He left, and I stood there like a tagged boxer, too stunned to even fall.
When Tina woke up a few hours later she reminded me that it was a school day and that someone would have to call into the high school main office for her. I dialed the number and told the secretary who answered that Tina wouldn’t be in today, that her father was in the hospital. The secretary asked who I was and I told her I was Tina’s uncle and hung up before she could ask anything more.
Tina didn’t want breakfast, but I made her drink a pint of green tea. I sat across from her and drank mine. I wasn’t used to having another presence in my apartment, aside from Augie. The last guest I had was back in November. A day hadn’t passed that I didn’t think at least once about the woman who called herself Rose.
After we were done with our tea, Tina sat on my secondhand couch for the rest of the morning and bit her nails and stared. I wanted to give her privacy but my apartment was too small. I ended up after a while in my bedroom, flat out on my bed, trying to work out the kinks a night on that old couch had caused, trying to reconcile the fact that, if not for Frank Gannon, I’d be in serious trouble.
That afternoon Tina and I went to the hospital to visit Augie. He was unconscious, his head and face wrapped up in gauze. There were tubes in his arms and mouth. He was breathing with the help of a machine. The doctor—a different doctor—tried to be optimistic but it didn’t sound at all good to me. If Augie did regain consciousness, he might remain in a vegetative state—awake but unaware, unable to speak or move or feed himself. I couldn’t imagine a worse hell for him. At best, the doctor said, Augie would have to learn to do the simplest things all over again. Chances were he wouldn’t ever be able to walk, his beating was that severe.
After the doctor left I asked a nurse if Gale was working today. I was told that she was on vacation, camping somewhere in New England with her husband, and wouldn’t be back till after next week. I think the nurse recognized me. She told me that Gale had recently switched from nights to days.
I decided to leave Tina alone with her father for a while and stepped out into the busy hallway. I found a set of chairs not far away and sat in one. I looked down at my feet for a long time and thought about nothing. Then I became aware of the sound of footsteps, heavy, booted footsteps. I heard the jingle of keys and the creaking of a leather belt. I kept my head down till after the sound had passed me. When I did look up, I saw a man in a cop’s uniform walking down the corridor. He was tall, well over six feet, and had long legs and arms. I didn’t have to see his face to know it was the Chief.
I didn’t move till he turned into a room at the far end of the hall. Then I got up and walked back to Augie’s room.
I stepped through the door and stopped short just inside it. I saw that Tina was leaning over her father, her mouth close to his right ear, whispering something over and over to him and holding his right hand with both of hers.
She was squeezing his thick fingers and, though it was barely noticeable, I could tell that he was squeezing back.
Chapter Five
It was two months before I finally heard from Frank Gannon. Every day I waited for his call, so much so that each time my phone rang, which was a lot more often now that Tina was living with me, I would pick up the receiver with a degree of caution and dread.
But one morning in early July I awoke shortly before dawn to the sound of my phone clanging on the coffee table near my couch. I answered it quickly, without, for once, thinking about Frank. My only concern at the moment was not waking Tina, who was asleep in my bedroom. The only real privacy or peace I had was when she slept.
“I need to meet with you,” Frank said. His voice sounded thin and faraway. I could hear commotion in the background but I couldn’t identify exactly what it was. I knew, though, that Frank was on a pay phone somewhere. And I knew not to expect much in the way of conversation. “I have something I want to discuss with you.”
“When?”
“Right away.”
“Jesus, Frank. Where?”
“It’s a nice morning for a walk on the beach, don’t you think?”
“It’s your show.”
“That’s right. The public beach at the end of Halsey Neck Lane. Your old stomping grounds, right? Ten minutes.” He hung up.
I returned the receiver to the cradle, rubbed my eyes with the back of both hands, then checked my wrist watch. It was a little after six. I wasn’t built for this time of day. I got up from the couch, my joints stiff, my back sore, and picked my jeans and T-shirt up off the floor and put them on. My bedroom door was open and I could see Tina tangled in the sheets. I knew by her breathing, by its rhythm and depth, that she was still sound asleep.
I moved carefully and tried to make no noise as I reached under the kitchen table for my sneakers. I pulled them on over bare feet and took my keys from the table near the door and left. I pulled the door shut behind me as softly as I could.
It was here in the dim hallway that I became aware for the first time that day of the terrible heat that had descended upon Long Island. I had forgotten somehow that we were in the middle of a heat wave, a literal killer with days of near hundred-degree temperatures and air so humid your lungs felt like they were wrapped in shrunken leather when you breathed in. But one step out into the hallway brought it all back to me quickly enough. The air there was like the blast of heat that comes when you open an oven door. It was worse in the stairwells, where climbing down was like descending into the rising exhaust and heat of some fire. The air was better on the street but not by much.
I still wasn’t completely awake as I pulled open the heavy door of my aging LeMans and got in behind the wheel. I had left the windows down overnight to keep the interior cool. My car was too gone with rust to be worth stealing, and any kids looking for a joy-ride wouldn’t get very far—the gas gauge was busted, and I never kept more than a gallon or so in the tank at any given time. I was broke and paid filling station attendants with change from the bottom of my pocket. I needed these days every cent I could spare.
Halsey Neck Lane was on the other side of the village, south of Montauk Highway. I’d make it there and back with the gas I had. I had grown up not far from Halsey Neck, on Gin Lane. The big-time rich lived there, old families that were among the first to build homes out here. But there was a lot of newly rich there now. The East End wasn’t like it had been when I was growing up. It wasn’t the quiet resort town where famous families summered in their grand homes. It was more than just New Yorkers who came there for the beaches and quaint villages. Europeans looking for a new Rivera came there now. Hollywood types flew into East Hampton airport on private jets. I hated this part of town more and more with each year that passed and made it a point of not going there for any reason. I was certain that Frank somehow knew this. That this was why he picked it as our meeting place. Frank was the kind of man who wanted, and found at all costs, every advantage.
My limbs felt heavy as I drove south toward the ocean. My vision blurred now and again. The heat was like an unwanted blanket. It pressed down on me. Sleep lingered in my body like a mood I couldn’t shake. But I knew I had to wake up. I knew I had to be on my toes. I had to listen to what Frank had to say. Most important, I had to try to hear what it was he really meant.
I made it to the parking lot at the end of Halsey Neck in less than five minutes. Frank was already there, waiting beside his silver Cadillac Seville. He was dressed for the heat in white summer slacks, a blue linen shirt, and loafers. His Seville and my Lemans were the only cars in the lot.
I steered toward him slowly, broken bits of asphalt popping beneath my balding tires. There wasn’t a part of me that was asleep now.
The first thing Frank said to me after I got out was, “You look tired, MacManus.”
I asked him what it was he wanted.
He started walking and nodded for me to follow. We stepped off the parking lot and onto the sand and walked over the primary dune and down the other side of it t
o the beach. I didn’t see anybody but us there. The sand was soft beneath my feet, hard for walking. I recalled running on this beach as a youth fifteen years ago to build my endurance and strengthen legs for fighting, running from where I lived with my adoptive family on Gin Lane all the way to Road ‘D” at the end of Dune Road, just before the Shinnecock Bay inlet.
Frank veered right, heading west down the beach. Gin Lane was to our backs. I liked it that way. I followed him and looked ahead down the long beach and wondered if I could make that same run now, at my age. There was, I’d learned, a big difference between fifteen and thirty. My toes sank deep into the soft sand, my calves working hard, harder than they’d had to work in a long time.
Frank glanced at me as we walked across the sand. “I like this time of the morning,” he said. “You can speak your mind and no one will hear it. It’s the safest time of the day for conversation.”
My lungs ached from breathing in the overheated air. I felt a look of strain on my face.
“Late night last night?” Frank asked.
“It’s the heat.”
“Get air conditioning.”
“Can’t afford it.”
“You mean you can’t afford to buy it or you can’t afford to run it.”
“Both.”
He looked ahead, then to his left, out over the ocean. Finally, he looked back at me. He seemed to me to be enjoying himself a little too much—enjoying the power he held over me. I thought of the Seville and its air conditioning, of the tranquil and comfortable ride down Halsey Neck Lane he had just made in it, passing great homes, a good number of which were probably owned by people who, in one way or another, were as indebted to Frank as I was.
He veered us closer to the shore line, where the sand was packed harder and was easier to walk on. Waves roared, then broke, collapsed, and retreated lazily, white foam hissing in their wake. The seagulls above beat their wings, trying to ride the windless sky.
“I couldn’t imagine having to live on what you make,” Frank said.
“I couldn’t imagine living on what you make, either.”
“You’re still working for that restoration company, driving that delivery truck, sweeping the floors?”
I nodded.
“It’s almost a record for you, isn’t it?”
I glanced out over the gray Atlantic. A slight mist hit the air every time a wave crashed in, but it wasn’t cool.
“They pay you minimum wage, right? Five-fifteen an hour. You bring home, what, two hundred a week? That’d be hard to live off anywhere. Doubly hard out here. You’re off the books, right. No benefits, no unemployment if you get laid off, no sick pay. You miss a day of work and you, what, go without eating for a week.”
I didn’t look at him, just kept my eyes straight ahead, the way I did when I used to run this beach, heat, rain, snow.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“It’s a real shame, you know, a guy with your talents, your education, your smarts. It’s a waste.”
“I know my resume, Frank. I don’t have a lot of time. You might want to get to it.”
“I’ve got some good news for you and Augie, and I’ve got some bad news, too. The good news is a few days ago the FBI picked up a man in New Jersey, a known leg breaker out of Atlantic City named Silva. He’s got a record for assault, attempted murder, the whole thing. Plus, he’s the suspect in several Atlantic City area hits. They found in his possession the badge of the cop who was killed last November, along with his sidearm. The serial numbers were filed down, but only partially. The lab was able to recover them. So it looks like they’ve got your man. They’re extraditing him back here, where he’ll be charged with the murder of the cop and the Vogler kid. I thought you and Augie would want to know that. It’s been a while, but I figured it might still be on your minds.”
I felt a lifting sensation in my gut. I felt I had just slipped out from under a tremendous weight.
“Does Augie know?”
“Not yet. I’m sure it’ll be a big relief to him when he finds out.”
“I’ll tell him when I see him tonight.”
Frank nodded. “Good.”
“So what’s the bad news, Frank?”
“People tell me you’re downstairs a lot, that you’ve seemed to hit your stride and are drinking more than ever.”
I looked at Frank but I didn’t say anything. Anyway, what really could I say?
“Is it true?”
My apartment was small, and no matter where I went in the past three months, there was Tina. She had begun recently to demand a lot of attention, more than I was willing to give. More than I could give. Eventually I took every night to going downstairs, where she couldn’t follow me, to kill time till she fell asleep and it was safe for me to go back home. I had been doing well for a while, had found the peace I’d needed to stop drinking—well, drinking to excess. The last bout of heaving boozing I’d done before Tina came to live with me was the night I had trashed Frank’s office. But nowadays it seemed I had to be numb. Going downstairs and drinking free on George had become a ritual I didn’t dare skip, but for a different reason. I wasn’t trying to escapes ghosts now, I was trying to avoid a flesh-and-blood being.
“You obviously have your sources, Frank. Why bother coming to me for confirmation?”
“They can tell me what they see, but only you can tell me what’s really important: if it’s under control or not. So, be straight with me, MacManus, is it under control?”
I knew all he wanted was for me to tell him that it was. I knew if I told him it wasn’t that he would put off the repayment of the favor I owed him to another time. But I wanted out from under his thumb badly, I wanted this over with finally, once and for all. I didn’t want to spend another day, let alone another two months, waiting for his call.
I said, “It’s under control, Frank. Nothing to worry about. I can stop any time, you know that.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it, won’t I?”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Frank. You’re lucky that way.”
He didn’t say anything to that, just regarded the beach and the working gulls and the gray Atlantic to his left.
“I’m going to be needing you for a job,” he said after a while.
“What kind of job?”
“The kind you’re good at. A family wants their daughter found. It’s a prominent family.”
“Aren’t they all.”
“I’d like to make an impression on them. This job could go a long way to making certain things happen for me.”
“Running for mayor again?”
Frank had run for mayor years ago and lost badly.
“Not exactly,” he said.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me who this family is.”
“I’ll get to that. Right now I just want to be assured that you’ll be available to me over the next few days.”
It was Friday morning. The Fourth of July, Independence Day, was Monday. I had no plans that would take me too far from my phone. I told Frank that.
“Which brings me to another point,” Frank said. “You have an exposure that you need to take care of right away. This isn’t open for negotiation. Do you understand me?”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s all about appearances, MacManus. We live in a small town, you probably know this better than anyone. I told you that you had to keep your nose clean, that you had to lay low. Playing house with a fifteen-year-old girl wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“You know the situation. Where else was she going to go? Anyway, Augie’s due home from the hospital after the weekend. She’ll be going with him then.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“The phony alibi may have protected you from prosecution, MacManus, but don’t think for a minute that the Chief isn’t waiting for his chance. I’ll give him one thing, he’s a patient man. When he moves ag
ainst you, it won’t be for littering. He’s waiting for something juicy, and statutory rape is about as juicy as it comes.”
“You’ve got a dirty mind, Frank.”
“If only I were the only one who did.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s talk. A lot of talk. Christ, the Chief wouldn’t even need to make the charges stick. He’d just need to get into the papers the simple fact that you’d been arrested and charged. He’d just have to feed the talk that’s already going on. And the fact that you took advantage of your best friend’s daughter while he was in the hospital, learning to walk all over again, is just the cherry on the top, so to speak.”
“What are you talking about, Frank?”
“Jesus, MacManus, everyone thinks you and the girl are banging away every night.”
I both was and wasn’t surprised. People had thought the worst of me before. It was out of my control, and I told Frank that.
“But how do you think all this talk got started, MacManus?”
“The way all talk does.”
Frank shook his head. “It came from the girl. She told all her little friends at school that you two are hot and heavy lovers living together like grownups in your crappy apartment. That’s where it all began.”
I was a fool not to have seen this coming. I was a fool for choosing not to see it coming, for turning a blind eye to the way Tina behaved around me, the way she looked at me, for letting certain things she said fall on deaf ears. Maybe I had thought it was a phase—a case of misguided attachment—and that it would eventually end. Maybe I had hoped to ride it out, continue to quietly ignore what wasn’t proper till she got the message and turned her affections elsewhere.
A mistake, I could now see.
I didn’t care what other people thought. I didn’t care what Frank thought. But the Chief was a different story. And, for that matter, so was Augie.
“Shit,” I said.
“I can talk to Augie, if you want me to,” Frank said. “The girl can spend the weekend with that family on North Main. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
The Poisoned Rose Page 11