“It’s beneath you. Why do you do it?”
“You gave away the right to ask me those kinds of questions.”
She shook her head. “You used to have pride.”
“I used to have a lot of things I don’t have anymore.”
“What happened to you, Gus?”
“The same thing that happened to you. What are you doing here, Annie?”
She didn’t answer immediately. We stood there, looking at each other, wondering what had become of us.
“It’s Kristen.”
She said our daughter’s name as if it was answer enough. I guess it was. There had been a third casualty in the shitstorm that followed in the wake of my son’s death. Kristen, always the most fragile of the Murphys, had lost more than any of us. She’d not only lost her brother, she’d lost her entire family. Worse, she’d been both complicit in and witness to the disintegration.
“What now?”
“She got pulled over again,” Annie said with a shrug.
“Where?”
“If it wasn’t so stupid it would be funny, Gus.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“In front of the state office building on 347.”
“You mean right in front of the Fourth Precinct!”
“See, I told you. It’s almost funny.”
“Not nearly, Annie. What was she doing this time?”
“Smoking weed. They also found an open bottle of vodka in the car.”
“Fuck!”
“Don’t worry, Gus. They’re not charging her, but they’re holding her until you get down there.”
“Why didn’t you just go get her?”
“Because I’m not a retired Suffolk County cop. I’m not the one with the connections. Anyway, he specifically asked for you to get her.”
“He who?” I asked.
“Pete.”
The name landed like a punch to the kidneys.
“Okay, I just have to let them know I’m leaving. Go ahead of me. I’ll meet you over there.”
“No, you won’t. I’ve had it with her, Gus. I don’t know what to say to her anymore. I’ve screamed at her until I’m blue in the face.”
“How about not screaming?”
“How about fuck you?” She flipped me the bird and stormed out.
I didn’t follow. Deep down I knew the reason she walked away had less to do with Kristen than with Pete.
6
(WEDNESDAY MORNING)
The new Fourth Precinct building was only a few years old. With its reflective blue glass, concrete-and-steel construction, it more resembled a bank or a suburban office building than a cop house. The inside was something else. Inside was inside and no matter how you dressed it up—and they had dressed it up—the same sort of business got done here as in the old house. The same scum, the same addicts and assholes, the same drunk drivers, the same murderers, thieves, and fools came through its doors. And the most recent fool was me.
For the majority of my career I’d been at the Second Precinct on Park Avenue in Huntington, so I didn’t expect anybody except for Pete to know me here. Some of them might’ve heard my name or heard about me, but it was unlikely they could place me. Nothing like retiring from the police to validate the saying: Out of sight, out of mind. In that way, the department was like a sports team. Retired players weren’t part of the team. They were gone. It didn’t much matter why. Gone was gone was gone.
I was glad to be forgotten. One of the worst parts of the mourning process was dealing with people who were aware of your situation. Grieving was hard enough without having to manage other people’s reactions. Half the time I wound up consoling them. Even when things didn’t get to that point, it was always awkward. People don’t know what to say or how to say it or whether to say anything at all. I hated it when they either pretended to not know or ignored it. It was like having a piece of spinach caught between your teeth. People would look at you funny, but just wouldn’t tell you. I’d catch them staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. God, how I hated it. It was one of the reasons I liked my job at the Paragon. No one at the hotel knew my story. They knew I was divorced and that was that. Everyone who worked the night shift there seemed to me to be hiding out or running away. We all had stories not to tell.
Detective Peter Francis Xavier McCann came to collect what was left of me so that I could collect what was left of my daughter. Pete, a lean and handsome son of a bitch, was seven years my junior. I’d been one of his training officers when he came on the job. He’d been transferred to the detective squad at the Fourth around the time I retired. He was a black-haired Irishman with oddly fair skin and the damnedest blue eyes. The bastard even had a cleft in his square chin, but it was his charm, not his chin, that was his deadliest weapon. He had the knack of making you feel you were the most important person in the world to him and the best friend he ever had. Problem was, believing you were Pete’s best friend was like believing you were Napoleon in a psych ward full of people who swore they were the real Napoleon. And even so, even after what had gone on between us, I got a jolt at the sight of him.
There was awkwardness between us obliquely related to John Jr.’s death. Pete had been one of the pallbearers at the funeral. I think the only fully honest relationship Pete had ever had was with my kids, John Jr. in particular. Maybe because John had the gift of seeing right through people’s bullshit. Pete’s blarney and charm bounced off him like bullets off Superman. So Pete was forced to expose who he was underneath if he wanted to be that sage “uncle” to my kids. It would be no lie to say that John’s death had been almost as hard on Pete as the rest of us. Almost. It was the way Pete chose to salve his wounds that was the issue.
“Come on back,” Pete said, smiling, waving at me to follow him to his desk.
I followed him back and sat facing him. He offered me coffee. I nodded.
“Half-and-half, two Sweet’N Lows?” he asked, knowing the answer, and said he’d be right back.
I sipped my coffee. He sipped his. The only sounds around us came from the occasional ringing phones and the buzz of early-morning traffic on Route 347.
He said, “Good thing I happened to be here this morning early to clear up some shit.”
“How’s that, Pete?”
“PBA cards and courtesy shields don’t work like they used to for DUI and DWI. If I wasn’t around, the uniforms would have processed her for sure.”
“Thanks.” There wasn’t much enthusiasm in my voice. He understood why.
“You still living out of that shitbox hotel by the airport?”
“Yep.”
He made a sour face, shook his head without being conscious of it. That was okay. I was use to much harsher judgments, specifically my own.
“Where are Annie and Kristen living?”
“They’re with Annie’s brother and sister-in-law in East Setauket.”
“East Setauket. Very nice. Somebody’s done well for themselves,” he said, his smile barely concealing his envy.
Unlike me, Pete was a man with ambition. He was a man who wanted everything and then some. It had taken me years of knowing him to figure out that he was most fond of things that belonged to other people, women in particular. When we’d all go out drinking after a shift, Pete would regale us with story after story about the women he was sleeping with, all of them well married: the Jets’ running back’s wife, the heart surgeon’s wife, the CEO’s wife. So I shouldn’t’ve been surprised when I found out he had added Annie to the list.
I believed Annie when she said she had started sleeping with Pete out of grief over John Jr. When she said that she knew it would blow us apart. That she meant to blow us apart. That all she felt for me anymore was rage and sadness and that she had no will or desire to bear it. But when Pete tried to find cover for his betrayal in my son’s death, I call
ed bullshit on that. I knew him too well by then. In some ways, Annie was his ultimate prize, the cherry on top of the icing on the top of the cake. Once it was out in the open, though, their passion turned to dust. Annie, regardless of her intentions, was embarrassed by what she had done. For his part, Pete lost interest. Trophies, even the biggest, shiniest ones, lose their luster pretty quickly, especially when they come at the cost of friendship.
Still, it wasn’t in me to hate Pete. Was I still furious with him? You bet. I was a lot of things, but hypocrite was not among them. I had listened as eagerly as the rest of the guys to Pete’s tales of conquest. Listened to him detail how he had so many other men’s wives in so many ways and I’d never once registered an ounce of protest or warning. I’d gotten what I deserved, but so too did Annie and Pete.
I let Pete’s envious comment about East Setauket go.
He took note of my silence and said, “Why not sell your house in Commack? You guys aren’t underwater, are you? Not with that house?”
“We can’t bring ourselves to live there and we can’t stand the thought of selling it. Besides, even if we wanted to sell it, its value isn’t all the way back.”
He seemed to understand.
I finally asked about my daughter. “How’s Krissy?”
“You gotta get her some help, Gus. She’s gonna do something soon that none of us can save her from.”
“No shit! Don’t you think we know that? We’ve tried everything with her. She just won’t listen.”
“Look, I know I’m not married and I don’t have kids—”
“That you know of.”
“That I know of,” he repeated, smiling in spite of himself. “And you and Annie have your reasons for hating—”
“Just say your piece, Pete.”
“Stop bailing her out. Stop letting your cop friends get her out of the shit she gets into. Let her fall down and scrape her knees. Parents aren’t there to catch their kids when they’re falling. Parents are there to help pick them up after they fall. If you don’t let her suffer a little . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to. The implication was clear enough. If we didn’t do something soon, Krissy would self-destruct. Annie and I would have no living children. I hung my head because I knew he was right—I hated that he was—and because I knew I couldn’t let Kristen suffer the consequences, not yet, anyway.
After Pete sent word down to bring Kristen from where they were holding her to his desk, it occurred to me to ask him about Tommy Delcamino’s kid.
“Pete, you working the Delcamino homicide?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “What case?”
“You remember Tommy Delcamino,” I said.
“That low-life piece of shit, sure. What about him?”
“They found his son tortured to death over in Nesconset last summer.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Nope, not my case.”
“Whose case is it?”
“Why you want to know?”
“Just curious,” I said, and left it at that.
“That asshole Paxson and Lou Carey.”
At first, he left it at that, but when he walked Kristen and me to the door, he grabbed me by the biceps and pulled me aside.
“Krissy,” he said, “give your dad and me a second, okay?”
I gave her the keys to my car and told her to sit there and wait for me. She hesitated.
Pete prompted her. “Go ahead, honey. Your car’s okay here. I’ll make sure of it. You or your mom can come get it later.”
Kristen, red-eyed and dejected, turned and walked away.
“What’s up, Pete?” I asked when Kristen was out of earshot.
“Listen, Gus, I’m gonna give you some more advice you probably don’t want to hear, but you need to listen to it. Stay away from the Delcamino case. Stay far, far away from it.”
I could feel myself pull away from him, my face getting hard with anger. “You ever know me to run away from anything?”
He took a deep breath, then said, “Seems to me that since John died, all you’ve been doing is running away.”
I wanted to grab him by the throat for saying that. If I had, I’m not sure I would have let go. He was right, in his way. But he was the last person I wanted to hear it from. I don’t suppose it mattered now. I’m not sure what did anymore.
7
(WEDNESDAY MORNING)
For the first ten minutes of the ride east to her aunt and uncle’s house, not a word passed between Krissy and me. For my part, I was busy turning Pete McCann’s words over and over in my head. It was hard to know with Pete if he was being sincere or if he had something to gain by keeping me away from the Delcamino homicide. No matter how I spun it, I didn’t get his play. The last two years had taken their toll; I didn’t see anything clearly. But just because I couldn’t figure Pete’s angle didn’t mean he didn’t have one. Pete had so many angles they could’ve named a new branch of geometry after him. That was how he had collected all those women, all those friends and hangers-on. He understood human weaknesses about as well as anyone I ever met. He sure understood mine.
Out of the corner of my eye, I stared at my youngest. Krissy: beautiful and fragile. She’d had the good fortune of inheriting the best physical aspects of both her parents and the misfortune of inheriting my mother’s reticent constitution. Kristen didn’t have many friends, but had always been her big brother’s favorite. John had doted on Kristen with an almost parental kind of love from the day she was born. Whereas Annie and I had pretty much entered the final stages of our slow-motion self-immolations, Kristen still seemed in the thick of hers.
For a year after losing her big brother, best friend, and protector, she had withdrawn. She’d dropped out of college, broken up with her boyfriend, gained weight, and pretty much became a shut-in. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, she transformed into a person we didn’t know. We were fooled at first, encouraged because she was finally getting out, reclaiming her life. Only the life she was reclaiming was someone else’s, one that involved stupid risk taking. The drinking and the drugs—pot was the least of it—were bad enough, but then there were the men. All sorts of men, most of them the type of guy Krissy wouldn’t have looked at twice. It was almost as if she couldn’t bear destroying herself one bit at a time, so she took on a different personality to speed the process along.
“What’s it gonna be next time, Krissy?”
She started. I’m not sure if it was what I said or the calm with which I said it, but it got her attention.
“I don’t understand,” she said in a little girl’s voice, a voice I recognized from when she would lie to me as a kid. It had taken me only a few years of parenting to learn that kids have a lying voice.
“You understand, Krissy. You understand.”
That was greeted by another few minutes of my daughter’s tight-lipped silence.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said as we drove past Smithtown toward St. James on 25A.
“For what part of it?”
“All of it, I guess.”
“Guessing’s not good enough.”
“Then what is?”
“Stopping whatever it is you’re doing to yourself.”
“I’m not sure I know how,” she said, turning to look out the window at a winter-bare and lonely nursery.
“You don’t know how to, or you don’t want to?”
“I don’t even know, Dad. I don’t know what to do with it.” She turned away from the nursery to look at me. “Feels like the center of my life is gone. I mean, it’s not even all about John anymore. I wish somebody could tell me what to do about that.”
“Don’t look at me, kid. Your mom and I haven’t exactly set a great example, have we?”
She laughed. It was a sad laugh. Then she leaned over, resting her head on my shoulder like sh
e used to do when she was little.
“Wanna know what’s funny, kiddo?”
“What, Dad?”
“You get instruction booklets with everything in your life except the hardest parts: marriage, kids, and death. Your mom and me, we did pretty good for a while.”
She didn’t say anything to that, just kept resting her head on my shoulder. When we were passing the Stony Brook University campus, she lifted her head, craning her neck to try and see some of the buildings.
“You miss school?” I asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Go back.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready yet.”
I felt a smile on my face. Kristen noticed it, too.
“What are you smiling at?” she said.
“Nothing.”
She punched my arm. “What?”
“You said you weren’t ready to go back yet.”
“So?”
“Yet. There’s hope in the word ‘yet.’”
“Isn’t there always hope, Dad?”
I was so happy to hear her ask, I just kept smiling. If I’d said anything, I would have been forced to use my lying voice, or worse, I would have had to tell the truth.
8
(WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON)
After last night’s shift and this morning’s drama with Krissy, I should have been exhausted. What I found instead was that I was oddly invigorated. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was outside myself. My internal voice clicking off the tape loop of funeral dirges and self-pity in spite of the gloom that hung over Long Island like a shroud. The air was mean and raw, the sky a patchwork of ugly gray bruises. A thin layer of cold mist covered everything. A mist that seemed not so much to fall as to just be. Stepping out of my car, I was assaulted by a wind of pinpricks. A wind that smelled of the ocean. That briny odor was at odds with my distance from the ocean, at odds with December. I guess it was a perfect day to find myself standing before the wooded lot in which TJ Delcamino’s body had been discovered.
Where It Hurts Page 3