“And he was from Russia?”
“From somewhere near Leningrad. Or whatever they’re calling it these days.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not much. His father was a mean man. When we were dating, Jack never took me around to Red Hook. The old man died just a year or so after we got married.”
He stopped spinning the can opener. “Do you know what happened to Dad’s brother?”
His mother pressed a button and they had to wait a moment for the blender to stop whirring.
“Why do you ask?”
“Like I said, background for the film. Also, I was thinking that if I ever have kids, it’ll be weird if I can’t tell them about their own history.”
His mother looked up quickly. “Kids? Is there something I should know?”
He blushed. “No. Nothing like that. But what about Dad’s brother?”
She lifted the pitcher off the blender and poured two creamy drinks. “Your father was never very communicative, even at the best of times. All I know is that his brother was killed. Some sort of accident.”
“Jesus—all he ever told me was that his brother died young. If I try to ask more, he always tells me to drop it.”
His mother shrugged. “Don’t expect too much from him. He’s not a happy man.”
Ben wrinkled his nose. “When you started going out, you must’ve thought better of him. I mean, weren’t you in love?”
She shrugged. “I thought we were. But I don’t know if he’s really capable of loving someone else.”
Ben felt the same way he had as a little kid: he was impressed that his mother told him such grown-up things, but he wished she wouldn’t always cut his father down. Especially since his dad never turned the tables, never said a bad word about her.
He realized that his mission today was fruitless—he wasn’t going to get the truth about his father from his mom. He was only going to get her truth.
twenty-six
SILENCE WAS AT THE heart of the job.
On TV detectives ran around waving guns, cars screeched and flipped over, bad guys shouted and jumped fences. In real life there was violence and noise during the crime, and there would be crying and confusion after, but in these first moments of discovery, the scene was still as a painting.
The condo was expensive and freshly painted, the few items of furniture new and pricey, but the place was a mess. Dirty clothes lay in heaps around the bedroom and the hall, beer cans and junk-food wrappers spread like confetti in the living room, crusty plates were piled in the kitchen sink. As usual, Jack was afflicted by the desire to start tidying up, to make some sense of the disorder; as usual, he refrained. A few posters provided the only decor: a Bud Light ad; a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model over which someone had pasted Hillary Clinton’s head; the ghoulish made-up face of some rock star called Marilyn Manson. The magazines on the coffee table—Money, Entrepreneur, Playboy, GQ—were addressed to one Bruce Serinis, who was currently splayed out on the living room carpet, DOA.
Jack had caught the fresh case so soon after his talk with Sergeant Tanney that he suspected his boss had tampered with the sacred rotation order. He was angry, but realized that little would be gained by a fight. Not until he had a solid lead on the Berrios case.
For now, he had this job in Park Slope. Most Brooklyn homicides took place in rough areas like East New York, which saw scores of drug-related slayings and simple diss murders—citizens popped just for looking at their neighbors the wrong way. But the Slope was a bastion of yuppies with baby carriages, health food stores, renovated brownstones. The rare homicides on the eastern side of the seventy-eighth Precinct were likely to be the result of a mugging gone wrong, not this sort of inside job.
It was a busy Saturday night—the usual crew of Crime Scene techs and other interested parties had not arrived yet. The local detective, one Tommy Keenan, was a clothes horse: cream linen jacket, red silk tie, gold bracelet on one wrist, a Rolex or a damn good imitation on the other. The linen jacket was not a great sign, Jack thought—it didn’t indicate any eagerness to get in close to the blood and guts of the job. And Keenan was a rookie.
Even so, he’d evidently been on the job long enough to become blasé about the sight of a murder victim. He seemed more interested in a photo of a half-naked woman than in the body of the late tenant. He whistled and held the picture up in a rubber-gloved hand. “Check it out. This is that chick from the new Star Trek. You know, the one who plays the shrink on the Enterprise?”
“That’s very exciting,” Jack deadpanned. “Make sure you include it in your Fives.”
It was clear from the get-go that drugs might be involved in the case—they’d found a professional scale on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room, a tin of silica gel packages in a drawer, seven boxes of sandwich-size Baggies in a cupboard, a stack of wax-paper squares for wrapping grams of coke. If that wasn’t enough, there were pot seeds in the crease of the Grateful Dead double album—an LP, historical relic—on the coffee table. An empty bong lay on the carpet next to a foul-smelling stain. Apparently the vic had been hit while sitting on the couch, then sprawled forward, knocking over the pipe.
“Thank God for AC,” Keenan said. Serinis might have been dead for a couple of days, but the apartment was so chilly that he hadn’t started to smell much—or at least not worse than the bong water.
“I remember the first DOA I ever caught,” Keenan said. “This guy’s neighbors smelled something bad coming out of his apartment—and it was the middle of a heat wave. We break down the door and there’s this old guy laid out on his kitchen floor; he’d been dead a long time and he was blown up like a parade float. My partner gives me a couple cigarette niters to put up my nose. I see this half-empty bottle of roach killer lying next to the vic. One of the neighbors walks in. ‘Oh, shit,’ she says. ‘He just come home from the clinic last week. They told him he had roaches of the liver.’”
Keenan dug a finger in the back of his collar. “Can you believe it? Cirrhosis of the liver.” He laughed, a ghastly booming noise, then moved closer to the body. “How do you see this? I mean, there’s no forced entry, so the vic probably knew the killer. Some customer comes over to make a buy, figures why give old Brucie the money when he can just take it, instead?”
“Maybe,” Jack said. “But it looks more personal than that.”
Keenan bent down for a closer look at the dents in Bruce Serinis’s forehead. “I guess you’re right.” The perp could have come up behind Serinis when he was cleaning the seeds out of his Maui Wowee—knock him over, take the money, get out. But this was a facial assault, which often meant that he had something emotional against the vic.
Keenan yawned. “Those Crime Scene guys are taking their goddamn time. You wanna watch the tube? He’s got cable.”
“No. Go ahead if you want.”
Jack’s new partner didn’t move toward the TV. Instead, he perched on a stool, careful not to disturb anything on the counter. The clock in the kitchen ticked loudly. The refrigerator hummed. Keenan shifted on his seat. “You remember the first time you saw a body?”
“A body?” Jack said. A chill flicked the base of his spine.
“Yeah. Not at a funeral—I mean, out on the street.”
Jack looked down and pinched some carpet lint off his knee. “I don’t know,” he lied. He had been fifteen years old. November 14, 1965. One o’clock in the afternoon.
“I guess when I was in the Army,” he said instead.
“You saw somebody get shot in Nam?”
“No. It wasn’t a gunshot. And it was in Germany. I was stationed there for a few months before I got shipped to the Philippines. It was winter, and we had to go walk guard duty—it was so cold that sometimes our feet would literally freeze. We’d start up a jeep, then take off our boots, sit on the back, warm our feet in the exhaust. One night this grunt was doing that and some hot dog swung a personnel carrier real fast into the compound, crushed him right into the
back of the jeep.”
“Oof.” Keenan grimaced.
Jack wandered over to a sleek black answering machine. The counter said three messages. He pulled on a glove and then pressed play.
“Bruce, it’s your mother. Your father and I were wondering if you’d like to come up for the weekend. You can bring a friend if you want. What was that nice girl’s name—Laurie? Anyhow, call us. We might have a barbecue on Sunday.” Beep.
“Serinis, you stud-muffin, it’s Alan. That chick looked pretty wasted by the time we left. What a cow. So, did you fuck her? Let me know—I’m at work.” Beep.
“Yo, Brewster, man, it’s Dingo. Can I come over and get something later? Like around midnight? I’ve got the cash right now. Call me at home. Thanks.” Beep.
Jack turned to his new partner. “Could be our perp right there. If some cokehead was dumb or stoned enough to leave a message like that, he might have been dumb enough not to erase it after he did the murder.”
“We need to find old Dingo.”
“Let’s look for an address book.”
“Hold on.” Keenan walked over to a desk in the corner, where animated tropical fish swam across a computer screen. He nudged the mouse and the Desktop blipped into view. He sat down and clicked on various icons.
“I’ve got an address list,” he said after a minute. “No ‘Dingo,’ though.”
He returned to his clicking and scrolling. “Wait a minute. Here we go. Boy, he did a great job of hiding the file—he called it ‘Cheech and Chong.’ Phone numbers, even addresses. And here’s our friend Dingo.”
“Tell you what,” Jack said, sitting wearily on a stool. “If you want to go pick up our boy, I’ll wait here for the Crime Scene guys. Get some backup before you go over there.”
Keenan grinned. He made a quick call to request that a couple of patrol units meet him at the location.
“I’ll let you know how it goes down. Thanks, Leightner.”
Jack sat in the silent apartment, remembering a victim in Germany. And another one in Red Hook.
To shut out the past, he went over and stared down at the present vic.
Bruce Serinis was dead. He wouldn’t be attending the Princeton alumni reunion marked by the invite on the coffee table. He wouldn’t watch any of the programs listed in the TV Guide for the rest of the week, would never again call any of the customers in his computer file. But Jack could watch the TV and he could pick up the phone. That was one of the strange lessons of the homicide squad: a life could be snuffed out in an instant, but the world went right on.
Serinis lay in a twisted, awkward position. The side of his face was smashed into the carpet and his mouth sagged slack. Human life was a battle to stand up, take steps, fight gravity. With a blow or gunshot—bang!—gravity suddenly won. Every crime scene was a testament to that victory.
Looking at the slumped, wasted bodies, Jack found it hard to believe in an afterlife. It was difficult to look at Serinis and consider him more than just blank flesh. And he didn’t feel his usual curiosity about the victim. That was partly due to an instinctive distaste: he didn’t like the rampant sense of irony in the apartment, from the posters to the victim’s T-shirt, which read: Welcome to New York. Now Fuck Off. He didn’t like the sound of the friends on the answering machine; didn’t like the picture of a shallow and slobby life. He had dealt with all sorts of mutts as victims, but they didn’t have the opportunities this kid had had. It was one thing to sell drugs if you were trying to break out of the ghetto, but this graduate of an Ivy League school should have made better use of his head start.
Maybe it wasn’t the victim. Maybe he was just getting burnt out on the job. Sick of all the corpses. He’d seen plenty of old workhorses who didn’t give a shit anymore, who just plodded toward their pensions. The Homicide beat didn’t foster an optimistic outlook. Dive bars and casual sex didn’t help. He had to cast far back to find moments—making love with his new wife, holding his infant son for the first time—when he’d been certain that the body was filled with a spirit.
The clock ticked on. He picked up the copy of Playboy from the coffee table and flipped through a pictorial. The July Playmate of the Month had tits that were perfectly round and so freestanding that they had to be fake. And she had one hand between her legs. Christ. He remembered Playboy from the days when he could really get excited about it, at thirteen, fourteen. Back then the models had big tits but they were real and slightly droopy. And the women were modest, wearing negligees coyly placed to conceal even the slightest trace of bush. He’d been thinking a lot lately about whether life tended to get better or worse—this seemed like a crazy way to mark the progress.
He remembered a stack of magazines in an old shed, a clubhouse where the more streetwise Red Hook kids smoked cigarettes and speculated about sex. He’d been initiated into the club after he boosted a carton of smokes from a five-and-dime. That was a time when, despite his father’s heavy hand, Jack had started taking pleasure in small acts of rebellion. His brother followed him to the clubhouse one day, but Jack told him to buzz off, to come back when he was older. If only he could take back those moments—if only he could go back in time and invite him in.
Peter, who left this world before he really lived in it. Who never saw men land on the moon. Never watched the Beatles turn hippie. Never knew that Nixon became president. Or Ford or Carter or the rest. Never used a computer, VCR, or fax machine. Never even had a chance to make love to a woman.
Jack sighed, then stood up. His heart was heavy, but he’d been carrying this weight for thirty-five years.
Out in the hallway a uniform kept guard, a beefy Irish kid. He held one hand to his belt in the stance of an aspiring gunfighter, but his eyes were dull with the boredom of the job.
Jack pulled the door closed. “Don’t touch anything in there, okay? If the Crime Scene guys show up, tell ’em I just went out for a cup of coffee.”
“Yes, sir,” the kid replied.
Jack pulled out a cigarette. He coughed as he took the first drag. A little voice in his head said, Those are gonna kill you someday. Another voice answered: Everybody died.
The sidewalks of Park Slope buzzed with couples and hungry singles, crowds streaming across Seventh Avenue against the lights. A group of yuppies in rumpled business suits spilled out of a bar and swaggered around Jack without a single “excuse me;” the air was thick with alcohol and testosterone.
Happy faces floated past, but he was sinking. He thought of calling Michelle—he wanted to call Michelle—but her image in his mind was blended with a picture of Mr. Gardner lying helpless upstairs. Was that the only reason he didn’t call? No, he dug deeper into his heart and hit ice: he was afraid.
And tired: he hadn’t slept well in a week.
There was always Sheila. He hadn’t spoken to her since his last drop-in; now here he was considering a call. What a sad sack.
He could fall into a bar instead; he was in plainclothes, so who would be the wiser? He wanted to bury himself—in flesh, in alcohol, it didn’t matter.
Go home, he told himself. Go talk to your son.
He was afraid of that too.
Instead, he walked. Off Seventh Avenue, the side streets were quiet save for a few dog walkers and couples promenading in the warm night air. He turned a corner outside a church. Through a tall iron fence, a group of little white statues gleamed amid some dark ivy. A shepherd. A wise-faced little lamb. The Virgin Mary, sad and sweet.
He paused, weary. He supposed he should get back to the crime scene, but he was sick of the smell of bong water, sick of searching the remnants of Bruce Serinis’s wasted life. What was he doing? he wondered. A Jewish man standing in the dark outside a church? He didn’t have to be Christian to be moved by the Virgin, though. She had the face of any mother grieving over her murdered son.
“The meeting’s down there,” someone said in the darkness.
Jack spun around. Under the little bit of light that filtered down from a street lam
p through the dense trees, a man sat on the steps of the church, smoking. The stranger leaned over the railing and pointed. A flight of stairs led down below street level to a door. “It’s okay. It hasn’t started yet. Go on in.”
“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
The man sat back and took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Whatever. It’s an open meeting.”
Jack stepped away. He looked at his watch and realized that he’d only killed ten minutes. Chances were that the Crime Scene team hadn’t even arrived yet. On impulse, he turned back and walked down the stairs.
He felt awkward entering the church, even if it was only the basement. When he was a kid in Red Hook, some neighborhood boys had dared him to go inside Visitation Church. They told him he’d be hit by lightning because he was a Christ Killer.
He walked down a corridor to a large fluorescent-lit basement hall. Rows of people sat in folding chairs facing a low stage with a faded red velvet curtain and an American flag on a stand. It reminded him of his elementary-school auditorium. Out of old habit, he found a seat near the back.
A lanky red-haired man casually mounted the stage and sat behind a card table. “Okay, let’s get going,” he said. “If this is your first time here, you should know that we have a regular meeting every night, and on Fridays we have a special Step meeting after that.”
Jack glanced around and noticed small red-lettered signs on the walls which proclaimed One Day At A Time and Take It Easy. His eyes widened at a big scroll headed The Twelve Steps. He’d stumbled into an AA meeting. Would it suddenly stop when they noticed the arrival of an impostor?
Flushed, he was about to jump up, but when he looked around no one seemed concerned about his presence. The forty or so members sat calmly, many of them with arms folded across their chests. He’d never been to such a meeting before, but he’d imagined they’d be full of old men with stubbly beards, wearing dirty raincoats. Alcoholics. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might look like this, these people who might have walked in off a busy downtown street. People in suits and ties. Normal-looking people.
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