“Okay,” I said, “you’ve got my attention.”
“Good.”
“You’ve got my attention, but I don’t see why you want it. And please don’t give me that crap about looking into your granddaughter’s murder. You said it yourself, the cops already have the guilty party.”
He pursed the lips of his cruel mouth and tilted his head. “You’re right. They have Salazar and he’s guilty, but he won’t talk. Hasn’t said a word since he was arrested. The press and cops have theories about why he did it, but I’m not buying. I need to know why for Linh’s sake, for her parents’ sake. I need to know why.”
The bastard had me and he knew it. Bill knew it, too. And I couldn’t help but wonder how much of a part Bill had played in this beyond bringing the both of us together. Spears knew about John Jr. and the price I’d paid in the aftermath. It was clear Bill hadn’t known the bloody details of Linh Trang’s murder. I’d seen his shock at hearing them, but he understood what made me tick. That the magic word for me was “why.” Why? Why? Why? I was haunted by it.
“You can give those checks to Bill for now,” I said. “I believe in earning my keep. I’ll ask around a little, and if I find anything, I’ll be in touch.”
He handed Bill the checks, handed me a business card. And for the first time since he came through the door, Micah Spears looked like a human being. All the sin, the cruelty, the snark and sneering seemed to have vanished.
“Thank you, Gus,” he said, putting his hand out to me again.
This time he let it go without that extra beat of assessment. Apparently, I had passed the test.
5
(SUNDAY, EARLY EVENING)
Why?
The word went round and round in my head as I drove away from Bill’s place. From the second I’d gotten the call from Annie about our son, “Why?” had been the central question in my life. The problem was there was no one available to answer the question. No one to see about it. No one to pay for it. No one to make it right. Doctors understand the mechanics of the why of death, but not the Zen of it. Why him? Why now? Why this? Why? And with all due respect to Bill, there was no God to ask. Even when I believed, God was mum. Paragon guests were always leaving books behind them in the van. I scavenged them to fill up the empty, lonely hours between runs. In one PI novel I read there was this character, a wise old man who claimed that God did answer prayers. He said God answered them all the time, but that his answer was mostly no. Sounded nice in a book, I guess. In real life it was just more crap. When it came to why, a cold, indifferent universe was more impenetrable than a mute God. It didn’t explain itself. Not to me. Not to anyone.
After the initial tsunami of pain and grief there was rage. It fueled me, became the filter through which I experienced the world. Every feeling I had, especially love, became an iteration of rage. I wasn’t alone in my rage. Annie and Krissy were just as furious in their way. It’s what fueled us as we blew apart what was left of our family. Annie and Krissy had targets for their fury. Annie focused hers at me. Krissy’s at herself. Me, I took on the universe. I wasn’t usually an ambitious person, but I was ambitious in my rage.
We’re complicated animals, us humans, but sometimes we’re nothing more than little kids asking grown-ups why. All we want, all we need, is a reasonable explanation, even if it’s wrong. Me, I needed something beyond “God has a plan for all of us.” Something more than When it’s your time, it’s your time. Something more than a shrug. I’m more at peace now with the knowledge that I’m never going to get answers. That the question of why will hang in the air like a lazy fly ball that will never come down or a red balloon slipping out of a little girl’s hand at the zoo.
It seemed to me that Micah Spears knew just what scab to pick at. Maybe Bill had coached him to go there or maybe Spears was genuinely interested in the true motive behind his granddaughter’s murder. Now that I was committed, it didn’t matter. I should have felt sympathy for the man and maybe I should have dug a little more deeply into his motives when I had the chance, but, Christ, I couldn’t stand to be with Spears another minute. Were his checks an inducement? Of course they were. I’m not a fucking idiot. To have a foundation in John Jr.’s name meant he might live on beyond the memories of the people who loved him. We are all forgotten eventually, but I wanted John’s memory to outlive me, Annie, and Krissy. And who wouldn’t want to contribute to research that might prevent another family from going through what we went through?
For the moment, Micah Spears and his motives could wait. Sadly, his granddaughter wasn’t going to be any more or less dead if I started looking into her death immediately or in the morning. Death was as much a constant as pi or the speed of light. The dead could afford to be patient and so could I. I pulled my car into a parking spot at the edge of the Paragon’s parking lot. Although I fished out the sheet with Michael Smith’s particulars from my back pocket, I ignored it.
I took a minute to check out the cabin of the 2010 Mustang I’d owned for about a week. I was still getting used to it. Since last Christmas, when three bikers tried to kill me, destroying my car instead, I’d made do with insurance rentals, borrowed cars, lifts, and the spare Paragon courtesy van. I wasn’t a procrastinator by nature, but I wasn’t sure what my nature was anymore. For the last twenty plus years, I’d owned family cars. A minivan when the kids were young. An Accord. A Taurus. I was a man and I had the remnants of a family, but I wasn’t a family man anymore. I guess it finally took a kick in my ass from Magdalena to get me to buy something.
“I’m not Cinderella and no one knows better than me that money isn’t anything next to love, but it’s a little weird when you leave the courtesy van in my guest parking spot overnight. I’m not a woman who needs a limo. Still, I prefer something a little sexier than an airport shuttle.”
She was right. Maggie was right about a lot of things. So when Tino, the night-shift van driver at the Clarion Hotel down Vets Highway from the Paragon, told me he was selling his Mustang, I checked it out and bought it the next day. One of the things that was different about me now was that I thought about my impulses, about what I wanted and why. I had never been a man who wanted for much, because I didn’t want much. Funny how that works. That much about me hadn’t changed. I still didn’t want much. But in the week since I’d gotten the car, I found myself wondering if I’d bought it because I’d never had a sporty car or because John Jr. never had one and never would.
Doc Rosen and I had talked about that earlier. He didn’t have much to say on the subject. He doesn’t usually have a lot to say except to ask how I feel about things, yet somehow he manages to get his point across. Today’s point was that it didn’t matter why I bought the Mustang. The car was mine, and like everything else in life that a person brings on himself or is thrown his way, it’s how you move forward. The weird thing about Rosen was that he could make me feel better just by asking me a question.
“How do you think John Jr. would feel about you buying the car?”
When I smiled, he smiled. We both had our answers.
Before I got around to looking at the sheet of paper Felix had printed out, Magdalena called.
“Hey, babe.”
“Hey, Gus.”
“What’s going on?”
“Can we switch plans to tomorrow night?”
“Why, what’s up? You get a bartending gig?”
“Better than that. A callback audition in the morning.”
When Maggie was in her twenties she had a recurring role on a popular soap opera, but her career stalled and she wound up marrying some asshole personal-injury lawyer. By the time their marriage ended, all Maggie had to show for it was a beat-up old Mercedes, an eighth of a bottle of custom-made perfume, and a condo. By then, as she told me, she’d lost her chops, her confidence, and her agent.
“I wasn’t Meryl Streep to begin with,” she said. “Playing the hot blond bad g
irl served me well when I was twenty-two. At thirty-two, not so much.”
When we met, Magdalena was bartending in an after-hours club in an industrial park in Hauppauge, a place called Malo. I’d been brought there by Pete McCann, a Suffolk County detective who’d once been a close friend. We were close until he started fucking my now ex-wife a few months after John’s death. Pete had slept with Maggie, too. That was the thing about Pete: Unlike me, he was a guy who wanted things, especially things that weren’t his to have. Pete was dead now. It was Pete who Bill Kilkenny had been forced to kill in order to save me, a woman named Katie Smalls, and himself. There was a lot of blood spilled that night. Only some of it was Pete’s.
In any case, Maggie and I had been seeing each other since we’d met. We were good for each other. She still tended bar. She also had started taking acting classes and auditioning. Me, I don’t know. I felt almost human again when we were together. Almost. We came to each other as damaged goods, but we didn’t dwell on the damage done to us and the dents we’d put into other people’s lives. We didn’t talk about the future, either. We just tried to be. Whatever that meant.
“What kind of part?” I asked.
“Let’s not talk about it, okay? I don’t want to jinx it.”
“Sure. I can shift my schedule around.”
When I hung up, I noticed a car zipping past me into the Paragon parking lot and pulling under the portico. It was Slava’s old green Honda Civic with the mismatched fenders. I knew it because I’d borrowed it many times since Christmas. Normally, I wouldn’t have paid it any mind, but Felix told me Slava had the night off. Even if he had been scheduled, his shift wouldn’t’ve started for several more hours. But what really got my attention was the man quickly getting into the front seat beside Slava. It was the mysterious Michael Smith. Since Maggie had just canceled on me, I decided on my new plans for the evening. I waited for Slava to leave and to get about a quarter mile ahead of me on Vets Highway before I pulled out to follow him.
6
(SUNDAY NIGHT)
Slava must have been distracted, because he didn’t seem to notice me behind him. If he had, he would have ditched my ass without much effort. Following a car is a lot more complicated than it’s portrayed in the movies. To do it right, you usually need multiple cars. Since I’d spent most of my career in uniform, driving a white-and-blue cruiser with the words SUFFOLK COUNTY POLICE written in big bold letters on its flanks and a light bar on the roof, I wasn’t exactly an expert at it. When I was chasing you, you knew it.
Slava wouldn’t talk about his past, but there was some stuff I’d figured out about him. For one, he wasn’t who or what he seemed. With his booming voice and broken English, cigarette and vodka breath, big belly, veined and bulbous nose, Warsaw Pact dental work, and thrift-store wardrobe, he looked the part of the buffoon. With a little greasepaint, maybe even the clown. He was no buffoon, no clown. Behind the back-slapping and favorite-uncle routine was a serious man with a dark past.
He carried a Russian-made Makarov pistol and an old-fashioned leather-and-lead sap on him. He was skilled with them both. I’d seen it for myself. He had known where to look to find a hidden tracking device in my car and, unlike me, knew how to trail a car without being spotted or lost. It was an unusual skill set for a Polish émigré bellman. Until last December, I had accepted his story that he was just a poor peasant from Warsaw. Now I was less sure about that.
As Slava’s Civic approached Sunrise Highway, I’d foolishly let myself get within that quarter-mile window. I half expected him to speed up or hang a fast U-turn or do something to lose me. He did nothing evasive, instead making a lazy turn onto Sunrise and working his way to the Southern State Parkway heading west. Given that we were starting out almost as far east in the United States as it was possible to be, our direction didn’t give me much insight into where Slava and his passenger might be going. For all I knew, it might as well be to Anaheim as Amityville.
For the first part of the trip along the Southern State, a twisty, old tree-lined highway with low stone overpasses, it was easy to keep my distance and still keep Slava in sight. But as the rush-hour traffic built up and the already gray skies deepened, both tasks became more difficult. There were whole stretches of stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic followed by moments of clear sailing and higher speeds. But I managed to stay with him through all of Nassau County, into Queens, and onto the Belt Parkway. The traffic on the Belt was a nightmare, though it eased when we passed Kennedy Airport. And after Slava zipped by the Cross Bay Boulevard exit, I figured we were headed at least as far as Brooklyn.
When Slava exited at Coney Island Avenue, it seemed that Brooklyn was indeed where we were going. Brighton Beach, to be exact. Brighton Beach was now almost completely a Ukrainian and Russian enclave. I’d heard stories from city cops about how the neighborhood was run by the Russian mob and how it was impossible to get them to roll over on one another. I knew Brooklyn a little bit because my parents and grandparents were from here, but not this side of the borough. They came from neighborhoods like Greenpoint, Flatbush, East New York, and Red Hook. I’d been around this side of Brooklyn maybe five times in my life, mostly as a teenager with my friends at Coney Island, and maybe once or twice when I went drinking with cop buddies in Bay Ridge.
The ride up Coney Island Avenue toward the beach was a brief one, and when Slava turned right under the elevated subway tracks along Brighton Beach Avenue, the sky blackened into permanent night. Above my head trains thundered, their wheels, their brakes screeching and squealing, random sparks raining down on the cars below. The air smelling like burnt metal sparklers on the Fourth of July. It smelled of the ocean, too. It was the same ocean smell we got in Suffolk County, same ocean, only somehow it smelled dirtier here, with sour, rotting notes beneath the brine. Slava was stopped at a light a block ahead of me, so I pulled over by a fire hydrant and waited.
With the El tracks, the little shops at street level, and two stories of rental apartments above them, the streets crowded with people, I felt like I was looking into the past at old New York. But in the past, the signs would have been in English or maybe Italian or Yiddish. Not the signs here. Not now. In Brighton Beach, the signs were written in Russian. Maybe it was Ukrainian. How the hell would I know the difference? I knew it wasn’t English. Lucky for me that I looked away from the signage just in time to see a man come running out of one of the stores on the street, a produce market, I think, and get into the backseat of Slava’s car. I couldn’t make out much about him except that he wore a torn black leather jacket and seemed to be about Slava’s age and size.
Emerging from the artificial night beneath the tracks and into real darkness, I followed the car down Brighton Beach Avenue until it turned left onto Surf Avenue. I stayed as close behind as I dared, worried that I might lose sight of the Civic along the swooping swan neck curve of Surf Avenue that was kind of the gateway to Coney Island. Suddenly, the boardwalk was visible to my left, the Atlantic maybe fifty or a hundred yards beyond it. I still couldn’t hear the ocean for the rumble of subways at my back. I passed a park with a band shell, handball courts, and the New York Aquarium. The Cyclone roller coaster was lit up for business, but there was no business. The gray mist of the day had transformed itself into a steady, miserable rain.
I could hang back because Slava’s taillights were easy to see with so little traffic. Then, just before he got to Nathan’s Famous, he hung a quick right onto Stillwell Avenue, heading back beneath the elevated tracks. But when I turned onto Stillwell, his taillights were nowhere in sight. I kicked myself for having gotten this far without being spotted and for losing him because my success to that point had made me complacent. Isn’t it always the way?
The thing was that I had pretty much already exhausted my local knowledge of the streets. Once I was off Surf Avenue, I was out of my depth, so I did the only thing I could do. I slowed down, looking left and right and ahead o
f me for the old Civic with the wrong-colored fenders. I turned left onto Mermaid Avenue and began a search pattern, driving along Mermaid, turning down the side streets—West 15th, West 16th, and so on—until I hit Neptune Avenue and back up the next street. Then, on West 21st Street between Mermaid and Neptune, I found Slava’s car. It was empty, of course, because a good fifteen minutes had passed since I’d lost him. I backed down the street, pulled into an empty spot, and waited.
7
(SUNDAY NIGHT)
As I waited, I put my cell phone to work in a way I hardly ever used it, Googling Linh Trang Spears. Though I realized Spears might not be her last name, I thought I’d try it. I realized a lot of things as I sat there in my front seat, waiting, watching. For one, I realized I was a fucking idiot. That I had finally gotten a piece of my life back. That I’d found an incredible woman I could love and who could return love to the man I was becoming. I was on good terms with Annie. Krissy was back at Stony Brook. I had a steady job, such as it was, and new friends. Yet here I was at the ass end of Brooklyn on my night off, following around a friend who probably didn’t want or need me following him around. But the worst of it was agreeing to help Micah Spears. I wanted to bang my forehead into the steering wheel for being a fool.
I realized that accepting his checks as a trade-off was a remnant of the magical thinking I had tried so hard to shed. Sure, the foundation and the research were worthy things, and of course I had jumped at them. Of course they were a means to keep John’s memory alive, but I’d had time to think as I’d driven here. I’d fallen into my own old pattern, the belief that if I just wished hard enough and did all the right things, and if I clicked the ruby slippers together three times, that maybe Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again. I was past hoping. I thought I had finally gotten past wishing. And each time I thought it, I would prove myself wrong. I would never get fully past it. I would always wish John Jr. back alive and wish all of it undone. Dead was dead and gone was gone and that was that. But I guess there was still a part of me that didn’t want to accept it. Maybe a part of me that never would.
What You Break Page 3