“I’m not sure what you mean by that.” Harold worked his fingertips around the rims of his eye sockets.
“I don’t want to get into specifics, but my impression was that some things were said that didn’t directly pertain to the investigation.”
He could see that he’d made Harold deeply unhappy. The chief drew in his lips and lowered his brow, making his face look slightly squashed, as if someone were sitting on his head.
“Look, I appreciate that you’ve got a murder to solve and that you’re just trying to do your job. And we’ll do anything you need us to do to cooperate. Sandi was a good lady. Just, if it’s possible …”—Barry tread carefully here, knowing he might have already overstepped his bounds by a half-mile—“it’d work better for us if you could give us a little more advance notice. My wife would be happy to come down to the station to talk to you.”
The compression increased around the chief’s mouth. He put his coffee cup down firmly.
“You’re a lawyer, right?”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
“My wife sold you your house,” the chief deadpanned.
“No kidding? Emmie?”
Barry found himself having to readjust his settings a little. All right, so the chief is married to a white lady. A very white lady. Cool. Emmie with the oversize round glasses, turquoise bracelet, and straight blond hair, who’d piled them all into her Navigator and driven them up to the farmhouse on Grace Hill Road less than twenty months ago. You’ll be happy here. She’d announced it, as if it was a prophecy out of one of the sun-faded New Age books on her dashboard. Not just your typical suburban couple. He’d forgotten her saying she was married to a cop.
“We’ve been married almost twenty-one years,” the chief said matter-of-factly. “My point is, is that this is a small town. All right? A lot of people know each other. I even knew the victim. So we may have some big-city problems, but we all have to coexist. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure, but …”
“Three weeks ago, one of my officers had to arrest my second cousin for selling marijuana less than a hundred and fifty yards from the high school. Was I happy about it? What do you think?”
“I think things might be sort of tense next time the family gets together for the holidays.”
“You’re damn right. But I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it. Now we got all kinds of folks living in our little town. We’ve got stockbrokers and bank presidents, heads of foundations and plenty of distinguished lawyers such as yourself. But do you think it would be right if I gave them special treatment over my second cousin trying to put a little cash aside to buy himself a new car?”
“Of course not,” said Barry.
“Now I know my officers make mistakes sometimes—believe me, I know—but I also know that I owe it to the people of this town to do a thorough and complete investigation without fear or favor and that Michael Fallon is one of the best men I have.”
“He tried to put a move on my wife.”
“Well then, I will certainly speak to him on that,” the chief said stiffly, clearly roiling under the surface. “But I also would appreciate it if you cooperated fully with any other questions my investigators have. You and your wife knew the victim, and you may have other key information we’re going to need in this case.”
“Of course.” Barry covered his coffee with a lid and picked up his briefcase. “You can count on it.”
He saw the chief take a deep fortifying breath and instantly understood the crux of his daily dilemma: how do you keep both your officers and your constituents in line when most of them probably don’t trust you in the first place? Probably only by conscientiously pissing everyone off to precisely the same degree.
“Well, all right then.” The chief dismissed him with a curt nod toward the front door. “Don’t miss your train.”
24
WHEN MIKE OPENED up the detectives’ squad room that morning, the phone was ringing on Paco Ortiz’s desk. Mike picked it up before the answering machine got it and found himself speaking to a state trooper named Cotter.
Sandi Lanier’s red ’99 Audi had been found in a Motel 6 parking lot some five miles outside of town. The doors were unlocked, there were no signs of struggle, and there were no obvious traces of blood anywhere in the vehicle. They’d already run the plates and come up with a photo ID of Sandi, but none of the motel staff could recall seeing her and there was no room registered in her name.
Mike took down the information in his notebook and thanked the trooper, saying arrangements would be made to pick up the car within the next few days. Then he hung up the phone and stared at his own handwriting, as cryptic as a doctor’s prescription, wondering what to do.
Two days at sea and he still had zero visibility ahead. Shouldn’t the fog have parted? Shouldn’t the next move have presented itself? But the only thing that was clear was that he should’ve said more to Harold the other night. Just enough to spin the wheel a little and save himself from a head-on collision.
Of course, now that he’d read the diary from end to end, he knew there was no easy way to double back and make excuses for not owning up in the first place. All he could do was keep sailing straight off the end of the map. But in the dreary haze of his early morning hangover, he felt confounded, seasick, and hard done by all the women in his life.
Am beginning to suspect no one will ever really love me. Every man I’ve ever known has turned out to be a fraud. Shiiiit, baby! Look at your own damn self. None of the men you knew had their fat sucked or their hair colored.
He decided to put off making a decision about the trooper’s message until he could at least sweat the toxins out. After checking to make sure he had no calls on his own machine, he changed into his shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers and went downstairs to the gym in the basement. A sign on the wall said, FATIGUE MAKES COWARDS OF MEN. Greaseman, the D.A.R.E. cop who spent his on-duty hours lecturing school kids about drugs and his off-duty hours popping steroids, was on the StairMaster, listening to his Walkman and watching stock prices fluctuate wildly on CNBC. Sweat stains darkened patches of the mustard-brown carpet and a Fedders air conditioner rumbled asthmatically.
Mike took a seat on the bench and adjusted the weight to 220 pounds. Then he lay back and shut his eyes, focusing all his concerns into the effort of raising and lowering those stacks of black steel plates.
His muscles felt sluggish and achy; he’d stayed up too late reading the diary in the basement, tooling around on the Internet, and drinking bourbon from a SpongeBob SquarePants glass. He tried to gather his strength in the middle of his chest and push it out, imagining himself as Atlas, holding up the world. He felt the strain in his lats, the heavy laboring of his heart, the poison starting to ooze out of his pores. His elbows locked, and slowly he tried to straighten his arms, tightening his grip even as every nerve in his body screamed for him to stop. It was just a matter of dead-center control. Life was about maintaining control.
I told M. that I didn’t want to keep doing this, she’d written in the diary. But he’s so relentless. He won’t let things just be. I’m really starting to get nervous about him …
Screw her. He concentrated on the flickering light over his head, pulling down deeper into himself, trying to find the hard impenetrable core of his being, the part that could never be broken.
The other night I showed him the new tattoo on my ankle …
Two hundred and twenty pounds and he was about to pop a double hernia. His brother could hoist 250 and dive with 75 pounds of scuba gear on his back, no problem. But how could that be? Johnny didn’t have any of his body mass. He was just a wiry little guy. So how could he have been so much stronger?
I made some stupid remark about how I hoped I didn’t get hepatitis C from the needle they used, and he just went nuts on me …
His sinews burned, and an angry hiss escaped from the corners of his mouth.
He started screaming and yelling about how
could I do this to him and his family. What if I got them all infected?
Slowly, his elbows unlocked, and the weights began to rise higher as if succumbing to some buildup of hydraulic pressure. I’m a man. I’m the son of a man who was the son of a man.
He shoved me down on the bed and put his hands around my throat. I really thought he was going to strangle me …
His arms trembled slightly as he thought of shutting the book as soon as he read that. It didn’t happen that way. Yes, it did. No, it didn’t. She was crazy. She was exaggerating. No one would have ever believed her if she was still alive. And not for nothing, she was kidding about that needle, wasn’t she? Hadda be. Hadda be. I’m a man. I’m the son of a man who was the son of a man … He ground his jaw, pushing harder and harder, slowly extending his arms until they couldn’t lift anymore. But just then, Harold’s face loomed above him, eclipsing the flickering light.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“What does it look like?” Mike gradually lowered the weights, incrementally becoming aware of the sound of his heartbeat fading in.
“Are we having some problem understanding each other?”
“What’s up?”
He sat up quickly, thinking somehow Paco had found out about the missing diary. Blood began pounding in his ears.
“You think this is some kind of joke that they made a black man the police chief?”
“Look, will you chill the fuck out and tell me what’s bothering you?”
Mike mopped his face with a towel, feeling a throb in the base of his throat. He’d never been afraid of Harold before, and he didn’t like it. The Greaseman had departed the gym, leaving the CNBC lady babbling about earnings disappointments and declining indexes.
“I told you I needed you to take a step back, didn’t I?”
“Just tell me what I did wrong.” A droplet of sweat eased down the bridge of Mike’s nose.
“Lynn Stockdale’s husband came up to me at Starbucks this morning and said you were by the house yesterday bothering his wife.”
“That what he said?”
The drop fell off the end of his nose and landed at Harold’s feet.
“You want to tell me your side of it?” The chief looked down at the spot it made.
“I came by the house to clear up a couple of details.”
“After I told you Paco was the primary. Twice.”
“There are certain kinds of information he might not be able to get, being from outside the community.” Mike dabbed sweat out of the groove in his lip. “Sometimes people are more comfortable talking to somebody they’ve known all their lives. Sets off fewer alarm bells.”
“Well, that worked like a charm, didn’t it? What’d you do, whip your dick out?”
“Nothing she hasn’t seen a hundred times. She used to be all over me, in case you forgot.”
“We are in the middle of a murder investigation.”
The chief’s voice echoed off the cinder-block walls and died in the middle of the room. On the television, a former presidential candidate was talking about erectile dysfunction.
“Look, nothing happened,” said Mike. “Absolutely nothing. She gave me a little peck on the cheek when I was leaving.”
“And that’s it?”
“Oh, come on. You know how it is when you see somebody you used to be into. There’s still a kind of energy. It doesn’t all just dry up. So she wanted to give me a good-bye kiss. It wasn’t any big deal.”
“Then why’d she tell her husband about it?”
“Who the hell knows? Maybe she felt guilty afterward. Or maybe somebody saw me leaving and asked her about it later. Whatever. Listen, it’d be the exact same way if you saw Sharon Carson again.”
With the mention of his first white girlfriend, the chief’s eyebrows relaxed and his features softened. It had taken him a good six months to get over the way Sharon’s mother broke them up senior year, determined that her Bryn Mawr–bound daughter wasn’t going to throw her life away dating one of the local black boys who washed dishes at the Copperhead Diner after school.
“You still put my back against the wall, Mikey,” the chief said, renewing his determination. “I told you to step off.”
“What’re you gonna do, Harold? Wrap me up in Tyvek and fiberglass insulation? I live in this town. I’m still supposed to be running day-to-day operations for this department.”
“And I am your chief,” Harold told him coldly. “I already saved your career once. I can’t do it again.”
“And I saved your life when Brenda Carter came at you with a butcher knife. I didn’t hear you complaining when I pumped a round into her.”
Almost unconsciously, Harold’s hand went to the right side of his abdomen.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I owe you a lot, but if I have another problem with you in this investigation, I’m gonna have to ask you to take more than a step back.”
“Understood. I hear you.” Mike stood up, wiping his face again. “You the big man now, Harold.”
The chief squinted, trying to decide whether he’d been dissed with his own father’s line.
“By the way,” said Mike, playing it light and casual, “you ever get the tox results back from the state crime lab?”
Harold’s face got small, as if he was going to start barking again. “You said you’d keep me in the loop,” Mike reminded him.
The chief looked down at the hand still hovering near the old entry wound, notice of a debt outstanding.
“Yeah, we did,” he said reluctantly. “She was eight weeks pregnant. But do me a favor and keep that under your hat, will you?”
25
AN IVORY-WHITE BMW 525i sat glowing in Sandi’s driveway, looking as if her big white house had somehow given birth to it.
Lynn parked the Explorer behind it and got out with three full Corning Ware bowls of food that she’d spent the morning cooking for Jeff and the children. The BMW had to belong to Sandi’s father, she realized. Every time she saw him, he had a different car, much in the same way other well-to-do men always had a new wife.
She heard his familiar phlegm-and-gravel voice as she walked up to the door and rang the bell.
“Oy, Gottenyu, Lynn.” He flung open the door and stood before her, shaking his head. “What did they do to my baby?”
“Saul, I’m so sorry.”
She put the food down and threw her arms around him. He was a short, blunt, unreflective cigar-smoker, who most people took to be a self-made millionaire. In fact, his own father had amassed a small fortune in the carpet business just after the Depression, most of which Saul lost on bad investments in the late sixties after his first wife died. But he’d found his touch in the seventies, snapping up Manhattan properties in decline, fixing up the lobbies, slapping faux-European names on the canopies, and charging exorbitant rents as soon as the market turned and people were desperate for two-bedrooms.
“Look at you.” He closed the door and stood back, appraising her. “You look just like you did when you got out of high school.”
“It’s very kind of you to say that, Saul.”
“I always said if my Sandi had half your poise, she’d be beating the boys off with a stick.”
She cringed a little, remembering how Saul had been a bit of a lecher for as long as she’d known him.
“She was a beautiful girl, Saul. I’ll never have another friend like her.”
He nodded his great white mane sagely. “She looked fantastic when she lost all the weight before the summer,” he said. “‘Pretty as a shiksa,’ I told her.”
Okay, thought Lynn, that would have been worth five years of psychotherapy right there if Sandi were still alive.
“Is Barbara here?” She asked after the second Mrs. Feinberg.
“Upstairs, taking a nap. This has been very hard on her too. She was very close with Sandi.”
Actually, Sandi always despised her stepmother and referred to her as Queen Botoxica. Barbara had be
en serviced and overhauled more often than a nuclear submarine, and if Saul had had a mind to do it, he could’ve made himself a third wife out of all her cast-off parts.
“How are the kids doing today?” Lynn asked, wondering if Jeff had finally got up the nerve to break the news to them.
“Who knows?” Saul raised his great bushy eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s even sunk in yet.”
She heard clattering and yelling from deeper in the house and peered down the hall to see Dylan and Isadora back by the stairway, wailing on each other and their baby-sitter, Inez, with wooden swords and plastic baseball bats. To the casual eye, they were just children playing wildly. But then Lynn saw Dylan take his sword with both hands and smash it as hard as he could against the flimsy cardboard shield Inez was holding. This was the fury of a little boy who understood perfectly well that he would never see his mother again.
“See what I mean?” Saul waved a weary hand. “They’re okay.”
Lynn looked askance, thinking what an old obtuse dope he was and how Sandi must have suffered growing up with him. No wonder she’d always been throwing herself at men, trying to get attention.
On the other hand, Saul was here, wasn’t he? He’d managed to raise Sandi and her two brothers mostly on his own, and now he was here to help keep an eye on his grandchildren. The man had lost a wife and a daughter in one lifetime, but he was in far better shape than Jeff was yesterday. So maybe obtuse and insensitive wasn’t such a bad thing to be.
“What about Jeff?” Lynn asked. “Is he around? I didn’t see his car by the garage.”
“Ach, he’s off making arrangements,” said Saul, his face etched in craggy contempt. “What arrangements do you have to make? Pick up the phone, call the rabbi. Get the body in the ground and say the Kaddish. You’re not rebuilding downtown. You’re trying to make a funeral.”
“Is he using Harold Baltimore’s funeral home?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing.”
Lynn realized she’d never really sounded the depths of Saul’s true feelings about his son-in-law before.
The Last Good Day Page 20