The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  He came to the top of the stairs, and the smell of gas filled his nostrils.

  “Hey, Harold!” he called out. “Is that you?”

  “Anything?” Paco watched the chief broom Luminal powder across the surface of the table saw, checking it for bloodstains with the infrared light.

  “Not that I can see.” Harold, wearing special tinted glasses, scanned each shark-fin blade carefully. “No blood at all. You think he would’ve cut himself using it. People lose fingers all the time.”

  The two of them had been searching the basement for almost twenty minutes, armed with a warrant signed by Judge Harper and a statement from Muriel Navarro saying that Mike had blackmailed her into withdrawing her original complaint a couple of years ago. When the call came from Jack Davis just before midnight, saying that Barry Schulman had tracked the girl down, Harold was furious, smelling a setup. But after actually hearing the evidence for himself, he’d done a complete one-eighty. So here he was, searching his former best friend’s basement. He tried to let his funeral director instincts take over. He was a servant of this community, he told himself. There were dire matters that needed to be attended to. No one ever said this was work for the faint of heart.

  “Maybe he knew we were coming eventually and washed it down,” said Paco.

  “Nah, man. Look at this place. It’s been years.”

  The basement was a mess. The rest of the house showed Marie’s fastidiousness and attention to detail, but here, she’d given up trying. This was Mike’s domain. An unfinished workshop with a dirt floor, an ancient octopus boiler covered in friable asbestos, and rusty ceiling pipes left half-insulated. It smelled of oil, sawdust, and airplane glue. On the work table, there was a cheap ProGen computer surrounded by bolts, hinges, and pieces of old radios taken apart but never put back together. Time got lost here. It rolled into corners and seeped into tiny spaces in the brick wall. It got covered in grime and soot and stacks of bundled old newspapers and sports equipment. It got buried under greasy bicycle wheels, bags of blacktop patch, paint-can lids, dismantled gearshifts, tangled fishing reels, and shoe boxes filled with Monopoly pieces, seashell soaps, spent shell casings, football trophies, Boy Scout merit badges, and, mysteriously, dozens of blue Corgi police cars and Tonka train engines.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking.” Paco unplugged the computer and started to wrap up its power cord. “She’s already dead when he brings her down here.”

  “Sandi?” Harold pushed the glasses up on top of his head.

  “Yeah. Let’s just say manual strangulation, for the hell of it. She wants to break it off. He doesn’t. Whatever. We know they were fucking. They argue. They fight. Maybe they’re just having too much fun. Oops. He chokes her. She turns blue.” Paco let his head loll and his tongue hang out. “He’s like, ‘Oh shit, now what am I gonna do?’”

  “Leave her in the motel parking lot where her car was.” Harold carefully removed the circular saw from its groove, holding it daintily by its edge in his rubber-gloved fingertips. “Make it somebody else’s problem in another jurisdiction.”

  “Maybe he thought someone saw him in the motel parking lot and figured they could ID him later. Maybe he just wigged.”

  “Come on, Paco. He’s a cop.”

  “I know he’s a cop, but he’s human. We’re all human. Right?”

  Tiny specks from the ceiling drizzled down on Harold’s head as he looked for a bag to put the saw blade in.

  He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have begged off doing this search. Just before he’d left the house this morning, he’d finally broken down and called the state police to ask for help. They’d said they might be able to spare a senior investigator in about an hour and a half to help out. Perhaps he should’ve just waited outside for the guy to get here. But with Mike due back at any minute, he figured that they had to start to secure the evidence as soon as they could.

  “I’m thinking he does her in the car and then maybe throws her in the trunk and drives her back here ’cause he doesn’t know what the fuck else to do.” Paco put the computer in a cardboard evidence box.

  “Okay. I’m with you so far.”

  “He remembers that dump job from last spring, where they found the dealer’s girlfriend floating in the river with her hands cut off so they couldn’t ID her. So, what does he do? He decides to make it look like one of those by mutilating the body and throwing it in the water.”

  Harold looked up, not sure if he’d just heard a footstep.

  “You don’t like it,” said Paco.

  “He’s got four people sleeping upstairs and a set of squeaky wood steps leading down to the basement.” Harold lowered his voice. “The body’s over a hundred pounds. He’s going thump, thump, thump, carrying it down the stairs. And nobody wakes up?”

  “We don’t know if nobody wakes up. We haven’t interrogated the rest of the family.”

  “It’s got holes in it. That’s all I want to say.”

  “Everything has holes.”

  “Not that many.” Harold went to look at the slop sink in the corner. “Drainage would be a real issue down here. You ever see how much blood there is when a head gets severed? I’ll show you the system we have at the funeral parlor one of these days.”

  Paco shrugged. “So he took his time and did it right.”

  “And then there’s the river.” Harold knelt down to study the underside of the sink with a flashlight.

  “What about it?”

  “Why would he dump the body in the river so close to town if he didn’t want any of us to find it right away?”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Paco rubbed the back of his ear. “He thought the tide would take it down toward the city.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Harold took off his glove and touched the pipe to see if it was dry. “Have you ever looked at the way the current moves?”

  “Chief, I’m from the South Bronx. All right?”

  “It’s an estuary,” Harold explained. “It’s constantly changing direction. If you dropped a stick off a bridge, it would go back and forth at least seven times before it made up its mind where to go.”

  “How am I supposed to know that? I’m not from around here.”

  “Exactly. Because if you were from around here, you wouldn’t just roll a body into the water at low tide and expect to never see it again. You would know it would come back at you eventually.”

  The sides of Paco’s head seemed to bulge and contract as he processed the idea. “You’re telling me it has to be somebody from outside here who did it?”

  “I’m not saying it has to be.” Harold stood up. “I’m just saying that if you’re from here, you’d know you couldn’t get rid of it that easy.”

  They both heard the squeal and groaning press of a floorboard above them at the same moment. And then Mike calling down the stairs, “Hey, Harold! Is that you?”

  Heart pinned up between his lungs like a piñata, Mike started down the steps and saw Paco standing by an open cardboard box with his computer inside.

  “The fuck you think you’re doing?” he said.

  Men were in his house. Going into his basement. Touching his things.

  “We got a warrant, Mike.” Harold stepped into the light of a bare bulb, wearing one white latex glove, a liberal sprinkling of gray dust in his hair. “Marie saw it before she let us in.”

  “Marie let you in?”

  “She said she had to get to work. And you’d be home soon.”

  “Let me see that warrant.”

  He trudged down the stairs, the treads creaking and threatening to snap under his weight. She’d let them in. She had to get to work. That’s what he meant to her. On the last step, Harold handed him a warrant, still warm from his back pocket.

  The words were a jumble before his eyes. He saw the name Muriel Navarro and the date 1998. Slowly his eyes scanned the rest of the page, trying to make sense of it, stopping on the phrase harassment and intimidation.

  “What IS this?” />
  “That baby-sitter you pulled over,” said Harold. “She’s decided to press charges again.”

  The warrant started to slip between his fingers. “Why?”

  “Schulman FOIA’d her complaint and turned her up. She’s saying you threatened her and made her drop the original charges. Said you were going to report her to the INS and send her back to El Salvador if she gave you trouble.”

  “Oh, fuck this and fuck you too. Fuck you twice.” But his original rush of fury was already slowing to a cold trickle. “She’s a greedy little bitch looking to get in on a civil suit with that shyster. And you know what? I don’t blame her. I blame you. Thirty-two years and you don’t have the balls to give me a heads up.”

  “She says you left messages on her answering machine.”

  “So what?”

  “She kept one of the tapes.”

  Mike felt carbon soot fill up his lungs, slowly blackening his in-sides. “You’ve heard it?”

  “She gave the tape to Schulman last night, and he gave it to Jack Davis, who played it for me. It ain’t Dolby stereo, but a jury would get the idea. It’s clearly your voice saying, ‘You make trouble in my life, I’ll make trouble in yours.’”

  “I think I gotta call my lawyer.” Mike sat down on the bottom step.

  A distant rumble began in the back of his mind, like water rushing through a long dark tunnel.

  “That’s okay,” said Harold. “But in the meantime, you need to understand that I’m going to have to turn over a copy to the DA’s office so they can file charges …”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  The cave-in. This was what a cave-in must feel like.

  “Mike.” Harold put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You know, it’s not going to end there.”

  Mike looked up and saw that Paco had opened one of his old shoe boxes and found his collection of squad cars and train engines.

  “There are going to be others who come out of the woodwork,” Harold said. “Aren’t there?”

  Mike probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue, finding a new canker sore in the wetlands of his cheek. The walls were narrowing on him. He had to give himself some breathing room.

  “All right, so I had a thing with her,” he said. “Is that what you want to hear? I got her doing sixty in a forty-five zone.”

  “This is when you were doing road stops?” asked Paco.

  “Right after my brother got shot.” Mike nodded. “Totally legitimate tactic. You never know when you’re going to pull somebody over and find a gun in the glove compartment.”

  He saw Harold and Paco exchange skeptical looks, but in his heart he knew it was true: a part of him still dreamed of pulling over the Chevy his brother stopped that night on River Road.

  “You thought that little baby-sitter was carrying a gat?” Paco arched one eyebrow.

  “Okay, I caught a rap with her,” Mike admitted. “I told her my mom looked after other people’s kids too …”

  “You banged her in the car and then tore up the speeding ticket,” Paco interjected.

  “Was it a chocolates and roses romance? No, probably not. Was she pissed about it later? I guess, maybe. She filed paper on me. Is it my proudest moment? Hey, I was going through a hard time.”

  “What about that answering machine tape?”

  “Shit.” Mike looked down at his thumb, seeing the nail hanging halfway off. “I made mistakes. I MADE SOME FUCKING MISTAKES. I knew I had a shot at the chief’s office, and I freaked when her complaint came in. And then Marie got wind of it, and I was hanging by a thread. So I left this stupid message. Was I actually going to do anything? Come on, Harold. Don’t you know me better than that?”

  Mike looked up at the chief, trying to find some small shred of understanding or fellow feeling to grab on to.

  “I thought I did.” Harold’s eyes went cold. “But then you started doing all this crazy shit again. What about Sandi?”

  “What about her?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were doing her?”

  A hard lump of mucus lodged at the base of Mike’s throat. “Who says I was?”

  “Come on, Mike,” said Harold. “We were all at the funeral. I saw you take the shovel out of the husband’s hands.”

  “I was just paying my respects to a friend.”

  “Sure.” Paco stepped up, crowding him a little more on the stairs. “Look, man, de verdad, I got you working on her fence. I got you signing out early all summer to go see her. I just went back and got Sandi’s baby-sitter telling us she heard you upstairs while your truck was in the driveway. And now I got your computer.”

  He nodded toward the unplugged ProGen in the open cardboard box.

  “What about it?” Mike swallowed hard, noticing the table saw had been pulled out and was lying on its side, teeth gleaming. “I use it to help the kids with their homework sometimes.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see about that, Topcat,” said Paco. “We’re going to confiscate it and see what kind of e-mails you sent her.”

  They had him. Brick by brick they’d been building a wall around him, hemming him in. They moved closer as they stood over him on the stairs. Paco’s belt buckle was level with his eyes, and the sight of the silver tongue poking through leather made him think of torture.

  “All right, so what?” Mike said, realizing he’d waited far too long for this. “She wasn’t getting any from the old man, so I helped her out a little. You gonna lock me up for that?”

  “No, not for that,” said Harold.

  “Oh, come on. Everybody lies about sex. You know I’ve been trying to get back with Marie and the kids. I didn’t need her to know I’d slipped up a couple of times. I’m a dog. I’m sorry. I’m a goddamn dog. But that doesn’t make me an animal.”

  “Down at the train station,” Harold murmured, studying the dust on his wing tips.

  “Come again?”

  “Down at the train station. You never said anything. When the body washed ashore. You saw the tattoo on the ankle. You saw the surgical scar on the breast and the liposuction scar on her ass.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Of course you were sure. You were fucking her, and you never said a damn thing to me about it!”

  They’d moved in so tight around him that he could barely breathe.

  “I panicked, all right?” Mike shouted, trying to get them to back off. “I’d been fucking her and then she was dead. I knew how that was going to look when it all came out.”

  “And how’s that?” Paco half-smiled.

  “Listen, I’m not going to bullshit you anymore.” Mike ignored him, appealing to Harold directly. “I got a wife and kids who I don’t wanna lose. I kept thinking I was going to tell you, but things kept coming up.”

  “Like what?” asked Harold.

  He thought of explaining about all the little mistakes he’d made, all the opportunities he’d missed. How he’d choked that first time Harold asked him about Sandi, how he’d been all set to come clean until he’d found that thing in the diary about strangling her. But then he stopped himself, realizing that he was in enough trouble.

  “I made some bad decisions. By the time I was ready to turn around and give it to you straight-on, it was too late.”

  “So you deliberately impeded an investigation? Is that your story?” Paco tugged on his earring, playing the wiseass. “Tell me something: is that your baby she happened to be carrying?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said the old man wasn’t giving her none. You could save us the expense of a DNA test right here.”

  “I don’t know.” Mike buried his face in his hands. “I seriously don’t know.”

  “So why’d you kill her?” asked Harold.

  “I didn’t! It’s the husband. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. He must’ve found out about us.”

  “But then why are you the one who’s been covering up all along?” asked Harold.

  “I’m telling you, I tho
ught I could stay on top of it. I thought I could keep my name out of it. I fucked up, okay? I didn’t want to lose my job and my family. I was fighting for my life.”

  The red mist had fallen over him. His brain had locked up. He was off-balance, not fully in control of what he was saying. There was a part of him that knew he should stop talking immediately and call his lawyer.

  But then Harold took the hand off his shoulder and hunched down so they were eye to eye with barely enough room for a closed fist between them.

  “Michael, listen to me,” he said. “I want to talk to you as a friend.”

  “A friend.”

  “I mean it. You have a choice here.” Harold held his gaze. “You can keep going down this road and end up in a prison cell.”

  Mike gingerly pressed the blackened nail back onto his thumb. “My father worked at the prison.” He grimaced, trying to hang tough.

  “Then what about leaving your family destitute after all the lawyers’ bills come through?”

  Mike felt a bubble of misery form and expand inside his chest. “And what’s my other choice?”

  “You put an end to this right now and spare us all the charade and expense of a criminal trial, where you’ll have to pay for an attorney out of your own pocket.” Harold started to pull off his rubber glove. “I’ll talk to the Town Board about setting up Marie and the kids with your three-quarters’ pension. We’ll do it quietly, as if it’s survivors’ benefits they’re entitled to.”

  “Like I’m already dead to them,” said Mike glumly.

  “Yeah.” Harold nodded, not trying to put a bow on it. “Like you’re already dead.”

  Mike watched each of Harold’s fingers pop out one by one with a little puff of resin. “What if I want to take it to trial?”

  “Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Harold hunched his shoulders. “We’ve already found bloodstains down here. As soon as we send them to the state crime lab, there won’t be a thing I can do for you. Deal will be off the table.”

  But at that moment, Mike saw the chief’s windbreaker ride up, revealing a band of navy Kevlar underneath. And in that small stretch of dark fabric, he saw a tender vulnerability, a piece of history, a place to strike.