The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  He watched Harold’s jaw grind and then loosen. The man was scared. So scared he’d put on a body armor vest today. Right over the place where he’d been stabbed by Brenda Carter.

  “Okay,” said Harold, feigning nonchalance. “I’m lying.”

  “You didn’t find anything down here,” Mike said, realizing he’d been gulled into saying more than he needed to. “You didn’t find dick.”

  He stood up slowly, reclaiming the physical space and forcing them both back a foot. They’d been playing him, trying to make him feel cut off, as if the only way out was through them. He’d done it himself a hundred times at least, only better. He picked up the warrant that had fallen at his feet.

  “I don’t know what the hell you thought you’d find down here anyway,” he said, studying the warrant as if he’d just woken up. “This is off a three-year-old complaint. It’s got nothing to do with Sandi.”

  “Prior bad acts,” Paco said quietly. “We’re establishing a pattern.”

  “You’ll get laughed out of court.” Mike looked from one to the other, nudging them farther back with his eyes. “Judge would’ve tossed anything you found here anyway. Fruit of a poisoned tree.”

  “If you say so.” He saw Harold give Paco a worried glance, not ready to be challenged so directly.

  “You never were worth a damn as an interrogator, Harold.” Mike handed back the warrant and closed a fist around his thumb. “You couldn’t even get Saint Augustine to confess. You always needed me to do the heavy lifting.”

  “Last chance.” Harold stooped his shoulders, the vest appearing and then disappearing under his jacket. “This is your only exit.”

  “My lawyer.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I want to speak to my lawyer. You don’t have a case.”

  “As we say at my other office: your funeral.” Harold reached into his pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs.

  “What the fuck’s this?” Mike backed up on a step. “You don’t have enough to charge me for the murder.”

  “But I got more than enough to get you on harassing and intimidating Muriel Navarro. Sorry, Mike. We’re still within the statute of limitations. You’re under arrest, my friend.”

  53

  “OH.”

  The bright-pink hoop of Molly Pratt’s mouth curved into a frozen smile as she realized it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen Lynn standing in line at the post office just before lunch.

  “So, what brings you here?” Her mushroom-shaped hair bounced as she came over, but her cheeks looked filled with solidifying concrete.

  “Just buying stamps,” said Lynn, slumped and shy in the confines of her barn jacket.

  A red dotted arrow flashed on the wall, moving the line along. Was everyone really looking at her? Testifying in open court had made her feel not merely ashamed but fundamentally unclean. She’d noticed several other moms hurrying past her with their eyes lowered when she’d dropped off Clay this morning.

  She told herself that her reputation couldn’t already be in ruins. It was mathematically impossible. Each friend who’d been in court would’ve had to tell ten people, who in turn had told ten others. But somehow she couldn’t escape the feeling that wherever she went the person she used to be was strutting visibly and wantonly alongside her, like an image from a double-exposed photo.

  “So is anybody talking about getting the book group together again for Tuesday?” she asked, noticing a clerk in a VFW cap, a white man in the gathering dusk of his years, staring at her through the thick glass partition.

  “Oh, I don’t know about this last one.” Molly frowned disapprovingly. “I have such a hard time with not-so-happy endings and characters who do things that I’d never do.”

  Lynn hesitated, not sure how to take this. Again, she felt the bleak chill of Sandi’s absence, of missing the one friend who’d goof on Molly’s neo-Victorianism to her face.

  “Well, it would just be nice to see everyone at something other than a funeral or a hearing.” Lynn moved up a place in line, noticing the Wanted posters taped to the wall.

  “I know what you mean.” Molly nodded and looked at her watch. “It’s gotten a little grim around here.”

  “Call me, all right?”

  “Will do.” Molly took two steps and then came back, realizing something else had to be said. “Lynn, I just want you to know that we’re all still with you, and no one’s judging you for the other day.”

  Lynn just stared at her as the red arrow flashed again. Judging her? As if none of them had ever done anything remotely scandalous. What about Anne Schaffer breaking her leg in three places driving drunk into a tree on Prospect? What about Jeanine stealing her father’s prescription pad so she could sell drugs at BU? And what about Molly herself, busted for screwing the circulation manager at work and ruining her marriage?

  Did they all think that Lynn was the one who’d been on trial? Hadn’t they heard that Michael had been arrested yesterday morning and charged with harassing another woman?

  “Hey, lady, next window’s open,” a man behind her said.

  “I’ll call you.” Molly edged away with a fragile wave.

  Feeling tainted afterward, Lynn decided to go on a cleaning purge to set her house in order. As soon as she walked in the door, she stripped off her clothes, put on some sweats, wiped the counters, did the laundry, mopped the floors, changed the linens, then took out the summer clothes and started to fold them to go back in the attic. Why did she wait so long?

  She turned her attention to Barry’s closet, deciding to be appalled before she even slid open the door. Wasn’t some of this his fault as well? He hadn’t exactly been a mediating influence, had he? To her disappointment, his suits were all hanging handsomely on evenly spaced wooden hangers. When did he get to be so anal? she thought. She slid the door open all the way, seeing his shoes lined up neatly and having the distinct sensation of being unwelcome. The only thing out of place here was an old Nike sneaker box jutting off the top shelf. Where did that come from? She stood on her toes, reaching, wondering if he was stowing a second set of tax receipts that he hadn’t told her about. Ever since she’d realized he’d been lying to her about work, she’d found herself snooping around, trying to see what else he’d been concealing.

  But the box was too high, and she decided to save it for later. Instead, she went out to the studio to do some work. François was breathing down her neck for a final edit for the show’s catalog.

  Perspective, he’d said. I’m not seeing the image that pulls it all together. Fuck you then, ya faux frog. She opened a file folder and started going over old contact sheets with a magnifying loop, still trying to find the right shot.

  Under the glass, her most recent image of William the Revelator’s house on Bank Street swelled up. An ancient pearl-colored A-frame with loose roof shingles, a snow-white cupola, and a crumbling chimney. For as long as Lynn could remember, a religious fanatic named William Pickett had lived there, gradually accumulating outdoor religious icons that grew more and more wild and flamboyant over the years. In the earliest picture of the series, taken when Lynn was about fourteen, there was just a modest placard above the door with a quote from Revelation: I AM HE THAT LIVETH, AND WAS DEAD; AND, BEHOLD, I AM ALIVE FOR EVERMORE. By the end of senior year, a three-foot-tall plastic Christ was crucified on the telephone pole on the front lawn. A picture taken on a visit to Mom in the mideighties showed a large plastic bald eagle added to the front porch railing, with a sign saying REPENT! around its neck. By the time she’d moved back a year and a half ago, a small windmill turned slowly beside a barren pear tree, and a pair of mannequins, a male and female in evening clothes, sat in a custard-yellow ’63 Ford station wagon parked on the lawn like discarded models for idealized suburban living.

  With William the Revelator’s broken-toothed blessing (Record it, child, so that the truth may be known), she’d taken dozens of pictures of this scene,
loving its sheer incongruity in these surroundings, its pure out-thereness, its impenetrability, and, most of all, the fact that nobody else in this town seemed to notice it.

  But studying the picture in this light, she felt her enthusiasm start to turn on her. Gawking, François called it. If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. She started to argue in her head. This was her hometown. She had a real feeling for this place. Even François admitted that. But when she asked herself if she’d ever had a substantial conversation with William Pickett, even just to unlock the true mystery of all this cryptic lawn furniture, all she could conjure was the image of his fractured beatific grin.

  You need to keep looking.

  She put the Revelator pictures aside and opened a file marked “Summer 2000,” which was filled with images that she’d been meaning to scan onto the computer for editing. There was another series of contact sheets inside, but she’d forgotten what was on most of them. She’d vaguely recalled experimenting with light and the new Canon, taking pictures of the kids asleep and Barry playing basketball at the Eisenhower Park courts, a man in motion, legs pumping, arms extended, serving the ball to a hungry hoop. Her eyes moved along the rows of filmstrips, picking out pictures she’d taken inside the house and from the backyard, as if she had been documenting her own life.

  On the next sheet, though, the scene changed. A different house, older and more careworn. A close-up showed tiny cracks on a white shingle, like blood vessels in the paint. Another displayed a knothole left by a woodpecker just above a window, something a casual passerby would never notice. A friend’s house. Again she remembered the slightly sordid charge she got from taking these shots, as if each click of the shutter was a small betrayal.

  Her eye moved down to the next row, finding Sandi in a two-piece bathing suit, her ankle not yet marked by the butterfly tattoo. Behind her was the kidney-shaped pool from the old house on Sycamore Drive that she’d said was getting too small for the kids.

  It was coming back to her. These were pictures she’d taken on a late-August afternoon, almost a year before Sandi and Jeff’s move to the big new house on Love Lane. In the adjoining frame, the two of them were dancing cheek-to-cheek at poolside, like Fred and Ginger in swimsuits, the happy couple for all the world to see. But as Lynn moved the magnifying glass over the shot, she noticed how Jeff seemed to be looking past his wife a little, as if he’d just realized they had an unexpected visitor.

  It was nothing, she told herself. Maybe one of the children was crying. Maybe a burger was burning or a phone was ringing in the house. Things happen. Life doesn’t always hold its pose.

  She looked at the next shot, wishing this feeling would go away. Jeff and Sandi on the back deck, Dylan in the foreground, swinging from the old tire hanging from the elm tree. Lynn noticed the mild clench of Jeff’s jaw as he looked down at the boards. Fungus. She remembered both of them complaining about green algae rotting the deck. Everything about the old house became anathema to them. The kitchen was too small. The walls were too thin. The electrics were old. The neighbors were too close. We’re bursting at the seams! Sandi had declared. Lynn recognized the familiar litany, the rising diminuendo of tiny tensions coming together.

  In the next cel, Sandi was alone on the porch, looking off at the horizon, a woman reviewing her options. Surely it was a testament to their friendship that she’d let Lynn hang around taking pictures while they were having this awkward moment. Or maybe it showed how much a friend with a camera could get away with. A better woman might at least have put the Canon down awhile and pushed Dylan on the swing.

  But then she would’ve missed the next sequence: Jeff coming out through the French doors with that furious clamped-down look. All right, already. Get off my back. They’d been fighting when she came over, Lynn remembered. She recalled thinking she should leave, but Sandi asked her to stay to look at pictures of some of the houses they were considering. In the next shot, Jeffrey was in action with a white tank full of bleach and a black sprayer, the Terminator wiping out deck rot. See? I’m doing it. In the adjoining cel, though, Sandi was throwing up her hands. You’re killing my roses! Look what you’re doing to my ivy! Can’t you watch where you’re spraying?

  One of those Mr.-and-Mrs. things. She and Barry had probably managed two or three of these fights a week during various stressful periods, when the kids were young. But there was another kind of despair lurking in the margins. Again, she told herself that this was all hindsight, that she was just magnifying elements out of proportion.

  But then her eye moved to the next frame.

  Jeff was well into the next stage of his clean-up operation. Clear plastic tarp sheets were spread over Sandi’s plants. The fungus had been scrubbed off, and the bleach had been put away. Another sprayer tank had been deployed. Jeff had donned thick goggles and a pair of black rubber gloves, showing the women present that this was how a real man took care of his home. Lynn suddenly remembered how surprised and impressed she’d been to see how much of the proper equipment he’d had just sitting in the garage, waiting to be used. Perhaps she’d even remarked that she wished that she could get Barry to be this handy around the house.

  And there in the lower right-hand corner, its white label facing the camera so the black letters could be read clearly, was an open gallon of Thompson’s Wood Protector.

  She moved the magnifying glass aside and got up from her stool, remembering her mother saying how certain things that Diane Arbus saw made her want to kill herself.

  54

  “NEXT CASE. CALL THE docket number.”

  Judge Henry “Highball” Harper, looking something like an old gray pigeon huddled on a window ledge, winced from the sound of his own gavel and turned to his court officer.

  “Number 31279984,” announced Tony Shlanger. “This is the bail application for the People versus Michael Fallon.”

  Michael shuffled into the courtroom, wearing the orange jumpsuit he’d been issued at the county jail in Valhalla. He was pale and unshaven, and even though the warden had put him in the protective custody section for his own safety, he hadn’t been able to sleep well last night with all the noise and taunts raining down on him from the upper tier. Hey, sweet thang… . Yo, Biggie Smalls, get ready to take my load… . Yo, Sergeant, remember me? No justice, no sleep! Yo, Biggie Smalls … where’s your nightstick, baby? Hey, Officer, you gonna be my honey pot?

  In the middle of the night, he’d sat up with pain shooting up his arm, realizing that his thumbnail had finally fallen off under his pillow. There was so much blood it looked like there’d been a small animal sacrifice on his cot. After all this time, the thumb still hadn’t been ready to lose its cover. The new nail had barely grown, and the tissue was mashed and pulpy underneath, like a beaten face. Over the next few hours, his whole hand started to swell, and a fever crept up on him. He called for the guard on the gate, but his father’s friend Larry Marshall had gone home and been replaced on the graveyard shift by a black Muslim CO., who called himself Malik Bin Muhammad and clearly had little regard for pedigree. He waited until six in the morning before he brought Mike a small half-used tube of Neosporin, a little dressing, and two Advil.

  But now, as he stood beside Gwen Florio at the defense table, he felt the ibuprofen wearing off and the fever starting to come back. He looked quickly over his shoulder to see if Marie was in the gallery this morning. But there was no sign of her. Only the regular courtroom buffs filling in the first two rows and the old man by himself in the back, his face lean and alert as a falcon’s, his self-cut hair a shade of gunmetal gray.

  The judge slowly moved his dim filmy eyes from Mike to Brian Bonfiglio at the prosecutor’s table.

  “Mr. Bonfiglio”—he cleared his throat—“what are you doing here today? This defendant has been in and out of this courthouse so much lately that it’s a little hard to keep track of it all.”

  “Of course, Your Honor.” The assistant district attorney smiled ingratiatingly. “We
’re here to oppose bail for Mr. Fallon on the harassment and intimidation charges. Our office is taking the position that there’s a significant risk of flight in this matter.”

  Perfect that he’d be handling this case, thought Mike. Bonfiglio had been the ADA assigned to cases in this jurisdiction for several years. Most officers in the Riverside Department called him El Exigente—the Demanding One because he was always sending them out over and over, insisting they get overwhelming amounts of corroborating evidence so he wouldn’t have to put any real effort into prosecuting the drug cases they brought him. But to Mike, he’d always be That Ungrateful Little Bitch.

  “Your Honor, with all due respect—or at least all the respect that remark is due—that’s absurd.” Gwen Florio stood up beside him, huffy and impatient to get on to a client paying her some real money. “This defendant isn’t going anywhere. He has deep roots in this community. His family has served this town for generations.”

  Mike felt his chest cratering as the judge’s eyes roamed past him. “Is his wife here today?”

  “No, Your Honor.” Mike bowed his head, speaking up for himself. “We have three children, and she has a regular job in hospital accounting. She’s already missed time at work.”

  He knew it was over as soon as he saw the teacup with the stain and the caulk gun by the sink. That was the surrender flag. She’d had it. She’d given up the fight. In a way, he couldn’t blame her. She’d given him a chance. Said if he could keep it in his pants and let her keep her dignity, she’d try to find a way to carry on with the marriage. But no, he couldn’t do it. He just had to keep spreading his seed around town, laying claim to the women one by one.

  He thought of throwing himself on the mercy of the court. Your Honor, I have a sickness. I know I need help. I’m powerless before my addiction. It started with my mother. But you don’t know what it’s like. Say you’re sitting in a Caprice by the side of the road at midnight with your radar gun. You’re bored. It’s cold. You’ve got all this pressure building up inside you. And then you see these little lights coming up from the road. It gives you a kind of hope. You see it’s a woman. And you know that when you pull out and put on the cherry top, they’ll have to slow down. That you already have that much power over them. It creeps up on you, bit by bit. You make them stop, you talk to them, you get a good look in their eyes and see if … . But that was only part of the story. The truth was, all those women had gotten something out of the deal as well. Lynn, Sandi, even that little Salvadoran baby-sitter, who’d been speeding and weaving all over the road. They’d needed him. Hell, he wouldn’t have gone after them in the first place if they hadn’t been signaling. And if he got a little something in return, well that was his right after everything he’d done for this town.