“Hola!” Díaz cried jubilantly. He was pulling a shoebox out of Moon’s closet, holding the top in one hand. Several officers looked over at him.
“Looks like maybe five, six ounces of pot, bagged for sale, and a shitload of cash here, Lieutenant.” He peered into the box and looked up with a happy grin, like a boy with a trick-or-treat bag.
“Don’t touch anything, for Christ’s sake. Put it back and get the video cam.”
“What do they pay you for an ounce of weed these days, Clarence?” the black cop on the other side of the bed asked.
“That’s not ours,” Sandra exclaimed. “Moon, what is that?”
“Whoa,” said the southern voice in the doorway. It was a man in plainclothes with a raid jacket, looking over the lieutenant’s shoulder at Sandra with a pleased, lazy smile. “I believe we just heard an excited utterance, admissible in a court of law.”
“Baby, hush now,” Moon said sharply, and his face made Sandra’s stomach plunge. She saw him look quickly over at her and then down at the floor, as if he were ashamed. This was the worst shock yet. Who had she married?
“Somebody might just want to scribble Miz Hudson’s remark down somewhere.”
Grace did begin to bleat faintly now. The sound expanded in Sandra’s mind and pushed its way through everything, one clear, irresistible call in this mass of confusion.
“Get her out of here,” the lieutenant said, waving his hand at Sandra. “Let her get the kid. She’s okay. What?” He twisted around to speak to someone in the living room, then turned again to look at Sandra in her nightgown and sheet. He seemed frazzled, and he gazed on her with distaste. “Take the cuffs off, Al. She’s okay. Seems like King sniffed out more goodies in the basement.” He blew his nose into a wrinkled handkerchief.
As Al, or Alex, unlocked the cuffs, Sandra heard the lieutenant mutter to the man in plainclothes, “Holy Mother of Christ, with the kid here and everything.” They looked away as she passed. A few seconds later, sleepwalking through the shattered living room, Sandra heard the lieutenant’s voice behind her.
“Jimmy, give Mrs. Hudson a copy of the warrant. It must be on the floor there somewhere, by the table. Anybody run across any Tylenol?”
In the baby’s room, Grace stopped crying the instant Sandra picked her up. The infant began to smack her lips and peer around eagerly with her beautiful almond-shaped eyes, watching the mobile with its dancing figures of Tigger, Kanga, and baby Roo. She’d be wailing for breakfast soon. Back in their bedroom, Moon’s deep, submissive voice was audible.
“What’s all this for? The weed?”
There was a dead silence and then a disgusted snort.
“Sure thing, Clarence,” someone said. “Pull that sweatshirt over him and stick his ass in the cruiser. Grab his sneakers.”
“Sean Daley’s on the porch,” the lieutenant said. “Let him have a good look.”
The female officer, heavyset with short, curly hair, came up to Sandra in the baby’s room, stepping over a strewn pile of Luvs and crib sheets. She spoke in a hard, automatic voice. “Is there any place you could take the baby, ma’am? How about your neighbor upstairs? We’re gonna be here awhile.”
Ten minutes later, having tossed a few baby supplies into a grocery bag, Sandra dragged herself up the stairs, bracing Grace awkwardly against her side. Her neighbor Spanky, an enormous woman in a fuchsia housedress as big as a tent, stood on the landing reaching out toward Sandra with flabby arms, a dreamlike figure at the end of a dark tunnel.
8
David and Claire were sitting in the driveway outside David’s garage, with rain streaming sideways across the windshield and the car rocking in the gusts of wind. The moment had come, David told himself, either to step off the high-dive or head back down the ladder. The last time he could remember being in this position was with Faye in the back of a school bus, getting up the nerve to hold hands.
He’d been stalling with apologies for his law rant at the dinner table.
“Oh, pooh!” Claire poked his shoulder. “Gerry plays one note—politics—and he always has to be the smartest guy in the room. Your ignoring him for so long was hysterical. I bet he’s plotting his revenge at this very moment.” A cracking noise made her glance up into the thrashing trees. “Assuming he and his ingenue du jour aren’t otherwise occupied.”
David began fiddling with the knob on the glove compartment.
“I always end up feeling … I don’t know …”
“Constipated, sure. But there are things you have to tiptoe around, right? Like, obviously, if someone asks your opinion of the death penalty, you go all peculiar and distant.”
“Not distant,” David said. The glove compartment flopped open, and he reached down between his feet to retrieve a pencil. “Definitely peculiar.”
“Okay, not distant.” Claire nodded. “Just fencing your garden.”
She had beautifully even, very white teeth and a mouth that seemed always about to break into a smile.
“I understand,” she continued. “We medievalists have our secrets, too, you know.”
“Really? Like what?”
“I can’t tell you. That’s the point.”
“What sort of secrets then?”
“Well …” She drew the word out. “One example. After you make full professor, they tell you who murdered the little princes in the Tower of London in 1483.”
“Wow! Was it really Richard III? I’ve always thought he was framed.”
“Like I said, I can’t tell you.”
David shook his head and muttered, “That is so much better than any of my secrets.”
The wind died down, and their black leatherette world went very quiet as he looked into Claire’s eyes. Just the purr of the idling engine, the thud of the wipers, and the tap of sleet on the glass. Faint scent of vanilla. He felt slightly dizzy, as though the back end of the car were lifting off the ground. This was when he was supposed to do something.
Claire turned to David and put her hand on his shoulder. He had an insane thought that she might reach down, unzip his fly, and propose oral sex. People did that these days, didn’t they?
“How about this?” She dropped her voice. “I’ll tell you one of my secrets, if you tell me one of yours.”
“Uh,” David began, but they kissed before he could continue, and his field of consciousness contracted to tongue, lips, and nose, the taste of her mouth, and the need to make spaces to breathe. After a life-transforming interval, they broke, and David said, “I don’t know about that.”
“I figured.”
They resumed kissing, maneuvering as well as they could in the cramped interior. Claire slipped her arms up inside David’s jacket, cupping her hands over his shoulder blades and down his long back, pulling him to her. The competence of her touch was as thrilling to David as her tenderness. This was a woman who might be, in the best sense, very easy.
“Okay,” Claire whispered, very close, “here’s the deal.” She kissed him. “I’ll tell you one of my secrets for free.” She kissed him again, longer this time. “And you can decide if you want to reciprocate.”
“I don’t … I don’t know.”
Claire’s breath played over his face. “You mustn’t tell a soul.” She put her finger on the tip of his nose and looked into his eyes solemnly. “William the Conqueror had three testicles.”
They burst out laughing and fell onto each other with even more appetite. David let his hands slide along the splendid curve of Claire’s waist, up over her ribs, brushing up over her breasts and around to the trailing archipelago of her vertebrae. Small things nipped at the edges of his mind—the gearshift and the painful hand brake, the cold nudge of the rearview mirror against his temple, the fact that he badly needed to go to the bathroom—but he was so engulfed in pleasure and amazed at Claire’s eagerness that he barely noticed. Even whe
n a sad chill brushed him, the ghost of Faye melting into the back of his mind, he did not pause or, for the moment, even care very much.
On the other side of infinity, they took a break, clinging and breathing contentedly.
“Okay,” David said. He laid his nose on the side of Claire’s head and breathed in deeply. Distant scent of coconut. “Here’s mine. Personally, I don’t care much for death.”
“Egad. Let me get a pencil.”
“Very funny. I mean, for the death penalty. Too much strain on the system.”
“The legal system or your system?”
“Everybody’s system. The doubts about whether the defendant did it, the pressure to conduct a perfect trial, everything.” He sniffed and drew himself up from Claire’s head. The air was cool. “Then, to tell the truth, I’m about sick to death of death. We’re all going to get there some day. No need to hurry things.”
Claire tilted her face up to him, and he kissed her eyelids, then the wings of her nose and her chin. As he put his hands over her breasts again, she moaned softly, cleared her throat, and spoke over his shoulder, slowing things down.
“I’ve never in my life seen such a tidy garage.”
“Rural upbringing. A man’s judged more by his barn than his house.”
Two sharp woofs came from inside.
“Oh, that’s right—you have an exploding dog!” Claire said delightedly.
“Yes.” He realized that Marlene had been barking for some time, not in anger but with the mechanical persistence of a car alarm. “Could you, uh, come in for a minute?”
“I think,” Claire said carefully, “that might be a little too soon.”
“No, no,” David said. “I didn’t mean that. That would be too much.”
“ ‘Too soon’ is what I said.”
“I just wanted to rescue my poor dog.” He rocked back into his seat, trying discreetly and without success to arrange his erection at a more comfortable angle.
“Uh-huh.” She glanced down and looked up at him with her eyes crinkling. “Go release your animal. This will do for now.”
As David swung his legs around to get out of the car, he was finally able to reposition himself and stand up with reasonable ease. The blowing rain on his face felt terrific.
“Don’t worry about my car,” he said, bending down.
“Oh, I won’t.” She lowered her window. “I did that on purpose, you know.” Her voice began to fade into the wind as she drove off. “Just kidding! Maybe. Now call me, you jerk!”
Back in his home, safe out of the weather, David’s yellow Lab was waiting; she banged her thick tail against the doorframe and pushed her nose into his knees in greeting.
“Marlene,” David said, “we really need to talk.”
9
After they took Moon Hudson away, Holyoke Police Captain Sean Daley spent a few minutes checking out the mess inside the apartment. Then he gave Jack O’Connor a call and asked if he could come over and talk to him and the boys. It was late, he said, so he’d only take a minute.
Daley had never married; instead, he’d poured his life into his job. He’d been hospitalized twice for stab wounds and nearly killed when a .38 round struck his “bulletproof” vest. Two civilians and a fellow officer were still alive because of his quick action, and he had four commendations for bravery. On duty, Daley’s views on discipline made him as unbendable as a tire iron, but in the supermarket he might easily have been mistaken for a bookkeeper or an introverted shop foreman.
Daley’s habit of passing out peppermint balls and telling hair-raising stories about the criminals he’d caught made him a favorite among his nieces and nephews. He loved to recount the tale of the family’s great-great-grandfather Dominic Daley, hanged in Northampton in 1806, supposedly for a murder but, in fact, for the crime of being an Irish Catholic passing through town when a local Protestant turned up with his head bashed in.
Of all the adoring younger generation, his niece Ginger Daley O’Connor had been Captain Daley’s secret pet. In fact, when she’d been a nursing student and he’d been in his mid-thirties, he’d had half, and maybe more than half, a crush on her, though of course he never let anyone know. He still remembered how radiant she looked at her graduation from Holyoke Community College, and how jealous he was of that big sap Jack O’Connor. At her wedding, Ginger’s were the prettiest brown eyes he’d ever seen and her young spirit the most luminous.
In his decades as a police officer, Daley had looked on death many times, but he had never dreamed that any loss would tear out his heart like this one. It had been Daley who, to spare Jack, had formally identified Ginger’s graying body at the morgue for the medical examiner’s staff.
Jack was standing on the porch, waiting with his arms crossed, oblivious to the blowing rain as Daley parked his Crown Victoria cruiser. The two men nodded, and Jack pushed the door open for him.
The boys were waiting in the kitchen in their pajamas and bathrobes, looking mussed and sleepy. It was a school night, and already after midnight. Jack Jr., the oldest and handsomest, was at the far end of the kitchen table, sitting like the image of his father with his arms folded. Ed, the middle child, the only one in the family who’d had the poise to speak at his mother’s memorial service, was to Jack Jr.’s left with his head resting on his arms, half asleep. Michael, the eleven-year-old, was sitting on the counter next to the flour and sugar canisters. His dark, wide-awake eyes looked scared.
They all said “Hi, Uncle Sean” when he walked in, but there were no smiles these days, and their voices were lifeless.
“Boys,” Daley said, standing just inside the kitchen doorway, “you need your sleep, so I’ll get right to it. It will be in the papers tomorrow anyway. We just arrested the man we think …” He started to say “killed your mother,” but he couldn’t get the words out, so after clearing his throat he just said, “did the shooting.”
“Who is he?” Jack Jr. asked. “Where’d they put him?”
“He’s a black drug dealer from Holyoke named Clarence Hudson,” Daley said. “They think he’s a Flag—that’s what they call members of the street gang called La Bandera—or somebody associated with them.”
“I wish they’d killed him,” Jack Jr. said fiercely, clenching his fists in front of him.
“Well,” said Daley, “we’ll see what happens.”
“How do they know it was him?” Michael asked.
“Now that’s a smart question, Mike,” Daley responded, nodding at Ginger’s youngest boy, the one who reminded him most of her. “Seems like the driver, a kid named Rivera, about Eddie’s age, says Hudson did it. He says Hudson was selling drugs up at UMass and got into some kind of beef with Delgado, who was supplying his drugs. Rivera says Hudson told him he was only going to scare Delgado, not shoot him, and that he got a hundred dollars to drive the car.”
“That’s funny,” Michael said. “Why would he just want to scare him?”
Daley scratched his head again and frowned. “Tell you the truth, Mike, it is funny. Rivera’s uncle Carlos is a big shot in the La Bandera street gang, and he’s disappeared. We’ll find him, and we’ll see what Rivera says in a day or two.”
“This Hudson guy,” Jack Jr. asked, “will they execute him?”
“God, I hope so!” Eddie burst out, sitting up. “I want to be standing right there when it happens. I want to pull the damn …”
The boys’ father broke in, “Edward!”
“Sorry.” Eddie lowered his head back to the table, staring forward.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “It wasn’t on purpose, was it? It was, like, a ricochet. If Mom just hadn’t stopped and leaned over …”
“Right,” O’Connor said. “That’s all the news for tonight, boys. They got him. We knew they would. Off to bed now. We can talk more tomorrow.”
The three boys moved slowly o
ut of the room. Daley brushed a hand through Michael’s dark hair as he dragged himself toward the door. The child was thin—the belt of his bathrobe seemed to go around him twice—and he looked as though he were hauling a slab of concrete behind him.
Jack squatted down in front of Michael after his brothers had passed.
“Mikey, listen to me. I’m going to stay home from work tomorrow. We’ll talk about this, okay? Just like Dr. Rosen said. And don’t forget, I’m not going anywhere.”
When he gave the boy a hug, the eyes of both father and son were shining. Daley turned and examined the darkness outside the window over the sink.
After they heard the bedroom doors close, Jack said, “Come in the front room a minute, Sean. You want some coffee?”
Daley shook his head, and they walked down the hall and into a far corner at the front of the house, where their voices would not be heard upstairs. They collapsed into a pair of armchairs.
Daley said, “Sweet Jesus! How do you do this?”
O’Connor threw his head back, put his hands over his face and breathed deeply, then dropped his arms in his lap and leaned forward. Sharp lines were pulling down at the corners of his mouth. His face looked ravaged.
“So what do you think, Sean? What’s up?” He looked at Daley. “Can we trust this?”
“Jack, I honestly don’t know. This Rivera kid’s a born liar, one of these Puerto Rican halfwits. You know me—I don’t say this about all of them. We have some fine Puerto Rican officers, but my God, Jack, some of the kids down in the Flats these days are barely human. They grow up with no fathers, their mothers can’t cope, they hardly speak English, they can’t read or write in any language, and they’re peddling drugs by the time they’re thirteen.”
As he’d been speaking, his voice had increased in intensity, and a flush had spread up his cheeks.
“They’re not bad people, most of those poor women,” he said, speaking even more quietly, as though talking to himself. “Most of them work like billy-be-damned. What hurts is I couldn’t stop this.” He paused. “Now she’s gone, and she was worth the whole basketful of us.”
The Hanging Judge Page 6