What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Get back in your car!” Palumbo said, pulling his shield out of his pocket. “Suffolk County Police. This is a police matter.”

  Maggie wasn’t having it. “Oh, yeah, good. Do you usually beat suspects like that? I think I’ll call nine-one-one and see what they have to say.”

  The car blocked my sightline, but I got the sense that Maggie had her phone in her hand.

  “There’s no need for that, ma’am.” Palumbo’s voice was suddenly brittle.

  “I disagree, Detective. You are a detective?” she asked, knowing the answer. “That’s a detective shield, right? What’s your name, Detective?”

  He didn’t answer, but Maggie had given me time to catch my breath, grab my gun, and get to my feet.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, racking the slide to get Palumbo’s attention. I figured with all those improv classes, Maggie would catch on. “I’m okay now. Please, go ahead and call nine-one-one.”

  “Yes, sir. I will definitely be a witness to what this detective was doing to you.”

  Palumbo raised his arms, facing his palms out, alternating his gaze between Maggie and me. “Whoa! Whoa! Wait a second! Wait a second! Ma’am, give me a minute to talk to this guy before you call.” He turned to me. “Whaddya say, Murphy?”

  I waited a few seconds to make Palumbo sweat. “Miss, could you give us a minute? Please wait in your car. If you see this man make any sudden movements, please call nine-one-one immediately.”

  She didn’t answer, but sat back in her car and slammed the door shut. I heard the locks click.

  Tony Palumbo was smaller than me, but that didn’t make him a small man. He was a solid six feet of muscle and orneriness. He’d made detective and moved into Homicide because he’d been one of Jimmy Regan’s chosen boys, not because he necessarily had any skill at the job. Now that Regan was dead, guys like Palumbo were on the fraying high wire without someone to catch them. They knew that the brass was looking for any excuse to cut ties with them and put as much distance between the department and Jimmy Regan’s legacy as possible.

  “Start talking, Palumbo.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Wrong answer, asshole,” I said. “You hear that?”

  “What? I don’t hear nothing except that shitty music.”

  “You don’t, huh? I hear it. It’s the sound of your pension going up in smoke and of that cell door slamming behind you in Riverhead. You think anyone in the department is gonna run to defend you? One wave to the woman in the car and you’re fucked.”

  Of course, he had no way of knowing that Maggie and I were connected or that she’d be in Detroit by Monday afternoon. All he knew was that she was a citizen who’d caught him in the act. He looked worried in spite of his bravado.

  “What do you want?”

  “Your complete files on the Spears homicide.”

  “No fucking—”

  “You really are deaf, aren’t you, Palumbo? I’m not fucking around with you here.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  I raised my left hand up to my ear to pantomime making a phone call and Maggie got the message. She held her phone up, the lighted keypad visible to Palumbo and me. She tapped nine, then one, then . . .

  “Okay, okay, all right, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “The file’s yours.”

  I banged on the roof of Maggie’s car for her to stop. Then I looked inside. She’d gotten the message.

  “I want something else. And when I tell you what it is, just say yes, because I won’t stop her from dialing next time.”

  “And what do I get out of it?” he asked.

  “You get to keep your pension and your shield and pretending you’re any good at your job.”

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  “If I need to speak with Salazar, you arrange it for me.”

  He laughed at me. People were doing that a lot lately and I wasn’t so sure I liked it.

  “What are you laughing at, asshole?”

  “You. You wanna talk to him, fine, for all the good it’ll do ya. I’ll drive you there myself.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “How do I know you won’t fuck me and have her call—”

  “Because you don’t know, Palumbo. Because I keep my word and because I like your partner.” I gave him the hotel card. “Fax the file, the whole file, to the number on the card. And if I need to see Salazar, I’ll call Charlie. That happens, this is all forgotten. Now get the fuck outta here.”

  I watched Palumbo leave and then got into the car with Maggie.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “What was that all about?”

  “My sore ribs are sore again, but other than that I’m good. What was that about? It was about misguided loyalty and stupidity. You packed?”

  “Bags are in the trunk. I’m gonna miss you, Gus Murphy.”

  “Not tonight you’re not. Not tonight.”

  I grabbed her and kissed her and told her I loved her. She told me to shut up and to just kiss her again.

  41

  (MONDAY MORNING)

  Airport goodbyes in the age of terrorism are empty, tearless affairs, usually marked by quick curbside kisses and rushed hugs in the face of honking horns and cops yelling at you to move on. Goodbyes were a bit more leisurely at MacArthur. Since Southwest had moved many of its flights to LaGuardia and all but one other airline had abandoned it, MacArthur was almost as popular as a pork store in the heart of Jerusalem. There were seldom tears shed by the people I dropped off at the airport. No one was going to mourn leaving the Paragon or scenic Bohemia, New York. I didn’t drop off any parting couples or parents sending kids off to college or to the military. My usual drop-offs were bleary-eyed salesmen or tech guys impatient to get to their next stop. But Maggie was anything but my usual drop-off.

  We’d spent all day Sunday alternating our activities between icing down my re-injured ribs and making love. There were tears, lots of tears. None of them tears of joy. We were both kind of heartsick at the prospect of being apart and of being forced apart sooner than we had to be. One day she would be there and we would have each other and then she would be gone. I don’t think Maggie realized how it had felt to me the night she told me about getting the part, about leaving. It didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have to be fair. I had long given up beating myself up over those constraints.

  Maggie was also torn. She had to leave me behind to pursue her long-dormant career. I had helped push her into it. She was thankful for that, too, for my pushing her to get back to what she missed, but hurt by it, too. Life didn’t have to make sense, and when it came to emotions, it seldom did. She was upset at me for making her leave earlier than she would have had to, mad at herself for loving me, for letting herself.

  It had been my experience that there was never a shortage of hurt or anger anywhere in the world, that we were an angry species by nature and that we could more easily summon up anger than any other emotion. Certainly with more ease than love or fear or hate. It seemed that anger was always there, lurking just below the skin, a breath away, or around the next corner. Cops work in a world of it, were surrounded by it. I had fooled myself for most of my waking life that it wasn’t so with me, that I had been spared the gnawing hurt and anger that seemed to come to everyone else so readily, eagerly. I had been spared from nothing. John’s death had supplied me with all the hurt and anger a man could ever need.

  As I drove the few blocks to the airport, I kept checking my rearview mirror. I was making sure that Smudge’s shitbox was there behind me in the distance. This was a trick Slava had taught me. If you want to make sure you weren’t being followed, have someone follow you. It was probably a waste of time, but if a man like Slava was afraid of Lagunov, I was going to be cautious. I guess I relaxed a little when I saw that the only thing between the ass end of my Mustang and the front end of Smu
dge’s car was empty space.

  I pulled up to the curbside check-in by Southwest and made to get out of the car. Maggie, who had been silent since we left the Paragon, grabbed my forearm.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. We had already set up plans for her to call or text at each stage of the trip. We’d set up an emergency word, an innocuous word that nobody else would recognize as a warning, in case she spotted trouble.

  “Even if you think it or something seems wrong, you let me know,” I’d told her.

  She was angry at me for that, too. For letting her suffer the rebound from violence that happened sixteen years ago in Russia. Something that she couldn’t have had less to do with even if she tried. I was angry at me for that, too.

  Maggie slung her bag over her shoulder, walked around to the trunk, yanked out her suitcase, slammed the trunk lid shut, and rolled her suitcase to the outdoor check-in counter. I watched every movement she made, soaking in the little things she did, took deep breaths of the perfume she had left in her wake. She never once looked back, eventually vanishing from my view behind the walls and clouded glass of the terminal. She told me that this was only temporary, that even if the play was a big success, nothing ran forever, that casts changed. But nothing about this felt temporary. It felt very much like a last goodbye.

  42

  (MONDAY MORNING)

  Felix called to me as Smudge and I headed to the coffee shop. I told Smudge to go ahead to get us a table.

  “Gus, please come over here when you have a moment.” His voice was high and he sounded agitated. The rich, dark skin of his Filipino face was paler than I’d ever seen it and he looked like he was fighting back a bad bout of nausea.

  “You okay, Felix?”

  “This came in the fax tray for you while you were gone.”

  He placed a thick pile of paper on the desk counter.

  “Thanks.”

  “It is very disturbing, Gus. Please do not have other police files sent here if they are like that.”

  Felix’s paleness made sense after I looked at the top several pages and saw arrays of Linh Trang Spears’s crime scene and autopsy photos. They were rough to look at, even for me. One set of photos was worse than the other, but in different ways. The crime scene photos of her body, clothing soaked and crusted with blood, dumped into a pile of leaves and garbage, her milky, opaque eyes left open, were hard to take. Her lifeless body had been tossed away like a ball of dirty tissues thrown out a car window. And an animal, maybe a fox, had gotten to her. So much blood had drained out of her that her skin was a ghostly bluish white.

  But in their way, the autopsy photos were even more difficult to take in. The knife attack on her had been vicious, more brutal than I had pictured it in my head. Some of the wounds were more like gashes than punctures, as if Salazar had pushed the knife into her then yanked the knife across her body until he hit bone or something else that prevented him from going any farther. There were two of those wounds. Most of the other wounds were less horrific, but probably no less painful. Puncture wounds can be terribly painful, and depending on where the wounds were, it could take a long time to die. Given the nature of Linh Trang’s wounds, I didn’t imagine death had taken a long time in coming, and I’m sure shock set in pretty quickly. Every time I was on duty at a violent homicide scene or saw photos like these, I was glad families were spared the added burden of having these images haunting them. I could only imagine how hard they’d hit a gentle soul like Felix, given what they were doing to me.

  “Sorry, Felix. It won’t happen again.”

  He nodded, regaining a little color and turning to answer the phone.

  Well, I thought as I walked toward the coffee shop, at least Palumbo had kept his word. I wondered if I would have to call in the marker on Rondo Salazar. After seeing what he’d done to Linh Trang, I was pretty sure I never wanted to be in the same room as that piece of shit. It was hard enough sharing the same island. I never had any moral objection to the death penalty, and after twenty years on the job . . . Let’s just say that I wouldn’t have lost a second of sleep if Rondo Salazar got put through an industrial meat grinder one limb at a time.

  My objections to capital punishment were practical ones. I knew too much about the system to think it was close to mistake free. Juries were kind of like computers: the verdicts they churned out were only as good as the information they were fed and, even then, not always. Cops, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, juries—they mostly tried to do their jobs as best they could, but they all had different agendas and there was too much room for errors, lies, and loss of perspective. Executing the wrong person was worse than murder because it made everyone complicit. Besides, in New York State, it was practically academic. Rondo Salazar would be spared his life and spend the rest of it inside a cell somewhere upstate, preying on the weaker inmates.

  It was no accident that I was having that thought as I sat down at the booth across from Smudge. Smudge had once been one of those weaker inmates. Everything about him screamed “prey animal,” but with Tommy Delcamino’s help, he’d managed to survive.

  “How was it for you inside?” I asked, pouring the half-and-half and two Sweet’N Lows into my coffee.

  “You know . . . it was rough. There’s a lot of bad feelings inside. Everybody is pissed off all the time for like everything and for nothing. And they all need bitches and punching bags, and sometimes they’re the same person. Look at me, Guth. I wasn’t going to be anybody’s bitch.”

  “You got smacked around a lot.”

  “Not too bad. Not as bad as some other guys. I was almost too easy to pick on. Then Tommy put the word out to leave me alone, and mostly they did. Tommy was a gentle guy in his heart, but when he got into a fight he always won.”

  I was going to drop it, but Smudge had something else to say.

  “I don’t know who thought of prisons, but they’re fucked-up places. I mean, I know there are some people who belong in them and deserve them, but they’re not good places for people. I don’t know many people who come out better for being inside.”

  I didn’t say anything to that and waited a beat or two to make sure he was finished. When I was sure he was done, I took out an envelope with cash in it and slid it across the table to him. He just folded the envelope in half and put it in his back pocket.

  “There’s a little something extra in there for you.”

  “But—”

  “Forget it, Smudge. It’s not a grand, so don’t argue. You helped me out and it was Maggie you were watching for me, not some mutt.”

  He nodded and looked down at his coffee. “What’s going on with you and Maggie?”

  Before I could answer, my cell vibrated twice in my pocket. I looked at the text. It was Maggie. She was on the plane to Baltimore. That was all it said. Although the plane hadn’t taken off and less than three miles separated the gate at MacArthur where it sat and the booth at the coffee shop, Maggie felt a million miles away.

  “I don’t know, Smudge. I don’t know.”

  43

  (MONDAY AFTERNOON, LATE)

  I got four more texts. Landed in Baltimore. On the plane to Detroit. Landed in Detroit. Checked into hotel. There was no phone call. I wondered if there would be another phone call, ever. Last night had been so full of anger, hurt, and longing, and this morning’s goodbye had been so strained that I didn’t know what to think. Does everyone learn the hard lessons in middle age or was it just me? If I hadn’t been so heartsick, I might have laughed at myself. When Maggie and I first met, when she was still Magdalena to me and the plan was that we were going to be just friends, I couldn’t have imagined being this deeply involved. Could I have envisioned sleeping with her? Fuck, yeah. I was a straight man with a pulse, for chrissakes. But I didn’t think I’d fall in love with her or think I’d be saying
goodbye, not this soon. Shows you what I know.

  After the last text, I shut off the Yankees game and looked through the murder file Tony Palumbo had sent me. I skipped the photo sheets, figuring I could go back to them if I had to, if I found some inconsistencies between Prince and Palumbo’s notes and what I’d seen earlier in the photographs. Otherwise there was no point. That was what was so weird about my task. I knew who did it and I knew how he did it. There was little in the photos to suggest where he did it or why. Well, no, that was wrong. There was a lot of evidence in the photographs to suggest why.

  An attack that vicious usually indicates rage on the killer’s part. But where had the rage come from? Had I been wrong to dismiss the newspapers’ convenient narrative about a childhood connection between victim and killer? Or maybe my scenario about LT going to a bar and coming across the wrong man at the wrong time had more to it than I had been willing to believe. Once I had a sense of her movements that day, I’d be better able to judge.

  There wasn’t much that I could find in the file about LT’s movements on the day of her death. She’d left the house early to walk down by the water and to get a bagel and coffee. Abby said LT came back in at about nine with half a dozen bagels. There was a notation in what I assumed was Palumbo’s handwriting—Vic had everything bagel with cream cheese. I understood the note. You never knew what would be important, and sometimes stomach contents could help establish time of death. Still, the note saddened me because it again made LT something more than just a perforated corpse. She was a complicated woman who struggled with her identity and who liked everything bagels with cream cheese.

  As I read on I could feel sleep imposing itself on me and I’d had to snap my eyes open a few times. I found myself shaking my head to wake myself up. As if that ever really worked. I kept reading as best I could. After the bagel, Linh Trang had showered, then told her mom she had to go into work for a few hours. That got my attention. I wondered why LT had to go into work on a Saturday. It was mostly curiosity. Her movements after leaving work were of more interest to me than anything else, but I didn’t get that far or, if I did, sleep blotted out whatever else I’d read.