Never Goodbye

by Adam Mitzner

  After lunch, we return to Gabriel’s office to find an extremely tall man waiting for us.

  “Lou, I think I got something,” he says.

  “Vincent, meet ADA Dana Goodwin. Dana, this is Vincent D’Angelo. He’s making the initial cut of the financial evidence we’re collecting. And in case you’re wondering, yes, he did play college basketball.”

  D’Angelo holds a black loose-leaf binder. The label on the spine says “Bank Records.” He remains standing after we enter the office, even though Gabriel takes his position behind his desk and I settle into one of his two guest chairs. D’Angelo must think this will only be a short visit. Still, by standing beside me while I sit, his head is practically in another zip code.

  “So what do you have?” Gabriel asks.

  D’Angelo opens the binder and then turns it around so it’s facing Gabriel, upside down to me and him. Still, I can tell that the first page he’s opened to is not actually a bank record at all. Instead, it’s a calendar for the month of August. Dollar amounts are listed in a few boxes, in $200 or $300 denominations, but the figure “$300” is written in red on every Tuesday.

  “The credit cards went nowhere,” D’Angelo says. “All routine stuff. But it’s the cash withdrawals that caught my eye. Husband and wife kept separate checking accounts, and the missus’s withdrawal pattern was to take out two or three hundred bucks on Monday, you know, cash for the week. Occasionally she’d take another two hundred in a month, but that was pretty rare. That pattern goes back more than a year. But then, about five months ago, in addition to these Monday withdrawals, she started withdrawing three hundred bucks every Tuesday. On rare occasion, on a Wednesday. But it’s like clockwork.” He waits a beat, then gives the big reveal. “Gotta be an affair, right?”

  Before either of us can answer, another man is at the threshold of Gabriel’s office. He’s heavyset, with a smoker’s yellow teeth.

  “Lou,” he says, “the uniforms just brought in a homeless guy. Claims he saw the Wright murder. He’s in Two.”

  “It seems that our cup runneth over,” Gabriel says.

  Two uniformed cops are waiting outside Interrogation Room Two. They’re big men, made to seem even bigger because they’re wearing bulletproof vests.

  Gabriel introduces himself, extending his hand to the older of the two cops, although both must be less than thirty years old.

  “Al Mitchell,” the cop says as he shakes Gabriel’s hand.

  The other one, the younger guy, reaches over to me with an outstretched hand. “Joe Roman,” he says.

  “So what’s the story?” Gabriel asks.

  Mitchell does the honors. “No ID on him. Says his name is Franklin. Homeless guy. We know him from the area. Sleeps a lot of nights in the shelter provided by a church over on Lexington. Anyway, he says that on the night the DA lady got killed he was in the park loading his sack full of empty soda cans, and he heard the shots.”

  “Did he see the shooter?” I ask.

  “He’s a little fuzzy on that,” Mitchell says. “He saw someone, but he can’t say for certain that it was the shooter. But the guy he did see was the only person in the vicinity, and he was in a hurry to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  “Described the guy as wearing dark clothes,” Roman adds.

  “White or black?” Gabriel asks.

  Roman answers. “Claims he didn’t see the face. Saw the guy from behind.”

  “This is good work, officers,” Gabriel says. “Anything else we should know?”

  Roman shakes his head to indicate we’ve been told everything, but Mitchell adds, “Only that the guy smells something awful.”

  Mitchell wasn’t kidding about the stench. Worse than the puke smell from my last visit to Interrogation Room Two.

  Franklin has long greasy hair, an unkempt beard, filthy jeans, and a ripped shirt that, once upon a time, was probably white. He could be anywhere from thirty to sixty-five and is fretfully thin. His vacant eyes are a dull gray.

  Gabriel seems totally at ease with both the offensive odor and the unwashed appearance of our guest. He extends his hand. For a moment Franklin looks confused, as if he’s never seen the ritual before. Then he grasps Gabriel by the fingers.

  “Franklin, I’m Gabriel, a police lieutenant here. Thank you for coming down. This is my partner, Dana Goodwin.”

  Franklin nods and smiles. “Okay.”

  “I want to talk to you a little bit about what you told the other police officers,” Gabriel continues. “But before we do that, can we get you anything? A sandwich maybe? Or some coffee?”

  “A sandwich would be nice. Do you have roast beef?”

  “I’m sure we do. Excuse me for a moment so I can have someone get you that sandwich. While we’re waiting, we can talk. Sound good?”

  “Okay,” he says again.

  Gabriel steps out, leaving me alone with Franklin. I smile, and he smiles back.

  “What’s your last name, Franklin?” I ask.

  “Pearse. But I don’t spell it like the twelfth president.”

  I nod. “So how do you spell your last name, Franklin?”

  “P-E-A-R-S-E.”

  Gabriel returns during the spelling bee. “Sandwich will be about five minutes or so.”

  “Gabriel, Franklin just told me his last name is Pearse, but not spelled like Franklin Pierce, the president. He spells it P-E-A-R-S-E.”

  “That’s right,” Franklin confirms.

  “Good to know,” Gabriel says with a smile. “Thank you for that, Franklin. And like I said before, even though I know that the questions we have for you are going to be the same types of questions the other police officers asked, it’s important that I hear the answers directly from you, okay?”

  Franklin doesn’t say “okay” this time. In fact, he doesn’t acknowledge that Gabriel has said anything at all.

  I decide that, because my rapport with him thus far has been good, I’ll ask the first question. “As I understand it, last Friday night, you were in Central Park at about one in the morning. Is that right?”

  “Don’t know the time. Don’t remember the day either. Could have been Friday or Saturday or some other day. Also don’t know if it was near the duck pond or some other place in the park. I always go to a bunch of places because the bigring can take two hundred and forty cans at a time.”

  “I’m sorry, what’s a bigring?” I ask.

  Franklin laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard that sound coming out of him. “It’s not a big ring, like you put on a big finger, or something. The big . . . green, like the color. It’s what the machine you put the cans and bottles in is called.”

  Gabriel looks at me and smiles as if to say “Everybody knows that.”

  “I understand. Sorry for interrupting. Please continue,” I say.

  “Okay. So I’m loading it up. Now, you can only get twelve dollars, and so that’s two hundred and forty cans, right?”

  He waits for me to confirm his math. I say, “Right,” even though I have no idea how much he might get for each can.

  Gabriel puts him back on track. “While you’re loading up the cans, what did you see?”

  “Didn’t see nothing at first. But what I did was hear something. It was like boom boom. Sounded like firecrackers, but not as loud.”

  “You heard two of them?” I follow up.

  “Yeah. Boom boom. Like that. One right after the other.”

  “What happened after that?” Gabriel says.

  “Nothing. I didn’t know nobody was dead. I just thought . . . I don’t know what I thought, but I kept filling up my bag. But then I saw someone . . . they was running away. I know I should have checked to see what was happening . . . maybe that poor lady would be alive if I did, but I had the cans and I didn’t want someone to steal them. I didn’t know they were gunshots neither. I just thought . . .”

  His voice trails off, as if he’s embarrassed. Even though he hasn’t shown the slightest trace of indignity about being homeles
s, how he smells, or what he looks like, he recognizes that not helping someone in need is shameful.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Gabriel assures him. “You didn’t even know that you heard gunshots, right? I’m glad you didn’t go to look. If someone has a gun, you need to stay clear of them. The best way for you to help that lady is to tell us what the person you saw running away looked like.”

  “I saw them from behind. Didn’t see any face. Just somebody wearing a black sweatshirt with a hood.”

  “Could you tell if the man was white or black?” Gabriel presses.

  “You need to see their face to tell that. Like I said, I didn’t.”

  “Okay,” Gabriel says. “How about how tall he was?” Gabriel stands up. “Was the person you saw as tall as me?”

  “No. More like me,” Franklin says. “At least I think so. He was far away.”

  He means someone closer to five and a half feet tall. In other words, much shorter than Drake McKenney—but still very much in the ballpark for Richard Trofino.

  26.

  ELLA BRODEN

  After my session with Allison, I return to my apartment and spend some time at the piano. All the while, I mull over Allison’s contention that my relationship with Gabriel is a gift from Charlotte rather than something forever tainted by her murder. I know Charlotte would like me to think of it that way. I can almost hear her say it: “If I’m going to have to be murdered, at least you should get a handsome man out of it.”

  Then Lauren chimes in. “And I’m glad my getting killed helped remind the universe that it owed you one, which is why you’re getting the Saturday-night gig at Lava.”

  I laugh to myself, envisioning my Grammy Award acceptance speech: I’d like to thank the people in my life who were murdered, without whom I would never have had anything good ever happen to me.

  After I’ve spent enough time feeling sorry for myself, I decide that it would be therapeutic to do something productive. I begin playing the song I had started to write the other day.

  Gabriel walks through the door like a beaten man. His face has a drawn, haggard cast to it that I remember all too well from when he was working Charlotte’s case.

  “You look like you’ve been ridden hard and put away wet,” I say.

  He laughs. “Long day.”

  He retreats to the bedroom to put away his gun, a ritual he follows religiously. Even though I’m wearing pajamas, I know Gabriel isn’t going to change clothing. He doesn’t keep anything here except his work clothes and some underwear. He sleeps in boxer shorts, if that.

  Sure enough, a minute later he’s back, still dressed exactly the same.

  “You want me to make you something to eat, or to order something in?”

  “No,” he says, heading to the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator. “I’m just going to have a beer for now.”

  He settles into the armchair that sits beside the sofa I’m occupying. After taking a long slug of beer, he asks, “So how was your day, dear?”

  “I had Allison this morning. We talked a little about how I should see your presence in my life as a gift from Charlotte.”

  “And here I thought I was God’s gift to you.”

  He says it with a smirk, which tells me he’s kidding. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t on some level know it’s true. After all, you can’t get as much attention from the opposite sex as comes Gabriel’s way and not have it go to your head at least a little.

  “If you’re not interested in hearing about my inner life, you should tell me about your day.” I say it with enough edge that Gabriel knows I’m mildly annoyed.

  “No, I’m sorry. I am interested. Why am I a gift from Charlotte?”

  “I’m struggling with the idea that if Charlotte hadn’t been murdered, we wouldn’t be together. How can anything good come out of something so awful?”

  He doesn’t initially respond. Even though we’d never expressly discussed it before, I’m certain that other comments I’ve made over the past few months have been sufficient for Gabriel to surmise that I find this cause-and-effect link a harbinger of our future unhappiness.

  “And Allison told you not to think of it that way, but as a gift?”

  “Yeah. She’s a glass-half-full kind of shrink, apparently.”

  “You know she’s right, don’t you?”

  Do I know that Allison’s right? Isn’t that a self-answering question? If I knew she was right, I wouldn’t be raising the issue in the first place. On the other hand, of course I know she’s right. I don’t believe that everything that occurs in the universe is because of me.

  All I can muster in response is a shrug.

  “Well, even if you don’t know, I know,” he says. “Allison is right, at least partly. Maybe I’m not a gift for you, but you are certainly the best thing that has ever happened to me. And . . . I didn’t have to suffer a tragedy for us to come together. The tragedy for me would be if somehow I lost you because you thought you couldn’t be happy with me on account of the way we met . So . . . how does that work with your worldview?”

  “It hurts my head to think about it. Let’s table the discussion about my tortured psyche for now, if that’s okay. Tell me about your day?”

  Gabriel’s eyes narrow. That’s his way of saying that the discussion about my tortured psyche is only going to be just that—tabled. It won’t be forgotten.

  “It was a big one, actually. First we met with McKenney, who claims he hadn’t heard about Lauren challenging him. He flatly denied getting into any kind of yelling match with Richard Trofino.”

  Gabriel had previously shared with me Richard Trofino’s claim of a profanity-laced shouting match with the District Attorney, with McKenney making threats. I took it with a grain of salt. Richard could be counted on to use whatever means necessary to cast suspicion on McKenney.

  “Just a flat-out denial?” I ask.

  “Yeah. McKenney says it never happened. He doesn’t just deny that he made threats. He denies that the conversation with Trofino about Lauren running for DA even occurred.”

  It does give me some pause to learn that McKenney denied even knowing about Lauren’s potential challenge. It’s a common fact pattern in criminal investigations for different parties to have differing views of an event—the archetypical he said/she said. But it’s rare not to have any common ground at all. I had expected McKenney to deny Trofino’s claims that he threatened Lauren, but not that the encounter ever occurred. One of them is lying. It makes sense that Richard would concoct a story about McKenney making threats, but the only reason that McKenney would deny it outright is if he thinks he might be a suspect. Then again, I suspect that lying is woven into Drake McKenney’s DNA. It’s possible he does it as a reflex, rather than with any long-term objective in mind.

  “There’s also a homeless guy who claims he saw Lauren’s murderer,” Gabriel says. “Or somebody near the scene. Or maybe no one at all, because he could be hallucinating. But if it’s that, it’s not even a particularly good hallucination. Although he claims he heard the shots nearby, all he saw was someone running away. Claims he didn’t see a face, so there’s no ID. Because nothing is easy, the one thing that the homeless guy is sure of is that the shooter was much shorter than McKenney.”

  “Lucky for you that Richard is five eight, tops,” I say hopefully.

  “Donald Chesterman is short too,” Gabriel says.

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  “But that wasn’t even the big break of the day,” Gabriel continues. “We also learned that Lauren might well have been having an affair, which puts the spotlight back on Richard. It also gives some context as to why he might be working hard to shine it in McKenney’s eyes.”

  Gabriel has said this part without thinking it through. If he had, he would have realized that I’d react poorly to the news that Lauren was having an affair. Charlotte was having an affair too, and it led to her murder. To this day, a feeling persists inside me that I never really knew my siste
r. Now I can add Lauren to the group of people I love whom I apparently don’t know the first thing about.

  Gabriel can tell I’m upset. He leans over to me and reaches to take my hand.

  “I’m sorry, Ella. I should have been more delicate in telling you that.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t have an affair. Lauren did. And she wasn’t cheating on me, so I really have no grounds to take it personally. What leads you to think she was?”

  “Cash withdrawals. Each week, three hundred bucks. Like clockwork. Started in late July.”

  That does sound like an affair. The other reasons for needing cash—drugs, bribes, gambling, hit men—weren’t in Lauren’s wheelhouse.

  “Any idea who Lauren might have been involved with?” Gabriel asks.

  I shake my head. Lauren’s sex life was not a topic that we ever discussed. Mine took up all the air.

  “I wish I did, but I’m kind of shocked to learn about it at all, to be honest. So, no, I don’t have the first clue. I don’t remember her ever even saying that so-and-so was attractive.”

  Gabriel nods. “We’re flashing her photo around the hotels in the neighborhood near the office. If someone recognizes her, maybe they can work with a sketch artist to come up with her guy. A better bet is her mystery lover showing up on the surveillance tapes from the ATMs where she made the withdrawals. But you know how the banks like to take their time getting those over to us.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s a little weird that she’d be the one paying, though, right? I mean, I’m all for gender equality, but I think that when you’re having an affair with a married woman, the guy should pay.”

  The way he says it suggests that this is not a hypothetical in Gabriel’s life. I wonder how many times he’s paid for hotel rooms to spare a married woman from doing it.

  “Maybe they went twice a week,” I say. “Or maybe the guy wasn’t a multimillionaire or married to one, so Lauren felt like it was only fair that she pay.”

  He nods. “I didn’t think of the twice-a-week thing, but yeah, they might have alternated paying. Because even if he wasn’t a millionaire, I still think the guy would pay sometimes, no matter how much money the woman has. Otherwise, I don’t know, you feel like a hooker.”