by Carrie Smith
But two months ago, Baiba had wanted to be here more than anything. She still vividly remembered the afternoon when Merchant had stopped her after his visit to Nostalgia and murmured, “Why don’t you have dinner with me tonight.” She could so easily have avoided that invitation by ignoring his smiles and subtle flirtations in the weeks leading up to it. But she had not ignored them. She had enjoyed his attention. She had encouraged it, she supposed. And by the time he extended the dinner invitation, she had already rationalized her acceptance. Yes, he was technically married, but he wasn’t truly being unfaithful. Lucy Merchant didn’t even know him anymore. And unlike some of the men with wives in Nostalgia, he had never attempted to make unseemly and inappropriate “conjugal” visits to a woman who couldn’t legally consent. For all intents and purposes, he was a handsome, eligible, sexually attractive—and wealthy—widower.
They had dined at a discreet corner table in the Pool Room of the Four Seasons. On her empty stomach, the crisp white wine had gone quickly to her head. They’d shared oysters and tuna tartare before their main courses. He had commented on the hypnotic blueness of her eyes and asked about her childhood in Riga, her education, and her ambitions. And all during the meal his knee had lightly touched hers below the table.
When the meal was over, he had dropped his Black Card onto the check and leaned so close that Baiba felt his breath against her ear as he whispered, “I want to take you home with me. Tell me you want to come.” She still felt that light touch of his breath after he sat up. For several seconds, she had stared at the glowing pool lights below the bubbling water in the center of the dining room. The wine and the warmth of those lights drowned out the warnings in her mind, and finally she met his eyes and said, “Yes. I want to come with you.”
An hour later they entered this room for the first time. He’d sat on the edge of the bed, fully clothed, and said, “Take your dress off for me.” And when her dress had fallen to the floor, he had gestured her over and pulled her face down across his lap in one practiced move, slipped his fingers under the edge of her panties, kneaded her buttocks, and murmured appreciatively. “You’re a walking sin. You need a spanking for being so sexy. Tell me you want me to spank you.”
For an instant Baiba had thought he must be joking. She tried to sit up, but he pressed her head back down. “Tell me,” he demanded, and then she’d felt the first prick of fear, but something else, too, swimming just below it. Curiosity. Excitement. Desire. “I want to hear you say it,” he repeated, and she heard herself say the words, and in saying them, she found that she did want him to do it. Her face had burned with deep self-consciousness and arousal as his fingers pulled back the fabric and his palm made contact with her flesh. Her arousal and her shame at it were so intricately entwined that she could not separate the two. Each sting of his palm against her skin had brought the two states closer and closer until the punishment was pleasure and the intensity of her desire was beyond anything she had ever felt. And in that state, it was suddenly so easy to rationalize what was happening. It was not strange at all, she told herself. Merchant was not actually hurting her. They were playing a sexual game. Everyone, she told herself as he ordered her onto her hands and knees and she heard the unzipping of his slacks, everyone explored their boundaries when it came to sex. How else did you ever really lose yourself to pleasure? How else did you reach a state of pure abandon in which you became nothing more than an egoless organism hooked to a high voltage cable?
But two hours later, curled into the backseat as Felipe deposited her home, her arousal and shame had uncoiled into separate entities again and she felt something more like self-loathing. I will never go back there, she had told herself. I will never let him do that to me again. But even as she’d made the vow, she knew she would go back, that she wanted to go back. And here she was yet again.
Baiba lifted her forehead from the cold windowpane. When Merchant came in, he would expect to find her undressed, she thought, and her fingers instinctively reached for the top button of her blouse, but they were like the numb extremities of a frostbite victim and would not cooperate. She should not be here, she thought again. Lucy Merchant had died less than twenty-four hours ago, and being here tonight was vulgar, tasteless, and unspeakable. He was unspeakable. He was not the same man she had dined with on that first night when he could not take his eyes off her. That night, she had believed she had a unique hold over him, that he wanted her—only her—and that Lucy Merchant’s disease, her move to Park Manor, her quick deterioration over the past eighteen months, had all been preordained so that she and Thomas would be together.
But what if she had never been the real object of his longing? What if she had only seen what she wanted to see that night in the Four Seasons? If he truly cared about her, would he sequester her in this room? Would he keep her waiting while he made his phone calls? The truth, she finally allowed herself to recognize, was that she—Baiba—meant nothing to him. She had probably never meant anything to him. He might be content with any attractive blond willing to submit to his fantasy requirements—requirements that had grown steadily more demeaning.
She heard his footsteps. She watched the doorknob turn. She put her hand to her throat as the door swung open. She saw him look at her, take in the fact that she was still dressed, and frown.
“I have to go,” she said quickly, reaching for her coat.
“Don’t be silly. You just got here.” He held out the glass in his hand and smiled. “Here. Drink this. Let’s sit by the fire.”
She stared at the clear, iced liquid in the tumbler. Her eyes darted to the two empty glasses on the coffee table.
“Go on,” he coaxed.
She shook her head, or she thought that she was shaking her head. She couldn’t be sure. Nothing seemed quite real. She did not feel quite real.
“Here.” He stepped closer. “Have a little drink.”
And then she felt fear in its undiluted form. Get away from me, she wanted to say. You can’t make me drink that. Get out. And in a sudden synaptic explosion that finally destroyed whatever force had been pulling her here, she realized that she had mentally uttered Lucy Merchant’s nightly refrain. The tips of her fingers tingled. Her legs felt weak. “I have to go. I really have to go.”
He grabbed her arm. “That’s fine,” he said, “but you don’t look well. Have this drink first. You’ll feel better. Then Felipe can take you home.”
He steered her to a love seat, placed the glass in her hand, and guided it to her lips.
CHAPTER 17
Their legs were still intertwined. Codella closed her eyes, and for an instant all of her was in the bed, between the sheets, with him. But in the very next instant, Julia Merchant’s voice was in her mind pulling her away from this comfortable reality. You’re a daughter, too. A daughter. You’re a daughter. And then she was thinking about the oxycodone Muñoz had detected in the rug fibers. “I’m going over to that Park Manor place tomorrow,” she told Haggerty. “I’m going to get my own carpet sample. I’ll have Muñoz run a test on that one, too.”
Haggerty’s lips were against the back of her head. “Do you always mix business with pleasure?”
“Sorry.”
He sighed. “Remember, those test kits can lie. It could be a false positive.”
“I know, I know. And I vouchered the fibers and sent them to the lab, but it could take weeks to get confirmation, and Julia Merchant’s evidence would never be admissible anyway. I have to get my own sample before there’s no sample to get.”
He rested his warm palm against her bare stomach. “Are you sure you’re not just manufacturing a homicide case because McGowan won’t give you one?”
His question was justified, she knew, because for three months he had been the sounding board for her frustration. He had listened patiently as she described every daily slight McGowan and Fisk had dealt her. And he had talked her off the ledge the night the Manhattan North duty sergeant steered a homicide to Fisk when she was the
detective on call. “That case was mine,” she’d told Haggerty as they sat in a vegan restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue eating organic coconut açaí bowls. Well, she was eating hers and he was looking at his skeptically. “McGowan’s got his people deliberately shutting me out. I should go over his head with a complaint on that.”
“And then he’d really have it in for you,” Haggerty had said as he tentatively sampled the muddy mixture in his bowl. “Listen, Claire. You’ve got to keep your cool. Don’t let him see how you really feel. Remember, he’s only there because he’s got two uncles with captain shields. Wait him out. Sooner or later he’ll do something really stupid and they’ll ship him off to some other unlucky squad.”
Now she placed her palm over Haggerty’s hand. She looked out the window and tried to see the tip of the Empire State Building’s spire—on very clear nights it was just visible over the rooftops—but tonight the falling snow concealed it. “Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Just thanks for being here.”
“Does that mean I get to spend the night?”
“Maybe. If you stop leaving the toilet seat up.”
She could feel him grinning in the dark, and she thought about how she had liked that grin from the moment she had met him eight years ago, the day she had joined the 171st. Three detectives had been sitting in the squad room that day, she remembered, but only Haggerty had looked up at her.
“Which one of these desks is mine?” she’d asked.
He shrugged and patted the metal desk next to his. “This one’s free—if you want to sit by your new partner.”
The flirtation was harmless, but the last thing she wanted was a squad of male detectives infusing every word to her with sexual innuendo. “Thanks,” she answered coolly.
He seemed to get the message. “Where you from, Codella?” he asked in a neutral voice, speaking low.
“Cranston, Rhode Island.”
“Cranston, huh? Aren’t you supposed to pronounce that Craaaaanston?” And then he had shown her that grin.
“Pretty good.” She smiled. “But it needs to be a little more nasal.”
“Don’t you want to know where I’m from?”
Codella booted up the computer terminal at her new desk and wondered if it had been vacant because no one wanted to listen to his chatter.
“Staten Island,” he volunteered.
“The borough nobody wants?”
“Hey, we don’t get to choose where we’re born, now do we?” He raised an eyebrow, and she had the uncanny sense that he was telling her, I get you. I know who you are.
Haggerty had been her partner her entire time at the 171st, and she had come to know all his habits as well as he knew hers. If he’d spent the night with some woman he’d picked up in a bar, he arrived the next morning in yesterday’s clothes, shaved in the second floor precinct bathroom, and slapped on too much cologne, which she had to breathe all day. If he’d spent the night with a bottle of Knob Creek, his breakfast would be hard-boiled eggs and tea loaded with sugar. He smoked when he was thinking. And when he was depressed, he flirted with her to distract himself and she’d have to say, “Cut the bullshit.” But Haggerty hadn’t really opened up to her until three years ago when she and Vic Portino pulled him out of a pub after he picked a fight with a guy at the bar. She took him to her apartment, sat him on her couch with a cup of strong coffee, and just watched him.
“You got a boyfriend, Codella?” he asked her.
“You know I don’t do boyfriends, Haggerty.”
“You don’t see yourself getting married, making a couple of babies, having the perfect life?”
“Who the fuck has the perfect life?”
“I don’t know.” His speech was thick from the alcohol. “I see these rich moms in their tight yoga outfits dropping kids off at private school every morning. Their lives seem pretty damn perfect.”
“Drink the coffee, Haggerty.”
But he didn’t sip it once, and his eyes were so red and squinted she wondered if he could even bring her into focus.
He leaned forward and set down the untouched coffee. “I once thought I’d get married, have kids. Even bought an engagement ring. Cost me twelve big ones I didn’t have, but I was in love.” He laughed. His laughter turned almost uncontrollable.
“Drink some coffee,” she said again.
He still didn’t touch the coffee. “Her name was Cindy. Had a big apartment in Murray Hill—courtesy of Daddy.” His head flopped back on her couch, and he stared at the ceiling. “God, I loved to go out with her, Codella. I loved to be seen with her. Stupid, huh? Shallow of me? But she was smart and beautiful. A law student. I couldn’t believe my luck. Why would someone like her want to be with me, you know?” He lifted his head and looked over. “I fucking agonized over that ring. Would she like it? Was it impressive enough? And I must have rehearsed a hundred times how I was going to propose. I was so fucking nervous.”
He was nervous now, she thought as she watched him bite his lower lip.
“So I showed up at her apartment one afternoon. Doorman always gave me the key. I had it in my head we’d make love and if it felt like the right time, I’d take the ring out and ask her the big question, but I never got the chance.”
Codella watched his hand grip his jaw as he spoke. She didn’t know why he had chosen this moment to tell her this story, but she sensed he was determined to get it out, even if he woke up tomorrow and regretted it.
“She was in bed with another guy. They were naked. Her hair’s all tangled. They’ve obviously just finished fucking. I’m too stunned to think clearly. So I say, ‘What’s going on?’ She just looked at me with her mouth gaping, but the guy, he smiles, pulls her close, and says, ‘What do you think’s going on? She’s done slumming with an Irish cop. Now get the fuck out of here.’ I can still hear how that fucker laughed as I turned to leave.” Haggerty leaned forward and stared at Codella’s rug as if he were looking at an enormous, shiny cockroach. “That motherfucking bastard. Bet he dumped her the same way she dumped me.”
“Why are you telling me this, Haggerty?” she asked him gently.
He met her eyes, and he looked absolutely sober. “Because that asshole in the bar tonight—that was him.”
After that Haggerty went to the bathroom, vomited, and fell asleep on her couch.
He was gone when she woke up the next morning, and he didn’t say a word to her when she walked into the squad room, so she knew he remembered his confession. He still hadn’t spoken to her when they signed out a car and drove to the BMW dealership on Eleventh Avenue to investigate a string of car thefts. He was embarrassed, she figured, and she gave him his space until they returned to the precinct two hours later and he still wasn’t talking to her. She motioned him into an interrogation room, closed the door, and stood right in front of him so he had to meet her eyes. “Look, you’ve been holding that rejection inside of you for a long time. It had to come out. It’s a good thing.”
“If you ever tell anyone, Codella—”
And then she grabbed both his shoulders and pushed him up against the wall. “Stop. Don’t even say it.”
She wasn’t sure if he was stunned by her grip on him or by the words, but he just stood there.
“Look, I’ll tell you something,” she said still holding onto him. “I don’t have a bunch of girlfriends I shoot the shit with. I don’t do friends or boyfriends very well. You want the truth? You’re the closest thing I have to a best friend. And I would never humiliate you. Get that straight.” Then she’d released him and walked out of the room, and they’d never spoken about Cindy again.
The drone of a garbage truck on the street below brought Codella back into the bed. She twisted around to face Haggerty. “My father’s out of prison, by the way. He and my mother are back together.”
“Huh?” Haggerty propped himself on his elbow. “Did I just miss a transition?”
Codella sat up. “When Julia Merchant s
howed up this afternoon, I took an instant dislike to her. She made me feel ashamed of myself.”
“You? Ashamed of yourself?”
“It’s strange, I know. But she’s the devoted daughter I never was. When I left Cranston, I didn’t look back. I haven’t seen my mother in eighteen years. After Muñoz did the presumptive tests for me tonight, I went back uptown and ran a DMV on my mother. She’s got a suspended license on a DUI—her taste for alcohol hasn’t changed—and she’s still living in the same yellow cracker box on Pleasant Street where I grew up.”
“Love that name. Pleasant Street.” Haggerty combed his fingers through her hair.
“Trust me. It didn’t deserve the name. I checked my father’s incarceration status, too. He was paroled four years ago and he’s back on Pleasant Street. My mother waited for him for twenty-two fucking years, and now they’re back together. Nothing has changed for her.”
“But it has for you.” Haggerty’s hairy legs brushed against her smooth ones. He kissed her lips gently. “Go to sleep, Detective.”
Five minutes later, he was sleeping soundly, and she slipped out of the bed, pulled on an NYPD sweatshirt and shorts, and tiptoed into the dark living room. She hadn’t been on Pleasant Street in Cranston for twenty-six years—since she was ten—but she still remembered her last night there. And that wasn’t so surprising, she reflected. Didn’t people always remember the childhood events that caused them spectacular joy or profound sadness? She could only summon a fuzzy, featureless image of her mother standing at the kitchen sink that night, but she effortlessly reconstituted every detail of her father’s face—his puffy jowls with a dark five o’clock shadow, his thick chest hair coiling over the V-neck of his T-shirt, the sheen of sweat on his forehead below his combed-back hair. Claire had been sitting next to him at the round faux-marble kitchen table that night as he ate his meal in silence. When he finished, he wiped his mouth on a white paper napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it on his plate. Then he pushed out his chair. “I gotta go.”