. I found Marina severely injured but alive at the bottom of an old wooden water tank. She had been molested, then tossed in the tank and left to die. To this day, I’m not sure what made me look up and notice the tanks and think to search them. I was lucky then. I was lucky with Brightman too.

  We were on the 7 train heading back home from Shea. Sarah was sleeping with her head of damp red curls resting on my leg. I was hot and tired too, but my eyes kept drifting to the front page of the Post that the man across the car from me was reading. On it was a picture of evil personified, a serial rapist the papers had dubbed Ivan the Terrible. He had scraggly hair, a cruel condescending smile, and black eyes. They were the blackest eyes I’d ever seen: opaque as the ocean on a moonless night. With a little bit of digging, I found a connection between Moira and Ivan. He eventually confessed to her murder. I was a little too lucky with that one. It all came just a bit too easily. In spite of it, I found the real facts behind the fabricated truths that had been sprinkled on the ground before me like so many bread crumbs.

  I could never go to a game or drive past Shea Stadium without thinking of Sarah’s first Mets game. Every year I renewed my Mets season tickets, but it wasn’t the same without her and it was never going to be the same. These days I usually gave my tickets away to Aaron’s kids or Carmella’s little cousins or clients. I checked the Arrivals screen for the hundredth time in the last ten minutes and noticed Sarah’s flight number was flashing. So far, I had been able to filter Ivan the Terrible’s kind of evil out of my kid’s life and I meant to keep it that way. I dialed Carmella’s cell number.

  “What?” she barked. “It’s so fucking noisy in here.”

  “Her flight’s landed.”

  “No shit! There’s like a screen two feet from my face.”

  “You remember what Sarah looks—”

  “For chrissakes, Moe! I know your daughter for ten years. I know what the fuck she looks like. I could spot that red hair from halfway across the state.”

  “What the fuck’s eating you lately?”

  “My stomach’s been bothering me for weeks. I’m sorry, Moe, I know I been cranky.”

  “Okay, she should be getting down here in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t worry. Anybody comes near her, I got it covered.”

  “Anything suspicious?”

  “I got my eye on a few mutts, but you know these town car drivers try to scam rides. We’ll see soon.”

  Not everything I got right was about luck. I was a good cop before my accident. I still possessed the ability to anticipate, to see what might be coming around the next corner, and what I saw coming was trouble for Sarah. Whoever had done this stuff with Patrick had gone through a lot of trouble. So far the only direct targets had been Katy and me, but if you really want to hurt, frighten, or generally fuck with people, you go after their kids. That’s why I had arranged for Carmella to come to the airport before me and stake out the baggage claim area. She was less certain about the setup than me.

  “What about that lady in Ohio? They fucked with her brother’s grave, no?”

  “Collateral damage,” I said. “It enhanced the effect of what was going on here, a bit of sleight of hand to distract me. It worked, too. I was out in Dayton looking at a grave when I should have been home keeping my eye on the ball. I’m not gonna let them catch me off guard again.”

  She was right about one thing. We’d see soon enough.

  My least favorite part of the airport was baggage claim. Baggage claim was like the final insult after the long ordeal, just another opportunity to hurry up and wait. Folks looked defeated waiting for their bags. And no matter how they spruced up the area, the machinery always seemed positively medieval.

  My phone buzzed, then stopped. That was Carmella’s signal that people were spilling into the baggage claim area. Sarah appeared. I couldn’t help hoping that I was being foolish and over protective, that Carmella was right. She wasn’t. Everything seemed to happen at once. Even before I was fully conscious of Sarah’s presence, the pocket of space closed around
her. Carmella came out of nowhere and tackled someone, Sarah screamed, a crowd surged in their directions. I put my head down and charged through the sea of bodies.

  “Get the fuck off me, bitch! You breakin’ my finger.”

  A chubby black kid of maybe seventeen was face down on the floor, Carmella twisting his thumb and wrist behind his back. Sarah’s expression was more surprised than anything else. Then I noticed a brown shipping envelope in her hands that I hadn’t seen her holding when she first came into view.

  “Give that to me, kiddo.” I held my hand out to Sarah and she placed the envelope in my palm. “Let him up, Carm, so we can talk privately.”

  Carmella pulled the kid to his feet as I assured everyone that it was all right.

  “Just a misunderstanding,” I lied, sounding authoritative as hell. I didn’t flash my badge. When the cops showed up—which they would—I didn’t need to try and explain away a potential felony charge. “Show’s over, folks. Go get your bags and have a safe trip back home.”

  By nature, New Yorkers are disobedient bastards. On the other hand they take an inordinate amount of pride in their unshockability. This time unshockability won out and they went back to reclaiming their luggage while we hustled the kid into a corner. As we walked, I tore open the envelope. It was another wilted rose and a “self-portrait” of Patrick done on an eight by eleven piece of Masonite. The familiar initials PMM were in the lower right hand corner. This wasn’t funny anymore.

  “Okay, asshole, what’s this about?” I said, pressing my face into the kid’s. His wide, frightened eyes told me he knew I wasn’t fucking around.

  “Guy gimme a twenty ta give dat package to da red-headed girl come out dat door.”

  “What guy?” I asked, pressing my face even closer to his.

  “Dat one,” he said, pointing.

  “Which one?” I stepped back to see where he was pointing.

  “Him.”

  He was pointing at the portrait.