Man of the Hour (26 page)

Gomez smiled disarmingly, but David wasn’t fooled. “I know what’s going on here,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “The girl from the newspaper just called.”

“Oh?” Noonan looked at Gomez, obviously not ready for this.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Whooa-ho-ho-ho.” Gomez made himself laugh. “Where’d you get that idea? Nobody said nothin’ like that.”

“No, nobody said that.” Noonan looked perplexed.

The game was getting away from them. Clearly they’d had another rhythm in mind for this afternoon.

“I don’t think I want to talk to you guys.”

David saw both detectives register surprise and then suspicion. He was feeling a little surprised himself. Where did he get the nerve to say no to them?

“Come on,” said Noonan. “You’re not a suspect. Let’s just get this cleared up as quickly as we can. Maybe if you could just answer a few more questions.”

“Yeah.” Gomez wagged his scraggly chin. “You don’t want us to think you have anything to hide, do you?”

“Well, I …” David saw Seniqua Rollins and Elizabeth Hamdy walk by slowly, almost as if they were under water, staring at him. Figures in a nightmare.

“Yeah, come on, really,” Noonan prompted. “Let’s just step into one of these little offices a minute. You don’t want to embarrass all the kids standing out here, do you? There must be someplace to talk.”

David felt his scrotum tightening. If he just tried to walk away now, they might throw him facedown in the hall in front of all his students. If he insisted on calling a lawyer, though, they’d surely find it suspicious and leak the information to the media, perhaps damaging his chances of getting custody of Arthur. Everything was happening too fast; he needed a chance to figure out all the ramifications.

Trying not to panic, he led them down the hall, through the fire doors, and past the work crews on the stairway to the second floor.
Think critically
, he told himself. That’s how he’d tell a student to handle this. Don’t just accept the scenario. Consider alternative interpretations. Kids he passed along the way avoided meeting his eyes, somehow sensing he was in trouble and not wanting to embarrass him. He could hear his heart beating in his head, a bass thump rattling his skull. He wondered, would Arthur see this story on the front page of tomorrow morning’s paper or hear about it on TV?

They found an empty office next to the science lab and went in. Noonan pulled over a steel-and-ripped-vinyl chair and turned it around so he could straddle it. David felt the ache in the middle of his chest radiating back to his shoulder blades.

“So,” said the detective. “I don’t know what’s going on either. You gotta understand none of us ever talk to the media. I hate the fuckin’ press. And I’m still the primary on this case. So if they write anything without talking to me, it’s bullshit.”

David noticed the way the detective’s pant cuffs rode up on his legs, revealing droopy mismatched black socks and pale hairless shins. Irish Catholic shins. The veins on the backs of Noonan’s hands stood out like worms among faded grass and it occurred to David that these men might be at least as nervous as he was today. And for some reason, that knowledge allowed him to step back a little and consider his situation in a different light.

He remembered being arrested when he was seventeen. Being thrown in a pissy gray cell after a Nassau County cop named McNally got done barking at him and trying to scare the wits out of him.
Keep your nerve. Remember who you are.
That’s what David had learned from that little encounter.
Don’t lose your nerve.

“So why is this happening?” he asked. “All I’ve done is try to help.” He glanced at the clock above the door.

“I know,” said Noonan. “You’ve been very cooperative.”

“So why am I a suspect? I didn’t have anything to do with the bombing.” David sat with his hands folded in his lap, measuring his words carefully. Think critically. Why do they have you here?

“We know you’re all right.” Gomez stood up straight with his arms hugging his chest.

“Yeah, yeah, we know you’re the good guy.” Noonan smiled his Nosferatu smile, which just made him look old and mournful. “We just wanted you to answer three or four more questions so we could narrow down the list of suspects.”

“You must think I’m a moron,” David said, remembering Detective McNally’s gray crew cut and the way he switched moods, playing good cop–bad cop all by himself.

“What?” Noonan’s smile disappeared.

“Nothing. I think I’d like to talk to a lawyer.” Something else he’d learned when he was seventeen.

“Well, just bear with us a second.” Noonan quickly took out his slim notebook and began flipping through its tattered pages. “So what time was it that you said you started getting the kids ready for the field trip?”

“I believe I said it was just after lunchtime.”

“And what time was that?”

“I think around one-thirty. Let me ask you again. Am I going to need a lawyer here?”

“Why do you need a lawyer?” Gomez leaned against a radiator. “We haven’t charged you with anything.”

David looked toward the door, considering the alternatives, recalculating the actual obstacles that would keep him from walking out right now. He was bigger than both of them. But then again, they could slap some cuffs on him and charge him with resisting arrest.

“So why didn’t you tell me you left something with the driver on the bus the first time I talked to you?” Noonan asked.

“I don’t know. It just slipped my mind. It was pretty confusing out there.”

“Right.” Noonan scratched his hairless shin.

“Look, I think I’d like to go now.” David felt a little damp spot growing on the back of his collar.

“Just a … just a minute.” Noonan turned to another page in his notebook. “Tell me again, how it is you knew enough to keep those kids off the bus?”

“I don’t know,” David said tersely, deciding he needed to parcel out his words carefully. “I just had a feeling.”

Noonan gave Gomez a meaningful look. “A feeling,” he said.

“Yeah, I told you before. I just had a feeling everything wasn’t right.” Two separate rivulets of sweat raced each other down his back.

“So what time did you go on your break?”

“My what?”

“Your break, your break. Everybody says you disappeared for about twenty minutes just before the class went downstairs for the bus.”

“Yeah, I was in the bathroom.”

The divorce anxiety and hangover giving him an upset stomach and diarrhea. He felt his intestines going end over end again here. He was falling into their rhythm, dancing to their tune. But he wasn’t sure how to get up and walk out without seeming totally guilty.

“Twenty minutes,” said Noonan. “It takes you that long?”

“It takes whatever it takes.”

The door opened and a wan, parchment-skinned little man in dark clothes walked in with a power drill. He was like a character out of a Buñuel movie. Without a word, he plugged in the drill and began boring holes in the wall.

“Excuse me,” said Noonan. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I got a work order.” The little man took a yellow slip out of his back pocket, looked at it, and then put it back without bothering to show it to the detectives.

“We’re using this room,” said Gomez, displaying his shield. “Beat it.”

The little man shrugged, unplugged his drill, and left. A few seconds later, the drilling sound started up again from the room next door and the drill bit began poking through the wall in front of David.

“So why didn’t you tell us about that before?” said Noonan. “The twenty minutes.”

“It didn’t seem relevant.”

David was struggling to get back into that cool place within himself, but they kept dragging him away from it. Forcing him out into the light. Panic closed in on him. Objects on the other side of the room—a globe and glass beakers—suddenly loomed much larger and he began to feel dizzy.

“Anybody see what you were doing in there?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“I was in a stall.” David tried to remember which stall he’d used and what the graffiti was on the walls, in case the detective tried to trip him up by asking about it.

“See, that’s a problem.”

Noonan moved his chair, and the scrape of its legs on the floor made David’s heart jump.

“Yeah, it’s a problem.” Gomez tugged on his earring.

“’Cause you disappeared for twenty minutes, and people are going to say that was enough time for you to set the timer on a bomb and put it in your book bag.” Noonan dipped his head and looked up at David from an angle. “See what I’m saying?”

“There wasn’t any bomb.” His heart began to pound harder. His collar was getting completely soaked and he became aware that he was about to start getting facial tics.

“Hey, David.” Noonan moved closer to him, ready to share an intimacy. “How come you never told us you been in trouble before?”

“What are you talking about?” David looked away, focusing on a chemical table chart on the wall.

“The little problem you had on the island before. I got a call from a retired detective name of McNally. He saw you on the news and remembered you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” David snapped back at him. “It was nothing. I was a juvenile. I took a car from a beach club where I was working. I’m not even supposed to have a record for that anymore.”

Though he dreaded the idea of this part of his past becoming public. Somewhere in a file cabinet, there might still be a mug shot of him as a long-haired, dopey-looking teenager.

Having scored a point, Noonan put a hand on David’s shoulder, keeping him in his place. “And let me ask you something else,” he said. “How come you didn’t say your old man was an explosives expert in the war? And he probably taught you all about dynamite.”

“I thought I did, but …” David was scrambling to remember everything he’d said these last few days. “He … what?”

“Because you did it, right?” Noonan was smiling, a crooked half-moon hey-we’re-a-couple-of-Irish-guys-in-a-pub kind of smile.

“I did what? What did I do?”

“You put it in your bag. It was your bag that blew up with dynamite in it.”

“No, it wasn’t.” David felt like he’d just caught a flat hand in the middle of his face.

“Yes it was.” Noonan gave a sidelong glance to Gomez. “We have witnesses who saw you playing with the timer.”

For a brief moment, the unreality of the situation overtook David and he realized he was no longer in control. He was back in the Atlantic Beach police station, a terrified kid listening to the detective tell him that this night would determine the course of the rest of his life.

These men were trying to scare him just as badly now. They wanted to hurt him, to take his freedom away, to keep him from his son. More than twenty years had passed, but nothing had changed. He still had to find a way to hold on to himself.

“If anybody says they saw me with a timer, they’re lying,” he said slowly and deliberately, looking from cop to cop.

“No,
you’re
the one who’s lying. Because
you
did it. Right?” Noonan’s voice had changed. He sounded flip and disgusted, as if he’d just noticed vermin in the room. He got out of his chair and walked across the room. “You didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt. You just wanted to save the day.”

“You’re making a mistake.” David found one scuffed-up piece of black-and-white floor tile and just stared at it, telling himself this was the anchor that would keep him in his place in the world.

“Come on.” Noonan stopped at a desk covered with books and test tubes. “It’s gonna be a lot easier on you if you open up about this now. If you just admit it, the judge will understand you didn’t want for anybody to get hurt. You were just trying to be the hero. Like you talked about in class.”

“That’s not right.”

“You did it!” Noonan pounded the desk and the test tubes rattled. “Goddamn it! I wanna hear you say you did it!”

“I’m not comfortable with where this interview is going,” said David, still hanging tough, staring at the floor tile.

“Hey asshole, this isn’t one of your kiss-ass celebrity interviews!” Noonan shouted. “You don’t get to say where this is going.”

David stood up abruptly. “Then I’m not answering any more questions.”

He couldn’t go back any further. It was the same point he’d reached in the police station all those years ago. The point where he said to himself: “Fuck you. I’m Pat Fitzgerald’s son. My father is a
fucking hero
and you cannot treat me this way.”

“Sit down, Mr. Fitzgerald.” Noonan’s vein throbbed in the side of his head.

“Yeah, sit the fuck down,” Gomez chimed in.

“I’m going,” David said, surprised by the strength in his own voice. “And if you have anything else to say to me, you can say it in front of a lawyer.”

It was okay. He’d been here, done this before. He was not going to be intimidated. Somehow his father must have transmitted some notion of stolidity and stoicism after all.
Just keep going.
David found himself pulsing with anger and the conviction mat one way or another he would get through this.

“Now you’re the one making a mistake,” said Gomez, moving to physically block the door.

“Yeah, this isn’t over.” Noonan stood next to him and rolled up his sleeves.

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” David threw back his shoulders and stepped around them. “I believe I have some work to do.”

On returning to his squad some thirty-five minutes later, Detective Noonan was duly informed that this was now a federal investigation and he would be expected to turn over all his notes to FBI agents. He calmly walked to his phone and called John LeVecque.

“Hey asshole,” he said. “You may have fucked me, but my ex-partner fucked your wife.”

29

SO THIS WAS WHAT
it felt like to be a success.

Judy Mandel filed her story at six o’clock and then stuck around for three hours to answer editors’ queries and make phone calls to double-check facts. By the time she was finished, Bill Ryan had gone home to be with his invalid wife and the only ones left for her to go out and have a celebratory drink with were the Death of Hope and the paper’s editor-in-chief, Robert “Nazi” Cranbury, who everyone knew was a notorious whoremonger and grossly sentimental when inebriated.