What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Although she now used her maiden name—Malone—Roberta Spears had been easy enough to research. She was fifty-nine, currently living on Shelter Island. She was, even now, quite a beautiful woman. She had let her long, straight hair go silver-gray, and in many of the photos on her Facebook page, it fell carelessly over her shoulders. Her eyes were on the brown side of hazel. What was gone from those eyes and from the curve of her lips was that look of love and admiration. There was a sadness there in their place, a look of bewildered disappointment. I don’t know. I was so overtired that I might well have been reading things into her face and eyes that weren’t there. It didn’t take too much more research to get her house number and phone numbers. Like I said, privacy was dead.

  The other thing that caught my attention was the fact that Micah Spears’s history seemed to go back only as far as 1973. And unlike with his ex-wife, no matter how much key tapping I did, I could not penetrate the wall of years preceding ’73. I knew he’d been in the military during the Vietnam War. At least that’s what I understood by Bill’s comments about his association with Spears. I tried a few sites that had histories of Army and Marine units that had served in ’Nam, but that was more a stab in the dark than anything else. Frankly, I would have been shocked had I stumbled upon a mention of Spears on those sites. Having grown up after the war, I never realized the depth of our involvement there. I knew more about World War II or, as Slava had called it, the Great Patriotic War, than I knew about Vietnam. I guess you hear more about the wars you win than the ones you lose.

  I scribbled down some notes for myself with one of those Paragon Hotel pencils, clicked off the computer, and headed, finally, back to my room. This time there were no funky feelings as I approached my room. Even if there had been, I was so tired, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was ready for sleep. I don’t think I’d ever been more ready for it in my life.

  37

  (SATURDAY MORNING)

  It was a conspiracy against sleep. My sleep, particularly, because not only was there someone knocking at my room door, but my cell was buzzing, dancing happily along the top of the nightstand. And it had been such a sweet, deep sleep, a drool-on-the-pillow sleep with pleasant dreams now unremembered. Dreams gone to where dreams go. I sat there for a moment, ignoring the phone and the door, thinking about that, about forgotten dreams. I wondered if we could be hypnotized into remembering them the way witnesses could be manipulated into recalling apparently forgotten details. And if we could, would we want to? I didn’t used to concern myself with questions like this. Seemed I thought about them a lot these days. More and more. I stopped wondering and answered the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Guth, are you okay?” It was Smudge.

  “Just sleeping. Why? Is anything wrong?”

  “No. Just wanted to let you know Maggie’s at the Paragon. She came straight from her job in the city. You want the details?”

  “Anything suspicious?”

  “Nothing that I could see.”

  “We’ll talk later. Thanks for the heads-up, Smudge.”

  Armed with that knowledge that it was Maggie knocking, I got out of bed, stripped down to full nakedness, and flung my door open. Only it wasn’t Maggie. It was Laticia, a new housekeeper, who took one look at me in my birthday suit and ran screaming down the hall past Maggie. It was almost worth it just to see the look on Maggie’s face.

  When the shock wore off, she said, “Should I even ask?”

  “You know me, Magdalena, I have a thing for husky Mexican women in brown polyester housekeeper’s uniforms.”

  She smiled at that, but when she thought about it, the smile disappeared.

  “You knew I was coming. How did you know I was here?”

  I deflected, grabbing her wrist. “Get in here.”

  She looked spent. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was all over the place. Her mascara had run a bit and her eye shadow was smeared. She smelled of ambient cigarette smoke, sweat, and musky perfume. The tails of her satiny black blouse hung over the waist of her short black skirt. But there was something about her like this that I found incredibly sexy. I can’t explain it, but I found her as appealing this way as when she was fresh and perfectly made up. I kissed her hard on the mouth.

  But she wasn’t having it. She closed the door behind her and pushed away from me.

  “Go brush your teeth and then you can explain why you thought that was me at your door.”

  I brushed my teeth and as I did I thought about how I should answer her. One thing that had helped cement our relationship was the truth. I’d already chipped away at that by omitting to tell her about Lagunov’s ride in my van and his implied threats. Omission was one kind of sin. Straight-up lying was something else. There’d be no rationalizing that away, no pretending. The thing I had to balance out was risk. If she found out I was lying to her, I’d risk losing her. If I told her the truth and she acted in a way to set off Lagunov, I was risking her life. I was using my time in the bathroom to stall. Maggie caught on.

  “If you brush those white teeth of yours much longer, Gus, you’ll be down to the roots.”

  I put my toothbrush down, rinsed, and shut the water off. I walked back into the room, so preoccupied that I forgot I was still naked. I remembered when I noticed that Maggie noticed, too. I went to grab my shorts.

  “I didn’t say I wanted you to get dressed. I wanted an answer.”

  “I’ll answer you. First you have to answer a question of mine.”

  She didn’t like that and opened her mouth to protest, but she could see by the look on my face it wasn’t open for debate.

  “What?”

  “During your last few gigs, has anyone hit on you in a way—”

  She didn’t let me finish. “Guys always hit on me. You know that. Are you getting jealous now? Now, after all—” She stopped herself, her beautifully tired face turning angry and red. “Are you having me followed?”

  “I know guys hit on you, and no, I’m not getting jealous. Let me finish. Has anyone hit on you in the last few nights in a way that got your attention? You know, in a way that made you feel especially uneasy?”

  “Why are you asking me—”

  “Maggie!”

  “Well, one guy, yeah.”

  “At the Russian’s party on the yacht?”

  She nodded, looking pissed off and frightened all at once.

  “Russian guy with cold eyes,” I said, “thick accent, but spoke almost perfect English?”

  The anger and fear in her face doubled. “How could you know that? You are having me followed.”

  “No . . . well, yes. Now, not then. How could I have you followed on that yacht?”

  “Back up, mister. What do you mean, not then but now?”

  “Smudge.”

  “Smudge what, Gus?”

  “Smudge has been following you, but only after you did the gig on the yacht.”

  “You better start explaining yourself or you better dance pretty quickly.”

  “The man who creeped you out on the yacht, his name is Bogdan Lagunov. He works for the man who threw the party on the boat. He’s an assassin and his next target is Slava.”

  “Slava? Why would anyone want to kill the doorman at a third-rate hotel in Suffolk County?”

  “Second-rate.”

  “Gus!”

  “Sorry. The answer is I can’t tell you. Even if you threaten to walk out that door right now and never come back, I can’t tell you. Please just take my word for it. Slava is in serious trouble.”

  “Why doesn’t Slava go to the police?”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “He can’t. Sometimes there are things we—the cops—can’t solve or even know about.”

  “But what’s any of it got to do with me?”

  “Lagunov thinks I know where Slava is, and by proving to m
e he can get close to you, he’s trying to motivate me to give Slava up.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No, not really, but that won’t matter to this guy.” I walked up to her and clamped my hands around her biceps. “Maggie, will you do something for me?”

  “Depends. What is it?”

  “Will you go to Detroit now? I’ll drive you back to your place and pack with you. I’ll pay your airfare and hotel until the rest of the cast shows up. Just please do this for us.”

  “First you don’t want me to go, then you can’t get rid of me fast enough.” The worried expression on her face gave the lie to her words.

  “C’mon, Maggie.”

  “I can’t . . . not today, at least.”

  “Then you’re thinking about it?”

  She rested her head on my shoulder, pressing her face against my chest. “Of course I am. I’m no hero.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Okay, Gus, tomorrow or as soon as I can. I have some stuff to cancel and to get coverage for, but that should work.”

  I just stood there holding her for a minute, my guts all torn up inside. After John’s death I had vowed that I would never let anyone get close enough to me to hurt me the way he had, that I couldn’t risk suffering like that again. But here I was and it was already too late for me to do anything about it.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked finally, trying to avoid the knot in my belly.

  She pushed her head back and stared up at me.

  “You’re not the only person in this who’s going to miss someone. I needed to be with you. Thinking about not being around you for months . . . it’s getting to me, Gus. Last night I could barely get through the gig. I was aching for you.”

  I cupped her chin in my hand and kissed her softly on the lips. “Let me make the ache go away . . . at least for a little while.”

  She didn’t argue or say another word.

  38

  (SATURDAY AFTERNOON)

  The ferry ride across to Shelter Island from Sag Harbor was a short one. The ride from Bohemia had taken considerably longer, though not nearly as long as it might have taken after Memorial Day. Any trip out to the Hamptons after that becomes a test of a person’s road-rage threshold. Most people don’t realize just how far it is from the middle of Suffolk County to “out east.” Even in the unlikely event you have smooth sailing on the LIE, it comes to an abrupt end once you hit Montauk Highway. Then you crawl, and that’s on a good day.

  There was a time when I was a kid that there had been a plan to widen the roads out east along the route of the high-tension lines, but it never happened and now it never would. The people who lived out here wouldn’t put up with it. They had too much money and too much influence to be ignored. It was to laugh, I thought, as the little flatbed ferry pulled away from the dock, Shelter Island looking close enough to swim to. The poor people in Wyandanch or North Bay Shore didn’t have enough clout to get their streets plowed in winter or their potholes fixed in spring, let alone dictate to the politicians how wide to make their streets or where to put them. Most people can’t understand desperation as a by-product of powerlessness. Cops see its effects every day.

  I tried forgetting about how the poor got the shit end of the stick, at least for the moment, focusing instead on the approaching shoreline. I’d lived my entire life on Long Island, but I’d never been to Shelter Island. I’d been close, been to Sag Harbor a few times with Annie for fancy seafood dinners on our anniversary and on my thirtieth birthday. I’d been out here once with Maggie to see a friend of hers do a dramatic reading. On a map, Shelter Island looked like a forgotten piece of food stuck between the jaws of a prehistoric crocodile. What it was, in fact, was an irregularly shaped wedge of land in the waters between the North and South Forks of eastern Long Island. Like the rest of Long Island, it had once been home to an Algonquin Indian tribe. These days it was home to twenty-three hundred mostly white people who liked and could afford privacy. I was interested in only one of them—Roberta Malone, the ex-wife of Micah Spears.

  When I got off the ferry, I took a ride around the island. It was a sleepy place in April. Maybe it was always so. I had no way of knowing. Although some huge, inappropriate houses dotted the landscape, most of the houses had an old Long Island feel that harkened back to the East End’s fishing past. Many of the homes, even the newer, larger ones, were done up in wooden shingles and I liked that there weren’t stockade fences everywhere. Once I’d satisfied my curiosity, I wound my way around to the southeast corner of the island to a street called Bootleggers Alley. If my information was correct, Roberta Malone lived off Bootleggers in a house overlooking Crab Creek.

  I was glad to see that the house matching the address was a lovely but simple little saltbox with a gravel driveway. There was a weathered gray Range Rover parked on the gravel. No wax had touched the four-by-four’s body in years. I parked at the edge of the driveway, walked straight up to the door, and rang the bell. As I waited, I noticed the air smelled different here. Unlike much of the rest of Long Island, which smelled of car fumes and wet grass in April, this piece of Shelter Island was relatively free of exhaust. Instead, the air had the slightly sour tang of marshland and salty grace notes of brackish water.

  “Back here!” a woman’s voice called out. “Come on around.”

  And there I found Roberta Malone, dressed in a ragged, paint-dappled sweater. She was seated on a stool, her back to me, an easel and canvas in front of her. To her right was a snack table on which were an assortment of silvery tubes and brushes. She used about a third of the tabletop as her palette. She was swiping at the canvas with a wide brush, broad swaths of azure appearing on the off-white material where I assumed the sky would be. Then she dabbed the brush in a glob of white and swirled it. I liked watching the way she moved the brush. There was an air of confidence and skill, of grace about her.

  “How can I help you?” she asked, only half turning to look at me, continuing to paint as she did so.

  “Micah Spears.”

  Her bearing changed. Her square shoulders rounding, her yardstick-straight posture slumping. She put the brush down on the snack table. Whatever inspiration she’d been feeling before I came around back seemed to have disappeared with the mention of her ex’s name. She spun on her stool to face me, but her lovely face was distorted by pain. I recognized that sort of expression. I knew what it meant. She was trying to smile at me, but her lips just wouldn’t cooperate and the corners of mouth turned down more and more with each quivering attempt at good humor.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “My name is Gus Murphy.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “I’d be shocked if it did.”

  She took the blue-and-yellow scarf off her head and shook out her hair. “Then why are you here?”

  “Like I said, I’m here about your ex-husband.”

  “But what about him, and what makes you think I’d talk about him to a stranger?”

  “Because I’m working for him.”

  Her pained expression shifted to a sort of bemused confusion.

  “You have my sympathy, Gus Murphy, and you’ve also got my attention. The question is, what are you going to do with it?”

  “How about I explain myself?”

  “That would be a good place to start.”

  “I’m a retired Suffolk County cop,” I said. “Mr. Spears hired me to look into his granddaughter’s homicide.”

  That bemused expression of hers vanished, replaced by something else. It wasn’t grief. I knew grief. This was something else. More like sadness than grief.

  “She wasn’t your granddaughter?”

  Roberta Malone shook her head. “No. I was Micah’s second wife.” She cleared her throat and said, “I’m confused. I thought the police had the man that mur
dered Linh Trang. Some sort of gang thug.”

  “They do, but they don’t know why he killed her. That’s the reason I’m working for your ex. He wants to know why.”

  Then she did the same odd thing her stepson Kevin had done. She laughed. It was a knowing laugh, with a sneer and resignation in it.

  “Micah would want to know, wouldn’t he, especially because it was Linh Trang?”

  Now I was confused. “Why would you say that? Why especially because it was Linh Trang?”

  Seeming not to have heard the question, she stood and moved past me toward the back door of the saltbox. Her strides were as long and graceful as her brushstrokes.

  “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Murphy?”

  “Gus.”

  “Would you, Gus? I would.”

  She disappeared into the house and I disappeared after her. I found her in the tiny kitchen, mixing herself a vodka and lime juice.

  “A gimlet,” she said. “Very old-fashioned stuff, but I’ve got a real taste for them. Please, have one. I would say I don’t like to drink alone, but that would be a lie. I don’t like lying, Gus. Do you?”

  “Lying? I didn’t used to. I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “What changed?” she asked, mixing me a drink. “I mean, for you not to be sure.”

  “My son died a few years ago. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “He was playing basketball and then he was dead.”