“Rigor?” asked Harold, ignoring the way Fallon was licking his lips and looking down at his feet.
“Still pretty strong in the limbs, so she was killed in the last forty-eight hours.” Paco took the photo out of his camera and flapped it.
“So, what’s your take on it?” Harold turned back to Mike as if he just remembered he was standing there.
“My take is maybe we cross suicide off the list.”
The chief sighed and watched a tugboat churn its way down the sun-dappled river, a vision of tranquillity receding.
He’d never felt the need for all this nervous joking about death. His father had brought him into the family business early on. By the time he was fifteen, he knew how to suture a mouth shut, how to fashion a nose out of wax, how to avoid blowing the features with too many chemicals. Over the years, he’d come to feel not just a reverence but a kind of affection toward the little ventilated basement room where “Midnight Train to Georgia” was always playing on the tape deck. Because in those quiet moments—working side by side, draining fluids and prelubing veins—he’d been able to hold on to that closeness with the old man that other boys lost when their voices dropped. The only time he ever remembered Dad cracking wise on the job was when they laid Godfrey Chamberlain on the slab, dead in a car wreck six months after he’d broken a bottle of Brass Monkey over Uncle James Booker’s head. And even then he’d had to strain to hear his father mumble as he injected the embalming fluid into the carotid artery: So who’s the big man now?
The 8:09 to the city whipped by behind Harold, and he was aware of people on the train craning their necks, trying to look down onto the crime scene as they passed.
“Shit.” He felt the vibration of the platform’s pilings in the river-bank. “All my life, I lived in this town and there’ve been—what?—eight, nine homicides? I make chief, I get two in less than a year.”
“You want to say eight or nine?” Mike looked at him sideways.
“Why, what do you say?”
“I wanna say like ten or eleven. You don’t always think of the ones that don’t bother the people up the hill. Not right away. But I remember cradling Tony Foster’s head when he was bleeding to death outside the Front Street Tavern my first year on patrol. He kept saying, ‘Tell Don I’ll give him the money Tuesday,’ like he didn’t know he was going out of the picture.”
“Loco Tony”—Harold knit his brow—“the Reefer Prince of Riverside. He was the first drug dealer I ever knew that had his own power lawn mower. Four-hundred-dollar Craftsman with six-and-a-half-horsepower engine. Man, he was an asshole, but he had a beautiful lawn.”
“You saw I locked up his son the other week with three ounces. Loco Junior.”
“The gift that keeps on giving.”
“So how do you wanna play this?” Mike ran his hand over the sandy buzz cut that emphasized the shape of his skull. “Should we call Metro-North about holding the rest of the trains this morning?”
“Hell no. You know what kind of crap I’m getting? Do you know how many times the mayor’s called already? Do you know how many of the town trustees have called?”
Harold wagged his chin, thinking about the other little cliques in town he hadn’t even heard from yet, all the people who liked to pretend there was never any crime in Riverside: the cocktail-shaker-and-plaid-pants contingent from the Stone Ridge Country Club, the Saint Stephen’s crew from halfway up the hill, the B’nai Israel crowd, the Rotary Club Mullahs, the Welcome Wagon Fanatics, the School Board Ayatollahs. The whole social strata of the town getting ready to tumble down on him if he didn’t wrap this baby up fast.
“Word does get around,” said Mike.
“Forget about it.” Harold snorted. “The people on the hill don’t wanna see this shit. Next we’ll hear from the TV and newspapers. ‘Paradise Spoiled,’ ‘Murder in Quiet Suburbia.’ Emmie got me on the cell phone while I was running over here, half about to lose her mind because she’s showing two houses today and she’s worried the customers are gonna back out because they’ll think they’re looking at the ‘Little House in the Ghetto.’”
“Well, Chief, we can’t mess around with people’s property values, can we?”
Harold narrowed his eyes, trying to read his old friend’s expression. This was the first white kid who’d ever invited him into his home. They’d stood together on the defensive line on Riverside High School’s football team, worked as a pitcher-and-catcher battery for two seasons, shared a squad car in their first years on the job, been best men at each other’s weddings, saved each other’s lives once or twice, and had dozens of sleepovers looking after each other’s kids. But there were still times that those blue eyes were as inaccessible and mysterious to him as the chrysalis within an ice cube.
“We need to start doing a complete canvass and see if anybody saw the body being dumped,” said Harold. “I want to keep officers up on the platform, questioning people for the rest of the morning rush, and then I want somebody at the station tonight to talk to people as they’re getting off to come home. And I want somebody to go around the corner and talk to the Mexican day laborers hanging out in front of Starbucks. A lot of those guys are out on the streets late in the evening, and one of them might’ve seen something. I think until we find out otherwise, we have to assume this poor young woman is from our area.” He glanced down the slope. “How old do we figure her for anyway?”
“Dunno.” Paco looked up from mixing the Plaster of Paris that would be used to take the shoe impressions. “She was in pretty good shape. Late thirties, early forties. Those might have been stretch marks I saw before.”
“You can usually tell the age by looking at the neck,” said Mike.
“That ain’t an option this time.” Paco ladled out a generous dollop of plaster.
“Goddamn.” Harold watched the river breeze riffling the white sheet, making it look as if the woman underneath were about to sit up. “I hate it when they have kids.”
He found himself picturing a quick cremation and a short dignified memorial service to comfort the surviving kin. This was not the season of open caskets. He thought of the Fitzsimmons family, not even having a body to bury.
“So how you want to handle the security presence?” asked Mike. “We’ve already got a lot of edgy people in this town.”
“I’m thinking we’re going to have to go with a twelve-man rotation for the day shift and ten officers for tonight, or at least until we can positively ID this young lady as coming from somewhere else.” Harold exhaled unhappily. “I’ll talk to the mayor about overtime.”
“One- or two-man cars?”
“Six one-man cars during the day and four at night. And let’s put another half-dozen officers out on bicycles. I don’t want panic, but we want the taxpayers to see they’re getting their money’s worth. I want all our missing person reports compiled, and I want all our available personnel calling around to the other departments up and down the river to see who they have missing.”
Harold took a quick mental inventory of the twenty-nine officers in the department, unhappily sorting out the highly competent, the functional, and the brain-dead. He wasn’t cut out for this. In his heart, he’d always known he was not a born leader or a follower, but a loner. He’d always preferred solitary activities: sweeping up for his father, washing out tubes, filling out arrest reports, and having the quiet satisfaction of being a man alone in his own kitchen at midnight, paying every last one of his bills while the rest of his family slumbered upstairs.
He saw Mike staring at him.
“What?” Harold glowered back. “Why’re you giving me the Look?”
“Just makes me feel glad I didn’t get the job.”
“Oh, we gonna start with that again?”
“I’m just saying it’s a lot of pressure. I don’t envy you.”
“I didn’t go begging for this job, Mikey, and you know it.”
“I never said you did.” Fallon blinked, his face suddenly as clear and u
ntroubled as a child’s open hand. “I said, ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you.’”
“I know what you said. Let’s not try to rewrite history.”
They were both still smarting from that last awkward Christmas dinner with the wives at the Olive Garden on Route 12—Emmie letting fly with that remark about the nerve of some people suggesting Harold got the job because he was black, Mike shrugging, rheumy-eyed over his whiskey sour, and asking, Well, why do you think they gave it to him?
It wasn’t like Harold had been looking to step up. Come this January, he would have had his twenty years and been ready to turn in his papers. He’d been thinking of selling his share in the funeral home to one of the national chains. Pace University, just down the road, was offering a couple of computer classes he wanted to take. He’d earned the right to coast awhile: with the money from his share and his savings with Emmie, they could afford to put the kids through college with a modest financial aid package and still have a little left over to buy one of those beachside condos in South Carolina his brother was telling him about.
But then, two days before Thanksgiving, that plan went bust. Yes, it did. He could still picture the Verizon Wireless bill he was about to pay when the phone rang. Mike saying there’d been a bad shooting in the Hollow. That damn fool child Replay Washington had taken a round in the back running from P.O. Woyzeck with a 3 Musketeers bar in his hand that looked just like a .22 at thirty paces. Shit happens. But this time it happened in the middle of Operation Ivory Snow, the hyperaggressive anticrack patrols Mike set up to make the waterfront safe for developers. After that, there was no way Mike would ever make chief. All the New York City liberals who’d moved up here for the boom a few years back went crazy, and the baggy old country-club Republicans who stacked the Town Board pronounced themselves shocked—shocked!—to discover there were only three black police officers in a town that was one quarter African American. And so Reverend Ezekiel P. Philips of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church down in the Hollow, whose great-great-grandfather Obediah had led a congregation of ex-slaves in horse-drawn wagons up from Elizabeth, North Carolina, after seeing a vision of a river running the wrong way, had taken Harold aside and said, “Son, it’s time we give that big stick to one of our own.”
So how was he supposed to say no? He would’ve been letting down not just his family, who’d been going to the church for three generations, but the whole community on Fenton, Shantytown, Bank, and all the other crooked little dogleg streets down by the river, all the people he’d sat next to in church and shared barbecue with since he was a boy. Still, on a day like this, he longed to be sitting quietly in an anonymous back room with a stack of pink invoices and an IBM calculator.
“Anyway,” Mike said, “you want to have a couple of extra officers handling calls for dispatch?”
“That’s a good idea. For the next few days, we’re probably going to need all hands on deck.”
“I promised all the moms I’d do soccer practice from four-thirty to five-thirty, but I’ll shit-can it,” said Mike, watching Paco smooth down the foot impressions.
“No, don’t,” said Harold. “At least put in an appearance. Make them feel like everything’s normal and under control.”
“All right. I’ll stay just a few minutes and then come back here ’til midnight.”
“What about Marie?” Harold knew they were at each other’s throats about hours lately.
“I’ll call and see if we can get the Mexican girl to stay late. It’s all right. I’m a dead man at home anyway.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Harold touched him lightly on the shoulder. “You know, I’d have your back if things had broke the other way.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The wind had suddenly subsided, leaving a slightly unnatural calmness along the shore. The gulls that had been walking along the bank with pieces of yellow crime scene tape stuck to their beaks flew away, and the ducks that had been floating nearby like bystanders drifted off. Violent death in the outdoors always changed the ecosystems around it, Harold noticed. Blood seeped into soil, green bottle flies swarmed, gases expanded, putrefaction set in, eels wriggled in the shallows.
“You know what this is going to turn out to be, don’t you?” Mike looked back at the body under the sheet. “This is going to be another dump job from upstate, like the one we had in May.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Harold.
“It’s obvious. Somebody goes to the trouble of cutting the head off a victim so she can’t be identified, and right away you have to start thinking organized crime. This is probably another drug dealer’s skanky girlfriend from Newburgh who pissed the old man off, got herself whacked, and then was driven down and tossed out in our parts. And it’ll turn out that people around here will have gotten their bowels in an uproar over something that has nothing to do with them.”
“Excuse me, but I don’t think so,” Paco, the new man, spoke up as he knelt beside the body, waiting for the plaster to dry.
He was a short pugnacious Hispanic guy from the Bronx, with a shaved head, a little earring, and a goatee that looked like a small dark hand over the bottom of his face. He’d been working his way up through the ranks of the NYPD when he discovered that there was a much faster route to promotion—not to mention a better chance of owning his own home—in these suburban towns with rapidly expanding Latino populations and no other Spanish-speakers on the job. Of course, some of the older guys in the Riverside Department resented getting leapfrogged and subtly insinuated that the ethnics were sticking together when Harold gave the newbie his shield this summer. But hey, Harold told them, they could always take night classes at Berlitz.
“So, what do you think it is?” Harold asked.
“Come over here and check it out.”
Paco gingerly lifted the side of the sheet with his thumb and forefinger as Harold navigated down the incline in his loafers, with Mike close behind. Underneath the little tent was the mottled moonscape of a flank. Harold’s eyes quickly found a light surgical scar on the underside of a breast. But Paco was pointing out another small white line in the flesh, this one low on the left buttock, a mark the size of half a matchstick.
“What is that?” asked Harold.
“Maybe she sat on a nail or something when she was a kid,” Mike said in an unsteady voice as he crouched down to get a better look.
“No, man”—Paco dropped the sheet in disgust—“that’s liposuction.”
“What?” said Harold.
He was aware of Mike becoming very still, staring down so intently that the chief could almost hear the liquid dab of his blink.
“She had her fat sucked.” Paco lifted the sheet again so they could see for themselves. “And that ain’t cheap, bro. That operation costs about three thousand dollars. I’m thinking this lady wasn’t broke, and I’m thinking maybe she was from around here.”
3
THERE. SHE TOOK the shot and moved back into the doorway again like a sniper. You rarely saw grown men looking that scared in broad daylight.
She quickly changed her angle, worried that she was about to lose this moment. Something about the way the sun broke over the old warehouses and abandoned factories on Evergreen Avenue turned the clouds into light boxes and made the men down the street look dwarfed and vulnerable, like shadowy figures in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. She ducked behind a Dumpster and changed to a shorter telephoto lens, reeling off a couple more quick shots from thirty yards away, making sure she was at least covered in case they didn’t want their pictures taken today.
It had been such a struggle to get here in time for the morning shape-up, when eighty or ninety men from Mexico and Guatemala gathered in front of the Starbucks around the corner from the train station and waited for contractors to drive by and offer them work. She’d had to get up early, fix breakfast for the kids, make sure her equipment was ready, drive Barry to the station because the other car was still in the shop, drop Hannah and Clay
off at school, sign up for the book drive and karate classes, make appointments for parent-teacher conferences, call the Dryer Man and Tree Guy again, and then race back here to find a place to park before the crowd dispersed.
A blue-and-white Chevy Suburban cruised by slowly, the contractor behind the wheel looking saturnine and jowly, a surly lump of a man with rolls of fat on his neck and a tiny stump of cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth. He could’ve been a corrupt Eastern bloc bureaucrat or the owner of a carnival with dangerous rides. Yet the laborers came rushing at him as if they were bobby-soxers and he was Frank Sinatra in the trim glory of youth. And for a few seconds, she was no longer Lynn Schulman, loving wife and mother of two children. She was all hand and eye. She shot and advanced, shot and advanced, as the men surrounded the van in their Gap T-shirts, Spackle-covered 501 jeans, and dusty Timberlands. She adjusted the f-stop, making sure she had the Starbucks sign and the flag in the window framed behind them. In their rising voices, she could hear that there was no longer enough work to go around. Friends and relatives—men who’d dragged one another barely alive across the Arizona border—were elbowing and shoving one another out of the way for the right to build a stone wall around some investment banker’s McMansion up in the hills.
She found a milk crate to stand on as two muscular guys jumped in the back of the van, leaving their unemployed friends behind on the sidewalk. She clicked away, capturing the half-open mouths, the raised hands, and the hope getting extinguished in their eyes.
A powerfully built little guy with the face of an Aztec warrior and the haircut of a Beatle fan turned to a taller dejected friend, a frayed rope of a man in a straw cowboy hat and a ragged plaid shirt. The little guy grabbed the cowboy’s stringy arm and patted his muscle, as if trying to assure him that they were both still robust and strong enough to somehow survive the long winter ahead. She took the picture and then slowly lowered the Canon, knowing that her morning had just been made.
The Last Good Day Page 2