All Day and a Night (19 page)

“Calm down,” Tim said. “Not like she’s the second coming of Christ or anything.”

A stranger might have written off the comment as typical couples’ banter, but Carrie knew all too well the complicated truth. Twenty years ago, Tim could have been a story Melanie would someday tell about a boyfriend bullet she had dodged in her youth. But instead, a then twenty-year-old Tim got Melanie pregnant while she was still in high school, and Melanie went from presumptive valedictorian to one of eleven girls whose black robes doubled as maternitywear for their walk across the graduation stage.

She still remembered how happy Melanie was the following June when Tim “stepped up,” in Melanie’s words, by proposing to her. “My baby will have a father. My baby won’t be out of wedlock.” At first, Carrie really had hoped for the best. Melanie insisted that Tim was looking for work. That he loved her and would love the baby.

There were early warning signs. When Carrie came home from Cornell for Christmas break and dropped by to see the baby, Tim, still unemployed, passed out on the sofa after drinking too much gin. As they whispered in the kitchen, late into the night, Melanie asked Carrie if she thought it was possible for a man to love a woman too much. She said Tim sat close to her, all the time, even when she was trying to find cool air in the late-summer heat when she was nine months pregnant. And since Timmy Junior was born, he was constantly accusing her of loving the baby more than him.

Then Carrie went back to Cornell, and she and Melanie had fallen out of touch. By the time Bill helped them reestablish their friendship, Melanie had tossed Tim to the curb and openly vented to Carrie about all of the many reasons he was toxic to her and their son. The on-and-off employment. The drinking. The jealousy. The petty scams and troubles with police.

As critical as Melanie was, at the time, of her estranged husband, Carrie always wondered whether she’d heard the worst of it. One night Melanie let it slip that, the previous year, she had gotten rid of a new puppy because Tim was jealous—sharing her with Timmy and a dog was just too much and she was afraid he might hurt the animal. When Carrie pushed to know why Melanie would worry about such an awful thing, she clammed up. Carrie hadn’t forced her to explain. And in her silence, Melanie wasn’t protecting Tim; she was protecting her own pride.

But then, five months after they had recommenced their friendship, Carrie dropped by with a bag full of groceries for what they were now calling their “family dinner night,” and Tim was back. Melanie seemed sheepish about his return, but offered no explanation. How many times since then had Carrie wondered if Melanie would have been better off on her own?

To Carrie, Tim would always be the boyfriend who had become Melanie’s burden to shoulder for life. And to Tim, Carrie would always be the twice-a-year visitor who made his wife silently wonder what could or should have been.

She had been in their apartment for an hour, and the mood had been stilted and awkward. She kept noticing Melanie’s gaze moving toward the stains on the sofa, broken slats on their blinds, and the threadbare carpet in the front hallway. The closest they had come to a smooth conversation was when Carrie asked about Timmy Junior—TJ—who was taking classes at the community college. Melanie beamed when she reported he had a 3.8 GPA and was planning to apply to a four-year university. At that, his father let out a burp and got up to fetch another can of beer, muttering something about a “waste of money in this economy.”

Then Melanie changed the subject to the last possible thing Carrie wanted to talk about—the Amaro case. “They’re saying on the news that they found somebody else’s DNA on the bodies.”

“Just Donna’s, actually. That was one of the big issues in court. The New York DA’s office was saying that Donna and the other victims here had nothing to do with the validity of their case in the city.”

“Well, that’s dumb. It was obvious back then that they suspected Amaro of killing all of them.”

“Look who thinks she’s a lawyer all of a sudden,” Tim mumbled.

He’d had three beers since Carrie sat down, and who knew how many before she arrived. Carrie resisted the urge to start an argument, because she knew Tim would only take it out on Melanie once they were alone. “Hey, do you know whether Mr. Sullivan has anything to do with the Amaro case?” Although Melanie had never mentioned it to Carrie, she knew from Bill that Bill’s father checked in periodically on Melanie and TJ to make sure they were okay. Though they didn’t have any proof that Tim got physical with his family, the suspicions of a career cop apparently matched Carrie’s own.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he does. That’s so cute that you still call him Mr. Sullivan,” Melanie said. “He’s been telling us to call him Will since we got out of high school.”

“I can’t help it.” Among the panoply of manners her mother had drilled into her, Carrie had been trained to call her friends’ parents “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” even when they insisted otherwise. “How long has he been involved in the case?” Carrie hadn’t seen his name on any of the materials she’d reviewed so far.

“It was as things were winding down, I think. By the time Amaro got caught, it had been more than a year since they found Donna and the other girl.”

“Stacy Myer,” Carrie said.

“I think by then the lead detective on the case was about to retire, and Will took over. He told me there wasn’t much for him to do at the time. He was just wrapping up the loose ends. Like, he was the contact person for victims’ families, media calls, that sort of thing. I mean, I guess he told your parents, because of Donna and all.”

“Yeah, they knew.” She remembered her father calling her on the dorm’s pay phone freshman year to tell her that there had been an arrest.

“That’s gotta help you, right? I mean, that you’ve known the cop in charge since we were little. Talk about a lucky break.”

Carrie smiled and took another big sip of her wine. It would be lucky if her job was to figure out who actually killed Donna and the other victims. But that wasn’t her job, not as far as Linda Moreland was concerned. Her job was to blame the Utica Police Department for not arriving at the truth earlier, and everything Melanie was telling her supported Linda’s theory that the police here had been all too eager to let the NYPD do the heavy lifting that should have been theirs. Rather than pick up the case and work it from scratch, Mr. Sullivan had used another detective’s retirement as a reason to close the case for the police department’s purposes, but without actually closing it with a legal conviction for those victims and their families.

C
arrie stripped the comforter off the hotel bed—a blanket of germs, as far as she was concerned—and flopped down. She was exhausted and wired at the same time.

She had packed the trunk of the rental car with all of the case materials, now lined beneath the window of her hotel room. There was still one entire box of records from Amaro’s original defense that she hadn’t reviewed. She removed the top of the box and stared down at the contents. The three glasses of wine she’d put away at Melanie’s had left her too fuzzy for any real work at this hour.

She heard a sitcom laugh track from the adjoining room. She thought about knocking on the pass-through door to see if Thomas wanted television-viewing company, but a pop-in this late might be inappropriate. She closed her eyes and listened to the muted sounds of punch lines and canned laughter. She pretended she was a child again, nodding off in the living room as her parents watched
Cheers
. They’d catch her snoozing, but she’d shoot her eyes open, insisting she was still awake so she could stay in the living room a little longer.

Then she was remembering another moment from her childhood. There was a heat wave. She’d taken a break from hide-and-seek to fetch a pitcher of water from Bill’s house. Bill had warned her to be quiet. His father was working graveyards and would be napping in the living room, the second-floor bedrooms too hot for daytime sleeping.

She opened the screen door as quietly as she could, then peeked into the living room on her way to the kitchen to make sure she hadn’t woken Bill’s dad. But Mr. Sullivan wasn’t sleeping. He was holding a framed photograph in his hands, and he was crying. His shoulder holster was loose on the sofa next to him. She’d never seen a man cry, and she’d never seen a gun that close up. She must have made a sound, because he suddenly looked up, wiping his face immediately.

She froze. It was too late to duck into the kitchen and pretend she hadn’t seen him. “It’s okay, Carrie.” He moved his gun away and waved her in. “Has Bill ever told you about his mother?”

He tilted the photograph in her direction. It was a younger but recognizable Mr. Sullivan with a woman in a crisp blue cotton dress, holding a baby.

“Everyone knows she died.”

He set the frame down gently on the coffee table. “Three years ago today. I’m all Bill has now. I know it’s hard for him.”

She still remembered patting him stiffly on the back, the way her father did to Carrie when she was sad and he didn’t know how to soothe her. “It’s okay, Mr. Sullivan. Most of the kids only have moms, and so Bill has a dad; and you’re sort of like a dad for Melanie, too. And then our moms can be moms to Bill. He’ll be okay. So will you.”

When she saw the tears in his eyes, she thought she had said something to make him even sadder. She didn’t understand yet that a single comment—offered by the right person in the right moment—could make you cry from appreciation.

As she fell more deeply into sleep, Carrie realized the real reason she hadn’t done any work tonight. She was dragging her feet. As long as she had twenty-year-old documents piled up in boxes, still awaiting review, she could tell herself she wasn’t ready to confront the police officers who had done the work. The more she procrastinated, the longer it would be before she had to demonize Will Sullivan.

R
ogan pulled the BMW to the curb, stopping behind a wood-paneled station wagon with a broken windshield, two slashed tires, and layers of graffiti, most of it gang-related. The abandoned car suited the block. A third of the houses appeared to be vacant, the paint peeling around boarded-up windows. The grass on most of the lawns was almost knee-high. It was the look of a neighborhood that probably didn’t take kindly to police, especially ones from another city asking questions about conversations that took place nearly twenty years earlier.

“And I thought the Bronx was bad,” Ellie said.

“Not nearly as bad as this coffee.” Rogan made a pinched face and threw his Styrofoam cup out the window.

“Seriously?”

“Please. As if one more piece of litter’s going to sully this paradise of nature.”

She climbed out of the passenger seat, walked around to his side, and stowed the empty cup on the rear floorboard as he stepped out of the car. “You should have gotten up earlier.” She tried not to gloat as she took another sip of her iced Americano. She’d had time for a morning workout in the hotel gym and a Starbucks run by the time Rogan finally texted her that he was ready to roll.

“I can’t sleep in hotels. And I don’t understand people who can.”

She paused in front of a house two doors down. “This is it.”

According to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles and the power company, this was the house where Robert Harris lived.

“We should know more about the guy before knocking on his door,” Rogan said.

Amaro’s one-time cellmate had kept a clean record since completing his sentence for distribution of methamphetamine twelve years earlier. But Rogan and Ellie knew that the lack of new police interactions could mean anything. Maybe Harris was a changed man. Or maybe he’d gotten smarter. No one was more dangerous than an ex-con who had vowed never to go back in. They were showing up on his dilapidated porch with no knowledge of who he was, who else might be with him, or how many illegal guns he might have.

And although Rogan didn’t say it, they were here only because Max had sent them.

I
f the man who answered Harris’s door was the same Robert Harris who had shared a cell with Anthony Amaro in 1996, he had certainly changed physically. In the mugshots they’d seen, his head was shaved, his body pumped like a beast whose only physical outlet was lifting weights in the prison yard. The man in the doorway was thin and hunched. His light-brown hair was limp, falling to his shoulders.

His eyes moved directly to the badge hanging from Ellie’s neck. “You guys don’t look like UPD.”

“NYPD, actually,” she said.

The man squinted for closer inspection, then waved them inside. “New York, huh?” He took a seat on a wooden ladder-back chair just inside his front door. There was no obvious place within reach for him to have stashed a weapon. “Guess that explains the car. No way Utica PD can afford a ride like that. You two can have the comfy spots on the sofa. So . . . I don’t suppose you’re here to talk about general mischief among my hoodlum neighbors, are you?”

Ellie scanned the living room as Rogan walked ahead of her. It was clean, if dated. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a television that came with its own wood cabinet. Close up, she now recognized their host: older, thinner, not staring at a camera like he wanted to punch someone, but the same man.

Rogan got straight to the point. “Eighteen years ago, you shared a cell for two nights with Anthony Amaro.”

Harris nodded slowly. “I was wondering if that’s what this might be about. I saw the news.”

“So what do you remember?”

“I think,” Harris said, “that you must already know, or two NYPD detectives wouldn’t be in my living room.”

“We’re just talking to people Amaro’s had contact with,” Ellie said. After the mistakes Buck Majors had made, they didn’t need to be accused of planting words in the mouth of an ex-con.

“I’m not stupid, Detectives. In fact, I’ve been told I’m quite bright. IQ of 148, according to the counselor who tried to explain to me at the age of fifteen why I was so bored in school that I was setting fires in the bathroom just for jollies. So here we go: presumably, since he was convicted, Anthony Amaro has been housed with—let’s say an average of a new cellmate every five months in prison. Eighteen years is 216 months, which is forty-three-point-two cellmates, round down to forty-three. And then a year or so of pretrial custody, where turnover’s higher—let’s say a new person a month to be conservative. So my estimate of the number of jellybeans in that jar is fifty-five. And yet here you are in my living room.”