City on Fire (42 page)

27

THE PARK ON NEW YEAR’S DAY had been a blasted whiteness, or a series of them, hemmed in by black trees like sheets snagged on barbed wire. Snow had melted and refrozen on the paths, leaving a thin shell that collapsed under Pulaski’s shoes and crutches, soaking his socks and lending each step a jerky quality. Of course, where Larry Pulaski was concerned, “jerky” was a relative term. Maybe when he’d bought the coffee this morning to soften up the Goodman kid, he should have stuck to decaf. Now it was getting on toward noon; CSU was winding down its canvass, there were no more witnesses, and it wasn’t even Pulaski’s case, technically. He could have been back in his bed on Staten Island an hour ago, dry of foot. So why had he returned to the park instead, to limp the perimeter of the crime scene one more time?

What answer you got would probably depend on who you asked. His detectives, McFadden and the others, would have said Pulaski was fastidious, a control freak, nothing ever done right unless he did it himself. And there was maybe a grain of truth to that. In 1976, there had been almost two thousand homicides in the City of New York, and Pulaski’s crew caught a fifth of them—one for each day of the year. The aggregate clearance rate was about 30 percent. After the third time he’d personally worked back on a case to discover a neglected eyewitness, he’d announced that he wanted a copy of every case-jacket on his desk. Now two or three times a week, he would show up at a scene like this, insert himself into an investigation, just to keep people on their p’s and q’s. Crunch.

He turned off the path. Between it and the wall was where Mercer Goodman claimed to have found the body, and though there was a strong circumstantial case for his being a heroin addict, Pulaski’s instinct was to believe him. Techs with plastic baggies tucked through beltloops now squatted there. But to the east were woods, and beyond that the Sheep Meadow. Pulaski toiled up a hill, breathing heavily. He’d always told himself he didn’t need the crutches, they were only just in case, but to be honest, he wasn’t sure anymore. At one point, he slipped on some rocks, but no one was watching.

Pulaski found a certain tactical advantage in being underestimated. His bosses thought that because he was a cripple he wasn’t up to legwork, so they’d promoted him to Deputy Inspector, supposedly a desk job. His supervisees—kids, essentially, with long hair and muttonchops and clothes like they’d never heard of dry cleaning—thought that because he knew how to dress and kept his fingernails clean, he lived like some kind of monk, when in fact he and Sherri still had terrific sex after fifteen years of marriage. He thought it was terrific, anyway. If you’d asked Sherri, though, why he was putting in more overtime lately than he cared to count, she might have suggested it wasn’t so much zeal for the job as unease about what waited at home. There was likely some truth to that, too. A decade his junior, Sherri was thirty-eight this year, and it was increasingly clear that even terrific sex wasn’t going to produce kids, maybe on account of the polio, maybe on account of something with her, he was afraid to find out, as she had been once.

He told himself it was for the best. His own dad had been a drunk, and not a nice one. Larry had long ago forgiven him. Watching your kid boil with fever, eyes rolling up to the whites, must hurt even worse than the fever itself. You knew you were going to die, after all. It was fear of this, of his imaginary kids, of screwing them up or worse, that sat like a patch of black ice high in his chest, invisible but heavy, whenever Sherri showed him some article about new advances in treating infertility. He’d broken the news to too many parents after finding daughters under highway overpasses, panties bunched at ankles. Finding sons tangled in the limbs of a tree in a courtyard between Avenues C and D, bloated from days of rain. Secretly, shamefully, every childless year that passed brought a kind of relief.

Except lately Sherri had switched to talking about getting out of New York altogether. And sometimes to crying in the bathroom at night. She ran the shower to cover it, but forgot to get her hair wet. And he couldn’t face the fact that, after years of making her happy, as he’d vowed to do, he didn’t know how to fix this. So he worked. A lot. Maybe he was supposed to; maybe this was why they couldn’t conceive. Although oddly, now, he looked back at his adult life, day after day of stepping off the ferry, sometimes not even home yet at nine at night, and at the quiet orderly adult-like house, and whereas Sherri had maybe started to make peace with it—having at least learned to cry—Larry himself did appear to have regrets. Kids were getting knocked up right and left, he saw it all the time. But maybe that was God’s will, too. Another advantage over more physically vigorous men was that he’d learned not to try to understand God’s will. He assumed that the heavenly father who’d crippled him must be like his earthly one: distant, arbitrary. The job of the child was just to love Him. Because He said so, was why.

The sun was out now, clearing bald patches on the meadow. Last night’s snow was like a dream. Kids shaped woeful snowballs out of what remained. The detectives behind Larry were invisible; none had thought to roam this far. He felt sharp, somehow. Called out of his thoughts. Something glinted in a bush near where he’d emerged.

He tottered over. Birds, flushed from undergrowth, beat out across the white. He extracted a mound of damp fabric. Bluejeans. A pocket rivet was what had winked. A lump inside one leg turned out to be a wad of jockey shorts he pulled on gloves to handle. Urine stains along the venting. In one pocket, a half-punched round-trip Long Island Rail Road ticket. In the other, a mimeographed sheet, ripped in half. And above this jumble a weird little glyph or symbol; hadn’t he seen it somewhere?

Probably this was nothing. The queers came here for assignations, there were vice raids all the time, one of them had lost his pants. Still, it was about the only evidence produced so far, and he hated to put it into the clumsy hands of McFadden, whose case theoretically this was. Out of habit, he carried a supply of forensic baggies. He returned the paper to the jeans, bagged the jeans in plastic, and squeezed the whole package into a large inside pocket of his brushed-wool greatcoat. He wouldn’t mention it to anyone just yet. He wasn’t sure he trusted the system, or any system, not to mishandle it. And no one would bother to mention that Pulaski looked lumpy, since that’s how he looked most days, these days.

28

AT THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK OF JANUARY, a memo had circulated, convening a plenary meeting of the upper tier of management: representatives of the Board, corporate counsel, financial officers, vice presidents, and, from the Office of Public Relations and Community Affairs, Regan Lamplighter, née Hamilton-Sweeney. The only person missing was her father, who was at home, recuperating from the “shock to his system.”

Or so, at least, went the story that circulated in the fractious period before the meeting came to order. In point of fact, Daddy’s system had long been in decline, and the arraignment had come as no shock. By the time Regan had reached him by phone in Chicago, Felicia had already warned him about the federal marshals camped out at LaGuardia; this, and not the snow, had been why they’d waited until Monday to fly him home. In New York, the marshals had agreed not to cuff him, had allowed his chauffeured black towncar to ferry him directly to the courthouse downtown, where Regan waited at a side entrance with his legal team. Though the bond the judge set seemed to her exorbitant, Daddy had trundled out under his own power two hours later, free until the case went to trial. No, the thing keeping him at home wasn’t shock, or even the longer-term corrosion of his faculties. It was that someone had tipped off the media. There had been two dozen reporters waiting for them out on the courthouse steps, a swarm of white locusts. Deep in the background, vans hoisted fifty-foot antennae into the gelatin-gray sky. Regan should have been ready for this; it was her job. But the lead image on the evening news that night would be a two-second clip of her father, looking bleached and confused, while an unidentified and slightly blurry woman clung to his elbow. “We have no comment at this time,” she repeated over and over. The angle varied subtly depending on which channel you were watching.

And it was ridiculous, the way they all covered this! He hadn’t been found guilty of anything, and notwithstanding federal insinuations of profiteering, the worst crime he stood accused of, according to some of the most expensive defense lawyers in the free world, was two counts of insider trading amounting to less than a million dollars—a tiny fraction of what the firm grossed annually. But no one wanted the scene from the courthouse repeated outside the lobby of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building every time Daddy came or went. And so, even as the conference room’s long table filled up, the chair at the head remained empty.

There were some moments of unease after the door closed. Without Old Bill, who would run the meeting? Then, from a seat halfway up Regan’s side of the table, a white head rose. The eyes didn’t seem to see her. The voice should have been inadequate to fill the big room, yet she heard the Demon Brother as if he were broadcasting from her inner ear: “As I’m sure you all know, Bill thought it best he remain at home this week, working on his defense.”

No one spoke, but there was a shift in the texture of the silence, a discomfiture that passed for assent. All heads having turned to him, Amory Gould sat back down. He didn’t bother to cover his mouth when he coughed.

“In his absence, the facts we face are these. Our fearless leader has been charged with running afoul of the securities statutes. Ahem. Which we know have been put in place to harass successful Americans.” His face was bland, but his hands seemed to want to exact some revenge on the pen in front of him, and tugged at both ends. “We have every confidence—every confidence—Bill will be cleared of wrongdoing. Our task in the meantime is to coordinate a response, such that this firm, a legacy of his hard work and, ahem, vision, can rise to the challenges of the moment. To chart, in short, a strategy.” Legacy made it sound as if Daddy were not recuperating, but dead. And who was this we? In the time it took Regan to formulate these objections, Amory must have opened the floor to ideas, because now ambassadors from the various departments began to speak up.

Legal advocated a policy of company-wide silence as it pursued dialogue with the U.S. Attorney. Accounting was conducting an audit. Global Operations required stability above all else, lest vital revenue streams be threatened. For all his showy circumspection, his refusal to move to the head of the table, the nervous coughs he produced at almost algorithmic intervals, Regan knew her step-uncle well enough to see he was enjoying this. Indeed, most of the men contributing to the conversation were allies of the Goulds, and seemed to be competing to say whatever would please him most.

Then she noticed the blond man taking notes in the corner behind her. Still pretending to listen to Amory pretend to listen to everyone else, she snuck a glance back over her shoulder. He had to be the youngest person in the room. His hair was like wheat germ mixed with honey. Shampoo-commercial hair. It was longer than Keith’s, but somehow wholesome, neat, even as it tumbled down past the collar of his arrow-collared shirt. In fact, she’d seen it once before, in the commissary on the thirtieth floor, back around the time she learned of her husband’s infidelity. She’d bumped into him with her tray. At that point, she’d been too distracted to get his name; in her head, he was just the Guy with the Hair. Now, as the syllables of functionaries closer to the empty seat of power flattened and warped into nonsense, she found herself wondering what the Guy with the Hair was doing here. “—Regan?” someone was saying.

She turned back to the yellow pad in front of her, heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sorry?”

“Artie suggested we hear from Public Relations.” Her step-uncle’s voice was full of something she couldn’t decipher. Farther down, next to the empty chairman’s chair, old Arthur Trumbull, eighty-eight and half-deaf, looked at her with eyes like a horse’s, wet and black and kind. He’d been a Director since her grandfather’s time, and a faithful retainer to the family. “Did you have something to add?”

She cleared her throat in anxious echolalia, trying to remember the points she’d wanted to make. “Well, first I think it should be noted that Daddy is … that my father hasn’t been convicted of anything.” She looked back at her notes from this morning. “I mean, I understand the position of Legal, and wanting to leave room to bargain, but if there’s no proven wrongdoing, why act otherwise? Not having him here right now sends a message to the media people out there. Anything we do will. It seems important—and this is the view of the department—that the message we send is, we’re prepared to fight.”

As she spoke, Amory had risen to gaze at her over the domes of intervening heads. His thin lips smiled. “What an asset to have someone so eloquent here to represent the interests of the family. But things must also be looked at from a business perspective, and I’m afraid sticking our heads in the sand and pretending nothing has happened … well, it’s a tactic, Regan, not a strategy.”

His attention was uncomfortable, hot, like the light on the surgeon’s forehead just before you go under. “Fine. So here’s a strategy. Pretrial kabuki will take until at least, what, July? And meanwhile, the press is only going to get worse. If we’re going to have any shot at a decent jury, we need a fair hearing from the public. Which means reconsidering the overall corporate image. We have to be seen again as the benevolent giant, the job creator. So what I’d like to do”—crafting this second point, she’d thought of the stadium plan Amory had shown her, but now she wasn’t thinking at all so much as trying to drive a rhetorical thumb into his eye—“what I’d like to undertake these next few months is a comprehensive review of any business we’re doing that affects the local market. Of course, I’d need data on every acquisition, every big position we take for our portfolio, every development project. Once we’ve completed our study, we can think about integrating them into a campaign. Like, Hamilton-Sweeney: Making New York Work.”