What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Nissequogue was part of Smithtown, the rich part. It was located on a scenic, steer’s head–shaped piece of land between the river on the west, Stony Brook Harbor on the east, and Long Island Sound on the north. There were municipal beaches at the tips of the steer’s horns: Short Beach on the river side, Long Beach on the harbor side. As a teenager I’d spent a lot of time at both beaches, but I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time in Nissequogue itself. Nissequogue didn’t really have a lot of there there, except for the country club and beach club, and the Murphys were never going to be members of either one of those. There weren’t even a lot of streets in Nissequogue. When you have huge houses on giant lots, who needs streets? I had never been in any of the houses up there, never even been close to one except for the time I had taken a wrong turn and ended up halfway down some rich asshole’s driveway. The fucker actually came out of his house toting a shotgun.

  I turned left off Nissequogue River Road onto Horse Race Lane, then left again onto Boney Lane. I stayed on Boney just past Pheasant Run and came to the private road Asher had alerted me to. It was down this private road, so I was told, that my streak of never entering a house in Nissequogue would end. I parked my Mustang in front of the four-car garage that had either once been an actual carriage house or been built to resemble one. I walked back to the front entrance of the house along a crushed stone driveway, the stones making crunching sounds beneath my feet. It was so quiet up here that my footfalls seemed to fill up the night. I was very close to the Sound and to the wetlands along the river. The air didn’t smell so much of salt water as it did of rotting vegetation, like at Roberta Malone’s house on Shelter Island. Wetlands, marshes, and swamps have a very distinct odor of decay, and that odor was heavy in the air.

  The house itself was tastefully huge in that it didn’t overwhelm the big old-growth oaks and maples around it, nor did it push at the borders of the lot, which were far enough away that they were impossible to make out in the dark. My guess was that the lot was a good three acres, give or take. It also helped that the next closest house that I could see at all was at least a third of a mile away across Boney Lane on Pheasant Run. The house before me was a three-storied, two-gabled affair. The section of the house that featured the main doors showed an old brick façade to me, the bricks rising up from the ground to the tip of the gable. The rest of the house was English Tudor style, with gray slate roofing. The place was all very tasteful: no poodle-shaped topiaries or bizarre sculptures, no elaborate fountains, giant prayer wheels, or wind chimes.

  The odd thing was that I was told I would be expected, but I had no idea by whom. What did I know about the person or persons on the other side of the big black doors? I knew he or she had lots of money. Just how much, how they’d gotten it, or if they still had it was in question. I also wasn’t quite sure exactly why I was asked to be there in the first place, though I figured it must’ve had something to do with Micah Spears. Why else would Asher have sent me here? Still, I would be sure only after I rang the bell. I did that.

  The right side door pulled back and an older man, a few years the senior of either Bill or Spears, stood in the vestibule. He was bald-headed and age-spotted. His blue eyes were faded and his shoulders stooped slightly. Still, he was a pretty imposing figure, one I thought I had seen somewhere before but couldn’t quite place. He wore a heavy blue wool sweater, frayed at the sleeves and around the collar. Beneath the sweater he wore a crisply collared white shirt. His pants were fine gray wool, the cuffs of which fell over beat-up brown slippers. He held a cut crystal glass of scotch—expensive single-malt, from the campfire smell of it—in his left hand.

  “You’d be Gus Murphy,” he said, his voice steady and rich with easy authority. “Come in. Come in. I’m in the study.” He didn’t bother introducing himself.

  The old man had a lumbering gait with a slight limp. As I followed him along the parquet flooring, under the pendulum hall fixture, past the sweeping staircase, I struggled to place him. And, after hearing his voice, it was even more frustrating. I knew this man, but from where? He turned left down a hallway and opened a door onto his study. I laughed to myself because studies weren’t standard issue in most of the houses I’d ever been in. They were the stuff of movies and the books I read to kill time during my shifts. But this was a study, all right.

  The walls were lined with carpet-to-ceiling bookcases, with a fancy wheeled ladder on a rail off in one corner. There was a fancily embroidered daybed by the fireplace and a massive desk near the huge picture window. The room smelled distinctly of old rum and fruit-scented pipe smoke. The neat display of pipes on the big desk confirmed what my nose told me. Rows of framed photos, black-and-white and color, sat atop a black baby grand piano. The piano partially obscured a cabinet and dry bar featuring an impressive display of bottles of single-malt scotches. The one wall free of bookcases was lined with artfully framed certificates and degrees and photos of my host with the rich and powerful, but I didn’t need to read the degrees or certificates to spark my recall.

  “Judge Kaufman,” I heard myself mutter.

  He smiled a yellowy-toothed smile in spite of himself. “Indeed, Gus. You’ve testified twice in my courtroom. I have a good memory for those things.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Judge Julius Kaufman was a Suffolk County legend. He was a legend because he was that rare judge all sides hated, but everyone respected. He was neither a hanging judge nor a soft touch. He wasn’t the type to issue a warrant on the whims of a prosecutor, nor was he the type to demand unreasonable proof before issuing one. He was a fair man. Fairness may be something people outside the legal system may think is the ultimate goal of the system. The truth is anything but that. It was adversarial, a competition, and when humans compete for anything they look for an edge. And when you’re looking for an edge, fairness is often the first casualty.

  “I see you admiring my pipes. I’m afraid they’re for display purposes only these days, vestiges of things past,” he said, his eyes looking far away to a place I could not see. “My late wife wanted to rip up the carpeting in here when I was forced to give up smoking. She thought the smell would make quitting more difficult, but I enjoy the memories too much. I find a comfort in it. Excuse me, Gus. Old men get foolish and wistful at inappropriate times.”

  “‘Foolish’ isn’t a word I ever heard anyone use to describe you, Your Honor.”

  He laughed a deep, hearty laugh, one that made me smile just hearing it.

  “No? I can only imagine the words your fellow officers and the prosecutors used to describe me.”

  “Well, they were certainly colorful.”

  “Excuse my rudeness, Gus. Please sit,” he said, gesturing toward a green leather wing chair across from his desk. “Would you like a glass of scotch? I have many to choose from. If you name one, I probably have it.”

  “I’m not much of a scotch drinker.”

  “Bourbon?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t want to be a pain and I did eventually want to get to the point of my being summoned. “You pick.”

  A minute later, he handed me a cut crystal glass like his own, and sat behind his desk.

  “Cheers. L’chaim,” he said, lifting his glass to me, and sipped.

  I sipped mine. It was pretty heady stuff for bourbon.

  “Gus, I have held the oaths I have taken over the years very dear, and considered the words in them seriously. I have tried always, with a good rate of success, to keep the promises I have made, both personally and professionally.”

  “I sense there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere.”

  He laughed again, only this time there was a sadness to it and no humor.

  “Yes, let me cut if not directly to the chase then closer to it. In 1967, fresh out of University of Michigan Law and passing the New York Bar, I did a foolish thing. To the horror of my parents, I enlisted in the Marines. I looked around me and
saw black kids and Puerto Rican kids being drafted left and right, being made fodder for the war machine, and I saw also that upper-class and middle-class kids had options. They could become cops or doctors or go to college and get deferments. Remember, this was before Nixon came in and put an end to that.” He laughed a real laugh. “Of course, you don’t remember that at all. How could you? Thank God for that. It was a terrible time. Anyone with fond memories of the sixties is being willfully stupid.

  “Excuse me, I digress. But truthfully, my parents needn’t have worried. Once I got through officers’ training school, there was very little chance I was going to see combat. I was assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Believe me when I tell you, we didn’t lack for cases during Vietnam. It was also during this period that I discovered I was a good lawyer, but that I was a particularly gifted prosecutor. Not only was I good at it, Gus, I had a taste for it. You didn’t want any blood in the water around me. No, sir.”

  I must’ve reacted, because he stopped and smiled at me.

  “You seem surprised,” he said. “I know my reputation. I’m aware that I was known as a fair judge, but fairness is learned behavior, Gus. And it was as a prosecutor in the military and then as a civilian that I learned it.”

  “Judge Kaufman, no offense, but is there a point to all this? I mean, your life sounds pretty fascinating, though I can’t see that you’d be interested in telling it to the likes of me. The reason I’m here must have something to do with Micah Spears. I know that a friend of mine met Spears in ’Nam and won’t talk to me about—”

  “Yes, that’s why you’re here, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to suffer through a little bit more of my background before we get there.” He scowled at me. “You haven’t touched your drink. I’m getting myself a little more. Do you mind?”

  I shook my head and I sipped some more of the bourbon as he refilled his glass.

  He returned but didn’t sit behind the desk. Instead he sat on one corner of it, close to me.

  “So let me skip forward to 1971 and my final case in the JAG Corps. It was a very ugly case, a very ugly case indeed. It involved three soldiers whose unit had been involved in a firefight in Kon Tum Province near the confluence of the borderlands of Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. The three soldiers in question claimed they got separated from their unit during the fight and resurfaced eight days later at a fire base about twenty klicks northeast of where the original skirmish had taken place. The three of them held to the narrative that they had lived off what they scrounged and foraged and that they had spent much of the time hiding from enemy patrols. When they were sent back to their unit, their CO would have none of it and had them charged with desertion under fire, a crime punishable by death. They were escorted back to Saigon to await court-martial.

  “About a week after that, intel reports surfaced—I had a lot of pals on the intel side of things—about a massacre at a small village just on the Cambodian side of the border. The reports were horrific. Whole families murdered in the most gruesome ways imaginable. The ones shot to death were the lucky ones. There were drowned babies, but according to the reports, the young women of the village got it worst of all. They had all been raped, beaten, tortured, and stabbed like pincushions. Naturally, our first inclination was to blame it on Charlie—sorry, the Vietcong. That it was retaliation for the villagers collaborating with us or the South Vietnamese. It wouldn’t have been the first time during the war that it had happened, but we were keen to make PR hay with it after years of getting killed in the press, most especially after the My Lai Massacre trials the previous year. Do you know about My Lai, Gus?”

  “Unfortunately, I do.”

  “So you can understand why many people in the armed forces were anxious to get play out of an even more brutal, if smaller-scale, incident by the enemy. We sent in our best forensics people, documented everything. Photographed, filmed, made site maps, sketched it all. We autopsied each victim. There was just one problem, but it was a big problem.”

  “The Vietcong didn’t do it.”

  “No, they did not. The bullets and shells recovered at the scene were from standard-issue U.S. Army M16s and Colt 1911 .45s. The stab wounds were from M7 bayonets, our bayonets.”

  “Could have been the enemy making it look like us,” I said, not believing for a second the words coming out of my mouth.

  “I suppose, if not for personal items belonging to the careless soldiers actually responsible for the slaughter.”

  “The three soldiers you already had in custody in Saigon.”

  The old judge smiled as sad a smile at me as I had ever seen.

  “But, Your Honor, that begs the question, how did he ever get back here. I mean, never mind the massacre, those guys were already charged with desertion under fire.”

  “As I said before, Gus, thank God you weren’t around in those days. It would be hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t lived through those times the incredible levels of insanity, dissention, and chaos. This was post–My Lai, and the year after we invaded Cambodia, essentially expanding the full-blown war into a neighboring country. We were negotiating peace with the north while the country was being torn apart at home.”

  “So what does any of that have to do with—”

  “Come, come, Murphy.” He stood up, his tone of voice becoming authorial, even impatient. “You’re a grown-up and an intelligent man. What do you think happened?”

  I asked, “Was it a weak case?”

  “To use the vernacular, it was a slam dunk. I had enough evidence to get those men executed enough times to vanquish all nine lives of the three most curious cats to have ever lived. No, I was told to make it go away. Ordered to drop it. To forget it. That the last thing the armed forces needed, that our negotiators needed, or the country needed was another public airing of our dirtiest laundry.” He walked around behind his desk by the window and stared out into the darkness. “You know the most galling aspect of it all, Gus?” He wasn’t really asking. “The most galling part of the whole disgusting charade was that I was ordered to help facilitate their name changes and to ensure the records were sealed.

  “I would like to tell you that I had done as I was told, that I had forgotten it and left the whole sordid horror story in my past until Asher Wilkes called me last evening. But I can’t tell you that. I have thought of it every single day of my life since and have suffered the most appalling guilt over having played along. I have thought of it every time I’ve sat in judgment on the bench, every time I have instructed a jury, every time I sentenced a man or woman to prison.

  “I’m a sorry old man and I’ve got a weak, tired, and sick heart. I haven’t done you any favors, Gus, by sharing this with you. Believe me, I haven’t, not in the long run. At least you didn’t have to look at the photos of those poor mutilated girls or drowned babies or the old men and grandmothers hanging from the trees. I’ve spared you that much.” He turned to face me. “I hope it’s worth the burden to you.”

  “So do I. What are you going to do now, Judge? Will you finally go public with it?”

  He laughed that sad laugh. “To what end? I’ll be the one to suffer the shame of not having come forward sooner. And the innocents will suffer, too. Spears’s family, the other men’s families . . . why should they suffer? Their families are no guiltier of the crimes than Hitler’s dog was guilty of her master’s. I won’t do that to them, and I hope you have the good sense not to.”

  “No, Your Honor. I won’t. I promise.”

  I stood and placed my nearly full glass of bourbon on the glass-topped desk where the judge had sat looking down at me a few minutes earlier.

  “Good. You know what I think I’ll do now, Gus?”

  “What’s that, Your Honor?”

  “I think I’ll smoke a pipe and finish my scotch. That’s just exactly what I think I’ll do. Good night, Murphy.”

  �
��Good night, Your Honor.”

  I let myself out. The sky had opened up, but not so much that I got soaked walking back to my car. As I turned right off the private road, I realized that I was, as had been suggested to me, in the employ of a monster. That I now understood Kevin Spears’s words and why Linh Trang had cut off her burgeoning relationship with her grandfather. Judge Kaufman’s words had the strongest grip on my attention. Why should the innocents suffer? I thought of the bodies of the mutilated girls of that Cambodian village and the photos I’d seen of Linh Trang Spears. Maybe, I thought, it was too late. The innocents had already suffered.

  54

  (THURSDAY NIGHT)

  Nissequogue River Road was fairly straight, but narrow—one lane in each direction—and dark, even though the leaves hadn’t yet bloomed on most of the trees. The clouds and the rain weren’t exactly helpful, either. Still, I had the road to myself and my thoughts. I couldn’t help but wonder how Kevin Spears and his daughter had found out about what and who Micah Spears really was beneath the fancy clothing and frosty exterior. I couldn’t bring myself to believe he had, in a weak moment, confessed his boxcar load of hell-worthy sins to either his son or granddaughter. No way. Men like Spears don’t have weak moments and they don’t confess. They compartmentalize and move on. They rationalize their actions, then bury their transgressions deep, pouring time and layers of concrete over the graves. But what did I really know about monsters? I’d crossed paths with murderers, rapists, and baby killers before, though never in a single package.