What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I didn’t speak again for a few minutes. I let the kid finish his slices in peace. When he was done, I told him he could take the rest of the pie home with him. He seemed happy about that.

  “One more thing, Jim. This is the tough question. Can you think of any reason Rondo Salazar would murder her? Did she ever mention his name or the Asesinos? Can you think of any connection between them?”

  He thought about it, searching his memory. “Sorry, Gus. I can’t think of her ever mentioning him or that gang or any connection between them. I just can’t. You know what’s fucked up?”

  “A lot of things, but what are you talking about?”

  “On the night she went missing, I went to her house.”

  “In Bellport?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I waited down the street for her to come home. I wanted to try and make things right between us. To tell her that I didn’t care if she never told me she loved me and that I could deal with whatever she had to deal with.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “Most of the afternoon and until about one the next morning. Then I left. I never got to tell her, Gus. I never got to say the things I wanted to say.”

  Boy, did I understand the pain of that. There were things I’d wanted to say to John that I never got to say. The crazy thing is, there were things I wanted to say to him every day. These days I said them, even if he wasn’t ever going to hear them.

  24

  (WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON)

  Although I had another of Linh Trang’s friend’s to see, I found myself driving deeper into the heart of Nesconset. Nesconset was a quiet area of neat, small houses and big, old trees at the southeastern corner of Smithtown. It was a nice if unremarkable place. I wouldn’t have even given the place a second thought but for the fact that TJ Delcamino’s battered body had been discovered in a wooded lot there last August. I guess I could sugarcoat things or deny that Delcamino’s murder hadn’t played a major role in my return to the living, but where had denial ever gotten me?

  I never knew TJ, not while he was still breathing, anyway. I’d known his dad, Tommy D, a petty thief, and not a very good one. I can’t say I really knew the father either, not in any meaningful sense. Until a Tuesday morning late last year, my contact with Tommy D had been limited to cuffing his wrists behind his back and reciting his rights. That all changed when he showed up at the Paragon to beg for my help in finding the people who had murdered his boy. He said the SCPD was dragging its feet, that they didn’t care because he was a fuckup and his kid was no better. I threw him the hell out. The way I figured it, he was playing the dead-kid card. Your boy’s dead. My boy, too. You’ll help me because that’s a tie that binds, ain’t it?

  I was wrong on many counts, but that’s not why I was parked on Browns Road, leaning against my car’s fender, peering through the tangle of suffocating vines, leaf litter, and dwarf trees starved of light by the huge oaks and maples along the lot’s borders. It was still early enough in spring so that I could see through the vegetation and the crap the neighbors too lazy or cheap to go to the town facility had dumped there late at night. I could see all the way to the left-hand corner of the lot where TJ Delcamino’s body had been left.

  I really wasn’t sure why I was there after all these months. Not to pay homage, certainly. The kid hadn’t been tortured to death so I could live again. That wasn’t the way things worked. I was no longer a big fan of magical thinking, because whenever I looked for it, I could never find any magic in it. The only things I ever found when I looked for the magic were wishes, hopes, and prayers. All unanswered. TJ Delcamino had been murdered because he took something that didn’t belong to him from the kind of people you didn’t take things from without paying a price. Where was the magic in that?

  I stopped staring, checked my watch, and realized I had to get a move on if I was going to make my appointment. As I walked back to the driver’s side of the car, my cell buzzed in my pocket. It was a seven-one-eight number I didn’t recognize, and I let it go to voice mail. I wasn’t in the mood for a robocall about lowering my credit card interest rate or winning a free trip to the Caribbean. I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. But the only person interested in my mood seemed to be me, because the phone buzzed again even before I could start the car. It was the same seven-one-eight number. Robocalls, as annoying as they are, don’t usually cycle through that quickly, so I picked up.

  “Gus Murphy.”

  “Mr. Murphy, this is Detective Dwyer. You remember me?”

  “How could I forget?”

  She laughed at that, but like everything else about her, it was guarded.

  “How is your charming partner, Detective Narvaez?” I asked.

  “Funny you should mention him.”

  “Yeah, why’s that?”

  “Because he’s standing right next to me and he’s not in a very charming mood. Fact is, that’s why I’m calling.”

  “That was my next question. Why are you calling?”

  “We’d like you to come in to talk to us.”

  “What for? You’re not lonely, are you?”

  She ignored that. “To answer some questions,” Dwyer said, her voice neutral.

  “We’ve already done that, haven’t we?”

  “New day, new questions. Look, Murphy, we can go round and round on this and I’m asking nicely. Don’t make me be a prick about it.”

  You could tell she had the capacity for extreme pricky-ness and no hesitation about displaying it. Still, I wasn’t going to jump through her hoops just on her say so or because her partner was a nasty SOB.

  “I don’t want to get on your bad side, Dwyer, but you’re gonna have to do better than a ‘new day, new questions’ before I come in.”

  “Hold on.”

  I could hear her putting her palm over the mouthpiece of the phone. No doubt she was consulting with Narvaez.

  She tried, “We’ve got new information that we need to ask you about.”

  “C’mon, Dwyer, that wasn’t even close. Try a little harder. Give me a reason.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then she said, “Slava Podalak.”

  I couldn’t afford to overreact and took a breath before responding.

  “What about him?”

  “You have any idea where he is?”

  “Told me he was going back to Poland to a relative’s funeral.”

  “Now it’s you who isn’t trying, Murphy. When can we expect you in here?”

  “Tomorrow noon.”

  “How about now?”

  “Sorry, tomorrow noon is the best I can do. I’m already late for an appointment and I work six to six.”

  “Brooklyn South Homicide on Mermaid Avenue at noon. We’ll be waiting, and don’t stall us, Murphy. Retired cop or not, we won’t give you that much leeway on this. We got a case to close. Do we understand each other?”

  “Tomorrow noon,” I said and clicked off.

  Now I had a call to make. I reached into my wallet and fished out that dollar bill with Slava’s number on it.

  25

  (WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, LATE)

  The entrance to Hauser Hall was guarded by two pairs of chubby concrete pillars. The building itself was a funky brown brick that looked like it had been carelessly spray-painted in a shade of concrete gray to match the pillars. But I was there to speak to Kaitlin Fine, not to critique the architecture on the South Campus at Hofstra University. Hofstra was a private school in Nassau County about a forty-minute drive from Nesconset on a good traffic day. Of course the next good traffic day on Long Island would come only after the apocalypse. So it had taken me an hour to get there, and an aggravating one at that. The aggravation was only partially the result of the traffic. Some of it was thinking about Maggie, about how she hadn’t called. Most of it was to do with Slava.

  He hadn’t
sounded at all surprised when I told him that the detectives had his name. Nor did he seem caught off guard or annoyed when I suggested it might be a good idea for him and Mikel to clear out of my old house in Commack.

  “This morning we are already going from there,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “It is better for all if you do not know, Slava is thinking.”

  I didn’t argue the point.

  “Gus . . .” he said, just before I was about to break the connection, “there is being more blood. You should not be surprised tomorrow when cops are telling this to you.”

  Whose blood? Why more? Where? He hung up before I could ask. It was just as well. I wouldn’t have known what to say if he had answered me. I didn’t like being in the middle of something I didn’t understand. Who did? But sometimes it was better not to know. That’s what I told myself. It would have been even better if I could’ve made myself believe it.

  First I went up to the main office of the Psychology Department on the second floor, where we’d been scheduled to meet, but she wasn’t there. I asked a woman working at a computer if she could tell me where Kaitlin Fine was. First she shrugged and then said I should try one of the labs in the basement.

  “The grad students are always down there futzing around in the labs.”

  Labs. The word conjured up all sorts of images in my head. Images of flashing red lights and behemoth machines shooting white sparks through the air, of test tubes filled with rainbow-colored liquids and beakers bubbling over blue-flamed burners. Images straight out of old monster movies I used to watch when I was a little boy. But the lab in which I found Kaitlin Fine was empty of nearly anything but her. It was a drab little space with a few chairs and a single Photoshopped poster on the wall of Sigmund Freud dressed in a shocking pink suit.

  “Pink Freud,” I said, pointing at the poster. “Funny.”

  She closed her laptop and walked up to me. “Mr. Murphy?”

  “Gus. Call me Gus. Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

  On Long Island, that was the one excuse that carried more weight than any other, and it was accepted without question.

  “That’s okay,” she said, gesturing at the chair across from her. “Please sit down.”

  I sat.

  Kaitlin Fine had a serious but unthreatening demeanor and her looks were kind of nondescript. Dressed in faded jeans, running shoes, and a black-and-white T-shirt with a diagram of a dopamine molecule on it, she kept her brown hair short. It wasn’t styled in any particular way, nor was it messy. She wore a light coating of makeup over the fair skin of her face. There wasn’t anything beautiful or ugly about her, nothing that screamed “Look at me” or “Look away from me.” There was nothing that would make you pick her face out of a crowd, yet I doubted she lacked for companionship. Some people just have a pull about them, and she had it. Dr. Rosen had it, too, a kind of welcoming magnetism.

  “You wanted to talk about LT, Mr.—excuse me, Gus?”

  “You were her roommate?”

  “For four years,” she said, the flicker of a smile crossing her serious lips. “First two years in the dorms and then with a bunch of other people off campus in a rental.”

  “You guys hit it off, then?”

  She nodded. “Immediately. Look, Gus, I think we need to establish some ground rules before we start.”

  “You sound like my shrink.”

  She smiled in spite of herself.

  “Ground rules like what?” I wanted to know.

  “One ground rule, really: the truth. I may be young, Gus, but I’m not gullible. I agreed to meet with you because I was curious about what you were really after. I’ve known LT’s family for a while now and I don’t believe they would have hired you as you portrayed in your message. She’s dead and they want to move on. So you can either tell me exactly why you’re here or we can shake hands goodbye.”

  It didn’t take me long to decide. I told her the truth, all of it. Right down to Micah Spears’s offer of the checks.

  “I’m sorry about your son,” she said, not because it was the right thing to say.

  “Thank you. So can we keep talking?”

  “Sure, but first I want you to know LT didn’t really have much of a relationship with her grandfather. In our junior year, there seemed to be a thawing. They even met a few times, secretly. LT’s folks hated the old man. But they wouldn’t have needed to worry because the détente didn’t last. It fell apart before it really got started. She wouldn’t talk about it, no matter how I tried to get it out of her. She just said he was a monster and that was all she ever said.”

  I thought about that for a second, about what her proclamation of Micah Spears as a monster could mean, but that was another issue for another time. I repeated to Kaitlin the same question I’d asked Jim Bogart. “LT, why not Linh Trang?”

  Kaitlin’s lips turned down at the corners. “She despised her name. She felt trapped by it. In fact, LT’s struggle with her identity inspired a subject I am researching: the dynamics of self-image versus ethnic identity and public perception. That’s why I was down here, trying to design a reliable and valid model for data collection.”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “Data collection, not so much.” She laughed. “It’s the stuff that comes of it that will be interesting.”

  “You said she struggled with her identity. How?”

  Kaitlin was amazingly well versed in Linh Trang’s struggles. She explained that college was weird for LT because it’s a time when most people are looking for a way to be different and to be seen to be different, but that all LT wanted to do was fit in.

  “Obviously, the name didn’t help with that,” Kaitlin said. “It got so that she simply started introducing herself as LT and wouldn’t tell people her name. But there was no escaping her looks. She was pretty and she was Asian and there’s a lot of guys, regardless of their own race, who have a thing for Asian girls. Bad combination—pretty, intelligent, friendly Asian girl on a campus of horny college boys.”

  “She dated, though.”

  Kaitlin was also well versed on that subject and needed little prompting from me to slide from LT’s dating history into her sexual escapades.

  “She was complicated. It was complicated. She liked all the attention. Who doesn’t like attention? But she didn’t trust it. Were they actually attracted to her, her sense of humor, and her wit, or were they attracted to their fetish about Asian girls? She would have sex with a lot of them on the first dates and then taunt them. She would play the subservient, submissive girl and do whatever the guys wanted and then she would abuse them. She used to describe stuff to me in detail. It was hard to listen to sometimes because she did it under the guise of punishing the boys she was with, but she was punishing herself.”

  I thought I had hit on something. As I sat there listening to Kaitlin Fine describe her old roommate’s self-destructive behavior, I formulated possible scenarios in my head. I pictured LT in a particularly low mood, going to the wrong bar at the wrong time and hooking up with just the wrong guy. A guy like Rondo Salazar wouldn’t take kindly to a woman taunting him, not about sex, not about anything. She hadn’t had sex, hadn’t been raped before her murder. But maybe it hadn’t gotten that far. Of course, I had to guard against jumping to conclusions, guard against creating likelihoods out of possibilities. That’s why it was so important to find out where Linh Trang had been before she was killed. I had to talk to Charlie Prince again.

  “I spoke to Abby, LT’s sister,” I said after Kaitlin had stopped talking. “They didn’t seem close. Why is that, do you think?”

  “LT loved Abby and Abby loved her big sister.”

  “But.”

  “But it was the classic case of the miracle baby.”

  I screwed up my face. “Huh? The miracle baby.”

  “Well, I can only tell
you what LT told me and stuff I heard from Abby, but it rings true to me. LT and Abby’s mom had had several miscarriages. And that was when their parents decided to adopt LT. The year after they adopted LT, her mom got pregnant and for the first time successfully carried the baby to term.”

  “Abby?”

  “Abby. But instead of seeing Abby as the miracle, they saw LT as the magical ingredient and she was clearly their favorite. Abby resented it, understandably. She was their biological child, after all. She was the miracle, but her parents really focused on LT.”

  “People are complicated.”

  “Incredibly so,” Kaitlin said. “I don’t think people realize how complicated we all are.”

  I told her about my earlier conversation with Jim Bogart and waited for her reaction.

  “Really nice guy, but it ended ugly,” she said.

  “I heard. Did she love him?”

  “If she ever loved any guy she dated, it was Jim, but I suppose in the end she didn’t even trust his love for her.”

  “Sad.”

  Then I asked her the same closing questions I’d asked Jim. Kaitlin’s answers were the same. She couldn’t think of any reason that LT would have had contact with Rondo Salazar.

  As I stood to go, she stopped me.

  She asked, “Have you spoken to anyone at her work?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You should. She was really unhappy there.” Kaitlin shrugged. “Maybe someone there knew LT in a way her friends didn’t. It’s worth exploring.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, and shook her hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  “Good luck, Gus. I hope you find out why this happened. Why things happen is what I’m all about.”

  “If I find out, I’ll definitely let you know.”

  It didn’t escape her notice or mine that I’d said “if.” Even with my newly conjured scenario, I wasn’t at all sure I was any closer to an answer than I was the day I started.