Invisible Boy (15 page)

Skwarecki’s radio kept bleeping and squawking as we drove toward Prospect, interspersed with rough voices speaking in snatches
of numerical code.

“How’s tricks?” I asked.

“Mrs. Underhill identified Teddy’s sneaker this morning.”

“I know,” I said. “She invited me over for tea, later.”

“That poor woman,” said Skwarecki.

“It’s hard to tell whether finally knowing a child is dead would be even sadder, or come as a relief, you know?”

Skwarecki slowed for a red light. “From what I’ve seen it’s both. A
lot
of both.”

“Does she know about Teddy’s life, what happened before he died?” I asked.

“We haven’t discussed it with her yet. It’s hard to predict what will happen once she knows—if she doesn’t already.”

“She had to know.”

Skwarecki shrugged. “Even if she did, the question is what she’s willing to do about it. Sometimes a death like this fractures
a family’s loyalties; sometimes it makes them pull closer together.”

“And sometimes it makes everyone go
la-la-la-la-la
with their fingers stuck in their ears.”

Skwarecki looked over at me and raised an eyebrow, not saying a thing.

Smart woman.

Had Mom really not suspected anything about Pierce back when Pagan and I were kids?

I crossed my arms. “But so far do you think she had any idea?”

“Doesn’t sound like it. But Teddy’s mother came to live with her when she was nine years old. Mrs. Underhill raised her after
that.”

“What’s his mother’s name?”

“Angela,” said Skwarecki.

“And what happened to Angela’s mother?”

“Shot to death,” said Skwarecki. “By a boyfriend.”

“Jesus.”

“Bad shit. Angela’d seen her mother get the crap beat out of her for years by a string of different guys, then had to watch
her die.”

“Were most child abusers abused themselves?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“I mean, you guys see a lot of this, right?”

“But you know what?
Not
everyone who was hurt as a kid grows up to hurt other children. Most people don’t—even the ones who suffered the most appalling,
scariest kinds of physical damage imaginable.”

Skwarecki hit the turn signal and checked her mirrors, then pushed the wheel left to cut across traffic. “I’m not saying personal
history won’t fuck with your head, but you raise your hand to a child? That’s on
you
. It’s
not
inevitable. It’s
not
a virus that gets handed down. It’s a
choice
.”

She slowed down, waiting for a gap in the oncoming cars, then gunned it for the shade of Prospect’s shattered lane.

“I think it’s worse to do it if you’ve known pain yourself,” I said. “I have no fucking sympathy for the people who grow up
to pass it on.”

She nodded, and we pulled to a stop in front of the gate.

I played with the door handle but didn’t move to get out.

Skwarecki put the car in Park and stepped on the emergency brake. She rested both hands back on top of the steering wheel.

“Like I said yesterday, you seem to know the drill,” she said.

“Compared to a kid like Teddy? I know
nothing
.”

Skwarecki turned her head toward me. “There’s a lotta territory between
Father Knows Best
and ‘beat to death by a crack junkie.’ ”

“No shit,” I said.

“Maybe we’ve both got reasons why this hits home.”

“It’s, like, I saw cracks in the surface of things when I was a kid. The kind that get bigger and bigger until really bad
shit starts leaking in, filling the void.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Not just in my family,” I continued, “but everyone’s around me, growing up. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to make it
stop
.”

She opened her door but didn’t get out. “A lot of people decide to be cops out of feeling like that.”

“‘Protect and serve.’”

“You ever think about it, going on the job when you grew up?”

“Nope.” I opened my door and we both climbed out of her car.

Skwarecki looked at me across its roof. “So what
did
you want

to be?”

“Same thing as now,” I said. “Batman.”

She cracked up. “How’s that working out?”

“Three more boxtops, they’re mailing my cape.”

We helped Cate drag some more brush-filled bags out to the sidewalk.

“Dude,” I said, “you cut all this yourself? You’re a
machine
.”

“It’s the steroids,” she said. “And possibly the Geritol.”

“Sign me up,” said Skwarecki. “I could use a good boot in the ass.”

We stood in the shade surveying Cate’s handiwork.

“Find anything else?” asked Skwarecki.

“Six bottles,” said Cate. “Five Olde English 800s and a pint of nasty-looking bourbon.”

“You have the sneaker,” I said to Skwarecki. “What else are we looking for?”

“I wish I knew,” she said.

“What if there
is
nothing else?” asked Cate. “What happens then?”

Skwarecki looked toward the chapel. “You got any more of those Chips Ahoy rattling around?”

“Half a package, out in my car,” said Cate, but she didn’t look like she was in any big hurry to go fetch them.

“You mind if I take a few?” asked Skwarecki. “I missed lunch and I’m starting to feel a little peaky.”

Cate said, “Detective,” and paused, looking like she was about to say something serious.

“Yes ma’am?”

Cate exhaled. “Nothing. I’ll get the cookies.”

We followed her out to the street.

Cate opened the back door of her car and reached inside to pull a Foodtown bag across the seat toward us. She stood up, blue
package in hand. “Would either of you like any water?”

Skwarecki said no and I added, “I’m good, thanks.”

Cate closed the door and handed over the Chips Ahoy.

Skwarecki dove in and Cate watched, brow furrowed.

“Cate,” said Skwarecki through a mouthful of cookie, “something’s bugging you.”

“I just can’t stop thinking about that poor little boy.”

Skwarecki swallowed. “Understandable.”

“The idea that whoever did this is going to get away with causing his death…?” said Cate, her voice trailing off.

Skwarecki took another bite.

I waited until she’d finished chewing. “It’s going to be the mother’s word against the boyfriend’s, isn’t it?”

“Is there
any
way to tell which of them did this?” asked Cate.

Skwarecki shook her head and folded the top of the bag carefully closed. “With what we have now? No.”

“If we’d found him sooner?” asked Cate.

“There might have been something pointing to one of them, with an autopsy. But even so, best we can hope for now is the pathologist
estimating Teddy’s age at the time of a specific fracture, based on the way the bones healed. Maybe that rules out the boyfriend.
Maybe not.”

“But there’s no way to tell who broke them in the first place,” I said.

“Madeline,” said Skwarecki, “we may not even be able to establish the cause of death.”

“His rib cage…” I said.

Skwarecki shook her head. “All we know is he didn’t live long enough for those bones to heal. But the ribs might have been
broken postmortem.”

“Is there enough evidence to arrest someone?” asked Cate. “The mother, or the boyfriend, or both?”

“Getting there,” said Skwarecki. “I’m waiting on one more thing.”

There was a strange little
Star Wars
–sounding warble from her general vicinity.

“Beeper,” she said, moving her jacket aside to peer down at her hip. “I have to go back to the station for a bit.”

By the way Cate was gnawing on her bottom lip, we both wanted to grab Skwarecki by her beige-clad shoulders and start screaming
“What? What ‘one more thing’?” while shaking her back and forth hard enough to make her eyes rattle.

“Skwarecki,” I said, “
spill
.”

The detective gazed down at the sidewalk. “Look, I need to get my tail to the One-Oh-Three. How long’ll you guys be here?”

Cate checked her watch. “Two hours.”

“I told Mrs. Underhill I’d come over,” I said. “But could I hitch a ride with you out to Locust Valley, Cate?”

Cate nodded and Skwarecki wolf-whistled. “Locust Valley. Aren’t
we
fancy with the schmancy.”

“I need to see a barn about a car,” I said.

It didn’t seem like the appropriate moment to mention that the car was a Porsche, that I needed it to drive to Southampton
for the weekend, or what had happened between me and its previous owner before I discovered that he’d willed it to me.

I mean, I felt like Skwarecki was only just starting to like me, and it was, indeed, a
very
long story.

Skwarecki got into her own car and took off.

“Would you like to come with me, to Mrs. Underhill’s?” I asked Cate.

“That poor woman, Madeline. I don’t know if I could bear it.”

“I’m sorry to ditch you. Will you be okay alone?”

“It’s fine, really,” she said. “I’ve already been here all morning. Please tell Mrs. Underhill how sorry I am, and I’ll see
you in a couple of hours, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, not wanting to go either.

M
rs. Underhill lived in the brick-faced left half of a two-family house on the kind of Archie Bunker block where each residence
paired the neighbor’s incongruous architectural whims side by side: Tudor versus Spanish, Flintstones versus Jetsons.

The cars on her street were old but proud: stalwart American models in tired colors, avocado and copper-fleck and harvest
gold. Not a Honda in sight, just Big Three sedans and wagons so seventies-huge they seemed more suited to ship channels than
parkways.

I slipped between the chrome bumpers of a gold Lincoln and a black Cadillac, thinking they must have required the aid of tugboats
to park.

Mrs. Underhill’s bricks were trapped in a loveless marriage with her neighbor’s lumpy swirls of mouthwash-green stucco, but
their shared front lawn was trimmed crew-cut neat. At the squeak of the gate latch, both sets of parlor curtains twitched:
synchronized vigilance.

I rang the left-hand bell and waited while Mrs. Underhill disengaged what sounded like half a dozen dead bolts. She opened
the still-chained door to peer out at me.

“Well hello, young lady,” she said.

Her voice was warm and soft, but I could tell she’d been crying.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“Not at all, dear,” she said. “Just give me a second to get this chain off.”

It was warm out, but she wore a thin cardigan over her housecoat, buttoned at the neck.

I heard a kettle’s whistle from down the hall behind her. “There’s my tea, ready. Would you like a cup?”

“That would be lovely,” I said, following her into the kitchen.

She padded slowly toward the stove and turned off the burner. Her feet were tiny, shod in little pink slippers with satin
bows on them.

Her kitchen floor gleamed, and there wasn’t so much as a fingerprint on the old Wedgewood stove.

The room smelled of lemon Mr. Clean, the baking sheet of cookies set to cool atop a wire rack. Half the alphabet danced across
the bottom of her icebox door: colorful plastic magnets scattered at toddler height.

How could a child have been harmed here? How could this place, this woman, have produced someone who’d do that, or even allow
it?

She reached into a lower cabinet for a wicker-handled tray, placing it on the countertop. The effort made her breathe hard
for a moment, hand pressed over her heart.

“Mrs. Underhill, are you all right?” I asked.

“It’s the emphysema. Terrible thing—don’t you ever mess with those cigarettes.”

“I used to, but I quit.”

“Do your best to
stay
quit, then,” she said. “You don’t want to get like this when you’re my age. Hard enough to be an old lady when you
can
breathe.”

She was so tiny, so thin.

“You look pretty good to me,” I said. “A glamorous thirty-nine.”

Mrs. Underhill smiled. “I like a bit of sweet talk. You may just get invited back here.”

“In that case,” I said, “now that I get a better look at you, you can’t possibly be a day over thirty-
four
.”

She smiled again, patting the tray. “I’ll fix everything up on this, then we can go sit down in the front room.”

I didn’t know how the hell to ask her whether she’d known about the abuse, but whatever Teddy had suffered, the damage couldn’t
have been inflicted by those frail, palsied hands.

Would Skwarecki even want me to ask?

This wasn’t some podunk town, and NYPD territory didn’t strike me as any kind of place for amateurs.

While our tea steeped in its rose-adorned pot, she placed a doily on a matching plate before piling it high with warm cookies.
“Do you take cream or sugar?”

I said, “No, thank you,” because her hands were already tired enough to make the teacups chatter against their saucers.

“Let me carry that for you, please,” I said. “You just lead the way.”