The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  The buzz saw screamed, going right into her cranium. He stared down at her, awaiting her reply. Who’s going to look away first?

  “You did what you did, and I did what I felt I had to do,” she said, trying to make it all sound neutral and impersonal.

  The sawdust odor began to make her throat itch. Where were all the other shoppers? Had there been some evacuation siren that she’d missed, leaving her alone back here?

  “You’re a fucking liar, Lynn. You know that?”

  “I’m not a liar. I just said what happened.”

  “According to you! According to you!”

  A fleck of saliva hit her cheek as he yelled. She suddenly remembered the time he choked her. His thumbs pushing through the soft tissues and into the hard cartilage of her voice box just as she rolled him off. He’d said it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to do it, but she’d always wondered.

  “There’s two sides to every story.” He jabbed a finger in her face. “Even your fucking wonderful pictures can lie. You cut things out. You show a man picking up a gun, but you don’t show he’s in the middle of a war or that his friend’s lying dead at his feet.”

  The buzz saw tore into another piece of wood, the whine sinking into a deep growl.

  “Well, I guess you’ll have your day in court,” she said, trying to draw herself up straight against a rack of dangling garden shears.

  Don’t show him that you’re scared. That will only make him stronger.

  His eyes went back and forth, strafing her face, as he leaned in on her, bracing himself with a hand on a shelf above her head.

  “You’re really going to do this, aren’t you?” he said, shaking his head in ragged disbelief.

  “I don’t see where I have a choice.”

  “You know, it’s not just my life you’re going to be ruining.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  His finger retracted. “Think about it.”

  “Hey, buddy!” A chunky Home Depot clerk in an orange shirt and an Everlast weight belt called to Mike from the far end of the aisle. “You still want that pressure-treated wood?”

  “Yeah, I guess I’ll look at it,” Mike grumbled, slowly simmering down.

  “We got it piled up for you in aisle nine.”

  “All right, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Finally, more shoppers strayed into their aisle as he withdrew his attention from her face one degree at a time. It was as if they’d been locked in a dark private dream for a few minutes while the rest of the world was going about its daily business.

  “I want you to know I was starting to get somewhere with Sandi’s case when you got me suspended,” he said quietly. “I was going to nail that bastard’s head to the wall.”

  She held her own tongue, literally against her teeth. He’s insane, she thought. He’s truly lost it. She’d known it as soon as she saw him take the shovel out of Jeffrey’s hands and start flinging dirt into Sandi’s grave.

  “You know, she was a friend of mine too.” He took his great barge of a pallet and shoved off. “Stupid bitch.”

  35

  THE TOWN ADMINISTRATOR, Beverly Crawford, was a vaguely Prussian-looking woman with hair the color of tarnished brass and a face like something drawn hastily on the back of a cocktail napkin. A People’s Bank calendar and a dark-purple vase with two wilting daffodils stood sentry at the front of her desk. A page taped to the back of her Compaq monitor advised: “I Can Only Please One Person a Day and Today Is Not Your Day.” Small letters below added: “And tomorrow is not looking too good either.”

  “What can I do for you?” she asked in a voice that would have made strong heavily armed men flee their capital cities in despair.

  “I came to check on my Freedom of Information Act request.” Barry leaned an elbow on the Formica counter between them, having rushed out of work early to get here before the office closed. “This is the third time I’ve tried to follow up on it in four days.”

  “Remind me what this is about again.”

  Mrs. Crawford tapped a single key six times and pushed her face at her computer screen.

  “I was asking for the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s records on Michael Fallon.”

  Barry smiled, more out of habit at this point than any sincere conviction that he could truly ingratiate himself.

  “You’ve had my formal letter making the original request since last week.”

  “Well, I’m not sure where that letter is right now. I’ve probably passed it along to the Town Board and the police chief. I’m sure they’ll take it up shortly.”

  She pulled a typewritten sheet from the in-box on her desk, examined it cursorily, and then dropped it into her green aluminum wastepaper basket.

  “Actually,” said Barry, “there’s nothing for them to discuss. Those records are public information. If I ask for them, you have to turn them over to me.”

  “Excuse me.”

  Mrs. Crawford slowly slid her eyes across his face, as if she’d lost whatever small interest she’d had, and picked up a ringing phone.

  “Yeah?” she growled, wrinkling her nose.

  Barry stayed by the front of the desk, as if waiting for the ball to carom off the boards.

  “You know, I don’t know what you expect me to do with that memo,” she said. “He just pulled all those numbers out of a hat.”

  Barry cleared his throat and stared at the top of her head, fully aware that like one of the mythic creatures in the medieval fantasy novels Clay and Hannah used to love, this was an entity that derived its power in direct proportion to the amount of frustration it could provoke in the questing hero.

  “Just bill him again and see if he pays twice,” she said. “But don’t make it my problem.”

  She pressed down on the hook and started to dial a number.

  “I’m still here,” said Barry.

  “I know that.”

  “I’d like to leave here with those files.”

  “And I’d like to wear a size six.” She stabbed at the Flash button with a stout wattled finger. “What do you need these records for anyway?”

  “We’ve been over this. It’s not necessary for me to tell you that.”

  As if they couldn’t have guessed part of what he was up to already. Even a small child could have discerned that Fallon had pulled that little number with the radar gun before. The first question was whether there were previous complaints on file about him doing it. The second question was whether he’d harassed other women in the past the way he’d harassed Lynn. From six months handling domestic violence and police corruption complaints at the DA’s office, he suspected that the answer was yes.

  He’d decided he had to come up with other witnesses for the disciplinary hearing on his own since the town attorney had yet to contact them about their statements. The possibility of a cover-up had started to take shape in his mind. He didn’t want to leave Lynn dangling as the only other witness against her ex-boyfriend. Already he noticed she was starting to look distinctly wan and uneasy whenever the subject came up, preferring to talk about Christmas in Paris or her gallery show in the spring.

  “How far back do you want these records?” Beverly Crawford asked.

  “Starting whenever he came on the job.” Figuring Fallon was around the same age as his wife, it had to be the early eighties when he was a rookie. “At least twenty years.”

  “Yeah, good luck. Most of those old CCRB records are probably warehoused with Iron Mountain in Wisconsin. It’s going to take at least six weeks to track them down.”

  “Then you better try to find a way to speed things up …”

  A police sergeant walked into the office, whistling, and waggled his monobrow as he came around the counter to drop a file on Mrs. Crawford’s desk.

  “Hey, good lookin’ …”

  He stopped beside her and looked over to see whom she was talking to.

  On recognizing Barry, the whistle trailed off abruptly, and the m
onobrow came down like a riot gate. The officer looked from Beverly Crawford to Barry and then back again, slowly doing the math in his head.

  “How’s it going?” said Barry, realizing this was indeed the same officer who’d fingerprinted him the night Michael Fallon pulled him over. The smell of the ink pad seemed to linger on him.

  “Yowza,” the sergeant muttered, turning with his shoulders hunched, carrying the burden of this knowledge back to the station across the street. Barry wondered if it would be seconds or minutes before Fallon knew what he’d been doing here.

  “There’s a town meeting coming up soon, isn’t there?” Barry said.

  “I think there’s one scheduled for the end of the week.” Beverly Crawford looked after the sergeant, the embers of smoky romance gradually fading in her eyes. “The mayor is just trying to keep everyone up to date on the situation as it develops.”

  Ah, the Lanier situation. So that’s what they were calling it this week. As if actually using the word murder would inflict further damage.

  “You know, I’d hate to have to take this matter up with him in a public forum.”

  She pursed her lips, finally giving him her full undivided attention.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” she said.

  “I mean I could stand up at the next town meeting and ask him why his administration is withholding information about police misconduct that’s supposed to be available to the public. I’d think he might find that a little embarrassing to hear in front of all the truth-in-government types up from the city who voted for him last time around.”

  She paused for just a moment and then continued about her business, pulling staples out of thickly stacked documents.

  “I suppose that’s your right as a taxpayer,” she said.

  “And I could also ask him about that piggy little deal he has with Northern Coastal Developers for the new golf course and the condos they’re building on Prospect. My understanding is that the mayor’s son is settling in very nicely as a vice president over there. I noticed there wasn’t much of a debate when the Town Board approved that particular arrangement. In fact, I don’t recall seeing any public announcement about the vote coming up at all.”

  He’d only heard about it on the train platform afterward when Marty Pollack mentioned it in passing, four weeks ago. This type of sleazy little real estate quid pro quo would make for screaming Daily News headlines in the city but barely raised an eyebrow up here since most people cared only about low taxes and good schools. But next year was an election year, and given the current circumstances, the mayor was under especially harsh scrutiny, his every misstep potentially providing evidence of deep subcutaneous moral rot.

  “I’m sure there was some notice in the local newspaper,” Mrs. Crawford said more mildly, realizing she was losing ground here.

  “If there was, it was probably buried among the used car ads, and the print was so small you would’ve had to have been an ant with bifocals to read it. I’m sure the town charter says these announcements are supposed to be ‘prominent’ and ‘easily accessible.’ So do you want me to keep making a stink about this, or are you going to give me what I’ve been asking for?”

  Her eyes were already taking on the cloudy far-off look of a snake about to start shedding its old skin. She reached for her phone.

  “How many years back did you say you wanted those files for?”

  “Twenty, at least. And don’t skip any years. I’d hate to have to come back and start this whole process all over again.”

  She began to dial a number. “Well, you don’t have to be nasty about it.”

  36

  “‘ONCE THERE WAS A little bunny who wanted to run away …’”

  Still shaken by her run-in with Michael, Lynn kept her promise to stop by Sandi’s house and read to the kids after school.

  “‘“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you.”’”

  Dylan reclined against her on the bed, his head heavy against her chest. How much she missed having this comfort from her own children. The way she’d grow drowsy reading to them, her eyelids getting leaden, her voice slurring conscious and unconscious thoughts together as she noticed herself referring to “John Sununu” and “silver gelatin prints” in the middle of The Runaway Bunny. She sniffed, finding herself unreasonably upset by the sight of the mother bunny fishing for her child in a trout stream.

  “Go on,” Dylan prompted her, his head going back and bashing her between the breasts like a bowling ball. “Read!”

  “See?” Lynn turned ahead. “When he becomes a crocus in a hidden garden, his mother becomes a gardener and finds him …”

  She heard her nose clogging, a prelude to tears. God. Why did he insist on this book? An author who’d died suddenly at forty-two. A child separated from a parent. This constant sense of loss and search. Controlling Mommy fantasy, Sandi used to joke.

  “Oh, look”—Lynn wiped a fallen tear-spatter from the corner of a page—“she’s become a tightrope walker.”

  “Mommy said she’d always come look for me,” said Dylan.

  “What?”

  “Mommy said that if I ever got taken away from her, she’d always get me back.”

  Again, there was that eerie unchildlike harshness in his voice.

  “Who did she think was going to take you away?” She took him gently by the shoulders and tried to turn him. But he made his body rigid, refusing to let her see his face.

  “Dylan?”

  His head turned toward the door.

  “Did Mommy think someone was going to try to steal you?”

  Once more, she felt that spindling sensation on the back of her neck. An awareness of being observed as acute as a spider’s thread touching her skin.

  Dylan’s head lifted from her chest.

  “Daddy!” He got up and ran for the doorway.

  Jeff stood there, in a white Polo shirt and navy Dockers, looking slightly less shell-shocked than he did the day of the funeral.

  “Hey, Lynn,” he said, gladly receiving a hug around the knees. “I’ll take over for you.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t even hear you come upstairs.” She took a deep breath as she swung her legs off the bed and looked around for her sneakers.

  “That’s me,” he said. “The strong silent type.”

  So this is what it’s coming to. Even a childrens’ book can unnerve me. She slipped her Keds back on and gave Jeff a quick kiss on the cheek as she passed him in the doorway. “I better get going. My guys will be getting out of school any minute.”

  “You’re a champ, Lynn.” He touched her elbow. “Sandi always knew she could count on you.”

  She hurried down the steps and into the empty foyer, still hearing, If you run away, I will run after you.

  37

  “AM I MISSING something here?” asked Harold, looking over the open containers of Chinese food arrayed on his desk and the reports Paco had written up for him.

  “That’s everything I’ve put in the system.”

  Paco sat on the other side of the Great Wall of Takeout, toying with the orange Nerf football with huge foam gouges taken out of it that Harold kept in his desk drawer for times of extreme stress.

  “Sandi Lanier’s husband is away all weekend, having business meetings in New England.” Harold lowered his bifocals. “That makes sense to you?”

  “It all checks out.” Paco tossed the ball from hand to hand. “Lanier lands at Logan Thursday morning, registers at the Four Seasons hotel by eleven. Spends the next three days tooling around in a rented Tempo, meeting with venture capital people. Goes sailing with two college friends on Sunday in New London. Goes to two more meetings Monday in Providence. Returns the car to Avis at Logan by three-thirty. Lands at LaGuardia at five. Walks in the front door a little after seven, almost twelve hours after his wife comes floating down the river without her head.”

  “You pull his cell phone and hotel bill records?”

  “Called ho
me twice over the weekend and made about half a dozen work calls from the hotel. I think he might’ve been blowing smoke up our asses about how well his business is doing, but that don’t make him any different from most folks around here.”

  The chief folded up his bifocals and put them in his vest pocket as the two of them took a moment to contemplate the moral lubricity of white people and their money.

  “Still think there’s anyway he could’ve done it?” he asked his detective.

  “If there is, I’m not seeing it.” Paco let the ball rest on his lap. “I’ve talked to people who saw him every one of those days. The only gaps are when he’s sleeping and a few hours Sunday night when he says he went to see Moulin Rouge. And he would’ve had to drive something like a hundred-fifty miles to be back in time for his meeting Monday morning. It’s possible, but …”

  He opened his palms, indicating to the chief the precise amount of hard evidence he would have to present to a jury at this point. A second-year law student could tear apart this circumstantial a case.

  “What about paying somebody else to do it for him?” the chief asked.

  “When we think he’s low on cash?” Paco shrugged. “I’ll look into it, but I gotta tell you, Chief, hit men don’t give preholiday discounts, even in this economy.”

  “Shit.” Harold pushed aside the round tin of beef lo mein he’d been picking at indifferently, wishing he could go home early and eat with the family one of these days. “So I guess we’ve gotta start looking at the other guy. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Hey, bro, I don’t like to talk bad about another cop, and I know you guys go way back together. But do the math.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Harold wiped his hands with a paper towel and sat forward in his chair, revealing a small tear in the leather behind him.

  “He knows the victim from the old days and does work around the house when the kids and the husband are out,” Paco said.

  “Mmm.” Harold grumbled, brooding again on what Lynn had said about those two “seeing” each other. Damn. They’d have to nail that down, get a real source. Not that he hadn’t figured it out already, but what else did the women in this town know? And how could you subscribe to be part of their closed-circuit twenty-four-hour news network?