The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “I don’t know.” Lynn hugged herself. “It just feels so useless to sit here talking about it.”

  “Honey, just let the police do their job.” Jeanine tried to reassure her. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “You think so?”

  Lynn found herself staring once again at the empty velvet seat. She’d sat right there, hadn’t she? Just a few feet away, with one leg curled up under her and both shoes parked beneath the chair. Her mind went back to a winter afternoon senior year of high school. A long train ride into the city, her breath fogging up the window, and a slender brown serpent of coffee spilling down the aisle. Her first time going to Manhattan without her mother. She and Sandi had made a promise to each other, that if they somehow got separated on the subway, one of them would come back for the other. Sure enough, at Times Square, the doors had closed and she’d seen Sandi’s face receding on the downtown local, leaving her stranded among the platform prophets, the stumblebum bystanders, and the muttering angry creeps in dirty raincoats. The lurid carnival she thought she’d been looking for. She remembered how that one scary silver-suited freak with a video camera kept asking her to come back to his apartment and take off her clothes. But then she’d heard a shout and turned to see Sandi running up the stairs to rescue her, having just caught the local coming back uptown, keeping up her end of the deal. If one of us gets lost, the other always has to come back for her. Cross your heart, hope to die, no excuses.

  “So,” said Molly Pratt, finally bending down to get her own damn book, “anybody want to talk about the novel?”

  18

  MIKE GOT TO WORK a couple of minutes late that morning and found most of the officers in the squad room watching that ridiculous annoying Riverdance video again while Larry Quinn, acting as desk sergeant for once, accepted a package covered in duct tape from the distinguished citizen known around the station as Peculiar Clark.

  “What’s going on?” asked Mike, raising his voice to be heard above the clatter of tap shoes and the sawing of violins.

  “There’s nowhere to hide anymore,” said Peculiar Clark. “It’s everywhere.”

  He was an elegantly addled old man in a milk-stained double-breasted suit, who’d supposedly made his fortune back in the forties writing saccharine holiday homilies for one of the major greeting card companies. But these days he lived by himself in a huge old Victorian wreck up in the West Hills, and at least two nights a week he got himself liquored-up and slicked-back like a boulevardier to try to importune young soccer moms in the aisles of Stop & Shop.

  “Mr. De Cavalcante says he may have been a terrorist target,” said Quinn, the station’s records officer and a character in his own right, twisting the waxed end of his mustache slyly. “He received a suspicious package.”

  “A pair of woman’s lace panties and an obscene note in my mailbox this morning.” Clark leaned on his battered wolf’s-head cane, his face as corrugated as an empty scrotum. “I never asked for that.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Mike. “What do you think that’s about?”

  “Biological warfare.” Clark gave a sage nod as Larry slipped the package into a silver hazmat bag. “Anthrax-soaked panties. The terrorists test it out on the old people first because they think we won’t be missed.”

  “Probably right.” Mike took the bag from the sarge. “I think I better show this to the chief.”

  “Thank you, son.” Clark shook his hand. “I’m glad somebody recognizes we’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

  Mike gave him a two-fingered salute and sprinted up the stairs to the chief’s office, trying to remember the last time he’d gotten so much as a true laugh out of Harold. The panties were probably a pair of those old rayon drawers that you could fit a little elephant into. Chances were they belonged to some hooker Clark slept with in 1953. But maybe they could be an opening, a way to get into a more casual kind of conversation with Harold about Sandi. Having taken a look at a large portion of the diary last night, he realized he had to play it cool with the chief, find a way to artfully arrange some details ahead of time so Harold didn’t go crazy and lop his head off.

  He moved through the outer office, ignoring the finger Deb Ryan, the secretary, was holding up to delay him, and threw Harold’s door open.

  Harold and Paco Ortiz looked up in surprise, like Catholic schoolgirls caught smoking cigarettes in the bathroom.

  “Hey, am I interrupting something?”

  He clenched the bag to his side, deciding to shelve the gag for the moment.

  “Case is starting to move.” Harold set down his Mont Blanc pen. “Old man and his grandson fished a head out of the river this morning.”

  “Sandi?”

  “Looks that way. The ME already picked it up. They did the autopsy on the rest of the body last night and said they didn’t find any oxygenated water in the lungs.”

  “And when were you going to tell me about this? I don’t rate a phone call?”

  Mike noticed the stubble contract like iron filings on Paco’s head, and he wondered what the two of them had been talking about just before he came in. There was a definite afterburn lingering in the air. Harold studiously avoided looking him in the eye. Did they know something already?

  No. It was too early for them to be seriously onto him.

  “I was going to tell you this morning, when you came in,” said Harold carefully. “Nobody’s keeping anybody out of the loop.”

  “Glad to hear that.” Mike shot Paco a cold look, reminding him who was in charge here.

  “So, what else is doing?” he said, as if the two of them were still holding smoke in their lungs.

  “Working on putting together an affidavit for a warrant to search Lanier’s house,” Harold said. “Brian Bonfiglio from the DA’s office is supposed to be here any minute to help us write it up.”

  “Hey, hey, what’s this about?” Mike looked back and forth between the two of them. “I thought we weren’t going to make a move until we all agreed we had probable cause.”

  He was sure he’d had everything under control when he left the Laniers’ with the diary yesterday. But here he was being upended and forced to scramble for his footing.

  “It was my call,” said Harold.

  “Your call.” Mike stared at him over the sallow dotted orb of Paco’s head.

  “The phone rang five minutes ago. Somebody saw a bloodstain on the wall in Lanier’s house.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Hey, bro, don’t feel bad about not seeing it.” Paco swiveled in his chair to face him. “We were just there to get the prints in the bathroom. It’s better this way. Now we have a witness.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Harold steepled his fingers. “Judge always likes to see a real name, but we don’t want to put anybody at risk unnecessarily.”

  “Fuck it,” said Paco. “Put it in. He’s gonna figure it out eventually anyway. How many other people were in his living room yesterday?”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Harold said. “He won’t see the actual affidavit with the name on it until we’re closer to trial. And by then he’ll have bigger fish to fry.”

  “Wait a second.” Mike made sure he’d closed the door behind him. “This was Lynn Stockdale who saw this?”

  Harold nodded.

  “And she called you and not me?”

  “It was a police matter, Mikey. She wasn’t looking for a date or anything.”

  Mike stared in silence, a hard dark coal glowing in his head.

  “This the lady we saw yesterday?” Paco palmed the top of his bald head.

  “I just don’t know why she would’ve called you instead of me,” said Mike, trying to button up the hurt quickly. “It’s just funny, that’s all.”

  “Well, either way it’s a break, and we have to move on it fast before he gets a chance to clean up.” Harold picked up his pen again. “We want to get a look in his garage an
d basement too while we’re there, and see what kind of saws he’s got.”

  “I know how to do a search, Harold,” Mike cut him off. “Who’s going to take the warrant over for the judge to sign?”

  On a Wednesday morning this early, old Highball Harper, the real estate lawyer who sat on the bench and heard local cases three days a week, would probably be out on the links at the Stone Ridge Country Club with all the other desiccated old WASPs, reminiscing about the Ford administration and trying to maintain their tenuous grip on the town’s levers of power.

  “I’m going to ask Paco to do it,” said Harold, officiously clearing his throat and rolling his pen between his fingers. “He’s the primary on this case. He’s going to have to swear to the warrant and answer any serious questions that come up later in court …”

  “But …” A hot protest started to spill out of Mike.

  “I said Paco is the primary, and you’re the supervisor,” Harold said in that brusque stentorian tone he’d started using since he became chief. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided maybe you’re a little too close with too many of these people.”

  “So that’s how you want it?”

  “That’s how I want it.”

  Mike took a beat, watching Paco scratch at the side of his goatee with his finger. That pumped-up little prick must’ve said something to Harold about the argument they’d had at the Lanier house yesterday. And these were the guys who held his fate in their hands?

  Screw this.

  He was thinking maybe some of the old-timers might’ve been right about Harold: that he’d suddenly decided he was a black man after all, once he got the chief’s badge. Sliding Paco in ahead of men with more seniority. Going to that NAACP dinner after all those vicious protests over the Woyzeck shooting. Joking around in the locker room with the three other black guys on the job, making all these coded little references white people weren’t supposed to get.

  When did the Blue Wall get color coordinated? What about loyalty and fraternity? What about remembering the men who put their lives on the line for you? What about the fact that they’d known each other since they were ten? Moment by moment, though, the idea was hardening in his mind that this was no longer completely his tribe.

  He sighed and put up his hands, knowing he had to keep stonewalling. He couldn’t count on Harold for anything. No mercy for the white man once he’s down on his knees.

  “Okay, Chief, whatever. It’s your bat and ball.”

  Harold sat back in his chair, hearing the bitter undertone.

  “Look,” he said, “nobody’s trying to do an end run around anybody else here, Mike. We’re all team players.”

  “I don’t have a problem working with Paco if Paco doesn’t have a problem working with me. You got a problem with me, Paco?”

  “No, man.” Paco draped an arm over the side of his chair, eyes moving warily. “We got an understanding.”

  “Fine, then we’re all one happy family.” Mike gave him a small scar of a smile. “Let’s go catch the bad guy.”

  He saw Harold fidget and shift in his seat, deciding whether to bury the tension or have it all out at once.

  He looked over at Paco, as if this was his new battery partner, and seemed to take the signal to take the easy way for now.

  “So, what’s in the bag?” He turned his attention to the hazmat bag Mike was still holding.

  “Forget it.” Mike opened the door to walk out. “Nothing important.”

  19

  LISTENING TO NPR on the way back from Jeanine’s that morning, Lynn heard the attorney general say more terrorist attacks were a virtual certainty, though he couldn’t say when or where. She turned it off quickly as she pulled into the driveway, noticing the mailbox leaning a little to the left, as if the post had been pulled out and then shoved back in haphazardly. Dead yellow leaves crunched under her wheels, and a falling acorn ricocheted off her hood, the trees following autumn’s usual narrative even as the sun ignored it. When she got out of the car, she saw that the plastic owl that was supposed to drive the crows away had fallen off the roof, and the gardeners had left a pile of pulled weeds by the garage.

  She stood there for a moment, promising herself not to fall into a deep depression again. She’d already been down that route after her mother died last year. But right after her book group broke up, her mind went back into a tailspin. Someone pretending to be human had done this to her friend. Someone who went to the supermarket and probably filled his car with gas a couple of times a week. Someone whom she might have nodded to at a stoplight. Someone who might have sat near her at town meetings and watched her children cross the street. The thought choked and bulged inside her head, threatening to burst like an artery.

  Breaking the paralysis, she went through the gate and out to the studio in the backyard, determined to stay busy and focused.

  The studio stood white-shingled and cool in the shade of a leaning cedar. Her private sanctuary with a working bathroom. Part of the deal when they bought this house was that she’d finally get real work space instead of having to furtively develop her pictures in the bathtub like some amateur pornographer. So they’d spent more than twelve thousand dollars to convert the old toolshed, installing a fully equipped darkroom, bathroom plumbing, an iMac with a state-of-the-art scanner, and a comfortable outer office with cool Scandinavian-style furniture. A window cut into the wall offered a tantalizing glimpse of the river down the hill. Stepping into this quiet zone five days a week had allowed her to reclaim a bit of her life from the children. But now she felt isolated and hollow, wishing she could just pick up the phone and call her mother or Sandi.

  She unlocked the studio and flipped on the lights, still feeling vaguely bothered by what Jeanine had said. She was very competitive with you. That’s what you never got about her.

  Could that be right? She prided herself on being the girl who never looked away. Even on the fifth-grade school bus, she’d make herself stare at the squashed squirrels on the road while the other girls were shrieking and the boys were making retching sounds. She was the girl who’d always climb the extra flight of stairs in the tenement to get the shot all the other photographers had missed. Now somebody was telling her she couldn’t even see her best friend clearly.

  She turned her attention to the coffee-colored file cabinets next to her tilted drawing table, thinking this couldn’t be entirely true. Maybe there’d been more competition than she’d ever really acknowledged, but Sandi was in her corner. She’d been the first friend to say she liked Lynn’s pictures. And she certainly wouldn’t have wanted Lynn moping around the studio, gnawing on the butt end of a throwaway conversation. Get on with it. She’d meant to go through more of her old shots anyway for the retrospective, but she had put off looking through some of the files, knowing they were as jumbled and disorganized as her memories. She pulled out a drawer and got a faceful of dust motes. Blowing them aside, she picked up an old envelope, and a series of red-tinted negatives fell out like peeled-off scabs.

  She turned on the halogen light and started examining the individual frames, realizing that these were the first pictures she took with the Kodak Brownie her father gave her on her seventh birthday. An off-kilter image of her mother’s rosebush. Hampton, the beagle, moving toward his water dish in a blur. And then the impossible, a perfect family portrait of Mom, Dad, and her baby sister, Carol, standing in front of the old house on Birch Lane, all the elements falling into place for one fleeting second. Mom before the MS, in her white-ribbed turtleneck, looking a little like Natalie Wood, with dark hair cresting on top of her head. Seeing it again brought back that old ache. Mom at least twelve years younger than Lynn was now, still slightly stunned to find herself back in the ’burbs, her bohemian painter years living with three other waitresses in a cold-water flat on Perry Street far behind her. Still thinking she was going to have more than half a life. Dad looking rakishly handsome in a Brooks Brothers shirt, with his initials monogrammed over the right breast
, not yet staring off into the distance and contemplating divorce. Carol standing between them, shading her eyes, as if she was already shrinking from her parents and thinking of moving to a hippie commune in Oregon.

  Looking at the shot reminded Lynn that like autumn leaves and Billie Holiday’s voice, families were sometimes at their most achingly beautiful right before they fell apart. She remembered the warmth that flooded through her when that picture came back from the Fotomat and Mom and Dad stood on either side of her, quietly murmuring that, yes, she really did have an eye.

  A year later, Mom took her to the Museum of Modern Art for the first time, to see the photo collection. She could picture herself standing before Diane Arbus’s Masked Woman in a Wheelchair, transfixed, as Mom—not yet wheelchair-bound herself—explained that this was how this artist looked at the world. “And the things she saw made her want to kill herself,” Mom said. “Can you imagine?”

  Looking back, Lynn realized that that was the first nudge. The second was Mom giving her the old Roloflex a year later, as if she was handing over a baton. She held a different negative up to the light and saw that it was a series of later pictures. Mom alone at the kitchen table in the midseventies. The Energy Crisis. The “first presenting symptom,” as the doctor called it, was a change in her perception of the color red. Mom noticing that a crimson line she’d drawn seemed to twang like a guitar string on paper. Then came the gradual loss of sensation—the inability to feel silk, sand, her husband’s touch. Eventually, she couldn’t even feel her own feet, making it almost impossible for her to walk. Not that Mom ever liked to dwell outwardly on the subtractions. She was happier talking about the new vibrancy of her vermilion strokes.

  Lynn put the magnifying glass over the image and saw the blank easel in the background next to the old Amana refrigerator, where Mom tried to do some sketching before the tremors got too bad. A red pencil was on the floor, having rolled off the edge of the table. The fallen baton. Mom was too weak to pick it up. So it stayed there for almost five hours until Lynn came home. A hot wave of shame washed over her as she remembered Mom insisting she take the picture because it was a good image. Mom, lemme help you; really, I don’t mind. Really. It’s okay, Mom. Don’t cry. I don’t mind cleaning up. I don’t mind helping you in the bath. I don’t mind cutting your food for you. The daily tug-of-war between guilt and obligation. Life getting smaller and smaller. Until the day Lynn found what looked like a rough draft of a suicide note in the desk drawer and confronted Mom with it in the bathroom. WHAT IS THIS? And Mom, naked and abashed on the rim of the tub, looked up at the ceiling and said, Your father’s right. One of us has to have a life.