“From what?” I always replied.
“This idea of revenge.” Because Darren, a reasonable man, had a proper civilized aversion to revenge—except in movies—Go Arnold, go Denzel. He viewed my desire to find and punish the cowardly bastard as verging on mental instability. He was right. I am damaged goods. Darren was patient in weathering my depression, my mood swings, my crying, and my rages. I alternately loved/hated him for his understanding, his calm, steady bedside manner. He finally diagnosed me: I had post-traumatic stress disorder. He prescribed Zoloft. I told him what I really wanted was a box of hollow-point bullets, but I would try the meds.
“I just don’t get the revenge part,” he said.
“You don’t have to. It’s mine. I own it, and I’m keeping it. I appreciate the pills, but they don’t make anything go away.”
Our dependence became a theme, until the one time when we weren’t there for each other. He was mugged at an ATM, and I flushed the Zoloft. Things went downhill from there. In a crazy attempt to repair the relationship, he proposed marriage. Equally crazy, I accepted. Neither of us meant it. So when I didn’t show up at the Queens County Clerk’s Office on our wedding day, it was merely embarrassing, and not quite unexpected.
We didn’t own much together. He took the TV, and I kept the Escher prints. Afterward, we advanced on the board game of life; Darren became a sought-after orthopedic surgeon while I got Detective of the Year twice. I saw his name in New York Magazine as one of the best hip replacement doctors in Manhattan. I wonder if he saw my awards in Newsday.
At the end of my senior year Wren Ballard, a social worker, drove over from Poughkeepsie and took me to a diner.
“I don’t do Starbucks,” she said.
Wren was thin and spindly, with a narrow, pinched face, hair in a reddish-blond bun. She walked in an ungainly tiptoe step that resembled her name—a nervous wren pecking at the ground. Later, Wren revealed it was early Parkinson’s. She ordered chocolate milkshakes for us and said, “I’m a grief counselor. How can I help?”
“I don’t have grief. I have rage,” I said. “And I don’t want it to go away.”
“That’s normal, but you will still have to deal with the grief.”
We drank our milkshakes and she gave me a referral to Dr. Feldman, who was just out of analytic training at Albany Medical College.
“If you had the person who killed your father in the room and he was tied to a chair, and you could do whatever you wanted to him, what would it be?”
I liked that he started in the middle. But it was an easy question. I had become a student of pain, of torture, of mutilation fantasies. Here’s one, Doc; a favorite of mine. It’s seventeenth-century, but way ahead of its time.
“I would copy the punishment dealt out to the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. They were condemned to be ‘put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both.’ Their genitals were cut off and burned before their eyes, their hearts removed, then the still-beating organs shown to the victims as the last drops of blood spluttered through their veins like a shut-off garden hose. They were decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies hung on poles so that they might become ‘prey for the fowls of the air.’”
Dr. Feldman said, “That sounds about right.” He gave me a prescription for Ambien. “You’ll sleep better but still wake up fucked and angry.”
The days after the murder of our father, we were put up in a Holiday Inn in Kingston. We never returned to the house in Grahamsville. Kind local women packed up everything of value, both emotional and useful, and stored it until we found a rental apartment a few miles away in Hurley. We kept the shades down, the curtains drawn, and we tried to be safe. Harry Dill, who used to plow our driveway, came over at night and sat in his pickup.
“Just to maintain a watch,” he said.
We really weren’t in danger, as an anonymous phone caller told us after we moved in. “You will not be harmed, as your father and husband will no longer commit the murder of innocent babies. Reflect on his evil and find redemption in Jesus Christ Our Lord.”
That was kind and considerate. I’ll keep it in mind, just before I shoot him.
Ernie doesn’t waste time on a telephone call from Maui with hello, how are you, what’s new, how’s the weather? He’s on a budget, won’t Skype or use FaceTime, and has important information for me.
“Nina, the Feds have a man in detention in Honolulu. He went down on a gun trafficking charge, a serious one, and he wants to make a deal. He’ll rat out everybody he can for a lesser sentence, says he has the name of a guy who bought a sniper rifle from him. He called it a baby saver. He said this to a US attorney who remembers your father’s case.”
Baby saver—in the more extreme edges of the anti-abortionist crowd, it’s the nickname for a Remington M24 sniper rifle that’s accurate to eight hundred meters, twice the distance from the edge of the woods to our kitchen window.
I’ve seen them in gun shows; they go for about a thousand dollars. For my father, they spared no expense. When I looked back at the death threats sent to him with photoshopped images of him framed in the rifle’s telescope sight, I wondered why they had ownership of fear. My parents lived it, and even though they did their best to hide it from their children, Sammy and I lived it, too.
Why did we have to live in fear while the people opposed to us didn’t? They marched safely on picket lines in front of women’s medical clinics, protected by the police, sometimes by me when I was a rookie cop. It was a duty I relished. I studied the faces of the protestors, listened for clues, random conversations. Would I hear something about the man who had murdered my father? I wondered why they are allowed to make us live in fear and not experience it themselves? What would it take? A few random killings: a .30-06 from eight hundred meters into the head of a Norman Rockwell grandmother holding a sign showing a fetus in a jar? That might give her life-affirming colleagues pause. Or that same sweet grandmother and her well-meaning husband who cross the country in their well-meaning Winnebago Minnie to picket women’s clinics as other retired couples visit minor-league baseball teams or national parks. What if I sent her a letter (no return address) with pictures of her grandchildren, their addresses, the names of their schools, innocent young faces framed in the crosshairs of a baby saver’s telescopic sight? Live with that, Grandma and Grandpa. My parents did.
They worried for us, for themselves. It was a part of their lives. It’s why they loved the Kapalua Beach Motel. Their children were out of range.
I realize these are the musings of revenge. They spring awake at three in the morning, erasing the Ambien, accompanied by despair and loss. These musings oppose justice, law, and civilization. I know that part of me. I know the desire for revenge is barbaric. It is also the rage of a teenager. I am glad I was sixteen when my father was murdered. If I had been older, more mature, I wouldn’t have that obsession; it wouldn’t be imprinted in me, made permanent, that desire to avenge him.
Now I am a police officer. My duty is to find and arrest people who break the law. I agree that it is up to the state to dispense justice in every case—except mine.
“Will the Feds make a deal?” I ask Ernie.
“I don’t know. I’m going to go to Honolulu and see. But I doubt it.”
“Can you squeeze him without a deal?”
“If I could I would dangle him off the roof of the Hyatt to get him to talk, but that’s not practical.”
“I can fly out in a minute.”
“I know you can, honey. Let me see if there’s anything to this first.”
Out of the blue.
Chapter 7
The Steevers house is standard: one-story brick and white wood. It occupies an eighth of an acre of flat suburban land in South Flushing, built after the war for returning GIs. The same contractor did all the houses, so they display no differences aside from the cars in the driveways, and the still-standing Christmas decorations. When the trees are in bloom, the owners may have som
e privacy, but right now, in these dead days of late winter, the Steevers house and those of their neighbors are exposed like white nuggets on a Monopoly board. If you part your curtains, you will have no secrets.
“Did you find him?” Mrs. Steevers asks.
“Did you find him?” Sammy asks. He speaks to me in the dayroom of Jericho Pines. It is how we begin our conversations.
“Did you find him?”
“Not yet, honey, but I will.”
Sammy, reassured, settles back into his chair, and we begin our game of gin rummy. I always deal first.
Sitting across from Mrs. Steevers, I am quiet. I sip the coffee she has given me and look out the picture window at the yellow, muddied lawns dotted with nubs of black snow. Spring is right around the corner. I will deal first.
“The problem is, Mrs. Steevers, Ronald is an adult. We have a protocol regarding missing persons. Children first—the younger they are, the more immediate. You’ve seen the Amber Alerts. Next, our priority is older people with Alzheimer’s or dementia, people who wander off. Adults are at the bottom of the list. I know Ronald was a police officer in Farmingdale. That makes him a brother officer, Mrs. Steevers. We take that kind of disappearance seriously. He goes to the top of the list—mine. Tell me, did Ronald have any enemies? Did he get any threats that might have related to his past work?”
“Ronald only had one enemy. His wife.”
She says it with a smile. I realize I am tired of playing amateur shrink, crafty cop, or trickster. I long for the simplicity of pulling someone over and asking politely for their license and registration while my partner runs the plates and signals to me the car is stolen. Please put your hands on the steering wheel; my gun is out of its holster behind my back while my partner comes to the other side of the car.
“I think you have to tell me all about Ronald and his wife.”
“There’s nothing to tell. She’s a crazy bitch.”
“Look, Mrs. Steevers, your son is missing. He left his car in the garage, he hasn’t shown up for work, he hasn’t used any of his credit cards or his cell phone. I know these things. I am going to presume something bad happened to him. I don’t want you to lose your status of concerned parent and move into the less pleasant one of withholding information that could lead to the apprehension of a criminal. The same goes for your husband, too, if he takes the same attitude.”
Mrs. Steevers looks down into her cup.
“Please tell me about his wife.”
“She got Ronald fired from Farmingdale.”
“How did she do that?”
“They got into an argument, she started hitting him—like I said, she’s crazy. He had to defend himself. Then she went to the cops, said he beat her up.”
“The next time?”
Mrs. Steevers looks at me as if I know more than she thinks. I don’t. I am just guessing.
“They believed her, but she was just setting him up.”
“They stayed together, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I asked him many times. You know what he said?”
I knew the answer. Because I love her.
Chapter 8
At the station, there is a crisis. A young woman was discovered in her car on Twenty-Fourth Road, off Queens Boulevard, stabbed to death. All the detectives in homicide are assembled in a conference room waiting for Lieutenant Hagen to bring us up to speed and assign people to the case. The victim is Anita Cavastani, a thirty-two-year-old waitress at Trattoria Amalfi, which, according to Yelp, is a highly rated Italian restaurant in Manhattan. She died in the passenger seat of her own car, a 2006 Toyota, so she must have known her killer—family, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend. Why wasn’t she driving? Officer Schwartz handed out photos of the victim for us. We look at them, then pass them to the person to our right, until they all end up back in front of Schwartz, who stacks them into a neat pile. We could have been looking at his vacation pictures of his wife and kids at Disney World, posing with Mickey, his smile sewn into his face, instead of a young woman slumped against the passenger door, her head wedged in the corner between the seat and the window.
Ms. Cavastani must have retreated as far back as she could, but she was still within range of the knife. There are black splotches on a thin leather jacket indicating stab wounds to the body, a flap of flesh dangling open on her cheek that exposes a row of white molars. Her hands and wrists carry red lines as she tried to parry the darting knife. There is a track of the blade against her white throat that must have killed her. The front seat is stained red with her blood. I vow, as I do every time I see human butchery, never to eat animal flesh again.
Lieutenant Hagen appoints me lead detective and tells me to pick my own team. I will choose Linda Fuentes and Sean Higgins. Detective Higgins is a hardworking guy with a bizarre history. He went to Penn on a full scholarship, majored in mathematics, got a law degree at Columbia, and walked out of his bar exam. He informed his parents that he was only interested in a career of action and adventure. He went to Tokyo, spent a year perfecting his karate at a nasty dojo, returned to the US, and joined the marines. He served two tours in Afghanistan, and then applied to the Secret Service, who turned him down, as did the FBI, the CIA, and the DEA. Unfortunately, his parents had spent five years in the Weather Underground in the ’70s, running from some of the same organizations he wanted to join. In terms of security clearance, Higgins was so dead in the water he couldn’t get into the Coast Guard. The enlightened Long Island City Police Department gave him a job, and he made detective in a year. If he can ever escape his parents’ sins, he might end up chief.
I will also ask Bobby B to look for any background on the victim—Lieutenant Hagen won’t know about him, leaving me free to investigate the disappearance of Ronald Steevers and the serial confessor and possible serial murderer Mr. McDermott. And, if I choose, the disappearance of a weatherman’s cat.
But none of this is more important than hearing from Ernie Saldana in Maui about a man who bought a “baby saver.”
Chapter 9
I meet McDermott at Molly Blooms on Queens Boulevard. It’s a pleasant Irish bar whose customers, with a few exceptions, think Molly Bloom is the owner. There’s a Clancy Brothers cover band on Tuesday nights. Saul Rifkin, the real owner, lets a play-reading group use the basement Sunday nights. Since McDermott has already confessed to murder, I take that as a sign we have bonded. We can skip the small talk. We order drinks: bourbon for him, a Diet Coke for me. My lips do not have to be loosened.
“Mr. McDermott, we have another murder in the neighborhood.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“Only what you read in the papers.”
“I don’t think we read the same papers.”
He’s correct. This murder wouldn’t be in his Wall Street Journal. My Newsday would have it all over the front page.
“A young woman was stabbed to death in her own car.”
“Doesn’t sound like me.”
“What does?”
Is this sex talk? How would you murder a young woman, Mr. McDermott? What’s your style?
“Can you tell me something about her?”
“She’s Caucasian, twenty-three, five one, slim, attractive, teaches ESL at Roosevelt College.” There are some lies in there. I hope he will correct me.
“Possible.”
“Possible? Can you elaborate?”
“I will say that I have not been sleeping well.”
“Is that a consequence of possible?”
“Yes. At four in the morning, guilt is like a strong cup of coffee.”
“We’re all a little guilty,” I say. “Are you seeing a psychiatrist now?”
“He told me a story, my psychiatrist. Yes, I am seeing one.”
I have a soft spot in my heart for elliptical speakers, but I mustn’t fall for this one.
“The story?”
“It is perhaps apocryphal, but it may apply to my condition. Thi
s psychiatrist had a friend, a child therapist who had a patient, a ten-year-old boy. The boy had pushed his younger sister out their apartment window. She died. He has no memory of the event. Should he help him to remember or make sure he never does?”
It made me think of the story I would tell in response if this were a normal conversation about a man who is heartbroken over his wife leaving him. He misses her terribly, is miserable, depressed, inconsolable. He goes to a voodoo lady and asks if she can help him. Of course, I can, darling. Would you like me to make your wife fall in love with you again or would you like me to make you forget her?
I don’t tell him this story, as we are not in friendly conversation; we are not friends. He is what I will call a cooperative suspect. I’ve never heard of the term, but I like it.
I say, “We will bring you the crime; when it fits it will be yours.”
He smiles and lifts his drink to me.
“A deal.”
I don’t like where I am during this conversation. McDermott is an attractive man, aligned to artistic opportunities in New York that I find interesting. He is familiar with cultural nicknames—MOMA, BAM, the Met, Eataly. Manhattan shortcuts flow out of his conversation like playing cards flipped by a professional dealer. I see myself on his arm, in the third-row seat next to his, reading the playbill before the lights dim. There will be a Tuscan dinner afterward at Orso in the company of handsome men and smart women, some of whom might be the actors in the play we saw. That’s just him trying to show me an interesting, innocent, yes, I’ll have the tiramisu good time. It occurs to me I’d rather someone tried to rob Molly Bloom’s, armed, if possible, so I could shoot the dude and change the topic of conversation. I always want to change the topic of conversation. I also want out of this meeting.
“You have my number, Mr. McDermott. Call me when you have something real to tell me. I have to go back to work.”
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