Suspects

by William Caunitz

  It was she who noticed the time. “We’d better get back. The distinguished district attorney does not countenance extended lunch hours for women,” she said. They each paid their share of the bill and split the tip between them. During their hurried walk back he reached out and took hold of her arm. “Will you have dinner with me?” he asked. People passed them, intent on getting to other places. Some turned and stared at the two of them standing motionless, and unaware of what was happening around them.

  She slowly freed her arm from his grip and pushed off ahead of him, saying over her shoulder, “I’d like that, Scanlon.”

  They decided that it would be wise to wait until after the trial before they went out together. Eight days later when the jury came in with a guilty verdict, they made a date for Saturday, two days off.

  On their first date they went to Texas Roundup in Soho, where they ate barbecued ribs and chicken and rib-eye steak and homemade chili and bourbon baked beans. She had discarded her usual conservative clothes in favor of an oversize silk blouse and tailored jeans that were cinched with a narrow snakeskin belt. After dinner they went to Las Cuevas, where they discoed until dawn. The sun was up when he escorted her into the Art Deco lobby of her West End Avenue apartment and rode up with her to the fourth floor. She stopped in front of her door. “Thank you, Scanlon. I enjoyed myself.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the side of her lips. She smiled at him and turned to open her door. As she was inserting her key into the lock, he asked her if she was busy later that day. They could drive out to the Island, eat lobster. She stepped into her apartment. “That would be nice. Why not make it around three.”

  It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon with thin motionless clouds bordering the horizon. The cool summer breezes were laced with ocean smells. Seagulls stalked the beach, glided aloft. Holding hands, they made their way along the rugged headlands of Montauk Point watching the whitecaps roll up onto the sand and rocks, each aware that they were on the threshold of intimacy.

  Eventually they got around to talking about their jobs. “Sometimes I think our society is on self-destruct,” he said, guiding her around a group of boulders.

  Scuffing seaweed aside with her sneakers, she said, “But can you imagine what life would be like without our court system? We’d be at the mercy of revolutionary guards meting out their own system of justice.”

  “Sometimes I think we’d be better off.”

  She moved close, put her arm around his. “But you don’t really believe that, do you, Scanlon?”

  “I guess not,” he admitted, conscious of her breasts pressing against his arm. Watching the retreating surf, he asked her to tell him how she had become involved with criminal law. She withdrew her arm and walked away from him. Going over to a cluster of boulders, she climbed up and sat, staring out at the ocean. He climbed up after her. Lowering himself next to her, he asked, “Did I say something to upset you?”

  She looked at him, her expression clouded. She seemed unsure how much of herself she wanted to reveal. She touched his cheek, looked into his softening eyes. After long hesitation, she tugged her knees up to her chest and wrapped them in her arms. A breaker pounded their boulder, lightly spraying them.

  “I’ve always been an overachiever, Tony. In law school I was the one who could always be counted on by the professors to rattle off the case law. Both my parents are lawyers. Dad’s specialty is admiralty law, Mom’s is blue-sky corporate stuff. My father went to Princeton. I went to Princeton. We have a house in Princeton. It has all the comforts: gardens, pool, pool house, tennis court. I’m the only child, and I guess I was fated to be my parents’ legacy to corporate law.” She frowned. Her eyes moistened. “You see, Tony, I never knew my parents when I was growing up. I hardly know them now. They were too busy with their careers and their social obligations to spend time with a rambunctious little girl who peed in bed. I can hardly remember being hugged by my parents, or being kissed by them, or told that they loved me. At Christmas I would get toys from F.A.O. Schwarz and a firm hug. That was as much as they could manage.

  “I was raised by a nanny. We lived in the south wing of the house, alone. Just the two of us, and Jasper, my cat. They’re both gone now. Nanny’s name was Helen McGovern. She was a warm, sweet old maid who showered me with her love and treated me as though I were her own child. I used to pretend that she was my mother, and that my parents were my cruel stepparents. She died last year, and I still miss her terribly.” She unzipped the side flap of her white windbreaker and took out a package of tissues. She pulled one out and dabbed her eyes. “I was in my middle twenties before I realized that my parents probably loved me, but were undemonstrative, incapable of giving much of themselves.” Jane looked at him, trying to decide whether to continue. She made a small dismissive shrug of her shoulders and leaned forward, resting her chin on her kneecaps. “I was a virgin until my senior year at Princeton. His name was David and he was the captain of the fencing team. We went together for seven months before David dropped me for a cutesy math major. I was devastated.” She laughed self-mockingly. “Young girls are such romantic saps. They think love is forever. But I got over David. I’m a survivor, Scanlon. Anyway, after law school, Dad wangled me a position with one of the city’s top firms. A very proper firm that accepts only top students from the best schools, people who have the proper family connections. And even then you needed what cops call a ‘contract’ to get a job with this firm.”

  He smiled. “Someone still has to make that old telephone call for you.”

  “Yes. It was while I was working there that I made the mistake of falling in love with one of the married partners. That little romance lasted a little over a year. And then one evening he announced that he could never leave his wife. And then he had the gall to add that I deserved more than a shabby little affair.” She dabbed her eyes again with a tissue. “That bastard. He never did realize that I had never intended for him to leave his precious wife.”

  She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “I really hated working there. It was a dead, boring place full of assholes dressed in dark three-piece suits and fusty dresses and sensible shoes and high-collared blouses. I used to go home every night with a headache. It was only after eighteen months of paying a small fortune to a shrink that I realized I was living my life for the sole purpose of trying to gain my parents’ love and approval. I decided it was time for me to grow up and start living my life for myself. My parents were disappointed, to say the least, when I informed them that I found corporate law a bore and had accepted a position on the DA’s staff. ‘But Jane, dear,’ Mother said, ‘criminal law is so undignified.’”

  They both laughed.

  “I don’t know, Scanlon, perhaps I’m still trying to earn their approval. But I do know that I love my work and that I am damn good at it. And that, sir, is a very nice feeling.”

  He picked up a pebble, ran his thumb over its smoothness, and skimmed it out across the surf. “Are you seeing anyone now?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone in a long time. I need a strong man, Tony. A man who is not searching for a mother replacement. And, unfortunately, there just aren’t too many of them around.” She turned and looked at him. “Okay, Scanlon, it’s your turn. What secrets are there in your life?”

  Policemen find it difficult to talk about themselves, to let others peek into their world. The Job makes cops xenophobic. But slowly he overcame his reluctance and began to tell her of his life. He described the wise guys on Pleasant Avenue with their wide-brimmed pearl-gray hats, and pegged pants and pointy shoes, and how they used to hang out on corners with their hands clasped behind them, ready to drop the day’s gambling action should any plainclothes cops appear. He described the rich, exotic smells inside Mr. DeVito’s cheese store, and explained how they used to make pizza with pure olive oil.

  They lived in a four-room apartment over a barbershop. He was the only child, and he had his own room next to his parents’ bedroom. His father was a b
arrel-chested Irish drunk who also happened to be a sergeant in the NYPD. Haltingly he tried to tell her about his father’s drunken tirades, and of the physical abuse that he and his mother suffered at his father’s hands. His face expressionless, he recounted how he used to lie awake at night listening as his father staggered in after a four-to-twelve tour, of hearing his mother’s whispered pleas, of trying to ignore the sounds of his parents’ squawking bed, his father’s hoarse grunts. He told about the times his father would pass out on top of his mother and of how he would have to get up and go and help his mother push the half-naked drunk off her slight body. He told of pretending to be asleep when his father would come home drunk and beat his mother. He spoke with bitterness of his father’s hatred of Italians. “And my mother is Italian,” he added balefully.

  His mother had grown up on Center Market Place in Little Italy. She was short and had a strong peasant’s face, olive skin, thick black hair, and luminous dark eyes. She was kind and generous and had a totally miserable life with his father. But still she maintained the pathetic and desperate illusions of a loyal wife: she told Tony not to judge his father too harshly.

  He paused to light a De Nobili, his face flushed by emotions that he normally kept in the deepest part of himself.

  Holidays spent with his father’s side of the family were joyless. His Irish aunts and uncles shared his father’s hostility toward Italians; in fact, he added with some dismay, they hated everyone who wasn’t Irish Catholic. They were, as far as he was concerned, loathsome, miserable people. Days before a holiday, his mother would prepare. She cleaned the house, shopped for food, liquor, beer, spent hours in the kitchen making delicacies, baking. He could almost smell the big pots of simmering sauces, the strong aromas. When the relatives arrived in midafternoon they would trudge, many already drunk, into his home, ignoring his mother. They would treat her as though she were their servant. His mother’s name was Mary. They’d address her as Maria. They would talk disparagingly of Eye-talians, in front of his mother, and tell awful ethnic jokes. With painful clarity he described the mounds of dirty holiday dishes in the sink, and him and his mother washing them while his aunts stayed in the parlor drinking cans of beer and smoking cigarettes. He told her about his childish fascination with the way his aunt’s false teeth slid up and down when they talked. “Every one of them had store-bought choppers.”

  Jane Stomer stretched out her legs, crossing them at the ankles. She had a perplexed look on her face. “If your father felt that strongly about Italians, why in heaven’s name did he marry your mother?”

  A series of breakers rolled into their boulders. The spray felt good. He tasted salt on his lips. “I had trouble with that one too,” he said, “until I took a few moments to compare my DOB with my parents’ anniversary. It was off by four months.”

  Windsurfers offshore with brilliant orange and blue sails flew over the waves, while the people on them struggled to stay upright. His eyes followed them. “I grew up speaking Italian with my mother and her relatives. That was all we talked whenever my father wasn’t around. The Italian side of my family was warm and wonderful. Kind, gentle people who went out of their way to make you feel at home in their houses. As a kid I dreamed of coming on the Job and of someday being my father’s boss, and of making his life a living hell.” He flicked ash into the ocean. “But he disappointed me in that too. Fourteen months after I came on the Job, he threw in his papers and ran off with his Irish girlfriend, another drunk.”

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “Rotting in hell for all I know.” He held up the De Nobili. “I began to smoke these when I came on the Job. I wanted the Irish Mafia to know that although my name is Scanlon, I’m a guinea through and through. It’s my own personal affirmative action program.”

  “And what about Tony Scanlon’s private life?” she said, staring out at the windsurfers.

  That warm smile, that baring of teeth. “It’s interesting.”

  “Come on, Scanlon, out with it. Don’t try to palm off any of that laconic cop talk on me. I want specifics. Is there anyone important in your life?”

  He became serious. “Not at the moment.”

  “Was there?”

  “Sort of,” he said with a sheepish grin.

  “What do you mean, sort of?”

  “Well, I was seeing two women at the same time.” He added quickly, “But I liked both of them very much.”

  “And they, of course, did not know each other.”

  He became uncomfortable. “Well, not exactly.”

  His little-boy discomfort caused her to suppress a smile. “Out with it, Scanlon.”

  “As luck would have it they both went to the same place on the East Side to get their legs waxed. Anyway, they met there accidentally, and as women inevitably do, they got around to telling each other about their boyfriends. And it just so happened that they both were seeing a police lieutenant named Tony. You can guess the rest of it.”

  She pushed herself up and stood over him. Placing a friendly hand on his shoulder, she said, “Scanlon, you are a typical, lying, two-faced cop. You’re the kind of man that women discuss in the powder room. Any woman who even considered becoming involved with you is a fool.”

  He made a weary gesture. “Guess I can’t argue with that logic, Counselor.”

  The next night they went to Allen Street in the East Village to eat Indonesian food. They ate rijsttafel served by waiters wearing colorful headdresses, and folk garb over washed-out jeans. They had finished their dinner and their table was covered with many small dishes and rice crumbs. He caught her watching him and took note of her haunted expression. She lowered her eyes, brought her napkin to her lips. There was an awkward silence. She toyed with a skewer, avoiding his eyes. He became conscious of his own heartbeat. Reaching across the table, he took her hand in his. “Will you come home with me?” he said, an edge of uncertainty in his voice.

  She squeezed his hand, scraped her chair back from the table, and got up.

  They stood before his bed locked in a lingering kiss. His hand moved under her dress, and she stepped back, out of reach.

  “Get undressed,” she said, in a tone of mounting urgency. As he struggled out of his clothes, she came up to him, slid her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

  Naked, he pressed into her, and again she pulled back from him, ordering, “Sit on the bed, Scanlon. I want you to watch me take my clothes off.”

  Standing a few feet away from him, her eyes locked on his, she removed her clothes, a garment at a time, carelessly letting each fall to the floor. Her slow, deliberate unveiling increased his desire for her. He sat motionless, breathing hard, his stare caressing her body.

  She was now clad only in bra and panties.

  He delighted in her long, smooth legs, her flat stomach, her breasts straining against her bra. His eyes swiveled down to the black mound that showed through her panties. They lingered there. His mouth dropped open, and he made a movement to go to her.

  She thrust out a palm. “Patience, Scanlon. This is how I like it. Slow. Hard.”

  Her face was glowing with desire. She reached up to the front of her bra, paused, looked down at her cleavage, then to him, and unhooked her bra. Large breasts with protruding nipples rose and fell with each breath. She slipped her hand inside her panties and slid them down, stepping out of them.

  “I want you,” he gasped.

  “Soon,” she said, coming to him, lifting her leg over his, straddling him.

  A searing sensation shot through his body as she lowered herself onto his penis, drawing him inside her body. She did not take him deep, but instead kept him at the entrance, slowly, methodically undulating her body over the head of his penis.

  “Slow, Scanlon. Slow,” she moaned.

  Her exquisite torment caused him to catch his breath. His mouth was agape, dry. He made low grunts. He lunged his body up into her. She retreated. “Not yet, Scanlon. Soon.”

  Long deep guttural so
unds came from her open mouth. Her eyes were closed in tight concentration. Beads of sweat dotted her brow. She was moving faster, faster, taking him deeper and deeper. He pulled her close, his mouth eagerly sucking on her nipple. She gasped. “Yes, Scanlon. Yes. Do it hard. Hard. Now. Now!” She plummeted onto his penis, wrapping her legs around his waist.

  They lay in a naked embrace, gasping, their bodies exuding the sweaty scent of lovemaking. Time passed, and they dozed. He awoke first, his passion renewed. His lips moved along her neck, savoring the smell of her body. He pressed her close. His caresses stirred her out of her sleep. She began to respond. She pressed her body against his, and opened her mouth to his kisses. He slid down between her legs and sucked her up into his mouth, his tongue delicately caressing, and his finger probing deeper.

  Her body was immersed in passion. Every touch, every tongue movement caused her to wrench, smear his face with her body. She was pulling her hair as her head thrashed on the pillows. She was making rough, grating sounds. Her body rose up off the bed at the waist, and she began to pound the mattress. Her nails clawed the sheets. “Yes! Yes!” she shouted. And then as orgasm ripped through her body, she grabbed a pillow to her face and screamed.

  He moved up the bed on his knees, kissing her body as he went. When he was kneeling alongside her shoulder, he stopped and took her head into his hands and gently guided it toward his glistening penis.

  Her face showed a momentary hesitation. She pulled back, vacillating, then looked up at him. “Please don’t …”

  “I won’t,” he interrupted softly, and then gasped and called out her name as her moist lips closed around him.

  The needle scratched with annoying regularity. He came out of his reverie and put the glass down on the treasure chest. Pushing his hulk up off the bed, Scanlon hopped over to the turntable and changed the record. Then he hopped back, while Piaf sang “L’Ac-cordéoniste.”