Empty Ever After

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  You would think I’d be good at grief by now, having mourned a mother, a father, a marriage, and a miscarriage before him. Miscarriage, what an asinine term. Oh, dear, I seem to have miscarried that baby. How clumsy of me! That child had been a part of Katy and me, not a tray of dirty dishes. As I recall, no one shouted, “Oops!” But experience had taught me that God doesn’t say oops. You have to have faith in God’s big plan, so I’m told, and that misery is all just part of it. For Mr. Roth, misery had been a big part of the big plan. No more misery for him. He had gotten his wish. Kaddish and ashes, ashes and Kaddish. Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo, B’ol-mo dee-v’ro … I hadn’t been quite so lucky.

  Sure, there was some sense of relief in the secret being out, with Patrick dead and buried and buried again. Just lately, I find relief is overrated and secrets, no matter how potentially corrosive, can often sustain a man much the better than truth. I would know. Patrick’s vanishing act had changed the course of my life. Without his dis-appearance in December ’77, I would never have met his sister, Katy Maloney, my future and now ex-wife. With Katy and me, as with all things, the seeds of destruction were sown at birth. Even if we hadn’t made Sarah, the most glorious child ever, I would not regret my time with Katy. She had taught me love and comfort and how not to be only an observer to my own life. So no matter what Patrick had or had not done, I could never hate him.

  The same could not be said of my late father-in-law, Francis Maloney. I knew exactly how I felt about that cruel and callous fuck. My father-in-law chilled the earth when they laid him in it, not the other way around. He too had known the secret of his son’s disappearance, that I had found Patrick all those years ago and let him slip away. For twenty years, neither of us had managed the courage to confess our sin to Katy. We held the secret between us like a jug of acid, both of us scared to let it drop for fear of being maimed by the backsplash. We were right to fear it. For when, in death, Francis let go of the jug, the splash scarred us all.

  Foolishly, he had assumed it would burn me worst. But the anticipation of the burn, the years of his taunting about ghosts and payback had hardened me. Secrets do that. If the secret’s big enough, you build a wall around it until there’s only wall and very little left of yourself. And Patrick’s secret was only one of many. As a PI, I had become a collector of secrets, a gatekeeper of orphaned truths. I kept the secrets of the murdered and murderers alike.

  Since the divorce, secrets and loss were my only companions. I suppose, then, that it wasn’t such a mystery, my thinking about Israel Roth on a rainy Sunday in July. Katy and I had tried briefly to reconcile, but there are some wounds from which recovery is neither possible nor truly desirable. We had sold the house even before the divorce was finalized. Katy moved back upstate to Janus and I bought a condo in one of the new buildings across from the water in Sheepshead Bay. Sarah stayed in Ann Arbor over the summer instead of coming home to work at one of the stores. The wine business wasn’t for her. Like father like daughter. Christ, I hoped not.

  The phone rang and there was someone at the door. Amazing! I had sat alone for hours staring out at the rain making shiny little ripples out of the petroleum film floating atop the bay. Now I was pulled in two directions at once.

  “One second!” I shouted at the door.

  I picked up the phone, “Hello.”

  “Dad!”

  “Sarah! What’s wrong? Where are you?”

  “At school still. It’s Mom.”

  “What’s Mom?”

  “Call her.”

  “Sarah, what’s going on?”

  “Somebody disturbed Uncle Patrick’s grave.”

  I would never get used to her calling him Uncle Patrick. It was weird, like me thinking of him as my brother-in-law. As it happened, Patrick had been murdered before Sarah was born. She was now older than he ever was.

  “What do you mean, someone disturbed his grave?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. Mommy was hysterical crying when she called me. You better call her.”

  “Okay, I’ll take care of it.” There was that banging again. “One second!”

  “Dad, did you say something?”

  “No, kiddo, there’s somebody at the door.”

  “So you’ll call Mom?”

  “As soon as I get the door, yeah. I promise.”

  “Call me later and let me know what’s going on.”

  “I will. Thanks for calling me about this.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “You too, kiddo.”

  The banging at the door was more insistent, but I wasn’t in the mood for anyone else’s crap. Divorce, no matter how amicable, isn’t easy, and Katy, Sarah, and I were still in the midst of realigning our hearts to deal with the new tilt of our worlds. That’s why Katy had moved back upstate, why Sarah had made work for herself in Michigan, and why I was watching raindrops in Sheepshead Bay. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged back into the thing that had blown us all apart. I must’ve looked pretty fucking fierce to Mrs. Dejesus, the maintenance man’s wife.

  “For chrissakes!” She didn’t quite jump back at the sight of me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dejesus. I was on the phone with my daughter and …”

  “Look!” she said, pointing down at my threshold and along the blue flecked terrazzo floor of the hallway. “Mud everywhere, Mr. Prager, to your door. And this!”

  I knelt down to try and compose myself. There, on my welcome mat, was a withered red rose and, beneath it, drawn in the mud, was the Chinese character for eternity.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BONEYARDS WERE ABOUT the only places yellow crime scene tape seemed not to attract a crowd. The bold black CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS was rather beside the point. There wasn’t much of a crowd inside the tape either. Even that number was shrinking. With the one deputy sheriff gone to pick up his boss and Katy headed back to her car to dry off, only the younger deputy and myself remained inside the perimeter. The longer I stood out there, the easier it was to see why Katy was distraught. Her father’s headstone was toppled and smashed to bits, while eleven rain-soaked red roses had been neatly arranged in a circle on her mother’s grave.

  Then there was Patrick’s resting place. Although Patrick Michael Maloney’s grave wasn’t quite empty, he, or what was left of him, was gone. The lidless coffin box was still at the bottom of the hole, buried now not by dirt but under several feet of rainwater and murky runoff. Splinters, jagged shards, and larger chunks of the muddy coffin lid were strewn about the family plot. Even in death, the most damage was done to Patrick.

  “Fooking kids, vandalous little gobshites,” the caretaker said.

  “Watch your mouth, Mr. Fallon,” said Father Blaney.

  “Sorry, father, but it had to be them kids.”

  I didn’t agree. “Kids? I wouldn’t bet on it. This was a lot of work, not just random vandalism.”

  “And kids don’t leave roses,” added the priest.

  “A sin writ large, no matter,” said Fallon. “In Ireland tis not how you treat the living by which yer judged, but by yer care for the dead.”

  “Amen to that, Mr. Fallon.” The priest crossed himself.

  Both men stood under the priest’s umbrella just beyond the yellow tape, neither seeming much bothered by the rain. The same could not be said for either the young deputy sheriff or myself. Father Blaney took notice.

  “Come lads, get out of the wet.”

  The deputy, feeling he had to prove himself, politely refused. I was too old to worry about proving anything to anyone, even if it meant sharing an umbrella with Father Blaney.

  I’d known the man for more than two decades. He was an old world priest, as avuncular as a meat hook and as politically correct as a minstrel show. He didn’t exactly get touchy-feely with his parishioners. So it was no wonder that he and Francis Maloney had been thick as thieves and equally disdainful of me.

  “How have you been getting on, Moses? I mean, since Katy’s seen the light and ridded herself of
you.”

  “I’m good,” I lied.

  “A pity.” He showed me a crooked grin of gray teeth and chapped lips.

  I almost laughed. One thing about Blaney, you always knew where you stood with the man.

  “Do you suppose Katy will return to the church now that she’s returned to her senses?”

  “I was born a Jew, Father. Katy chose to be one. What do you think the implications of that are for you?”

  Fallon smiled. I’d never met the caretaker before that day, but I liked him for his smile. Blaney saw it too and scowled. When Blaney scowled, clouds darkened.

  “Such a lovely place, even in the rain,” said the priest, changing subjects.

  “Tis that,” Fallon agreed.

  The Maloney family plot was in a secluded corner of an old Catholic cemetery up in Dutchess County. This section of the graveyard, a grouping of low hills overlooking a stream and woods beyond, was reserved for the families of the local movers and shakers. My late father-in-law had certainly been one of those. Back when our paths first crossed in the winter of’78, Francis Maloney Sr. was a big time politico, a major fundraiser for the state Democratic party. Francis was an old school power broker in that he kept a low profile but wielded influence from the Bronx to Buffalo. A valedictorian at the Jimmy Hoffa Charm School, Francis Maloney Sr. traded in nepotism, patronage, kickbacks, and threats as easily as most men breathed. He’d have rather paid for your vote than make his candidate earn it. “Cleaner that way, less risk involved,” he would have said.

  Blaney, who’d baptized all the Maloney children and had performed Katy’s first wedding ceremony, took inventory. “A shame,” he said.

  Fallon took the bait. “A shame?”

  “Such a big plot of land and it will never hold the family but for Francis Sr. and Angela. With Francis Jr. in Arlington and Katy … Well, never mind about Katy.” He crossed himself again.

  “What about Patrick?” I asked.

  “The boy, please God, will never rest for his sins. His spirit is destined to roam.”

  “Resurrection, Father?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Fallon. Pushed out like a splinter more likely. His kind are a blight on holy ground.”

  I was far away from laughing now and stepped out from under his umbrella to stand in the rain with the young deputy. At that point the rain was preferable to inhaling the fumes that malicious old bastard breathed out. It was more a matter of principle than kinship with Patrick. The truth was that Patrick and I spoke only once, very briefly. That was on February 15, 1978. I stood on one side of his boyfriend’s bedroom door and Patrick on the other.

  “Do I have your word?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  That was it, the entire conversation, and for twenty years I thought his one word was a lie. The irony is that his lie became my lie and my lie became my secret. He had promised to turn himself in that coming Saturday, to stop hiding, and to finally face his family. God, I was so full of myself that day. I found Patrick. I found him! Not the NYPD, not the daily busloads of volunteers, not the newspapers, not the fortune hunters, not the passels of PIs his family had hired before me, but me. That day I proved I was worthy of the gold detective’s shield I was never to get. Whether I deserved it or not was moot. I’d already been off the job for months by then.

  But that Saturday came and went. Nearly twenty years of Saturdays came and went without word of Patrick. Oh, there were a thousand false leads and sightings that amounted to nothing. Offer a reward for anything and the roaches will crawl out from under the floorboards, the hyenas will come out of the bush. Only once, in 1989, when I was looking into the suicide of my old pal and NYPD Chief of Detectives Larry “Mac” McDonald, did I ever truly believe I was close to getting a handle on what had become of Patrick. But that lead was crushed beneath the wheels of a city bus when the Queens District Attorney Robert Fishbein was run down on a Forest Hills street. None of it mattered now, not any of it.

  The rain was letting up some. Katy had just gotten out of her car. She seemed composed, but it was hard to disguise the distress deepening the lines around her eyes. There was a time when I believed it could never hurt me to look at her. Even after the miscarriage, when she took her guilt, fury, and indignation out on me, it was grace to look upon her. And when we hit that inevitable dead spot in our marriage, when the sameness of our days made me feel light years away from her, the sight of her face was always reassuring. Now it stung. What we had was gone. I broke it. Francis broke it. There was far more breakage out here than a headstone and a coffin.

  I looked away.

  Over Katy’s right shoulder, I could see a Janus Village sheriff’s car pulling into the cemetery followed by a dark blue and yellow State Police SUV. My cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

  “Excuse me,” I said to no one in particular, pulling the phone out of my soaked jacket. I ducked under the tape and hurried along the path toward the stream below the Maloney family plot. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Prager?” It was an older woman’s voice, but a familiar one somehow.

  “Yes, this is Moe Prager.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll remember me, it’s been a few years. I’m Mary White, Jack’s—”

  “—sister. Of course. How are you, Mary?”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone, an unsettling silence.

  Jack White had been an actor, a painter, and a bartender at Pooty’s in Tribeca. Pooty’s was the bar Patrick Maloney disappeared from in December of ’77. Beside Jack’s other interests, he was Patrick’s lover. It was behind Jack’s bedroom door that Patrick stood and uttered the only word he ever spoke to me. Jack was the man who sat across from me, hand clamped around my wrist, promising me Patrick would return to his family. When Patrick broke that promise and vanished again, Jack went back home to Ohio. He taught drama to troubled teens until he died of AIDS in 1986. After we discovered the truth about Patrick, I’d flown Mary in for Patrick’s funeral.

  “Mary, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Jack’s grave.”

  My heart stopped.

  “What about Jack’s grave?”

  “I’ve visited him there every Sunday since the week I buried him. No one but me and a few of his old students has ever left flowers at the grave. Then last Sunday …” She trailed off. I could hear her fighting back tears.

  “What about last Sunday?”

  “Roses.”

  “Roses?”

  “Almost six dozen red roses were laid on Jack’s grave.”

  “Maybe one of his students hit the lottery,” I said without an ounce of conviction.

  “No, I checked. We keep in touch. They are very loyal to Jack even after all these years.”

  “Wait, Mary, let’s back up a second. What did you mean there were almost six dozen roses?”

  “There were seventy-one roses. Five bouquets of twelve were propped up against his headstone,” she said. “But on his grave itself, there were eleven individual roses—”

  “—arranged in a circle, the tips of the stems meeting in the middle.”

  There was that ominous silence again.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” I asked.

  “My God, Mr. Prager, how did you know?”

  “In a minute, Mary. First tell me the rest.”

  “This afternoon, when I went to his grave …” Now she could no longer fight back the tears. I waited. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s fine. I know this is hard for you.”

  “On the back of Jack’s headstone someone had painted that Chinese symbol with the rose, the one Jack had tattooed on his forearm. Do you remember it?”

  “I do.” I’d seen something just like it on my welcome mat a few hours ago.

  “And at the corner of the painting were the block letters PMM. Why would somebody be so cruel, Mr. Prager? Jack never hurt anyone in his life.”

  Now the silence belonged to me.

  “Mr. Prager …
”

  “Sorry. I’m here. It’s just that someone’s disturbed Patrick’s grave as well.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Mary, would it be all right if I called you later? It’s too complicated to talk about now.”

  “That’s fine. You have my number. Please know that my prayers are with you and your family.”

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  When I wheeled around, Katy was coming down the path toward me. The sight of her stung a little less this time. Maybe it was repeated exposure. Or maybe it was that the thickest clouds moved east and what was left of the sun shone like an orange halo behind her head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MR. FALLON’S QUARTERS were small and tidy, not unlike the man himself. His house—a bungalow, really—was way on the other side of the cemetery, close to the tool shed and equipment barn. All three—shed, house, and barn—were of similar rustic construction and painted a thoroughly depressing shade of brown, but everything looked neat and well-maintained. Fallon himself was less than thrilled at the prospect of our company, but the sheriff thought the bungalow was the best available option given that the station house was on the opposite side of the hamlet. So we formed an odd cortege, my car behind Katy’s behind the priest’s behind the sheriff’s behind the caretaker’s backhoe, and snailed across the fields of stone in the dying light. The youngest, wettest deputy and the crime scene investigator from the state troopers stayed behind.

  Sheriff Vandervoort was a gruff, cinder block of a man who, in the space of a very few minutes, had twice boasted that his ancestors had lived in these parts since New York was New Amsterdam. He wore his insecurities like a rainbow. He was well aware of who the Maloneys were—everyone around here was. They knew about the hero son shot down over ’Nam and his big wheel father. Although nearly three years dead, the mention of Francis Sr.’s name still turned heads in Janus. Vandervoort knew, all right, and if he’d forgotten, there was little doubt Father Blaney would take the time to refresh his memory.