The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “He’s at the crime scene the first morning at the train station,” Paco went on, laying it out piece by piece, as if he was putting together a bike, “so his footprints were all over the riverbank by the time I started to take shoe impressions. Then he’s all hinky about what kind of relationship he had with Mrs. Lanier when I ask him about it. And he keeps bothering Mrs. Schulman, wanting to know if Sandi ever said she was having an affair. Then a can of the same wood protector he uses turns up in the bag with the victim’s head …”

  “You don’t think that could’ve been someone setting him up?” Harold raised his eyebrows.

  “I ain’t done yet.” Paco shook his head. “He has access to all the physical evidence in the locker, so I don’t even know the rest of what we’re missing besides the diary. There could be fingerprints, carpet fibers, and hair samples I never got a chance to look at because he got to them first.”

  “Damn …” Harold eyed the open container of white rice, deciding the last thing he needed was more starch in his life.

  “And then there’s the laptop.”

  “The laptop?”

  “The one we collected from Mrs. Lanier’s house. It’s got a bunch of e-mails from an AOL account called Topcat105.”

  “So?” asked Harold, remembering the old cartoon character Top Cat, who was always giving people a dime on a string and then yanking it out of their hands.

  Top Cat was probably working for the federal government now.

  “The last e-mail from this Topcat was asking Mrs. Lanier to meet him at the same Motel 6 where the state trooper found her Audi a few days later. It says, ‘I have a few things of yours that you might want back. You miss that earring?’”

  Harold glanced over at his office door, making sure it was firmly closed. “And who’s this Topcat?”

  “His member profile gives the name J. C. Martin and says he’s a law enforcement professional with an athletic build and a movie-star smile.”

  J. C. Martin. Harold took a second to close his eyes, trying to drop the name into his memory bank. It rolled around and then hit the jackpot, sending him back to the Samuel R. Walker Middle School lunchroom. He was in the pack with white kids gathered around a little Panasonic transistor, listening to Lindsey Nelson call the fourth game of the ’69 Series. And the ball hit Martin in the wrist as he was running up the first-base line! A journeyman back-up catcher for the Mets, having his one moment of glory because an errant Baltimore throw struck him and allowed a run to score. He remembered the whole lunchroom exploding with joy, everyone jumping up and cheering, slapping him on the back as if he’d finally become one of them just by being a Mets fan. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that Mike had been one of the white boys who’d put an arm around his shoulders.

  “It’s a fake name,” he said.

  “I figured as much too, even though I’m a Yankees fan.” Paco squeezed the ball on his lap. “It don’t look good.”

  “Can you prove it’s Mike’s account?”

  “I’m working on it with the company’s legal department. They got all kinds of privacy laws to protect people’s identities.”

  Harold threw his bulk back into his chair, a jagged lightning bolt of rage shooting across his brain. Long ago, he’d acclimated himself to the fact that this was an imperfect world and that there was little to be done about it but to accept the bitter immutable facts. When he was seventeen, he’d learned that his father, whom he dearly loved, was having an affair with a local widow and had never told his mother. But at this moment, he felt his tie slowly constricting his throat.

  “You got a theory why he would kill her?” he asked, reaching up to loosen it.

  “Not yet, but it’s pretty goddamn obvious something’s up with him, after all that crazy shit with Mrs. Schulman and her husband. And then that John Henry number at the cemetery. I thought he was gonna hit water the way he was digging …”

  “I kept telling him to leave it be,” Harold muttered, pulling on the fat end of his tie in rhythmic frustration. “I said it once, I said it a hundred and fifty fucking times.”

  “You cut him a lot of slack.”

  “He saved my life, Paco. Not just with that crazy old woman, but a hundred thousand other nights out on the street. You know what it’s like trying to get some little punk-ass motherfucker in the back of a squad car with fifty of his relatives and best friends surrounding you and yelling, ‘Get their guns’?”

  “So what? I’m trying to save your job.”

  Harold grimaced and touched his right side again, feeling the old knife wound starting to burn a little.

  “I’m not seeing it,” he said.

  “You’re not seeing what?”

  “I’m not seeing him kill Sandi. I see a husband killing his wife because she’s stepping out on him. But the boyfriend as the doer?”

  “I’ve seen it.” Paco shrugged. “He’s a control freak. Maybe she was trying to break it off with him.”

  “It still don’t make sense to me.”

  Harold pulled open his top desk drawer and looked for the Motrin. At least he didn’t have to take those nasty antibiotics that had him running to the bathroom every five minutes while the wound was still healing.

  “How’s he get along with the ladies generally?” asked Paco, trying another angle.

  “Fine … okay … not bad.” Harold heard the confidence in his voice ebbing as he cast his mind back. “Better than some, worse than others. What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just saying, I worked Sex Crimes a couple of years in the Bronx. I know how the play goes. Has he got a history with this?”

  “Listen, the man’s no saint.” Harold picked up the Motrin bottle and started wrestling with the lid. “I’m not defending the way he acted with Lynn Schulman. Or the fact that he was having an affair with Sandi. But I don’t see him cutting off anybody’s head and throwing the body in the river. You’re gonna have to connect those dots for me.”

  “Some guys they start small and then they escalate.” Paco shrugged. “It’s like a drug, bro. You gotta go a little further, hit that shit a little harder every time so’s you can still feel it.” He smacked his fist into his palm for emphasis. “Maybe a couple of times he hit it a little too hard.”

  “I still don’t see it.”

  “Then maybe you’re too close to it. Lemme ask you something else, Chief: If he was screwing Sandi, but he didn’t kill her, why wouldn’t he just tell us that?”

  “I don’t know.” Harold pulled the cap off the Motrin bottle and saw it held only cotton. “Chain of command. He was afraid I’d take him off the case and bust him down to patrol. Problems at home. He thought Marie would give him the heave-ho and take the kids away. Say what you will about the man, but he loves those children.”

  “Then the best-case scenario is that he was impeding an investigation and tainting the evidence against whoever killed his girlfriend.”

  “Maybe he thought he could keep control of the wheel and steer us around the problems.” Harold tossed the Motrin bottle across the desk in disgust. “Who knows what he was thinking? The man’s seen more fucked-upness in his life than veterans of two world wars. Maybe it started to get to him.”

  Should a friend have tried to help out more? Harold was reluctant to absolve himself too easily. In his new job as chief, he’d told himself he couldn’t afford to get too close to any of the officers anymore, but at the same time he knew you couldn’t be so distant as to have no idea of what they were up to.

  “So have you entered all of this evidence into the system?” he asked.

  “What, are you kidding?” Paco let the ball roll off his lap. “So a defense lawyer can subpoena all of it as Rosario material if we end up arresting somebody else? We’d be fucked if they got their hands on all these notes. That’s why I wanted to talk it over with you first.”

  Harold saw the orange Nerf ball appear under his desk and roll up to his feet.

  “What do you want to do
then?” He bent down to pick it up and felt a small tearing in his side.

  “I want to take a run at him.”

  “For real?”

  “We’ve almost got enough for a warrant,” Paco said. “And he’s already gotta be sweating about the disciplinary hearing. I say we lay it all on him. Go at him hard. Straight on. Lying about the relationship. Stepping on the evidence. Not answering our questions. The e-mail account. Ask him to give us a DNA swab so we can compare the fluids on the body and then see if it was his baby she was carrying. Make him think he’d be lucky to catch a break from us.”

  “Won’t work.” Harold shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not enough. I know this man. Some of his wiring may not be up to code, but the lights still go on. He’ll see right through us. If we’re only going to get one shot at him, we have to make sure he doesn’t get up and walk away.”

  “So how do you want to play it?” asked Paco.

  “Keep digging. Get us a little more leverage. See if you can prove it’s Mike’s Internet account on the laptop. Recanvass for witnesses who might have seen the body dump. Give it a few more days.”

  “All right.” Paco nodded.

  “One thing I do worry about, though.” Harold cocked the ball back by his ear, feeling the burning like a lit cigar stuck in his side.

  “What’s that?”

  “If we can trust Mike to keep his hands to himself in the meantime.”

  “I don’t know.” Paco got up. “You know him better than I do.”

  38

  “I SAW HIM again today,” said Lynn.

  At half past midnight, she was sitting up in bed, listening to branches scrape the window and watching the play of moonlight on her husband’s profile.

  Barry’s eyelids fluttered. “Who?”

  “Michael. He was in the aisle at Home Depot.”

  Barry rolled onto his side, suddenly wide awake.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he said.

  “I didn’t want to mention it in front of the kids.”

  “Did he try to talk to you?”

  “He was pretty upset, as you might imagine.”

  “What exactly did he say?” She heard a hint of impatience in his voice, a former prosecutor’s demand for precision.

  “He kept asking me, ‘Are you proud of yourself?’”

  “Are you proud of yourself?” He flipped each word over as if carefully inspecting its underside. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  Here it is, Lynn. Here’s your opening.

  “I guess what he meant was, we’ve known each other a long time,” she began cautiously.

  “Yes. And?”

  Listen to me, she thought. Don’t just hear the words. Hear what I’m not saying.

  “I was close to some of the other people in his family too.” She pushed it a little further. “Did I ever tell you about his brother?”

  “No,” he said, remaining male and frustratingly obdurate. “I’m sure he was wonderful. But so what? Attila the Hun probably had a nice sister too. Is that supposed to be an excuse?”

  No. He’d missed the signal. There used to be this subfrequency between them, a silent way she could prompt him to ask the right question, but they weren’t hearing each other as well anymore. Too much static on the line. The noise-to-signal ratio was off. Even their sex life was phasing in and out lately. For a while there, they’d been in a real groove, not just having boring Married People Sex, but Rock-’Em Sock-’Em Post-Apocalypse Sex. The last few days, though, they’d been having Refugee Sex, furtive and uncomfortable, as if they were doing it in steerage among hordes of other starving immigrants.

  “So did you call the police to report it?” Barry pushed back the covers.

  “I spoke to one of the sergeants. Larry Quinn. He said there’s no law against talking to somebody in the aisle of a chain store.”

  “Bullshit.” He pushed back, knocking the headboard against the wall. “You’re a material witness against an officer in a disciplinary procedure.”

  “They said somebody would have an informal conversation with him about keeping his distance.”

  “And that’s supposed to make us feel better?”

  They both fell quiet for a few seconds, watching maple-leaf shadows on the ceiling.

  “I really don’t want to do this,” she said. “I don’t want to testify against him.”

  “Great,” he said. “We keep our mouths shut, and he skates? Is that the idea?”

  “Would that really be so terrible?”

  “Hell yeah. I just spent the afternoon pulling his old CCRB complaints. The guy’s got a file like the Sunday Times. Harassment complaints from at least two other women and four brutality complaints out of the drug sweeps they did down by the waterfront. If we let him off the hook, what’ll we do next time he comes by the house?”

  She heard a distant sound in the woods like the tensing of a dock rope. You should tell him. He’ll understand. Unless he doesn’t.

  “We could move again,” she said, rubbing her chin against her kneecap. “Our old apartment in Manhattan’s probably renting for a couple of hundred dollars less since the Eleventh.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Halfway. What if we just stayed in Paris after Christmas vacation? Remember how we used to talk about moving there?”

  “Yeah, before we had kids and high cholesterol.”

  She felt around for his hand in the dark. “You really wouldn’t consider moving?”

  “Lynn”—he sighed, his knuckles lightly brushing hers—“all our money’s tied up in this house. We can’t just pick up and move tomorrow. We’d lose our shirts if we tried to sell it in this market.”

  “I thought you said our company stock was going to come roaring back any minute.”

  She felt him go rigid beside her, a center of gravity sinking into the mattress. “It’s late,” he said, starting to roll away. “We should talk about all this tomorrow.”

  He was shutting down on her, like the old local television stations used to. This concludes our broadcast day.

  “Did you make sure all the doors were locked before you turned in?” She watched him pull the covers up again, his silhouette curving away from her, becoming an indistinct lump.

  “I did.”

  “Did you tuck the kids in?”

  “Hannah’s seventeen,” he muttered. “If I tried to tuck her in at this point, she’d call child welfare on me.”

  “They’re still very young.”

  “Lynn”—he reached back, feeling around for her tentatively in the darkness—“everything’s going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?”

  “That’s what you keep telling me.” She turned back the quilt and started to slip out of bed. “I’m going to check on them again. I can’t help it.”

  Parquet cold against the soles of her feet, she padded out into the hallway, grabbing the blue flannel robe from the closet on the way. The thermostat reported it was 68 degrees in the house, but that seemed unlikely. Even with pajama tops and bottoms on under the robe, the chill went right into her bones.

  Call me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

  She stopped in Clay’s room first and found him curled up under the “Raw is War” quilt, little Stone Cold Steve Austin action figure clutched in his pudgy left hand, like a talisman to ward off evil spirits.

  Almost thirteen years old. Should she be worried? Hannah had put most of her dolls away by the time she was ten. Shouldn’t he at least have something more appropriate for his age, like a stroke book hidden under his pillow? She smoothed back his hair and moved on to her daughter’s room.

  The den of iniquity. The door gave a long drawn-out groan as she pushed it open, and she found herself cringing, awaiting the contemptuous hiss and the inevitable exasperated question—What are you doing? It felt as though it had been weeks since she’d entered this space uninvited. Light from the red gamma-globulin Lava lamp illumin
ated the Marilyn Manson poster and the faux-Egyptian amulet dangling from a nail above the bed. She felt a pang, remembering the old kindergarten finger paintings and crayon scrawls they used to tape to the apartment walls. Back when she wanted to make pictures like Mommy. She stepped carefully, knowing there were stacks of Anne Rice novels and CDs by the Cure somewhere in the dark. For some reason, the Goth obsession was lasting longer than her other phases. Odors of patchouli and recently extinguished incense lingered vaguely. Hey, what happened to the little bottle of Chanel Number Five she bought for Hannah’s birthday last year at Bloomingdale’s? Her daughter lay face up on her pillow, the full moon melting away her baby fat, a thin black camisole strap slipping off her bare shoulder, as if she was waiting to be ravished.

  The time was near for another one of their talks, if it hadn’t already come and gone. Seeing that soft white shoulder, she sensed with a reasonable degree of certainty that Hannah had begun having sex with Dennis Paultz, and all she could do about it at this point was make sure her warnings about protection had been heeded and prepare Barry so he wouldn’t need four-point restraints when he found out.

  She sat down on the side of the bed, wondering if she’d missed the moment. More and more these days, she was looking around and asking where her children went. The details of their daily lives were no longer second nature to her. There were friends, places, and habits popping up in the middle of conversations that she’d absolutely never heard of before.

  She touched the satiny side of Hannah’s face, a privilege she was no longer permitted to enjoy in waking hours.

  Are you proud of yourself? Why didn’t she say something to Barry just now? The shot was right there. The light was perfect. But somehow she missed the chance to frame it and click the shutter. Why couldn’t she just come out with it? Instead, here she was, rambling at midnight, the little disturbances of the house echoing and amplifying the disjunction of her thoughts.