“Don’t be silly,” she said without certainty.
“No, I want to. Really.”
Claire tipped her chin to look at him. So that was it. He hadn’t liked the kiss she’d loved. He didn’t care about her after all. What a silly fool she was! Of course, now he could see how ugly she was with her nose all sweaty. “Well, thank you, then, for saving the dog,” she muttered.
“Hey, don’t mention it.” He let go a manic laugh. The policewoman picked up the windshield wiper and smacked it down on the ticket. The jig was up. Then it hit him. Claire’s mother would certainly tell them he’d been there forty minutes ago. There was no reason now not to come clean. “Uh … look, I didn’t want to say nothin’ before. Didn’t wanna worry you or nothin’, but I got a car right here.”
They looked at him, puzzled.
“I been sorta following you,” he said to Claire.
“What, still?” Freddy studied Claire with scornful interest. “You think Claire is in some sort of danger? I doubt that.” He laughed a condescending little laugh. “She’s a little bit past the age for a child molester’s interest.”
“Is that right?” Johnny put his face up against Freddy’s. “I guess you got this whole business all figured out.”
“I didn’t say that.” Freddy’s sardonic tone faded fast.
“You were just acting like that for no reason, like.”
“Yeah, that’s it. No reason.”
“’Cause if you got any ideas about what’s going on around here, we’d be more than happy to listen to anything you have to say down at the stationhouse.”
Freddy went pale. He hoped with all his heart that the customers just going in hadn’t heard that.
The traffic cop sauntered by. “Whatsa matter,” Johnny shouted at her, “you never heard of professional loyalty?”
“Hey, mister, I just do my job.”
“That’s a cop on duty, sister.”
“Yeah, well I got my orders. I ticket anybody, any vehicle sits itself down in my no standing.”
“Johnny,” Claire said, and as she did she realized she’d never said his name like that before, directly to him.
“What.”
“Perhaps you could drive us home. Then Freddy wouldn’t have to leave at all. It’s getting awfully busy in there.” As if to demonstrate her point, a gang of snappily dressed coke types went rollicking up the stairs.
“Hey.” Johnny rolled his shoulders. “Can a corn.”
“I take it that means you will.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell your mother,” Freddy said to Michaelaen, “that I’ll be over tomorrow to see her.”
And Carmela, thought Claire, sick to death of him.
“Off you go,” Freddy tapped him on his bottom.
Neither Claire nor Johnny spoke until they dropped Michaelaen off. They both smiled pleasantly from the car and waved to Mary as she let the boy and the dog into the house.
“You didn’t have to make a fool of him in front of his son,” was the first thing out of her mouth.
“He’s a piece of shit.”
“Maybe so. But that knowledge isn’t going to help Michaelaen grow up a happier person.”
“Happier than what? Happier than who? You? Me?”
Claire let her breath out slowly. She didn’t know what to think anymore. Especially not with him this close to her. “Whatever happened with the license plate numbers?”
“Nothin’. Didn’t turn nothin’ up.”
“Oh.” She waited.
He didn’t want to tell her about the only old golden Plymouth he did know about, the one that sat in front of the station house for as long as he could remember. Furgueson’s. Captain Furgueson’s. 5473 BNJ. So she had her numbers right. Only the thought of Furgueson molesting kids was so ridiculous it almost made you want to laugh. The only body Furgueson was known to molest was over twenty-one and top heavy. Which was where he’d been on his way back from the morning of the murder. He didn’t want to tell Claire about that, though. Nancy Drew here would have the whole neighborhood informed. Truth and all that crap. And where would that leave Furgueson? Divorced, that was where. And from a very nice old broad. A lady. So why hurt either of them? The famed wall of blue loyalty between cops was not always a bad thing. You had to be loyal in this game. He looked over at Claire’s worried, pretty face.
She’d been staring at him. “Were you really following me?” she asked.
“Yes.” He looked through the rearview mirror at the shopping bag on the backseat and sighed happily.
“Because you think I might truly be in danger?”
“Truly,” he mimicked her.
“Why, though? Anyone who thought I could hurt them would surely be satisfied with the films. I would think. Or hope. I don’t mean to say that I’m afraid. At least not unreasonably so. I carry my white light about me so I couldn’t possibly come to any real harm.”
“Your what?”
“My white light. Around my aura. Stop looking like that. What are you thinking when you look at me like that?”
“What do you care? You’ve got your aura thing there protecting you.”
“Yes, but what are you thinking? I’d just like to know. Or perhaps you disagree with the theory that fear attracts fearful things and peace repels them?”
“I’m thinking you’re really stupid, you know that?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” she heard herself saying. “While I was over there chanting, you were over here … stun-gunning or whatever.” She was pleased with the effect this statement had on him. He controlled his rage, however.
“Somebody might think you still know something,” he said stubbornly. “Something you been choosing to keep to yourself for the time being.”
“I don’t know anything. I keep telling you.”
“Except maybe you do and you don’t know it.”
“But I would remember something. I really don’t know anything. I keep telling you.”
“The killer doesn’t know that. And who says he’s rational, anyhow?”
“The killer! It’s like a film. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Neither can the dead kid’s parents.”
That shut her up for a bit. It was quiet enough for Johnny to realize he was driving them around in circles.
“You wanna go to my house?”
“No,” she replied as a matter of form.
“So you wanna go to a motel?”
“Let me out of the car.”
“Huh?”
“Just stop the car and let me out.”
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“With me? I don’t even know you and you’re talking about going to a motel? I think there’s something wrong with you!”
Johnny locked her door from his control panel and kept his finger on the switch. “You’re gonna sit there and tell me you don’t feel nothin’ between us? Is that what you’re saying? You really wanna get out?” He let go of the switch. “So get out!” He waited. She waited. “’Cause if that’s the way it is, then my mind isn’t tickin’ too quick. Or what is it? You want me to play the game with you? Come over to your parents’ house with flowers? Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Johnny made a horrible grimace and grabbed the cement loaf stuck in his jeans. “This! This is what I’m talkin about! Whenever I get within ten feet of you!”
“Ach du liebe scheisse!”
“Ach du liebe this!” he shouted, reaching under her skirt. “Oh Jesus,” he groaned. “You’re wet.” He climbed over the stick shift with the alacrity of a ballet dancer and pushed her seat into a reclining position. Recovering from his surprise attack quickly, she punched him in the chest, then once in the ear with a high choral bang. Still he held devotedly on to her underwear and still she kept her knees locked tight. While their limbs continued to wallop in combat, Claire’s mouth had called an independent open tr
uce and the tongue that attached itself to hers fit snugly in there like the perfect juicy glove. He collapsed on top of her in bewildered frustration and she realized where she was: pinned to the emergency brake and suffocating quickly. A blaring horn sounded from someplace.
“What the hell?” Johnny picked up his head. Not having bothered to pull over, they now had six or seven cars backed up impatiently behind them. He grappled to retrieve his hand and lurched back to his seat. Claire looked about frantically and tugged on her skirt.
“You’ve gone and ripped my knickers,” she panted.
“I love you, too,” he said and shifted into first.
He made a quick left onto Woodhaven Boulevard. Up in the woods on her right she could barely make out the soft lights of the merry-go-round.
This is it, thought Claire. Nothing on God’s earth can stop us now. She settled back in the big plush seat of the vast American car and let him take her wherever he wanted. There was a button on her door. She pushed it and the window opened. The night time came in, the huddled streets blurred past and she still felt the hard, kinetic weight of him on top of her. Good thing I shaved my legs, she thought. A siren passed them, a squad car racing in the opposite direction. He said he loves me, she marveled. He’s watching me out of the corner of his eye and he wants me as much as I want him. Another bweep bweep bweep of a radio car cut through the noise of the deafening el train. Johnny did a U-turn on 111th and Jamaica. She saw her reflection in the bakery window, sliding across the seat and flattened against the car door like a passenger on the Roundabout, the carnival ride that whips you around until you’re dizzy. “What are you doing?” she cried.
“I’m taking you back home,” he said, his mind on something else entirely now. “Something’s going on.”
He pulled up in front of her mother’s house with a screech and practically pushed her out the door. She stood on the curb, looking at him as though he were mad. “Go in the house,” he ordered and turned the big car around one two three. “I said go in the house, dammit.”
She went into the house.
Johnny followed the noise. In the very same pine forest where they’d found the body of the little boy Miguel, where no one in his right mind would ever think to look for trouble again, some kids up there, young kids getting high in the summer night, had stumbled across the mutilated body of a five-year-old girl.
This time the papers had a field day. Furgueson at the 102nd had everybody working overtime, and that meant everybody. Nobody said boo. They all wanted this guy and they wanted him quick. This was their precinct. It made them nauseous to think of some monster out there just sick enough to try it again. There weren’t too many cops who didn’t have little ones of their own at home.
By morning, all of New York had had a tour of the Richmond Hill pine forest over three major networks. The squirrels were mad with joy from all the Drake’s Cakes and doughnuts the crowds had left all over the place. Reporters got in everybody’s way down at the station house and when Furgueson had them thrown out, they interviewed the people on the street. This was no longer one alleged “minority crime.” Or something within one family. This was beginning to look like a habit. The dead girl had been a perfectly charming blond innocent with cherry lips and pink hair ribbons—the whole thing. She’d been missing only five hours, last seen on her tricycle in front of the Park Lane South candy store. This was news, big news, and the media was out to milk it for every ounce of hypnotized fear and fascination its viewers were sure to tune in for.
A few of the reporters had themselves televised up in front of the carousel. It was awful to see it on television that way, they all thought. How hard they had worked in the community to bring it back to life. Nothing over the years had brought the people together with such pride and happiness. Nobody didn’t love the carousel. And now, to see it used like this. It was a sin. A real sin.
At the Breslinsky’s, the newspapers were spread out on the kitchen table. There they sat, recounting with fascinated horror just how close they’d come to being at the candy store yesterday and, who knew, right now it could have been themselves, God forbid, dressing up to go solemnly down to the morgue.
“And I say,” Stan insisted, “that it could never happen in a family like ours, where we keep such close tabs on the kid. We would notice the moment someone talked to him.”
“Stanley. Sweetheart. It only takes a second. Look how the children run around the block wild as Indians and there’s no one to pay them a never you do mind. I mean it can happen to anyone.” She shuddered. “You can be as careful as you like, but then there’s always that unguarded moment.”
“Oh, come on. I saw that Miguel kid around here a hundred times, up and down the block with the other kids. You can’t tell me his parents kept tabs on him.”
“Daddy, that’s easier said than done. How many times have I come home from work and there was Michaelaen, across the street,” her voice rose. “Alone. No one around. So you come on.”
Claire, her face half buried in her hand atop an elbow on the table, listened to their morbid might-have-beens. Mary made another batch of waffles and laid them caressingly on top of the cold ones. No one would eat those, either, but the effort of it soothed her. She didn’t exactly know the parents of the dead girl but she was almost sure she’d seen the mother, the day before Easter it must have been, on line at the butcher.
Stan had a feeling he knew the unfortunate father. He’d come into the store once or twice. For nails. Or linseed oil, he thought it was. He’d know him well enough to nod hello.
Annoyed by this claim, Mary scooped the colder, bottom waffle onto his plate.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s good. Just because you couldn’t make up your mind about it doesn’t make it bad.”
“I don’t want a waffle, Mare!”
“And you who told me to make them!”
Here the Mayor stood and waddled confidently to his empty dish.
“Did I ask for waffles? Did anybody here hear me once ask for waffles?!”
“Gimmie one, Ma. Only gimmie one from the top. I don’t want a cold one.”
Indeed, it was chilly enough in the kitchen to make you want to warm up. Mary had the air conditioner on maximum. She felt safer in the cold, today of all days, barricaded from the murder lurking outside with the doors locked tight. They huddled together as though from a winter’s storm.
Michaelaen came up from the cellar. He put his sneakers on his lap. The first knot was easy. Then you did a loop. That was easy, too. It was that darn second loop that got him. Did it go around the first loop or stay right where it was? The possibilities exploded in the air until he had to close his eyes. Here he would stay until, like any exasperated ostrich, he felt the coast was clear. Something was going on. Everybody was yelling and then whispering. Especially Grandma. You had to be careful when Grandma started whispering. Michaelaen opened his eyes and saw his old friend Miguel’s picture right in the paper. Miguel was probably in jail, he thought morosely. There were some things you just knew you weren’t supposed to ask about.
Stan turned the page. He didn’t want Mary to notice the horoscopes and get started on that. Then the doorbell rang and the dog howled. Michaelaen ran to the front and the Mayor trotted after him. “It’s the back,” said Zinnie. “It’s the back,” hollered Mary. They trotted to the back. Carmela got to the door first. It was Johnny Benedetto. He came into the kitchen ducking, big fellow that he was, one corner of his mouth stuck upward. Claire felt herself blush at the sight of him and the sight she knew she must be, rumpled in her father’s Yankees T-shirt and a red plaid robe she’d discovered behind the bathroom door. She felt his eyes go right through her, and then he acted as if she wasn’t even there.
“It’s crazy out there,” he said. “I can only stay for a minute.”
“Of course, of course,” the family nodded in unison. They knew he was working on the murders. They wouldn’t bring it up unless he did. They were a fam
ily on the “in,” a fact that was etched importantly all over their faces. Stan patted him fondly on the back and signaled for coffee. This is wonderful, Mary thought. She had three waffles on his plate before he sat down. A man needed his strength. Good thing she’d had Michaelaen pick those raspberries. She gave the sour cream a fluff up with her spoon and licked it with a smile to demonstrate how mm-mm good it was.
Claire was embarrassed by all of this coddling. Even Michaelaen stood rapt at Johnny’s knee. What would he think, they’d never seen a nice young man? She’d never brought a fellow home? Oblivious to her, Johnny wolfed down a deck of waffles and held out his plate for more.
Carmela had to go to work. She went upstairs to the bathroom and Claire was glad to see her go. Carmela looked so chic. Even Zinnie, whom she loved with all her heart, looked far too cute for so early in the morning.
“You sleep all right?” Johnny asked her.
She almost jumped. His eyes were teasing her.
“Not bad.” She gave him what she hoped was a look of nonchalance.
“I got somethin’ for ya.”
What did he mean? Was he going to give her a kiss? Right in front of her parents? There was a street-sharp danger that accompanied him and you never knew quite what he would do.
Johnny was more nervous than she was but his demeanor was deliberately cool. Inside, he swelled with the love he felt for her and the awe he had for her family. A real American family, he thought, his orphaned heart pounding. Just like on television, with no one on drugs or drunk and all of them casually sitting down to home-cooked meals together as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Hell wasn’t being one of twelve kids in a tenement flat the way they showed you on “Eyewitness News.” Hell was being out on your own every last morning in a different burger joint, greasy spoon, whatever. They were all the same. He’d heard a poem once, in passing, on some jerkie’s radio. He didn’t remember the whole thing, but part of it had hit him like a hammer: “Nobody playing piano … in somebody else’s apartment.” That was him. That was his life. These people here, they didn’t know what they had. He stood up, knocking over the heavy oak chair, then picked it up as though it were some featherweight. Mary didn’t even glance at her linoleum. Claire clasped the robe to her chest in a panicky gesture but he turned and went out the door. Then back he came with a shopping bag from Lipschutz Quality Camera Store. He laid the whole thing down on her empty plate, obliterating her from view. “What’s this?” she said.
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