Man of the Hour (22 page)

“It’s what life is like,” the doctor said, waggling the pencil between his fingers. “A hundred thousand little decisions and then you add them up. You don’t get a chance to save somebody’s life every day.”

David touched the armrests of his chair, aware he’d been subtly admonished. “That’s like what my mother used to say to my father: ‘It’s no good being a hero one day a week and a bum the other six.’”

The doctor wrote that down. “That’s a nice aphorism,” he said.

“’Tis,” mumbled David. “Didn’t make a damn bit of difference, though. He just stayed in that chair getting drunk all night anyway.”

“But back to your marriage,” the doctor prompted him again. “So you concluded that after a certain point there wasn’t much more you could do to help Renee.”

“Well.” David cleared his throat. “I kind of have problems of my own. I felt she was … we were dragging each other down.”

“In other words, you felt so overwhelmed by these problems of your own that you were unable to save your marriage?” the doctor was asking.

“Well, that’s not putting too fine a point on it. I mean, I held on for as long as I could, for Arthur’s sake.”

Renee’s cigarette butt fell into her soda can with a hiss.

“So what makes you think you’re going to do any better in raising a son all by yourself?” the doctor asked.

“Oh boy.” David worked his fingers together.

Busted!
As the kids would say. He stared at a Francis Bacon print on the wall, a picture of a man trapped in a glass case.

“I don’t know,” he began slowly. “I guess you could say my life has this kind of loose improvisational quality … well, some people would call it immaturity. I mean, let’s face it, I haven’t accomplished a tremendous amount, except for being a teacher—
though, I’m a damn good teacher, mind you!
But I can change.” He felt himself growing stronger as he spoke, turning to face the doctor straight on. “I love Arthur and I’d do anything to make him happy. What Renee said might be true—there may be some unfinished business in my life, but with Arthur, it’s different. This is the one thing I want to complete.”

He stopped speaking and stared at me doctor, trying to determine if he’d had any effect. He realized his pulse was racing. The urgency of the moment had sneaked up on him. Having lost his marriage, he was terrified of losing Arthur too, especially if Renee decided to move away with the boy.

“You know, it’s a lot of responsibility taking care of a child on your own,” Dr. Ferry said. “How are you guys getting along this weekend?”

“It’s fantastic,” said David, puffing out his chest. “We’ve had a blast. We went all over the city and he ate everything you put in front of him, instead of just nibbling on Pretzel Stix. It was the happiest I’ve seen him in months.”

Dr. Ferry chewed on his pencil for a few seconds with a beaverish intensity, considering what he’d been told. It’s adding up, David thought to himself. He’s starting to take me seriously. Maybe I
will
get custody.

“You know, David,” said the doctor. “I’ve seen Arthur a couple of times, and I must tell you he seems much better since your recent little run-in with fame.”

“You think so?” David tried to sound nonchalant, but in his mind he was straining, waiting to see if this bail would go fair or foul.

He heard Arthur calling out, “BOOM!” exuberantly as a chair fell over in the waiting room. He could almost picture Renee frowning and lighting another cigarette under the doctor’s no-smoking sign.

“I mean, he seems much more confident, all of a sudden,” said Dr. Ferry. “Last week, I saw him and he was a wreck. But now he’s beginning to come out of his shell. He sees your picture in the newspaper and hears your name on television. He knows the mayor is going to give you an award soon. His daddy’s a hero. It has to do something for his self-confidence.”

David resisted the urge to smile. “So what’s the problem?” he asked.

“The problem,” said Dr. Ferry, chewing his pencil again, “is what happens when it all ends.”

24

OH MY GOD,
that idiot’s balls are hanging out of his shorts, Detective Noonan said to himself. It’s disgusting.

He was at John LeVecque’s backyard barbecue in Hempstead, watching his partner get progressively stewed as he lay on a white chaise, sucking down Budweiser after Budweiser with his angry-looking red scrotum dangling out of his loose-fitting jogging shorts.

If it was up to Noonan, he would have just skipped the whole thing. Work was piling up and he was never much for mixing. But there was no escaping the politics of this case. He’d gotten a call from his old friend Tommy Vaughn in the first dep’s office telling him that this LeVecque had indeed developed a butt-link with the commissioner—and was even ghost-writing a column for the P.C. in the
Post
—and so attendance at this little shindig was strictly mandatory.

So now, here was Noonan standing around, trying to make conversation with two dozen cops without saying anything substantial about the school bus bombing. Anybody with real information didn’t need to ask and the rest of them were better off outside the loop.

Kelly was starting to worry him, though. Standing by the hedges, Noonan watched him polish off his fifth Bud of the afternoon and then grab LeVecque’s wife by the belt loops, begging her to bring him another. The man was a disaster. He was liable to say anything. The wife, however, didn’t seem to mind. She was a slim, hard-faced number in designer jeans and a tight halter top who clearly enjoyed sticking it to her husband a little by flirting with the guests.

“You have enough to eat?” There was LeVecque trying to shove a hamburger on a paper plate at him.

Noonan stared at him until he backed off a little. “Ah, no, I’m all right.” He patted his midsection. “I gotta watch what I eat these days anyway.”

“I’ve got some no-nitrite hot dogs I could throw on the grill.” LeVecque smiled, wanting to be liked. “It’s no problem.”

“Forget it, I’m a strict plain fish man these days.” Noonan said preemptively. “My last partner had heart trouble.”

He still remembered trying to give Frank Rowan CPR after he collapsed during a volleyball game on the beach last summer. Poor Frank never even made it to the ambulance. All his partners were doomed, it seemed.

“So the school bus investigation, how’s it going?” LeVecque asked brightly.

Noonan turned and gave him the Dawn of the Dead look. “You keep the press off our back and we’ll have it wrapped up sooner instead of later,” he told LeVecque.

“It’s a lot of pressure, I guess.”

The detective twisted his mouth slightly, knowing the sympathy was just another pretense for him to see through. “I’ve had plenty of high-profile cases before. Doesn’t mean a thing. They either get solved or they don’t.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Tom Kelly almost falling off his chaise lounge as he tried to play grab-ass with LeVecque’s wife.

Fortunately, LeVecque had his back turned and missed that little bit of byplay. “You’ve heard that the mayor and the police commissioner have been meeting every day, trying to make sure the FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force doesn’t take this case away from us,” he said quietly to Noonan.

“Like I said. Doesn’t mean a fucking thing.”

There was a blast of music and a puff of smoke from the screened window on the house’s second floor. A touch of reggae and a pungent druggy odor joined the fumes from the barbecue. LeVecque’s teenaged son was obviously smoking pot and blowing it out the window onto the party of cops. Christ, thought Noonan, the kid must hate his father’s guts. He thought of his own son, Larry, doing the adolescent rebellion thing, piercing every inch of his body with studs and barely speaking to his parents. For a moment Noonan was filled with sadness, remembering a time when the boy was a sweet five-year-old, pounding a baseball glove and plaintively asking his father to play catch with him.

“So what should I tell the reporters in the meantime?” LeVecque asked.

Noonan turned his gaze to the press spokesman’s jugular and raised an eyebrow. “Tell them whatever the hell you want,” he said. “We’ve got thirty men working on this case full-time, not to mention the FBI, ATF, and God knows who else climbing up our backsides. We’ve interviewed everyone who was on the street that day, all the kids from the school, all the mechanics who’ve ever worked on the bus, and now we’re going through all the recent graduates and former employees. Plus we’ve got the lab working on the wreckage day and night and the bomb squad guys going over the sidewalk with the dogs and the spectrograms.”

“What about the teacher?”

“What about him?”

Noonan felt that vein throbbing in the side of his head again.

“How do you think it is that he knew enough to keep most of the kids off the bus for thirty seconds or whatever until the bus exploded?” LeVecque pressed on. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“You asking this for your own information or should I frisk you for a tape recorder?”

Close with the commissioner or not, Noonan still knew this guy had once been a reporter. And reporters were never to be trusted. Bill Ryan, the old bird from the
Trib
, had once laid it out for him: in the pursuit of a story, everything must fall.

“Well, that girl Judy Mandel asked,” LeVecque explained with a grimace of embarrassment. “But I figured it’s worth following up on it, just in case the P.C. asks.”

Noonan scowled. “If he does, tell him to call me direct,” he said. “How the hell should I know, anyway? He kept them off ’cause he was doing a head count. Maybe it was just a lucky coincidence. Maybe he noticed something was just a little out of place and couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly. That’s happened to you, hasn’t it?”

No fucking way was he going to share any leads with some flack before he was ready. He’d told only four other people of his suspicions about Fitzgerald so far.

There was a shriek across the party, and Noonan turned to see Tom Kelly standing next to LeVecque’s wife, both of them convulsed with imbecilic laughter. He saw Kelly put an arm around her and draw her close with little resistance. Oh fuck, she’d been drinking too.

This time, LeVecque was watching, and his ears visibly reddened. Almost in spite of himself, Noonan felt singed with pity for the man.

LeVecque turned back to him, trying to ignore the humiliation and get back to business. “You know, the mayor, the governor, and the police commissioner are supposed to give him an award on Wednesday. The teacher.”

Noonan pinched the end of his nose for a second and then said something that he knew would probably haunt him for years to come. What he said was: “Ah.”

There was no choice, he realized. He had to give the brass and City Hall some kind of heads-up. Especially now that he had gotten that little tip from Atlantic Beach. He only hoped LeVecque wouldn’t press him on it too much.

“What’s going on?” The flack’s eyes opened wide and the hamburger plate almost fell out of his hands. “Is there a problem with that?”

“Ah-yyy …”

Noonan turned and watched his partner disappear into the house with Mrs. LeVecque. The party was edging closer to the line that separated extreme social awkwardness from outright catastrophe.

But LeVecque was so fixated on this conversation that he didn’t notice. “Listen, is there something wrong with this guy that we ought to know about?”

“Ah, nah, he’s all right.” Noonan glanced at the house. Kelly had not come back out.

“Look,” LeVecque said anxiously. “The last thing any of us need is to put the mayor and the commissioner into an embarrassing situation. So if there’s a problem with this Fitzgerald, I need to know about it right away.”

Noonan poked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to figure out if there was another way to play this. On the one hand, LeVecque was the commissioner’s guy. Telling him to fuck off was not an option. On the other hand, Noonan knew all about reporters like this Judy Mandel. They ran over you like road graders.

“Maybe you could find a way to put off the ceremony for a week or something,” he said. “Just ’til we’re done checking everything out.”

“So you’re looking at him?”

Noonan turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head, finishing a silent debate within himself. “Yeah, we’re looking at him,” he mumbled, almost in disgust. “But no one else needs to know about that.”

LeVecque’s mouth fell open, and instantly Noonan knew he’d chosen wrong. He’d given the wand to the sorcerer’s apprentice, and soon broomsticks would be marching.

“So he’s
the guy
,” said the flack.

“That’s not what I told you,” Noonan warned him.

“Jesus, that’s amazing. I would never have thought of him.”

Within less than a second, Noonan was in his face, pressing in so close that LeVecque tilted his plate and the burger slid back against his polo shirt. “Listen to me,” he said with quiet intensity. “I don’t care how many columns you’ve written for the P.C., if I read one word of what I just told you in the newspapers, I will come over to your house in the middle of the night and I will shoot you. Okay?”

LeVecque checked the stain on his shirt and then looked up at Noonan, his face pinched as if it was caught between subway doors. “
I’m
not going to talk to anyone.”

Noonan held LeVecque’s gaze for almost a half minute, giving him some idea of what life would be like handcuffed to a chair in a Coney Island interrogation room.

Just then he heard the screen door slam and saw LeVecque’s wife come running out of the house, pink-faced and sweaty.

“Detective Noonan, I think you’d better come quickly,” she called out “Your partner has gotten very sick in our bedroom and I believe he needs your assistance. I think he’s had some sort of a stroke.”

25

AND THEN IT WAS OVER.

David was in his office Monday afternoon, talking to Kevin Hardison and Elizabeth Hamdy about their upcoming papers, when the phone rang.

He picked it up and the ambient electronic hum of a speakerphone suddenly narrowed down to the closeness of a young woman’s voice. “Hi, is this David?” Whoever she was, she sounded rushed, brisk, and eager to get rid of him—even though she was the one who called.