The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  “We haven’t had a murder here in six years,” Roffman said. “And now this fucking mess. Barbaric, like something out of the Dark Ages. The kind of thing the press will eat up and still want more of. And I’m not talking just the local press, either, the weekly papers, the radio. I’m talking national coverage. We got the bodies down as fast as we could, before anyone had the chance to take any pictures, but it seems to me that word of this alone will be more than enough to bring us some unwanted attention.”

  Miller knew then why he was here, the reason Roffman had sent for him.

  “I don’t believe for one minute that you don’t have an interest in knowing what your connection is to all this,” Roffman said. “There’s something very . . . cautious in the way you live these days. Like a man with something to lose, as opposed to what you used to be, a man with something to gain. I’ll tell you, I don’t miss that guy, he was a pain in my ass. But I simply can’t imagine you sitting there in your apartment, popping those pills of yours, content to hope that this, whatever this is, doesn’t rush up from behind and bite you on the ass. I just don’t see you doing that.”

  Miller took a breath, let it out. He wondered what exactly had given his current condition away. Had he been slurring his words? Reacting slowly? Had Roffman seen his eyes, the wild look the drug brought to them? Of course it was foolish to wonder about this at all. Really, what was there about him now that wouldn’t have given him away? Administrator or not, Roffman was intelligent enough to identify a person half-lost in the warm haze of painkillers. One didn’t need to be an experienced street cop to do that.

  “I have a brutal double murder and no leads to speak of,” Roffman said. “No leads, right now, that is, except for you. It seems for now our interests might be somewhat aligned. Since we both know you’re going to end up looking into this, I’d be interested in knowing what you find out about our two victims here. In exchange, I’d be willing to look the other way should you need to . . . cross the line in the course of your investigation.”

  Miller looked at him. “Cross the line?”

  Roffman shrugged. “You don’t have a license to protect these days. There are advantages to that, you can go places you couldn’t go before. Do things you couldn’t do before.”

  “Things you can’t do. Places you can’t go. That’s what you’re really saying, isn’t it, Chief?”

  “Like I said, people are going to be watching this closely. A lot of people. I’m asking for your help, Tommy. Help yourself and help me at the same time. I’ll give you a window of twenty-four hours. If at the end of that twenty-four hours you need more, we’ll talk.”

  “Why twenty-four?” Miller said.

  “Because you know full well that if we don’t find who did this by then, we probably won’t ever find them. Those are the unfortunate statistics. Besides, you’re a Miller. Like father, like son, right? You can’t give a Miller too much free rein, he’ll only end up wanting more. Or making a mess of things. After the twenty-four hours is up, if I don’t hear from you, we’re all back to business as usual.”

  “And what does ‘business as usual’ mean?”

  Now Roffman said nothing. He looked at his watch, adjusted the cuff of his jacket. “Don’t contact me directly,” he said. “Anything you need to tell me should go through Mancini. He speaks for me from this point on. Do you understand?”

  Miller nodded. It was more of an indication of his desire to get the fuck out of there than an indication of his complicity in what Roffman was proposing. Miller had heard more than enough, more than he needed to hear, more than he could right now handle. His mind was reeling.

  “Amnesty doesn’t mean you don’t need to be careful, Tommy. Eyes will be upon us, remember that. Crossing the line is one thing, but going too far, that’s something else.”

  Miller said nothing for a moment. Then, finally: “I need to call a cab. You sent my ride home.”

  Roffman took one last look at Miller, sizing him up.

  “Officer Clarke will take you back.” Roffman knocked on his window with the knuckle of his middle finger. Miller’s door opened then. He got out, was face-to-face now with the female cop he had seen earlier. How long had she been standing there? He felt suddenly that everyone around him was steps ahead of him, and he didn’t like that at all.

  He rode in the back of the cruiser, like a criminal. He and Clarke didn’t speak. What was there for them to say? There was cross-chatter on her dispatch radio, but nothing that told Miller anything he didn’t already know. Every now and then he’d look through the steel grid separating the front and backseats and notice that Clarke was looking at him in the rearview mirror. She was young, pretty. A few years out of the academy, at the most. Roffman’s driver, no doubt. The privileges of being chief. The man had a type, though, that much was clear; Clarke looked enough like Kay to be her kid sister. Miller realized something then. His whole life he had been younger than the cops on the force, but now here was a new recruit, and one that was obviously younger than he. Significantly younger. A fact, he thought, worthy of noting.

  He was twenty-nine now. His father hadn’t lived to see sixty. Granted, the man hadn’t died of natural causes, but still, for the sake of argument, it was safe enough for Miller to claim that he was halfway through his own life now, give or take. Another fact worth noting, he thought. But it felt to him as if a lifetime was already behind him. It felt, too, that another one, a life he could not quite imagine, was ahead still. Somewhere, waiting, beyond sight and grasp. A comfortable, if not promising, future. But what future, exactly? Who to be now that he wasn’t who he used to be?

  At one point on the ride to Southampton, Miller met Clarke’s eyes in the mirror and held them for a moment. He couldn’t help but wonder then what she knew about him. About his past. The good and the bad, though, more than likely, of course, she would have heard only the bad. Who really talked about the good? What was that line from Shakespeare, about the evil that men do?

  It didn’t really matter, though, what she may or may not have been told. Miller knew that. He had made his peace, paid his debt, in doing so sacrificed what should never be sacrificed. He owed nothing to no one, least of all an explanation.

  He turned away from her stare then—the stare, for a change, of someone younger than he. The rest of the way home he watched the gathering fog drifting past the windows of the cruiser like long puffs of lingering smoke. The world he knew so well, the landmarks that had been there his entire life, were almost completely obscured now, hidden behind these gathering banks of reflecting white. Unearthly, like the landscape of some bad dream. If he didn’t already know where he was—on Montauk Highway, winding through the Shinnecock Hills, one turn shy, by his count, of the long straightaway that ran past the college—he would have felt utterly, terribly lost, little more than a stranger adrift in some foreign and dangerous land.

  Back in his apartment, Miller stood in the empty front room, by one of the tall windows that let in the street light, looked down at the train station, or what he could see of it. Finally he got tired of all the open space, wanted the comfort of four walls close around him, that and a little more darkness, so he retreated to his back bedroom and sat on the edge of his mattress. Too much to think about, too much to take in, still. He considered calling Spadaro, as he had been asked to, and fill him in on what the chief had said. Several times he even reached for his phone and then stopped himself. Spadaro’s feud with Roffman was real, Miller knew this much. Still, this whole thing felt somehow wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t find words to explain his feeling, but this just seemed wrong.

  Miller glanced at the amber-colored bottle of pills on the sill near his bed. Eventually he reached out for it, held it for a moment with both hands, then opened the drawer of his nightstand and tossed the bottle in. It was then that he saw the photograph, lying in the bottom of the drawer. He picked it up and looked at it in the weak light of his room.

  Abby. Taken in this v
ery room, as she lay beneath the covers of his bed. Their bed, back then. The very same covers, in fact. Her bare shoulders, her long brown hair, her arms folded across her stomach, something she did whenever she was nervous. But she was laughing, almost wildly, happy. She was twenty-one when they had met, twenty-three when the picture had been taken, months still before she would leave him. She was, what, now? Twenty-seven? He thought about that for a while. Life passing him by. He had lost her because of his job, because of his commitment to it. His obsession, really, he knew that. He often wondered if things might have been different had he quit sooner, back when she was still with him. She was afraid of being alone, hated it, and he had thought a restaurant full of people below would have made the nights he worked and she waited for him easier on her. It hadn’t. There was no point in wondering about what he should have done; he had done the only thing he could do at that time, and she was gone now, long gone. Still, if he knew where to find her, he’d do so, tell her about the changes he had made in his life, tell her that she had been right and he should have listened to her, that he wished he had listened to her, wished he could simply go back and find a way to pay his debt and not, as she saw it, abandon her, not leave her alone night after night till she finally left him. . . .

  He looked at the photo for a moment more, then returned it to the drawer. He needed to think this through, see where it came out. Whom to trust? Roffman or Spadaro? Both were cops, so there was, really, no reason at all for him to trust either.

  He needed answers. And there was only one person to whom he could turn.

  Miller checked his watch. It was a few minutes before eleven. Late, but he didn’t care. He stood, crossed the small room, opened the top drawer of his bureau and dug through its contents till he found what he was looking for. A calling card, years old by now, but maybe it was still valid. He left his apartment, hurried across Railroad Plaza to the train station, hardly limping now, hardly feeling a thing at all. Dangerous, to be out in the world like this, impaired as he was. But he had no choice.

  If something was heading his way, then he wanted to see it coming. Needed to. Roffman had been right about that much.

  From the solitary pay phone on the long, empty platform, Miller made the call.

  Four

  THE CAB HAD YET TO ARRIVE.

  She thought it would have been there by now, had, in fact, expected it to pull up in front of her place just minutes after she’d hung up the phone. That was how it had always gone in the past. Concerned now that the cab wasn’t going to show at all, she wondered if she should call for another. Finally, though, she told herself to give it one more minute, and when that minute had passed, she told herself to give it one more. She wasn’t supposed to drive her own vehicle, that much she knew, and anyway, she didn’t know where it was they were supposed to meet. He hadn’t told her that, had only said that he needed to talk to her and that he was sending a cab to get her. He was never one for saying much over the phone; eavesdropping on calls was just too easy these days. But this wasn’t a recent thing, he’d always been that way, for as long as she’d known him. She was asleep when he had called, dead to the world, half-naked in her warm bed, there for the duration. Now, minutes later, she was in jeans and a thermal shirt and boat shoes, her oversized green parka wrapped tight around her narrow torso, the fur-lined hood pulled up over her head against the damp and cold. If she had known the cab was going to take this long to arrive, she would have waited upstairs, in her apartment, watching from her front window. But how could she have known that? How could she have known that this would be any different from all the other times she’d been called to meet him like this? Still, she felt a little silly, standing there on her dark front porch, watching her quiet residential street and listening for the sound of tires on wet pavement, drawing her parka tight around herself to hold on to what remained of the deep warmth she had carried down with her from her bed.

  She’d heard the sirens earlier tonight, was home from work by then, but hadn’t thought twice about them. She began to wonder now, though, exactly what they had meant. Four patrol cars, racing westward, by the sound of them. That was every cop on duty. Add to that the call from Miller a few hours later—after all this time. And add to that the overdue cab. Even in the summertime, when the streets were congested with tourists, cabs came faster than this. Any one of these things separately was enough to tell her that something was going on in town. Something big—or big enough. All three of them together, though, well, there was just no way that could be anything but bad news for someone.

  She was about to head back inside, call for another cab from her third-floor apartment and wait for it there, where it was warm and dry, but just as she was turning toward her door she caught sight of the familiar sweep of headlights crossing her street, knew by this that a car had made the turn from Meeting House Lane onto Lewis Street a block away. She heard then the sound of tires on the pavement, started down the path that led from her front door to the curb even before she actually had seen the cab. But who else could it be at this time of night? She reached the end of the path as the cab pulled to a stop, climbed into the back and pulled the heavy door closed. Though it was warm in the cab, she kept her hood up, settling back in her seat as the cabbie made an illegal U-turn, then returned to the end of Lewis. Once there, he made a left on Meeting House Lane, heading west, toward the village. He was driving just a little bit above the speed limit, but she ignored this, as she had done with the illegal U-turn.

  Such things were no longer any of her concern.

  The cabbie had been told where to take her by Miller, so there was no need for her to say anything. She sat with her parka wrapped around her and looked out her window. She didn’t glance at the driver once, even though she sensed that every now and then he was looking back at her in the rearview mirror.

  Halfway down Meeting House a call came in on the radio.

  “Dispatch to Bobby.” Even with the voice distorted by static, muffled as it came through the single small speaker, she could hear a Jamaican accent.

  The driver picked up the handset, responded, “Go ahead, Eddie.”

  “Got a pick-up in Wainscott. That bar called Helenbach. How soon can you get there?”

  “I’m about to drop off the Southampton fare. Better tell them a half hour. The weather’s getting pretty bad.”

  “If they can’t wait, I’ll radio back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Eddie out.”

  The driver replaced the handset to the radio mounted under the dashboard. They came to the stoplight at the end of Meeting House. As they waited, she looked to her right, down Main Street. Visibility was less than a block in all directions. About halfway down Main, all she could see was the shimmering black pavement feeding into a blur of soft white.

  A severely limited world tonight, but that was fine with her.

  “Busy night,” the cabbie said then.

  She was still looking down Main, at the end of the world. Hypnotic, almost. “Oh, yeah,” she said flatly.

  “They had to stop the eastbound trains in Hampton Bays, and the westbound trains in Bridgehampton. I’ve been running people stuck in Hampton Bays to their cars at the stations in Southampton and Bridgehampton. Had to take one guy to East Hampton. Boy, was he pissed. Crazy night, man. Crazy night.”

  She nodded politely, wasn’t going to ask but finally couldn’t help herself, a part of her had to know. “Why’d they stop the trains?”

  “The cops found two people murdered at the canal. On the bridge there.”

  She nodded at that, thoughtfully. It was clear why Miller wanted to see her. Something to do with this, no doubt, what else could it be? But what she didn’t know was why Miller would now, suddenly, care about something like this. Last she knew he was out, retired, done with all this. Last she knew he had gotten what he needed to finally be able to live with himself.

  Another question came to her mind. She waited a moment, wondered if she could live wi
thout knowing the answer, told herself she’d find out sooner or later, that much was certain. But, of course, in the end, she asked. Like she could have stopped herself.

  “Any idea who the victims are?” she said.

  “No.”

  She glanced forward then, met the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He was young, maybe Miller’s age, maybe a little older. Younger, then, than she was, by a few years at least. Caucasian, a mop of curly black hair framing, from what she could see of it, a long but handsome face. Steady eyes, remarkably so, piercing even. Pale blue, though maybe that was a trick of the dashboard lights. A practiced stare, though. It had to be. Though he was sitting she estimated his height and weight, just as she had been taught to a long time ago. Five-eleven, one-eighty. Only an inch taller than she, but outweighing her by a good sixty pounds. She had lost too much weight over the winter, had become too slight, significantly weaker. When she was a cop, she had worked out, run, stayed strong. Now she didn’t do much but work at the liquor store and sleep, started her days not with a blend of vitamins designed specifically for runners but with the pill her doctor had prescribed to ease her depression.

  She broke from his stare, glanced down at his license mounted under clear plastic on the back of his seat. Falcetti, Robert. It wasn’t a name she’d seen or heard before. Nothing worse than coming face-to-face with someone she had once arrested or helped to process at the station house. Seeing them walk into the store, then ringing them up at the register, wondering if they were staring at her because she was a woman and they were men or because they recognized her, or almost recognized her, had seen her somewhere before but just couldn’t figure out where. Nothing, really, worse than that.

  Falcetti was still looking at her in the mirror. Still staring with that stare of his. Her face was framed by the fur-lined hood—faux coyote fur, army surplus. A perfect oval of eyes and nose and mouth, nothing more. She knew how she looked in that hood—coy, almost—was wearing it not for that reason, never wore it for that reason, but just to keep warm and dry. And, too, to feel concealed. Private. She knew, also, that stray strands of her hair—brown, straight, long—had slipped out of the ponytail she had pulled it into before coming downstairs to wait for the cab, were now peeking out from the fur-lining, hanging here and there in front of her face. It used to interest her what men had found attractive about her. The more unkempt she looked, it seemed, the more they stared. A woman on the verge of wildness? Was that what they saw? Was that what she was?