What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The Calder stuff had been auctioned off years ago. The movie theaters were gone, too. I’m not misty-eyed about any of that. Still, it is kind of sad that the Smith Haven Mall was now like any other mall in any other suburb anywhere. I’m not a fan of sameness. I mean, I like Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang’s as much as the next guy, but who wants sameness to define a place that once meant so much to him?

  But the mall had a new significance to me that had nothing to do with teenage Gus hooking up with girls from Sachem North or Ward Melville. Nothing to do with getting high outside Sears or setting off firecrackers in the theater. The mall was where I took my first footsteps away from the edge of John Jr.’s grave. Doc Rosen had pretty much told me to get out of my room on my days off, to get back into the world again. Go to the mall. The mall, I thought. Why not? It was a safe choice. For a Long Islander, going to the mall was like going to Mass. Turned out the mall was the least safe choice I could have made and Doc knew it. Because as I zombie-walked the mall I was confronted with the reality of men who would have been my son’s age. Breathing, laughing, walking men with friends and girlfriends and lives ahead of them. At first, I hated them. I hated that they had something my son was robbed of: a future. Then came a period when I wanted to scream at them, to shout at them about how lucky they were. That they had a gift not to be thrown away or taken for granted. Eventually I stopped seeing them at all. That was when I knew I was living again.

  Zin’s was in a strip shopping center on the Route 347 side of the Smith Haven Mall. When I pulled up to the place, Al Roussis, a somewhat dour, athletic man about five-foot-nine, was pacing a rut in the concrete out front. Al was a good guy who was on the job because he believed in the job and in doing right. Homicide was the perfect place for him to be. He took his job speaking for the dead very seriously. If Al had a fault, it was that he took too much too seriously. One of the things he took too seriously was eating. Athletic and fit as he was, he ate like a moose. When I took Al out, it cost.

  We hugged hello. Pushing back from the embrace, his moist brown eyes were full of suspicion. I must’ve winced a little.

  “What happened to you?”

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  He held his palms up to me like he was on traffic duty. “Forget it. I don’t want to know. Just tell me it’s got nothing to do with this Spears case.”

  I slashed my index finger over my chest. “Cross my heart.”

  “Should I believe you?”

  “About this, yeah. Let’s eat.”

  The inside of Zin’s smelled like the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was perfumed with the scents of sour pickles and steaming meats, of drying salamis hanging like red wind chimes over the counter. The walls were covered in badly painted murals of the home country—Brooklyn. Nearly all the folks on the island my parents’ age came from the city. A lot of people my age were born in the city and had moved out here, most of them from one Brooklyn neighborhood or another. Some from Queens, too. Very few from the Bronx or Manhattan. Almost none from New York City’s stepchild, Staten Island.

  Neither Al nor I bothered with the menus. As usual, Al ordered enough food to feed a family of four. He had matzo ball soup, a pastrami sandwich, a potato knish, pickles, coleslaw, and a sour tomato. My last name was Murphy, so I had a corned beef sandwich. We didn’t talk much during the meal, because when Al ate, he concentrated on chewing. But in between courses we managed to catch up a little. His family was fine. Work was good. Like that.

  “So,” he said when I ordered us coffee, “what do you want to know about the Spears murder?”

  “Your case?”

  He shook his head. “Not mine, no. Guys who caught it had a suspect in like fifteen minutes. Once there was a blood-type match, they arrested him. The DNA results confirmed it.”

  “Rondo Salazar?”

  He nodded. “Real piece of shit.”

  “I know,” I said. “The Asesinos, from the womb to the Tombs.”

  “If we were in the city, yeah. Now he’s in Riverhead. Some bad motherfuckers, the Asesinos. Really prey on their own.”

  “What gang doesn’t? For them their people are low-hanging fruit.”

  “Good point. So, is that it?”

  “Almost.”

  Al rolled his eyes. “Uh-oh, here we go.”

  “What?” I made a face.

  “Don’t give me the innocent look, Gus. Last time you stuck your nose where it didn’t belong a lot of people got dead.”

  “Some of them deserved it.”

  “But not all.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “So who you working for? And don’t give me any shit about privileged information. All you got a license to do is carry a gun and drive a van.”

  “The vic’s grandfather.”

  The downturn at the corners of Al’s lips was even more pronounced than usual. “Sad, really sad for the family when a kid dies.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, shit! Gus, I wasn’t thinking. I’m—”

  “It’s okay, Al. I know what you meant.”

  “So, what, he doesn’t believe Salazar is guilty, because I gotta tell you, this guy’s as guilty as sin.”

  “That’s not it. He believes the guy’s guilty. That’s not why he asked me to help.”

  “Then what?”

  “He wants to know why.”

  Al nodded, but without being aware of it. “Yeah, Salazar won’t talk.”

  “There’s all this speculation in the papers about unrequited love and stalking, but the grandfather thinks it’s bullshit and the family needs some real answers. They want to know why. He’s a real piece of work, the grandfather, a mercenary SOB. I don’t blame him, though. Still haunts me.”

  “No need to tell me about it, Gus. I deal with victims’ families all the time. They ask me why first a lot of the time, even before who.”

  “Then help me out here, Al.”

  “If I can I will. Ask your questions.”

  The waitress brought our coffees, but neither one of us drank. We just kind of played with them, stirring and stirring. I asked for the check.

  I said, “How did the guys who caught the case get onto Salazar so fast?”

  Al shrugged. “They were already looking at him for this drug thing, but my guess is either he was snitched out or they got an anonymous tip.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too. But you don’t know for sure?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you get me a sit down with the detectives who caught it?”

  Al suddenly looked as uncomfortable as if I’d asked him to give me head.

  “I’m not sure, Gus. I know that you did the right thing last year by exposing Chief Regan and Pete McCann for the corrupt, murdering pricks they were, but they’re dead. And it’s easy to make heroes and martyrs out of the dead. There are still a lot of guys on the job who looked up to Pete as Mr. Cool Guy and others who owe a lot of loyalty to Regan.”

  “So that’s a no?” I said, slipping my credit card into the black check folder.

  “That’s an ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ May cost you another meal.”

  “Thanks, Al.”

  Outside, Al headed right for his car. I stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, letting the sun warm my face. It was one of the first days of spring that actually felt like spring. I didn’t know whether April was the cruelest month, but it was a liar. That much I was sure of.

  15

  (MONDAY AFTERNOON)

  If you look up the expression “wrong side of the tracks,” you might find an accompanying photograph and map of North Bellport. North Bellport was largely poor, largely African-American and Hispanic, and basically shit out of luck. And the thing about the wrong side of the tracks was literal in North Bellport, because once you
crossed south over the Long Island Rail Road tracks into Bellport proper, you were in a different world, a white one. One featuring a yacht club, the Gateway Playhouse, and a country club with a nineteenth-century golf course bordered by the Great South Bay. A cozy place that held free concerts on summer nights at a band shell down by the water. Across the Great South Bay was Fire Island and the Atlantic beyond.

  Bellport was a picture postcard village of white picket fences and quaint houses sided in cedar shingles gone silver and black with age. There were great restaurants, art galleries, and little shops along Main Street. It was like a little slice of Sag Harbor had been carved out of the Hamptons and transported thirty-eight miles to the southwest. North Bellport . . . well, it had its unique charms, too: 7-Eleven and Spicy’s Barbecue. Spicy’s kind of looked like the devil’s concept of a McDonald’s. Its squat, freestanding building across from the railroad tracks was painted white and Hey-look-at-me-right-the-fuck-now red with like colored, cat ear–shaped arches on either side. Spicy’s chicken, ribs, and collards were top shelf, according to the cops who worked the Fifth Precinct. And the place was probably the only spot where the citizens of North Bellport and Bellport crossed paths. Those railroad tracks might just as well have been a wall or a moat, but you didn’t need physical barriers when economic ones were just as effective and far less conspicuous. That was how segregation worked on Long Island.

  I drove with my windows down to take advantage of the rare warmth of the day. Only a few seconds after taking the right fork off Montauk onto South Country Road, I could smell the ocean almost as if I was standing on the beach. I didn’t know whether it was because we were surrounded by Long Island Sound on the north and the Atlantic on the south that we were nose-blind to the smell of sea water or because most of us lived along the spine of the island, just one side or the other off the LIE, far away from any body of water larger than an in-ground pool. There were days you could smell it inland, but not many. I forgot all about the smell of the sea in the few minutes it took me to get into Bellport proper.

  My attention had been drawn away by the sight of greening hedges, big old houses on fat pieces of property, and thoughts of the inevitably painful conversation I was going to have with Linh Trang Spears’s family. I hadn’t asked Micah Spears for his family’s contact information because I wanted as little direct contact with him as possible. I wasn’t a brown-noser by nature and didn’t feel I had anything to prove, not to anyone, not anymore. When you’ve sat with the muzzle of a Glock nestled up under the fleshy part of your chin, your finger on the trigger, you get past giving a shit about what the world thinks of you. In that way, the last two years had been liberating. Liberation wasn’t worth the cost of my son’s life, but the nature of the universe isn’t transactional. The universe isn’t like some large-scale version of Let’s Make A Deal. No one, not God, not Monty Hall, had offered me a choice. You can have liberation, your son’s life, or what’s behind door number two. No one had given John the choice. So I figured that word would get back to Micah Spears indirectly. And if he didn’t like that, well, he could go fuck himself. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but there was something about that man beyond his brusque manner and fine clothing that rubbed me wrong, very wrong.

  I turned off South Country onto Browns Lane, a lovely straight street that ran downhill to the water’s edge. But the house I was looking for was a few hundred yards north of the water, across the way from the Mary Immaculate Church complex. It was a lovely slate-blue-and-white Victorian with one turret, a side portico, and only a bit of whimsy. Lovely as the house was, it looked tired and lived in. Maybe I was projecting, but probably not. The painted rows of clapboards and shingles were chipped, flecked, and faded. I could see down the pebbled driveway into the backyard where the detached garage was sagging, seeming in the midst of a decision whether to collapse this way or that. There was a white Toyota RAV4, a girl’s car, I thought, parked under the portico. Krissy had always wanted a RAV4. The lawn and garden, such as they were, were overgrown and weedy.

  The porch boards creaked under my weight. I pressed the nib of the old-fashioned doorbell and heard it buzz inside the house. At first, there was nothing, but as I raised my finger to the bell again, I heard footsteps.

  “Coming!” promised a muffled woman’s voice on the other side of the door.

  There was a click, another, and the door pulled back. Standing there in front of me was a heavyset girl with a pretty face and Micah Spears’s green eyes. Only on her, they were warm and welcoming. She was twenty, maybe younger, and she smiled an uncertain smile at me with a mouth of perfectly straight white teeth and curvy lips. She was the type of girl my mom would shake her head at and whisper under her breath, What a catch she’d be if she would only lose the baby fat. My mom was born here but was old-school.

  “Hi,” she said, tucking some stray black hairs behind her right ear. “What can I do for you? Because if you’re selling anything, I—”

  I smiled back at her. “I’ve got nothing to sell.”

  The smile vanished from her face, but the uncertainty remained. “Then what?”

  “My name is Gus Murphy and I used to be a Suffolk County police officer.”

  That didn’t have the intended effect.

  “Oh, Christ! Oh, no. Is it my mom? Is it—”

  I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder and smiled as reassuring a smile as I could manage these days. “No, no.” I pulled my hand back when I felt her relax. “It’s nothing like that. I’m a retired cop. I’ve been hired by your grandfather.”

  That also got an unexpected reaction.

  “But Grandpa Frank is dead. How could he hire you?” She grabbed the door, ready to slam it shut.

  I held my hands up. “Not that grandfather,” I said. “Micah Spears.”

  She didn’t slam the door, but she didn’t let go of it, either. That was something, at least. She tilted her forehead toward me, challenging me. I could see she wanted to ask me a question. She just couldn’t seem to decide which one.

  “What did you say your name was again?” she asked. I supposed to give herself more time to sort through the others.

  “Gus Murphy. What’s yours?”

  She wasn’t expecting that and smiled in spite of herself. “Abigail. Everyone calls me Abby.”

  “You’re Linh Trang’s sister?”

  Abby ignored the question, sort of. “Is that what this is about, LT?”

  I nodded.

  “But they have her killer.”

  “Rondo Salazar. I know.”

  “Then . . . I don’t understand. My folks—we don’t really have much to do with my grandfather, with the man who hired you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “My dad doesn’t talk about it much, but he says Micah isn’t anyone we want to have anything to do with.”

  “And your mom, what does she say?”

  Abby rolled her pretty eyes. “She likes him even less than my dad.”

  I thought back to my meeting with Micah Spears and remembered the photo he’d shown me from Linh Trang’s graduation. If he wasn’t at the graduation, and it didn’t sound like he would have been welcomed there, someone must’ve forwarded him the photo. I tried something that I hoped would get me off the front porch and into the house, something that would help me get some answers instead of having to answer them myself.

  “But you keep in touch with Micah, don’t you? You sent him pictures from Linh Trang’s graduation.”

  That did it. Abby swiveled her head, searching for anyone who might be within earshot. This was a secret, one nobody could know about. When she was satisfied it was safe, her face twisted up and turned red with anger.

  “Micah swore to me he wouldn’t tell anybody. I—”

  “He didn’t tell me, Abby. I figured it out. Like I said, I used to be a cop. Now, can I come inside so we can have a talk?�
��

  She hesitated. She was smart to hesitate. Who was I, anyway? Some guy who showed up at her front door claiming to be an ex-cop hired by a man her family hated to look into what was probably the most traumatic and horrible event in her young life. I pushed her to decide.

  “Call him,” I said, taking the business card he’d given me out of my wallet. “Here.” I offered her the card. “Call your grandfather. I’ll wait.”

  “Come in, Mr. Murphy. Come in.”

  As she closed the door behind me I got the sense that the secret between Abby and her grandfather was just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Abby showed me into the parlor—her word, not mine—gesturing toward a leather wing chair. She asked me if I wanted anything to drink, listing beer, soda, and water among the choices.

  “Coke,” I said.

  When she left, I looked around the room. Mostly it was dark. I got the sense that there were a lot of things in this house hiding in the darkness behind the drawn window shades. There was much to wonder about in the old blue house on Browns Lane. And when I asked Abby about some of those things I was wondering about, she didn’t shed much light on them. Like when I asked her about Linh Trang’s ethnicity.

  Abby shrugged. “I don’t know. They could’ve adopted from anywhere, I guess, but it wasn’t something we ever talked about. She was my sister and that was that. It was weird sometimes, them trying to make her American and also make her Vietnamese. It was almost like they felt guilty and tried to do too much. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t know, but I could guess. Leaving the house, I realized I had more questions on the way out than I did when Abby let me in.

  16

  (MONDAY, LATE AFTERNOON)

  I didn’t have to be at Maggie’s until eight, so I picked up some Spicy’s Barbecue and headed to Bill’s apartment in North Massapequa. The contrast between Bellport and North Bellport was the most egregious example of the north and south haves and have-nots, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. See, the north/south town contrast was a reoccurring phenomenon all along the South Shore of Long Island. Sometimes, like in Bellport, the dividing line was the railroad track. Most frequently, though, it was Montauk Highway. The towns and villages south of Montauk, the ones closer to the water, were the haves. The ones north of Montauk Highway were the have-nots or, in the case of places like North Massapequa, the have-lesses. And in Massapequa not only was the contrast less drastic, it was less to do with ethnicity and more to do with salary.