THE SPELLMANS STRIKE AGAIN

by Lisa Lutz

  “I had been watching Harkey for a while. Nothing he did slipped past me, although I pretended like it did. I documented everything. Just in case it came to that. But back then if you snitched on another cop, your career or your life was over. It’s better now, but still. I had a family to support. I did what I thought was best.”

  “You blackmailed him into retiring?” I blurted out.

  Fishman checked the restaurant to make sure no one had heard my exclamation.

  “That’s one way to put it,” Fishman quietly replied.

  “Did you ever think about all the suspects before Rollins? How many times Harkey might have tampered with evidence to get the result he wanted? I checked—he had the highest clearance rate on the force for five years.”

  “I thought about all of it,” Fishman soberly replied.

  The waitress refilled our coffee; we remained silent. She was the friendly kind of waitress who requires interaction. Our lack of interaction with her and each other apparently needed commenting on.

  “I sure hope this isn’t a date. You two seem to have nothing in common,” she said as she sashayed away.

  She was very wrong.

  “I thought about it. But at the time, there was only so much I could prove. So I thought about the men and women who would come later. And I still have to think I did some good.”

  “So now what?” I asked.

  “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

  “A little bit,” I replied. It was the truth, at least.

  “I want you to think about it for a few days. Consider every angle. You might not want to touch this mess, Ms. Spellman.”

  “What if I do?” I asked.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Before Fishman left, I gave him a copy of the Merriweather file.

  “We could free him now if only the physical evidence would turn up,” I said.

  Fishman took the file and nodded his head. Our conversation was over. At least for now it was.

  I needed to clear my head, so I went to the one place that gave me peace in those days: the community garden. On this particular afternoon, I picked up a cup of coffee and sat on the bench where I’d discovered the best view. The other bench perk was that Rae could see me watching her, which I knew she found utterly unnerving. Once she even dug the shovel into her own shoe. Good times.

  This afternoon, Rae approached the chain-link fence and glared at me.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I replied.

  She rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders, and got back to work.

  Once my body was caffeinated and my head was clear, Henry approached the park bench to muddle everything all up again.

  “Haven’t I seen you enough for one day?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Have you?” he said, then he handed me a bag with a chocolate croissant inside.

  “Is this from _____?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Henry replied.

  There’s this French bakery on None of Your Business Street. I won’t tell you the name because then you’ll go there and the lines are already long enough. Suffice it to say, you can’t find a better croissant on this side of the Atlantic.1

  “Thanks, but I’m all out of coffee.”

  Henry pulled a thermos out of nowhere, it seemed. I uncapped my to-go cup and Henry poured the piping-hot brew.

  “You think you’re so smart,” I said with as much attitude as I could muster under the circumstances.

  “I like to come here myself sometimes. I find it relaxing,” Henry said in his own defense.

  Then nothing was said for a while. I drank more coffee and ate that croissant from the place I’m so not going to tell you about. And we watched Rae dig and give us dirty looks. It was like Shakespeare in the park, I bet. When I was done with my afternoon coffee break, I scrunched up the bag and gave my garbage to Henry.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.

  Henry tossed my trash into the appropriate recycling bins and followed me to my vehicle. I tried to pretend he wasn’t there, but it was more of a performance piece.

  “Thanks for the croissant,” I said, trying to sound not all that thankful.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied.

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you around,” I said, unlocking my car door.

  “There’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Henry said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “You know this whole community-gardening probation?”

  “Yes?” I said, turning around.

  “My idea,” Henry said.

  You can only fight your feelings for so long. A hot cup of coffee and a pastry might warm your heart, but you can cool it down with memories of rejection and embarrassment. But there are some gifts that are too perfect to ignore, gifts that tell you that someone knows you deep down in your core. I could pretend for years that I didn’t still love Henry Stone and I could tell myself every day that he was all wrong for me and I was all wrong for him—and we were most definitely wrong for each other. But I’m the sort of person who’s always embraced wrong. So why not embrace it now?

  This time I threw my arms around Henry and kissed him; this time, nobody broke away; this time, we accepted what lay ahead. We knew we were doomed. The kiss was a warm acceptance of years of bickering, years of me consuming foods that I found barely edible and Henry tidying up after someone who already thought she had tidied up. When I kissed Henry I wasn’t imagining Ex-boyfriend #13; I was picturing Husband #1.

  What ended the kiss was not any desire to end it but a hazy sense of being watched. At the same time, Henry and I broke away and looked toward the garden fence. Rae had her cell phone out and was shooting pictures. No doubt they were already being e-mailed to the unit.

  Henry sighed and looked at me sheepishly. “I always imagined that we would tell them.”

  I quickly walked toward the entrance to the garden. Henry followed after me.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Oh, there’s just something I need to do.”

  I found Rae’s bike and let the air out of the tires. When I was almost done, Rae caught me.

  “Hey, what are you doing!” she shouted through the fence.

  “Consequences, Rae. Consequences.”

  CONSEQUENCES

  A flurry of events, negotiations, and family meals transpired over the next several days. In the interim, all of the doorknobs, light fixtures, and other transportable household necessities were returned to their proper places. What was odd about their sudden reappearance was the adjustment period required in returning to the norm. In fact, my dad had so gotten used to carrying around an extra doorknob that I caught him a few times, doorknob in hand, realizing that he could use the one that was already in its place.

  As anticipated, Rae disseminated the photos of me and Henry to every relevant person in her address book, including Grammy Spellman, who found the whole thing quite sordid. The next time I saw my mother and Henry in the same room, I could’ve sworn she tried to give him a high five. In his defense, he shook his head scornfully at her. It got me thinking that maybe my mother was the ultimate puppet master. I had to admit, I really didn’t care anymore.

  If you know me at all, and you should probably know something by now, you know that I don’t like beginnings. They feel awkward, strange, and unnatural to me. I understand the status quo; it’s getting there I have trouble with. While I had shared many meals with Henry and been to his house on numerous occasions, we had never been on an official date. Neither of us quite knew how to proceed.

  He phoned me the afternoon after the garden kiss.

  “What are you doing later?” he asked.

  “I have no plans,” I replied.1

  “I’ll see you at eight,” he said.

  At eightish (I’m not a timely person) I arrived at Henry’s house. At eight o’clock sharp, Henry arrived
at my place. He waited patiently inside my foyer for ten minutes, then phoned my cell.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “At your place,” I replied.

  “I’m at your place too,” he said.

  “I thought you didn’t like my place,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t like my place.”

  “I like your place fine. I just don’t like the food there and since there’s no food in my place, it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” I said.

  “Here’s the plan—”

  “It needs to involve food, because I’m starving,” I said.

  “I’ll go to the store.”

  “Listen to me very carefully: I’m not eating tofu!”

  “Calm down, Isabel.”

  See, beginnings suck. But as the night progressed, matters improved. Henry keeps a hide-a-key in a slot in his doormat.2 Once I got a neighbor to let me into his building, I was able to get into his apartment, where I promptly ordered Chinese food before he could protest.

  After dinner, there was a knock at the door. Henry quickly muted the television set and dimmed the lights. We sat in silence for ten minutes until we were certain that the person behind the door (Rae) had vanished. Then Henry cleaned up, because he likes cleaning up and I don’t, although he did mention that if I was thinking this relationship was going to involve permanent maid service, I was very wrong. I didn’t mention that I had a feeling he was very wrong.

  Of course, other things happened during the evening and I did stay the night, but most of that stuff is none of your business. Henry claims I’m a blanket stealer, and he snores (on occasion), but in my experience they all snore at least a little bit. In the morning, he made the bed with me still in it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked as he straightened out the blanket on top of me.

  “Now all you have to do is slip out of your side and tuck in the covers.”

  “You’re insane,” I replied as he tucked in the covers on my side of the bed. He kissed my forehead while I was freeing my arms from the bedding trap.

  “I’ll make coffee,” he said, leaving the room.

  I slid out of bed when the mug was ready for me. I made toast and watched Henry eyeing the crumbs that sprinkled onto the kitchen table. When I was done eating, he wiped the table clean with a sponge.

  “I was going to clean that up,” I said.

  “No, you weren’t,” he replied.

  He was right. I wasn’t. I had a feeling fights would come frequently and would last indefinitely, but that morning I got a glimpse of something very different than the list entries that preceded Henry.

  FREE MERRIWEATHER—

  CHAPTER 7

  Lieutenant Fishman phoned me a few days later. He wanted to meet me again at that out-of-the-way diner. He’d had a chance to look over the Merriweather case and had a few insights. Especially since I didn’t have any, I welcomed the meeting.

  The case was beginning to weigh on me. Not only because an innocent man was doing time, but more because an innocent man was doing time and I had given him hope for freedom. That hope was beginning to feel more and more tenuous.

  Fishman kept the pleasantries brief. He ordered coffee and oatmeal and explained that he had a cholesterol problem. I made a sympathetic order of oatmeal myself, even though I can’t stand the stuff. Mostly I drank coffee.

  Fishman slid the file back to me.

  “Don’t you think it’s an interesting coincidence that the physical evidence went missing right around the time DNA evidence became a common tool in the legal system? Twenty years ago, when the murder took place, it was still in its early stages, but it wasn’t regularly used and was still considered somewhat unreliable. For instance, people didn’t even trust it in the O. J. case. But by then, it was solid and it could have freed Merriweather, if it was available and someone took the time to look into it.”

  “But it’s missing,” I said. “What can we do?”

  “It’s conveniently missing,” Fishman replied.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “He might have been protecting himself,” Fishman said without too much conviction. He said it as if he was hoping it wasn’t true.

  “You think Harkey might have taken the evidence?”

  “He might have misplaced it. It’s easy to misplace. It’s just stuff with a label on it. We’re human. It’s not a file you can stick on a computer. Certainly evidence nowadays is easier to track down, but if you misplaced a box in the evidence room, it would be like finding a needle in a haystack to locate it again.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re suggesting that, years later, Harkey might have made the evidence disappear in the event someone revisited the case.”

  “All conjecture,” Lieutenant Fishman replied.

  “Why hasn’t anyone ever done anything about him? How many other cases has he manipulated?”

  “I don’t think you understand the mess of trouble that could happen if we try to open an investigation into Harkey’s old cases. He wasn’t only involved in improper convictions. In fact, most of his cases were legit and the right person went to jail. All those convictions would be revisited if we could get the DA to reopen this one case, which is unlikely. What is more likely is that we could get shut down immediately because so far in these files there’s nothing that can be easily proven—besides what I know.”

  “Isn’t what you know enough?”

  “Except that it happened fifteen years ago. And it could destroy my career.”

  “You can’t tell me there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Maybe there’s something. But I should warn you now, it’s a long shot.”

  That was my morning; I’m afraid to report that the afternoon only got worse.

  DIVINE INTERVENTION

  When I arrived at Morty’s house to pick him up for lunch, Ruth was there, whispering something to him. He whispered something back in an agitated tone.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Have a seat, Izzele.”

  I sat down on this impeccably white couch that came with the furnished condo. I hated that couch.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I got good news and I got bad news; what do you want first?” Morty said.

  “The good news.”

  “Today, you can pick the restaurant.”

  “Okay. Thank you,” I replied.

  “You want the bad news now?” he asked.

  “Next week you get restaurant choice?” I suggested.

  “That’s true, but that’s not the bad news.”

  “Okay, give me the bad news.”

  Long pause.

  “I’m sort of dying.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sick. I don’t have much time left.”

  “Like a normal eighty-five-year-old?”

  “Sure. Like a normal eighty-five-year-old who has four to six months to live at the most.”

  “This is not how you tell someone that you’re dying,” I said, feeling my face flush red.

  “How do you know? Have you done it before?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ve got the cancer.”

  This was not the time to criticize Morty’s excessive use of an article. I let it slide, sort of.

  “What kind of the cancer do you have?”

  Morty slowly got up from his chair, walked over to me, and pinched my cheek. “Now that, Izzele, is why I got to keep you around.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Where are we going for lunch?” Morty asked, trying to keep things casual.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. I wasn’t even sure I could drive, let alone eat.

  “Izz, no crying. I need you to step up right now. I’m swimming in long faces. I got to have one person who can pretend this isn’t happening. And that person is going to be you. If you think about it, you owe me. All tha
t free legal work, when you got yourself in trouble? Did you get a single bill? Because I don’t remember sending one. This is how you repay me. Pull yourself together right now. If you don’t, I will refuse to see you.”

  “Seriously?” I said, fighting, and I mean fighting, back tears.

  “Yes,” Morty replied. “You can just forget about lunch.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  I rushed to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. And then I did exactly as I was told. I pulled it together. Well, just for lunch I did.

  When I exited the bathroom Morty had his coat and scarf on.

  “What are we eating?” he asked.

  “Sushi,” I said.

  “What, are you trying to kill me?”

  “You can order the teriyaki chicken,” I calmly replied.

  During lunch we talked about the weather, Gabe’s upcoming wedding to “the shiksa,” and then the Merriweather case, which seemed to be the subject that felt the least awkward, the least like we were doing everything in our power to not talk about what was going on. When I dropped Morty off at his house, he made one final serious comment to me.

  “I’m old, Izzele. It’s okay to be sad, but it’s not a tragedy. This is part of life. Now next week we go to Moishe’s as usual, we’ll chat about the Merriweather case and your ridiculous romantic life, and you’ll help with some of my funeral arrangements.”

  “Isn’t that a bit premature?” I said.

  “I want to go out with a bang,” Morty replied. “So we’ll have to plan ahead.”

  I didn’t return to work after lunch. I went home and slept and maybe did that crying that Morty had forbidden. Then I had a couple (maybe more than a couple) drinks and fell asleep on the couch.

  SABOTAGE

  There was a knock at my door a few hours after my bourbon nap. I peered through the peephole and saw it was Henry. I tiptoed away from the door and into my bedroom. I immediately turned off my cell phone and ignored all calls to the main line. After about a half hour, he went away. I drank more bourbon and watched bad television and tried to think about nothing at all, which is really hard, if you’ve ever tried to do it.