“Yeah, yeah, right. Look, don’t necessarily think you’re getting any higher yourself. Back in the twenties, the Reverend Philips’s great-grandfather and some of Chief Baltimore’s relatives raised a half-million to buy a couple of hundred acres near Indian Ridge to set up their own little suburban community. Last minute, bunch of white bankers from up the hill swooped in and bought it for three hundred thou and kept the lots empty for thirty years. I can show you the headline from the News in my archives. It says, ‘NEGROES FOILED!’”
Paco tucked in his chin, feeling mildly insulted. He’d never thought of himself as dark-skinned in the first place. His family were aristocrats from Cuba. It was just a quirk of history that they’d lost the plantation in Havana after La Revolución and had to go to San Juan for a few years. He’d never bought into this tocarle a uno la suerte, crushed-under-the-wagon-wheel-of-destiny sorry-ass bullshit. Sucede lo que sucede. A man took the future in his own hands and shaped it every day because otherwise, what made him a man?
“I got June and July.” Larry plucked out another file and slammed the drawer shut. “So you’re really looking to nail him, huh?”
“I’m not looking to nail anybody. I got a dead body and two taxpayers filing harassment complaints. The chief’s got the Town Board and the state police breathing down his neck. You do the math.”
Larry hobbled over to hand him the second file. “You know, some of the guys are saying that in the old days, it didn’t matter if you were black, white, or brown. You gave a man the benefit. The only color that counted was blue.”
“Can’t turn the clock back, Sarge.”
“Hey, Paco, this isn’t me talking. I’m just telling you what I’m hearing from the rank and file.”
“Yeah?” Paco flipped the folder open. “Well, here’s what I’d like you to tell them: You don’t love me? Fine. I don’t love you either. But I am still the primary that your commanding officer put in charge of this investigation. And if you got a problem dealing with that, go get a security guard job at a museum. Because this is how it’s going to be. And by the way, Larry, the Spanish made it to America a long time before the Irish did. But being a guy who studies history, you probably knew that already, didn’t you?”
Larry’s mustache drooped. “You don’t have to chew my head off, Detective.”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
Paco quickly paged through the file and saw the pattern almost immediately. Fallon had signed out early and often on his day tours the last two months, up to and including the night Sandi Lanier disappeared.
“So how’s the case looking anyway?” asked Larry, trying to read his expression.
“Great.” Paco snapped the file shut and put it under his arm. “Thanks for asking.”
47
THREE PAIRS OF grubby hands grabbed for the same bright-yellow dump truck, and a cry went up like an air-raid warning siren.
Barry saw the baby-sitter spring into action, rising from the park bench, stepping into the sandbox, and getting between the children to play mediator without missing a beat of conversation among her friends still sitting over by the strollers.
She was lovely, he thought, watching her from the playground entrance. One of those ageless Latin women with smooth copper skin, a tiny waist, and a heart-stopping smile. Somehow she managed to crouch among the toddlers without dirtying the knees of her white Levi’s, stroking unruly heads, distributing her smile evenly, while deftly extracting the contested toy from the area of play without any of the children noticing.
By the time she stood up, they’d all turned their attention to a labor-intensive joint project, attacking a giant hole with pails and shovels. A lawyer who could resolve conflicts on Wall Street that quickly and painlessly would be making five hundred an hour easy.
He fixed his collar and came moseying over, intercepting her three steps short of her friends, the group of older nannies who gathered for early lunch just about every day at this time at the Eisenhower Park playground in Indian Ridge, a half-mile down the hill from his house.
“Muriel?” he said, raising his eyebrows, as if they were old friends just running into each other. “Muriel Navarro?”
“What is it?” Hearing her own name from a stranger’s lips dimmed the wattage in her smile instantly.
“My name’s Barry Schulman. I’m an attorney. I was wondering if I could take a few minutes of your time.”
Her eyes danced from the children in the sandbox to her friends on the benches, who were cautiously watching this scene unfold while still opening Tupperware containers of fresh fruit and talking loudly to one another in machine-gun Spanish.
“You from Immigration?” asked Muriel.
She had the deep husky voice of a much older, heavier woman. A smoker’s voice. Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, he mentally placed her. He’d taken dozens of statements from women who sounded just like her when he was a DA. Except that so many of them looked worn out beyond their years, with baggy eyes, junk-food figures, and phlegmy asthma coughs from crappy housing-project ventilation systems. Somehow this girl had made it out into the sun.
“No, I’m not from Immigration,” he said. “I’m a private citizen.”
“Then what do you want? How’d you find me?”
“You used to work for Kim Roseborough, whose daughter Allison went to the same school as our son, Clay. I got Kim’s number out of the school directory, and she gave me the number for the lady you’re working for now. She told me I might find you here.”
If he’d hoped to allay her suspicions by throwing around familiar names and casually outlining the route he’d taken, he saw now he was sadly mistaken. She was looking at him as if he, not Fallon, was her stalker.
“You don’t have to worry. I didn’t get you in trouble with the boss,” he said. “I told Mrs. Lockhart we were thinking of hiring somebody to help out with some baby-sitting on the weekends. She told me you were busy with your classes at Hostos Community College, but that we could talk to you …”
She shook her head, not buying it. “What do you want?”
He turned, subtly using his size to encourage her to walk alongside him. “I know you filed a complaint against Sergeant Michael Fallon a few years back.”
“Oh, no.”
She took two steps and then stopped, gold hoop earrings swinging and winking in the daylight.
“Look, you’re probably not eager to get into all this again. But my wife and I were also harassed by him. And we’ve filed charges too.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said.
“I understand. But we’ve got a little disciplinary hearing coming up the day after tomorrow, and so I’m just trying to rally a few more support witnesses in the meantime.”
“How’d you get my name in the first place?” Her eyes narrowed again, seeing through that breezy so and just, right down to the shifting unstable core of their case.
“You filed your complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I looked it up in the old records.”
“Qué batingue!” She looked back in frustration at the sandbox, where a towheaded girl was mashing a Korean boy’s face into the dirt. “Chiara, leave your brother alone!”
He suddenly became aware of just how unwelcome his presence was here. A white man at a playground in the middle of a working day. Even his size marked him. He had to squat to sit on a low jungle-gym bar so he wouldn’t keep towering over her.
“So, what happened?” he said, trying to sound solicitous. “He pulled you over when you were driving your boss’s car?”
“I can’t talk about this.”
“I understand. You’re nervous. You don’t know me. The man’s a police officer …”
Slow down, he told himself. You’re violating your own rules of the road. The moment a witness knows how badly you need him is the moment he pulls away.
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “I’m this close to getting full citizenship. I don’t even know the family back in San S
alvador anymore. I haven’t lived there since I was nine.”
“I seriously doubt Immigration is going to come after you just because you testify in a local cop’s disciplinary hearing.”
“Yeah, thanks a lot. I’ll wave to you from the back of the boat.”
He watched the children rocket down a long wiggly aluminum slide and wondered what else he could do to gain her trust. As always, time was the enemy.
“So why’d you withdraw the complaint after three days?” he asked. “Did somebody say something to you?”
“You know, my life is good now.” She brushed a fringe of dark hair, almost the same shade as Lynn’s, out of her eyes. “The kids are nice. The lady I work for lets me borrow the Honda twice a week to drive down for my classes in the city so I can get my RN license. Why you wanna mess me up?”
“I’ll take that as a yes then. So did he threaten you?”
The texture of her skin seemed to go from butter cream to distressed leather right before his eyes.
He realized he’d come on far too strong. “Look, I didn’t mean to pressure you. All we’d need is a brief statement.”
She looked back toward the sandbox, where two of the little girls were beginning to bury the Korean boy up to his neck, sunbursts of fine lines appearing around both of her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” She turned. “I have to get back to work.”
“What about all the other women?” he called after her. “You know if he did it to you and he did it to us, he’s probably done it to other people.”
Her shoulders seized up under her bright-yellow sweater. It was like watching his own shot at the buzzer arc high and hopeful in the air, begin its descent on target, and then somehow bounce uselessly off the back rim. He’d let it go too soon. His timing was gone. He’d lost the soft touch.
“You trying to make me feel guilty?” she said.
“Well …”
She glanced back, taking in his Italian loafers, his Brooks Brothers khakis, and the cut of his blue Custom Shop shirt. All this studied hey-I’m-just-another-dad-at-the-playground casualness that suddenly felt like an ill-fitting costume.
“You know what the police used to do in San Salvador?” she said. “I have an uncle who doesn’t have ears anymore because he left them in the interrogation room. There’s just a hole on either side of his head.”
“That usually doesn’t happen in your average East Coast suburban town.”
She needed only the mild lowering of her eyelids to remind him that a woman’s decapitated body had washed ashore less than a mile down the hill from here.
“Well, it doesn’t happen very often …”
“I think you should go,” she said firmly, her eyes roaming past his shoulder and finding the black Saab, newly washed, parked alone across the street. “The police patrol here all the time now.”
Nothing in her expression gave him any indication whether she was warning him to be more discreet or telling him that she was about to call the cops herself.
“Forgive me for bothering you.” He dug a business card out of his wallet, scribbled his home number on the back, and slipped it to her in a handshake. “But call me if you change your mind.”
“Okay.” She dropped the card into her sweater pocket as if it was of no great importance and then went back to referee the children.
He watched her go, a gentle knowing sway in her hips, sunlight spreading like quicksilver in her hair. From behind, she looked a little bit like Lynn. And in that instant, he saw why Michael Fallon had pulled her over in the first place.
48
“GOOD AFTERNOON, MRS. SCHULMAN.” Gwen Florio faced the witness stand, a stiletto-thin figure in a dress-blue skirt and jacket with official-looking white piping along the lapels that seemed to strongly suggest some kind of police affiliation for the benefit of the judges hearing this case.
“Good afternoon.”
The disciplinary hearing had gotten off to a relatively uneventful start this morning. Lynn had been sworn in by Tony Shlanger, the six-foot-nine court officer who spent every Saturday morning outside abortion clinics in the city, screaming himself blue in the face and waving tiny plastic fetuses at frightened young pregnant women rushing by. Her right hand wavered slightly as she swore to tell nothing but the truth. The members of the Town Board stared down at her from the dais. But even the so-called friendly questioning by the prosecuting attorney, Jack Davis, a stumpy old codger with hair the color of a striped bass and a worsted plaid suit, had left her feeling exposed and shaky on the stand.
For almost an hour, Mike had sat at the defense table, less than fifteen feet away, glaring up at her and jotting down the occasional note to help arm his lawyer for this cross-examination. His anger emanated toward her in waves, defining her like the shadow on a sonogram. Even more disturbingly, his thumb appeared to have swelled up to twice its normal size and had turned a livid purplish shade that reminded her of an erection.
And just to ratchet up the general anxiety level, right after lunch the courtroom doors swung open and Jeanine, Molly Pratt, Anne Schaffer, and Dianne de Groot from her book group filed in, giving her A-OK signs and warm supportive smiles.
“You know my client, don’t you, Mrs. Schulman?”
“Just as I told Mr. Davis right before lunch.”
Lynn had dressed demurely for her appearance, in a blue blazer, a gray skirt, and a white shirt with a subdued Chanel scarf and simple pearls. Her hair was pulled back, starkly revealing the grip and release of sinews in her throat.
“How long have you known my client?” asked Gwen Florio, stepping from behind the lectern.
“I think I’ve testified that I’ve known him since high school.”
Barry sat two rows back on the right side of the spectator section, arms spread wide across the back of the pew, trying to look open and relaxed.
She felt as though she was seeing him across a busy avenue, cars and trucks speeding back and forth in between. In the middle of watching Charlie Rose in the living room the other night he’d suddenly announced, I quit today.
She didn’t even wait to turn the sound down. You what?
You heard me, he’d said. They wanted to do something like a Mafia bust-out. Pull the furniture out, burn the place down, and scam the insurance company. They wanted me to hold the matches. I couldn’t do it.
So you just quit? she’d asked, trying to get over the shock.
He’d studied the separation of his scotch and water. Why am I not hearing the kind of support I expected? All these people I work with are going to get screwed out of their savings.
But what about us? she’d said.
Gwen Florio stood before her, smiling. “Can you tell us a little more about the nature of that early relationship? You seemed to gloss over that very quickly this morning.”
“We were close.” Lynn gave up trying to make eye contact with Barry and concentrated on speaking in a strong loud voice. “At the time.”
“Close?” Florio’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that how you characterize it?”
“Yes.”
Lynn noticed a woman in the first row staring at her with the kind of pinpoint attention that made her aware of every pore on her face, every little catch in her throat. A lady with a kind of severe composure, wearing earth tones and a short sensible haircut. This had to be Mike’s wife, she realized. She’d positioned herself to be dead center in Lynn’s field of vision when she stared straight ahead into the spectators’ gallery.
“When you say close, you are of course referring to a romantic relationship, aren’t you?”
“Of course. I mean, I was.” Lynn heard herself stumble, trying to sort through her tenses, and saw a slight droop in Barry’s lip. “I mean, I was referring to back then.”
Gwen Florio approached the stand, her heels clicking on the floor like a Geiger counter.
She was a woman who’d carried off middle-age with a certain seasoned smoky elegance. Her hair was a little wiry and her eyelids were
weary, but she had legs like a Bob Fosse dancer and there was a hint of husky amusement in her voice, a throaty forthright quality that Lynn found both admirable and intimidating. She seemed like the kind of dame who would tell her lover straight-out when she didn’t consider a job done right.
“Now, during the course of this romantic relationship, Detective Lieutenant Fallon would do things not just for you but for your family from time to time.” Florio held her in the green-eyed tractor beam of her glare, slowly pulling her in. “Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Your mother was sick then. Wasn’t she?”
“She had MS.”
“Mrs. Schulman, can you speak up please?” Mayor Flynn cupped a hand behind his ear. “Some members of this board—and I’d rather not say who—are at the age that they need hearing devices.”
A gentlemanly chuckle rippled down the dais. The mayor was a chalky thin man in his midsixties, with a bow tie knotted neatly over a large Adam’s apple. Lynn’s mother used to call him the “most thwarted man I’ve ever met,” back in the seventies when he was a local accountant just starting to run for office. And Lynn had captured a rather harshly lit Robert Frank-style picture of him standing alone in the canned goods aisle of the A&P with his campaign literature, looking for someone to shake hands with. The Candidate, she’d titled it. She’d been planning to use the shot in her gallery retrospective, but now she hoped that he wouldn’t remember it from her high school exhibit and hold it against her.
“She had multiple sclerosis.” Lynn raised her voice, trying not to sound strained or strident.
“I see. And isn’t it true that Lieutenant Fallon helped take your mother to many of her doctors appointments?”
“I don’t know if you’d say it was many, but he certainly helped us out. I would never deny that.”
Lynn cast a quick look over toward Barry, hoping for guidance. But he was studying her with a sort of clinical detachment.
“So this was more than some puppy love,” the defense lawyer pressed on. “Your lives really became enmeshed at some point. Isn’t that right?”
The Last Good Day Page 34