Empty ever after mp-5

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  We were on the 7 train heading back home from Shea. Sarah was sleeping with her head of damp red curls resting on my leg. I was hot and tired too, but my eyes kept drifting to the front page of the Post that the man across the car from me was reading. On it was a picture of evil personified, a serial rapist the papers had dubbed Ivan the Terrible. He had scraggly hair, a cruel condescending smile, and black eyes. They were the blackest eyes I’d ever seen: opaque as the ocean on a moonless night. With a little bit of digging, I found a connection between Moira and Ivan. He eventually confessed to her murder. I was a little too lucky with that one. It all came just a bit too easily. In spite of it, I found the real facts behind the fabricated truths that had been sprinkled on the ground before me like so many bread crumbs.

  I could never go to a game or drive past Shea Stadium without thinking of Sarah’s first Mets game. Every year I renewed my Mets season tickets, but it wasn’t the same without her and it was never going to be the same. These days I usually gave my tickets away to Aaron’s kids or Carmella’s little cousins or clients. I checked the Arrivals screen for the hundredth time in the last ten minutes and noticed Sarah’s flight number was flashing. So far, I had been able to filter Ivan the Terrible’s kind of evil out of my kid’s life and I meant to keep it that way. I dialed Carmella’s cell number.

  “What?” she barked. “It’s so fucking noisy in here.”

  “Her flight’s landed.”

  “No shit! There’s like a screen two feet from my face.”

  “You remember what Sarah looks-”

  “For chrissakes, Moe! I know your daughter for ten years. I know what the fuck she looks like. I could spot that red hair from halfway across the state.”

  “What the fuck’s eating you lately?”

  “My stomach’s been bothering me for weeks. I’m sorry, Moe, I know I been cranky.”

  “Okay, she should be getting down here in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t worry. Anybody comes near her, I got it covered.”

  “Anything suspicious?”

  “I got my eye on a few mutts, but you know these town car drivers try to scam rides. We’ll see soon.”

  Not everything I got right was about luck. I was a good cop before my accident. I still possessed the ability to anticipate, to see what might be coming around the next corner, and what I saw coming was trouble for Sarah. Whoever had done this stuff with Patrick had gone through a lot of trouble. So far the only direct targets had been Katy and me, but if you really want to hurt, frighten, or generally fuck with people, you go after their kids. That’s why I had arranged for Carmella to come to the airport before me and stake out the baggage claim area. She was less certain about the setup than me.

  “What about that lady in Ohio? They fucked with her brother’s grave, no?”

  “Collateral damage,” I said. “It enhanced the effect of what was going on here, a bit of sleight of hand to distract me. It worked, too. I was out in Dayton looking at a grave when I should have been home keeping my eye on the ball. I’m not gonna let them catch me off guard again.”

  She was right about one thing. We’d see soon enough.

  My least favorite part of the airport was baggage claim. Baggage claim was like the final insult after the long ordeal, just another opportunity to hurry up and wait. Folks looked defeated waiting for their bags. And no matter how they spruced up the area, the machinery always seemed positively medieval.

  My phone buzzed, then stopped. That was Carmella’s signal that people were spilling into the baggage claim area. Sarah appeared. I couldn’t help hoping that I was being foolish and over protective, that Carmella was right. She wasn’t. Everything seemed to happen at once. Even before I was fully conscious of Sarah’s presence, the pocket of space closed around her. Carmella came out of nowhere and tackled someone, Sarah screamed, a crowd surged in their directions. I put my head down and charged through the sea of bodies.

  “Get the fuck off me, bitch! You breakin’ my finger.”

  A chubby black kid of maybe seventeen was face down on the floor, Carmella twisting his thumb and wrist behind his back. Sarah’s expression was more surprised than anything else. Then I noticed a brown shipping envelope in her hands that I hadn’t seen her holding when she first came into view.

  “Give that to me, kiddo.” I held my hand out to Sarah and she placed the envelope in my palm. “Let him up, Carm, so we can talk privately.”

  Carmella pulled the kid to his feet as I assured everyone that it was all right.

  “Just a misunderstanding,” I lied, sounding authoritative as hell. I didn’t flash my badge. When the cops showed up-which they would-I didn’t need to try and explain away a potential felony charge. “Show’s over, folks. Go get your bags and have a safe trip back home.”

  By nature, New Yorkers are disobedient bastards. On the other hand they take an inordinate amount of pride in their unshockability. This time unshockability won out and they went back to reclaiming their luggage while we hustled the kid into a corner. As we walked, I tore open the envelope. It was another wilted rose and a “self-portrait” of Patrick done on an eight by eleven piece of Masonite. The familiar initials PMM were in the lower right hand corner. This wasn’t funny anymore.

  “Okay, asshole, what’s this about?” I said, pressing my face into the kid’s. His wide, frightened eyes told me he knew I wasn’t fucking around.

  “Guy gimme a twenty ta give dat package to da red-headed girl come out dat door.”

  “What guy?” I asked, pressing my face even closer to his.

  “Dat one,” he said, pointing.

  “Which one?” I stepped back to see where he was pointing.

  “Him.”

  He was pointing at the portrait.

  “Bullshit!” Carmella hissed in the kid’s ear, tightening the thumb lock.

  He winced. “I ain’t fuckin wich y’all.”

  Carmella yanked and twisted. The breath went out of the kid and I thought he might pass out from the pain.

  “Carmella, stop it!” Sarah said. “Dad, tell her to stop it.”

  “Look! Der he at.” The kid’s voice was barely a whisper, but he pointed toward the exit doors with his free hand.

  I turned and my heart jumped into my throat. There he was, tattoo and all. The world around me crawled. There was a muted roar in my ears. I could hear individual noises-the squeaky wheel of a baggage cart, the smack of a suitcase as it hit the metal railing, a limo driver screaming “Mr. Child. Mr. Child. Mr. Child,” the whoosh of the doors-but none of it made any sense. I told my legs to run, but they wouldn’t move. I tried to shout, but I could form no words. Something was tugging my arm.

  “Dad! Dad!” Sarah was shouting, pulling my sleeve.

  “Moe, what’s up?” It was Carmella.

  “Let the kid go,” I heard myself say. “Let him go.”

  “What?”

  “Let him go.”

  My legs finally started moving, but not fast enough. Strong arms grabbed me.

  “Where the fuck you think you’re going, buddy?”

  “Huh?”

  “C’mon, pal,” the Port Authority cop said. “And the three of youse too, let’s go. Now!”

  I didn’t argue, but kept watching the door as I moved.

  I didn’t know ghosts used doors.

  It didn’t take long to straighten things out with the Port Authority cops, especially once we showed them our old badges and shields. You should never underestimate the power of the us against them mentality. Once cops, always cops. Raheem-that was the kid’s name-was no fool either. He understood that he wasn’t going to get a whole lot of sympathy once the policemen’s love fest began. So for a hundred bucks and a sincere apology, he was willing to forget all about Carmella’s tackle and death grip. For an extra fifty, he agreed to have coffee with Carmella so she could debrief him about how he’d been approached to deliver the package to Sarah.

  I had to get Sarah back to my condo so we could tal
k about the full extent of what was going on with Katy and so she could decide if she wanted to stay with me or her mom. Having Sarah in the car to talk to was helping me not to obsess over who I thought I saw at the airport. The distraction of driving had also let me regain some measure of equilibrium. It wasn’t Patrick-that’s what I kept telling myself-but I was meant to think so. My new mantra was, “Don’t fall for it. Don’t fall for it. Don’t fall…” But Christ, that guy in the airport terminal looked an awful lot like him.

  “So talk to me, kiddo.” I wasn’t quite pleading.

  “I didn’t like that back there.”

  I didn’t like it either, at least not the part where I saw a ghost. I didn’t think Sarah had seen him, so I played dumb. “You wanna give me a hint here?”

  “How you guys treated Raheem.”

  “We were only being cautious. Don’t hold it against Carmella. She was trying to protect you. Blame me. More has been going on at home than I’ve let on.”

  “Not that part,” she said, staring out the window as we passed Shea and smiling wistfully.

  “Then I’m a little confused.”

  “How the cops blew him off because he was a black kid and you guys were cops. If the roles were reversed and he had tackled you or Carmella, the cops would have beat the shit out of him. They wouldn’t have been slapping him on the back and inviting him out for drinks like they did with you and Carmella.”

  “You’re right. I’d like to tell you it’s not true, but it is. That’s a cop’s world sometimes.”

  “Well, it sucks.”

  “There’s a lot of injustice in the world, Sarah. Some of it’s big. Some of it’s small. In the scheme of things, today’s events were a small injustice.”

  “You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a little kid, Dad. Besides, there’s no such thing as a small injustice.”

  “I didn’t say it was right. I just said it’s the way it is.”

  “Is that how you rationalized yourself to sleep when you were a cop?”

  “When I was a cop, I slept like a baby. Being a cop isn’t about the big questions. It’s about doing the job.”

  “Did doing the job include mistreating innocent people?”

  “Sometimes, yeah, I guess it did.”

  “Then that sucks too.”

  “I’m glad I’m sending you to the University of Michigan so you can learn to use the word ‘sucks’ in every other sentence. You gonna try for the debate team next term?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “Okay. Look, Carmella and me, we were just looking out for you. Raheem got the shit end of the stick today, but he also got a hundred and fifty bucks for getting his thumb twisted a little bit. You seem a lot more worried about his dignity than he did.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then I’m lost,” I said.

  “It wasn’t necessarily what happened back there, but what it represented that bothers me. You guys got a free pass because you were once cops, not because of what you did or didn’t do.”

  “Oh, kinda like how you got out of those speeding tickets last year because you were a cop’s kid and had the PBA and Detectives Endowment Association cards in your bag that Carmella and I gave you.”

  Sarah had no snappy reply for that one, but sank into her seat and sulked for a few minutes.

  “So what is it with you and Carmella anyway?” she said as we got off the Van Wyck and onto the Belt Parkway.

  “We’re partners.”

  “That all? Just business partners like you and Uncle Aaron?”

  “Not exactly. I get along better with Carmella. I’m not a disappointment to her like I am to your uncle.”

  “Come on, Dad, Carmella is beautiful and you have that cop thing between you and-”

  “Look, kiddo, if this is about me and your mother, forget it. What went wrong with us has nothing to do with Carmella.”

  “Not even a little bit, not even about you and Mom not getting back together?”

  “I love your mom, but it just doesn’t work between us anymore.”

  “But-”

  “No buts. I hurt your mom and she can’t get past it. Until this stuff with Patrick, we were both okay with that.”

  Patrick. Shit! I got a little queasy just saying his name. What had happened at the air terminal came rushing back to me. I worried Sarah might notice. Then, of all people, I thought of Francis Maloney and smiled. A reaction I had never before had nor was ever likely to have again. The strange thing about my late father-in-law and me was that in spite of our mutual loathing, we never fought, not really. We were engaged in a long cold war. And just like in the real Cold War, both of us kept a finger close to the button that would bring our worlds crashing down around our heads.

  We barely spoke, but there was one question Francis Maloney Sr. never missed the opportunity to ask me, “Do you believe in ghosts?” He never explained the question, never once discussed it. He didn’t want or expect an answer. After a few years, he didn’t even have to say the words. The question would come in the guise of a sideways glance or a churlish smile. His favorite form of silent sparring was to raise his glass of Irish to me, a toast to his sworn enemy.

  Only in death did he explain. The mechanics of his revenge from the grave were particularly cruel. Included in Katy’s inheritance was a cold storage receipt. She thought it might be for her mom’s wedding dress. When we retrieved the item from cold storage, it wasn’t a wedding dress at all, but a man’s blue winter parka, the blue parka her brother Patrick had been wearing the night he disappeared. Katy recognized it immediately. So did I. In the pocket of the coat was a twenty-year-old handwritten note from Francis:

  “Your boyfriend gave this to me on February 17, 1978. Ask him where he got it and why he swore me to secrecy. Did he never tell you he found Patrick?”

  And so I came to understand the question he had asked me hundreds of times in a hundred different ways over the years. The coat proved I had found Patrick, that I had let him go, and that I had conspired to keep the secret from Katy forever. Patrick’s ghost had essentially ended our marriage. Francis, thinking that his death would protect him from the fallout, had miscalculated. For as angry as Katy was with me, the extent of it was nothing compared to the animus with which she regarded her late father. Katy and I might never reconcile and she would likely not forgive me, but we would always share Sarah. Sarah was the best of both of us. On the other hand, Katy would hate her father for eternity.

  So I sat there in the driver’s seat, smiling, thinking of the late Francis Maloney Sr. and wondering whether he would have appreciated today’s delicious irony. I closed my eyes just for a second and saw him raise his glass of Irish. In my head I heard him ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?” And this time I answered, “Maybe.”

  “Dad, what are you smiling at?”

  “I was just thinking about your grandfather.”

  “Your dad?”

  “No, Grandpa Francis.”

  “But you hated him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m smiling.”

  “You’re so weird, Dad.”

  “I suppose I am, sometimes. At least you didn’t say I suck.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the second time that day I drove into Brooklyn Heights, but the road ahead hadn’t gotten any clearer. Now I was facing down the sun sliding slowly behind the curve of the Earth and the blue of the water was less assertive. The green spaces and bike paths that ran along the Belt Parkway were crowded with couples, joggers pushing strollers, tanned skater girls, dogs on long leashes, dogs on no leashes at all. Kites bathed in dying orange light flirted with the Verrazano Bridge and dreamed of untethered flight. These were not the cheap, diamond-shaped kites I flew as a kid, kites made of splintered balsa wood and paper, trailing tails of my mother’s old house frocks or whatever other schmattes were laying around. No, these were proper kites, fierce and sturdy things that loved the wind and did not fear it. I
wondered if I were a kite, would I love the wind or fear it? It’s odd what you think about sometimes.

  By the time I turned off the BQE at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and into Cadman Plaza, the sun and the kites were gone. There may be no silence in Brooklyn, ever, but there are lulls when its symphony quiets down just enough to hear individual instruments: a tugboat horn, the squeal and rumble of a lone subway, the thwack, thwack, thwack of a low-flying helicopter. I used to love this time of night. I would sit on the steps outside Bordeaux In Brooklyn and listen to the reassuring buzz of tires along the metal grate deck of the Brooklyn Bridge. The buzz was gone now that they had paved over the deck. I knew it was silly to miss it and that the bridge was far safer this way, especially in the rain. Still, I listened for the buzz as I walked from my car to the lobby of 4 °Court Street.

  Working nights never bothered me much nor did staying late at any of the wine stores. I did hate coming to 4 °Court at night. Office buildings are depressing places, lonely and desperate places after dark. Bored square badges read the papers, slept in the shadows, spoke broken Spanish to the cleaning girls. As I walked from the elevator, I checked for light leaking through the bottoms of other office doors. I thought about the men and women behind those doors. Was it always about the work? Was it about avoiding a loveless marriage? An empty apartment? Or worse, an emptier bed?

  Carmella didn’t greet me when I came through the front door, so I went into my office and collected my bottle of Dewar’s and two glasses before heading in to see her. Just lately, it seemed like she needed more than a few drinks and I’d been scotch jonesing since the airport. I hadn’t wanted to drink in front of Sarah. Crazy, right? It’s not like she’d never seen me drink before. I mean, she was twenty and I owned four fucking wine stores, for chrissakes. But she’d never seen me drink at home and never alone. She had never seen me drunk and I wanted to keep it that way.

  I knocked on Carmella’s office door and walked in. Her chair was turned toward the window, but not completely so that I couldn’t see her profile. She was crying. I had seen her cry only once before, when the NYPD finally did to her what they had done to me. They had wanted to show her the door almost immediately after she was wounded at Crispo’s Bar in Red Hook in ’89, but the only thing Carmella Melendez ever wanted to be was a cop and she wasn’t going to give up as easily as I had. Amazingly, she hung on for seven more years and made it to detective first before getting the boot. She’d taken a lot of shit to make it that far, but that last year had been particularly hard on her. And after her last shift, she broke down.