The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “First of all, you’re going to keep your voice down.” She took a deep breath. “Second of all, you’re going to spare them all the horrible details. Because, frankly, they don’t need to know and they won’t want to know. But don’t lie to them. They’re tougher than you think, and they’ll never believe you again if they see you’ve tried to fool them. Just answer their questions as honestly as you can without frightening them and let them know you’re not going anywhere.”

  She remembered hearing a kindly old detective from the 43rd Precinct give a grieving Dominican grandmother the same advice in the Bronx after her daughter had been found raped and stabbed to death on a rooftop, leaving five children for her to raise on her own. Let them know you’re not going anywhere. She found herself struggling through the flood tide of grief to get to him and keep him from drowning.

  “You do it,” Jeff said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You’re stronger than me. They’ve known you all their lives. They trust you. You tell them.”

  “Jeff, you are their father. No one else can do this. It has to come from you.”

  He sagged against the wall, and his bathrobe fell open slightly, revealing a gut that had added a small front porch since the last time she saw it and a pair of red Jockey-style underwear. She averted her eyes, not quite ready for this much humanity.

  “I know. You’re right.” He straightened up, trying to gird himself. “But they’re never going to get over this. I’m never going to get over this.”

  She felt a shimmer go through her body, her sadness shading inch by inch into anger. She told herself that it was a natural animal response against the viciousness done to her friend, a girl she shared a bed with when she was six and a suede skirt with when she was twenty-four.

  “So have the police been here?” she said, trying to maintain her outward calm. “What have they told you?”

  “I went in last night to give a missing person report, and then they called me this morning. The chief. I guess he knew Sandi from school or something. He was very … decent about it.”

  “Harold’s a good man.” Lynn nodded.

  “He asked if they could send somebody by in a few minutes to collect some of her things and dust for fingerprints to make sure it’s her, but he seemed pretty certain.” He shriveled again, like a balloon losing all its air. “God, I can’t believe anybody would do this …”

  The brown-red smear on the baseboard appeared in Lynn’s mind again. She wanted to go back and look at it, but she didn’t dare. It couldn’t be what she thought it was, could it? Other people’s memories were triggered by words, hers by pictures. Where had she seen that exact shade before? A mashed-up yam Hannah had flung at the wall of their 10th Street apartment when she was a baby? Something awful in Clay’s underpants? Evidence of forbidden M&M’s before dinner?

  “I haven’t even started thinking about how to bury her,” Jeff was saying. “And I think it’s the Jewish tradition that you have to have the funeral right away …”

  Another image flared in Lynn’s mind. A tenement hallway. A crime scene photo taken on assignment. Dried blood on white cinder block. The News hadn’t used it. No color presses back then.

  “So now I’ll have to call her father and stepmother in the city and all the relatives in Florida …”

  “You want me to make some of those calls for you?”

  “No, you’re right.” He banged the back of his head lightly against the wall, as if reminding himself of what he had to do. “I’ve got to try and get it together here. For the kids. That’s what it’s all about. Right? I’ve got to be strong for the kids.”

  “They need you, Jeff.” She reached out and squeezed his elbow harder than she’d meant to. “But don’t forget, the rest of us are here for you. Anything you need. Call me anytime. I’ll help with the funeral, and I’ll make travel arrangements for the family. I’m serious. Use me. Lean on me. I’ll come and cook for the kids. Or they can come and stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room. Sandi would have done the same for me in a heartbeat.”

  She pushed the sepia image of the blood smear out of her mind and tried to think of something she could make and bring over later so the kids wouldn’t starve. Lasagna. Pot roast. Lamb chops. Did these kids eat anything other than chicken fingers and French fries?

  “Is there anything you need right away?” she asked, desperate to help, to do anything to alleviate this sense of suffocating helplessness.

  “How about a new wife to help me raise Dyl and Izzy?”

  Her jaw went slack. “Jeff …”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He put up his hand. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m still in shock.”

  “I understand.”

  She heard a car pull up outside and grind to a halt. The squeaky cry of a door opening and then a brisk aluminum slam. The stately bell rang once more.

  “I think that’s the police,” he said.

  “You want me to stick around while they’re here?”

  “No, I’ll just put on a video for the kids. It’ll be fine. I rented Bambi.”

  “Did you?” She looked stricken, remembering what happened to the mother in the movie.

  “Oh, shit. You’re right. Bad choice. Maybe I’ll just put on Yellow Submarine instead. They always like that.”

  14

  “SO WHO WAS the mujer bonita?”

  Paco sat on the rim of a tub in an upstairs bathroom five minutes later, watching Mike Fallon dust the sink counter for fingerprints.

  “Who? The one we just saw on the porch going out?”

  Paco wrung his hand as if he’d just touched something hot. “I seen you talking to her before at the train station, right?”

  “An old flame of mine.” Mike shrugged, delicately brushing the dark powder across the white surface. “You know how that is.”

  “Ai, pappi! You put all my old ladies together in a room, they’d form a coalition. Women United Against Paco. They’d form subcommittees to talk about different things I did that pissed them off.”

  “Hey, you guys got everything you need in there?” Jeff Lanier called out from the bedroom just outside the door.

  Mike’s eyes fell on a red toothbrush, and his stomach dropped, realizing her DNA was in its bristles. He thought of tagging and bagging it, but then Paco would ask how the hell he knew it was hers. Damage control. That’s what it was all about today.

  “Ah, we’ll just be another couple of minutes, sir,” Paco answered in his hoarse Bronx accent. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  Mike shook his head and mouthed the word asshole as he went back to brushing and tapping powder out of his little vial, watching latent patterns beginning to emerge as whorls.

  Say something. Don’t say anything. He’d had a terrible night and a worse morning. For twelve hours, he’d been steadily replaying last night’s conversation with Harold every fifteen minutes, second-guessing himself, seeing the obvious places where he could have given himself a little more breathing room. But, no. You know everything you need to know. Why didn’t he just find himself a nice tight iron maiden to climb into?

  “See this, man?” Paco leaned over the edge of the tub and touched a little silver nozzle in the side. “They got a Jacuzzi right here in the bathroom. Think they got a sauna too?”

  Mike ignored him, patiently sifting grains across the white surface, waiting for more of the dark patterns to appear next to the sink with the shiny brass basin.

  He remembered how large the Castlemans’ bathroom used to seem to him, when in truth it was probably half this size. He could still picture the white marble floor, the deep sunken bathtub, the greenish Jean Naté bottle with the black ball on top that looked like the dot over an i, the white Lancôme powder puff on the sink counter, the potpourri basket, the individual paper hand towels with flower designs draped elegantly over the brass rack, the little pink and purple seashell soaps, and the space-age toilet so clean and shiny that he felt guilty just squatting on i
t.

  His mother used to clean the place twice a week when she’d come by to help take care of the house and the kids for Mrs. Castleman on High Plains Road. Years later, it would finally dawn on Michael that the occasional seashell nugget and flowered hand towel that he later saw in their bathroom at home were items she’d spirited away from her employer, at a rate of about one every two weeks.

  Not that he blamed her for wanting things they had. The Castleman kids, Bobby and Erica, looked like Kennedys. They played chess and took riding lessons. They had an old-fashioned player piano in the living room, a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes, a clay tennis court in the backyard. Everything in the house had that fresh new-catalog smell. He remembered going over there when he was eight and noticing the dirt under his fingernails and realizing he’d never heard of this science show Nova that Bobby kept talking about. Erica, who was a year younger than him, killed him at Scrabble with words like franchise and gullible.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Paco, opening a Ziploc bag and blowing into it. “I get a little bit ahead on my support payments, I’m gonna put all that shit in my bathroom in Port Chester. My kids would love it, man. When we stayed with their grandparents in Florida, they’d spend all fuckin’ day in that Jacuzzi. I worried their little cojones were gonna get boiled …”

  “Hey, as long as you’re sitting there, why don’t you try and see if you can snag a pubic hair from around the drain so we have some fibers to work with?”

  Paco curled his lip in distaste as he pulled on his latex gloves. “But then who’s gonna get the sample of his pubes so we know what to compare it to?”

  “Ask not what your supervisor can do for you; ask what you can do for your supervisor.”

  Mike put the brush down for a minute and went to look out the door, making sure Jeff Lanier had left the bedroom.

  “So, what do you think?” Paco asked sotto voce.

  Mike listened for a moment, making sure he heard the husband talking to his kids downstairs. “I think I’m gonna take a look around their bedroom.”

  He pissed in the Laniers’ toilet, flushed, and then stepped across the threshold and sniffed deeply. A red incense candle sat unlit on an Early American cherrywood chest of drawers. The white linen canopy sagged slightly over the four-poster bed with green wall sconces and a red-and-green Persian rug underneath. The ceilings were high, and the closets were big enough for Volkswagens. He turned his attention to the bookcase across the room and saw that its shelves were equally divided between Oprah choices and the kind of meaty World War Two volumes Dad always fell asleep with on his chest. But at the very end of the top row he spotted a familiar slim blue spine. The diary. Just sitting there like an eyeball staring back at him from the shelf.

  “You know, I really like what they did with this room, man.” Paco moved into the doorway beside him. “It’s got a lot of light and space. And the wall sconces and window treatments really warm it up.”

  “It’s all her.” Mike sniffed.

  “Yeah, how do you know?”

  He walked over to the cherry dresser and pretended to study the lacquered Japanese jewelry box on top.

  “Hey, bro,” Paco said quietly, “we gotta tread lightly here. We don’t got a warrant. We’re just supposed to be collecting hair and fingerprint samples. Anything else we pick up this time is gonna get thrown out of court.”

  “I know the law, Paco. You don’t have to school me.”

  He turned and dropped down into a squat, as if what he really cared about was under the bed.

  “Nice house, though,” Paco sighed, going to check out the valance and detail around the windows.

  “Big, that’s for sure.”

  The diary. He’d completely forgotten about it. He remembered asking her why she had to write everything down in the first place. Wasn’t she afraid her husband or somebody else would see it? Who cares? she’d said. At least then I might get some attention. At the time, he’d put it down to the usual bellyaching, never thinking she’d do any real damage with a pen. But now she had him spooked, and he realized that he might have to look for her laptop as well, just in case she didn’t delete all her old e-mails.

  “The lady I’m hooked up with now, she’s after me to get a bigger place.” Paco yawned. “She got three kids of her own, almost grown. And they wild, man. They need a lot of space, I need a lot of space. We livin’ in two bedrooms, man, and I fuckin’ hate it. I got J.Lo and Christina Aguilera screeching in my ears at two in the morning. Fuck that shit, man. I want a garden. I want to grow roses and, whaddayacallem, rhododendrons big as fuckin’ water buffalo. I want an island in my kitchen the size of San Juan. Say, you gonna let me know if you see a head down there, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try and mention it.”

  Mike stood up and smoothed the wrinkles from his trousers, trying to guide his thoughts through the heavy traffic in his mind.

  “So how you liking my boy downstairs?” Paco dropped his voice into a whisper.

  “I’m liking him okay.”

  “Gave his old lady the big house with the big kitchen, though.”

  “And hardly anything in it. You notice that?” Mike listened, making sure he heard Lanier downstairs on the kitchen phone. That was at least one obstacle out of the way. “Except for this room and the kids’ rooms, the house is barely furnished. He’s got a great big sun-room downstairs that’s totally empty except for a card table. So, what does that tell you?”

  “You think he got in over his head?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first one. Lotta people living beyond their means these days. Big house, big problems.”

  “He told me his company was doing okay down at the station.”

  “Yeah, how about that?” Mike grinned. “Maybe we ought to check out his cash flow. See what else that leads to.”

  Paco stayed by the window, a day’s worth of stubble grown out on his head.

  “See that Benz four-by-four in the garage?” he said. “Man, that’s a sweet ride.”

  “If you don’t mind emptying the kids’ college savings.”

  Mike shook his head, trying to think of how to get his partner out of the room for a few minutes. A diary. Fuck. AND a laptop. Whatever happened to discretion? Whatever happened to just sucking it up and taking it? Why did everyone go around these days bursting to tell their secrets as if they were about to get booked on some talk show Freakfest.

  “So let me ask you something, man.” Paco looked back at him, fingering his earring. “You said you went out with that little fox we saw on the porch.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “And she’s like a friend of the lady who lived here?”

  “Yeah, what’s your point, Paco?” Mike felt his back teeth come together, not liking where this was heading.

  “So did you know our victim here too?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Crown and enamel began to grind and scrape. “Didn’t Harold tell you that? We all knew one another in school.”

  “Fuck, man. I didn’t know that. What’s up with that?”

  “Are we having a problem here?” he asked, pausing and letting the silence between them become a weapon.

  “Well, that’s fucked-up.” Paco’s goatee became a long V. “Your victim and your investigator knowing each other.”

  A cartoon sycophant’s voice brayed, “No, Your Blueness,” downstairs.

  “We’re in a small town,” Mike said slowly. “Less than twenty thousand people live here.”

  “I understand, but que le pasa? Come on, how’s it going to look when we go to state court and …”

  Mike held the Ice Man stare, allowing the silence to freeze and harden, even as he imagined the laptop screen starting to pulse a bright blue aura from somewhere in the room.

  “Look, I’ve been with this department almost twenty years,” he said. “You’ve got a little over eighteen months. If you don’t like the way we do things, why don’t you just get the fuck out of here?”

  “You
guys almost done?” Jeff Lanier appeared in the doorway with a black mobile phone cradled to his ear.

  The detectives shot each other recriminating looks, neither of them having heard him come back upstairs.

  “Five minutes, sir.” Paco held up a rubber-gloved hand.

  “I thought you were only looking in the bathroom.” Jeff’s eyes narrowed.

  Both Paco and Mike gazed down at their shoes, like parents caught arguing by the children.

  “We just stepped out to get some air for a second.” Mike glanced at the amber prescription bottle on the bedside table.

  Jeff opened his mouth to protest, but his son called out from downstairs, asking his dad to come sit with him through the scary parts of the video, and he stalked off grumbling into the phone.

  “Think he heard us talking before?” Paco looked out the door after him, making sure he was gone.

  “I don’t know,” Mike muttered. “Let’s just wrap this up.”

  It was taking more and more effort not to look over at the bookcase. Did she or didn’t she? He could just leave the diary there and see what happened once they got a warrant. But that would be a little like leaving in a brain tumor and seeing whether it turned out to be malignant. Once it got vouchered as evidence, it would be part of the official record, and there’d be no pulling it back.

  “Hey, man, lo siento.” Paco raised a clenched fist to show solidarity. “I don’t wanna fight witchoo. No vale la pena.”

  “Whatever.”

  “We just have to learn to respect each other. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Without warning, Paco suddenly grabbed Mike’s right hand and snared his fingers in a soul shake, leaning forward to bump shoulders and clapping him heartily on the back with his free hand. Mike stiffened in the half-embrace, not wanting anyone this close right at the moment.

  “Okay, we’re good, we’re good.” He pulled back from the newbie and straightened himself. “All for one, and one for all.”

  “Todo sigue bien.”

  “Look,” said Mike, “why don’t you go downstairs and ask him if we can get access to both their credit card records so we can track their movements and purchases over the last few days. I’ll be down in a minute to see if I can get the kids to talk to me while you have him occupied.”