Where It Hurts

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The house to my right, a split ranch covered in white vinyl siding, had a nativity scene on the lawn. The figures were plaster, not cheap extruded plastic. And because all the figures had a weathered patina, I got the sense it had been in this family for many years. I could see places where the figures had been chipped and fractured over time. Some of the chips had been unskillfully repaired and coated with mismatching paint, while other scars were left to the mercy of the elements. The Magi, Mary and Joseph, even the goats, the ass, and the sheep, seemed to huddle around the baby Jesus as much to shield him from the wind as to adore him. When I looked more closely at our infant savior, I saw he was impossibly large for a newborn and that someone had glued bright blue doll eyes onto his face. Eyes that followed my gaze. When I looked at him, he was looking back at me.

  The house to the left of the lot was a pageant of bad taste. Santa, his sleigh, and his reindeer sat atop the roof of the cedar-shingled ranch. The Santa display was all mechanized. First, sleigh bells would sound as the reindeer legs moved to simulate landing. Rudolph’s nose flashed red. Then as Santa stood up from his seat, a massive toy bag slung over his shoulder, his red pants would drop to expose his pale white flanks and a recording would play “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.” The whole thing recycled every thirty seconds or so. I half expected the reindeer to poop plastic pellets. The house itself was covered in a grid of red, green, and white lights that would have given Times Square a run for its money. There was a huge blow-up snowman on the lawn, smoke coming out of his pipe. In front of the snowman were plastic figures of Alvin and the Chipmunks dressed as elves. A speaker hidden somewhere on the lawn played cover versions of the elfin rodents singing seasonal tunes and carols. “Little Drummer Boy” was just starting up when I got out of my car and now it was ba-rump-ba-bump-ba-ing to a close.

  Fuckin’ guineas and their Christmas crap. They have no fuckin’ respect, those people. I heard my father’s drunken refrain loud in my head as I waited for the Chipmunks’ next selection. He particularly enjoyed saying stuff like that in front of my mom because some of her people were Italian and he knew it ate at her. And when he saw the hurt in her eyes, he’d say, “So you are alive in there after all. Christ knows, sometimes, I have my doubts.” A real charmer, my old man.

  About fifty feet wide and a hundred feet deep, the lot on Browns Road was vacant but not empty. It was full of misshapen, vine-strangled trees covered in scales of sickly ashen bark. Pine trees and maples, oaks and dwarf cherries, their limbs twisted and palsied, knotted and weak. The floor of this distorted little forest was carpeted in rotted mower clippings, pine straw, generations of leaf litter, and just plain litter. Newspapers turned back into mounds of gray pulp by the mist. Old car bumpers, their last remnants of chrome now just a few silvery flakes. Small piles of broken concrete blocks, jagged pieces of scrap wood, bent nails, and discarded wallboard. A dented refrigerator door. The frame of a bicycle. The rusted carcass of an abandoned oil tank, its vent pipe sticking up out of the leaves like the arm of a drowning man.

  As I waded into the lot, the Chipmunks squealing “White Christmas,” the smell of the ocean was quickly overwhelmed by the stench of fresh dog shit. There was also a heavy background odor of decay, of moldering vegetation, of dead animals—feral cats, squirrels, possums, raccoons, mice, bats, blue jays, and sparrows—and maybe some things I didn’t want to think about. The ground was rocky and uneven beneath my feet. Thorns and vines grabbed at the bottoms of my jeans, snagged on my shoelaces. Still, it didn’t seem like there was anything much about this lot that made it more special than the twenty other lots in the area. Like those other lots, it was the local dump, the convenient strainer at the bottom of the neighborhood’s sink. The place where all the crap that nobody wanted or was too lazy to bring to the town dump got tossed. But why, I wondered, leave TJ Delcamino’s body here? Why not any of those other area lots? The bigger question was the one I didn’t want to think about. Why did I give a shit?

  I made it to the back left corner of the lot. Above me, the noise of the gears from naughty Santa and his reindeer drowned out the Chipmunks. This was the spot where the newspaper said the kid’s body was discovered. The lot was enclosed by the six-foot-tall stockade fencing from the surrounding properties, the two along its flanks and the house behind it. I stood there for a moment, scanning, imagining how different the lot would have been last August. This time of year, I could see through the vines and trees all the way to the street, but in summer, in the dark, that wouldn’t’ve been the case. That time of year, I’m not sure I would have been able to see twenty feet ahead of me in any direction.

  Although the paper was unclear about where the kid had been killed, it was fair to assume he’d been killed somewhere else. No matter how thick the vegetation in summer, the lot wasn’t isolated enough to afford much privacy. None of the surrounding houses was more than fifty feet away from where I stood. And from Tommy D.’s description of what had been done to his boy, it was clear the kid’s assailants had taken their time killing him. The torture and murder must have taken place somewhere else. In that way, the kid’s body was like everything else dumped in the lot: used up, discarded, and left to rot.

  Someone else might’ve wasted time wondering why. Not me. Not yet. Maybe not ever. As a cop, you know there are only a few reasons people murder. Sometimes the reasons even make sense, but mostly not. You take alcohol and drugs out of the murder equation and there’d be a lot fewer cases for homicide detectives to close. The greatest human accomplishment isn’t landing a man on the moon or the Internet. It’s impulse control. Early on, our ancestors understood we couldn’t be trusted if left to our own devices. I mean, we created God to keep us in line, didn’t we? You dampen impulse control with alcohol or drugs and you get blood. But as I stood on the spot where TJ Delcamino’s body was found, I didn’t think the kid’s murder could be explained away by a lack of impulse control or a fit of sudden anger.

  I stepped back out of the woods to the street. Behind me, Santa was mooning whoever cared to look. Alvin and the Chipmunks were crooning about roasting chestnuts. Before getting back in my car, I turned to look at the baby Jesus with his blue doll’s eyes. He was still looking back.

  9

  (WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON)

  Dr. Rosen’s office was in a medical building in Islandia, a few miles north of the Paragon Hotel on Vets Highway. I’d never taken the time to look at the exterior of his building before. What was the point? It was rectangular and had a main entrance. It had walls and windows. I didn’t even know how many floors the building had. All I’d needed to know was how to get from the parking lot to room 207. Robots know only what they need to know. Now that I looked at the building, it kind of reminded me of the Fourth Precinct.

  Dr. Rosen looked about as much like the stereotypical shrink as I looked like a steamed lobster. No gray beard. No glasses. No suit. No pipe or cigar. And he was a big man. Bigger than me. Bigger than Tommy Delcamino. Broader, too. Fifty, with slicked-back black hair, kindly brown eyes, and pitted skin, he moved gracefully for a man of his build. In spite of his imposing size, he wasn’t very intimidating. It had been my experience that intimidation was a function of attitude, not size. The most intimidating guys I knew on either side of the law had been little men. Dr. Rosen was dressed in a brown corduroy blazer, a white sweater, and Levi’s over brown half-boots, but I couldn’t tell you what he’d worn last session or the session before that. Like I said, robots know only what they need to know.

  We shook hands. We always shook hands. Then I sat in the black leather chair by the wall with the framed print that looked like a stained-glass church window. The real window was to my left. I didn’t look out that window much. Maybe if there was something more fascinating to look at than the Long Island Expressway service road, the real window might have held greater appeal for me. Dr. Rosen pulled his office chair out from behind his desk, sat across from me, and leaned back, pad and pencil in
hand.

  “What’s going on with you, John?” I liked that he called me by my proper name and not Gus, like everyone else.

  Once a week for about a year, and always the same question. I’d come to look forward to it. Sometimes, like when I would sit at the train station waiting to pick up hotel guests, I’d think a lot about what I would say when he asked it next. On the ride over, I’d even prepared an answer for him. I meant to talk about what had gone on with Krissy. About seeing Annie. About seeing Pete McCann for the first time in months. But those weren’t the words that came out of my mouth.

  “Tommy Delcamino came to see me at the hotel yesterday.”

  “You haven’t mentioned him before,” Rosen said, his pencil scratching at his pad. “You’re smiling. What’s that about?”

  Instead of answering, I shook my head and laughed.

  Rosen tilted his head. “You’re laughing, only you don’t seem amused.”

  “Yeah, how do I seem?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know. Angry, I guess.”

  “At what?”

  “I don’t know . . . the world, myself.”

  “You’ve been angry at those things for two years. But what’s different today?”

  When I looked down, I saw my fists were clenched. He saw them, too.

  “What’s going on with you, John?” He looked at his pad. “You mentioned Tommy Delcamino. Is this about him?”

  My jaw tightened.

  “C’mon, John. Words. Talk to me.”

  “Tommy Delcamino’s a guy I arrested for petty shit a few times when I was in uniform at the Second Precinct.”

  “Why had he sought you out?”

  I didn’t say anything, stared up at the ceiling. Rosen waited me out the way he always did.

  “You know where I was this morning?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Kristen got herself jammed up again. She got pulled over in front of the state office building on 347. She was getting high and drinking vodka in her car. Annie was at the hotel waiting for me to tell me about it. And you know who came to the rescue?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Pete McCann. Pete fucking McCann. Can you believe it?”

  Rosen took a deep breath. “John, do you like magic shows?”

  I laughed. This time I meant it. “Not for nothing, Doc, but that’s a weird question.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Magic shows?” I shrugged. “I guess I like them as much as the next guy, sure.”

  Rosen put his pad and pencil down on the carpet next to his chair and raised both his hands to about shoulder height. He wriggled the fingers of his right hand and kept at it. “Magic works by distraction. For instance, I can see you’re staring intently at my right hand, and as long as you’re staring so intently at it, I could be doing something with my left that you wouldn’t notice. A good magician is skilled at distraction. The magician is saying, ‘Hey, look over here. Here is what’s interesting. Here is the magic.’ But that’s not where the magic is.” He raised his left hand and waved it at me. “The magic is over here. And a really smart magician switches hands so that the audience won’t catch on.”

  “Is there a message in there for me, Doc? Because if there is, I’m not getting it.”

  “Aren’t you, though? There have been days when Kristen or Annie or Pete McCann were the magic, but not today. Today they’re the wiggly fingers. Show me what’s in your other hand, John.”

  I sat there in silence, my whole body clenching. Rosen sat across from me, leaning back in his chair. He had a way of looking at me without judgment, but with concern. I’ve got to say that I never felt like he was acting about that. This never seemed like a job to him. Maybe he was just a good magician. But whatever it was about that look, it worked. It always worked.

  “Tommy Delcamino’s son got murdered last August,” I heard myself say in a strangled kind of voice. “They found his body in a wooded lot in Nesconset. He was tortured to death.”

  Rosen looked gut-punched when I told him about Delcamino’s son, but he gathered himself. “And Tommy telling you this made you angry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s back up, then. Why did Tommy come to see you?”

  “He said no one would help him. That the Suffolk PD wouldn’t give him the time of day because of his record and because his son was mixed up in the same kinds of petty crap that he’d been mixed up with his whole life.”

  “But he thought you could help him?”

  “I don’t know what he thought,” I said, that now-familiar heat rising beneath my skin. “He just said that I’d always treated him like a human being and that it never seemed to matter to me that he was a piece a shit. Fucking guy. You know what he did? He took out three thousand bucks in cash and begged me to help him.”

  “Do you know you’re shouting?”

  “Sorry, Doc.”

  “No need for that, John. Why were you shouting? Why are you so angry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon. You know. You tell me you were a good cop. Be that good cop now.”

  I laughed a hollow laugh. “A good cop and look where that got me.”

  “Stop the magic act, John. Why are you so angry at Tommy?”

  “All right, you wanna know?” I didn’t need him to tell me I was shouting.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll tell you why.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wasn’t mad at Tommy D., not to begin with. I was jealous of him. I know that sounds fucked up, but there it is.”

  “Jealous?”

  “I don’t think I’ve been more jealous in my whole fucking life, Doc.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? You wanna know why I’m jealous of a man whose son was beaten and tortured to death?”

  He nodded again.

  I waved at the window. I stood and walked to the window, showing Rosen my profile. “Because there are people out there with blood on their hands for his kid’s murder. Because even if they never get caught, they’re responsible. They have guilt. They have blame. And maybe someday Tommy D. can find them and make them pay. There are people to see about his kid’s death. Who do I see about my son’s death, Doc? Who? Who do you see when your kid drops dead playing pickup basketball? God? Please! There’s nobody for me to see. No one to point my finger at. No one to blame. No one to hunt down. No justice. Who can I go see about that? Who, Doc? Who do I go see?”

  “I don’t know, John. I don’t know who you see about the randomness of the universe. I wish I did, but I don’t. But Tommy thought he knew who to see. He came to you.”

  I laughed that hollow laugh again. “Desperate people do stupid things.”

  “Sometimes.”

  I didn’t speak. He waited me out.

  “Do you know where I was a few hours ago? I went to the wooded lot in Nesconset where they found his kid’s body. I stood right on the spot where they found him.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I’m not sure. I honestly don’t know.”

  “Are you going to help Tommy?”

  “No . . . I don’t know, Doc. I don’t think so.”

  “We have to stop now, John.”

  “Okay, Doc,” I said, but I couldn’t make myself turn away from the window.

  “John . . .”

  “Why do you call me John, Doc? Everybody else calls me Gus.”

  “We’ll talk about it next time if you like. Now it’s time to go.”

  I turned finally, shook his hand, and headed for his office door. I left the office. A woman was seated in the waiting room. She held a magazine up close to her face as if to hide her identity. Funny, I thought, how she wouldn’t have done that at a medical doctor’s office
. Then again, shrinks strip you down more naked than on the day you were born. Nobody wants to be seen like that. Nobody.

  10

  (THURSDAY)

  It was my day off and I slept in late. I used to love days off, but now they’d become a burden, just more empty hours to fill; and all I’d had to fill them with was pain. After John’s death, I’d just stay in my room, first at home, then at the hotel, endlessly cycling through the cable channels until I could sleep again. Sometimes I would read the books hotel guests would leave in the van or in their rooms. That was okay. I learned to love reading again, but a lot of the time the books made me ache worse. When I was in school I didn’t realize that most fiction was about death and regret. About things people wished they had or hadn’t said, done or hadn’t done and how, for whatever reasons, saying or not saying, doing or not doing had buried them alive. I was already too familiar with that feeling to want to read much more about it. Lately I was sticking to nonfiction.

  Then, when I started seeing Dr. Rosen, he suggested I get out of my room on my days off. It didn’t much matter where I went or what I did, he said, as long as I got out. So for the last few months, I did that, got out. Sometimes I’d go to the movies. Long Island has plenty of movie theaters. Within fifteen minutes of the hotel, there were about forty movie screens. Problem was, they all showed the same ten movies, usually dumb superhero blockbusters. The other movies were like the found books: they made the ache worse. Eventually I settled on the Smith Haven Mall. Going to the mall made me a good Long Islander. Long Islanders believed that world peace would only be achieved through shopping, and not even the Dalai Lama himself worked as hard at world peace as the citizens of Nassau and Suffolk counties. My going to the mall seemed to please Dr. Rosen, though it took me a while to figure out why.

  I’d go and zombie-walk. I’d walk and walk and walk. I didn’t shop. I didn’t even window-shop, not much, not really. At first, it just sort of felt like an incarnation of clicking through the channels, but when my eyes unclouded I came to understand Rosen’s pleasure. Because in the mall, I was confronted by the sight of twenty-year-old men, men the same age as my son at the time of his death. That hurt more than any book or movie. I hadn’t cried much since right after John Jr.’s death. That day, the day my eyes unclouded, I got back from the mall and cried so that I exhausted myself. I didn’t go to therapy that week as a kind of Fuck You! to Rosen. Funny, my not showing up didn’t seem to bother him. He was like that, seemingly unperturbed by my acting out.