“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry. I’m sorry. Everybody I know is sorry and he’s still dead. That’s why I’m not sure anymore.”
She nodded, said nothing. I was thankful for that. Her silence and nod were more eloquent than the thousands of heartfelt words spoken to me on the subject of John’s death. All those words . . . I came to resent them. She handed me the short glass with the greenish drink in it and raised her glass. “To your boy.”
I raised my glass and we both drank. The drink was tart and a little bit sweet. My taste ran to bourbon, but I liked the gimlet just the same.
“It’s my turn to be confused again, Gus. If you’re working for Micah and it’s about why Linh Trang was murdered, what are you doing here? You don’t think I had anything to do with it. I know it got ugly there at the end between Micah and me, but—”
I laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just that I can’t get anywhere, not really. But I got this crazy idea in my head that I won’t get anywhere about Linh Trang until I know more about your ex.”
“Micah was right to hire you, Gus,” she said, mixing herself a second. “You’re a perceptive man.”
“Then you’ll help me out?”
She laughed again. “Shall we go outside?”
It wasn’t a question. Roberta Malone took her fresh drink and headed out the way she had come. Outside, she plopped herself down in a lounge chair, its back raised. Even that she did with an almost balletic flair. She patted the arm of the Adirondack chair next to her.
“Sit, Gus. Sit.”
I did.
“So,” I said, “can you help me out about your ex?”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
She rubbed her chin and cheeks with her right hand, a smear of blue paint spreading across the line of her jaw. I didn’t point it out. I wanted to hear what she had to say.
“Technically, I suppose, I won’t help you, but for all practical purposes, it’s that I can’t. You see this house, this property, that car in the driveway, and the vodka you’re sipping? Most of it’s paid for by your employer, my ex-husband. It’s all part of the settlement. Micah was very generous with me. I won’t want for much for the rest of my life, but the terms of the settlement are quite clear and specific. If I discuss my past relationship with Micah or divulge any information about him, any at all, I risk all of this. Now, you seem like a really nice man, and if I was about twenty years younger, there’s no way you’d be leaving here without bedding me, but nobody’s that nice or sexy enough for me to jeopardize my future security. No one.”
“I’m wounded,” I said, putting my hand on my heart. It was easy to see she was girding herself for pushback and that if I went at her straight on, she’d slam the door shut on me. “But I understand. I mostly depend on my pension now and I wouldn’t do much to jeopardize that, either, not even for you.”
She smiled at me and there was no mistaking the glint of mischief in her eyes.
“Did you love him? Are you allowed to tell me that?”
She hesitated, sipping her drink, thinking.
“I loved him something fierce, Gus. Never loved a man more in my life. I’ll never know that kind of love again. It had a kind of life of its own.”
“But then something changed that. What?” I said. “Did you know Linh Trang had been forming a kind of secret relationship with him and then something happened? Blew it all apart.”
She took the remainder of her drink in one swallow and her jaw clenched tight. She said nothing.
“Look, your ex isn’t the nicest guy I ever met, but I’ve gotten the sense that people think he’s some kind of monster. I was a cop for twenty years and I met some monsters, but—”
Roberta Malone stood up. “I think it’s time you leave, Gus. I’ve enjoyed meeting you. I really have, and if I’d had another drink, those twenty years in age would have stopped mattering to me. But you’re straying into territory I can’t go to. I won’t go.”
“Okay. I get the sense you want to talk to me. I’m pretty good at reading people. If you decide to point me in the right direction, I’m at the Paragon Hotel in Bohemia. Just ask for me and they’ll put you through.”
She shook her head. “That won’t happen.”
“Okay. Thank you, anyway.” I offered her my right hand. “I enjoyed meeting you.”
She pushed my hand away, clamped her palms on my cheeks, and kissed me square on the mouth. Nothing silly. She didn’t part her lips or thrust out her tongue. There was an oddness to it. Though her lips were soft and warm, there was a grayness and chill in the kiss. It was a kiss born of alcohol and some desperation, I think. I didn’t encourage it and I didn’t fight it. I let her play it out. She needed to, and sometimes you just have to let people do what they need to do. There are all sorts of kindnesses in the world. When she was done, she moved her cheek along mine until her lips were touching my ear.
“Micah Spears wasn’t always Micah Spears.”
That was that. She let go of me and retreated into the house without looking back. I took a last look at Crab Creek and another at her unfinished canvas. The canvas was mostly empty but for those broad blue strokes I’d witnessed her apply when I first got there. I spent a few seconds thinking about how the painting might come out in the end. Mostly I wondered about what she had whispered to me after the kiss. When I looked in my mirror to back out of the end of her driveway, I noticed some blue had rubbed off on my cheek. I took a napkin out of my glove compartment and wiped it away. The paint was gone, but the chill of her lips on mine lingered.
39
(SATURDAY AFTERNOON)
I got the call on the way back to the Paragon. In the jumble of the last few days I either forgot or hoped the call wouldn’t come. You’d think I would have learned my lesson about hoping by now. Where had hoping ever gotten me? Where had it ever gotten anyone? It was Detective Dwyer on the other end of the line, and all the hoping in the world wasn’t going to stop her from saying what she’d called to say.
“Monday noon, at the Sixtieth Precinct. The ADA will be there, so you might want to bring that lawyer you like threatening us with.”
“Tuesday.”
“Monday.”
“Dwyer, I’m working late tonight. I’m taking Sunday off. Besides, my memory is especially bad on Sundays. So it’s Tuesday, and then only if my lawyer is available.”
“Tuesday, noon.”
She hung up without a goodbye or telling me to have a good day.
I put in a call to Asher Wilkes, expecting to leave a message, but he picked up.
“Gus Murphy, is that really you?” he asked, his resonant voice clear as ever despite the road noise. “Hell, I haven’t heard from you since—”
He stopped himself abruptly, remembering that the last time we’d dealt with each other was after John’s death. Parents spend a lot of time, once they reach a certain age, preparing for their own deaths, planning how to divide their estates among their children. For all the right reasons they spend very little time preparing for their children’s deaths or planning the division of their assets. Nonetheless, John’s savings and his few possessions had to be dealt with, and Asher had helped us through the surreality of it. He didn’t do divorce work and wouldn’t have gotten between Annie and me even if he had, so the dissolution of our marriage was handled by strangers.
“How are you doing, Gus? I read about you in the papers last year. Fucking Jimmy Regan,” he said. I imagined him shaking his head. “I knew he was no saint, but I never would’ve figured him for that.”
Of course he knew Jimmy Regan. He knew a lot of Suffolk cops because Asher had been an assistant district attorney in Suffolk, and not just any ADA. He was a high flyer, a superstar. Word was that he was being groomed for the top spot after the old man retired. He would have been
the first African-American elected DA in Suffolk’s history. The Department of Justice got to him first and made him a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Once again, Asher rose quickly through the ranks and was being talked about as a future attorney general, but one day he threw his big future away, trading it all in for a job as a public defender back in Suffolk County. He’d given that up a few years ago to start a small private practice.
“And how many people would’ve figured you to throw away a shot at being AG?”
“You know why I did it,” he said, his tone suddenly somber. “You were one of the good guys, Gus. You saw how the system chews kids up.”
“I know, Ash. I saw. I was just saying. From the outside, you never really know someone. Shit, sometimes we barely know ourselves.”
“Amen to that. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“What are you doing in the office on a Saturday at this hour?”
“I got some tough cases coming up, but never mind that,” he said. “Why are you calling?”
“I need help.”
“People who call lawyers usually do.”
“Good point. Tuesday, I need you to come with me to Brooklyn.”
“Why, you turning hipster on me, Gus? We going to Greenpoint or Williamsburg?”
“Funny man. No, the NYPD thinks I’m a material witness and believes I’m holding out on them.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t inquire as to the validity of their beliefs.”
“Not unless you’re in the mood to get lied to.”
He laughed at that. “A client lying to his lawyer, how novel. So, what time?”
“I need to be in Coney Island at noon.”
“Hold on . . . hold on, let me . . . Pick me up at my office at ten. You can explain the situation on the way in. Afterward, you can treat me to some hot dogs and Nathan’s fries or some other Brooklyn delicacy. Though I do love me some of them Nathan’s fries. Best on the planet.”
“Ten it is.”
Asher was a good man, maybe the most honest human being I’d ever known. He’d thrown his big career away because of a kid named DeShawn Pickette. Asher was connected to Pickette because he’d prosecuted him. I was connected to Pickette because I’d arrested him. DeShawn was a sixteen-year-old black kid from Wyandanch—the same town Asher had come from—who’d been in the system since he was eleven, so that when he and two fifteen-year-old friends used a toy gun to rob a 7-Eleven on Jericho Turnpike in Commack, nobody was looking to give him the benefit of the doubt. Especially not Asher Wilkes, who, with the blessing of the then DA, charged DeShawn as an adult and steamrolled his inexperienced and overwhelmed public defender. Not unexpectedly, DeShawn got the max.
Asher admitted to me once that he’d pretty much forgotten DeShawn Pickette fifteen minutes after he was sentenced.
“I was too busy steering my own ocean liner to give a shit about some asshole fuckup kid who came up out of the same streets I did. You don’t lose sleep over a swatted fly and I didn’t lose any over that kid.”
Asher’s attitude changed in February 2009 when he read in the paper that Pickette, after four years in Dannemora, had hung himself in his cell.
“The name sounded familiar,” Asher said. “So I went back and reviewed the case. And when I saw that he was sixteen when I prosecuted him, that he’d been kicked around from one foster home to another and that his lawyer wilted when I blasted him for even suggesting a plea bargain, I took a hard look in the mirror and a harder look at the system. I didn’t like what I saw wherever I looked. Suddenly, Gus, I wasn’t so interested in power and a title, my record or my pride. I realized there could be no broader justice without individual justice. DeShawn Pickette deserved punishment for what he did, but he deserved justice, too, and maybe a little bit of compassion. He got way too much of one, some of another, and none of the last.”
I didn’t suffer from the same guilt as Asher. All I did was arrest the kid and his pals, but Asher and I would always be connected through DeShawn.
When I pulled into the lot at the Paragon, I made another call. This time I got what I expected—Charlie Prince’s voice mail. I told him that I was curious about Linh Trang Spears’s movements on the day of her murder and asked him to call me back. I sat there for a few minutes, thinking about John Jr., about TJ Delcamino, Linh Trang, and DeShawn Pickette. I didn’t reach any grand conclusions beyond the fact that there was a lot of pain in the world and that it wasn’t likely to end anytime soon.
40
(SATURDAY, CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT)
I was distracted that night, so distracted that I had one of the other guys work the door, something I almost never did. It wasn’t like I was confused about the cause of my preoccupation. I had a grocery list of reasons to preoccupy me, not the least of which was getting Maggie the hell out of New York. How many people, I wondered, go to Detroit to be safer? Since my initial shock at hearing the news about Maggie getting the part, it hadn’t really struck me again that I wasn’t going to see her for months at a time. Well, about an hour into my shift, it hit me like a sledgehammer. Sure, I had time and money enough to go see her wherever the play went, but that would be a day or two here and there on either side of that night’s performance. At least she was coming to spend the early morning with me before I took her to the airport and put her on the plane. I took some small comfort in that.
The waves of heartsickness over Magdalena’s leaving were kind of the baseline distraction. There were also the worries I had about Tuesday’s meeting with the detectives and the Brooklyn ADA. Slava had given me the number to give to Lagunov if I had no other choice, though with Maggie out of town, that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t turn it over to the cops. I owed Slava that much.
Although my confidence was bolstered by knowing Asher Wilkes would have my back, my fucking with the cops didn’t sit well with me. Narvaez and Dwyer may have made it easy for me to see the situation as me against them, but it wasn’t. Not too long ago, I was one of them. Nor had it escaped my notice that Micah Spears had hired me because Rondo Salazar wouldn’t talk to the cops. Hypocrisy isn’t relative or situational, and mine was starting to give me a bellyache. There were parts of the new me I guess I didn’t love too well.
But the thing I couldn’t get off my mind was the weird scene that had played out between Micah Spears’s ex and me. Through the course of the night I found myself touching my lips, remembering her kiss, the smell of lime and vodka on her breath, and replaying the words she’d whispered in my ear. Though it had been a fine first and final kiss, it wasn’t that I was recalling it as the beginning of a fantasy or because I’d been aroused by it. As handsome a woman as she was, what I recalled most was the desperation and the chill in Roberta’s kiss. I couldn’t shake the feeling of darkness about it and about what she had said about Micah Spears not having always been Micah Spears. Was she playing games with me, being cryptic? Was Spears not Spears in the way I was no longer who I used to be, or was she telling me something so obvious I was blind to it? That’s what I was thinking about when Mike Parson came over to me.
Mike was a retired city cop I went to high school with and who did some Saturday nights with me at the Full Flaps.
“You okay, Gus?” he asked, concern on his face.
“Yeah,” I lied. “Why you asking?”
“’Cause the DJ’s playing ‘Rock Lobster’ and you haven’t moved.”
When I laughed, he laughed. It never occurred to me before that everyone who worked the club noticed my habits. But of course they did. They were all cops like me.
“I missed my cue,” I said, standing up from the barstool I’d been keeping warm. “I’ll be back in a few.”
Outside, the air was pretty raw for April and you could smell the coming rain, sense it looking for any excuse to start. The cigarette smokers were huddled even closer together than usual, the men’s collar
s turned up against the chill, the women furiously rubbing their bare arms, still pale from winter. Tonight they mostly nodded their greetings to me as I passed, many of them shuffling from foot to foot. I looked at my watch. It was just past midnight and the sound of the B-52s seemed to carry better in the thick air. There was just no escaping them.
As I approached the corner of the hotel, somebody threw a heavy fist into my gut that felt like it tore through my skin. It knocked the wind right out of me and sent me to my knees. Even as I scrambled to get up, I thought that this was getting ridiculous. This time I hadn’t heard or seen him coming, nor had I sensed his presence. Well, I sure as hell knew he was here now. My attempt to get up was futile. My body was preoccupied with trying to get some oxygen back into my system. Though even if I had managed to make some progress toward the vertical, my friend with the heavy fist seemed more interested in keeping me right where I was. He drove his foot into my ribs, twice, making sure I felt it good. I felt it, all right, but nothing about it was good, and those kicks didn’t exactly help me catch my breath. I rolled over on my right side and reached for my ankle holster.
“That was for Jimmy Regan, you piece a shit,” he screamed at me after delivering that second kick.
I didn’t recognize his voice.
“And this,” he said, busting me in the gut again, “is for sticking your nose into my case, asshole.”
Now I knew who it was: Tony Palumbo, Charlie Prince’s partner.
“Yeah, you cocksucka, I heard your message. Who the fuck do you think you are, messin’ around in my business?”
He was screaming, his face a twisted, angry mess, and I saw him swing his right leg back to kick me again. I tensed, but the kick never came. Tires screeched and I saw Palumbo jump out of the way. I recognized the car. Maggie’s.
A door slammed and Maggie was screaming, “Leave him alone. Leave him alone.”
Palumbo froze for a second, not sure what to do.
What You Break Page 19
