The night before, looking over the photos before passing out, I’d marveled at the fact that even a low-level jerk-off like Tommy Delcamino had the same sort of silly family photographs as everyone else had. The ones you could get at the mall or the local photography studio. TJ as an infant looking cool in his Ninja Turtle Halloween onesie. Tommy smiling proudly yet looking uneasy dressed in a collared shirt, tie, and sports jacket, his arm over the darkly beautiful woman’s shoulder, the three-year-old TJ in her lap. TJ in his Mets Little League uniform. TJ and that woman at a school graduation.
There were other shots, too, just like the ones Annie and I had of us and the kids: Christmas morning opening gifts in front of the tree. Confirmations. First communions. Proud grandmas and grandpas in front of their houses. Funny, seeing Tommy D.’s pictures brought Annie back to me in a way I hadn’t felt about her since we’d begun to deconstruct. I remembered happy, funny Annie, loving Annie. The Annie who threw surprise parties and who waited up for me to come home after a bad shift. Annie who had swept me off my feet because I had never met another woman who was so much a mix of sexy and sweet. That was the Annie these photos brought back to me, not the angry, defeated Annie. But I’m sure that’s not what Tommy D. had in mind when he stuffed them into the backpack.
I handed one of the photos of the dark-haired woman over to Zee.
“Is that Tommy D.’s wife, TJ’s mom?”
He grunted again. “Marie, that twat. She was TJ’s mom and Tommy’s old lady but they never got hitched. She was something else to look at, man. That black hair, those black eyes, legs up to your chin, tits that wouldn’t quit . . . But she was a whore and user. Had Tommy twisted around her pussy. Half the shit he got jammed up for was to feed her habit.”
“You know where I can find her?”
“Sucking cock in purgatory.”
“What?”
“Ding dong, the bitch is dead. OD-ed a few years ago.” Zee lit up another bowlful. When he exhaled, he said, “That’s one of the reasons Tommy was able to keep straight these last few years. He didn’t have to support her appetite for drugs anymore. Good fucking riddance.”
I left that discussion there. I felt bad for the crap Tommy had had to deal with, but for the moment I had other more important questions. Zee, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as ready to move on as I was.
He waved the picture of Marie between two of his twisted fingers, offering it back to me.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“Tommy gave it to me.”
Zee didn’t like that answer, but it was, strictly speaking, the truth. Besides, I didn’t want to drift away from the reason I was there by bringing Smudge into the conversation. I was there to get information, not give it.
I took the photo out of his hand and said, “You got any idea who might’ve wanted to kill Tommy D.?”
Zee leaned forward. “C’mon, Gus. Tommy did time. Everybody makes enemies inside. I mean, I loved the guy, but he was a thief and not a very good one. I don’t know anyone in particular who’d want to do him bad.” He made a sweeping gesture with his balled left fist. “For all I know, it was one of those douchebags outside at the bar.”
“I don’t think so,” I said aloud to myself.
But Zee heard it. “You don’t think so what?”
“The guys who killed Tommy were looking for something specific. They ripped his trailer apart. You were close to Tommy, Zee. You have any idea what they could’ve been looking for?”
He shrugged again, looking pained. I couldn’t tell if the pained look was about the arthritis or the loss of his friend.
“No idea, Gus. Sorry.”
“How about TJ?”
“Same answer as with Tommy. TJ was a good kid. I was like an uncle to the kid, but he had both his folks’ worst habits. He was a thief and a user. He was a better thief than his father, mostly cars and car parts, or so I’m told. And he was a bigger junkie than his whore mother. Heard that at the end his habit was getting pretty expensive. Coulda been anyone killed the kid.”
“You think the murders are related?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Could be . . . maybe. Your guess is as good as mine.”
I stood up, offering him a fist bump instead of repeating the painful handshake. “Thanks for the time.”
He didn’t move. “You thinking about getting involved in this, Gus?”
“Christ, Zee, I don’t know. It’s not like I owed Tommy anything more than an apology. If the pricks who killed Tommy hadn’t shot me, too, I’m not sure I would even be here talking to you.”
I lifted up my pant leg and showed him the bandage.
He ignored that. “An apology. For what?”
I explained about how Tommy had come to me in the first place and how I’d treated him.
“Walk away, Gus. Leave it alone. Like you say, you don’t owe Tommy nothing that you can give him now.”
“You’re the third person to tell me to walk away,” I said.
“You sound disappointed.”
“Could be, Zee. Could be.”
“Why?”
Now it was my turn to shrug.
“One guy tells you something, fuck him. A second guy tells you the same thing, fuck him, too. A third guy . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s just good advice. Nobody ever got hurt walking away.” His eyes got a distant look in them not unlike Father Bill’s. “I shoulda walked away a long time before I did. You’re smart, you’ll close that office door behind you, Gus, and forget you ever heard of Tommy Delcamino.”
Now he gave me that fist bump.
“Thanks, Zee.”
“Let me know if you decide to keep on going. I’ll help you any way I can until I’m outta here.”
I left the darkness of Harrigan’s behind me, thinking I might just take Zee’s advice. But when I answered my phone, I realized that walking away wasn’t an option.
16
(FRIDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON)
Number 11 Pinetree Court in Commack had once been the happy center of my universe. The place where Annie had made a home for us. The place where Annie and I raised our kids. The place where we were going to grow old together. The place where we would watch our grandkids for John Jr. and Krissy when they wanted to get away for long weekends. We weren’t the type of people who cared about fancy cars or expensive things. Our house was the one possession we took the most pride in. We had scrimped and saved for the down payment. We’d jumped through all kinds of hoops to get the mortgage. I’d even swallowed my pride and asked my dad to cosign. Something he lorded over me until the day he died. We’d worked on it until it was just how we wanted it. Then, in a single heartbeat, it turned into sawdust.
Nothing brought John’s death back to me quite in the same way as seeing the old place. I could not separate my memories of him from the house. There wasn’t a spot in the yard or inside the house itself that I could not see John. Even now, pulling up alongside the mailbox, I pictured John shooting free throw after free throw at the hoop in the driveway. The hoop was gone. I’d destroyed it in a drunken rage the night we’d buried John. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t believe in ghosts, though I did believe in hauntings. As much as we had loved the place, we couldn’t bear to live there and we couldn’t bear to sell it. The day would soon come when we would have to sell. The rent we were charging was a few hundred dollars short of the mortgage payment and we had lived in limbo for long enough.
Sue Sherman was standing in the driveway, waiting for me, her face twisted up into an expression that was one part panic, one part worry, and one part anger. I’d seen that look before, a hundred times. No one ever thinks they’ll be a victim of a crime, so they are woefully unprepared for the aftermath. The sudden sense of insecurity. The intense, empty feeling of violation. The gnawing fear. The outrage. When she saw me getting out of my car, it all boiled ove
r. Tears poured down her cheeks and she yelled something out at me that was utterly unintelligible, but completely understandable. I hugged her until she calmed down.
“I was out shopping and when I came home . . .” She was out of breath. “The cats were sitting on the front porch. I knew I didn’t leave the door open. I figured they must have found a new way out of the house, but when I went to open the front door—”
“It was already open.” I finished the sentence for her. “Did you go inside?”
“No. I called my husband, who told me to call you.”
“Did you call 9-1-1?”
“I guess I should have but I didn’t know what to do because I haven’t been in the house.”
“It’s okay, Sue,” I said, patting her shoulder. “You did the right thing. Are the cats okay? Where are they?”
She pointed at her car in the driveway. Two little brown Siamese faces stared out at us.
“Get in your car and drive down the block. Then call 9-1-1. I’m going to take a quick look around. Whoever was inside is gone now,” I said, although I had no way of being certain if that was true or not. Sue seemed uncertain, but I told her to go on, that I would be all right.
When she backed out of the driveway, I reached down toward my ankle. I was halfway bent over before I remembered that the Crime Scene Unit had my little Glock and that I hadn’t taken my old service weapon with me. I didn’t go directly into the house. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure Sue had been accurate about not having left the door open or a window open a crack so that the cats might’ve gotten out. People forget all sorts of things. Second, if it really was a crime scene, I didn’t want to taint it. But the real reason was that I didn’t want to go in. I don’t think I ever wanted to go into that house again. So I found a fallen twig and used it to unlatch the gate to the white vinyl fence I’d put up a few years ago.
The right side of the house looked fine. Nothing was disturbed, but as soon as I got around back and saw that the sliding doors had been smashed through, I knew Sue hadn’t forgotten about leaving the front door or a window open. Our old backyard was bordered by a Polish cemetery run by a Catholic parish in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There was a small woods between the cemetery and our back fence, but that was easy enough to navigate and the fence easy enough to climb. As long as someone kept his head down, the side fencing would prevent him from being spotted by a neighbor.
I climbed the short flight of wooden steps up to the sliding doors and looked inside. The hallway leading into the kitchen and living room was a total mess. The closets had been emptied, their contents dumped onto the white linoleum floor. I stepped back down onto the winter-dormant grass and peeked through every window. All the rooms had been trashed. John Jr.’s bedroom, too—a room the Shermans agreed never to use or to enter. It was the same as it had been the night before in Tommy’s trailer. This made it very personal now, even more so than getting shot.
It was too big a coincidence to believe that my old house getting tossed had nothing to do with what had gone on the previous evening. I wasn’t a big fan of coincidence. I believed in it about as much as the Virgin Birth. Someone was looking for something, something they thought Tommy Delcamino once had. Something they thought he might have given me. Unless I was blind or just plain stupid, the green backpack wasn’t it. There wasn’t anything in the backpack worth risking prison for. Certainly not a bunch of old photos or a roll of twenty-dollar bills.
When I heard the sirens, I went back around to the front of the house and waited. But I was through waiting to make up my mind. I was in now, with both feet.
17
(FRIDAY NIGHT)
It had already been a long tough shift by the time I took my first break. The Full Flaps Lounge was jam-packed and rocking the ’80s. The crowd was younger than usual. Much younger. I guess that was due to the fact that it was Christmas office party season. For whatever reason, people seemed to be coming through the door already half-lit. Some were so shitfaced we’d been forced to escort them out before they’d even properly warmed their barstools. A few of them were belligerent about it, but none enough to rate an ass-kicking.
Younger crowds were trouble because it screwed with the club’s usual vibe. Having younger, unmarried women around meant the older men paid less attention to the women who’d come to get their attention. It meant that the younger men hit on the older women to see if what they’d heard about cougars was true. Everyone got a little more sensitive. Tempers got shorter. Competition got fiercer. Insults got nastier. And nights like these were worse because the bar was three deep, the dance floor so densely packed that there was no hope of keeping potential warring parties at arm’s length. On more than a few occasions, we’d had to separate guys who were getting chesty with each other and just a shove away from a first punch. It was all very schoolyard, but I’d seen schoolyard bullshit turn into murder and that wasn’t going to happen on my watch.
It was on nights like these that I wished I was out driving the van. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized I was in a pretty bad frame of mind to begin with. This afternoon, on my way back to the Paragon, I stopped at a walk-in clinic on Portion Road in Ronkonkoma. I’d had them check the dressing on my leg and write me a script for antibiotics. I’d made up a story for the doctor about how I’d taken out that chunk of my calf with a piece of hot metal in my garage. You mention a gunshot wound to a doctor and, by law, he or she must contact the cops. I wasn’t up for explaining myself, thank you very much.
Between Tommy Delcamino’s murder and the break-in at 11 Pinetree, I’d spent way too much time over the last twenty-four hours with my old colleagues at the SCPD. The detectives from the Fourth Precinct who responded to the break-in didn’t connect that crime to Tommy D.’s murder. Why would they? Two different crimes. Two different precincts. Two different detective squads. But I knew better. Although I lived at the Paragon, my official address was 11 Pinetree Court, and anyone who didn’t know about the fallout from my son’s death would assume my family still lived there. I guess I was also more than a little annoyed at the fact that I’d moved myself into a different room at the hotel. It was a matter of precaution. I figured that it wouldn’t take too long for the guys who had killed Tommy and tossed my old house to track me down to my room at the Paragon. For now, only Felix and I knew I’d moved.
Just before midnight, I walked out the entrance of the Full Flaps Lounge. I needed some fresh air, cold as it might be. As soon as I stepped into the brisk night air, I got a face full of cigarette smoke. Off to my right was a group of ten men and women huddled together, smoking, keeping warm, and chatting. The word was that many of the hookups happened out here and not inside the club. I didn’t doubt it. It was often so loud inside the club that it was impossible to hear your own internal voice, let alone ask for someone’s number. A few of the regulars said hello to me, patting me on the shoulder as I passed. Thankfully, none of them whacked on the arm where I’d gotten the tetanus shot. Damned thing hurt almost as much as the leg wound. I nodded and kept moving.
I stopped at the corner of the building, leaning back against the rough concrete wall. I hoped the quiet would ease the ringing in my ears and help stop “Rock Lobster” from going round and round in my brain. I let the cool night air wash over me. It was warm inside the Full Flaps when it was half-empty. On nights like this, it was downright tropical.
A woman’s voice came out of the darkness. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t even know what all right means anymore.” The words came out of me like yesterday’s weather, nasty and raw.
“This was a mistake. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”
The sound of her heels clicking against the pavement echoed in the quiet of midnight. I called after her. Limped after her. Clutched her gently by her right biceps when I finally caught up to her.
“No, no, please. I didn’t mean to be so rude. Ther
e’s no excuse for that. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
I took my hand away from her arm. Her face was familiar to me. She wasn’t a regular at the club, but she was there often enough so that we’d nod hello to each other when I’d stamped her hand for reentry. She was in her midthirties, on the short side, and maybe a little heavier than she wanted to be. Maybe not. I think I assumed as much because she always seemed self-conscious in the club. She wasn’t the type who initiated conversations, but would sit at the bar nursing her drinks or stand at the edges of the dance floor waiting. I’d seen her leave with men on occasion, but she’d be back alone the next time. I seemed to know a lot about her, a lot more than I would have believed. Not her name, though.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked, the look on her face unsure.
It was a pretty face, but it was her eyes that I took most notice of. They were light blue and had that cracked-ice-crystal quality to them. They also had a paradoxical warmth about them so that they almost seemed to glow.
“I was smiling at you, I guess. You have beautiful—”
“Eyes,” she finished my sentence. “Thank you.”
“I take it I’m not the first person to tell you that.”
She shook her head, smiling shyly, hinting at the straight white teeth behind her pink lips. “Not even the first tonight. But I’m glad you think so.”
I thought she might’ve been blushing a little, but it was hard to tell in the harsh parking lot light.
“I’m okay, by the way,” I said. “Just hurt my leg a little, is all.”
“What?”
“That’s how this started, remember? You asked me—”
She laughed a kind of goofy laugh. “Right. Right. I saw you were limping in the club earlier and then when I saw you leaning against the wall, I was just wondering.”
Where It Hurts Page 8