“Like I said, your case, your call. Isn’t it funny, Nick, how when you start, you picture all the great things you might do, and in the end, you wind up wondering what you can get away with?”
When Nick rose from his crate, his calves began to cramp. As he clutched the wall, Esposito jumped up to steady him, seizing an arm. After the pain passed, Nick limped back inside the boiler room, for a last look at how he’d solved his last case. This was how it all ended. No, not everything, only the good part. He could conceive how a kidnapping charge could be made against him, at least how the arguments would be framed. The law says it’s when you take a person against his will, not a “good person,” and a cop of all people should know better…. Maybe they’d go easy on him, in the end, but he wouldn’t be a cop anymore. His career was over. Was that so bad? He looked at Costa, the kinked neck, the darkened face. Nick wished he could have been proud.
Esposito still had his gloves on as he picked up the notebook, and started to examine the pages. “Shit, Nick—you broke him? He even wrote it out for you? He wrote this?”
“Yeah.”
For a second, Nick did feel pride, if only in the narrowest aspect of the contest, that he’d cracked a code, found a way in. He almost didn’t care what Costa had to say. All had been revealed, and Nick assumed that Costa’s final disclosure had been equally candid and complete. The story would go where it would, and Nick would make no further effort to spin it, stop it, shove it along, no matter what.
“What did he say?” Nick asked.
“You’re not gonna like it.”
“What?”
It hadn’t occurred to Nick that there might be something other than truth at the end of the ordeal. He tried to take the notebook, but Esposito held it away from him, in his gloved hand.
“Hang on. Wait, don’t touch. I hate to break this to you, Nick, but there’s pages and pages about how if he’s a rapist, you are, that you’re no better than he is. She’ll never stay with you, blah, blah, blah. Plus, a lot of sex stuff.”
Nick stepped toward Costa’s corpse as if he were about to punch his lying dead head, when Esposito stopped him, grabbing the collar of his coat.
“Are you kidding?” Nick’s voice nearly cracked. “This guy blames me?”
Esposito shook his head, then nodded. No and yes.
“Easy, buddy. It is what it is. He says everything was going fine for him, till you showed up. That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
It seemed like sacrilege to erase a man’s last words, even this man’s, but Nick could not let them be heard. “Throw that shit out. Burn it. That is just not—”
“Easy, now. Would you let me finish? There’s a lot here, a lot of cross-outs and starting again. But look at the first page. Just don’t touch.”
Esposito held the pad in front of him. “I, Raul Costa, have done NOTHING wrong. It is NOT my fault.” That was it? Nick found it hard to concentrate on the pages that followed, found it hard even to think of it as a confession, with all the shrill denunciations and mopey platitudes. As if Nick should have expected more.
“Shit. I mean, I know it doesn’t mean anything, but I wanted a real statement from him. For him to just admit what he did.”
Esposito’s laughter perplexed him.
“Don’t you know what you got? Leave it to you to see the downside…. I love you, pal, but you got this wrong. It’s perfect. Just the first page. Nothing about getting arrested, nothing about you yet. It’s all whiny bullshit about how life is unfair. Don’t read it like a confession. Read it like a suicide note. It is! I’m gonna put it back in his pocket, just that page, not the rest. Let’s get out of here.”
Esposito shook his head, smiling, and Nick realized how well it worked, how it would make the lie true. Was it that? The words had not changed, but they now said something else. They had been translated by circumstance. Or maybe they had become hostile witnesses, repudiating their prior testimony. But their meaning would not settle and fix, not as intended; the story would go on, with or without Nick. Maybe it was time to just get out of its way.
Esposito asked if he’d searched him, if Nick had anything from the body. Nick handed over the wallet, keys, lollipop. Esposito said he’d take care of the warrant, so that when cops found him and ran his ID, they would know who he was, what he had done. The story would arrive with the body at the morgue, shaping the understanding of what had happened. This walking depravity had finally been overtaken with remorse, had fallen prey to his own hatred. Which had happened. It was what had happened. True enough, close enough. Let’s finish and be done. Tomorrow, a fresh start.
Neither of them spoke after that, until they left the basement. Esposito took the wallet, wiped it down, slipped it into Costa’s back pocket. Keys in the front. There was a momentary hesitation at touching the body, but Esposito pushed on, did what he had to do. He unlocked the cuffs from the ankle and pipe and handed them to Nick, who rubbed them on his leg, as if to get the Costa traces off before putting them into his pocket. He remembered Esposito’s revulsion at the morgue, and thought how hard it must have been for him to touch the body. Nick was glad he hadn’t disclosed the details of his last, nauseous proximity to Costa’s mortal arousal. Esposito shuddered when he finished, brushing his shoulders as if there might be flecks of death on them, like dandruff. Upstairs, Esposito circled the lobby, checking for cameras, but Nick waved him on. He knew there weren’t any. Someone had checked it for the stakeout earlier today, when Grace had left for school. They were in the clear.
Outside, the chill air tasted as sweet as mint, and snowflakes fell like flower petals in the lamplight. So beautiful, all of it was. As Nick looked north to the park, remembering how it had started, he felt dizzy. The magic landscape seemed to circle and buck. How it all goes round and round; maybe Ivan Lopez would find this body, too, just like at the beginning. No, there was no going back. It would be another story tomorrow, about someone else. Nick felt steady again, almost strong.
Esposito had walked ahead of him, was already at the car. He opened the door and was about to get inside, stamping the snow from his feet.
“I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Nah. I’ll walk. Clear my head.”
Esposito looked doleful, uncertain. His face could have been Nick’s face from yesterday, hours ago, most of his life.
“See you tomorrow?” Esposito asked.
“No.”
Esposito looked bereft, alone. Nick knew that face, too, and he spoke quickly, careful of his emotion, fearful of the breadth of its spectrum.
“No. We’re off tomorrow.”
True enough, cold truth, the coldest, in its solid form. No promises and no lies. He’d see Allison tomorrow, the old wife, the old life. No, he’d see what was new. Tomorrow, after he woke, he’d see soon enough, he’d know what he’d dreamt, which dream had survived the daylight. Husband and father; neither and nothing. All in the air. Nothing was fixed yet, settled, as things were in the basement, down by the river, on the rocks. Three dead men, men of agency, of ambition and resolve, who had known the world was against them and had proved their own truth. Rapist, killer, and rat, the hell with all of them. Nick recoiled at the presumption, the lack of charity. Had he already forgotten—wasn’t it only minutes ago, when he’d last been forgiven himself? As if he were outside of the process, as if he wished to be. He walked over to Esposito, touched his cheek, tousled his hair. Not quite right, the contact; something distant and paternal to it, when he was neither. Esposito took a glove off and shook Nick’s hand. That was better. That would do. No desolation in Esposito’s eyes, not that Nick could see, now that his own sight was unhindered, unhelped, by the wilder lights. Tomorrow would tell, enough to keep him interested. He was not a hopeful man at heart, but he would manage. Nick turned and walked away, out of the deeper snow to the road, shaky-legged but thankful that he didn’t have far to go.
Abiding thanks to my agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh; Laura Van der Veer, Michael Mezzo, and,
most obviously, Julie Grau at Spiegel & Grau; early readers Elizabeth Callendar, Amanda Weil, and John Driscoll; and last-minute Spanish proofreaders, Eduardo Castell and Rafael Estrella.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDWARD CONLON is a detective with the New York City Police Department. A graduate of Harvard, he has published articles in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine and has been included in The Best American Essays 2001. He is the author of a memoir, Blue Blood, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and a New York Times bestseller.
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