The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “What do you think it’ll take for us to get real probable cause to give this place a good toss?”

  “I’m not sure, but you’ll let me know if you see a hacksaw with blood all over it.”

  “Yeah, right …”

  He watched Paco leave the room, listened for the sound of his feet on the stairs going down, and then grabbed the diary off the shelf. He stuck it inside his jacket, zipped up the front, and started to look around for the laptop in earnest.

  15

  AS THE CAB made the turn into the driveway on Grace Hill Road, Barry was unpleasantly surprised to see the mailbox lying on its side with its little silver door wide open like a sleeping man’s mouth. He cursed under his breath, remembering how he’d dug that hole deep in the dirt and pounded the post in with a sledgehammer. And then some suburban cretin knocks it down to impress his troglodyte friends. Brilliant. They couldn’t have done it just by leaning out a car window with a baseball bat. Some genius probably stopped the car, got out, and strained his back trying to uproot it.

  He gave the driver seven dollars for bringing him up from the station and then climbed out and shoved the post back in, thinking he’d fix it properly over the weekend. He trudged up the driveway, pausing inside the gate to pick up the pair of sunglasses that had fallen off Slam the garden gnome. Then he looked at his house, considering the distance he’d traveled. Crickets were just coming out, and streaming lights from the dining room softened the evening. He watched his family go through their familiar movements without him, like figures in an antique music box. Clay chugging Diet Coke straight from a twenty-ounce bottle; Hannah carefully spooning out wheat germ onto whatever meatless dairy-free vegan meal she was eating, while Lynn moved around the table, carrying heaping bowls and blue glasses. He wondered if that first man he’d seen falling from the North Tower that morning, his tie flapping silently in the wind, had had such a vision right before he hit the ground.

  Taking a deep breath, he put the shades back on the gnome, strode across the yard, and walked in through the front door, as if he was just coming back from a short practice.

  “I have returned,” his voice rang out as he closed the door behind him, put down his briefcase, and opened his arms.

  With a slight pang, he remembered how the Munchkins used to scurry out to greet their mayor when they were small. Now, only Stieglitz trotted over to jump up and hump his leg.

  “All right, down.” He pushed the dog away. “Daddy doesn’t need that kind of love.”

  They were arguing in the dining room just off the front hall. Hannah’s voice a high tense pizzicato against her mother’s low, patiently bowed counterpoint.

  “You’re such a hypocrite,” his daughter was saying. “I haven’t done anything that you didn’t do when you were my age. I bet you went to the city every other weekend when you were a senior.”

  “I certainly did not.”

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Barry walked into the room, stripped off his jacket, and draped it carefully across the straight-backed chair at the head of the table.

  “Mom’s being full of shit again.”

  “Hey.” He rolled up his sleeve and drew back his hand, a halfhearted gesture toward Old World discipline. His father would’ve knocked him halfway across the room for talking to his mother that way.

  “Your daughter wants to sleep over Saturday night in the city with some of her so-called friends,” Lynn explained, looking sallow and drawn. “But she can’t give me the phone number of the people she’s staying with so I can talk to the parents and make sure someone responsible is going to be there.”

  “That’s not true,” Hannah said, flicking back her white streak. “I gave you Joanne’s mother’s office e-mail.”

  “Which, strangely, she hasn’t responded to, even though I left her a message three hours ago.”

  “Well, she works.”

  “As opposed to?”

  Barry gave a small groan, knowing there would be no peace once they got into the subject of work, the Bermuda Triangle of mother-child relationships.

  “I think your mother’s just concerned about you going into the city with everything else that’s going on.” He came over and kissed Hannah on top of the head, remembering how she used to sit on his lap and let him read Go, Dog. Go! to her. “She just wants you to be safe.”

  “Oh, Dad, we’re not going anywhere near the bridges or the Empire State Building or any of those places. It’s a Friends of the Earth organizational meeting. I don’t think anyone’s going to fly a plane into a building on Ninety-fourth and West End.”

  “You’re still going to be coming through Grand Central Station.” Lynn’s jaw locked. “Barry, back me up on this please.”

  He heard the scales tipping in her voice and was reminded he should’ve returned her call earlier today, instead of waiting until she was out picking Clay up from karate. “It’s important,” she’d said in her message. He looked over and was surprised to see that her face was puffy and a little warped-looking, as if he was seeing her through a rain-streaked windshield.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” he said.

  “I can’t protect you all the time.” She turned on Hannah, her voice choking as if there were stones in her throat. “Don’t you understand? You have to learn to take care of yourself and make the right decisions.”

  Clay, never able to handle the sight of his mother upset, looked over at Barry, his little man’s face on a big man’s body scrunched up in confusion.

  “I’m not always going to be there for you,” Lynn was saying.

  “Why? Where are you going?” Barry stood with a hand on the back of Hannah’s chair, studying her and realizing something major had changed in the thirteen hours since he’d last been in the house.

  This is how it happens. You’re away at work five, six, seven days a week, and little by little the ones you love turn into other people while you’re not looking.

  “Is there something we need to talk about in private?” he asked.

  Lynn nodded and started to rise, leaving a tangled pile of spaghetti puttanesca steaming on her plate.

  “You had a diaphragm when you were sixteen,” said Hannah, getting off a parting shot.

  “And this is the thanks I get for being honest with you.” Lynn wiped her eyes as she headed toward the kitchen. “Very nice.”

  Barry saw Clay give him a blank look before he followed Lynn down the hall and realized there were some basic fundamentals about women that he needed to review with the boy.

  “What’s going on?” he said, shutting the kitchen door firmly behind him.

  She ignored him, sprinkling flour on the counter and getting a ball of dough out of the refrigerator.

  “Lynn? What gives?”

  Fat tears began to drip down her cheeks as she slammed the ball down into the bed of flour.

  “Sandi,” she said.

  “What about her?”

  “That’s whose body it was at the train station. They think they’ve identified her.”

  She suddenly turned and grabbed him in a puff of flour. He felt the dampness of her tears through his shirt as she buried her face in his chest. This was a woman who could straddle you like a cowgirl, haul fifty pounds of camera equipment uptown in sweltering New York heat, squeeze out two children, and build backyard jungle gyms without ever asking a man to lift a finger. But all at once, she was a fragile child.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  He gently took her shoulders and set her back a little, seeing her face crumble and the flour dotting her sweater like dried white tears.

  “That’s why I was trying to call you today,” she said, pressing back into him. “But you didn’t call me back. It was so horrible …”

  He put his arms around her, letting the news sink in.

  After all this time, he’d finally started to get Sandi. For years, he’d wondered why Lynn had put up with all this drama and lunacy. The crazy PR schemes, the extravagant children’
s parties, the ridiculous stiletto heels and low-cut shirts that seemed to force your eyes into the shallow valley of her cleavage, her wild frizzy hair, her severe angular looks and obsession with weight. But she’d grown on him. He’d started to see her friendship with Lynn was one with real stretch marks and dirt under its nails. They’d seen each other through tough childhoods, difficult pregnancies, and scabby marital patches. He wished he had a friend that loyal. Sandi was all right, he’d decided after seeing her weather the cancer scare with a kind of quiet stoicism that most guys he knew couldn’t have mustered. And, in fact, watching her sail off the diving board into the pool this summer, legs flaring out straight behind her and red Lycra stretched tight over her breasts, he’d seen certain limber erotic possibilities in her that he hadn’t noticed before.

  “You tell the kids about this yet?” he asked, remembering Hannah had baby-sat for Sandi’s kids two or three times last spring.

  “No,” she said, trying to find the drawstrings to pull herself back together again. “I wanted to wait until you got home. I didn’t think I could handle it on my own.”

  “Shi-ii-itt.” Barry stretched and laced his hands behind his head. “And so what’s Jeff doing? Who’s looking after the kids?”

  “He was almost catatonic when I went there this morning. But when I came back to drop off some food this afternoon, the babysitter said Sandi’s dad was there with her stepmom. They’re assholes, but at least they can keep things running.”

  He remembered meeting the father once, a stumpy beetle-browed little white-haired guy who’d hit it big as a real estate developer, buying low in the seventies and selling high in the eighties. His second wife was like one of the apartments in his East Side buildings: cramped quarters, high maintenance, limited views.

  “Jeff was taking a nap when I came back.” She got a rolling pin out of one of the drawers. “He was apparently a mess after the police came there.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I just need to stay busy with my hands.” She attacked the dough ball with the roller, trying to flatten it and smooth it out. “I’m too upset and nervous to stay still. I thought I’d make them a pie. I remember the kids liked my apple pie …”

  “So has Jeff got himself a good lawyer?”

  “I don’t know.” She put her shoulders into the task. “Why? Do you think …”

  “It would just be standard for the police to take a good long look at him.” He shrugged. “Especially considering what was done to the body.”

  “God, some of the things you say.” She stopped trying to smooth lumps and just looked at him.

  “I’m only thinking about it the way a prosecutor would.”

  “He just lost his wife, Barry!”

  He asked himself what he’d be doing under the circumstances. The truth was, he might well be holed up in his office like a shell-shocked veteran, swilling scotch and watching World at War reruns on the History Channel. Jeff had never struck him as having a particularly flinty core to begin with. When you first met him, he seemed like a guy who you could have a beer with while the kids played in the pool. An army brat who landed in Babylon, Long Island, got himself into Harvard, and could name every Mets starting lineup of the last thirty-five years. Somebody you could tolerate at a cookout or dinner at a local restaurant every six weeks while the women huddled together like sequestered jurors. But once you really got to talking to him, a kind of gooey self-pity oozed out. Every other story was about how somebody had screwed him or failed to recognize his talent. Every slight was a grave insult; every bad break was a mortal blow. In a good mood, he could be even harder to take. Earlier this year, he’d bragged to Barry that he was going to celebrate the completion of their new house by bending Sandi over and giving it to her “doggie-style”—doggie-style!—over the new three-thousand-dollar WaterWorks bathtub they’d put in upstairs.

  Just as bad, he had a competitive streak. Finding out Barry had rarely played tennis, he insisted they hit the courts at the Stone Ridge Country Club. But after losing the first set and wrenching his bad knee, Barry had gotten his groove on and beat Jeff easily in the next two sets, and Jeff had spent the rest of the afternoon sulking and watching golf on the TV in the clubhouse.

  On the other hand, the guy had built his baseball card collection into a 12-million-dollar-a-year business selling souvenirs on the Internet. He’d bought himself a brand-new wine-dark Mercedes 320 SUV late last year while everybody else’s business was tanking. So maybe it was just pure jealousy Barry felt toward him.

  “You really think Jeff could’ve done that to her?” Lynn swiped more tears out of her eyes as she went back to making the pie crust.

  “I don’t know. You never get the real story just looking at it from the outside.”

  “I swear, I’ll kill him myself if I find out he had anything to do with it.”

  She started pressing down harder with the roller, her eyes getting that fierce, almost scary, determination. He remembered this was one of the things he both loved and feared most about her. Her refusal to ever back down. He’d seen her bull her way past cops twice her size at crime scenes and browbeat fusty school administrators into getting more money for the children’s art programs. She was unstoppable once she got going, but in part of his mind he always worried about what would happen if she ran into somebody who decided to push back.

  “Listen, I’m sure the police have got this covered. You said they were over there already?”

  “I saw Mike Fallon going in with another cop as I was leaving.” She put the roller down and got herself a sharp knife off the wall rack.

  “Well, there you go. I’m sure they’re professionals.”

  “I saw something else there, though. I was in such a daze, I didn’t think to say anything.”

  “What?”

  She hesitated with the knife in her hand, as if she’d forgotten why she picked it up. “There was a little mark on the wall in the living room. At first, I thought it was a chocolate handprint or something, but now …”

  “Oh, come on. You think it was a blood splatter?”

  “Barry, she was murdered.” She grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl. “Somebody slaughtered her. They stuck a knife in her throat …”

  “All right.” He patted the air, urging her to keep her voice down. “I hear you. Maybe you should call the station then and let them know, in case they missed it.”

  She started peeling skin off the apple in a long unbroken strip. “Christ, I can’t get over this. It’s so horrible to think this could happen to a friend of ours.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, you come to a town with good schools and no crime, where you think you know all the people. And then …”

  The skin broke before she was done with her peeling, and she dropped the knife on the floor. He came over and put his arms around her again, feeling the smallness of her bones moving under the skin and seeing the glint of the blade on the floor. Now would not be the time to mention the fallen mailbox or the potential disaster unfolding at work, he decided.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” he said, resting his chin on top of her head.

  “I know you keep saying that.”

  “Well, what else do you want me to say?” He stepped back again. “Honey, let’s go to the mall and buy a gas mask and a MAC-10 this weekend.”

  A vertical crease appeared between her eyes. “I feel like we’ve lost our ozone layer.”

  “Look, I’ll make some calls tomorrow about upgrading our home security system, but we both know that it’s not going to turn out to be some random maniac breaking down people’s doors. It’s going to be somebody who knew her.”

  “We knew her.”

  “Come on.” He touched her face, trying to smooth the line away. “Let’s get back to the table. The kids are waiting.”

  16

  RAY MARTIN WAS seventy-seven today and had long since given up hope of ever having a real relationship with his only son. The kid had
ruined his life with drugs, burning through a half-dozen businesses and two marriages with nothing to show for himself except a job managing the broken-down Sunoco station on Route 12 and a son of his own named Kyle, a little reed bending in the wind. Five years old with a hapless smile and a gap in his teeth, but no one gave a damn about him. His mother was into drugs herself and relinquished custody, only visiting the condo on River Road often enough to ask for money and upset the little boy’s delicate equilibrium.

  But Ray loved the child. A couple of years ago, his wife had died, and he’d decided that instead of moving down to Florida and frittering away his remaining days on the golf courses, he’d try to hang on and raise Kyle as best he could without repeating the same mistakes he’d made with his own son. He lavished attention on his grandchild, feeding him, buying him clothes, and learning to play his insanely violent video games. Occasionally, with his hand on the joystick, he’d remember the clear blue clarity he’d had as a young pilot flying missions in the Pacific, and he would hint to the boy that he’d been in a great war. Other times, he would just enjoy Kyle’s company in silence as they sat together on the fold-out couch in the living room, drinking warm milk and watching Barnaby Jones reruns on the satellite dish, a small yellow head getting drowsy on his lap.

  For his birthday, Ray had decided to indulge himself a little. The UPN 9 weather last night had predicted it was going to be another day in the low seventies, and he decided to keep Kyle home from kindergarten for some early morning fishing.

  He woke the boy just before sunrise and took him out on the river in the rowboat he kept down at the marina by the train station. A bumper sticker on the side said, “OLD FISHERMEN NEVER DIE—THEY JUST SMELL THAT WAY.”

  “Grampa, are we gonna catch a shark?” Kyle asked, after Ray pulled his oars in and dropped his line into the water, clear and gray as an Akita’s eye in the morning light.