She sighed and pulled a wad of tissues out of her tracksuit pocket and blew her nose, then let out a harsh, forced laugh. “God, look at me! I feel like one of those jerks on Sally Jessy Raphael.”
“You’re doing great, Con,” said Guma. The two men waited, hardly moving. They both had heard a lot of confessions.
She sniffed, dabbed, resumed. “Okay, Brian got killed, shot in the street. Do you know this story?”
Karp said, “He was killed protecting one of his informants.”
“Yeah, he gave his life for a junkie snitch. That’s what he was like, Brian. A hero. The funeral was huge, delegations from all over, the widow and the three kids, the flag-folding thing. And all the time I kept thinking, I couldn’t help it, even though I was ashamed, you know? I’m so glad it’s not Brendan. And I thought he should’ve been thinking about his family, Brian. I mean it’s one thing to go through a door or chase a guy down an alley, up fire escapes. That’s part of the job, but not take a bullet to protect a . . . a skell. You think I’m awful to think that, right?”
“No,” said Karp, “it’s natural to think things like that.”
She gave him a long look to check him out, and she saw that he was sincere, that he’d been there, too.
“And after that, it’s hard to explain, it sounds stupid, but Brendan wasn’t there anymore. It was like someone else was living in his body. He quit his job and got into the cops. No problems there. Graduated top of his class in the Academy. No more jokes about the job. Practically no jokes about anything. And he was always angry. The Cooleys have all got this Irish temper, especially if they think someone is trying to shaft them, and he started to blow up all the time, at me, at the kids . . . and when we got together at parties, now I was the one who was left out. He was in there with the cops, and I was in the kitchen with the cops’ wives. And I thought it was my fault. I couldn’t stand thinking of him out there on the streets. He’d work a graveyard shift. I couldn’t sleep, waiting for him to come home. He started taking risks, too. About six months after he joined up, he tackled an armed robber by himself. He would’ve been killed except the guy’s gun jammed. So they made him a detective, and then he did that thing with the hostages, going in there without his vest, unarmed. You heard about that?”
Both Karp and Guma nodded.
“Well, after that I told him I couldn’t take it. It would’ve been one thing if he really loved it, if it was his life, I would’ve been prepared for it, like the other girls, like Rose was. But he didn’t love it, it wasn’t his life. It was someone else’s life. We started fighting all the time. I was awful, I admit it. I threw stuff, I scared the kids. I wanted to shake him back to being Brendan, really Brendan. This doesn’t make any sense, I know . . .”
“No,” said Karp, “it makes perfect sense. That’s why you split up?”
“Yeah, he beat me up one night. My fault, again. I hit him with a candlestick, and he punched me a couple of times and packed a bag and left. And later he said he was afraid he might hurt me if we lived together. I mean he never touched me before that. He’s not that kind of man. He said we could talk about our problems later, after this Firmo thing was over. But it was never over.” She threw up her hands. “And here I am. A PD widow and I don’t even have a folded flag.”
“The Firmo thing,” said Karp carefully. “What was that about?”
“Oh, that was the only thing he’d talk about, I mean from the job. A big criminal, a Mob guy, some kind of thief or fence. Ray was always talking about Firmo, too. The One That Got Away. It was like a family joke. Like when are you going to take the trash out? Just wait, I gotta get Firmo first. Ray tried to catch him for years and couldn’t, and now Brendan was going to. He was going to show his dad that he was as good as Brian . . . better, in fact. Better than Ray was himself.”
“What, he said this?” Karp asked.
“Oh, no. Are you kidding? A Cooley thinking about why they’re doing something, ruining their life, getting killed? That’s not the Cooley way.” She hung her head, picked at her fingernails. Karp noticed they were bitten like a child’s. “We went for marriage counseling. Our priest set it up, a nice Catholic social worker. Brendan went one time. I went to her some more, by myself, because I wanted to understand: How could this happen? I wanted to know. We’re good people. We both love our kids. How could this happen to us?”
Karp knew it was a rhetorical question, but he said, “I don’t know.”
She looked up at him. “Yeah, neither do I. She, I mean the social worker, Mrs. Ruffino, she said it’s the unconscious. When you have kids, you take all the negative crap you haven’t dealt with in your life and put it into them, and then they go and do the same to their kids. We don’t like to deal with the dark stuff. We want to be nice, and we want our kids to be nice. But we’re not nice, or not all nice, like we think we are. And we lay it on our spouses, too, that shadow. I can feel that Cooley stuff working in me, too. That need to be totally, like, upright, clean, that outrage at the bad guys. I don’t know if I follow all of it, but it’s a point of view.” She laughed, that same harsh sound. “It’s not the kind of thing we talked about when I was growing up.”
“Me neither,” said Karp. “But back to Firmo. Brendan didn’t get him either, did he?”
“No. He had an informant. He was working him for nearly a year . . .”
“This was Cisco Lomax?”
“I didn’t know his name,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t privy to the details. I mean this was incredibly secret. He didn’t even register this guy as a CI because he thought that Firmo had some cops on the payroll, which was how Ray’s case got wrecked back then. Maybe he thought I was working for Firmo, too, I don’t know. He was a little nuts on the subject. But I heard him talking to Ray about it. My guy, he called him, just ‘my guy.’ They set up this scam, some big shipment of stolen gold watches, diamond watches. Brendan was really out on a limb with the department on it. I think Ray was backing him on it, or they never would have let him take it on. It was one of those things like the job does. If it works, great; if not, you’re shafted. He couldn’t sleep the week before it went down, hardly ate at all. And what happened was his guy screwed him on it. I don’t have the details, but I got the impression that this informant leaked the scam to Firmo’s people, and they pulled a switch at the place where Brendan expected to catch Firmo with the hot watches. Firmo didn’t show, and when Brendan opened the package, the watches in it were cheap copies. The real ones were gone.”
There was some more after that, and they listened. She made some coffee and they drank it. Guma and Connie talked about people they knew, the family. They heard the hiss of a bus stopping down the street, and soon after that a blond kid rushed in, a little older than the one in the picture over the mantel. He stopped short and gave the two men a hard look, then went over and stood next to his mother, who rose and put an arm around him. Karp and Guma stood, too, and made their good-byes. Connie Cooley came to the door with them.
“Nothing is going to happen to Brendan, is it?”
“I don’t know, Connie,” said Karp. “I’ll be honest with you, like you just were with us. I think he broke the law, but I don’t have anything yet I can make the case with. I may never have.”
“But . . . if it came out, he’d be through in the cops, wouldn’t he? They’d make him leave.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true.” Karp said it because that’s what she wanted to hear. That’s why she had agreed to talk with them.
Back in the white limo, Guma cracked another beer and said, “Poor kid, huh?”
“Yeah, a sad story. You marry someone and they change.”
“Or they don’t, which is probably worse, as my second wife never got tired of pointing out. Anyway, it sort of clears up why Cooley did what he did.”
“To an extent. Lomax was clearly his rat. He thought he’d turned him, but Firmo was playing Cooley for a sucker, with Lomax’s help! Cooley saw him on the street that night, took
off after him, and blew him up. That’s clear. Probably he’s killing these homeless guys to cover his ass on that.”
Guma knotted his brow. “Killing . . . ? What, you think Cooley is the bum slasher?”
“Some of the later vics, anyway. I got my guy down at the cops checking out if any of the people who died, the vics, had ties to Firmo’s organization, like this kid Ramsey did, the one Marshak shot. What I think happened was there was a nut going around killing homeless, and after Cooley shot Lomax, he had to get rid of anyone who knew about his connection to Lomax, so he adopted the nut’s MO. What’s a few bums more or less? It fits.”
“It might,” said Guma, “but right now you can’t even show the connection between Lomax and Cooley. If you’re right that Lomax was the snitch there, you got no one to testify. The only people who knew about it are Firmo, obviously, and maybe Cooley’s partner, neither of whom are going to be witnesses for you.”
“There’s the Canman.”
“That’s the bum he’s been looking for, the one Lucy knows.”
“Yeah, the first time she told me about Cooley looking for him, the thought crossed my mind that he might have something to do with the homeless murders.”
“Why the hell would you think that?”
“I don’t know. Just a vagrant thought. I knew he’d assassinated one lowlife already, and I knew he wasn’t assigned to the bum-slasher task force. Why would he be looking so hard for the one homeless the cops were most interested in as a suspect? Why would he want to rough up people who the regular task-force cops just talked to? I mean it’s not characteristic of Cooley. He’s got absolutely no history of brutality, as you found out yourself. But now we know a little more about Brendan Cooley. We know he’s a little nuts about being the perfect cop. We know his brother died protecting a snitch, and that made him change his life, become a different person. He develops a relationship with a snitch of his own, but this particular snitch betrays him. Cooley goes crazy and kills Lomax. Now he has to cover it up or his whole life is going to collapse. He takes out the homeless guys who knew the story. Maybe only one is left, Canman. According to Lucy, the Canman’s a pretty smart guy. He runs all over the city with a cart full of cans, which could make him a perfect courier and stasher for a theft-and-fencing ring. We know about the connect between Cooley, Firmo, and Lomax now. What if there’s one between Lomax, Cooley, and Canman? Now Cooley catches a break because the cops have Canman as a suspect in the slashings. Cooley finds the guy, and it’s heroic cop shoots and kills bum slasher, case cleared and closed.”
Guma rubbed his jaw and snorted. “Oh, that’s a stretch.”
“Maybe. But Cooley’s going out of his way to find this guy, and he seems to have started just after he shot Lomax. That’s significant. Maybe finding and whacking Canman is a twofer for him. He shuts up the last witness to the fact he knew Lomax and clears the other killings he’s done. In any case, I’d sure as hell like to find Canman before Cooley does.”
“How are you going to do that without using the cops, or cranking up Keegan? Because I can tell you right now, the Goom is not going down those tunnels looking.”
“Oh, I’ll think of something.” Karp reached for the telephone.
16
LUCY’S FINGERS SNAPPED DOWN ON THE KEYS, AND THE WORDS SNAKED across the screen. Ten past three in the morning and she was pulling an all-nighter. She had heard the phrase often enough but had never actually done one herself until now. Pulling an all-nighter, a deed dense with scholastic virtue, and she felt good about it, an unexpected attainment of the new her. She was writing an essay in French on the subject of Paul Claudel’s Cinq Grandes Odes. Tran had suggested the theme, somewhat ironically, as being suitable for a Catholic schoolgirl. He had, in fact, known Claudel in Paris in the late forties, if known, as he said, was not too strong a word for the relationship between a Vietnamese student busboy and a literary lion. Lucy liked the poems anyway, full as they were of homages to the glories of creation and expressions of longing for God. She loved the line about the girl in the white palace who felt no regret for home but was like a little tiger ready to spring, and whose whole heart was lifted by love and by the great force of laughter. One of the great advantages of fluency is that one has perfect access to poetry in the original. She had not thought about this much before, not being, she had thought, the kind of person who liked things that other people demanded she read, but she had to admit she had changed her mind about this. She had, almost without knowing it, become an educable person. Not quite the little tiger girl yet, and she did regret her home, but she could now see that she could become someone like that. She could be open to joy.
She finished a page, mashed the save button, got up, stretched. A reward was due, a fresh cup of coffee and a cigarette. Everyone in the house smoked like coke furnaces, and she had taken up the habit in a desultory way, more for self-protection than because she enjoyed it. Although the taste of tobacco, the first toasty puff, was delicious, she could do without the trays full of butts and the constant acrid stench. She went into the kitchen and stood for a moment at the sink, enjoying the ticking silence of the house. She filled the coffeemaker, poked in the refrigerator, ate a couple of cold spring rolls, licking fish sauce from her fingers afterward. The smell of coffee filled the room, and something other than coffee, a sweetish, heavy odor, something burning. She sniffed; it was coming from the door that led to the finished basement that Tran used as his office. She sniffed again. Burning insulation? She opened the door, walked down a couple of stairs. The smell was overpowering. She trotted down the rest of the flight and came into the room.
The overhead lights were off, and the room was lit only by a tiny blue flame that hovered like Tinker Bell near the far wall. Something flashed copper-colored in the glow, a pipe of some kind. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that Tran was lying on his side on the brown leather couch, holding a long, brass, small-bowled pipe. His eyes were closed, and his face was more peaceful than she had ever seen it. He looked ten years younger. His eyes opened. She felt a flush of embarrassment.
“I’m sorry, Uncle. I thought something was on fire.”
He smiled and beckoned. She walked over and sat next to him on the couch.
“Now you know my secret vice. Are you shocked?”
“I am scandalized, Uncle. Why do you do it?”
“Take opium? To assuage my grief. It is very effective.” He spoke slowly, with long pauses between the phrases, as if each one required substantial consideration. “Have you finished your work? It is very late.”
“It is. I can’t imagine how you are up every morning so early.”
“Oh, I don’t sleep. Perhaps a short nap in the afternoons. And the work . . . ?”
“I think I have the math and science down. The history paper is done, as you know.” She had written about the effect of the battle of An Loc on American and Vietcong diplomatic and military policy, including some insights not at that time known to the CIA, much less the American-history teacher at Sacred Heart. “Also, I’m almost finished with the Claudel paper. I intend to work through the night.”
He smiled and nodded and upended the bowl of the pipe over the flame of the alcohol lamp. He took a deep breath of the fumes, released it, and sighed. Raising his eyebrow, grinning, he offered Lucy the mouthpiece, which she could now see was made of amber.
She giggled. “Maybe later.”
A deep chuckle. “An excellent, virtuous answer. Also, it avoids my being shot by your mother or put in jail for a hundred years by your father. I believe it is time for us to return.”
“Us?”
“Yes, I am coming with you. Your mother requires more service.”
“You talked to her?”
Another long puff and a longer silence. “Of course. I talk to her almost every day. It is a benefit of the telephone.”
Lucy gaped, she grinned.
“Surely, you did not imagine she was unconcerned about your welfare, or that I was in any
sense helping you to hide from your family.”
Lucy was offended and felt betrayed. She was, on another and more genuine level, delighted and relieved. She was silent for a while as these feelings fought among each other, with the latter gradually triumphing.
Tran inspected the bowl of his pipe, scratched at it with a fingernail. “I am going to prepare another pipe. You may watch and see how it is done. Perhaps one day you will be the mistress of an Asian warlord, and the skill will be a useful addition to your many other talents.”
“Do you think that is at all likely, Uncle?”
“With you, one cannot tell. Life is full of surprises, which is why I am not teaching French literature at the Lycée Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon, as my father planned.”
So she watched as he manipulated the yen-hok needles, twirling and roasting the tarry ball over the flame, and carefully placed the fuming pellet into the pipe. He drew heavily and lay back. She was dying to ask him about the service her mother wanted, but he looked so relaxed and peaceful that instead she kissed him quickly on the cheek and returned to Claudel.
It cost Marlene a nice lunch and a lot of guilt, of which she could afford the former a good deal more than the latter, but Wayne Segovia seemed genuinely happy, and that might count for something in the halls of purgatory. He had lost twenty-five pounds, and his normally olive skin was the color of old dishwater. She watched him eat a whole lobster, a dozen cherrystones, a scoop of garlic mashed potatoes half the size of his head, and a dark brown dessert made entirely of unblended calories. She picked at a Cobb salad and drank most of a pricey bottle of Meursault.
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