The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “So when was the last time you spoke to your wife?”

  “Yesterday around lunchtime. She called me on the cell. She wanted to remind me we had a parent-teacher meeting coming up later this week, and she didn’t want me to miss this one. We’ve had some scheduling conflicts in the past.”

  “I hear that,” said Paco with an encouraging half-smile. “There ain’t enough hours in the day for me to be with my kids.”

  “Since when is he married?” asked Mike behind the glass.

  “He isn’t.” Harold shrugged. “But he’s got two kids living in Florida.”

  “So were you guys knocking heads a little about your schedule?” asked Paco.

  “Just the usual stress of me being on the road all the time and her having to stay home with the kids.” Jeffrey Lanier crossed his legs, a big toe flexing under a Velcro strap. “It’s hard for her, me being away so much. Look, it’s hard for me too. I miss them like crazy when I’m away all week.”

  Yeah, right, thought Mike. And then try to make up for it by screaming at them on the soccer field Saturday morning and falling asleep on your wife before the opening skit on Saturday Night Live.

  “So how long were you away on this trip anyway?” asked Paco, staying focused. “Five days, did you say?”

  “I took the shuttle to Boston early Thursday morning so I could get in all my meetings, see some friends, and be home tonight.” Jeff hunched forward earnestly, like a seventh-grader trying to read a blackboard. “That’s part of our new deal. I’m supposed to get home to watch the kids so she can go out one or two nights a week.”

  “I hear you.” Paco made a quick note on his pad. “And so you’ve got phone numbers for people in Boston we can double-check everything with.”

  “Yeah, sure, but look … what’s going on?” Jeff put a hand over his bald spot, protecting his tender vulnerability. “I came down here to give a missing person report. Is there something you guys aren’t telling me?”

  “Sir, I’m just trying to get all the facts together so we can proceed to look for your wife,” Paco said patiently. “Now, what time did your flight get into LaGuardia today?”

  “About five o’clock, but …” Jeff was distracted, noticing the window in the wall for the first time and realizing somebody might be behind it listening. “Look, I’m really starting to get scared here. These children need their mother …”

  “Sir, we’re gonna try to find her as fast as we can,” said Paco, swiveling his chair around the side of the table to get close to him. “Do you have a picture of your wife that we can work off of?”

  Mike watched the husband fish around in his pocket for a wallet photo, his nostrils expanding and contracting more quickly, his agitation filling the interrogation room like helium.

  “What do you think?” Harold murmured.

  “He’s making the right noises, but it’s too early in the song.” Mike moved back from the glass. “Why’s he so hinky already?”

  “This is a head shot.” Paco thumbed his lip as he studied the wallet photo. “You have anything that shows, um, a fuller view?”

  “What do you mean?” said Jeff, pushing back in his chair and holding on to the armrests, his bare knees starting to double up like knuckles. “Why would you need that?”

  “It’s standard.” Paco shrugged. “Just to see if there are any distinguishing marks and characteristics. People can change their hair or even their eye color nowadays if they decide to run away. Body type can be harder.”

  “She was tall, about five foot eight, and … well, you know, she’d had two children.” He touched his glasses and looked up at the ceiling, trying to concentrate. “And she’d had a lumpectomy. And then, um, a little liposuction.”

  “She got her fat sucked?”

  “It was for her, you know, not for me.” Jeff started breathing harder. “And, ah, I guess she’d just gotten some kind of a tattoo on her ankle.”

  “A tattoo?” Paco’s eyes batted up at the window and then landed back on Lanier. “What kind of tattoo?”

  “A blue butterfly.” Jeff’s chest began to heave, and he coughed. “She got it in the city this summer, on Saint Marks Place. Midlife crisis kind of thing. She started doing a lot of crap like that after she got past the cancer.”

  “Shit, it’s her,” said Harold, a radiator hiss leaking through his front teeth. “I knew it.”

  Mike pressed his lips together, carefully containing himself.

  In the other room, Jeffrey Lanier removed his glasses and put his hands up to the sides of his head as if he’d just realized he had a splitting headache.

  “Hey, you’re not asking me this because that’s what they found on the body at the train station?”

  “Sir, we honestly don’t know who that was, but we just have to follow through on every possibility …”

  “Oh my God …”

  Jeff started to rise, and his face turned a deep arterial shade of red.

  “Oh, here we go,” said Mike.

  “Shit.” Harold grimaced. “Is this guy gonna stroke out on us?”

  It was like watching a controlled demolition. Jeff’s left knee went first, bending and buckling, his shoulders sagged, and then the rest of him fell sideways against the table, scraping the legs on the linoleum floor. He grabbed the edge to try to keep his balance, and a high rasping honk choked his chest.

  Paco half-rose and slid a box of Kleenex across the table. “Mr. Lanier, you gonna be all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. I’m all right.” Jeff gasped and waved him off.

  “I only have a few more questions. I know you’re anxious to get back to your kids.”

  “What am I going to tell them?” Jeff sat down again, the rhythm of his breathing becoming more spasmodic, as if he were turning inside out. “How am I going to do this?”

  “Well, hopefully, you won’t have to. It’ll turn out to be somebody else.”

  Mike heard himself snort. Harold looked over at him impassively, as if they were strangers on a park bench trying to read the same newspaper.

  “Mr. Lanier?” said Paco, waiting patiently for the subject to get himself under control. “I’m sorry to have to ask this, but are you and your wife having any emotional or financial difficulties?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jeff Lanier blew his nose and wiped his brimming eyes.

  “Do you have any money problems?” said Paco. “What kind of business are you in?”

  “I’ve got an Internet outfit, selling sports memorabilia, sportsmemories.com.” He put his glasses back on, trying to keep it together for just a little bit longer. “We’re doing fine. It’s not like we’ve had to borrow money from the mob to pay our mortgage, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Wall Street hype,” Mike muttered, earning himself another lingering glare from the boss.

  “And how are things in the marriage?” Paco was asking. “You said something before about ‘conflicts.’ Are you guys getting along okay?”

  “Far as I know.” Jeff glanced around, genuinely bewildered. “I gave my wife everything she asked for.”

  Mike made a conscious effort not to say any more, knowing that Harold was watching him almost as closely as he was watching the husband.

  “So were either of you seeing other people?” Paco tossed the legal pad on the table, as if this part of the discussion was just going to be regular guys talking.

  “You mean, did she have a boyfriend?”

  The prospect caused Jeff to sink down in his seat and lose whatever meager composure he’d gathered. “No … I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry to have to ask you that, but again, it’s standard in a missing person case …”

  Jeff began to shake violently, an uncontrollable tremor that started in the chin and vibrated down to the shoulders. Paco averted his eyes for a moment, not enjoying the spectacle of a grown man going to pieces.

  “He did her, that son of a bitch,” Mike said in a low voi
ce. “I fucking knew it.”

  Harold turned to him. “Come on,” he said, like a man who’d got tired of waiting for a bus. “Let’s get out of here a second. There’s something we need to talk about.”

  The chief’s office was a long rectangular room on the second floor, where the manager of this converted bowling alley used to sit. It had a sky-blue carpet, forest-green file cabinets, and pictures of Harold’s wife, Emily, and their kids, Keith and Crystal, in their soccer league uniforms on the credenza behind his desk chair. The shelves were full of law books, Nelson DeMille paperbacks, and three-ring binders full of up-to-date administrative codes and law changes. There were degrees on the walls from the FBI Academy in Quantico, where Harold had taken a special six-week training course years ago, and from LaGuardia Community College, where he’d majored in mortuary science. A tiny brass coffin engraved with the name of his parlor—the Baltimore-Langston Funeral Home—sat at the edge of his mahogany desk.

  “Sounds like you were getting a little worked up in there, Lieutenant.” Harold’s old leather seat puffed out as he sat on it.

  “You can just tell the guy’s lying, that’s all. Pisses me off.”

  “Didn’t you used to go out with Sandi?” Harold closed one eye, trying to remember. “In high school?”

  “Nah, you’re getting things mixed up again.” Mike turned sideways in the guest chair with the copper studs along the armrest. “She was a hag back then. I felt sorry for her. Or maybe she felt sorry for me because of what happened with Lynn. Whatever. We were friendly.”

  “So have you seen her lately?”

  “Just the little bit earlier this summer. I put up a deer fence in her backyard. I told you about that.”

  Harold tilted back, pulling that long church deacon face on him. The one that was supposed to make you think he’d never taken a drink on duty or considered nailing a pelt that wasn’t his wife’s.

  “That all there was to it?” he said.

  “What are you asking me?”

  “You seem very … emotional.”

  “You’re damn right I’m emotional, Harold. This is a girl we both knew since we were fourteen, got her head cut off. On our watch. What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m trying to be …”—Harold waited, choosing his words judiciously—“professional.”

  “Well, so am I. What do you think I’m doing?”

  Small bright-purple patches appeared high on Mike’s cheeks.

  “Look, we’ve known each other a long time,” Harold said. “You’re the godfather of my children, and whatever bullshit problems we’ve been having lately, I’d still trust you with my life, man. But I also know how you get around with the ladies sometimes.”

  “I’ve made my mistakes, and believe me I pay for them on the fifteenth of every month with an alimony check.” Mike rubbed his ring finger with his thumb as if it was sore. “But I’m back with Marie and the kids now, and we’re solid. I’m through wandering off the reservation.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I did a fucking twenty-five-hundred-dollar fence job for them. You gonna make that into a major conflict, Harold?”

  “Not if that’s all it was.”

  Harold hunched forward heavily on his elbows, once again the high-school catcher waiting to see if his signal was going to be shaken off.

  Mike blinked, letting himself go far away and then come back again, knowing that whatever words he spoke here would be a house of his own construction that he’d have to live in from now on. He looked past Harold for a moment, trying to buy himself a little more time.

  “So is this what happens when you get the big office?” A half-moon smirk carved its way into his face. “You make all your old friends jump through hoops.”

  “I have a department with twenty-nine officers covering twenty square miles,” said Harold. “I don’t have anyplace to hide a man who’s going to make life difficult, particularly my number two. I already have a youth officer who’s afraid to go out on patrol and a K-9 officer who’s too drunk to clean up after his dog half the time. And now it looks like we’ve got a major homicide of one of our citizens landing right smack in our front yard. So if you have some conflict here, I’d expect you to tell me about it now so I can ask you to take a step back and let Paco run the show.”

  “A step back?” Mike cocked his head to one side as if he hadn’t heard properly. “I trained Paco for this job. He’s supposed to answer to me.”

  “And if you’ve got a conflict, I’d expect you to remove yourself from the chain of command, just like you’d expect me to do the same for you. I don’t need to read a story in the New York Post about how this department blew its first major investigation with a black man as its chief. So I am trusting you to tell me if there’s something I need to know.”

  “Thirty-five years I’ve known you.”

  “Thirty-two,” Harold corrected him. “They didn’t integrate the schools until we were in fifth grade. So let me ask you one more time: Is there something I need to know here?”

  Mike looked down, realizing he’d been tracing a circle around one of the armrest studs with his finger.

  He made himself stop, understanding that if he took the detour here, there would be no getting back on the main road. Harold’s chair creaked slightly as he rocked in it, awaiting an answer. Mike’s eyes fell on the little coffin at the edge of the desk. Okay. You either hit the brakes now and risked the pileup, or kept plowing straight into darkness without headlights.

  For a moment, he was seven years old again. Lying in bed, with his collection of trains and cars under his pillow, listening to Dad come in after the four-to-midnight shift. The prison seemed to follow him into the house. The smells of piss, cigarettes, ammonia, and WD-40 for the locks. You could hear the heavy sound of his keys hitting the table and the squeak of the refrigerator being yanked open, its chilled breath slowly escaping.

  And then, after it shut, the sibilant incitement of his mother’s voice and the muffled slap of her slippers on the linoleum floor, pursuing Dad around the kitchen, trotting out her children’s sins one by one. Stap, stap, stap. Johnny smart-mouthed me again. Stap, stap. That little one’s a liar. The way she talked about them made them seem so much worse than they were! He could still taste the blanket’s binding in his mouth as he chewed on it, thinking about the hiding he stood to get off this windup. Stap, stap.

  I caught Michael trying to steal a fire truck from Angela’s. He’ll be the death of me, that one …

  And what made it even more terrible was the way she kept comparing them to the children she took care of at other people’s houses. With their exquisite manners. And their Bloomingdale’s clothes. And their riding lessons. Stap, stap.

  To the manner born, they are. You never have to ask them to do anything twice… . You should see the little one. The spitting image of John-John, he is …

  Sometimes she’d even come in the house smelling from the sirloin and lamb chops she cooked for “her people” while her own kids ate Chef Boyardee and sucked the marrow from leftover chicken bones in the fridge. Stap.

  He remembered the bedroom door opening and the slant of kitchen light falling across his pillow. The small plastic wheels making a cracking sound under his head. The groan of the floorboards as his father crossed the room with his work shoes still on. The long pause while Dad stood at the foot of the bed, just watching. His mother moving around just outside the door, impatiently tidying up in the kitchen, letting them both know she was listening. The burner on the stove making a dry tsk-tsk sound. And then the light on his nightstand going on. Christ, he loved the old man so much more than he loved her. In some little boy way, he understood his father’s exhaustion, his white-knuckled grip on the throttle, the second-by-second struggle to keep the noises from the cell block from getting in the room with them.

  So, what’s the story? Dad said.

  This was his father. His idol. The man who was going to give him his old unif
orm shirts when he was big enough and take him hunting up in the Adirondacks one of these days. The man who was going to teach him how to shoot a gun and put a tie on. If you couldn’t trust your father to understand, who could you trust? The old man probably did the same thing when he was a kid. Wearily, Mike had sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  Dad, I’m sorry … , he’d started to say.

  But his father had already spotted one of the little trains sticking out from under the pillow.

  The back of his hand caught Mike under the chin.

  When he thought back on it, though, Mike didn’t so much remember the taste of blood or even the embarrassment of not being able to stop crying. What still haunted him was the look on his father’s face. Like seeing the wind go out of a sail, the realization dawning that after spending all day guarding scum, he was raising a little thief at home. After that, things were never the same. There was never any hunting trip to the Adirondacks or uniform shirt passed down. And so Mike took to hiding his trains under the mattress and never telling anybody anything.

  “No,” he said to Harold. “There’s no conflict. You know everything you need to know.”

  11

  AT A QUARTER after nine the next morning, Lynn headed out to her garden in the backyard in a ragged old T-shirt and gray sweatpants to pull up dahlia tubers and deadhead yarrow. A rare hour of having no particular place to go. Soon it would be time to start turning the soil over and putting the garden to bed for the winter.

  She was forty-two now and old enough to know that the cycle of renewal didn’t always follow decay. Some of the tomato plants had withered, leaving thin black stems like umbilical cords sticking out of the ground. Slugs had gotten to the squash this year, and the broccoli rabe never really took. Rabbits ate the radishes, and birds had pecked at the sunflowers and stolen the seeds, leaving the heads as blank as the faces of showroom dummies.

  What most disturbed her, though, was the fact that deer had jumped over the eight-foot mesh fence and eaten some of her carrots, leaving stubs strewn around like small orange fingers.