The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “It’s just interesting, you end up coming to me for help after all this time,” Richie was saying. “So have you tried to get a carry permit in New York?”

  “It’s a three- to six-month wait to get your application processed. And my understanding is that in my town, the local police chief is allowed to review all handgun applications. And that’s something I’d like to avoid as well.”

  “And why is that?” Richie chewed with his mouth half-open.

  “Politics. It’s just awkward, having people know your business.”

  Fallon’s suspension had done nothing to reassure Barry, especially after last night’s e-mail. They’d reported the message to the police first thing this morning, but the facts remained that Fallon’s good friend Harold Baltimore was still the chief and that at least a half-dozen previous complaints against the lieutenant had been swept under the rug.

  “I remembered something you said at Chloe’s Bat Mitzvah, about being able to expedite things.” Barry stared at his cousin’s gold bracelet. “You mentioned you had some contacts who could move the paperwork along in New York.”

  Richie picked absently at one of his incisors. “Let’s just say I have a certain understanding that allows some of our applications to rise to the top of the pile.”

  “I’d like to take care of this situation right away.”

  “Hey, if a gun is all you want, you can walk into a thousand places around the city and buy one illegally.”

  “I’m a lawyer, Richie. I need to keep my license. God forbid I ever have to use the thing to defend myself, I better have the proper registration for it.”

  Richie smirked, the side of his mouth twisting up like bundled wire. “You know, my mother used to drive me nuts talking about you. It was always Barry this, Barry that. She used to bring home clippings from the Star-Ledger about you playing basketball for Barringer. And then when you went to law school, it was ‘Why can’t you be a scholar like your cousin? Why’re you hanging around with those idiots on the corner? When are you going to make something of yourself?’ Man, I just wish she were alive to hear this now.”

  Barry fixed him with a cold level stare. “So are you going to help me or not, Richie?”

  His cousin sighed, not really wanting to relinquish the moment. “What is it exactly that you want me to do?”

  “I was thinking we could try to speed up the process. What difference does it make if the date on the application is today or three months ago?”

  “You want me to falsify a date on a permit application?”

  “Don’t look at me like I’ve got three heads.” Barry unfurled his napkin and set it on his lap, dropping his voice into a low tense whisper. “You’ve done a helluva lot worse in your life, and we both know it. Remember that little tip I passed on to you about the raid at Dr. Feelgood’s?”

  Richie blanched slightly at the reminder of how close he’d come to getting arrested for trafficking in heroin and underage North Korean prostitutes. “Barry, I swear on my mother’s grave, I never set foot in that place again …”

  “Listen, I don’t give a shit. You’re my cousin. I was looking out for you. Just like I know you’re here to look out for me.”

  Across the table, his cousin’s face became a kind of gauge, measuring resistance against obligation.

  “You’re not going to use this piece to go do something stupid, are you?” Richie said quietly, realizing he’d lost the advantage.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’re not going to go shoot a cop with it or anything.”

  Barry felt a tiny fatigue crack spread out from the far edge of his smile. “What the hell would make you say a thing like that?”

  “I just don’t want this coming back to bite me in the ass someday. I’ve got enough problems with the legislature.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Fine. How much were you looking to spend anyway?”

  40

  “FLORIO, FLORIO.” MIKE MURMURED the name like an incantation as he sat in his new lawyer’s office in White Plains, rubbing his thumbs together on his lap. “Used to be a nice Italian restaurant on River Road called Florio’s.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I remember it had a penny fountain and a little statue of the Venus de Milo up by the cash register.”

  Late-afternoon sun sliced through the Venetian blinds, making white stripes across the orderly surface of Gwen Florio’s heavy mahogany desk.

  “Venus de Milo lost her head,” she said, crossing her black-stockinged legs. “Given the current atmosphere around your town, maybe it would be a good idea if you didn’t remind anybody about that.”

  She was a middle-aged lady in glasses, whose degree of fuckability had probably declined precipitously in the last couple of years, he decided. She wore a cranberry-red suit and chunky high heels, a crop-dusting of makeup with claret-red lipstick and dark mascara. Gray streaks shot through her stringy black hair, but there was still something kind of hot and avid about her, like maybe she looked better with her clothes off.

  Law books and pictures of teen-aged children lined the bookshelves behind her, alongside framed letters of thanks from various fraternal organizations and local Police Benevolent Associations her firm had done work for.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I was just trying to make the connection. You aren’t from Riverside, are you?”

  “My father was a cop in Mount Kisco; my late husband was a detective in Yonkers.” She tilted forward in her seat, quickly establishing her bona fides. “And I was an officer myself for several years in Larchmont before I had children.”

  “I was just surprised when my union delegate told me I was getting a female lawyer, that’s all. You don’t mind me saying that, do you?”

  “Not at all.” She arched her back. “But what’s important for you to know is that I’ve represented over a hundred officers in the twelve years I’ve been doing this, and I’ve gotten acquittals or the charges dismissed in over eighty percent of those procedures, with officers getting reinstated with full back pay and benefits. And in cases like spousal abuse or harassment, where the chief complainant witness is female, my percentage is even higher. So sometimes it doesn’t hurt to have a good woman out front fighting for you. Capisce?”

  “Capisce.”

  “So, what’s your story, Lieutenant?”

  “You got a couple of days?”

  Her smile said you wouldn’t want to know about her frown. “The union is paying for my services at the moment, Detective, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste my time.”

  Okay. A tough bitch. He could handle that, as long as she was taking a hunk out of someone else’s ass.

  “You have the statements from Mrs. Schulman and her husband,” he said. “So you’ve got the gist of their case. And then you have the notes that I typed up right after the interviews, which is the real story. I was just doing my job.”

  She flipped back and forth between pages in the file he’d given her, her mouth relaxing as she concentrated.

  “You used to go out with the wife, and you nailed the husband for speeding and resisting arrest. That’s it? It’s just a he said / she said / he said?”

  “Don’t sneeze; you’ll blow their whole case away.”

  She pushed the glasses up on top of her head, and he saw there was still something frisky and youthful in her eyes.

  “Then why did Chief Baltimore pass these disciplinary charges up to the Town Board?”

  “Politics. What else? The two of us were both up for the job last year, and he got it and I didn’t. So now he’s all insecure because he thinks the white guys in the department are all on my side, trying to undermine him.”

  He pressed his thumbs together, thinking about that message he got from Larry Quinn this morning. Chief’s not happy about you bothering your ex at Home Depot. He’d almost thrown the phone across the kitchen. Like anyone had a right to tell him where to shop.

  “He’s just threa
tened by me and looking for any excuse to get rid of me,” he said. “He’s trying to move his own people into place.”

  “Is that all there is to it?” She smiled tolerantly, used to naughty boys playing hide-and-seek with the truth.

  “Well …”—he twiddled one thumb over another like a turbine—“there might be one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “This new guy, Paco Ortiz. A detective I trained, up from the Bronx. Hispanic guy.” The thumbs circled each other more quickly. “He’s running the homicide investigation for Harold, and I think he’s got some crazy ideas about where he wants to take it.”

  “Are you telling me you’re a suspect in this case?”

  “Nothing official yet. Just, he’s said some things that sounded a little … off the beam to me. I’m thinking maybe this whole disciplinary hearing is an excuse to go after me for the murder. Like it’s part of a pattern or something.”

  She looked at him in silence, as if she were breathing him in through her eyeballs. “I have to tell you, Lieutenant,” she said, “if criminal charges develop, I won’t be able to represent you for free. The union only covers you for disciplinary charges. Defending a murder would break most people. Financially.”

  “I understand that.” The thumbs rose up, forming an X on his lap. “But I could look into this on my own time and clear myself. This woman, Sandi, was a friend of mine …”

  “I’m not sure I like the way that sounds.”

  “Why not? I’m the best investigator this department has. I can make some phone calls. Track people down. I can take apart witnesses in two minutes that the rest of them couldn’t break in a week.”

  “You try anything like that and I walk,” she said. “Let’s understand each other, okay? You are the defendant here. If winning your job back in this disciplinary hearing helps you in the criminal case, then so be it. But if I’m representing you in this disciplinary matter, I’m your watch commander. And I’m not going to have you running around trying to play pin the tail on the defendant.”

  “So I’m just supposed to sit tight?” The chair he was in seemed to shrink down to kindergarten size, bringing his butt closer to the floor. “I’m totally innocent.”

  “Gee, I’ve never heard that before.” Her lips thinned. “Look, Lieutenant. If you want to play games and blow smoke up your lawyer’s ass, go pick up the phone book and find another one.”

  “You learn to talk that way in Larchmont?” he asked glumly, trying to keep his back straight.

  “I’ve been around cops all my life, Lieutenant. I’ve seen the best, and I’ve seen the worst. Which one are you?”

  He made a fist, noticing how the tracery of veins changed. “I’m a good cop,” he said slowly. “I’ve given half my life to this job and all my life to this town. My brother lost his life in the line of duty. My father was a CO. And his father guarded the aqueduct. And on and on. I’m not perfect by a long shot, but I would never bring disgrace to the uniform.”

  “Are you telling me no one else is going to come out of the woodwork?”

  He willed himself to sit up and look her straight in the eye, remembering everything he’d ever learned about interrogation technique and turning it on its head. Don’t fidget. Don’t evade. And for God’s sake, don’t look away.

  “If they do, they’re liars,” he said, maintaining the steady beam of his stare. “Go back and look at my service record if you want to see what I’m about. It’s right there in your file. Two awards for valor, three citations for bravery in the line of duty, and one for saving the life of a fellow officer. Who happens to be the chief now.”

  “You saved the chief’s life?”

  “It’s right there in the jacket. The letter he wrote to the Firearms Board, saying it was a good shooting. That’s gratitude, huh?”

  As she glanced down at the file again, he saw something begin to change in her face. It reminded him of the moment when a woman decides to stop ridiculing a man on the next bar stool and consider maybe going home with him.

  “Well, perhaps that does give me a little more to work with,” she said, fingertips gently brushing the page.

  “I hope so.”

  “All right, let’s think about how we can attack the witnesses in the disciplinary hearing.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned across the desk. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Schulman?”

  41

  AS SOON AS BARRY opened the front door, the brand-new alarm sounded, a deafening lunatic bloooop! bloooop! that made the dog jump up and whine frantically.

  “Aperture!” Lynn shouted from the dining room. “Aperture!”

  “What?” Stieglitz started to hump Barry’s leg.

  “That’s the new password they put in this morning! You have to punch it into the keypad.”

  “Aperture?” Barry turned to the green-lit unit on the foyer wall, his fingers clumsily searching for the right buttons to push.

  “You have to do it within thirty seconds or the light goes off at the security company’s monitoring center.”

  Normal. The goal here was to act like everything was relatively normal. They’d made a mutual decision this morning to talk to the kids together about what was going on. Present a united front. Reassure them that everything was going to be okay, even as they upgraded the security system, talked about imposing a new curfew, and told Hannah and Clay that they couldn’t be on the Internet without an adult in the room.

  “You couldn’t have picked an easier word to spell?” he said, entering the dining room as the alarm died away and the dog slunk back to the table.

  “What about Mankind?” asked Clay.

  “Or redrum” suggested Hannah, imitating the little boy from The Shining with his creepy netherworldly voice.

  “Somehow I don’t think that would be entirely appropriate,” Barry said, cutting a quick glance over at Lynn to see if she’d gone ahead and started the talk without him.

  This kind of stomach-knotting tension must be what other couples go through when they’re about to tell the kids they’re getting a divorce.

  “Hey, what’s that you’re holding?” Lynn’s eyes dropped down to his side.

  “Oh this?” He casually held up the head of Slam the garden gnome, as if he hadn’t been disturbed to discover it lying in the driveway. “I found it like this. I was wondering if we could glue it back together.”

  Right. Keep it loose and normal.

  “What happened?” Lynn looked stricken.

  “I dunno.” Barry set the head down on an empty chair and took his place at the head of the table. “Maybe the dog knocked it over.”

  Hannah and Clay stared at the head and then looked at each other across the table. They’d have to have the approximate intelligence of woodchucks not to notice something was up.

  “I tried you around lunchtime on the cell phone,” Lynn said, passing him the spaghetti bowl and the tongs, trying to slip back into the role of Regular Mom.

  “I had to make a quick little trip to New Jersey. I guess our regional plan doesn’t extend to the end of the Holland Tunnel. Cheap bastards.”

  “Everything okay?” All the concern she kept out of her voice went right up into her eyes.

  “Yeah, fine. We’re just looking for a little more tech support.”

  He was still trying to decide what to tell her about the .38 he’d brought home in his briefcase and planned to hide in the old Nike sneaker box on the top shelf of his closet. On the one hand, he knew she’d be apoplectic when she found out that he’d brought a gun into the house. Especially one with the funky registration his cousin had provided. On the other, what was the good of having the piece around unless she knew where to find it if she needed protection?

  “Everything all right here?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of Cabernet.

  “I was a little late picking up the kids, but otherwise nothing significant to report.”

  Her eyebrows rose like accent marks, alerting him that she hadn’t told the kids anyt
hing yet but that the time was upon them.

  “So, Hannah, what’s the good word?” he said, deciding to lead into it slowly. “You get the first draft of that college essay written yet?”

  She rolled her eyes back into her head so that only the whites showed through her kohl-tinted lids.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m still working on it.” Her shoulders slumped under the straps of a red tank top that said: “I Know Victoria’s Secret: She’s Anorexic.” She’d consumed a piece of tofu the size of a hotel soap and a cup of alfalfa sprouts.

  “You ever notice she doesn’t smile anymore?” Barry gave Lynn a sidelong glance.

  “I’m too tired to smile,” said Hannah, one of the straps slipping off her shoulder. “I don’t see what there is to smile about.”

  “Clay, my man”—he turned to his son for relief—“what are you up to?”

  The boy looked up from the business of carefully segregating the meatballs from the pasta on his plate, like a postwar governor dividing up the Balkan states.

  “Nothing much,” Clay said glumly. “I got a karate tournament tomorrow.”

  “Then you better stop playing with that food and start eating it.”

  The Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt was looking a little big on him these days. Barry had laughed it off a couple of weeks ago when Lynn said she was worried the kid was turning into a bulimic and making himself throw up in the bathroom, but now with this sudden weight loss he wasn’t so sure. Clay looked like he’d dropped ten pounds in a week. Maybe big sister was trying to clue the parents in on a secret with that shirt she had on.

  “How’s your Torah portion?”

  “It’s okay.”

  Barry looked over at Lynn as if she could interpret this terseness. Did they know already?

  “So have you been practicing?” he asked his son.

  “We were just talking about it when you came in before,” said Lynn. “I was asking him why he thought God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.”

  “I think it’s a story about not waiting too long to have children.” Barry turned his fork, raveling his pasta. “What was Abraham, a hundred?”