“I will. And please call me if you need anything. Or to talk.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said, releasing my hand.
She shivered once and pulled the thin cardigan closer around her shoulders, buttoning it down to the hem before turning to walk back inside.
I listened to all her locks being clicked and slid carefully back into place between us, then turned toward the street.
I let myself out through the little gate in the yard’s hip-high chain-link fence and latched it securely behind me.
Just in case Mrs. Underhill was looking, I waved one more good-bye toward her living-room window.
The spyhole-gap in her neighbor’s lace curtains twitched shut behind glass grown milky with a watcher’s breath.
23
Teddy Underhill was already in the system,” said Skwarecki back at Prospect.
“ Which system?” asked Cate.
“Child Welfare,” said Skwarecki. “There was a report of abuse three months before he was killed.”
“By Mrs. Underhill?” I asked.
She shook her head. “A neighbor.”
A stranger.
I looked down at the brown grass, weary and disappointed.
“Someone out by LaGuardia?” asked Cate.
“Brooklyn,” said Skwarecki. “Angela Underhill and her boyfriend had an apartment in East New York—third-floor walk-up in a brownstone. They moved in together when Teddy was around six months old.”
“So how did they end up in a welfare motel in Queens?” asked Cate.
“My best guess is they were avoiding Teddy’s caseworker.”
“ And the neighbor?” I asked.
Skwarecki nodded. “They knew who’d called it in. Ms. Keller.”
“Who?” asked Cate.
“She lived directly below them. Keller called SCR, and SCR called ACS.”
“Which stand for what?” I asked.
“Sorry,” said Skwarecki. “First one’s the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Neglect. They run the hotlines, decide which reports get handed on to the Administration for Children’s Services. If that happens, ACS sends someone out to the family within twenty-four hours.”
“So did SCR hand it on?” I asked.
“Keller called the line for mandated reporters, so they took her seriously. She used to be an ER nurse.”
“What’s she doing now?” asked Cate.
“Chemo.”
From Skwarecki’s expression I knew she wasn’t talking about a change in the woman’s medical specialty. “How bad?”
“She had a double mastectomy two years ago. Last fall they found tumors in her lungs. Now it’s her liver.”
“So this is not only a woman who’s professionally up to speed on the signs of abuse,” I said, “but also one spending a great deal of time in her apartment.”
Skwarecki nodded.
“Have you met with her yet?” asked Cate.
“By phone,” said Skwarecki. “I’m going out to see her tomorrow. You guys remember Louise Bost?”
“The ADA chick with the girly shoes,” said Cate.
“She’ll be coming with me, to take Ms. Keller’s statement.”
“And her statement’s the thing you need before you can consider making an arrest?” I asked.
“There’s also a larger question of timing,” said Skwarecki.
I leaned back against Cate’s car. “How so?”
“Ms. Keller’s in hospice.”
Cate winced. “That ill, and she tried to save Teddy.”
“This is one tough cookie,” said Skwarecki. “She won’t let them start her on a morphine drip until after she’s given her statement. Said there was no way she wanted any question about whether she was compos mentis.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“My age,” said Skwarecki. “Just turned forty-three.”
“What about the caseworker?” I asked.
Skwarecki’s eyes shifted back to mine. “I’ve spoken with her, too.”
“And?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Skwarecki,” I said, “the woman gets a credible report that a little kid’s getting the shit beaten out of him and she doesn’t do anything?”
“She closed his file.”
“She did what?” said Cate.
“Not immediately. She went to the apartment. Met with Teddy’s mother, saw his injuries—old and new. Wrote it all up as a case of a child at ‘High Risk.’ ”
“Which means?” I asked.
“It means the child protective specialist thought that Teddy’s situation merited court involvement.”
“That was the best she could do?” I asked.
“It’s the secondary rating. If she’d written it up as ‘Immediate Danger’ he would have automatically been recommended for foster care,” said Skwarecki.
“And why didn’t she?” I asked.
Skwarecki shrugged. “Who knows. Her caseload, the wait for foster-care placements? There’s a good chance it wouldn’t have made any difference. The specialist may have had the best intentions in the world, but there’s a sixty-day window—they’d left the apartment before she came back.”
I shook my head. “And she closed the fucking file.”
“She couldn’t track them down, so, yes, she closed the file,” said Skwarecki.
I was livid. “When they were all of, what, ten miles away? In subsidized goddamn housing?”
Swarecki leaned back against her car, eyes closed.
“Come on,” I said. “ Somebody working for the City of New York in an official capacity had Angela’s name. She wouldn’t have had that motel room otherwise.”
Skwarecki raised her hands up alongside her forehead so she could press the heel of each palm into its corresponding temple—hard. Her fingers stuck straight up, like antlers.
“Did anyone try contacting Mrs. Underhill?” I asked.
“ACS?” said Skwarecki, pissed off. “Don’t get me fucking started.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“My fault. I’m bitchy ’cause I missed lunch.”
I put my hand on her arm. “Want a cookie?”
“What I’d really like’s a couple aspirin,” she said. “Maybe a boilermaker to wash them down.”
“There’s Excedrin in my glove compartment,” said Cate. “But you’re on your own for the booze.”
Skwarecki gratefully swallowed two of the fat white pills with ice water instead.
“Listen,” she said, “you guys are great. I appreciate all your help. Sorry I got pissy.”
I shook my head. “You’re working your ass off, Skwarecki, and I’m sitting here pestering you like I question your judgment.”
“Thanks.” The detective looked at her watch. “You guys need to hit the road, right?”
Cate consulted her own. “We do, yes. Especially if I need to drop you first, Maddie.”
Before I climbed into the car I looked back at Skwarecki. “Hey, have you talked to Mrs. Underhill again since she ID’d the sneaker?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“I’m thinking now might be a good time.”
“What, you got her warmed up for me—good cop/bad cop?”
“Maybe good cop/good cop? She’s a nice lady.”
Skwarecki laughed, snapping me a salute.
“A Porsche?” said Cate an hour later.
I’d just pulled the tarp off my car, and the low western sun was warming up its black exterior, winking yellow off the chrome.
We were standing inside my mother’s friend Polly’s old barn, just off Skunk’s Misery Road in Locust Valley. There probably hadn’t been so much as a Shetland pony stabled there since Kennedy Airport was called Idlewild, but it still smelled faintly of alfalfa and horse shit.
Not, in my opinion, bad smells.
Cate had her hands on her hips, a tad slack-jawed. “How much do they pay you at that catalog?”
“It was kind of free,” I sa
id.
“You were just minding your own business one day when you stumbled across an old brass lamp lying on the beach?”
“I, um, inherited it.”
“ Still,” she said. “The most I ever got was six fish forks and a chafing dish, from my great-aunt Julia.”
“Cate, I can’t even afford a full tank of gas for the damn thing.”
“But you haven’t sold it.”
I shrugged. “I’d miss being able to come out and visit.”
“Do you ever actually drive it?”
“Mostly just run the engine. Check the tire pressure and the fluids.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
“Okay, so I confess to strewing the occasional handful of rose petals around. Lighting some incense.”
“Good for you,” she said. “It’s beautiful. It deserves a little worship.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
“So who left it to you? Any chance I’m related?”
“Just this guy,” I said.
“Well, he obviously thought well of you.”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “He was kind of an asshole, actually.”
“You’re driving it back into the city?”
“Yeah. We have to go to this work thing for my husband over the weekend, way the hell out on the island.”
“Madeline, promise me you’ll put it in a garage tonight.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
“Can we just sit in it for a minute?” she asked.
“I bet the traffic still sucks on the expressway,” I said. “Wanna go for a ride?”
I hadn’t been out here for a month, but the machine started right up with my favorite throaty growl, and I’d left some Allman Brothers cued up in the tape deck.
I turned to Cate. “Hey, d’you remember if there were any cars parked in front of the big house when we drove in?”
“Not a one,” she said. “And I think there were dust-sheets over the furniture inside.”
“Cool.”
I turned up Duane and the boys as loud as they’d go and we hit seventy by the time we were halfway back down Polly’s driveway.
It had just been that kind of day. And week.
We cut across Ludlam Lane and rocketed over to Bayville.
I sprang for a couple of ice-cold Manhattan Specials at the souvlaki place next to the mini-golf down on the strip before we swung back to Polly’s barn via Shore Road and Mill Hill.
Cate climbed out, then leaned back in through the passenger window. “If I hear from Skwarecki I’ll call you.”
I said, “Back atcha,” and watched her get behind the wheel of her own car. Her hair was sticking up and she still had a big dazed grin on her face.
I followed her sedately down the driveway, then waved and blew past her at the end, heading back for the city.
* * *
It was close to seven, but there must have been an accident on the LIE because even westbound 25A was still a nightmare. I switched over to the radio’s AM band for a 1010 WINS traffic report, but turned it off when Tom Carvel’s pitch for Fudgie the Whale ice-cream cakes segued into a Radio Shack ad so boring it made me yearn for Crazy Eddy shrieking about prices so low he was practically giving it all away.
I was stuck in second gear behind a truck full of lawn mowers. At every stoplight a chorus of late-season crickets rose above the grumble of our idling engines.
I didn’t want to think about people dying of cancer or beating children to death, but my alternative was contemplating the abyss of Mom’s having remained so nauseatingly chummy with Pierce Capwell.
Hard as that had been for me over the years, I couldn’t begin to imagine how exponentially much more pain it must’ve caused Pagan.
I wondered whether she’d talked about what happened with anyone other than me and Mom—if Sue knew, or if Pague’d be okay with me telling Dean.
And for the rest of the drive into the city I thought about this one summer afternoon in California, back when I was sixteen, a couple of months after Mom and Pierce had broken up while Pague and I were away at school.
Mom had started tentatively dating Fassett, a guy I rather liked, and she and I were doing the lunch dishes in the tiny kitchen of his condo while Pagan taught seven-year-old Trace how to play tennis on the complex’s courts out back.
All of a sudden Pierce came bursting through the other man’s front door and started running from room to room, screaming all kinds of horrible bullshit about Mom and how she’d betrayed him, which struck me as especially outrageous and pathetic since it turned out he’d been balling this ugly intern chick at the Forest Theater for at least a year before Mom had finally told him to move out.
She turned from the stove to face Pierce as he barreled through the kitchen doorway.
He hit her in the mouth once—hard—and everything seemed to slow way, way down.
I picked up a big-ass carving knife out of the sink, then turned around.
I raised it in my fist until he could see that I’d aimed the tip of its twelve-inch blade at his throat, then quietly suggested he get the hell away from my mother.
Pierce backpedaled out of the room on his little banty legs, then swiveled to sprint for the front door.
He must have known I’d walked out of the kitchen behind him, because he couldn’t resist stopping for a moment on the welcome mat outside.
Hand on the doorknob, he turned back and looked me in the eye while he got in one last dig:
“ If it wasn’t for that knife, you little cunt, I would’ve knocked you flat.”
24
Sue and Dean and Pagan were halfway through dinner by the time I’d found a cheap enough parking lot in the meat-packing district, but the burrito they’d brought me from Benny’s was still warm.
Christoph had driven Dean back early from New Jersey, trying to beat the traffic out onto the Island so he’d make Southampton in time for dinner with Astrid and Cammy.
“Do you think we could drive out Saturday instead of tomorrow?” I asked. “The LIE was just a total fucking nightmare coming this way.”
“Check with Astrid, I guess,” he said.
I called her Upper East Side machine and made our excuses, knowing she was probably checking for messages hourly, as usual.
Sue looked at her watch. “Funny, she hasn’t called once tonight—not even to interrupt dinner.”
“She’s hanging with this other friend,” I said.
“I thought we’d successfully palmed her off on La Bella Città Roma,” said Pagan.
Dean shook his head. “Alas, Nutty Buddy didn’t make it past the eastern tip of Lawn Guyland.”
“Still,” said Sue, “I live in hope.”
“She’s having a rough time, you guys,” I said.
“My heart bleeds,” said Pagan.
“I know,” I said, “but she’s still my friend.”
“Madeline, why are you always friends with the crazy bitches?” asked Sue.
“Um, because I am one?”
“Right,” she said. “I keep forgetting.”
Pagan snapped her fingers and looked at me. “Hey, that reminds me. Your mother called.”
“ My mother?” I said. “I had her last month.”
Pagan wadded up her burrito tinfoil and chucked it at my head. “She’s driving down from Maine on Monday. With some new guy she wants us to meet.”
“Gee,” I said, “won’t that be just fucking ducky?”
Pagan shrugged. “He’s taking us to lunch at ‘Twenty-one.’ ”
“Just you and me?” I asked.
Pagan waved a hand at Sue and Dean. “These guys, too, if they can get off work.”
“I’ll be in Houston,” said Dean. “Shucks.”
Sue said, “What are you, chicken?” and I made a couple of bawk-bawk noises at him.
“Definitely,” said Dean, completely unfazed.
Saturday morning Dean and I ransomed the Po
rsche from the slaughterhouse garage and hit the road for the dreaded Hamptons. Even with the seat all the way back his knees were still up around his ears.
“So how bad is it out there?” asked Dean. “My experience is limited to Binghampton.”
“It’s heinous,” I replied as we dropped down into the Midtown Tunnel. “Want a Percodan?”
“Maybe after lunch.”
The traffic was totally fucked until practically Commack, which was a new low, even for me.
“Ah, Exit Fifty-two,” said Dean. “Such memories…”
Having had twenty-four après-reception hours to kill before our wedding-trip flight for Switzerland two years earlier, we’d grabbed a bag of hamburgers at White Castle and spent our first married night on a freezing-cold waterbed at the Commack Motor Inn.
“I still can’t believe they gypped us out of that heart-shaped bathtub,” I said, taking my hand from the gearshift to give him a couple of fond pats on the knee.
“If it gets really bad this weekend we can come back here for a late second-anniversary celebration.”
“Fuck it,” I said, “let’s bail now. I bet they wouldn’t even miss us.”
“Can’t,” he said. “Christoph and I still have some technical shit to go over before Houston.”
I sighed. Dean had been raised on a farm Upstate. Trust me, you do not want to get between a Methodist and his work ethic.
It had taken me three years to talk him into leaving his hometown. The fact that he was now pushing me to spend a weekend in the nether-belly of my own geographical heritage was a bit off-putting.
“We should go visit your parents,” I said. “It’s been months since they’ve seen you.”
Dean laughed. “Good God, Bunny, they don’t even have Sze-
chuan.”
“Pinko,” I said as the traffic finally melted away before us.
Dean laughed harder.
I shifted up into fifth and floored it.
I hadn’t told him about Teddy and Mrs. Underhill, nor had he asked.
We wrestled with Christoph’s directions, making several U-turns before finally stumbling upon a hedge-constricted dirt lane with a name that bore some passing resemblance to the actual word we’d been told to look out for.
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