Empty ever after mp-5

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The rain was letting up some. Katy had just gotten out of her car. She seemed composed, but it was hard to disguise the distress deepening the lines around her eyes. There was a time when I believed it could never hurt me to look at her. Even after the miscarriage, when she took her guilt, fury, and indignation out on me, it was grace to look upon her. And when we hit that inevitable dead spot in our marriage, when the sameness of our days made me feel light years away from her, the sight of her face was always reassuring. Now it stung. What we had was gone. I broke it. Francis broke it. There was far more breakage out here than a headstone and a coffin.

  I looked away.

  Over Katy’s right shoulder, I could see a Janus Village sheriff’s car pulling into the cemetery followed by a dark blue and yellow State Police SUV. My cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

  “Excuse me,” I said to no one in particular, pulling the phone out of my soaked jacket. I ducked under the tape and hurried along the path toward the stream below the Maloney family plot. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Prager?” It was an older woman’s voice, but a familiar one somehow.

  “Yes, this is Moe Prager.”

  “I don’t know if you’ll remember me, it’s been a few years. I’m Mary White, Jack’s-”

  “-sister. Of course. How are you, Mary?”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone, an unsettling silence.

  Jack White had been an actor, a painter, and a bartender at Pooty’s in Tribeca. Pooty’s was the bar Patrick Maloney disappeared from in December of ’77. Beside Jack’s other interests, he was Patrick’s lover. It was behind Jack’s bedroom door that Patrick stood and uttered the only word he ever spoke to me. Jack was the man who sat across from me, hand clamped around my wrist, promising me Patrick would return to his family. When Patrick broke that promise and vanished again, Jack went back home to Ohio. He taught drama to troubled teens until he died of AIDS in 1986. After we discovered the truth about Patrick, I’d flown Mary in for Patrick’s funeral.

  “Mary, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Jack’s grave.”

  My heart stopped.

  “What about Jack’s grave?”

  “I’ve visited him there every Sunday since the week I buried him. No one but me and a few of his old students has ever left flowers at the grave. Then last Sunday…” She trailed off. I could hear her fighting back tears.

  “What about last Sunday?”

  “Roses.”

  “Roses?”

  “Almost six dozen red roses were laid on Jack’s grave.”

  “Maybe one of his students hit the lottery,” I said without an ounce of conviction.

  “No, I checked. We keep in touch. They are very loyal to Jack even after all these years.”

  “Wait, Mary, let’s back up a second. What did you mean there were almost six dozen roses?”

  “There were seventy-one roses. Five bouquets of twelve were propped up against his headstone,” she said. “But on his grave itself, there were eleven individual roses-”

  “-arranged in a circle, the tips of the stems meeting in the middle.”

  There was that ominous silence again.

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” I asked.

  “My God, Mr. Prager, how did you know?”

  “In a minute, Mary. First tell me the rest.”

  “This afternoon, when I went to his grave…” Now she could no longer fight back the tears. I waited. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s fine. I know this is hard for you.”

  “On the back of Jack’s headstone someone had painted that Chinese symbol with the rose, the one Jack had tattooed on his forearm. Do you remember it?”

  “I do.” I’d seen something just like it on my welcome mat a few hours ago.

  “And at the corner of the painting were the block letters PMM. Why would somebody be so cruel, Mr. Prager? Jack never hurt anyone in his life.”

  Now the silence belonged to me.

  “Mr. Prager…”

  “Sorry. I’m here. It’s just that someone’s disturbed Patrick’s grave as well.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Mary, would it be all right if I called you later? It’s too complicated to talk about now.”

  “That’s fine. You have my number. Please know that my prayers are with you and your family.”

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  When I wheeled around, Katy was coming down the path toward me. The sight of her stung a little less this time. Maybe it was repeated exposure. Or maybe it was that the thickest clouds moved east and what was left of the sun shone like an orange halo behind her head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mr. Fallon’s quarters were small and tidy, not unlike the man himself. His house-a bungalow, really-was way on the other side of the cemetery, close to the tool shed and equipment barn. All three-shed, house, and barn-were of similar rustic construction and painted a thoroughly depressing shade of brown, but everything looked neat and well-maintained. Fallon himself was less than thrilled at the prospect of our company, but the sheriff thought the bungalow was the best available option given that the station house was on the opposite side of the hamlet. So we formed an odd cortege, my car behind Katy’s behind the priest’s behind the sheriff’s behind the caretaker’s backhoe, and snailed across the fields of stone in the dying light. The youngest, wettest deputy and the crime scene investigator from the state troopers stayed behind.

  Sheriff Vandervoort was a gruff, cinder block of a man who, in the space of a very few minutes, had twice boasted that his ancestors had lived in these parts since New York was New Amsterdam. He wore his insecurities like a rainbow. He was well aware of who the Maloneys were-everyone around here was. They knew about the hero son shot down over ’Nam and his big wheel father. Although nearly three years dead, the mention of Francis Sr.’s name still turned heads in Janus. Vandervoort knew, all right, and if he’d forgotten, there was little doubt Father Blaney would take the time to refresh his memory.

  Vandervoort was just the sort to do things his way, like interviewing us as a group. It was a dumb move, but I wasn’t going to moan about it. In the end, it would probably save me some leg work. Small town policing, even in the new millennium, was different than any policing I understood. I’d gotten my first taste of that when I saw how the deputies mishandled the crime scene. As far as I could tell, they’d done nothing to preserve the scene beyond stringing the yellow tape. For a while there, I thought they might invite any passersby to add their footprints to the increasingly muddy mess that was the Maloney family plot.

  The deputy who’d accompanied Vandervoort sat at Fallon’s small kitchen table taking notes as the sheriff asked his questions. Katy sat at the table too, as did the priest. Fallon had dried off a spot on the counter near the sink where the two of us sat. Most of the early questions were for Fallon and they were pro forma, the kinds of things you’d expect to be asked.

  Did you hear anything? “Not me own self, no.”

  Did you notice anything suspicious last night or this morning? “No.”

  When did you first notice the damage? “Near noon. Was a slow day with the wet. Not one visitor I can recall. A disgrace to be sure. It took me that long to work me way over to that part of the cemetery.”

  Has anything like this happened before? “Like this? Jesus and his blessed mother, no! In thirty years as caretaker, I’ve had but two incidents and then only a few stones were toppled.”

  When? “Years ago.”

  Who did you call first? “The father there.”

  Other than revealing that he had been the one to alert Katy to the desecrations, Blaney’s answers shed less light on the matter than Fallon’s. I could tell by the tone of the old priest’s answers that he held the sheriff in even lower esteem than me. That was really saying something. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Vandervoort or relieved for myself. The first part of Katy’s interview was about the same. She had asked Bla
ney to meet her at the family plot. Afterwards she called the sheriff and Sarah. And no, she couldn’t think of anyone who might want to do this sort of thing. I was glad he hadn’t asked me that question in front of Katy. Then things turned ugly.

  “Your brother Patrick was murdered. Is that correct?” Vandervoort asked.

  “Yes, but what does that have to-”

  “Can you describe the circumstances surrounding his death?”

  Katy went white. She bowed her head and stared at the linoleum floor.

  “I can answer that,” I said, jumping off the counter.

  “I’ll get to you in a minute, Mr. Prager. Right now I’m asking your wife-”

  “Ex-wife,” Blaney corrected.

  “I’m asking your ex-wife what happened to-”

  “Okay, that’s it! Interview’s over.” I grabbed Katy by the elbow and we started for the door. “You want to ask her anything else, you go through her lawyer. My wife,” I said, glaring at Blaney, “is going home. She’s had a terrible day. I’ll be back in a few minutes to answer any questions you have for me.”

  I could see Sheriff Vandervoort doing the calculations. He might’ve been a bit of a bully, but he wasn’t a total schmuck. There was little for him to gain by jumping ugly with the sole surviving Maloney. Town sheriff was an elective office and although the late Francis Sr. wasn’t exactly a beloved figure, a lot of people around this town owed their livelihoods to him. Ill will has lost a lot of elections over the years and my guess was Vandervoort understood as much.

  “All right.” The sheriff stood aside. “I’m very sorry, Miss Maloney.”

  “Prager!” she snapped.

  “I was just trying to do my job. If I need anything from you, I’ll call. Rest up. I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Outside, I saw Katy to her car and told her to go back to her house and get some rest, that I’d call on my way home to Brooklyn to let her know how things turned out. She asked me to stop back at the house. I told her no. We had twice suffered the fallout from horizontal despair. Divorce creates new history, but it doesn’t blot out the past. It was just too easy for people who’d once loved each other as much as we had to succumb. Yet, the thing that drove us apart was never far away and fresh regret makes the next time that much harder. Neither of us needed to compound the hurt, especially not after the grief of the day. I had skillfully avoided mentioning the rose on my doormat and my talk with Mary White. But I could see in her face what she must’ve seen in mine: it was happening all over again. I didn’t watch her leave. I’d already seen that once too often.

  “Sheriff,” I said, stepping back into the kitchen, “I believe there’s some things you want to know about Patrick’s death.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Short or long version?”

  “Short,” he said. “If I need any details, I’ll ask.”

  “Patrick was a student at Hofstra University on Long Island in December of ’77. He’d gone into Manhattan for a college fundraiser at a bar in Tribeca called Pooty’s. Sometime during the night, he vanished. Eventually his parents got worried and contacted the cops. After the investigation turned up nothing, his folks started organizing twice-daily bus trips of volunteers to go down into the city to put up posters and look for the kid.”

  “I remember that. My folks went a couple of times. I think they just wanted the free ride to Chinatown.” The sheriff amused himself.

  Father Blaney gave Vandervoort a category five scowl. Christ, with this guy around I might rise to sainthood in the old priest’s eyes. The sheriff got the message.

  “Sorry, that was a bad joke. Continue.”

  “When that didn’t work, the Maloneys hired PIs.”

  “That’s where you came in,” he said to me.

  “I was just retired from the cops and I wasn’t licensed then, but yeah. I tracked the kid down to an apartment in the West Village where he was staying with his lover.”

  “So the kid was a fag, huh?”

  I ignored that. “When I tracked him down, he asked me to give him a few more days and that he’d come back to his family on his own and on his own terms. I agreed.

  “But he never turned back up. For twenty years, I assumed he’d run again.”

  “Such hubris, Moses,” said the priest, “to play God like that. You should have grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck and dragged him back home.”

  So much for my beatification. Blaney was right, of course. Not bringing Patrick home was the single biggest mistake of my life. Not confessing the truth to Katy was a close second.

  “So what did happen?” Vandervoort was curious.

  “I’m surprised you don’t know, sheriff.”

  “There were rumors,” he said. “There was something about it in the local paper, but no details. Sometimes I think the people up here are still scared of the old man even though he’s dead.”

  I was right, the sheriff was shrewder than he looked.

  “A pissed-off dealer who worked the Village wanted to whack somebody as an example to his crew. It was Patrick Maloney’s unlucky day. They took him back to Brooklyn, tortured him, killed him, and wrapped him in a plastic shower curtain. They buried the body in an empty lot out by a Cypress Hills cemetery. A couple of years ago, I got a call from a hospice in Connecticut. One of the members of that old drug crew was dying and he wanted to confess about witnessing Patrick’s murder. How he located me is irrelevant. He died the next day. The cops found Patrick’s body right where the guy said it would be and Katy re-interred his remains here.”

  “A Cypress Hills cemetery, did you say?” Fallon asked.

  “I did.”

  “Is that not near where Houdini is buried, Mr. Prager?”

  “That’s right, Fallon.”

  A somber smile washed over the caretaker’s face. “That being the case, it would seem the Maloney lad has perfected an escape Houdini never mastered.”

  All of us understood and let the line hang there for a moment.

  “What about the dealer?” Vandervoort broke the silence.

  “Dead.”

  “The lover?”

  “Dead.”

  I withheld the information about Jack’s grave and the muddy visit to my front door. Whatever was going on was beyond the capacity of a small town cop to manage and, more importantly, it was personal.

  “Anybody else you can think of who’d want to do this?”

  “Like you implied, sheriff, my father-in-law was more feared than loved. So if it was only his headstone that had been fucked-destroyed, I could understand it. But what was done to Patrick’s grave was pretty extreme. I don’t know who would do something like that.”

  That was no lie. This just seemed to come out of the blue. There was no significance to the date or season that I could tell, no precipitating event. There hadn’t been any mention in the media of the Maloneys or me or my cases in years. My brother Aaron and I hadn’t even opened a new wine shop in quite some time. With the exception of the phone call from Mary White, neither Katy nor I had had contact with anyone connected to Patrick or the events surrounding his disappearance since 1998. Even Rico Tripoli, the man who got me involved with the Maloneys in the first place, was dead.

  “I’ll be taking my leave then,” the old priest said. He wasn’t asking permission. “I’ve nothing to add. Fallon… Sheriff… Deputy… Moses…”

  But as Blaney stepped to the door, there was a knock. The other deputy and state crime scene investigator came in without waiting for an invitation.

  “Well…” Vandervoort prompted.

  “The scene’s a mess,” said the crime scene guy, frowning at the sheriff, “but you knew that already. Took lots of pictures, foot impressions, dusted the coffin lid, the headstones, bagged the roses. I’ve got some samples to take back to the lab. I’ll need elimination prints and shoe impressions from anyone who stepped on or near the site. Frankly, I’m not hopeful.”

  That made two of us.


  I called Sarah on my way back to Brooklyn and minimized the situation. There was no need to worry her about this stuff and I didn’t want her flying home. Although my secret about her Uncle Patrick had caused her parents to split, she really wasn’t a party to it. I couldn’t see a reason for making her one now. As promised, I rang Katy, but only after I got home. If we had chatted while I was close to Janus, it would have been too easy for her to talk me into coming over. Katy didn’t pick up, so I left a message. I preferred thinking she was asleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Carmella Melendez was in a foul mood, not like that was headline news or anything. The first time we met, she was cursing at her partner in the lobby of my old precinct house, the Six-O in Coney Island. The first words she ever said to me were, “Yo! You got a problem?” Nice, huh? The thing was, I had been staring at her. Her looks, in spite of the tough-bitch demeanor and foul mouth, invited staring. Carmella had coffee-and-cream skin, plush and pouty lips, and straight, jet black hair. She had a pleasantly curved and athletic body, but it was her paradoxical brown eyes from which I could not look away. They were fiery and cold all at once. It was easy for a man to lose his way in those eyes.

  That was more than ten years ago, when she was maybe twenty-four and one of the youngest detectives on the NYPD. She took a lot of shit for getting the bump to detective at that age. Women take a lot of shit on the job no matter what. You can set your watch by it. If a guy had gotten the bump at that age, he would have taken a lot of crap too. But not all crap’s the same. For Carmella, no matter how it was couched, it always came down to her looks. Every day was a struggle for her to prove to the world she was more than just pussy on the hoof and that struggle put quite a sizeable chip on her shoulder. After I got to know her a little bit, I realized that chip had been there for quite a long time and for a very different reason. In any case, that chip got shot off her shoulder in ’89 during a gun battle at Crispo’s Bar in Red Hook.

  Things had changed between us in the last eleven years. She was by no means less pleasing to look at. If anything, Carmella had blossomed from simply stunning to beautiful. The years had softened her harder edges and she had learned to dress and makeup to her strengths. If it sounds like I’m a little in love with her, maybe I am. We even shared a kiss once that resonates to this day, but there are reasons we can never be together, reasons as solid as the wall of secrets I built over the years between Katy and me. We were also partners now: Prager amp; Melendez Investigations, Inc., established 1998. As Ferguson May, the late great philosopher of the 60th Precinct, was wont to say: “Don’t shit where you eat. Don’t fuck where you work.” Too bad Bill Shakespeare and Fergie May were born centuries apart.