Ice Shear

by M. P. Cooley

  He remembered Danielle and Ray fast when I opened the door, revealing the murder wall.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  “Oh, yes,” Dave said, handcuffing Marty to the table and walking out.

  I now sat opposite him, steeling myself. Not illegal, but that’s the only line I wasn’t crossing. I spoke low and firm. “Marty, I understand. Marriage is an important thing.” I thought of Kevin, for whom I would have done anything to keep alive, and Danielle, whom Marty might have killed. “It’s supposed to be forever.”

  He didn’t respond, and I adjusted course.

  “She must’ve loved you a lot, considering she didn’t have to marry you. I mean, she wasn’t pregnant.” At this he shook his head, participating in the conversation nonverbally. He would talk soon.

  “And she had choices, her parents made sure. Sure, UCLA didn’t work out, but she wasn’t going to be stuck in a dead-end mill town, wearing a smock and stocking cigarettes at the minimart on the eleven-to-seven shift, always on the lookout for someone who’s going to rob her. Her parents would’ve made sure she earned a degree, bribed her way into a second- or third-tier school somewhere far away, someplace where Jesuits could give her a solid education so she could be a teacher, or a newscaster. She was pretty enough to do that.”

  “Don’t forget smart.”

  A response. I was on the right track. I continued my story. “And she’d marry someone nice, someone who’d appreciate the connections she provided. Being the daughter of a congresswoman had its perks.”

  Marty joined me in telling my fairy tale, far away from an interrogation room in Hopewell Falls, New York, with, if I had to guess, everyone he loved dead. “And Phil’s got weight. Weight he could throw around. If he wanted to.”

  I knew the “if he wanted to” part was the part that stung. Phil didn’t want to help Marty. “So she must’ve loved you,” I said. “Or you must’ve had something she wanted.”

  He nodded at the pictures on the wall. “Like my brother?”

  “So that was it?” I leaned forward. “You were stopping her from going behind your back?” I continued to tell the story. “I think you were setting up something nice for yourself here. You brought your brother out as your second. You ran the operation the way you ran the operation in California, your wife stealing amphetamines from her job until she got fired.”

  “They didn’t have the money to pay her. . . .”

  “Fine, if you say so. The Byrnes were broke.” I pushed at the edges of Marty’s control. “So you, your brother, and your wife were the first wave in the Abominations’ move to New York, and she was the perfect cover—the daughter of a congresswoman and a millionaire—”

  “Multimillionaire,” he corrected.

  “—who could fix things if you got in a jam. You just repeated the operation you had set up in California: Get the supplies through the Abominations’ connections. Cook at the Brouillettes’. You were the one with years of experience running a meth lab. Produce enough meth to blanket upstate and Pennsylvania and maybe Ohio—did you have enough? But then, you caught the brother and the wife—caught them on camera—trying to edge you out.”

  “When they weren’t fucking.” He nodded to the picture of Danielle and Ray kissing. “Don’t forget that.”

  “That couldn’t have been a surprise.” I was ready to tip him over. “Yeah, they figured out you’d lost your edge—lost it when you got sober. He bought her diamond earrings, and you bought her a tea set.”

  He exploded. “She liked that tea set. She liked it fine. She always talked about how she and her mom would have tea parties, and I wanted to give her back a little of what she had . . . something nice. She used it the night she died—I came home, and she wasn’t there, and two cups were in the drying rack. Two cups you fuckheads broke, thank you—”

  “Submit a receipt, Marty. Let me finish my story, and after you can tell me yours.” I had him talking, and discussing Ray’s diamond earrings had him off balance. “So an old and boring gift made clear you didn’t have enough brass to run the show, and they were going to do it themselves, do it better. You had to punish them for the runaround, what they’d done. I can understand. I can. You build something up, you make your own way, away from your family, and you get screwed. So you did what you did last time. You killed them.”

  He nodded along. “One problem. My brother was a squid, and—”

  “Squid?” I asked.

  “I thought you were little miss gang task force. Big surprise, you know shit. A squid is . . . a guy, a kid, who has no fucking idea how to ride a bike . . . has no respect for his machine or the road. Ray couldn’t cook a clean batch of crystal to save his life, and unless Danielle was taking lessons”—he hesitated, cocking his head, as if considering the same thing I was: did she learn to cook? He shook his head and continued—“if I was running the show, I’d be hard to push out.” His wrist wrenched against the cuff as he pointed at me, and it would be red and bruised in an hour. “Except I wasn’t. I didn’t pull them in. Into the life.” He hissed at me the same way his mother had, warning and threatening at the same time. “I’ve seen what crank does. Taking it, cooking it. What I did, before, in Cali? I had no choice.”

  I got up and walked around the table, never breaking eye contact as I circled. “Marty, you’re the person who knows more than anyone. You know why someone might’ve killed Ray. You know what Danielle wanted to do, what she did. You know why someone killed her.”

  I placed my hand on Marty’s shoulder and leaned close, so that I could look up at the wall of evidence—the wall of blood, and death, and so much cold—from the same angle. “People wanted them dead. Like Danielle, there. Cut right through her middle, almost in half. And Ray’s head wasn’t really attached to his body. Someone hated him.”

  “Someone like me?” He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “Someone like you,” I agreed. “Did you do it, Marty?”

  He was silent.

  “Marty?”

  “No.” He breathed deeply. “But Dani and Ray, those stupid, stupid . . . and I didn’t stop them. I didn’t protect them.”

  “From who?” I edged my shoulder against him, trying to be a still presence, even as my legs shook from holding the crouch. The room was warm, and a trickle of sweat ran the line of my spine, but I remained steady.

  “Not the dealers. Abominations’ve got the dealers by the nuts.”

  “Which dealers?”

  “Truckers, mostly.”

  “Which truckers?”

  “I don’t have their names. And maybe the Mongols found out too soon, but no, I don’t think so. But the cook or the suppliers . . .”

  He stared at the wall in front of him. When he looked at me his pupils were wide, blacking out most of his blue eyes.

  “Craig,” he said. “He was supplying them, must have been their partner.”

  I stood, processing what Marty had said. It didn’t match up with what Craig was claiming at all, presenting himself as an innocent—or rather, dumb—sidekick.

  “He flew a bunch of shit up from the South. He was going to fly more sometime soon.”

  “The image there, with Ray”—I pointed to Ray going into the glove factory. “Bigger facilities? Were they doing a little downtown redevelopment?”

  “Yeah. I was gonna go down there and bust up the deal, but then Danielle . . .”

  “When was that picture taken?”

  He paused. “I have to keep her name clean. I went to work after the funeral to get rid of them all, so no one would see them.”

  “You didn’t do a very good job, Marty. You didn’t do a very good job with any of this. Deaths wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I brought those deaths.”

  “Marty, when was it taken?” I asked gently.

  “The picture was from that night. The night she died. Ray grabbing the supplies from the Brouillettes’ barn and making Craig move all the shit to their new cook spot. I figured I’d get proof on that dumbf
uck.”

  “Sure you weren’t keeping tabs on your employees?” I asked.

  “Would you listen to me for a second?!” he shouted. “That’s not me anymore!” He tried to cross his arms, but the handcuffs prevented it. “It never was, not really. It was the life my parents shoved me into, twisting me into a person they could use. And I finally figured out they were doing the same thing to Ray.”

  “When?”

  “Valentine’s Day.”

  “Not Christmas?” I asked. “I heard about how you threw him out. Very Hallmark Special of you.”

  “That was different. I smelled meth in the house. You know how noxious it is?” I did, unfortunately, like cat urine or rotten eggs. “Well, that was on his clothes. And I got so mad at that shit-for-brains that I threw him out. Danielle talked me out of it the next day, said to give him another chance. She said”—the words caught in his throat—“that she felt like a mother to him, and that we didn’t want him to go through what I went through and get into bigger trouble by sending him back to the Abominations.” He shook his head at the memory. “Danielle wanted to get him into bigger trouble out here.”

  “So Valentine’s Day?” I asked.

  “The earrings. I never saw them until you forced Ray to hand them over, but I knew they existed. Ray got some certificate of authenticity in the mail from the jeweler, laying out how much they were worth. I opened it. I thought he was throwing money away on Jackie, kept expecting her to show up wearing the earrings. Now I know they were for my wife.” Marty shut his eyes and took three deep breaths. I let him have a moment of peace.

  “In either case, I knew Ray had money—too much money. And coming from our family, I knew there was one way he would make it.” Anger crept into Marty’s voice. “He didn’t know. Dumbass thought our people, Zeke, he thought it’s the way to live, that making meth was an honorable profession. He had no fucking idea being a gangster involved being a real bad guy.”

  “And did you know what it took?”

  His eye went to the photo with the 22s, the beakers, the chemicals. He looked poisoned. “I did. I didn’t want to know, but I did. And the weird thing I figured out?” He laughed. “So did Danielle. She heard my story in AA. Heard what drugs did to me, heard where they were taking me: jails, institutions, death. When she and I got together . . . I thought she wanted me in spite of it.” A grayness settled over him, which I thought would never leave. “No. She wanted me because of it.”

  “And Ray gave her what you wouldn’t. And he did what she told him?”

  “Like that was hard. I tried . . . I tried to show him how a man lives. A real man, who gets up in the morning and goes out into the world and does the right thing. AA taught me how to live, and I was going to teach him how to live, save him from my path. I got a job and was going to maybe buy a place later this year. I had my eye on a sweet place on Cayuga, been for sale forever.” I knew the place Marty was describing, a two-story white wooden house with almost two acres of land around it. It even had a picket fence.

  “Real estate is for cheap around here, you know?” Marty continued. “That’s why we were living in that shit-hole, so I could save money.”

  I thought of my father’s house, neat and clean, and worth just what he paid for it in 1970. “What happened to all the money from the last deal?”

  “Danielle, she’s her father’s daughter. She invested in the business, the next stage. That night, at the factory? Craig dropped a bubbling 22. And what does Ray say? ‘Danielle is going to kill you.’ ”

  “Did they take any money from you? Any other source?”

  Marty pointed to pictures of his parents. “Them. The Abominations. I think that little ‘get to know you’ visit before we left was her making the deal. They wouldn’t trust Ray with milk money, but they always wanted a chance to go national. Danielle was their in—in to the Northeast and a chance to tie me to the family.”

  I wound up for my last push. “Marty, you had access to the car. You had plenty of reason to hate Danielle, to hate Ray. Hell, you might have done it for the money.”

  “I loved them.”

  “Well, sometimes people kill out of love. Pained love. Twisted love. When the people you love stab you in the back.”

  He stood up, the table jerking, the floor screws straining. “Fuck you. I walked away, I gave up everything I had—my fucking birthright. Three years in the desert, no family, no connections, and then Danielle. And I could see where she was going with that dealing Adderall bullshit, and Ray, he couldn’t wait to get patched. I was trying to help them, save them! Instead, I brought them together.” His voice broke, and he crumpled back in his seat. “I killed them both. That may be who I am. I destroy stuff. Like Zeke. But I didn’t do it. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “I just want the truth.”

  “Well, you got it. I won’t profess my innocence. ’Cause I’m not innocent. I brought death to their door.” He stared at the wall of photos. “Are we done?”

  “Let me make sure we have a cell open for you.” I exited into the hallway. Dave high-fived me. To my surprise Jerry, on the phone, gave me a thumbs-up from across the squad room.

  “You know that wasn’t a confession, right?” I said.

  “I know,” Dave said. “Everything but. He told us why he did it. He gave us the motive. We know he had opportunity. It’s enough to arraign him on charges. Hale is off corroborating details with Craig.”

  “Charging him would be stupid. We can’t physically place him at either murder, it’s all circumstantial.” I hesitated before my next statement, but I knew I was right. “He didn’t do it.”

  The smile fell halfway off Dave’s face. “Well, I think he did. And so does Jerry.”

  “I don’t.”

  Dave crossed his arms in front of him. “Look, Lyons, type up your report and go home now.”

  “Are you dismissing me?!”

  “No!” he yelled back, and then more gently, “It’s just . . . I think there isn’t anything either of us can do tonight. I’m going to go home, and Jerry can’t take it in front of a grand jury until tomorrow, at the earliest. Maybe we can get some more evidence, prove how very right I am. June, we both need to get ready to play cops and robbers with the feds tomorrow. And while that drug deal tomorrow will line up the Abominations for Hale, I think we got our killer.”

  I didn’t feel like things were solved. At all. But I knew they weren’t going to be solved tonight. Seeing Jerry approaching, I braced myself for something worse than Jerry’s criticism: his praise.

  “June,” Jerry said. “Great policing in there!”

  I let his positive words, like his negative ones, wash away, disappear under my thoughts of Marty, and Danielle and Ray, drugs and family, too much money, and not enough. Marty had given me the key—who was underwriting this venture? who was the cook?—but I couldn’t yet unlock the door.

  CHAPTER 24

  I PLODDED UP THE SIDEWALK to where my father sat on the steps. Even in the low light, he was reading, a newspaper in his hand opened to coverage of Danielle’s funeral, a cup of coffee beside him, still steaming.

  “Lucy?” I asked when I was halfway up the walk.

  Still focused on his paper, he gave an almost imperceptible nod toward the far end of the yard. Lucy popped out from behind what had once been a formidable snow fort, now brought low by higher temperatures. She disappeared, surfaced again, and threw a snowball, which flew three feet and dropped into the snow. She raced up to it and dug it out—she had no problem discerning her ball of snow from the drifts that surrounded it—and threw it again. It sailed high and to the left. Lucy raced to where it landed and, again, dug it out. She ran up, her face filled with harsh determination, completely focused on the snowball. She suddenly realized how close she was to me and stopped, only a foot away. Instead of throwing herself into my arms, she whaled the snowball right into my chest.

  I gasped slightly, from the shock as much as from the icy ball. Lucy darted
back behind the wall of her snow fortress.

  “Shouldn’t have missed ice-skating,” Dad said, taking a sip from his coffee as he continued to read his paper.

  I was as sorry to miss ice-skating as Lucy was. After a day spent in crowded rooms that closed in on me, death plastered to the wall, I had been anticipating the clean air and open space and the speed of ice-skating. Not that I could really go that fast, being so out of practice. Maybe a snowball fight would be good for us. I gathered up my own ball of snow and ran within her throwing range. Unlike my daughter, I fought fair, although she was seven and gave me plenty of warning on the attack, albeit unintentionally.

  Her aim and control had evidently improved. The next snowball missed my head, but only because I ducked. As Lucy leaned over to grab another, I gently threw my own loosely packed snowball, which disintegrated before impact, sprinkling white against the purple of Lucy’s snowsuit.

  Lucy ran up and threw another snowball from her stash, and I dropped a shower of snow over her, where it spilled over the pom-pom and earflaps of the dark blue cap and made Lucy laugh.

  Until it went down her back. She rubbed the snow that was on her head and neck and ended up smearing even more snow past the edge of her elastic collar.

  “It’s in my back!” Lucy cried.

  “C’mon, honey.” I pulled her to me, but she flapped me away. I held my hands out as I might with an angry suspect, proving I wasn’t armed, and dropped my voice low. “Let me get that out. Or maybe we should go inside and get warm? I know I’m freezing.”

  “It’s cold, Mom,” she said through tears. “It burns.”

  I knew my daughter was too distraught to make the decision to let me help, so I snatched her up in my arms and walked into the house, my father shutting the door behind us. I sat down on the staircase and pulled her into my lap, interspersing hugs between removing her hat, snowsuit, and boots and dropping them all on the paper grocery bags that lined the hallway in the winter months. Lucy went limp in my lap, the tears stopped. I kissed my daughter’s temple and held her close, taking advantage of her rare stillness.